Small Changes (76 page)

When he woke, he reached out and pulled her over on top of him. “How’s the sexual identity this morning?”

“More varied. Are you always so sure of yours?”

“Feel.” He gave Orpheus a nudge. “What do you think you’re doing in bed? Think I’m going to cut you in for a piece of the action, you old tomcat? Out! Go find your own pussy.”

She laughed and her hand slid lower. “See, now I have you by the balls. I do remember that man saying that’s all every woman really wants. Was that the one I kicked?”

“Yes, in the shin. You said that would do as well.”

“You found all that attractive!” She stared at him, straddled. “You do. Isn’t that perverse?”

“It amuses me. By and by we can have a discussion about how awful that is.”

On top she could come more easily. They were both looser, more passionate, more spontaneous. She forgot to watch whether he was watching and he lost his ironic control and writhed under her and grabbed her behind and moaned.

After she had taken a bath, at lunch of sardines and tomatoes in the kitchen, she said to him, “The apartment is different. Isn’t anyone living here with you?”

“Years of roomies have worn me down. Besides, with rent control this place is a bargain and I’m not quite so hard up. I’ve got a job teaching at the U. of Mass. in Boston. I’ll never get rich but it’s a far cry from washing dishes or sweeping floors or getting a graduate student stipend a family of gerbils would starve on. My wants are few. I eat a little better, I can afford to have the place to myself—that’s the major luxury—I feed Orpheus chicken livers, I buy a better tobacco mixture
and better booze. I bought a piece of furniture or two. That’s it.”

“What strange journeys lives are. You started in the middle class, you dropped out, and now you’re slowly returning.”

“My father would call this a slum. He’d think I was living in squalor, and the difference between last year and this wouldn’t be visible to him.”

“But that difference is visible to you. And tangible.”

“Beth, virtue isn’t pain. You’d learned that by now, I thought”

“Too true. I think I’ve reacted so far to my old masochism, I don’t even respect sacrifice when it’s vital, maybe.… Okay, like you, I live kind of ascetic. I truly don’t need a lot of fat between me and things, padding, waste.”

“Neither do I, by and large. I’ve simply replaced the few things I want by others better in their type—instead of an old mattress, a real bed. I haven’t expanded those things that I do want.”

“I have.” She picked at the sliced tomato. “I really have. There are human things I need I didn’t used to. To hold and be held, to feel myself doing good work, to feel myself with others that I love, to be able to say out loud what I think and feel …”

“What are you going to do now?”

“Call the defense committee and find out what’s on today. I have to hang around Boston another few days to help.”

“Stay here. Why not?”

“Do you want me to?”

“Sure.”

“It would amuse you?”

“It would amuse me. Better, it would please me.”

“You’ve stopped carrying a torch for Miriam, is that it?”

“Well, you can hardly dream about a portly housewife with a couple of kids. I wouldn’t know what to do with her. Once while Phil was still sponging on me, I saw her here. That was before his Christ the Carpenter routine—”

“You don’t think his life is better now?”

“That woman has turned him into a house husband. He’s besotted. Anyhow, a couple of months ago I saw Miriam buying a shirt for her hubby in one of those overpriced shoppies in Harvard Square. I say hi, she says hi. Nothing. No fire in her. She’s just a busy lady with a shopping list and a crying brat on her arm.”

“You don’t like children and you don’t like grown-up women.”

“Right now, I like you. I like a little steel, a little fire, a little ice. Something that bends but doesn’t break. Something that fights back so you know someone’s there and not just a puddle of warm glue. I don’t get it off with glue.”

“Jackson, you are so incredibly arrogant, sitting there telling me what you like and what you don’t! Well, now, I like chocolate but I don’t like vanilla, and tutti-frutti’s fine, but you can keep the lemon sherbet. I’m a human person, you pig!”

He laughed deep in his chest. “Exactly. Now the girls I’ve been silly enough to mix with in the last year or two, they might expose some energy in class. But as soon as you take them to bed, all resistance collapses. They become marshmallows.”

