Braided Lives (60 page)

Tonight after the forum there is no party. Somehow no one arranged it this week. I end up at Gerrit’s apartment by default. The time has come to make this attraction real or dismiss it. Bolognese, Gerrit and I sit in Gerrit’s tidy kitchen.
Die Deutsche Ideologie
lies on the dish rack with a knife marking his place. Bolognese leans all the way back in his chair. Gerrit sits loosely forward, his elbows resting on the table, as we drink coffee I made.

“The truth is, the better students are always displeased by their education,” Gerrit is saying. “They complain it’s too hard, but it’s never hard enough.”

“Bullshit,” Bolognese says. “We don’t want it harder, we want it truer. We want dialogue, but we’re just statistics on a curve.”

“You think you don’t crave answers?” Gerrit sits up almost straight so I know he has thought of something he is going to enjoy saying. “What we all want from our education is to be one on one with Socrates. We all want to be fucked by Socrates.”

“I bet you wouldn’t, actually,” I say. “The ugly disreputable old geezer. A lower-middle-class failure who only flirted, then went home to his bag of a wife. You’re thinking about Plato. The poetic young man of good family and interesting attitudes.”

Gerrit is looking at me, eyes glowing with interest. He likes me when I am his good, good student. Why doesn’t Bolognese go home? Am I allowed to seduce Gerrit or forbidden? I want Gerrit to save me from Kemp and my taste for low adventure. Gerrit, make books as exciting as my underworld journeys. You’re a moral man: make me moral too.

I waver. I want to take Gerrit’s handsome leonine head between my hands and waken him to my potentialities with a kiss, not one of those chaste dry-lipped pecks he gives me in his car when he is about to deliver me to my house like a penny into a piggy bank. A moment later I want things simple. I want to be his student/friend/comrade as unambiguously as Howie and Bolognese are, without sexual vibrations to trouble the air. He started pursuing me, but only to a point where I hang flapping idly like a newspaper caught on a fence.

Finally Bolognese leaves, but only after Gerrit has dropped a few hints that the hour is late. Is he going to take me back immediately? He doesn’t. Instead we sit on the couch. With his head in my lap, I pet his hair like a cat’s fur while his feet in hand-knit argyle socks hang over the far arm. His mother knits them. She also knits him sweaters, mufflers and an afghan that covers his bed instead of a spread. He is his mother’s darling boy, the oldest, brightest son in a family of five. His father is a corporation lawyer. I suspect his family has almost as much money as Peter’s but he cares less. It never occurs to him he is not important and successful in himself. He lays his head in my lap and soaks up female attendance and adoration without ever considering that this is not a service provided by the city like water, I think, but I am still charmed.

A. You cannot easily seduce a man who does not touch you. If I sat down suddenly in his lap, he would assume I had mistaken him for a chair.

B. He does not get drunk. He drinks wine only to the point of an even greater ease of the tongue.

C. I could ask him. Hey, Gerrit, you wanna? Want to what? You must define your terms. Nowhere in any staged miniature drama in my head, one-act revue, can I say, Hey, Gerrit, want to fuck? I am too respectful. To put anything into such blunt words would alter our delicate rapport. Gerrit, do you love me? Of course he doesn’t; I myself suffer only from a four-year crush.

D. Hey, Gerrit, I’m in love with Howie, so let’s go to bed so I don’t mess up with him and Stephanie. That lacks appeal.

At the moment what I want is to get him to pay attention to me: intellectual attention. Maybe I want the answers he accuses students of longing for. Tell me how to put my life in order. Show me how to be just and political. “Sometimes I don’t know where I belong,” I say, thinking of Kemp’s shack, which is so much more comfortable to me than this apartment. “If I belong anywhere.”

“Anomie,” he murmurs. “The center doesn’t hold. Invisible stresses. Unresolved contradictions. A bridge stands until one day it falls into the river, that bridge in Puget Sound, suddenly we think, but the stresses were built into the design.”

“Other people my age know what they want. They want X other person and they want to marry X and have three children and live in Bloomfield Hills. They want to earn so many thousand a year and have two specific cars and a specific model boat and a summer home on one of two lakes.”

