Braided Lives (17 page)

Theo’s laconic, “Come,” brings me in to find her lying on the floor listening to a violin concerto. “Wieniawski,” she offers, reading my curiosity. “Talk or listen?”

“Listen,” I say, pleased at her company and her silence. She offers me vodka from a rubbing alcohol bottle. I hate vodka but think it would be gauche to admit that. I take a big gulp and manage to swallow, although I must blink hard to keep my eyes from watering.

When the record finishes I ask, “Have you ever been in love?”

Theo sits up on a tan elbow and stares. “Me?”

“Is someone else here?”

“Ummm,”’ she says noncommittally. Then she blurts out, “Yeah.”

“Did you love them a lot?”

“Too much.”

“Did they love you?”

She coughs a laugh. “No. It was my psychoanalyst.”

“Your psychoanalyst? Oh, transference.”

“Yeah, he encouraged that. It was healthy and I had sexual problems, he explained, that could only be worked out by him. On top.”

“You’re kidding. A doctor? Who was he?”

“Never mind the name. I’m still scared of him.”

“What are you scared of?” I hardly believe this.

“Jill, he and my parents had me committed. I had to spend a year in a loony bin before I figured out I should take back my story. I agreed it was hysteria and I was just making it all up about him forking me three days a week on the couch in his office.”

“He made you do that?”

Theo shrugs, reaching for the rubbing alcohol bottle. “If this was really what it says, we’d go blind.”

I choke. How do I know what’s in the bottle?

Theo gives me a weak smile. “It was his idea. I was scared. But then I was in loooooove with him. Like a clam on a fork.”

“But haven’t you ever loved anybody else, I mean, in real life?”

“Pablo Casals. I want to be a cello…. That was my real life, old bean. This is my afterlife.”

“But you got away from them.”

“Not so far. Not so very far at all. Alan the doctor of my soul is in New York and so are my parents. You can fly there and eat supper with them. The wonders of technology.”

“You didn’t grow up in New York?”

“With a Kansas drawl? My father as he succeeds moves eastward. We moved to Manhattan when I was fourteen.”

“But you’re twenty.” Mike’s age. “You’ll be twenty-one soon and then they can’t touch you.”

“Old bean, I’ll never be an adult. They can always commit me. I’ve been certified a loony and loony is what I am. Every time I get kicked out of another school for drinking, they threaten me. Alan tells them how sick I am. The only terms I’m here on is I see this chum of his Dr. Atwood three times a week.”

“What does he do?”

“Classic Freudian. Sits and hides his yawns. I know how to make the hour go by like a dripping faucet. I am careful. I am cool. All I have to do is keep my lies straight.”

I decide I will not confide in Theo about Mike. As I go upstairs to Donna I remember her crack about collecting misfits. Yet Dulcie seemed one who fit in superbly, her future with its clauses spelled out like an insurance policy. All women are misfits, I think; we do not fit into this world without amputations.

A thaw quickens the air. The sky is busy; the sun appears like a blessing between clouds and touches my face. At four I am to meet Mike. Meantime I browse for Donna’s birthday present. I’ve almost decided to get the collected Dylan Thomas poems when I think, If I give her a book she’ll be flattered in her mind, but if I give her something pretty, she’ll be glad all the way through. So I buy the Thomas for me and having no money left I saunter off to steal her present. What will please her truly I cannot afford anyhow. With a high tight tingle in my chest I amble in the trench coat only slightly stained and now repaired in the hem that Donna and I found in the Nearly New Shoppe just off Main Street last week. I have not repaired the right pocket, which is bottomless and empties into the hem.

Once I have secured it, I run with the present and the boughten book (dog with a bird in my mouth) to a bench I like over the railroad tracks. I like to be conscious of Detroit in one direction, Chicago in the other. Finally surfeited with poetry, I scrawl a quick letter to Howie quoting fatly and ordering him to buy the Thomas.

Spring vacation in only 2 weeks. Glad we’re getting off at the same time. I’m in love with Mike. He comes from Detroit too—not that you’d think so to meet him. He’s
erudite.
He’s fantastically brilliant. It’s a big blowy day here and soon I’ll meet him. In the meantime I move carefully so as not to knock people’s houses over. Remember to get hold of the Thomas immediately.

Your roommate sounds like a real jerk. If he keeps bugging everyone, why don’t you send
his
name to McCarthy as a pinko-commie-dupe and let him see how much he enjoys his hero in action! If he does that again, why don’t you tear up one of
his
books and see how he likes it?

We are so shy signing our letters that we both use the ploy of writing to the bottom of the page so there’s room only for the name squeezed in. But love makes me strong in my other loves and I sign it with a flourish above my name.

Mike already sits at a table in the Union. I rush through the line to get my coffee. When I bring it over he is slipping my Thomas from its bag. His brows rear up. “So?”

I smile. “I went to get Donna a present, but greed ran away with me. ‘The force that through the green fuse drives the flower drives—’”

“Merde.
He was an actor, not a man of letters.”

“I like those poems.”

“You would. He’s a decadent romantic and that draws you.”

“Decadent, am I? I thought I was just badly read.”

His hands rest with the knuckles heavy as judges, holding the book wrestled flat. “‘Into her lying down head.’ That’s all you need!” His mouth drops, he rolls his eyes.

“‘through the rippled drum of the hair buried ear; and Noah’s rekindled now unkind dove Flew man-bearing there….

Rekindled now unkind dove—all to rime eventually with love, as maybe we suspected? Hairy embroidery. You don’t care what it means. You want to get drunk on the words.”

I try to tug the book from under his fist. Already he has mangled that poem so I won’t be able to read it without hearing his voice turning it to rant. “Give it to me. If you don’t like it, you have no right to ruin it for me.”

