by Laura London
“Of course. Why am I being so stupid? Jess and I just need time. I’m sorry I bothered you, Indy. Look, I’m not really hungry. I had a late breakfast, so if you don’t mind, I think I’ll let you get back to—” It humiliated her to end her sentence midway, but she had no choice. Her voice was breaking. She had begun to rise. His hand on her arm stopped her.
“Can I put my arms around you?” His voice was soft, gentle, as she had never heard it before, and it made her furious.
“No! I’m not eighteen either. I won’t be babied.”
The silence was awkward, and she could feel in it the reflection of her own helplessness, because he had come to fully understand, as she had, that he lived in symbiosis with Jesse’s strength of character. And even the strongest of human beings have a terrible fragility not seen or thought about until something stabs out, testing: Fate as predator.
“I’m in the advice market.” Emotion sandpapered her voice. “I’ll take anything. Cheap shots. Barroom psychology. Aesop’s fables…”
A pause. “How about one cheap shot and an allegory?” He handed her another napkin for her nose, seeming to examine her silent assent. “Don’t try to be so wonderful. It’s not invisible—that effort. Since Jesse went in, the family has watched you barter little pieces of yourself as if you were trying to get so perfect that someone floating around in the clouds would look down and say, ‘That’s one hell of a nice little girl down there. Let’s not mess around with her life anymore.’ But that’s not how it’s going to work. If you keep it up, you’re going to come apart like a picture puzzle.”
Some marginal parameter of her brain noticed that the chocolate left in her cup was shaking. “I said cheap shots accepted, not thoracic surgery.”
“Sorry. I’m not good at saying things gently. You asked for help: I’m doing my best. Listen a minute. About five summers ago I danced at an outdoor festival in Canada. Natasha Churbanova and I were doing the wedding bit from Sleeping Beauty. It was hot and muggy and mosquitoes were eating the hell out of us, and that made everyone nice and tense. When I held Natasha, I could feel her body trembling like a wet puppy’s. Her leg was hurting her. But everyone dances hurt, right? That’s ballet—body abuse. That night in front of a full house she went up on pointe. All of a sudden there was this loud crack. You could hear it all the way back to the cheap seats. Her Achilles’ tendon had snapped; you could see it curling up like a scroll on the back of her leg under the skin. They had her into surgery within the hour so they could get to the thing before it atrophied. The point is, you should never ignore a sore Achilles’ tendon.”
Feeling vaguely harrowed, she said, “How long did it take her to recover?”
“Two years, the doctors said. But she was dancing again in six months and onstage again in nine. You’ll turn it around, Christine. But don’t try to buy Jesse’s sanity by sacrificing your own.”
“Be plain, please.”
“If you want him in bed, dear, then you ought to tell him.”
She swiveled to face him, cold chocolate in hand, cold anger inside. “Just how selfish do you think I am? After the pressure he’s been under, I should insist on a big performance in bed?”
The long mouth stretched up at one corner. The dusk-green eyes began at her face and traveled over her in a slow survey, a thorough, infuriating, and very gratifying salve to her tottering confidence.
“There’s not a single doubt in my mind,” he said, “that the poor, poor man will survive the torture.”
Chapter Four
Jesse Ludan didn’t get a lick of work done all day. For one thing, he had become a hero and everyone from the printers to the publisher wanted to wring his hand. It meant nothing to him, because he had fallen into the role almost by accident, and because he had always despised reporters as celebrities—it was so damned hypocritical. But mainly he kept those reflections to himself. When he voiced them, people tended to come away saying he was modest, and that irritated him more than all the rest of it put together. It was better to keep your mouth shut and be a little misunderstood than to open it and be misunderstood totally.
