by Marge Piercy
“Don’t you see why I feel like a fool?”
“No. I’m the fooled one. I thought I belonged here.”
“Look, I had you into my house and we pretended like this is a world where that makes sense, where people are naturally together. All the time my black brothers need places to live, need them desperately. You can find yourself an apartment anyplace. We have been pretending, and that’s why I say we are both fools.”
“When you got this house you wanted your mother upstairs of you and me downstairs, because we were friends. If none of that finally worked, it’s not hard to see why, but it sure doesn’t mean it’s wrongheaded to try … I’ll have my stuff out by supper time.”
He parked his boxes in the basement of a friend’s house. If it were spring he had the feeling he would keep on going down to the hiring hall and sign on a lake freighter.
Herb let him sleep on his couch, a thin pillgulping announcer born of the alliance of American Legion and WCTU in the dry prosperous northern suburb of Evanston, born wrong and running. Since Herb had just been divorced again and was sleeping at his new girl’s, there was little pressure on Rowley to look for a place.
Herb had a suite in an apartment hotel a couple of blocks from the lake on Wilson Avenue halfway up the North Side—a location chosen by the vectors pulling him: Evanston, Loop job, girl on the near North Side, exwives and children in suburbs. A gamy and exhausting neighborhood with cheap kitchenettes jowl by jowl with uniformed doormen, girlie bars, secondhand stores and the rococo Waikiki nightclub. Rowley was growing his moustache again and out-of-work men in bars with veins of steel string, hill twang in their voices wanted to pick fights. Like the men in the mills. Men he would belong with except for the University, except for his music with its black roots. Under the El on Broadway the stores were festooned with plastic poinsettias. In the lobby an aluminum tree turned bathed in a blue spot.
Christmas Eve at cocktail time he was leaving the studio, passing the Blackhawk, when the Lovises emerged with a small party. Tom was thick with a portly tanned old man, but Nina svelte in leopardskin saw him. Saw him, looked, looked through him. Turned away her perfect chin and slipped her arm through Tom’s, laughing.
Christmas he worked the six A.M. shift. Then he drank sour mash while a blizzard howled in the streets, and played Herb’s records. After a while he took out his Gibson instead and began to feel a little action in his blood. Herb was off splitting Christmas among his previous begottten households and his girl, with a visit to god’s country also on schedule. He would arrive late and drunk. A mirror was hung to reflect the couch, giving him the feeling of the WCTU watching. Feet up he played and sang to himself:
Did you ever wake up lonesome—all by yourself,
Yeah, did you ever wake up lonesome, all by yourself,
And the one you love was loving someone else?
My friends don’t see me, they just pass me by,
Yeah, my friends don’t see me, they just pass me by,
Wouldn’t mind it so much, but they hold they heads so high.
Ragged moustache, leathery face, bloodshot eyes. He looked, he felt, mean. So, so let her go, he thought about Vera with a raw angry ache. He lacked the gall to try her iron virginity again. He missed the way she tilted her head, her fresh laugh and the taut line of her thighs. But he could not want to see her. Nothing to say.
That makes me evil, oh Lord, so evil,
Yea, I get evil, baby, when my love comed down.
Caroline carrying that lump she called his. She had phoned before he left Harlan’s and gotten truly angry, truly indignant. She could get in touch with him through the studio. He knew his mother and Sam were disappointed he did not come to Gary, but he could not face them, play older brother and sturdy son, play man with the answers. He didn’t feel like going to work or fucking or talking.
If you want to have plenty women why not work at the Chicago mill?
You don’t have to give them nothing, oooh well, just tell them that you will.
After Harlan bought the house they’d gone to see his mother. Harlan wanted her to live upstairs and he told Rowley that they’d just go and move her. A hot dusty July day. She had been living with one of Harlan’s half sisters on South Buffalo but they were all gone. Rowley sat in the car while Harlan asked around and finally they found them a couple of blocks away on Green Bay, living in a shotgun house—the rooms getting smaller as it backed off the street.
