by Marge Piercy
Purple was still producing gold. Daniel would have little to do with what Friedman’s factory, called by its employees the salt mines, was producing, except as Friedman or one of his top subordinates passed on some nugget directly relevant to Navy decoding and analysis. Nonetheless, he was flattered that Friedman remembered him and saw him personally, instead of turning his visit over to an assistant, which would have made more sense. Friedman was a man he would always approach with as much awe as curiosity.
Daniel was constantly involved with the information that came from the decodes of the German radio traffic, dubbed by the British Enigma codes, and the intelligence derived from them, which had been given the name Ultra. He was concerned with this material as it bore on submarine warfare and blockade-running between Germany and Japan. Once Germany had attacked the Soviet Union, the main route between Axis partners could not go overland, but weapons or matériel must go by water, susceptible to American submarine attack. He worked with a commander who conducted the higher level liaison and two assistants who did the fetching and carrying. It was a relatively quiet fiefdom within OP-20-G, offering a fascinating overview. Once he felt secure in his new job, he began to think more about Louise.
She had not replaced her French director with anyone else. Like Daniel, she seemed estranged from family—aside from her callow daughter—and to have made a family from friends. Of those, she had many, female and male, but he did not think any of the latter were her lovers. Often they came accompanied by wives or acquaintances. Her social life still revolved around her New York friends; she would never view Washington as other than temporary, in which she also resembled him.
Although Washington had provided him with the first work that had deeply engaged his brain and a new estimate of his own abilities, a new respect for himself, he would never feel it was completely real. His dreams centered on China and on Cambridge. The buildings of Washington seemed to him cold, dull and turned from molds. In spite of the history of the place, it did not strike him as having any. It made history, but did not seem to hold on to it. A historian was somebody who remembered how a senator had voted the year before.
Place interested Louise, and they compared notes endlessly on the various cities with which they were familiar. He realized by mid-March that she was no longer keeping him out of her life, but gradually allowing him to take more of her time. Still, he could not quite plot a way through her defenses of amusement, irony, wit. It was like living in a civilized comedy, he thought, this wooing of her, but how had Nick Charles ever persuaded Nora to stop raising her brows at him and making pointed remarks long enough to get her into bed?
That Sunday they rented a tandem bicycle and pedaled around the Tidal Basin, for fifty cents an hour, Daniel’s treat. On the single-flowered cherry trees around the Basin, the buds were just swelling, a crack of pink showing. There were stumps where right after Pearl Harbor, an idiot with a strange sense of revenge had attacked some trees with an ax.
Louise rode in front of him, her auburn hair trailing from a pale gold silk kerchief tied around her head. The wind loosened from her a faint spicy perfume that blew back to him. If he leaned forward just right, sometimes a tendril of her blowing hair touched his chin. Pedaling a bicycle made him think about sex; lately he had noticed almost everything had that effect. Making his bed made him think about sex. Shaving made him think about sex. So did taking off his clothes or putting them on. Flowers resembled vaginas. Everywhere couples were embracing. There was more lust in the air than smog.
He was always seeing couples necking in the park, in hallways, on stoops, in bus and train stations, just standing on a corner. On some mauve evenings he felt as if everyone else were just about to go to bed with someone. Soon, he thought, watching the muscles in her neat buttocks flex. Louise was about the age of his first real romance in Shanghai, the wife of a doctor, but he was now ten years older than he had been and just as overwound sexually.
They stopped near the seawall, where old weeping willows chartreuse with spring bowed to the ground shuddering in the wind off the Basin. The golf courses nearby were busy, the two courses, the white and the Negro, for even at golf Washington was segregated.
“I’m a little out of breath,” Louise said apologetically. “I’m not getting enough exercise here. At home—in New York—I walk miles every day. I don’t try to, it just happens. Here I spend my time standing in trolleys. And sitting, sitting, sitting.”
