Going Down Fast

by Marge Piercy

  They struck him as good. Nothing would be given them but each other. They made him feel fat and sluggish. They made him feel that the pleasure he took in his work had drained something from his life that he must get back. He felt bought off. He had been allowed to do his thing and paid for it and sat on the shitheap studying blues archives, witnesses of past troubles. He would not be sorry to have them gone, for he was not used to envying. He was afraid for them, for Sam’s rosy face and soft body. A few nights in jail were an experience: five years ground anyone down. No one had charm after that. He had met civil rights workers with the shattered reflexes of mental patients. This fat violent country wanted pretty longhaired radical kids no more than lice in its armpits and would squash them one by one.

  A little after three in the morning they left, bookbag and laundrybag and bag of sandwiches and fruit, gone, and he lay on his mattress with his head echoing and did not particularly like being alone.

  He stopped by concession row after work for several days before he was convinced nobody was there. First he sat parked in the VW hoping to catch Anna coming in or out. Then he took to banging on the door. Finally he leaned his forehead on the plateglass and peered in. Mail was piled below the mail slot, and lying nearer to the door was a key. Everything looked clean and neat and cryptic. Were they out of town together? Leon’s old Buick stood at the curb looking as if it would never move, yet he could not get rid of the notion she might have gone off with Leon.

  All they would tell him at ISS was that Anna had quit at the end of December. He hated to ask Paul, but they had other business. On Friday he picked up the kid after a meeting and they ate Chinese.

  Paul was letting his hair grow—mostly up—and he looked tall and wild. Paul would carry a load of ornament. At first he had prized Paul for what remained of Vera in his looks and most his way of speaking. The resemblance had hurt but hooked him. He had felt protective of the kid and full of an unnerving urge to touch him. That had passed. Paul was Paul and not Vera (or only a little).

  “What are you doing on your show tonight?” Paul asked him over iron steaks. “That Jack Custis thing, that was strong. That had pepper in it.”

  He winced. “Thought there’d be backlash. Cries of pain. But Cal, my boss, called me in to tell me how he loved it. It was too tough, too beautifully brutal, Cal said, the real nitty gritty, and why don’t I do some more? … Jack’s sister finally turned over the records she has and Psychedelic is bringing out an LP. I wrote the jacket copy.” He took out a check for fifty dollars. “So the guy says, get in something about black power, that’s very now.” He endorsed the check and shoved it across. “I know you have FBM contacts. Pass it on.”

  “You meant to build a fire and only made fireworks.” Paul put away the check, giving the waitress a cool eye. “I thought you were down on them.”

  “They’re sitting ducks. And I want everybody in one movement, everybody wanting to change the system, shake it, break it. But I have nothing to offer except that I don’t know where to start. Harlan’s fighting, anyhow.” He rubbed his chin. “What’s old Leon doing these days?”

  “You mean aside from busting up the shopping plaza?”

  “That was him? But …” He shook his head. “Were you there?”

  Paul looked embarrassed. “Don’t see much of him. Anna called to say he was in the hospital.”

  So where was she? Saturday morning he went by her old place on the off chance she might have left a forwarding address. Her mailbox was stuffed with eviction notices. The hall hadn’t been swept in weeks and a drunk had left an empty tenth and a stink of piss in the entrance. Dark as the mines. Feeling silly he knocked. No answer of course. Notice pinned to her door that if she did not remove her things by Monday A.M., the city would.

  He knocked pock-pock on an empty room. He was turning away when he smelled something. Funny sharp smell like scorched food. He sniffed at the crack. Yes, from inside. He banged harder. “Anna?” Put his ear to it. Heard something, maybe. “Anna? Open this goddamn door, I know you’re in there.” Alternate visions of her roasting in bed and some bum burning the furniture to keep warm. Yet he was scared. He could see his breath as he yelled, “I’m going to bust it down, Annie.” Old private eye flicks. Bust his shoulder first. Instead he took out his jackknife and slid it between the rotten wood of the jamb and wall until it nudged aside the bolt. He pushed the door open and walked in.

