‘I am a woman, yes,’ she says. ‘A revolutionary woman.’
She is a revolutionary woman. She has been a girl with parents and boys and sadness, yet her true identity is as a revolutionary woman, and as his lover. He tells her that she was once the lover of a great revolutionary leader, and in her own right an educator, an organizer, a reformer of systems. He tells her that she was French and beautiful. She is still beautiful. ‘You’re a beautiful revolutionary,’ he croons. ‘This is your past, your future, your highest being.’
They have been speaking for perhaps three weeks, perhaps three nights a week, for several hours at a time. She has been sleeping little yet performing well in her everyday work, maintaining a distance between her day-self and night-self. On the last night she and Jim speak, she does not sleep at all but remains in the kitchen, making herself coffee and watching the dawn so beautiful, the pink and green dawn, and knows she is exactly where she belongs.
That afternoon, Jim comes to the white house when Lenny isn’t home, and they do everything they want to do.
8.
Lenny has begun to have bad dreams. Strange, imprisoning dreams set in the half-built Temple or the mental hospital or some hybrid of the two. In these dreams, he wants to work but can’t find what he needs, and he has to ask Jim Jones, who is always right there, smiling and clapping his shoulder and telling him things that make no sense: It’s alright. You’ll be a bird soon. Don’t forget your clean uniform.
Evelyn doesn’t appear in the dreams. In fact, she’s conspicuously absent.
Lenny doesn’t want to admit to himself that Evelyn is absent from his waking life, too, especially since he still sees her every day, talks to her, shares a bed with her. He doesn’t want to admit that he has woken several nights and found her side of the bed empty, or heard the phone ringing, just once, a lonely and blood-curdling sound. These things are also dreams, he tells himself.
One night – he is sure it must be a dream. Getting up from the empty bed, he shuffles to the kitchen, and, though his eyes are still weak from sleeping and the kitchen dark, he sees very clearly Evelyn in her nightgown, clutching the phone with tears in her eyes, like a teenager whose boyfriend has just broken up with her. He sees her and he’s certain she sees him, for her wet eyes meet his through the darkness and there’s a flicker of recognition. Yet it isn’t a real kind of recognition, not a human kind, more like she’s a pet cat he’s just disturbed eating the guts of some rodent off a garden path. And he feels nothing human for her, either: only a desire to unsee what he has seen.
Another dreamlike night, she comes to him dressed in her moon-colored nightgown, her breasts beneath it small and peaked like meringues. Her hair is in that rare state of freedom, not a single pin in sight, and it’s long — to her shoulder blades and ticklish in his face, catching in his mouth. Because she’s on him before he fully realizes it, kissing him, touching him, her mouth very wet and bitter tasting. He’s feeling her before he sees her, bitter sucking kisses and hands so bitter cold. Thighs cold, too, the way silk is cold. He’s surprised to feel such coldness. So surprised, like a falling dream, and is it really Evelyn? His Evelyn? Come to him in the night so beautiful and coldly purposeful, like a fantasy he’d be embarrassed to tell her about in the morning? She’s turning him loose with cool, brazen tenderness, and he’s making it easy for her, not resisting and dreamy-hard and wearing only boxer shorts, like every other night. She’s taking him coolly and placing him in that familiar bracing warmth and for some moments there’s only sweetness, the sense of a well-deserved windfall.
Then the awakening. Her hands cold on his chest, her hips and thighs doing all the work. He’s seeing her more clearly, her closed eyes and gritted teeth and body in motion, and what’s striking is he’s never seen her this way before. Never in all their time has he seen such a look on her face, like a riddle, or her eyes so tightly shut yet somehow all-seeing. She’s inflicting pleasure, pinning him down and drawing it out, and the sweetness of it has nothing to do with him. This panting sighing straddling sweetness is neither for or about him, so even in his pleasure there’s a sense of being hoodwinked, like watching a magic show and having his pockets picked.
