by Marge Piercy
“You’ll do a good job,” Shirley said from the backseat. “You always do.”
“Yeah? In a way it takes a lot of brass to come to a black group and try to stir them up about us. Because we made it out of the ghetto. Asking them to help us save what they can’t even get. Come on.”
But when they were in the hall on folding chairs and Harlan was introduced, his face was different. He had begun to have a public manner. Rowley still experienced the shock of how well Harlan spoke, that magic of voice and manner that changed the air in a room. He spoke fast, his voice sometimes faltered, but he was learning. He had special appeal in the ghetto, but he worked for some white audiences too. The great pressure Harlan was feeling to save his home, his community, what he called his ordinary life, that was a commodity that could be sold. Rowley had written some songs for the Defense Committee, none of them good but all of them good enough. The money they raised hired a lawyer to help them prepare for the hearings which would start Monday, December eighth. Ten days, That was all.
Vera’s absence caught in his head like a burr. He figured she had to return Sunday night, and sure enough he found himself on his way, walking over. A winter obsession. If he could have her and be done. He passed a bar, the grind of the bowling machine and warm beery lap of voices. Ought to stop in, have a shot, and go home and work on his Burns program. His steps did not slow. He turned into her dark street. The ice felt more steeply rutted. Half bare she struggled on the cot, under the masks. Her head was pressed back on the pillow and her body felt like short piled velvet. With outthrust hand he broke ice-capped twigs from a hedge. He had never forced anyone. Clots of racial phlegm.
To clear out the poison he sang:
“Green grow the rashes O;
Green grow the rashes O;
The sweetest hours that e’er I spend
Are spent among the lasses, O!”
He passed the blind facade of an abandoned synagogue. On either side of the wide steps—a smooth slope of snow—iron candelabras lifted jagged, broken globes.
“For you sae douce, ye sneer at this,
Ye’re naught but senseless asses O,
The wisest man the warl’ e’er saw
He dearly lov’d the lasses, O!”
To make Burns come through: a drinking man, a leching man, of the left and proud of his work, with wit and temper. Annie wouldn’t care for that program either. Or didn’t she listen now that she didn’t have to?
Though that reaction was not typical. He crossed the Moorish lobby. For some reason he could not get rid of the image of her laughing. She laughed with her whole body—laughter as sensual and total as her sex. Leon liked to talk about fucking, he was full of mystique. Yakking about the Zen lover, after tripping holed up with that skinny kid he’d used in his first flick. Like people who got high talking about grass with maybe one roach between them.
He realized he had forgotten to buzz. He rapped on the door. Nothing. Again. Then the creak of the springs. “Who’s there?”
“Rowley.”
A longish pause. Then the chain slid off and she opened. One side of her face looked puffy from lying on the bed, but even more the expression in her eyes and a purplish cast of fatigue about them made him ask, “What is it?”
“It’s me, I suppose.” Her thin hand came up to guard her mouth.
He took off his jacket, drew the armchair toward the rocker and sat. “What’s wrong?”
She tossed her head. “What do you want? I’m tired!”
“Something happened at home?”
“Paul has gone out of his mind.” She curled into the rocker, retracting her knees under her chin. She wore a wool dress in a soft dusky pink, a loose dress like a child’s smock with wild embroidery across the top. Hugging it about her slender legs she hid in the dress, snuggling into it like a blanket. “Clean out of his mind, oh, completely.”
“What did he do to get you so angry?”
She hugged her legs tighter. “What do you care!”
“We’ve been through that. Come on, you’ll explode if you don’t talk. Dump.”
She rocked, rocked with her chin dug into her knees. “He’s very bright. You probably couldn’t tell the short time you saw him. You bet they were put out when they gave him an IQ test back home. They made him take it over.”
“Sure, I could tell he was quick.” Hero worship.
“My father was thirty-six when Paul was born and nothing but girls. You might say he took it as a personal favor from God to get a boy.” Under her lashes she watched, poised to take offense.
