Going Down Fast (45 page)

“And I love you. Whatever that means. This time I admit it's not the same thing.”

“Go away then. Come back when Leon's out of the hospital. I have to think.”

“No. Can't afford that. I want you to clear out of here with me. If you loved him—”

“Whatever that means,” she said bitterly, lifting her head.

“—you wouldn't be here. You'd have fought his family tooth and claw, nails and crockery. You'd know where you belong. You'd be sitting in that hospital corridor on guard.”

Gravely she met his gaze. He saw that she half believed him. A great lightness buoyed him up.

“In some sense it's because he never
left
his family,” she was beginning. He kissed her hard, holding on to that sleek piece he had claimed, and her mouth under his turned warm and ripened. He gathered her closer with a nostalgic ache through his groin. Wanting, remembering wanting, remembered having, all the merged funny burrowing of bodies. His. He kissed her until he was sweating and heat shimmered off of her like a blacktop road in summer, till her mouth was swollen and pulsing. Yet she lay in his arm withdrawn in her clothing and taut with waiting. If he released her she would spring away. He groped upward and into her bush and found the truthful ooze of welcome. Her mouth came wider under his, her breath caught and crumpled and the tautness faded into her arms. He dug for her among the woolens, unbuttoned the coat and rolled her out, unbuttoned the ski sweater and drew off the pullover, digging for the ample slow lines of her until they were nested among the cast clothes. Her breast heavy and filling his hand. Curve of hip into him. Solid pressure of thighs under. Quick ripple across her belly as he stroked it. Lips nuzzling, her urgent passivity gathered against him and moving as he moved. Her large dark eyes were open and watching and merry, almost amused. He wondered then exactly when she had decided. He came into her and slowly her muscles accepted him. Her cunt held him in a smooth firm grip like her hands, and he was home.

Yawning she curled up in her coat, round and embryonic, and smiled. He dressed and stood looking around. “Come on. Time to pack up.”

“Oh,” she said languidly. “Didn't say I'd go back to you.”

“Won't be the same. Nothing is. And I don't want it to be.”

Lying on her belly she looked at him out of the cocoon of coat. “Something new? Or just the rhetoric of prick?”

“Come and live with me.”

She shuddered in the coat. “We'll probably get pneumonia, it's freezing. I'm afraid you'll hurt me. I've always been afraid.”

“I guess I will. There's a lot of meanness in me. Did Leon make you happy?”

“Happy was what Asher married me for. What an obscene thing for any human to think they can do for another.”

“I've asked you, Annie. I won't argue with you.”

“You shouldn't quit so easy.”

Standing over her he gave her a gentle nudge with his foot. “I've used up my best argument.”

“I'm coming already. What's the hurry?” But she did not move until he began awkwardly pulling clothes out of drawers. When she had dressed she came to stand beside him. “Did you miss me, then?”

“Sometimes. Especially lately.”

Marching off to pack her bags she called, “Well, if I liked to fuck just a little bit less, you wouldn't get me back, not yet you wouldn't.”

“That cuts both ways.”

“Five or six ways, Rowley. I was hoping you'd turn up.”

“Why didn't you open the door?”

“Who shut it?”

That afternoon they spent moving her. He was inclined to leave things and she to take them. She was quiet in the car, downcast. Since he was fifteen, women had happened to him. She had not happened this time. He had the advantage, he thought as he drove north, of understanding better than she could yet what that meant. She would find her footing.

As he parked her face questioned him. They loaded up and she preceded him stopping at each dark and smelly landing until he nodded her onward. Worn coat. He had been more giving with Sam, with Harlan, with any casual acquaintance. The coat was thin and threadbare. Was she cold in it?

Hesitantly she walked in. “You didn't waste yourself furnishing it.”

“Figured you'd want to help.” He ambled after her. “Planning to take off your coat and stay awhile?”

“
Chutzpah
pays again. Well, if it wasn't me, it would be another.” She stood shy and flatfooted until she came to unbutton her coat. She stepped out of her boots, then walked slowly before him to the mattress past a witnessing row of unpacked boxes. With a small smile she sat down neatly on the edge of the mattress and gave a nod toward her left shoulder. “Pull down the shades.”

