Going Down Fast (34 page)

“Forget it. I'll catch him some other time. Are you living here?”

“Yes,” she said firmly, enjoying it. He plunked into a chair and looked glum. She had the advantage of better intelligence service and of seeing him in an awkward fix. Not that she could relax. His eyes made her restless. She kept turning to the vacuum cleaner in the corner to look away from him. He was growing his moustache again. Paul said Vera was through with him. He looked thin and tired and his eyes were bloodshot.

He wanted to talk. Once he started it poured out. She wanted to put her hands over her ears. Harlan, the Defense Committee, their defeat, Yente's death, as if she were still his he poured his troubles into her, he grappled for her attention and sympathy, he demanded. But she could not help being curious and gradually involved. Briefly she was angry, as if he should have been able to keep Yente alive, then she pitied him.

She was almost enjoying herself—she felt in a way superior and that was new. Perhaps she did feel a sort of friendliness as she'd imagined before that night in Woody's. He left and she stood leaning against the bedroom door feeling short of breath. Somehow the encounter had blundered through like a package falling downstairs. She looked at her levis. What a way to catch her … Why should she care? Every encounter between them was worn or lost, for her.

She did sit down with the ads for apartments and call a few. Leon came from lunch with Caroline, high, whistling, swinging his arms. She looked him over from boots to Van Gogh hair. He would be hard to save. They went off to do the week's shopping at the Co-op.

They loitered through the spacious aisles of the supermarket, clean, airy, a monument to the educated consumers who created and owned it. People shopped there because it was vaguely liberal to do so, because it was well stocked and because the help were friendly. It was pleasant and sumptuous and made her uneasy. Much time and effort and idealism went into making shopping nicer. Suppose they had gone toward solving some lethal problem?

He strolled beside the cart she pushed, with his hands in the pockets of his worn peajacket. “No shit,” he mumbled, “she's coming around. She's beginning to
see
me.”

She puttered along the meat taking chucksteak for goulash, chicken and a pork loin.

“She can't trust that stud whose diamond she's toting. Rowley doesn't give a shit if she dies under the knife—”

“That's a little strong.”

“But I care, and she's beginning to sense that.” He popped a box of imported biscuits into the cart. “I'm not making her promises, dig. I won't bribe her. I'm just saying trust daddy, loosen up. If she'll do that—come home and ask for help and put herself in my hands … She's got to choose it. Otherwise it's useless.”

She shopped the peanut butters for price. “You like chunky, right? Planning to marry her and have the kid?”

“I've had worse ideas.” He dropped Port du Salud into the cart. She took out the English biscuits and left them on a shelf among catfoods. He muttered, “I'll never get my hands on my own kid. Joye'll see to that. Should've been Caroline got pregnant two years ago, instead of Joye. Simpler all the way around.”

She was reading the labels on rice: 59 cents for 22 5/12 oz. as opposed to 69 cents for 1 lb., 7 13/16 oz. She could not see Caroline sharing the rickety concession stand, the shack from the Great White City of the Columbian Exposition with its fainthearted stove and Joye's mobile shuddering under the ceiling, his old catcher's mitt moldering in the closet, disciples and cronies and wounded old friends shuffling and moaning in the stall of kitchen with its unsurpassed collection of popbottles. Yet Caroline had fallen for him once and come to him in trouble now. Joye had married him. Nice cleanlimbed girls from Winnetka and Park Forest had taken off their clothes for his movies, and he mostly had not bothered to seduce them. Their pores were recorded and they were back in Winnetka and Park Forest with their clothes on. Here she was pushing his shopping cart. This misshapen red man.

“I bet her family would send me back to school. They'd have to, huh? Have to give a hand. With a degree I'd land a decent job. Or get foundation money.” He tossed a can of albacore tuna into the basket along with a jar of caviar.

She replaced the tuna with a cheaper brand. “Could be.”

“We can have dozens of big fat pink babies.” His harsh laugh. “I come home at night and yell about how she doesn't keep the house clean—and she won't—and why didn't she water the lawn. I'll get fat, I'll look like a vulture too.”

