Small Changes (25 page)

“I hadn’t noticed that,” Miriam said, smiling. It was a good summer based around her sublet.

“Smoking dope and tobacco in the same pipe. Jackson, you have no style. Why don’t you pour a little chocolate in too? Or mayonnaise. Everything in the Midwest comes covered with a thin pale greasy layer—salads, bacon, sandwiches, hamburgers. When a boy baby is born to a family like yours, he’s slapped on the behind and coated with mayonnaise.”

“Listen to the gourmet. Why, before I met you, you thought a meal was a hot dog, and a seven-course dinner was seven hot dogs.”

“Remember who turned you on in the first place.”

“My Uncle Sam. You were just a scrawny nineteen-year-old, too stupid to use his asthma to stay out of the stew.”

“A lot of good your conniving did you. Three years in the reserves, and you ended up in Nam anyhow.”

“And that,” Jackson said soulfully, with his hand on his belly, “is where I went wrong. Led astray. Where the lures of the wicked lay in wait and tempted me. I always tell that to my father, on the rare occasions we hold converse these dark days. It’s usually good for a twenty.”

Phil had been drafted, but Jackson had been caught by surprise. Old Jackson had had things worked out in his life. Very fancily he had taken concurrent M.A.s in sociology and business administration, married his girl friend Sissy, and gone to work for a conglomerate. Their parents kicked in lest they live in squalor on his measly salary of sixteen thou, and helped them into a split level in the woods outside St. Paul. Soon enough Jackson wiggled upward, they moved to a suburb near Dayton, had a baby, while Jackson switched his reserve duty to his new location. He had joined the reserves after college, figuring his deferments might come home to roost. Then the President called up Jackson’s unit and he found himself in it for real.

“Man, you know, in the reserves you can just ooze up from rank to rank,” Jackson had told him long ago. “When they activated us I was a top sergeant. Hadn’t done more than clean rifles in years. The next thing I knew I was jumping out of a helicopter leading an attack and landing in a rice paddy, sinking up to my hips in the muck.… I hated the Army. It was two weeks of hyped-up shit every summer. All the guys saying to each other as we crawled through the woods on our bellies slapping at mosquitoes, ‘If my secretary could see me now,’ while some nineteen-year-old with stripes on bellowed orders.” Jackson’s stripes did not last long, with a little help from his friends. The Army had been, as they say, a radicalizing experience for Jackson.

Phil hadn’t needed any pointers on how shitty things were. But they had locked into each other strengths and weaknesses and somehow the pattern fit, meshed. Jackson had turned him on to books. Jackson was big then on Hermann Hesse and gave him
Steppenwolf
to read. That was Jackson identifying, the lean gray bookish wolf of the steppes who was going to bring them through somehow alive and fight the brass to save their skins. Bunch of kids, lot of them from college, painting peace symbols on their helmets but following
orders just the same. They called the company hangout the wolf den. Less than half of them came back to the world.

Jackson had tried to return to his life and pick up the leads where they had been cut from his hands. He tried. Sort of. But he was full of anger and bitterness and depressions he could not handle and rages that spilled out and a boredom he could not hide. Phil went to a better school than he’d quit, got into N.Y.U. in English. He went into a brief incandescent dream in which books seemed more real than his life—hard now to remember his idealism about departments of English and the teaching of literature. Vacations he’d go to Medford a couple of days and then off to Jackson’s. Each time the tensions were rawer. Sissy stopped being polite and then she stopped flirting and bared her teeth. She was scared. She was losing what she thought she needed. She was fighting for what she felt entitled to. He was a messenger of chaos come to wake in Jackson all she could not understand or accept.

