Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  “Are you saying he did it?”

  “Funny thing. Johnny was under investigation at the time. All the records the state probers wanted were lost.”

  “What was he being investigated for?”

  “Conflict of interest. Obtaining state grants for the town to build roads through land he owned, to dredge the harbor for a fancy new marina built by his friends. The very site selected belonged to his wife. Sweet woman. Spent the better part of every year in a mental hospital.” Gordon seemed to drift off into the past. He was silent for several minutes. “Saltash might have had thousands more acres of protected land if it wasn’t for old Johnny. Powerful man. His connections ran high up. You didn’t fuck with him. He could be very good to you or come down hard. Two sides of the same coin …” His voice trailed off.

  “How is he?” I asked Judith when Gordon finally went to bed.

  “I’m worried,” she said.

  “For a while he seemed so lively.”

  “He’s getting a lot of pleasure out of your campaign. He’s having fun.”

  “Isn’t that odd? Why does this backward little place mean anything to a man as successful as Gordon?”

  “Gordon knows that small places are just as real as large ones. Since he’s ‘succeeded,’ as you call it, on a grand scale, he knows what’s at stake here: the well-being of the land, the local economy. He has high hopes for you, David. He thinks you’re bright. He told me you have a sharp instinctive intelligence.”

  “That’s a very kind thing to say.”

  She smiled. “Kind? It’s something that his graduate students would have killed to hear.”

  We finished the dishes together quietly. Before things had changed, I would have taken my sweater off, made myself comfortable. Now I felt like a guest. “I forgot to ask about the tide,” I said when we finished.

  Judith cocked her head, as if to consider an interesting ploy. “Are you asking if you have to stay or if you can?”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Good.” She kissed my nose. “What’s wrong?”

  “Why do you put up with me and her?” I asked.

  “You and Crystal? Is she very much on your mind?”

  “No,” I said quickly. Unless I was in bed with her, no. Even when sex was over, when she’d offered me something I’d never dared ask a woman to do, we lay side by side without a thing to connect us except what we’d just done. So we did it again.

  “How well do you really know her, David?”

  “Why? Do you think she’s hiding something?”

  “Most people are, David. Some more than others.”

  One afternoon, when business was slow and the back lot was alive with insects and wildflowers, I asked Laramie if he wanted to play catch. He was sweeping up the stock room in his quiet, meticulous way, seeming content, but I felt like a sweatshop foreman keeping children from the light. “I thought you liked baseball?”

  As if annoyed with the interruption, he continued sweeping. “I don’t have a baseball glove.”

  “Use mine.”

  “Too big,” he said.

  “Well, you’re going to get one soon, right? For your birthday. Your dad’s sending it.”

  “No, he’s not. He never sends me anything.”

  “He sent you a tape deck last year. I saw it.”

  “My mom got it.”

  “That’s not what she told me.”

  “Yeah, she did. Her handwriting was on the box.”

  “Maybe he sent it to her and she rewrapped it.”

  Laramie swept the dirt into a perfect conical pile. “She says my dad sends presents, but she does it. ’Cause she wants me to think he loves me.”

  Most nights, after Crystal left work, she had both kids to care for. She did the shopping and all her other errands, the laundry, gave the kids supper, cleaned up afterwards, supervised their homework and put them to bed. Two nights a week she came straight from work to my house with clothes for the next day. She loved those nights, she told me. She loved having supper on the table in my house with its shabby furniture and cold drafts, because, she said, “I feel like somebody wants us.”

  That night, as she usually did, she threw the door back and spread her arms wide. “Where’s my guys?” I had brought Laramie home with me from the nursery.

  She gathered Laramie up in the folds of her coat and kissed his sallow face until he squirmed and turned pink. Me she dragged behind the closet door and shot her tongue into my mouth murmuring, “Thank you, thank you, thank you, for saving my life.” Then the kid and I settled down with her at the kitchen table.

  “This is great,” she said. “What is it?”

