Once We Had a Country (15 page)

“That’s great,” says Maggie, drawing away from the viewfinder.

“What, is that all?” Rhea sounds disappointed.

“I’m out of film,” Maggie explains.

“Oh—good,” says Rhea without much enthusiasm. “Now we can really talk.” In a friendlier tone, she asks, “How are you doing?”

“Why, what have you heard?”

“Oh, nothing. We just never seem to chat, do we? It’s Brid’s fault. You can’t get a word in edgewise.” A second later there’s a geyser of water from the tub and a high-pitched cry of pain. “Judd, don’t kick,” she orders, then waits for peace to return before she speaks again.

“Fletcher has got quite the set-up here,” she continues. “It isn’t much of a commune, but it’s cute how straight he wants things to be. Some folks think he’s only slumming it here after Cybil Barrett dumped him, but that’s just silly, right?”

“It better be,” says Maggie, laughing uneasily. She wonders who has been saying such things. To change the subject, she asks, “You really can’t imagine staying up here?”

“Not if Dimitri gets his job back.” Rhea looks at Maggie intently. “You knew he was fired, right?”

Maggie shakes her head. Fletcher only told her that Dimitri was in between things.

“Well, it wasn’t a surprise,” says Rhea. In a lower voice, she adds, “Did you know he got into speed?”

Maggie says she didn’t.

“He had me trying it, even,” says Rhea. “He had me trying a lot of things.” She glances back at the boys, whose attention seems focused on some unseen aquatic phenomenon. “I figured out pretty fast I wasn’t into that stuff, but Dimitri had some people in his life who were bad influences.”

“The dragon lady!” exclaims Judd, looking up at her. For a moment Rhea appears horrified. Then she gives a sigh.

“The dragon lady,” she agrees. Leaning toward Maggie, she says, “One night he came home so strung out he couldn’t remember the kids’ names. I told him that was it, no more drugs, no girls, or else. So he went cold turkey, tried Zen, spent three weeks in a field near Hartford building a geodesic dome. Fine, I thought, whatever works. But in June I spotted the tracks on his arms, and a few days later so did his boss.”

It’s Maggie’s turn to glance at Judd and Jeffrey.

“Oh, I don’t care if they hear it,” says Rhea. “They need to know their father isn’t the Almighty.”

“Are things better up here, at least?” Maggie asks, and Rhea’s overtaken by a look of gloom.

“I wanted them to be. We’ll see. He goes out a lot.” Seeing Maggie’s puzzlement, she adds, “Not in the car, just walking. He says he’s looking for the cat.”

As if she’s just remembered something, she stands and strides over to the tub, picks up a wet washcloth, and begins to wipe at Jeffrey’s neck.

“It’s cold!” he shouts, enraged and ducking. “I don’t like it!” Rhea dips the cloth into the bath, wrings it out, and reapplies it.

“It’s no fun for me either,” she mutters, scrubbing hard. In a brighter tone, she says to Maggie, “I hope you won’t mind me saying something.”

“No, of course not,” Maggie replies, still trying to wrap her brain around what Rhea has already told her.

“The problem with Fletcher,” says Rhea, “is he’s too hard-headed.”

Suddenly Maggie realizes she does mind. She wants to say as much, but Rhea doesn’t give her the chance.

“Fletcher never listens at meetings, he only talks. All that stuff about the bourgeois machinery and the repressive state apparatus—the rest of us hashed that out years ago. We were going to teach-ins when Fletcher was on his parents’ yacht every weekend. Now we’ve moved on. Hold still, I’m almost finished,” she instructs Judd. To Maggie, she says, “I know he’s trying to show his father he can run a business up here, but he’s too uptight. You know what I mean?” Maggie nods absently and Rhea smiles. “Of course you do. You’re a good listener. Fletcher could take a page from your book.”

Maggie’s still kneeling on the floor. She remains silent long enough that Rhea glances over at her.

“Rhea, I want to be your friend,” says Maggie. “If you have something to say about Fletcher, though—”

“What? I can’t hear you.” Rhea sets to work smoothing down a cockscomb of hair on Jeffrey’s head.

