Vida (69 page)

“Joel, at two we’ll go home. And we’ll have a home. Right after the Michigan job, we’ll start looking.”

“I don’t know if I want to live with you” he grumbled. “You think I’m a moron.”

“I love you. Let’s just finish what we have to do and clear out. I’m on edge in the city. I’m always a little scared here.”

“You don’t wish you were living here? With the Mouth?”

“Not anymore. Truly!” As she started to get out of the car, she reached for the paper bag. “We split this here.”

“What for? Are you planning to run out on me?”

“Sure. Or you’ll elope with Oscar. For safety, love. It’s an automatic precaution. If one of us is offed … you know.”

“Spend it all on lingerie. See if I care”

“You’d love it if I did”

For the first time since they’d left the motel he grinned. “Frederick’s forever! Purple satin! Black lace bikinis! Red see-through bras!”

“The Cloisters will put you in mind of the mortification of the flesh”

“Yeah? You don’t care to have your flesh mortified. You like a good fuck and a hot bath and a crisp chewy bagel, the same as me.” He gunned the engine and drove off, smiling, giving her a crooked little wave.

Riding the subway down, she picked up a
Times
off a seat to read and to screen her face. The headlines were all about the Middle East and a liquidgas-tanker explosion. She read about the disaster with the sense of things getting entirely out of control. How can we win, she thought, when they’re destroying so much so fast? A world gutted, disabled, the vision of a burning ship—but the ship was a planet. Still seeing people burn in the terrible wreckage, she skimmed the other headlines summarily; then her eye was caught.

ALLEGED I.R.A. GUNRUNNER
SHOT ATTEMPTING ESCAPE

A former anti-war activist allegedly turned gunrunner for the I.R.A. engaged in a running battle with the police yesterday on West 104th Street. Kevin Droney, 33, was arrested in Manhattan on September 21 and charged with illegal possession of prohibited firearms. Assistant District Attorney Randolph Gibney described Droney as leader of a ring transporting automatic weapons to troubled Northern Ireland.

Come on—shot? Impatient, she skimmed

… released on $10,000 bail … police guard as a cooperative witness in conjunction with a grand jury …

Gibney said Droney had agreed to cooperate with the office of the District Attorney in apprehending members of the Network, a revolutionary underground organization that has claimed credit for 51 bombings since 1970.

At least, she thought vaguely, coldly, they don’t say “so-called revolutionary” any longer; but we’ve done more bombings than that. They don’t bother counting them accurately any longer. At least, no photographs were printed this time.

Officer George Gregarian said that Droney pulled a gun and threatened him yesterday at 9 A
.M.
in the hallway of an apartment building at 186 W. 104th Street where Droney had been living in the 3rd-floor apartment of Lohania Hernandez.

Gunfire was exchanged between the two men and Gregarian was wounded in the arm. Droney fled toward a car driven by Miss Hernandez, a naturalized citizen born in Havana, Cuba.

Gregarian called for help and a police cruiser responded in time to prevent Miss Hernandez from leaving the street. In the ensuing gun battle, Droney was shot three times. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Metropolitan Hospital.

Miss Hernandez, 35, a clerk in a travel agency, has been taken into custody on charges …

… fugitive for several years after Droney fled charges stemming from a 1970 bombing at Mobil Oil Corporation offices.

She looked up quickly, pierced with fright. She felt on display in the subway car. Kevin was dead. She did not feel like prancing on his grave. Poor Kevin. Poor Lohania. Lohania had spoken the truth to Natalie: he had not meant to cooperate for long. Had he been trying to contact the Network? He was stringing the authorities along. They had not bought him off. Randy was wrong about Kevin now as Kevin had been wrong about Randy then. She could not reread the article. Her eyes blurred, but she did not weep. She had cried herself out for Ruby till her tear ducts felt sore.

Kevin was bitter and hard, but he was true. Maybe he had sold them out, but nothing they couldn’t survive. He had not sold himself. He had been biding his time. Ultimately, that mattered a lot to her; she was surprised how much. She would mourn his death in battle gravely and silently. Now she would at last forgive herself. She felt almost close to him. She was certain he believed passionately in what he was doing for Northern Ireland. That struggle would even heal him to his family and his past. She understood; she could not disapprove.

