Braided Lives

by Marge Piercy

  “My mind’s on money, not sex.”

  “Like you say, you won’t hustle for money. But if I told you I’d help you get the money, you’d ball me.”

  He’s not stupid. I draw my legs up and face him on the bench of the seat. I cannot help but smile. “What do you do? Who are you? Were you born in town? Is Kemp your first or last name?”

  “The sun’s down. I like to get out in the country. When I was a kid, there was a lot more country here. Not so many fancy professors’ houses. More rabbits and pheasant. Even some deer. Ever had deer meat?”

  “My uncle Floyd used to give it to us. He worked in the mines in Pennsylvania and when he was off work, he liked being in the woods.”

  “I work in an optics factory. Ball-busting work. Gives you a headache so your scalp could break open like a cracked tomato. Buddy works there too and Ray. One good thing is we go through it together.”

  “Buddy really hurt her. It was no joke. She was covered with bruises and her back was so sore she had to stay flat for two days.”

  Kemp shrugs. “Buddy’s a horse’s ass. You give him something, he won’t let go of it.”

  “You never did answer me your name. What do you think I’ll do if I know it?”

  “I don’t want to ball you here. In the car. I want to take you back to my house. See, if you want to talk, we got to go to bed. Because otherwise we don’t have enough of a basis in common. Right?”

  “Orville Wright. It’ll never get off the ground.”

  “Sure it will. All you got to say is yes.”

  “Otherwise will you take me back to town?”

  “Right back where you live. Think I’d dump you here? One time I found a girl walking down the road, eleven thirty at night with her blouse tore. Some dude from the basketball team did it to her. Tore her blouse because she wouldn’t fuck him. So he just dumped her out of the car in the middle of Lodi township.”

  “You going to tell me you rescued her?”

  “Sure. Why not? Besides, she wasn’t my type. Too skinny. Flat all over. And she was shaking. I don’t like broads that scare easy.”

  I don’t want to go back to the co-op where Stephanie is gloating about Howie and Donna is worrying about Peter. Besides, he feels so curiously down-home. If I had got involved with Kemp at fifteen, it would have been fatal; but at twenty, I suspect I can have him if I want and survive handily. “Who lives in your house?” I don’t want a gang bang set up on me.

  “Just me. I’m on my own. You’ll be surprised. I live good.” He switches on the engine and the lights. Suddenly it is night.

  “Could we eat first? I’m hungry. I usually am.”

  “How about spaghetti and meatballs? At my place. I bet I cook better than you do.”

  “No contest.” I sit back. Whatever crazy thing I am doing, I am doing it.

  Kemp has a little house on a gravel road you get to by going way out West Liberty until you begin to see working farms. He has a bedroom and a combination living room-kitchen heated by a wood stove. Outside, the neatly split wood is stacked. It’s homey and certainly as clean as I keep my room back at the co-op.

  Times blur. With Kemp few sharp scenes form. The first time was more awkward than the succeeding times, but our conversation always occurred in spurts.

  Kemp is no reprise of my childhood delinquents, for country and city blend and collide in him. He grows tomatoes, lettuce and eggplants in his garden. The sweet and the hot peppers are around the corner from each other. He says the hot peppers are male and the sweet peppers are female, and if you put them in the same bed, the males get at the females and make them hot too. Between my first and second visits, we have a frost. He pulls up the tomato plants entire and hangs them from the rafters. The hot peppers he dries. The sweet ones fill the refrigerator. He chars them at the flame in the wood stove, then braises them in olive oil.

  He is the first really good cook I have met. I think from an occasional pot of sumptuous rosemary chicken or manicotti that appears after he has been at home, that his mother taught him. He’s a bastard; Kemp was his father’s last name, a married truck driver. His father gave his mother money when Kemp was little but after the man went away to the army, they never heard from him again. His mother waited all through the war; then in 1946 when Kemp was eleven, she married a man who worked in the same plant. She was thirty then and she had three more children in rapid succession, lost a couple and finished with one more at thirty-eight. Kemp has two half brothers and two half sisters. We agree that connection through the mother is strong.

