Well in Time

by SUZAN STILL

  She slowed her stride as she stepped onto Pont Saint-Louis, that homely old pedestrian bridge so startlingly banal in the luscious heart of Paris, and strolled out to mid-span. Casually, she lowered her bag onto the pavement by the railing, slipped off her fox jacket, its pelts afire in the late afternoon sun, and dropped it onto her bag. Then, with studied calm and elegance born of many hours at the ballet barre, she turned to the railing and performed a perfect developpé. Raising her arm in a port au bras, she proceeded with the familiar routine of ballet stretches, humming a Bach cantata for rhythm. Behind her, a tattered stream of weary tourists straggled by, and a gray figure melted into the deepening shadows of the Left Bank dusk.

  . . . .

  Hill: Paris, 1992

  Culturally, so much depends on the placement of the body in space. For the French, there are three reasons why one might sit alone at a café table: one is waiting for a friend, or is an intellectual, solitary and brooding, or one is a tourist. Of them, the first is most acceptable, the second, merely suspect, and the last, contemptible.

  Perhaps his patina of world-weariness led the woman who served Hill his café au lait, carottes râspées and hard, butterless bread to believe he was the suspect of the three. In a neat dark skirt and white apron, she whisked to his table on the basic black de rigueur pumps of the Parisian working woman and deposited his food without the familiar buoyancy offered natives, but also minus the blank reserve that walled out the taint of the étranger. He was a creature apart, her actions told him. Having been so on every continent for the last thirty years, he accepted her appraisal without surprise or resistance. He was in fact vaguely pleased to find his psychological camouflage intact.

  This café on Île St.-Louis was a favorite of his, although the prices were high and the food poor, fit only for the clientele of footsore tourists who managed to limp over that plainest, most utilitarian of Parisian bridges, Pont St.-Louis. The problem lay less in their feet, he always suspected, than in the daunting effect of that first tour of Notre Dame.

  From his vantage on Quai d’Orleans, the cathedral rose majestically across the intervening channel of the Seine, dominating the tail of the Île de la Cité, startling and grand as a newly-erupted volcano. He watched the intermittent stream on the bridge. They came to sit over their coffees with the stunned look of survivors of cataclysm. Perhaps the fifth whirlwind day since Brussels had undone them. More likely, Hill suspected, it was the ecstasy of the thirteenth-century cathedral. Notre Dame smells of mold and smoke, but steps like a stone foot on contemporary notions of aesthetics.

  Paris always put Hill in this mood. Bangkok, Tokyo, Montreal, D.C., Santiago, Baghdad–they had their charms, of course, but he could remain detached, do his job. But Paris! He approached her like a lover. Thirty years as a foreign correspondent dropped away and he was a besotted adolescent, or mendicant monk, finally come home to the City of Light.

  He ordered another café au lait and sank his upper lip into its bitter foam. Across the river, the brilliant November light picked out the cathedral’s bones, and the great arching buttresses seemed to exist simply to exhort its immense walls upward. White flecks of pigeons sailed through the stone lacework of arcs and spires like liberated souls. It was this back view, with all her props and braces, that Hill loved. The facade always seemed too austere, too foursquare, with its truncated spires. No, Notre Dame revealed her true grandeur to those who flanked her from the Quai aux Fleurs and came with amazement on those arcing arrows of stone.

  Here he was like an old lech, slobbering in his coffee over the Virgin, again. Time for a good war somewhere before his brain rotted out completely. He fished some ten-franc pieces from his pocket and began to push back his chair when his eye lit again on Pont St.-Louis. A woman stood there, mid-span, facing the cathedral. She was wearing a yellow dress and the afternoon sun slanting through it gave hints of a long and lithe body. But more remarkably, she had one leg stretched out on the railing and was rhythmically lowering and raising her torso to her extended knee, in long, balletic stretches. Intrigued, Hill left a five-franc tip to propitiate the gods and threaded out through the metal chairs.

  When he reached the bridge, she had taken her leg from the railing and was doing a dainty little series of steps–a pas de bourrée?–her hands resting on the rail for support, apparently absorbed in the wonder of Our Lady’s derrière.

