Vida (12 page)

She dumped her logs. “Not in a personal way. Look, Kevin and I hate each other. But I don’t want him busted.”

“I don’t want to hate anybody I’ve been close to. Even somebody who left me. I mean, I guess I want her to suffer some the way she made me suffer, but that’s not hating. Just a little desire for revenge.”

Tipping back his head on its short neck, he laughed. “Would you like to kill him? Is that what you mean by hating?”

Turning away, she scowled at the bright blue water. Sun struck the small brisk waves, firing them. “I suppose I mean the opposite of love. What love that turns bad turns into.”

“Isn’t that just pain?”

“No. Though there’s pain in it. Kevin has to control a woman.”

“He likes to control men too,” Joel said lightly. “He likes that a lot.”

“Did you love Jimmy?”

Now it was his turn to look away from her to the pond. “I guess so. He was hard to love. He hated himself so much”

“Didn’t he!” She was touched by the justice of what he said.

“We had a kind of sexual relationship, but Jimmy didn’t like sex all that much, and I’m basically heterosexual. It’s hard for me to make it with a man, and if he’s having trouble with it too, it’s a lost cause … He wouldn’t let himself be tender. But when they got him … “

“Did you watch?” she asked compulsively.

“Yeah.”

They looked at each other. He said. “I was in a redneck bar in Detroit—I can say that because in a way that’s who I am, a misfit Jewish redneck. They shot him right on TV and I went in the john and threw up. I just kept puking, though I hadn’t drunk but two beers.”

“I was in Philadelphia. I was living with a … friend part time, but he wasn’t there that night.” Suddenly she felt as if she could admit her fatigue. “My back’s killing me. After all, I’m a lot older than you. I think I’ll take yet another hot bath.”

“Sure. Then I’ll give you a massage. I give great massages. Kiley taught me”

“Oh, she did.” She tried to remember exactly what she had heard about Joel. Had he been with Kiley in Wichita?

“But you didn’t say what you meant by hating Kevin.”

“Let’s talk about it later.” He was pushing her, she realized. She drew back, not so much repulsed as startled. Yet dragging her sore body away, she realized she was enjoying herself. It was a relief to be with another fugitive. She observed cautions, such as not mentioning Leigh’s name, but such censorship was so slight, compared with the reticence with others, that their talk felt yeasty and spontaneous.

When she came back, he had built fires in the wood stove and in the fireplace. “Actually, if the fire wasn’t so pretty, it’d make sense to block up the fireplace” he said. “We lose more heat up the chimney than we get from the fire … That’s a pretty dress. You look beautiful”

“Sure” she said sardonically. It was the blue dress. “I used to, anyhow.”

“How come you don’t believe me?”

“The way my back feels, I’m an arthritic old woman.”

“Let me give you the massage I promised. Really, I’m good.”

“‘Cause Kiley taught you?” She was teasing, curious.

“She gives a mean back rub.”

Kiley had been a fugitive almost as long as Vida had, and along with Kevin and Vida and Larkin and Jimmy, she had been involved in founding the Network. She was a tight-bodied small blond Wasp from a family that owned a department store in Waukegan; she had gone to Radcliffe; she was very bright, articulate, five years younger than Vida and never more in love than she could easily handle. She was tough and charismatic, and Vida had had good times and bad times with her. Always, though, Vida had been a little, a little jealous of Kiley, to whom so much seemed to come easily. An underground anecdote told about a bombing Kiley had taken part in that had had just about everything go wrong with it that could, with final success—an anecdote about a bunch of fugitives trapped in a basement under their own bomb. It had as a punch line “And then Kiley began to sweat. Two drops.”

“Were you involved with her?”

He grimaced. “Yeah. But was she involved with me? You want a massage?”

She felt absurdly hesitant. “Why not?” Actually, she could think of several reasons, but they made her feel silly. She lay on her belly on the braided rug before the fireplace and he straddled her, applying his weight carefully to one segment and then another of her spine.

