by Marge Piercy
“A guy can be really likeable and still not be someone you want to hitch up with. I’ve known some really charming murderers and the sweetest bank robber you ever could meet.” Nadine took one of the whitefish and slit it neatly along the belly, separating the fine bones from the flesh.
Sara snorted. “He wasn’t a murderer or a bank robber.”
“Just a pothead,” Nadine said. “Is that how you want to spend your life?”
“Better than robbing banks, I guess.” But Sara had stopped crying. She scrubbed at her eyes, blew her nose and went back to her lunch. “Anyhow, it’s over and dead, so bury it.”
“Sweetie, I didn’t bring him up. I’m glad to drop the subject.”
Everybody had trouble with their parents, everybody. It was a law of nature. Even a nice warm mother like Nadine could stick her nose in it. Blake had kept quiet, but now he carefully changed the subject, asking Nadine about a client she was representing. Sara cast him a grateful look, but Nadine took the bait and launched into a description of her defense of a thief she was convinced the cops had framed.
After lunch, Nadine drove to her office, where she was meeting a new client. Sara looked at them. “I’m retiring to my room and turning on my music. So I won’t hear you and I don’t want to see you, and have a good time.”
“Thanks.” Blake kissed her on the cheek. “See you at supper.”
Blake’s room was on the second floor. It was twice the size of hers, well furnished with electronic gear plus state-of-the-art player and amps. “It’s soundproofed.” Blake waved at the room, papered with posters of rock stars and some old flyers about his father, declaring his innocence, calling for rallies in his defense. Melissa remembered the candlelight vigil outside the governor’s mansion in Harrisburg that Noreen had let them peek at, to Rosemary’s displeasure. She examined all the flyers and posters. “His case must have generated a lot of interest.”
Blake unfolded himself onto the bed, covered with a bright pieced quilt. “A lot of people believed in him. They knew he was innocent. The way I did.”
“Did that help? That others believed in him too?”
“I was a kid. Nothing helped. Maybe nothing ever will. I knew he was innocent, and I was powerless to save him.” Blake lay staring at the ceiling.
“At some point you have to let go of it. He’s dead, unfairly, yes, but your anger and pain can’t help him.” She wanted him to look at her, not the ceiling; she wanted to be able to reach him. “You have to get on with your life.”
“He couldn’t get on with his. We were robbed of him. My mother never got over it.”
“But you have to, Blake. For us to have a life together, you have to begin to let go of your anger and your desire for revenge. Otherwise it will poison you. Otherwise it will destroy us. Your mother and your father are dead and you can’t help them, but you can help or hurt us.”
He lay staring, his anthracite eyes fixed on nothing. She took his limp hand in hers, perching on the bed’s edge. She felt like throwing herself on him to bring him back, but she did not want to make things worse by seeming to ignore his mood or by making a demand he pay attention to her. She simply held his hand and waited. It felt as if an hour passed without Blake responding, but she saw from her watch that only ten minutes went by.
Finally he sat up and squeezed her hand back. “Of course you’re right. The sensible thing to do is to let things go…. You said your parents were in high spirits?”
“Things are going well. He’s been getting good press. He’s viewed in his party as up-and-coming. He’s made friends with powerful senators. The legislation he’s pushing to loosen gun laws is popular in his party and stands a good chance of passing. Other senators have been signing on as sponsors. It eliminates the Brady Bill provisions, whatever they are.”
He shrugged. “It’s not that hard to get a gun now.” He was frowning into space again.
