Instead he sat down on the side of the bed and beckoned to her to sit next to him, then put his arm around her.
“What’s up, Maggie? What are you so jittery about?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Everything seems so complicated. I hate the thought of going to Philadelphia.”
“That’s natural. We’ll get it over with fast.”
“And then, let’s say you get the money and everything else happens the way it’s supposed to, and then . . . well for instance it’s one thing to think about living in a permanent situation with De Witt and something else to think about Mira.”
Roger smiled. “I feel exactly the opposite.”
“You do?”
“Sure. It’s one thing to think about having this spooky do-gooder nobody relates to kind of floating around the house but it’s something else to think about living with this guy your wife digs and you know he’s always gonna be there ready to prop her up if you’re being a louse, a perpetual alternative for her to flirt with.”
“You could try not being a louse,” she said.
“That’s true,” he said.
She watched him suspiciously. Was he putting on some kind of brilliant act that would last just long enough for her to do what he wanted her to do? When he’d first arrived at the farm they’d had that one decent talk when Roger had been the way he was being now—however that was . . . reasonable—listening to what she said instead of just using it as something to bounce off of—and then what had happened? They’d been talking about David. Of course, that was it. He’d been upset about David and he couldn’t admit it then for fear of being put in a time machine and sent back to the nineteenth century, so he’d just gotten nasty and sarcastic again. That was reasonable, actually. But he was being straight with her now about De Witt.
“De Witt might split anyway,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have any trouble finding a new partner, there’re always people looking for a setup like this. Anyway, why would he do that?”
“If you have an argument. Or he might get bored. He told me once he hated the idea of staying anyplace forever.”
“Who doesn’t? I might get bored, too. You can’t not do anything because anything you do you might get bored with. In theory, once you get something like this going you can rotate responsibilities and everyone can have some freedom.”
She smiled. “And anyone who doesn’t like it can split.”
“You get so upset when I tell you that. But it’s true. And not only that but I never said it until you’d really done it once.”
“I was getting out of an unbearable situation,” she said. “I hated you and myself and my whole life. I couldn’t stand it any more but I never thought about leaving you forever. I thought about escaping for a while, or I’d think how nice it would be to have a husband I got along with, stuff like that, but I never thought about leaving you permanently.”
“Is that true?”
“Yes.” It was funny that it was true, but it was.
Long silence. He fondled her arm, kissed her cheek.
“You know,” he said, “you never asked me what happened to me while you were away.”
“I didn’t think you’d want me to.” In truth she hadn’t wanted to know. What was she supposed to do, ask for a written list of his conquests?
“Well,” he said, “I’ll tell you now. When you left, at first I felt pretty relieved to realize you were gone, you looked like such a freak, and you were so fucking spooked and jumpy after your mother died, it was like living in a haunted house. So when you went . . . I didn’t think I was going to care. I figured now I could relax and enjoy myself . . . I stayed stoned a lot the first few months . . . screwed around some, constantly as a matter of fact. I think maybe in the back of my mind I sort of assumed you were coming back and things would just go back to the way they were before, except we’d have the kids. Then Christmas came and went and I guess that was when I began realizing you weren’t coming back.” He smiled ironically. “I got very nostalgic. I stayed stoned but the pictures changed, I kept seeing these very bucolic pastoral scenes, you and these beautiful little twin girls running through meadows, swimming bare-ass under waterfalls, stuff like that. I found I couldn’t get interested in sex any more except when I was seeing those pictures. Then after a while the pictures didn’t do it any more . . . I couldn’t get it up . . . and that’s when I panicked.” He smiled. “That particular problem I’d never had before. I went through the next few weeks after that literally drunk, stoned and/or sleeping every minute of the time. I woke up scared. Then one night I was stoned as usual, and I had on some really good stuff, some ragas, I guess, and I started getting pictures of women. But I mean from way back. Like my mother and my aunts and every maid we ever had and every girlfriend and every chick I ever lived with, and so on, and as the stuff wore off I started thinking, and I realized . . . this may sound dumb but I’d actually never thought of it before . . . I realized it was actually the first time in my whole life I’d lived without a woman in the same house for more than a few days at a time. Boarding school they took me home from after a week because I made such a stink. From the time I left home I always made sure there was some broad around. This was the first time in my life I’d been on my own. That really got to me. It set off a whole train of other things. I got very introspective. I thought and I thought and I thought and I thought and some of it was pretty painful . . . like I spent days thinking to myself, what would I have been thinking about all this time if I wasn’t thinking about getting laid, bugging my wife, etc. But the interesting thing was that from that day on, the panic was over. If I got stoned once in a while it was because I felt like it, felt like seeing some new pictures, getting some new insights, whatever. Not because I was scared not to be stoned. I still had no sex feelings, though. Not until I got here and saw you again. That flirting business with Hannah and stuff . . . I don’t think I would have bothered if you weren’t around, and the David business . . .”
Silence.
“Roger,” she said truthfully, “I love you much more now than I ever have.”
They hugged each other.
