Beautiful Revolutionary

by Laura Elizabeth Woollett

  ‘Well,’ Evelyn says carefully, ‘I guess we could go to Lake Mendocino this weekend. We might not get a chance to go again this summer, with all our Saturdays on construction crew. At least, not together, anyway.’

  ‘Work … Saturdays?’

  ‘Yes, Lenny, Saturdays. My God, do I need to start sending you memos?’ Evelyn shakes her head, but his shirtless chest seems to distract her from being truly mad. ‘It’s a minimal commitment. All the able-bodied members will be doing it, Jim included, and he’s obviously busier than anyone.’ She smiles. ‘I hope you listen to the construction crew leaders better than this. You don’t want to, I don’t know, cut off a hand or something.’

  2.

  They pack the station wagon and head to the lake around noon that Saturday, with their hats and sunglasses, their towels and books, a basket full of sunscreen and picnic foods, and it’s all very A Summer Place in Evelyn’s mind, very lightweight and bourgeois, and reminds her intensely of the weekend she lost her virginity in Santa Cruz. That was the year she was living away from her parents, with family friends in Salinas, finishing twelfth grade where she began it rather than following her father to the next parish. She was almost eighteen. The boy was called Percy. She has to grapple for the name, but it’s there. Percy. His face isn’t. Only that he had dimples and was good-looking in a bland sort of way. He was someone else’s friend on the weekend trip. A whole group of them went, white girls and white boys with wicker bags and convertibles. He courted her for a whole day, up close and from a distance; smiled at her when he caught a football and sat with her at lunch and asked her questions about her family and interests. Later, when it was dark and everyone a little drunk and the two of them walked to the sand dunes, probably neither of them was expecting anything more than some heavy petting. She remembers lying on her back. How soft the sand was. How dark the sky. Looking past Percy at the stars and thinking, Am I really too good for this? Am I really so pure?

  It was giddy and hot and hurt a bit, but it didn’t make her bleed. She wondered about that afterward, whether there was something wrong with her for not bleeding, something insensitive and unfeminine. She and Percy stayed on good terms for about a month and went out a couple of times, to a concert and to a dance, but both times she had treated him with blithe friendliness, like a visiting cousin. By the end of the second date, he had been completely subdued, and never called her back for a third, though he said he would. A little while later, she found out he was dating another girl, and the news left her feeling disproportionately rebuffed, used-up, so that she wept in private and swore off boys for the rest of the summer. Then she was a freshman in college and then JFK was dead, and it all seemed connected somehow to the same misery, which stretched across her life as stickily intricate as a spider web.

  Evelyn sits in the evergreen shade with her book. She won’t get sunburned again. She watches Lenny bounce to the lip of the lake, wade in to his knees, and look back at her, then take to the water. The next time she looks up, he’s just a dot in the middle of the lake, near the boats. If he were drowning, would she notice? She returns to her book, and later sees Lenny sitting in the shallows, trailing his fingers through the water like it’s a rare substance, apparently deep in thought.

  It isn’t love when two animals of the same species sniff each other out and mate successfully, but it’s seen as a good thing nonetheless. Evelyn and Lenny are of the same species. Percy, too, had been of the same species, and every other young man she went out with and withheld sex from between her freshman year and her exchange year in Bordeaux. There was a certain dry pleasure in withholding what she knew to be good and easily obtainable; in going to the trouble of putting on nylons and ratting her hair and dancing in high heels, and then giving absolutely nothing. In her own way, Evelyn lived ascetically, though she ‘had fun’ and ‘dated a lot’. She sublimated her desires. She got good grades. She had many female friends, who she talked with incessantly about women’s rights and whose menstrual cycles fell into sync with hers. And perhaps once every six months, she would drink a little more than usual and let some quiet, attractive fellow take her home and tell no one about it, with the hope that he wouldn’t either. For though she wasn’t ashamed, it would’ve looked bad for the daughter of the minister-on-campus to have a ‘reputation’.

  It would’ve looked bad for the daughter of the minister-on-campus to be anything but what she appeared to be.

