Storm Tide

by Marge Piercy

  She had a week before she was due in Amsterdam to catch her flight home. She stayed with Hannah in her small flat. She had not spent as much money as she had expected to. She spent it now on clothes, on accessories—exotic panty hose, a stylish bag. She experienced a frantic desire to shop, to bring home souvenirs of what she felt she had learned. I want to live well, she thought to herself. I will work hard but I want something different. I want a graceful life. A life that satisfies the senses and the brain. Yirina would have understood perfectly. She knew she would not be able to put any of her desires into effect for years, since she must establish herself as an attorney. She would be working at least sixty hours a week. But she knew what she wanted, and she would not forget. Eventually, eventually, she would reach that pleasant shore.

  JUDITH

  Judith thought that the mother or perhaps both parents might come in with her client, but the family group that trekked into her office was larger and noisier than she had expected. There were four other adults and a child. She had one of the smaller offices at Birch and Fogarty, a Boston law firm she had joined after two and a half years at Legal Aid, and she had to borrow chairs from the other associates.

  Her eyes went first to her client, looking surly and messy. When it came to court, she would have to make him clean up his act, or the judge would punish him. He was a kid from an affluent respectable family, and he had to look like one, not a bad imitation of a ghetto runner. “In this office, you will remove your hat,” she said firmly, not smiling, gesturing at the greasy wool cap he had pulled down almost to his eyes.

  “What for?”

  “To get used to looking like someone the judge should take pity on. They don’t like drug cases. It’s going to be a battle to make sure you don’t do time. The sooner you get used to taking my advice, the better our odds are.”

  Larry Stone was pouting, oozing self-pity. He was tall like his father, but looked rather water-softened, slumping in the chair. His attitude was just as it had been the first time she sat down with him, petulant and put upon. Being caught was something he shouldn’t have to endure.

  “Larry can’t go to jail!” That was his mother, now Mrs. Caldwell, talking. She was a well-kept woman with short crisp blond hair and nails that matched her pale blue designer suit. Judith was sure her gold was twenty-four karat and her earrings were real pearls. Her current husband said nothing. He looked extremely bored, glancing at his Rolex every two minutes. He was a Texan in a beige suit who resented every second he spent in her modest office.

  Her eyes kept being drawn against her will to her client’s father, Gordon Stone. Years ago when she was an undergraduate, she had gone to hear him speak. He was still an impressive presence. So far he was mostly listening, yet the room seemed to revolve around him. He was a tall lean man with dark hard blue eyes, fierce, hawklike, but his mouth was full and sensual. He had what people called good bones, meaning his face would photograph well and his features had an edge, a definition she had to call attractive, charismatic. While she was talking, she caught herself trying to figure out his age. Fifty maybe? No, he had to be older.

  She lectured on the seriousness of Larry being caught selling marijuana at B.U. He had done a sloppy job of it and someone who did not like him had reported him to the campus police. It was probable that if Gordon had a better history with the college administration, the matter would have been quietly dropped. But Gordon Stone had always been too famous for his own good, controversial, often being quoted on topics the administration would have preferred he ignore, and he had been fired from B.U. before being hired by Brandeis.

  “Larry has to say he’s very, very sorry, right?” That was Natasha, eleven and bright. She seemed to be trying to take care of her half brother, who did not even look at her when she spoke. Natasha was a forthright child with whom Judith had immediately fallen a little in love. She could be my child, Judith thought, although of course that was not literally true: she was only sixteen years older than Natasha. But Natasha was the child she could wish for.

  “The more persuasively he can apologize and the humbler he seems, the better we’re likely to do in court,” Judith said.

  Larry made a retching sound. “This is just sickening.”

  “My darling, I feel for you,” his mother, Mrs. Caldwell, said. “This is so unfair. They’re treating him like a criminal.” She glared at Gordon Stone. “I know you could have hushed this up, if you’d tried a little harder.”

