by Glenda Adams
“I know,” said Lark.
“I don’t know how you can stand New York. Far too much noise. Sirens, radios, car horns, people yelling at one another. It’s like World War Three in your own backyard. The price postindustrial society willingly pays for its pleasures. If you’re going to be staid and stodgy and settled and sit and put down roots, you might as well go home to where you came from. I hear the weather’s good.” From the street came the squeal of brakes, longer, louder than usual, followed by a crash. They all ran to the balcony.
“You see, far too much noise,” said Greta. “It’s not natural or healthy.”
A white car had run into a green station wagon parked on the corner opposite. A man jumped out of the white car and started running away from the crash, across the road in front of the apartment, trying to get away, almost knocking down two girls roller-skating. Five police cars and three taxicabs were suddenly on the street, with uniformed and plainclothesmen pouring out. The two girls continued to skate. The fleeing man, seeing his path blocked in one direction, turned and ran back, under the balcony. One policeman had drawn his gun and was taking aim. The girls skated calmly in the line of fire.
“They’re going to shoot the children.” Lark, looking down on it all, a spectator, unable to help, tried to will the girls out of the way. If she screamed, it would make the situation worse. The children would be distracted and look up. The fugitive spread his arms wide, like a child imitating an airplane, but kept running. A second policeman was now blocking his path. The girls seemed to skate in slow motion, almost stationary. The first policeman’s gun remained raised and aimed. Lark waited to hear the gunshots and to witness the death of a child.
The fleeing man careered into the policeman blocking his way. The two of them fell to the pavement. Then a dozen men were on top of him. One was kicking him in the ribs. He lay face-down, his hands handcuffed behind his back. Blood was running onto the sidewalk. The police rolled him over. The skin on his forehead had split open. The two girls skated up to have a closer look. Several policemen were going through the white car, cutting up the upholstery, tearing out the seats and throwing them onto the street. They hurled things out of the trunk. The green station wagon had been spun around and rested on the sidewalk, under a tree. One of its tires had been knocked off and was rolling through the traffic. A city ambulance turned up.
The fugitive had been lain across the trunk of a cab. His blood ran out onto the yellow paint. The ambulance attendant bandaged his head, and he was driven off. The two girls skated over to the blood on the sidewalk. They stood still for a moment, looking down at the red puddle, then took out tissues and dipped them in the blood.
The police cars left, the yellow cabs left, the police drove the white car off. One policeman waited with the wrecked green station wagon.
“They kicked him,” said Lark.
“I can use this for a feature on New York life,” said Greta.
“Drugs, probably,” said Tom.
“Probably had a good kick coming to him,” said Greta. “Those children could have been killed. Someone could have been in that station wagon or on the sidewalk.”
“But the man was already lying on the ground when he was kicked,” said Lark.
“Police brutality,’’ said Tom. “That’s what they’re like, all the time, the police.”
They drew back. “I’m going to have to make tracks,” said Tom. “The demonstration won’t wait for me.”
Greta asked if there was anything else they would like to tell her. Tom related briefly the story of the phone tap. “Actually the government likes to have critics in the middle class. Dissension and criticism serve to legitimize a government, don’t forget that. The antigovernment demonstration itself demonstrates that the government is the power.” He looked at his watch.
Greta got up to go. “You know how I found you, don’t you? Someone at the paper remembered seeing your wedding on television and said it was a brilliant piece of theater. So I thought you would be just the right people for this article. People are simply doing things differently these days, from weddings to childbirth to furnishing a home and preparing food. I’m sorry we haven’t had time to speak about the wedding. But I can view the tape at the television station.”
“If it’s unorthodox living you want, you should talk to Manfred Bird, my mentor. Professor Manfred Bird? But he’s off in the field, on some island in the South Pacific. He almost went to jail for theft and smuggling. Maybe he was set up. But they let him off. Good government connections. The Birds led a crazy life for years, long before it became fashionable. His apartment is something else.’’ He looked at Lark. “Great guy, Manfred Bird.”
