Robert B. Parker (16 page)

Jennifer and I didn’t speak of love again. As long as she took courses, I’d take courses. I was her friend. We went places. In spring of 1968 a group of graduate students had a party in a second-floor walkup off Magazine Street in Cambridge.

“John doesn’t feel that it is appropriate for a professor to mingle socially like that with the grad students,” Jennifer said.

I nodded.

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room drinking mulled cider with cinnamon. The stereo was playing something that sounded like the oriental music I used to pick up on the radio in Korea. One string being plucked lethargically.

“I guess they’re not having anything to drink,” Jennifer said. She wore a lavender dress and beige high-heeled shoes. Her gold earrings were big loops and her lipstick was glossy and her eyes shadowed dark. In her
honor I wore my blue blazer and my polished cordovans and my rep tie. Our hostess wore a flowered ankle-length dress and bare feet. Her boyfriend wore sandals and cutoff jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. The air was thick with marijuana smoke. Two graduate students sat silently on the couch. The boy in paint-stained jeans and moccasins and a collarless green-striped shirt. The girl had on hiking boots and Swiss army shorts and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. They moved their heads slightly in what might have been time with the one-stringed noises that came from the stereo.

In front of the couch was a coffee table made from an old cable spool. A big yellow tiger cat uncurled and jumped down from it.

“Hey, Jane,” I said to the hostess, “what’s the cat’s name?”

Jane looked startled, as if I’d just awakened her.

“Hester Prynne,” she said.

“Cute name,” I said.

She nodded. Jennifer murmured to me, “Boy, you are some conversationist.”

“If they had a black lab they’d name it Othello,” I said.

“Oh, now,” Jennifer said, “they’re not so bad.”

“Like hell they’re not,” I said. “They are more predictable than Prussian noblemen. They dress the same, they talk the same, they are cute in the same way, they have the same furniture, the same attitudes. All the women look the same: No makeup, pseudo-proletarian clothes, granny glasses as needed.”

“God,” Jennifer whispered, “they must think I’m a whore.”

“No booze,” I went on. “A lot of grass. East Indian zither music or whatever the hell that is. Bookcases made with bricks and boards.”

“You’re so absolute, Boonie. You’re scary sometimes. Hard to live up to.”

“I’m thirty-six years old,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of things and I’ve thought about all of them. Sometime in life you have to stop speculating and start deciding. I’ve done that.”

“You’ve had more experience than most of us.”

“It’s not the experience,” I said. I wanted her to understand. Maybe I even wanted to instruct her a little. “It’s what you do with it. It’s what you turn it into.”

“Why turn it into anything,” Jennifer said. “Why does it have to be systematized?”

“So you won’t kick around like a grasshopper on a hot afternoon,” I said.

Our host in the tie-dyed T-shirt said, “Boone, you were in the army.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. They had been talking about Vietnam.

“How’d you let them get you?”

I’d had the conversation before. I knew how it would go. It was like talking sex with a virgin. I sighed softly. Jennifer looked at me.

“They were going to get somebody,” I said. “I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be me.”

Jane said, “Wow, they had you brainwashed, didn’t they?”

“A different time,” I said. “For a lot of us then it was a rite of passage. Now resisting it is a rite of passage.”

“That’s all you think the antiwar movement is?” the host said.

“Barry,” I said, “I don’t think about movements any more than I have to. Trying to assign a single motive to a movement is like trying to catch minnows in your fist.”

“It’s that attitude that permits it,” Barry said. “People that don’t concern themselves. Easy for you, Boone, I suppose. They can’t draft you.”

I smiled at Jennifer. “At least I understand that,” I said to her. “I can identify with not wanting to get drafted.”

“That’s a legitimate concern, Boonie,” Jennifer said.

Barry was inflamed. “That’s not it,” he said. “That’s not where it’s at. That’s not what it’s about. Our commitment is to change. The world’s gone too long this way, the masses like cattle herded into the military to be massacred in wars of imperialism. People who serve in a war are traitors and it’s themselves they betray.”

For the first time since 1961 I felt like I needed a drink. “
Mea culpa
,” I murmured.

