The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  “It certainly didn’t sound that way when we were fucking.”

  I turned and looked at him straight on. “That’s exactly what this was for you: a fuck.”

  “Well, what was it for you? Love?”

  He said that last word with such disdain that it landed like a slap across the face. I said nothing. I just continued to get dressed—avoiding his smirking gaze. Then when I was ready to leave, I said, “I have to go over and pick up Jeff now.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I’m happy to drive you over to Lewiston tonight. There’s a Greyhound bus station.”

  “You’re throwing me out?”

  “I’m asking you to leave.”

  “All because I asked you to run away with me.”

  “That’s not it . . .”

  “Okay, because I had the audacity to challenge your image of yourself . . . to consider you special enough to want to try to make a life with you. And what do you do? You go ballistic—and tell me I’m an asshole and ask me to leave. And maybe I deserve that, because my style is just a tad confrontational. But if there’s one thing I know about getting someone to embrace revolutionary change—whether political or personal—it’s this: sometimes you have to hit them hard to shake them up.”

  “I don’t need shaking up.”

  “I think you do. But listen, I think I’m just telling you stuff you’ve told yourself dozens of times, which is why you’re screaming at the messenger. And before you bawl me out again, you don’t have to drive me to Lewiston. I’ll just get my stuff together and hit the road. I’ll be gone by the time you get back.”

  “Fine,” I said, and headed to the door. Then, when I got there, I suddenly turned back to him.

  “Stay till morning,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “So I can think this over.”

  As I walked downstairs, I deliberately passed in front of the doctor’s office to gauge Nurse Bass’s reaction to me. She was, per usual, seated behind the reception desk. She looked up as I walked by, gave me one of her usual curt nods, then returned her gaze to the Reader’s Digest. Nothing in her face hinted that she had heard anything while Toby and I were upstairs. I walked on over to her house, trying to stay calm, trying to sort through the jumble of thoughts and fears that were racing around my head. I had been a fool to become so furious at Toby—because what he said had been fundamentally true. I did feel trapped. I did feel thwarted. I did feel unloved—and I knew how much I was to blame for being in a place I didn’t want to be in. Just as I was flattered, dazzled, by the fact that Tobias Judson—star radical extraordinaire, a pinup among women lefties—actually wanted to run away with me. And he seemed genuine enough that he was willing to fight with me about it. How right he was about the way I had embraced the complacent option. And how I wanted to get back into bed with him at the earliest possible moment . . . preferably as soon as Jeff was down for the night.

  But. But. But. The voice of reason—of boring play-it-safe conformity—kept whispering in my ear. Let’s say you run off with the guy. You do the unthinkable—you abandon your son, leaving him behind with his father—and hit the road with the amazing Mr. Judson. He brings you everywhere. You meet all his famous friends. You go to Washington and have lunch with Senator McGovern. You go to Chicago and talk politics with Abbie Hoffman. You go to New York and visit Columbia, where he’s treated like a radical deity—the John Reed of our times. You stay in hotels, motels, and friends’ spare beds. You make love every night and the sex is never less than three-orgasm good. You sit in on meetings where he pitches an article to the editor of Ramparts or Carey McWilliams at The Nation. You attend the lunch where he talks over his book idea with an editor at Grove Press. Your parents approve of your choice of guy—and have few qualms about your walking out on your spouse and child (“It’s about time you did something extreme,” your mother tells you. “And frankly, I should have walked out on you and the Professor when you were five and I knew you were going to fuck up my life.”). You are the envy of all those women you see at Toby’s talks (besides everything else, he’s also on a lecture circuit). You try to bask in his glory, but secretly feel like nothing more than an appendage. And no matter how good the sex is . . . no matter how interesting the people you meet are . . . you are haunted by one simple, terrible thought: You haven’t simply left your son, you’ve also betrayed him—and in a way that would affect his life forever. You have failed him.

  And then, in the midst of all this terrible longing for Jeff, this ongoing private grief, Lover Boy announces one day that he feels a little trapped by having a full-time woman in his life; that the moment has come when “we should both experiment with other alternatives” (or some such shit). You’re devastated. You’re terrified of being abandoned. You plead with him not to turn you out, to give you another chance. Your entreaties fall on deaf ears. “Hey, everything’s ephemeral,” he says. So you grab a Greyhound heading north and end up back in Pelham, where everyone looks at you as if you are the Fallen Woman, and where Dan slams the door in your face after telling you that it’s too late for apologies or second chances. There will be no reconciliation—Dan has met a very nice, very available nurse at Bridgton Hospital who is now helping him raise Jeff and whom your little boy will consider his own mother . . . for his father will tell him (as soon as he’s able to understand such things) that his real mother abandoned him for her own selfish, venal needs.

  By the time I reached Babs’s house, I was thoroughly spooked. I knocked on the door. It opened. Babs was holding Jeff in her arms. He gave me a big smile—and, per usual, my heart melted.

  “I can’t thank you enough for giving me the extra couple of hours today,” I said.

  “Well, he was no trouble whatsoever,” she said. “You manage to get some sleep?”

