Harry was still.
“But, but,” said Colson. “This is a silly time for that, my love. I mean just when The Artisan has been reborn. This mockup is brilliant. And to think we were all so afraid of failure.”
“And of success,” she said.
“What was that, my dear?”
“Listen, this mockup is a good start, but only that. We could have much more direct reporting from Latin America and Southern Africa; a broader review policy.…” She knew she wasn’t talking to either of them, but just enjoying the rush of her own voice. “Some hard investigative pieces and wider circulation in the West.”
“That’s all very well, but hang on, girl, and look for a moment at what Harry’s accomplished here. The multiple review is superb. The Spanish piece is a real coup.”
Susan had no reason, no inclination to expose Harry. He and Colson would find out about each other soon enough.
She said, “Look, I’ll outline the ideas. You can think about them. If you feel they make sense, I’ll stay and help. If you don’t, I’ve got another job.”
Susan and Colson turned to Harry who looked terribly tired.
“Yes,” Harry said. “They’re sensible ideas. Perhaps we could discuss them after lunch?”
“Well, well,” answered Colson. “Of course we’re open to change. Just look at this issue, real revolutionary editing.”
“I know,” said Susan. She picked up her copy of The Artisan and went back to her desk. “See you after lunch,” she said as she closed the door on them.
Newsworthy
John Forester, 59, of 18993 Montez Drive, Walnut Creek, reported that his wife, Gertrude, 62, was missing on Tuesday. He had not seen her since Saturday night when the couple attended a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at the Opera House in San Francisco.
Forester, an insurance salesman, said that his wife had been calm and collected throughout the performance. Afterwards, they stopped for coffee at the Yum Yum Room. Mrs. Forester went to the lavatory and did not return.
Forester said his wife had shown no signs of worry lately. Two months ago, she had mentioned divorce, but apparently became reconciled after a long talk and a visit with the family doctor. Mrs. Forester, an active volunteer at their church and a local hospital, has no past record of instability. (Picture, page five.)
V
Stray
Susan felt like the stray cat from In Our Time as she sat shivering in the parlor of the dark rooming house on Admiral Road. Outside the yellowed lace curtains snow flurried with relentless delicacy. The parlor was heated by an electric fire. This Edwardian contraption provided an illusion of warmth as a light wheel circled under translucent plastic coals. Watching the prism turn, she tried to time the colors against the urgent balance piece of the marble mantle clock.
“Far out light show, eh?”
He was a freak. Blond ponytail. Splotchy hiking boots. Fatigued jacket. Susan wondered if they played acid rock here all night long. Probably no one in this rooming house sleeps after midnight, she thought. Probably they’ll think I’m some sort of Miss Priscilla.
“Yeah, it almost keeps you warm,” she bluffed composure. “Say, do you know when Robert is coming back?”
“You can never tell about Robert,” laughed the handsome young man. He’s the busiest absentee landlord in the Annex. But look, here’s the switch for the fire,” he knelt down gracefully. “All you’ve got so far is the light show. This is how you turn on the heating filaments.”
“My name’s, uh, uh, Susan,” she said, blushing.
“I’m Phil. Musta been a hard day, Susan.”
She nodded and looked down at her lap to hide the blushing.
“How about a cup of camomile tea?”
“Right on,” she said, realizing this was not Phil’s dialect. He was more cooled out. Laid back. She felt auntish, the way she always felt with hippies. Always so much older. And consequently younger—as if she hadn’t lived through anything. Virginal. She hadn’t made the trips. She had stayed home and worked.
“What do you do?” she heard herself saying. The wrong question. Why was she so obsessed with what people did? Bourgeois bitch. Was she messing up on purpose to prove that she wasn’t capable of living with hippies?
He handed her a cracked mug of tea, baptism after the mea culpa.
“Depends on where you’re coming from,” Phil was saying. “I do music. I do meditation. I do boxes.”
“Boxes?”
“In a packing plant up on Dupont, loading boxes of gears to be sent down to Buffalo.”
