by Nathan Hill
“Never mind.”
“And not just any war protestor. The war protestor.” Alice clapped, a mocking applause.
“Be quiet,” Faye said.
“Sebastian’s got a Vietcong flag on his wall. He gives money to the National Liberation Front. You know that, right?”
“This is none of your business.”
“Your boyfriend is going to get shot. And Sebastian will have supplied the bullets. This is who you choose.”
Faye stood up. “I’m going to leave now.”
“You might as well pull the trigger yourself,” Alice said. “That’s low.”
Faye turned her back to Alice and marched out of the apartment, her hands balled up in fists, her arms straight and rigid.
“Now this is it,” Alice called after her. “Shame. Real shame. This is how it feels, girly.”
The last thing Faye saw as she slammed the door shut was Alice kicking her feet back up on the coffee table and flipping the pages of Playboy magazine.
5
NO CAB FARE, no train tokens. Alice believed in freedom, free movement, being free—here, at five o’clock in the morning, walking in the purple and cool and damp light of Chicago. The sun was beginning to show over Lake Michigan and the faces of buildings glowed weakly pink. Certain delis were opening, and shopkeepers hosed off the sidewalks, where batches of newspapers tossed from trucks landed in heaps like sacks of grain. She looked at one and saw the headline—NIXON NOMINATED BY GOP—and she spat. She inhaled the early-morning scent of the city, its waking breath, asphalt and engine oil. The shopkeepers ignored her. They saw her clothes—her big green military jacket and leather boots, her ripped-up skintight jeans—and they saw her black rumpled hair, her unimpressed eyes leveled over silver sunglasses, and they assumed correctly she was not a paying customer. She carried no cash. She did not warrant being courteous to. She liked the transparency of these interactions, the lack of bullshit between herself and the world.
She didn’t carry a purse because if she carried a purse she might be tempted to put keys in the purse, and if she had keys she might be tempted to lock her door, and if she began locking her door she might be tempted to buy things that needed locking up: clothes purchased at actual stores rather than hand-sewn or shoplifted—that’s where it would begin—then shoes, dresses, jewelry, stockpiles of collectible doodads, then still more stuff, a television, small at first, then a bigger one, then another, one for each room, and magazines, cookbooks, pots and pans, framed pictures on the walls, a vacuum cleaner, an ironing board, clothes worth ironing, rugs worth vacuuming, and shelves and shelves and shelves, a bigger place, an apartment, a house, a garage, a car, locks on the car, locks on the doors, multiple locks and bars on the windows that would finally turn the house more fully into the jail it had long ago become. It would be a fundamental change in her stance toward the world: from inviting the world in to keeping the world out.
Tonight was one of those nights that would not have happened if she carried a purse, or keys, or money, or hang-ups regarding easy necking with motley strangers. She went looking for free kicks and found them so quickly, so easily: two men downtown who invited her up to their dirty apartment, where they drank whiskey and played Sun Ra records and she danced with them and swayed her hips and, after one of the men passed out, gave gentle kisses to the other until the weed was gone. The music was not hummable, was not really even danceable, but was excellent to kiss to. And it was fun until the guy unbuttoned his pants and said, “Would you do something with your mouth?” That the guy couldn’t even ask for it correctly, couldn’t even name the thing he wanted, was, she thought, pathetic. He seemed surprised when she said so. “I thought you were liberated,” he said, by which he meant that she should indulge all his various wants and like it.
Such were the expectations of the New Left.
She still felt the pot in her body, in her legs, the way her legs felt like stilts, harder and thinner and longer than normal sober legs. Step after westward step, through downtown and back to Circle, Alice walked a clownish walk that made her love her body, for she could feel her body working, could feel its various wonderful parts.
She was testing her legs when the cop saw her. She was hopscotching past an alley where his car was hidden and he called out to her: “Hey, honey, where ya going?”
She stopped. Turned to the voice. It was him. The pig with the ridiculous name: Officer Charlie Brown.
“What you been up to, honey,” he said, “out so late?”
He was large as an avalanche, a big pumpkin-faced enforcer of petty laws—panhandling, littering, jaywalking, curfew. The cops had lately been stopping them for minor infractions, stopping and searching them, looking for anything contraband, anything arrestable. Most of the pigs were idiots, but this one was different. This one was interesting.
“Come here,” he said. He leaned on the hood of his police cruiser. One hand on his nightstick. It was dark. The alley was a cave.
“I asked you a question,” he said. “Whatcha doing?”
She walked to him and stopped just out of arm’s reach, stared up at him, at the great imposing mountain of him. His uniform was a light blue, almost baby blue, and short-sleeved, too small for him. His chest was shaped like a keg and strained against the buttons. He had a light blond mustache that you couldn’t really see unless you were up this close. His badge was a five-pointed silver star directly over his heart.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just going home.”
“Going home?”
“Yes.”
“At five in the morning? Just walking home? Not doing anything illegal?”
Alice smiled. He was obeying the script she’d given him. One of the few things she admired about Officer Brown was his persistence.
She said, “Fuck off, pig.”
