by Marge Piercy
As I lean on the bastion of desk in the periodicals room counting the afternoon’s fine money and yawning as I wait for my replacement to come on duty, Howie enters. I hate the jab of these unexpected meetings. Just time as he walks the length of the room to put together a face surprised (not too) and pleased (mildly). He hails me, “Where have you been?”
“Working here all afternoon, as usual.”
“Been studying upstairs. I’ll wait till you get off and we’ll have coffee in the Union. It’s been awhile.”
Our voices murmur conspiracy against the turning of slithery pages, the coughing and shuffling, the beat of the rain on the long windows. “Not this afternoon. I have to study.”
“You can’t spare half an hour? You’re avoiding me.”
“Why? Do I owe you money?” For all the exchange of smiles, I will have to go with him. I half rejoice, for I have been parched for his company. “You’ve been busy yourself.” My voice, is it bitter? Here comes the woman who takes over. It has been raining since noon and we pause on the library steps before plunging into the downpour. Campus is dotted with bright yellow slickers. As we agree by nods to venture out, he takes my arm, then with sudden awkwardness becomes conscious of the automatically intimate gesture that belongs to Stephanie.
Pell-mell we run through the storm to the Union. At a table I stare at him covertly. Unlike Kemp who moves with grace that is conscious but conscious as Minouska is when she stalks a bird through the windowpane, unlike Gerrit who often pays no attention to what his body is doing and walks into a chair while involved in arguments or puts his glass down where the table isn’t and looks astonished as it splashes below in a small explosion of shards, Howie’s movements seem drawn from a legion of possibilities by minute but conscious decisions. Subtle bulldog. He was not subtle in Dick’s kitchen with Stephanie. As we sit with our coffee, his strong hands with their blunt spatulate fingers crouch on either side of his cup. Deep inside, my hopeless desire sighs raggedly. I am feeling sorry for myself, indeed. I imagine myself arrested, shot tonight. I would like to pin the blame somehow on Stephanie and him, but it won’t wash.
He gauges me over his glasses, tilting his chair back with a muscular arm on the table steadying him. “You’ve been avoiding me, and I know why.”
My ribs contract fearfully, a wheezy concertina. “Oh?”
“Because you know both of us so well, you’re afraid of getting caught in the middle. Of being a double agent. Of interfering.”
I feel as much disappointment as relief. To have it out! “More cowardice than scruples, believe me.”
“But we want to go on talking to you. We’re not so delicate you have to tiptoe around watching out for us.”
That we grates on me. “This is a committee report?”
“Stephanie feels as if you close up. I see you duck out of PAF meetings before I can speak. You never have coffee with Dick and Bolognese and me anymore.”
Their wills trapping me. “Let’s not overanalyze this. I’ve been busy.”
“Not too busy for Herr Professor.”
“Oh, Howie, there’s no great romance going on.”
“You show up with him at every party. And you leave with him. After meetings you go off with him. You stay on in his apartment.”
We glare. I say, “Gee, I forgot I signed that total-abstinence-from-men pledge. When did the Central Committee send that through? It must have slipped my mind! Of course you live in a monastery these days yourself.”
“I just don’t see what you’re getting into. You don’t ask enough of men!”
“I ask too much!” I push back my chair. “I get nothing I want!”
“Oh, sit down, Jill, sit down.” Visibly he puts a lid on his temper. “People always think they could run their friends’ lives better than their friends do.”
Ashamed of letting my bitterness flash out, I sit. “Want to run my life? This government is ready to resign.” I do not want to quarrel with him. Am I trying to force him to guess? To drive him away? They want me as a pendant to their intimacy, so I should display a healthy calm interest. “So you’re serious about my roommate?”
“Everything I do is equally real.” He rocks back. “People like to fool themselves that only certain parts of their lives count.”
“People like to fool themselves that some abstract nonsense said loud enough answers a personal question.”
He waits for me to look up from my coffee, his eyes a hard enamel grey. “Let her make what she can of me.”
I catch his gaze overintently. What did I used to do with my eyes when we talked? “What do you mean?”