“They’re just deferring the discovery that you cannot define yourself by things you own and surround yourself with.”

“But I have to belong somewhere. I get scared. I don’t fit into anything. What can I join myself to?”

“But the price of joining, of belonging. The price!” He frowns up at me. “You were close to Alberta.”

“Still am.” Astonishing. He mentioned her name of his own free will.

“She talked to you about her life?”

“You, you mean, or her life otherwise?”

“And her family?”

“Mostly her father. But yes, her family.”

A silence. Then, “I wanted to be sure…. I never joined. Maybe I’m too bourgeois. Too attached to the intellectual freedom I prize which Ralph—Alberta’s father, did you ever meet him?—calls the candy with which petit bourgeois intellectuals are bought off. The power, he’d say, to publish radical academic papers no one reads and write all the jargon you please as long as nobody can understand it who works in a factory.”

He never joined what? Then I know what I halfway guessed. Alberta’s father and mother are in the Communist party. “Well, aren’t you glad now you didn’t join?”

“After Hungary? Yet I don’t feel spared any disillusion. Spared some sense of complicity, perhaps, but perhaps not. I wonder if I just refuse to take any chances—do you think so?”

“Without you there wouldn’t be any PAF and thus no progressive presence on this campus not closeted or tiny and sectarian.” I am deeply flattered by the question. Oh, give me your intricate and beautifully constructed Wasp conscience to handle reverently. I won’t hurt it.

“But is it enough?”

That seems a rhetorical question and I wait him out.

After a while he mumbles, “I feel guilty about her tonight. As if I ought to be comforting her. I know how she’ll hate what’s happening and yet feel wholly supportive of her father.”

“You could call her.”

He snorts. “I’m sure her phone is tapped.”

“You could say you’re thinking about her. You could say that with the FBI listening. Really. If they watch her, they know you were involved.”

“They used to follow us sometimes. She had her first scary experience with them when she was twelve…. Should I really call her?”

“She might not be home,” I offer. “Why not try?”

After another ten minutes of debate he goes into his bedroom and shuts the door. I hear the murmur of his voice. Half an hour passes while I read his latest
Dissent.
There’s a great article by C. Wright Mills. By the time Gerrit emerges, I have lost my desire to seduce him. Any strong reminder of Alberta’s feeling for him turns me off. He looks as if he had been pummeled into some kind of feeling, and we start where we had left off, trying to talk about how we each feel about the Communist Party of America and its clandestine embattled glamour. I spend the night, but on his couch.

Saturday afternoon in January. Yesterday snow sifted down and today the sky is a basement ceiling. Cellar light. The wet snow is mounded over everything, censoring all garbage and details, the old tires and bottles around Kemp’s shack. It looks pretty and yet the clammy light saps any desire to venture out. We drink cocoa and eat little lemony cookies Kemp’s mama baked. I study for my finals as Kemp works on an old hunting rifle he has taken apart on the kitchen table. He picks up old guns and refurbishes them for fun and profit.

We hear the car drive up. With a leisurely shuddering yawn and stretch, Kemp goes to the window. I hope it isn’t Buddy. Kemp glides past me to his room and opens a drawer. I look out then, suspicious because of the tension of his stride, the silence. It’s a red T-bird I know I’ve seen parked downtown. It’s so red I always noticed it, well kept and polished except for one crumpled fender which I used to wonder why the owner didn’t fix. The man who gets out and squints carefully at the house is Black.

“Who’s that?” I ask with part-real and part-feigned innocence.

“Nobody.” Kemp sits at the table and works on his rifle as if he had heard nothing. “Take your book into my room. You can study in there.”

Slowly I walk to the bedroom doorway. I can see the Black man finish a careful survey of the locale and approach the door. “How come? Who is he?”

“Shut the door. It’s nothing I can’t handle, but I don’t want to be worrying about you.”

I shut the door and stand just inside. Another fence? Another little job? It’s none of my business, but as a writer, don’t I have to study everything? There is a loud insistent banging on the door.