Why had they been unable to love each other? She did not know, but for the first time in years she regretted their failure; regretted they had not meshed as a couple rather than cursing herself for having become involved with him. They had needed Lohania to complete their family. They had not been sufficient as two. But why had they turned their anger and frustration so strongly on each other? How they had worked together the first years underground, twins, one machine, two arms of one swift body! For a moment she remembered his body, the lean fierce heft of his torso, the glint of lamplight on his yellow hair. The raw force of him. Lohania had been true to Kevin; all those years she had waited. She had thrown over whatever life she had built with bricks of pain in the intervening years to help him escape. She had been willing to cut herself off from her methadone source. Lohania too had proved ultimately incorruptible. Vida was impressed, and she was moved. Someday, she promised Lohania silently, she would see her again. The state would take revenge on Lohania for Kevin’s act and once again she would have to do bad time, in a state prison under maximum security, Bedford Hills. No civilized time in places like Danvers for Lohania.

Numbly she moved toward the doors, got off. She breathed deeply, hyperventilating. She must make herself pay attention, break from the thick murk of depression. Look around, she ordered; be wary. Eyestalks waving.
Muerte en Sangre Fria
was playing at the movie house. Better a death chosen than a wasted life—right, Vida? She clutched her arms. A gaggle of empty buses half-blocked 181st Street as she walked toward Fort Washington. The neighborhood reminded her of where she had lived with Leigh—not physically, for the buildings were lower—because nobody in the lively street crowd seemed to own a majority: Blacks, Italians, Puerto Ricans, Jews. She made herself amble along past Thom McAn, a Daitch Dairy, a superdiscount cosmetics in the blare of “Silent Night” Most of the stores had Christmas decorations tacked up, aluminum trees turning to canned music, angels and shepherds and dusty white sheep under a pointy gold star. The liquor-store window was full of gift-wrapped whiskey. Christmas had crept up on her. She was not sure what date it was.

She had a desperate desire to give Joel something. If only they had not blown the eighty! A velour shirt or a bulky wool sweater. She could not spend the money. Instead, she ducked into a deli and bought him a dozen of mixed garlic and onion bagels, thinking of his last words to her. She considered putting them in the Bloomingdale’s bag (from Natalie) she had folded up in her small rucksack, but actually the bagels fitted in with her change of clothes, toiletries, and minimal disguise items. Striding on, she tugged at her green velour tunic that had once been a mini-dress, like Lohania’s, like Natalie’s. She had a strong urge to call Natalie, to hear her voice, to know her safe. Dangerous: Natalie’s phone must be tapped. Just a bit of warmth. She noted every pay phone she passed, most of them broken, and kept walking. Identical apartment houses in a row with courts. Dr. Manolli’s entrance was on the ground level to the side.

Even Dr. Manolli’s office had a Christmas tree, this one red with crystal snowflakes. Muzak pumped into the waiting room, a thousand strings dreaming of a cooled-whip Christmas. Five women, two men and his three children sweating there glared at her as she strode through to door and knocked.

“What is it?” he called. Three years before, she had arrived with a badly swollen leg full of shards of metal. Would he remember? After digging out the metal, he had put her on antibiotics, which had given her a yeast infection.

“I have your mail they left next door” she said.

“Oh, yes, come on in” The patients went back to gazing at the wall, leafing through
New Yorkers,
dozing, suppressing their children. Dr. Manolli was sitting behind his desk walled in by heaps of paper. “Can’t trust anybody to do insurance forms,” he said. “You got what you want renewed?” He was about five feet five, with a wreath of wavy gray hair around a bald dome that looked fashioned sensuously of marble. His complexion was clear and creamy. His eyes, a cool foresty brown, were magnified by his glasses. He was thin and elegant in his neat body and three-piece green-flecked gray suit, but his desk was unkempt as she remembered it, files all over the office, half-packed or unpacked boxes of yellowing paper.