“She’ll have what she wants from me. She’ll define it. You know what I am. She has to figure out if that’s what she wants.”
And you, what do you want? I know my desire, a friend whose secret wish, is disaster while jealousy’s dark rheumatism attacks my joints.
When I leave the Union, the rain is lighter. The town has a damp smell of earth and earthworms, of drains. The wooden houses strike me as excessively pastel, never the iron greys or grime of the city, but light grey, white, pale yellow, the sodden green of lawns. I am tired of lawns and classrooms. I can see a path composed of many flagstones of a pearly opalescent grey under the faintly raining sky, leading me on to teach in my own classroom the work of other poets to students almost involved enough to care. What I do tonight is a prying of myself away from that security, classes leading to classes leading to classes.
But when I arrive home there is a message to call Kemp, who is terse and to the point. “Game called on account of rain. See you tomorrow, Julietta. Same time, same place.”
What a letdown. I cannot endure the hours I have to drag through. And suppose it rains tomorrow too? Who ever heard of a burglary called on account of rain? In Ann Arbor it could rain until it starts to snow in early November. I promised Donna.
Sunday afternoon as I am returning with my duffle bag of clean laundry over my shoulder, I glance automatically into the living room and stop short: Peter and Donna. They sit on the couch both blond and fair and slight and tense and wiry. I cannot believe I ever fitted between them, each with elbows tight in to their slim sides, arguing in low charged voices. I receive an electrical shock as they look up at me, both together.
Donna becomes vivacious. “Oh, you’re doing laundry—how completely virtuous! Everything I own has stains. I’ve been in an orgy of coffee spilling for weeks!”
His head bowed, Peter manufactures a sick glassy grin. “How are you?” he asks with paralyzing earnestness. How alien he looks in a neat flecked grey Harris tweed sports coat and properly contrasting flannel pants all knife-edge precise, yet the face of a beautiful pale rat at bay. He shines with icy tension. My flesh denies him. With a curtsy I re-shoulder the laundry and flee.
I am haphazardly sorting my socks and panties when Donna slips in to whisper breathlessly, “Do you have it?”
“For sure.” I lie and glance past her out the window. It is only drizzling. Tonight has to do, it has to.
“I can’t sleep anymore. I haven’t slept all week.”
In fact the skin around her eyes looks like crinkled carbon paper. Her hands that close hard on my arm are cold. Her face is beyond pleading to a demand. She is drowning in her fear as I have been stewing in mine. I force my voice hearty. “Sleep long and hard. It’s all right.”
“Can I see the money?”
“I don’t have it here. But it’s okay. I’ll have it by the time we go. Wednesday, right?”
“Wednesday at nine in the morning.” Her hands wring my arm. “If we don’t have the cash, he won’t do it.”
“No problem, Donna, no problem. We got it. You can take my word.” And flush it down the toilet.
My word. I sign out for Detroit and Kemp picks me up for a late supper. We eat in his favorite Italian restaurant in Ypsilanti. About halfway through the meal he begins to come to life. We are sharing a bottle of the house Valpolicella.
“Come
on,” he says grinning. “What are you scared of? We pull our deal tonight and get our money cash on the barrelhead. In the meantime those bozos in Washington decide it’s time to flex some muscle and show the Russian boneheads what’s what. So we wake up at two A.M. with everything bright and before we know it we’re just hot ashes.”
“But I am scared. I’ve never done this.” And I’ll never do it again. However my appetite begins to wake and unwind its shining coils, to taste the smells and flavors with flickering quick tongue. Maybe we’ll all be dead by the end of the week, squandered like my mother’s teeth.
“Being scared is a waste of time. What does it do you? Makes you stupid. Makes you careless.”
“Aren’t you scared?”
He shakes his head no. “I stopped in Korea. I went over for the end of it and I figured after the first month, what the hell? If I get blown to pieces, I won’t know what hit me. Nobody asked me, please, Mr. Fuselli, do you feel like dying today? When your time comes, you buy it. Right now some miserable real-estate salesman is boozing on route twenty-three. We waltz out of here and he plows right through us. Or I just ate a cancer germ. My mom’s old man, he keeled over one day. Never sick a day in his life, just like me. Then one day he was picking up a sack of cement and pow, he died. His heart burst. What good would worrying have done him?”