“Hey chief, what do you want her for? And what kind of bread you want—French or a nice dark rye?”

“Rye. Because we're each other's best hope. She's a narcissistic woman. But she made it with me once. And I bet she never really made it with anybody else. I can keep her from coming apart into little plastic pieces. I can make her grow up the way she should have, with me instead of her pig father. And I like her soft hair. The way her face is. The bones in her throat … Remember in
Moonblood
when she puts her hands over her eyes, and they're like slugs moving on her face, and her mouth is so sad? I like it. She moves me.”

He grinned at her over a head of cauliflower she was fingering. “I warned you. Remember?”

She smiled back, adding the cauliflower to the cart, removing the caviar. “Would you like grapefruit for breakfast tomorrow instead of juice?”

Caroline

Saturday, December 27

101. = PROGRAM XX2

Caroline woke Saturday morning feeling oppressed. Her avocado waltz-length gown clung faintly damp to her. Only ten fifteen. Awful dream. She snapped on the clockradio. Really, she wished she were still in therapy to have someone to tell it to.

MAKE OWN STORAGE FUNCTION

She had been walking out of Woody's bar with a man. He had his arm around her, they walked together from the crowded bar. At once she saw that many more buildings had been torn down. The sky was black, the streetlamps lay roots up. The sidewalk petered away in a rubble field. They were walking pressed together, his arm supporting her across a desert of gritty sand and broken bricks. Thinking that she did not know where they were going, she turned to him. Then she saw he was changing. He was falling apart. His big head cracked like the turret of a sandcastle, cracked and before she could cry out, ran crumbling down his shoulders. She tried to scream but the wind blew the stinging sand into her mouth. She was blinded and choked by her scream.

EXIT TO CONTROL ROUTINE

She tuned the radio to music, programatic, familiar. Pushing the pillows against the headboard with its sliding doors she peered into the distant vanity mirror, reached for her brush. She was a touch nearsighted. Just enough to make games difficult. Just enough that entering a room she could not look to the right or the left for fear she might look at someone and not recognize him. Her brother Orland always acted as if she missed the ball on purpose.

Fingering her throat she sighed. A world of bright feathered dead birds, oiled guns and smelly dogs: her father's world had once seemed never far from the neat order of the house, but thanks to his own success in land development, the fields and swamps were gone now. In the back of her head she could hear her father's flat deep voice. “You're lazy and inept, like your mother, and her biggest exercise is lifting a glass.” Images of mother were fuzzy, even from before, when mother wouldn't touch a glass of sherry. Her father had been an officer during the war, and trekking from base to base, mother had begun. Mother belonged to rooms with blinds drawn, bottles of pills, chenille bedspreads and pale quilted robes.

UNCONDITIONAL JUMP

She squinted into the distant mirror. Dingy at the roots. This time she must get Dominic to restyle her. She had seen a cut in
Vogue
. She had felt a need of change, had felt herself sagging. She reached for the princess phone to wheedle her way into an afternoon appointment. Dominic claimed he could scarcely fit her in Monday. Thanks ever so.

She ran her hands lightly up her body. On the belly her hand paused. A chill spread. Sandcastles from summers on Lake Michigan. Orland had always devastated her castles. Sibling rivalry. As the therapist had indicated, she must not live in such a way that she proved the contempt of father and Orland justified.

CONTROL STATEMENT REJECTED

As she cradled into the pillows, music billowed over her and she drifted in vague murky wistfulness. “Darling, why …?” Her hand touched her belly again gingerly. What did Rowley mean by having his phone disconnected? Perhaps he was drinking trying to forget. She saw his dark face set in that smoldering sullenness that melted her, bent over a table in some sordid bar. The night of the party he had been harsh from shock. He was afraid of the attraction and afraid he would weaken toward her. His behavior was not difficult to interpret. That was the woman's role, to understand, not to withdraw as her mother had. Strange how hard he found speaking about his feelings when he was so glib on the air. But after all he made long tedious notes to himself. She had always thought his programs spontaneous.

