Vida (16 page)

… The way Hank looked at her made her uneasy. She rode up beside him in the ornate creaking old elevator of the huge apartment building that made a hollow square around a courtyard. The Seventh Heaven, it was called. The lobby was Moorish. The gates of the swaying elevator were of wrought iron. In the grimy courtyard an object like a bomb crater had once been a fountain. Sconces with stubs of bulbs, long broken, lined the hall.

She was wearing a mechanic’s coverall daubed with grease. That embarrassed her, following his tweedy tailored back into an apartment. The apartment was Moorish too: overstuffed divans, harem cushions, brass tables. I need clothes, she thought. Where can I get clothes?

“Hank, I need something to change into.”

“Such a bother. You’re always making demands. I assure you, you’d look absurd in any of mine” He was annoyed. She saw then that he did not desire her any longer. The only threads that had coerced him were spun of unsatisfied lust, and now that had unraveled. Partly it was the awful mechanic’s uniform. She did not want him; she was repelled by him. But she needed him to desire her sufficiently to hide her, to help her. Now she heard him using the telephone in the next room, and sweat broke out on her body under the filthy jump suit.

“I have to get out of New York” she heard herself saying. Hank was sitting cross-legged on a big blue cushion smoking dope in a brass hookah. She peeled off the jump suit and stood naked before him.

“You haven’t anyplace left to go. Except round in circles” He was giggling the way some people did when they smoked too much dope. “Round and round.”

The police were coming up the fire escape. They were outside in the hall. Now she was naked and there was no time to dress. She was naked and running, out through the service door into the back hall and up the steps onto the roof.

The tar was hot to her bare feet as she ran. She had a gun now, a .38 Police Special. She was kneeling there naked, embarrassed, and scared with the rough hot sticky tar of the roof chafing the skin of her knees, shooting back. Then she realized that men were swarming over the roof and behind her, men in boots running. Through her bare knees she felt the roof quiver. Then the bullets tore her flesh like bolts of fire. She saw her blood wet on the tar, thickening in the heat as it poured from her, faster. The gun fell. Slowly she slumped onto the roof. A shadow fell over her. She could not raise her head, although she tried, tried again. A booted foot kicked her in the ribs to flip her over …

“A bad dream,” she said to Joel, clinging to him. “Just a bad dream.”

“What about?” He stroked her hair, her cheek.

“Being hunted … shot.”

“Welcome to reality. How awful to have a dream about being hunted and how wonderful to wake up to being hunted for real.” He gestured. He was sitting up in bed reading the Boston
Globe
he had bought in town. Outside, the rain continued and the day loomed prematurely dark.

“I’ve been looking for something about Kevin.”

“Isn’t there anything at all?”

“Sure there is.” He passed her the paper.

She skimmed. Kevin Fogarty arraigned today in … bail set at $50,000 … released in the custody of his attorney, Ben Bassett … “Who the hell is this Bassett?” she asked, more to herself than to Joel. “He’s not a Movement lawyer. Is there a magnifying glass around here?” She bounded out of bed to look under stronger light at the accompanying photo of Kevin just leaving the courthouse. He looked seven feet tall and jaunty, a leather cap over one eye. It was not Kevin’s lean nonchalant face she was peering at. Beside him stood a beefy lawyer in a double-breasted suit, but just behind and between them a woman was following. “Lohania,” Vida burst out. “Lohania’s come to him. Double shit. Mother of all shit!”

”Who’s Lohania?”

“An old friend. She was Kevin’s lover. She and Leigh were lovers too.”

“Oh?” he said sarcastically. “And were you and her lovers too?”

“Briefly. Abortively, but—”

“And Kevin and Leigh?”

“Don’t be silly. They detested each other … Lohania and Leigh and I were a family. And Lohania and me, Kevin, Jimmy and Randy Superpig were the Little Red Wagon collective.”

“And were you lovers with Randy too?”

“No! We never got along.”

“First man I ever heard you mention you neglected to go to bed with … Okay, so Lohania’s busted now too?”

