The clock on the wall has stopped at three minutes past nine. Tell the truth, they could throw all the clocks into the pond for all it mattered. Time enough to bathe later. Time enough for everything. She looks at herself in the mirror atop the bureau, at the stone monkey on the lanyard knotted around her neck.
“Bastard,” she says. It is unclear whom she is addressing. She pulls on some slacks and a T-shirt and goes back downstairs, heading into the sunny parlor, where Joan sits between two windows in a Morris chair, her leg tucked underneath her.
“I was just writing Willie about you,” says Joan. Joan’s letters, which contain coded names, places, and events, are forwarded and retranscribed by a series of intermediaries before ending up in Willie Clay’s lonesome hands in Soledad. Her admission comes as a surprise to Tania.
Joan says, “I tell Willie you’re getting stronger all the time. Every day there’s a little bit more of you. Amazing.” She points at the tablet with her pen. “But I was just saying that you know who and you know who must have put serious pressure today. It’s a long time between a day like this.”
Tania feels the muscles in her mouth jerk downward, as if pulling the tears from the ducts in her eyes.
“I thought to be honest you’re like a fruit or a vegetable when I first met you. Then a little better, back on Ninetieth Street. Then he”—she jerks a thumb Teko-wise—“shows up, and it’s bad all over, worse than before. Sheesh, I say, this girl’s fucked up. Nothing really happening up there.” She taps her forehead. “Don’t cry, honey,” she adds, closing the tablet to indicate that it’s time to concentrate on making Tania stop crying.
“It was really terrible today,” she says.
“People can really screw around with you. Some people, it’s like their job.”
Tania nods, sniffling.
“But you know, I know you’ve been through lots; every time you turn around it looks like you’re starting all over someplace; you are kidnapped, your boyfriend is killed, you’re here, you’re there, wow. So I am bare in mind from the minute I meet you that you’re together at all, like shampooing hair and eating. I know just from watching that there’s hope. And”—a brief pause; Joan flings open her hands, fingers spread wide, to indicate the radiance of what she’s saying—“there is.”
“Your boyfriend and mine have the same name,” says Tania.
“I know, honey,” says Joan.
“Isn’t that like the funniest coincidence?”
“It’s funny. And either of us don’t see them anymore. But it gets better. I’m telling you you’re here to get better and you are.”
LYDIA STOOD IN HALF-LIGHT. She was in the doorway leading to the lighted hallway, and he was standing on the other side of the doorway in the living room, a newspaper in one hand, just about to turn on a lamp, in fact. Her face was in shadow.
“You’re going to meet with him, then?” she said. This is a conversation that they’d been having off and on. “No matter what I think of it.”
“I think it’s important to keep the lines of communication open.”
“This is not the sort of person from whom I would have thought.” She didn’t finish. Then she said, “Lines of communication?”
Hank was going to meet with Popeye Jackson, paroled leader of a group called the United Prisoners Union. Jackson had earlier been named by the SLA as one of the people they wanted to oversee the food distribution program, and he gave off the impression of having multiple contacts and connections in the underground. When his parole was nearly revoked after a tainted bust for possession, Hank had printed an editorial supporting him.
Talk to the man. Find out what he has to say. Lydia’s problem was that she was still awaiting a white knight who would ride to the rescue of an untainted daughter. Untainted being a crucial conceit. Hank had the impression when he spoke to his wife that she would prefer a dead child to the return of a living one who would shame her. White being a crucial conceit as well. The interpolation of a man like Jackson as a kind of medium suggested that the gap between the Galtons and their child was greater than that between the Galtons and Jackson, not to mention between Jackson and their child. Well, what an idea; Hank didn’t find it any more palatable than Lydia did. But there she was. To a willfully ignorant observer, like Lydia, it appeared that Alice had simply vanished into a rabbit hole, equidistant, in the mystery of that other dimension, from every normal thing on the planet. But it was becoming clearer to Hank, from conversations with his reporters, with Stump, from the necessity of conversations with people like Jackson, that she was close, close enough for a Jackson to say credibly that he could find a way to get in touch. Seams of mistrust divided them, and at every level Hank would have to overcome these, mining further into the black earth of her disappearance.
