The Sky Is Falling (25 page)

“So,” Pete said. “I guess that's it.”

“Don't you have anything you want to say to me?” Belinda asked.

Sonia, I noticed, was trying to peep in through the doves and peace signs on the door panes. “Ask him,” Belinda said in an urgent voice. “Ask if he doesn't want to tell me something.” “No,” Pete said.

“Nothing?”

Sonia poked her head in. “Sorry. Pete, the phone's for you.” “Who is it?” he asked.

“I don't know. A woman.”

Belinda, who had been leaning forward on the chesterfield, anxious for Pete to speak, fell back when Sonia said this. “Take a message,” Pete said.

“It's long distance.”

“Take a message.”

Sonia gave me a stricken glance as she closed the door again, probably in response to the SOS I was transmitting with my eyes. As soon as she was gone, Belinda asked in a completely different tone, “Who was that, I wonder?”

Pete lifted his head and looked at her. I could see by his expression he was devastated, and now this too: confused. “Is this about sex?” he asked, like it was the last thing he would have blamed their troubles on.

“You slept with Ruth!”

“Who told you that?”

“Ruth did,” Belinda said.

“In what context?”

“I asked her.”

“You could have asked me.” He turned to me. “I don't lie.” To Belinda: “Is that what you're waiting for me to tell you?”

She rolled her eyes. “No. I already know that.”

“Should I go?” I asked and they replied, “Stay!” in adamant unison.

Pete: “I said you could sleep with other men.”

“Why, thank you.”

“I'm not giving you permission! You have the right to do what you want. Now and then I feel like sleeping with someone else. And if she feels like it too, it sometimes happens. It has nothing to do with you. I'm completely committed to you.”

Belinda tossed her snakes.

“I thought you were okay with it! You said you were!” He threw up his hands. “Christ, if this was the sixties this wouldn't even be an issue!”

“I don't want to sleep with other men,” Belinda said.

“Then don't!” he shouted.

She yanked on her braids in frustration, as though she wore them as a prop. “Don't you get it? I don't even want to sleep with you!”

Pete sat, apparently absorbing this. After a long, blank moment, he sprang out of the beanbag. Belinda scrambled to her feet too, reaching for him, and they hugged for a long time, fused and swaying. When Pete started running his hands all over her back, Belinda abruptly pulled away and Pete lurched off through the French doors without looking back.

“God,” she said to me, lifting her arm and sniffing. “I stink, I'm sweating so hard. Can you walk me home? I need to debrief.”

Sonia came out of the kitchen as we were leaving. Belinda held up a hand to stop her from asking. No, Isis did. All that was over now. Sonia nodded; she would get the whole story from me later.

“That was the hardest thing I ever had to do in my life,” Isis said as we descended the wooden front steps into dusk. “Correction. My stepfather once tried to get in my pants.”

“Oh, my God,” I said.

“This was the second hardest. Thank you.” She hugged me.

“I didn't do anything.”

“You did. You were there. I felt supported having another woman in the room.”

“Pete wouldn't hurt you,” I said.

We stopped at the bottom and Isis said, “All men are latent rapists as far as I'm concerned. But what a relief! What a relief it's finally over!” She threw her head back and inhaled. “God, the air smells wonderful. I love spring. Have you read
The Cherry
Orchard
? Of course. You've probably read it in Russian. We should read it together. The group, I mean.”

Then the street lights suddenly winked on and we looked at one another in surprise. Isis laughed and took my arm. Together we walked on, linked like schoolgirls crossing the street. “Was I too hard on him, do you think?” she asked. “See, I'm trying to be assertive. I'm trying to find my power.” Before I could answer, Belinda—this time it was Belinda—pulled her arm out of mine and staggered over and sank down on someone's lawn. People were obviously home. Lights were on in the house. She toppled onto her side, howling, “He would never say he loved me! He would never use those words!”

I hurried over. “He won't say sorry either.”

“You keep defending him! Are you sure you didn't sleep with him?”

“No!”

“But if he did, Jane? If he had once told me he loved me? If he had said it tonight? That's what I wanted. I need to hear those words. I'm so insecure.”

This surprised me very much.

“My mother used to say the awfullest things to me,” she went on. “Like my breasts are two different sizes. Who cares! She made me so self-conscious. I hate her.”

She curled in a ball, sobbing, with me bent helplessly over her. “He kept screwing around. I said it was okay but it wasn't. I was jealous. I wanted to slit their throats.” She looked up at me, grass and snot blending with her freckles, and her whole body spasmed. “
Hic!
Sorry. That's not non-violent. God! Now I've got the hiccoughs.

“He's jealous too,” she went on. “He won't admit it, but he is. Remember what he did at the Hyatt? He's jealous of—
Hic!
—Carla.” She rolled onto her back, used her sleeve on the tears, sighed. “Look. Stars.”

I looked up and saw them, the first faint emanations that night. “Make a wish,” she said and I did. “I'm always torn,” she said, lying at my feet, “between disarmament and gender equality.”

When she got up, fresh-cut grass was stuck all over her army pants. She brushed herself off and we continued down Gandhi Street. Every time she hiccoughed, I pretended to too, so by the time we reached the Blenheim house, we were laughing again. “Are you going to be okay?” I asked.

“Yes. Carla's home. Thanks.” She foisted the mandatory goodbye hug on me, then started up the walk. Halfway she turned, wearing a different face altogether—pleased and smug. She said, “Carla worships me.”