“Where does it hurt?”

“Ow. There. There too. Yes! … I guess all over.”

“I’d do a better job if you took that dress off.”‘

The wool rubbing on her skin irritated, but she was sorry she had agreed to the massage, fast becoming too intimate. At the same time, she would feel stupid if she demurred over taking off her dress. What did he care? Matter-of-factly, trying to look bored, she rose to her knees, pulled the dress over her head and folded it gently on the settee.

Again he straddled her and began to work. He did give her a good massage. Relaxing under the strength and knowledge of his hands, she began to enjoy it, but also to become conscious of the body set on hers. So damned quasi-sexual, massage was one of those counterculture gray areas. A back rub wasn’t supposed to be sexual: it was supposed to be sensual; but who drew those lines? They weren’t drawn on her body. His thighs pressing her flanks excited her. Carefully she controlled her breathing. Her nipples itched, pressing into the rag rug. She suffered a ridiculous fear that he could guess she was excited. Say no to all back rubs. That was how she had happened to make love with Eva the first time. The better the back rub, the less likely she was to stop with having her back rubbed.

Did he have an erection? But why would he? Getting your back massaged was exciting, but massaging somebody was hard work. When he paused, she said, “Thanks enormously. That really helped!” She flexed her muscles as if to rise, so that he released her and backed off.

Dress in hand, she hastened to her room. A little shaken, she wondered at her volatility. That had belonged to a previous life. She had thought herself grown cold and rational and slow in the senses. No more back rubs! She stayed in her room reading an old
Natural History
magazine about parasites in western Africa and then about the life of the tree frog. She forgot her own life completely, let go of her worries and her obsessions and her political concerns and floated in fascinating and irrelevant knowledge, a back rub of the mind with no erotic side effects.

When she ventured out, he was in the kitchen. “I’ll make supper,” he offered. “I took out this chicken to defrost, and now I’m cutting it up”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll make supper tomorrow.”

He smiled into her eyes as if she had said something marvelous. “Great!”

Let’s see, suppose he was nineteen in 1972. He’d be twenty-six now. Susannah’s age! Leigh was involved with someone the same age as Joel? She was subtly shocked. Kiley was thirty-one, so he must not be incapable of being interested in an older woman. After all, she had no competition here in the piney woods. He could even be twenty-seven, but no way could she stretch his age farther. “I’m going to take a walk, then.”

He pointed. “Be back around six.”

Walking helped her back. The oaks had begun to brown spottily but the beeches and maples had turned to towering torches, and the first fallen leaves brightened the ground. As she approached the ocean, the trees, tall near the ponds, dwarfed till only small scrub oaks stood up, and then nothing but grass blew on the dunes. The wind smote her, but she found a sheltered alcove of sand. The shadows were lengthening blue toward the water, the air felt chilly, but crouching with her eyes on the horizon, she felt better. The ocean calmed her, quieted the silly buzz of desire, dispersed that dangerous gathering energy. She must sit tight here till she could talk to Natalie or until the Network told her to break cover.

Natalie had a new task for her. To be useful would build her spirits. Once it had been a matter of recovering some seized documents on the battered women’s shelter. Years before it had been helping a runaway. Another time it had been a matter of dealing with a rapist known to women along the North Shore as the Stocking Man, for the nylon stocking he wore over his face. Women had tracked him down and identified him as an Olds dealer, but the police could not or would not prosecute. He specialized in baby-sitters.

That was the only time Kevin had been involved, which placed it in time neatly: 1973. With nylon stockings pulled over their faces they had let themselves into his office, catching him as he was leaving work. Kevin had raped him, an act she had thought rather fitting, although the dealer did not. That had been the end of the Stocking Rapes. Kevin had perhaps enjoyed it a little too much, but she, to whom Natalie had described the bleeding and battered young women, knew that she would have found it in herself to kill him, if that had been asked. She saw that in herself as a fact, observed it. Were they beating Kevin now? His having worked with the IRA lately might do him some good in New York; there were still Irish cops. It might save his butt from savaging.

