by Marge Piercy
“Eva, stay friends with me. Stay close. I need you.”
“I’m slower than you are. Slower to feel, slower to know what I feel, slower to act on it, slower to recover. It’s like you’re done and summing and up when I’m just starting to deal with it … “
“It’s as a friend I loved you and as a friend I still love you. My feelings haven’t changed. Be my loving friend still, please.”
“I was happy when we lived in that funny house, even with Alice sick and whining. I thought you’d be happy too once you got used to it. But after you left I began to suspect you’d never come back”
Vida leaned on the well-scrubbed yellow stove. “I wasn’t happy. For years I haven’t expected to be happy.”
“It was what I’d wanted.”
“Eva, I tried. But it didn’t become what I want. I’m sorry it isn’t, but I’m telling you, I felt in exile. I wanted to please you, and I tried.”
“Why is it good with him? Because he’s a man and you think that’s real”
“No! I didn’t pick you out because you’re a woman. Because he’s fast too. Our emotions, our reactions work at the same rate. You know you get tired with me because I want to talk about everything, to chew it over. My sister’s like that. He’s like that. I’m not lonely with him.”
“How could you be lonely with me?”
She felt a bellyache seizing her. How could she hurt Eva so? “Eva, I was happy. Of course I wasn’t lonely!” The image came to her of the two of them lying in the white-painted bedstead. Eva was sleeping on her side with her black braids pinned on her head, her sweet even breathing like the song of a muted cricket, her hand holding Vida’s. She saw herself stark awake beside Eva wanting to talk, wanting to discuss Alice’s depression and why they should all study Spanish harder for the neighborhood and what they could do politically to relate to the undocumented workers who got the same kind of off-the-books jobs they did. Eva spoke most deeply through silences and smiles and gestures, through her music, through her guitar and her rich satiny voice, through the paintings she had stopped doing in the last year. Vida needed to talk in words. “How many times does anybody really fall in love?”
“How do I know what you mean? As you say, I don’t have a passionate nature” Eva turned her back, taking the percolator off the flame and pouring four cups of coffee. “Why don’t you carry a couple of these and we’ll join the men?” Eva stalked into the living room.
She leaned on the stove feeling sad. She had failed Eva, who had stood by her; but in order not to fail her she would have to lie or turn into somebody else. She had trouble believing that the couple aspect of their relationship could mean much to Eva, but that very inability to believe was a further failure. In order to please her friend she would have to lie, and there she couldn’t. To please Eva she had eaten brown rice casseroles and vegetarian soups watery as tears, but she could not tell herself she preferred them to veal scaloppini or Ruby’s Jewish pot roast spiced with cinnamon and cooked with apricots. The gentle holding acting between them was not a love that engaged her. If she and Lohania had come underground together that day, she believed they could have been lovers as Joel and she were. Lohania instead of Kevin. She needed someone who compelled her, who seized her in a fierce and conversational demand. She could not take passion lightly, for it did not strike her often and yet she valued it.
Carrying a cup for herself and a cup for Eva she entered the living room, where Roger and Joel were forgiving each other for Kiley by arguing about the Knicks. They looked relieved at her entrance. Eva sat in the straightest chair with her arms folded. Vida stared at Eva and then at Joel,
asking for forgiveness. However, she had more arguments to try out on Roger and Eva, and that must come first.
21
Eva declined to drive with Vida and Joel, going on ahead with Roger. Vida was sorry she would miss the little shock of surprise that must hit Kiley when Roger and Eva arrived, as theirs had to be an unsuspected alliance, although whether for or against her proposal she could not tell. Vida dropped Joel off at Agnes’ farmhouse to wait, while she went on to the meeting.
