“No, he’s in department stores,” she said. “Mother’s beginnings are a bit more posh, I suppose. You haven’t told me your name.”
“Robert Vishniak.”
“I’m Gwendolyn Smythe.”
“Well, Gwendolyn Smythe,” he said, summoning his courage now, taking a deep breath. “Wanna get out of here?”
In front of all of them, he helped Gwendolyn to her feet. She was the one who was shaky now, but he felt suddenly alert. A boy lying in front of them grasped her ankle, not letting go. Robert stepped hard on the boy’s wrist, ignoring his groan of pain as he moved Gwendolyn out of the way. Then he put his hand around her waist and felt the eyes of all he knew watching.
Cates moved over next to Tracey, occupying the space Robert and Gwendolyn had left. Robert could hear his voice floating up through the crowd. “They were your ’ludes, Tracey,” Cates said. “Fucking Vishniak. After all you’ve done for that phony.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Gwendolyn
Gwendolyn told Robert that she was studying at Boston University and she took him, that first night, to a roomy two-bedroom, two-bath apartment in a doorman building on the fancy end of Commonwealth Avenue, away from the noisy fraternities and crowded dormitories of the university. To Robert the apartment was very adult: the living room had a nonworking fireplace and was furnished with a flowered couch, a coffee table, a wing chair, and an apricot-colored area rug. The pale wood of the floorboards seemed to gleam even in the late-afternoon light.
“All this is yours?” Robert asked.
“I rent it.” She took his hand and led him down a long hallway and into an enormous white bedroom, big and high with a canopy bed, like something out of a children’s story. Certainly she could have been a princess to him, as much a mirage as the ones in stories, with her accent and how she’d fallen on him seemingly out of nowhere. He stepped close to her, wondering why the stench of the afternoon had not clung to her. He could smell his own sweat, and the smoke that had been all around them, felt embarrassed by it, but Gwendolyn made everyone she came near smell a little of her perfume, a mixture of her lavender shampoo, a certain mysterious foreign soap she used in the bath, followed by a lavender talcum powder, and then her body itself—her very own particular smell, as individual as a fingerprint.
“Why were your lips moving?” she asked him, as if out of nowhere.
“What?”
“Your lips. Out there at the concert, when you put your hand out to me, your lips were moving. Are you religious?”
He laughed. “No, but I think I was praying.”
“For world peace?” she asked seriously. She stood closer, her hips almost but not quite squared against his thighs, her fingers now at the back of his neck, touching him lightly with her fingertips.
“For you to notice me, and walk over,” he breathed.
“That’s sweet,” she said. “What I noticed were your lips, you know? Such full lips, as if you’ve just eaten something very juicy. I wondered what it would be like to feel those lips all over my —”
He kissed her, ran his fingers through her hair, then pulled at the arms of her loose blouse to reveal the whiteness of her shoulders, and her collarbones and neck.
“You’re awfully slow about all this,” she said, and reached over her head, removing her shirt altogether.
They spent most of those first few weeks making love; he wanted her all the time, and she was obliging. No one interrupted. No one pounded on a door or barged in. There were hardly any phone calls, and when the phone rang they ignored it. He had chased women, and women had chased him, but often, when he got down to things, many of them seemed to be submitting. Even the girls who announced they were on the pill, who were reaching for something modern and new, still made him feel that they were giving in for him and not for themselves. This had not stopped him from enjoying himself, hardly, but afterward he felt the slight twinge, the ego, the man’s peculiarly secret insecurity—had he done right by her? How to respond when a woman says yes as if for something larger than herself—a cause, a birth control pill, a domineering sister, or the urging of a man’s insistent desire?
But Gwendolyn said yes because she wanted him; he felt that, felt the wonderful selfishness of her desire existing next to his. She was not aggressive, and rarely did she approach him first, but when they made love she moaned and whispered obscenities in his ear, and tore at his clothes and sometimes even sobbed, so taken over was she by her climax. After making love, he held Gwendolyn in his arms, startled by the emotion of the whole experience, and told her that he’d never leave her—which he’d whispered to more than a few women already—and how strange, all of a sudden, to mean it.
