The Infinite Plan (18 page)

I made the circuit of the offices, trying to find my way through the labyrinth of the campus, calculating how much money I would need to survive and how I was going to find a job. I was sent from window to window in a round of form-filling, like the proverbial serpent biting its own tail. The bureaucracy was crushing; no one knew anything, we newcomers were considered an inevitable nuisance, to be got rid of as quickly as possible. I didn't know whether they treated us like garbage to toughen us up or whether I was the only one who was so lost; I came to believe they were discriminating against me because of my Chicano accent. Occasionally some good-natured student, a survivor of earlier obstacles, passed on information that set me on the right track; without such help I would have spent a month circling around like a slug. No rooms were available in the dormitories, and I wasn't interested in fraternities—they were strongholds of conservatism and class consciousness, with no room for a person like myself. One fellow I ran into several times during the madhouse of those first days told me he had found a room to rent and would share it with me. His name was Timothy Duane, and as I would later find out, girls thought he was the handsomest man in the university. When Carmen met him many years later, she said he looked like a Greek statue. There is nothing Greek about him; he's a typical blue-eyed, dark-haired Irishman. His grandfather, he told me, escaped from Dublin at the beginning of the century, just ahead of the arm of English justice; he arrived in New York with one hand out and another behind him, and after a few years in some questionable business dealings, had made a fortune. In his old age he became a benefactor of the arts, and everyone forgot his somewhat murky past; when he died, he left his heirs a pile of money and a good name. Timothy had grown up in Catholic boarding schools for sons of the wealthy, where he learned various sports and cultivated an overwhelming sense of guilt that must have been with him from the cradle. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to be an actor, but his father believed there were only two respectable professions, medicine and law, everything else was a great stew of crooks and incompetents—especially the theater, which in his eyes was a hotbed of homosexuals and perverts. Half his income was diverted into the arts foundation his grandfather Duane had established, a beneficence that had not made the father any more sympathetic to artists. He remained a healthy autocrat for nearly a century, depriving humanity of the pleasure of viewing the fine figure of his son on stage or screen. Tim became a doctor who hated his profession and told me that he chose pathology as a specialty because at least when your patients were dead you didn't have to listen to their complaints or pat their hands. When he renounced his dream of being an actor and exchanged the boards of the theater for the icy slabs of dissecting theaters, he became a recluse, tormented by unrelenting demons. Many women pursued him, but all those affairs had foundered by the wayside, leaving behind misgivings, regret, and insecurity—until late in his life, after he had lost laughter, hope, and a large part of his charm, when someone came along to save him from himself. But I'm getting ahead of my story; that happened much later. At the time I met him, he was deceiving his father, promising to study law or medicine while secretly devoting himself to acting, his one passion. He had just arrived in town that week and was still in an exploratory phase, but unlike myself he had had experience in the world of education for whites; he had a rich father behind him and a manner that opened every door. To see his self-assurance, you would think he owned the university. You don't have to study much here, but you learn a lot, he told me; keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. I was still walking around on a different plane. His room turned out to be the attic of an old house, a single room with a cathedral ceiling and two skylights that offered a view of the campanile. Tim showed me how you could see other things too; if we climbed on a chair, we could see into the girls' dormitory bathroom, where every morning girls trooped to the showers in their underwear. When they discovered we were watching, several discarded the underwear. There was almost no furniture in the room: two beds, a large table, and a bookshelf. We attached a length of pipe between two beams to hang our clothes, and everything else ended up in cardboard boxes on the floor. The house itself was occupied by two delightful women, Joan and Susan, who in time became my good friends. They had a big kitchen, where they tried out recipes for a book they were planning to write; the rising aroma of those dishes made my mouth water, and thanks to them, I learned to cook. They would soon become famous, not for their culinary talents or the book they never published, but because they originated the idea of bra-burning at public protests. That gesture, the result of a fit of inspiration when they had been denied entrance to a bar for men only, was accidentally captured by the camera of a tourist, shown on the television news, imitated by other women, and adopted as the trademark of feminists around the world. The house was ideal; it was only a stone's throw from the university and very comfortable. I also appreciated the air of graciousness; compared to other places I had lived in, it was a palace. Some years later it would house one of the most famous hippie communities in the city, twenty-some people living in happy promiscuity under the same roof, and the garden would become an overgrown marijuana plantation—but by then I had moved elsewhere.