He lunged for her then, grabbed her neck and brought her to him, to his face, pressed his nose into her scalp and sniffed loudly right above her ear.
“You smell like weed,” he said.
“So what?”
“So I’m gonna have to search you now.”
“You need a warrant for that,” she said, and he laughed a laugh that was admittedly pretty fake-sounding, but she appreciated it, that he was trying. He spun her around and pinned her arm behind her back and walked her deeper into the alley, then forced her over the trunk of his cruiser. They’d been through this once before, only a couple of nights ago, and had gotten this far, bending her over the car, before Brown broke character. He had shoved her onto the car a little too forcefully—to be honest, she had let him shove her, had gone slack at the key moment—and when her cheek met the metal she was momentarily dazed, which is exactly what she wanted, a brief escape from her head.
But it had scared him, her face hitting the car like that. She bruised almost immediately. “Little piggy!” he had cried, and she admonished him for using their safe word, had to explain to him that their safe word was reserved for her only and it didn’t even make sense for him to use it. And he shrugged and looked at her penitently and promised to be better next time.
Here is what Alice had asked of Officer Brown: She wanted him to find her some random night when she didn’t expect it and act like he didn’t know her and certainly not act like they’d been carrying on a summer-long affair, just act like she was another hippie freak and he was another brutal cop and he’d take her into a dark alley and bend her over the trunk of his police cruiser and rip off her clothes and have his way with her. That is what she wanted.
Officer Brown was deeply perturbed at this request. He wondered why on earth she would want that. Why not have some more normal backseat sex? And she gave him the only answer that mattered: Because she had already tried normal backseat sex, but had yet to try this.
Her face against the car now, and Brown’s hand pressing hard against her neck—it seemed like he was going to go through with it this time, and she was not exactly enjoying it, but more like hoping she would enjoy it very
soon, if he kept it going.
Officer Brown, meanwhile, was terrified.
Terrified of hurting her, but also terrified of not hurting her, or not hurting her in the correct way, not being good enough for her, terrified that if he wasn’t good enough at the weird kinky things she wanted from him that she’d up and leave him. That was the biggest terror of them all, that Alice would lose interest and go.
This was what it was like for him, every time. The more of these encounters Officer Brown had with Alice, the more afraid and paranoid he became about losing her. He knew this about himself. He could feel it happening, but he could not stop it. After each new encounter, the thought of no longer encountering her became more devastating and impossible to bear.
This is what he called them, privately, to himself, in his head: encounters.
Because the word sounded passive and almost accidental. You “encounter” a stranger in an alley. You “encounter” a bear in the woods. It sounded like it happened by chance and certainly not in the elaborately premeditated way the encounters actually occurred. The word encounter was a word that did not sound like he was aggressively on-purpose cheating on his wife, which of course he was doing. Willingly. And often.
When he thought about his wife discovering his secret, he was ashamed. When he imagined what it would be like admitting to his wife what he’d been doing and how he’d been doing it in such a well-thought-out, behind-your-back way, he felt full of shame and disgust, yes, but also a kind of recrimination and justifiable anger and a sense that he was beyond reproach and driven into Alice’s arms by a wife who, since the birth of their daughter, had changed.
Changed drastically and fundamentally. It began when his wife started calling him “Daddy,” and so he called her “Mommy,” and he thought it was a joke, a game between them, trying to get used to these new roles, like the way she called him “Husband” all through their honeymoon. It seemed so suddenly formal and exotic and strange. “Would you join me for dinner, my dearest husband?” she would ask each night for a week after they were married, and they would fall giggling onto the bed feeling much too young and immature for names like Husband and Wife. And so he figured in the hospital in the days after his daughter was born and they called each other Mommy and Daddy that it was similarly comic and temporary.
Only that was five years ago and she was still calling him Daddy. And he was still calling her Mommy. She never explicitly asked to go by that name, but rather slowly stopped responding to other names. It was weird. He’d call to her from the other room: “Honey?” Nothing. “Sweetie?” Nothing. “Mommy?” And she’d appear, as if that was the only word she could still hear. He found it creepy she’d refer to him as Daddy, but this remained, for the most part, unsaid, except for furtive suggestions here and there: “You don’t have to call me that if you don’t want to,” he’d say, to which she’d respond, “But I want to.”
Plus there was also the matter of sex, which was not happening, at all, sex between them, a fact he chalked up to the family’s now regular sleeping arrangement, which involved their daughter sleeping with them, between them, in their bed. He did not remember agreeing to this. It simply happened. And he suspected it wasn’t even for his daughter’s benefit, this arrangement, but for Mommy’s. That Mommy liked sleeping this way because in the morning their daughter would climb on Mommy and kiss her all over and tell her she was pretty. He got the feeling that Mommy did not want to live without this daily ceremony.
She had in fact trained their daughter to do this.