“It’s Standard Oil that wants this war. It wants the oil in southeast Asia.”

I could feel myself going. “Standard Oil isn’t anybody,” I said. “It’s like the peace movement. It’s an artificial entity made up of lots of people who are not entirely interchangeable.”

“Boone, that’s an incredibly naive view of society,” Barry said.

I nodded. Jennifer put her hand on my arm.

“Some of the sons of some of the people who work for Standard Oil are at this moment getting their balls
blown off in Vietnam,” I said. “I don’t suppose their parents are fully consoled by corporate profits.”

Jane leaned forward, her hands clasped in her lap. “Boone. It’s hard for you to understand, I know. It’s hard for you to oppose the war. You’re older and …” She hesitated, trying to think how to say it. “Well, look at you, I mean you lift weights and …” She let the rest hang.

“Despite having a thick neck,” I said. “I think the war is wrong. I think it’s a mistake. But I’m not sure everyone involved in it is evil. I’m not even sure the world would run better if you took it over, Barry.”

Barry shook his head with dogged passion. “Things can change,” he said. “And people willing to make the commitment can change them.”

“I can agree with that,” I said. Jennifer sipped at her mulled cider and watched me over the rim of the glass. I smiled at her. “And I believe in commitment,” I said.

Cambodia had been invaded. Jennifer had marched in protest, and the march had culminated with a takeover of the Student Union Building at Taft. I went with her. I had no sense that we would bring the warmongers to their knees. But Jennifer was passionate about it and I was happy to be with her, to share her passion, or to insert myself in the path of nightstick or firehose if the chance appeared, if I was lucky.

So we sat together on the stairs of the Union while outside the campus police awaited the arrival of the Tac cops. The electricity had been shut off to discourage us, but it merely added to the excitement. Looking back now, I marvel at how every step the authorities took to combat the demonstrations added to the fun of the demonstrations, nourished the demonstrators, enriched their opportunity to demonstrate their authenticity, offered them the consolations of martyrdom and simple joys of nonfatal combat.

“This is crazy,” Jennifer said. “You being here. You aren’t committed to this.”

“I’d like to see them stop the war,” I said.

“But that’s not why you’re here.”

“No.”

We spoke in whispers, sitting in the dark with students all around us whispering among themselves, and the smell of grass and cigarettes and humanity seeping around us in the close dark. Through the glass doors of the Union there was movement in the quadrangle, but we couldn’t see of what. There was the familiar revolving flash of the police cars, but they had been there since we’d occupied the building.

In the dimness, close to me, I could see Jennifer shake her head. “I spend more time with you than with my husband,” Jennifer said.

“Yes.”

“He should be here with me.”

“Or you with him,” I said.

“He doesn’t approve of this; he wants to become chairman of the department.”

“His wife’s behavior would have some effect on that,” I said.

“Well, it shouldn’t. I’m who I am, he’s who he is.”

“True,” I said. “But it does. Probably always will.”

“You would say the hell with being chairman.”

“To be with you,” I said.

I could feel her left thigh pressed against mine. Her hip. Her left arm and shoulder. We had to lean close to hear each other’s whispers.

“Are we being silly, Boonie?”

“You and me?”

“No, all of us. All of us who march and protest and occupy buildings and try to change things?”

“No, you’re not silly,” I said. “It’s bound to help. It already has.”

“Sometimes I feel like a jerk,” Jennifer said. “A grown woman marching around with a bunch of kids yelling slogans. John says I should grow up.”

“This is one of the ways,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Yes, it is. John says I am selfish, that I’ve abandoned my responsibilities and been swept up in myself. He says all I care about is being with it.”

“You don’t believe him,” I said.

“Partly. Partly he’s right. I am selfish. I care about myself. Maybe I’m learning to care about myself more than about anything else. Maybe I am caring too much. But I’m finally important. I’m finally involved in the world and people take me seriously. Can you understand that?”

“Sure,” I said. “Among other things, this is a way to be taken seriously. There’s some risk. Risk is the earnest money of conviction. Most of the people in here are after what you’re after.”

“But most of them are kids,” she said.

