Braided Lives (69 page)

“If you’d let me know, I could have met you.”

“I wanted to surprise you.” With a guileless smile. “Being met is so artificial. Besides, you know me—tons of baggage. I thought my uncle would be better equipped. He has a van.”

“But you know I hate surprises.” His voice rises gruffly from his chest through layers of inner wool. “I’m too slow moving.”

“Still a porcupine?” She glances from under thick lashes.

A cautious look passes between them intimately questioning. Reluctantly he answers, so I know this is one of their shtiks, “And you’re still a bobcat. So. Did you finish your incompletes?”

My superfluity runneth over. “I have errands. Back in an hour.”

I wander in a daze limp with self-pity till I pass the Strand Book Store and am sucked in. I browse. Melville. I took English honors, but I never had to read him. A squat
Moby Dick
in blue binding draws my hand. Sitting on a short ladder I skim. An hour and ten minutes later I blink up from a school of suckling whales and fathoms of green water, while the present falls over me with the soft weight of a ton of blankets. The small miracles of concentration. Rising I shake the wrinkles from my skirt to exchange two dollars with a hunched man behind the cash register for the sure weight of the book under my arm and drift onto the cold blowy pavement toward my occupied apartment.

Hesitating, I knock. Stephanie flings open the door with an exuberant bang. “Such politeness! I hope you didn’t think …” With her bubbling laugh, her old robustness of movement. “We’d been wondering what had happened to you—run over by a bus, carried off by white slavers. Now, Howie must go home.” Mock severity. “He has studying to do. You and I can chat—unless you’re busy?”

“No, no,” I say weakly, searching for his gaze. He gives it to me with bland incredulity.

“Now march.” She takes firm hold of his shoulders. “We’ll have supper together on the early side. We won’t eat till you come.”

“I’m going. Think kindly of me.” With gentle bashfulness he flees.

When the desire to bolt after him has subsided, I turn to face her. “You know.”

“Well, rather.” She passes her hand over her neatly cropped hair. “His delicacy is extreme. Why don’t you give it to me straight?”

A grin tweaks my face as I imagine his mumbled oblique recital. “We’ve been sleeping together.”

“Ah.” She sinks back on the couch. “I wasn’t quite sure.”

“I’d hoped he’d told you that.”

“Who knows what he told me?” With a tense forced smile. “At no small cost I’ll relinquish saying I told you so. This happened recently?”

“Sort of. Labor Day.”

“Labor Day? Right after he arrived. Oh. Go on.”

“To what?”

“What did you plan to go on to?”

“I didn’t plan. I leapt.”

“Into bed.” With a sharp giggle. “The usual leaping place for the likes of us.”

“Worse I meant it. I love him.”

“Of course.” Judgment serrates her voice. “But I too love him. I’m standing back taking all this in. Don’t think because I didn’t fly at you, I’m vacating the field.”

“I’m not trying to push you out.”

“No?” The sun catches the flecks of green in her wide-spaced eyes in which anger dances. “What, then?”

“We’re a triangle. Given. Supposing of course that he’ll accept the situation, dubious even though he created it.” I feel as if I am forcing my will on her through a burning glass. “We’re three peculiar individuals with odd connections. How else can we proceed but trying to find out what we want and need from each other?”

“Mmmm. You think if forced to choose between us, he might throw the whole thing up and decide to study extra hard?”

“That’s my guess. I won’t ask him to choose. It’s your freedom to put that to him if you want to.”

“Do you have anything alcoholic? I really am dry as a bone. Anything long and tall?”

“Nothing but wine and cider.”

“You? I don’t believe it. I thought you’d have a bar set up.”

It occurs to me I’ve been drunk only once since I left Ann Arbor. In my new regime of laboring to buy writing time, I have no desire to waste myself. “I could mix wine and seltzer for you.”

“Okay. But I learned to drink gin and if we’re going to have a ménage à trois—what does that mean, exactly?”

“Housekeeping by three.”

“Don’t think I don’t envy you this apartment! It gives you an unfair advantage. You won’t mind if I make myself comfortable?” Squatting she wriggles out of her girdle (how the hell do you suppose anybody wore those skirts?), unpeels her stockings. Then she sprawls on the mattress reaching up a lazy plump arm for the wine. “I hate girdles, but you must admit it improves my figure unutterably!”

Kicking off my shoes I sit propped against the wall. “You looked elegant when you stalked in.”

She laughs throatily. “And you two looked like dying fish. Did you think I’d make a scene?” She shakes her head, setting the silver earrings tinkling.

“I like those.”

“A present.” She touches them. “After holding on to my virtue for months, I succumbed to George one night. Moonlight’s a dangerous commodity—trickier than whiskey. Tell me how it happened between you.”

I hardly think I am meant to believe her. “It rained hard one night so he slept over.”

Vulgar as blue jays and as wary we pass the darkening afternoon. At six Howie returns, pausing in the doorway as if hesitant to enter. She pinches his cheek. “Come on. I’ll take you both out. My treat.”

He frowns. “That’s pointlessly extravagant.”

“I want to!” With stubborn vitality. “I have money now. Tomorrow I have to look for a job and I mean to land a good one. Tonight I want to eat real Italian and drink red wine.”

He gives in gradually as we meander looking for a restaurant to match Stephanie’s fancy, ending in one south of Houston. In the dark booth he sits like a bulldog tormented by a butterfly.

Leaning flirtatiously over the table she gives him a clam from her appetizer. “You lucky man with two devastating concubines. Show one shred of bumptiousness and we’ll beat you up.”