In a quiet moment after an overly effusive and hail-fellow heavily alcoholic lunch at the press club, he had gone to his desk and dug out the column that had put him behind bars. It was a competent little piece, not one of his best. When one writes for a living, one turns out a lot of drivel. Editors with a deadline needed words to fill the paper’s news hole; words had to be there whether the muse came or not. Jesse didn’t mind. It was worth it for the occasional white-lightning high of writing something he really felt, and knowing that the next afternoon a whole county of people were going to stare at it, and get angry or happy, depending on their philosophical bents. He was controversial; the city wasp putting a sting to all shades of the political spectrum. His favorite memories came from the times he walked unknown into a tavern and watched it come alive with an argument over one of his columns, men and women howling their viewpoints, brains working at fifty miles an hour, tongues at a hundred. He had thought, That’s right, this is a democracy. Revel in it.
His post-high-school involvements with women had been mostly with political activists. Christine was not political. She tended to view activists as people who were always on their way to somewhere else, to a brighter, more beautiful world. Chris never saw the earth as a place filled with complex issues; she saw it as a place filled with complex people and simple issues. Her tolerance was far greater than his; it was one of the things he loved about her. He’d had many reasons in the last six months to be thankful for that quality.
The nuclear power plant had been a hot issue from the beginning. The power company had had the deplorable lack of tact to decide they ought to build the damn thing on Jones Island, a narrow peninsula that jutted out from the center of Milwaukee into Lake Michigan. Nice choice. Even with a huge public relations campaign about “our friend, the atom,” there were any number of home folks who looked on the situation as over-my-dead-body-you’re-going-to-erect-that-holocaust-maker-in-my-backyard.
He was the only journalist the demonstrators had invited to that fateful sunrise vigil they held at the Jones Island construction site. Some people are just born lucky. So he had rolled out of Christine’s warm arms on a Sunday morning, resisting the considerable urge to stay and turn her disappointed sigh into something husky and wanton. He had stood in the misty cold at six a.m., warming his hands in his jeans pockets during a short dawn rally, taking no notes, just watching the men and women who had assembled at the lonely site at an hour when most people were still in bed.
They weren’t all strangers. Far from it. He saw the daughter of a coworker; an old girl friend of his brother Peter’s; nuns from a South Side parish. When someone told him that construction equipment on the site had been sabotaged, his first reaction had been, Oh, Lord, why me? Why am I the sad sack reporter who has to hear this? You nice sincere people are going to end up in jail, and so, perhaps, am I.
He had written the article anyway—a mood piece, nothing polemical, just lyrical. He let the story tell itself except for a brief aside on the irony of how easily the powerful and expensive bulldozers and cranes could be demobilized—sand and sugar in the fuel tanks, distributor caps and injectors pulled. There were those who later interpreted that as an antitechnology stance, in the sense that a power plant was a machine, machines break down, we can’t afford to put our trust in one fueled by anything as potentially devastating as nuclear energy. It was hard to remember now whether that was what he’d meant. Probably not. Who bothered being that clever at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning?
Predictably enough, the power company had had no sense of humor about paying for engine overhauls on their earth-moving equipment, feeling that, damn it, if they were so magnanimous as to build a nuclear power plant to supply the city with electricity, John Q. Public should stop complaining and count his blessings. You don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, and you don’t mess around w
ith the power company. Not much time went by before the district attorney had a John Doe investigation going to gather evidence for charges of conspiracy to damage private property against the leaders of the antinuclear coalition. When his editor, Phil Jackson, found out who they’d pulled as a judge, he’d called Jesse and said, “I think we’ve got trouble.”
Besides writing his weekly column of personal opinion, Jesse was a by-line reporter with a court beat, and this particular judge had been the disgruntled subject of one of his columns. Presiding over a case where a young woman had been sexually assaulted in her backyard, the judge had lectured the victim about mowing the grass in her halter top. The go-for-the-throat tone of Jesse’s resultant article had been influenced more than a little by the fact that, when Christine mowed the grass, she often wore her halter top.
