Small Changes (10 page)

“I am stumbling here

with gulls’ cries in my ears
,

hunting a lost key
,

lost coin, lost year.…”

Although Hal announced his songs he did so with a drawled mumble unlike his singing voice. Thus all the songs sounded as if they were Gumpty Grubble written by Muddle and Mutter. Still she knew the moment Hal started one of Phil’s songs, because a shudder of pain would go through Phil, while everyone else at this table seemed to draw tighter.

“Here is the golden place

where I lay down to sleep.

Here I dreamt until I felt

the sharp salt wavelets creep

about my feet

and woke in the day’s debris
,

papers, driftwood, seaweed

and rotting spawn.

That other body gone
,

my golden love is gone
,

only the setting sun here with me
,

only the sunset

floating like an oil slick

on the sea”

That had a flowing melodic line. It was pretty. But so self-pitying. Though Beth listened to Hal, she watched Miriam, sitting with her arms crossed as if she were chilly, pushing her heavy breasts higher against her. Why should Miriam prefer this man to Jackson? Perhaps she did not know as much about men as she seemed to. This one, Phil, was handsome, but what could you do with him? Jackson was solider: she longed to give Miriam advice. Miriam’s big florid body seemed to make her more vulnerable as well as more visible. Now Hal was playing a bluesy song. Tom was drumming his fingers, looking around. He winked at her, mouthed something to a friend two tables away.

“The stinking Hudson

runs deep and wide.

That’s Jersey smoking

on the other side.

I smell like a loser

but I’m mean with pride.”

Besides, Beth thought, maybe being married had given’ her some insight. Miriam was loving with her eyes, as Beth had loved Jim. Perhaps Miriam had had a quarrel with Jackson that Phil with his ready tongue had taken advantage of. Tom was always ready to needle and gossip and spar, but with Phil he became embattled in an ugly way. Perhaps Phil had made Tom dislike Miriam. Though the talk implied something had happened between them.

“I like that one,” Dorine said when the blues had ended.

“It’s a song, you can say that,” Phil said. “Not a poem set to music. Maybe that’s all you can say.”

Hal began a minor flamenco-like introduction. Immediately Miriam sat up straight and pulled the shawl close, glaring at
Phil. “Here comes my unfavorite. Goddamn you, you are a complete brass piggy!”

Tom was grinning. Everybody else at the table seemed to have sunk into a hot miasma of discomfort for the duration of the song, which Hal sang with great relish and many guitar decorations:

“Let the night come down upon my back.

Let the clocks close their staring eyes.

I will have her in my bed again.”

Phil winced. “Think of it this way: I suffer too. When I am bad, I am very, very bad.”

“Close the doors of your arms on me
,

lock your arms around my neck.

I name you hope, I name you despair.

Wind me in your hair, your hair
,

wind me tight in your black, black hair.”

Could Miriam and Tom have been involved before he got married? But that was five years or more. Further, Miriam had told her she had grown up in Brooklyn and gone to school in the Midwest.

“The squalid lusts of little men

hammer at you, Venus of distress.

Night mare, night witch, dark madonna
,

coffin angel, whore of loneliness.”

Tom nudged her. “Venus Berg—get it now?”

Anyhow, Beth was sure Phil had made it worse. He sat there vain and self-centered and made glass walls grow up around him and sucked his own invented pain like a pickle inside. Perhaps Miriam thought his writing songs was romantic. Would Miriam put up with him if he made change in a supermarket instead of songs for a coffeehouse?

“Close the doors of your arms on me
,

dig your nails in my back.

Do not promise, do not swear
,

Just wind me in your hair, your hair.”

Miriam was sitting with a mask of non-expression, turned outward to the room and apparently fascinated by Hal’s performance. Phil was faintly smiling, his mouth drawn out thin and his brows lifted. Beth found herself sweating. It was ghastly.

“Let the night come down and bury us.

Go on loving me and go on lying.

Venus, you pulse with life and I am dying ….”

As Hal finished, Miriam turned back to the table with an audible sigh. “Wow! Does that really get longer every time?”

“Do you get tired of tribute?” Phil asked gently and she glared.

“It’s not about me! It’s about your mythical nonsense.”

“Didn’t I invent you?”

“You won’t believe how angry you make me when you say that.”

“Oh, I went down to the river last night

just to throw my body in.

I left my soul to the F.B.I

and I left my love my skin.…

“I held my nose and said, Here goes
,

and jumped right off the bank.

I choked and coughed as I rolled down
,

the smell was pretty rank.

I hit the waves with a thud and thump
,

but you know, I never sank.”

Miriam’s face opened in a big grin. “Phil, Phil, that’s new! Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I thought for your patience you could use a small surprise.”

“For the water it was solid

with garbage, oil, and shit.

No matter how I banged and kicked, I

couldn’t penetrate it.

I did not sink, I did not drown.

I walked on the water to Boston town.”

“But I like it, Phil. It’s funny.”

At the end of the set Hal announced that he was off to New York next week to sign a contract, no shit, folks, for his first record.

“That song is something new for you,” Lennie said. “First time I ever heard you putting your politics into your songs.”

“That ecology crap, it’s not political. It’s every place, like garbage.”

“A muse of ecology, that’s a new turn for Venus,” Tom said. “A broadside, by God.”