“That wouldn’t be because you were careful to please them so as to get them off guard, so they stopped being defensive and wanted to please you, now, would it?” She folded her arms. “It’s a power trip, and they were Uncle-Tomming too crudely for you. You go in for uppity niggers. It gives you more sense of having overcome.”

“You believe in being in touch with your feelings. I’m doing the same. I’ve been down in the gutter, Beth, and now I’m out and seeing clear. I have a little energy left from surviving to try for what I want. Surely a man is less oppressive who likes a little vinegar than one who wants nothing but sugar, sugar, sugar, all day and all night.”

Beth was struck by how unlikely her old fantasies of being with Jackson had become. She had made him up in part, while believing she was shrewd in perceiving him. A quiet industrious poverty in which they would each remotely and hermetically dwell. “You’re a white man from the upper middle class and even after you fell from grace you can be saved. Not on your father’s terms, sure, but on your own. Now take Miriam. She’s only been off the job market what—three years? But she’s scared. She isn’t sure she could make it for herself and her kids. Then there’s Sally, my friend. If she tried real, real hard, she could get a job as a waitress. What options do I have? When I was on the inside of the system, I was doing tweeny jobs for peanuts. Now I couldn’t tell you how I get by.”

“Beth, don’t start rattling some class consciousness you
learned from a book. I’ve been poorer than you’ll ever be. I’ve been down and out like you can’t imagine. I’ve been to the bottom of New York and the bottom of Mexico City—and you can’t dream up a bottom more mean and dirty and violent.”

“But I wouldn’t be here if I’d been there. Women don’t recover. We don’t get a second chance. We’re too expendable.”

“On Skid Row you see a few female losers, but you see a lot more men. And in jail its ninety per cent men.”

“Right now that isn’t too real to me, as you might guess. But it’s just different trash cans. Men get thrown in jail, women get pushed into mental hospitals. There you don’t even learn survival skills and how to be a better criminal. You get drugged into forgetting why you were angry and what you knew.” She sat back suddenly and shook her head at him. “You’re getting a real bargain if I stay here, you know? I’m replacing both Phil and Miriam in your domestic economy. You can argue with me and I’ll fight to the end, and then we can go to bed too.”

“My sentiments exactly. Are you still saying
‘if’?”

Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and still she stayed. The defense committee finished the mailings she had been working on. Laura and Lynn went back to New York.

“It’s amazing how you turn me on,” he told her in bed. “Seeing as how you resemble a
Playboy
centerfold less than I do. Though I will say you have nice legs.”

“Listen to you! Always competing. You’re managing to feel superior because you’re fucking a woman who doesn’t have a fashionable body! You can even extract points from this!”

“Points and pleasure and insults too. What more could I ask?”

She amused him. He was keeping her and feeding her and petting her, like Orpheus. He felt he could afford her. She sensed by Thursday that he wanted her to move in. He would not quite come out with it, but he seemed to circle around and around saying so. “You don’t eat much. You don’t take up much space. You wear pants and a sweater and boots. Why, you’re the economical size woman. Eat like a mouse and roar like a lion, now that’s what I call an efficient use of energy. Very little fuel lost in that system.”

The sex was different: not better or worse than with Wanda.
Being with Wanda was easier. Somehow they were loving each other and they pleased each other without calculating about it. The difference with him made it more intense. When she came, she had that sense of losing control, of being swallowed into her orgasm and then floating up to the surface again light and loosened. But making love with Wanda was loving. It was one of the ways they loved each other, and all day long there were other ways. Touching was loving like talking was loving like working together was loving. They made love to intensify the loving and then went about their business.

With him there was not the loving. And they had no other business.

Friday she told him she was leaving to hitchhike first to New York and then to Alderson. He tilted his chair back and looked hard at her. “What for? Just a visit?”

“I have to think what to do next.”

“Think here. Why not do this next? You’re already here and you’ve already let go of what you were doing.”

“Look, I have a commitment to Wanda. I think I could have loved you. It would have been different. I prefer the life I’m living to somebody else’s.… I do think I could have, before.…”

“I think you could now. You haven’t said love and neither have I. We don’t know each other. Live with me, a month, two months, three months. Take what’s in front of you. Now you’re the one who’s afraid.”