They were sitting on the grass, growing already although the ground felt chilly beneath them, leaning on the broad trunk of a huge grandmother willow. As if casually he put his arm around her. Watching some children playing follow the leader along the seawall, embarrassed by the fact that she was still catching her breath, Louise said nothing and did not move away. “We should be sure to come back when the blossoms are out,” he said.
“And join the thousands?”
“I can promise you cherry blossoms without a crowd, if you have patience for a few weeks more.”
“But the petals fall.”
“In East Potomac Park along the drive, there are double blossoming trees—some light pink and some a deep intense color I prefer. The tourists will be gone before they start.” He felt a little guilty offering this bouquet to Louise, because it had been one of the pleasures Ann had shared with him on a warm Sunday early in their affair. Among the graceful reddish black polish of the tree limbs and the clusters of blossoms and the petals underfoot like exotic pink snow, she had moved like a dancer, exquisite, shy, porcelain and silk.
Louise seemed made of hardier stuff. She knew how to dress and could emerge glamorous in mink and silk to her fancier evenings, but without makeup today under the sun, she looked younger, in fact, and healthy, sensual. Lately every time he touched her, however casually, his body went into instant arousal. He was always standing in odd positions to mask his erection.
He decided to follow up the success of his arm and try to kiss her, something he had occasionally attempted. She would turn her face and take his kiss on her cheek, then slip away. Oscar must have been a monster of persistence. He tried to think of a remark that would lead up to what he intended. A compliment on her beauty? The words stuck in his throat. In desperation, he brought his other hand up to her cheek so that she could not turn her face away. Her lips were soft and unresisting, surprised. He could almost feel her thinking, tensions flicking through the muscles of her back and arms. Then she kissed him back.
He had difficulty making himself proceed in that slow, measured inch at a time way he had learned. Perhaps she sensed that, because shortly, she wriggled free of him. “I don’t have the temperament for this public passion.” She smiled at him, getting to her feet. “We should pedal back.”
He could not have said, pedaling furiously behind her, whether he felt more hope or more despair. It could take years at this rate. On her deathbed she would roll over and admit him to her sheets. He would die of extreme congestion. His sperm would boil, causing a stroke.
They returned the rental bike and headed home. He had intended to make a longer afternoon of it, then take her to supper, perhaps casually as she was, perhaps more elegantly after a change of clothes. Several fantasies had eddied about that possibility. Stuck zippers. Help me. Dress falling.
They chatted pleasantly all the way back, as they usually did. He had never had trouble making conversation with her or in fact found conversation something that had to be made, bricks manufactured without straw to fill that pit of silence. But he was nervous. In the hall, he expected her usual fast turn through her door, leaving him punished by this abrupt decapitation of their day for his boldness.
Instead she stood aside, waving him into her apartment. It had grown more and more hers as the months had gone by, until it no longer resembled the tentative and scruffy flat Susannah and Abra had shared and partied in. Many books had appeared and a great pile of newspapers and periodicals covered the coffee table that had formerly sported nothing heavier than highballs
. Louise had the habit of reading half a dozen books at once, which lay opened where they had momentarily failed her interest, waiting for her curiosity to renew itself. Novels, poetry, plays, biographies, books on politics and economics, tomes on the woman question, sociology and history lay waiting on every chair arm and end table.
She obviously liked Klee and Miró, for lightness? wit? A few photographs in leather frames, mostly of her daughter but one with the President sitting behind his desk while Louise, Robert Sherwood and several people whom Daniel did not recognize posed around him. Art deco bookends, silvery metal, probably aluminum, in the shape of single-engined planes taking off and trailing behind them a pedestal of curved motion. Some painted peasant crockery that he knew was from Eastern Europe because his uncle Nat had pieces like that.
Usually she rushed him through so quickly he did not have time to look around, but she was standing in the doorway to the kitchen smiling rather tentatively at him. “Would you like some coffee? Or a drink?”