  She is reading Camus. She is wearing a black bathing suit, with full black briefs and a black bra. She likes the way reading in French makes her mind feel impenetrable, and the time lapses between one scene and the next. Lenny is there, and then he is not. The trail up from the beach is empty, and then there are two teenagers walking along it; a boy and a girl, short-legged in shorts, with towels slung over their shoulders. Evelyn looks a little closer and sees that the girl has straight black hair and golden skin like an Asian; is an Asian; is probably, on that assumption, Temple, and now that she thinks of it, may actually be one of Jim Jones’s children. The boy and girl seem to sense her gaze and look up, and the boy calls out from the trail, and Evelyn waves and wonders about Jim, if he is near. She feels a stab of desire, involuntary as a fart, and is embarrassed. She reads some more Camus, and then Lenny is on dry land, toweling himself off and wearing Wayfarers.

  ‘Who were those people?’ he says.

  ‘Temple people, I think.’

  Lenny nods and shows no further curiosity. He sits on his towel and interprets the title of her book aloud, ‘Happy Death’, then looks proud of himself for understanding French. He plays with the grass and after a couple of minutes, he says, ‘The water was good.’ And, not for the first time, Evelyn thinks to herself that this is the man she is married to.

  Even though the thought of running into Jim Jones and his family recurs throughout the afternoon, it’s still a shock for Evelyn to see the messy, many-colored lot of them, loading up a big blue Pontiac in the syrupy end-of-day light. Boys, maybe four of them, all chirping happily, and the smallest of them a black boy, very cute, following after Jim Jones, and Jim Jones with a dog under one arm, a decent-sized sheepdog she wouldn’t have thought could be carried like that. Other dogs, too, one of them nosing an empty Coke can, and collapsible sun-chairs, a collapsed umbrella. Jim Jones notices the dog with the can and frowningly says something to one of the white boys, who trots over dutifully and takes the can away and places it in the trash. The teenagers from before are there, too, and what about Jim Jones’s wife, Rosaline? At first, Evelyn thinks she must be absent, but then she notices a plain-pale face with cat-eye sunglasses, a sleeveless blouse, a hive of faded reddish-blond hair, a homey female voice running like a creek beneath the commotion. Why is he with her? The thought comes unbidden and painful, and Evelyn understands that she’s a terrible person and Rosaline isn’t, that’s why.

  ‘Hey, look,’ Lenny says from by the trunk he’s just prised open. ‘That’s Jim.’

  Evelyn turns to her beautiful shirtless boy-husband with a smile she hopes is nonchalant and nods, so her still-damp ponytail bobs. Her black bathing suit, though mostly dry, is patched with dampness, and the man’s shirt she’s wearing over it has two comical dark spots where her nipples are. She passes the basket and towels to Lenny and he puts them in the trunk. A breeze shakes the evergreens. Evelyn shivers. Lenny slams the trunk, comes up beside her, and puts an arm around her shoulder.

  Together they watch Jim Jones and his family.

  After a while, Evelyn becomes conscious that they’ve been watching too long, and that Lenny wants to speak to Jim Jones as well, but is feeling the same shyness she is. Lenny likes Jim, she knows: likes him like a foreigner likes Mickey Mouse; has said he is ‘cool, like a cowboy or Elvis’. She turns to Lenny with a helpless shrug, and they laugh and wordlessly agree to get in the station wagon without making themselves known, and, fastidiously, they shut the doors and wind down the windows and reverse.
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  But … Maybe it’s the fact that they have to pass the Pontiac anyway, or maybe it’s that most of Jim Jones’s family are already in it, only the teenagers and Jim still chatting, and the black boy on Jim’s shoulders, and one smiling dog. Or maybe it’s Jim himself, how good and dazzling yet somehow reassuringly normal he looks, barefoot and wearing shorts, nice tanned feet, nice tanned muscular legs. Evelyn feels a spike of giddy entitlement and, without really thinking about it, she leans out the window and purrs, ‘Just look at that bourgeois family.’

  Jim Jones turns, grins hugely, doesn’t miss a beat.

  ‘Lousy sonofabitchin’ longhairs, get the hell outta here!’

  3.