Later he sat watching Swing Time on channel 20. Deadeye Fred Astaire, late for his own wedding. How easily the man could have played a gangster, the cold-blooded city boss from a Hammett novel. Hat cocked low and over one eye, he speaks, he sings, he pretends he can’t dance. How well he lies, only to reveal the lie in the moment when he begins to move his body. And yet there is some complicity in the person lied to—for who wouldn’t know Fred Astaire just from watching him walk across a room? But there is a definite, defining distance to him, as if in some unfeeling being a sublime gift had been vested, a gift that made everything easy, that made him pitiless. Astaire dances into the middle of a storm in the hostile nightclub, and all is well. All is well, Astaire says, legs, arms, and easy, deadly smile. All is well.
GUY IS SILENT AND fretful throughout the drive, gnawing his nails; the car has become a familiar enough space to them that Randi believes they have divined a way, sitting side by side for hours and days on end, to be apart from each other. And so they sometimes ride, hushed and remote, as if in separate rooms. Guy is a garrulous man, but prone to fits of cavernous brooding, and the indecipherable silences he enters without warning come when you might expect him to be at his chatty best: in cars, in elevators, in bed. Usually it’s fine with her because there’s always a lot of reading to get caught up with in a life. But today Randi happens to feel like talking, and Guy, what is the right way, he parries her every comment or cheery observation. She is feeling kind of put upon, to tell the truth. She hasn’t breathed a word of protest about zipping back and forth across the country, not one complaint, and so she feels it’s not unreasonable that Guy should give her a smile of acknowledgment when she points out the hawk wheeling overhead, or the horse peeking its nose out the back of its trailer, or the water tower painted red so that it looks like a giant tomato on stilts. Instead he grunts or shrugs or says ah with an exquisitely nuanced lilt to indicate a total lack of interest. She feels he ought to stop without hesitation at the roadside stands selling cherries and peaches, but he doesn’t. Lunch, she wanted to try a place they’d been driving right by for years now. Homemade pizza. Homemade ice cream. Homemade pie. Sounds good, doesn’t it? But Guy shoots by as if there were a hydrogen bomb inside.
They have not been back to the farm since dropping off the four fugitives. While not explicitly promising anything, Guy had suggested to Randi that their visits would be more frequent. Randi doesn’t want to be a harpy about the whole thing, but she feels her central point is well taken: They ought to get some kind of enjoyment out of the two thousand dollars. Concerning money, Guy has all the sense of a drunken sailor; in her mind this old phrase of her mother’s calls up the image of Guy, reeling through the streets, tossing handfuls of cash to his left and to his right. But she senses that what is operating here is a sudden wizening sense of prudence, not to say paranoia. The Cuba trip is suddenly off; they are “too hot.” No sooner are Guy’s parents back in Vegas than Guy is badgering them, trying to get information from those poor old people about his brother, Ernest: his whereabouts, his recent activities, any comments he may have made or questions he may have put to them about Guy (“No matter how innocent-sounding!”). Guy makes cheerily innocuous telephon
e calls from the apartment and then descends to the street to call the same people from a booth.
But what if the people he’s calling’s phones are tapped? Randi wonders.
“That’s their problem,” says Guy.
Until “the critical issues,” as he puts it, are resolved, Guy apparently intends to spend most of his time sitting in the living room on Ninetieth, drinking Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray, watching the Mets on channel 9, and complaining bitterly about Tom Seaver’s sciatica.
Drops the hand he’s been tearing at back on the wheel and lifts the other to his lips. He worries and gnaws at the nails, shearing them far back from his fingertips. Occasional utterances from out of nowhere, but why bother. Totally incoherent. Here are the subjects of her husband and helpmeet’s fragmentary conversation:
The daily Tom Seaver update. They pitch him despite the pain Guy knows he’s feeling in his hip and lower back. “Excruciating,” Guy says. Excruciating.