She wanted to ask him if that gun that had been in his room had been Jamal’s, but she did not dare admit she had looked through his things. It would remain a mystery until someday he told her. She was seventy-five percent convinced Blake had been keeping it for someone else, the way Jamal had kept Blake’s zip discs for him. He had never said anything about owning a gun, and as far as she knew, he had no more idea than she did what to do with one. Her father, Rich and Alison were the only people she knew besides bodyguards who would actually be able to use a gun successfully. Grandpa had kept a shotgun, to kill varmints, he said. She remembered it in the passageway between the kitchen and the barn. She had been forbidden to touch it. When he had been younger, Grandpa had gone hunting, but he had given that up by the time she was old enough to pay attention. Her father took part in duck or deer hunting on occasion as a political act, but she knew he found it boring, because she had heard him confessing that to Rosemary. He had tried to talk his wife into going with him just once. It was one of the few times Melissa was aware of that Rosemary had disappointed Dick, but she said she wasn’t about to tramp around in the woods all day in a hideous orange outfit trying to blow holes in some animal she had no desire to eat. Dick agreed with her, but he had to keep up his credentials with hunters and the NRA. Hunting was big in Pennsylvania. She remembered mothers of friends complaining that it seemed to go on for months, making the roads unsafe to drive in the country.
Melissa had volunteered to go with him instead. She was thirteen, still trying to please. Dick had agreed, although when they arrived, she could tell the other men were annoyed. It had been horrible. They had tramped around for hours in the woods. She had to pee and kept trying to fall back to get behind a bush, but her father was afraid she would get lost and made her stay close. Finally her father and his press secretary Mac—he had not come to Washington with Dick—climbed onto a platform in a tree and the others made noises down the valley until they drove a deer toward the blind. The press secretary shot the deer. It died spurting blood near where she was standing uselessly. It had beautiful brown eyes that looked into hers. She had shamed Dick by crying and the men had called her Bambi. She knew she had screwed up, making her father sorry he had brought her. She was ashamed of disappointing him, yet that night and the next, whenever she thought of the beautiful deer bleeding to death, she cried again. Although Mac had shot the deer, the photo in the paper was of Dick standing over the carcass. She would never be able to attack a deer or any other animal, except maybe a mouse. Even mice were kind of cute. She wanted to be at peace with the animal kingdom. She wasn’t a vegetarian, but she wasn’t about to go out and start killing things either. She almost said something aloud to Blake but realized she was miles from his thoughts at the moment. She stared at him, wondering how to break through. This was not developing into one of their more intimate afternoons.
“Blake, I’ll have to go home about four. I don’t know when I can get away again.”
That got his attention. He swung around to look at his VCR clock. “Sorry. I have a lot on my mind. My lawyer tells me he thinks my case is going to a grand jury soon. They’ve probably managed to extract enough data from my computer to get me into real trouble.”
“Oh, baby, you didn’t tell me. That’s terrifying.” She clutched his hand hard.
He put his arms around her and drew her down on the bed with him. “It sure is…. So your father got away with everything we uncovered?”
“He doesn’t seem to feel threatened any longer.”
“So he ought to be in a pretty good mood?”
“I think they’re both enjoying the holidays. More than we are, so far.”
His mouth moved over hers and he began to kiss her, passionately, fervently, as if drinking life itself from her. They kissed and kissed until she felt molten, all her bones turning to flaming jelly. She felt if anyone had been looking at them, they would have shone with a blinding light, would have left spots on any observer’s eyes. They were burning together. They fumbled out of their clothes and, for once, he let his drop on the floor. His hands fastene
d on her breasts, danced on her spine, slid between her legs teasing her, withdrawing, slipping back into the grove of her swollen labia. Finally when she was clawing at his back, they came together. She forgot everything in the rush of pleasure. Afterward she dozed for perhaps fifteen minutes. Then he was ready to start again. They were lost in each other, making love until they were sated and then showering in his own bathroom. Most males’ bathrooms she had been in—her old boyfriend Jonah’s, her brothers’—had been untidy, the basins littered with stubble from shaving, a smell of piss around the toilets. Not Blake’s. His bathroom smelled of verbena aftershave, of spicy soap. He took a clean towel from the closet for her. After they showered, rubbing soap into each other, lathering, joining again under the spray, she dried herself and reluctantly dressed. “I have to go.”