And they were bad together, baaad. Phil left at school his earnest new scholarly identity, his passion for Keats, and arrived in fatigues and street-corner leer, the lining of his jacket hiding the magic pills. They traded atrocity stories, their own, ones they had merely heard told as their own. They reminisced about whores for hours in the kitchen till Sissy barricaded herself in the bedroom. She refused to cook for them, and they brought back take-out and filled up the house with bags of french fries, the bones of barbecued spareribs and gnawed chicken, paper plates and cups of half-drunk Coke and 7-Up. They spread their untidy feast over the pale carpeting and the glass and chrome Design Research furniture and Phil pissed in the potted avocado tree. On weekends like those Sissy could be made to represent Mom and apple pie and the American Dream and the vast pile of crap waving at them from every plastic ad with a blond selling a refrigerator. The last time he went to visit, Jackson left with him, after breaking up the living room and trying unsuccessfully to flush Sissy’s mink coat down the toilet.

Jackson went into a strange violent scene in New York, holed up in a commune supported by a couple of dealers and some girls who hustled, on Third between C and D. When Jackson climbed out of that, he withdrew into ascetic monkishness. Jackson had the basement cell on Tenth Street and
the janitor’s job and was into needing nothing, no one, self-sufficient and lean and bony and ogling the death’s head in the mirror, all established as a way of life by the time Phil had picked up Miriam at the MOMA.

“I’d never have gone to school if you hadn’t pushed me,” Phil said. “But while you were nudging me into the system, you were climbing out.”

“Does anybody really influence another? Maybe it’s all genetically determined. If we could read the DNA, who knows? I was programmed to zig, then zag. I am all zagged out.”

Unconfrontable Jackson. They had talked for years about sharing rooms. But always before something had precluded it. “Miriam’s sublet will be up soon. She’s starting to look. I think she kind of expects I might move in with her.”

Jackson tapped his pipe out. “I could get somebody else to split the rent. If you’re into the domesticity routine? I guess you could get used to it. Might as well get it over.”

“Yeah. I just don’t know if I want to.”

“What’s the matter, you scared of some other guy cutting you out if you don’t set up house?”

“Don’t project that shit on me. She’s free. So am I. I do what I want to whoever I want when I want to.”

“Sure,” Jackson drawled, grinning. “Have fun. They’re all so easy to get on with in the beginning. Women are always agreeable. For a while, for a while, for a while.”

“Not that she’s pushing me. She knows better than to try that. But I told her, how come she doesn’t move in here. Would that bug you a lot?”

“I don’t have to deal with her. She’s no worse than the other chicks you’ve let loose in here.”

“Aw come on, Jackson, they’re not in her class.”

“She’s smart, or so she tells us. But I’ll bet you a nickel bag she’ll never move in while I’m here.”

“She says she couldn’t work here, there’s too much traffic.”

“It’s your worry. Just so she splits the expenses when she eats here, it’s the same to me.”

“You’re so scared someone’s going to cop one meal without putting into the kitty, I can’t believe it.”

“I didn’t know you’d inherited a fortune. Or is your princess keeping you these days?”

“Aw come on, we get by. It gives me a large pain to hear
about voluntary poverty around here, when everybody has bread to buy dope and clothes and bikes and records. Poverty my sweet ass! Poverty is when you don’t have it for food, man. We live pretty well, if you ask me.”

“It is because I do not ask you that we live well. And small thanks I get for my clever managing.”

“Sure, Jackson, you’re the best housewife on all of Pearl Street!”

Jackson punched him in the chest not quite playfully, then shambled off to his room before Phil could get his breath back. He was always susceptible in the chest. Dirty pool. He’d get back at Jackson later. One way or the other. Noisy sex scene. Bring some of the political heavies home from the bar tonight. Maybe Joe Rosario, who always got Jackson uptight when they argued by making him feel like a liberal. Joe would get more and more vehement and more and more militant and finally he would stand there pounding and roaring and representing the whole Third World in their kitchen. Besides, Jackson liked politics in words and Joe liked to do it in the streets. Phil hated all those meetings where people jawed at each other in their stupid factions, but he was drawn to Joe’s energy and anger. Phil got his breath back and smiled to himself. Jackson wasn’t always right: though Phil could remember when, at nineteen, that thought would have seemed disloyal.