The Bicentennial Minute gets everything wrong. “It’s a total opportunistic misread of history. You’d think for one lousy minute a night they could pick something where they weren’t afraid to tell it straight. Typical Paley. Tiffany network, my ass.”
Some newscaster in Florida blew her head off on TV and you can buy a copy of a film of her doing it for five grand. “It’s like porn, but not. You hear about that South American porn where they kill the chicks after they’re done fucking them? Down in the slums of Rio they film these guys doing these women, and then bam, they’re sawing off fingers and disemboweling them right on camera. Guys, couples, the cream of society, lining up with sackfuls of dough to get into these secret screenings, glitzier than Graumann’s Chinese. She’s not fucking, the news chick, though, is the thing. So is it worth five thou? I think yeah, because she’s a semicelebrity. Celebrities don’t have to fuck. Yet.”
Nixon, Nixon, Nixon.
It’s not until the afternoon that Guy announces “the plan.” Guy chooses to deliver the offhand announcement immediately after they blow by the restaurant over her objections, and this move so compounds his naked unconcern for her feelings that Randi chooses to view it as a kind of touching testament to the utter sincerity of Guy’s monomania. “The plan” involves, guess what, the expenditure of additional cash. “The plan” is that Guy will stay on at the farm for a couple of days, playing the part of the industrious writer checking in with his research assistants, while Randi drives north, across the New York state border, to rent yet another house. Why? Joan has called collect from a pay phone to let Guy know that Teko is freaking the fucking hell out: The propane man showed up and spent a good five minutes flirting with Tania. And plus then Tania met a little girl in the hills picking blueberries. So Teko belted her one in the face, which did not, Joan dryly suggested, mitigate the risk that they might be identified, though Teko now is making them all paint freckles on their bodies and Yolanda is in a trance of ascetic preparation, chomping on half sticks of gum to discipline her body and chanting seventeen-syllable terrorist haikus while running backward up the hills. This is how Guy puts it, anyway, tearing at his cuticles. It sounds terrible to him, suspicion and mistrust on the rise and the four of them out there in the sticks getting ready to kill one another. On top of all this, there is the general nervous tempestuousness of being a Guy Mock—type person in troubled times, and this is too much for Guy.
On the other hand, Randi has a far closer relationship than Guy with the statements that arrive each month from the bank and has been monitoring the erosion of their balance with something resembling, in the fine old phrase, mounting horror. To Guy this is a nonissue; money is never an object. She considers which has the greater palliative effect: her own frugal habits or Guy’s spendthrift ways. On the basis of close observation, she would say that however terrific it might feel to her to save half a dollar here and there, it doesn’t approach the deep fulfillment Guy evinces after he’s dumped a nice fat wad of cash. In her opinion, the reason he has been being anxious and nudgy and weird is that the money is still there, burning a hole in his pocket.
Guy nearly overshoots the driveway, and in jerking the wheel to avoid missing it, he sends the old Bug’s suspension into a sort of tailpipe-banging seizure. After this grand entrance, Randi notices that the place seems quiet. They enter the house and discover it in a state of fetid disarray: days’ worth of dirty dishes in the sink and on the counters, garbage overflowing, dirt and mud all over the floors.
So much for the deposit.
“Well, they’ve been eating at least,” Guy says. He holds up a chicken bone between thumb and forefinger.
“Thanks to Uncle Guy and Aunt Randi,” says Randi.
Guy removes his cap and runs his hand through the hair thinning at the crest of his scalp. “Let us not measure the extent of our commitment,” he says, affecting a round, oratorical tone. “Let us only measure its depth.”
Yeah, yeah.