  “Obviously not too good if you can’t tell.”

  “Beef stew! We made it,” Laramie said.

  “You two made this? No sir. I don’t believe it. It’s takeout from a fancy restaurant.”

  Laramie’s laughter was as pure as water splashing on a ledge of slate.

  “I really do not believe you made this,” she said to me with a wink. “Is there something you want?” Then, sotto voce, “Because I think you’re going to get it.”

  Laramie studied his mother, not quite understanding the sudden huskiness in her voice, the tip of tongue brushing her upper lip, but trying to.

  “So what’d you do in school today?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know. Nothin’.”

  “And you, Daddy? Nothin’? You guys.” She shook her head. “Well, I have good news.”

  Because she said it quickly, because it blew across the table and was gone, we continued our conversation. Although I played at being Daddy two nights a week; although I was often mistaken for Laramie’s father by shopkeepers and placed in that role by school officials beside themselves in the presence of a man of appropriate age, a working man, taking an interest in a child, I was not Laramie’s father. In his presence I watched the years I’d lost with my own boy and imagined taking Laramie down to Florida with me the next time I went to see Terry. I cared a lot for Laramie. In my way, I loved him. But every time Crystal cast me as Daddy—and I believe she did it when I wasn’t around—she created expectations that could only break his heart.

  “There’s a party after work on Friday. For Mr. Lynch’s birthday. I know. I know.” Crystal deepened her voice. “He’s the evil Darth Vader. But he asked you especially to come.”

  “Well, send my regrets.”

  “Can’t you put politics aside? He’s been very nice to me, David. He may give me a recommendation to law school.”

  “Johnny Lynch can be very nice when he wants something.”

  “Maybe you’ll meet some new people. Isn’t that what politicians are supposed to do? Show up and mingle?”

  “I doubt anyone in his own office would vote against his candidate.”

  Her voice became liquid sugar. “That’s not what the girls say. They’ve seen you in the parking lot, David. They think you’re adorable.”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t make it on Friday.”

  “No, of course not, that’s not my day, is it? It’s Judith’s.”

  I looked at the clock, the wall, anything but the little family I could only seem to disappoint. Crystal took a second helping of stew and wiped the gravy up with stale bread. Laramie’s eyes moved from one of us to the other. He barely seemed to breathe.

  I was in bed pretending sleep when Crystal crept under the covers and kissed my nose. “I want you to know you’re the sweetest, most wonderful boyfriend I’ve ever had.”

  “Except that I see another woman.”

  “That does hurt me. But I know you care about me. We have plans together. For me to go to law school. That’s what you, and only you, convinced me I could do. And I believed you. I believe in myself because of you.” Crystal turned on the beside lamp. She was wearing a black nylon nightgown. Crystal complained about putting on weight since she’d moved East, but if she had, it only made her breasts bigger and more attractive to me. I had no particular reaction
to the small roll of flesh that swelled over her skirt waistband. Her face was round and luscious. “Look, David, you don’t know where I came from. My ex didn’t want Laramie. When I told him I was pregnant, he—” She stopped abruptly.

  “He what?”

  “He got very angry. I thought I would lose the baby.”

  “You never told me.”

  “It’s behind me now, and you’re the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  “At least I have you three nights a week. I know where I can call you if I need you. Liam used to go off for weeks at a time. If the baby got sick, I was on my own. Sometimes he’d have wads of money, stacks of bills. But not for me.”

  “From what?” Dealing drugs? Gambling? Where did a guy get stacks of bills?

  “I didn’t ask questions. But then it would be gone as fast as it came.” She yawned heavily. “You’re great, David, for me and for Laramie.”

  “Compared to Liam.”

  “Compared to anyone.” She yawned again. “We better do it before I fall asleep.”

  “We don’t have to do it. Not if you’re tired.”

  “But you want to, don’t you?”

  “You were up at five this morning. You got two kids off to school, worked a full day and then did the laundry. We can skip a night.”

