Going Down Fast

by Marge Piercy

  Rowley’s mouth tweaked upward in restless unease. He crossed the room rubbing his scalp, setting the coarse dark hair on end. “I don’t suppose this is the half of it, but it’s what I turned up. Don’t take my word for it. Better look around.” He had piled pans and kitchen gadgets on a chair along with clothes, a box of tampons, her toothbrush and hairbrush, Navaho rug, wineglasses, a wide strawhat, books. It came to her that if she had not gone on pills two months before, her diaphragm would be on the pile too, and she was thankful.

  “The Klee drawing in the bedroom. That’s mine.” She longed for a squabble about possessions to relieve them both.

  “Sure it is.” He strode off. “You know me, I buy things to listen to, but not to look at.”

  She resolved that her dignity consisted in not following him to that doorway. She stood clutching Yente.

  “Look, have a seat. How about a drink?” He brought the drawing back and stood against the heaped chair.

  She accepted, grimly. She had begun to dread the moment she would walk out. How she hated endings.

  His hand as he gave her the glass was steady, but his eyes broke from hers, returned with a strange vivid black stare that felt familiar, as if a long time before she had seen him look that way. “How are your classes?”

  The room was tilting toward him. She could tell him. Yes. That would rally him to her because it would let him off from being wrong. As if she were sliding across she set her flesh against him. She would not use her trouble as bait. She would not trust again. “Please don’t let’s talk for the sake of making talk.”

  He hopped from his seat to pace around the chair laden with her things. “Fuck it, Anna, you think something’s more real if it hurts?”

  She told him more items and he fetched them. She was tortured by the feeling that all she had to do was laugh or touch him, and the savage coldness would rip aside.

  He came to stand in front of her. “Take Yente.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “I’m not home much. He’s used to you.”

  She kept looking at the cat so she would not have to look up. “I don’t think I’m allowed to have pets.”

  “Your landlady afraid they’ll bother the roaches?”

  “Besides, I can’t support him.” She pulled the cat off her shoulder and handed him over. Resentful, Yente twisted free and trotted into the kitchen, tail high.

  The phone rang. He dodged into the bedroom. “Rowley speaking.” He scooped it up and walked to the door cradling the receiver against his shoulder, his eyes still on her. “Oh, it’s you.” His gaze turned to the wall. “No, I am not …” He turned as if casually and walked back into the bedroom. “I’ll call you back.… Yeah, yeah, later.… Now shut it off. I told you she would be …”

  She caught herself holding her breath. Caroline? Or another, what matter. The contemptuous intimate tone hurt more than pet names. He was sure of this girl already. She knew that Anna was here and was jealous. Need not be.

  “I said I’ll call you. Goodbye.” He hung up.

  She rose. “I’m just going. You needn’t have cut that short.”

  “Of no importance.” His eyes were hard. “You have everything you want?”

  “Everything that belongs to me. I wouldn’t be wanting anything else.”

  They stood face to face and she in the heat of her anger sustained his gaze.

  “A safe attitude. I suppose if I’d held it, I’d have saved us both a lot of trouble.”

  His face was dark and bitter, making her forget the insult of her tongue. “Oh, Rowley, I’m not gong to start blaming you for that now—”

  “Start?”

  “I wasn’t happy with Asher. We’d have broken up eventually.” Ashamed of letting her truculence slip, she turned and loaded her arms with objects from the chair.

  As he was putting a box into the backseat, he said over his shoulder with his teeth showing, “You’re a fair woman.”

  “To everyone but myself. There I’m fowl—a sitting duck, no?”

  He straightened up and glared.

  “Let’s not talk,” she said. “Help me get this stuff to my rooms and don’t say any more. Not any more.”

  He shrugged broadly but he kept the silence. Without more than directions exchanged—“Hold the door would you?” “I’ll take the clothes”—they finished loading the car, drove to her place, and carried her things upstairs. Letting him make the last trip alone she began to put kitchen supplies away. She did not turn when he brought the books in, put them on the table and stood looking at her. Feeling his gaze on her back she thought loudly, oh please, please don’t let him say anything, please don’t let him speak. Keep his mouth shut and send him away. Please.

