Braided Lives (56 page)

“Slumming,” Donna calls it. “You’ve given way to a decadent romanticism. You’ve seen too many James Dean movies.”

“This one doesn’t pout. He enjoys life like a baby.”

“It’s a giant step backward! What did you struggle to stay in college for? You’re going to get torn to ribbons.”

“Actually I think you’re playing a more dangerous game.”

She drops her face into her hands. “Where are we going to get the money? Where?”

“I’ll find it. Trust me.”

“Where? Last time we could ask our friends. But if Peter gets wind of this, I’ve had it.”

A vague desire to write him a poison-pen letter crosses my mind, but I expect their engagement to collapse from within. I do not tell Donna that Kemp offered last Saturday to give me the money. I can’t take it. What he said in the car that first night stays in my head, and I will not take the money because I am sleeping with him. I will earn it somehow. If I pretended to myself I was borrowing the money, I could never pay Kemp back, and I’d be bound to him. As I chug along, the virtues of financial independence clarify. I will take nothing from Kemp except his company and cooking.

I have not told Donna that Kemp is Buddy’s buddy, but I know she senses a connection, a betrayal. But I will get the money to buy her abortion and that will justify my adventure.

Donna argues, “But it can’t
go
anywhere with Kemp.”

“Did Mike go anywheres? Yes, to Yale. Did Peter? Yes, up you.”

“As a one-night stand, Stu, I can see it. We all have our violent flings. A mud bath now and then. But to go on seeing him, as if he were a … a real possibility!”

“I’m not husband hunting and I don’t find him dirty. He treats me better than Peter did. I feel better before, during and after.”

She shakes her head, not believing me. She feels guilty, as if by taking Peter she has condemned me to what she sees as the depths of degradation. “Why do you want to go back where we came from?”

“I can’t go back. But I can use some time there, Donna.”

The subject rubs her sore. When she looks at me now, she stares with the anxiety I used to beam at her. I am not displeased. Her caring emerges in the attempt to argue me out of Kemp, bully me, psychologize me. Every day she produces fresh reasons. I imagine her sitting in boring classes making notes on how she will dissuade me of my folly. Every week she tells me about a great new therapist.

Stephanie has decided to treat Kemp as one of my poetic aberrations. “Verlaine and Rimbaud liked to hang around gangsters,” she tells me. “It’s a phase. You’ll get bored. It’s like when I was dating that hockey player. You can put up with just hockey, hockey, hockey for a limited time…. Not that your hoodlum isn’t handsome as the devil—looks like old photos of my papa except for the nose. I don’t wonder you succumbed. But you can’t just go on with it.”

I have committed a class sin, a crime against upward mobility expected of and by my friends. The potential for shock of my love life during my senior year has not begun to exhaust itself.

I can’t remember whose idea it was that the movers and shakers of PAF should meet at Donaldson’s apartment for a potluck: probably Dick Weisbuch, who lives with his wife and baby and who arrives with a decent tuna and noodle casserole made by his stay-at-home wife. But if you ask five men and two women, all students, to bring stuff for a potluck supper, you end up with one tuna noodle casserole, two loaves of bread and four bottles of cheap red wine.

This is my shining hour. Recently I watched Kemp make fettuccine, glory from such minima: noodles, eggs, cream, a little cheese. I can do it if I try; and I do. This wins me the gratitude of six other hungry people and the barely divided attention of Donaldson. As the meeting is breaking up, he says quietly, “Stay and help me clean up, why don’t you? I’ll give you a ride home.”

This is hardly an invitation I can refuse. The annoying part is that I cannot sort out if I am being asked teacher to student, comrade to comrade, or—if I am brazen in examining my scarcely formed suspicions—perhaps from romantic interest? The cleaning is over in half an hour, for we ate on paper plates. I feel a little manipulated as he conducts a postmortem of a dull meeting. I experience him as being entirely in control of what will or won’t happen, so that even my suspicions feel disloyal and crude.

“Would you like coffee?” he asks.