Not on purpose, not at first. But Mommy had definitely actively ritualized this behavior, which began innocently enough, their daughter waking up one morning and saying all puffy-eyed and bleary, “You’re pretty, Mommy.” It was cute. Mommy hugged her and said thank you. Innocent. But then a few mornings later Mommy asked “Do you still think I’m pretty?,” and the daughter responded enthusiastically “Yes!” That wasn’t weird enough to say anything about—just enough to note, quietly, in his head. Then again a few mornings after that, when Mommy asked the daughter “What do we say to Mommy in the morning?,” and the daughter said, reasonably, “Good morning?” And Mommy said no and this quizzing went on until the poor kid got it right: “You’re so pretty!”
That was kind of weird.
Weirder still the next week when Mommy actively punished the daughter for not saying she was pretty, withholding the pancakes and cartoons that were their Saturday-morning tradition and instead directing the daughter to clean her room. And when the daughter asked through her disappointed tears why this was happening and Mommy said “You didn’t tell me I was pretty this morning,” he thought it was very weird indeed.
(It goes without saying that when he told his wife she was pretty, she rolled her eyes and pointed out some new part of her that had lately become wrinkled or fat.)
He began working the night shift. To avoid the cascade of kisses and hollow compliments that had now become the normal and habituated way each day began. He slept during the day, the whole bed to himself. At night, he was on patrol, which is how he encountered Alice.
She was exactly like the rest, at first, memorable only because of the sunglasses she wore in the middle of the night. He found her out walking and asked her to produce identification. Predictably, she could not. So he cuffed her and pressed her against his car and searched her for drugs, which about one in three of these types usually carried, stupidly, right in their pockets.
But she carried nothing—no drugs, no money, no makeup, no keys. Homeless, he guessed. He took her to the lockup, dropped her off, and promptly forgot about her.
She was at the exact same spot the next night.
At exactly the same time. Dressed exactly the same: green military jacket, sunglasses worn most of the way down her nose. She wasn’t walking this time, just standing there on the sidewalk like she was waiting for him.
He pulled up and asked, “What are you doing?”
“Breaking curfew,” she said. She glared at him, stood stiff and straight, a pose of abstract anger and resistance.
“You want to go through this again?” he said.
“Do what you’re gonna do, pig.”
So again he cuffed her, pressed her against the car. Again she was carrying nothing. All the way to the lockup she stared at him. Most people slumped against the door, defeated, almost like they were trying to hide. Not this girl. It unnerved him, her stare.
The next night he saw her again, at the same spot, the same time. She stood leaning against the wall of a brick building, one knee up, hands in her pockets.
“Hey there,” he said.
“Hey, pig.”
“Breaking curfew again?”
“Among other things.”
He felt a little afraid of her. He was not accustomed to people reacting this way. The freaks and hippies were unbearable, of course, but they could be trusted to act rationally. They did not want to go to jail. They did not want to be hassled. But this girl, she emitted a kind of danger, a flirtatiousness and fierceness that he found alien and unpredictable. Maybe even thrilling.
“You gonna cuff me?” she said.
“Are you causing trouble?”
“I could. If that’s what it took.”
The next night was his night off, but he found someone to trade shifts. She was there again, same spot. He drove past her once, then again. She followed him with her eyes. She was openly laughing at him by the third time around the block.
The first time they screwed it was in the backseat of his police cruiser. Alice was at her usual spot, at the usual time. She’d simply pointed at the alley and told him to park the car there. He did. It was dark, the car almost completely hidden. She told him to get in the backseat. He did. He was not used to taking orders from girls, from hippie street freaks especially. He felt briefly resistant to the whole thing, but that evaporated as soon as she got into the backseat with him and closed the door and removed his belt, which fell loudly to the floor, ho
lding as it was his radio and nightstick and gun. A great thud and clatter on the floorboards. And Alice didn’t even try to kiss him. She didn’t seem to want to, though he kissed her—it seemed gentlemanly, to kiss her, to stroke her face with his fingers, a gesture that he hoped conveyed thoughtfulness and human affection, that he wanted more than simply what was in her pants, except that what was in her pants was mostly what he wanted, at that moment very much so. She yanked at his slacks and all thoughts of his wife and the guys back at the station and the superintendent and the mayor and the slim chance of somebody walking by and seeing them, they were all obliterated.
They didn’t have sex “together” so much as Alice had vigorous sex with him while he lay there also participating.
Afterward, exiting the car, she turned and smiled her sly smile and said, “See you around, pig.” And for the rest of his shift he obsessed over what she meant by that. See you around. Not “See you next time.” Not “See you tomorrow.” Not even “See you later.” She’d said See you around, which was the least forward-thinking, most noncommittal thing she could have said.
Each encounter followed roughly the same basic emotional pattern: massive relief that Alice had returned, followed by ceaseless worry that she’d never come back.
And he needed her to come back. Desperately. Harrowingly. It felt like his chest and guts were held together by a single wooden clothespin that she could remove by simply not showing up. He imagined arriving at their usual spot and not finding her anymore and feeling his insides burst like a water balloon. The rejection would be terminal. He knew it. This led him to a morally questionable but, in his mind, totally necessary employment request: He asked to be assigned to the Red Squad.
After which his full-time job became to spy on Alice, which was really excellent because he could both keep track of where she was at all times and, even better, have a somewhat-plausible excuse if anyone found out about them. He wasn’t having an affair; he was undercover.