Perhaps it was her indecisive air. Perhaps it was simply her inviting him in without immediately setting limits. Perhaps it was her offering him a drink at four o’clock on Sunday afternoon in her apartment. Perhaps it was wishful thinking. It suddenly came to him as he was staring at a report by Edgar Snow on China, that she was a woman who did not yield by inches.
He had become accustomed since arriving in the States from China to a style of courtship such as he had pursued with Ann, where first came a kiss, then a tongue kiss, then the as-if-accidental caress of the breast through the cloth, and so on, at all stages protesting that stage was the last desired act. What he began to suspect as he put down the book and walked toward her was that Louise might be quite different.
Indeed she waited in the doorway, one hand on the frame, until he had come face-to-face with her and had bent his face to kiss her again. At that point she let go of the lintel and slid not backward this time but forward into his arms and kissed him vehemently back.
They stood kissing in the doorway until he could not contain himself further and tried to pick her up in his arms. “Dear Daniel,” she said, her voice thick with silent laughter, “I’m heftier than you think and I can walk perfectly well. Come.” She took his hand and led him into her bedroom.
He was not sure as he got hastily out of his clothes, while she got far more leisurely out of hers, whether she had not decided on this even before she had let him kiss her in the park, or if she had decided beneath the huge old willow. Since then, however, they had been delightfully of one mind.
Her body had not the tightness or the porcelain delicacy of Ann’s. Her breasts were soft and full, not pointy buds; she had borne a child and her belly was full also. But she projected a sense of being at ease with her body and with his that was a tremendous aphrodisiac. She was active, passionate, easily aroused and clear in her demands. When he entered her, her vagina closed around him firm and gentle as her hand, intelligent, full of small conscious muscular responses. Prostitutes in China had used their muscles like that, but no one he had been with since. He could not control himself and came too quickly.
He was apologetic, mortified. He wanted to give her satisfaction that would wipe the French director and the mythologically endowed Oscar out of her mind. “Don’t worry,” she said, nuzzling his cheek. “If you touch me, I’ll come that way too.”
When she had, he said, “We can do it again if you want.”
She laughed softly, more with pleasure than amusement, taking his newly risen prick between her firm warm palms. “So it seems. Why not?”
JEFF 7
When the Postman Passes at Noon, Twice
“Ma mere a un gros rhume. Ma mere a un gros rhume,” the BBC said. It was half past nine and still the personal messages continued. Every week they seemed to get longer and longer, a clue that Resistance activity was building up everyplace in France and not just in their sector. Still Jeff found it tedious to sit through minute after minute of nonsense—my mother has a bad cold. My aunt has a fat goose. The barnacles turn blue. Christmas comes early. Christmas comes early.
Jacqueline was sitting on a leather car seat—pried from some fine wreck and set up near the desk in M. Faurier’s garage—mending her coat. The atmosphere in the garage was heavy with Lev’s smoke, from the cigarettes he managed to get on the black market, but heavier with leftover emotions from the early evening. Lev was in a foul temper—after all, he had known Gilles much longer than Jeff had. His cheek had stopped bleeding, but it had to hurt. Jeff too was badly shaken. He had only managed to have five private minutes with Jacqueline, and he could not judge her reaction by her face, as she was apparently intent on repairing the disintegrating coat that could not be replaced. The ritual of sitting through the messages on the BBC was one he could have dispensed with.
Then Jeff sat up. The BBC was talking to him. “Le facteur passera à midi, deux fois. Le facteur passera à midi, deux fois.” The postman will come by at noon, twice.
He leaped up. “The stuff is coming!” he announced to Lev.
“You’ve been saying that for months,” Lev said with a yawn.
“I’ve been saying that I wanted it, that I asked for it. This is an official message. They’re sending two planes over at the next full moon. Tuesday, right? Weather permitting. Same spot as last time.”
“The last drop was you. We haven’t had a sou from them since, not a bullet, not a firecracker.” Lev paced, his hands knotted behind his back.
“It sounds as if they’re making up for the wasted time. Two planeloads could give us a decent amount of firepower.”