On a sudden aggressive impulse, born out of frustration at the awkwardness, I ask, “What is your name? I know Alberta called you Donnie.”

“Just a nickname. My given name is Gerrit.” He sits at the kitchen table with an empty cup before him, to excuse his idleness. Of all the men I have known he is the most indifferent to his surroundings. The apartment is rented furnished in boxy blond modern. He has added only a couple of Käthe Kollwitz prints, a George Grosz exhibition poster and several thousand books and periodicals. He still lives in the vaguely Tudor apartment house where I spied on him when I was a freshman.

I face him across a Formica-topped table, like a little lunch counter. “You don’t like the name much?”

“Gerrit? I didn’t when I was younger. I thought it was affected. But nobody’s used it in so long, it’s as if I’d lost it. You could call me that or Jerry—my sisters call me that.”

“I’ll use Gerrit.” I am not about to call him anything other than Donaldson in meetings, no matter what. How the hell is he going to make a pass at me across a Formica table? If I were planning a move, I would have kept us on our feet or sat us down on his perfectly comfortable couch. Or is he the type who says, Let’s do it, all verbal?

Nothing happens. Except in Gerrit’s mind. When he takes me back to my co-op he kisses me good night. Two days later he takes me to a showing of a film made of Raymond Radiguet’s
Devil in the Flesh.

So I have two “lovers.” I perfunctorily sign out for Detroit whenever I spend a night with Kemp. Our new housemother, a graduate student, is no special friend, but finding me already in possession of my own key and accustomed to independence, she acquiesced and I have her pleasantly cowed. I avoid making an issue of my habits by observing minimal forms. I sign in and out, even if what I sign does not correspond to my activities.

We tramp through the fall woods while Kemp picks late mushrooms to use in a spaghetti sauce—tomatoes, tomato paste and sauce, a dash of cinnamon, some red wine, a garlic clove mashed with the back of the stirring spoon, basil added late—and we drive in his barge of a car to country bars to dance.

His eyes are beautiful in their darkness. The irises turn translucent when he is happy and opaque in his angrier moods. If he believed I really exist with my own hungers, he would be a good lover. He is a true solipsist, I think, but his charm saves him, rooted in an ease with himself and what he likes. The world scrapes him raw enough to save him from complacency. His body draws my hands, the lithe power in his satiny back. Some nights when I sleep alone I have erotic dreams about him, yet nothing in our lovemaking matches what I sense could happen. Neither of us speaks of love, a reticence I find delightful. Love is not much on my mind. I know which man I could love and my path is away from meddling with Howie and Stephanie. I tell myself I have Kemp for my body and Gerrit for my mind.

Gerrit has not slept with me. As Mike used to, he lends me books. He expects me to cook, which I sometimes do, trying out on him what I learn from Kemp. I prefer eating with Kemp. I am willing to cook occasionally, but a long day in school and a long evening in the kitchen are not my delight. We see every art movie that comes to town. I have always gone to the movies. Now I discuss “the cinema,” as if they were all one long foreign film. He subscribes to periodicals that analyze movies. His French and his German are superb, at least in reading, although when I hear him speak French, I always have to ask him to repeat because I can’t tell what language he is pronouncing as Milwaukee English. He even reads some Russian. I learn vocabularies for film and a wider political vocabulary. His leonine head moves me as it always did and I walk teetering on the verge of falling for him hard. His coldness holds me back. I cannot find the fire in the private man that moves me in his public self. My hands reach out and come back empty.

He feels guilty about Alberta, a sore I seem to lurch into but actually touch intentionally. I need to understand. I still judge him for not keeping her. He loses his temper by growing taller and colder. The temperature drops forty degrees in two minutes while ice crystals form in his eyes.

Stephanie and Howie spend every evening together, except the Tuesday nights PAF meets. When she has gone to him, her afterimage haunts the room. She paces, shaking her sleek hair back and talking compulsively of him. I hallucinate them in bed. Jealousy scalds me. Ever since I was in Detroit, too, I am haunted by myself as my mother’s heir and successor, of how the energy and vitality in her were leeched away by the grind of surviving. I have a vision of myself just before sleep as a mountain composed of millions of women, keening, begging, demanding the fulfillment denied them. All their thwarted wills flow through me.