“Lohania got busted in ‘70 and eventually did two years. She wasn’t with Kevin and Jimmy and me the day of the bombing. They didn’t go after a thirty-year sentence on her. Randy was into her, or wanted to be. She copped a plea” Lohania and Kevin come together after all those years; why should that make her nervous? Because Lohania had been injured by drugs and prison and could not quite be trusted. Leigh and Lohania, stranded aboveground, deserted in the glare of sudden publicity, had tried to make it as a couple but had failed.

“Do you trust me?” He raised himself on his elbow, glaring.

She stared, her pattern of thought broken. “Sure” She sat down on the bed.

“I don’t think you do. Or you forgot how to talk to another human bring you’re connected to. You give me these glib answers. All these names. I’m supposed to be a newspaper morgue of old radical history. Either tell me the whole thing or tell me to shut up, but I can’t have a relationship with somebody who won’t talk to me. I mean talk. Not wave some kind of signs at me and expect me to pretend I know.”

She felt chilly with fear. Clutching herself, she knelt on the bed, wanting to flee him. Get out, clear out. To what? “It’s work. To communicate. I’m out of the habit. Mostly I try to persuade people subtly not to ask me questions.”

“I don’t know how to be lovers with someone and remain strangers. Either open up to me or we just give up and go our separate ways. But you got to show me more respect.”

“I do respect you! You haven’t told me much either.”

“Have you asked me?”

“I’m out of the habit of trying to penetrate other people too” Something caught in her chest, words like a switchblade sprung open. “The phone call this morning. I’m meeting my sister Saturday.”

“Is that safe?”

“Of course not. But I have to see her. We always manage”

“Can I meet her?”

“Maybe. Let’s see. I think so” She felt as if she had jumped off a bridge and not yet landed. “I’ll tell you my life, you tell me yours. We have till Friday morning, depending on the bus schedule.”

When he was convinced she meant it, he got the bottle of wine and they camped in the bed, hidden, the house locked up, no lights on but a candle on the bedside table. From across the pond came sounds of a small party at the Kensingtons. A cricket had got in the house and creaked from the living room. Side by side they sat against the wall, pillows heaped up behind them. “What were you doing when you were my age?” he demanded. “What were you like? Tell me.”

PART II

October 1967

7

“Listen to him lie! Listen to him! In that corn-pone voice. Like it’s just a real homey little truth that we have to murder all those people, it’s really good for them” Vida paced.

“Shhh” Leigh shut off the machine. “You get too excited, Vida. Go work on the collage with Lohania. You’re driving me crazy” He squeezed her around the waist and then gave her a push toward the dining-room table, where Lohania was cutting and pasting.

“I just hate him so much. The peace candidate!”

Leigh was playing Johnson’s speeches from the campaign of ‘64, putting together a tape to play in the War Pavilion at the Smash-the-State Fair the next day.

“How come you hate him so much?” Lohania asked, hand on her hip. “Just one more lying politician like all the rest.”

Vida looked at their dining-room table covered with a mural in progress. Lohania was putting together ads, political advertisements, news stories, photographs, Revlon lipsticks and Corvettes and maimed babies and bombed villages. Lohania’s black curls had bits of rubber cement and ends of paper caught in them. “If I cut, you can concentrate on the arty part” she offered to Lohania. She could not explain to Leigh or Lohania why she hated Johnson personally; during the campaign of ‘64 she had been married and living in Crete with Vasos and his family and America had been legendary and unreal, what the village people always said to her when her country was mentioned: “Poly lefta, poly aftokineto” “Much money, many cars”: their automatic response. She hated Johnson because she felt she and Natalie had been taken in completely by Kennedy. They had campaigned for him. They had listened to his speeches in hushed silence. They had believed that Jack and Bobby would do wonders for civil rights … She had resented Johnson as the gross successor, but she had come to hate him as the one who showed the corporate inside of Camelot, the imperialistic dreams behind the clean-cut Harvard rhetoric. Johnson pursued openly what Kennedy had secretly set in motion—the invasion, the war. He had made her see how duped and silly she had been weeping at the cortege in black and white on the television set in the dormitory lounge.

