by Marge Piercy
“I like that one,” Dorine said when the blues had ended.
“It’s a song, you can say that,” Phil said. “Not a poem set to music. Maybe that’s all you can say.”
Hal began a minor flamenco-like introduction. Immediately Miriam sat up straight and pulled the shawl close, glaring at Phil. “Here comes my unfavorite. Goddamn you, you are a complete brass piggy!”
Tom was grinning. Everybody else at the table seemed to have sunk into a hot miasma of discomfort for the duration of the song, which Hal sang with great relish and many guitar decorations:
“Let the night come down upon my back.
Let the clocks close their staring eyes.
I will have her in my bed again.”
Phil winced. “Think of it this way: I suffer too. When I am bad, I am very, very bad.”
“Close the doors of your arms on me,
lock your arms around my neck.
I name you hope, I name you despair.
Wind me in your hair, your hair,
wind me tight in your black, black hair.”
Could Miriam and Tom have been involved before he got married? But that was five years or more. Further, Miriam had told her she had grown up in Brooklyn and gone to school in the Midwest.
“The squalid lusts of little men
hammer at you, Venus of distress.
Night mare, night witch, dark madonna,
coffin angel, whore of loneliness.”
Tom nudged her. “Venus Berg—get it now?”
Anyhow, Beth was sure Phil had made it worse. He sat there vain and self-centered and made glass walls grow up around him and sucked his own invented pain like a pickle inside. Perhaps Miriam thought his writing songs was romantic. Would Miriam put up with him if he made change in a supermarket instead of songs for a coffeehouse?
“Close the doors of your arms on me,
dig your nails in my back.
Do not promise, do not swear,
Just wind me in your hair, your hair.”
Miriam was sitting with a mask of non-expression, turned outward to the room and apparently fascinated by Hal’s performance. Phil was faintly smiling, his mouth drawn out thin and his brows lifted. Beth found herself sweating. It was ghastly.
“Let the night come down and bury us.
Go on loving me and go on lying.
Venus, you pulse with life and I am dying ….”
As Hal finished, Miriam turned back to the table with an audible sigh. “Wow! Does that really get longer every time?”
“Do you get tired of tribute?” Phil asked gently and she glared.
“It’s not about me! It’s about your mythical nonsense.”
“Didn’t I invent you?”
“You won’t believe how angry you make me when you say that.”
“Oh, I went down to the river last night
just to throw my body in.
I left my soul to the F.B.I
and I left my love my skin.…
“I held my nose and said, Here goes,
and jumped right off the bank.
I choked and coughed as I rolled down,
the smell was pretty rank.
I hit the waves with a thud and thump,
but you know, I never sank.”
Miriam’s face opened in a big grin. “Phil, Phil, that’s new! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought for your patience you could use a small surprise.”
“For the water it was solid
with garbage, oil, and shit.
No matter how I banged and kicked, I
couldn’t penetrate it.
I did not sink, I did not drown.
I walked on the water to Boston town.”
“But I like it, Phil. It’s funny.”
At the end of the set Hal announced that he was off to New York next week to sign a contract, no shit, folks, for his first record.
“That song is something new for you,” Lennie said. “First time I ever heard you putting your politics into your songs.”
“That ecology crap, it’s not political. It’s every place, like garbage.”
“A muse of ecology, that’s a new turn for Venus,” Tom said. “A broadside, by God.”
“I never call Miriam that old rot any more.” Phil seemed less drunk. It was as if his energy level had trebled and burned out the alcohol in sudden efflorescence. “It’s spring—you’d only know that by the university calendar—but everything’s going to turn out all right, all right.…”
Miriam came over behind Phil and tickled him under the arms, saying something in his ear.
“Is that for real about the record contract?” Lennie asked. “What about the rest of Going-to-the-Sun?”
Phil shrugged uneasily. “He’s trying to make it as a single. Terry and Rick are getting a new group together.… Hal says he’s going to do some of my songs.”