  Because he was a boy and already beginning to run with the other guys and pull away from home when his siblings began to appear in an almost annual harvest, he did not feel stuck with them. He loves to appear laden with presents, playing Kemp the magnificent. He struts like a dark rooster, adored by everybody except his mother’s husband Jerry, who is awkward with him. Kemp doesn’t mind. “Julietta,” he says, his name for me since he finds Jill too Wasp, “I owe him a big one. He got me off the hook.” Because he feels he lives better than they do, he tastes a little guilt: hence the constant presents. “If she hadn’t of married that poor tired old horse, I’d still be handing over half of my paycheck, still paying on a mortgage from the year one for a house at least that old.” One of the presents he takes to his siblings this week are brother and sister kittens—Minouska’s offspring.

  He is cock of the walk, he is king of his cronies, so he may indulge himself in cooking. He cooks and I wash dishes. He is as fussy as my mother that I get them clean, but he is better than my mother at teaching me to cook. She wanted my help without wanting to share her skills. Most of what he cooks is Italian, but if we eat out and he tastes something he likes, he attempts to reproduce it. Because he didn’t learn from books, he lacks the vocabulary I will acquire later. When he is telling me to do some assistant’s job, he will say, “You put it on the soft fry,” in teaching me how to saute onions instead of frying them to brown plastic shards. He calls it a soft fry because it leaves food soft.

  Because he likes to eat well, because he likes to carry presents to his two half brothers and his two half sisters who lack too many things for the list ever to sustain a serious dent no matter how fervid his generosity, because his mother has a bad chronic cough, because nobody knows more how to enjoy what there is before him to enjoy, he supplements his income from the optics factory with thieving.

  He has a good mind that has passed through public school with its ignorance of books or the world of culture never enduring abrasion. He has not read a book since he left school except for a try at Tropic of Cancer in a battered and imported paperback, because he was told it was dirty. Betsy, one of the whores who hang out at Ovid’s, gave it to him. Her clientele is university professors. Certainly she reads more contemporary fiction than anybody I ever found teaching in the department of English.

  His intelligence finds its outlet not only in cooking but in stealing. For an amateur thief, he is careful and successful. His impulses play themselves out with women. I am one of three or four he is seeing. “A little of this, a little of that, it’s more fun,” he tells me, waiting to see if I will play jealous. I am not; I do not. A little of Kemp is just perfect, once or twice a week.

  I am saddened that my adventures must be with men. If I walked into Ovid’s by myself, I could not stay. I would be harassed till I left. I could never sit in on conversations. If I came in alone, the whores would never chat with me. If I wandered the seedy Ann Arbor underworld he moves so grandly through, unpleasant and violent things would happen to me. Following after Kemp Tomaso Fuselli I walk through walls. Sometimes I am visible; sometimes I am invisible. In both modes I listen and watch and I am fed.

  With Donna’s education in small snobberies and the university’s education in major snobberies, I have been forgetting something of myself I want to remember. Furthermore, in the world of the university, men who are drawn to me still know that a blond Wasp dressed by Peck and Peck would be mor
e desirable. Here my Oriental eyes and glittering black hair mean less than my body. I feel myself my mother’s daughter in a strong new way, even as I worry about her when I am trying to sleep. Kemp’s friends define me as smart, but that does not make me asexual as it did in high school. My being smart redounds to Kemp’s credit. He shows me off like a new car.

  What do I flee to in Kemp’s shack? Sex, you say? Nonsense. He is too involved in his own pleasure to be great in bed. If he manages to put off coming long enough, he is a delightful and sensual lover, but when he feels like coming, he comes. That tension makes it hard for me, since I never know if I let myself mount in excitement whether he will pull the plug. Then I am barely able to control a desire to bite off his head. I form the conviction that that is why the female praying mantis turns and attacks the male in midact. He has probably just prematurely come. To a woman who reaches orgasm in intercourse, all ejaculation before her climax is premature. He does not make me come any other way and at that point in my and our common history, I do not know I can ask for that.

