Small Changes (30 page)

Suddenly Phil grinned, while something tore in her. He looked beautiful and funny grinning at her rigidity, till he crooked his index finger and made a Svengali face. “Come,” he mouthed at her. “Come!” Playing hypnotist. Obediently taking the part he offered, she played zombie. She came walking toward him with hands stuck out past students who turned to look at her and then away (drug episode).

“All right, buddy,” she said, “I saw you put that book under your coat. Stealing pornography again.”

“I’ll go along quietly, sir or madam, but don’t take my dirty book.… How about a wake at Finnegan’s? A drink is surely in order.”

“Phil, Phil, it’s been so long—”

“Not by my choice.”

“He didn’t exactly give me a choice, Phil. I wanted him. Those were his terms.”

He did not take her arm. It was strange to walk with him and not touch, through the streets where a south wind smelled warm and a little smoky, stirring papers in the gutters and promising more rain. The sun was in and out, drying the morning’s puddles. Across Mass Avenue the Yard looked busy. It was a relief when they were sitting in the booth in the dimness of the bar. They ordered dark beer and faced each other. His legs grazed hers under the table. Her knees felt watery. She kept staring into his face looking for estrangement, hatred.

“Phil, I don’t underestimate my guilt. I can’t get my mind around it. It’s such a relief to see you again!”

“Seeing is believing, as they say. Would you believe I knew it would happen?”

“Why, then? Why let it?”

“He’s my friend. We’re bound up together too. I thought I’d kept you apart long enough so the thing with me was very strong. I thought we’d got to the point where we could handle anything.”

She put her face in her hands. Shame was the taste.

He tugged gently at her fingers until he had pried her hand loose. He held it lightly in his only half-closed hand. “Come on. No suds, baby. You love him, huh?”

“You know it.”

“That figured. So, is it good?”

She shook her head. “It’s awful.”

“Shit! He’s closed himself up, right? I thought he couldn’t do it to you. Thought he’d be too scared of losing you.”

“He’s more scared of me than he is of losing me, Phil. It’s rotten to complain to you about this. How are you?”

“Getting it on. I hung around with that leather chick, for a while. Wasn’t much of a trade, Miriam. I got the short end of the stick. She had money and drugs, but she was a bad fuck. Nothing in bed but whining and do me something. The energy level of a maggot. But she bought me things and turned me on to anything. She couldn’t make coffee in a pot, but we could go down to the S. S. Pierce and buy pâté de foie gras and smoked trout in cans. You aren’t such a great companion on a trip, but when I got up there, I’d just want to
step on her. But she got me this vest—nice, uh?”

Miriam was astonished to find herself mildly jealous of the woman. She felt that was in the worst of all possible taste and unjust, but she had the uncanny sense that Phil knew and that was why he was grinning again.

“You can have it if you want to.” He made to take it off.

“No! It would look ridiculous, all that fringe hanging off my boobs. It looks handsome on you, or you in it, whatever one’s supposed to say.”

“You’re supposed to tell me I’m devastating and ask for the next dance.”

“I would if I could.” She smiled for the first time. “I can never remember your eyes—that color.”

“I can never remember how hard it is to keep my self-righteous anger against you. You’re always sacrificing me to someone you think is bigger.”

“Phil, don’t say that!”

“You lack respect for me. Maybe ’cause I’m no good.” He took her hand again, just the fingers, his finger against the tips of hers. “But I’m learning to live with my mean self. You know McGeorge Bundy is lecturing at B.U. tomorrow?”

“What has that to do with the price of fish?”

“I want you to go and hear him.”

“Nu
, Phil, are you handing out penances?”

“Something will entertain you, and I don’t mean his speech. They think they’re off the hook now Nixon’s in, all those bastards who used us and sent us over there to rot and die all those years, they’re all fading back into the foundations and corporations and universities. Chalk that one up to experience, boys, and we’ll write another book about it. Memoirs by and by. They’re war criminals and we can’t forget it.… Will you go?”

She nodded, taking down the time and place.

“I’m late now to meet Joe Rosario. Can you go my bail?”

“I’ll be ready. See you there.”