“If it’s theater you want, I’ll give you theater,” Lark burst out at Tom. “It is because of me that Manfred Bird was investigated. I told the authorities in Tacoma. I thought they didn’t want to listen to me. I thought there were bombs in those boxes on the ship, but it was really his smuggled art works. It’s his own daughter’s doing. One of her jokes. Were you in on it, too? Educating me? Forcing me to make a spectacle of myself? Donna Bird told me there were bombs. She is the one who really destroyed her father, not me.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” said Tom.
“I loved you. I was afraid of making you angry,” said Lark. “I wanted you to love me.”
“All you want is love.” Tom was standing up, his teacup in his hand, breathing heavily. “That’s all you’re interested in.”
“Most people want love,” Lark shouted back at him.
“Not the way you want it. Love is all you want.” He looked all around him, as if he had lost something. He looked down at the teacup and saucer, then hurled them against the bookshelves, which swayed back and forth. The shattering sounded surprisingly trivial, slight.
“Do you, did you, love me?”
“Don’t you know yet that that kind of question has no meaning?” Tom said.
Greta edged to the door. “I should be going.”
Lark, still talking, led her back into the room. “I actually tried to set fire to the Avis Maris, I actually put a flame to the bedding, thinking I was possibly saving the world. I was even prepared to die.” Lark gave Greta a shake. “Take notes. You want to see how people do things these days? I’ll show you how marriages end.” She kept hold of the sleeve of Greta’s T-shirt.
“Now that’s crazy,” said Tom. “Setting fire to a ship.” He was frowning, angry, and seemed to be looking around for something to throw or push around. His hands were clenching and unclenching, his eyes were darting from one object to the next.
“You had better leave. For good, I mean. I don’t want to be married to you. For God’s sake, leave. What a terrible error we made.”
Tom was suddenly calm. He smiled, shrugged. “Well, well, well. It has taken you long enough.” To Greta he said, “Ever since I’ve known her, I’ve been trying to get her to stand on her own two feet. I was wondering just what it would take, how far I would have to go, how long it would take, for her to take some kind of action, do something.” He looked at his watch, as if it would tell him exactly how long it had taken. “If you can wait a moment,’’ he said to Greta, “I’ll just throw a few things together, and I’ll leave with you.” To Lark he said, “You’ve got to admit, you don’t know everything, but you know a lot now. Lesson number four complete. It’s called standing on your own two feet.” To Greta he said, “You see, sometimes an outside source of activation energy is needed to get a reaction started.”
Greta, smiling, looking pale and frightened, looked dubiously at Tom then at Lark, who was still grasping her T-shirt. “Far out. You both planned that, didn’t you? Another brilliant piece of theater.”
Tom appeared with an overnight bag in which he had thrown a few clothes. He was also carrying the carving knife.
“Jesus,” gasped Greta, trying to free herself from Lark and get to the door.
Tom strode over to the old armchair and turned it u
pside down with a thud. He slashed the underside of the chair, then reached into the seat, pulling out the stuffing. Then he cut up the seat cushion and the arms.
“That Russian,” he said.
“I get it,” Greta said, still nervous. “The performance isn’t over yet. Okay. What Russian?”
“The one who came one night, to the party.”
“That was months ago,” said Lark. “Over a year.”
“He was sent, it just dawned on me.”
“Sent?” Greta echoed.
“Here.”
“Why?”
Lark turned away from Tom, who was still attacking the chair.
“I was just thinking,” Tom said finally, “that that Russian must have planted a microphone in this chair. He didn’t move from it all night.”
The upholstery of the chair was spread over the floor.
Tom straightened up and threw the knife down. “Listen,” he said jovially, seeing the appalled expression on Greta’s face, “think of the kind of surveillance that’s been going on in this country. You know they photograph demonstrations and then enlarge the faces and catalogue them and put them on file.” He kicked at the chair stuffing. “It’s not completely off the wall to look for a hidden microphone. And I am considered a troublemaker, I’m known as a critic of society. There’s that phone tap I told you about.”
