Small Changes (34 page)

Like a squirrel, Beth carried about with her nuts and fruits to nibble on, and Miriam took to bringing her little delicacies for the smile that produced, a shining smile of surprise and delight almost too big for the thin freckled face. She liked to tease Beth: she could not help testing to see if Beth would be shocked. Beth seemed to want and to need nothing, but to live like a squirrel in the city eating her seeds and nuts and fruit and running to classes and concerts. As sexless as a child, perhaps, but Miriam liked that dry cool quality. It was a relief from her own vast yeasty sexuality. She wanted to think she might be as simple and as contained as that if only she decided to be.

When she saw Beth leaving the computer center with Ryan one day in April, she felt a sharp pain of loss. Her enemy was carrying off a new friend. He would poison Beth against her. He would damage Beth. He would use her and tear that clear integrity.

After the ugliness with Ryan, she was wary and careful with men at M.I.T. Indeed, her relations seemed to clarify. She had won admittance to a special seminar Wilhelm Graben was giving as his only contact with students while spending a few months at M.I.T. That in itself established a certain minimum of respect. It was also more exciting than anything else she had taken. He was one of the creators of the field, with a career in physics accomplished before he had encountered his first computer. He was urbane, witty, remote,
still on the cutting edge of theory, and radiated a kind of amused power. She had almost a crush on him. Her work went well.

With Phil, things were bumpy. School had given a structure to his life that nothing replaced. He was drifting, tending bar and writing an occasional song, marking time, with his court case pending, always pending. Hal got two club dates and at each he sang a number of Phil’s songs. Phil was excited by dreams of making it; he was ashamed and sure his songs were crap and he had sold out as a poet. Hal had a boat and they went sailing a lot during May. On the boat Hal was endurable, nautical and involved. Otherwise she found him rancid. He used others easily and moved on. His days were decorated with women. He had a chow who growled at everybody else and bit someone once a week, a dog he treated better than any human and fed raw beef. Putting up with Hal was a kind of penance.

That spring, with the invasion of Cambodia and the stepping up of the war, there were many demonstrations. Phil had nightmares and spent more and more time with Joe, who had gone into a permanent condition of rage. Joe was a chesty muscular guy with a brilliant smile set off by a thick brown mustache. His deep ringing voice carried through Going-to-the-Sun, with his loud descending laugh. But he was not sleeping that spring, or eating or teaching his classes, he was driven, burning, furious, and half the time his fury turned on those around him, who were at least within his reach. He was always telling Miriam how bourgeois she was.

No one who would not leave whatever they were doing and go with him on the streets that spring could escape his driven anger, and even minor political differences with those working with him blew up. The third week in May he stormed out of his apartment, leaving his wife Wanda and their little boy Luis and baby Johnny just at the crawling stage. For a week he hung around Going-to-the-Sun blowing hard, with two nineteen-year-old women doting on him. Phil had given him his room and moved in with her for a week and they were peaceful in the eye of the storm. In the meantime Wanda was running his Defense Committee, holding together the shaky coalition that his attacks threatened. On the eighth day of Joe’s terrible reign over Going-to-the-Sun, Wanda arrived at suppertime with Luis by the hand and the baby
on her back—a small chunky woman with dark wiry hair and intense black eyes—burning, worried, overworked, desperate, and strong as a mule. She simply arrived in time to eat supper. Joe began making a great fuss over his sons. And after supper, when it was time for Luis to go home to bed, Joe went with her, A simple division of labor, Miriam thought wryly, watching them depart: she loves and he permits himself to be loved.

Phil managed through the demonstrations not to get busted again, but Thursday he was clubbed and then gassed. Miriam sat up tending him. “If the enemy is the people who own banks and factories and the Pentagon, then I’m not the enemy. Am I?”

He rolled his head to and fro in her lap, under the icebag. “Who said you were?”

“You do. Your poems do.”

“That’s something else.”

Gently she touched his swollen nose. “I wish we could lose our history. You worry me.… Why can’t it be simple again? Without these reverberations of old pain.”

