Vida

by Marge Piercy

  Come on—shot? Impatient, she skimmed

  … released on $10,000 bail … police guard as a cooperative witness in conjunction with a grand jury …

  Gibney said Droney had agreed to cooperate with the office of the District Attorney in apprehending members of the Network, a revolutionary underground organization that has claimed credit for 51 bombings since 1970.

  At least, she thought vaguely, coldly, they don’t say “so-called revolutionary” any longer; but we’ve done more bombings than that. They don’t bother counting them accurately any longer. At least, no photographs were printed this time.

  Officer George Gregarian said that Droney pulled a gun and threatened him yesterday at 9 A.M. in the hallway of an apartment building at 186 W. 104th Street where Droney had been living in the 3rd-floor apartment of Lohania Hernandez.

  Gunfire was exchanged between the two men and Gregarian was wounded in the arm. Droney fled toward a car driven by Miss Hernandez, a naturalized citizen born in Havana, Cuba.

  Gregarian called for help and a police cruiser responded in time to prevent Miss Hernandez from leaving the street. In the ensuing gun battle, Droney was shot three times. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Metropolitan Hospital.

  Miss Hernandez, 35, a clerk in a travel agency, has been taken into custody on charges …

  … fugitive for several years after Droney fled charges stemming from a 1970 bombing at Mobil Oil Corporation offices.

  She looked up quickly, pierced with fright. She felt on display in the subway car. Kevin was dead. She did not feel like prancing on his grave. Poor Kevin. Poor Lohania. Lohania had spoken the truth to Natalie: he had not meant to cooperate for long. Had he been trying to contact the Network? He was stringing the authorities along. They had not bought him off. Randy was wrong about Kevin now as Kevin had been wrong about Randy then. She could not reread the article. Her eyes blurred, but she did not weep. She had cried herself out for Ruby till her tear ducts felt sore.

  Kevin was bitter and hard, but he was true. Maybe he had sold them out, but nothing they couldn’t survive. He had not sold himself. He had been biding his time. Ultimately, that mattered a lot to her; she was surprised how much. She would mourn his death in battle gravely and silently. Now she would at last forgive herself. She felt almost close to him. She was certain he believed passionately in what he was doing for Northern Ireland. That struggle would even heal him to his family and his past. She understood; she could not disapprove.

  Why had they been unable to love each other? She did not know, but for the first time in years she regretted their failure; regretted they had not meshed as a couple rather than cursing herself for having become involved with him. They had needed Lohania to complete their family. They had not been sufficient as two. But why had they turned their anger and frustration so strongly on each other? How they had worked together the first years underground, twins, one machine, two arms of one swift body! For a moment she remembered his body, the lean fierce heft of his torso, the glint of lamplight on his yellow hair. The raw force of him. Lohania had been true to Kevin; all those years she had waited. She had thrown over whatever life she had built with bricks of pain in the intervening years to help him escape. She had been willing to cut herself off from her methadone source. Lohania too had proved ultimately incorruptible. Vida was impressed, and she was moved. Someday, she promised Lohania silently, she would see her again. The state would take revenge on Lohania for Kevin’s act and once again she would have to do bad time, in a state prison under maximum security, Bedford Hills. No civilized time in places like Danvers for Lohania.

  Numbly she moved toward the doors, got off. She breathed deeply, hyperventilating. She must make herself pay attention, break from the thick murk of depression. Look around, she ordered; be wary. Eyestalks waving. Muerte en Sangre Fria was playing at the movie house. Better a death chosen than a wasted life—right, Vida? She clutched her arms. A gaggle of empty buses half-blocked 181st Street as she walked toward Fort Washington. The neighborhood reminded her of where she had lived with Leigh—not physically, for the buildings were lower—because nobody in the lively street crowd seemed to own a majority: Blacks, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews. She made herself amble along past Thom McAn, a Daitch Dairy, a superdiscount cosmetics in the blare of “Silent Night” Most of the stores had Christmas decorations tacked up, aluminum trees turning to canned music, angels and shepherds and dusty white sheep under a pointy gold star. The liquor-store window was full of gift-wrapped whiskey. Christmas had crept up on her. She was not sure what date it was.