“And the two of you will live happily ever after?”

“Why not?” She flutters her bronze lashes. “Just don’t ever, ever let me hear another word about a brother-sister relationship or I’ll climb up on a table and scream.”

“I told you I always wanted a sister—I just never explained what I wanted her for.”

Eating my supper I feel decades older. I had forgotten how she brings out that awkward playfulness in him (although remembering the scene Bolognese’s phone call interrupted, I feel absurd in my aloofness). Not with the jealousy of the afternoon but with relief I’ll go home after supper and leave them to each other. At least we have purchased a time to find out what questions we have to ask one another. I mean to be patient and daily as grass.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

T
ILL
S
OMEONE
T
AKES
I
T OFF,
Y
OU
D
ON’T
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NOW
T
HERE’S A
L
ID

P
ERHAPS IF STEPHANIE and I still shared a room, the flurry of day and the rumination of evening, we could hold in balance our separate needs. She spends time in my apartment primarily to prevent my being alone with Howie more than she considers necessary, and the harder she tries to conceal her anger, the more I feel it permeating every interchange.

As for me, I have more time for Alberta, for Bolognese and for the subworlds of New York I explore with each. With Bolognese I go to readings and bookstores and coffeehouses. With Alberta I go to political lectures and meetings, to parties among the young people we have met. In January we take part in a demonstration. About three hundred people carry placards in the cold against H-bomb testing.

Alberta is used to demonstrations, so I do what she does. Refused a permit to use the streets, we walk on the sidewalks round and round with our signs. I feel frankly silly. It seems futile to march around Times Square with our placards as if to persuade the few prostitutes on the job in the afternoon not to drop more H-bombs. I am reminded of the Jehovah’s Witnesses of my old neighborhood with their
Awake
magazines, their intense uttering of The Message. I have become a member of a little sect, the antinuclear Left.
As I describe that lonely march
The Times
today carries an article about people who lived near the test sites then and
who were invited to come outdoors and view the fireworks, local schools being let out for the occasion. Now the survivors are trying to sue the government because they have lost many in their families to cancer.

Alberta is cheerful, pleased with the turnout and spirit. People march in knots of friends and comrades. Alberta has no trouble telling the Labor Youth League from the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom from the Quakers. We march with people our own age we have met at forums, less sectarian than the older people. Those bloody internecine battles of the thirties that estrange them are quaint to us. Perhaps we need a larger mating pool than any one party would provide, I think sardonically as we march round and round.

I ask Alberta, “Do you think this does any good?”

“Not doing it would for sure not do any good, right?” She winks at me. “If it makes a few people think about the issues, isn’t that a gain? It puts a little pressure on the powerful.”

I stop to pee in Longchamps. I’d like something to eat, but my budget won’t permit it. Then I rush back, half tempted to fade into the tourists and passersby but making myself locate Alberta. You have to say what you have to say however you can manage to say it, I tell myself, waving my placard and marching by her side. It occurs to me she does not march with the CP people, although she says hello to many of them by name. Alberta has not joined the party and will not, although she will always defend her parents’ choice. I wish I had warm fur-lined boots. I wish I had warm gloves. BAN THE BOMB!

Howie never takes part in protests about nuclear weapons, but he comes along to meetings about the Negro voter registration drive beginning in the South.

“Do you think voting is more important than the possibility of getting blown up?” I ask, curious. My apartment is hot; the temperature inside apartment buildings in New York seems fixed at eighty. Outside the wind rattles the windows, blowing down from a flat black sky like painted cardboard. When I bend to kiss him, his mouth tastes of cocoa.

“Protesting technology is stupid. Like weavers breaking up machines. You have to imagine people crusading against gunpowder.”

“Gunpowder can’t wipe out a world.”

“Tell that to the peasants during the Hundred Years War.” He groans, rolling onto his back. “I don’t want to be political…. It’s a mug’s game. The Left never has a chance. But I can’t help getting involved. We both grew up in Black neighborhoods and we can’t ignore what we know. We were born implicated.”

“That’s true.” I sit up. “Do you remember the Detroit race riots?”

“Jill, I was too little.”

“I remember. I was in day care that summer. The whites started whispering that the Blacks had knives and the Blacks started whispering that the whites had knives. All the whites congregated on one side of the room and all the Blacks on the other side, and me and Sarah Altweiler were left in the middle, the two Jews. Then the mothers started arriving to fetch us.”

“Sarah Altweiler. Why does that name sound familiar?”

“One Sarah Altweiler is speaking next month at the Young Progressives Forum. I wonder if it’s her? It can’t be.” But I want it to be: some link with my burned-down childhood.

His eyes are grey wilderness as they look at me with a question that could be simply, Do I want to? Or as complicated as a summation of six years’ knowing. My cheek rests on his chest against the tree of hair and the heart telling seconds. “Do you ever think suddenly about death when you’re happy?”

“I’m not Mike striking poses,” he answers brusquely.

Hello old sore: still open after all this time? “Howie, you miser, you never forgive or forget a thing.”

He shuts his eyes and I watch, hungry for that change into a younger, harder-looking, impulsive Howie whose face has an imperative beauty that is the precise mask of his need. Like his body slumbering in faded khakis and coarse work shirts, does that vulnerability live in him behind the constant decision-mongering of his daily life? I feel in love with the man I have known, but I love this man with the immediate yes of vision. Could he be born tonight from this bed, his boredom would rip like cellophane before his first step; with an infant’s fierce curiosity he would seize the choices before him and tear into them, know them. His ungrounded intelligence would move freely.