He went to the typewriter and took out the sheet of paper he had been working on. “Outline for a manifesto,” he explained to the reporter. He gave Lark a pat. “So long. Welcome to the real world.”
Greta thanked Lark for her time. “Brilliant,” she said to Tom as they left the apartment.
“You see,” said Tom, “Jung didn’t take his concept of the collective unconscious far enough.” They were on the landing waiting for the elevator. “I maintain that we carry with us the memory of the single cell state and that everything we do is part of our drive to return to that primitive state. We constantly seek to break down the boundaries of complex structures. Look at the inevitability of nuclear war. Look at the sexual act itself. Look at Rigoletto. Verdi knew it. So did Einstein.”
“That’s truly brilliant,” said Greta. “But haven’t you heard that Darwin’s evolution is no longer tenable, that we didn’t crawl out of the primordial sludge, that life on earth was brought in on cosmic dust?”
“It was my ancestor who discovered the cell nucleus,” said Tom in reply. “And he observed Brownian movement, the irregular zigzag of particles suspended in a fluid, the result of collisions between the particles and the fluid molecules, which are in constant thermal motion.”
Lark watched Tom and Greta walk along the sidewalk beneath her balcony, past the wrecked station wagon. Tom gesturing as usual, Greta looking up at him, nodding, smiling, eager.
The doorbell rang. Lark, standing amid the fragments of the armchair, hesitated, then walked slowly to open it. Solomon Blank stood there.
“I’ve run away,” he said, his voice high, tense, his face gray and pinched. “I just drove all the way. Now they’ve wrecked my car.” He stepped into the apartment and leant against Lark, holding on to her. “I needed you.”
Lark led him into the living room. He walked right through the remains of the chair and the shards of cup and saucer to the balcony. “I had just arrived from Chicago. I drove nonstop. I was trying to get the courage to ring your bell. I’d gone for a long walk. When I came back, my car was totaled.”
Lark made fresh tea, which Solomon drank one cup after another, swaying in the rocking chair. He seemed to be in shock. Lark sat on the cushion on the floor. “So that green station wagon was actually yours? It was an accident. I saw it happen just now.”
But Solomon did not seem to care. “We know the same things, you and I,” he said. “The ocean, the rocks. I want to stay with you. I can’t stand being inland. I just got in the car and pointed east and drove.” He lay down on the floor, next to Lark, his head in her lap. “Take care of me,” he said, reaching up and stroking Lark’s cheek. The white stuffing from the armchair frothed around him. He looked like an angel at play in heaven.
Lark said nothing. She looked around at the chaos of the room. “Go home,” she finally said. “To your wife and the baby.”
“I’m not happy there. And I love you. I must stay with you.”
Lark stroked his forehead. “It’ll be all right,” she murmured. “You’ll feel better soon.”
Solomon kissed her hand, then he closed his eyes and seemed to sleep. Lark sat and watched him. When he opened his eyes, Lark reached for the phone. “Tell me your number,” and she dialed Champaign-Urbana.
“I don’t want to go home,” grumbled Solomon.
Lark passed the phone to Solomon. Then, easing out from under his head, she left the room and lay on her bed, while Solomon talked at length to Amanda. Half an hour later, he came and lay on the bed next to her.
“I’m sorry, Lark. I can’t stay. She’s hysterical. She wants me back. She doesn’t care about the car. I’m sorry. She says she still loves me.”
“You’re lucky.”
“I’m sorry. It’s you I must turn away from. Forgive me.” Solomon propped himself on one elbow and looked down at Lark.
“It was your idea. I didn’t ask you to come.”
“I have to go back, but I never want to lose you. You are one of the most important people in my life.” Solomon started kissing Lark, making love to her.
Lark rolled away from him and stood up. “I’ll call the travel agent. You can leave right now.”
“I love you. Will you give me a rain check? In case I’m ever free in the future?”
Lark dialed the agent. “Mavis? Can you reserve a place on the next plane out of La Guardia for Chicago?”