  But I like being in bed with Kemp because his personality doesn’t change. He doesn’t get deadly intent or infantile or weird. He makes me laugh in bed. My most intense pleasure with him is at table. What I like best is that although we talk a lot, here the intellect is not primary. I live among people who think that analyzing something is an action, who think that if they have dissected why they have done something that makes it permissible to do it again, who think that a label gives possession, that when they have identified a sharp-shinned hawk they know something of hawkness—wooing high in the air and sinking with talons locked, swooping on live prey and tasting the fresh blood spurt hot, feeling with each extended feather the warm and cold shift of the winds and the sculpture of the invisible masses of moving air. Dealing in words, I try to remember how far they go and where they leave off. Hungry for food for my brain, I try to remember all the other ways of knowing that coexist. Kemp is good for me, but I cannot persuade Donna or Stephanie.

  “Slumming,” Donna calls it. “You’ve given way to a decadent romanticism. You’ve seen too many James Dean movies.”

  “This one doesn’t pout. He enjoys life like a baby.”

  “It’s a giant step backward! What did you struggle to stay in college for? You’re going to get torn to ribbons.”

  “Actually I think you’re playing a more dangerous game.”

  She drops her face into her hands. “Where are we going to get the money? Where?”

  “I’ll find it. Trust me.”

  “Where? Last time we could ask our friends. But if Peter gets wind of this, I’ve had it.”

  A vague desire to write him a poison-pen letter crosses my mind, but I expect their engagement to collapse from within. I do not tell Donna that Kemp offered last Saturday to give me the money. I can’t take it. What he said in the car that first night stays in my head, and I will not take the money because I am sleeping with him. I will earn it somehow. If I pretended to myself I was borrowing the money, I could never pay Kemp back, and I’d be bound to him. As I chug along, the virtues of financial independence clarify. I will take nothing from Kemp except his company and cooking.

  I have not told Donna that Kemp is Buddy’s buddy, but I know she senses a connection, a betrayal. But I will get the money to buy her abortion and that will justify my adventure.

  Donna argues, “But it can’t go anywhere with Kemp.”

  “Did Mike go anywheres? Yes, to Yale. Did Peter? Yes, up you.”

  “As a one-night stand, Stu, I can see it. We all have our violent flings. A mud bath now and then. But to go on seeing him, as if he were a … a real possibility!”

  “I’m not husband hunting and I don’t find him dirty. He treats me better than Peter did. I feel better before, during and after.”

  She shakes her head, not believing me. She feels guilty, as if by taking Peter she has condemned me to what she sees as the depths of degradation. “Why do you want to go back where we came from?”

  “I can’t go back. But I can use some time there, Donna.”

  The subject rubs her sore. When she looks at me now, she stares with the anxiety I used to beam at her. I am not displeased. Her caring emerges in the attempt to argue me out of Kemp, bully me, psychologize me. Every day she produces fresh reasons. I imagine her sitting in boring classes making notes on how she will dissuade me of my folly. Every week she tells me about a great new therapist.

  Stephanie has decided to treat Kemp as one of my poetic aberrations. “Verlaine and Rimbaud liked to hang around gangsters,” she tells me. “It’s a phase. You’ll get bored. It’s like when I was dating that hockey player. You can put up with just hockey, hockey, hockey for a limited time…. Not that your hoodlum isn’t handsome as the devil—looks like old photos of my papa except for the nose. I don’t wonder you succumbed. But you can’t just go on with it.”

  I have committed a class sin, a crime against upward mobility expected of and by my friends. The potential for shock of my love life during my senior year has not begun to exhaust itself.

  I can’t remember whose idea it was that the movers and shakers of PAF should meet at Donaldson’s apartment for a potluck: probably Dick Weisbuch, who lives with his wife and baby and who arrives with a decent tuna and noodle casserole made by his stay-at-home wife. But if you ask five men and two women, all students, to bring stuff for a potluck supper, you end up with one tuna noodle casserole, two loaves of bread and four bottles of cheap red wine.

  This is my shining hour. Recently I watched Kemp make fettuccine, glory from such minima: noodles, eggs, cream, a little cheese. I can do it if I try; and I do. This wins me the gratitude of six other hungry people and the barely divided attention of Donaldson. As the meeting is breaking up, he says quietly, “Stay and help me clean up, why don’t you? I’ll give you a ride home.”