Miriam could not get in. They were checking tickets carefully, but obviously Phil and his friends had provided themselves with tickets. But she heard the uproar. In the middle of the speech they began to play tapes of bombing and Phil stood up holding aloft the papier-mâché figure of a burned child. A mob of campus and regular police stampeded them
at once and they never got to finish their guerrilla theater.

Miriam collected Phil from the Charles Street jail the next day. He had been roughed up but he was in high spirits. As he had had nothing to eat for eighteen hours, she took him to Jackson’s by cab. There Phil washed and got into Jackson’s shirt and pants, complaining about their tackiness, while Jackson cooked up a garlicky spaghetti and sauce. The evening seemed to flow all right.

“It’s time to make those power brokers feel they aren’t safe either.” Phil leaned on the refrigerator rubbing his sore head.

“And who gets their head bashed? Bundy? Or you?” Jackson sucked on his clay pipe, smoking his favorite gingery tobacco.

“Someone’s got to be willing. You lost years to them too. Do you want to let them get away with it?”

Miriam kept quiet. She wanted the evening to glide gently by and establish precedents. She wanted them to be together and friendly. She would look and see Phil gesturing and grimacing, Jackson tilted back sucking on his pipe and slowly scratching his chest, and she could almost believe in the surface ease.

Two nights later the bill came due, when she mentioned something that had been troubling her. “I know I’m being irrational. The doctor told me I might skip a period or two before my body got over reacting to the pill. But honest, it makes me nervous.”

He gave her a long measured stare. “If you’ve taken the pill every day, you can’t be pregnant. If you haven’t, why haven’t you?”

“Jackson, you know damned well there was one night I missed, when we went to bed early and never got up again. I took it in the morning, that’s supposed to work. But how can one ever be sure, playing around with hormones? I’ve been getting a bad reaction to the pill, and I suppose this is just part of it, but it’s gruesome to have to worry.”

“You’re starting early to worry out loud. What kind of reaction are you expecting? What reassurance do you want from me?”

“I want you to tell me with great confidence it can’t possibly be so. I guess just mainly it’s better to share a worry. Don’t you find that natural?”

“I find the whole thing a little too natural.”

“What does that mean?”

“We’ll discuss it when it’s relevant. If you really are pregnant. If it’s not just your body wanting to be. I’m assuming that, in telling me, you are assuming that it would be mine?”

The jagged ugly insinuation trailing worse arguments was lurking there just under the surface waiting for her. She could feel the suspicion, the fear, the hostility from him. It was too ugly. She had no stomach for it. She shut into herself and went home early to lie in her own bed, brooding and wondering.

Saturday afternoon, shortly after two, Phil appeared. He posed against the door, arms outstretched. “Pigeon, I been crucified!”

“Can they make that assault rap stick?”

“For that I have a lawyer. It’s the university. I’m out.”

She came and put her hand on his shoulder. “Can’t you appeal. Won’t your sponsor Proxmire help you? He has clout.”

“J. Singleton Proxmire has decided I’m one of the unwashed hoodlums the gates must be barred against. Barbarian, he called me. Said I don’t understand the fragility of academic freedom and the importance of the exchange of ideas. I said I’m more into real freedom for people, and as for expression of ideas, I’d been expressing mine. Aw shit.” He flung himself on the bed and spoke muffled into her pillow. “Looks like Joe’s in trouble too. A faculty type, even worse, and not at his own school. They may really go after him. They put four times the bail on him they had on me, and Wanda, his wife, had to go running around all night to raise it, so pregnant she looked like she might drop the kid in night court”

“The woman who was yelling at the police?”

Phil laughed. “That’s Wandal Pigeon, I was never cut out for the academic strait jacket and that’s the truth. I’ve conned my way as far as I can. I’d never have been able to write that asinine thesis on George Herbert. My Catholic background was supposed to be a big help. My Catholic background consists of Irish wakes and St. Patrick’s Day parades—a great day for the bar business—my mother’s fear of abortion, maudlin tenors singing ‘Mother Machree’ and ‘The Croppy Boy,’ and a big to-do on election days.” Phil started
to laugh again, shaking the bed. “Old Singleton, he’s a converted Catholic, fills his house with religious paraphernalia and always gassing about the beauties of this or that missal. He’s a big one for looking into my baby-blue eyes and squeezing my knee, but I heard him call one of the other profs a disgusting faggot for actually getting laid.”