“We haven’t figured out what we’re going to do. Okay, sit down and draw me a picture of the layout of your house, floor by floor.” He pulled a tee shirt over his wet head and groped for his jeans on the floor.
“Why?”
“So I have a notion what I’m walking into.”
She thought it was silly, but she understood he was nervous about finally meeting her parents as her lover, her husband. She drew diagrams as he asked.
He studied them, scratching his head with his nails. “Okay. Can you get me in the back door?”
“It opens onto a little parking area and then a street that’s really a big alley.”
“What’s the best time to catch your parents together, with a minimum of other people around?”
“Usually early evening. But it varies. What I can do is call you each day when I know my parents’ schedule. Say I call you at ten in the morning and give you the latest information. But I don’t understand what you’re planning.”
“Look, I’ve got to do something. They’re closing in on me. By now, they’ve probably reconstituted what I was doing on my computer—or they will have all they need very soon.” He was pacing the length of his room, from his long dresser with the posters and flyers of his father papering the wall above it to the windows with their blinds closed. Outside, it was growing dark. “You let me in. I throw myself on their mercy. Only after that, you tell them we’re married. Leave most of the talking to me.”
“Why should they help us?”
“To avoid scandal. Maybe they’ll try to buy me off. I have no idea—and you don’t either. So we’ll just wing it. It’s the only chance we have.”
“I wish we had a better plan. Maybe I should talk to them first.”
“No! Don’t give them time to put up their defenses. We’ll spring it on them and see if we can persuade them that the scandal is worse than what we did.” He stopped pacing and put his hands hard on her shoulders. “Don’t say anything. I can be eloquent. Just get me in there without announcing me, without warning them I’m coming, and let me talk to them. You stand by and keep quiet until I signal you to join in. Okay? Agreed?”
“Why do you think you can get through to them if I can’t?”
“You’re their daughter. They have you pigeonholed. They don’t know me. I have a chance of getting through. If it doesn’t work, we’re no worse off than we are now, right?”
“I guess so,” she said, although she really wasn’t sure that was so. Now her parents had no idea of their relationship.
He stared into her face. “Are you sure that what we did, what we revealed has had no consequences? Are you sure of that?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. He’s flying high. Why does it matter now?”
He sat on the bed’s edge to pull on his socks and his boots. “Because if there are consequences, if his career is in jeopardy, if there is any chance of prosecution or even just political fallout, he’ll be less apt to hear us out, right?”
“Of course.”
“Let’s roll.” He grabbed his jacket. “I’ve got to take you home. I think we can risk dropping you at your corner this time. And stay in touch. We’ll talk every morning. Every afternoon. Every evening.”
“I’m scared of telling them, you know. But in a way, it will be a relief.”
“It’ll be something, anyhow.” He smiled thinly. “It will be some kind of a change.”
• CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO •
Melissa was having trouble sleeping. She would fall asleep all right, but then at two or three a.m. she would come bolt awake and her mind would begin to churn. She simply could not make herself stop thinking about what was going to happen with Blake and her parents. It felt hopeless. His plan was weak and unlikely to prove effective, but she could not come up with anything better.
Several times she resolved to break her agreement with Blake and talk to them, but each time she faced them, she could not imagine the words that would make them understand. What she had done was foreign to them. How to make them comprehend that marrying Blake had not been an act aimed at them but something she passionately wanted; that she had married him not out of defiance but with love. They might not care about her motives. Would her love for Blake weigh more than a feather with them? Ultimately, she lacked the courage to take them on by herself. She submitted to Blake’s wish that she remain silent, because doing nothing was easier than approaching her parents. If only Blake and she had not gotten involved in that stupid attempt to discredit her father, then their marriage would not seem, perhaps, such an attack.
