by Marge Piercy
“Almost none. I assume the phone’s tapped—we’ve always lived that way. But not bad. Here she comes: at long last, service.”
They ordered. The waitress poured coffee and left. A Jeep stopped outside and a man came to order coffee to go.
Leigh continued, “The Feds check me once in a while, fill out their routine forms. Julio tells me when they been by.”
“He’s still there!” Julio, one of the janitors in their building, had always kept them cued to surveillance. “How is he?”
“Julio’s got bleeding ulcers. He’s on some medication that makes him feel lousy, but without it he could die … Every so often there’s a flurry. I don’t mean to imply I’m a forgotten man. Last May when I was doing a piece on the longshoremen, I was tailed for a couple of weeks. Thought it was the Red Squad or the Feds, but my God, it was the Mafia! I was flattered”
“Be careful when you go back. With Kevin busted, it may heat up. I guess disavowing me legally might help, but they’ll likely continue to watch you when they get active in wanting me.”
He glared. The waitress brought his pancakes and her eggs, keeping him quiet until she had gone again. Then he said in a low grating voice, “They’d watch me if you’d never done anything more exciting than knit argyles, Vinnie. I’m one of the most prominent media voices on the left. They watch me for me.”
Oh, my, she thought, what provoked that? “Of course, sweetheart. Everybody knows your broadcast journalism. But sometimes you get extra heat from me when you least expect it … How come you suddenly decided to go ahead with the … ?”
“The what?” he asked stubbornly when she trailed off. “The piece on the longshoremen?”
“The legal proceedings.”
“Ah, babes, we talked about that so many times. I can’t explain to Susannah why I stay married to you. Listen, we have to clear this up. I want to be able to tell her about you.”
“No,” she said levelly, sitting upright and methodically eating her eggs.
“She doesn’t know where in hell I am this weekend. She thinks I’m in bloody Chicago, and she’s going to be wondering why I haven’t called her. I lied to her all week. I’m going to have to lie to her when I go home again.”
“Lying now and then is something we all have to get used to,” she said, chopping her eggs fine.
”Why lie to her? She’d understand.”
“I never met the lady. Why take chances?” Vida tore a piece from her English muffin and mopped at the yolk. The muffin felt like bits of furniture stuffing in her mouth.
“Damn it, Vida, do you want to meet her?”
“Could you remember my name?” Vida sipped her coffee, carefully placed the cup on the Formica. The liquid was lukewarm and acid in her throat. “I have no need to meet her. In no way would her knowledge that you see me help me survive or accomplish any political purpose. Or am I missing something?”
“You’re jealous of her!” He sat back grinning.
“I’m jealous of her. Of course. But whether or not I am, I must act rationally or I won’t continue to survive. Jealousy would lead me to insist you tell her I’m still your … lover, that we see each other, that I’m still in your life, that I want to be with you. That the only reason I’m not with you is because they won’t let me be. But caution and the desire to survive and the accumulated political wisdom of the Network lead me to tell you that she cannot know.”
“She’s not about to talk to anybody else. I think making her suspicious of me is far more dangerous”
“I don’t. Surely you can handle that. You’ve always been skilled at keeping space for yourself … Did I ever demand you account to me in any way? Surely she trusts you.”
“Sure she trusts me, and here I am letting her down.”
“Leigh, it seems important to you right now to tell this lover, but you’ve had many women over the years. Suppose you’d told every one of them about me? Suppose you’d told just half of them?”
“I never wanted to. I wasn’t living with them.”
“You lived with some on and off. Remember Fran? And you have wanted to tell before, Leigh. You wanted to tell Lohania.”
“That was different”
“Right. Lohania had more real interest. But not enough for me to let you do it … Leigh, all relationships feel permanent when they’re good. But usually they end. We’ve been close for thirteen years, and that counts for something in how I trust you.” She was aware that under the obvious argument she was debating him about the sudden importance of Susannah, of a relationship which had been one of three diversions in March and which now represented a surrogate wife, a hearth goddess. “You can’t tell how long your affair with Susannah may last”
”It’s pretty real.” His voice was low and surly. He squished his remaining pancake around the plate. “We’ve been involved for a year already. I can tell what I want, Vinnie. I’ve never had any trouble telling what I want and what I don’t want.”
