Going Down Fast: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  END IMPLICIT SUBROUTINE

  INDEX RESULT

  “It does seem a bit funny that she’d stay with you.”

  “Why? Lots of room. Rowley treated her rotten too, which should have given you fair warning. Anyhow, forget Anna, she isn’t your problem.” He pushed the sandwich at her.

  She chewed it doggedly to please him. Lowgrade stringy beef. “I don’t see any way open to me. I feel trapped.” Tears wet her eyes and subsided. “Why can’t Rowley act like a human being?”

  “He’s being very human. Cowardice is. He don’t want no consequences.” He tapped her arm. “I said I’d help you, and I will. But you have to trust me. Decide that you want my help. That’s a decision only you can make.”

  UNDEFINED INTERNAL CONNECTOR

  He wanted to reopen the affair. She was a little surprised. After all she had changed. She had been dreadfully young and he had impressed her with his psychologizing. He had actually talked her into therapy, but of course once in she saw the affair as destructive, with him married. Then too she’d been impressed because he did make films, even if they were poor things that hardly anybody saw: the sewer cinema Bruce called them. Though he’d never seen any. Of course Leon was divorced now. “I do trust you, you know I do. But how can you help me?”

  REQUEST KEY

  He grinned, a painful grimace. “Think about it.” He drew his hand nervously across his mouth. “You know I’ve got a position at ISS now, fieldwork, and with that kind of experience I can move up to something better. I’ve got a thing going for me at the Council of Arts, a grant that looks like a sure thing. A longer flick, no more one-reelers. This idea is going to blow your mind. You come over tomorrow afternoon and I’ll tell you about it, okay? Elliott’s got a New York distributor now and if I can bring off this new one, he’ll screen it for the guy. A new way to shoot you I worked out, wait till you see. We’ll finally get that quality of your skin, right? That dull bony glow. My mother Fern, she’s not a bad sort, she had a soft heart, you just got to get her by herself. You’ll like her.…”

  RESET CLEAR

  Afterward she went downtown and bought baby suede gloves, a new afterbath called Silky (leaves you silkened from head to), and a cashmere scarf for Bruce. Then she bought a Countess Mara tie for Leon. After all, he was trying to be a true friend. And she detested his ties.

  She could not tell if Bruce liked the scarf. “I thought we had Christmas two days ago,” he drawled. On the other hand he did not seem annoyed. The evening would have gone well if only she had had her hair done instead of having to wait till Monday. Perhaps Dominic had not liked his Christmas present? Bruce was hypersensitive to slight defects or carelessness in her.

  Bruce was wearing a shirt Mother had given him (though of course Caroline had bought it), which brought back the Christmas scene she had succeeded in forgetting all day. Her father liked Bruce fine, her brother thought he’d do, Mother was vaguely pleased. She had thought she would tell Mother what was wrong—or had she really thought she could? Each time Bruce went home with her he was perhaps a little less … nice afterward. If only Rowley … They would be poor but her family would have to help. And Rowley could do better, she was sure.

  MEMORY OVERFLOW, FIELD LENGTH TOO SHORT

  The color TV was playing but Bruce had the sound down and the stereo on, some demonstration record with earsplitting brass. “How does it sound?” He frowned from his Corbusier chair.

  He did not trust her judgment anyhow. She assured him it sounded great, looking around to see what he had changed this time. Actually the battering of the noise suffocated her.

  “I don’t know. It’s fuller yes, but it lacks something that Gil’s set has. Why should that be? Poor room acoustics?” He looked bored. He shut it off in the middle of the record but left the TV on. He usually did. He had a small set in the bathroom where he often sat for an hour on the toilet reading the stockmarket. He said that helped. He had promised they would have two bathrooms in the condominium rising on the far North Side they were signed up for.

  They had prime ribs in a place with early American motif. Afterward they stopped to look at the skeleton. Bruce wanted to go poking around the site on the lakeshore. Although she tried to beg off he made her come along. A watchman was sitting in a shack with smoke puffing from a makeshift chimney, but Bruce led her down the next lawn and through a hedge. Counting floors he pointed out where their suite would be. The thing she liked best so far was the word “condominium,” which was a game to say to people, to see if they knew what it was.