“Are you as religious as your father?”
“No. We are not.”
“You’re saying that Paul’s spoiled.”
She frowned her nose at him. “No. You don’t understand. He is special.”
He slumped way down, hands clasped on his belly. “He must have done something special this weekend.”
“It’s that disgusting ofay toad he’s hanging around. Poisoning his mind—I mean it. Like a sewer. I never met him but twice and the first time I didn’t say boo. But he told Paul I’m trying to run his life. That I domineer over him.”
“A kid in school?”
“Your age. Paul is stuck on him. It’s disgusting.” She stretched her legs out and flung her head back, an arch of protest. “Listening to every vile thing.”
“Such as?”
Her hand came to her mouth. “All sorts of warmed over Freud in a special ugly sauce of his own … you know … penis envy, sibling rivalry, the whole bit.”
“So he was spouting at you, trying to convert you.”
“Worse.” Shooting out of the chair she crossed to the bed, jerked the spread flat, straightened a couple of masks. The images of violence that had swept him on the street seemed absurd here. From across the room he explored the curve of her tall neck, the arm turned like a vase on a wheel. Fragility/resilience.
“When I say he’s out of his mind. We’ve been close all our lives, you can’t understand. But he loves preposterous ideas.” Her hands drew across her temples, ironing. “Our folks went to church. We don’t. We made that an issue last year …” She trailed off, silent for so long he almost gave up. Then she looked up and said with rising inflection, “He said I wanted to sleep with him.”
He laughed, not wanting to.
“You laugh because it’s silly. Isn’t it?”
“He marched in and accused you?”
“We’d been fighting all weekend about this domination business. Then he said, what I told you. He was watching me with his face all sly, feeling clever. Oh, I could have killed him!”
Rowley grinned still, he could not help it. “Did he expect you to confess? Or take him in?”
“How do I know? He’s such a goose.” Once again she coiled in the rockingchair with her knees tucked under her chin. “He was acting in a play. Being so adulty, so damned sophisticated. Oh, I wished I’d smacked him.”
“What did you do?” The laughter he had quelled still leavened his muscles. He had been jealous of the brother; but the brother could not make her either.
What you got in mind ain’t going to happen today.
Get off of my bed, how did you get that way?
Literal children captured by an amateur analyst: who would have said what, had Paul come strolling in after vacation announcing he and his sister had established perfect sexual rapport?
“I don’t know what to say. He went on lecturing, Basically our relationship is incestuous! I said, Basically your head is a pumpkin. Finally he sashayed out telling me I would never serve my reality principle intelligently until I faced the darker forces of my Id, end quote. I threw my best early mask at him and broke it.”
“If he’s as bright as you say, he’ll wear it out.”
“It hurts me to see him acting … stupid? vulgar? He hasn’t been doing as well in school as he should. He was flunking science. The toad helped him in some way he won’t tell me, but all of a sudden he’s not worried
.”
“Does he have a girl?”
“Usually.” She smiled. “Girls chase him. Even white ones.” She gave him that filtered look again.
“Do you really think being black is the most important thing about you?”
“Of course not. That I’m black is the most important thing about you. You can’t ignore or forget it.”
“Why should I try?”
“Want a medal? I have some gold foil on the workbench.”
He got up and stood in front of her. “I want you, in that bed with your arms around me.”
She laughed with surprise. Her voice came a little muffled. “Well, at least you don’t insist that’s what I want. Don’t stand over me.”
He took a step backward, but as he did he caught her hands and slowly pulled her to her feet. “Look at me.”
She did then, her eyes in her face of slightly flattened delicacy playing on him in open observation. She was amused. In the arms he gripped he could feel no sexual response, not fear, not desire. “I’m not any more successful with you than your brother,” he said softly and closed the gap. At the last minute she turned her face so that he brought his lips against her smooth warm cheek. As if he were operating a tiny rickety crank, slowly he tightened his hold and drew her against him, first the soft fleecy wool of the dress, then the warmth of her, then the first resilient touch of her breasts and belly through the cloth. Slowly, slowly he brought her against him. He thought he felt in her a stir, a slight catching of the breath. Then she burst out laughing and broke from him backward, rubbing her cheek. “Your moustache! It’s like being kissed by a dog. You tickle me.”