“Right, and the hot lover you want in October is frequently the nagging bitch you’re bored with by January”‘ She heard her voice rapping out and drew a deep breath. This was Leigh, not an enemy. “I don’t want you to be lonely. God knows how long our separation is going to last. But you can’t gamble politically that this new affair will be there in two years. You can’t gamble with others’ lives and freedom that you won’t do something to infuriate her, that you won’t walk out in a huff. That one of you won’t fall madly in love with somebody else … You’re a wonderful man. A woman may do and be anything for a while to please you. But small incompatibilities swell into large ones over time—”
“Sometimes people get closer. She’s not pleasing me. She’s a strong woman too in her own way.”
“How old is she?”
“Twenty-six. She’s mature. She’s not a kid, if that’s what you’re getting at.” He was absolutely furious.
She was glad Natalie couldn’t overhear the conversation, because she felt guilty enough about trying to undermine Susannah; but Susannah was young and free. What could Leigh mean to her? “Leigh, I can’t let you tell her. Next year we can review the situation. But I don’t even know what she’s into politically. Have you ever really checked her out?”
“V— … Vinnie! I’ve been living with the woman!”
“We all felt close to Randy, and he was more than an informer, he was an agent! Leigh, I don’t want to upset you. A security check is a nasty business. Only you can’t make what’s a purely political judgment on a purely sexual basis”
“It isn’t purely sexual!” But he was looking a little shaken. He would think for a while that it might be.
“I can tell you care about her, and I’m sure she’s crazy about you.” She made herself smile. “How many women have wanted to marry you over my dead body these thirteen years? That’s not a basis for bringing her into the Network!”
As they walked out of the restaurant, the sky was a blurred watery blue. They could hear foghorns moaning; a wall of cotton batting stood out to sea, but the sun was burning off the overcast. The day felt washed and hung out to dry. Leigh took her hand as they scrambled down to the beach. Now she understood what had been going on between them in Lundy’s. He had felt guilty. He had been living as a couple with Susannah. When Vida and Leigh had lived together, he had always needed to be open with her about his sexual encounters; he had wanted to carry back experiences and observations and problems to her. Thus even the other friends and lovers they had became part of their common experience.
She would block him from discussing her with Susannah, mostly because it was dangerous to her, but also because she would not permit him that additional measure of intimacy with Susannah that would come from turning herself, Vida, into matter for their communication. She felt better, as if an enemy had come into the open where she could fight. He too was in a more affectionate mood. Being honest about Susannah had made him more relaxed after the initial sparring at the table. I will survive her, I will, she tho
ught. She can keep him warm and feed him and enjoy him, but she can’t take him away from me. I won’t let her.
She drew in the sharp smell of the sea edge, the damp tossed-up seaweed, the crushed shells of small salmon-colored crabs, the salt, until her body rang with energy. Snakes of surf coiled in, slithering white up to her feet. Thalassa, thalassa, the surf said, as it did in calm weather, singing its name. Ta thalassa. Leigh’s arm was sharp and bony against her rib like an umbrella.
Brown-and-buff birds at the water’s edge pattered after the waves’ retreat, danced back from each advance. Eva would know what they were. She was always pointing to a bird on a wire and telling Vida its name, so that Vida felt as if she should bow and acknowledge the introduction. As soon as Eva told her the name of a bird, Vida started seeing it all over the place, as if naming made it appear. Suddenly Say’s phoebe or the house wren was sailing for insects everywhere. She opened her mouth to tell Leigh and shut it. Enough other names circled them like sea gulls crying. She realized he did not know Eva, who had not been part of their New York scene before becoming a fugitive. She remembered the first time Eva had pointed out a roadrunner to her; she had thought roadrunners cartoon figures, not live birds, and they had enchanted her. In the desert the fugitives were training for an action. She felt displaced with Leigh, remembering Eva, remembering herself preparing for the pipe bombing of the offices of a landlord notorious for rent gouging and burning out his own tenants—arson at a profit, with a little incidental death of three Chicano children the week before. Her group was taking reprisal on property valued over children.