Sure enough, a month after the investigation began, they had slapped him with a subpoena. They wanted the names of the people he’d seen at the sunrise vigil, and all he could hope for was that when he refused to cough up, they wouldn’t want to make an issue of it by ordering him confined to jail. But with an aggressive DA who was pushing for a promotion to head of the Felony Unit, and a judge who was likely to be voted out of office next election due in part to a Jesse Ludan column, things didn’t look rosy.
He had tried to prepare Christine, but judges to her were white-haired gentlemen with twinkling eyes who played golf with Dad. They didn’t put nice people in jail for being in the wrong place at the right time. Furthermore, this was the United States, and everyone had a right to a trial by his peers. Secret tribunals couldn’t order people willy-nilly into jail. And if the judge tried anything, they’d appeal all the way to the Supreme Court if they had to. When he’d tried to explain that under Wisconsin statute 972.08 (2), secret tribunals could order people willy-nilly into jail, that an appeal would take five years to reach the Supreme Court and would probably lose, and that the Constitution had been interpreted to provide surprisingly flimsy protection to journalists under these circumstances, she had looked at him as though he were some kind of Bolshevik. She might have been more ready to face the coming ordeal if he had forced her to accept the nasty reality, but he hadn’t had the heart to batter through that frail shell of optimism. In the month before he testified, when everyone was admiring Christine’s courage, he knew that her poise came from an inner conviction that he wasn’t going to jail, and that knowledge still made his heart twist.
He had never considered cooperating with the John Doe, because he’d been raised to believe that questions of conscience were not matters of choice. In any number of countries around the world, it was suckers like himself who made up the statistics for Amnesty International. And if he’d ever managed to slide around his ethics, how in heaven could he hand over information that would put a pair of nuns in jail? He visualized them staring mournfully out from their cells in their habits, penguins behind bars. The good Catholic education his parents had beggared themselves to provide had never made him devout, but for God’s sake, nuns.…
* * *
That evening he spent with his family, rehashing the lighter points of the last six months, reassuring his grandmother that no, he hadn’t picked up head lice, American prisons were very clean; and being good-natured when his mother stuffed him with about three times as many kürtös kalács as he wanted, under the touchingly misguided notion that he had spent the six months in jail pining for Hungarian pastry. Love kept back the confession that he would much rather have had a Big Mac.
He needed to be home with Christine, but he hadn’t even begun to slough off the disturbing sensation that he had become an alien invader in her immaculate universe. The fear was strangely untouchable, encased in some sort of obdurate covering that resisted his efforts at penetration.
He said good night earlier than they were ready to part with him, knowing they would understand, but when his brothers Sandy and Peter walked him to his car and produced three bottles of Hungarian wine, he was uptight enough about his own lack of mental well-being to say “Sure” when Peter suggested they go to his apartment to drink it. Indiana joined them at the last minute, and, having a car full of his brothers, listening to their familiar banter, slipping into the easy particular pattern of his sibling role, Jesse found that he had begun to feel more real and less like an escapee, driving over the freeway under the pale spring moon.
Then his rearview mirror framed a police car with its cherry-red dome flashing. A shadowy impulse, hardly acknowledged but still present, pricked him to flee, to stop and get out and run. He had a sudden icy awareness of the three wine bottles Sandy was holding in the front seat, of the apricot brandy his father had served him, of the Baggie of grass that was probably in Peter’s coat pocket. And when the police car sped past, intent on some other subject, he pulled to the shoulder and sat with his face pressed into the steering wheel. Afterward, Sandy drove.
* * *
Jesse made it home by ten-thirty and relatively sober, which was something of a feat, given that Sandy’s solicitude had expressed itself in his plying him with vintage wine. Christine hadn’t wanted to join him at Peter’s; when he’d phoned to ask, she’d told him cheerfully that she “had things to do.” She’d sounded like she meant it, though under the circumstances that much nobility was a little out of character. She was practicing self-denial to give him the freedom he needed to reassemble himself. He had been able to give her nothing in return except perhaps the restraint in holding back as much of the pitching of his sense of identity as possible.