She sat down on the bed’s edge and tapped his shoulder, “Why did you do it, really?”

“Told you.” He mumbled into her pillow. “Besides, been impotent for a month.”

“You’re turning my questions.”

“No! S’true. Buried anger makes maggots, pigeon. I’ve been swallowing my rage too long and it’s eating me. It’s shit to grow up poor in the supermarket. I carry my childhood in my bad teeth there was never money to get fixed, in my poor bones, in the lines of calcium deposit you can see in X rays for the times when, by god, I got enough for a stretch.”

“I carry my childhood too. I’ve learned with Jackson how hard I carry it.… Unloved, dreaming of the love that would prove me, vindicate me.… But you wanted to be in school!”

“I can push the words. I can pretend to be an intellectual. But inside I’m a street kid, and I don’t believe what those smug pricks do is so fucking superior. I hate them because they’re so comfortable. Sweet Jesus, are they comfortable with their tasteful lives and tasteful wives and bright kids and trips yonder and interesting food and interesting books and interesting friends, so comfortable, and they don’t care for five minutes, Miriam, who’s screaming outside. I’m sick to dying of all those cracks about the mindless boobs who watch television and put themselves in hock to buy a new car. What the hell do they think is the choice? They watch the news on TV and feel superior to the people who watch Lucy, and don’t figure they’re both watching situation comedy. They feel so damn nose-in-the-air about the folks in South Boston trying to keep blacks out of their schools, then they send their kids to private schools ’cause they’re so sensitive. They feel contempt for hardhats who won’t let blacks in their unions, and they squawk and scream about Black Studies actually run by blacks. I’m dying of hypocrisy, pigeon, dying of it. I had to throw up. Can’t you understand?”

“I’m trying. I see your anger. But the gesture seems futile.”

“Any gesture is futile that isn’t victory. Assassination is futile. But acting my anger makes me less dead.”

Affection welling up in her. An old strong loving that was a choice, not a destiny, that didn’t engulf her. Feeling meek, she asked, “Do you think I’m the same kind of hypocrite?”

“No. You’re a real intellectual. You like to push things around in your head. Besides, that’s the point of a girl from even a wishy-washy pink family. You’re trained right. Social conscience may be a weak guilt, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to live with than the downright open contempt I put up with every time one of those Johns opens his trap about those who haven’t made it through to join the club.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go on tending bar. Write my poems. I’ve been into songs, lately. Hal was giving me lessons and Rick has been showing me some things. They think I’m onto something. One of them you won’t like at all.” He chuckled. “ ‘Litanies to the Deadly Venus.’ ”

“Oh? Is that supposed to be me?”

“If the shoe fits …” He turned onto his back. “Aw, I don’t know nothing about nothing. Maybe I’m dead already. I walk in a fog of pain. I fog myself up inside to bear that. I swallow fog in pills. I shoot fog in my arm.”

She pulled back the Indian cloth of his sleeve. “Damn you, Phil, what’s the use of that?”

He began to laugh loosely. “Only you could ask a question like that! Why, I’m acting out my self-hatred, what do you think?”

“Idiot child. What will become of you?” Somehow she had put her arms around him and he was curled up, his body pulled into embryo position, his head coming to rest against her.

“You’ll take care of me. Or won’t? Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you?”

“Ya-ta-ta-ta, ya-ta-ta-ta. Want to hear what’s scaring me?”

“Not me, I hope.”

“No,
nudnik
, not you. In me. I went on the pill—”

“Your belly’s bigger.” He patted her. “Made me swell up. And belch and feel nauseous and bloat.”

“Your breasts are bigger too. Bury me between them.”

“As if they weren’t ridiculous before.”

“I like them. They’re warm. There are too few warm big soft things in this mean world.” She laughed and he put his arms around her. “I like to feel you laugh. You do it from the belly, not the throat or the head. For an intellectual woman, you’re pretty physical. Ha. It must be kind of nice on the pill, no apparatus. Just pop right in.”

“If you had to take pills that made you swell up like an elephant with elephantiasis, you wouldn’t think it was cute. If your balls got sore and your legs swelled. Besides, I haven’t had my period this time. Nothing happened. I’m scared.”

“Think you’re knocked up?”