  Their life has come to revolve around Peoples Temple in strange, small ways. Friends from before are ‘non-Temple friends’ and their calls not always returned. Food Evelyn makes is often ‘Temple food’, for potlucks or midweek meetings, or sometimes cakes or cookies to be sold. When they get in the station wagon to go anywhere, there is always three minutes of meditation first, and the one time Lenny forgets to do this he almost runs over that white cat. When Evelyn is offered a position instructing girls’ P.E. at Evergreen High, in addition to the French teaching job she secured even before graduation, she comes home starry-eyed and gushing, ‘I can’t wait to finally be earning some real money for the Temple!’ When Lenny is told of the ‘groovy night classes’ Jim Jones teaches a couple of towns over, he doesn’t like the idea of being away from Evelyn, but she says he should go, says it’s important not to neglect his mind with all the days spent with crazy people and he’ll no doubt learn a lot, can come home and tell her what he’s learned and save her the trouble of going herself. So on Thursdays, Lenny packs a change of clothes and drives thirty minutes from the mental hospital to the high school in Moontown, and for two hours or usually more, he’ll sit in the over-filled classroom and try to follow as Jim Jones zips from topic to topic: Mao Zedong, the Spanish Inquisition, reincarnation, the execution of the Rosenbergs. Mostly Lenny likes the classes and the people in them — at least half of whom are Temple and the rest hippies or rednecks from all over the county — but the long hours are difficult and he has trouble articulating anything he learns to Evelyn and on these nights they never have sex.

  Saturdays are no longer days of leisure but Temple days as much as Sundays, days for Temple construction work, which isn’t easy for a Berkeley Hills boy unaccustomed to physical labor and not so good at taking instructions. The old Temple people from Indiana are often common people, who’ve made their livings on farms or in factories, and are quick to shove Lenny away or take the tools right out of his hands when he does something wrong, and will sometimes even cuss at him — folksy cusses like for-pete’s-sake or goshdarnit, but their facial expressions mean, snarling.

  Evelyn never seems to mess up. He sees her from a distance working and talking in an old shirt of his and wonders how she does it.

  Late in July, Evelyn turns twenty-three, and Lenny is proud of his pretty smart wife, so grown-up, always growing. Her birthday is observed early as part of the Temple’s communal July-births celebration, a barbecue after one of those hardworking Saturdays, but he would like to get her something nice. So he calls her parents in Davis and speaks for a long time with her mother, whose name is Margaret and who knows better than anyone the sorts of things Evelyn likes. They talk about books, blouses, a delicate but practical wristwatch so Evelyn can keep time when she starts teaching, but in the end, they agree on some earrings: Mexican silver like on their honeymoon, and with little dangling roses. When he describes them to Margaret, she says yes, silver roses, how Evelyn.

  ‘I mean, they’re lovely of course,’ Evelyn says on the morning of her birthday, having unwrapped the tiny jewelry box, ‘But I meant it when I said I don’t want you wasting money on me. I’d rather help the Temple than accumulate material vanities.’

  She proceeds to tell him emphatically not to get her anything for their first wedding anniversary in August, that she won’t get him anything, and he feels hurt, disconcerted. Yet she does wear the earrings, seems to like them and touch them frequently, and looking at her bare neck and pinned hair, he thinks she is even more beautiful than when he used to see her around campus, walking around like a rare thing that he would never know.

  ‘He is bright in his own way, it’s just not a lot comes out and not a lot gets through.’

  ‘Mmm-hmm. I seen that.’ Jim Jones takes a sip of coffee, swirls it around his mouth, and swallows. ‘Thing is, I think, he been sheltered. By privilege, parents, women. ’Course, I don’t blame you. He got that sweetness, makes a woman protective. Just, ah, honey, don’t be fooled into thinkin’ you got all the power, on account of he depends on you. Male dependency, that’s a form of chauvinism.’

  ‘I never thought of it that way,’ Evelyn says.

  ‘You think on that, darlin’. I want you to think on that, ’cause it’s my feeling … Socialism ain’t about weak takin’ from strong. We all wanna be freethinking, striving individuals, workin’ for the greater good, and Lenny can’t be doin’ that if he’s dependent.’

  ‘Perhaps I’ve been living in bad faith all this time.’ Evelyn looks at her coffee.

  ‘Hell, honey, I know you’re tryin’ hard to live the honest life. Meaningful life. Ain’t easy. Hope you don’t mind me askin’ … Man you with before Lenny, you love him better?’

