Vida

by Marge Piercy

  “Great. Some random place. The politics of that makes sense!” Jimmy’s face was flushed dark red as he sweated in the navy suit.

  “Slow down. We’re getting soaking wet,” she said. “We can’t walk in someplace looking as if we ran two miles. How about a police station? Headquarters?”

  “With an APB out on us, think again,” Kevin snorted. “Come on, Jimmy, get us a war criminal. You did all that bloody research. Let’s lay a fine on some damn corporation.”

  “See, Leigh was right,” she said almost cheerfully. She felt numb and brisk; this was what it was like to be dead. It was all over, all over but a bullet in the back. “Research has its political uses. Let’s have a cup of coffee and pick a target. We have to write propaganda. Jimmy and I can do that in half an hour while you scout.” Move, she thought; we have to do something because they have us anyhow. They can send us up for twenty years on conspiracy, even if we never set off this damned thing. Besides, they’ll try to pin every unsolved bombing in New York on us, and if Randy is an agent, he’ll back them.

  “The East side” Jimmy said slowly. “Chase Manhattan’s all the way south. Union Carbide. Du Pont’s on Fifth. IT and T. Sylvania. Mobil Oil. All good war profiteers. I’ll give you a rundown on their games at home and abroad”

  “I could do with some breakfast. Some coffee shop on Third, maybe,” Kevin said.

  A splash of stomach acid bathed her throat at the mention of food, and for an awful moment she thought she would vomit. “We have to be sure the timing won’t fail,” she said. “We have to give enough warning to clear the building,”

  “It’s built right,” Jimmy said stubbornly. He looked like a miserable high school student late for graduation.

  “Make it snappy”‘ Kevin barked at them. “I doubt we got all day.”

  “You’re wrong” Jimmy said, cold and serious. Connections were being made in his head, that she did not understand, concentrating as she was on not showing her panic. “For whatever time we have, that’s what we have to do in it. Our lives are over. We’re only weapons now. It’s very simple”

  With her credit card she outfitted them in different clothes at Altman’s putting the rest into a suitcase she also charged. Kevin checked the suitcase at Grand Central while Jimmy and she made appointments by phone at 150 East 42nd Street. She was applying for a secretarial job. Jimmy was a junior high teacher wanting materials for a unit on Developing Our Natural Resources. Kevin elected to try to enter at lunchtime through Shipping and Delivery, around on 41st Street.

  They stood across 42nd Street, taking a last look together before splitting up. Mobil Oil was housed in a massive misshapen aluminum skyscraper that occupied a square block. Blue glass was used in the lower few floors. The windows above were small in the dull metallic walls decorated with wedge-shaped bas-relief like cuneiform inscriptions. The front entrance was squat, a mouth under a big brown marble moustache. “It sure is ugly!” Vida tried to sound cheerful. “Too bad we can’t demolish it. We’d probably get a medal from some architects’ association.”

  Jimmy had taken the bomb, since he argued the briefcase was most congruous with his persona. “Meet you on the 34th floor. I was actually in there several times, when I was researching the oil companies.” They had mailed the communiques explaining their action to the press; no way they could drop off the other copies as planned.

  “Well, here goes.” Kevin sauntered away.

  The building had heavy security, not one, but five guards standing around the lobby, watching everyone and frequently challenging for business and identity, but Vida walked in at one o’clock in a stream of secretaries returning from lunch. She started a conversation with two women, and strolled in between them. She did not need her appointment, but rode up and promptly salted herself away in a women’s rest room to give the others time to arrive.

  By two they were all upstairs. Vida took the bomb from Jimmy, and in a stall in the women’s room she painstakingly disconnected the wires, working on the toilet seat. With such a large building, the bomb must go off during the night, as the occupants during daytime could never get out in half an hour. They could not after all call in a warning to evacuate only the 34th floor, or the bomb squad would be right on the job. Finally she reset the clock for eleven and connected the wires again. When she had finished at three, she was exhausted, wet, and shaking. Her hands trembled. She gave the briefcase back to Kevin and Jimmy. They had decided to place it in the wall in the men’s rest room. She could not help them. It would take them a good while. She kissed them both, briefly, dryly, and rode down.