11

The Competition

Miriam tried hard to locate a permanent apartment in the North End but she could not find anyone who would rent to her. As August progressed, Phil suggested frequently that she move in. She did not take that idea seriously. She was no longer the Complete Scholar she had been, but M.I.T. was a place that habitually set students a rigorous schedule and
she liked computer science. Above all she had found a project to work on, which was not only supporting her but could probably be mined for a thesis subject eventually.

Before school started she found a one-room apartment in Cambridge on Upland Road. It was twenty minutes by bus from Phil’s apartment but she bought a bicycle and sometimes she pedaled to M.I.T. or to Phil’s. Her room on the top floor faced small yards where housewives hung out their laundry and put their children to play. Past the back fence the Boston and Maine Railroad ran, shaking the house. The room was
light
and clean and free from bugs and only typically exorbitant in rent. The street outside was lined with big trees whose branches almost knit.

She was working for a project that was just getting started with a number of biochemists plus her providing the computer know-how. M.I.T. was not like Michigan. It lacked a campus people gathered around, easy meeting places, comfortable hangouts if you overlooked the F&T Diner. She was on campus some, among the modernistic slabs of building, but most of the time she was over at Project MAC, in Tech Square. It was a total environment. Some computer freaks almost lived in. The big computer and the artificial intelligence labs were on the ninth floor but her project office was on eight. Her part was to work on developing an artificial language which biochemists could use to describe such entities as enzyme systems: a language which they would find easy to use without having to know anything about computers and in which they could directly express their problems. She was also working on computer software which could operate with that language, to turn it into machine language, and run simulations of those enzyme systems that the scientists were describing. The computer would simulate them and give the results back to the biochemists. It was an interesting set of problems, way more interesting than the mathematical models she had been diddling with at Michigan.

For one thing, she thought that this work felt real. During her senior year, purer mathematics had come to seem more and more alienated and alienating. She did not want to spend her life manipulating concepts almost nobody understood and nobody could relate to. People might not understand exactly what she did now if they weren’t in her field, but at least they could relate to the products of that work. She thought
that her mind was really more suited to this work than to pure mathematics, and the feedback with the machine at one end and the biochemists on the other end was interesting in itself. Even debugging the programs that she wrote was fun.

Because she liked her work, she had essentially different needs than Phil or Jackson. Too many people came percolating through Pearl Street. She wanted a place where she could shut Phil out when she had to, where she could spread out her books and her papers and her flow charts, and come back and find them undisturbed. When she came skipping in from class or from Phil her work waited, beautiful and inviting her to grapple with it.

Phil could be home engulfed in that steady gregarious hum he craved, friends, acquaintances, just faces to turn on with and drink with during all those hours when she worked on her compiler. The structures she generated gave her aesthetic pleasure: there was a neatness, an economy, an elegance to a good program just as there was to a good piece of music, although she could never convince Phil. That sense of economical and functionally elegant shape pleased her, satisfied something that had been hungry for use inside her. She felt surer than ever that she had made a good choice in changing fields.

Tech Square had been built for NASA under Kennedy and now housed corporations like Polaroid and cold-war entities like the Cambridge Project, as well as M.I.T. offshoots. It stood in a vast parking area that had been a working-class neighborhood when Phil was growing up, and towered over two mostly black housing projects from which trashing parties and entrepreneur thieves came raiding. 545, the building she spent so much time in, had a big fancy lobby with security and seemed to have been designed like a lot of M.I.T. to minimize the environmental shock students would experience in moving from school to industry. She shared an office with three other students, windowless and painted luridly, full of science fiction and mild anti-war slogans, with a cot and a hot plate and a calendar run off by computer with Snoopy saying
FUCK YOU RED BARON
. If she wanted to kill time, she could do it endlessly.

For all of her careful irony to Phil about the place and her sense sometimes of “What am I, daughter of a HUAC victim, doing in the brain of the military-industrial complex?”
she was having a good time. Just one floor up were the most exciting toys she could imagine. Besides the big old GE 645, there were elegant small computers, two DEC 10s and a 6 lashed together, and graphics terminals for dynamic modeling. Not to mention the computer-directed robots in the lab where there was so much wiring that the floor quaked when she walked on it, floating on a mass of circuits.