His eyes opened. He lifted the ice pack. “Aw, pigeon, don’t take it so hard. Everything hurts as we go, I don’t ask that it don’t. I don’t want any other women I’ve ever seen, except for a change of bed now and then, I’m the one who likes you this way, remember?”

“Don’t, Phil.”

“You think it’s over with him, yet you’re still bleeding.”

“Phil, it’s over. But no matter what happens, ever, I won’t cut you off again. I won’t.”

“Promise me.” His voice was steely.

“I promise.” She moved the ice pack back onto the swelling. “Tomorrow I have to go to work.… But we’ll have Saturday together. Do you think you’ll feel together enough to go to the street fair Saturday? On Garden Street, with music and goodies to eat and theater …”

“Together enough! Me, the original street-fighting man? Sure, I like carnivals. That is, if the weather holds good.”

14

You Got to Feel It Spontaneously

In the morning she woke to the sunlight filtering through strawberry-bronze curtains she and Phil had made from sheets. Jackson still snored softly on his back. She raised herself on her arm to look at him, his sleeping face unguarded. His lowered eyelids were rosy. His lashes were longer than hers. Those silver hairs in his beard and mane glittered like real metal. These moments when she could contemplate him without being seen, without waking his wariness, were a gentle pleasure.

From that sleep she could believe he would open his eyes and his face would open too: he would wake as vulnerably open as he looked in sleep. Well, things were better. Yes, better. Yesterday had been trying, however. She had had a job interview in one of the firms just off campus, those electronic companies that nestled like piglets to the teats of M.I.T., on the same street as Draper Labs where they did simulations of wars and submarine battles. It had been hate at first sight. Then she had gone out for a second interview in the afternoon at Lincoln Labs. She did not want that either: too large, too hierarchical. She had come home glum and wanted to creep into his leanness and be supported. But Jackson had perceived her mood as a demand. He had backed off into his Who are you anyhow, woman? mode. She had had to pull herself together and put off worrying until she could be alone. Today when Jackson had gone off to his morning class she would be able to bring her depression out front and study it and figure how to live with it or deal with it. But through the evening she had to conceal her problem to be with him.

Dorine and Jackson and she had eaten hash brownies he had made till they were silly and easy giggling laughter
swirled in the room. She and Dorine had danced together—Jackson would never dance but would glare under his brows at anybody who tried to pull him from his chair and tighten his muscles into rigor mortis. Watching them, he tilted back in his chair and smiled like an oriental potentate being entertained, and truthfully they were dancing in a few minutes not so much for the music or for each other as they had started, but to please his eyes.

Then they had all gone for a walk to get ice cream at Brigham’s, where she had mocha and Jackson had butter pecan and Dorine had peppermint stick. Jackson had walked in the middle with his arms around both of them, unusually pliant of him. He made a point of never touching Dorine. Then they came back still happy and said good night to Dorine. At ten-thirty they had gone off to bed and made love until midnight and it was good, it was beautiful to be with him again.

His chest with the curly hairs rose and fell. Lightly she rested a palm against the skin, feeling the pulse. Beneath her hand his breathing altered. She felt that he was coming up through the layers of sleep. REM sleep: rapid eye movements under the blush of the lids. Dreaming about what? She had a pang of jealousy for the women in his head, more real than any flesh for him. Gradually she was learning how to love him properly. She was not letting her desperation force her into bitter cycles of retreat. She was not being coaxed into overtly trying to squeeze love from him. When he withdrew, she was learning to step back too. Yes, doing better. He would open to her. That promise was always there in the taut lines of his body, in the sad lines of his face, in the sandy wisdom of his eyes. Patience and accommodation. Living out her love day to day.

The eyes opened, blinked, focused. Caught her in the act of bending over his face. The eyebrows raised. He came alert so quickly. “Well. Are you putting a hex on me?”

“What makes you think I’d know how?”

“All women are witches.”

“All men are pricks.” She sat up and felt for her slippers under the bed.

“Where do you think you’re off to?” He put out a long arm and pulled her against him. “Was a love spell. Mojo working.”

“You can’t bluff me. You have a ten o’clock class today. You wouldn’t be tempted by ten naked maids in a row.”