His mother would not move though it was obvious they were in bad times. “At first I didn’t like Shirley for nothing,” his mother said, shaking her head with a blank, benign smile. “Now I know she good for you. But she wouldn’t be good for me. Now every week I wonder how are we gonna do, how are we gonna make out. But if I come and live with you, I know how: war!”
They went out with two of the boys to a shingled rickety corner store for icecream and beer and a few groceries. A little money infused in the house made everybody happy. Mrs. Williams cooked a crazy hot chicken stew that Harlan and Rowley ate till they were stuffed. Near the turning basin in Calumet Harbor. Cottonwood, sumac, patches of tall weeds. A rubble dump and towers of high tension wires. Railroads crossed at grade level. Dogs trotted through the dusty streets and kids hung around on the corners. Remote, hot, isolate. Ships came and went slowly, potently, past the scrawny handmade looking houses. Near the grain elevators a big gray ship was hosed down. Highway 41 stood up on end to let a frighter pass. In the sky trucks trundled along the expressway. A concrete rainbow of no particular promise arched over the deadend houses. Harlan stayed hours past the time he had promised to be home, and he did not go out to a payphone and call Shirley, he ate supper and drank with his brother-in-law and nephew and mother, ate till he hurt, laughed himself silly: and that day they were close and understood each other without needing to talk about it. Gone.
Maybe in a place like that he’d turn up Black Jack. He had let that slip, let that go. Maybe it was the one real thing left for him to do. The one person he could talk to, that he had anything to say to. And one other. On the seventh day of his drinking, Saturday, he rose and drove in glittery sunshine past the frozen baroque of the lake to the South Side to see Leon, for friends are friends and what the hell.
He remembered how he had come in that morning, stopping off on his way to class to shower and change, and found Leon. When he went to see Leon in the hospital and after, he had felt closer to Leon than Leon felt to him. Then Leon got married and moved out.
Leon had admired him, imitated him, dogged him. He was a shy pimply suburban kid. When he got excited his voice would go way up. He was so awkward around girls that he sounded rude. Sometimes he courted insult. Always he came obliquely at what he wanted. Grimacing, Rowley called up time after time when he had known what Leon was getting at (wanting to meet a girl, wanting to be taken along, wanting Rowley to say out loud that he was welcome, wanting Rowley to come out to his folks’ house with him) and pretended not to, pretended to him and Leon that as long as Leon hadn’t spoken out loud, there had been no communication. Why? His mean streak, only. Leon had been a vulnerable kid, and they’d all had a crack at hardening him. Yes, meanness.
The plateglass window was steamed up. When he banged on the door he could hear Leon moving but when the door opened, Annie stood there. She stared. He thought she was about to slam the door before she produced a broad smile, perhaps at her own shock, and motioned him in.
Her dark tangled mane was caught back on her nape. She wore no makeup. Her face was flushed with exertion and looking around he saw a vacuum cleaner plugged in. The room looked bigger, lighter than he remembered. She seldom wore levis—thought herself too broad in the beam—but she was wearing them now with a striped jersey. She looked younger, leaner, yet domestic: the vacuum, the splash of cleanser on her pantleg.
“Leon’s out, probably for the day. Let me think where you could look …”
“Forget it. I’ll catch him some other time. Are you living here?”
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“Me? Sure.”
His impulse was to march out but he was too curious, too annoyed. He sat down heavily. “You’ve left your mark. Can Leon bear it?”
“He likes it clean, but it’s hard for him to throw junk out. He hoards every last butt and popbottle of his life. I understand that, I’m enough that way myself. Maybe I’ll learn to dispose of my own collections.” She laughed easily, throwing herself into the chair opposite. Quickly her eyes covered the room, measured her progress and allotted herself a break. Her embarrassment had evaporated, and obviously she was relaxed with him as any casual visitor.
