Going Down Fast: A Novel

by Marge Piercy

  He walked through the gargoyle gate into campus. To their left a pond straddled by a small stone bridge where he sat down. The gray ice was puddled. Digging into the slush and leaning back, Paul lit a cigarette and winced. His face looked closed and young and weary. He kept rubbing his fists into his eyes. The whites were sore-red, full of blood. Around his wide sensitive mouth the skin was broken out. Past him rose the Gothic lace of the corner tower. The guardian of what is, what owns.

  “Leon never did see her. I lost contact myself. He thought she tried to run me. Not like that. She sunk a lot of imagination into me. She didn’t want enough for herself.”

  “What did you want for her?”

  “Not enough. In gradeschool she was already good. They couldn’t tell because they were big on having kids draw blue sky and green trees and white sailboats, and Vera was too easy with her paints to stop with that. But the woman who taught art encouraged her. Then one time her homeroom teacher was asking the kids what they wanted to be and when she got to Vera, Vera said she was going to be an artist. The homeroom teacher stopped and raised her brows and did an exaggerated doubletake. ‘What’s an artist, Vera, do you know?’ Between classes Vera saw her out in the hall telling two other teachers about the funny colored girl who was going to be an artist. She walked like a little broomstick and she couldn’t bear to be laughed at. The masks laughed at others, and if they didn’t like them, well she made them to please herself.”

  Sparrows hopping around some tidbit bared by the thaw. Paul stared at the gargoyle entrance, iron gates ajar.

  “They’re still saying it was arson, aren’t they?”

  “Fuzz are pinning it on the FBM. Harlan Williams said the school ought to be blown up, that parents should keep their kids home sooner than send them to that lousy indoctrinating firetrap to learn to be stupid and sick. The fuzz raided a garage and picked up some squirrel rifles and bowie knives and spread it all over the papers. Others say it was the Marauders—a teenage KKK. I talked to the janitor. He says if they’re investigating they aren’t trying very hard because nobody will listen to him. Something exploded but he says it was the rebuilt boiler. Construction graft, the Syndicate connection, and who cares how the job’s done.”

  “You went over and talked to him?” Before the funeral he had gone into a fury if anyone discussed the fire.

  “Yeah, at first I wanted to shut it out. But I changed my mind.” He rubbed his gloved hands slowly. “It’s an issue to organize around. I’m going to let them use me. That’s what I belong to, where I start. I’m going to let them use me and her death.”

  “Rowley called me. It hit him hard.”

  “Yeah, he felt it.” He got up and they walked among the gray buildings and through a damp arch to the Midway. “He wanted to go to the funeral. I said no but I was sorry after. Would have introduced one note of truth.”

  “Have you been seeing him?”

  Paul made an ambiguous gesture. “He’s useful. And he cared about her. He sees what I’m trying to do.”

  Traffic on the Midway was heavy already. Soon she would have to leave for a staff meeting. “Come and see Leon. I can’t get through to him.”

  “No.” His voice clanked. “He doesn’t see what I’m after and he should. I can’t forgive him for being blind. And I just plain don’t want to talk about her with him.”

  “Paul, things are bad. He’s sick and feverish. I woke up in the middle of the night and heard him using the phone. I’m sure he was calling Caroline—at three, four in the morning.”

  “At the funeral she started to say he was bothering her, but I cut her short. What does he think it will do him?”

  “He blames me in his head for the way she dumped him. That’s why I have to move. I slept at my place just one night—it’s spooky with the building empty and the heat off. Next day he made a scene. Claimed I was sneaking out to see Rowley.”

  They drifted toward the fountain of time in shape of a half moon swarming with figures crawling out of and fading into the muck at either end, cast in crumbling concrete. It was obvious, pompous and fine to look at. They sat on the rim of the basin facing the centerpiece of mounted legionnaire. Beyond the fountain and fringe of trees stretched an expanse of wintry lagoon.

  “You can’t pull out. Suppose he is acting crazy. You can’t up and leave him when he needs help.”

  “But he doesn’t want me there, Paul. At times he hates me.”

  “He’s sick over Caroline.”

