The Children of Hamelin (36 page)

“Don’t you see what Ted was really doing?” I finally said from deep right field. “He wants me to go along. He figures that if you go, I’ll go.”

“You trying to tell me that your
friend
is using me to trick you into going to San Francisco?” Arlene said belligerently, taking a brief sip of her over-sweetened tea.

“Yeah... But it’s not like
that
... it’s not something sinister. Ted’s nothing if not sincere. He digs me, he digs you, he thinks we should be together, he wants all of us to be in San Francisco with the Foundation where he truly believes we’ll all live happily ever after, and he feels that he knows what’s good for us better than we do. I’m not putting Ted down... I feel sorry for him.”

“Why should you—”

The waiter shuffled up with the wonton soup and Arlene cooled it. I spooned broth, wontons, greens and reddish-pink slivers of pork out of the tureen and into our bowls. I tasted the soup: flat. I dribbled in a few drops of soy sauce, turning the broth a murky brown. Not exactly great, but better.

“Why should you have such a superior attitude?” Arlene said, sipping diffidently at her soup.

I suddenly realized I was hungry. Uptightness can do that to me sometimes. I started gobbling up soup and wontons, gauchely talking with a full mouth.

“Maybe because I
am
superior. I see through what’s going on and you and Ted don’t. A week or so ago, you wouldn’t have dreamed of following old guru Harv to San Francisco. Now—”

“I know what you’re going to say. Harvey maneuvered the whole thing. I’m not that dense, Tom. But what if he has? So what?”

“So what?”

“Look,” she said, starting to eat a little heartier, “it all depends on what you think of Harvey and the Foundation. You think Harvey’s a phony and the Foundation is bad. If you’re right, then Harvey maneuvering everyone into going to San Francisco is an evil thing. I’ll grant you that...”

Looked like the food was starting to make her more reasonable: she was talking more calmly and the lines on her face had relaxed with the motions of chewing. Maybe it was a matter of eating up that old Oriental cool—I was feeling less combative myself.

“But?” I said. “There
is
a but...?”

She nodded, finishing off the last of her soup.
“But,”
she said, looking up from her bowl, “what if Harvey is a good man and the Foundation a good thing? What if he’s wiser than any of us? What if he knows that a clean break with our pasts and a fresh start in San Francisco and a sense of the Foundation as a community is what we all need? What if he knows we wouldn’t accept it if he told it to us? Well, then the only way to get us to help ourselves is to make us think it’s our spontaneous decision. You see what I mean? If what Harvey’s doing is really a good thing, then how he gets it done doesn’t really matter...”

“Der Fuehrer knows best, eh? Baby, I have not the words to tell you how slimy and evil that feels to me!”

“But you’re just going with a feeling...”

“I trust my instincts,” I said.

“So why shouldn’t I trust mine? My instincts tell me that Harvey is good and wiser than I am. So—”

The waiter appeared carrying three big dishes with steel covers on a metal tray. He cleared off the soup tureen and the bowls, set a big platter down in front of each of us, put the three dishes down on the table, and split.

I spooned a big mound of fried rice onto each of our platters. The other two dishes were lobster Cantonese (pieces of lobster in egg sauce) and Chinese pepper steak (beef with green peppers, onions and water chestnuts)—nothing fancy. I dumped some of the lobster on my plate. Arlene started on the pepper steak.

“Look,” Arlene said while I struggled with my lobster-fork, “doesn’t it all boil down to what you feel about Harvey and the Foundation? You feel he’s not doing a good thing, so the move to San Francisco is just one more bad thing. I feel he’s good and he knows what he’s doing, so going to San Francisco is probably a good thing for me. Especially since it scares me. Ted was right about that. So were you—I’m full of fears. Maybe if I lick this one big fear, it’ll be a breakthrough for me...”

The lobster wasn’t bad. “Try some of this,” I said, spooning some of it onto her plate. I took some of the pepper steak. Too greasy.

“I’ll buy the fighting your fear thing,” I said. “Okay, you gotta make a motion, an existential act, whatever you want to call it. But why buy Harvey’s junk? Why not do something more personal?”

“Such as?”

I reached into my pocket, dangled my apartment key in front of her face.