They walked a couple of miles, picking up shells to admire and dropping them again.
”Remember that place we had in Montauk?”
“That was a great summer” he said. “You baked that bluefish whole stuffed with a caper dressing. And when the crew from the Roach was out, you made bouillabaisse … Let’s turn around.”
By the time they hiked back to the motel, Leigh was talking about lunch. He got out his briefcase and sent her for ice from the machine to chill a Hanns Kornell champagne. Riesling.
She commented, “You’ve got into California wines.”
“Maybe you can drink French wines at current prices, but I’ve had to look around. Besides, it’s fun to explore. There’s a lot of good California wines from small producers these days” He tapped the bottle cooling in the ice bucket. “I visited that winery.”
With Susannah? And when? And why had he come and gone in California without seeing her?
He added at once, second-guessing her, “I was just out there for a broadcast-journalism conference at Stanford. Rented a car and made a couple of excursions.”
“Does Susannah drive?”
“Sure. Like you, she thinks I’m a menace on wheels.”
He loved to learn something new, enter a field of expertise, and obviously Susannah had shared that exploration with him. She was determined not to give way to jealousy again. He was with her and she was going to repair their intimacy. While the champagne was chilling they showered together. Afterward she slipped into her kimono and knelt on the bed smiling at him. He slid his hand under her robe and began to caress her breast. How strange his body felt to her still, covered with a pelt of curly hair. It was like being in bed with a lean and sinewy raccoon. “You have such a neat body.” He was staring at her in a way that made her feel clumsy. “You’re a gorgeous woman. Neat, that’s the right word. Not an ounce of flab and yet all the furniture’s in place.”
He was not comparing her with somebody, he was not; he was just being appreciative. She wriggled out of her kimono and pulled him down on her, remembering where and how he liked to be stroked. Strange and familiar at once, his weight and bones and curly hair, the chugging of his buttocks that were long and pale half-moons, the jungle of his thighs, the savanna of his back, his beard tickling her ear. She squirmed and settled into his rhythm and began to float backward, to move out on that long arc where words faded, where the mind dipped into the flesh and happily drowned, where she strained and hauled on him and pressed upward, where she ballooned out more urgent and she had to have, had to and then finally pleasure quickened, held, teased and then broke inside and fanned outward, flushing hot in her arms and breasts, and at last ebbed.
When he came too and slackened inside her, she tried to go on holding him. After a while he slipped out and then turned with a deep sigh onto his back. She curled sideways facing him, fitted into the curve of his arm. The scent of sweat like fine erotic perfume. The smells of aftersex, sail marsh, salt sweat, rank and soothing. She couldn’t remain still but crouched over him, kissing gently his flat cheeks, his drooping eyelids, his pointed beard, his nipples, his wet slippery shriveled cock, his bony square kneecaps. She adored him. “Leigh! Leigh, I missed you. I missed you so much. I love you!”
His lids fluttered. “Love you too, babes … Good together”
After sex they’d used to share a cigarette, passing it back and forth. In ‘67 Leigh had given up smoking because he realized it was coarsening his voice. One morning as he coughed and spat, he announced he was done with it. He never smoked another cigarette. She admired his willpower, crouching over him. He indulged himself but he also drove himself; in some ways she thought of him as the essence of what she loved most in New York.
In midafternoon he unpacked the dark bread, smoked oysters, and another good pate from his briefcase. “Let’s catch some sun.”
“Aren’t you going to play some of your programs for me?” She wanted to hear what he had been doing politically.
He hefted the champagne bottle. “Let’s picnic now. I’ll take the programs along. How about the lighthouse?”