  “But I’m not doing him any good.”

  “How do you know?”

  She knew, sitting on the basin, that her friendship with Paul had lost its home and she was saddened. There were no natural ways left for them to meet. “Can I do anything for you?”

  He shook his head no. But a minute later, “Vera left some things at the Art Institute—drawings, papers. I want them but I don’t want to look at them yet. You could get them.”

  She nodded. Just to the side of Paul the tall gaunt figure of Time peered from his hood like Lamont Cranston, the Shadow. “You think the way he eats us all he’d be fatter … It’s late.”

  “Have to see a man. You know, take care of old Leon. He doesn’t have anybody else who will.”

  At dusk the temperature dropped with a thud and the slush froze hard. Coming home her feet grew numb, her teeth ached with cold. As she crossed campus a meeting or lecture was just letting out. She picked her way along a glacier behind a couple. The woman was wearing heels and the man had to pry her over the crevices and catch her as she slid. Something puzzled her about them.

  “Tomorrow night we’ll present them with a fate accompli,” the woman said cosily, crashing against him.

  He corrected her pronunciation and equilibrium. “Do we actually have the votes this time? We’re not forgetting someone?”

  Asher. For a year and a half she had dreaded this accident. The woman played to him and he accepted it, the ritualistic recounting of votes. She would have been useless: would have tried to make him laugh or got amorous from the jostling or said right out, hey, you know you’re going to win so let’s have a drink or go to a movie or something.

  When Asher drank he got silly and penitent and likable. He put his head in her lap and howled I’m no good, I’m no good at all, and then suddenly he would pull her off the chair smack on the ass, and giggle. They had had games. Games had been their best mode. He was fond of cheese fondue and when they both stabbed the same piece, they would duel briefly with their forks … Ay ay. A chill in the liver. To remember their quarrels was less painful. She hurried past them, slipping and skidding, and no one spoke. She smiled down at her feet, weakly. She continued and so did he.

  If Leon found a job, he would steady. She believed in the therapy of work. Besides he couldn’t go on taxing his mother. Fern kept nagging him about getting a job and claimed that Sheldon had found out she was giving him money. Leon’s car had not started in weeks and now the plates had expired. At any rate she’d got him to write out a résumé the night before. Now while he slept she typed it. Details of last evening nagged. “Caroline said Rowley talked against you all the time.” Did he believe that?

  When the phone rang she hesitated before answering.

  “Is this Leon Lederman’s residence?” A woman’s voice.

  “Yes. Just a moment.”

  “Just a moment, you. Who is this?”

  “His secretary. I’ll call him.”

  “This is his exwife. Don’t tell me you’re his secretary!”

  “Hi, Joye. It’s Anna. I’m doing some typing for him.”

  “Anna? How are you? It’s amazing how he always cons some girl. Anna, you’re crazy!”

  “If you’ll wait, I’ll get him. Hold on.”

  “No, wait. I’ll bet he’s in bed.”

  “He’s sick with a bad cold.”

  “Not so sick he can’t drive me crazy. You just tell him I’m informing my lawyer. If he tries to waylay me again with Jimmy, I’ll get a court or
der. And if my check doesn’t come before next week, I’m raising the roof.”

  “Has he been hanging around?”

  “I won’t put up with it. I didn’t go through all that to have him in my hair. You tell him.”

  “But he really is sick. Don’t run to your lawyer just yet—okay? I’ll speak to him.”

  “I’ve given him chance after chance. I’m fed up. I’m calling my lawyer right now, and you be sure and tell him. His secretary! You must be crazy as he is. Not that I didn’t throw away six of the worst years of my life on him.”

  Afterward she made faces, nauseated with worry. She hardly dared give Leon the message and dared even less to withhold it. She wished Paul were around to share problems, but she could not even call him until she had done what she’d promised. Signing Leon’s name, she took the letters and résumé’s to mail in the Loop.

  The money was not in her purse. She felt an instant wild terror, imagining it stolen in the office, the street, the bus. No, she had still had it last night. She fumbled through her big purse, finally shook out everything and went through its contents a piece at a time. Ten dollars. The money was gone, all but ten dollars and change.