“I never call Miriam that old rot any more.” Phil seemed less drunk. It was as if his energy level had trebled and burned out the alcohol in sudden efflorescence. “It’s spring—you’d only know that by the university calendar—but everything’s going to turn out all right, all right.…”

Miriam came over behind Phil and tickled him under the arms, saying something in his ear.

“Is that for real about the record contract?” Lennie asked. “What about the rest of Going-to-the-Sun?”

Phil shrugged uneasily. “He’s trying to make it as a single. Terry and Rick are getting a new group together.… Hal says he’s going to do some of my songs.”

“Phil, think you’ve absorbed enough glory and we could depart?” Miriam lingered over him. “Let’s go home before you start coming down.”

“Just like a woman, to drag you off,” Phil grumbled but he got up. Slowly from clot to clot of people she got him out the door.

So much of the new lives Beth touched through Ryan puzzled her. At least her room was cheap, but she was shocked to learn that Jackson paid two hundred and fifty dollars for the apartment rented in his name. Tom paid shares on the first of the month and Lennie whenever he could scrape his together. During his stint as a C.O. Lennie had served in hospitals as an orderly. Afterward he went on working until he had got involved in an attempt to organize a union of hospital workers in Boston. He had been badly beaten and then fired. Now he was making a living hawking underground papers around Harvard Square.

Their apartment was considered a bargain, although whenever
anyone slammed the bathroom door too hard another portion of the ceiling fell into the tub. The wiring consisted of extensions plugged into hanging light sockets in gross webs or run against the baseboards from one plug to the next. If Dorine forgot to unplug the refrigerator before plugging in the iron, the fuses blew. Often they blew randomly, and sometimes the whole house went dark and the ice would melt in the refrigerator. Then the milk would spoil and the meat would begin to smell and everyone would have to study by candlelight or hang out in the all-night diner where the police were always drinking coffee and telling stories, watching the neighborhood longhairs come and go with a hostility that coagulated the air. Regularly the plumbing quit, and Tom would have to get out his tools and make it work again. Tom’s father was a plumber and the tools were an old set from him. She learned that fact from Jackson, not from Tom.

Saturday night she invariably spent with Tom in the apartment, and then he would get her up early Sunday and drop her off on the way to pick up Bonnie and Tom, Jr. The third Sunday in May Beth did not leave with him, since she had promised Dorine to hang around and help her mat some of Lennie’s drawings and frame some canvases. Memorial Day weekend there was a Cambridge street fair, and Lennie was hoping to sell something. They always got up late and so she sat on at the breakfast table drinking smoky Lapsang Souchong tea and reading
Swann’s Way
, until Jackson emerged from the bathroom scratching himself drowsily over his chest.

Strong homely face. Lines etched the mouth and eyes, making a texture that drew her fingers to want to touch lightly, like carved wood. Jackson discomforted her, a reaction she hid away. She felt he looked upon her as if she were a child or a pet cat, while she was all too aware of him as a man. All too aware. Often she did not speak to him when she wanted to, because the remote kindly quality of his answers made her feel invisible.

He asked her, “Do you think Tom’s going to move out?”

“He’s found a place in Brookline that sounds good, but he hasn’t actually seen it yet. Do you mind if he moves?”

Jackson shrugged. “This is a kind of halfway house. People come in here and stay for a while till they can get it together.
From busted marriages and bad trips and exploded communes. They can take it easy here and keep to themselves if they need to, or have company if they need that. Once their heads are together, they move on. At least that’s what I like to think on good mornings.”

“On bad mornings what do you say?”

He laughed silently, almost a grimace. “Then I think we all live in narrowing circles, round and round saying our pieces. Like a cartoon I saw during the last Harvard strike. One of the deans had his head up his own asshole saying, ‘Now we’re beginning to see the light.’ ”

“If Tom moves back to Brookline, he’ll be closer to his kids.”

“Close to Laverne too.” He puzzled on her, his forehead wrinkling. “You don’t care?”

“He belongs to that marriage. That’s where he’s … glued together, somehow.”

“Suppose he goes back to her. You wouldn’t miss him?”

“We miss each other every day, by about a mile.”

“What a cool child you pretend to be.” His eyes searched her, sandy and narrowed. “You ought to at least
think
you’re in love at your age.”

“I did that once. And got married.”

“You’re awfully young to be so cynical. To go drifting along with such a measured thing.”

“Maybe I’m not so young that I don’t prefer to know what I’m doing!”

His bread popped out of the toaster and he spread grape jelly on it. “The young learn the words early. But wait. You’ll turn on again.” He was smiling at his toast.

His easy patronizing assurance, you’ll fall back into love, wheel turning, natural as the seasons. How dare he assume that she would do what she did not want, did not accept? Looking up from his plate, Jackson winced as if he had bitten on a stone. For a moment he met her stare with his sandy gaze questioning. Then he pulled an old wallet from his pocket and unzipped the picture compartment, shaking out loose pipe tobacco before handing the photograph across. A small boy stood wobbly-legged, his sunflower face open in a blaze of grin.

“Who is that? You? No. Your baby brother?”

“Jerry Magnusson, born Jerry Jackson.”

“He’s your son?”

Dryly, “He was.”

Dorine said from the doorway, “What’s that? I didn’t know you had a kid. I didn’t even know you’d been married. Nobody knows, do they?”

“Sure. Phil and Miriam do. Phil’s met him many times. The courts are something wonderful, when you get caught in their net.”

Dorine handed the photo back and went to take a shower. Beth came around the table to look again at the picture.