“It’s going to happen.”
“No, Teko.”
“Help me now,” he insists, pulling, his fingernails raking her.
“No, Teko.”
“You have to.”
He has her hand now and is jabbing at himself with it; she keeps it as dumb and stiff as a mannequin’s but can’t mistake the hot, jouncing erection for anything other than what it is. The sheer intimacy of this assault is all needful rage; the thing Teko is trying to wrap her hand around demands a satisfactory answer; that other, usual, anger of Teko’s—the comic, blustering ire—is nothing compared with this thrusting, jockeying, earnest vehemence. In the days of the closet, when Cinque, Teko, and, god damn it, yes, Cujo had taken turns with her, it was all compounded talk and cajolery and appeals to what was portrayed as her born culpability that led to her humiliated surrender. But this is spiked with a greater violence, plain and awful.
He tries forcing her down, getting his leg behind her knees to fold her there so that she crumples partway and then dropping her. She lands, lightly and solidly, on her back, breathing in the old smell of sweet hay and manure gone stale. Teko stands over her for a moment, and she brings her foot up, kicking him in the balls. As Teko doubles up, grunting and panting over the reverberant drumming of the rain, she sees in a corner near the yawning door the two upturned milk crates where she had sat, studious and compliant, learning the People’s tongue.
Teko straightens up, puts his small, shriveled penis away. Then he falls upon her, a collision that expels the reek of his stale sweat. He grips her jaw in his hand and shakes it.
“Do that again and you’re dead. Dead.” He shakes her jaw roughly, then pops her hard in the chin with the heel of his hand. “Dead.”
Finally Teko rises. On his face is all the dull satisfaction of having definitively uttered the last word. After a moment she moves, lifting her ass off the floor and removing a BB that has embedded itself in her soft flesh. She holds it between her thumb and forefinger and lifts it so that she can examine it.
Teko looks as if he were about to speak, and she knows that what he is going to do is he is going to raise the issue of the unsweptup BBs. For the first time since she entered the creamery she experiences true anger, anger undiluted by fear or confusion. She glares at him, angry now beyond the assault: at the daily harassment, at the man’s inability ever to quit while he’s ahead, at the last three months she’s spent enduring him and his bitchy hag of a wife.
Her limited concept of him has been—well, it hasn’t been broadened. Say infected with foreign impurities. The perception of him as a man frail with unhappiness and self-doubt, a man capable of these emotions, gained brief admission to her consciousness, drew her to the creamery in curiosity and wonderment and baffled sympathy—and he’s made her pay. There’s a new complexity to her hatred; that’s what’s broadened. Perhaps reading some sign of this in her face, angry and pale against the broad boards of the floor, Teko backs off, stands in the doorway under the shelter of the roof that shakes and pings in the siege of the rain before he leaves without having uttered another word.
Joan sees Teko’s face, flat and expressionless as an aluminum pie plate, through the kitchen door. They are gathered around the table again: Kearse with his arm draped over the back of Yolanda’s chair; Yolanda in turn inclined toward Kearse, one hand resting on his thigh. Joan sits across from them, smoking. The conversation simply expires as the door swings open and Teko walks through it, drying his eyeglasses on his shirt, into a room he fills with his own spent hostility. Not that the abrupt quiet has everything to do with Teko; the same silence fell when Joan entered, the first to pop the insulating bubble of Kearse and Yolanda’s complacent lust.
“H’lo,” says Teko.
“Evening, General Field Marshal,” says Kearse. “Good run?”
“You looked like maybe you lost your way when we saw you,” says Yolanda. Kearse starts, jolted with a quick, silent laugh.
All that moves in the kitchen then is the smoke rising from Joan’s cigarette in the ashtray. The sight of it curling dumbly up from the burning cylinder annoys her all at once and she reaches to stab the cigarette out. Like Tania, she feels Kearse’s presence as the unbalancing of an equation. She experiences nothing like sympathy for the little man, who now goes to wash his hands in the kitchen sink, the stream of warm water loosening and washing away the soiled bandage that covers his forgotten injury, only disgust with Yolanda and her resolution to test, now, the strength of this one particular “revolutionary conviction” and with Kearse for assisting her, for casually coming in here and planting his lackadaisical sneakers all over their painstaking equilibrium. And with Guy too, while she’s at it. What the fuck’s he thinking? Sending them guests like this is Martha’s Vineyard. What trouble it all is.
