Vida

by Marge Piercy

  “Come on, baby … don’t sulk. You knew about Susannah. Anyhow, what difference does it make to you? We can’t live together”

  Part time, we could, just as we did in Philadelphia, she thought, which was one thing she wanted to arrange this trip; but she was already seeing that wasn’t the way his plans were running.

  He said plaintively, “Here I am cheating on her to spend this weekend with you, and do I complain? It means a lot to me to see you. It’s worth any risk, any expense, any amount of finagling and covering up”

  “Cheating, to see your wife? That’s a new one” Make me feel guilty, why don’t you? She sighed, grimacing into the rain. Say something bland quick. “Have you any ideas about motels?” She had let too much time go by without seeing him. She had to stay East now. Eva would just have to understand. L.A. would never be Vida’s home. She was losing him finally, losing him utterly. Another woman in the bed she had picked out. Would it have been a worse sign if Susannah got up with him Monday through Friday at 6 A.M. just to see him off into the early smog? Also, it was typical of Leigh in their whole marriage to keep a disturbing piece of information from her—an overdraft, a bill, a problem—and then to announce it all at once when it had reached postcritical explosiveness as if she had really known all along, just as he did. Control. Retaining information gave him control. She found herself angry, and again she sighed at the rain.

  “ … so I made a reservation” he was saying. He sat up as they approached Montauk. “Take the shore road, next right. Let’s see if we can find it. Sounds nice.”

  He had chosen a colony of duplexes scattered over a hillside on sand paths that twisted among stunted pines overlooking the ocean, just across the blacktop road. Vida felt a little nervous. It looked expensive. But it would be Leigh’s treat. She wondered if she looked shabby, but the blue dress was still in good shape. She had not worn it much in L.A. She had a picture of herself in the dress sitting there, and she thought she looked good as he went in to register. Then she realized that in her mental image of herself she had red-gold hair halfway down to her waist. Somehow she saw herself as still looking that way, just as she saw herself as really married to Leigh and active in Natalie’s life and an aunt to her nephews and niece and a friend to her best friends.

  “I’ll show you the way, Mrs. Biggs,” the woman said, pointing up the pathway but giving Vida a quick scornful glance.

  She followed Leigh uphill. He had a suitcase and a briefcase; she had only her pack.

  “Biggs?” she asked.

  “K. P. Biggs. E. Power. Get it?”

  E. Power Biggs played Bach on the organ: some level of sexual pun, she supposed, and was annoyed he trifled with unlikely pseudonyms. The pines dripped, the sea faded into a fogbank, but the air smelled freshly laundered. No one was in the other side of the duplex, through the knotty-pine wall. They had a big room with a double bed, a couple of pleasant chairs at the table, a modern bathroom with tub and shower, and an outside counter lit up like a theatrical makeup table, with bulbs all around the mirror.

  Leigh bounced on the bed. “Not bad at all.”

  Shyly she sat beside him, against the headboard. He opened his briefcase, took out a bottle of dry sherry—Amontillado—and opened it, pouring some into two tumblers from the bathroom. “Here’s looking at you, kid. Hey, didn’t I pick out that dress?”

  “For my last birthday.”

  “That’s right. It’s too pretty for anybody else to have chosen. Right classy”‘

  ”Who would?” she asked. “Do you like it as much as you expected?”

  “Absolutely” He put his arm around her forcefully, if a little awkwardly, and grinned through his curly beard. “Now, enough of the dress already”

  As they made love, she was preternaturally conscious. It meant too much. She wanted to take his face between her hands and stare at him for hours. Every caress of his dry warm palms on her, every inch of his body brought back memories. The experience was too strong emotionally to move her sensually. When he entered her and she felt his weight, the pressure of his known body on hers, his dense hairiness, the pelt of him, the bones jutting, the outsized joints, the full hammering of his penis in her, she wanted to beg him to stop, to wait, to slow down, to lie still on her and let her endure the onslaught of wanting that could not be used up in sex. She felt as if she would weep with happiness, but she soon realized she would not come. She had not made love in a month and a half, she had not been with a man since the last time she had been with him, and her vagina had tightened. She could not jam the circuits of her mind, could not find the easy sensuality she had repressed on the road. Nor was she acclimated to him yet. Yet his thrusting pleased her, moved her intensely. Her pleasure was of emotions more than sensations, but she did not care.

