Braided Lives (38 page)

“Hiya … Stephanie.” The name comes back. Peter’s party long ago. We chatter brief banalities about PAF and then I watch them off. Lennie enters sponging snow from his head and beard. Our gazes dodge, slide guiltily back. He plods toward me, drying his glasses on his denim shirt. “How’re things?”

“Fine, Lennie. How’s your work going?”

“Okay. I’m taking figure drawing with Russo—good man.”

“Good.”

“Mike is doing a little better,” he says aggressively, as if giving me an up-to-the-minute report on an accident victim. “He’s got a room by himself on Division. He’s drinking but he made up his incompletes.” He shoves his hands deep in his leather jacket, rocking on his boot heels. “And how’s Peter Crecy?”

I get up to face him, resting my knee on the bench. “Fine. When I have supper with him tonight, I’ll tell him you asked.”

No, that sour grin is not of embarrassment nor accusation but an old man’s expression, a knowing grimace of humor rooted in pain. He turns on his heel and sidles off with a backhanded wave. I look after him, judged. Faithful still to Donna? Our common ark of love on the cocoa sea he painted has gone down, and none of us doing right well by ourselves. Yet I would not go back into that tight place.

We are supposed to be planning a PAF forum this afternoon, but Bolognese came back from the dean of students with the absolute refusal of our speaker, a lawyer considered tainted by his appearance before HUAC. Donaldson sets his auburn hair on end, ruffling it. “We’ll just have to be our own forum on this one, then. We can’t let them scare us off the issue.”

Howie is discussing the need to dramatize the issues, when Alberta pops out of her seat. She is so excited she has unwound her dark yellow scarf and waves it like a banner. “We’ll be HUAC ourselves! We’ll be the committee and we’ll visit campus and hold hearings!”

“A play,” I say. “We’ll write a farce and put it on.”

We decide to base our satire on the mad tea party in Alice with the Red Queen thrown in. Bolognese and I with Donaldson’s help will do the writing and everybody will make suggestions and act in it. I feel out of breath just sitting here. My wrists and throat pound as they do when I run uphill or when I am writing and an idea carries me racing forward so I forget myself entirely. Suddenly it is six thirty. I forgot to ask Howie to let me see his watch and now I’ll be forty-five minutes late meeting Peter.

I trot to the Union but he is not there waiting. Now what? I run to his house. The snow has stopped and the sky is clear up to the polestar glittering. The wind breathes ice on my cheeks.

Rooming houses lurk under the night sky on Division. February ice. As I pass one of the tall houses a movement in a corner room catches my gaze. A thin arm reaches through the couple of inches of open window to tap ash from a cigarette. The face drifts into the light in profile, then is thrust back laughing. Mike. A glimpse then of someone in the room, a flash of bright pink. His arm pulls the shade leaving me with my prying face of surprise angled up. Did he see me under the streetlamp?

I clatter up Peter’s steps gritty with rock salt. Through the draperies light shows from his room. I slip into the pocket of hall and bang on the door. “Peter!”

Nothing. I feel as if he is inside yet he does not answer. Why did I assume he would come back here? I give the door a last thump, then leave a note. I swing by the Union once more and then I go home.

I am still waiting in my room for him to get in touch when Donna comes in with her blue wool coat draped over one shoulder. She looks sharply at me but does not speak.

“What I’ve done! The PAF meeting ran late and I missed meeting Peter at the Union. How do I do these stupid things? But we had a great idea—”

“Why make such a fuss?” She turns her back, brushing her hair with vehement strokes. She is wearing it extremely short, a cap fitted to her head.

“But he’ll be angry, he always thinks I do things on purpose.”

“If you couldn’t remember you had a date with him, obviously you don’t care.”

“I just got caught up in the meeting. We’re going to put on a play about HUAC. Bolognese and Donaldson and I are going to write it, hey? Come on, Donna, what’s wrong with you anyhow?”

“I’m tired is all.”

“You’re tired a lot lately.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” She swings around, glaring.