  The current Mrs. Stone, the third one—Judith consulted her notes to discover she was named Fern—sighed heavily. “This is all such a trivial matter clogged in process and meaningless words.” Fern had been gazing out the window, as if she could pass through it and escape. She was wearing wide silk pants, an overblouse and various shawls, scarves, draperies. She was so vague and unkempt it was only the third time Judith glanced at her that she noticed how beautiful Fern was. Her hair was long and red-blond; Judith realized where the term strawberry-blond came from. Fern’s eyes were large and pale brown against her ivory skin. Her face was oval and her features classic. Vaguely Judith remembered that Larry had described her as an ex–soap opera queen; but then Larry was sarcastic about everyone in his family. Fern did not seek to be the center of attention, as Judith would have expected from an actress. She basically seemed to want quiet. Judith thought of the White Queen in Through the Looking Glass. This was a gentle ineffectual woman who appeared to generate centrifugal force that caused her to leak scarves, tissues, sighs.

  Gordon sat up and glared. “Why don’t you go back to the ashram, Fern. You aren’t doing us any good—as usual.”

  “It isn’t an ashram.” She wrapped her arms in her shawl. “The center is based on the teachings of Bodhisatva Selena MacDowell, also called—”

  “Please, Fern, shut up and leave if you want to.”

  Smiling slightly for the first time, Fern gathered up her fringed cloth bag and several shawls. “I’m used to operating on a higher plane.”

  “Mother!” Natasha yelled. “Larry may go to jail. Wake up.” She planted herself in front of her mother, frowning.

  “It’s not the place that defines us, but we define our place. Selena wrote that ….” Fern floated out, abandoning them all.

  Gordon grinned. “My wife has grown a little weary of the world, defined as me and the family.”

  “Including me,” Natasha said, tugging at her hair.

  “No, darling,” Gordon said, “nobody ever tires of you. It’s the rest of us who bring her down.”

  Judith tapped on the desk. “Now if we could discuss our strategy in Larry’s impending trial, there might be some chance you won’t have to traipse off to prison to visit him.”

  Judith did in fact get Larry a sentence of community service and two years’ probation. He barely thanked her, but Gordon paid her bill in full and promptly. He was the family member she had the most contact with, besides her client. He was the one who argued with Larry to obey her. He was the one who listened carefully to her plans. He picked out Larry’s clothes for court, with her approval. When she had to consult the family, it was Gordon she called, and she now called him Gordon. She admitted she liked having an excuse to talk with him. Their conversations rarely stayed on the case. She was almost sorry when the trial process ended with her successful plea bargain. She would miss their discussions of the events of the day, politics, the judicial process.

  Therefore she was surprised but delighted to be invited out to what Gordon called the Compound for July Fourth. She had no other good invitations and she was curious about him. She threw some clothes in an overnight bag and drove out, following the photocopied directions. They were so precise she assumed Gordon had written them. After a series of turns, she found herself crossing a humpbacked rickety wooden bridge to the island where Gordon had a summer home.

  She had imagined a glassy modern house on various levels, nicely landscaped. There was such a house, but there were five other buildings, four of wood and on
e of stucco, so different one from the other and bizarrely constructed, she assumed Gordon, perhaps with the help of some of his sons and daughters (she knew he had five children ranging in ages from nine years older than her to sixteen years younger), had thrown them up by whim. All this random architecture was built in the lee of a bayside sand dune obviously blowing away. No one had landscaped. Piles of discarded objects lay about, not trash, not bottles and cans, but abandoned projects—a fence that separated nothing from nothing, a shed without a roof, a half-built tower, a flagstone path that led halfway across the courtyard, various pieces of abstract sculpture of rusting metal. She learned that the second wife, Mrs. Caldwell, had dabbled in sculpture.

  Gordon greeted her with a kiss on the cheek and a little more body language in the hug than she had expected. “Where’s Fern?” she asked, looking around. She saw many people picnicking, sunbathing, sitting in the shade—including a baby in a playpen—but no Fern.