  Leon’s room was dark and smelled of menthol and damp clothes. He lay on his stomach with his face in the crumpled pillow. His breathing was hoarse and wheezy. Oh dear, oh dear. Trouble was the air they breathed. Slowly she drew out his top drawer and looked. A rumpled five, change. She must have left it someplace, but where? Her flesh felt heavy on her bones. Carefully she shut the door. Plodding to the IC she kept wondering should she move or stay, keep quiet or try to convince? And the money, where?

  When she climbed up from the train at Jackson, the sun was bright and a clean wind spanked off the lake, pushing her as she headed toward the Art Institute. She came out with Vera’s papers in a manilla envelope as the big Coca-Cola sign north on Michigan Avenue read ten forty-five. Sun bounded off the glassy facade of buildings. The city began abruptly at the park presenting a sophisticated, monied, bland broad facade of gray worsted. Wind scoured the wide streets, pale blue and dark gray, streets that ran along for miles and miles across the prairies. The day felt clean and generous. The skyscraper was invented here, a thrust skyward to counter the thrust of the horizon. Leisurely she walked north toward the slab of Prudential. The loss of her little cushion of check scared her, but the kids in the office lived on five bucks here and two bucks there. From affluent homes for the most part, they lived below welfare level. They never made budgets. The Movement would somehow feed its own. She felt bourgeois beside them.

  Prosperous people pacing along, furs, crisp overcoats, cared-for faces. Leaving Peck and Peck a blond who … Caroline? Couldn’t be. But that cashmere trenchcoat. Carrying a small package and eyeing herself in shopwindows, she walked north too. Seen her? No, absorbed in self crossing Air France, American Express. She quickened her own steps, risking the loss of Caroline if she stepped into a shop, but if Anna did not get ahead, she could not cross Michigan in time. At Madison the light was against her and on a gamble she kept going. When she looked back she thought she had lost. Then she saw Caroline peering in at John M. Smyth furniture. At Washington she waited for the light, catching flashes of the trenchcoat through breaks in the crowd. Caroline turned the corner toward State just before the light changed. Feeling silly she hurried after. As she came up to Wabash Caroline was crossing Washington with the last green of the light. She trotted under the heavy iron shadow of the El, under the deep rumble of a train as Caroline did, opposite, and completed the square as she strolled into Marshall Field.

  Inside she caught up. “Caroline!” she said loudly, suddenly sure it was not.

  Caroline turned, her face composing. “Oh, Anna! What a delight. How goes it?”

  Slightly out of breath. “Shopping?”

  “In a frantic rush. We’re getting married Saturday in Green River and you can imagine!” Caroline moved on a few steps.

  She kept close, clutching the large envelope. “Yes, but I wondered—”

  “Tonight I leave and Bruce arrives Friday. It’s going to be intimate—just family and neighbors.” Caroline danced along a few more steps in the moving crowd.

  Great gray beard and glittering eye. “You’ve no doubt figured out that Leon is in a panic. Can’t you talk to him, just for a little while? To reassure him. He’s worried, you know Leon.” She felt slimy-mouthed as she offered him up for mutual superior commiseration. Yes, we girls know poor Leon.

  Caroline’s face closed. She withdrew into her makeup. “Really, if you had any idea how he persecutes me! I don’t know what gave him the impression—”

  “You told him your troubles. How can you be surprised if he still feels involved?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Caroline drew her gloves smooth, touching the ring. “After all! He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he? Why don’t you keep him from making a nuisance of himself?”

  “I thought you liked my boyfriends.”

  Clutching her purse close, Caroline half turned. “I had to have my phone unlisted, because of him! He waits outside Bruce’s like a detective. When Bruce caught on, he was outraged. He knows Leon’s father, and he said last night he’d speak to him.”

  “Are you going to let him?”

  “What can I do? It’s not my affair. After all, I can’t imagine why you want to run around trying to force me to see Leon!”

  She found herself staring at Caroline’s belly through the coat. “You couldn’t imagine. My, I’d love to give you a good kick.”