“Yes. Because if we lived together like that I’d try to make you love me.”

“Do you have so little faith in yourself to think you wouldn’t succeed? Don’t you think I’m ready by now, ready for a woman?”

“I think you want that interesting, intimate struggle. You’d find that stimulating. I think I don’t want to face in toward somebody and make them my struggle—not even you, Jackson. I don’t want
you
for my life. With Wanda, we have problems, we fight, but we aren’t each other’s problem. We work together. I don’t want to love a problem. I don’t want that difficult, interesting relationship. I want to love somebody and face outward and struggle to change things that hurt me and hurt others. I don’t want to be fighting the person I’m supposed to be with.”

“Don’t you think you’re enough of a person by now to
take on a real relationship with a man? Sure, it wouldn’t be cozy, it wouldn’t be easy. What is, that’s worth anything?”

“The theater troupe was just as real as arguing with you, Jackson. Can’t you see? You want me now because I don’t love you yet.”

“Because things didn’t work out with Miriam? I did care for her, Beth, but it was the way she was demanding. The way she pushed me made me clam up.”

“You push on a woman until you have her loving you. Then she isn’t anything to win, but a demand. Don’t you see it would be the same way with me?”

“No. You’re not the sort of woman with a real taste for complication and bringing the neighbors in and wanting to be a soap opera heroine that Miriam was. I think things would be pretty straight with us. I think we’d fight a lot—”

“But you’d win?” She shook her head. “No. I don’t want to fight with you inside a household. I’d rather fight City Hall. I’d rather fight the system that made us both.”

He shook his head slowly. Leaning back, he looked at her beneath half-lowered lids. “I don’t want to see what’s going to happen to you.”

“You won’t. But can I give you a dependent? A mate for Orpheus?”

“Oh, you still believe in heterosexual relationships between cats?”

“They’ll have to work that out. But if I bring you Lucy Stone from the country next time? She’s a beautiful calico, and I think she’ll be needing a new home. Too many kittens there.”

They had coffee together in silence, a reiterative sadness thickening the air. As he sat with his long hands clasped over his cup, seeking the steam, she could no longer tell what he was thinking and, more important, she knew that he would not any more allow her to find out.

She picked up her cloth bag of underwear and socks, stuck her wallet in her pocket, and kissed him good-by. He would not let his mouth respond. Behind her he walked to the door. “Good-by, Beth. If you lose that identity again, you know where to find it.” As she went down the steps, she did not hear his footsteps walking away.

30

Plot of the Wild Chicken
Breaking Through

She did not really hitchhike to Alderson. After she had been in New York for five days Laura found a car for her to borrow. Laura offered to come along, but Beth said no. She wanted to talk to Wanda as nearly alone as luck would deliver.

The weather held. That made a great difference. Eight-thirty Thursday morning she drove in the lower gates. Hitchhiking was bad because all the towns around were hostile to the women in the prison and their visitors, and the chances of getting stashed away under some local ordinance, or any count they wanted to dump on her, were high. She even had to stay in a motel. Of course one of the side punishments of the way prisons were set up was that they were usually in places hard to get to and stay in if you didn’t have money, and only your friends and relations who could take off from work and had transportation could ever get to see you. A lot of the women in Alderson were poor black women from Washington, D.C., who ended up in West Virginia for convenience in sticking them somewhere, since everything done in D.C. was a federal offense.

With no gun turrets, no barbed wire, just a mesh fence around it, Alderson was a genteel prison. She drove up the winding drive past the warden’s house to the inner gates, where she parked by the visiting room. Alderson looked like a college campus or a boarding school for girls: trees and red brick buildings, the dormitories called cottages. Most of the guards were not in uniform. Wanda had remarked that it reminded her of high school: the dress codes, the sexual hypocrisy, people going steady and jealousy rampant, the insistence on being ladylike and prissy, the total arbitrariness of the rules, under which at times they would come down on
prisoners for minute infractions, and other times they would let much go by.…