American Woman (3 page)

Because Frazer had had an idea, and though the anticapitalists and the anti-imperialists and the antiracists and the antiexploitationists who should have been his natural allies thought him a boneheaded joke, an irrelevance, he knew that his moment would come, and it did. The moment came, surprisingly soon, when people saw he'd been right about the exploitation of athletes in professional sports, and the way it rhymed in so many respects with racism, and the way the exceptional status of black athletes proved the rule of American fear and loathing of the rest of black people. He'd been right about all of this—not being a black man, not being a great or even a consistently good athlete, not being some politico-sociotheorist, just being a hyperactive middle-class white kid with the scary muscularity of a blue-collar thug and a brain that, though flawed, was a lot better at thinking than most people thought. Stubbornly, he'd gotten himself into the sociology department, stubbornly started a mimeographed, smeary newsletter, at first just his own trademarked ranting and raving. Then he'd written his first book, a compendium, typos corrected, of the newsletter. Gotten it published by a very small press, sold it out of the back of his car in the stadium parking lot. Been abused by a number of sports fans, and, unsurprisingly to him, intensely supported by more and more athletes. Swung his way into the socio doctoral program and started getting submissions to the newsletter, and inquiries from like-minded writers who thought he could help them—and it turned out he could. And then, all of a sudden and almost too fast, had come Mexico City's raised fists and the threat of the boycott, his loud support, a pipe bomb through his window, a national news crew the same afternoon, and, crowningly, a denunciation from a Republican senator and former football star who called him, Frazer, a sour-grapes football failure turned Commie destroyer of the American way. Which meant, just like that, fame.

After Berkeley he'd gotten hired at a small East Coast college as athletic director, over the unanimous objection of the corps of individual team coaches. He was fired before he'd worked a single day, with a full year's salary as severance—a full year's pay without work! Carol had wanted to move to Manhattan, and he'd been able to take her there, set up an office for himself, get the newsletter going again—now with the senator's denunciation as part of the masthead—and start writing his next book. He found that he knew people—academic types drawn to his anti-intellectual ass-kicking hard-left persona, professional athletes he'd helped learn how to voice their critiques of the system while negotiating lucrative contracts, sportswriters who knew who he knew, and who amusingly abased themselves before him. The fracas over the gymnasium at the local university hadn't initially grabbed his allegiance—by this time it had dragged through three semesters and two student strikes—but he'd eventually gone over to find out about it, and one thing had led to another, and in the end the university, in its abject confusion, had hired him, as athletic director and as sop to the student insurgency, in the hopes that his reputation as a left-leaning white with black friends would be helpful to them in the course of a now-labyrinthine negotiation schedule. Frazer had reveled for a few weeks in his power, given about a hundred interviews to local media, and then, as all was threatening to cool, hired a known black Muslim and world-ranked 800-meter runner as his co-director, and been fired again, this time for almost twice his previous severance, as he made them buy out his whole contract. He gave the runner a chunk of the money, gave more interviews, and continued to settle with Carol into their university-owned apartment, which they'd decided to keep, by whatever legal or illegal means necessary.

It was a nice apartment, with high ceilings and creaking french doors and a claw-footed tub in the bathroom. Calling Carol that night from his Rhinebeck motel room, Frazer thought happily of its shambling extent. “Hi,” he said when she finally answered. “Did you pick up milk yet?”

“Oh, my God.” He could hear Carol dragging the phone across the room and down the hall, pictured the cord slithering over the rug, catching on a chair leg and going taut until Carol yanked it impatiently. On cue, something crashed in the background. “Fuck!” Carol said. Frazer had bought Carol the fifty-foot phone cord just after they'd gotten married. He'd come home and found her lying on their bed, fully dressed, sobbing at the ceiling. It was like Carol to cry flat on her back, arms and legs splayed, eyes open and angry. She wasn't the kind of woman to roll into a ball or hide under a blanket. “What is it, baby?” he'd asked her. She'd said, with difficulty, but vehemently, “What about my privacy? Goddammit! What if I want to be alone?”

She'd gotten the phone down the hall to the bathroom. Carol had turned the bathroom into a sort of private office; it was full of water-warped feminist books and all manner of atmospheric scenting equipment. Frazer liked to go in there when she wasn't home, finger her little incense bowls and read the labels on her candles. That sort of stuff generally got lost or broken in the rest of their apartment. He heard her push the bathroom door firmly shut. “Goddammit, Robbie! Where are you?”