  However, after a while she realized that he would mind if she did not seem to reach orgasm. With so few times to make love in the course of a year, fierce pressure fell on each of them to be perfect, or acclaimed so. She did not want to get things off badly, and she knew she had no way to make him understand she felt totally satisfied to make love with him even without a climax. She was too conscious of him, too moved by his presence, to sink into her muscles. Finally she moaned several times and clenched him hard; then from the way he began to move she knew he assumed she had come and was getting ready to come himself.

  “You came okay, babes?” he asked her afterward, lying propped on his elbow. His loins were pale, but his chest and arms were still tanned from the summer. By midwinter all his skin would be pale, with blue veins strongly showing raised in his sinewy arms.

  “Wonderful, Leigh. It’s beautiful to be with you!” Because it was. She did not like to lie to him, ever, but he would not understand her pleasure. She had a dressing gown she loved, a chinoiserie kimono that took up little space in the pack and looked just as good wrinkled as not. Putting it on now she faced him, sitting cross-legged on the bed. He wore a navy velour bathrobe, the sort of thing his mother got him on his birthday every other year. “How’s Natalie?” she asked.

  ”Two weeks ago I had dinner out there. Daniel’s getting to be a first-class bastard. We got into a fight about municipal unions. Then he and Natalie tussled over picketing dirty movies. It was a great evening. Natalie’s for wiping out porn these days—sounds like the Legion of Decency”‘

  “What’s she doing lately? Are things still the same with her and Daniel?”

  “They seem to jog along from year to year, regardless. Oh, Peezie’s taken up running. She’s a jock—every morning at six thirty she’s out doing three miles. And Sam’s got a Puerto Rican girlfriend they are determinedly accepting.”

  “Well, why not? Is she pretty?”

  “If you like giggling twelve-year-old jailbait. They talk Spanish together, which drives Daniel secretly crazy. He can’t stand not knowing what they’re saying, and he can’t admit, the big Cuban expert on the basis of a ten-day trip, that he can’t speak Spanish well enough to follow them. Listen, Sam’s going to be a real linguist. That kid’s okay, you know that? I been taking him along on my Bronx excursions. The Ricans dig the way he talks the lingo now. He’s my interpreter. Peezie’s in her ugh-ugh phase. All she does is grunt, act macho and stumble around like a ten-year-old dyke. Never mind! Don’t jump me. Natalie gets mad enough for two.”

  “And how’s Fanon?”

  “He’s called Franky now. He’s too young to tell yet. All, I want it, I want it, I saw it on the TV. Overweight whining brat.”

  Fanon was the least real of Natalie’s children to Vida. She had waited in the hospital during Sam’s birth to see him first in the vivid rainbow colors of the newborn. She had toted Peezie around in a pack on her back in Central Park. Both of them she had fed with a spoon, screamed at, kissed and cuddled. Fanon had been born after she had gone underground, and she had seen him only once when he was too young to understand what was going on. Only Sam as the oldest was able to keep up his connection with her.

  “Picn
ic time,” Leigh said, bringing out black bread that they used to get Saturdays in the bakery at 101st. The loaf was huge and round, and he had bought a wedge of it. Along with the bread he unpacked a can of good French pâté, a wedge of Port-Salut, and a Camembert. “Your favorite and, I trust, ripe enough.”

  “It seems great. Oh, when did I have Camembert?”

  “We can have some more sherry tomorrow. I have a nice wine here. A Sutter Home zinfandel, a ‘74, Amador County. Give me your glass and I’ll rinse it out.”