“Mean? You’re irritable. Did you eat with Paul? Are you going out with him?”

She draws a hand across her forehead. “Oh, him. He’s married.”

“How do you know?”

“He was at the tea, all right. Gossiping about the high cost of babies.”

“Donna, I’m sorry. Where were you, then?”

“Curse men who don’t wear rings.” She raises her head and seeing me waiting for an answer, winces with irritation. “Out! Out, mother mine by appointment of who?”

“Sorry. But what can I do about Peter?” I pace. “Maybe I should have waited at his place. Now no supper. I’m hungry.”

Her hands attack her hair. “I don’t care! Just don’t go on about it!”

Martyred I stride in injured silence to the closet for a can of sardines, open them at my desk.

“That smell! The room stinks of fish.”

I will not turn around. Why is she so cross with me?

She raises the window to the cold air. “Living with you is like hanging on to a seesaw.”

I finish the sardines and drop the can in the wastebasket.

“Are you going to leave that in here to stink?”

“Even I don’t eat tin. Get off my back, Donna.”

“I want to.” She leans tensely against the door. “I want to live with someone else.”

“What?”

“I want to move out of this room. Living with you is too hard on me. You drive me crazy!”

For a moment I feel nothing. Then pain begins to resonate. “You want to move out? To live with somebody else?”

She nods. “I have to. Understand, Stu, I have to.”

“Sure thing.” I take my towel and toothbrush and cross the hall to the john. Can’t believe. I stand at the stained sink facing the mirror, foaming white mouth in a fixed grin taking the toothbrush. I thought she needed me. Thought she wanted the way we strike on each other and nurture each other. Fool. People get tired of you. Vampire. Magpie. Fool. You want too much, you lean too hard, you spill your guts on the floor. Even my parents can’t stand me. Nobody can.

She stands at the window with a taut nervous smile. Her painted nails click on the ledge. “We interfere with each other. You’re always wanting to talk when I should be working. You don’t need to study the way I do.”

“Fuck it, Donna, if you didn’t keep changing fields, you could take a normal load of courses. You’re damned smart. Why didn’t you say something to me about what was bugging you?”

“What good would it do? You can’t stop. Then your stuff all over. You make me feel guilty because I’m neat—”

Petty reasons stinging like black flies. “Shut up!”

“Don’t yell at me, Stuart. I’m trying to be reasonable!”

I am crazy with rage, I want to pound her face in. My anger terrifies me. My voice issues from me in my old gutter nasality, “Shut up, you motherfuckin’ whore, shut your shitass face!”

“Don’t scream! You demand too much. You jab at me and probe. You try to run my life. You try to drag me along to everything you do—”

I grope behind me, grasp something. Throw it hard overhand. A box of powder slams off the wall and shimmers down on her. A cry chokes in her throat as her arm snaps up to shield her face. Then she is sneezing, turning blindly in a swirl of settling powder. I grab my coat and run out.

Running, running blindly, I pause at last to ask myself after a few blocks, where? On State Street I duck into the drugstore to call Howie. No answer. I walk back along State to the Union and circle the tables. Mike sits with his tooled leather binder open before him. Grant Stone sprawls low in a tilted chair, running his hand through his florid hair, yawning. Julie sits primly on Mike’s right working on a French translation. The arm of her pink sweater rests against Mike’s arm in its old unraveling sweater. Oh. My goodness. Well.

Cold, it’s cold outside. My jacket leaks through its poor seams. Where? Where else? At the corner of Peter’s street a car grinds in frozen slush. As I climb his steps, the engine still grunts, the wheels still spin. Through his closed door music permeates the hall. I knock. Creak of bedsprings and then his voice. “Who is it?”

“Jill. Let me in.”

He slides the door aside. His face is blank and sullen. He looks seven years old and sulking. “What do you want?”

“Sorry I missed you….” The heat swells in my lungs. Padded cave of room. On the chocolate spread the impress of his body, a slit envelope, pages of a letter.