ERROR   TOO MUCH TIME BETWEEN CHARACTERS

If he didn't come through for her … Perhaps she shouldn't have fallen on him by surprise, but how could you prepare a man if he lacked sense to realize the consequences of his own actions? Lacked conscious sense,
bien entendu
. That night when he had understood that Bruce was truly coming and that she would be lost to him he had fallen on her in the hall. His arms came around her in naked assertion, they fell together, their mouths fusing. Her nipple hardened under his curious fingers. Then in the shock he had acted before he could stop himself, creating their baby. Unconsciously he must be made to recognize his own motivations. He had wanted her, had.

TAKE REAL RESULT

The phone rang. She held her breath, afraid to answer. “Caroline here.”
Ici Caroline, j'écoute
. Settings are everything, she had told Bruce once at Amalfi, where they had stayed in the villa of his friend who had not liked her, and Bruce had agreed.

“Yeah, how are you?” Leon.

“Bearing up, ducky, bearing up.” Of course she had been a bit disappointed, for what they called a villa was no bigger than the cottage where her father went fishing. She had been wise to conceal her reaction. Bruce could not bear feeling that he had not got the best. He and his friend spent the whole time skin-diving while she went sightseeing and the Italian men drove her mad.

“How are you really? Don't chatter at me. Are you meeting me for lunch?”

“Lunch?” Anyone else would have put off till she had her hair done. Once she decided something was below par, it was dreary to go around where people could look at her. But Leon was not a materialist. He belonged to that period when she had been seeking her identity. “If you want, pussycat. Love to. Where?”

BEGIN STATE

Looking sideways into the mirror she drew mist nylons up her legs slowly. Would be great to be an American in French films like Jean Seberg. After all, she spoke French perfectly and everyone told her how good she was in
Moonblood
and
Grokking Wholeness
and
Viaduct Rock
. “
Je suis triste ce matin,
” she murmured with her new pout. She drew her hand up her leg watching. “
Comme tu vois, je suis seule, absolument seule
.”

Slipping into her little boy suit she turned from side to side. Was she beginning to show? Already? Anyhow she could not, absolutely could not wear it without a girdle, and she could not crawl into a girdle feeling so done in and the day just begun. “They're murdering me!” she said, turning back and forth in hopes she could persuade herself her belly didn't show. But it did. She knew how she wanted to look: slim, understated, somewhat innocent. The sailory knit would have to do.

She sat down to add lashes and brush on makeup. Durrell's for lunch was no treat but she would not run into Bruce or his friends. She had a vivid foretaste of Leon across the table and yanked off her lashes. He could embarrass her about the most ordinary things.

INCONSISTENT ENTRY

As she completed her face her eyes traveled from photo to photo around the mirror. Herself at seven in a white dress with darling smocking: Might need one like that soon enough, oh dear. “Everything is grim lately!” She had always been a beautiful child. Herself in the professional pix right after she had won the Teen Queen contest and Mother and she had been sent on that ghastly trip to Hawaii. She had tried to break into modeling, but finally she had the grim news: her hips were too prominent. She would never call modeling a loss because she had learned ever so much and it was priceless training. She drew her fingers along her cheek, her eyes growing wide into themselves. They thought it was all glamour, but the incredible discipline …

SYSTEM AWAITS NEXT INPUT STATEMENT

Leon was already at a table. In spite of the nagging of her hair she felt good and to be looked at. The
très élégante
wife in a French movie going to meet her lover—or else her husband after she has been with her lover? That was better, for Leon was giving her a truth-or-else look that made her suddenly unhungry. Why had she told him?

She ordered a grapefruit salad and tea. Leon immediately increased his order to two roastbeef sandwiches, thundering, “You're in no condition to starve yourself.” She was sure that the dimestore blond waitress had heard him.

“I don't know why I bothered you. Really, it's nothing to concern you, and—”

“Don't you know why you told me?” He glared from under bushy brows till she felt confusedly that at any rate, he knew.

“In a way. I've been desperate.”

“You know I'll help, right? You know you can ask me to help you in ways you can't ask others.”