He squinted at the first prescription. “How’s her asthma? Just as bad?”

“She wrote it’s a little better.”

“Hmmm. Is he sticking to that diet I gave him for his ulcer?”

“As much as he can. When he isn’t traveling.”

“Medicine won’t do a thing if he doesn’t take care of his condition. And no aspirin. That’s part of his problem”

They haggled their way through the prescriptions and notes on medical problems. At one point he shook his finger at her. “The septic leg. I remember you! What a mess.”

“I
was
a mess” She glanced at her watch surreptitiously. She must not appear to be hurrying him, but she desperately wanted to be gone before his nurse and his receptionist came back.

“High blood pressure” he said, nodding. “Let’s check you” She sat with the pumped-up device on her arm, trying not to fume lest she raise the pressure. He showed her the figures. “You’re still running high. Cut out the salt. I’m going to put you on some medication …”

“I’m feeling fine. Really. I don’t want to go on anything if I can avoid it. I’ll do without salt.”

“I want to see you in a couple of months, then. Let’s weigh you . . “

He made her get onto his scale. “Weight’s good. It’s not weight that’s your problem.”

Finally he moved on to the next card. “Alice. She still hasn’t had that operation for her deviated septum and poorly draining sinuses?”

“Never mind Alice” Vida took the card back. “She isn’t with us any longer”

He raised his eyebrows, but made no comment. “For that migraine, I’ll prescribe ergotamine tartrate, but Roger’s not to use it often. Ask him to watch for nausea and feelings of numbness” He rummaged first in the drawers of his desk, a garbage heap of pill bottles. Then he poked around in a drawer of the filing cabinet. “Know I have it here. Might as well use it” At last he came up with a sample bottle. “Why waste these?”

She opened her backpack on his desk. Her palms were sweating. It was after one. She expected the patients outside to charge the door. Finally there was a knock and the door opened a crack. She shrank out of range, to the side. “I’m back, Doctor. Should I start sending them in?”

“Not yet. Hold the fort another few minutes.” He went on going through the list, mumbling over each entry. “I’ll give you some heavy B’s.” He threw some bottles of vitamin pills into her backpack. “Is Eva still on that vegetarian diet? You get her to take B-12 regularly, hear me?” He threw in some more bottles—randomly, it seemed to her, but they were probably vitamins. “I will not renew Kiley’s barbiturates. I told her before she has to stop taking sleeping pills when she gets nervous.”

“Kiley doesn’t take them often”

“But she takes them in a dangerous pattern. It’s basically a pre-addictive pattern I can’t encourage. I won’t write her a prescription for barbiturates.”

She felt a flash of full acidulous rage. Who was he to judge their levels of tension? He should try living on the run for years and years. Kiley wasn’t about to be addicted to anything, but sometimes she simply forgot how to sleep. Vida dreaded walking out into the anteroom jammed patients and now with his receptionist to look her over, but finally he glanced at his own watch. “My nurse’ll be here any minute. Go out that way.” He pointed to a door in the far wall she had assumed to be a closet. “It takes you into the corridor. The door will lock behind you automatically. Go left and through the service entrance. That’s how I sneak in and out. Merry Christmas,” he added as she was leaving. His calendar said today was December 23.

Hurrying toward the subway to take the IND, this time north to Fort Tryon, she worried over the date. There would be a lot of traffic for the holidays. Approaching the Cloisters, approaching the castle entrance, approaching then the room of the unicorn tapestries through mobs of schoolchildren herded from room to room to the drone of history on this, the last day of school, she observed all her usual cautions and went circuitously and warily, but her eye was perfunctory. It was more ritual than action; more prayer than surveillance. Her mind was on Ruby. She wanted to crawl back into the lap of her childhood and rest awhile. Come to Mama. She realized with a little queasiness that part of her passion for Joel was rooted in some subliminal identification of his warmth, his impulsiveness, his earthiness—even his testiness, his quickness of response—with Ruby. Well, why not? Why not seek in a lover the best traits of your first love?