  Hill was now close enough to ascertain three things: her dress was of a light-weight, open-weave wool of the most sumptuous Naples yellow; a red fox coat, heaped on a big oxblood-colored leather bag, glowed like a fire at her feet; and she was humming the strains of Zum reinen Wasser: “Where streams of living water flow, He to green meadows leadeth. And where the pastures verdant grow with food celestial feedeth.”

  Leaning casually against the railing about four feet away, a distance he deemed friendly but not overpowering, Hill ventured: “I love Bach, myself.”

  She stopped humming but was slow to tear her eyes from the view. When she did, it was not to face him but only with a slight turn of the head, the eyes sliding into the corners, regarding him warily, the color suddenly blanched from her cheeks.

  After a moment, the tension left her shoulders and her eyes crinkled wryly. “Truly,” she said. It was not a question and it rolled between them like a ball of butter spiked with carpet tacks. The accent was American, like his own. Thirty years of savoir-faire melted and Hill was a fuzz-faced lout from Denver again, all elbows and size-16 shoes.

  “One of his loveliest . . . ” he managed to stammer, “his finest cantatas. I heard it performed there . . .,” he nodded across the water to the cathedral, “the second Sunday after Easter. Two years ago.”

  “Such a memory!” She wasn’t going to give him an inch. A cold wind came up-river, wrapping her skirt around her calves. She had beautiful ankles above a pair of expensive-looking pumpkin-colored snakeskin heels. He raised his eyes and found her grinning.

  “Well? Do you have me all sorted out yet?” she asked pleasantly.

  Time for pure out-West charm–ingenuous, all-man, no-horseshit.

  “Listen,” he said, “I know just from looking that you and I are as different as hogwire and harpstring. But if you’re not otherwise engaged, I’d be honored to take you to an early supper.”

  Her eyes took on a vague, unreadable look. She gazed searchingly over his shoulder toward the Left Bank. Then, to his amazement, they lit with a friendly twinkle. She grinned again and said, “Okay! As long as we eat here,” nodding behind her toward Île Saint-Louis.

  “Dear lady . . . whatever your heart desires!” Stooping, he retrieved her coat and held it open for her gallantly.

  . . . .

  Javier: Northern California: 1992

  Deep oak woods were wrapped in thick moss and rich in the umber scent of rotting leaves. An incandescent evening sky, apricot and electric blue, was snagged in a net of bare, black branches as Javier tramped, weighted by heavy clothes and muddy boots, his nose red and numb, his hands numb, too. His chest was tight: too cold for deep breathing, yet he was warmed down deep by some rising sense of transformation. Winter was in the land, but spring was rousing early in his heart. Fragile hopes flittered in the wintry dusk, sparks of summer glimmering on heavy, settled air. Winter was not death, as so many poets would have it. No, not death, but the tremblings of resurrection, rooted like the wildflowers already stirring beneath the snow, kicking at their seed hulls for liberation.

  Liberation! Javier plotted as he trudged through crusted patches of snow, imagining the hungry fed, the homeless roofed-over, children reading and laughing. As the west gleamed like the Second Coming or the End of the World, ravens winged by, black silhouettes on the fiery sky.

  OOSA. USA. So damn cold! Where is the sun of Chiapas and Yucatan that makes the humidity rise and vines bloom? Here in the north the sun burned through the black oak woods like the imperious eye of God, vermilion and gold, not caring if it warmed. And it had a message, as if it were
written on a card and dangled on the thin, cold thread of the wind: It has to be done. It cannot be avoided. There is no turning back.

  The sun was sinking fast, its curved bottom edge slicing into far indigo hills like a scimitar into flesh. The light was both more brilliant and more somber. The woods hunkered like a vast animal already camouflaged in night–not menacing but mysterious, all to themselves, not knowable, as was the way of all wild things; as was his own way.

  He was divided between this awareness and other visions: Paris all aflame; London hanging the Lord Mayor; mobs in the streets of Santiago; American guerrillas lurking in the woods, awaiting the Red Coats.