“Phil, think you’ve absorbed enough glory and we could depart?” Miriam lingered over him. “Let’s go home before you start coming down.”
“Just like a woman, to drag you off,” Phil grumbled but he got up. Slowly from clot to clot of people she got him out the door.
So much of the new lives Beth touched through Ryan puzzled her. At least her room was cheap, but she was shocked to learn that Jackson paid two hundred and fifty dollars for the apartment rented in his name. Tom paid shares on the first of the month and Lennie whenever he could scrape his together. During his stint as a C.O. Lennie had served in hospitals as an orderly. Afterward he went on working until he had got involved in an attempt to organize a union of hospital workers in Boston. He had been badly beaten and then fired. Now he was making a living hawking underground papers around Harvard Square.
Their apartment was considered a bargain, although whenever anyone slammed the bathroom door too hard another portion of the ceiling fell into the tub. The wiring consisted of extensions plugged into hanging light sockets in gross webs or run against the baseboards from one plug to the next. If Dorine forgot to unplug the refrigerator before plugging in the iron, the fuses blew. Often they blew randomly, and sometimes the whole house went dark and the ice would melt in the refrigerator. Then the milk would spoil and the meat would begin to smell and everyone would have to study by candlelight or hang out in the all-night diner where the police were always drinking coffee and telling stories, watching the neighborhood longhairs come and go with a hostility that coagulated the air. Regularly the plumbing quit, and Tom would have to get out his tools and make it work again. Tom’s father was a plumber and the tools were an old set from him. She learned that fact from Jackson, not from Tom.
Saturday night she invariably spent with Tom in the apartment, and then he would get her up early Sunday and drop her off on the way to pick up Bonnie and Tom, Jr. The third Sunday in May Beth did not leave with him, since she had promised Dorine to hang around and help her mat some of Lennie’s drawings and frame some canvases. Memorial Day weekend there was a Cambridge street fair, and Lennie was hoping to sell something. They always got up late and so she sat on at the breakfast table drinking smoky Lapsang Souchong tea and reading Swann’s Way, until Jackson emerged from the bathroom scratching himself drowsily over his chest.
Strong homely face. Lines etched the mouth and eyes, making a texture that drew her fingers to want to touch lightly, like carved wood. Jackson discomforted her, a reaction she hid away. She felt he looked upon her as if she were a child or a pet cat, while she was all too aware of him as a man. All too aware. Often she did not speak to him when she wanted to, because the remote kindly quality of his answers made her feel invisible.
He asked her, “Do you think Tom’s going to move out?”
“He’s found a place in Brookline that sounds good, but he hasn’t actually seen it yet. Do you mind if he moves?”
Jackson shrugged. “This is a kind of halfway house. People come in here and stay for a while till they can get it together. From busted marriages and bad trips and exp
loded communes. They can take it easy here and keep to themselves if they need to, or have company if they need that. Once their heads are together, they move on. At least that’s what I like to think on good mornings.”
“On bad mornings what do you say?”
He laughed silently, almost a grimace. “Then I think we all live in narrowing circles, round and round saying our pieces. Like a cartoon I saw during the last Harvard strike. One of the deans had his head up his own asshole saying, ‘Now we’re beginning to see the light.’ ”
“If Tom moves back to Brookline, he’ll be closer to his kids.”
“Close to Laverne too.” He puzzled on her, his forehead wrinkling. “You don’t care?”
“He belongs to that marriage. That’s where he’s … glued together, somehow.”
“Suppose he goes back to her. You wouldn’t miss him?”
“We miss each other every day, by about a mile.”
“What a cool child you pretend to be.” His eyes searched her, sandy and narrowed. “You ought to at least think you’re in love at your age.”
“I did that once. And got married.”
“You’re awfully young to be so cynical. To go drifting along with such a measured thing.”
“Maybe I’m not so young that I don’t prefer to know what I’m doing!”