He plants his fist harder. “No right? How could I ruin it unless I’m right?”

“You can spoil anything saying it that way.”

“You want to take it and hide with it! Like a secret drinker away in a corner smacking your lips.”

“Are you jealous of a book?”

“Why not? That actor! If you loved me you’d understand. Why can’t I hate anything you stare at and run off to and prefer to me? You spend yourself on everything.”

“I do love you!”

“Sure.” His teeth are clenched. He has hardened his face to a mask of derision on which my message is spent without effect. “You love me alongside of Donna and your idol Professor Donaldson and that boy you write to and your old dead cats.”

The table sinks and I am strapped to my chair. “No. I love you. Listen.” Tears burn my cheeks. “Do you want me to hate everybody else?” If only I had not signed the letter, love. “What can I say? I love you.”

“More than the others?”

“Much more.” I feel guilty. What does that mean?

“More than your parents?”

I nod.

“More than God?”

“I don’t believe in any god.”

More gently he says, “You have to. Otherwise it’s just ants on an anthill. It just all comes to dust.” He leans back in his chair.

He did not ask about Donna; that is a relief. In that lull I feel the stares. Scarecrow with dripping eyes I sit in a ring of watchful tables. In public nakedness I expiate my cowardice in not daring to enter his dormitory last night. If I had told my love then, this would not have occurred. He came ready to find fault with me.

He prods my hand on the table, the fingers one by one. “So we belong to each other now?”

Belong frightens me but I nod.

“If you love me, throw that book away.”

“I can’t. That would be wasteful.”

“I’ll return it. Get you something you should have.”

I do not like this but I have no energy left to fight.

He sandwiches my book into the center of his pile, calling my attention to his leather binder. “Paulsen, my writing teacher, didn’t like the journal. Too imitative, says he, the bastard. But I was getting tired of it anyhow.”

The binder is noticeably thinner. “You didn’t throw it away!”

“A purge.” He snaps his fingers. “It was going good up to the point where my best character J.—for
je, naturellement
—kills himself by taking off his clothes and walking into Lake Michigan. But Paulsen, the creep, said that was too much like Virginia Woolf’s suicide. I’m going back to poetry anyhow. Prose is too slack. It’s for amateurs.” He yanks his coat on, picking up the books.

That journal I agonized over was fiction. I’d like to break a chair on his head. He waits but I sit on, trying to think up something nasty enough to puncture him. Then remembering what I came to tell him today, I jump up. We walk out past the tables where certain stares follows us, as we proceed much too slowly toward the refuge of the hall.

CHAPTER TEN

L
IFE
G
OES TO A
P
ARTY

W
E HAVE ALREADY been thrown out of a dark conference room in Angell Hall to walk the rain-pelted streets under Mike’s big umbrella. Watch how we walk, pressed together in concert, movements synchronized, thighs together, my shoulder floating on his arm. In a dark tango through the puddles I follow him, experiencing myself as small and soft, as if my body had changed suddenly. Under a tree we kiss and the slow drip of the branches blesses our heads. Luck is with us and in only the third building we find an auditorium left unlocked. A scuffling down near the stage halts us with our hands frozen together.

“Mice,” he whispers. I sit on his lap and slowly we resume building up each other’s body from the dark. I am so accustomed to the damp frieze of his coat against my cheek I cannot imagine how it would feel to be parted by thinner membranes. Flesh is a distant smoothness strained toward. This intense yearning will be interrupted in five minutes, sometimes in twenty, by janitor or campus cop or other students. I learn his body in small patches.

Tonight Donna is eating her birthday supper at Lennie’s while I finish a paper due tomorrow, before we go home for spring vacation. Easter is early this year. When I am done, I am to join Mike, Donna and Lennie at a party Peter is giving in the apartment where Donna and Lennie first slept together the night after Christmas vacation. How my life has changed since then, and Donna’s too.

A block of loose-jointed rambling wooden houses and thick-waisted oaks. The number in my hand matches a plain grey house with a wooden fire escape. Timidly I give the front door a push. It opens on a wide entry hall where an English bike is padlocked to the banister. Through a door ajar come guitars and voices singing a work song raggedly. I stand in the hall feeling the clean fragrant air of the spring night clinging to me, longing to go on walking through the roomy darkness past lighted houses with my thoughts for company. Then a couple enters and pushes past, arguing. “Well, maybe there are worse things than cutting a few classes,” the woman snaps. “Such as being terrified ever to cut a class.” It is Julie with Van. Then she sees me and forces a smile. “Are you lost, Jill? Peter lives here.”

Van nods at me. I always feel he does not quite approve. In some way I am not appropriate. Mostly he gives me curt little nods from his blond-mustached eminence, sometimes a little jerk of his clenched pipe. He comes from Kalamazoo, where his father works in a paper mill. Sometimes I think he is afraid if he talks to me, our common class background will be apparent to everyone. In they go, Julie with her arm in mine sweeping me along. Her taffeta dress rustles. That worries me. My red warrior is at the cleaners, finally, and I am wearing my black turtleneck with my best black corduroy pants, an outfit put together out of some image in the back of my mind of French existentialists and set off with a long double loop of my mother’s bloodred beads from the twenties I used to wear when I played dress-up with Callie.

In a moment I see that for once and accidentally I fit in. The women are mostly not dressed as the image party suggests, in spike heels and swishing dresses. “Rather bohemian,” Van mutters, responding to Julie’s elbow by helping her off with her coat. “Didn’t expect that of Peter.”

“In his Prince Hal in Eastcheap phase,” Julie murmurs, peering around. Kids sit on the floor, playing guitars, banjos, bongos, nodding their heads and faking the words. “In college it is permitted to slum a little.”