  “Fern has filed papers. I told you, she’s tired of the noise. I think she imagined that things would quiet down over the years, but they never have.” He waved his hands vaguely at the scene. Children in a loose posse were chasing a black Labrador. Another kid was throwing a ball hard against one of the houses. Voices were raised in song somewhere, several radios were playing not only competing stations but wildly incompatible music, opera and rock duking it out in the ears of everyone. Two teenagers were having a fierce argument. Someone had started a fire that was smoking badly. No one was tending it.

  She found Natasha in the kitchen trying to make lunch, near tears because she had burnt the tomato soup.

  Judith put down her bag on a kitchen chair and took over. She tried to send Natasha off to amuse herself, but the girl begged to stay. “I want to help. I have to learn how to do all this!”

  “Won’t you go with your mother?”

  “To that stupid place where people walk slowly like zombies and sit on the ground with stuck-up smiles? No thank you. I’d rather be with Daddy. Besides, I’m hoping he gets married again real soon.”

  Gordon had come quietly into the kitchen. She could feel him behind them. She realized she had begun to be aware of him physically. She did not want to turn, but finally she had to.

  He was propped against the doorjamb, amused. “You’re making order out of chaos. A rare talent. Everyone here seems to have the opposite knack.”

  “Is that why Fern gave up?”

  “Let’s talk about that another time.” He was wearing a tee and shorts. His body was lean and tightly muscled, a much harder body than his son had. As if he could read her thoughts, she felt her face heat. She turned back to the stove.

  It was twilight. A group of them had decided to stroll on the beach. She started off walking with a young woman whose thesis advisor Gordon had been. They talked about the Reagan administration. Gordon appeared at her elbow. Gradually she found herself walking with him instead. He was full of questions. They sat on the beach as the last lavender light drained from the sky, the waves whooshing in over the pebbles to their bare feet.

  “So, where do you come from, Miss Judith, lawyer? Not New York or Boston. You have no obvious accent.”

  “I grew up in Brooklyn.”

  “So much for my ear. Where in Brooklyn?”

  “The corner of Bedford-Stuyvesant that touches Flatbush Avenue and Prospect Park. I am the illegitimate child of a doctor whose name I bear and a mother who was born in Prague, married and divorced in Turkey—I think—and may have had a son there I know nothing about. She met my father in Mexico.”

  “Why didn’t he marry your mother?”

  “He was married already. To a very middle-class lady. He had two daughters, both older than me.”

  She did not know when she decided to tell the truth. She did not know why. Perhaps she felt it did not matter or perhaps she felt it mattered very much. She found herself compelled. His attention was like a drug that loosened her mouth. Suddenly she wanted to be who she was. She had developed a proficiency for obfuscating her past; but now she just wanted to speak of herself. She decided to take that enormous chance for the first time in her life. Her husband, Mark, had known less about her after a year of marriage than this man knew right now.

  They spent the evening talking, until the breeze grew cool and she was chilled. Walking back to the compound, he put his arm around her. He led her to a room she assumed was his. She resisted the pressure of his arm and stood flatfooted in the hall. “I don’t have casual sex,” she said, planting her feet. “It doesn’t appeal to me.”

  “Who says this is casual?”

  “I’ve only been with two men, and one of them I was married to.”

  He frowned, tilting on the balls of his feet, regarding her. “I must say, I’m disappointed. A lack of curiosity I didn’t expect in you.”

  She turned away. “There are other things to be curious about.”

  He stepped back. “You’re too young for me. Of course.”

  “I’m not too young for you!” she snapped. “I’m more mature and more capable than either of your wives I’ve seen so far.”

  He began to laugh helplessly, sliding down the doorjamb. She gave him a hand and drew him to his feet. He opened the door to his bedroom and bowed her in. She went.

  What she had considered satisfactory sex before that night was if the man was not unclean or piggy and did not hurt her, and if she had an orgasm from time to time. Perhaps Gordon was simply more sensual than any man she had been with, perhaps he was simply more patient, perhaps he was simply more experienced with the bodies and needs of women. Whatever it was, she lost control as she never had. By the time he entered her, she was moaning like an animal, grabbing at him, lurching to meet him. When she came, it shook her. She lay afterwards with the feeling of having been dropped from a great height. She fell asleep almost at once.

