Vida (68 page)

“What have you been doing? Joel, this is no joke.”

“I don’t find it funny. Fucking bastards stole my car. I came from meeting her and my car was gone.”

“You took our car into Manhattan? Why?”

”I get lost on that dirty stinking subway. Nobody ever gives you directions. It’s noisy, and I can’t tell one line from another … So they towed my car.”

“But you have it … Joel, you went after it?

“Damn right I did. We put six hundred dollars into that baby. Not to mention all my labor. What do you mean, I went after it? Do you think I’d throw it away?”

“But they could have our plates. I still don’t know if they got them that time we were leaving the hospital.”

“Sometimes you’re a nut” He stomped around the room, flinging his coat at the bed. “Because of some half-assed might-have-been from Chicago, you want to throw away our car! Nobody cares about us, Vida! Nobody. It’s ten years. You’re living in a spy movie that’s over.”

Was she? She blinked hard. “Joel, why did you drive it into the city?”

“We have a car, why not use it? I hate that frigging subway. Every time the train hits a station, everybody shoves you. I won’t run around the subway with a bag full of money. I’d have to be crazy”

“To take a car into Midtown, you have to be crazier.”

“Fucking street didn’t say No Parking. There were cars all along there and they didn’t tow
them.
Just me, the bastards”

The anger faded back into her muscles. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“You’re in some lousy mood.”

“I was scared. And upset. I saw Natalie.”

“Let’s eat. That damn lawyer wouldn’t buy me anything but peanuts and booze. I drank three bourbons and I got drunk as a skunk. But when I walked out in the street and my car was gone, did I sober up fast!” He snapped his fingers. “Still mad at me?”

“Joel, my mother’s dead.”

He swung around to face her. “Natalie just told you?”

She nodded. “I wasn’t there. I couldn’t even go to her funeral.”

“She doesn’t know that, Vida. And you did go see her. Remember that you went and saw her. It was dangerous, but you did it, and that made her feel good—right?”

She could only nod numbly.

“Take off your coat. Have you been crying?”

“I cried some, but we were in a public place.” Even now the inner censorship of years made her say “public place” rather than the name.

He sat on the bed and drew her down to sit beside him, her head lolling. “I got angry at you because I felt guilty. I thought I’d for real lost the car. And I know what those machers are going to say when we show up eighty bucks short.”

“We have to make it up,” she said without emotion. “It’ll come out of our share.”

“Want to go out to eat?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“I am.” He prodded her gently.

“It’s the second time for Natalie—you know that? Imagine losing two mothers. Abruptly the tears rolled down her face again.

“That’s better,” he crooned, hugging her. “Cry it out.”

“Better? No.” Tears slid down, splashing on her bent arm, soaking into his raggedy rust-colored sweater. Her body was turning into salt water. She wept until her eyelids were too swollen to touch, until she could not breathe through her nose. Finally the tears slowed. “I still can’t believe she’s dead.” She lay across him like a corpse. “Maybe that’s why they have funerals. So you don’t go on expecting love and a chance to explain or help or say something more.”

He ran a bath and dumped her into it. That was a luxury. She lay spent, soaking, lapped about in water warmer than her last oozing tears. He took off his damp sweater and pulled a clean shirt from his rucksack. Their only luggage was a small backpack apiece. Then he went out to get sandwiches.

It took him longer than she expected. It was nine before he reappeared, as she lay curled on the bed in her robe. He carried in a pizza and a bottle of Italian red she viewed with suspicion. “I wanted to cheer you up” he said, waiting to see if she’d object.

“It’s perfect” she pushed out. After all, he needed a treat. As she began to eat, she discovered her own hunger. The Chianti was thin and dusty, but she drank it for the alcohol. They picnicked on the bed. This was not a fancy motel. The television set was black-and-white and the ice machine was broken; but they weren’t about to watch television and they had nothing to put ice in. After the last slice he licked his fingers. “Suppose I died? Would you mourn me? For a month? How long?”

“Look how long it’s taken me to stop missing Leigh.”

“You still miss him.” He made a sour face. “Suppose I get shot? Like in Michigan. Suppose I’m wounded and you have to choose between leaving me there bleeding or staying with me and being caught.”

“I’ll shoot you myself. Quit this!”

“Did you get hold of Leigh?”

“I haven’t tried to get hold of Leigh. I don’t want to see him.”

”You could. After all, you slept with Eva. You’ve seen him five or six times since we’ve been together.”

“Once. Except for on the street that time. I don’t feel good about him any longer, Joel. It’s over, and I was a fool to hold tight on it so long. I wouldn’t admit my old life is dead and I can’t get those years back and I can’t lead a life by remote control.”

He relaxed against the headboard. “Now you get smart, woman. A little house. Even a trailer. Wouldn’t it be cozy to live in a trailer?”

“But I like having a bathtub. A shower just isn’t the same” She cuddled up beside him. “That A-frame could do us fine. Who owns it?”

He burrowed his face into her belly. “I only know it’s somebody’s ski chalet and they’re off till mid-January in New Mexico. Wouldn’t it be great to be snowed in together? Say, for a month?”

“You have to do one thing for me.” She kneaded his shoulders. “You have to stop being touchy with Eva. I want the two of you to be friends”

“I like her okay” He stiffened his back. “How could we be friends?”

“Because you can’t fuck her? Just because she’s a woman. If she won’t flirt with you, she’s beyond the pale”

“That’s not true.” He sat up.

“Sure it is.” She pulled him back down.

“Would you be with her if you weren’t with me?”