  The door closed and his footsteps cascaded down the stairs. Weakly she leaned against the refrigerator and looked with blank stupidity and fatigue at the baggage piled on her table, residue of a finished small life.

  Tuesday, September 23–Tuesday, October 7

  Anna stayed out of the bars Rowley frequented, and since they were the only ones she felt comfortable in alone, she did not drink. She changed restaurants, stores and laundromats, avoiding Rowley and incidentally their friends. That suited her. She would keep away till she was less pitiable, but she was cut off from the usual job channels at the University, the station, the journals and institutes, and thrown back on the newspaper.

  In the Lotus Gardens where for less than a dollar she could escape her walls and her own company, she sat eating chow mein. It was a slot between stores with a cramped row of booths and a take-out counter presided over by the Grand Canyon at sunset. The proprietor’s fourteen-year-old daughter, who waited on tables with a transistor radio clapped to her ear and her neat butt twitching, looked on customers with disdain for anyone who would eat in such a crummy place.

  She was rereading Veblen for comfort. She had an old crush on his clumsy integrity. He had been a tweeny too in this city and fired eventually. She looked up from her book and plate to see Leon waiting by the take-out counter. She started to wave, thought better. She did not want to talk to him and slid down. But a moment later he stood beside the booth, slope shouldered and scowling.

  “So how are you?” he said heavily as he slid in the opposite bench. Rumpled and careworn he rubbed his hands loosely.

  She smiled for answer still hoping to evade him, but he went on, “How’s Rowley? You make things up?”

  He must know, he was a friend of Caroline’s. “We’re not seeing each other.”

  “Oh?” His bushy eyebrows met. “From that night?”

  “I think we’d about reached the end of our rope.”

  “You don’t have to try to act cheerful. You look like hell.”

  She snorted. “Oh, that was only the first blow. I’m out of a job too.” Briefly she told him what had happened.

  Taking off his glasses he rubbed his eyes hard with his palms. His voice had a builtin sneer, undermining whatever he said. The words seemed to come out at a slant. “What kind of job you want?”

  “Just one to keep me, modestly. Not bore me out of my mind or cause me to do harm to myself or others. I can type, run a switchboard, I’ve done editing. I’ve timed rats and taken care of shell-shocked lab monkeys. I’ve had some statistics …”

  “Okay, I think I can get you something at ISS.” The Institute for Social Surveying.

  “You could?” She did not believe him but the offer was well meant. “That would be fine. You work there?”

  “Yeah, and it’s not fine. A place with the jitters. But there are always openings, the door swings out, the door swings in. I’ll ask around. Eat, don’t mind me, your food’s getting cold.”

  She obeyed. It was already cold. After a minute he asked, “He seeing Caroline?”

  She kept her eyes to her plate. “Can’t say that I asked him.”

  “I knew that engagement was a farce. Just wanted the ring. Look, girls, stone of my own. She won’t marry him.”

 
; “If she wants marriage, she’d better stick to her boyfriend.”

  Leon shrugged, still harried. He frowned at her as if trying to figure something out. But he did not speak, and then his named was called.

  Two days afterward he phoned. “Looks like a good deal. I got a bit interviewing on what people think we should do with old folks—like should we gas them or just let them starve—but the opening for you is inside. Norma Clay needs a helper—mainly secretarial, some technical stuff. Come on sociological. Her last is having a baby. Call her tomorrow—a fat old dyke if you don’t mind that—but uh don’t tell her I sent you if you want the job.”