  “A little.”

  “You sure look like you’ve just gotten out of bed,” she said. “And if I was you, I’d try to get a big long sleep tonight. If you don’t mind me saying so, you could use it.”

  “Well, thank God it’s the weekend.”

  “I hear ya. Have a good one, hon.”

  As I walked back into the apartment, the smell of frying garlic and tomatoes filled my nostrils. Toby was in the kitchen, adding ground beef to a hot, olive-oily skillet.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Why not?” he said. “I mean, I like to cook, we have to eat, and anyway, I thought it would be a nice peace offering.”

  I put Jeff into his playpen, walked over, and put my arms around Toby.

  “Peace offering accepted,” I said, kissing him deeply. “And I’m sorry for—”

  He put his finger to my lips and said, “You don’t have to explain anything.”

  Another long, heady kiss. Then, “There’s still a bottle of Chianti left,” he said. “Why don’t you get it opened?”

  I did as commanded—and as I worked the corkscrew, I glanced into the bedroom and noticed that not only had he pulled the mattress back onto the bed, but he had also remade it perfectly . . . right down to the hospital corners.

  “My, you were raised well,” I said, nodding toward the bedroom.

  “Well, my mom threatened to take back my bar mitzvah money if I didn’t make the bed every . . .”

  The phone rang. I picked it up, fully expecting to hear Dan’s voice. Instead, I found myself talking to a stranger.

  “Hi, can I speak with Jack Daniels?” he asked, his voice low and edgy.

  “Who?” I asked. Immediately Toby stopped stirring the sauce and looked over at me.

  “Jack Daniels,” the voice said, sounding impatient.

  “There’s nobody with that name here,” I said.

  “He told me he’d be there.”

  “Look, you must have the wrong number.”

  “No, this is the right number.”

  “And I’m telling you there is no Jack Daniels here.”

  “Yes, there is,” Toby said, hurrying out of the ki
tchen and relieving me of the phone.

  “Hi, it’s me,” he said into the mouthpiece, his voice barely more than a whisper.

  “Toby, what’s going on?” I demanded. But he silenced me with a wave of the hand and then showed me his back. I stared at him, wide-eyed, wondering why someone had called Toby here, and why the sinister-sounding guy on the line referred to Toby by an alias. I couldn’t read Toby’s face because every time I tried to look at him straight on, he turned away. Nor was he giving anything away on the phone, as his end of the conversation was monosyllabic: “Yeah . . . right . . . I see . . . When? . . . You sure? . . . How long? . . . You saw what? . . . And that’s it? . . . Okay, okay . . . Got it . . . Yeah . . . Right now . . . Yeah, tonight . . . Done.”

  After he hung up, he avoided my gaze. But I could see that he was looking blanched and nervous.

  “Oh fuck, the sauce,” he said, dashing over to the frying pan and stirring the congealed contents. From the way he was attacking the garlic, tomatoes, and meat it was evident that he was nervous.

  “What was that all about?” I asked.

  Silence. He kept stirring the pan.

  “Who was that on the phone?” I asked.

  Silence. He kept stirring the pan.

  I walked directly over to him, turned the heat off the pan, and pulled the spoon out of his hand.

  “Tell me what is going on,” I said.

  He walked over to the table upon which I had left the Chianti bottle, poured himself a glass, and drained it in one go. Then he said, “You have to drive me to Canada tonight.”

  NINE

  IT TOOK A moment to sink in.

  “What did you just say?” I asked quietly.

  He met my gaze. “You have to drive me to Canada tonight.”

  It was the use of the imperative that got me. No Could you please . . . Instead You have to . . . as if I had no choice.

  I studied him carefully and immediately his eyes betrayed his fear.

  “I don’t have to do anything, Toby,” I said, my voice as composed as his own.

  “Yes, you do. Otherwise the feds could show up here at any moment . . .”

  The feds. As in: Federal Bureau of Investigation. I felt a stab of terrible panic—but tried not to show it.

  “And why would the feds be showing up here?” I asked, reasonableness itself.

  “Because they’re looking for me.”

  “And why are they looking for you?”

  “Because . . .”

  He paused.

  “Because what, Mr. Jack Daniels? Is that your code name or some such shit?”

  “We never use real names on the phone, just in case someone’s listening to the call.”

  “And why would somebody be interested in listening to your calls?”

  “Because of who I am, what I do.”

  “Yeah, but what you do is rabble-rouse, and occupy university administration buildings, and write the occasional j’accuse article in small-circulation lefty magazines.”

  “True, but I’ve also had an affiliation with a certain group . . .”

  “What certain group?”

  He poured himself another glass of wine and drained it in one go.

  “The Weather Underground.”

  Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit. The Weather Underground was the violent, radical wing of the student protest movement—a collection of shadowy “revolutionaries” who thought nothing of using dynamite to achieve their so-called political aims.

  “You’re a Weatherman?” I asked.

  “Not exactly. As I said before, I have an affiliation with them . . .”

  “An affiliation? What does that mean—you’re a subcontractor?”