His bread popped out of the toaster and he spread grape jelly on it. “The young learn the words early. But wait. You’ll turn on again.” He was smiling at his toast.
His easy patronizing assurance, you’ll fall back into love, wheel turning, natural as the seasons. How dare he assume that she would do what she did not want, did not accept? Looking up from his plate, Jackson winced as if he had bitten on a stone. For a moment he met her stare with his sandy gaze questioning. Then he pulled an old wallet from his pocket and unzipped the picture compartment, shaking out loose pipe tobacco before handing the photograph across. A small boy stood wobbly-legged, his sunflower face open in a blaze of grin.
“Who is that? You? No. Your baby brother?”
“Jerry Magnusson, born Jerry Jackson.”
“He’s your son?”
Dryly, “He was.”
Dorine said from the doorway, “What’s that? I didn’t know you had a kid. I didn’t even know you’d been married. Nobody knows, do they?”
“Sure. Phil and Miriam do. Phil’s met him many times. The courts are something wonderful, when you get caught in their net.”
Dorine handed the photo back and went to take a shower. Beth came around the table to look again at the picture.
Jackson said, “It’s easier for him, having the same name as his brothers. And his new father, oh, he can do a lot for him.” He slammed the wallet and shoved it in his pocket. “You kind of look like him, freckles and coloring. Who the hell knows what he looks like now?” He sprawled back, glaring at nothing.
Slowly Beth returned to her side of the table. The splatter of Dorine’s shower came through the closed door. She felt a sore sympathy with him that she was too timid to offer, but also a sense of wrong … as if the picture were a license, a degree in suffering. “You used that on me to say you know more about pain than I do.… Okay! … But you don’t know me.… I mean …” Words so flat. Tempest of emotion and thought churned through her and issued in words like a handful of gravel.
“Whereas you know yourself through and through.” He grinned bleakly.
“But I can try to live the way … according to rules I believe in. To live … right.”
“Child, life isn’t played that way. Matter of fact it isn’t played at all. It’s endured. Your cool is all on the surface. Scratch you and you get mad as a tiger kitten.”
She dropped her gaze, convinced he could see in her what she most wanted to hide, her attraction. Her eyes stung. She feared for a moment that she would cry. She took a deep breath, placed her palms together under the table, pushed tight and relaxed, then slowly forced herself to meet his gaze again. He had been looking at her with an open brooding sadness that he instantly ironed from his face. It was just her luck that she probably did remind him of his son Jerry: turning what had perhaps become a convenient role—that pose of absolute detachment, the man with the ancient wound, the total bachelor—into something more real again. Well, let him rest with his honorable wounds. She could not grapple with him.
When she was working with Dorine and Lennie in their room, choosing drawings to mat, Dorine told Lennie what she’d heard in the kitchen. “Did you know he’d been married and divorced?”
“Christ, no.” Lennie rubbed his kinky beard. “If he isn’t close-mouthed. Now how come he told you?”
Friday night Tom went to a party which he told her would be a great bore: which she had come to learn meant that his wife would be there. It was also true that she would find the party not so much dull as an attack on her nervous system. She had not figured out how to cope with the smoking that made her sinuses swell, the drinking, the talking that had no purpose, the looking each other over in that blatant sexual window-shopping that made her want to hide in a closet. No, he was better off going alone.
Saturday morning when he picked her up he took her to Brookline first, to three empty sunny rooms he had rented in a yellow brick apartment house on School Street. “Now isn’t this an improvement? The toilet actually flushes, the windows open and shut in a normal manner, and there is even a lock on the door. Pretty nice kitchen, good stove, what do you think of it?”
“It looks fine.”
He seemed disappointed at her lack of enthusiasm. “Well, I hope you like it. After all, you’ll be the one spending your time in it, ha-ha.”
A chill settled on her. “I’m not much of a cook.”