“You still want to make some money?” Kemp is brushing his hair in the bathroom mirror. It takes him ten minutes to arrange it to his satisfaction. He likes brushing mine for the sensual pleasure.

“You know it.” I bring up the subject with tedious regularity because my panic is fed by Donna’s. It is soon or never. If I don’t get money some other way, I will have to put the bite on both men.

“If you got the guts for it.” He eyes himself in the mirror as critically as Donna.

“Try me.” I sound more confident than I am. Money, money. The hills of Ann Arbor feel lately like compacted bills. The booze that flows one weekend in a fraternity house would buy Donna free.

“I’m thinking on it,” he says cagily. “If your nerve’s good. Because once you’re in on this, you’re in.”

My mind summons up images of bank robberies, technicolor shoot-outs starring Randolph Scott and John Wayne; then my mind plays black-and-white gangster movies. Rat-a-tat-tat and James Cagney dies in the gutter. Edward G. Robinson is machine-gunned into a wall. I see stocking masks, fast black sedans taking off with a screech of rubber.

“It’s a dental supply place.”

“Dental supply?” I am almost outraged.

“Babe, they put gold in teeth, right? But mostly we’re after drills, drill bits, equipment. I got a connection wants a load of it, but it’s pretty specific.”

“We’re going to steal dentists’ drills? You’re putting me on.”

“This is a right deal. The best kind. Where you got a buyer and you got a supplier. Now I’ve been looking over a place the orders go out from and it’s a piece of cake. In a block of offices. The night watchman makes his rounds every two hours. We’d have an hour and a half safe.”

“Don’t they have an alarm?”

“That’s my business. I got myself a key made but I have to check it out—make sure it works and see if a key triggers alarms. Tonight we have to make a spot check.”

“What do you want me for? Is that why you’ve been teaching me to drive?”

“Julietta, you don’t drive that well.” He laughs. “I got a list of what my man needs and Saturday night when we do the job you got to find what’s on it so the boys can move it out.”

“A list? Of things like drills?”

“All kinds of fancy expensive stuff. He—the man—can sell it in Detroit. Costs a fortune for dentists to set up in business. We’re doing them a favor.”

“But I don’t know anything about dentists.”

“I’m giving you a list. The boxes’ll be labeled.”

“And I get a cut of what he pays you?”

“A fifth.”

He gets two shares. “That’s because I’m the contact with our man and ‘cause I do the headwork. Without me, nothing happens.”

I am to meet him at eleven tonight. I sit through Friday classes in a stupor. “Miss Stuart, I realize your thoughts are far more stimulating than our poor seminar, but if you could bring yourself to shine the light of your intellect on Auden, we are discussing one of his poems and I have twice asked you for an explication of the closing lines.”

Something about me annoys my professors in the department of English, even when I am unpolitical and trying to please. I am the wrong sex, wrong class, wrong ethnic mixture, wrong size, wrong volume level. Even when they give me A’s, they tend to be sarcastic and curt. Perhaps they suspect years in advance what I am going to do—write what they will never admire but will have to endure years of students who do. All time is an illusion: as I sit in his seminar my professor is punishing me for how annoying he will find my work in twenty years.

Tonight I am supposed to go to a PAF party. I’ll develop a headache at ten thirty. Not sleeping with Gerrit has some advantages. He’ll take me home from Dick’s and I will promptly slip out again.

At supper Donna bolts the table. I follow her. She is throwing up. Afterward she lies on her cot weeping. Minouska kneads her shoulder, trying to comfort her. I hold her limp chilly hand. “If I keep throwing up this weekend, he’ll make me see a doctor. Then I’m done for! It’s all over then. I want to die!”

“I’m getting the money. For sure! You go ahead and make the appointment for a week from now. You have the deposit. Give him your hundred down. Next Wednesday or Thursday.”