That was why she understood the kids, the SAW troops, better than Leigh or Lohania did, she thought: because they were angry as she was angry, because they had believed in the dream of American justice. President Shane in the white suit. It was the liberals who had made her responsible for the deaths of peasants in their paddy fields and ordinary guys, men she’d gone out with, who didn’t want to have their bellies torn open in somebody else’s backyard. Lohania’s family had hated Kennedy for calling off the Bay of Pigs: they were right-wing Cuban exiles. That Lohania had changed her politics completely around did not give her that sense of having been seduced and then betrayed that Vida had.

Leigh was whistling as he worked, his shirt open, listening to the tapes and then splicing bits and pieces. He hopped around like a cat playing with a mouse: relax, listen, then pounce, dash, grab. He was doing a good job, and she loved watching him. “Some blood of the bull!” he roared. “What a thirst I have.”

She opened a bottle of the Sangre de Toro they bought by the case— good cheap red Spanish wine—and poured out a tumbler for each of them. For once the phonograph was off, because of their not wanting to interfere with Leigh’s tapes, but he whistled and sang snatches of current rock songs, and Lohania and Vida joined in. “Earlier movements sang political songs” Vida said thoughtfully. “We don’t do that. Maybe we’re being co-opted.”

“The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Jefferson Airplane, they’re political” Leigh said vehemently. “That’s our music, and all the kids are boogeying to it. Who wants to stand in some attic singing ‘Solidarity Forever’ when you can take over the airwaves and reach everybody?”

It felt so good, home with her own tight family and doing their work together, she felt a pang of annoyance when she looked up and saw Kevin saunter in. He was Lohania’s new boyfriend, an ex-con who had served a couple of years for robbery and who was working on the docks in Hoboken. Since when had he had a key? He gave her a cold hard stare as he ambled past, looking around warily as always, as if he might be walking into an ambush or a fight. A great shock of yellow hair fell over his forehead, and he was growing a wild beard, fuller and shaggier than Leigh’s. He was a head taller than Vida, taller than Leigh, and Lohania looked as if she ought to stand on a ladder to kiss him. Immediately as he walked in Lohania’s expression changed to one more kittenish, her eyelids fluttering, her full mouth pursed, standing in a way that emphasized the full bow of her hip toward him. “Hey there, the Big K,” she said. “What blows you in?”

“It’s Saturday night” he said. “Must be a party someplace. What is this, hippie kindergarten, cut and paste?”

“It’s for the Smash-the-State Fair tomorrow” Lohania said. “I’ll be done in a wink.”

“Jesus, Smash the State, huh? You ain’t doing that with rubber cement, Lulu.”

That was his awful nickname for Lohania. “I’ll finish up,” Vida offered. She’d just as soon get him out. He made her edgy.

His eyes lingered on her, wearing only a T-shirt with T
HE
B
READ
is R
ISING
on it from the last spring mobilization and her cutoffs, as the night was warm for late October. She turned away, going to stand by Leigh, who was splicing and mumbling, oblivious, snapping his fingers to a tune played in his head and editing Johnson into Johnson in blatant contradiction. Lohania was wearing a pretty paisley minidress, because, as Vida realized, she had been expecting Kevin to appear.

After they had left, for of course there always was a Movement party to go to—Oscar and his new girlfriend Jan were throwing a Halloween bash in their loft—she finished up the mural and then helped Leigh till they both were done. Then, hearing in the hall the couple from Chapel Hill who had been sleeping on the living-room floor, they retired with the remains of the bottle of wine to her room, to chew over the week together, political, sociological, psychological profiles, and then to plot the week to come.

“Lohania must have given that guy a key,” she said sullenly, her head resting on Leigh’s furry chest.

He was playing with her breasts, idly. “Her new Irish rover? Why not?”