That was her style. A little bitterly he recognized the ease with which she had played hostess to married couples and bachelor friends. Once Herb had fluttered round her in the kitchen while she was making sesame lamb: she had turned on him and said sweetly if he did not exit at once she would roast him. Herb had scurried into the livingroom, convinced that she would. She presided where she sat now ankles crossed and head pensive on hand, eyes cleaning the rest of the room.
“Been living with Leon long?” He wanted to ask her what had become of that independence she used to rub his nose in.
“My building’s coming down. Half the tenants are out and the city’s using indirect persuasion. Heat’s off. Last week two people got mugged in the upstairs hall. So Leon insisted I clear out, and I’m staying here—my stuff’s still in my apartment—and looking for a place.” Her large eyes flashed over him.
“I’m looking for one myself.”
“Is Harlan down already? My god.”
Then he wanted to tell her. He wanted to talk about it and he did, even drawing out the story. Trying to convince himself? Or trying to make her react to him?
“You shouldn’t have left like that, getting your back up. How do you know he wouldn’t have changed his mind? He was sore. You have to leave doors open for people.”
“I’ve never been able to force myself on somebody or stand around biding my time while they cool down.” He was doublesaying but damned if she got it.
“But you’ve known him so long. It has to heal.”
“Nothing has to work out.” He shrugged. She was insufferably friendly, helpful, remote. He felt like punching her. “I didn’t mean to startle you. Just looking for Leon. Had no idea you were here.”
“It’s just that you’ve been the missing man all week.” Pushing the hair from her face she smiled into a corner of the room, smile of recollection and something harder. “Caroline’s been around.”
“Did she come to you with that story too?”
“Too?” Her gaze twitted him. “She’s been crying on Leon’s shoulder, and you’ll admit, won’t you, she has something to cry about? Couldn’t you have been more careful?”
“Caroline can reach me through the station any time she wants.”
“It’s all coming down on Leon. Clearly he invites people to use him. Me, for instance, now. But still—”
“Are you saying you’re staying here platonically?”
She looked at him levelly. The amusement that had been working in her face along with a submerged tension, surfaced. “I am neither saying that nor its opposite. I am not saying anything like that, since it’s clearly none of your business.”
“Insofar as I know both of you—”
“Oh, in a way.” But she was not truly interested in scoring off him. “I’m scared Leon will let her use him.”
He was not grateful she had let him off. “I think you’ll find Leon taking care of himself. He never gets more involved with a woman than he means to.”
She made a wry face. “You’re both bigger improvisors than the other thinks.”
She was wrapped in Leon like a flag. “I was always defending Leon and you were wondering why. If we’ve changed sides, it’s not because Leon’s changed any. He’s the same confused guy.”
“As Leon says, last year I didn’t see who he was. He claims Caroline has to be made to see who he is, in a similar way. I’m scared that she will and take him for the patsy he is. I mean, in regard to her.”
“You have the field in hand.”
She threw that away with her right hand. “But her need, her obvious urgent need is much greater.”
He felt dizzy. The conversation proceeded by rules known to her, not to him. He had a sore urge to make her talk about him instead of Leon. “Are you straight that I should marry her?”
“I know you’re not up to that. Besides, I wouldn’t, but I’m prejudiced, as Leon says. I told Leon in September you wouldn’t marry her.”
“Thanks. I could have told him that in March. You know Vera broke up with me over this?”
She nodded. “Paul’s relieved, of course. By the way, how is that fight coming? Are things happening there?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Where Vera teaches. The parents were trying to get the Board of Ed to bus the kids out to white schools with room. Finally they got fed up and then they were organizing to try to take over the school. You know anything recent?”
He did not know anything unrecent. How little Vera communicated to him. “I knocked on that door a long time. That’s all I know.”
“Paul’s a strange one too. Unlike Leon, I liked to see them together. They played with style. That moved me.”
There she coiled in the chair, the bow of her hips, breasts rubbing against the striped jersey. That he couldn’t have her if he wanted seemed unreasonable. She had passed beyond him, miles past Sally bitter still at the party. Anna was not bitter. He had the bizarre feeling he could tell her his troubles and she would listen and cluck, thinking of Leon all the while.