  A week and a half later Anna began work for Norma Clay, a squarish bedeviled sociologist about forty who wore tweed suits with dainty frilled blouses, as if she had once been told to assert her femininity. Miss Clay had a high girlish voice that belonged to a much younger, slenderer woman, but everything else was soldierly. She walked weightily with a slight frown of decision and threat. The major business of the institution, Anna discovered, was jockeying for position within it. Miss Clay was not a natural conspirator. The constant effort to maintain her place, to wangle her share of foundation and industrial monies and to counter plots to oust her had soured what must have been a gentle, rather phlegmatic disposition, so that she had become awkward but dangerous, like a cornered cow.

  Anna shared an antechamber with a middle aged woman who looked her up and down and sucked in her mouth. Mrs. Cavenaugh had been with ISS from the beginning. Sociologists came and went, but the secretarial staff abided in full security elaborating Byzantine rituals. Mrs. Cavenaugh ate lunch at her typewriter, arrived before nine, left well after five and spoke of the director with an elderly flutter. In her view her most important task was to keep the technical personnel from getting their hands on the office machines and supplies.

  As she left Tuesday, Leon was perched on the receptionist’s desk. He rose and came after her. “So, you got the job?”

  She thanked him effusively, awkwardly. She felt she had been rude, remembering things she had said to Rowley, worse things she had thought. He had gone out of his way to help her, either willing to excuse her rudeness or unaware of how she had felt.

  “I told you it’s no great job, so forget it.” His voice was cold and distancing. In a prickly silence they walked a block, crushing the brittle cottonwood leaves underfoot. He said, “Have supper with me at Parks, I hate to eat alone.”

  To make amends she agreed. Though Rowley seldom ate there, she felt a great relief when she looked quickly over the sandwich shop. How long before she need not do that at every entrance?

  He stared at his hands on the table as if they were something the waitress had neglected to clear. “Yeah, I hate to eat alone. Leftover from marriage. Got to have someone across the table to yell at.”

  “You get out of the habit of being alone. I was married once myself.”

  “Good experience for a woman. Makes her useful.” He grinned. His teeth were his best feature, strong and white. “What happened?”

  “I met Rowley.”

  “Oh.” His eyes, milky blue and arctic, studied her. “Like that.”

  “He was a lever for prying myself loose.”

  “How come you got stuck to begin with? Why so young?”

  She played with her food. If she said she married Asher for his reform politics, because she had soured on the department? “Because at twenty-one I felt older than I do now. Because a couple of other people hadn’t married me. Because I thought Asher—my husband—loved me, needed me. Because I was feeling a little shabby. I wanted to get out of the wind.”

  “I got married because … it seemed the thing to do. Joye kept yakking about it. I was worn out with her thinking she was knocked up every month.” He grimaced, his face tight. “You know she’s got my kid.”

  “Your kid?” Vaguely she remembered Rowley arriving late, drunk and amorous from celebrating the birth. “I guess I did know you have a boy.”

  “She’s got Jimmy, not me. Because of a trick I pulled when we were fighting our way through the courts she doesn’t have to let me see him for a year.” He tucked his chin into his ski sweater. “She’s got the bit in her teeth these days and she’s tearing around whining about how I treated her. I hear she tells some gory tales.” He stuck out his square jaw. “All of them true.”

  “We had a quiet divorce. Asher’s a gentleman. Once he’d given up trying to change my mind he wanted no more fuss than necessary to comply with the law. But I was the guilty party. And I felt like it.”

  “But you would have anyhow.” His strange eyes lit with amusement.

  “Too true.” She smiled. “That’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said on the dreary subject. But it in no way detracts from the sense of guilt I keep polished.”

  “Defense.”

  “Guilt as defense? Against what?”

  “Believing in anything the way you must have in your marriage. Getting cheated again.” He sighted along his finger at her. “When you talk about your marriage you get an expression on, like you’re remembering a bad joke somebody played on you.”

  She frowned. “Only myself. Yes, I’m scared of being taken in.”