“Leigh, the fishermen will be shoulder to shoulder for the stripers. What’s that other park, where we used to swim?”
Hither Hills, it was called. Leigh said it was next to Thither Holes, where the locals sank the tourists in quicksand when they got out of hand. The campsites looked full and they kept away from that part of the beach, following a trail into the dunes and piny woods. The sun was strong by now, and the beach was settling with families and couples.
On the blanket filched from the motel she sat eating slowly and trying in memorize each moment. She felt distended with happiness. Leigh took off his shirt and lay propped on an elbow, savoring the champagne drunk out of a paper cup. That was Leigh, all right: the best for his palate and he’d eat it out of an old shoe. A champagne picnic on a scuzzy blanket. That was so typical and so reminiscent of good times together in the past that she had to clutch herself to keep from crawling all over him with affection the way he detested. Instead, she finally got him to play two of his specials on his little cassette player, one about longshoremen and the other about an old folks’ commune. He gave her a couple to carry away to hear when she could. Then she would burn them; her life at times reeked of burning tapes, tapes the Network sometimes used to communicate internally and with the outside world. She wished he had played the programs in the motel room. She had trouble concentrating under the mild blue sky and the warm soporific sun.
A couple ran over the dune. Immediately she shut off the player. The man and woman were photographing each other, mugging, posing, shooting from a crouch, lying back languorously. She would have liked a picture of Leigh to carry with her. She would have liked to give him a photo of her, not to forget her, to carry her with him, but that was a pleasure as forbidden as strolling into her own building, greeting Julio and gossiping a few minutes as she picked up her mail, riding up in the elevator and walking into her own apartment. Among the furniture they had bought together so long ago she would sit down with one of her own books. In the wonderful old tub long enough to lie down in, she would run the water very hot and pour in her pomander bath oil. Then she would dry and come into her own bedroom with the red velvet draperies or into Leigh’s with the Venetian blinds and the blue burlap curtains.
They had always had separate rooms. Leigh’s overflowed w
ith clippings, tapes he was editing, splicing equipment, files, a dandruff of loose papers she could not endure. Leigh suffered from occasional fierce insomnia, stands of nights when he could not bear anyone in the bed with him, when he would get up and read at 3 A.M., work on an article, record his ideas or projects. Her room had been consciously sensual, a place to make love, to sleep, to talk hour after hour curled among heaped cushions on the big bed under the Cretan hanging, a room with two mirrors and a hanging light with a stained-glass shade, a modern imitation of Tiffany but lovely, lavender, cobalt, maroon …
“Do you and Susannah have separate bedrooms?” she asked.
“What?” He was shielding his eyes from the sun, stripped down to his swim trunks now. “I had to move the bed out of my office a while ago. I’ve got too many files. I put in a couch. It’s big enough for fucking” He grinned. “Black Naugahyde, looks like a doctor’s office. I can do decent recording there. I had it soundproofed. Not studio quality, but decent.”
Time was spinning faster and faster. When the couple wandered off, she turned on the cassette player again, listening as Leigh dozed. She bent over him. He had gained some weight. He had a visible soft stomach, but he was in remarkable shape considering he almost never did any physical exercise beyond making love and climbing steps out of the subway. He did walk a lot, blocks, miles around New York, often preferring to walk from 69th to 42nd or from their apartment up to Columbia, rather than take public transportation or a taxi. Somehow he burned up the good eating.
As he dozed, stirring in his sleep, grimacing slightly, she sat over him while his rich voice came tiny from the cassette interviewing a multitude of other New York voices. He was aging some, nicely. White hair flecked his beard, glinting in his brows. Lines were etched under his eyes; a deep furrow stood between. How good it would be to grow into middle age talking, incessantly talking, chewing over their life together, tasting and trying and learning, always learning, coming home again to talk it all over. She loved him. He was a permanent part of her. They had helped to shape each other. He had the key to her body. They had much in common and could have so much more if permitted. Yet in the early morning they would separate, and she must depend on luck and the inefficiency of the government to let them come together again.