The Board was meeting in a borrowed A-frame cabin on a small frozen lake, midway between Agnes’ farm and Hardscrabble Hill. She was the last to arrive, walking into a glum silence. Five folding chairs had been set up around a card table; an ashtray for knocking out Roger’s pipe; cups and a coffeepot; mint tea and antacids in front of Lark, whose stomach must be upset. Some journals and papers were on the table. Lark gave her a bleak searching look and nudged a medical journal which lay open before him toward her. She took it. A boxed notice called the attention of orthopedic surgeons to the case of a single amputee, Frederick Walter Burns, a.k.a. John Larkin or Larkin Tolliver or Lark Tolliver, armed and dangerous. A complete account of Lark’s condition was appended.
She sat down hard. “How did they get it?”
“You tell me,” he said.
“Well, how many women have you slept with?”
“I don’t exactly burn with suspicion of you or Kiley” he said. “But Alice came into my bed after her abortion. In 1974, you’d left for Philadelphia, Kevin ran out and Bill went with him, although he came back in June. I was reorganizing our cell there. Now Alice has turned tail.”
“Alice turned herself in just six days ago” Eva said matter-of-factly. She sprawled in her chair, arms folded. “This journal came out a month ago. Assume it was at least a month being printed. Two months ago Alice was unhappy, but she was not talking, and she had not talked when I left L.A.”
“How do you know?” Kiley asked, tapping a pencil on the card table. “It takes time to work out a deal.”
“Alice told me when she started to think about it. We argued about it every day, every night for a month.”
”Why didn’t you inform us?” Lark asked coldly.
“Maybe you never talk about turning yourself in, but I hardly know anybody else in the Network who doesn’t have fantasies about pardons and short terms and going home. Alice wants to have a baby. When she went to the lawyer, I told you.”
“You shouldn’t dismiss me” Vida said. “I’m a possible source”
“You told Joel?” Lark said.
“I did not. He wouldn’t tell anybody if I had. Which, I repeat, I didn’t.”
“What do you mean, you’re a source?” Eva said. “Don’t talk in your sleep that I recall.”
“Lark, we first slept together in ‘67. When I was living with Leigh and Lohania.”
“You told them?”
“Not Leigh. I never told him details like that. But Lohania. We used to tell each other everything.”
“Vida!” Lark forgot for the first time in years to use her underground name. “How could you take those risks?”
“I think it’s disgusting” Kiley said. “Going home and giggling like adolescents.”
“We didn’t giggle” She drew herself up in her chair. “May I remind my comrades that in 1967—you were a little young then, Kiley, unless you’ve read about it—we were wide open. We had just more or less amalgamated with hippiedom. Everything was love and bright colors and beads and feathers and openness. We had less security than the Girl Scouts. Lohania and I shared everything in our lives.” Especially information about men.
“You were lovers, weren’t you?” Eva asked.
“Yes,” she said gratefully. Eva was making her confession easier. “None of us guessed we might ever be fugitives. What would it have meant to us? A TV program? Escaping from the posse? Remember, ‘67 was the year we had a workshop in bombing and sabotage at the national Convention to draw the agents out of our real workshops, because we knew nobody else would go and it was a joke on them. By ‘70 it was no joke. Anyhow, I’m afraid Lohania has a good memory. She’s thick with Kevin, Leigh tells me, and Kevin is talking. Randy is in the middle of it all. So I’m your leak, and we can date it and trace it. Until Lohania and Kevin got together in New York after he was busted for gunrunning, sh
e had no idea you were in the Network.”
“Well, that’s better than suspecting Alice, isn’t it?” Eva said brightly. “We can hardly trash Perry for telling her best friend and lover in 1967 about sleeping with a man. It’s only amazing it took them this long to put your fingerprints and name on you”
She caught Eva’s gaze for a moment, beaming thanks. Eva still would not look her in the eyes, but uncrossed her arms.
“What exactly did you tell her?” Lark asked, still staring.
“Oh”—she smiled slightly—”I was very taken with you. I told her you were fascinating. You seemed different from any man I’d been with. You were more serious, more disciplined, honed by suffering—I believe that was the romantic phrase I used. I described you physically and I talked about the sex. Lohania loved good oral sex, and I said you were the best” She felt wicked as Lark blushed to his fingertips and Kiley tapped the pencil furiously.