  Caroline colored and whirled, trotting away. She found herself sweating heavily and wandered off at right angles. Came to among aisles of sparkly mothers’ necklaces. She had intended to buy underwear at the January sales, but with the money missing … From the gaudiness of State Street with its flashy many-armed fluorescent streetlamps she ducked down a subway entrance. A “B” train was pulling in and she ran for it. She would go directly to the office.

  With a sense of prying she looked through the manilla envelope. Mainly figure drawings in a fine but cutting line. A number of quick studies of Paul, of an older woman with a pleasant homely face, of small children, then a series of talking, gesticulating people, black and white. Those faces reappeared in a careful sketch of a room full of people centering somehow on a brooding Paul at the back. Sketch for a painting Vera had contemplated? She returned again and again to a drawing of Rowley, more finished than anything except the room. A clear look at him, not caricature and yet not at all what Anna saw. It vexed her. Staring at it was like pressing on a burn.

  The only warning she had was oblique. When she came in Friday evening, Leon was on the phone to his mother. He hung up saying thickly, “Got to hustle over there. Sheldon’s rattling the windows with his righteous anger because those two finks, Joye and Bucko the Lord of the Ring, turned in complaints. I been causing trouble, oh shame and scandal in the family. They want a little blood on the walls tonight.”

  She had to bring up the money. “Uh, did you pay the rent?”

  “Next month’s? What for?”

  “Leon … I was trying to call you this afternoon to ask you about something, but the line was always busy.”

  “Yeah? Some girl called. Wanted to know when you’d be back. It wasn’t Caroline.”

  Sam appeared an hour later. “Thought I’d take a chance on catching you in. We’re at Rowley’s for the weekend.” She tossed her pilelines corduroy coat on a chair. Her face was rosy with cold, her dark hair loosely braided. She wore levis and a faded workshirt. Anna decided she looked happy. “That’s Gino, my friend there.”

  “Nicespeak for husband.” He was prowling around on edge but curious, taking everything in with slow panning movements of his long head. After that first comment he ignored them for a good while, as she and Sam brought each other up to date with a fair amount of honesty. She had always judged Sam to be on her side, and she was confident Sam assumed the same for her.

  �
�Rowley was awful.” Sam laughed quietly. “You can guess. And Gino has to come on to everyone at first, particularly if they’re older—”

  “Not everyone,” came the quiet voice.

  “Rowley’s warmed up since. He can’t be pompous for too long, and Gino finally won him over by being himself.”

  Gino snorted disagreement, drifting out from the walls finally into the light. The type of some of her best students. Blossom head heavy with beard and hair. Thin as a saint, he had that sharp flayed boy’s sexuality potent off him like the smell of paint. His eyes suddenly coming up to meet hers were a dark blue-gray that startled her, and she looked away without meaning to. She was making her lame explanation about what she was doing in Leon’s rickety household when she had an idea. “Can you run a projector?”

  He could and they had movies. They liked that. Gino even allowed himself excitement and spoke of what he would do with a camera. They had brought grass and got high in the screen-lit dark but kept talking, kept in contact. Last year she had fretted that Sam might never escape Rowley’s domination. Obviously her relationship with her brother had trained her in the right mixture of independence and submission needed to live with Gino and his bruised cool idealism and the girls who would keep trying to immolate themselves on it.

  Sam flipped her braid over a shoulder and drew her feet under her, blinking at the return of light. “Are you still mad at Rowley for being so stupid?”

  “Of course not.”

  “He’s awfully silly. But he’s generous and gutsy and warmhearted—”

  “Toward himself. Does he care about anyone else, finally?”

  “Don’t pretend you think that, Anna. Don’t.”

  Lying on the floor, Gino opened his eyes. “Leave her alone. You can’t hand her over to your brother like a pacifier. Lay off.”

  Sam did. Anna told them casually what she was doing and they were careful to take it almost for granted. They kidded her on coming into the Movement an old lady. Gino probed about what exactly they were doing in the neighborhood and said he would go down to the office with her before they left town. They talked about organizing on campus, they told her dozens of names of people she must meet in Chicago. When they generalized with “we,” they included her. She knew when they left they would discuss her, and Sam would say, see, see, I told you.