  He rubbed his cheek roughly, giving her that shy feral grin that was as close as he came to smiling: As if the shame of his awkward hairy body was too great to allow spontaneous gestures, only gashes through which his reactions could escape. He was not entirely ugly. He had remarkable eyes and good teeth, and a squat powerful build. But she remembered Joye, conventionally pretty and fluffy like a nice highschool girl. Blond-brown hair, turned up nose, okay legs. Joye had been crazy about him. At parties she had clung to him until he turned lowering and shook her off, when she would retreat to a corner and watch him with lonesome eyes. She could hear Joye talking, giving his name two full syllables: Leeyon doesn’t like carrots, Lee-yon says opera is for Maggots, Lee-yon says I’m a masochist, do you think so? Joye would drink too much and end up passed out on the bed with the pile of coats or crying on a man’s shoulder. He had punched someone’s nose for comforting her, so Rowley had told her as proof Leon cared for his wife. Marriage was a three-legged race uphill. Foolish to blame Leon for Joye’s unhappiness when all it meant was that they should never have agreed to bungle along under one roof trying to make each other’s discomfort complete.

  “Think there’s a good chance of you making it up with old Rowley?”

  “Not a chance.” She bit the words off.

  “Why not? Unless he’s shacked up with Caroline.”

  “I have no idea—except there’s sure to be someone warming that bed. We’re both too proud. We won’t put up with each other’s demands, and neither of us will back down.”

  “Ummmm. He’s had an eye on Caroline for a long time.”

  “I don’t think so!”

  “How would you know? I’ve seen him looking her over. It won’t last—he won’t care for her. But he was willing to toss you overboard to get hold of her.”

  Her cheeks felt swollen. “It’s just that he can’t resist prancing around and proving himself.”

  “Was it spontaneous when he took you away from your husband? Listen, I know Rowley. Didn’t I share a pad with him for two years? Not that he means to be ruthless, but he’s introspective as a bulldog and all he does is follow his nose—or his prick. When he wants something he wants it so bad he manages to make you think for a while, maybe a long while, that it means something. Then he can’t be bothered. I used to get his girls crying on my shoulder.”

  She had great difficulty meeting his gaze. He was unjust, jealous. Or did she want to protect her pride?

  “I don’t mean he’s a bastard. Only he gets into situations and then loses patience and wants out.” When she did not answer he added harshly, “I suppose you think I’m a shit talking about him that way. Doesn’t show much gratitude.”

  “Gratitude?”

  “Sure. For his big rescue.”

  “
What?”

  “You know. His heroic bit.”

  “What are you talking about?” she cried in irritation.

  “Strong silent type. He saved my life. Big deal. I took an overdose of sleeping pills. The bungler’s way. If you really mean it, you don’t take pills and wait for somebody to stumble over you. You borrow a gun and blow your head off, you cut your throat. You jump out a tenth-floor window. You don’t fuck around with pills.”

  “He never mentioned it.” She was not sure how to react. “You must have been very depressed.”

  “No more than usual.” He picked his nose.

  “That was before you got married?”

  “That’s what I did to myself instead. Like the pills it didn’t live up to expectations.” He reached for the check. “I half hoped she’d lead me out to green suburbs, but I was too strong for her.”

  “You were involved with Caroline, weren’t you?”

  “Me?” He paid the cashier, turned and walked out. Under the blinking green neon sign he stood hunched as if against a wind. “While I was married. Shouldn’t have mixed with her then, bad idea.” He shook his head mumbling, “A hard scene, all the way round.”

  So he felt guilty about Caroline, hence the paternal concern. Another blondbrown girl with nice legs. He must collect them. She said, “I never use my head for anything useful. When I’m interested in a man my brain shuts off. Perhaps that’s what you were saying about Rowley.”

  “You’re still soft on him.”

  “Not true! But I don’t dislike him.”

  “Good.” He caught hold of a no parking sign and swung around the pole, stopped to face her. “If you mean I dumped her, you’re dead wrong.”

  “I know nothing about it.”

  “People always think they do,” he said stubbornly but walked on with her. “I’m afraid that’s how she sees it.”