“Oh, that’s why … When we were penetrating the Hilton together, she was … flirting heavily with me and I didn’t know why” Lark moved around in his chair. “Anyhow, I don’t think you can be blamed for what happened way back then. I just wish she had forgotten.”
“No doubt my advertising was too persuasive,” she said, teasing. She could feel that she had got out from under it. “If I know Lohania, she put you on a list to be tried and there was never a chance she would forget.”
“Can we get on with program?” Roger asked in a bored voice. He was not feeling warm and friendly toward Lark. No doubt somewhere in his head he was wondering if Lark was that good a lover and if Kiley preferred him and did she really like oral sex that much? Sex could get you in trouble, but sometimes it could get you out, Vida thought. She had flattered Lark to the core. He could not quite look at her, but glanced and then withdrew, glanced and withdrew. If they were alone, he might counterattack by asking why, then, she had chosen not to live with him in 1974, but they were hardly alone, and he could not expect a chance to question her. How much could what she said matter now, with Kiley at his side? She was protected from the consequences of flirting with him. Why did she feel that way, as if he embodied a chilling fate, the grim, in some ways helpless, ascetic man she might end up with? For all Lark’s virtues and Joel’s weaknesses, she preferred Joel. Flesh and tsurris; hot bothersome kvetchy talk and sex.
“The antinuke movement is nonviolent” Roger said when she finished her presentation. “What makes you think they’d welcome our intervention?”
“In the antiwar movement we had pacifist groups and revolutionary groups. In any viable movement, there’s a vast spectrum. Same with civil rights, women’s issues. They can’t exclude us if we don’t join their groups. They can’t judge what issues we choose to work on any more than we can choose their strategies.”
”So you don’t think they’d welcome us?” Eva asked.”
“Hell, no,” she said. “Do you want to be welcomed?”
“Sometimes” Eva did look at her briefly for the first time that day. “We have to be clear what we’re doing and why. Good propaganda this time, folks. And antiproperty only. No antipersonnel stuff. We have to be extra careful of that in this context where we’re arguing about saving lives in the future. There’s no saying we’re fighting a war at home now.”
Eva was supporting her! Vida let herself sit back against her chair, her tension loosening a bit.
“A revolution is a war,” Lark said. “It’s hot enough war in Africa right this moment.”
“But we’re here,” Roger said. “And it’s tepid.”
“Are you arguing for or against this proposal?” Kiley barked.
“I’m making up my mind” Roger puffed out clouds of smoke as Eva and Vida moved back surreptitiously. “Not all of us are visited by the truth instantly. Some of us think till we reach it”
“Then I take it you’re undecided on this proposal and the proposal for a new global position paper?” Kiley persisted.
“No, Kiley. I’ve made up my mind on the paper. I’m opposed. I think we’ve taken quite enough time playing academic in the last two years. We could do that as well in prison. The Network exists for two purposes: one, to service fugitives; two, as a political expression for fugitives. We can’t do political education well from underground. Anybody with a job at a college, a high school, a trade union, a newspaper can do that fifty times better. Our specialty has to be propaganda of the deed”
“Then you intend to vote with Eva and Vida?”
“I intend to work on the only proposal for action I hear coming out of this meeting. I don’t care who proposed it—I wouldn’t even mind if you had, Kiley. I want us moving again. I doubt if my decision shocks you. You had to have reached the same analysis, or you wouldn’t have been trying to maneuver me off the Board” Roger puffed more furiously.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Kiley gave a thin smile, a crescent of even white teeth. “Your recent choices of how to live your life are disconcerting in a Board member.”
“I don’t think cadre should relate only to cadre. I think that’s elitist. If we want to serve the people, we have to have some contact with them”“
“Oh. Are you recruiting your schoolteacher, then?”
“I was a high school English teacher myself, Kiley. Don’t be a snob. Your class background is showing.”
