“That’s what he said. Read it.”
“I have read it. Come on!”
“Well, he says that Fidel is only doing this because he needs the Soviet Union right now because of the crop failures.”
Richard stared at her, surprised that her argument made sense and stunned that she had the nerve to say it. Lisa seemed ecstatic to have reduced him to silence. She smiled broadly and delightedly at him, almost as if he should share in her pleasure at his defeat. “Right?” she said, and looked at the others.
“You’re out of your fucking mind!” Richard said quickly. He had seen Joan’s look of discomfort and he sensed that an attempt would be made to end the discussion. It was obviously unpleasant for the other three. “I can’t believe that the one thing in the article which is written to defuse the criticism of Fidel is what you consider so bad.”
“What?” Lisa said loudly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Lisa, what is this shit?” Salvatore said.
“Yeah,” Mark said. “I think it would be better if you two—”
“Oh no!” Richard yelled. “I want her to deal with what I said.”
“Fine,” Lisa looked at Richard calmly. “I didn’t hear what you said.”
“Dad explained the relationship between Fidel and the Soviet Union in order to show Fidel’s side of it. Clearly Fidel thinks it’s more important that the Cuban people eat than that their artists be free to write avant-garde junk.”
“Isn’t that saying that Fidel is a stooge?”
“You are concluding that Fidel is a stooge because he depends on the Soviet Union for food. You make that judgment, not Dad.”
“Not Dad,” she mimicked.
He felt his heart pound and the room’s light close in. Lisa even paused momentarily at the ferocity of his expression.
“Well, Dad,” she went on with a humorous emphasis, “isn’t making much sense. Because that proves Fidel was right. It’s not important what happens to Padilla if it means Cubans will starve.”
“And I suppose it doesn’t matter that the Soviet—”
“Stop shouting, Richard,” Lisa said with an air of innocence that doubled Richard’s fury.
“Don’t you dare tell me to stop shouting! I’ll scream—” He knew he had lost the others from the embarrassment on their faces, and Joan’s interruption was a galling confirmation: “Richard. Calm down, it’s not worth it.”
“Shut up!” he yelled, opening his throat and ripping the sounds out. “Shut up!”
“I can’t take this,” Joan said, and left.
Mark called after her and followed her out, and Richard watched Salvatore do the same with surprise. He had never had walkouts by observers during a tantrum. Lisa still sat on the floor with her legs crossed and her feet tucked beneath her body, smiling somewhat pityingly at him. “This is silly,” she said.
“Will you listen! You’re into scoring points. Listen!”
“Okay.”
“It means nothing to you that the Soviet Union applies this pressure. You don’t care about that. Anything to justify Fidel. Does the Cuban Revolution amount to anything if it’s merely an excuse for Soviet power? If they’re going to influence tiny decisions such as the status of poets, then what else will they influence? They didn’t support Che. I mean, do I have to run down the number of fucked up things Russia has done in terms of leftist movements in other countries. Like the CP in France?”
“You’re so confused. I don’t know what you’re saying.” She scored with every line, touching on things about him or his ideas that he felt were embarrassing or irrational. He tried over and over to force her into discussing his points, but she remained personal, saying he was defensive, that he was too upset to think clearly.
He heard the other three laughing in one of the adjoining rooms, and occasionally a head would pop in to see if they were still fighting. He imagined he heard them comment on his stubbornness, and every laugh sounded derisive.
As Richard became more desperate, he began to return Lisa’s personal remarks. He called her manipulative when she accused him of defensiveness. His escalation must have caused her really explosive charge. “You’re just an intellectual,” she said at last. “You don’t like the idea of a poet being censored. It’s just a liberal hangup.”
“I’m an intellectual!” Richard didn’t have an angry reaction at first because it was incredible: he had railed against intellectuals in every other argument; he blamed intellectuals for the decadence of contemporary literature; he left school to avoid becoming one. He would have considered it more likely that he was a fascist. “How the hell am I an intellectual?”
