The Company You Keep (25 page)

Now, I don’t particularly want to teach you the tricks of the trade, but I will tell you this: if you want to buy stuff to disguise yourself, no matter whether you’re going to leave it in a closet for months, do it at Halloween—no one will bat an eye. Sitting in the bathroom stall, knees pressed together to hold my impedimenta, I stripped off my shirt and began working carefully with the kit that I kept replenished each Halloween. First, I used the Grecian Formula to turn the red hair on my head black. Then I shaved carefully and by feel with a disposable razor, shaving cream, and witch hazel—that way I didn’t need to leave the privacy of the stall for running water. I put on the mustache and the toupee with adhesive. With a pair of barber’s scissors and the mirror, I trimmed the toupee and mustache. Finally, I put on a pair of horn-rimmed glasses with a very slight prescription—so slight that it did not much impair my vision, but still avoided the telltale glare of flat glass on fake lenses.

When finally I held the little mirror away from my face, I was shocked to see a handsome Jewish man staring back. It was the Jewish
part that shocked me—it had been a very long time since I acknowledged my tenuous relationship with my parents’ religion. As for the handsomeness—I have warned you before that I am not without vanity—it saddened me. I did not like to admit how much better I looked with more hair. Perhaps, I told myself, it was just the color.

I put my shirt back on and cleaned up, then waited for the bathroom to be—or to sound—empty. When at last I thought it was, I left the stall, then the bathroom, and walked directly out into the parking lot. Repressing my now imperious need for coffee, which was making my head ache, and carrying my bag, I crossed the lot to the service road leading away from the highway. Without looking back, I stepped down its verge toward the low skyline of suburban sprawl, soon finding myself in a residential neighborhood of small clapboard homes.

The streets here were empty: a blue-collar bedroom community on a weekday—at least, I thought it was a weekday—air conditioners letting a dull hum into the air. For a time I walked, nearly thoughtlessly, watching the trim lawns and modest houses, feeling the lassitude of heat in the suburbs. Finally, at a public park where a couple children played listlessly in front of their mothers, I sat under a tree and waited the couple last hours until nightfall, feeling my caffeine-deprivation headache rise to new heights.

When it was at last dark, I rose and retraced my steps toward the highway, or where I thought the highway should be. This time, my route must have been different, for after several blocks of lit houses in black streets, I came to a gas station and convenience store, both built of cinder block, sitting under a pool of neon light from a high streetlamp. Cicadas had started sounding, so slowly I had not noticed it, but now I became conscious of their ululating scream, like Arab women in mourning, and with it came a sudden sense of panic. There was a video camera mounted on the lamp, pointed to catch the entrance doors of both shops. I crossed a little patch of oil-stained tarmac behind the grocery store to point my back toward the camera and then, shoulders hunched slightly, walked into the store.

Coffee, here, came in large and extra large. I took two of the latter. I knew I had to eat, and although it broke some of the firmest principles
of my life with you, I finally took a bag of Doritos from a shelf and bought those too. Munching the Doritos and sipping coffee thirstily, I walked back out into a din of crickets and went on through the streets of little houses. A soul-destroying place to live, I thought, and as the coffee quieted my headache, somewhere distant, for the first time since leaving you, I felt a grief bigger than my own, the grief of people forced to live lives of work and consumerism in houses like this.

When, after a mile or so, I found the entrance ramp to the highway, strong halogen streetlamps cast a thick curtain of luminescence—a shower of light that emitted an electric buzz and held a swarm of insects at its top—through the summer-warm air.

I did not enter the highway but stood just outside the border of the light. The first car that came was a Taurus, and as it approached I stepped fully into the light, thumb up, wrist toward the car. It swerved slightly, then accelerated down the ramp, a woman at the wheel looking steadfastly ahead. A full fifteen minutes passed without another car passing, then a battered Tercel driven by a single man came up. This time I stepped into the light more fully, showing my face, and held a hand up. The car pulled up while its driver, a boy in his twenties, leaned over to unroll the passenger window.