“What sort of music?” she asked, enjoying the gentle tea. She had never liked camomile before. Next time she would remember not to use sugar.
“I listen to what I play,” he rubbed the stick pointing out of his back pocket.
“A flautist. Wow.” “Flautist” was definitely wrong. “Wow” sounded OK.
“And you?” he asked. “You look like a pretty classy lady to be moving into one of Big Bob’s half-refinished houses. You break up with your husband or something?”
“Does it show on my face?” Susan asked, stricken.
“On your hands,” he smiled.
The ring mark was visible, whiter than Ontario winter, and her hands were shaking, despite the warm mug.
“I’m kind of worried,” she said, “about, about … my cat. She’s only a little thing. I just got her. I mean I just found her. A stray. Does he mind?”
“Roberto? You bet. He hates all animals and other living things. You’d never be able to hide her. The vacant room is next to his. And he’s got a nose like a narc dog.”
She lowered her eyes. The hands. Her damn hands.
Three hands. He was massaging her knuckles.
“But my room is in the attic,” he said quietly. “Good for flute playing. Good for hiding strays.”
Phil’s smile of conspiracy now turned to greeting as a tall man entered the kitchen.
“Robert, this is Susan, our new housemate.”
“So you’ve seen the room and it’s OK?” Robert asked, only mildly surprised.
“No, not exactly,” she said.
But of course she would take it, despite the broken concrete floor and the water-stained wallpaper. She would take it for her stray cat.
Phil happened to be around the evening she moved in. He offered to help her carry the boxes.
“Thanks, but I can do it on my own,” she said.
“Boxes,” he reminded her. “I’m an expert on boxes.”
“Thank you,” she said, resigned to his kindness.
First he carried the perforated shoe box up to the attic. Then the boxes of books to the second floor. “All these books,” he exclaimed. “Too heavy”? she asked. “No, he did this all day, remember, boxes? But so many. When did she find time to relax?”
“Intellectuals get uptight relaxing,” interrupted Mandy from the second floor landing. She introduced herself as a “radikeel med student,” explaining she always tried to forget most of what she learned right after the exam. She said she was into med school for the nitrous oxide. She would catch them later, after her anatomy lab test.
Susan also met Christine, melting down the mahogany stairway in a long black skirt and a pink satin bed jacket. Phil had told her that Christine was a lesbian, that she read Tarot cards and made papier-mâché puppets. Christine smiled demurely and Susan could see she wasn’t one of the dyke feminists, but more the Natalie Barney type. She had read a lot about lesbians this year.
Suddenly Susan felt like Sister Joseph Marie on a missionary field assignment. She was wearing a perfectly acceptable—even wrinkled—work shirt, and jeans. But she was sure they could all see through to her starched habits.
This was a new experience, a growth situation, as Guy would say in his own earnest, tedious way. She would learn a lot. She might learn how not to be straight. Hip? Mellow? She might at least learn the vocabulary.
“I hope you’ll like it here,” Phil said as he fi
xed the tea. “You and ….?”
She was confused, blushing at her confusion.
“Our refugee?” he asked.
“Oh, my cat’s name is Imogene.” Her laughter was the only visible trembling until she closed the door to her room.
Lying on the paisley floor pillow, she pulled Carol’s old purple sleeping bag over herself. Just fine. She had had enough of beds for a while. Beds with embroidered pillowcases and floral sheets. Making their bed had been like laying a goddamn altar. This was simple, comfortable, easy to convert. She hated excess. Comfortable. Two in the morning. Comfortable, but she couldn’t sleep. She ran through the projects in her mind. The layout was done. The darkroom time was scheduled. She could easily have the paste-up finished by tomorrow. Yes, work was fine. She and Hilary would go to the National Ballet on Saturday night. Sunday, she would take the yoga class. Letters. Maybe a good read, listening to the Pachelbel Canon. Sleep. She tried to remember the gigue after the Canon. Sleep, she whispered gently. Everything was settled. Why couldn’t she sleep? What did acid rock sound like anyway?