“I said, did you pick up milk yet?”

“Oh, Rob. It's pouring out.”

“Will you go get milk, please?”

There was a long pause, during which Frazer waited for Carol to accept that the rain wasn't his fault, that the milk was in her interest, too, and that for all these reasons, she couldn't yell at him. “Okay,” she said finally. “Fifteen minutes. But don't blame me if—”

“Later, Carol,” he said. She sighed and hung up.

Frazer looked at his watch, bounced onto the bed, bounced back to his feet. Fifteen long minutes. As usual, given a very brief, exact amount of time to kill, he found idleness unbearable. He opened the door to his room and stood watching the fading light darken the fields on the far side of the road. Out here the air cooled so quickly at sundown; he felt it seeping through his shirt, raising the small hairs on his forearms. He smelled damp earth. The rhythmic creaking of crickets seemed to slowly fade in, although he knew it was only himself, tuning in to the sound. The air was passing into that stage of particulate darkness, as if made of fine charcoal dust. He saw a firefly drifting slowly across the parking lot, parallel to the ground, and stepped forward suddenly, confused, feeling through the outskirts of his skin the pristine sense memory of his own cupped hands, closing together, the whisper of the insect on his palm—

When he remembered to look at his watch it had been twenty minutes. He went back into his room, which now seemed to blaze like a stage in the deepening dusk. Carol answered on the first ring and he heard the hiss of wet tires on wet pavement, all the boomerang howls of the traffic on Broadway. He'd left the door to his room standing open—this was how confident he'd come to feel in this place—and he stood for a moment ignoring Carol's voice, listening just to the racket of the city in the background while keeping his gaze on the motionless night. He couldn't remember the last time he'd so palpably appreciated the drama of the telephone.

“There was a guy talking and talking. I practically had to glare him to death to get him to get off the phone. Do you think he's still hanging around? He went into the deli and now I don't remember seeing him leave.”

“Calm down, baby.” Frazer inched over and pushed the door closed with his toe, feeling regret. The stale motel lamplight closed around him.

“Don't tell me to calm down.”

Frazer laughed. One of his favorite things about Carol was her ceaseless narration of grievances; he never wondered what was on her mind. That kind of mysterious woman was for hopelessly loving, not living with.

“So this situation isn't quite as entertaining as it was two days ago. For one thing I'm going stir-crazy. I'm scared to leave her alone in the house. I'm all freaked out so I can barely concentrate. I can't even imagine what she's doing right now.”

“She's not doing anything. She's doing whatever it was she was doing when you left.”

“Oh, great! Jesus, Robbie. She might be running up and down Broadway completely naked this very minute. I keep looking around expecting to see her go by with her hair on fire or something. I'd lock her in but we don't have the right kind of lock.”

“The last thing she'd ever do is leave the house. Are you kidding? She won't even get up off the floor.”

“Now she does. She's obsessed with the streetside windows.”

“Keep her the fuck away from the windows.”

“No, the blinds are down, but she keeps creeping over to them and kind of perching there all stiff and wide-eyed like she's some kind of woodland animal listening for something. I swear I've seen her nose twitching. You know how squirrels look when they're really freaked out? She looks like that.”

“More evidence there's no chance she'll run out of the house.”

“You're probably right but I wish she would.” Carol laughed a little.

“Hang in there, baby.”

“If she isn't in squirrel posture she's ranting at me about our shitty security. The super was out in the hallway mopping and she went off about how our place isn't secure and we're really fucking her, blah blah, she won't be surprised if it's all a fucking setup, blah blah. And the worst is she ruined my paper—after you left I went and got the Sunday paper to have something to do so I wouldn't go nuts and then I went out again for about
five minutes
and when I came back she had totally ruined it.”

“She's just clipping the coverage about herself. She likes doing that.”

“No! That's not even what she was doing! She had the paper spread all over the floor and she was crawling around on it with a Magic Marker X-ing out people's faces and going ‘Pig! Pig!' She fucked up the whole thing.”

“Jesus. Who'd she X out?”

“How should I know? Henry Kissinger.”

“What else is she doing?”

“Not much. Crying. Smoking.”

“Why don't you just talk to her a little? Make friends.”

“Oh, fuck off.”

“You were getting along great when I left.”