  Revolution. Others had done it. And now, Mexico. Again.

  The land reforms of the past revolution were ineffective now. In Mexico City, the most populous, diseased, polluted place on the planet, people were packed like stockyard animals into dismal slums. Bad water, little food, violence, drugs, despair and death. Not the birthright Villa, Zapata and Cardenas envisioned back when the land was divided and the great estancias broken up into ejidos–community-held, farmable plots for the common man.

  The sun cut deeper into the mountains’ flesh as his boot heels struck the frozen crust of snow with the report of small arms fire. In the woods, something big moved quickly and silently. A gato montés? A deer? His stomach felt empty and light; hungry, but also as if it would never accept food again.

  This was the day, or never. This was the time and place, although it had always seemed to him a thing of the future. Now, the future had arrived and his life was no longer an endless stream of days. From now on he must live each day, hour, breath as if it were his last, all assurances of a long existence erased from his Book of Life. He would be like that nameless creature that moved in the shadows just now: both hunter and hunted.

  Commune of Women

  There is, in my town, a person who is particularly irritating to me. Her voice is loud and intrusive. She digs for information and then disseminates it, often with embellishments that deviate widely from fact. Despite my having waged a campaign of both acts of kindness and tight-jawed tolerance over the decades, she has worked overtime to tell tales about me that are entirely false, and she does this with a persistence that would shame the Ancient Mariner.

  Never one to let a good character study go to waste, I began to imagine what it would be like to be trapped with her for an extended period, say in a snow-bound cabin or wrecked train car. It occurred to me that each one of us probably knows such a person who, to a greater or lesser extent, irritates the hell out of us and whom we avoid like the plague. Thus, the possibilities for group interaction and its psychological consequences grew in my imagination and Commune of Women was born. In trapping my characters in a small room during a disaster, and separating them widely by race, age, education, and socio-economic status, there was definitely malice aforethought!

  I am of the somewhat antique notion that a writer has certain didactic responsibilities to her reader; that writing should uphold undying virtues and principles, the “old verities and truths of the heart,” as Faulkner would have it. My desire is that each reader come away from one of my books with a sense of having been magnified, edified, and inspired. This is the deep thematic basis and underlying motivation of my writing, the place where it wells up out of my heart, what I most want to tell, my philosophical and spiritual underpinning.

  In the case of Commune of Women, I first wanted to affirm the human spirit—that humanity is redeemable, despite all of its foibles. Secondly, that women are endlessly resilient in affirming life, nurturance, and peace, despite their personal differences and the burdens of prejudice which so often afflicts them. I also affirm poetry, intuition, and instinct and all other kinds of subjective knowing, while eschewing gratuitous violence or sexuality and the titillation of the baser instincts.

  Additionally, I want to offer my readers a vision of the persistence of basic human decency, the prevailing of hope against all odds, and the immortality of love in the face of all that would annihilate it. To that end, in Commune of Women I address the nature of terrorism and its roots in disenfranchisement, poverty, political corruption, and violence. I focused on the Palestinian dilemma in particular because that captive people is a macrocosm that reflects the microcosm of the trapped women—for all the world’s greater problems have repercussions in our individual lives.

  Most deeply, I affirm that love and beauty are the fundament of the universe, and I wanted to demonstrate how each of us, albeit often in stunted, misguided, or deviant ways, seeks to uphold that truth with rather touching, and sometimes stunning, honesty and faith. Through these individual choices culture is shored up or rearranged, one act at a time, and each of us, the women of Commune of Women included, is forced to stretch and grow to accommodate it.

  Who knows? Maybe even me and my nemesis, in my town.