”This context is an odd one for waving class banners,” Lark said with annoyance. “This proposal is basically opportunistic. It doesn’t grow out of our politics.”
“Our politics have been growing mold,” Vida said. “We slowed down our corporate and governmental raids because the war ended there was no constituency out there for them. There’s a hundred issues, but you have to look to people to tell you which of those hundred terrible things move them …”
“A Marxist analysis should tell us what to move on, not the evening news” Kiley said. “Lark, remember in the SAW office in ‘68 when Oscar, Lohania and I launched the Con Edison project? It had everything: Labor troubles we could relate to. The consumer getting screwed. Pollution. Alternative energy—yes, we were talking about that in 1968. Public health— the incidence of respiratory diseases near generating stations. Regulatory agencies. Governmental corruption. Control by the rich and powerful. Demands for public ownership. But there was one problem: it was boring. The project died a slow, dreary death. People crept away from it and didn’t answer their phones. Fewer people came to every meeting. Finally Oscar, Lohania, and I had a fight and we buried it. An absolutely correct project with no sex appeal.”
Kiley stood. She met every pair of eyes. “You have the votes, I’ll work on it.”
Lark frowned. “I can’t go along … No, I’d better resign from the Board”
“Don’t be foolish. Accepting the temporary will of the majority is good discipline,” Kiley said to him. “It won’t hurt us to carry out a successful action. I am convinced the position paper doesn’t move the troops. This project is weak-minded and opportunistic, as you agree, but we can put together a proposal for a set of actions based on a sounder analysis by February or early March.”
According to the prevailing etiquette of the group, Kiley and Lark could not go into the next room to confer privately about whether he should resign from the Board in protest to what was obviously going to be their decision. Kiley could only glare appeal to him with her eyes and ask him to maintain discipline.
Lark cracked his knuckles in the silence, “My disagreement is too strong.”
“I don’t want you to quit, Lark. Neither Eva nor I went along with the omission of a strong gay-rights section in our last position paper, and that struck close to the bone. Neither of us resigned.” Vida asked with her eyes also. She had a moment of relief that Joel was not present to reduce her maneuverability. “Continuity is important to us. You and Kiley provide that. We built this Network in the teeth of a government at war with us and we’ve survived everything they could throw at us. Let’s survive our occasional disagreements with each other.
They’re minor compared with all we share of work and politics and history.” As if tremendously moved, she took his hand: a rhetorical gesture, but meant. She did not want Lark quitting. What kind of victory would that be? A Board without Lark would lack legitimacy.
He let her squeeze his hand while he frowned into space. “I don’t know …”
“Well, I could hold your other hand if that would help you decide” Kiley said sarcastically. “Vida likes to put a little body English on her arguments.”
Vida noticed that Roger was not joining the persuasion attempt. Either he wanted Lark off the Board, leaving him clearly the dominant male, or he couldn’t get rid of resentment about Kiley.
Eva said, “If you think we’re wrong, shouldn’t you retain the maximum leverage to affect our judgments?”
Vida gave Lark’s hand another squeeze and let go, smiling at Kiley. “Communication works on a lot of levels. Between comrades, argument should be aimed at communication. What I was trying to communicate is the depth of my respect and affection”
“Do go right ahead” Kiley snapped. “Borrow the couch”
“Kiley is having an emotion,” Eva said smiling, “It’s big and green and covered with long spines.”
Kiley glared. Vida thought that Kiley was a woman who did not take nonsense or interference from any man, including her lovers, but refused to identify with other women, who annoyed her simply by being women.
Lark drew himself up. “This is unnecessary. Of course I’ll remain on the Board. I strongly disapprove of this decision. I can’t even imagine how we’ll explain it internationally. But I’ll stay on and fight with you. I’ll work on a counterproposal. I admit, I’m surprised by Roger’s position. I’m beginning to think the time is wrong for a long analytical project. I accept responsibility for producing a counterproposal by February 28 centered on corporate profits from South Africa.”
“But you agree we proceed with this project in the interim?” Roger asked.