EVERYONE was there for the meeting, including Starr’s fifteen-year-old boyfriend, Jordan’s No. 2 girlfriend, a freshman at the Putney School, Harry Kirschner, a wild-eyed, nouveau organic farmer who lived a few miles down the road, whom De Witt had met recently at an organic-food suppliers’ conference, and Harry’s five apprentices, a murmuring chorus of sweet-faced acidheads, as well as two men, Larry and Jim, who’d appeared that afternoon in dashikis and bell-bottom jeans, explaining that they were considering giving up their FBI jobs to farm organically.
“Oh, Jesus,” Starr said, “do we have to let in every creep that comes to the door?”
Starr’s boyfriend smiled amiably.
“No,” De Witt said, “we don’t. But where to cut it off is the problem.”
“Before them,” Starr said.
“Can’t we just ignore them?” Margaret asked. “It’s not as if we’re doing anything political.”
“That’s where you’re wrong!” Harry boomed at them from the periphery of their little corner group. “Wrong wrong wrong wrong! Everything we do is political! This is where the politics is, now!”
“Thanks for telling me,” Starr muttered. From their corner, Larry and Jim stared at Harry, wide-eyed.
“Whaddya mean, fella?” one of them finally asked.
“Where do you think the revolution’s gonna be, man?” Harry asked. “In the Pentagon? You can’t have a revolution in the Pentagon, they’re all robots! And you can’t have a revolution in the cities, nobody has any energy, they’re all half dead from eating plastic food and never letting their feet touch the earth. This is the place, man! It’s the only place for the revolution to begin! It has begun! This is it!”
“Jesus,” Jordan muttered. “Maybe he’s FBI.”
“This isn’t a meeting,” Roger said. “It’s a fucking comic ope
ra!”
“I’m not taking part in any meeting,” Starr said, “with any fucking list-making tape-recording FBI pricks!”
“No kidding,” Paul said, “do you think we’re on their list?”
“Everyone’s on their list,” Roger said. “The Cancer Crusade’s on their list because they discovered the Left has more of it.”
“Will you settle for a vote?” De Witt asked Starr, who consented. By vote it was decided that Harry Kirschner and his apprentices could stay, as could Jordan’s girlfriend and Starr’s boyfriend and Dolores’s girlfriend but that Larry and Jim would have to go. One of them was practically in tears as they left. The other one was telling him, audibly, not to be upset, that they were martyrs to left-wing racism.
“Okay,” De Witt said, “Most of you probably know or have figured out that Mitchell’s having a bad time of it financially right now . . . the recession, depression, whatever you want to call it . . . and he wants to pull back on some of his obligations. Aside from his general situation his taxes here have gone up enormously . . . anyway, he’s decided to sell the farm, and possibly the land as well.”
“Oh, no!” Carol wailed. “I was just beginning to think of this place as a real home, someplace I could go away from and come back to.”
“Shit,” Starr said, “I knew it was coming. Shit, shit, shit, shit!”
Dolores said nothing but looked more stricken than anyone.
“Don’t let him do it, man!” Harry said. “Take possession of the land, it belongs to you.”
Everyone ignored him and he subsided for the moment.
Jordan’s face was impassive but Margaret couldn’t tell if it was stoicism or indifference. Paul looked bemused. Carol was making it a point not to look at Jordan or Butterscotch or Jordan’s No. 2 girlfriend; they had agreed in some way, open or tacit, Carol and Jordan as well as Paul and Starr, that they were to use the farm, instead of each other, as the center of their lives.
“It could take him a long time to sell it,” Carol finally said.
“Oh, that’s great,” Starr said. “Sitting around waiting for the ax to fall.”
De Witt said, “I think we may be spared that.”
They waited.
“Roger is willing to try to buy it,” De Witt said, “and go on with our plans as before.”
There was a long silence. Then Starr, in a voice thick with suspicion and hostility, said to Roger, “What, are you rich?”
“My parents are,” Roger said.
Margaret always enjoyed the admission; until him, the rich people she’d met in New York had been like the aunts and uncles; you had to see the summer house in East Hampton or the yacht to know that the toe-worn sneakers were a matter of style. The kids in ratty clothes who thought they were breaking with a tradition were merely pushing one into the realm of the ridiculous.
“I’m not sure they’ll give me the money,” Roger continued into the vacuum. “I own a house where we used to live though. Outright. It’s worth maybe close to fifty grand, and I’ve called the brokers and put it on the market, and assuming I can sell it . . . I’ll come down on the price if I have to, to do it fast . . . anyway, that would give me more than enough to buy the farm parcel but that only includes a few acres, and in terms of having a self-sustaining enterprise here I’m not sure it pays to buy it without the big piece of land. If it comes to that it might be a better idea to look up north of here and see if I can’t do better.”
Silence.
Starr: “I notice you keep saying I and my instead of us and our.”
Roger: “Does anybody else have any money?”
Starr: “That’s not the point.”
Roger: “All right. What is?”