  As she walked out of the large but stark marble lobby, she noticed an American Express travel office to her right. Ought to march in there and book passage for Calcutta. It was like a joke the building was making to her. Up above her, Kevin and Jimmy were working like mice in the walls. She felt faint and realized she had eaten nothing since the night before. Walking toward Grand Central, she bought a hot dog with sauerkraut from a vendor. After she picked up the suitcase, she sat on the platform of the IRT waiting.

  Their communiqués were traveling now through the bowels of the post office. She passed the time by addressing more notes to radio stations and underground papers. They were all in her or Jimmy’s hand writing: no time today for fancy messages cut out of newsprint like the communiqués Randy and Lohania had been supposed to deliver.

  Socony-Mobil is one of the biggest corporations in the United States. Its annual profit would feed the hungry and clothe the poor and warm the elderly from Bangor to San Diego. Yet like the other parts of the Rockefeller family empire, the men who run it never feel they have enough. Oil companies profit immensely by war, because every machine that moves on land, sea and air uses their product. But Mobil’s interest in Southeast Asia is not on the surface, it’s under the water. Offshore oil drilling in the shallow waters off Vietnam is one of the places Mobil plans to pump oil to sell to the Japanese, always oil-hungry and willing to pay high I prices. We are just showing them what war feels like, since they appreciate it so much. Let’s bring the war home to Mobil and other war profiteers.

  She felt it would be almost a relief to feel a heavy hand on her shoulder and be carted away. She wanted to cry; she wanted to sleep. Instead, nervously, she copied the communiqué, sealed it in an envelope, addressed and stamped it and started the next one, to the Roach, Leigh’s paper. Was he in jail? Was he out?

  Where would they go? Where in the world could they run to? The funny white gloves she had bought for the job interview she had not needed were growing grimy and stained with blue ball-point, but she kept them on. Even if the handwriting was hers, at least she wouldn’t leave fingerprints. Those precautions felt like a joke, because she was damned sure by now that when Lohania came to trial, Randy would surface as an agent.

  Finally she saw them coming down the steps together, small Jimmy and tall Kevin, and rose to meet them. They all looked at each other and they could not help smiling grimly, a twist of the dry lips, but with genuine relief. “Into the train,” Kevin snapped, and gladly she obeyed him, grateful for his command, for something to shore up against the mudslide of hopelessness inside her. “We go to the end of the line and grab us a car. They’ll be looking for us all over the city. We got to make some distance fast. We can call in the warning.” They sat huddled together, the suitcase against Kevin’s knees, taking the subway off the map into what she could not begin to imagine. What happened to people who ran away? She had helped deserters and draft resisters to get to Canada. But they would be just as wanted and just as hunted in Canada. No safety there for the three them. She was glad she was not alone, glad for their company and the animal warmth of their bodies, one on each side, as all three sat staring glumly and riding in silence through the noise and the dark.

  PART V

  November 1979

  14

  The two cars were parked at the entrance to the trail, the old black Chevy Joel had bought and the truck from Hardscrabble
Hill, where Kiley and Lark were staying. When they met in the parking lot, the sun was poking feebly between scuds of cloud. Kiley embraced Vida, reaching up for her; then with no difference of expression or emphasis, she embraced Joel, who blinked and blinked, staring at her. Lark kissed Vida and shook hands with Joel. Then they began to climb. A few people had climbed this way since the last snowstorm, probably on the weekend, making the trail easy except where ice filled the ruts.

  “One thing for sure” Vida’s breath blew out before her over the snow. “We don’t meet in smoke-filled rooms any longer. We may not be safe or centrally located, but we sure are healthier.”

  Kiley gave her one of those famous icy pale blue glances. Vida was trying to figure out if Lark and Kiley were a couple. Lark had grown even thinner. She was unquiet about his health, but he shrugged off her questions, limping a little, restraining a worse limp.

  “We must strike back” Kiley said, slamming her small fist into her gloved palm. “We can’t let a defeat remain in people’s minds. We must follow it with a positive breakthrough.”

  “You mean Kevin getting busted?” Joel asked. “But he wasn’t even in the Network anymore. Was he?”

  Lark went on as if Joel had not spoken. “We need to put our politics out to people. People think of us as stuck back in the ‘60s. It’s important for them to know our line on current problems.”