  She had a desperate desire to give Joel something. If only they had not blown the eighty! A velour shirt or a bulky wool sweater. She could not spend the money. Instead, she ducked into a deli and bought him a dozen of mixed garlic and onion bagels, thinking of his last words to her. She considered putting them in the Bloomingdale’s bag (from Natalie) she had folded up in her small rucksack, but actually the bagels fitted in with her change of clothes, toiletries, and minimal disguise items. Striding on, she tugged at her green velour tunic that had once been a mini-dress, like Lohania’s, like Natalie’s. She had a strong urge to call Natalie, to hear her voice, to know her safe. Dangerous: Natalie’s phone must be tapped. Just a bit of warmth. She noted every pay phone she passed, most of them broken, and kept walking. Identical apartment houses in a row with courts. Dr. Manolli’s entrance was on the ground level to the side.

  Even Dr. Manolli’s office had a Christmas tree, this one red with crystal snowflakes. Muzak pumped into the waiting room, a thousand strings dreaming of a cooled-whip Christmas. Five women, two men and his three children sweating there glared at her as she strode through to door and knocked.

  “What is it?” he called. Three years before, she had arrived with a badly swollen leg full of shards of metal. Would he remember? After digging out the metal, he had put her on antibiotics, which had given her a yeast infection.

  “I have your mail they left next door” she said.

  “Oh, yes, come on in” The patients went back to gazing at the wall, leafing through New Yorkers, dozing, suppressing their children. Dr. Manolli was sitting behind his desk walled in by heaps of paper. “Can’t trust anybody to do insurance forms,” he said. “You got what you want renewed?” He was about five feet five, with a wreath of wavy gray hair around a bald dome that looked fashioned sensuously of marble. His complexion was clear and creamy. His eyes, a cool foresty brown, were magnified by his glasses. He was thin and elegant in his neat body and three-piece green-flecked gray suit, but his desk was unkempt as she remembered it, files all over the office, half-packed or unpacked boxes of yellowing paper.

  He squinted at the first prescription. “How’s her asthma? Just as bad?”

  “She wrote it’s a little better.”

  “Hmmm. Is he sticking to that diet I gave him for his ulcer?”

  “As much as he can. When he isn’t traveling.”

  “Medicine won’t do a thing if he doesn’t take care of his condition. And no aspirin. That’s part of his problem”

  They haggled their way through the prescriptions and notes on medical problems. At one point he shook his finger at her. “The septic leg. I remember you! What a mess.”

  “I was a mess” She glanced at her watch surreptitiously. She must not appear to be hurrying him, but she desperately wanted to be gone before his nurse and his receptionist came back.

  “High blood pressure” he said, nodding. “Let’s check you” She sat with the pumped-up device on her arm, trying not to fume lest she raise the pressure. He showed her the figures. “You’re still running high. Cut out the salt. I’m going to put you on some medication …”

  “I’m feeling fine. Really. I don’t want to go on anything if I can avoid it. I’ll do without salt.”

  “I want to see you in a couple of months, then. Let’s weigh you . . “

  He made her get onto his scale. “Weight’s good. It’s not weight that’s your pro
blem.”

  Finally he moved on to the next card. “Alice. She still hasn’t had that operation for her deviated septum and poorly draining sinuses?”

  “Never mind Alice” Vida took the card back. “She isn’t with us any longer”

  He raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. “For that migraine, I’ll prescribe ergotamine tartrate, but Roger’s not to use it often. Ask him to watch for nausea and feelings of numbness” He rummaged first in the drawers of his desk, a garbage heap of pill bottles. Then he poked around in a drawer of the filing cabinet. “Know I have it here. Might as well use it” At last he came up with a sample bottle. “Why waste these?”

  She opened her backpack on his desk. Her palms were sweating. It was after one. She expected the patients outside to charge the door. Finally there was a knock and the door opened a crack. She shrank out of range, to the side. “I’m back, Doctor. Should I start sending them in?”