Last night had been a blur, spent trying to experience his freedom, to believe in it. Small things had become luxuries. He drifted from room to room, looking at familiar remnants of himself—the wall of books in English and Hungarian, the racks where his Smokey Robinson nested with Christine’s Bach, the drawers of clothes that seemed wonderfully soft and fragrant after the prison coveralls that had corroded his skin. It’s over, he kept telling himself. It’s over.
Last he had gone to their bedroom, drenched in bliss, as though it were a gift he had been waiting to open. Christine had lain asleep in a square of moonlight, her moppet’s hair tousled and dark against the pillow, her hands folded in prayer fashion under her cheek like a child in an Edwardian lithograph. She stirred. The falling cover bared one smooth leg, but he killed the quick response of his body as though it were profane. With his own heart beating a silent rhythm in his throat, he had studied the small exposed ear, the delicate sharpness of her thin shoulder, the pearly translucence of her flesh. He didn’t want to be in bed; didn’t want to close his eyes and lose himself in sleep. He had stayed awake watching her, getting up sometimes to wander the house restlessly, to end up finally in the big easy chair in the living room alternately dozing and waking with a start, the scents of his own home forcing him awake with the power of their reality.
Jesse put the car into the garage and came up the back path through the moist fragrance of her flower garden. One light shone in the second story behind the curtains. He let himself in the rear door. The living room lay in feathery darkness. Flat surfaces caught invisible light in pale waxy accents, cooling the black shadows, and from the partly open bedroom door a soft glow, warm and inviting, spilled down the stairs toward him. Something made him follow the beckoning path of light, two steps at a time. Outside the door he hesitated, trying without total success to force down the nagging sense that he was an intruder here, and then he pushed the door with the touch of one hand.
Christine sat on the bed in a mist of candlelight, straightbacked and cross-legged, and barely covered in a diaphanous body-skimming topaz nightgown. Another woman might have struck an erotic pose. But Christine sat perfectly still, looking back at him. When realization came, it hit him like a brickbat.
Every inch, every inch of the brass bed frame she had covered with flowing yellow ribbons.
* * *
Christine had watched Jesse enter the room and freeze. His eyes, bright as a Halloween cat’s, held
hers in an unwavering scrutiny, but whether he approved, disapproved, or was shocked she couldn’t tell. Stubborn inside, she scrambled to her knees, knotted an imaginary lariat, twirled it expertly overhead, and lassoed Jesse. She tugged. He stood transfixed. She tugged again.
Wistfully stern, and a little nonplussed, she said, “Are you going to come along quietly or am I going to have to muss you up, bub?”
His reply was soft. “If I come, will you promise to muss me up anyway?” The love inside him was painfully strong. It ached in his throat, behind his eyes, deep within his chest. Desire had returned also, the strong low swell of wanting her that he could neither leash nor deny. Part of him felt as bright and weightless as a flame, but his yearning for the comfort he knew her body would give him was a dark, turbulent presence that had slipped beyond his control.
She was a dim, golden vision and he moved toward her slowly, feeding his anticipation. Her eyes seemed to open wider; a bond that delicately mixed love and desire was pulling them together. She seemed perfect to him, and perfectly desirable, the source and fulfillment of his dreams. Before he reached her, he could feel the taste and warmth of her.
Beside the bed he offered her his hand, because words wouldn’t come. Her fingers entwined with his, emphasizing the satiny delicacy of hers, the strength of his, the brilliant accent of their wedding rings. His other hand flexed slightly to fit the modeling of her cheek, and with hypnotic tenderness his lips skimmed her brow and the velvet folds of her ear.
“Thank you.” His voice was uneven. “I think you might be saving my life.”
Resting one knee on the bed, he withdrew his hand. In easy movements that belied the passion welling within him, he picked up pillows from the cedar chest beside the bed and piled them beside her. Then, with a gentle grip on her shoulders, he nestled her back to half-recline against them.
“Welcome home, Jess.” Her breath was quick, almost frightened.
