Braided Lives (35 page)

Once we were out on the water in the pearly fog of dawn, I kissed his hands. I had escaped Mike again. I had escaped from that marriage again. We were voyaging together, our fourth year in the fall, and I could love without confusing it with having a tooth drilled without novocaine. Josh scolded me for confounding past and present as we ate our apples and cheese, shivering on the deck. We had to go back to Oslo soon anyhow, where my Norwegian publishers were expecting us.

That night in the Hotel Terminus in Bergen I woke in the darkness hearing that man’s cold voice relentlessly proving her wrong, but it was only the rain, the cold steady rain of Bergen. I wanted to wake Josh and tell him I did not confound the past with the present but the past was the compost that fed the present and the worm that curled inside eating away its sweet wholeness. The past confounded me only when I believed it was passed and dismissed it. I love this man so hard it scared me, resurrecting old fears to walk through me again wearing faces and clothes I had forgotten I ever possessed. I am a person to whom sex comes easily and pleasantly and love hard; friendship is common and important, intellectual and political passion my daily bread, but sexual passion conjoined with love rare. Now I was with my friend who is my lover and I went back to sleep again.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
N
W
HICH
B
OTH
J
ILL AND
D
ONNA
T
RY A
C
HANGE OF
A
LTITUDE

B
Y SPRING I have figured out that Donna and I should move into one of the cooperative houses owned and run by students, a federation that attracts those of us who need cheap accommodation, foreign students looking for company and those attracted by the progressive aura. The one that has room for us needs a great deal of work over the summer, but by September—the beginning of our junior year—we can move in.

Our housemother is Alberta Mann, at twenty-six considered mature enough to get a stipend from the university for living here and exercising supposed discipline. Alberta comes from New York, where her father is a lawyer whom HUAC has pestered, although that does not seem to have destroyed his practice, mostly in labor and civil rights cases. When he is working on a case that excites him, he still calls to give her bulletins, but carefully, always assuming as Alberta does that the phone is tapped. Alberta fell in love with a Black law student she met at a National Student Association conference when she was nineteen. Their marriage was annulled but Alberta did not return to school for another year. At that time she felt her father was a hypocrite to oppose her marriage, but she no longer thinks so; it was a disaster. The next year she met Donaldson. Now Alberta is in the last year of law school, having a hard time but persisting doggedly. Since her long affair with Donaldson seems to have come to a ragged ending, she has taken an interest in no other man. Their political work throws them together too much for her to have the opportunity to recover.

My only defeat was in failing to persuade Theo to move with us; I still don’t understand why. I don’t mind crossing campus to her, but inevitably I see less of her in the late evenings, which have been our intimate time. I didn’t expect Julie to move into these frowsy accommodations, but I did think Theo would. She claims to be too lazy. I drink now with Alberta, who is fond of bourbon. I think of the bourbon I buy as Old Overcoat, the cheapest brand that tastes as though it were cooked up last night out of caramelized straw. Alberta buys Wild Turkey and shares it with me. Her husband of three months taught her to drink bourbon, she says; her family drinks Scotch and martinis. Alberta has the single room next to the white corner double that Donna and I share. Alberta’s room is sumptuous, heavy fabrics, interesting textures of burlap curtains, velvet spread, corduroy-cushioned Danish chair, tones of mustard and gold and dark woodsy brown. Donna seldom drinks. She is high and giggly or melancholy after two shots; she disapproves of my drinking and tells me I stink when I come in to go to bed.

Now Donna stands in front of the full-length mirror she found in a secondhand store, putting her hands on her hips and turning to watch the line of the tight skirt over her small pert ass. “See, I can get into it finally.”
It
is a black sheath dress she bought at a rummage sale, narrow enough to fit tightly on a barber pole.

“Yeah, after starving yourself for two weeks.”

She rests her hands on her hipbones. “Americans eat too much.” Usually no matter how wonderfully luminous her skin, Donna greets the mirror as if it were the eye of an enemy. But today she allows herself a pursed smile of pleasure. Even with her skinniness the dress is so tight it requires a girdle and hobbles her so that she must take tiny, tiny steps like a windup Chinese doll. The effect, however, is what I’d call sophisticated and that’s what she’s aiming for.

“What kind of party is it?”

“Sal’s just having some friends from the department and a few grad students to meet Edmund Rosco while he’s in town.” Her voice still cannot quite say “Sal” naturally. It sticks out of the sentence like a flashbulb going off as her voice rises a little in controlled anxiety.

I don’t ask if she wants me to come; I know better. Salvatore Spinellosa is her private adventure, a foreign correspondent usually attached to the
Washington Post,
here for a term as distinguished visiting lion. He teaches one seminar and gives a few lectures while he writes a book on the Middle East. He is in his forties with hair as black as mine, silvered over his ears. Six feet tall, he carries his potbelly well. He has gradually covered Donna’s dresser with French perfume I dip into when I dare. I know she is going to buy a safe and lock it away from me eventually, but I cannot resist. I like to smell my body with the musk of perfume rising.

Donna is wearing a bra based on the design of a medieval iron maiden, pushing her up and out into the décolleté. Now grinning at me in the mirror, she hangs her little gold cross around her neck.

“Holy shit,” I mutter. “Didn’t know you still had that.”

“It’s real gold,” she says defensively but she is eyeing herself with wicked satisfaction. “It gives him an extra frisson.”

“I suppose he needs all the help he can get.” I do not believe Donna is in love with Big Sal, although she staunchly insists that she is, and I am furious with him for being the occasion of her lying to me.

“He’s a man of many talents,” Donna says. “Some of them above the waist and some of them below.”