“Yeah, well, then you left. I don't know if it's because I'm another woman or what, but as soon as you left she started to really antagonize me. Pulling rank. In
our
goddamn apartment.”

“What do you mean, pulling rank?”

“I don't even want to talk about it.”

“Telling you what to do?”

“I sincerely don't want to discuss it. I'll get mad. We fought, and then we stopped talking, and now we're in a truce, I guess. She's pretty much staked out the living room and I'm hiding in the bedroom.”

Frazer lay back on the motel bed and laughed. “Oh, man. You know what? I love you.”

“And I hate your guts. When are you coming back? You said you were going up
for the day
.”

“You haven't even asked me how it's going.”

“I'm sorry,” Carol said. “How's it going?”

There was often this moment in their conversations, when Frazer's love for Carol, or what he thought of as his love for her—perhaps it would be better described as his gratitude, for their script, his role, her familiarity, the fixed rhythm and ritual of their life against which he felt a freedom he'd never felt when he was alone—unexpectedly vanished. It was usually due to some excess of one of the very constants on which their married life was built. In this case, her selfishness of outlook, which prevented her from ever fully registering what he was doing, even when it was for her benefit. It was true that he had fallen in love with her for the same reason: She was, in her selfishness, extremely entertaining. And generally, except at moments of weakness, he valued nothing else so much. But at those moments of weakness he wanted something entirely different. Some clearer sense of their partnership.

“Really,” Carol was saying. “Tell me everything that's happened. Have you found her?” He hated it even more when she sprang to pro forma attentiveness; sometimes, like now, he found it actually insulting.

“Just about, but I'll be a few more days. And I think we've spent enough time on the phone. You run on home and try to be a good girl.”

“Oh, Robbie. I really do want to hear—”

“Bye baby,” he said, and hung up.

The next day he returned to Wildmoor and found a rusty chain across the drive between two posts. On one of the posts hung a little sign that read,
HOUSE TOURS MONDAY AND FRIDAY
, 10
A.M
.
AND
2
P.M
.
PLEASE COME BACK!
He idled a long minute with the end of his rental car sticking into the road before he had the presence of mind to back up onto the shoulder and turn off the engine. Then he ran over to the sign in the manner of someone being targeted by sniper fire. Even after seeing the state of genteel, mild dilapidation the house was currently in he couldn't help thinking of those tales of miserly paranoia and weirdness on the part of the wealthy and old. Fifty cats, foot-long fingernails, and a million dollars sewn into a mattress. Cars rusting all over the lawn and high-tech motion-detection trip wires concealed in the dirt. That he couldn't see cameras bolted to the trees didn't mean they weren't there. But still, he couldn't resist getting close to that sign. It was a flat piece of wood so weathered it looked almost silver, with the letters painted on it in black. It wouldn't be right to say he recognized the handwriting: Rather, he recognized the ability to have unrecognizable handwriting. Jenny could have been a professional sign painter. Back when they'd all lived in Berkeley she'd done Mike Sorsa's truck for the house-painting business. That time seemed far too remote, haloed in nostalgic gold light, to have been barely six years ago. She'd been nineteen years old. Weeks's startling new girlfriend. Frazer remembered sitting with her in the driveway of the Stannage Street house while she perched on an overturned milk crate, with the little cans of bright paint all around. He'd first met her just a few months before, when he'd needed somebody to paint him a banner for an action he'd planned to disrupt Berkeley's homecoming game. Sorsa had brought her and Weeks to a meeting and afterward she'd come up to him and said, “I'll do your sign”—a flat statement, not a question or an offer. Like an asshole, he'd grinned at her; he'd assumed she was flirting with him. Later, he'd watched her slash out one three-foot letter after another on his huge bolt of muslin, kicking the bolt progressively unrolled with her foot, this slight quiet girl creating a brash declaration at a feverish rate. She'd been working with a piece of soft chalk glued to the end of a stick—just to sketch out the letters beforehand, make sure of the spacing. The stick was so she didn't have to crawl around on the muslin; she worked too fast for that. She'd fully grasped the assumption in Frazer's grin, had coldly ignored it, and then, for a long time, him. He'd had to campaign hard before she'd talk to him again. The banner, of course, had been spectacular. Because flawless, remarkably authoritative. He'd felt like kissing her the day of the action, when the whole hundred-foot length of it, rolled up and rigged with some system of weights that she'd thought of, had regally unfurled, on cue.