  Natasha was up before her in the morning, waiting impatiently in the kitchen. “You stayed with Daddy. Do you like him?”

  “Yes, I like him a lot. You know too damned much for your age, Natasha.”

  “I have to. I’m the house mother, haven’t you noticed? Daddy says Fern started turning things over to me by the time I was seven! I want a stepmother, but I want some choice.”

  “It’s a little early to talk about that.”

  “It’s never too early,” Natasha said firmly. “We can’t let you get away.”

  She decided that what she saw around her was a paradise gone to weeds. Sunburned children chased puppies nobody had bothered to housebreak; students camped out on the beach among great mounds of garbage bags and green-headed flies. Gordon had begun building a tower to distance himself from the chaos. He simply could not manage the logistics any longer. He needed help, obviously, and she began slowly to make order.

  She did not leave the next day. She did not leave until the morning she was due in court. By the time she drove into the city through the hot gritty morning in rush-hour traffic, she knew she was obsessed with him. That night she called Hannah in Washington. They often spoke at ten at night, about the time they usually got home to their respective tiny apartments from their respective overheated demanding jobs.

  “Do you love him?” Hannah asked.

  “I don’t know …” Judith clutched the receiver hard. “I never thought I was capable of falling in love.”

  “When you look at him, does he make you feel weak?” Hannah asked.

  “No! He makes me feel strong.” She was going to marry him. She knew it then. Yirina would have loved him too.

  DAVID

  “Let’s play home movies,” Judith said, curled up with me before the fire. “Tell me about your marriage. I was married before too. I was twenty when I got married and twenty-one when I got divorced.”

  The image that came to me as she talked was a cartoon of a pimply faced boy from New Jersey; then I added a beard to the pimply faced boy. Ridiculous. But Judith was more interested in questioning me.

  “I married the
boss’s daughter. I was twenty-three, I had forty thousand dollars left of my bonus, every possibility in the world, and I couldn’t think of one. I was drifting around Florida, where I felt comfortable because everybody seemed to come from someplace else.” I lay on my side staring at the flames in the gas grate. The room was almost tropical. She had turned the heat high when we made love.

  One night in the lounge of a seafood restaurant under the bridge to Singer Island, I met a guy who’d seen me pitch. He’d played baseball himself. “But never professionally,” he said. Few people knew enough to refer to minor leaguers as professional.

  “Jewish kid, aren’t you?” Wynn Hardy was the kind of man who thought he could say anything he liked. He was taller than me, lean except for the beer belly he steered like the hood ornament of an expensive car. His lips were always set in a half smile, so everything he said could be taken as a provocation or a joke. “It’s a compliment, son. Means you’re probably smarter than the average asshole I hire, that you don’t stay out drinking till four in the morning when you have to be at work at eight.” Wynn described a forty-acre property he’d just bought, only recently an orange grove, six miles from the coast, twenty miles north of Palm Beach. He was putting up a hundred Spanish-style ranches with white plaster arches and wrought-iron grillwork. He offered me a job and I took it.

  “I liked working construction,” I told Judith. “The same as I like nursery work.” I liked swinging a hammer, using the power in my shoulders and upper arms. Most of Wynn’s crew were Dominican and Cuban. When it came to keeping records of deliveries and dealing with inspectors, I was important.

  “So what was she like, the boss’s daughter?” Judith leaned over me, her eyes alight with curiosity. “Did she have a name?”

  “Vicki. She loved horses.” Had she won the lottery or married a rich man, she might have spent all her time preparing for competition. But she had to work, which left her only mornings, from dawn until about eight, evenings and weekends to exercise her horses and muck out the stables. Vicki Hardy was as strong as most men her size. Her butt was pure muscle and something of a family joke. Her doctor, Wynn Hardy’s best friend, once said that giving her a booster shot was like trying to penetrate an orange with a drinking straw.