“I said, if you want to complain about Fletcher, you should talk with him yourself.”

As soon as Maggie speaks the words, she gathers the camera and audio recorder, then stands to go, already regretting what she’s said. But as she turns to apologize, she discovers that Rhea’s attention is fixed on the tub. Judd and Jeffrey are flexing non-existent muscles for their mother, and exuberantly she praises their physiques. When Maggie says softly that she’ll see them later, Rhea waves without even turning around.

That night, Fletcher’s mouth refuses to move in time with his voice. “Punch me,” he says a second before his lips purse. Sitting at the card table in the playroom, Maggie rewinds the film on the editing machine and cues the audiotape again. Synchronizing the sound with the images is the most difficult part. There’s equipment that can do it more efficiently, but already she feels guilty enough about the expense of all the cartridges. “Punch me,” says Fletcher, half a second too late. She rewinds once more. “Punch me,” he says. He has his shirt off and the lighting’s good enough for her to see his abdominal muscles tighten perceptibly as Pauline wallops him in the gut. It’s a solid swing, producing a short, insuppressible grunt, but one that comes too soon, just before the little fist makes contact.

“Three-thirty,” says a voice not on the soundtrack. “You should be in bed.”

Turning from the editor, Maggie sees Wale standing by the door. Against the backdrop of the lit hall, he looks naked. Then her eyes discern the white of his underwear, and she glances away. By day she’s seen him in swimsuits, but still, he must know he’s embarrassing her.

“I’ll go to bed soon,” she says. “I just want to finish this.” He doesn’t leave as she hopes, though. “Punch me,” says Fletcher on the audiotape and viewer, finally at the same time.

“You ever think your man tries too hard?” says Wale. He has come up behind her, and he bends over her shoulder to look more closely at the viewer. “You know, to compensate for all his father’s dough.” Hot air rolls along Maggie’s neck, carrying the scent of skin and sweat.

“Fletcher’s spending that dough on you and me and this place,” she says.

Wale only laughs. “Right on, defend the guy. I know you’ve got your ideas about him.” He pauses, giving her room to retaliate, but she holds back, so he adds, “Hell, you’re only up here because he is.”

She can’t help herself. “That’s bullshit.”

“You’ve got quite a mouth,” he murmurs into her ear.

She wrenches her chair around to face him, but having completed this manoeuvre, she finds her eyes level with his underwear, so she stands and folds her arms across her nightgown.

“Fletcher’s not the only one committed to this place,” she says. “Coming up here was my idea.” And then, lest he should hear some regret in this admission, she adds, “I was right, too.”

“You’re a real visionary, Auntie Maggs.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What, a visionary?”

“No—Auntie Maggs.” It’s too late in the night for arguments. This must be payback for filming him; he’s out to lay her open in turn. Well, she won’t have it.

“You really want to live like this?” he asks. “With all the rich kids chasing after satori?”

“If you think they’re such phonies, why are you here with them?”

“Sometimes I wonder the same thing.” There’s a hardness in his voice. She studies his face to see if he’s kidding, then waves him away.

“I almost believe you. The way you treat Pauline—like you couldn’t care less.”

“Pauline,” he replies in a flat voice, “owes her life to a broken rubber.”

“That’s a horrible thing to say.” Yet immediately she’s sure it’s the truth.

He moves into the circle of light from the lamp beside her, a shadow deepening across one side of his face even as the other gains texture and detail.

“Let me tell you something I’ve learned about myself,” he says. “The heart of me is a lump of selfishness. Concern for other people is just a ribbon tied around it. I wish it were otherwise, Maggie, but at the core I’m this piece of petrified shit. It’s a fact that has kept me alive, at least, and it never goes away. It’ll stick around longer than this place.”

“What do you know about it? You don’t even come to meetings. You’re always playing cards. If you paid more
attention, you’d know we’re going to be here for years and years.”

