Stages (18 page)

“A week from Monday?” Paula volunteered.

“That would be fine,” Mr. Weiss replied.

The next day, Paula gave her notice to Mr. Feldman.

On her last day of working at Toppers, Mrs. Singer presented her with a box of Coffee Nips as a going-away present. Mr. Feldman was his usual imperturbable self, sustained by the knowledge that whatever happened, women’s hats would endure. He had his usual pat of butter after his lunch.

That weekend, Paula and her mother went into the city to look at apartments. Her mother wore a white hat from Toppers, and Paula, bare-headed, ate Coffee Nips one after the other, because of her nerves.

33

The march on Washington was one of the biggest antiwar demonstrations yet. Hundreds of thousands of people had converged on the city for the weekend. Kathy had driven down from New York with five middle-class black college kids, one of whom had a van. All radicalized, the kids had left their school in Vermont to help free Newark, which they referred to as New-Ark, from its oppressors.

But they’d become hopelessly lost looking for the Baptist church where the leaflets were being printed. Ultimately they’d wound up in Manhattan, at the East Village office where Kathy was counseling draft resisters. She’d taken them up on their offer to give her a ride when they left for Washington at the end of the week.

Kathy was staying in the northwest quadrant of the city, in a partially rehabilitated Victorian townhouse that belonged to a friend of a friend. This friend’s friend was a guy from an Old Philadelphia family, a Quaker whose religion happened to be right in tune with the times. His name was Cuthbert, and he had a wife named Keating. To Kathy the couple looked hammered together, like their house. They wore lumpy corduroys, and their hair was powdered with dust from sawing sheetrock.

Although the house smelled like a plywood glade, Kathy was very grateful for its owners’ hospitality. Given the throng that was in town, being able to share a bedroom with only four other people was something of a luxury.

Among Kathy’s weekend roommates was a young man who was introduced to her as Aaron Goodman. He too had wound up at Cuthbert and Keating’s house through a friend of a friend. The peace movement was, after all, like one big family. Out of the suburbs had come these waves of young immigrants to the new world of the hip, fleeing the moral famine amid the charcoal grills. Gladly these refugees sheltered one another, shared, and sacrificed, as their grandparents had done before them (their
parents
were the Czars, the ruling class having skipped a generation).

Aaron had grown up in Hewlett. He’d gone to NYU, and now he was in law school at the University of Virginia. His hair reminded Kathy of Art Garfunkel’s—that Wonderful Wizard of Frizz. His pale skin was faintly freckled, and his wide brown eyes were so intense that they seemed to Kathy to be made for seeing through lies. She felt drawn to Aaron almost immediately.

Because he wore his beliefs up front—they shone on him, Kathy thought, like a steel breastplate—Aaron had natural leadership ability. During the march, he was to be one of the marshals. After talking to Kathy for a half hour, he had enlisted her into the ranks of the marshals as well. She would ride with him, on the back of a motorscooter, watching the sidewalk while Aaron monitored the marchers.

The night before the demonstration Kathy and Aaron sat up in their attic room talking, for a very long time. They conversed in fervent whispers so they wouldn’t disturb their companions, a couple in their early twenties who were either going to Harvard or living around Harvard Square (it amounted to the same thing) and who were sharing the accommodations without any false modesty.

“I like them,” Kathy whispered to Aaron, “but they make me glad I’m not ticklish about pubic hair.”

Sitting cross-legged on his sleeping bag, with a joint between his fingertips, Aaron told Kathy about the time he met Joan Baez, and she told him about the friend of hers who’d split for the Coast at fifteen and had gotten a job in a restaurant and had waited on Milton Berle, who hadn’t left her a tip.

“She said she thought he did it as a joke,” Kathy whispered.

“Milton Berle is the true west,” Aaron replied. “Not Joan Baez.”

“I might’ve wound up on the West Coast if it hadn’t been for the war,” Kathy said. “I was a drama major.”

“Were you?” Aaron replied. “I majored in poly sci.”

“I took one political science course,” Kathy said. “And I also read
1984.
Do you think we’re political animals? Or just plain animals?”

“Politically I think we’re marsupials,” Aaron said. “Animals with pockets that have to get lined.”

“Yeah,” Kathy said as she took the joint Aaron was holding out to her. “That’s the way it is, isn’t it? Everything’s just so totally
corrupt.
The system just grinds people up, and they don’t even know that they’re losing their integrity, their humanity,
everything.
I’ll never get over Kent State as long as I live. That picture of that kid lying on the ground in a pool of his own blood, and that girl kneeling over him, with her arms in the air, wailing. They were
children.
I read that some housewife said it was a blessing that one of those girls they shot had been killed, because she was
pregnant.
”

“Jesus,” Aaron muttered.

“Then a little while ago someone showed me this article,” Kathy continued. “It was in the
Reader’s Digest.
The article said that what happened at Kent State
wasn’t murder.
That was the conclusion of this investigative report…which had been written by
James Michener.
”

“James Michener,” Aaron mused.

“Well,” he said as Kathy handed him the jay, “I guess the moral of that story is
don’t buy books in drugstores, buy drugs.
”

From the overstuffed sleeping bag on the other side of the room came a rustling, followed by panting and a moan.

“The worst thing about Kent State for me was seeing
that picture
,” Kathy said. “It was just like a picture I saw in
Life
magazine years ago, when I was little. It was some article about the Russian Revolution, and they’d illustrated it with these pictures that showed what a pogrom was like. One was of a little Jewish girl, lying in the gutter outside her parents’ shop, with her doll beside her. She was lying on these black cobblestones…that looked so wet and cold. You couldn’t see her face because she was lying facedown, but you could see a pool of blood around her head….”