  This is hardly an invitation I can refuse. The annoying part is that I cannot sort out if I am being asked teacher to student, comrade to comrade, or—if I am brazen in examining my scarcely formed suspicions—perhaps from romantic interest? The cleaning is over in half an hour, for we ate on paper plates. I feel a little manipulated as he conducts a postmortem of a dull meeting. I experience him as being entirely in control of what will or won’t happen, so that even my suspicions feel disloyal and crude.

  “Would you like coffee?” he asks.

  On a sudden aggressive impulse, born out of frustration at the awkwardness, I ask, “What is your name? I know Alberta called you Donnie.”

  “Just a nickname. My given name is Gerrit.” He sits at the kitchen table with an empty cup before him, to excuse his idleness. Of all the men I have known he is the most indifferent to his surroundings. The apartment is rented furnished in boxy blond modern. He has added only a couple of Käthe Kollwitz prints, a George Grosz exhibition poster and several thousand books and periodicals. He still lives in the vaguely Tudor apartment house where I spied on him when I was a freshman.

  I face him across a Formica-topped table, like a little lunch counter. “You don’t like the name much?”

  “Gerrit? I didn’t when I was younger. I thought it was affected. But nobody’s used it in so long, it’s as if I’d lost it. You could call me that or Jerry—my sisters call me that.”

  “I’ll use Gerrit.” I am not about to call him anything other than Donaldson in meetings, no matter what. How the hell is he going to make a pass at me across a Formica table? If I were planning a move, I would have kept us on our feet or sat us down on his perfectly comfortable couch. Or is he the type who says, Let’s do it, all verbal?

  Nothing happens. Except in Gerrit’s mind. When he takes me back to my co-op he kisses me good night. Two days later he takes me to a showing of a film made of Raymond Radiguet’s Devil in the Flesh.

  So I have two “lovers.” I perfunctorily sign out for Detroit whenever I spend a night with Kemp. Our new housemother, a graduate student, is no special friend, but finding me already
in possession of my own key and accustomed to independence, she acquiesced and I have her pleasantly cowed. I avoid making an issue of my habits by observing minimal forms. I sign in and out, even if what I sign does not correspond to my activities.

  We tramp through the fall woods while Kemp picks late mushrooms to use in a spaghetti sauce—tomatoes, tomato paste and sauce, a dash of cinnamon, some red wine, a garlic clove mashed with the back of the stirring spoon, basil added late—and we drive in his barge of a car to country bars to dance.

  His eyes are beautiful in their darkness. The irises turn translucent when he is happy and opaque in his angrier moods. If he believed I really exist with my own hungers, he would be a good lover. He is a true solipsist, I think, but his charm saves him, rooted in an ease with himself and what he likes. The world scrapes him raw enough to save him from complacency. His body draws my hands, the lithe power in his satiny back. Some nights when I sleep alone I have erotic dreams about him, yet nothing in our lovemaking matches what I sense could happen. Neither of us speaks of love, a reticence I find delightful. Love is not much on my mind. I know which man I could love and my path is away from meddling with Howie and Stephanie. I tell myself I have Kemp for my body and Gerrit for my mind.

  Gerrit has not slept with me. As Mike used to, he lends me books. He expects me to cook, which I sometimes do, trying out on him what I learn from Kemp. I prefer eating with Kemp. I am willing to cook occasionally, but a long day in school and a long evening in the kitchen are not my delight. We see every art movie that comes to town. I have always gone to the movies. Now I discuss “the cinema,” as if they were all one long foreign film. He subscribes to periodicals that analyze movies. His French and his German are superb, at least in reading, although when I hear him speak French, I always have to ask him to repeat because I can’t tell what language he is pronouncing as Milwaukee English. He even reads some Russian. I learn vocabularies for film and a wider political vocabulary. His leonine head moves me as it always did and I walk teetering on the verge of falling for him hard. His coldness holds me back. I cannot find the fire in the private man that moves me in his public self. My hands reach out and come back empty.