  Her tongue was going crazy. Her tongue was fattening on sensations. She had a sense of slippage with Leigh, that now she and her husband belonged to different social classes. He had become more affluent in recent years. He was doing well with the station, he wrote regularly for left and liberal periodicals, and once in a while he did an article for a slick at a good fee. He did some paid television as an expert on one social problem or another—panel shows, talk shows. She was not sure exactly what he was making, but it circled around twenty thousand, she guessed. She lived so marginally, she was not sure whether she spent four thousand in a year. What money she had was in her wallet—less than fifteen dollars. Her possessions were mostly in her pack. She had a West Coast stash (no identification in it) and an East Coast stash up at Agnes’ in Vermont with winter clothes, but basically what she carried was what she had, and it would hardly have filled an airport locker.

  “Tell me a little more about Natalie. How does she look?”

  “Aren’t you going to see her?”

  She did not like his asking. He had no need to know. Furthermore, that was not a question she could ever answer with a sense of accuracy whether a clandestine meeting would prove safe. She hesitated long enough to make him aware. “Could be. Who knows?”

  “Flying turds, Vid—Vinnie, do you think I’m going to tip the Feds? Come on, you wouldn’t bob into New York without seeing your sister.’’

  “You aren’t getting along too well with each other, huh?”

  “We always get along, except when she’s crazy with her women’s chauvinism. She’s a good egg, under it all. Too bad she married that jerk-off Daniel, though, he’s settled into the academic rut. That’s a pun: he’s making his way through the coeds as usual. She’s into battered women lately, but I’ll say this for her, she’s always got it in the kitchen. She made a Mexican seafood soup that was from heaven, with little bowls of chopped hot peppers and avocados on the side. And for dessert, a caramel mousse light enough to fly”‘

  A sharp pang of loneliness for Natalie hit home, vexing her with herself. Here she was finally with Leigh and missing yet another loved one. They picnicked on the bed. “Remember Sunday mornings?” She touched his beard. “We’d fight for half an hour about who’d go out for the Times and the deli?”

  “The loser would get it, and we’d have café au lait with the good dark French roast.”

  “Then we’d get back in bed and take the phone off the hook and read the paper and make out.”

  He reached for the wine bottle. “And haggle over the book review and the entertainment and The Week in Review. Then we’d fuck. Then we’d put the phone back on the hook, and before my hand got loose, the thing would start ringing every two minutes for the rest of the day”

  She kissed his sharp curving nose. “Doesn’t it still?”

  “I got a machine now. It answers the phone” He fiddled with the room radio trying to pick up his station, but he couldn’t tune it in. “Weather’s rotten for reception. Let’s hope it clears tomorrow. Get the last of the beach days in.”

  “Did you get out of the city this summer?”

  “We rented a house in Setauket for August. July 1 was covering the Cahoon trial for Seven Days and the station. Got an exclusive interview with him. Did you see it?”

  Who was Cahoon? It must be a local case. “Maybe you could show it to me?” Was we Susannah too? “A big house you rented?”

  “Nah, a shack. In back of another house two blocks from the bay. Paper walls and hot and cold running ants.”

  She heard herself laugh, realizing she was a little drunk. The zinfandel was good, and she had had three glasses without considering, on top of the sherry. Her head was floating. She never drank now, and the wine had gone straight to her brain and then suffused through her body. What presents he had bought her!—wine and cheese and a fancy meal at Lundy’s and a night in a beautiful clean motel by the real ocean, the Atlantic, and his body and his voice and his presence and his love. She felt cherished, coddled, enveloped in caring. Rain pattered on the roof, gurgled in the eaves, but she was out of the storm for once and snug …

  The first time, the very first time he had brought her to his apartment, she had expected the usual bachelor grubbiness. He had one room and it was untidy, but he had sat her down on the couch, given her an aperitif— something she had never heard of at the time, and in memory it remained something absolutely exotic staining her tongue with fruit and fragrances and hidden herbs—and gone to prepare a fettuccine Alfredo with a salad whose dressing he made in his blender and garlic bread he slathered with something he told her was pesto di basilico. She was more than impressed. He was politically correct; he was Leigh Pfeiffer of the spring mobilization; he was smart and witty and brave and a marshal at peace parades. And the first man who had ever cooked for her. He knew how to live very, very well on fifty a week.