She came back to the house calm and hungry. What could Joel give or take from her? Nothing much. As she came in from the fresh piny cold, the house smelled of chicken basted with lemon and broiled, of home fries, of wood smoke. “You want to toss the salad?” He winked at her. “You just got back in time. It’s after six, and this dinner is hopping ready”“

As they sat at the round glass-topped table on rattan chairs looking onto the darkening pond, the lights of a house at the far end, the mauve tint of the last vibrations of a quiet cloudless sunset, she tasted melancholy like a steely dry wine on her palate. A mock couple, they sat down to eat. How much easier it would be if she were alone here, and how beautiful if she were alone with Leigh. Would she ever have that again—Leigh with her as an ordinary couple sharing quarters, meals, at least part of a life? How awkward to be dumped into a false intimacy with someone so ill suited to her, puppy and alley cat keeping house. She noticed he had put candles on the table, their almond flames wavering in the twilight. “Candles! You like that sort of thing, don’t you?”

”Don’t you?” He made a defensive grimace. “Anyhow, they’re here. How much work is it to light a match?”

She was being cruel. He could not help that he wasn’t Leigh. “The way you set out the coffee last night. And supper tonight. It just strikes me. I’m not attacking—it’s nice”

“You think so? Really? I like to make things nice, if I can. How much comfort do we ever get?”

He was not Leigh, who wanted the very best wine, the best sturgeon, but would not care if he ate them on the floor. He preferred plastic dishes, because they didn’t break and were easy to wash and moreover, he thought them a proletarian taste. He liked to combine high-bourgeois tastes with proletarian preferences. Thinking of him, she felt a little desolate, a little abandoned. But contact had been reestablished, and she must push to see him soon. In the meantime here she was in a cozier oasis than she had seen in long traveling. Much better chicken overcooked a bit and drunk with water in the company of a fellow wayfaring stranger and harried exile than perfect poulet aux herbes de Provence and Pouilly-Fuissé with Hank the Bank. Leigh had a rhyme about him in the old fundraising days:

Hank the Bank

He’s long and lank.

Turn his crank

Till the money comes out.

But it doesn’t.

Always been tight. She had more in common with this young stranger.

After supper, they sat by the fire sipping coffee and some bourbon from a dusty bottle of Jim Beam. “If tomorrow’s nice, we should take a walk” he said. “Get some exercise”

She reflected that from her point of view they’d got plenty today, but amiably she agreed. The evening wore on. Together they looked at a picture book of photographs of American Indians taken in the nineteenth century. The heavy book was spread across both laps while their thighs touched. It was not boredom that made the evening interminable, but wondering if anything was going to happen between them. She didn’t want to spend another cold night alone. If they slept together, if proved nice, this might be an even more pleasant interlude. Probably they would meet again in another three or four years. She planned to stay put in the house until she called Natalie from some pay phone she could hike to on Monday morning. Warm against her, his thigh did not move away. He seemed very animated leaning over the book. Perhaps he was nervous fearing she would want him to sleep with her; perhaps he was nervous fearing she wouldn’t. He could also be nervous for ordinary fugitive reasons, as this house on a sand road offered no easy exit. They could hardly escape across the pond in a canoe.

They took turns piling wood on the fire and poking it and feeding the wood stove, which gave out ten times as much heat as the fireplace. Then they pored over a local Geodesic Survey map and planned a tentative walk. After they had finished looking at the picture book and then the map, there seemed no excuse for continuing to sit thigh to thigh. When she got up to feed the stove, she positioned herself at a more discreet distance. Nothing was moving forward. He must not be interested; or perhaps he was gay in spite of Kiley. He sewed a button on his jeans jacket. She fetched pants Eva had given her from a thrift shop, good khaki pants about two inches too long. Her own legs were long enough; the pants must have belonged to a grasshopper. After a while he frowned at her ragged stitching. “You must hate to sew he said.