“Can you give me a ride, man?” I leaned onto the window and showed my whole face, which held anxiety. “My car died. I left it at the gas station up there.”

“Where to?” The
r
was French. His face, not recently shaved, was framed by dirty-blond hair, and he wore a denim shirt over a faded orange T-shirt.

“I’m going to Chicago.”

“Chicago?
Merde.
”

“Wherever, man. As far as you’re going is fine.”

The boy looked me up and down, appraisingly. “O-kay.
Venez.
”

I climbed in and slammed shut the door, defining thereby a microclimate filled with the warmth of my body and the smell of tobacco. A pack of Canadian Export A’s sat on the well under the handbrake. The kid pulled out and the car sank down the ramp into the zone of bright, yellowish streetlamp, merging into fast traffic while accelerating at the
limit of its little engine. Now the interior of the car was lit, and I felt sweat come out on my face.

“J’ai cru qu’on fait plus de stop aux États-Unis.”

The kid was speaking to himself, I knew. Still, I asked: “Sorry?”

“No itchikeeng anymore. In America, I thought.”

I watched the cigarette pack, feeling a horrible desire rising in me. I looked down at it, then back up. The kid was watching me now.

“Listen, man. Can you take me into Chicago?”

The kid laughed. “I go to Joliet. I already come from Quebec. You make me drive all night.”

“Yes.” It was, I thought to myself, like getting in a stranger’s car in New York and asking to be driven to Boston. Without thinking, I reached ten twenties out of my pocket. “I’ll pay gas and food and this on top.” I glanced at him, then back to the road.

“What ees your problem?”

I tried to enunciate clearly. “I’m in trouble with the police. Marijuana. Do you understand?”

“Oui. And een Chicago, it ees better?”

“In Chicago I have friends. They’ll help me get a lawyer.”

He watched for another instant, then turned back to the road, smiling. “
Allon-zy donc.
”

Relief flooding through me, I reached a cigarette out of the box. “And I’ll buy more cigarettes too.”

“O-kay, man.” It came out, this time, in an imitation American accent, as if the kid were making fun of me. And I lit the cigarette, drawing the deep richness into the back of my throat, sitting back in my chair. Feeling, in the interior of the car, the slightly sweaty warmth of my savior. Thinking, as the nicotine swirled into my bloodstream, numbing my lips, cooling my hands, that it was always like this.

It was always like this. Total strangers would help, for no reason whatever. Some of us had been very public figures in SDS, sometimes addressing crowds of thousands of people, and when we were underground, we would be recognized wherever we went, in restaurants, in bars. Recognized, and after the moment of recognition, ignored. And later, when the police came—and the police came early and often, with
warrants, with subpoenas, and with a whole boatload of COINTELPRO tricks—not one person, not a single, solitary person, ever told them a thing.

All of us, for years after, when on left and right alike we had been condemned—on the right for adventurism, on the left for destroying the movement—we would all remember the hundreds and hundreds of total strangers who, at enormous risk, helped us. People who lent houses, gave money; doctors who saw us; kids who gave us rides, and cars, and apartments.

How hated were we? Sure: There were those like Gitlin, who hated us on political grounds, and those who hated us on personal grounds, for our arrogance, for our plain meanness. But apart from these, I have never been convinced we were widely hated at all.

Except for how much some of us came to hate ourselves.

And we were lucky. Endlessly lucky, as I had been tonight.

And so as a stranger started to drive me hundreds of miles out of my way to Chicago, as the sweetness of nicotine spread through my bloodstream, I remembered something: luck is never surprising, always inevitable.

Perhaps that is because you only see your luck when, as few people ever do, you put yourself in a position truly to need it.

Little J. I must have been somewhere in Utah, on the 80 East, before I stopped inventing Cleo Theophilus’s identity, and let my mind go where for so long I had kept it away, to thinking about your father.