  “Not yet. Hold the fort another few minutes.” He went on going through the list, mumbling over each entry. “I’ll give you some heavy B’s.” He threw some bottles of vitamin pills into her backpack. “Is Eva still on that vegetarian diet? You get her to take B-12 regularly, hear me?” He threw in some more bottles—randomly, it seemed to her, but they were probably vitamins. “I will not renew Kiley’s barbiturates. I told her before she has to stop taking sleeping pills when she gets nervous.”

  “Kiley doesn’t take them often”

  “But she takes them in a dangerous pattern. It’s basically a pre-addictive pattern I can’t encourage. I won’t write her a prescription for barbiturates.”

  She felt a flash of full acidulous rage. Who was he to judge their levels of tension? He should try living on the run for years and years. Kiley wasn’t about to be addicted to anything, but sometimes she simply forgot how to sleep. Vida dreaded walking out into the anteroom jammed patients and now with his receptionist to look her over, but finally he glanced at his own watch. “My nurse’ll be here any minute. Go out that way.” He pointed to a door in the far wall she had assumed to be a closet. “It takes you into the corridor. The door will lock behind you automatically. Go left and through the service entrance. That’s how I sneak in and out. Merry Christmas,” he added as she was leaving. His calendar said today was December 23.

  Hurrying toward the subway to take the IND, this time north to Fort Tryon, she worried over the date. There would be a lot of traffic for the holidays. Approaching the Cloisters, approaching the castle entrance, approaching then the room of the unicorn tapestries through mobs of schoolchildren herded from room to room to the drone of history on this, the last day of school, she observed all her usual cautions and went circuitously and warily, but her eye was perfunctory. It was more ritual than action; more prayer than surveillance. Her mind was on Ruby. She wanted to crawl back into the lap of her childhood and rest awhile. Come to Mama. She realized with a little queasiness that part of her passion for Joel was rooted in some subliminal identification of his warmth, his impulsiveness, his earthiness—even his testiness, his quickness of response—with Ruby. Well, why not? Why not seek in a lover the best traits of your first love?

  Where the hell was he? She knew she had suggested as politely as she could that he get there ahead of her, but he was nowhere to be seen. Damn him. It was exactly two. She tried to concentrate on the tapestries, but irritation was nagging at her. Couldn’t he do anything right? New York threw him. He had to do things his own way. Probably he’d got lost, thought he’d found some dandy new route and ended up going over the Triborough Bridge. All she wanted to do was clear out of the city. The later they waited, the heavier holiday traffic they would have to endure and the greater chance of something’s going wrong.

  At two fifteen, she did not know quite why, she went back to the lobby and called Oscar.

  “Listen, Oscar, what time did my friend pick up from you?”

  “He was here just before lunch. But I wish you’d called first, squirt. Leigh didn’t give me that money.”

  “He didn’t? What a jerk. How come?”

  “Aren’t you seeing him today?”

  “No, I am not.”

  “Well, he thinks you are, and so does Joel.”

  “Joel thinks I’m seeing Leigh?”

  “Yes, yes” Oscar sounded impatient. “So does Leigh”

  “Well, I’m not. Oh, damn it, Oscar. Everything at sea” She hung up and ran back to the tapestries. No Joel. His damned stupid jealousy. He thought she was seeing Leigh while she was getting the prescriptions, so what had he done? Going out and getting drunk was not his style. What would he do? She had a moment of conviction and ran back to the phone. She had no choice; she had to call Natalie.

  “Natalie? Me. Did my friend call you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he had to reach you.”

  “Where did you say I was?”

  “He seemed to think he knew. I thought you weren’t going there, but he said you’d gone. He said he had to find you in a hurry. That it was desperate”

  “So you told him that address?”

  “I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said automatically as she hung up. She started running before she decided, while she still swam in confusion. She acted first, running toward the subway, knowing she would have time to think on the way south. She ran, pushing herself, panting, her heart hurting, each breath serrated. If only Natalie had a worse memory or more suspicions of Joel’s motives; but Natalie had never seen Joel as jealous lunatic. If only Leigh had been less arrogant in assuming she would meet him because he wanted to!