“Practice makes perfect. Besides, we won’t spend all our time in the kitchen.” Hand on her elbow he walked her to the bedroom door. “Cross ventilation. Could be attractive, once we get it fixed up. The landlord’s going to paint it next week. Says I can move in by Friday. I told him paint all the walls white. But I can still change it. I’m meeting him at three. What do you think?”
“Paint them whatever you like best.”
“Thought you might have a preference. Look, Bethie.” He locked the door, pocketing the key with satisfaction, and they started down the carpeted stair. “No reason for you to live in that rathole. I mean, if you want to keep up a separate address for your family, cool, but it’s a waste of rent. There’s plenty of room for both of us here. All this coming and going and getting you and bringing you back is a drag. Like dating and other horrors. I couldn’t ask you to move into that menagerie—like moving into the Park Street subway station—but this is more like it, isn’t it?”
“Tom, I like to live alone. I was already married once.”
“Well, who says we have to go through that nonsense? You know what I think about the ring game.”
“But I don’t want to live with somebody either. It’s easier to cut out then, but that’s the only improvement I can see.”
“It’s a whole different scene, Beth. It’s being together because we want to, not because some guy in a black dress says it’s okay to do it in bed.” They got into his VW. “Got to meet the landlord at three. You really want to go to that freak show in the streets?”
“I would … really. I’ve never seen a street fair.… Besides, Lennie would feel bad if we didn’t come by.” She felt itchy and uncomfortable. The situation was sticky. Yet the day was so beautiful, so summery, she could not stay worried. On the corner of his street a magnolia was in full bloom. The smelly rank puddle of the Charles, the river that hardly flowed, reflected the sky blue as a country lake from the B.U. bridge, busy with sculls and kayaks and sunfish and sailboats.
He grumbled about parking. “Freaks panhandling, lot of losers like Lennie selling nonsense to each other.” But they did find a place, a car pulling out just as they drove up.
It looked like any other Saturday and she was disappointed till they came around the corner to Garden.
At first it just looked like a street full of people milling. She had imagined lights and structures, perhaps rides and games and she did not know what else. Garden Street was closed to traffic and booths and tables had been set up, and ahead she could hear rock music. Men with carts were selling ice cream on a stick and hot dogs and soft drinks and balloons with peace symbols.
“Look, there’s Phil the Failed.” Tom waved. Phil was slouching with his hands in his pockets looking bored while Miriam was chatting with a woman selling loaves of wholegrain bread, spread out in ornamental step pyramids about her as she squatted on a red blanket, wearing what looked like an old tablecloth. Miriam was in wide elephant pants in a soft blue tie-dye print. The top was cut low in front and in back consisted only of yarn ties. The line of her tanned back was graceful and the soft fabric moved as she moved, flowingly. He hair was plaited in a fat glossy braid.
“If that little string should break, two more loose balloons,” Tom said. “Let’s get a hot dog.”
Beth had a lemon slush: syrup poured over crushed ice. She began to enjoy the fair. Everything was dancing, the flickering trees, the people walking with rangy grace to the jingle of ice-cream bells and the sputter of a motorbike making a slow way through the crowd, the throb of rock music ahead. Green and gold and blue: the sun was hot, a foretaste of summer. All along the sidewalk paintings leaned and hung, rectangles of color claiming as they passed, Look! Look! with the artists sitting on the ground or folding chairs. On occasional tables or spread on the ground as in photographs of native markets, jewelry, pottery, leather belts and sandals, macramé, hand-woven fabrics, elaborate candles of dripped and molded wax were set out.
“Look here, Beth, this part-time thing is silly. We’re both adults, we’ve been through the marriage mill, we know what we want. It’s a great thing to sleep with a woman and wake up with her.”
“But I don’t want to live with anyone. I’ve never before had a door that really shuts and a place only for me. It wasn’t till both Dick and Marie got married that I finally got a room of my own. Even then, I had to share it with Mother’s sewing machine and everybody’s off-season clothes.”