  The night was bitter cold. The ground was rutted, and piles of lumber and metal joists blocked them at every trun. She twisted her ankle and ran her stocking and finally she felt like sitting down on a joist and never moving again. Of course it would be great to live here, of course. There would be a doorman, of course, but also closed-circuit TV as a security precaution. All-electric wall kitchen. Central air-conditioning. A balcony. A view.

  INVALID JUSTIFICATION IN COLUMN XX

  Usually on Saturday they went to his key club, but last week the comedian playing there had annoyed Bruce. Bruce said he drank in a key club to avoid types like that. When they got back to his place she was frazzled. Not the bedroom yet. She had a scotch and ginger ale and then got sick, just making the bathroom. After she’d washed she winced at herself in the cabinet mirror. It was just too much. How could she trust Leon? For all his talk and his big ideas and his famous insight, what could they do? Sit around that barn and make home movies?

  COLLAPSE

  She began to cry. Bruce sat across the room in the Corbusier chair hearing her out with a funny expression, almost a smile, as if he’d been expecting something. She told him how when they’d been separated for weeks and weeks she had been racked by doubt and wanted to be sure. She left all that vague. But she did tell him the important night. She told him how when she had informed Rowley that he was coming back, after they’d left Vera’s and come downstairs, he had seized her in the hall and carried her into the courtyard … Tears poured down her cheeks. He had not loved her, he had hauled her around like a rag doll. She saw his face. They were jammed against the fountain in the dirty courtyard and he was fumbling at her pants. He pushed her clothes aside and came in hammering at her. She saw his face, his brutal face huge, inflamed and almost laughing, laughing at that moment. Then all the joy and excitement and sureness that she had him after all, went: went like that. She was rammed against the stone fountain afraid, and she begged him to be done. Again she saw his animal face and she was scared and did not want him any more at all. She wanted that face smashed.

  BLOCKING FACTOR

  Bruce was very angry. She was twisting her hands in her lap. She felt nauseous.

  “If you throw up again I’ll rub your face in it.” He told her to powder her face and come on. She thought he was going to take her home and demand his ring, but he told her they were going to find Rowley.

  They drove first to his house. Bruce made her go in. The basement was dark but she banged on the door anyhow. She came back and told Bruce that Rowley was not there. She remembered his phone being disconnected but did not dare say she had called. Then she rang the upstairs bell. Mr. Williams answered, a big dark Negro who had always been polite, but this time he told her he did not give a damn where Rowley had gone and she could clear her white ass off his porch. She did not repeat that to Bruce.

  Bruce started in slowly, not looking at her. His handsome straightnosed profile stood out against the streetlamp. “Where would he be, then, on a Saturday night? You must know his habits. One would presume you had learned his habits?”

  SEARCH MODE CHECK MEMORY

  They parked around the corner from Woody’s. She mainly hoped they would not find him. Bruce grasped her elbow until her arm felt numb. As they walked in she saw Rowley down the bar, huge, relaxed, nodding: just the same. She stiffened with anger. The same, the same.

  “Which one?” Bruce had that earlier smile. When she point
ed, he took her by the arm, steered her outside and sent her toward the Jaguar. “You can wait there. And I mean wait.”

  A few minutes later they came around the corner. Bruce marched first, not bothering to look back. His camel coat and blond hair passed under the streetlamp and moved palely through the shadows toward the alley. Rowley came more slowly, ambling. He had been drinking. Slowly he turned his head to and fro. He looked puzzled, not unfriendly. For a moment she felt sorry. She almost called out to Rowley not to go into the alley. But he shambled past and was gone.

  INNER DO LOOP NOT CLOSED

  She waited and waited in the car. She couldn’t just sit there. Finally she slipped out, leaving the door ajar on the curb side so she could pop back, and crept to the alley corner.

