by Marge Piercy
“… Harlan Williams and the socalled Defense Committee. There are a number of longterm reds or fellow travelers—I don’t know what you’d call them—who’ve operated in the neighborhood for years. Tried to infiltrate UNA. They’ve captured Williams and they’re using him in an attempt to obstruct the plan.”
The graduate student asked for names and Tom Lovis obliged. “One is a folk singer named Rowley who comes from a leftish background. I personally know he’s involved in narcotics.”
Anna sat hands poised typing nothing. Why did Tom have it in for Rowley? The student would never read her transcription. She produced a smooth version without names.
Lovis finished with a panegyric to the trustees and administration of the University, who had finally awakened to their responsibilities and joined the most forward looking parts of the greater business community in civic decision. Near the tape’s end the graduate student, alone now, described Lovis’ office in its glory and Lovis too, who had retained his slim athletic looks. He described even the paintings, impeccably violent and chic. The student added that he would attach high validity to Lovis’ remarks as he was an informed observer with a background in the social sciences. Anna longed to add her own comments on Tom Lovis drunk and sober, at work and play, propositioning her in the kitchen while Asher held forth on reform from within the Democratic party in the next room. She giggled, but nervously.
Saturday night she went to a party at Marcia’s, intentionally without Leon. But she could interest herself in no one. She caught herself wondering where Leon was, what he was up to. Simply to describe herself to a stranger seemed more work than any small pleasure could justify.
Then Rowley arrived. Vera wore sheer white wool. Her face burned above the dress very dark: reverse image of a candle. Her expression was a sulky curiosity but Rowley looked hot in the face, excited. She waved and turned her back.
She had to look again. Had to look for Vera’s body in the dress. Skinny for him. Was Vera’s being black like her being Jewish, something he ignored, something he desired, something he needed? Not a line on the girl, smooth as a ripe plum. He walked behind her warily. He thought her a prize someone might take from him. Anna laughed, she danced, she talked and heard herself emptying her lungs. She went home early.
“Tonight, dress. Like you did for that party you went off to on your own, prospecting. We’re going up to the North Shore. Some film society—I’m going to suggest they rename themselves the Sons of Eisenstein and see them writhe—are paying—poorly—for a bunch of us to come and show our uncouth experiments. Afterward some broad will raise her hand and ask why is it depressing, and how come Caroline don’t have no clothes on.” He grimaced in pain.
“Vera insists you used to go out with that Rowley,” Paul said, picking at the side of his boot. “I told her she was crazy.”
“That she is, but she’s right.” Leon slumped in the director’s chair, his broad ass filling it.
“She was at the party with him,” she said.
“What’s this?” Leon glared. “What about him?”
Paul fitted his chin into his cupped hand, spoke through his fingers. “She’s acting funny. Still mad. I don’t want her to seize on me again, but I wish she’d admit the truth—”
“You want to take her with you.” Leon scowled.
“After all, it’s bad for her not to be able to talk.”
“What’s this about Rowley?” Leon repeated.
“They’ve been seeing each other,” she said.
Paul muttered, “You mean, he’s been hanging around.”
“Come on. Nothing obliges her to attend parties with him. Rowley is not an unattractive man.”
“To Vera? You don’t know her. She’s not interested in men. Especially not white men.”
Leon extended a palm. “You don’t mind it. Why should she?”
“She’s straight with herself. It’s her way. Besides, she knows how it looks.”
“How it looks. Now it’s your sister, and out comes the race trash. Not my sister, not my daughter, keep it clean.” Leon turned away in his chair.
“Look, most of the girls who … come after me they want the same thing, black or white, it’s simple.” The breath sang in Paul’s throat as he held his temper. “She’s not anybody. Not like that.”
“It all comes down to you believing in good girls and fallen women,” Anna said coldly. For an instant she hated them both.
“No!” Paul clawed at his close wiry hair, set it on end. “It’s a matter of what people can do. I don’t say this because she’s my sister. I wouldn’t say it about Sylvia or Loueen. She’s proud, she’s tight, if she believes in anything it’s form—beauty, style.”