‘Evelyn …’
He says her name softly, at the same time touching the small of her back. He doesn’t want her to stop, just to come closer — his little dark-haired wife in her moon-colored nightgown; he knows the nightgown, likes it very much. He doesn’t want her to stop and is looking into her eyes to make sure she understands this, caressing her gently through the nightgown. And she understands; seems to. Her eyes gloomy but half-open, her face docile and young-looking. Breathing with him, staring back into his eyes, and how beautiful to have her with him. How beautiful to be woken this way, his little dark-haired wife in the middle of the night, hot for him, wanting him, in love with him.
But the coldness. Such coldness. It shouldn’t come as a surprise and yet it does, so painfully sharp he could burst into tears. She has taken it all away as suddenly as she gave it — those hips, those thighs, that ticklish hair — and like a wounded animal is huddled out of his reach. At the foot of the bed, all elbows and bare feet and faceless dark hair. A cold woman and also a woman feeling the cold, cast out in the night like a serf or a sinner. So cold, just looking at her is like being exiled.
‘Evelyn …’
She doesn’t answer. He wonders briefly if maybe she is dreaming, or was dreaming and has just woken embarrassed of whatever unconscious need made her come to him this way. How he wishes it could all be someone’s dream.
It’s a long time before Evelyn speaks. In a flat voice, without turning.
‘Just go back to sleep, Lenny.’
Around the same time, Lenny hears something funny in one of Jim Jones’s night classes. Actually, he’s always hearing funny things in Jim Jones’s classes — most of them stories told by Jim Jones himself, but some of them stories from his fellow students, hippie and redneck kids who always seem to getting into trouble with hitchhiking, swimming holes, other people’s horses. This particular story comes from some guys Lenny is pals with, Johnny Bronco and Dale Alport: both white and longhaired, both unmarried, both guys who’ve smoked pot enough for it to show in their mannerisms. ‘Hey … You hear about Jim and Lenin?’ Dale, the squeaky-voiced surfer, asks as Lenny slides into his seat, and when Lenny shakes his head in bemusement, long-limbed Johnny slips him an open textbook and points at a photo. ‘You dig?’
The photo shows Lenin before he went bald and grew a moustache. He has high cheekbones and a pug nose. Lenny looks across the room at Jim Jones, who also has high cheekbones and a pug nose. He smiles and shrugs, passes the textbook back.
‘Yeah,’ he says.
They’ve been learning about Lenin in class, his exile in Siberia, his mobilization of the Bolsheviks, the sealed train, the October Revolution. Jim tells the stories so vividly it’s almost like he was there himself, like they’re all there with him, like they’ll never be left out of anything important ever again. ‘We gotta enter the next phase of history,’ Jim confides. ‘This most human phase can only be achieved through the breakdown of capitalist America.’
All through that lesson, the textbook picture is passed around and there are whispers about Jim Jones and Lenin until Jim interrupts the class to make an important announcement.
‘It has come to my attention that there’s been speculation on my, ah, former incarnation.’ Jim looks around the room with the soulful brown eyes of a dog, a bear, Lenin. ‘I say only this: I am a socialist and a man of destiny.’
‘I told you he was Lenin,’ a girl sitting in front of Lenny whispers loudly to her friend. The girl is wearing a see-through blouse but isn’t pretty.
When Lenny returns home late that night, there’s no sound in the kitchen except the ticking of the wall clock and the clacking of Evelyn’s fingers on the typewriter, where she sits so skinny and hunch
ed. He feels sorry for her. He thinks it must be boring to be her. ‘Did you know Jim used to be Lenin?’ he asks her hopefully, but she barely looks up, just says, ‘If you say so, Lenny,’ then wants to see his notes from class, then tells him off for his poor handwriting, then tells him he should go to bed if he’s tired, she will join him later. Lenny doesn’t know how much later it is that Evelyn actually joins him, only that the night is filled with bad dreams, before he wakes up to a cacophony of birds.
Of course, Lenny knows there is only one real explanation for Evelyn’s behavior; has known it perhaps from the first time he came home in the summer and found her having coffee with Jim Jones. And many times after that, Jim Jones inside the house, looking far too at home — his shoes off, his feet up, once even Evelyn coming through the beads with her lips pursed and eyes down and handing Jim his watch. Most times, Jim Jones has a smile and some words for Lenny, so many words sometimes that Evelyn appears to grow bored and drifts out of the room or sits down with her paperwork. Yet there are other times when Jim Jones passes him by with nothing more than a shit-eating grin, a slap on the shoulder, and goes into the night, sunglasses on and a bounce in his step that Lenny wishes he didn’t notice.