The sherry was just for hospitality, she scolded herself as she poured a glass now. Probably shouldn’t have bought it. She had passed by Brights three times that day. She didn’t buy it for herself, more for a cordiality to friends. She would reassure her visitors that this new home was a civilized place, not a soiled old rooming house three blocks from wino land. A spare, but civilized refuge. She had stored the marriage accessories in Robert’s damp basement: her linens, the unbreakable dinnerware and the silver chafing dishes. She felt like an immigrant. Like her mother and Rosa Kaburi. The bottle of sherry would ease the transition. If someone dropped by, she would feel less like an evacuee and more like a passenger on an ocean liner—temporarily, voluntarily homeless. A traveler.
“This is the day of my liberation.” She poured another sherry.
The woody sweetness of Guy’s parents’ living room used to encompass her after one glass of their Bristol Cream. Sherry was one part of the Thompson legacy she would keep. The only alcohol her mother ever drank was cans of Budweiser from the fridge. Sour. Urine before it made its own. Sherry would lend Susan a certain elegance, an immunity.
“This is the day of my liberation.” All evening she had been telling herself how immune she was. “This is the day of my liberation.” A claim. “This is the day of my liberation.” A litany. Without an amen.
So what had she sacrificed with the divorce? Their move to Cuba had become a pipe dream. Children she could have with someone else. Or on her own. Hilary was right. What a fixation to think you needed to have a man to have a child.
Ruth Thompson had been as sweet as her woodened sherry the last time they spoke. “I’m so sorry,” her mother-in-law had sighed. “I had no idea you children were having troubles. Yes, probably it is wise to part, for a while. What will you ever do with all your things? The silver? Oh, no, don’t send it back. That sounds so permanent.” (Susan knew, deep down, that Ruth liked her. Once, after two hours of civilized sherry, Ruth had told Susan she admired, maybe even envied her independence.) “Well, all right, send it back if that makes you happier. I’ll keep it here for you. Yes, yes, we shall continue to write.”
Now, pouring herself a second glass—the last glass, she promised—Susan lay back down on the paisley pillow. “Do this in remembrance of me,” she thought foggily. How impressed she had been when Guy told her that four generations of his family had attended Berkeley. That he had relatives, ancestors and descendants in the state legislature. A half-million dollar vineyard harvested into a two million dollar shopping center. Sherry in the parlor. Women confined in the needlepoint. The first afternoon she had alone with Ruth, they spent tranquillizing the poodles so they could be clipped.
Still, there had been security as a Thompson. There had always been that security with Guy, before there was anything else and after there was nothing else.
Someone was sitting outside her window the next morning, in the maple tree. Susan thought it was the telephone man at first. She felt relieved because they had promised to install the line yesterday and she really couldn’t work without a telephone. Then she noticed that the cat was under his arm. Shaking herself into morning, she realized it was Phil. He rapped lightly on the window and she let him in.
“You looked like the telephone man,” she said stupidly.
“More like a cat burglar, eh?”
They both laughed.
“We got on real well last night,” Phil said. “She snuggled right up to me. I left the window open. Must have gone out to stalk zebra in the night ’cause when I woke up, there she was, shivering out on a limb. Say,” he touched Susan’s bare shoulder, “so are you.”
The window was still open and it was starting to snow. She was wearing a summer nightgown. He asked if he could join her under the sleeping bag. She breathed deeply and nodded, repeating to herself, “This is the day of my liberation.”
The second time that morning she was wakened by the telephone man. The doorbell rang downstairs. A knock on her door. A loud voice. “Telephone man.”
“Got to get to work, man,” Phil yawned sleepily. “You can put Imogene in my room when you leave the house. The window’s closed now.”
After that, she went up often to visit the little stray. She insisted on maintaining separate quarters, relishing the security of her own room. During the day she went to The Artisan; afterwards she usually had a meeting. He was steady at his packing plant job and spent evenings with his flute and Imogene in the attic. Late at night, he would float into her room, shut off the ceiling lamp and light one of his sandalwood candles. So they came together in the dark and on weekends in High Park.