She grimaced, seemed about to say something, hesitated, smiled, grimaced again. “You know,” she finally said, “you could be right. Maybe it would be the same thing. But... I can’t do that...”

I put away the key. “Because you’re afraid,” I said around a mouthful of rice.

“Yes...”

“Well, there you are... It
is
the same thing. If you can fight one fear, you can fight the other.”

She swallowed a mouthful of food. “It’s
not
the same thing,” she said. “If I take that key, then it’s you and me all alone and the Foundation goes to San Francisco... and... and I’m left here with you and my fears... and no support... That’s a much bigger thing than going to San Francisco....”

“I’m glad you finally realized that.”

“Don’t you see?
If I go to San Francisco, I have the Foundation and Harvey and all the members... a whole community to help me with my hang-ups... I’d be afraid, but I wouldn’t be so alone.”

“You wouldn’t be alone with me.”

“But... a real relationship really scares me. You’d be the last person in the world to help me with
that
fear... I haven’t reached that level of consciousness yet... I think with the Foundation’s help I could, someday... But if I stay behind, I’ll be trapped... I’ll
never
be able to have a real relationship with you or anyone else.”

“You’ll never know until you try. You won’t get there by just talking about it for the rest of your life.”

She played with her pepper steak, stared at her plate while a vein pulsed at the hinge of her jaw. “You’re right,” she said, “But... but I’m right too. I’d like to take that key, but... But if it means giving up the Foundation—”

Suddenly she cut herself off. She looked at me with a thin smile arced across her face; her eyes shone with a strange kind of berserk fire.

“Do you think it could be... the real thing between us?” she said.

“Yes...”

“I think so too. And I’m willing to prove it. Are you?”

“Try me.”

“I will: If the Foundation goes to San Francisco, I’m going with it; I have to. But I’ll prove that you mean as much to me as the Foundation does—I’ll be your... woman on any terms you want.”

She paused, put down her fork, and stared at me with frightening intensity. “But
only
in San Francisco,” she said. “That’s what
you’ve
got to do to prove yourself to
me;
we’ve got to go to San Francisco together. That’s fair.” And she clamped her jaw into bear-trap resolution.

“Fair?
That’s asinine! Love me, love the Foundation, that’s what you’re saying!”

We stared at each other across the littered table, across the oriental flotsam and jetsam of a meal that was starting to turn to a cold greasy lump of lead in my stomach.

“In a way, maybe that’s right,” she said. “I need the Foundation; I can’t survive without it. That need’s part of me, so you can’t have me without it... I’m not asking
you
to need the Foundation...”

“Aren’t you?”

“No I’m not.”

“Sure
you’re not!” I said. “You’re just asking me to drag my ass all the way across the country to be with you—and all because
you
have to be with Harvey.”

Her jaw trembled but didn’t relax. “If you don’t think I’m worth leaving New York for...”

“Oh shit, it’s not that and you know it! You want to run away with me to Paris or Timbuktu or Cleveland, we can leave tomorrow. Anywhere but San Francisco!”

“If you really mean that, then why
not
San Francisco?”

I forced myself to shut up for nearly a minute and recover my cool. What she was really saying was, I’m willing to try making it with you if you’re willing to give me a quid pro quo. All the logic was on her side. But goddamn it, a relationship between a man and a woman can’t be based on horsetrader’s logic!

“Okay,” I said, about ten decibels lower and minus 25mg of speed less uptight, “I’m trying to understand, really I am. You need the Foundation, you say. And you want me. So I have to go with you and the old Cuckoo-clock to San Francisco. Okay, I dig: you want me, but you
need
the Foundation and you’ve got to go with the need over want.”

“You still don’t completely understand—even if I stayed in New York with you and let the Foundation go to San Francisco, it wouldn’t work. Maybe part of me
wants
to do that. But I
can’t.
Because I need the Foundation to get me to the point where I
can
have a real relationship with you.”

“Bullshit! It’s the Foundation that’s keeping you from really making it with a man.”

“You believe that. I don’t.”