“I’m sorry, Lark,” said Solomon. “But Amanda can’t manage without me. She’s very dependent. I see that now. She’s not strong like you.”
At the door Lark stepped back from his kiss. “Perhaps you should take her something from New York. A present. You can get it at the airport.”
As she closed the door, the baby woke up and began to cry. For a moment Lark rested her head against the door, then went in to her little girl. “You woke up,” she said softly, taking the soft, happy baby in her arms and kissing her.
In the space of a baby’s afternoon nap, Lark had separated from her husband and rejected a lover.
Solomon Blank wrote: “Mother died today, or maybe tomorrow—the dateline, you know. My mother, not yours. We’re going back to live in her house and start afresh. Think of us on that cliff, that beach, that rock shelf. Family life is at a really interesting stage. Little Hugo seems to be doubling his knowledge every day. When asked how old he is, he says, ‘Almost two,’ but he pronounces it ‘oh-mose two.’ It was good to see you in New York.”
Greta telephoned. “I’ll read you what I’ve written about your life style,” she said, “in case there are mistakes. I treated your fight as theater. It was very good. I kind of reviewed it.” And she read out the piece, ending with, “‘They are now settled smugly in New York City.’”
“Smugly?” Lark was astonished. “Smug?”
“You don’t like smugly?” the reporter said. “I’ll change it to snugly. That’s easy. One letter. ‘They are now settled snugly.”’
“You realize we don’t live together now. We don’t have a life style, anymore.”
Greta laughed delightedly. “I know you staged that fight for my benefit. I know a joke when I see one.”
Mrs. Watter wrote: “My native garden is doing very well. The bacon-and-egg plant, the sarsaparilla, and flannel flowers are flourishing. The Susans are unsteady. The jacaranda is out and it happens also to be the year for the flame-tree to blossom. The red next to the purple of the jacaranda brings tears to my eyes.
“Which brings me to your father. I’m afraid we have lost him. There has been no news. Perhaps you’ve heard something. The letter from the shipping company was the first I heard of it. They said the
ship stopped at some island and some of their cargo disappeared or was mislaid. They said they hoped to recover it and there would be no charge. I wrote to them saying I hadn’t shipped anything. He’ll be back, I thought, all in good time. I’d been away for a week, up the coast on a little holiday. I managed to collect a few more specimens from the bush for my native garden. He wasn’t here when I came back. The box, that project of his, had disappeared from the basement. I thought he’d gone off in a huff because I went away. He doesn’t like being left. But I thought it was time he stood on his own two feet, a man his age in a pet because his wife of twenty-seven years went away for a few days on her first holiday in years. I had had enough.
“I didn’t think he’d actually do something. He never has before. The shipping company sent me a copy of the bill of lading. It was for a big box, C.O.D., to New York. Among his papers under the mattress I found a clipping about a penniless Australian athlete who had himself shipped home C.O.D. from London in a wooden crate because he couldn’t afford the ticket home. But he shipped himself by air, not sea. That project of your father’s was certainly big enough to hold a man. Perhaps he packed himself in it, along with supplies, food, drink, a cardigan in case it turned cold. He did say it would be cheaper, when he went, didn’t he? Well, that’s what he must have meant. And now he has been lost or mislaid, or maybe even stolen. Sometimes freight is stolen. I am quite upset about it. I don’t know what to tell the authorities. It, or he, was insured for quite a lot. The bill of lading said household effects. The shipping company said I would get the insurance if they didn’t find the crate.
“Perhaps you will hear something. The whole thing was consigned to you. I had noticed that there were holes along the sides of the box, but I thought it was for decoration or a mistake, so I said nothing about it. He hates to be criticized. And remember that lock. It was on the inside. Perhaps you will hear something. There’s no news at this end. Perhaps he escaped and is wandering on some island and is happy. Too, before I left on my holiday he said to tell you, you have made your own way in this tricky world. You have done it all yourself. There has not been much help from us, I am aware.”