“Unless they just drop some more wise guys,” Lev muttered. He was not as friendly since Jacqueline had become Jeff’s lover. Everyone disapproved at least a little, but mostly they minded that until now, no weapons had come, no explosives. He had had Raymond send message after message requesting, begging for arms, but until now, nothing.
Daniela came in with her arms full of newspapers. “Quand Même is out again,” she announced jubilantly. “Fat new issue. I mean fat for a clandestine paper.… Lev!” Her voice rang out. “What happened?” She dropped the bundles, bolting forward.
His hand shot up to his face, as if surprised. “This? We took care of that double agent Gilles. We know he fingered Larousse for the SS. He’s been running back and forth, back and forth between the railway workers and the Gestapo, playing both sides and selling us to keep himself in good.”
Daniela touched Lev’s slashed face with her fingertips, then ran for her bag to dress it. “But how could you be sure? Justice is not something to dispense like water when you turn on a tap.”
Jeff intervened. “When he realized we had come to shoot him, he confessed. He said he could get us information. He tried to bargain.”
Lev spat, then rubbed out the spot on the floor with his sabot. “The heart of a worm.”
“Even when he was dying”—he turned to Jacqueline who was undoing the wire-binding bundles of the underground Jewish paper—“he was still trying to bargain. He still thought if he offered enough, he wouldn’t have to die, even with the blood bubbling out of him.”
Lev took a flask of marc from the cupboard and poured little cups for everyone, including Daniela who never drank anything stronger than wine. “If he hadn’t been so greedy, turning in those peasants who were hiding the German boy, we wouldn’t have suspected him. But he had gone there with us, and hardly anybody knew about them.” The cut on his cheek where Gilles had slashed him was livid but looked worse than it was, bloody but shallow.
Jeff had then disarmed Gilles, as he had been taught, and felt a jolt of surprise when the knife dropped neatly from Gilles’s broken hand to stand upright quivering in the floorboard. It had worked. Had he never really believed in the methods they had taught him in Washington and again in Kent and Sussex? Had he always suspected they were only playing? Indeed, he had felt primarily astonishment as he first disarmed Gilles and then knocked him down, with three precise blow
s of hand and foot.
Jeff saw the two boys again, Theo bounding like a goat in the dark, Alain exclaiming over the fireworks of the explosion. Dead? In a camp?
“I don’t want that poison.” Daniela waved it away. “Only the goyim drink that. You’ll give yourself ulcers.”
“Drink it.” Lev pushed the old blue cup back across the table. “Listen to me, and drink it.”
“Why? What’s wrong?” She cleaned out the cut on his cheek, carefully.
“Drink it and I’ll tell you.”
Daniela stared into his face and drank off the cup like medicine, wincing. “So now tell me. What is it?”
“Now another one.” Lev poured.
“Lev, no more. Tell me. Who’s been deported? Who’s dead? I see you, I see my Jacqueline. Who’s missing?”
“Your brother was a brave man,” Lev said. “We heard the news today.”
“That was Daniela’s brother?” No one had bothered to tell Jeff that; he felt like an outsider.
“Nathan was on a housetop in Neuilly. When a German patrol was passing underneath, he threw two grenades and got the officers. They surrounded the roof and he ran out of ammo. He had one grenade left. He blew himself up.”
Obviously so that he would not talk under torture; the same reason OSS had given Jeff a cyanide pill in a false filling. He had not really listened to the story the courier had told. His mind had been fixed on the coming confrontation and his own desire to believe Gilles innocent in spite of the strong but circumstantial evidence convicting him. He found Gilles gentler, friendlier than Lev, and had preferred him. He did not want to give up the Gilles of his experience for the Gilles who sold people to the Germans to save his own skin, to protect his family and to provide them creature comforts. To Lev the shocker was that a Jew would turn in other Jews, that a resistant would hand in other resistants; to Jeff, the sticking point was how much he had liked Gilles. He did not want to be proved a poor judge of character. Therefore he had paid minimal attention to the courier and the news she had given Lev.