  “You really are the best man in the world.” She set the alarm and kissed me. “I’ll make it up to you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Yes, I do.” She curled into the crook of my arm and fell asleep within seconds.

  The alarm rang in what seemed the middle of the night. Crystal ran off to the bathroom. I was still fumbling with the clock when she returned. “We don’t have to get up for another hour.”

  “But you’re seeing her today,” Crystal said.

  “So what?” The room was cold. A sharp light knifed into the room from the hallway we kept lit for Laramie. I smelled perfume and toothpaste as she crept beneath the sheets. “You want to make love? Now?”

  “I want to fuck you dry.”

  I struggled to get to the toilet but she pushed my shoulders back. “You have to piss, don’t you?” She squeezed my balls. “You feel like you’re going to burst.” She knew men’s bodies, the pressure of necessity and desire.

  “Just stay here,” she said, and began licking me, feathering my cock, lips and tongue, drawing the edge of her teeth across the shaft, giving me pleasure to the point of pain. “I’m going to come,” I said, at which she tugged my balls and swallowed me down the tunnel of her throat. She threw her leg over my head and buried my face in her crotch. Smelling of piss and sex, night sweat and traces of perfume, she ground herself to the beat of a primal tune. Feeling me shudder, she scuttled off and presented her ass. “Shove it in deep,” she said. I fell into her, quivering. I melted. I ran my palms up her thighs, the plane of her back, her nipples, her throat. Her mouth. She bit my fingers and we collapsed, liquid and skin, into the twisted sheets. “Do you want to do it again?” she said.

  “Are you crazy?” I was gasping. Breath and strength had left my body. “Do you?”

  Her face half in darkness, half light, her voice cool in spite of the sweat that glistened on her breasts and upper lip, she said: “I can’t send you to her with anything left.”

  JOHNNY

  Through his office window Johnny watched Crystal running out to her car in the rain—a bit of thigh showing as the wind lifted her skirt—settling herself in the driver’s seat, fixing her hair in the rearview mirror. He found himself smiling. Women were all the same. As if she wouldn’t have to leave the car in the same pouring rain and get mussed up before anyone saw her. He heard her try the engine, try it again and again until the starter motor screeched and she banged the steering wheel with her fist. As she struggled to open the hood, he ran out with his umbrella, blown inside out by the northeast wind. “Come inside! Come inside now!” he shouted.

  Crystal hadn’t heard him and jumped, startled, when he appeared behind her. “It won’t start!”

  “Go back inside and we’ll call the garage.”

  “They won’t come in a storm like this.”

  “They will if I call them. Now get under this umbrella.” She resisted his grip but gave up and followed him inside. “That’s all I need,” he said, “you getting sick and nobody knowing how to work the damned computers.”

  “I have to pick up my son.” She shook out her hair.

  Johnny was on the phone with the garage. Whatever idiot they’d left in the office had no idea to whom he was speaking. Johnny gave him the address and hoped for the best. “Now sit down next to the radiator and dry off. The office is closed for the day. Relax.”

  Crystal seemed uneasy, but no more than he was, he supposed. He hadn’t spent ten minutes alone with her since the day of the interview. He didn’t want to be caught staring, an old man at a pretty girl. But he could enjoy a glimpse of her profile, the little turned-up nose, the lovely shadow of her earrings against her cheek. As her clothing dried, he smelled roses, probably her perfume. “Let’s get you something warming to drink. Would you like that? Would you like a scotch?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, as if frightened. “I can’t drink!”

  “Tea then. I suppose I can still boil water.” As Johnny lumbered around the staff kitchenette, he saw her watching the window. “We’ll give the tow truck the time it takes to drink a cup of tea. If they don’t show up, I’ll give you a ride.”

  “You’re very nice,” she said. “Thank you. Every time it rains, my damned old car gives me trouble.”

  “It’s hard, isn’t it? My mother worked all her life,” Johnny said. “But people had their families around in those days, cousins, grandmothers.”