He did. As he was kneeling to reach for her, she swooped forward and caught him off balance, toppling him into her arms.

At last they carried the final load up the three flights. Then as she made supper he sat on the floor picking chords and singing now and then.

Me and my baby was side by side
,

Yes, me and my baby was side by side
,

She said to me, Daddy I want to ride …

He was tired, he was hungry, he was pleased. He trusted that she was too.

Anna Rowley

Sunday, January 25–Sunday, February 1

Putting away kitchen utensils she thought of Leon damply, with guilt. She felt partly as if she had run out on him, and partly as if she had escaped. Clearly there was nothing there for her, but equally clearly that had not mattered. In comradely love she had lived with Leon, on his terms. Now it was as if she had quit their game and said, Well that was fun, but now it's time for some real live adultsize sex and love and household. He would say she had sold out, and if what she had betrayed was vague, her sense of it was not. She had opted for bread and flesh and direct clang-clash argument, she had put away Leon's gods in a box like broken dolls, and they haunted her.

Rowley was at work. Though she felt shy about calling hospitals—encountering any bureaucracy—she forced herself to begin at A in the yellow pages. She called through D, went back to work in the kitchen, then did E-H. No luck.

Next she hung her dresses on the left side of the closet, one at a time with enjoyment. After she called through L she began supper, freed and tangled and vaguely satisfied. She put on a Bach cello partita. She had mostly wasted the day and that was a treat, pottering about in random gusts of thought and memory. She moved in her loose body listening, touching, fixing and in part waiting, because she was not sure of him yet—if ever she would be—but she was sure now of herself.

Though rationally he did not believe she could have left, because hadn't it taken them four hours to move her in, he was relieved to see lights up there. The hall smelled of chicken and cardamon and coriander. Strolling from the kitchen to greet him, she wore that grave sensual smile of the day before. Her loose hair shone. She looked at home and serene. He was struck by the knowledge sudden and painful as a muscle cramp that he no longer lived alone in his privacy. He followed her into the kitchen and told her his day.

After supper she said she had called through L and handed him the yellow pages. During Ns he reached the right hospital.

“Mr. Lederman was checked out this afternoon.”

He repeated it to her. She gave a wince of dismay and took the phone. Waited, thumbnail at teeth. Waited. Finally she hung up. “But he's not there.”

“So he's out. Or staying with his family.”

“I can't call them. Anyhow, he must be all right if they let him out. Mustn't he?”

Monday when he came home she was more puzzled. “Leon's phone has been disconnected.

“Did you pay the bill?”

She threw her arms around him. “That must be it!”

She could not go on calling a dead phone. On her way back from work on rainy Wednesday she headed over, speeches bumping one another in her head: all crude, awkward, apologetic and stupid. Ho ho, guess what, old Leon, we've come full circle. Yes, I know I hated him last week, but the moon or the wind changed … She saw herself arriving. Leon would be sitting in his director's chair bundled up, tousled and still blowing his nose. “Why isn't there coffee?” he'd bark, and she'd trot out to the kitchen. He would launch into denunciations of his family, the doctors, the hospital, the wasted time. They would argue about his happening and why he had kept it secret from her and she would help him edit the film. He would have a new plot for reaching Caroline or abducting Jimmy. “What's for supper?” She would never, never have the nerve to tell him about Rowley. She could not look him in the eyes and say, I'm leaving, it was all a mistake. She would take his temperature and off they would go to bed, clumsily, furtively, gently. All would recommence. Ay. And then she would see Rowley, his eyes. Had to, had to tell him.

She knocked and peered in the rain-streaked window. The shade was up and the key on the floor as she had left it. She hung around in the rain stamping her feet and watching her breath, but it was dark and she felt Rowley waiting and suddenly wanted to be with him, with him at once.

The next morning the phone rang. They had finished breakfast and he was going through a stack of new releases while she measured the windows for draperies. When he put down the phone she took one look at his face and got down from the chair. “Leon?”