  They were both tall, turning about each other. Rowley was heavier but moved more slowly, with drunken awkwardness. With anger to help him Bruce was landing many more blows. Rowley mainly tried to keep off. Bruce circled, jabbing. His hat lay on the snowy lid of an ashcan. They looked heavy and slow and lethargic in the dim light. Rowley’s face was smeared with blood, his lip was split. Bruce bled from his nose which looked lopsided—his fine straight nose. She breathed down the urge to giggle. They were snorting and panting, and occasionally one slipped on a patch of ice as he lunged.

  Bruce kept going at Rowley, jabbing at every opening. Rowley tried to keep him off and struck out rarely. He seemed bored. When he did hit Bruce she heard the impact. Then Bruce would move in cautiously for a while. They looked comical, padded in coats, shuffling in the dingy icy alley and snorting whitely. Maybe she should trust Leon. At least he seemed to care about her. When she told him she was pregnant he did not drag her out on a freezing night to watch him dance in some alley. After all, what good were they doing her? They were not even hurting each other. Her father could lay them both out, as he had done to Orland that time he’d got fresh.

  UPDATE BUFFER

  Bruce hit Rowley hard on the jaw and Rowley rocked back. Then he straightened and walking into a flurry of blows, picked up Bruce and slung him though the air into the back wall of Woody’s. In her excitement she stepped free.

  Rowley turned and saw her. “What is this?” he mumbled. “Want me to kill this guy? Who needs it?” He stood squinting at her. His left eye was shut. His face looked dark, bruised. “You are a real busy broad, you know that?”

  By the wall Bruce was getting to his feet. He rose with something in his hand—a broken board. He came at Rowley swinging it. Rowley caught the movement and turned but too slowly. The board crashed into the side of his head and he went down on his face.

  She was too startled to duck back, but Bruce did not seem surprised to see her. “Let’s go.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  She should kneel beside Rowley to make sure he was not dead but the alley was trodden into black slime and Bruce was already walking toward the car. She hurried after.

  “Never leave the door open. Never,” Bruce said evenly. “I forgot my hat. It’s on the ashbarrel.”

  She realized he was waiting for her to go get it. “I can’t!”

  “You will.”

  EXECUTE RETRIEVAL FORMAT

  She hurried. The hat was on the ashcan. Rowley was still lying face down. As she trotted back she brushed the loose snow from the hat. Bruce had got in on her side, and he tossed her the keys. “I hurt my hand, I’m afraid. You may drive.”

  Nervously she got in the driver’s side. He had never before let her. Rubbing her gloved hands she stuck the key into the ignition. “Is first up or down?”

  He showed her the plan of the gears. “I meant to fight him like a gentleman until he pulled that wrestling hold. I certainly wasn’t about to wrestle him. How do you happen to know toughs?” But he was smiling, dabbing at his nose with cautious fingers. “Are you surprised that I know how to fight?”

  STORE IN MEMORY

  She took a taxi home. She felt exhausted and even the doorman asked if something were wrong. She crawled into her avocado gown and unmade bed, turning on Music till Dawn. She kept on the small lamp. Should she call Leon? She wanted comforting. But if Anna were there. She did not like that. Was he really not sleeping with her? Anna was lumpish but she wore her sweaters too tight. Anna had heavy thighs and a big behind. Leon couldn’t want her. She drew her hands along her own thighs. The emptiness of the apartment coagulated, the wind tried the locks. She had to force herself to turn and look behind her. She touched the phone and turned the radio louder. But if someone broke in she would not hear. She lowered the volume.

  ILLEGAL FUNCTION NAME

  She squinted at the light through her ring, twisting it back and forth, then burrowed into bed. How the wind moaned off the lake. Her hand came slowly up her thigh, gingerly. She shut her eyes tight, clenched the lids. Her muscles waited. She saw herself strapped to a table, a narrow white table, conscious, naked, powerless. She was strapped to the table, her arms bound above her head. Two men in white surgical masks drew her legs wide, wide apart. They strapped them down. She could not move. She strained her muscles rigid. Things would be done to her. Others watched. The eyes over the masks looked at her. Naked she lay in the hard light, spread open. They would make her suffer pleasure and they would watch. Deliberate as an insect, long nails catching, the hand walked up the inside of her thigh.