At Kemp’s shack I change, just before Ray and Buddy arrive. In my pocket the list is wadded up, but the ability that lets me pass courses like botany with A’s by memorizing the book the night before is with me now.
We pile into Ray’s Studebaker and drive into town, where Buddy and Ray pick up a bread truck their friend Ace is driving. Kemp will not drive his car because he used it to scout. We wait a block distant till Buddy trots back to signal us that the night watchman has just gone around the far corner. Ace drops us in front of the dental supply house and continues on to park his truck around the corner and then return for the Studebaker. I feel like a brass band. How can anybody miss us, four of us shuffling around on the step while Kemp unlocks the door and glides into the fluorescent-lit hall to check things out.
He is back quickly, opens the door and beckons us inside. We follow him down the hall through a reception room. The door beyond stands open into darkness. We dog him closely, tripping over each other’s heels, down a corridor past the doors of offices to another door, also open. Now we are in the warehouse. I suffocate in black air thick as glue. I find myself panting. They will read that as cowardice. Which it is. I control my breathing.
“All right, Julietta, move it. Find our stuff!”
I fumble with the flashlight he gave me. My mind goes a complete blank. Steel shelving reaches to the ceiling. The room is divided into narrow aisles with a cross aisle halfway down. I drop the flash, scramble for it and then Kemp turns on the lights.
“Hey, Kemp,” Ray says, wincing.
“They got no windows.” He shuts the door to freedom. “We’ll work much faster.”
“Here’s the instruments,” I squeak. I am a mouse pittering along the aisles from box to box. I was happier in the dark, but Kemp is right. What I point out, Ray piles by the door. Kemp has gone back out to stand watch and supervise. Buddy treks each box out through the maze of corridors to the outer door. When we are ready, we’ll send for the truck.
Kemp segues back and forth to keep an eye on the operation. “If I whistle, drop out of sight and keep still. Douse the lights. If I whistle twice, make a break.”
What I always wanted was to get shot by a night watchman for stealing dental instruments. Maybe it’s Mother’s dentist who’s buying this stuff hot, so he can expand his humanitarian practice. At first I worry about taking the wrong items. If I mess up, I don’t think Kemp will take it lightly. After all, we’re in business together.
But a rhythm develops and when I look at the watch I borrowed from Wanda, time glides by. I worry whether we are moving the stuff out fast enough, before the watchman’s next round. I have a sudden sense of our balletic movements, of beauty in the coordination and the speed. Nobody talks, except for an occasional grunt or an exclamation when something is heavy. I carry a few of the lighter boxes to the hallway myself. I realize I am no longer sweating fear; I am not even afraid. We move too fast. Fear is around me like fog outside the walls, but I am inside the action and I have no time to notice the cold white bank of fear. What we do provokes its own exhilaration, this nighttime dance deep inside a place we are not supposed to be.
We swirl through our paces. I find the objects and the boxes and the crates, which then are carried through the hallway to the outer door. As I find items, I try to take time to check them off on the list.
Suddenly Kemp is at my elbow. “Speed it up. Five more minutes in this stage. That’s all.”
“But we haven’t got everything.”
“What we’ve got, we’ve got.”
Ray and I scuttle faster. Now it is close to comedy, my sense of us sweating in the barely heated room rushing the boxes, me dashing ahead down the grim high aisles and grabbing sealed boxes of instruments, of alloys, of drills and pumps. To tote out a chair takes Ray and Buddy together. I am sweating again from haste.
“Okay. That’s it. Out!”
We follow him. Ray helps Buddy cart the last stuff to the outer door as Kemp sends me for Ace and the truck. Kemp never relaxes his grasp on the scene; we are his hands, his legs, his muscles. Around the corner Ace guns the truck. I climb into the Studebaker to sit quietly, the key in the ignition but the engine off. After Kemp’s lessons, I could drive this car, I think. Nervous again for the first time in at least an hour, I lock the doors and lie down to make myself invisible. In ten minutes they must have the truck loaded with all those boxes. That gives ten minutes more leeway before the night watchman is due around the far corner to begin working his way down the three buildings on this side of the block. I turn the engine on, pull slowly around the corner.