Jason Sinai. There were so damn many Js in SDS, not just Jeff Jones and JJ but all manner of Joannas, Jaffes, Johns, Jeans, Justins, Jennifers. First person to call your father Little J, that was JJ, and when he did, your father’s face fell. Years later I found out why—Jack Sinai and Jason, in the big extended family that gathered in the Sinai’s house on Bedford Street: Big J and Little J.

Little J. I’ve tried a thousand times to see him, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge that midnight after leaving you, a man who had moments before abandoned his daughter in a hotel room, and like that, he finds himself watching across the black water at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the same view he had seen with his father in 1962.

Little J. I’ve tried a thousand times to see him, waking on that bus to Chicago, that June day of 1996.

I see him in a room on the Cape, sprawled naked on white sheets, the long autumn sun crossing the wooden wall, lowering, lowering, until it sweeps over his face: his thick red bangs, his forehead, his eyebrows. In houses upstate, lent to us, rented, or stolen. Apartments in the Mission, Hyde Park, Williamsburg, the cheap neighborhoods of cities across the
country. Always off-season, the time when the radical chic, not needing their pricey country houses, could lend us them in return for a daring dinner party story, a thrill up their spines, and that without interrupting their summer. Stay as long as you want, but be out by Thanksgiving, because the kids are off school and it’s the last time we can get out of the city till Christmas. Cars and trains, buses. Tents. A precious collection of mornings, waking in places where we had been safe enough, provisionally, to sleep, to fuck, to hold each other in the protection of the dark.

When you are a fugitive, it is in the day that the regrets, the terrors, the awful memories come. “Whatever gets you through the day/It’s O-kay, Okay—” We rewrote the words to the song, our first year on the move, and I remember wondering how night could ever be a threat to anyone. Night, with the amazing chances it offers to hide, is always the respite. Mornings, only the innocent—like Jason—wake unafraid.

That is why it is so hard for me to imagine how your father woke, that day on the bus to Denver after leaving you in New York, the swirling of blood-pink before his eyes. I can’t, or I won’t, accept that as a man your father no longer wakes as he did as a boy, no longer wakes happy, no longer wakes hopeful. That, in my opinion, is the greatest casualty of his marriage to Julia, and I will give you any odds that it only became the case after Julia became an addict. I will bet you anything that those magical first years, as your father realized how solidly James Grant was holding, as your father floated on the safety net of the Montgomery fortune, as life unfolded to him with magical ease, I will bet you that he woke happy and rolled toward Julia’s beautiful naked body as he once rolled toward mine. And I will bet you that it was only after you came along and Julia, a line of coke at a time, started abusing first herself, then herself and Jason, and finally her daughter too, that at long last peace began to drain from your father’s nights.

For this, I will never forgive your mother. Not only for taking hope from your father, but for taking its possibility, its very possibility, away from me.

For as I came to understand your father’s part of this story—and I have had ten years to learn it in its every detail and imagine its every
thought—I realized that for all the time that I lived as Tess Sanders, for the entire central period of my life, the belief that happiness might be possible, not just for me but for others, was founded on your father’s way of waking into happiness, each morning, his ability to face the day with hope. Later, when your father was often described as foolish, even naive, how it must have galled him to have those things for you to read, someday, yourself. Let me tell you something, Isabel. To be an optimist like your father is not naive, nor is it an error. Only the naive would think so.

I, who lost my naïveté the day my father put a gun in his mouth on the dunes at Point Betsie; I, who have lived without the slightest fantasy ever since, know that optimism is the highest of spiritual developments, and I would trade my soul for it, if I had a goddamn soul.

Shit. I keep writing exactly what I promised I wouldn’t. Promised myself, that is. I promised myself I would just tell you what happened. Here’s what happened in June 1996, Isabel Sinai: I drove east from San Francisco. On the 80. I got the story every hour, on the hour, on NPR as I headed east, not sleeping, living on coffee. In the evenings
All Things Considered
gave background, interviews, human interest. And in between broadcasts I could hear, rather than just imagine, the conversations that were taking place, that day, in hundreds, even thousands of ex-Movement houses, telephones, e-mails.