For the first time during their fight he was comfortable. There was no unstoppable surge of rage to embarrass him. He smiled sarcastically at her and noticed with a thrill that she suddenly seemed at a loss. “Well, you read books—”
“I read books!” He laughed with real delight. “Boy, you have low standards. You don’t read books, I suppose.”
“I mean—”
“Only illiterates aren’t intellectuals.”
“Richard, will you stop being obnoxious? I mean, you relate to the world through books. You’re a novelist.”
She had stumbled into this line of attack but Richard could see, in her eyes, her determination to maintain it. He asked her if she meant that novelists were intellectuals and noticed, with dismay, that there wasn’t the slightest insincerity in her manner when she said yes.
He was hurt. The discussion was no longer merely tactical or excessively vehement. He was hit. “Novelists aren’t intellectuals. Don’t you know what intellectual means?” He was whining. “An intellectual perceives the world through ideas. A novelist observes and feels experience and then relates it.”
He was so obviously upset that even Lisa hesitated before continuing. “Why are you so defensive about it?” she said once more. It was apparently a favorite question, but this time it seemed more apologetic than offensive. “It’s not a terrible thing to say, Richard.”
He noticed the disturbance before he spoke. He had said how can you say that, twice, before he turned to look at what had gotten Lisa laughing. Joan was entering the room, riding on Salvatore’s back. “We come in peace,” she kept saying, addressing it to Richard mostly. Mark was behind them, smiling benignly.
“What the fuck do you two assholes think you’re doing!” Richard’s words broke up the carefree tableau quickly. To abuse them was satisfying. He felt his voice rumble into a storm of words that refreshed his self, his sense of self. “Don’t you come fucking around in here while I’m fighting! I don’t care how unimportant it seems to you. You think you’re cool and intelligent for not being involved. What are you? Too fucking civilized to be able to stand an argument?” Joan had slid off Salvatore and he had looked abashed. Sal muttered that Richard obviously didn’t think it was funny. And Joan had said Richard twice in protest. They all looked at him and he thought, Do they think I’m going to stop? “Get the fuck outta here. Right now! I’m tired of patronizing your sensibilities. I’m fighting with Lisa! So fuck off!”
Lisa allowed him to ramble on about how intellectuals weren’t artists when they were alone again. She was quite content with what had already been said and she began to say that it was foolish to go on discussing it. He knew he was through. He couldn’t judge which was more painful, continuing to talk to Lisa, or facing the others when it was over.
Mark made a joke about the heavyweight championship finally ending when Richard emerged and said to Joan, “I wanna go.”
“Do you want me to go with you?” she asked. “I’m an asshole, remember?”
“That’s hilarious,” Richard said. “Can we go?”
“All right.” She looked suddenly vulnerable and walked over to hug him. His mind told him to hold her and that would relieve most of his humiliation and hers, but his body pulled away against orders. She managed a look of pain and annoyance that was remarkable for its comp
lexity.
“Come on,” he said, his voice twisted into a whine.
Her eyes stopped pleading. “All right! Calm down.”
He knew they would ride home in silence and that he would turn on the television as soon as they arrived. He didn’t want to behave peevishly, but he did. He hoped that after an hour or so he would be able to start talking to her and straighten it out, but she fell asleep almost immediately and he was left alone with ceaseless slow-motion replays of the fight.
He lay on his side, slipping into sleep. His mind was busy repeating his argument when he suddenly felt his body slide into space. He fell rapidly and wanted to wake up and move, but couldn’t. Fear rushed in on top of the struggle to move and pushed him up with a start.
“Sweetheart, are you all right?” Joan asked. Her eyes were red and one side of her face was streaked from the pillow.
“No. I woke up with a start.” He laughed. “I never knew what that meant. That’s heavy. It’s really unpleasant.”
“Poor baby,” she said, and wearily moved next to him. He accepted her gratefully and enjoyed the protectiveness of having her head on his chest.