She asks, “Where’s Tania?”
“I left her in the creamery,” says Teko.
“Ahhh, the creamery.” Yolanda giggles. Kearse starts again, rocked by his silent gestural laugh. Funny stuff. Lots of fun sitting around with these comedians all afternoon. Lots of fun today with Gary and Yolanda, and lots more to come, Joan can just tell. Everybody in the whole wide world is full of shit, Joan thinks sourly.
“Think I’ll go see her,” she says. None of the others, each of whom has an idea about who does and who does not belong in the kitchen, objects.
She finds Tania sitting cross-legged on the creamery floor, massaging her jaw. Some ugly dishevelment might have signaled the entire story to Joan, flashed it neon-bright into her brain, illuminated a whole territory she’s sometimes seen when she and a man’s anger have overlapped. But she sees only her friend sitting in an odd place on a dark wet afternoon. When Tania’s eyes roll around to focus on Joan, though, she sees something’s going on.
“Are you OK?” she asks.
“I’m actually pretty good, I think,” says Tania.
Joan comes closer. “What happened to your jaw?”
“Teko did it.” A shrug. Then she laughs, a little. “I kicked him in the balls.”
“Good girl,” says Joan. “Next time kick him once for me.”
Guy AND A YOUNG man sit at the table and chairs Guy has dragged from inside the house and set on the grass. The young man is the journalist Guy has recruited to help write the book, an overweight guy sweating in the dwindling heat of the August evening, carefully dressed, as if for a job interview, in tweed jacket and gray slacks. Guy is in a particularly jovial mood, Tania sees, trading on his neuroses, exaggerating them for comic effect, charming their guest. She wonders: Does he have to?
“Fortune tellers?” Guy is saying. “I love ‘em. Tarot, psychics, palmystics, crystal ballbusters. They’re a diversion and they’re a habit and they’re surprisingly rare, a comment incidentally on the prejudices lurking behind local zoning laws. Let me tell you about the all-time number one fortune-telling experience of my life. I go to a chick who’s got this tiny closet of a stall on Church Street in San Francisco. Looks and sounds just like Maria Ouspenskaya, a schmata on her head, earrings the size of hula hoops. Minute I sit—bang!, she starts telling me all about myself. Where I was born, what happened to me when I was a kid, all that jazz. Great, I mean, really on the ball, but what do I need to know all this for? Tell me the things I don’t already know. So she says, ‘This you don’t want to know? About what you want to know? Who it is has it in for you? Who your true love is gonna be? What’s that pain going a boom-a-boom in your side right about here? What it is will become of you?’ And I say shit, no. I say I’ve been eating all this crappy food for like two weeks straight, and what I really want to know about, the issue pushing itself to the forefront of my thoughts is, What kind of things have I unknowingly been eating all these years? I read this thing in the Bay Guardian about what the FDA allows in prepared foods. They have special Filth Labs that analyze foods for what they call defects. What’s in Fig Newtons alone is enough to put you off your feed for a couple of days. So, I just want a sampler—s
o I know what I’m up against. You know? All you have to do is read the papers to know that these are bad times, dark times, nutritionally speaking. So she takes a deep breath. Passes a gnarled old hand over the crystal ball. ‘You are certain?’ she says. Of course I’m certain. Think I’m walking in here just for the good news? Save it for the tourists, baby. You’re the real thing; well, I’m the real thing too: a haunted man. Desperate, or curious at any rate. So she passes the hand over the crystal ball again and then hunkers down over it.
“‘There have been at the least one hundred and twenty-seven incidents in the last three years when you have consumed veterinary drugs, in particular antibiotics, along with meat,’ she says. ‘Enough?’ Go on, I say.