But she is still his wife. She still wears her wedding band and the silver rose earrings, and she is still nice to him sometimes, still does his laundry, still surprises him one day by showing him a picture of himself in the latest Temple newsletter with a column underneath that calls him a ‘bright young altruist’, a ‘soldier of peace’, a ‘patron of the insane and mentally handicapped’. She stands right next to him as he reads, her arm resting lightly against his, and he feels his throat closing up, his eyes stinging; it’s the closest they’ve been in weeks.
‘This is really nice, Evelyn,’ he says eventually. ‘And … unexpected.’
‘It shouldn’t be.’ Her voice is soft and reasonable, her face expressionless. ‘You’re doing good work. It deserves to be acknowledged.’
They haven’t been lovers since that strange night in September. It is October, then November. Though her body is no longer his, he hopes at least that she will continue living with him like a sister: mocking him, managing him, leaving her things around the house for him to touch and sniff. He hopes the new Temple building, once completed, will somehow make things better, and looks forward to the grand opening on Thanksgiving weekend. He is proud of what they’ve made together, even if it has destroyed them.
And then, one evening in mid-November, Lenny comes home in his white uniform and finds Jim Jones and Evelyn together, only it isn’t like the other times, because there are other people, too. Men and women from the Temple, and all of them seem to be waiting for him. The men are middle-aged, old Indiana men Lenny is obscurely fearful of: that tall white cop, that tall black assistant pastor, a round bald engineer called Brother Ike. The women, too, are older: Sister Joya, the cop’s corn-fed Doris-Day-lookalike wife; Sister Diane, a lesbian social worker with short chestnut hair and the mouth of a movie starlet. Evelyn is sitting between the two women at the kitchen table and looking almost middle-aged herself; severe, though also very frail. She doesn’t look at Lenny. Jim Jones does.
‘There’s the man,’ Jim Jones says with a wide, dog-like smile. ‘Lenny-husband.’
The kitchen feels very crowded. Lenny smells cake.
At that, Jim Jones circles his arm around Lenny’s shoulder and leads him through the beads to the den, where there is indeed cake. Evelyn follows, and the women after her, and then the men. She sits on one edge of the green sofa, Jim Jones beside her. Jim Jones pats the cushion beside him and in a deep, fruity voice says, ‘Sit down, son.’
Lenny sits.
Joya and Diane start serving cake.
‘I gathered this small committee here today,’ Jim Jones begins theatrically, ‘on account of we’ve observed a, ah, distance between you and your wife. Kind of distance ain’t normal for a couple so early in their union. Son, you care to comment on this distance?’
‘There has been a distance,’ Lenny admits. Jim Jones nods and puckers his lips like a chimpanzee until Lenny goes on. ‘I guess … she’s been sort of cold and distant.’
‘Cold and distant. Uh-huh, uh-huh … Evelyn, darlin’, you agree with that?’
‘Yes,’ Evelyn says quietly, only to Jim. ‘I have been distant.’
‘Can you, uh, elaborate on this distance? Tell us why you been so cold on him?’ Jim is leaning forward, his fingers steepled together. There’s nothing ardent or overly familiar about the way he looks at Evelyn, sits beside her. She is still Lenny’s wife.
Evelyn purses her lips, keeps her eyes lowered. She looks so pretty and demure to him, her hands in her lap so neatly folded, her hair so sleek, those roses dangling from her ears.
‘Well, first of all, I don’t love him.’ Evelyn raises her eyes, looks at Jim and only Jim. ‘Second, I want a divorce.’
With the exception of Evelyn, who has retreated to another part of the white house that was briefly their home, everyone hugs Lenny at the door. Jim Jones hugs Lenny first, and for the longest, puts his whole body into the hug, strokes Lenny’s face, Lenny’s hair, calls him a good son, loves him, smells of Brut and other manly things. Next the women, their tangy perfumes, cushiony breasts. Then that cop, Brother Gene, an awkwardly tender hug that surprises Lenny and more than any of the others makes him want to cry. Brother Isaiah and Brother Ike give him curt, clapping hugs, and curt words — Brother Ike, who Lenny is to go with for the next few days, will help him with the Nevada divorce. Everyone is kind to Lenny, everyone wants to help him, everyone is sorry for his loss.
