But then, midsummer, the calls began. Teko and Yolanda, calling separately, calling together, from public phones. We need you, Susan. Don’t forget us, Susan. She was thrilled. Jeff would conk out after a day painting down in Castro Valley or Hayward, a copy of Grundrisse open across his chest, and she’d be dragging the extension into the bathroom to have the kind of intense, whispered conversation she’d been missing since Angela had gone. They planned for the future, schemed and plotted. She sent money, packets of cash wrapped in dark paper and sealed in manila envelopes addressed to general delivery. She set aside more money to rent the W Street place. They worked the arrangements out, speaking frequently, fervidly; it was intimate and seductive, communication beyond words, she felt. She tried to project soulful desire into every phrase she uttered into the mouthpiece. She missed them. She wanted them.
But it was as a revolutionary that she signed on, even as she formed this emotional bond, and as a revolutionary recruit she expected a more formal sense of belonging, she expected a clear channel to the truth through the many, many shades of gray that she was certain they’d consider, she expected a studious solidarity, the cell hunched over its synoptic texts. It’s beginning to dawn on her that what she has is a small and argumentative group cohering around its mutual discontent, assigning it a name (“fascism”), and using it as a pretext for every kind of dim-witted excess.
Jeff comes into the kitchen, dressed for another day of life-affirming manual labor. She stubs out the cigarette in an ashtray that says GREAT ELECTRIC UNDERGROUND and seizes the soft lapels of her old robe in her hands, draws them together over her breasts. No, this isn’t the time for analysis. She’s always had her doubts. She had them when she found out that Angela was involved with them. She thought it was stupid and fruitless to assassinate Marcus Foster. Viscerally alarming that they invaded the home of Alice Galton and carried her off into the night. Ostentatiously self-seeking when they robbed the Hibernia Bank and shot two depositors. Boneheadedly dense to have risked shoplifting—what was it, socks?—when they were supposed to be laying low in L.A. But she’s caught up in something now, committed, successfully outpacing her boredom, for once. She will be drawn in and implicated, move beyond the everyday, into a kind of history, a legend amid the outlaw annals, larger than ideology.
LYDIA GALTON SAT AT her desk, waiting for Thomas Polhaus to arrive, alternately composing anagrams on a sheet of paper and gazing out the window at the ladies and gentlemen of the press who clustered below, seeking shelter from a cold drizzle beneath the wind-whipped canopy pitched on the lawn. There were more reporters than usual this morning, the reason being the occasion of her daughter’s twenty-first birthday, she supposed.
A good anagram for diazepam was “zap media.”
Though everything seemed to have a reason nowadays. She was always being presented with reasons for appearing before television cameras, for permitting reporters into her home, for providing emotional responses to “the situation” on demand, for traveling to places she had no wish to visit, for speaking, all the time, to policemen with their roving eyes. paid maze
She understood perfectly well that the reasons had been made up. If you were told why you had to do something, there was a greater chance you’d shut up and do it. Damned simple. In the end, of course, if you had any sense, you shut up and did it just to shut up the people intent upon providing you with all those good reasons they cooked up. It was why she’d married Hank, for God’s sake. She’d become so tired of hearing about him that she’d guessed it would be simpler just to live with him. Eighteen years old, and all she knew for certain in this world was that she’d rather hear anyone’s voice every day than her mother’s when she was mounting a campaign. The campaign to turn Lydia Daniels into Mrs. Henry Hubbard Galton, into an entirely different person, had been the last Lydia endured at her hands. And now here it was thirty-seven years later, and Lydia was an old lady, and her mother was dead and buried, and now all the good reasons that were presented to her each day as solid, practical, and virtually self-evident were to explain things, situations, that hadn’t existed even as possibilities back then. She imagined that hers was a shared perception, a fairly common take on the times: Where had the world gone?