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” Aaron said.

“I tore that page out of the magazine,” Kathy confessed. “And I folded it up as small as I could and hid it. I still have it. It’s in this safe deposit box my mother got for me when I was in high school, along with some Series E bonds and a few silver dollars and the collar that belonged to my cat.”

“Why do you keep it?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know,” Kathy admitted. “To ward off evil, I suppose. To keep anything that terrible from happening to me…as if you can. I was nearly killed in Chicago when I was working for Clean Gene. I just want to survive, you know? I don’t want to wind up getting greeting cards from Sylvia Birnbaum.”

“Sylvia Birnbaum?”

“Yeah. She was the assistant editor of my high school yearbook. She never had any dates, so she thrived on other people’s misfortunes. Her best friend was a girl in an iron lung. They wrote to each other twice a week. The best friend held her pencil between her teeth.”

Someone in a neighboring house was playing a Stones album.

“Hey, it’s getting
late
,” Aaron said, looking at his watch. “We should be getting to bed. We have to be up pretty early in the morning.”

“Another day, another demonstration,” Kathy sighed.

Aaron moved closer to her.

The look on his face was unmistakable. He smiled, and touched her hand with his. Lowering her eyes, Kathy saw the peace symbol ring on his finger.

They kissed.

“It’s like being in the French Resistance, isn’t it?” Kathy said. “You feel you have to take tonight, because you can’t be sure about tomorrow.”

Aaron gently drew her down, onto his sleeping bag. “You know I really like you,” he murmured.

“I like you,” Kathy said. “You make me feel…safe.”

34

David, who had never traveled west of Cleveland before, had imagined that Los Angeles was another Miami Beach. So the rounded mountains he’d see from the air, bare except for brown grass, surprised him. His first view of the L.A. landscape reminded him of a Bugs Bunny comic book he’d read as a child. Bugs Bunny had gone to the moon in a wooden rocket ship, which was eaten there by a ravenous giant termite. Of course it turned out that Bugs had been dreaming. Not so for David, though. After his first week in L.A. he felt as if he were
living
in a daydream. Even the Pacific Ocean was comic book material, with its big waves that broke abruptly, like a splash in a bathtub, and its little boats bobbing on a horizon that didn’t look far away enough.

By the end of his first month on the Coast, David had decided that it was the quality of the light that did it. The sun overhead was like an enormous projector, turning everything into an image in a celluloid frame—brilliantly colored and almost real until it dawned on you that everyone had only four fingers on each hand and was wearing white gloves.

David had moved into an apartment building in the spirit of a motel. It was a U-shaped, two-story structure with a poured-concrete balcony onto which the second-floor apartments opened. Along the railing of this balcony were square plastic panels of mottled orange and green that were supposed to look like stained glass, David assumed, but instead made him think of the room dividers he’d seen in restaurants along interstates.

His living quarters hadn’t depressed David, though. If you knew there was no way in hell you were going to stay where you were, then you also knew you were going to get someplace. Perhaps it was one more trick of the sun-struck atmosphere that from the bottom the top seemed to be getting closer.

In L.A. you didn’t pound the pavement looking for work, you drove. David had been driving a blue Volkswagen Beetle that looked as if it had been polished with Ajax. Wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap, he would drive from his apartment to his agent’s office, literally going from one end of Hollywood to the other.

David’s agent, Stuart, who had been a kiss-off referral from his agent in New York, was a big man but a nervous type. Stuart’s standard line to David was that he just wasn’t right for the part. After two screen tests and five auditions, David was beginning to wonder if he was right for anything—or if, as his ego would have it, he simply had the wrong agent.

So finally on a Monday morning with no prospects but Friday coming, David put it to Stuart directly.

“Isn’t there anything that I’m
right
for?” he asked.

“Sure,” Stuart replied. “But they offer everything that’s right for you to Dustin Hoffman.”

“There’s nothing left over?”

“What’s left over from Dustin Hoffman goes to Elliott Gould.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“With the beard, you could maybe be a TV weatherman in some city where beards are allowed. Minneapolis, maybe. Or Boston.”

“I went to school in Boston, for Chrissake.”

“There you went to school; here you’re learning.”

Slumping in a chair, David looked at the photographs of famous and not so famous actors on Stuart’s walls and said, to them as much as to Stuart, “What the fuck am I gonna do?”

“Get a job?” Stuart said.

“Ironic, isn’t it?” David replied. “I can’t find work so I’m supposed to get a job. Does that make any sense?”

“It’s the reality of the situation,” said Stuart. A bead of sweat rolled from one of his sideburns into his shirt collar.

“What can I tell you? They found Clint Eastwood working in a gas station.”

“I think I’ll go home and sit by the pool for a while,” David said, standing up.

“Do that. Maybe you’ll come up with something. Meanwhile, if I hear of anything, I know where I can reach you.”

“Anything,” David said, thinking out loud.

Stuart’s telephone rang.

“Get it. It might be the National Weather Service,” David said.

That afternoon he sat for a couple of hours by the pool; from time to time he picked up a glass of tepid Scotch. How was he supposed to take stock, he wondered, when there wasn’t even anything on the shelf?

Around four one of his neighbors appeared. His name was Nat and he was from Georgia. Nat wore faded Madras sports jackets. He’d said he’d started out wanting to be a theater manager; his ambition, apparently, was to be some kind of show business civil servant.

“Hi, how’s it going?” Nat asked.

“Not well,” David replied. “How about you?”

“I had a couple of interviews today, one with the William Morris Agency, and one with Donald Jacobs.”