Forcing himself together he started after her.
“No.” She dodged behind the rocker. “I don’t want to be kissed and mauled and handled.”
Stiff and sore with wanting he sat heavily in the armchair. “How do you know?”
“Anyhow, your moustache tickles. It’s funny.”
“It’s soulful.”
“Off with it. Shave it, and then maybe, maybe I’ll kiss you.” She leaned forward on crossed arms on the rocker’s high back. “I don’t hate you any more, the way I did when you came clumping in here with Caroline like you were going to die with your boots on.”
“Thanks, sport. You mean I listened like a good doggy.”
“Can’t you believe I don’t want any part of that?”
He looked at her in momentary defeat and thought he had never yet fully seen her. The puffy fatigue had passed from her face, leaving the skin like ripe plum. The emotions that lit and went out in her face held nothing gross, murky or demanding: nothing of Caroline’s turgid narcissism or Anna’s bitter aftertaste. It was not a case of taking her from someone, but persuading her she wanted to share her possession of self with him.
“I’ll tell you, mama, and I’ll tell you true,
If you don’t want me, baby, it’s a cinch I don’t want you.
I got those bullfrog blues, and I can’t be satisfied …”
He was singing with the guitar and Yente both somehow on his lap when Harlan came down. “I saw your lights were out. Is my playing keeping you up?”
Harlan shook his head. “Soon as I lay down I start thinking of things I should have said. Or things I have to do. I start repetitively going through the next day’s scenes, making speeches and correcting and changing. If I do fall asleep, I come awake with a scared hard knock like I’d dozed off driving.”
“You’ll be in a hospital bed soon if you don’t ease up.”
“Talk sense. The hearings start the eighth. How can I ease up? Though I sure could use some tranquilizing.” Harlan paced the record shelves pulling albums out randomly. “You keep any grass around nowadays?”
“You asking that as my landlord?”
“As a dying man begging for water.”
“Why if I give it to your kids, I don’t see why I shouldn’t share it with you.” Harlan hardly ever turned on with him any more. A thing they used always to do. “What do you want to hear?”
Harlan picked out some jazz tapes and he set them up. They passed the joint and soon Harlan started talking. Ritual soothes. “The bind is tightening on me. They have their ways of letting you know you’ve been rocking the boat in Welfare. Every routine form I send upstairs comes bouncing back. I can’t get a paperclip without petitioning, and they keep making us reinvestigate. At home the kids feel neglected. Maybe I spoiled them. And Shirley …” Slowly he rubbed his nose.
“I thought she’d been taking it pretty well. She’s put a lot of work in.”
“Sure,” Harlan mumbled. After a while, “But she can’t get away from thinking making a stink is plain wrong. She’s scared I’m going to get in trouble. Deep down she blames me for not making it all disappear. The world is my business like the house is hers.”
“You satisfied with the materials I’ve dug up for our case?”
“I’m not satisfied with anything these days. All my thoughts got spikes on them. But I bet you haven’t done that kind of research since we were in Dugan’s class.”
“Happens you’re wrong. I research my programs.”
“How’d you ever get started playing blues?” Harlan stretched way down in the chair, slowly letting out the smoke. “You been doing it since I met you, but you sure didn’t grow up with the blues.”
“If it’s black music, what’s a white man doing thinking he can own it—the old problem of blue-eyed soul.”
“Now I put you down a lot, but you have feeling for it. I like Miles better any day than all the old funky country blues you dig or those screaming rock singers. But why?”