“I wonder why that happened,” he said.
“It’s probably because we didn’t talk about the argument.”
“Oh, yeah?” He smiled as he realized that the bitterness he had felt about Joan’s behavior had been so quickly repressed. Such knowledge was still too new to be depressing. “Yeah, I was really pissed off at you,” he said casually.
“You were very mean, babes,” she said, only slightly less casually.
His attempt to absorb and accept this view of hers was intercepted by anger. “Well, that was just defense, you know? I mean, you fucked me up first.”
“What?” She moved away and looked at him. “How—” She stopped and then lay down. “It’s silly. You were upset.”
“Exactly,” he said in a loud quick tone.
There was silence and they both huddled into the blankets as if they were going to sleep. Richard’s nervousness increased as he remembered Joan entering the room on Sal’s back. He couldn’t believe she was so ready to ridicule him. “I’m gonna turn out the light, okay?” Joan asked.
“Uh, no. We’ve got to talk.” He said that grimly and tossed the covers aside violently. He got out of bed and hunted in his clothes for cigarettes.
She sat up, looking tired, and watched him. After he lit a cigarette, he stood at the foot of the bed. “I guess you don’t understand.”
“I don’t.”
“Yeah. Well, if that had been just a routine political discussion I wouldn’t have been right to be so upset that you wanted me to stop. She was talking about my father.” He paused and looked intently at her.
Joan returned his look and waited. “Do you want me to say something to that?” she asked at last.
“You don’t get it, huh?”
“Richard, I knew she was talking about your father.”
“Oh, come on! Fuck off!”
“What? What are you upset about?”
“I suppose you would have been casual about it if it had been your father. I suppose that it means nothing. I suppose it doesn’t even mean anything that she called me an intellectual.” Joan laughed. “What are you laughing at?” She looked stunned. “She was telling me I came from a family of intellectuals whose liberal perceptions—” He was overwhelmed by frustration. “She was calling me a pig.”
“Richard, you’re being crazy.”
“I’m telling you that’s what it amounts to.”
“Okay.”
She sat quietly, stubbornly. “Look,” he said. “Even if you thought I was too upset, then why didn’t you respect my problem? Why didn’t you just wait it out?”
“I can’t answer that. That’s not the way I saw it.”
“Well, goddammit, how did you see it?”
“Babes, do you have to yell at me?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I thought you were very upset and I didn’t think you were doing yourself any good arguing with her. I mean, I thought it was silly to fight about it. We just thought it would break up the tension if we came in like that”
“Yeah, it sure broke the tension. I can’t believe you didn’t realize that I would think you were ridiculing me.”
“You thought I was making fun of you?”
Her expression was so incredulous that he suddenly felt foolish. “Of course. What else do you expect me to think?”
She smiled. “I didn’t expect that. You really thought that?”
“Yeah,” he said unhappily.
She looked at him lovingly, but with a mild amusement that he fancied contained a trace of contempt. “I’m sorry you thought that, babes, but I didn’t—I wasn’t making fun of you. I just wanted to stop the argument. So did Sal. He thought Lisa was crazy.”
The conversation had taken on a settled tone; Richard walked away from the bed and then back again. “Yeah, but you see she really wasn’t being crazy. She was just being straight about her arrogance toward people she considers nonpolitical, or nonactivist.”
He watched her reaction to this and it was obvious that Joan merely distrusted the sound of his words and had no understanding of them. “I mean,” he went on, “that’s the way most of those people feel about me.”
“What people?”
“Political people.” He had snapped the word at her.
“Look. I’m not gonna get into this. I don’t know what’s freaking you out about this but I can’t deal with it. If you want me to support you no matter what happens or what you’re saying—I can’t do that.”
“Oh, then fuck off. Go to sleep.” He got into his clothes and she watched him, looking miserable.
“Are you leaving?” she asked plaintively.