“‘At least twice you have eaten food that was contaminated with measurable amounts of radioactivity,’ she says. ‘Enough?’ Keep going.
“‘The Korean barbecue, the taqueria, the dim sum, the Jack-inside-of-the-Box, these are all fine and likely places where to encounter certain uncommon and exotic livestocks in cooked form,’ she says. ‘Enough?’ Don’t stop now.
“‘Soft-serve ice cream from all purveyors is a virtual poison to human beings because of certain diminutive parts in the apparatus used to make this confection which are requiring but never getting virtually constant disinfection,’ she says. ‘Enough?’ More, more.
“‘The number of times you have devoured insect parts, larvae, and waste are far too copious to enumerate,’ she says. ‘Enough?’ Onward!
“‘Once you consumed pretzels and other gratuitous comestibles in a saloon in San Bruno, and these were tainted with human urinary and fecal residue,’ she says. ‘Enough?’ Not by a long shot.
“‘A tubercular waiter who did not like you did an expectoration in your soup in a restaurant last month,’ she says. ‘Enough?’
“And finally I say, OK, enough. That is just dandy.”
The young man is laughing; the table is rocking on the uneven surface of the lawn. Guy tells the story with his usual animation, his hands periodically moving to reshape the crystal ball he has formed in the air before him.
“Guy, how do you suppose she knew about that pain in your side?” the young man asks.
Guy’s face falls.
In the kitchen Yolanda is cursing and throwing empty bottles into the trash.
“Norman Mailer, he said, god damn it! Hunter fucking Thompson!”
The young man is Adam K. Trout, an instructor at a junior college over the Canadian border. Ph.D. from Brown and—more important, for the purposes of revolutionary accreditation—an expellee from the London School of Economics. “I took a shit on a picture of the queen,” he says, proudly, by way of explanation. Trout gazes at Tania over his bottle of Genesee cream ale and her face slips into a practiced glazed dullness: Trout has that now-familiar starstruck look.
Guy leaves them again, climbing into the indefatigable Bug and taking to the road, leaving behind the writer, a tape recorder, and miscellaneous stationery supplies.
Teko talks about a dog he had, Rex. Who taught him the value of selflessness. Of loyalty.
Yolanda talks about the injustice she saw working as a waitress in Illinois. It was a form of awakening.
Trout’s face, impassive and still, gazes steadily at each of his interlocutors from over the tape recorder sitting between them.
Later they listen to the playbacks, Teko and Yolanda do, while Tania, Joan, and Trout play gin rummy in the kitchen. Their own voices unspooling, monotonous and strange, from the tape. The afternoon’s session has captured them sounding banal, clichéd, incoherent, naive, rambling, tongue-tied, and unaware, to list things alphabetically. Not to mention the sounds, embarrassing to the point of faint nausea, of the quotidian goings-on the tape has arrested. At one point in the recording, Yolanda whines, “Gimme couple more, some more of that ice. Will you, sweet pea?” Really, is that how she sounds? In the background is Teko’s unintelligible response and the tinkling of the extra cubes he drops into a glass.
Why is it so embarrassing on tape?
Because it reveals to you as naked and obvious the open fact of your own preposterousness, a fact that normally is concealed only from you?
“What I saw was like I saw maybe there was something more than what I like thought there was. I mean like a different world, society or whatever?”
Tomorrow they will do things differently.
Here is the way Teko decides that they will do things differently: They will work out questions ahead of time, with as little assistance from Trout as possible, and then fabricate appropriate answers to them on paper. These scripts will be recorded, then retranscribed, and then the transcripts scrutinized to identify and correct any inconsistencies between the statements provided by the SLA three (Joan has declined to participate), to firm up and clarify matters of political dogma and philosophy, and to begin to shape the interviews toward the desired end, a finished book. In short, an assembly line approach, precise and controlled.
Trout’s reaction is diffident but unenthusiastic.