How she was touched by the compliments from this pony-tailed freak. Susan had always been embarrassed, helpless about her straightness. (Such was the dowry from parochial school. Better on discipline than décolleté. When she graduated from St. Mary’s, she couldn’t understand the difference between mix n’ match. Even now, in her jeans, she looked like an unfaded ingénue. Her Levis were zipped when everyone else’s were buttoned.) Phil thoroughly enjoyed being her tutor. With him, she heard her first Procol Harum, ate her first hashcake and came close to taking acid.
“How are you doing, dear?” Susan’s mother phoned from California, ever hopeful of redeeming her back to civilization.
“Mellow,” Susan said, inhaling a joint and reaching over to stroke Phil’s thigh.
“Beg pardon,” her mother said.
“Fine,” Susan said, remembering the old language, assuming her former, solid voice, her cheerful daughter tone. “Did I tell you about my cat?”
Susan began to understand how much of her generation she had missed. In college, she had no time between her cafeteria job and her studying for the Grateful Dead or Big Sur. She read Rolling Stone once, for a journalism class. She visited Haight Ashbury twice, taking out-of-town relatives on Sunday afternoons to view the hippies. Marriage had been a worthy sequel, working every night, reading together on Saturdays. (They tried earnestly to learn about Canada, another guilt to expiate. Not only were they white, middle-class and heterosexual, but they were American.) Perhaps that was what was wrong with marriage. Perhaps it was just too straight.
Although Phil had never read The Artisan, he said if that’s how she spent her time, he wanted to see a copy. He didn’t get beyond the last couple of pages. He always read from the back. They had some good talks about the office and he stopped making women’s lib jokes after a while.
“Watch it,” she had said, “I’m serious about feminism.”
“I can see that” he laughed, adding, “politics is cool.”
“Politics is not cool,” she said.
He couldn’t handle the dialectic.
“I know you’d agree with me if we discussed it,” she said.
But he didn’t feel like it.
So she accepted a moratorium on socialism, feminism and the counterculture because she was tired
of figuring things out. She wrote to her friends that he was a nice guy, a natural non-sexist. They had no struggles about authority or fucking or washing the dishes.
“We can still be friends, can’t we?” Guy telephoned to ask. “I thought we might get together.”
“Sure,” she said, out of guilt, holding the cat close to her cheek.
“The abortion,” he said abruptly. “We never really talked about it. You made that decision, you know. I want to deal with that. I feel I’m still mourning.…”
“Friends,” she spoke absently, wistfully, directly into the cat’s eyes.
“Don’t get ironic with me, Susan. I’m just trying to be open with you.”
Sometimes Phil talked about a muse in Afghanistan, a spiritual leader, but she did not press him about it. Whenever he talked about leaving, he promised he would bequeath her the half-melted sandalwood candles, a collection of Blind Faith, a finely polished cheroot and one of his flutes.
He wasn’t a very good flautist. And whenever she thought of leaving him, it was because she didn’t really like his music.
It would be up to the cat to choose between them.
Someone Else’s
Baby
The Food Coop met every Saturday morning at ten. Ted waved to Maureen as she parked her bike. He was armed with someone else’s baby, a kid who was being raised in his commune.
Maureen helped him weigh the tomatoes.
“We broke up a couple of weeks ago,” he told her. “It was Maryanna’s decision. I still don’t get it. She claims there isn’t anyone else. What did I do?”
Maureen shrugged and tried to look sympathetic. Ted was all right for a man—gentle and pretty un-oppressive. “Maybe Maryanna just wanted to be alone.”
“But we had so many plans.”
Maureen was glad he didn’t notice her brief smile.
He explained all he could explain. “I told her she could sleep with anyone she wanted. I even offered to introduce her to this new guy at the Institute. You know I’ve always been a supporter of women’s liberation.”
Movement Page 6