They did not say much about themselves in the beginning. Gwendolyn, like many of her peers, saw little distinction between the political and the personal, and so they listened to records, talked about articles in the paper, and she tried to explain her politics—a patchwork concoction that seemed half Socialist, half whimsy. She knew all about Vietnam, for instance, but had not heard of Laos; she was devastated by the recent death of Martin Luther King, believed that the Black Panthers were onto something important—the bookstore where she worked was the first in the city to have a section of writings by colored writers—but had no knowledge of Jim Crow. He chalked it up to her being a foreigner—she read newspapers, but for someone who’d spent her whole life in fancy schools, her education seemed scattered, slipshod. But mostly, in those early weeks, they made love, showered together, watched television, and said very little. It was a great thing to be able to be quiet with a woman. Girls had always tired him out with so much talking, but being with Gwendolyn was all patient calm and quiet. He could be himself.
They met in early April, and by the end of the month Robert had moved in; he had more or less been living there anyway, and she had plenty of room. Luckily, only three weeks remained in the semester and it was the girls, mostly, whom the school went after for cohabitation. He did not think of Tracey, whom he never seemed to run into when he returned to the room. He didn’t think of Cates or Zinnelli or any of them. His mind was utterly singular—it was as if these others had never existed.
But once ensconced in the apartment, having moved all his things from the dorm, he did not see as much of Gwendolyn as he’d expected. She maintained a very busy routine, running from one activity to another. There was her job at the bookstore, and she went to various political meetings, including those held by that same group of draft resisters in Arlington who had come to Robert’s dorm the year before. That she, as a foreigner and a woman, was a tourist in all this and would never be drafted did not seem to matter to her.
When four from her group were put on trial in Boston, including Dr. Benjamin Spock, the famous baby doctor, Gwendolyn’s zeal knew no bounds. She spent hours making posters, circulating petitions and going to rallies outside the courthouse. Everyone around them seemed caught up—the fever for change had even spread to Europe. In France student riots broke out—on television they looked much like the riots and takeovers in Berkeley and Columbia and now Harvard, except in another language with subtitles and better-looking girls. President Johnson announced that he would not run for another term and promised that the bombing in North Vietnam would come to a halt—but a few weeks earlier Westmoreland had ordered another 200,000 troops.
Robert wanted to believe that his generation’s actions might actually change something, but more than anything he found himself searching, not for a larger truth but for a loophole, an angle, a way out of his own dilemma. He reminded himself that he still had time, that he was resourceful and would figure a way out. Zinnelli told him that if he lost fifty pounds, got down to 120, he’d be turned down as useless. The campus rabbi suggested he get ordained. He was still a Vishniak, certain that if he let down his guard for just one moment, gave up self-interest for that of the collective, he’d be fucked.
Loving Gwendolyn was the closest thing he’d found to a cause. Let thos
e who could afford it have their revolution. When Gwendolyn invited him to her meetings, he told her that going into churches made him uneasy, and he sensed he’d get little solace in a place where people advocated going to jail. If there was one place he knew he’d never survive, it was prison.
But Gwendolyn was energized, engaged utterly by the issues of the times. Robert had no real sense of what she was studying. When he asked her, she said that she was taking a variety of courses. But there were no books of hers around the house, only various periodicals. She had at least three newspaper subscriptions—to the Globe, New York Times, and International Herald Tribune—yet the place was rarely cluttered. Back issues disappeared as new ones arrived. He assumed that the maid took them away, but Gwendolyn didn’t even bring books home from the bookstore where she worked, though she got them practically for free. Finally, trying to figure out where to put the cumbersome boxes of his own books that now lined the halls, he asked her at breakfast one morning, not sure when he’d see her again that day: When on earth did she study? Where were her books?