“You have got to let go. She is twenty-two, Ace, she is none of your business. She’s a woman and she’s going to lead a woman’s life or lose her mind. See that. Know it!” Leon leaned from the director’s chair, his voice grating with passion.
She stirred, moving her thighs. “She’s bright. So few men would attract her you shouldn’t wonder some of those few will be white.”
“What I don’t like are Rowley’s motives,” Leon mumbled. “Trying to keep an eye on Caroline, you think?”
In a muted voice she said, “I did see them together. He looked wrapped up in her.”
Leon drawled, “We have noted what a wonderful sense of observation you show toward men.”
“Why shouldn’t he be interested in her if he’s not blind?” Paul snapped, looking up. “Think that’s abnormal?”
“Are you soreheaded tonight. I’ve screwed all sides of the line myself—”
“Every lynching cracker can say the same.”
“Listen to yourself. Listen! Then ask if you’re so free of your obsession as you’ve been boasting. Maybe your sister’s the one who really pulled out.”
Paul looked from one to the other and then at the street, already darkening. “You think she’s involved with him?”
She said, “Get Leon to ask Rowley.”
“Are you kidding?” Leon strained back in his chair. “He isn’t going to tell me anything.”
“Why not? I bet he would.”
“Because.” Leon’s voice rose in scratchy exasperation. “I have you. I took you away … so to speak.”
Paul smiled naturally for the first time in an hour. “I like that. Having a woman ‘so to speak,’ that’s very spiritual. It’s near ethereal, by god.”
Leon cleared his throat. “Something important happened yesterday when we stopped by Macphersons for a bite. Who was there but Caroline and her fi-yan-say. We sat at their table.”
“They were glad to see us as a couple of kingsize roaches, I’ll tell you.” Paul let out his breath in a hard, flat laugh.
“You mean that klutz Bruce was negative. Caroline was glad. Didn’t you see the way she smiled at me?”
Paul tilted his head scarecrowlike on one thin shoulder.
“That’s her way. I bet if we walked in on them humping away, old Caroline would give you the glad eye and the time of day and invite you to sit down and have some too.”
Leon went doggedly on, “She doesn’t love him, she can’t hand me that bull. She doesn’t turn on when she looks at him. She’s fidgety and tense.”
“That Bruce is a cold fish. All the wheels turning. Can I make anything out of this one? Anything here for me?”
“Did you see her take my hand? If she won’t give me a chance she won’t let go either.”
Paul winced. “She flirts, she comes on. That’s her style.”
“Then when we were getting up, she reached out and touched my arm. Just reached out …” Leon produced a girlish imitation. “Not as if she meant to, not something thought out, but just as she was saying good bye as if she didn’t care, out shoots that hand and says unconsciously, stay. You heard her invite me over.”
Anna sighed and Paul held his head in his hands. “Like my granddad with his Bible: that’s how you interpret that piece.”
/> Leon’s face turned sullen. “Maybe I just want her because it’s something to do. My project. Ever think of that? It organizes me so I don’t fly apart. Maybe. Did Dante really want Beatrice? Not that I couldn’t give him a few pointers on hell.” He grinned slyly.
Paul went home to eat and change, while Leon got on the phone to his brother and yelled. Then he spent ten minutes putting on and taking off various ties she had never seen before. Finally he collected his stuff and they drove to a new building up on Schiller to borrow Sidney’s Porsche.
Sidney opened the door with a grumbled peevish greeting. He was shorter than Leon and even fatter than she had remembered. His hair was brown and fine and slicked down over his face of a dyspeptic rabbit. “That’s an expensive car, Leon,” he whimpered. “A delicate mechanism. I keep it in perfect order because I know how to drive it and I watch the tachometer. You’ll get carried away making the engine roar and burn it out.”
He had glanced her over with sour envy, peering around Leon, but she decided he did not remember her at all. He could not distinguish faces in the swarm of women he imagined around his brother.