Tim told me I had to get rid of my shirts because that southern California style made me look like a tropical bird; no one dressed like that in Berkeley, he said, and there was no way I could go out and protest in that garb. He explained that if we didn't join protests, we'd be nobodies and would never get any girls. I had seen the signs and banners for various causes and catastrophes: famines, dictatorships, and revolutions at points on the globe impossible to locate on a map, minority and women's rights, endangered forests and animals, peace and brotherhood. You couldn't walk a block without signing a manifesto or drink a cup of coffee without donating a quarter to some goal as altruistic as it was remote. Time spent studying was minimal compared to the hours dedicated to demanding redress for wrongs against the downtrodden, denouncing the government, the military, foreign policy, racial abuses, ecological crimes—all the eternal injustices. That obsessive preoccupation with world affairs, however extreme, was a revelation. For years Cyrus had filled my mind with questions, but until then I had primarily thought of them as material for books and intellectual exercises with little practical application in everyday life, things I could discuss only with him because the rest of humanity was indifferent to such topics. Now I shared this revolutionary zeal with friends; we felt part of a complex network in which every action reverberated with unpredictable consequences for the future of humankind. According to my friends in the cafés, there was a revolution in progress that no one could halt, and our theories and customs would soon be universally adopted; we had a historic responsibility to stand on the side of the good—and the good were, of course, the extremists. Nothing could be left intact, everything must be leveled to make way for the new society. I had first heard the word “politics” whispered in a library elevator, and I knew that to be called “liberal” or “radical” was an insult only slightly less offensive than “Communist.” Now I found myself in the one city in the United States in which this norm was reversed; here the only thing worse than being conservative was to be neutral or indifferent. One week after coming to Berkeley, I was living in the attic with my friend Duane; I was regularly attending classes and had found two jobs to keep my head above water. Studying presented no difficulty: the university was not yet the terrible brain factory it would later become; it was like high school, only less orderly. I was required to attend ROTC courses for two years. I liked the exercises and the summer camp so much, and was so taken with the uniform, that I signed for all four years and reached officer's rank. When I enlisted, I had to sign a sworn declaration that I was not a Communist. As I was writing my signature at the bottom of the page, I felt Cyrus's ironic gaze on the back of my neck, so strong that I turned around to speak to him.

The foreman of the plant for manufacturing tin cans dreamed every night of Judy Reeves, and in his waking hours relentlessly pursued a vision of her. He was not obsessed with corpulent women; he had simply never noticed that she was fat. In his eyes Judy was perfect, neither too little nor too much, and if anyone had told him she was carrying nearly double her normal weight, he would have been truly amazed. He did not focus on the extent of her defects but on the worth of her virtues; he loved the spheres of her breasts and her voluminous buttocks and was thrilled her flesh was so plentiful—all the more to hold. He was dazzled by her baby-fine skin, by her hands, roughened by sewing and housework but nobly formed, by the radiant smile he had glimpsed only twice, and by her hair, fine and pale as strands of silver. The girl's determination to reject him merely fed his desire. He looked for opportunities to be near her, despite the arrogant indifference that met every overture. Fresh from the shower, wearing a clean shirt and splashed with cologne to dissipate the acrid odor of the plant, he stationed himself every evening at the bus stop to await his beloved's return from work; he would reach for her hand to help her from the bus, knowing that she would choose to lurch down the steps rather than accept his help. Then he walked her home, speaking in a conversational tone as if they were the closest of friends; undiscouraged by Judy's stubborn silence, he would tell her details of his day, the baseball scores, news about people she had never met. He would walk her as far as her door, invite her out to dinner—sure of her silent refusal—and say goodbye with the promise to meet her the next day at the same place. This patient siege was maintained for two months, without variation.

“Who is that man who comes here every day?” Nora Reeves finally asked.