“Leon says you’re being nasty to Caroline because you feel guilty. And I do think you could make your position clear without being brutal. It isn’t her fault you knocked her up.”
“If you use the expression ‘Leon says’ once more, I’ll pick you up and shake it out of you.”
She laughed. “Ah well, new disciples are the most earnest.”
“What are you a disciple to?”
“You’ve never taken him seriously.”
“Once or twice,” he said dryly.
“Well then.” She shrugged her round shoulders. He caught her glancing at the clock.
“If you’d got stuck I wouldn’t have felt this way.”
“Gee thanks, dad. Why don’t you go talk to her?”
“Instead of hanging around here? I can’t argue her into an abortion. Jesus, she’ll be some mother.”
“Leon thinks motherhood will redeem her—in spite of what it did to Joye. He has his illusions. Thinks it will fulfill her.”
“What would fulfill that girl? Disneyland?”
“Are you finding her a nuisance?” she asked with syrup and looked openly at the clock.
So he left. Climbing over a snowbank to the VW he shook his head. Then he grinned.
He used the newspaper first and then walked the streets. Got two narrow rooms at the top of a gray stone building back up in Herb’s neighborhood, but on a poor scroungy street. A real place anyhow. To begin trying to figure out who the hell he was now. He wrote a check, got the key and sat back to the wall on the floor of the room with the bay. Not even shades. A period in his life had closed down. In almost all ways a good one but defunct, already the stuff of nostalgia and revision. In the interstices of a rich society he had lived. A society that paid him to entertain it and to preserve pieces of its urban folklore for future entertainment, and paid him better than his father had ever been paid for making its steel. Now he was cutting down his standard of living. He was preparing for something else.
Cracks, crevices. One time he had stayed in the Mecca with a friend, jazz composer who was making a living playing cocktail piano. He was working the freighters then, he was in between and somebody was getting married. So he slept at Fred’s.
The Mecca had been built in the nineties as a fancy U-shaped block. Inside you walked down block-long arcades dim and echoey
with the only light leaking through skylights four floors up and sixty years of city grime. Wrought iron balconies. Two thousand people lived there. It hummed. No sound came at you sharp. The building mumbled, kids playing in the interior streets, people yelling off the balconies, music. An elderly white woman lived there and a girl married to a bass player, but aside from them the only whites he saw those ten days were a bill collector and a social worker. Torn down. Two thousand gone noplace as cheap. Another institution ate it. He had lived in the cracks where people could now and then get together, disaffiliated but easy among themselves, and when a crack closed he found a new one. Thus he had lived in his society without confronting it, and now he did not know where to begin.
Saturday night. Not the local bars yet. He drove back down to Woody’s. He drank at the bar, keeping to himself. He wanted to prolong his new mood until he understood it. He felt the bones of his life setting into a new form. He had been passive for too long. Vera had finally crawled into his arms because he seemed less menacing than the rest of the world. He had not been honest with her. He had waited around until she had shown him how she should be seduced. He had failed to make her want the risks he offered. Leon had been more successful with Anna: Leon had taken thorough possession. How much did he dislike that?
The beer made him feel bloated, so he switched to bourbon. He drank more from the habit of the week than desire for that thickening of mind tonight. Several thoughts seemed on the point of articulating themselves, but never came through. At the bar no enlightenment was going to descend. But he stood there and drank because he considered the night wasted already and because he did not want to go to Herb’s couch but hardly relished sleeping on the bare floor. He exchanged a few words with friends but stayed at the bar because he felt too clotted with ideas and longings to talk.
The guy had been standing beside him a couple of minutes before he felt the stare on his face and turned. A guy his height, fairhaired, whose face was reddened with a tightly reined anger. A guy who stood in Woody’s as if it stank in his nostrils, who wore a handsome tweed overcoat, leather gloves, and a hat. The hat should not be forgotten.