“Don’t break it down. It’s open,” Kemp says in his cold, nasty, don’t-mess-with-me manner. “You just turn the handle and pull.”

The door opens and shuts and nobody says anything. I press my ear harder to the door. Finally the Black man says, “What’d you do with your girl? The one standing at the window giving me the once-over-lightly?”

“I sent her home.”

“Sent her in the bedroom, you mean. You call her right out. I don’t want nobody in this house I can’t watch. Don’t fancy being shot in the back by no white floozy.”

“She’s a college girl. She’s doing her homework and minding her own business.”

The bedroom door kicks in with such suddenness it catches my arm as I jump back. “Get out here where I can see you,” he barks.

I sidle along the wall and sit at the table opposite Kemp. I still have my Schopenhauer clutched in my hand. The man’s eyes fall on the book and he grins. He is an inch or two shorter than Kemp, maybe five, six years older and built strong like Howie. His hair is in a long smooth conk and he is wearing a light grey suit as fine and conservatively tailored as any of Peter’s. “Missy Coed, no lie. You Chinese?”

“No, Jewish.” Surreptitiously I rub my bruised arm.

That always stumps them. Kemp seizes the moment to try to regain his lost dominance. “Okay, Mercer, what gives? I don’t remember issuing no invitations to come drop by and chew the fat. But now you’re here, sit. You want a beer?”

“Let Missy get it. I don’t turn my back on lowlife.”

“This here pimp is calling me a lowlife. That’s some joke.” Kemp nods to me to get the beer.

“Yeah? My girls come to me because they like my loving and they want my protection and they got it. And they need some protection with lowlife like you and your little creeps scuttling around.”

I sidle to the refrigerator and take out two beers. Facing Mercer, I open the bottles and place one in front of each.

“I drink from a glass,” Mercer says. “Unlike lowlife.”

I get him a glass from the cabinet and sit again.

“Sure,” Kemp says. “We can break it after you leave. And that blessed moment should come real soon.” He drinks with his left hand. His right is under the table.

“I’d be pleased to leave real soon with Rinda’s money. Your little creeps took two hundred off of her last night. I also want fifty for her doctor bills. Plus I’m giving you a warning. You lay mean hands on one of my girls again, I’ll cut you into pieces so little a pussycat can eat them out of a dish.”

“Kemp was with me last night from seven on all night,” I say truthfully and with great relief. “Honest. There must be forty other people who saw us together including my whole co-op.”

“But his two little creeps weren’t with you, college, Buddy Rayburn and Ray Koszieski. They busy down on Liberty, shaking down my girl and beating her till she bleed.”

“Buddy and Ray beat up a prostitute and took her money?”

“Shut up,” Kemp says to me. “A Black whore so ugly she ought to pay them to fuck her.”

“Sure, she so ugly and so Black she make two hundred dollars by one
A.M
. sure as clockwork. Your girlfriend don’t think it’s so great they gang up, two big fat crackers beating on one poor skinny piece and knock her around and take her hard-earned money.”

“You stay in your own part of town over on Detroit Street. But you were on our turf. If she wants to walk our streets, she pays us. She owes us, and we took it.”

I am shaking with anger. “And Buddy likes to beat up women. He likes to leave women all bruised and bloody. That’s better than the money they took off her.” I stand and they both look at me with surprise. “Please, Kemp, give him her money. It’s hard being a prostitute, real hard. And if they hurt her, give him money for a doctor. I remember what Donna looked like after Buddy raped her.”

“Shut up!” Kemp pounds his fist on the table. He stands. “Go in the bedroom and shut up. This is business. I don’t have a thing to do with that whore of a cousin of yours. This is a nigger whore and if she wants to come on a white street, she’s going to pay.”

I grab my purse and throw my wallet down on the table. I pull out my money. Twenty-eight dollars. “Take that for her. She’s a woman, and do you think I’m so fucking white? I won’t have any part in this. I won’t.” I take my coat from the hook by the door and run out. I pull my coat on as I run, stepping into my boots and stumbling through the car tracks toward the road.