  “People mostly don’t think about us at all” Vida said dryly. “But a way of reaching people, yes. Remember that idea Eva had of comic books? I saw a wonderful Marxist comic book done by a Mexican—”

  “We need to clarify our position,” Kiley said. “We’re projecting a long position paper. The energy crisis, racism, Puerto Rican independence, apartheid, the woman question, neofascism. We can run it off on the press at Agnes’ house. That would knock them on their heels.”

  ”Kiley, no!” She banged on her arms to warm. “A long position paper? To be read by nobody but the ten thousand hard-core nuts who read everything we put out.”

  “That’s no way to talk about cadres—” Lark began, but she blundered on.

  “Kiley, Lark, how can you think what people crave right now is a couple of hundred badly inked pages of our inimitable rhetoric? By the time we run it through the collective it comes out stirring as a list of spare parts for a ‘74 Chevy. The Sears catalogue is written in more moving language.”

  “Jargon turns people off”“ Joel said. “If ads were written the way we try to talk to people, nobody would buy blenders or leisure suits”

  “Some jargon is necessary” Kiley said stubbornly. “You can’t talk about imperialism without saying imperialism.”

  She had hoped that Lark would support her about the jargon; sometimes he did. Roger and Kiley were the two people in the Network who wrote the worst, in Vida’s opinion, and thus were charged with grinding out most of their propaganda. But Lark was not talking much. He seemed to be concentrating on putting one foot ahead of the other as they walked up the snow-covered fire road.

  “Lark” she said in direct appeal. “Remember the Vietnamese telling us in Montreal to shut up about imperialism and talk about suffering and bread and butter? What’s imperialism to my mother? But if you tell her how jobs move out of the country, she’ll understand. She used to work in a shipyard”

  At the mention of Vietnam, Lark’s face relaxed from the grimness of controlled pain. “I remember the woman who talked to us that way. She was a company commander from Quanh Binh, and she hadn’t seen her husband in seven years … “

  “We must correct the course of the left. We can clarify weaknesses of certain key sections of the Movement” Kiley said. “Our words matter to people”

  “Sure,” Joel said, his head down, “The sound of one claque clapping.” He was mad at being ignored.

  “Do we need this negativism?” Kiley turned and looked him in the face. Four inches shorter than Joel, she vibrated annoyance, her eyes wide and pale with anger when most people would narrow them. Her hair in a blond Afro stood out around her head. She alone wore no hat, no cap, and her hood was cast back on her slight shoulders. Her nose did not run, as Vida’s did. Her skin shone rosily pale, blood through porcelain.

  Can he still want her? Vida wondered. Very likely Lark had her now. This coupling had been under construction for a long time, she suspected, ever since she had broken up with Kevin in 1974 during an upheaval in the organization. At that time Kiley had been with Roger. Vida had chosen not to work with Lark that year. It had not been that she was rejecting Lark so much as that she wanted to be without any man except and unless she could be with Leigh.

  She felt a tinge of regret. She did love Lark, not passionately but fondly. He was a more serious person politically than Joel would ever be. She trusted Lark even when she disagreed with him. She felt involved with him, his rattletrap body, his pain, his frailty, his driving will. He was a cold man. Yet when she had suffered through the infection from a metal chunk in her leg, he had been the best nurse of all, even better than Eva. That was the most recent period when they had been lovers for more than an occasional night. He alone had understood that even though she was an invalid, she needed to make love to feel herself still involved and alive.

  How strange to walk a fire road arguing about things that had no connection whatsoever with the landscape, knowing that nothing would so prick up the spirits of the FBI and the right, more militant daily and wealthier, than if the four of them were suddenly surrounded by police. Forever Jimmy and Belinda died in her head in black-and-white flames. The television had not been a color set. And how strange to argue as if their mutual histories had no influence on the positions they assumed and the anger and heat with which they hammered at the others.

  “I suppose you two think we should go back to bombings,” Kiley said, striding on. “For a long time we expected people to follow our politics from our targets and the communiqués. But the Times can’t get the issues straight. They don’t want to. They botch it.”