  INPUT COMPLETED TO TERMINAL

  Leon

  December

  He had been invited to show at the Cellar Cinematheque with three others, but Elliott had made it painfully clear he had to turn up with something new. They grew bored with him, they put him down with a shrug. Mindless bastards who could play with color film and Nagra tape recorders. Him with his Bolex. He could splice something together that would blow their minds all over the ceiling. Act fast. Get Elliott to let him use the Moviola at that place that did training films. Work all night. Clean up before they got in in the morning. Twist his arm.

  Shots from the reptile house: Live mice were put in with the small boa constrictors. They took hours to swallow a mouse. Boa’s mouth: mousehead in. Mouse kicking. Mouse swallowed to mid-belly. Then all in but the snakelike tail.

  A girl danced in front of a big concave mirror he’d borrowed and set up in the livingroom. Dusty floorboards, attic gray light. Sound of mindless crooning. This girl was a college dropout whose parents had since shipped her off to a sun-and-ski school to get her away from him. Bones poking through her skinny back. Shuffling back and forth in front of the mirror with a birdcage in her hand: image of despair, image of narcissistic trapped adolescence.

  The projector ran dry. White screen. Wastepaper images from Black Orpheus and The Trial. Mounds of wastepaper, coils of paper stirring. He would prefer bones, tincans, beer-bottles and condoms and autobodies rusting in the sun. He would prefer:

  CAROLINE VISITS THE SANITARY CANAL

  Out through the railroad yards that on the map looked like bundles of muscle fiber, past quarries and claypits and gas storage tanks and the Hawthorne Race Track. The Sanitary Canal: the name evokes old kotexes floating down the Mississippi to the sea. Drowned Caroline borne along with churning sewage pumped out of the city daily, nightly.

  Her face with eyes closed perfectly suggested soft death. Her eyes full open with the chin lowered became the mask of a tortured child. He had not used her well enough. He had not unwound a coil of past from within spieling images that would explode.

  Another reel. Badly exposed, useless. He had sat in the last car of a “B” train coming all the way south from Howard Street and shot into the lighted windows: short glimpses of women stirring suppers, men looking out hopelessly from grimy sills, couples embracing, babies kicking in their cribs, old men playing cards around brief tables. The sequence was never quite in focus, grainy, underexposed, yet it hit him with a poignant restlessness that made him remember being sixteen: a sense of possibilities and random concatenations merging beyond his empty hands. There, there pe
ople were really living, out there where he could not reach.

  He looked at one image again and again. A woman with dark hair and dusty skin—Negro or Italian or Mexican or anything from most places—a small, tired looking woman stood in a flash of plain dingy room with cot, washstand, wave of ashgray curtain. As the camera went by plucking her like an apple tasted only never eaten she bent to the cot, picked up the pillow and clasping it in her arms rocked it against her breasts, a limp flat pillow.

  Sheldon Lederman’s Dream of the City of Light

  White towers. With brick and stone it had been a matter of piling little pieces. Something fussy in that that could never please a man who liked to think in terms of large functions. But now building was rational. Not like those older skyscrapers with frou-frou on top. Might have the Taj Mahal perched like a hat on a medical building. Victorian protocol: couldn’t cut through the red tape. Like Fern who could never come out and say anything. Hinting, sulking, rustling in corners, moving little objects. Even when he knew what she was getting at, her prissy ways infuriated him so much he wouldn’t admit he understood.

  But a poured concrete building on a steel frame with walls of glass: that moved him. Light, cleanliness, order, totality. The truth was he was shrewder even in aesthetics than his wife with her Ethical Culture airs and his hippy son. His own desk was free form. No reason to think in cubes once you grasped that the materials created their own dynamic. Had to keep an open mind, up to date, receptive. Take the helix. Technology could render you obsolete as an old pen you would dip in the inkwell to write, rusty point, yes, penholder and point and clotty black ink. For a moment he almost liked remembering. Dip, scratch, scratch.