Hence the remark that had made it into the papers, that had become notorious, scandalous, that had begun the process of turning her into a dotty joke. She’d suggested to Eric Stump—in passing, so she’d thought, a mere observation—that if Clark Gable had been in the house with Alice, those hoodlums couldn’t have taken her. “Where are all the real men?” she’d asked rhetorically. If Stump were a “real man,” he would have taken it in good part and laughed with her. If he’d been capable of understanding who Clark Gable had been, what he had meant, then the implication of the remark would have been obvious. But to Stump, to all these ignorant young people, Gable was merely something obsolescent, a superseded precursor of some contemporary creature like Jack Nicholson holding food between his legs. If she could begin to explain why a Jack Nicholson, or a Dustin Hoffman clouting wedding guests over the head with a crucifix, was not a patch on Clark Gable’s ass, for all their easy gestures of defiant contempt, she would be a professor of movies (something she was always astonished to note actually existed). It was a nostalgic remark: that’s all. A man who is jealous of movie stars is no man at all; he is a nitwit. If Stump had possessed the good sense to realize that she was not directly comparing him with Gable, that Gable was incomparable and that that was precisely the point, she might have forgiven him everything (though she doubted it). But instead Stump had scuttled off, looking all wounded, straight to the reporters, who naturally distorted the remark. When it appeared, the story had become Can you believe what the silly old bat had to say? Clark Gable, imagine that. Direct from the days of the wind-up Victrola!
Her nostalgia was not only out of place but out of style as well. The young people had their own synthetic nostalgia: a television show, Happy Days; a Broadway musical, Grease; and a movie, American Graffiti, all of which concerned a sentimental 1950s past. Men, women, and children alike seemed to accept these spectacles as the truth of the era, its absolute limit. Lydia sometimes watched the television program in the kitchen with the cook (it was Tuesday night, it was eight o’clock, it was Hank hiding from her in his study, so why the hell not sit watching the kitchen portable beside a woman with the last name of Núñez?). The lettered cardigans and pomaded hair, the snickering references to backseat sex that all of the nation, in the year 1975, seemed to find titillating. This was the first time Lydia could remember when there seemed to be a strong communal will to reverse the clock, an attempt beyond nostalgia actually to construct a living imitation of the past from the shinier and more durable pieces of its debris and then to dwell in it. There was of course the inconvenience of people her own age, not to mention the thousands still walking the earth who could vividly recall something as distant as the last century. While the conventional take on the ascendancy of Happy Days etc. was that these diversions provided an “escape” from the “perplexing” “reality” of a “turbulent” era, Lydia had little doubt that around the 1990s there would be a television comedy all about the trigger-happy days of the seventies. All this would be funny in the distant future!
Though to Lydia the fifties didn’t really seem all that distant. Just yesterday, really. Certainly nothing much had changed in Hillsborough. And what else? Walter Winchell was gone, but Herb Caen was still writing. Gunsmoke was still on the air. Mutual funds were very popular now. Willie Mays had joined the Country Club. Paperback books were respectable. So were California wines. Ann Landers suggested divorce occasionally now. The United States lost Vietnam, but who’d really wanted it? People drove little toy cars from Japan and had machines that answered their telephones. The people who called to talk to them talked to these machines instead. They still stocked Mallomars in cooler weather only. Israel was still there, and people seemed just as angry about it as they ever had.
W
ell, the anger. That was the difference. She couldn’t remember the anger, from back then. She was certain that it had been out there, somewhere, but it hadn’t been right here. There had been boredom and fear, there had been some terrible photographs in Life, there had been plenty of boorish people, most of whom seemed to end up in the United States Congress, who arrived with their wives for dinner or cocktails and who’d had strong notions about Negroes, Communists, taxes, labor unions, and young men who played the guitar. And then they left and you didn’t think anymore about Negroes or guitars or what have you. But now you couldn’t buy a house big enough or build it on a hill high enough to get away from the anger. It was an angry age. Restraint had been swept out of fashion. People working in the grocery store and the filling station were angry. The man skimming the pool. They were angry about their jobs, or about not having jobs, or about having jobs when other people didn’t seem to need to have jobs. They were angry about preservatives in food, about air pollution, about miniskirts, about college tuition, about property taxes, about there not being enough left-handed scissors in the world. They were angry about things people never even used to talk about. Had they always been angry?