Wale shakes his head. “People have been setting up communes for decades. They all think they’ll work twenty hours a week and live like kings. It never happens. Brook Farm, New Harmony, the Oneida Community—all gone. You know why?”

“Because people have hearts made of shit?”

He chuckles and nods. “But it’s nice you think otherwise.” Then he adds, “In some ways you’re a lot like your father.”

Maggie scowls at him. “How would you know? You’ve never even met him.”

“I met him in Laos.”

At first Maggie assumes it’s a joke, but he isn’t laughing.

“It was in May,” he tells her. “While I was on the lam.”

“You were in Laos?” She doesn’t understand. It’s impossible. He must be lying.

“Hardly any white people over there,” he says. “They tend to run into each other. It’s like in Africa with Livingstone and what’s his name. Your dad and I, we met at Long Chieng, the big CIA airbase. The reds were on the offensive, so half of Laos had hunkered down there. I was on my way back here, and your dad was heading to some refugee camp.”

As he speaks, Maggie feels a growing anger. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“You broke off contact with him, didn’t you? I figured you weren’t interested.”

But she knows that’s bullshit too. He’s been playing with
her, waiting for the right moment to spring the news, a time late at night with no one else to interrupt.

“You really talked to him?” She can’t help asking it. “How was he?”

“We only spent a couple of hours over beers, but he seemed happy enough.” Then Wale’s brow knits as if he’s rethinking it. “No, not just happy. Maggie, he was radiant. It freaked me out. I mean, Long Chieng isn’t Disneyland. I figured your dad had to be working an angle.”

“Angle? What angle?” The question carries an energy with it, as though if Wale could give her the answer, it would let her feel better about the situation. But he only shrugs.

“I asked him that, flat out, and he said he was there to make something of his life.”

Her chest tightens. It couldn’t be so simple and piteous. “He went to Laos because he was broke, and because he didn’t have me at home to look after him anymore.”

Wale raises an eyebrow.

“Did he tell you about the things he said to me before he left?” she asks. “Did you even tell him you knew me?”

“Sure I did. Then you were all he wanted to talk about. Whatever happened between you two, he was feeling bad about it.”

“What did he say?”

“He said he had a hard time when you left for college.”

A pain of remembrance shoots through her.

“Hey, I sympathized,” says Wale. “If I had you all to myself and you split, I’d have a hard time too.”

She remembers Wale in Boston, the intensity of his gaze at the bar, the way he seemed to be mapping her inch by
inch. He’s looking at her like that now, and it’s no less alarming than it was then. What did she do to merit such attention? He reaches out to clasp her by the elbows. “Don’t,” she says.

“You really see something in that guy?” He’s looking over her shoulder at the editing machine. When she turns to it, she realizes that the image of Fletcher being punched in the gut still glows in the viewer.

“Don’t,” she says again, shaking free of him and flicking off the editor. A low electric hum disappears that she didn’t notice until the moment of its vanishing.

“You haven’t written your dad lately?” says Wale. “You haven’t heard from him?”

“Why do you care?” It’s impossible to stay here; she has to leave. “I’m going to bed. Turn out the lights, will you?”

She starts for the door, wishing there were something she could say to let them speak of more trivial things in the future. Instead, she ends up asking, “Did you really meet my father?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“I don’t believe you just ran into him. It’s too much of a coincidence.”

“What do you think happened?”

She doesn’t reply because she doesn’t know.

“Good night,” she says, worried he’ll call after her and wake everyone. The trip down the hallway seems to take forever. When she makes it to her room without hearing his voice, it feels like a lucky escape.

In bed, unable to sleep, she remembers the father she once had, the one unwilling or unable to change his life. Gran always thought the solution was for him to marry again. She said a man in his thirties was still young. Besides, she insisted, playing her trump card, Maggie needed a mother. Gran always said this in a patronizing tone Maggie loathed. “I don’t,” Maggie wanted to say. “My father’s all I need.” But she never spoke the words aloud. It wasn’t until she had been accepted for college and was on the verge of freedom that she decided she could say whatever she liked.