“Well, school’s still something of a novelty. This aging boy wonder. I’m older than Higgins, my ten o’clock seminar man, and I can see that embarrasses him. He thinks I should be back on the Bowery waiting on the mission line.”

“I knew the first time I saw you drinking grapefruit juice for breakfast that you liked self-pity in the morning.”

“Woman, you don’t know what’s good. It takes the sweaters off my teeth.”

“Have you tried a toothbrush?” She got away from him and hopped across the room. She wouldn’t have minded bicycling over to M.I.T. a bit late. But once on such a cozy morning she had rolled over onto him and he had taken out that missed class on her for two days. He was convinced in his heart he was about to flunk out.

He skipped breakfast except for his glass of juice and a piece of toast eaten standing, but Dorine padded out in her cotton smock as soon as Jackson left, and they ate granola and blueberries together leisurely.

“Did Phil come in last night?”

Dorine dropped her gaze and nodded. “In my room.”

“Dorine, don’t start that guilty bit on me. Why shouldn’t you take him in if you want to? You don’t think I’m jealous, please, do you?”

Dorine made an effort to look at Miriam. “He makes me feel funny about it.”

“Phil?”

“No! Phil?”

“Jackson, you mean. You know how uptight he is. You shouldn’t let him get you down. I swear, somewhere inside he doesn’t really approve of sex. It might be considered fun. He doesn’t really approve of anything where the fact is more interesting than the theory.”

“He says I shouldn’t sleep with anybody while Lennie’s in the hospital.” Dorine stirred her very light, very sweet coffee round and round.

“He said that? Or you’re just guessing?”

“He said it all right. With sadness, as if I were really being a shit. He makes me feel … so cheap.”

“What business is it of his?”

“It was my fault, I mean, you and Phil had gone off to
that rock festival for the weekend. We were alone here and we were talking. I mean, I felt really close to him. I was talking about what happened with John and why it hurt so bad. How I got involved with Lennie and how I got into that trip last spring of really wanting him to marry me and what a shock it was when I finally said so and I learned he’d never even thought of it. I felt Jackson must like me a little bit, I mean, he listens so sympathetically.…”

She thought but could not say it was the role he liked: he liked listening and nodding and sympathizing a bit, giving advice.

“I thought, well, he can’t find me completely ugly, to listen to me all evening practically. So when it was kind of late I asked him if he wanted to sleep with me. I didn’t make a big thing of it. I just thought he might just as soon … he’d spent all that time …” Dorine trailed off. “I wasn’t trying to poach on you. But he made me feel like a rotten potato.”

“Dorine, don’t let him get you down that way.”

“He put down this quiet line about how Lennie is a friend of his and Lennie is in the hospital. I wouldn’t have felt half so lousy if he’d just said, ‘No, you don’t turn me on,’ But Lennie’s been in the hospital since June, and I don’t know if he’s going to pick up with me again when he gets out. He keeps telling me he got hepatitis because he wasn’t taking care of himself, as if I had failed him. He’s grumpy when he’s sick, and he just isn’t that interested in talking to me when I hitchhike to New York. When I walked in he said, ‘Oh, it’s you.’ His mother was there, and he hadn’t even told her who I am.”

“Being with Phil is between you and Phil. Jackson has nothing to say about it.”

“But he watches me. Honest, sometimes I feel I have to sneak around. I feel his eyes on me. He makes such heavy judgments. He’s always making judgments and telling us where we come short.”

“He does that.” Miriam poured more coffee for both of them. “Back when we were together before, when I broke up with Phil—”

“That was before I knew you.”

“Yeah. Before Phil moved into Going-to-the-Sun—”

“For me, that place should have been named Going-to Hell-Fast. I’m glad you got me out of there, honest. No
matter how heavy Jackson weighs on me, I think a lot of him. I like living here. It’s better with Phil, here. He’s like a baby sometimes, and sometimes he just lashes out when he’s had too much or he’s upset.… But he can be sweet too. I know I should probably move out.”

“I like having another woman in the house. They gang up on me. I’d go out of my mind with both of them if you weren’t here to talk to. Besides, this place would stink, literally stink. The walls could fall in before either of them would wash a dish.”