“I keep my books in my library carrel,” she told him. “It’s too quiet to study here.”
Robert laughed. “Is there a party at the BU library that no one’s told me about?”
“Don’t tease me,” she said. But she looked at him uneasily, biting on the skin of her thumb, which she did often, so that it was thick with callus; the only ugly part of Gwendolyn was her hands, fingers pink and calloused, cuticles ripped, as if repeatedly gnawed on by small animals.
“Put your books on the empty shelves in the living room. Then we’ll have books around. Since you have these decorating prejudices.”
He took a deep breath. He was not used to giving real information about his family or how he’d grown up, but Disston Street was always on his mind in one way or another—compare/contrast/compare/contrast; then and now, then and now, like an endless freshman literature paper. “We never owned any books,” he said quietly. “The shelves were for the television, or knickknacks. No one I knew growing up owned any books of their own.”
“How’d you learn to read?”
“Library,” he said. “Every week we took out books and returned them.”
“Libraries are so much fairer, don’t you think?” She got up and immediately began uncrating his boxes. “I can leave a little later today,” she said. “I’ll put them up there myself.”
HE LIKED TO PRETEND that they were alone in the world, on an island with soft, flowered sheets, sweet-smelling soaps in the bathroom, and thick, oh, such thick bath towels. Even the air felt different at Gwendolyn’s. He did not yet understand the severity of his childhood allergies, the sensitivities he had to dust mites and various cheap chemical cleaners. He did not think about the proximity of dorm rooms with teenage boys sandwiched in together, the air heavy, rank, and filled with cigarette smoke. Nor did he connect the weekly arrival at Gwendolyn’s of the middle-aged Czech maid, Dana, who banished dust and scrubbed floors with rigor, using homemade concoctions and pine oil, with the fact that his nose and eyes hardly ran, and his chest felt lighter. He only understood the final effect—for the first time in his life, he could really breathe.
A doorman held the door for him when he came with groceries, and on days when he had no classes or kitchen work that doorman was the only person he saw other than Gwendolyn. Whatever friends he’d had at Tufts he met only in classes or for the occasional beer after work. Tracey extended a few invitations, which Robert declined because it was one of Gwendolyn’s nights off or because Gwendolyn had asked something of him—and then Tracey stopped asking. Robert found himself relieved by this, happy to be away from them all. Had he just been pretending for the last three years? Was this love? Or a reaction to the times?
The only person Gwendolyn ever mentioned with any consistency was Bruno, the manager of the left-wing bookstore where she worked three nights a week. After Robert had lived with her for a few weeks, he asked to meet Bruno and see the place she talked about with such affection. She told him to come to the store that Thursday night; Bruno was there until closing.
The bookstore was just off Brattle Street. Posters of Chairman Mao, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X lined the front windows, their faces staring at him, backlit by a harsh neon bulb. A Closed sign had been hung on the front door; the lights were on but the shop seemingly empty. He found the front door unlocked—had it been left that way for him?—and turned the knob, entering to the sound of wind chimes. “Hello! Anybody here?”
Pope Paul VI looked down at Robert from the wall of the entrance, his hands outstretched above the caption “The Pill Is a No-No.”
Bruno came out from behind a curtain in the back and walked toward him. He was big and beefy, with wild, curly hair and small, slightly crossed blue eyes. His belly hung over his jeans, seemingly pinned up by the enormous peace sign that was his belt buckle. He put out his hand and, instead of shaking, made a fist. Robert knew he was expected to do the same, but he simply took his hand away. He had no desire to play at being a Black Panther.
“Gwen, he’s here! Your fucking Prince Charming!” Bruno yelled, and Gwendolyn rushed out from behind that same curtain. Had they been back there together in the dark? Before she got across the room, Bruno took several steps forward, met her halfway, and touched her arm. “We got those bags to sort through tomorrow.” He turned to Robert. “Prof at Harvard donates the stuff. Modern Soviet fiction mostly. We’re low on that.”