  Woman. Anna. Wrapped in an old black winter coat, three sweaters and a scarf, she squatted behind a hibachi from which smoke curled. To her left was a pile of index cards she was checking one at a time against a typed list. Her hands were bare and she warmed them at the small flame. Over her the ceiling was smudged. She was bundled into shapelessness. She looked Eskimo, the skin of her face tight, the cheekbones slashes, the eyes squinted against the smoke black and tough with scrutiny. Stubbornly she went on matching the index cards against the list and making an occasional correction.

  “Hello there.” He got down on his hunkers. “Having fun?”

  “Working. Remember me, I don’t believe in fun.”

  “What are you burning there, old mice?”

  She showed her teeth briefly. “My past.”

  “Glad you’re finding it useful.” He looked into the hibachi. Scorched notes. Letter fragments. Brown and shiny scraps with small gray lacunae of photographic images. “Here I am again, keeping you warm in war as in peace.”

  “You and half a dozen others. Heroes all.”

  “Including Leon?”

  “Leon is in the hospital,” she said in a flat monitory tone.

  “So I hear.”

  “Did you hear which one?” Her eyes hoped.

  He shook his head.

  “The hospital.” She snorted. “That’s all I know.”

  “You’re squatting here?”

  “I slept at the project office last night. It got spooky at Leon’s. The phone made me jump. I felt I didn’t belong there.”

  “You don’t.”

  Deep in the burden of wool she shrugged. She was round as a potato. Indifferent as the stone goddess on the door. She crouched behind the smoking hibachi with her nose smudged and her hands black with carbon and inkspots and the plume of her breath dissolving before her. Hobo over a campfire in a jungle.

  He looked and looked, stymied. She took more cards and checked them. Only the faintest curl of her lips indicated she knew he was there. Her body was veiled and padded. She corrected a card and reached for another. He grabbed her by the arms and tipped her over against him. Her lips were cool and tasted of smoke. Her eyes widened in surprise and she tried to speak against his mouth. It was so much like embracing a large bag of laundry he lost her mouth and began to laugh.

  “Let go of me, Rowley. I have a right to choose what I want.”

  “You moved out of Leon’s. Here you are.”

  She glared. The scarf came off and her hair, warm from it, flowed over his bracing arm. “Maybe I’ll marry him. He needs someone to look out for him—”

  “And you need someone to look out for? I’ll buy you a blind goldfish.”

  She shoved the heel of her hand into his chest. “Stop belittling him.”

  “Only want one thing he’s got.”

  “Didn’t want it when you had it.”

  “Older. Wiser. Hungrier. Poor Leon will get out of the hospital with his knees dragging and find this big strapping woman wanting to screw him back in again.”

  Her eyes snapped. She struck fullforce against his chest, trying to thrust free. She was too bundled up to exert pressure and he held on.

  “Victorian Anna. How come you get mad like that?”

  Her temper dwindled and she touched her tongue to her lip. “Suppose it’s a matter of my repressive upbringing among what C. Wright Mills calls the lumpen-bourgeoisie—a name I find suggestive of the texture of my mother’s kreplach. I remember asking my mother what rape meant, and she told me that was what men did to women.”

 
“And what do women do to men?”

  “Your father told you that was marriage—no?” Her voice was urbane. “How is your father lately?”

  “In the hospital again. I drove Sam home. Grim scene. They want him to have another operation.”

  She was covertly trying to wriggle out of his grasp, all the while asking nice questions. “Will another operation help? Do they hold out any real help?”

  “Going to stick a warm poultice named Annie to him and watch the old king go. Come here.”

  “I am nobody’s warm poultice,” she said and spat in his face. Her eyes were narrow. She would not budge.

  “With Leon hanging on your tit?”

  “Ah, you’re so sure you’re better than he is!”

  “For you? You bet I am.”

  “Ha. Well, turn it into a mysticism. Rave about it the way he does about Caroline.”