  She sat on the train, clutched, quivering. Natalie’s phone had to be tapped. The only question was how much Joel had said over the tapped phone and what they had been able to put together. Part of her demanded she clear out; part wanted to die on the spot with fear; part was determined she could still save the situation. Burst in, grab Joel, run for it. What had she failed to do? How had she failed Joel and herself?

  She had told him she didn’t plan to see Leigh, but he had not believed her, for in the past she had concealed meetings. His jealousy from Eva slopped over, contaminating this situation. What a stupid place for Leigh to suggest meeting! The train hurtled along. Her whole body thrummed with impatience. In normal times, whatever those might be, she would never have agreed to meet him in Midtown. What Leigh was doing was trying to fit her into his lunch hour. Then she realized she should have called at once, called the hotel room 314. But if she got off the train to do it now, she would have to wait till the next train. Too long. No, she was headed in the right direction, although the ride was interminable. What mess was she walking into? Leigh and Joel presumably were still shouting at each other. How could Joel have assumed she would fit such a meeting in? He wouldn’t think clearly; he wouldn’t think; he would just bull in bleeding, expecting to catch her in bed with Leigh.

  She wanted to bang her head on the filthy window. She was sitting at the far end of the car facing a corner decorated with glowing graffiti of names and streets. Faster, faster! Joel and she had lacked the leisure, the space away from hustling money, being on the run, to work out tensions between them. They must sit down and confront the ugly doubts and misgivings; they must face what they each most feared and mistrusted in the other. They could come through: she knew it. She would not give up on him. No matter what danger his possessive impulses dragged them into, he was too powerfully entwined with her to relinquish; her love for him was too strong. She would not give him up. She would fight him to make it better, to make him better, but she would not give up.

  She got off the train and ran three blocks and then stopped abruptly and stepped into a long steamy tunnel of a bar, back to the women’s room. She went quickly past men drinking at the bar. A couple of men watched her all the way. In the women’s room she opened her rucksack and with a spray can quickly streaked her hair gray, put pads in her face to r
ound it, put on glasses with pink plastic frames. She wriggled into a dress and panty hose and crammed her tiny rucksack into the Bloomingdale’s shopping bag from Natalie. The scent of the garlic and onion rose. How could he doubt her? She had a moment of anger: while he was stalking her presumed rendezvous, she was buying him bagels. Would he be embarrassed! As she hurried on, she tucked in the hood of her parka to make it a suitable coat for her new role. Middle-aged, slightly dowdy, respectable, that was the invisible woman she intended to be.

  Still, the time was ten after three. Could they be waiting? If Joel had left, where would she ever find him? Nothing to do but charge back to the Cloisters. That idiot! Surely Leigh would not sit in the hotel bashing heads with Joel all afternoon. What would they talk about? Trouble, trouble, trouble. Yet what tugged at her as she picked out the hotel marquee across the street, on a building about ten stories tall and one hundred feet wide, was not an inkling of that kind of trouble. The hair rose on her arms. Slowly she ambled along the other side of the street, moving in the crowd, a shopper among shoppers. On the corner, a bundled-up nun huddled over a charity bucket. The first flakes settled like midafternoon ennui, little flat white yawns. She marched along the far sidewalk past the hotel, around the comer. She could not stop. She could not cross the street and enter. She could not.

  Slowly she crept back around the block. As she came along the far side of the block, she stopped at the first functional pay phone to look up there the number of the hotel. She called. “Room 314 please”

  “I’ll connect you,” a woman said. There was a pause. “What room was that?”

  “Room 314” she said, waiting.

  “Just one moment, please.”

  “What room was that again, please?” the voice asked a moment later.

  Vida hung up. She knew immediately they were putting a trace on the call. She kept walking around the block. She must be crazy, her Manhattan paranoia rampant. She must overcome her irrational fears, cross the street and go in and get Joel; yank him out of there and streak for safety. As she came round the corner to face the marquee again, that was her determination.