“Come on, I was driving cars while you were still pedaling a bike. You’re getting hung up on things, Sid. A thing-miser.”
“If you don’t think it’s so good, why are you always after me to borrow it?”
“Not for months.”
“In September you asked for it.”
“You wouldn’t give it to me, so why remember? Tonight I need it. The Buick is falling apart, no lie.”
“I told Dad you’d asked for it and he said it would be a mistake. He said not to trust you—”
“Going to listen to him? Old Divide-and-conquer. Okay, come on, Anna—”
“He always liked you better because you’re older, anyhow.”
“Get off it, Sid, he hates my guts.”
“He says I don’t have any.” Sid giggled. He fished the keys out of his pocket, swung them from a fat thumb. “He wants to know what you’re doing. He says you’ll get me into trouble. He wants to know if you’re getting money from Mother.”
“What do you think?” Leon brought his face almost to Sid’s.
“I think you’re trying, anyhow.” Sid let Leon slide the keys off his thumb. “It’s redlined at 5500, and listen to me this time, Leon, don’t drive like a lunatic. Don’t race it. I’m going out but I’ll be back by eleven. You get it back to me by twelve, at the latest.”
“You don’t drive to work, what do you care? Seeing a girl? Hey, Sid.” He prodded his brother’s belly gently. “You getting any?”
“Let me alone. Listen to me, Leon, or it’s all off. Don’t put garbage in the jumpseat, don’t shift gears as if you’re a racing driver, and get that car back by twelve.”
“At twelve it turns into a VW bug, ha ha,” Leon said as they rode down in the elevator to the basement garage. They left Leon’s car on the street and transferred the film into Sid’s white Porsche. Grinning like a demon Leon drove her home to change. She took her clothes across to the bathroom. He prowled restlessly. When she came back he paced round her, then nodded, “Okay, okay.” But her coat made him frown. “Jesus, that won’t do. Wonder if we can get something from Fern.”
“No! I won’t. Besides she is two sizes smaller. Wake up, Leon, what’s wrong with you? Think those people give a damn how I’m dressed?”
“Exactly,” He said. “That’s all they do see. Her old mink—”
“Nothing is going to make me look that kind of respectable.”
“At least we got the Porsche.”
“You’d do better to leave Paul and me here, you know that.”
“Eh.” He shrugged. “Go up there alone? What a bore.”
Paul sat in front with Leon and they chattered about the car while she was jammed in the jumpseat with his attaché-case. My relationship with Leon, she wrote across her mind, characteristics of: ascetic, verbal, emotionally charged, manipulative (largely him of me), analytical, nutritive, flirtatious, exclusive, and commanding of loyalty. Based on a role model of brother/sister. We are not however b/s. What are we doing? Games. Feint and withdraw.
Leon was to show Moonblood. Imposing, flawed, selfindulgent: she felt a deep physical unease to think she must sit through it. She had tried to talk him into showing something else, Our Lady of the Nikes for instance, but he said she had no taste.
“I’ll never be any good while I’m dragged by money problems,” Leon was saying. “I’d like to shoot everything that goes through my mind. But I can’t afford to waste film. I have to use damn near everything I take. If I don’t get what I saw, there’s no way to do it over. Can’t even get hold of the same people twice. Course there are strengths. The same hardness reality has. Is, is, and gone. No second chances. Forget your own preconceptions and react, really react, with what’s there. Film’s an aquarium where people become themselves with a difference—like Caroline.”
“You shouldn’t try to get your family to finance you—even indirectly,” she said, leaning her arms on top of his seat. “It costs you more than it’s worth.”
“They can afford it,” he said shortly. “They ought to help. Where else am I supposed to go? It’s mine too.”
“Only if you’re theirs too. You think you have a right to goodies. Maybe it’s better to come from a family who couldn’t help if they wanted, like I do, because there’s no temptation to manipulate them.”
“I’m not interested in the bourgeois virtues.”