“No one, Mama.”

“What is his name?”

“I've never asked him. I'm not interested.”

The next day Nora was waiting at the window, and before Judy could close the door in the gigantic redhead's nose she stepped out to greet him and invite him in for a beer, ignoring her daughter's murderous gaze. Sitting in the tiny living room, on a chair too fragile for his enormous body, the suitor sat tongue-tied, cracking his knuckles while Nora observed him with interest from her wicker chair. Judy had disappeared into the bedroom, where her furious snorting could be heard through the paper-thin walls.

“Allow me to express my appreciation for your courteous attentions to my daughter,” said Nora Reeves.

“Unh-huh,” the man replied, unaccustomed to such formal language and unable to offer a more articulate response.

“You appear to be a decent person.”

“Unh-huh. . . .”

“Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“I asked whether you are a decent person.”

“I don't know, ma'am.”

“What is your name?”

“Jim Morgan.”

“My name is Nora, and my husband is Charles Reeves, Master Functionary in Divine Sciences: Surely you have heard of him; he is very well known. . . .”

Judy, listening in the next room, had heard all she could bear; she swept into the room like a typhoon, facing her timid admirer with arms akimbo.

“What the hell do you want of me? Why don't you stop bugging me?”

“I can't. . . . I think I'm in love; I'm really sorry . . .,” her miserable caller stammered, his face flushing red as his hair.

“All right, if the only way I can get rid of this nightmare is to go to bed with you, let's get it over with!”

Nora Reeves uttered a horrified exclamation and jumped up so quickly she overturned her chair; her daughter had never spoken such words in her presence. Morgan also stood up, made a slight bow to Nora, and clamped his cap on his head; at the door, he turned.

“I see I was mistaken about you. What I have in mind is marriage,” he said succinctly.

As she descended from the bus the next day, Judy found no one waiting to take her hand to help her. She heaved a sigh of relief and started majestically homeward, swaying like a slow freighter, observing the activity in the street: people going about their errands, cats pawing through garbage pails, dark-skinned children playing cowboys and Indians. It was a long walk, and by the time she reached home her happiness had faded, replaced by acute dejection. That night, desolate, she could not sleep but tossed and turned like a beached whale. At dawn she arose, drank a cup of chocolate, and ate two bananas, three fried eggs with bacon, and eight pieces of toast slathered with butter and marmalade. Her mother found her on the porch, chocolate mustache and egg yolk still on her upper lip, with two rivulets of tears running down her cheeks.

“Your father came again last night. He told me to have you bury chicken livers at the foot of the willow tree.”

“Don't talk to me about him, Mama.”

“It's for the ants. He says that will get them out of the house.” Judy did not go to work that day; instead, she visited Olga. The divine looked her over from top to bottom, evaluating the rolls of fat, the swollen legs, the labored breathing, the unbecoming dress hurriedly stitched from cheap cloth, the terrible desolation in the girl's definitively blue eyes, and she did not have to gaze into her crystal ball to suggest advice.

“What do you want more than anything else, Judy?”

“Children,” she replied unhesitatingly.

“For that you need a man. And while you're at it, it's best if the man's a husband.”

Judy went straight to the pastry shop on the corner and devoured three millefeuille pastries and two glasses of apple cider; from there she went to the beauty shop, a place she had never visited before, and in the next three hours a short, sympathetic Mexican woman gave her a permanent, painted her fingernails and toenails a bright pink, and used a wax depilatory on her legs, while Judy patiently and methodically ate her way through two pounds of chocolates. Then she took the bus into the city to buy a new dress at the only store for fat women in the entire state of California. She found a blue skirt and a flowered blouse that slightly minimized her bulk and brought out the childlike freshness of her skin and eyes. Thus arrayed, at five o'clock she was standing with crossed arms and a fierce expression at the door of the factory where her lovesick admirer worked. The whistle blew, and she watched the herd of Latino workers troop by; twenty minutes later the foreman appeared, unshaven, sweaty, and wearing a grease-stained shirt. When he saw her, he stopped dead, dumbfounded.