Still every night she woke and played out endless scenarios in her head; none came out the way she wanted. Even in her imagination, she could not force her parents to acquiesce. They remained adamant and punitive. No matter how she pleaded and how she imagined Blake pleading with them, she could not believe in a happy ending. It was only a question of whether Blake went to jail alone or whether their anger would prove stronger than their fear of scandal. Perhaps if she agreed to have the marriage annulled, they would not prosecute Blake. That was the only bar-gaining chip she could imagine producing. However, she would not share that idea with him. She would keep it in reserve for the time right after his best efforts deflated.
In the livingroom stood a bushy Douglas fir Alison had bought and erected. They had trimmed it on the obligatory home evening, with Alison taking photos for publicity and next year’s Christmas cards; she had finished sending off the six thousand and fifty-second card the previous weekend. The chairman of the state party dropped by. “I still think you should have a dog. You could borrow one for the shoot.”
“No dogs,” Rosemary said with a sweet smile. “The children are all allergic.”
The vacation crept along like a slug leaving a slime trail of fear, of deceit, of constant anxiety.
“You’re not eating,” Alison said.
They were at supper on Christmas Eve. A supporter had sent Dick a pheasant, and the caterers had agreed to prepare it. Melissa wouldn’t have been excited about eating a pheasant any time, but she simply did not want anything tonight. Why did Alison notice everything? Rosemary hadn’t observed her lack of appetite. “I’m on a diet.”
Rosemary turned to her. “That’s an excellent idea, but it is the holidays. You could eat less than usual, but have a bite of everything. I find that works beautifully. You just taste a forkful or two and then put the fork down. That way you don’t feel deprived, but you definitely see results.”
Rosemary always thought there was too much of Melissa. Melissa used to worry about her size, but Blake liked her body just the way it was. Still, her appetite shrank as her anxiety grew. She chewed each bite over and over until, when she tried to swallow, it stuck in her throat like a stone. No matter how little she ate, the food turned to a brick in her stomach. All she wanted was water. Her thirst was endless. She kept refilling her water glass from the silver carafe frosted with condensation. How cool it felt in her hand. She longed to roll it against her forehead.
Her parents were euphoric. They had been invited to a party at the house of a CEO in pharmaceuticals, a possible backer. Rosemary and Alison were researching his family, his wife’s habits, e
verything they could learn. Rosemary was feeding Dick information about the needs of the pharmaceutical industry, the kind of legislation that benefited them, the kind they feared, the kind they desired but had not yet managed to buy. Dick would be well prepared. He could learn his lines quickly. He would have been an excellent actor, she thought, except that he played only himself—but himself with a difference depending on the company. He would shape his approach, his manner, his ideas, his likes and dislikes to fit the contours of the backer he was wooing. All her life since she had been old enough to overhear, to eavesdrop, she had wondered at her father’s ability to remain Dick and yet alter his coloration, his tone, his demeanor, his opinions to suit the occasion.
Every day, Blake and she spoke or e-mailed several times. Blake was asking for an optimum time for his surprise appearance, and always she had to explain that there were too many people around. Finally on Christmas, she saw an opening. Her parents were going to a cocktail party, a formal dinner and then they would drop in to the local Republican soiree. But nothing was scheduled before five. Merilee was meeting a colleague from the Law Review. Billy was going to watch a game at the house of a friend who had a giant wall TV—something Billy had been lobbying for all vacation with no perceptible results. Her parents scarcely watched network television; they were not about to give over a wall to it. All they ever had on was omnipresent CNN or an occasional football game.
“Can you get away?” She sat in the bathroom running water to cover her voice.
“Sure. No problem.”
“Si and Nadine won’t mind if you disappear for a couple of hours?”
“Remember, it’s no holiday here. Nadine’s working on a brief. Si’s on the phone with a client who just got busted. He’ll probably have to go down to the station. Business as usual. They won’t miss me.”
“Then come to the back door at two. I think that’s the best time. Everybody but Rosemary and Dick should be out of the house.”