We didn't see Pete for three days. Except to cross the hall to the bathroom, he never left his room. Nor did he respond to Sonia's pleas, delivered through his door, to come down to supper. His heart was broken, Sonia said, but I thought it was more complicated than that. Getting Belinda back would have been easy. All he had to do was utter the formula she had doubtlessly given him many times, the three magic little words we all long for. He could probably have got her back without them, but he knew it wasn't fair. His looks, his manifold charms—they were inherited, not earned. If he turned his magnetism on, like he had done that time at the Hyatt, what message would it give to people like me who had none of his physical advantages? So he stayed in his room, pitting his heart against his principles. I knew he would come out when his principles had won.

Without the Reliant, both Dieter and I had to take the bus the last few days of term and, in the morning, we walked together to the stop. “I really don't want to do that action in Seattle,” he told me. “It's a way bigger deal to get arrested down there.”

“You can be support. That's what I'm doing.”

“They'll arrest everybody. They're a bunch of Fascists. I'm going to Nicaragua in June. We're driving down. I'll have to get across that border again. But we need consensus, right? Are you with me?”

I thought he was asking if I understood. “Yes,” I said.

“Good.” After a pause he said, “What are you doing this summer?”

“I don't know yet.” I was in a quandary. I was supposed to go home. My mother had asked in her last letter when they should expect me. But Sonia and I were moving out together. If I left for the summer, I'd have to sublet my room. I'd have to be apart from her for four months when I could scarcely endure the day's separation and often trudged halfway across campus just to eat my lunch near Scarfe, the Education building, pathetically hoping to catch a glimpse of her. Who knew what would happen during those four months? It was always there, the enormous matter of a nuclear war, the monster in the room, the ominous shadow falling over all our plans and dreams. And where did I want to be at the end of the world? Wherever Sonia was, I knew.

“Did you talk to Sonia about me?” Dieter asked when we reached the bus stop.

“No.”

“No! Why not?”

“I didn't know what you wanted me to say,” and by his crumpled look I saw he didn't know himself any more.

“Well, could you do this for me then? Could you find out if there's any other guy she likes at the moment?”

“There isn't,” I said with complete confidence.

Pascal mostly kept to the living room, out of everyone's way. Or he hung around with Dieter when Dieter wasn't studying. I think he hoped being unobtrusive would earn him an extended stay. The night it was his turn to cook, I came into the kitchen and saw no evidence of food being prepared. When I went to remind him, he leapt off the chesterfield, killing the cartoons. The doorbell rang. “Supper!” he called.

Pizza was a treat, though a guilty one. “Cheese is made with rennet,” Dieter explained—nicely. He seemed relaxed, almost jocular, now that he had a friend in the house he didn't feel the need to impress. Now that Pete was in seclusion. “See, rennet comes from the hooves of calves. We usually buy rennetless cheese at the co-op. Anyway, it won't kill us this one time, right?” he asked Sonia.

“It killed the calf,” she said, stripping the stringy topping off her slice.

Pascal looked at her, rueful, his eyes big, like the calf's, so she couldn't help but excuse him. “You didn't know,” she said. “Take some up to Pete later.”

“I'm surprised the smell didn't lure him down.” Dieter yelled at the ceiling, “Pete! We've got pizza down here! Yummy! Yummy!”

Sonia: “Leave him alone.”

“Is he sick?” Pascal asked.

“He's heartsick,” Sonia said.

“It's his pride,” said Dieter, pushing up his glasses. “The worst possible thing that could happen to a guy just happened to him. His girlfriend became a dyke.”

I'd already figured it out walking Isis home a few days before. She as much as told me. Still, I felt sick when Dieter brayed the word out so coarsely. Sonia seemed as shocked. “Who told you that?” she asked.

“It's obvious. They're a bunch of man-haters. You'd better watch it when you go over there. They'll convert you too.”

“That sounds pretty sexist to me, mister.”

“Sexist? Me?” Dieter tossed his crust into the box. “They can say whatever they like. They can make jokes like, ‘What do you call a man at the bottom of the ocean?'”

“What?” Pascal asked.

“A good start.”

Sonia and I laughed. “See?” said Dieter. “But if I said, ‘What do you call a
girl
at the bottom of the ocean?' it wouldn't be funny. No. I'd get the lash for saying that.”

Now Pascal laughed. He'd only just got the joke. Sonia leaned over and hugged him, because he was so sweet and naive, because he made us feel less so.

After supper, Pascal and Dieter went out to the back yard to kick a soccer ball around while Sonia and I lingered at the table. “I thought Belinda and Carla were best friends,” she confessed.

Maybe if we weren't sitting on six hundred thousand Hiroshimas. Maybe if the hands of the nuclear clock weren't stuck at two minutes to midnight. Maybe without all that pressure, instead of feeling racked over what it was I felt for her—whether it was physical or not—I would have been thrilled to be designated a best friend. It might have ended my torment. But it was March
31
,
1984
. “We have to give a month's notice if we're going to move out,” I told her.

When Isis and I had made our star-bent wishes, I'd put moving in with Sonia ahead of world peace.

“We can't have a meeting if Pete won't come down,” Sonia said.

Outside the window the soccer ball soared past like a moon in an accelerated orbit. We could hear Dieter and Pascal laughing and the robins belting out their songs in the vaudeville of spring. I wanted to say, but didn't, that we could give our notice in writing.

“Let's try talking to Pete one more time,” she said.

We crept up the stairs together, bearing the pizza box with the two pieces we'd saved at supper by slapping away greedy hands. “He'll come down if we call a meeting,” I said.

Sonia stopped on the landing. “Jane. He's in so much pain.”

“Do you still want to move out?”

She saw then, and heard in my voice, that I was in pain too, and squeezed my arm to reassure me. Her pupils were dark pools of compassion I wanted to dive into. “Yes, Jane. But we might have to put it off a month. Okay?”