  “When I was the head of Students for a Democratic Society at Columbia, I was in contact with an entire range of radical groups—from the Panthers to the Weathermen. And since most of the Weathermen came out of the SDS, we were particularly close to them. So close that, when I moved to Chicago, some of the group out there got in touch with me. I’ve never openly endorsed their use of confrontational violence—even though I do believe that, for revolutionary change . . .”

  “Why are the feds chasing you?”

  A pause. He started reaching for the wine bottle again.

  “You don’t need another drink to tell me,” I said.

  He moved his hand away and instead reached for my pack of cigarettes. He lit one, took two deep drags, and said, “Did you read about a bombing in Chicago a couple of weeks ago?”

  “A government office or something?”

  “The regional office of the Defense Department, to be exact about it.”

  “You bombed that office?”

  “Hell no. Like I said, I would never do anything violent.”

  “You’d just support the people who were doing it.”

  “Political transformation demands theorists, activists, and anarchists. And yeah, it was the Weathermen who blew up the building. The thing was . . . they set the charge to go off in the middle of the night, thinking there was nobody there. But they didn’t realize that the Defense Department had decided to start using a firm of private security guards to keep an eye on things at night. There were two guards in the building at the time. They were both killed.”

  “Hey, it was just a couple of working stiffs. In your book, it was a small price to pay for political transformation.”

  “That’s not how I think.”

  “Bullshit—but that’s beside the point. Did the security guys have wives and children?”

  He took another drag on his cigarette.

  “I think so,” he said.

  “You think?”

  “Both married, five kids between them.”

  “You must have been very proud of your Weathermen friends.”

  “They weren’t my friends,” he said, sounding angry.

  “Comrades, then?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “So if you didn’t plant the bomb,” I said, ignoring his question, “then why are you on the run?”

  “Because after the bombing went wrong, the two operatives stayed with me for a couple of days.”

  “In other words, you harbored two murderers.”

  “I let them chill at my place, that’s all.”

  “But isn’t it a criminal offense to let murderers chill out chez vous?”

  “They are not murderers.”

  “In my book, if they killed two men, they are murderers . . . and don’t you go telling me that, because it was a political act, it’s not murder.”

  “Think what you want,” he said. “The fact is: once the heat died down, the two guys staying with me slipped out of town—to points unknown . . . at which point it was suggested to me by some people in the organization that I get out of Dodge for a while too, just in case the feds or the police put two and two together and worked out that I had been hiding the operatives. Which is exactly what happened.”

  “How did they work that out?”

  “I didn’t get all the details on the phone, but it seems there was an informer in the organization, because the feds raided my apartment last night. And according to the guy who called me, they found the number of Eastern Airlines on a notepad by the phone. And from there they were able to . . .”

  “Hang on,” I said. “You told me that you hitched out here.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another. After lighting it up, he said, “That was a lie. I flew from O’Hare to LaGuardia, then changed planes to Portland.”

  “Why Portland?”

  “You don’t want to know this.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Because when word got out that we’d been infiltrated . . . and I was told it was best to vanish for a while . . . in my panic I called your dad.”

  “You what?”

  “Look, your dad’s always been a great friend and I’ve always turned to him for advice.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “And h
e advised you to use my place in Maine as a hideout?”

  Now he did avoid my furious gaze.

  “Not exactly. But he did say that, if I did happen to be in Maine . . .”

  “Oh, bullshit!” I yelled. “You were told to get lost, you called John Winthrop Latham for advice, and he said . . .”

  I stopped myself because I remembered exactly my conversation with Dad that evening—how I mentioned that Toby said he was just bumming around the country, having “fled” his doctoral thesis at the University of Chicago. And what was my father’s reply?

  “Typical of Toby to hit the road like that. He might be the brightest kid I’ve run across in thirty years, but he can never apply himself when it comes to the long haul. One of the best public speakers I’ve ever heard—articulate, funny, ferociously well-read, and a really good writer to boot. You should have seen the stuff he published in Ramparts and The Nation. Great style—and a brilliant analytical mind . . .”

  And then, “Can you put him up for a couple of nights?”

  Dad knew all along what Toby had done, what he was actually fleeing. Dad set me up.

  “. . . and he said, ‘My daughter has a place in Maine. Quiet little town, just a couple of hours from the Canadian border. And best of all, her husband’s away right now . . .’”

  “That’s not exactly how he put it.”

  “Let me ask you something,” I said. “If your face has been all over the papers as a wanted man . . .”

  “According to the guy on the phone, the feds haven’t gone public on this yet. They raided my apartment, they want to talk to me, but I’m not on the Ten Most Wanted list. They know who planted the bomb and have established that I simply ‘aided and abetted.’”

  “Still, why didn’t you just make a run for it to the border?”

  “The thought did cross my mind—and I discussed it with my comrades. But there was a genuine worry that, if the feds were already onto me, they’d be watching the border. Anyway, even if they weren’t onto me just then, the problem for someone with a big FBI file for allegedly subversive activities is that once you cross into Canada, you can’t get back into the States without, at the very least, getting the third degree from the American authorities.”