“I’ve eaten,” he says bluntly but takes my coat. “What are you doing here?”

“Pure desperation.” My head tilts forward on its stalk.

He turns my face toward him. “What happened to you?”

“Donna just told me she wants to move out.” I pull from him, leaning on the mantel over the grate where the speaker blows Stravinsky in my face. “It hurts.”

“Did she say why? What did she tell you, exactly?”

I shake my head. The end of something I loved. “She gave stupid reasons, like I’m messy and I talk too much.”

“You probably do.”

“So?” I wheel between the furniture waving my arms. “I’m me. I love her. She should care more!”

“Maybe she doesn’t love you. Maybe your love is a burden to her.” A nervy alertness in his face and in the tense hunch of his shoulders under a tee shirt, he sits yoga fashion holding the soles of his narrow feet. As I pace his eyes blue as Donna’s fix on me tauntingly.

“What have I done to her? Only cared. She’s sick of me.”

“You’re so naive. Must take a lot of work to stay that way.”

“If you don’t want to listen, throw me out. I’m set to bleed for the night.”

He rubs his feet in sensual kneading. “It’d be so easy to comfort you.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“I do. Jill, I do.”

“She wants to study? Bull. She wastes more time than I do.”

He rocks back, chin against chest. “Cut the surface. Of course she didn’t give the real reason.”

I stop pacing. “Since I’ve been seeing you, she’s resented it. How blind I am. You’re attracted to her and she’s attracted to you. What am I doing in the middle?”

“You say I’m attracted to her?”

“It’s clear from the way you talk about her, ask after her.”

“I couldn’t… wouldn’t push her out of bed. But she’s more mixed up than I can handle.” “We’re a lot alike.”

“Hardly.” He makes a fist and stares at it. “Considered it when I noticed her running around with Lennie. Obviously not going to stick to that poor twerp. Pure rebellion.”

“Why not now?”

“She’s too mixed up, I tell you. Too stormy.” He catches my arm. “You’re my size.”

“Poor reason. If you’d rather have her, go after her.”

“I don’t want to.” His arms tighten around me. “You’re trying to put me off, but remember, you came to me tonight. I’ve been waiting for this.”

“It’s just pain, you know.” My tears soak into his shoulder. Emptiness expands in my chest till I feel as if I am floating. I can even observe that he seems to enjoy my crying as if it released something in him. His hands move on my back, my arms, hands cradling and stroking and soothing, hands curious and avid of me, hands exploring my breasts, my thighs. So be it. His tongue catches the last tears. I lie back and look at him. In a moment of silence the record changes. “What’s that?”

His cheek resting on my breast, he listens. “Prokofiev. Second violin concerto.” He smiles. “Sometimes it’s like pushing buttons, how predictable your reactions are.”

“Why bother, then?”

“I want you.”

The words echo through, tap tap on my spine. “Why?”

He smiles as he bends to my mouth. Long kiss carrying me backward on a slow swell. I want to be carried. I lie loosely as he undresses me, even perversely applying my limp leverage against him. But finally free of clothes, the first impact stops my breath in the ice-hot shock of flesh on flesh. My skin is charged with static. His body against me in the lamp glow seems hammered of some warm pale metal, hard, sleek and hairless. I desire him. Attempting to control my reactions, I say to myself, See, this is Lust. I am glad for the break when I stop to put in my diaphragm. I realize abruptly that Mike and I never were naked together. As Peter nibbles on my breast, an image lights my closed lids of that flash of pink in Mike’s room and his thin arm pulling down the shade. Julie got what she wanted finally, although I wonder if she wants Mike entire.

I am so busy exploring my reactions and defending myself against them (what do I think will stoop and sweep me away?) that I am slow to realize he has pulled back, his face sullen. He contracts as if he were being unborn beside me, returning to fetus. I fold my arms around him comfortingly as he grinds his face into my breasts. He is not erect. He cannot pump himself erect.

“If you don’t want to, Peter … You know it’s not necessary.”