“The old man. He walked out of the hospital. That was my mother.” Turned on his heel. “Got to call the station.”

She followed, waiting. “Do you think you'll be back for supper? Or will you spend the night in Gary?”

He drew his hand through his dark bushy hair. His eyes tightened, grew catlike and cruel. “Get changed. You're coming.”

She did not dare say anything but with suddenly fat hands put on a teaching dress and pinned up her hair. In ten minutes they were in the car heading south to the Calumet Skyway.

The thaw continued. Yesterday, the day before, an unclean gray rain had fallen, not hard but constant like a bad cold in the atmosphere. Everything felt clammy. The world had begun to dissolve. Sidewalks flowed between granite levees stained tan with old dogpiss. Deep waterfilled ruts snaked through the deeper ice of streets. Sand, cinder, turds, grit and rocks were left exposed as by the retreat of a glacier. A pause in the Ice Age. The winter would be continued after a short intermission.

Covertly she fingered her hair and moved a bobbypin to tighten the chignon, looked at him—his walrus moustache and strong nose and coarse black tumbled hair. She touched his thigh. From the Skyway the sky was low and battered, clearing in patches over the immense gray city. She could not lose the sense of going on a journey. “Hey you,” she said softly.

“Yeah?”

“It's good. That's all.” Tatters of the night lay warm and tenuous on her. Turmoil and compromise. She was humiliated to want him as she did, and nothing else was worth the sweat. Loving him justified nothing, changed nothing outside their coming together which would always be ragged and flawed and the strongest thing she had to assimilate into herself. He had come to her and this time he was putting himself on the line: but there would be other parties and pretty easy girls and invitations too sincere to be passed up. She would have to make her own peace with her pride. That was what she decided was Anna this windy wet February day as they passed a great storage tank where turning flights of smoke-colored pigeons like specks in a film flickered against the rusty sky.

He just drove. He disengaged his concern because traveling would take the time it took and then he would see what was up. What he must do. She curled on her side looking demure and sleepy. Occasionally her gaze turned on him and asked, Is it all right? are you worried?

The sky was dull red over the refineries. Squat orange flames blew off. Rolling down his window he stuck out his hand for a ticket at the tollbooth and handed it to her. Clark emblem on the low round tanks. He speeded some on the tollroad, running past the orange South Shore trains to one side, freight running contrary, E J & E on the other, high tension wire strung from towers he had called soldiers as a kid, soldiers marching tall in rows blam blam blam from the backseat of the old Terraplane, past dunes, marsh, scrub, approaching the vast steel mills. A nonlandscape, abstract. 90 East. It never failed to move him in contradictory spasms. The Calumet River steamed with chemicals alongside.

“Close the window. It's gassing me,” she said.

Downhome smell. Clouds of stink rotting the lungs. U.S. Steel as far as the eye could travel on the left. On the right gritty Gary led to the twin domes of downtown. An even line of slender stacks suddenly belched rusty smoke. They were putting oxygen into the open-hearth furnaces, making the flames leap and roar. A belt of coke cars pulled out empty. Parkinglots glittered cars.

Why hadn't he gone into the mills? He'd wanted to clear out of Gary. Fighting with his old man, girl on his back to marry her. The ships had drawn him. At least they moved. But through childhood he had been fascinated by the mills where his father went. Sunbright corn likker steel. The shapes of the buildings, the stacks, the towers, the furnaces excited him. Inhuman manmade scene. He remembered the long strike when the air had been clean over the drab houses. Steel shaped men and land: for miles the mills pissed into the lake and dirtied the sun. They were beautiful.

Gary West exit. He had a gut perception that slacked his foot on the gas, a slight queasiness that resolved in a shrug as he touched his tongue to his moustache. Overlap with the old man. Because he was bringing her home—not that it was. As he downshifted on the ramp she counted change and handed over the ticket. Then they were on Grant heading south. Because he was fulfilling the old man's pattern, choosing his own dark somewhat alien woman later then usual. A woman he damn well ought to treat more kindly and in better faith than his father had. Having learned something? Only Annie would judge.