  On an ordinary Los Angeles morning, the lives of seven women are about to become inextricably entangled, as they converge upon LA International Airport for various purposes. Suddenly, the morning erupts into chaos, as black-clad terrorists charge into the terminal, guns blazing. As the concourse becomes a killing field, six of the women dodge a hail of bullets to find refuge in a tiny staff room. Betty, a Reseda housewife, Heddi, a Jungian analyst, Sophia, a rugged and savvy mountain woman, Erika, a top-level executive, Ondine, an artist just returning from France, and Pearl, an ancient bag lady, all traumatized or injured, barricade the door and cower down, hoping to survive. As four days drag by, their expectations of an early rescue dashed, the women find a way to dominate their panic and terror by telling their life stories. As their situation becomes increasingly grave, the women begin to reveal their most intimate secrets, as their stories descend deeper into the dark shadows of their lives–and they discover that part of survival is simply surviving one another. At the same time, in a similar small room close by, the sole female terrorist, dubbed simply X by her so-called Brothers, has the task of watching a bank of surveillance monitors. Apparently forgotten by her co-conspirators, she nevertheless is the best informed of the happenings in the outside world–happenings that are not easily understood. Why are the police and FBI so slow to respond? What has motivated this attack? Who are these terrorists and what do they want? And will the women survive to tell their tale? Answers to these questions slowly reveal the terrible web of conspiracy and deceit into which they all have fallen. But the most profound revelation of all is how each has betrayed herself.

  Day One

  Los Angeles International Airport

  Los Angeles, California

  Monday, 8:37 AM

  Erika

  The noise as Erika steps out of the cab is deafening. She’s screaming at Amelia, “Just call Dallas and tell them…” and the fucking phone cuts out. She spins around, hoping to pick up the signal again. It’ll take Amelia ten minutes to settle down and remember that she already knows what she’s supposed to tell the Dallas office. They went over it yesterday. Christ!

  The cabby’s on Mexican time. He’s taking her bag out of the trunk like he’s doing it underwater. She’s got forty minutes to dash through the terminal, get through fucking Homeland Security, and catch the flight to Berlin. Come on!

  Every loser in Creation is in her way. Why do most people look like genetic throwbacks? They mope along, looking dazed – no sense of direction; no focus. How do they manage to feed and clothe themselves? What must their sex lives be like? She’s like a shark among guppies. If she has to, she’ll bite her way through this sea of zombies!

  Heddi

  The thing Heddi always hates about LAX is the frantic pace. Traffic swarms around entrances and parking spaces like bees around a disturbed hive. Once she’s run that gauntlet, dealing with the mess inside the terminals is a piece of cake.

  Thank God Betty insisted on driving her today. The thing with Hal has her so upset! And this Wellbutrin’s so strong she wouldn’t trust her own driving. Betty – big and solid as a navy-and
-red mountain, her grip on the wheel like a strangler’s; her jaw, lost in a pudding-like sack of triple chins – is navigating the traffic like one of the Norns clutching the reins of the Car of Fate.

  She’s never let a patient drive her anywhere before and this is the first time she’s ever come to the airport to pick one up. Heddi has a special spot in her heart for this arrival. According to her own analyst, Dr. Copeland, Ondine represents some part of Heddi’s shadow which is why Heddi always finds her so marvelously aggravating.

  “Offer her particular hospitality,” Dr. Copeland advised her. “She has much to teach you.”

  The digital read-out of Arrivals says Flight 3742 from Paris is on time, probably taxiing up to Gate 34 at this very moment. Which means she has at least half an hour to use the loo and then read a few pages of the murder mystery that’s got her hooked – if she can hold Betty at bay – before she even has to start looking for Ondine in this mob. And to make herself suitably hospitable, whatever that might entail.

  Betty

  Betty never thought she’d be the kind of person who’d go to a shrink. She’s as normal as apple pie. Dish water. Laundry soap. Whatever. But things happen to you in this life; things you don’t expect and that are painful.

  That was a surprise. She grew up so normal and still that was no proof against suffering. During their last session, Heddi said that Betty survived her normality by staying unconscious – not, like, out cold, but by not really thinking about the things that were wrong. That’s why things got so crazy – because Betty wasn’t bringing any of the stuff to consciousness.

  Betty steals a sidelong glance at Heddi, so cool and aloof in her short blond do and pale blue silk pencil skirt that glints like surgical steel, so slender and self-contained, and she feels a shudder run through her. She’s not sure if it’s from pleasure at being of service to such a svelte, sophisticated creature, or from pure terror of her.