  “Caroline?”

  “Don’t you feel funny thinking she’s married to that prick and going to have your baby? Don’t you feel anything?”

  “Hell, yes. It’s a bad joke. The kid should come and shoot me in twenty years, but he isn’t reason enough to live with her.”

  “And I don’t have any reason to put up with you.” Even her hands were closed against him into fists.

  “Indifferent.”

  “Hard as that may be for you to believe.”

  “It’s some good instinct makes you provoke me, because otherwise I might just give up and go home.” He yanked on her and she came dragging against him with willful clumsiness, making herself bulky and inert and thumping like an old boot caught on a line. She hid in her layers of garments and turned her face into his jacket. He was left to bury his mouth in her hair.

  He fumbled at her looking for flesh. Boots, thick texture hose, finally a stretch of thigh—under her coat and skirt and slip his hand found and closed on hot sleek skin. God she was warm. Almost burned his hand. “Annie, I want you.”

  “On rye or whole wheat? And who will you have for dessert?” She spoke muffled into his chest, hiding her face.

  “And I love you. Whatever that means. This time I admit it’s not the same thing.”

  “Go away then. Come back when Leon’s out of the hospital. I have to think.”

  “No. Can’t afford that. I want you to clear out of here with me. If you loved him—”

  “Whatever that means,” she said bitterly, lifting her head.

  “—you wouldn’t be here. You’d have fought his family tooth and claw, nails and crockery. You’d know where you belong. You’d be sitting in that hospital corridor on guard.”

  Gravely she met his gaze. He saw that she half believed him. A great lightness buoyed him up.

  “In some sense it’s because he never left his family,” she was beginning. He kissed her hard, holding on to that sleek piece he had claimed, and her mouth under his turned warm and ripened. He gathered her closer with a nostalgic ache through his groin. Wanting, remembering wanting, remembered having, all the merged funny burrowing of bodies. His. He kissed her until he was sweating and heat shimmered off of her like a blacktop road in summer, till her mouth was swollen and pulsing. Yet she lay in his arm withdrawn in her clothing and taut with waiting. If he released her she would spring away. He groped upward and into her bush and found the truthful ooze of welcome. Her mouth came wider under his, her breath caught and crumpled and the tautness faded into her arms. He dug for her among the woolens, unbuttoned the coat and rolled her out, unbuttoned the ski sweater and drew off the pullover, digging for the ample slow lines of her until they were nested among the cast clothes. Her breast heavy and filling his hand. Curve of hip into him. Solid pressure of thighs under. Quick ripple across her belly as he stroked it. Lips nuzzling, her urgent passivity gathered against him and moving as he moved. Her large dark eyes were open and watching and merry, almost amused. He wondered then exactly when she had decided. He came into her and slowly her muscles accepted him. Her cunt held him in a smooth firm grip like her hands, and he was home.

  Yawning she curled up in her coat, round and embryonic, and smiled. He dressed and stood looking around. “Come on. Time to pack up.”

  “Oh,” she said languidly. “Didn’t say I’d go back to you.”

  “Won’t be the same. Nothing is. And I don’t want it to be.”

  Lying on her belly she looked at him out of the cocoon of coat. “Something new? Or just the rhetoric of prick?”

  “Come and live with me.”

  She shuddered in the coat. “We’ll probably get pneumonia, it’s freezing. I’m afraid you’ll hurt me. I’ve always been afraid.”

  “I guess I will. There’s a lot of meanness in me. Did Leon make you happy?”

  “Happy was what Asher married me for. What an obscene thing for any human to think they can do for another.”

  “I’ve asked you, Annie. I won’t argue with you.”

  “You shouldn’t quit so easy.”

  Standing over her he gave her a gentle nudge with his foot. “I’ve used up my best argument.”

  “I’m coming already. What’s the hurry?” But she did not move until he began awkwardly pulling clothes out of drawers. When she had dressed she came to stand beside him. “Did you miss me, then?”