“So we age more slowly than some,” I said.

“You’re not like me,” Jennifer said. Close to her on the stairs I could see her smile again. “Or the other kids. You don’t need to do this.”

“Not for the same reasons,” I said.

“You do this for me,” Jennifer said. “You grew up a long time ago.”

It was thrilling to talk with her about myself. It was too exciting for me. It threatened my control. But it was irresistible. I wanted her to go on.

“In some ways you’re right,” I said. “I grew up in the years after I bottomed out in L.A., and I had to learn what mattered. I’m clear on that now. I know what I care about. I know what I need to control and what I can control and what I can’t. It’s a kind of freedom.”

Outside, a man with a bullhorn told us we’d have fifteen minutes to clear the building and then we’d be subject to arrest. A stir of near-sexual excitement ran through the kids massed there in the dark.

“What do you need to control, Boonie?”

“Me. My feelings. I feel very strongly. If I don’t keep them clamped all the time, they run to excess. They’re destructive of me and other people. If I combine them with drink, it’s a mess.”

“Humor,” Jennifer said.

“It’s one way,” I said. “It’s a distancing trick. Another way is to stay inside.”

“Inside yourself,” Jennifer said.

“Yes.”

The word passed among the kids in the dark.
Link arms
. I put my arm through Jennifer’s. The phrase moved through the crowd like the domino effect.
Link arms
.

“And in college,” Jennifer said. “When I called you and asked you to rescue me from Nick?”

“I took the leash off,” I said. “Or if you prefer a different metaphor, I let you inside.”

In back of us, up the stairs, someone began to sing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The bullhorn announced ten minutes. The song spread, like the link arms
had spread before it, tying people together. Everyone stood.

“And so,” Jennifer was whispering close to me, “when I turned away from you, you took to drinking and the unleashed emotions nearly killed you.”

“Dramatic,” I said.

“There you go, distancing again.”

I nodded.

“I never understood exactly,” Jennifer said. “Maybe I can’t even now. I don’t have the same emotions you do. They’ve never been in need of control, I suppose. Or maybe they’re under such control that it’s a way of life. Either way I never quite understood how betrayed you must have felt.”

The lights came on suddenly. The bullhorn announced, “
Five minutes
.” Jennifer’s eyes widened as they came on and she thought of something. “Maybe still feel,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I’m beyond that. That way madness lies.”

The crowd inside the Student Union, on its feet, arms linked where possible, singing now lustily, waited in ominous sensuality. Outside the bullhorn sounded again. A bored mechanical voice, “You are trespassing. If you do not leave the premises of the Student Union in two minutes, you will be forcibly removed and subject to arrest.”

The singing grew lustier. Jennifer’s face was bright with excitement. Her hair was beautifully done. Her jewelry expensive, her eyeshadow flawless, her lips were parted and her teeth were very white. Occasionally she rubbed the tip of her tongue on her lower lip. I felt as if I might burst, like the ancient Greek fertility god. But
what I felt wasn’t hubris. It was love and it nearly overpowered me.

“When the cops come, stay close to me,” I said.

Jennifer looked at me with the excitement gleaming in her face. “I can take care of myself,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I was hoping you’d take care of me.”

On a June morning Jennifer and I went to the cellar of the Chapel Building at Taft to dig up our Ph.D.s. The diplomas were in cardboard boxes in which copy-machine paper had originally been shipped. Two undergraduate girls were in charge.

“We’ve come,” I said, “to receive our degrees.”

“Names?” one of the girls said.

We gave them. The girls shuffled through the boxes and found the diplomas, bound in red leather with
TAFT UNIVERSITY
in gold on the cover. The girl who’d asked for our names brought them to us. As she held them out she rendered a brief excerpt of the traditional graduation march, “Dah, da da da dah da.”

Afterward, holding the diplomas, we walked along the Charles River.

“Think how smart we are now,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, “dumb no more.”

“Should we celebrate?” I said.

“Yes, we should. I actually am very proud to have
done this. When I went to college it was so that I could become educated and marry a man with a white-collar job. An educated woman was more interesting at cocktail parties and having dinner with the boss.”