There is a suitcase that Brother Isaiah hands him; it has clean clothes and a shaving kit. Sister Joya asks him if he wants some reading material, and Lenny says he does, he guesses. So he’s given an armload of books, chosen seemingly at random; some science fiction, Emile Durkheim, a history of the tsars, a volume of French poetry. He’s on the doorstep, about to leave, when Evelyn comes swishing through the beads, bearing a pile of linen.
‘I almost forgot,’ she says. ‘I cleaned your other uniform.’
Stranger in Your Land
1.
He gives her a cabin. He gives her a gun. He gives her a barking dog. He gives her multiple orgasms.
He gives her four nights a week in the cabin between Evergreen Valley and Moontown, and on these nights, they seldom sleep.
He does things to her, things that stop time and make the moon fog over, and sometimes she will open her eyes and find herself weeping, singing, quoting French philosophers, as the dog barks and barks.
He cherishes her. He wants her dead. These two things are one and the same, on the hard, rustic bed with the embroidered linen. ‘I should kill you, ugly white bitch,’ he says, but also, ‘Mmmm, sweetheart. Your skin is so soft.’ She sees her own body from afar — the flattened breasts and nipples like berries and glacier of white skin over sternum. She sees him licking, sucking, biting, burrowing, his black head between her thighs as powerful as a totem. She is alive, but how and when and on what planet, she cannot say.
He tells her stories from before she was born, about a boy called Jimmy Jones whom nobody loved. He tells her how little Jimmy once healed a cat he found maimed in a ditch. How he once killed a cat, because he felt sorry for it and to see if he could. How he almost drowned a rich kid once, because he could and because that rich sonofabitch deserved it. He tells her of the dust, the crops that failed, the screaming freight trains and lone water tower, the pain that comes whenever he thinks of that miserable one-horse town in Southern Indiana.
He tells her stories from the future. How the ghettoes will be fenced in barbed wire and converted into concentration camps. How America will set fire to itself, mushroom clouds over every major city and years of no sun. How they will find themselves a hot green paradise somewhere by the equator, and eat fruit off the trees, and care for all th
e animals and the children and the elderly.
He tells her other things: ‘We’re the same, honey,’ and, ‘I never had nothing like this,’ and, ‘Nobody else understands.’ He holds her dark hair up to the firelight, admires the secret threads of red, closes his eyes and smells it, sighs, croons. ‘I’d be here all the time, baby, if I didn’t have so much on me. So many askin’ for me …’ He kisses the downy hair at her temple, the pulse of her neck, squeezes her white hands, loves her, loves her. ‘I’d like, oh, I’d like to marry you. That’s what I’d do. Only, baby, I know you know we’re married in a deeper sense.’
He asks her for things: cold water, warm milk, little white pills. He asks her to check his car, to check the locks, to check that rustling outside, to take the gun. He asks her to rub his feet — ‘If you’ll do that small thing for me, darlin’,’ — to rub his shoulders — ‘I got a crick, goddamn crick in my neck,’ — to suck his cock — ‘Your lips, honey, oh your lips right now would be so sweet.’ He asks her to pour pretty words into his ears — poems, hymns, folk songs — and dozes off while she does, waking with a start minutes or hours later and in the mood to talk again. He asks her questions that have just one answer: does she love him, has he given her life meaning, would she die for him?
‘Yes,’ she says, without hesitation. ‘Yes. Yes.’
Then there is the morning where she wakes from two hours of sleep with a black eye, because of things that had happened the night before. Miraculous things. A miraculous thought that came unbidden at the sight of his strong, ministering hands on her body: How beautiful it would be to have him hurt me. And just like that, he’d brought the heel of his hand briskly down on her cheekbone, cuffed her hard enough to elicit a strained-startled cry, like no sound she’d ever made before. She could see from his face that the action had given him no personal pleasure; that he was simply responding to a need in her, deep and wordless.
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