“Oh. You mean he digests well.” I hate her forcing her body into the confines of the dress. I hate her hobbling across the floor on four-inch spike heels to dip carefully, holding her breath, to retrieve the velvet envelope of evening purse he gave her.

“Maybe you’ve forgotten what else men can do.” She hobbles out while I am still trying to think of a retort.

Because his father is dying of cancer of the stomach, Howie has transferred from Columbia to Michigan. He has bought himself an old grey Plymouth he manages to keep running; weekends he commutes into Detroit to visit his father in the hospital and to do what he can for his mother and grandmother. Often I have coffee in the Union with him, Dick Weisbuch and Bolognese, who share with me a writing class and a course in the metaphysical poets and share with Howie and me membership in the PAF.

Has Howie changed? I study him as he sits with his elbows thumped on the table before him. Built like a fort, Donna said caressingly, but awfully young. He has matured over the past two years, jaw, neck and wide shoulders carved from the earlier fat. Sometimes he moves with confidence; sometimes he shambles like a bear in captivity. He is dogmatic and shy at once, hiding his constant worrying over his father as if embarrassed by his own grief. Monday, after a weekend of sitting by his father’s hospital bed and of soothing his mother and grandmother and cleaning out the gutters on the house and putting up storm windows, he drags back to school exhausted. The two halves of his life do not mesh.

He likes to ride Bolognese, who lives alone in a rooming house on Packard, goes to bed at eight and rises at four to write cold electric fables. Lean, olive-skinned and neat, Bolognese views the world with icy mistrust.

“Listen, you cold bastard,” Howie says genially, “you’re locking yourself in a closet like Emily Dickinson. I see a great spinsterhood ahead.”

“Good work comes from inside,” Bolognese drawls. “With great effort.”

“Sure. Like a starving man trying to shit.”

Bolognese sits with fingers hooked over the table edge. The closest he comes to registering warmth is during their battles. “I see. The great doctor is going to close his office at five, kiss his fingers to his dying patients and go nightclubbing. A time for work and a time for play, or how to be piss-poor mediocre all the time.”

“When I have fifty grandchildren singing me happy birthday, you’ll be dead from overwork and they’ll put a pretty marble stone over you for the pigeons to shit on.”

“The two of you can do my research.” Bolognese includes Howie and me in a wry glance. “You’re both so good at getting what you want. And Dick can eat for me.”

“Now you’re both right.” Dick is a mediator who thinks if we all married and ate good home-cooked meals, we’d be as plump and cozy as he is. Dick has a baby, financial troubles and the surest future: he will finish his Ph.D. and write “on the side” while teaching. I think his optimism greater than mine. I enjoy sitting with them and joining in their rivalries, particularly pleased to be here not through the patronage of any of them, nobody’s girl, but by proved competence. Occasionally Donna comes along as she will to PAF meetings, but the boys flirt with her, competing awkwardly, while the tone of insult puts her off. She calls Bolognese the Undertaker’s Assistant, and I laugh. But I respect him. He is serious about writing. Like me, he has no nets under him, no family with money. He works hard, he reads whatever I show him and says straight out what he likes and dislikes.

Peter across the table: clean-limbed English schoolboy. Clipped blond hair, black-rimmed glasses strident on the young mask of clear-skinned slightly fragile face. Hard to believe he has six years on me or that he is a graduate student in particle physics, working here with Glaser who invented the bubble chamber. He slides the Mosel across the checkered cloth. “The sauerbraten must have been good tonight. I like the girls with hearty appetites.” We are in a dark booth at the Old German.

“You’ve found one.” I still work the dormitory switchboard, forcing me to miss meals at my co-op. We have shared four suppers, a movie or a play, then a drive back to my house where Peter double-parked, slid over for a mannered kiss and departed.

“Not surprising. Like pregnant women, we both eat for two. Ourselves and our neuroses,” he announces.

“To make them grow?”

Earnest face except for that deepening groove beside the mouth. “Takes less energy to go straight ahead than forward in circles.” He traces epicircles on the cloth.

“And less to sit still. What do you mean?”

“That’s a proposition of geometry you grasp intuitively, or not at all.”

“You’re awfully arbitrary, Peter.”

“But ‘awfully’ right.” He refills the wineglasses.

With the sense of being rebuffed I chatter, “It’s strange to drink in public. Whose ID card do I have?”

Quick grin. Point for him. “No idea who the girl is.”

“One more thing I should grasp intuitively?”

“I have a friend in the lost and found. Operators are useful.”

“If they don’t operate on you. Or do you have a license yourself?”

He says sharply, “The knife goes across the bread-and-butter plate. Not on the table.”

“You should have taken out a sorority girl.”

“No reason you can’t eat like one. To your advantage. After all, aren’t you a social climber?”

“Like hell I am.”

“You told me you’re the first in your family to go to college. Working-class neighborhood. Going back there after college?”

“I can’t.” I am not about to explain my last summer in Detroit. “I’m a freak there now. What I aspire to is the society of compatible freaks.”

He pours more wine. “Culture’s nice but expensive.”

“Not to make it. All it costs is paper and time.”

“You don’t want clothes that show a little taste? For a change.” He can’t resist little jabs. “A hi-fi that doesn’t cook the music? Wine on the dinner table?”

“I bring out the inquisitor in you. Why?”

A flash of reaction across the high boyish forehead, the thin supple mouth with a groove like a scar of thought on either side. “You don’t know yourself.”

Old introspective me? “That’s where you’re wrong.”

Two-finger signal to the waiter. “You’re too busy reacting to take the time off. I’d gather you’ve had little enough to react to.”