“The happy Soviet workers in the fields? Or reports from the Gulag?” Robert asked. “Isn’t that where they put all their writers?”
“Our government feeds us lies about Russia,” Bruno replied. “The whole Cold War is just lies piled on top of lies.”
Robert stood near the door hoping that Gwendolyn, looking over the piles of new books, would hurry up and get her coat. The place smelled of old books, dust, and a clientele that didn’t bathe. He bristled as Bruno ran his eyes up and down Gwendolyn’s body.
“You got it all wrong,” Bruno continued. “In Russia everyone has plenty of food, free medical care, nice apartments. They got the longest life expectancy on earth. Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” Robert said, signaling to Gwendolyn to hurry along.
“I’ll tell you why,” he replied, banging his hand on a shelf so that the books shook. “They don’t have to answer to the Man over there! He don’t exist.”
Robert had been hearing about the Man all his life. He felt certain he knew more about him than Bruno. More and more lately, Robert had been forced into conversations about the evils of capitalism and the glories of being poor. In Harvard Square, anyone with a leaflet about class oppression made a beeline for him, as if his face gave him away as an immigrant from the other side, a betrayer of something he didn’t even understand. Or did he just look confused? “What do you call the secret police and the purges?” Robert asked. “A man can’t listen to Miles Davis over there without getting arrested.”
“There’s no use talking to someone like you!” Bruno bellowed. “Go home, rich boy!”
“Happily,” Robert said, aware that Bruno easily had eighty pounds on him and that his chest felt heavy. “What is your father anyway?” he asked. “A dentist? From the accent, I’d say Great Neck.”
Bruno grabbed Robert by the collar and backed him up against a shelf of LPs. “You seem a little gray all of a sudden, man,” he said, as Robert heard a rushing sound in his ears.
“Brun, we’re leaving now,” Gwendolyn said calmly. “Go in the back and smoke some dope. Relax.” She put her hand on Bruno’s arm. “And here I was hoping you two would get on.”
Back out on the street, she scolded him for contradicting Bruno. “He’s a smart man.”
“No,” Robert said. “He’s a large man.” Now Robert knew why Gwendolyn had such confused opinions. Clearly it was Bruno’s fault. “And he’s an idiot.”
“You don’t understand. He trained me for my job, and he looks after me.”<
br />
“Yeah, I’ll bet he does.”
“He’s my friend!” she said. “I didn’t hear any complaints when he was giving us all that grass, and the hash, too.”
“You paid for that stuff, if I remember.”
“At a discount. He has to eat,” Gwendolyn said, raising her voice. “You don’t know what this job means to me. Robbie, what’s wrong? All the color has left your face.”
“Happens,” he gasped, coughing. It had never been this bad before. Usually the heaviness went away after a few minutes, now he felt himself unable to take even small breaths, felt as if someone were holding his head underwater. He heard that sound, the awful, squeaking sound of his desperation to breathe.
“Try to relax,” she said, taking him by the elbow and settling him on a bench nearby. Sinking. He was sinking deeper. The sidewalks and people weaved and dove.
She took his hand in hers and began to massage the palm, pressing on the center, and then she went to each finger, massaging the knuckles and joints. “Breathe, Robbie. The air is so clear tonight. Slow down. Breathe.” She had her fingers around his thumb, and as she squeezed it between her fingers, strong fingers that seemed to loosen something inside him, he felt himself calming, the rushing sound abating. Air. He felt it slowly at first, as if through the cracks of an old wall. Then his chest began to expand.
“A nurse taught that to me once. The hand has a lot of nerves.”
He leaned over and kissed her as she continued to knead the base of his thumb and then the sockets of his fingers. Yes, the hand did have a lot of nerves and now he was horny as hell. “How about we go home?”
She agreed, and they walked off quickly toward the T.
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