“But she’s right,” Paul teased, “you’re interested in the bourgeois comforts and toys.”
“If you want to drive this later, shut up.”
The film society met in the auditorium of a very new school. A couple of guys she had seen at Leon’s were on the first half of the program, and a woman was scheduled to follow Leon with a documentary in the second half.
The audience was inert for the most part, occasionally restive through Wet Bag Dream Soup. She sat between Paul and Leon and their obscene muttered comments. Images of commercials and bodies, politicians and penises, the world with red paint running over. She could sense Leon’s consciousness of her body in the flickering dark. Heat gathered where their arms brushed.
During the second film—sharp blinding black and white scattering shapes, screeches of glassy color, bleeps of motion, Paul put his hand over his eyes and went to sleep. At intermission he got up, posed carefully and centrally, and they let him alone. Boredom relaxed the edginess from his body and he truly did not care what happened up here any more than these men seeking out Black Belt prostitutes believed they acted in the world. The women came to him and he played his putdown role with the same joy he played their own ramshackle games.
Leon was on the make following the smell of money. He argued with society officers that they should underwrite a film he would make with them, become involved, immersed in it themselves—then they’d learn what film was. People wanted to look at her. She felt pricked with foreign eyes. Their faces caused her unease. They seemed impermeable, bland and hairless. She could imagine them attacking her like pigeons pecking up seed. She would be glad to sit down in the dark.
A night moth hovered over a flower, slowly put out its proboscis, sucked. Paul had not sat down with them. He sat with a tall rangy redhead all in beige but for a large glossy platinum wristwatch whose dial glowed in the dark nervously tapping, marking time. The huge blindseeming moth hurled against a window screen in brutal persistence. Again again again. A fine dust came from its battering wings. Again again. Caroline lay wrapped in a twisted sheet, distorted, mummified.
Caroline tied to a rock: tied with bits of rubber hose and a jumprope and nylons and two gauze curtains and a string of Christmas tree lights. A black bird pecked at her small vulnerable breasts, at her smooth belly: a bird of the shadow of a hand. Slowly her legs parted. The bird diminished into her and disappeared.
Caroline stood in what looked like a large ashtray, washing herself. She bent and straigh
tened rhythmically, splashing water up over herself, washing at herself. Slowly the camera moved around her watching the water slide over her radiant flesh, watching a web of shadows, filmy then hardedge then filmy shadows move across her, despoiling her as she bent and rose washing at her body. Her face was shrill with fear and twisted.
The lights went on though the projector buzzed still. Anna swung around blinking. Everyone was turning. Leon muttered a curse. Two uniformed cops and a round man in a business suit were standing at the back. The projectionist was arguing. Leon got to his feet and pushed into the aisle.
Everyone was standing now and she could hardly work a path through the crowd. By the time she reached the back and got up close enough to hear, the portly man had confiscated all the films including the still unshown documentary on learning in schoolchildren. It seemed for a moment that the projector would be confiscated too, perhaps for contamination, but it turned out to be rented from the school.
“We had a complaint after the first half of your program that some of the material being shown here was questionable and lewd …”
Anna puzzled. The light and dark patterns? The first film, a soft silly homosexual fantasy? Go on!
“… what we saw ourselves is certainly not the sort of thing allowed in our community. I’m surprised at your bringing this sort of thing in, people like yourselves.”
“We didn’t know what it was going to be like,” the club secretary said. “But it’s not right to interrupt—”
“You’re on taxpayers’ property. How would you like the schoolchildren to find out what goes on here? As long as I’m captain I’ll make it my business to keep smut out of our city.”
The members made their way out with all possible speed, and Leon was left to argue with the society president for his promised fee.
“We’re in enough trouble because of your film. You didn’t tell us you were bringing something obscene.”
“You’re the obscenity, you and your fucking town. I want my print of Moonblood back and I want my money. You think I got extra goods to donate to the policeman’s ball?”
Threatening to sue Leon stomped out. Paul appeared at his elbow near the door. “Want company back? Or don’t you care?”