  ‘I … didn’t realize I had mentioned …’ Evelyn feels her cheeks burning — that characteristic sense of shame that always comes over her when anyone mentions Jean-Claude unexpectedly. ‘I suppose I did, if romantic love is what you mean.’ She sees Jim Jones frown and tries to explain herself. ‘I was younger then, and it was a new world, and he was the first man of any substance I was, well, with. I was vulnerable, I think, to that kind of romantic attachment.’

  ‘You were vulnerable.’ Jim Jones chews over this fact and extrapolates quietly, ‘You allowed yourself to be vulnerable, like never before. He was, uh, older?’

  ‘Not very much older. Twenty-four. I was twenty. I was you-ng.’ Evelyn’s voice cracks queerly, and her face suddenly feels like it might shatter. She is still young.

  ‘He taught me things, showed me things. He was a Marxist, and a very good lover.’ Evelyn takes a deep breath. ‘We read poetry … French poetry. We only spoke French together. I spoke like a child when I met him, but then I was fluent and then it was over. I could have married him.’

  There’s much more Evelyn could say about Jean-Claude, but already she suspects she’s said too much. Jim Jones is silent, staring somewhere behind her. She has bored him. Her problems are boring and insignificant and not real problems. She brushes her hand over the table and makes her voice clear and shallow. ‘It would’ve been a very different life. But it’s not the life I’ve chosen.’

  At this, Jim Jones looks at her. He has his sunglasses tucked into his shirt pocket, and his eyes without them are very kind and very brown, almost Oriental. She likes his eyes. ‘That vulnerability, made you love the Frenchman …’ Jim Jones starts thoughtfully, then smiles like he’s telling a joke and reaches across the table. Her hand. ‘You keep that. You need that. Where you goin’, this life you’ve chosen, you’re gonna need to be vulnerable.’

  Later, after they have risen from the table and he has kissed her, a visiting pastor’s kiss by her ear, nothing more, and he has complimented her earrings — ‘Them’s nice roses there’ — and she has thanked him again for the paperwork — really she likes it, she isn’t suited to being a housewife, anything for the Temple that uses her mind before the summer is up — and after he is gone, and there’s only the white emptiness of the house and empty white cups to be rinsed, cups that remind her of eggshells, and her hands on the cups, that hand he held, and her voice humming softly, a song she doesn’t consciously choose but so appropriate: Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair, His lips are something
wondr’ous fair … And, yes, his hair is black, and, yes, she loves him truly. To the devil on her shoulder, she’s smiling yes, thinking of the man who just left and smiling, for is it so bad to love him? To love this man so wondrous and black-haired? And anyway, she isn’t serious in the thought, can dismiss it any moment, is a freethinking woman with free will. Dismissing it and drying her hands, she sees, outside the kitchen window, the garden where two months ago they were growing marijuana — two months is not a long time, two months is not true love. But love, she loves, she knows, and no angel to whisper otherwise, no punishing lightning bolt, only the garden, which somehow breaks her heart, and the white cups drying upside-down and her white hands on the dishtowel and a sudden muddled feeling in her brain, because of course it’s true, of course she is, and there’s no hope for her: she is in love with Jim Jones.

  4.

  Jean-Claude was twenty-four when Evelyn was twenty. He was a graduate student of economics, rabidly critical of the free market, pale-faced and pale-eyed when rabid, and capable of talking very fast, in sibilant tones that she found both distressing and sexy. Though his mind was rational, he liked poetry; he’d even had a couple of poems published, which he showed to her early on, wandering off while she read them and later only shrugging and saying, ‘N’importe quoi,’ when she tried to talk about them. She didn’t think much of his poems, perhaps didn’t understand them, but she liked the other poets he read to her. Pressing her ear to the bones of his chest and listening to his voice, lazy and lovely and rumbly, reading Louis Aragon. He would play a harmonica sometimes when bored, and the sound of that had a similar effect on her. He would sometimes draw detailed building façades, craggy faces, including once the face of a vagrant he saw outside the Bordeaux-Midi, which was so sensitively rendered she found herself wishing she’d kept it after they broke up.