  She had not quite decided that evening whether she was going to let herself succumb to him or not. She was waiting for the pass. But after they had eaten and eaten, he said, “We’re much too full to enjoy making love. Let’s go take a walk by the river. It’s gorgeous outside, and we can have an espresso in a while. After all, we have the whole night. We even have the morning.”

  She had been finessed. That neatly. She appreciated the ease of the maneuver even as she resigned herself to it. But wickedly she said, “If you never ask, nobody ever says no. Right?”

  How he had grinned at her, swinging around in the doorway, lithe and skinny with his satyr beard pointing at her and those marvelous light eyes glinting into hers. “You want to say no? Go ahead. Supper’s on the house.”

  She didn’t want to say no. Then or now. They were still mated; they were still married. The Network was in a slack period, a phase that scared and threatened her, but might nonetheless give her the freedom to choose to live within commuting distance of Leigh once again. She was beginning to think about programs to propose at the annual Board meeting, more important this year than it was usually because of the widespread sense she had picked up on her way from L.A. that the Network was drifting perilously.

  In Cincinnati people had been excited by the pirate-TV technology, but in Omaha the fugitives were doing nothing more progressive than study groups and infighting. It had taken her a week to get the two factions to speak to each other again. Back in Denver the fugitives had had V.D. scare, and nobody was sleeping with anybody and depression was being passed along like a flu bug. She had put them on paramilitary discipline with hikes and target practice, but it was only a holding action.

  Perhaps she could propose some kind of action centered on pirate media and get Leigh involved. It would be good for him politically. Then they would share work and begin anew to share a life. Eva would like such a project. Vida was always trying to come up with some new way that Eva’s music could be used and thus given some place of importance in their world. Eva had been cut off from an audience for years. Involve Eva’s music, involve Leigh’s knowledge of radio and print media (she had a quick image of counterfeit editions of newspapers, the editorial page-through clandestinely replaced). Involve the Network in a lively new project that would jolt everyone out of depression and lethargy and infighting! Cheek pressed against Leigh’s arm and lips to his warm skin, whose fur tickled her, she lay plotting changes.

  3

  Vida was always a little nervous in public with Leigh, for he had the habit of commanding and the willingness to confront when service was not up to hi
s specifications. On the other hand, he could be charming, and that sometimes ended up worse, making him the center of local attention. He was chatting with the woman at the desk about what was open for breakfast.

  “Oh, if you and your”—the woman glanced at her hand—”‘wife’ want a nice breakfast, the Surf Clam’s open early”“ As Vida walked after Leigh, the woman looked her over: Vida could feel the hostile gaze like a crab scuttling across her back. Mrs. Pine-Acres wanted to run a family business. No whores, no fugitives, no clandestine rendezvous. She had to remember to dig out that worn gold band she had in her pack—not her own wedding ring, symbolically thrown into the sea at the Battery that day in ‘68, but Ruby’s old wedding ring from her first marriage to Tom, Vida’s father. With her husband, she had forgotten to wear it.

  The Surf Clam at seven thirty was almost deserted. A group of fishermen warming up from the raw wind, a family on their way to or from church, a couple having a quiet spat in a booth, their eyes glaring over pursed lips and stiffly held menus.

  “Mrs. Pine-Acres thought we were pitching illicit woo in her nice big bed” Vida said, playing with envelopes of sugar on the beige Formica table-top. Pictures of famous women on the packets. Clara Barton. Julia Ward Howe.

  “Should I be boldly wicked and order waffles? Probably frozen. Pancakes? I’d face the calories if the taste was right … Reminds me, talked to your lawyer lately?”

  “No” She did not have any reason to he in touch with the law firm and hadn’t yet checked the drop she used.

  “Oh … So they didn’t tell you the divorce is finally coming through?” Leigh high-signed the waitress, who was elbows on the counter deep in conversation with a young man in a slicker.

  “It is?” Now she remembered that they had vaguely discussed the possibility of eventual divorce in April. Once or twice before he had begun proceedings, but dropped them. “You had a lot of heat on you lately?”