  “Sometimes. Especially lately.”

  Marching off to pack her bags she called, “Well, if I liked to fuck just a little bit less, you wouldn’t get me back, not yet you wouldn’t.”

  “That cuts both ways.”

  “Five or six ways, Rowley. I was hoping you’d turn up.”

  “Why didn’t you open the door?”

  “Who shut it?”

  That afternoon they spent moving her. He was inclined to leave things and she to take them. She was quiet in the car, downcast. Since he was fifteen, women had happened to him. She had not happened this time. He had the advantage, he thought as he drove north, of understanding better than she could yet what that meant. She would find her footing.

  As he parked her face questioned him. They loaded up and she preceded him stopping at each dark and smelly landing until he nodded her onward. Worn coat. He had been more giving with Sam, with Harlan, with any casual acquaintance. The coat was thin and threadbare. Was she cold in it?

  Hesitantly she walked in. “You didn’t waste yourself furnishing it.”

  “Figured you’d want to help.” He ambled after her. “Planning to take off your coat and stay awhile?”

  “Chutzpah pays again. Well, if it wasn’t me, it would be another.” She stood shy and flatfooted until she came to unbutton her coat. She stepped out of her boots, then walked slowly before him to the mattress past a witnessing row of unpacked boxes. With a small smile she sat down neatly on the edge of the mattress and gave a nod toward her left shoulder. “Pull down the shades.”

  He did. As he was kneeling to reach for her, she swooped forward and caught him off balance, toppling him into her arms.

  At last they carried the final load up the three flights. Then as she made supper he sat on the floor picking chords and singing now and then.

  Me and my baby was side by side,

  Yes, me and my baby was side by side,

  She said to me, Daddy I want to ride …

  He was tired, he was hungry, he was pleased. He trusted that she was too.

  Anna Rowley

  Sunday, January 25–Sunday, February 1

  Putting away kitchen utensils she thought of Leon damply, with guilt. She felt partly as if she had run out on him, and partly as if she had escaped. Clearly there was nothing there for her, but equally clearly that had not mattered. In comradely love she had lived with Leon, on his terms. Now it was as if she had quit their game and said, Well that was fun, but now it’s time for some real live adultsize sex and love and household. He would say she had sold out, and if what she had betrayed was vague, her sense of it was not. She had opted for bread and flesh and direct clang-clash argument, she had put away Leon’s gods in a box like broken dolls, a
nd they haunted her.

  Rowley was at work. Though she felt shy about calling hospitals—encountering any bureaucracy—she forced herself to begin at A in the yellow pages. She called through D, went back to work in the kitchen, then did E-H. No luck.

  Next she hung her dresses on the left side of the closet, one at a time with enjoyment. After she called through L she began supper, freed and tangled and vaguely satisfied. She put on a Bach cello partita. She had mostly wasted the day and that was a treat, pottering about in random gusts of thought and memory. She moved in her loose body listening, touching, fixing and in part waiting, because she was not sure of him yet—if ever she would be—but she was sure now of herself.

  Though rationally he did not believe she could have left, because hadn’t it taken them four hours to move her in, he was relieved to see lights up there. The hall smelled of chicken and cardamon and coriander. Strolling from the kitchen to greet him, she wore that grave sensual smile of the day before. Her loose hair shone. She looked at home and serene. He was struck by the knowledge sudden and painful as a muscle cramp that he no longer lived alone in his privacy. He followed her into the kitchen and told her his day.

  After supper she said she had called through L and handed him the yellow pages. During Ns he reached the right hospital.

  “Mr. Lederman was checked out this afternoon.”

  He repeated it to her. She gave a wince of dismay and took the phone. Waited, thumbnail at teeth. Waited. Finally she hung up. “But he’s not there.”

  “So he’s out. Or staying with his family.”

  “I can’t call them. Anyhow, he must be all right if they let him out. Mustn’t he?”

  Monday when he came home she was more puzzled. “Leon’s phone has been disconnected.

  “Did you pay the bill?”