The people who’d taken her daughter were angry with her, and she had no bloody idea even who they were. She could imagine perhaps kidnapping the daughter of someone who had, say, run over one’s dog. That she could imagine. A dog was, in many ways, more valuable and satisfying than a daughter. But to kidnap your daughter simply because you lived in a nice house and belonged to a prominent family? It was difficult to understand. There were certainly plenty of people in the neighborhood with more money than they had. Yet their daughters were dressing nicely and keeping up with their studies and preparing to become leading citizens. If these revolutionaries were such marvelous democrats, they damned well should have driven to Woodside and Atherton and Portola Valley and Los Altos Hills and kidnapped everyone’s daughters. Let everyone open the Chronicle in the morning and have to read about himself, “Mrs. Galton briefly appeared in the luxuriant front garden before her impressive home. She waved to reporters but declined to answer their polite questions. At ten in the morning, she sported a costly-looking string of pearls around her neck and a large diamond glittered from one finger.” In the end it came down to anger. They were angry with her. Take a number. Certainly Hank was angry with her, and she was beginning to think she had no idea who he was either. Alice was angry with her, and she’d never quite known what to make of her. Lydia was pretty convinced that the reporters below were angry with her.
Id zap me
iz mad ape
iz mad
mad
The other thing about reasons was that when she failed to provide a reason for something she had done, even when it was something she’d done without a thought, without, as it were, having had any reason at all, there was trouble. If she dressed in black, they wondered if she was mourning prematurely. If she dressed in a colorful print, they wondered if she’d put her daughter out of her mind. Why are you crying? Why aren’t you crying? Are you on tranquilizers? Pep pills? Have you been drinking? She was obliged to fabricate reasons for the way she dressed, for the jewelry she wore, for the hairstyle she preferred. No wonder that in the midst of this flurry of improvisational rationalizing she had to perform she sometimes got it wrong. There were the professional explainers, like Henry Kissinger, and then there were private citizens. And of course the newspapers, those mandarins of cause and effect, were all over her. Rainstorms and scarce parking spaces and the profusion of sex in today’s motion pictures, they had an explanation for everything. Nobody wanted only news; they wanted reasons as well. If you didn’t give them a good reason, they just made up a bad one for you. Here was a good example: Dutch Reagan had offered her, simply as a formality, her own seat on the Board of Regents of the University of California, a seat she’d occupied since 1956, those happy days. Of course she accepted the reappointment. It was a responsibility, it was a privilege, it was an honor. What it had never before been was news. But were those good enough reasons? Why, no. The reason, Lydia was startled to read, was that she was arrogant. It was arrogant not to allow herself to be pushed around by the gangsters demanding that she leave the board. It was arrogant to have done so without wringing her hands over it in front of the TV cameras.
Outside, a young man from KRON dashed out from under the canopy and began to sing a few lyrics from “Singin’ in the Rain.” There were a few laughs, a general murmur of appreciation. A little something to break up the routine of another boring day spent standing outside the Galton house. It was a practical form insanity could take. Or anger. Probably anger. Lydia remembered going to pay someone a call at the Huntington Hotel once upon a time and spending a perfectly awful afternoon, drinking tea and dodging catty remarks. It had been one of those visits. Afterward, stepping off the automatic elevator on the lobby floor, she’d paused on the threshold and then ducked back inside to press each of the buttons, from B all the way up to PH. She had no idea why other than that she’d been angry. “Singin’ in the Rain” was about the least angry song she could think of; it made “Happy Birthday to You” sound like “Ride of the Valkyries,” but why wouldn’t they be angry, standing under a canopy in the rain all day like a bunch of damned fools?
The doorbell rang, and there she was getting up, rising from her perfectly comfortable seat. She could greet Agent Polhaus or she could take cover in the bathroom. Probably she would go downstairs and meet her visitor. Hear him out. And then see him out. She had begun to suspect that Polhaus’s motivation for calling on them to deliver his status reports derived more from his interest in the twelve-year-old Laphroaig they kept behind the bar than from any sense of decorum or professional courtesy. She felt as if she ought to say, No daughter, no scotch. But then she’d be in hot water again. Well, whatever his “reasons,” there he was, and if Hank wasn’t going to hide from him, she was damned if she would.