  “I get help sometimes,” she said. “I have a roommate.”

  A roommate. She was raising a child, for Christ’s sake, and she lived like a stewardess. “And the boy’s father?” He set down the cups and searched for the sugar, asking absently, “He doesn’t live in the area?”

  “Wouldn’t much matter if he did,” Crystal said, more amused than angry. “Liam might have been a good father, if he had ever grown up himself.”

  “I see that all too often, I have to say.”

  “But you would have liked him,” she said. “He was born in Ireland.”

  “Where? Do you know?”

  “Dublin. He had an Irish music band. They were really good. We traveled all up and down the coast in a Volkswagen bus. Going to a different coffeehouse every night and just getting by, making friends everywhere we stopped.” He heard a wistful, almost songlike quality in her voice, like his own when he was reading to children. “Once in Lake Tahoe we got arrested for camping, and Liam took out his fiddle and got us off.”

  “Sounds like a charmer.”

  “Oh, you don’t know the half. He sure got everything he wanted from me.”

  “But not a baby.”

  “How’d you guess? Once Laramie was born, Liam had to choose between his music and his family.”

  “But your boyfriend, dear, if you can bear the questions of a nosy old romantic, is there no chance of wedding bells? I see how David looks at you.”

  She responded with a self-mocking scowl. “Except I’m not the only one he’s looking at.”

  Johnny expected her to turn away again, to bolt, having offered too much of herself. But she sat quietly, staring into her cup. Johnny sighed. “Two paths in a yellow wood. If he’s a good man, he’ll know which one to take.”

  “But he is,” she insisted. “She just puts ideas in his head.” Everyone in this office knew who she was.

  “Dear, I’ve fought Judith Silver for a decade.” He felt Crystal’s attention. “She’s the worst kind of adversary. She fights on moral grounds, tries to persuade you you’re acting out of selfish motives, when she and her husband are the most corrupt couple this town has ever seen. The drug parties, the sexual display … Gordon Stone has an FB
I file as thick as a volume of the encyclopedia. It’s not hard to imagine a good man getting mixed up with her. We men are all weak. A woman like that comes along and tells us what we want to hear.”

  “I think it’s the election,” Crystal said. “He didn’t know her before she asked him to run.”

  “Didn’t he?” This was interesting. Johnny hadn’t realized they’d actually recruited the boy. He’d thought David one of the pretty young people they were said to share, to pass between them in bed. But this made perfect sense. David Greene. Local hero. Angry young man. Out of town for almost fifteen years. No political history. A clean slate. He had underestimated Gordon. However slow on the uptake and soft-spoken, David was an excellent choice, far better than his own old witch. He was sorry he hadn’t gotten to him first. “You see, they simply have no values, these people. David is a man who was trying to do the right thing by a woman and a child, and they lure him away from his family. I bet you don’t see enough of him, do you?”

  “Two nights a week. David says after the election he’ll have more time.”

  Johnny saw the tow truck circling the parking lot. He had to work fast. “Not if he wins, believe me. Meetings every night, calls about everything from where a yellow line gets painted down Main Street to who gets to be fire chief. You see, people like Gordon and Judith could never get elected themselves …”

  The tow truck sounded its horn. But Crystal didn’t move. “Look at that,” he said. “One beaten up Olds with its hood unlatched, one brand-new Ford, and the idiot can’t tell which needs help. Hold on, dear.” He ran outside to instruct the driver and at the same time take care of the bill.

  Back inside, he continued, “Gordon Stone and his people have been waiting for a puppet for years. Once they attach their strings, they own him. Believe me, as much as he might want to, he won’t have time for a family. God bless my dear wife, she would tell you I didn’t.”

  “But David doesn’t think he has a chance to win.”

  “That’s not what I hear. People like him. The fishermen go for their man, the environmentalists for theirs. It splits the vote. I think he stands a hell of a chance. Come. Get your coat. Looks like our genius out there has your car started. What’s the matter, dear?”