Guy roots around in the refrigerator, which, owing to a strange habit of Yolanda’s, is full of uncovered plates containing halffinished meals. He pulls out a couple of bottles of Schmidt’s. He opens the squat brown bottles and carries them out to the porch, where together they sit on a faded love seat to wait for the others. Side by side, again, though without all the business of shifting and signaling and checking mirrors. Randi remembers that when she and Guy were first together, he always joined her on the same side of a restaurant booth. Waitresses frequently acted put out by this, as if to serve them in this manner would fall foul of an honored eatery tradition. Not that new lovers, their whole world shrunk to two hearts’ desire, concern themselves with mere mortals and their sense of trespass. And now here they were, still together, but long ago having entered the time and motion world in which those waitresses subsisted, everything a matter of mechanics.
“Where could they be? Aren’t they supposed to be, you know?”
“Laying low? To say the least. Especially given the panic over the propane guy and the blueberry kid. You’d think they’d be under the beds or something.”
“Oh, come on. They’re not that paranoid, are they?”
Guy shrugs. “Maybe they are. We didn’t look. Hey, if it were me, and I were here, I might have just killed us, waltzing in like this.”
“Aren’t they expecting us, Guy?”
“I wouldn’t exactly say not expecting.”
“But you think they might have killed us.” Randi is not shocked, not ever, but what is the word, nonplussed.
“No, I think I might have killed us. What I think is it’s a good thing I wasn’t here to get the drop on us.” Guy laughs.
“The drop on us. You’re not the killer type.”
“History’s populated with the nonkiller types who kill in the clutch.”
“Name me one.”
“Ah, Alan Ladd in The Deep Six.”
“Name another.”
“Anthony Perkins in The Tin Star.”
“One more.”
“James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
“Nice try, but that was really John Wayne if I recall.”
“Secret sharer.”
Movie characters as history, certainly the memory of lanky Jimmy Stewart and little Alan Ladd coheres into something realer, more authoritative, far more satisfying than the frail group that Randi and Guy have arrived in Pennsylvania to gather up and replant. Except of course that one of their number is a star. Again Randi wonders what exactly it is that they have here in this particular revolution. Whenever she tries to envision what the future holds, it’s never anything she can imagine having had its origin inside Teko’s skull. You know? Guy advised her to forget about idealism.
“‘History is made by men, but they do not make it in their heads.’ Speaking of Mr. Conrad. He daid.”
Yeah, and does Guy think the SLA is going to make history?
“They already made it. It’s made. I know, they’re a highly suspect organization, politically speaking. Nonsensical. But the politics
have to take a backseat to the show. Maybe they say they want to overthrow the government. Maybe they even believe it. But if anything, these guys’ relationship to power is parasitic. Symbiotic, if you will, heh. What they really excel at is preempting the regularly scheduled programming. These guys are running with an idea that’s been sort of sitting there unexplored at the margins of every single thing going on since the Free Speech Movement. How do these nice kids from these nice families turn out this way? Before, it was always somebody else’s kid, and the press is dutifully pasting together this blurry picture of bearded, long-haired filthoids who you could never in a million years imagine they belonged to Four-H or toasted s’mores over a campfire or had a catch with Dad, and the SLA zeroes in on the story of one particularly nice girl and how she becomes a little fanatic waving a gun around. It’s the fucking movie of the week.”
But it isn’t a story, Guy. It’s her real life.
“You should’ve seen her in that car riding across country, Randi. Anytime we saw a highway worker, a tollbooth clerk, she’d want to blast him for being a pig. She’d sit and X out the faces of executives in the financial pages of the paper. This nice kid sitting there with her Brearley accent rattling on about rich fascists. It could happen to her, it could happen to anybody’s kid, is what the SLA is saying. And you bet it’s history. Posterity’s going to look back, and it’ll be one thing if she dies out there in the wilderness, the terrorist princess. But it’ll be a whole ’nother thing if she cops a plea, says “just kidding” and turns state’s evidence and then after a couple of years in minimum goes back to the name and the millions and the uptight boyfriend with the mustache. If she’s some Hillsborough matron in twenty-five years, remembering on Dick Cavett her crazy days as a revolutionary, then that’ll be the story of the sixties, so called. That’ll be the whole and only story.”
Trance Page 28