  “No, I don’t think we should go back to bombings,” she said, striding ahead just as rapidly. “Bombings made sense when they were bombing too. When a lot of people cheered us on and felt, Hooray, we hit them again” How to introduce her own inchoate project?

  “What I saw in Angola convinced me, bringing down apartheid is the first priority”“ Larkin said. “American banks and corporations are fattening on slavery. And the party for an Africa war of intervention is growing. Another Nam in the works.”

  Vida said, “But what about racism here? That’s our business. Plus, at this stage of things, it’s teach-ins that are needed. Yes, American banks profit from South Africa, and South Africans are buying into American economy—”

  “We recognize your America-is-no-longer-the-center-of-the-empire thesis” Kiley said. “Have you finished that paper yet?”

  “Not yet. I’ve been on the move. It’s coming along.”

  ”We have to raise money,” Lark said. “We’re nearly broke.”

  “You could have a bake sale,” Joel said.

  “What is wrong with you.?” Kiley snapped. “I can’t stand cynicism and pessimism. You’ve been a negative force all afternoon”

  “What could be wrong?” Joel rolled his eyes. “You’d never guess. You’re shitting all over me.”

  “Oh” Kiley’s eyes were expressionless. “Is this a personal issue?”

  “Is there anything personal left in you?”

  “Are you not with Peregrine? What do you want from me?” Kiley used Vida’s nom de guerre.

  “I guess only some stupid recognition we were together for two years. Something really wild like that.”

  “This is a political meeting, not an encounter group.”

  “Aw, fuck it” Joel said. “It’s a bunch of people walking in the woods”

  “Maybe we’ve walked far enough,” Vida was watching Lark. The set of his thin mouth, the tension in his shoulders registered like muffled screams. “Let’s turn around now.”r />
  Larkin glared briefly at her. “I can go on”

  “But why should you?” She took his arm. “You don’t have anything to prove to me. Or anybody else here. It’s close to zero and my face hurts, and so do my sinuses.”

  “You know that’s not what’s bothering me.” But he let himself be turned. He even leaned a little on her, surreptitiously.

  “Did you hurt your … self in Africa?”

  He nodded.

  She wanted to carry him down the mountain on her shoulders. How hard he pushed himself.

  “But it was worth it!” he said strongly. “Our international connections are vital. That’s what keeps me going—the sense that if we’re stalled, in other parts of the world, on other fronts, people are fighting and winning”

  “We have to endure until the time is better for us.” In front of them Kiley and Joel walked together a distance apart. As Kiley turned to speak to Joel, Vida saw that she was smiling. She had a small smile that bared her white teeth in their orthodontically correct bite but left the rest of her face unmoved. Kiley’s purer, stronger, simpler than I am, she thought. How can I call her a fanatic? Most people would think I’m one. Kiley is incorruptible, as Lark is. They never hesitate from fear, from desire, from any motive of profit or greed. “Leigh thinks Kevin may be talking” She spoke up. “Randy and Lohania are both around him.”

  ”Kevin” Larkin drew out the name as if it filled his mouth with mud. After a few minutes he said, “If you hadn’t stuck with him so long, I think we’d have thrown him out earlier.”

  “That’s not accurate “ Kiley said over her shoulder with measured fair-ness.”The first years under, Kevin was a source of strength. His anger and his energy pulled us through the paramilitary phase. He simply couldn’t evolve politically. His adventurist tendencies came to the fore.”

  “Sounds like something more dangerous may be coming to the fore now” Lark stumbled and leaned harder on her. Why had Kiley let them walk so far? She had to know about his leg; you could not sleep with Lark without finding that out. It was a small elite club; all the woman who had been Lark’s lovers knew about his leg. The government did not know. It was on none of his Wanted posters. When he came into the Movement he had taken a new name, Larkin Tolliver, because his father was an officer who disowned him, and changing his name was a way of disowning his father right back. The name Tolliver was from a teacher who had been kind to him. Larkin was his mother’s maiden name. The government had never busted Larkin, never got his fingerprints or his real name. His family did not know what had become of him. All the women in the Movement who had made love to Lark held his secret and held it well, but Kiley did not take good enough care of him. He stumbled again and cleared his throat. “Sounds as if the desire to save his dirty neck may be taking over” he went on stubbornly.