He looked at her and laughed. “Boy, do you have an exaggerated sense of the force of my anger! No, you fool, I’m going to read. I just don’t want to be cold.”
He stayed up until dawn. He considered that an appropriate reaction and woke up to an empty apartment refreshed. Joan had left him a note explaining that she was out job hunting, and he was amused by this unusual care she took to explain her absence. He was pleased they had fought. He was especially pleased he had left her on the defensive. She had always been in control of their relationship because of her greater sexual experience, and he had discovered a major weapon to neutralize her.
CHAPTER NINE
Richard spent the last month of the summer smoking grass and bickering with Joan. They fucked once and he was perfunctory about it. It didn’t occur to him that Joan might become disgusted with his behavior. He also refused to analyze why he was so depressed.
In September, they spent one weekend cleaning the apartment. It was unbearable to do such work, but, after Richard had vacuumed and straightened vehemently, he felt his thoughts were just as ordered and clear as the apartment.
They settled on the bed and Joan furtively rubbed his groin and, when encouraged, she undid his pants and lowered them. Richard was heartened by his situation: his penis enveloped in the cool of her mouth, his novel coming out in two months. It was fantastic to consider, to add up, the things he had acquired in the last six months: an apartment, a checking account, a lover, a publisher, a summer vacation, a life ordered by no institution. He knew it was cynical to think of it this way but he did, gleefully and triumphantly. How frightening that that was all he enjoyed about them. The fact of their existence.
He loved it when Joan took his penis into her mouth, but there was something ruthless about looking down at her doing it. He felt it was impolite to enjoy it too much. And then the problem it created by bringing him to a climax. So when it became impossible to control his excitement, he stopped her. She lay back ready for him, and it was difficult to overcome the sudden depression that hit him. It was tawdry: the lights on, his pants bunched at his knees, and Joan lying there with her eyes closed, waiting.
“Babes,” he said with a slight tre
mble.
She opened her eyes, alarmed. “What?”
He got up and put his pants back on. “I don’t want to have sex.”
He expected an explosion but it was silent, internal. He saw its flash in her eyes. “Why?”
“God, this is so fucking tense.” Richard smiled, hoping to get rid of her severe expression. But she only looked more unhappy. “I’m sorry, babes,” he said. “I just feel fucked up.”
She began to cry! He was amazed. Great tears formed in each eye and rolled down her cheeks. He ran over and hugged her. It did something extraordinary to his privacy, his self-indulgence, when confronted with emotion. Even that brief amusement he felt at being in the middle of a classic scene between men and women was broken through. She sobbed in his arms, he felt his eyes ache and tears come. “I don’t know what’s happening,” Joan said. “I just feel so frustrated.” They both laughed at the word. “What’s the matter? You can’t stand my body?” She was so ashamed to ask that he was saying no before she finished the sentence. And he said no several times while she wept. He realized he had to explain his coldness, the anger he had allowed to silence him for the past weeks.
“I’ve been shitty because of that argument with Lisa. Wait,” he said, to stop her from protesting innocence. “I’ve always felt inferior in my family about politics. And I don’t like feeling inferior.” They laughed at this. “Even when Dad was telling us about Padilla, he didn’t address himself to me, he talked to those schmucks.”
“What schmucks?”
“Leo and Louise. What schmucks! Have you got a block about this?”
“Probably.”
“Anyway, I’m tired of it, I’m tired of being patronized. I’m tired of being thought of as a little middle-class kid who has no right to be impressive about politics. Mark telling me in Vermont that he’s a revolutionary! My brother has been parading around like Lenin for the past three years and they are all little snot-nosed kids.”
“That’s silly, babes.”
“That’s what got me angry! Don’t tell me it’s silly. You hurt me badly when you say that. I know it may seem crazy. It isn’t important whether I’m right. I feel attacked about being a writer. Not even that. I feel like I’m being treated as some kind of a freak. At least the publication of my novel will stop that. But unless I jump on people for dismissing me on any political question, I’ll be miserable.”
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