They are still loading. I pull up abreast. “It’s time!”
“Shit,” Kemp says. “I know it. Faster!”
Now my hands sweat so profusely my gloves are wet and slip on the wheel. The men move in slow motions, large figures underwater who push against high gravity to force the leaden boxes through the murky atmosphere, three men (Ace still at the wheel of the bread truck) frozen in instant replay. I stare at the far corner around which the watchman will march any second. The truck is facing back the way we came. Laboriously I turn the car around to face the same direction, then sit with my eyes fixed on the rearview mirror watching that pool of light into which the watchman will step.
Kemp has given the high sign. They shut the doors of the bread truck as Kemp comes around to our car’s driver’s side. With the engine running, I scramble over and he slides in, slamming the door with the same gesture as he heels the accelerator and we are off with a screech of rubber down the street, leaving the bread truck to amble after us.
We drive straight to Livonia, a near suburb of Detroit, where we park in a garage behind a row of garden apartments. As I sit in the Studebaker, Ace, Buddy and Ray unload, much more leisurely than they loaded. They are tired and clumsy. Kemp goes into the apartment building with a thin grey-haired man who tells us to be very quiet, for this is a respectable neighborhood. Kemp returns for my inventory and then disappears again.
When he comes back at last, he brings a six-pack of beer and the unloading goes on. When the truck is finally empty, Ace drives it away, after Kemp peels off bills into his hand. Then Buddy climbs into the driver’s seat with Ray beside him, while Kemp and I curl up in the backseat.
There he makes five piles of money. Ace got a hundred and fifty off the top. Kemp gets two shares; the rest of us one, in twenties that crackle in Kemp’s hands. As the car is stopped at a traffic light, he passes Buddy’s share to him. Ray reaches over the seat for his money. Last, Kemp hands me mine. I would like to count it. I don’t know if this is polite. It feels fat, but I don’t know how thick a pile the three hundred I nee
d for Donna would make. I stick the wad in the pocket of my suede jacket and try to count the bills surreptitiously with my fingertips, but I keep losing track.
When Kemp and I are finally dropped at his house, I shut myself in the bathroom and count the bills quickly. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred eighty. Abruptly tears start out of my eyes. I wash my face and comb my hair down.
“Not bad for such an easy job.” Kemp rummages in his refrigerator. “See, I told you it was a piece of cake. Are you hungry?”
I nod.
“I’ve got some minestrone. Good and thick. While it’s heating, let’s fuck.”
It is one of our good times. We are both greedy and easily roused, tired enough to take the time I need, keyed enough for my time to be shorter than ordinarily. By the time we are done the soup is boiling. He steps into his pants without underwear, hastening to the kitchen to see to it, lest it boil over. Yawning with pleasure and relief and deliverance, I pick our scattered clothes off the floor. As I lift his jacket, the weight puzzles me and I touch the pocket gingerly. It is a gun. Carefully I replace the jacket on the floor and sit on the bed’s edge.
He lied to me. He told me he never carries a gun. I am sweating again as I sit there and my teeth abruptly chatter. I put on his terry-cloth robe, twisting it tight around myself as I consider whether to challenge him. It is over. Nothing bad happened, so far at any rate. I do not expect us to be caught. Still, I feel tricked. I would not shoot any working person for money. Why did Kemp bring it? Inner security? Feeling like a professional, a big shot? Superstition? Or to use if necessary? I feel less safe with him than I have since that first time I got into his convertible.
In the morning Kemp calls in sick to the optics factory, I cut my classes and we sleep till eleven. After breakfast I walk to town. The sun is sunny, many leaves torn from the trees by the recent storm and clear sunlight lancing down unobstructed on my bare black head, warming me like a motherly hand. Briskly I hike, contemplating how much I enjoyed the burglary and how frightened his gun makes me. I probe and probe my reactions, aware I am truly frightened and yet truly fascinated: by myself, by the night’s adventure, by Kemp still.