“Every white musician has a conversion experience. The real thing. That’s what I mean, or it means, or He means. Besides nobody really white comes from Gary. Real white people wouldn’t live there and work there—right? Like Detroit and Cleveland and Newark. That’s why the working class is so racist. It’s the physical bloodstream music of where things are at now and that’s why a kid in Stockholm or Berlin can hear it and have to make it—and if he can make it well it’s his—right?”
“So the Jews had the book and we have the beat, and both conquer. Though in both cases the victories belong to converts from the outside who didn’t quite dig the message.” Harlan grinned. “And we’re still outside and damned.”
“The fate of all peoples who invent things beside weapons.”
“You know what? Blanche got me. That’s what it amounts to. Oh, my.”
“Does Shirley know?”
“Is the roof still on this house? You know, I’ve been so wrapped up in this I didn’t see it coming. She’s a real worker, but she’s a real hustler too.”
“Isn’t that going to cause a few difficulties?”
“No more late night sessions, for nothing. I like Blanche—she’s quite a woman when you get down to it—but she’s not getting me down to it again. Too much wildcat there.”
“It’s all that charisma you’ve been building up.”
“Sure, Georgie. She really is after me, though. I hope she keeps her mouth shut. I got enough trouble upstairs. We got enough trouble all over. I went to a meeting of that big central renewal wingbat, the mayor’s planning and housing council, and I looked around very careful waiting to make my little appeal. And I saw that one guy sitting on the board is the president of the alumni association of Inland, and another is on the board of trustees, and another is a politician they gave an honorable degree to last June, and another is vice-president of Curtis Brothers. When I finally got to make my little presentation, I couldn’t get much oomph in it.”
Why didn’t he tell Harlan about Vera? Since Harlan married they hardly talked about women. Still he had the feeling he was keeping something back. Come on now, nothing had happened. Tell him about what? The jazz threw mandala patterns shifting and slowly turning on the air between them. Sitting a few feet apart and sharing the third roach, they were close and easy in their fatigue, and it seemed pointless to bring up a
thing that could scratch the skin of a good, rare moment.
Asher
Sunday, November 9
Asher woke taut, clenched. His gums felt sore, as if he had been grinding his teeth. He was not sure who he had been confronting across the desk, Sheldon Lederman or Boss Tweed. Someday he would slip and call Stan that to his face. Funny that he couldn’t be sure which man it was making him squirm in the dream, they were so different. Stan had the professorial manner, softspoken, pipe smoking, big boyish, how-are-you-smile.
Whereas Lederman. Should never agree to go see him at his office. That enormous desk like a decapitated racing car, broad dully gleaming expanse of lustrous designer plastic. Then the view of the city: almost all of that wall. Sketches of garden cities and double helix skyscrapers on two walls. They waded in through his carpet, gingerly fitted themselves into the arty molded plastic chairs. He had them already. Out of their depth. Even Muriel had kept tugging at her skirt, uncertain about the angle.
He had headed the UNA delegation to argue the matter of school expansion with Lederman. But Lederman had thrown them all off balance by starting out so sympathetically, delighted to see them (beaming at Muriel of course), subtly flattering them about their expertise in neighborhood matters and then landing the punch about UNA not being the real grassroots. Chiding them gently for calling their group of professionals a grassroots organization, oh come now. Catching them smack in the middle of their class shame, of course, liberals who are afraid they aren’t as real as blacks or workers. Should have challenged Lederman directly, instead of letting him operate by innuendo and nudge. Pointed out they were the people the neighborhood was being renewed to keep and to attract, and thus they damn well were the neighborhood’s grassroots. How had he let Lederman catch him offguard, when Lederman’s position was statistically unsound? He could prepare a case that would blast Lederman’s sly aspersions to kingdom come.
Button off his pajamas. New too. Planned obsolescence. They didn’t care about bachelors, sewing buttons on by two threads. He pinched his belly folds meditatively. Got up and went to brush the sweaters off his teeth. Could never decide if the electric toothbrush represented technology in the service of hygiene or his weakness in the face of gadgets. Pleasant sensation. Maybe worth it on the animal level. Buzz in the mouth. Insect noise.