by Marge Piercy
Her anger did not surprise him. Nor her clumsy vague schemes. But he was surprised by how long she cried.
“I loved him!” she said passionately into his chest. “I loved him but he couldn’t love me.”
“It’s over now.” He stroked her hair. Neither he nor Leon had taken each other’s ideas as real but written them off as life style. They had had no dialogue. They had failed each other. Only she might have been a bridge, but he did not think that would happen now.
When the phone began to ring again he felt afraid and did not want to answer it.
“Rowley?” The voice was deep, peremptory. For a moment he did not recognize it.
“Yeah, speaking.”
“It’s me. After all.”
“How are you?” What people say in shock. He cursed his clumsiness. “I mean I’m glad to hear from you. Where are you?”
“In a payphone. Where I’m staying the phone’s tapped. Got the check and used it.”
“Fine.”
“Money is one thing we can really use.”
“That was meant more like a letter than a check. I won’t be having extra money. I’m quitting the station.”
“How come?”
“Because I can’t fool myself I’m doing anything to change the system in that job, and I can’t fool myself any more that I haven’t been fucked by the system too. Shaped, channeled, mutilated, dehumanized, squeezed by the balls. And I can’t see myself happy as a concerned honky.”
“The whole Black Belt’s going to blow this summer, don’t you know that? You got anything more real?”
“Not yet. But I better have. I start with the fact that I’m cut off from my own roots, powerless to save what was my community, cut off by a wall from a woman I loved and her wasted, burned, my music gone dead and useless, mocked where I’ve tried most to say something, turned into a commodity to be advertised and used up like any other. I start with that. I start with those busy kids who made me so pissed. I start with where I’m trying to live.”
Harlan chuckled. “Well, Paul can always get a message to me, you know. If there’s a good reason. Take care.”
“You too. Don’t let them bust you.”
“I’m trying.” Harlan hung up.
That was all there was and there might never be more. He went back to Annie who lay spilled on the floor. “Come on. We might as well go to bed.”
She got up. “I’m not crying because I’m with you. I really am with you. But they’ve got him, Rowley, and it’s such a rotten waste!”
She lay in his arms damp with tears, tears that dripped slowly over his shoulder. He thought they lay at the bottom of a shaft of dim light and in the dark about them many circled. Not Paul who had cut her on the street but spoken to him, not Sam who lay with her love in their own pool of amber light. Through the dark drifted the ashlight bodies of burned Vera and Black Jack and Leon bound and Yente and his old man with a suitcase almost as old hiking into the past, and the thousands in the city burning with a stench more suffocating than the soft coal favored by its landlords, burning in poverty, in powerlessness, in blindness, in thousands of deadend graverooms where the smoke of their angry flesh and charred nerves rose in their nostrils and choked them. A sweet fetid odor of slow decay sweated from thousands of other rooms where in the aquarium of the TV objects pirouetted, objects glossier than any body in a shimmer of blurred lust and status and money-purr, while in the twilight contempt and desperation and cancer burgeoned like house plants. There were light high rooms where Nina’s teak body banged toward some apotheosis of the nerves, some release from the spiral of golden sawdust, where Caroline sweated her odorless fears and reacted, reacted like a clean sleek white lab rat, where Asher sought the rational world that would reward his observance of the rules and found his new Olds and his living stomach betraying him.
All his life he had been dodging. He had opted for his comfort. Now he had planted his feet and from this point must begin. In the morning he would see Cal and resign. He’d keep only his own program. He could no longer live in interstices. He did not want to make a gesture or express his moral fiber: he wanted to act but could only push from where he stood and recognize that hardly anyone was going to feel the pressure for a long while.
Harlan had seen one thing: defeated you gave up and died or fought from a new base. You began by recognizing your own oppression and once you tasted that, you could not go back to sleep.
He thought that he was lucky to have something he wanted in the dark, only lucky, for all things come down in the dark and the light, come down like ash upon the sleeping and those who stretch and rock with pain, and on him too who held in his arms the woman he wanted, though crying tediously, with patience through the long polluted night.
About the Author
Marge Piercy (b. 1936) is the author of nineteen poetry collections, including The Hunger Moon and Made in Detroit, and seventeen novels, including the New York Times bestseller Gone to Soldiers and He, She and It, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. She has also written a memoir, Sleeping with Cats; a collection of short stories, The Cost of Lunch, Etc.; and five nonfiction books. A champion of feminism, antiwar, and ecological movements, Piercy often includes political themes in her work and features strong female characters who challenge traditional gender roles. Her book of poetry The Moon Is Always Female is considered a seminal feminist text. Piercy’s other works include Woman on the Edge of Time, The Longings of Women, and City of Darkness, City of Light. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, radio personality and author Ira Wood, with whom she cowrote the novel Storm Tide.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1969 by Marge Piercy
“Barnyards of Delgaty,” by Pat Clancy, Tom Clancy, Liam Clancy, and Tommy Makem. Copyright 1962 by Tiparm Music Publishers Inc. Used by permission.
Cover design by Andy Ross
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3339-8
This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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