I was starting to feel old and weary. We were talking in closed circles. If she was right about Harvey, I was being a stupid shit, and I should go with her to San Francisco and with the help of the Great White Father, we’d live happily and Totally Conscious ever after, after only a few decades and maybe fifty thousand bucks worth of Total Psychotherapy. But if I was right, then the more she chased her freedom into the labyrinth of Harvey’s machine, the further in she’d be sucked, and if I let myself chase after her, I’d go down the rathole too.

No way we could argue rationally about Harvey: he was her god and my devil. But... but there was still one card left to play:

“You’ve got the Foundation now and you haven’t taken the key. What makes you think it’d be any different in San Francisco?”

“Because... because if I can face my fear of leaving New York, I can face my other fears too...”

“You think that, you don’t know it.”

“I believe it.”

“Because you want to believe it!”

She heaved a great sigh; all the combativeness went out of her face and she looked like a pale, lost little girl. I felt myself melting... melting...

“Oh Tom,” she whispered, “I don’t know... I just don’t know... All I know is that I feel so lost and alone and hopeless... Harvey gives me hope... and you do too. I can’t stand the thought of leaving either of you... If only you believed in the Foundation too... If you can’t believe in the Foundation, couldn’t you just believe in me?”

“I want to...”

Shit, I felt all talked out. The wall between us was a micron thin and a million miles high. I found myself wishing I
could
believe in the Foundation so I could take her in my arms and carry her to San Francisco and... But it was no use!

“Well what the hell,” I said lamely, “the Foundation hasn’t voted to go to San Francisco yet. Let’s jump off that bridge when we cross it, okay?”

“We
will
have to cross it, you know,” she said in a tiny voice.

“I know,” I sighed. “But let’s pretend for another week that we won’t.”

She gave me a poor brave smile. “I’m tired of talking too,” she said.

We both stared at our empty plates until the waiter finally came and cleared them away and set chocolate ice cream and a fortune cookie down in front of each of us.

Arlene cracked open the crisp brown pastry, pulled out the little strip of paper, read it, pouted, and shook her head. “What’s it say?” I asked.

“Hope is the mother of faith,” she said softly, “but despair is its father.” Then solemnly: “And yours?”

I broke open the cookie, read from the slip of paper: “You are about to take a long trip to an exotic land.”

Somehow, it didn’t seem all that funny.

Sitting around the pad Friday night nervously waiting for Robin to show up, it occurred to me that when she had called, maybe I just should’ve told her to get lost and take Arlene with her and I should seriously consider becoming a monk. I mean, monks don’t have any problems with chicks who demand that they do
their
thing, crawl into
their
bag or else it’s splitsville. Monks have their own bag and no one is about to convince a monk that he has to make
their
scene.

Only thing wrong with becoming a monk is you end up like Arlene. Which must be why monasteries are so heavy behind silence—if you had all those monks gibbering at each other, each one sure he was into The One True Faith and determined to drag all the others into his bag with him, they’d chew each other to bits like a school of famished piranhas. Naw, I really couldn’t cut it as a monk—if I were the True Believer type, I might as well make my One True Faith the Foundation and go with Arlene to San Francisco and at least get laid for my trouble, which is more than your monk gets for
his.

Of course, there was always Robin (where
was
she), and the more I thought about the heavy dues Arlene demanded, the better Robin looked. Robin didn’t ask for anything from me—except that I shouldn’t ask anything from her. She accepted me for what I was—even accepted that she couldn’t quite understand exactly where I was at—and all she wanted in return was that I accept her for what
she
was.

Yeah—but the only thing keeping me from making it Robin all the way and to hell with Arlene
was
what Robin was: namely, a dealer.

Ah yes, there was the crunch! Maybe I was just a prisoner of my junkie past—a smack dealer, let’s face it, is just about the lowest form of vertebrate life: a creature either driven by slobbering need if he’s a junkie or by something nameless and far, far worse if he’s the kind who never touches the stuff. I couldn’t help it, that was the kind of dealer I had known.

But maybe Robin was right—maybe I was just thinking like a dirty old junkie, emphasis on the word
old.
It was sure true that grass and hash and acid were
not
junk. I still dug good old
cannabis sativa
in any form, and acid had been a good trip. Robin’s customers weren’t junkies and neither was I, any more. Where did I come off being self-righteous about her selling what I was buying? Shit, that was plain old square hypocrisy—I had no moral grounds for putting down Robin’s dealing.