“It wouldn’t be
with
in that sense. We aren’t a couple. And I can’t go back to L.A. I don’t belong in that desert-freeway landscape. I always I feel as if I’m in a television series playing private eye. It undermines my sense of reality. I keep waiting for the music to tune up and the commercial to come on.” She wanted to say right out, I want to be with you and Eva. But she felt the timing was bad. A. Persuade them to like each other. B. Persuade Joel he wanted to live with Eva and persuade Eva she wanted to live with Joel. C. Persuade Eva she wanted to live in Vermont. She had a month to work with, she figured. If only she could manage all the loose ends and sort of nudge it along without either of them figuring out too early what she wanted.

With her mother dead, she needed Eva more. She had to make everybody happy. When she let go of people they died. Bad things happened. She still felt guilty for Jimmy’s dying, as if she had sacrificed him to Kevin and he had run off to prove his courage and burned for it. Too many losses. Joel was prodding her, repeating, “So who would you be with?”

“My own self. My history, my choices, my politics. Basically, that’s how it’s been for years. Alone, but without the fantasies emanating from my past … And you? Who would you be with?”

”Agnes!” He rolled over onto her. “Goats and maple syrup. A great big house with sugar bush and a stream to fish in. That’s contentment. What more could a good old boy like me ask? A garage to tinker with my cars in and lots of broken-down old machinery to play games with”

“She’d never sleep with you. Not once in forty years!”

“So she’d be just like Kiley. I’d make it with the goats” He took off his pants and shirt and was naked. Never in the coldest weather did he wear underwear. She was sure it was vanity.

“Let’s make love slow this time. Make it last,” she said.

“All right.” He tugged at her robe.

She slid away from him and reached for her purse, getting out the diaphragm. “I don’t ask miracles. Just a nice long cozy fuck.”

As he lay over her, her skin took him in through every pore, his prick inside only the slightly more intense point of contact. Her breasts burned against him, the nipples rising into his chest. Her grief, her anxiety chafed the skin sensitive. She no longer felt solid but molten, liquefied. They were interpenetrated, his tongue in her mouth, his prick in her, arms and legs braided into confusion, sweat trickling mingled. She wondered if it would feel different if they were making a baby. Never would she have a child with him; debt to Ruby unpaid. Yet she lived for the children to come: children of her act rather than her body. That the world be different. For Alice that had not been enough.

She felt the breath swelling in her chest and throat, a desire to shout she bottled up in the motel, where they could hear the nasal drone of the TV in the room to either side. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” she said over and over, churning under him, clutching. “I love you, I love you,” he said into her neck, into her damp hair. “Oh, Vida, I love you!”

In the morning he went out for deli and coffee and brought back a bag to the room for a leisurely brunch, more baths, more lovemaking. “How come we aren’t in a red-hot hurry this morning?” he asked. “Shouldn’t we be making tracks?”

“I have one more errand to run.”

“What kind?”

“For the Network. Just an errand. What you have to do is get my alimony from Oscar at Richmond. That’ll cover some of the money lost yesterday. Then we can meet.” She stopped to do mental arithmetic. She’d get him to drop her at the end of the IRT at Van Cortland and she’d take it down to 181st. Suppose Dr. Manolli ran half an hour slow and it took her half an hour to do business with him. At one thirty she’d be on her way. “Let’s meet at the Cloisters at two and take off from there. You ever seen the Cloisters?”

“What is it, a bar?”

“No, it’s a reconstructed monastery. A museum in Fort Tryon Park. I’ll show you on the map. At two I’ll meet you there in the room with the unicorn tapestries.”

He made a sour face. “How will I ever find that?”

“Just ask anybody.”

“Why can’t we both go to Oscar? You don’t care if I drive to Staten Island, right? I’m allowed to drive to Staten Island. It doesn’t make me out to be a hick, right? So let’s leave now, we both go to Oscar, and then we run your errand.”

“I can’t do it that way.”

“Why?”

Because Dr. Manolli was worth platinum to them. Because only Board members were supposed to know the medical problems of everyone in Network. Because Dr. Manolli could be contacted only by Board her members. Because why did Joel always have to act so damned stubborn curious when things did not concern him? “That’s standard operating procedure. I have an errand for the Network. I’ll see you at two. I’ll probably be early, but I know I can make it by two. If you’re there early, so much the better. By the way, you can park at the Cloisters.”

He glared. “All right, let’s get going.”

“We don’t have to leave for another twenty minutes.”

“We don’t want to be late for our little appointments and rendezvous, do we? You’re not always right! You hand me these timetables like you’re a god damn social director. You run our lives like a fucking airport.”

“Oh, let’s be spontaneous, then. Like yesterday, when you impulsively decided to take the car into Manhattan because you were too lazy to ride the subway. Like taking a pet elephant along!”

“I knew you’d bring that up!”

In the car they sat rigidly side by side, each daring the other to speak. After a while she felt absurd, but did not try to make up because she simply could not take him along to the doctor’s office. She would be in enough trouble with the Board because of the missing eighty. It would have to come out of their money, of course. She was more annoyed about the loss of the money than she had been the day before, when she had been frightened about him. If he got extra money from Oscar, that would help.

“See if you can touch Oscar for something,” she said. “He ought to be good for a twenty.”

”Why should I beg from your old boyfriend?”

“Oh, Joel, he’s likelier to be interested in you than in me.”

“So I should take advantage of that to try to get money from him?”

“Joel, stop it!”

“Stop asking you questions? Just take everything on faith. My girlfriend Moses.”

“Stop twisting my intent like a corkscrew. Oscar likes us. He has a nice job and a comfortable life. He’ll give you something. Tell him the car story.”

“So he can feel superior too? You New York jerks. If you bombed into Sacramento and did something stupid, nobody in Sacramento would expect you to be born knowing the municipal ordinances. But every New Yorker thinks everybody with brains is born with the subway map of Manhattan imprinted on their circuits. If you ask some creep how much it costs to ride the subway, he laughs at you.”