Tania works on a mattress in the sleeping loft, lying on her side to write. So many choices. Was she kidnapped, rescued, liberated, or saved? Was she converted, rehabilitated, reeducated, or transformed? Is she a freedom fighter, a revolutionary, an insurgent, an urban guerrilla? So many decisions. Well, definitely not saved, she thinks. Or converted. Too evangelical-sounding.
She rolls over onto her stomach and continues to write. Soon it’ll be time for her session with Trout. They’ll sit outside on the grass, if it’s pleasant, or in the creamery. Someplace informal, Trout says.
So many questions. They proffer themselves to Tania, though most are far outside the parameters of the “Tania Interview” as established by Teko and Yolanda.
Did she love her family? Does she see herself as different from the person she was when she lived with them? Did she see herself as different from the others at the time?
On the tape, she says, “The media knowingly spreads propaganda lies regarding how close my family is.”
She says, “An upbringing like mine, coming from my class position, was all about bringing me in line with my parents’ and their friends’ values and ideas. In high school everyone I knew was from a background like mine. Though I was embarrassesd by and ashamed of my parents’ wealth, I had no support, no one to help me understand why I felt the way I did. Everyone was too like me.”
Does that make sense?
Who is she now? Is the SLA her family? Is a family something it is possible to choose? Did she choose the SLA? Did Cinque actually offer her a “choice” per se? Hadn’t she already, in effect, chosen—left her birth family; surrendered some of the burdens and privileges of that “class position” and its “values and ideas”—by choosing to live, out of wedlock, in genteel though hardly luxurious circumstances with Eric Stump?
On the tape, she says, “I wanted Eric to take me away and change my name. I felt very safe with Eric. I thought that I would be able to escape my ruling class upbringing with him.”
She says, “I cooked dinner and cleaned the toilet. I let my mother plan my wedding. I posed and smiled for the engagement pictures. But soon I was wishing to escape from this relationship that I’d begun to hate.”
Does that make sense?
Does she remember making love to Eric for the first time in his Menlo Park apartment, then driving to Draeger’s for thirty dollars’ worth of gourmet specialties that would please him? That would please them both? Was there anything that she hated on that day, anything that she felt other than the most delicious sense of triumph watching Eric’s face tighten as he convulsed with his orgasm?
When, at Draeger’s, she tore the personal check out of her checkbook and passed it over to the checkout clerk, did she thrill a little as she saw the clerk’s face brighten with useless comprehension at the sight of the famous name?
Hadn’t she wanted to be engaged? Hadn’t she dreamed of a station wagon, with a big dog hanging its stupi
d head out the window?
And hadn’t she always really liked to cook? Wasn’t it actually the fact that Stump was ready and willing to eat just about any old slop that was around that had provided her with her most acute marital, as it were, dejection?
Who is she now? Who in the end had changed her name?
On the tape, she says, “It only took me a week or two at most to begin to feel sympathetic with the SLA.”
She says, “I was given a choice: join the unit or go back to my parents and Eric Stump. I was worried I wouldn’t measure up, but my new comrades were enthusiastic about helping me acquire the military and political skills I needed, as long as I was willing to truly struggle.”
Does that make sense?
Did she choose the SLA? Did Cinque actually offer her a “choice”? Has she forgotten the daily death threats? Has she forgotten having been locked in a closet for six weeks?
On the tape, she says, “Well, it was pretty cramped in there.”
She says, “What is meant by ‘brainwashing’? To me, now, it seems mostly to refer to what the fascists refer to as ‘mandatory education.’ School begins the process and the pig media ensures its continuance.”
She says, “How could I disagree with the goals of the SLA? How dishonest would I have to be with myself to disagree with the idea of wanting hungry children to have enough to eat?”
And, “Starvation, hunger, ghettos, poverty. This is the real tragedy, not that one rich bitch has been kidnapped and might get killed.”
Does that make sense?
Is it really self-honesty that causes a person to seek common ground with the people who threaten to kill her?
Does she actually not understand that she was the “rich bitch” who might get killed? Has her conversion in any real way relieved the plight of the poor? Would her death have relieved it?
Trance Page 35