TRAINING AND PLANNING. Tania scouts the area, working from Yolanda’s painstakingly detailed notes, typed up on the Royal portable (§VI.A.2., knowledge of main access routes, natural barriers, defiles, parks, schools, dead-end streets, stop signs, stoplights, shopping centers, parking lots).
Teko picks Jeff to lead the Bakery Operation, but Jeff greets the suggestion with naked panic. Teko persists; they conduct drills under the assumption that Jeff will be in command. Quickly it becomes clear that Jeff can’t even rehearse the job without fucking up; so huge is his nervousness that the hand in which he holds his unloaded pistol shakes disconcertingly; he stammers and falters when demanding money from Susan or Tania. Teko agrees to take over. Jeff will cover the bank with a shotgun and keep time. Three minutes in and out.
She and Roger drive all the routes, for the hell of it, to have it down, to get out of the safe house: W Street to Arden Plaza; Arden Plaza to the switch point; switch point to the McKinley Park rendezvous; back to W Street. Yolanda’s list is all heads and subheads and sub-subheads (§VI.A.4.d., final dry run with all drivers), multiple indents. It’s a thing of beauty, they agree. A glimpse of the inside of her head.
Tania’s not at all sure why Teko feels confident about handing a nervous man a shotgun inside a confined space. Just say she’s glad she won’t be anywhere nearby. Still, she diligently instructs Jeff in the weapon’s use, shows him how to hold it, how to swing it in an arc. She teaches him the zone system, though she knows the gun’s sawed-off barrel makes the knowledge useless. Still, maybe her expertise and confidence will rub off. The shotgun was her first firearm; she learned it by feel in the closet. This particular gun dry fires awfully easily, though. A hair trigger, she and Jeff agree.
On the way back to W Street they pull over near Southside Park, deserted at this hour, or rather two figures are on the lakeshore, practicing tai chi with complete absorption, remote beyond the physical distance. Across the street, the freeway structure and beyond that a windswept softball field. She turns to Roger.
“O
K, wheelman. Fuck me, now.”
They do it in the car. Under the trees in the park. Roger is reluctant to fuck in the house ever since awakening one night in the living room to find Teko sitting in the sagging chair opposite him and Tania, holding a submachine gun in his hands, a sign of a growing craziness he could feel but couldn’t put a name to.
One afternoon Jeff lets the muzzle cross her as he moves with the weapon. She is about to tell him, again, “Be muzzle aware,” when she hears the click. For a moment they freeze.
“Sorry,” he says, finally.
“Keep the safety on,” she advises him.
“In the bank?” he asks.
“Especially there,” she says.
Three minutes in and out. That’s all.
A FEW CARS HAVE already parked at Arden Plaza. Susan watches the Chevy turn into the lot, bouncing on its ruined shocks. Some depositors stand waiting outside Guild Savings, their hands buried in their pockets against the early-morning chill. Inside, a man in a suit bows deeply, unlocking the front door. His necktie slips out of his jacket and swings free for a moment as he works the key in the lock at the base of the door. Standing upright, he carefully straightens the tie and places it back where it belongs before opening up, waving the customers in, holding the door as they pass.
Susan has the Bee open before her, and she pretends to read it while spreading grape jelly on a buttered English. 9:01: The Chevy pulls away from the front of the bank. She smiles up at the waitress and accepts more coffee. 9:07: She hears distant sirens. 9:09: A sheriff’s cruiser enters the lot. Uniformed deputies leap from the car, leaving the doors open, and run into the bank, guns drawn. She turns over the check and puts a couple of dollars on the table, then ambles over to join the gathering of curious shoppers and store clerks assembled outside the bank. A deputy stands blocking the door, telling everyone that the bank is closed. He still holds his .38 in his hand. Susan can hear another siren’s faraway howling.
Trance Page 42