Starr: “The point is, what you’re offering is to replace our weekend-hippie-absentee landlord with one who’s here all the time.”
“Oh, wow,” Paul said. “That’s pretty heavy.”
“Still,” Jordan said, “I can see what’s she’s talking about.”
Margaret looked at De Witt; he’d foreseen something like this, which was why he’d suggested the meeting. His face was expressionless. Roger was looking annoyed but not half as angry, it seemed to her, as she would have imagined if she’d had to paint his face without seeing it.
“I know what she’s talking about, too,” Roger said. “But I don’t see any way of getting around it. First of all, I want to make it clear that nobody’s sending me on any guilt trip over my money.”
“Nobody has to send you, man,” Jordan said. “You’re there already if you know you’ve got something no one else has that you didn’t earn.”
“Or,” Roger said, “to put it another way, that I didn’t have to exploit anyone to get.”
De Witt and Dolores smiled but the others were angry.
“You’ve managed to twist it around,” Starr said.
“You have to realize,” Margaret said, “that anyone who has money gets an awful lot of that . . . stuff.”
“And you have to realize,” Starr said, “that anyone who hasn’t got money would be happy to exchange that kind of stuff for the kind of shit you get when you’re poor.”
Margaret nodded reluctantly. She glanced at De Witt; he was still watching. He would wait for it to get worse before he made any attempt at mediation.
“Are you just getting it off your chest?” Roger asked Starr. “Or do you have an idea?”
Starr shrugged. “I have a lot of ideas. Like why don’t you split up the money and let us all buy it?”
Someone whistled.
Roger said, “You’re not kidding, are you?”
Starr shook her head.
Silence.
“You’re HUNG UP, man!” Harry Kirschner burst out with sudden violence. “You’re all hung up on your money! Don’t you know that money is shit?”
“Fine,” Roger said calmly. “Go squeeze some out.”
“You know what I mean, man,” Harry said. “How you gonna face the future if you can’t get rid of your hangups from the past? Look at me! Look at my body!” He flexed his muscles, pulled up his chambray shirt to reveal a lean sun-tanned torso. “Look at the life I lead! Would you believe I used to be a two-hundred-sixty-four-pound chemical engineer?”
Roger said, “Yes.”
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you,” Harry said.
“Why don’t you go fuck off?” Roger said. “What’s this joker doing here anyway?”
“You see?” Starr said. “You’re throwing your weight around already.”
“My God!” Margaret exclaimed. “He’s doing exactly what you were doing a few minutes ago with those other men.”
“I’ve been here a lot longer than he has,” Starr said defensively.
“You mean you’d like a dictatorship of time instead of money?”
“I wouldn’t like a dictatorship of anything!” Starr said heatedly. “I’m saying it’s bad enough to feel like someone controls your life who’s a few hundred miles away, and now you’re telling me some guy that walked in a couple of months ago is gonna be able to tell me to go fuck off.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Roger said, “nobody’s telling you to fuck off.”
“You could. Or you’ll think you can.”
Of course he would have even without the money but Starr probably didn’t realize that. By the time of Roger’s arrival Starr had been out of the winter madness and into her new boyfriend and a variety of other projects so that they’d never happened to cross. Roger was smacking his forehead in frustration.
“May I say something?” De Witt asked gently. They all turned to him. “As you know, I’m not against anger as a response to an immediate situation. A way of working out the knots that develop between people. But these issues we’re getting into now, they’re not like that . . . they’re very large, complex, legitimate problems, that is to say they go beyond personalities. Questions like who has a voice, how you earn the voice, and so on, this isn’t a question of clashing personalit
ies, it goes to the heart of our culture and beyond it.”
“Not our culture, man,” boomed Harry to the smiling and nods of his chorus. “Their culture. Money has no place in our culture.”
“Bullshit,” several people said at once.
“How’d you buy your farm?” Starr demanded.
“I used up what I had in the bank. That was it, I’m finished with money now.”
“Tell that to the tax collector,” Jordan said.
“What if you hadn’t had that?” Starr demanded. “You’d have had to find someone who did, right?”
“I’m sorry,” Harry said, standing up and yawning. “I can’t get into you people. You’re too hung up for me.” And he left, followed by his boys.
“Now it seems to me,” De Witt went on as though he’d never been interrupted, “that there are several related issues involved. Maybe we can take them up one at a time, even if they overlap . . . Now the first question I think only you can answer, Roger, and that is whether the feelings of the group are crucial to you. That is, assuming that Mitchell really means to sell and you’re able to raise the money to buy, would the feelings of the rest of the group matter to you to a point where they would cause you to go ahead or stop?”
Margaret held her breath; what admission was he asking of Roger, from whom she’d never heard the words I love you. How could Roger ever admit in public that other people’s feelings were important to him?
Long pause. Then Roger said slowly, “Your feelings are important to me because we’re talking about a partnership . . . Margaret’s feelings are important to me because she’s my wife . . .” Mirabile dictul She exhaled. “The others . . . I care how the others feel but not as much.”
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