Guilt by Association

by Susan R. Sloan

  “When you’re the older of two and getting so much attention you can’t breathe”—Karen sighed—”sooner or later, you have to get out, too.”

  “My parents were delighted.”

  “Mine were appalled.”

  Karen was an avid reader of popular fiction, but now her employer opened her mind to the beauty of the classics that she had heretofore relegated to the category of required reading.

  “You have to sample everything to evaluate anything,” Demelza instructed.

  So, for a few precious hours each day, she would crawl into someone else’s world and make it her own. Heathcliff haunted her, Becky delighted her, Inspector Jarret infuriated her, Madame Bovary made her blush, and Anna Karenina made her cry.

  In addition to her new fictional friends, Karen got to know the scruffy lot who frequented the Bookery. The women wore long skirts and beaded headbands and attended an assortment of classes. The men wore beaded necklaces and hair below their shoulders. Many of the younger men were just hanging out, working temporary jobs until their draft numbers came up and it was time to head for Canada. Some of the others were career dropouts, searching for a reason to get up in the mornings. Several, with a foot in each camp, ran soup kitchens down on the Bowery or taught at places like NYU and Cooper Union. A few composed music or wrote poetry or tried to paint the shapes of their dreams.

  Each had a story, and as Karen listened, the ragged clothes, unkempt hair, and shaggy beards disappeared, and she saw instead a group of lost souls, not unlike herself, struggling to find their way in a frequently hostile world.

  In the backlash of Camelot, America had splintered into a dozen different subcultures, from the flower children of Haight-Ashbury to the civil-rights marchers of Selma to the drug addicts of Needle Park. Sentiment against the country’s involvement in Vietnam was surging and Demelza defiantly displayed every antiwar poster and cartoon she could find.

  The Kerns came to visit the Bookery one afternoon when Karen had been there for two months. It was a rainy Saturday in early April and Beverly, dressed in a bright splash of purple and fuchsia, gushed through the door with her umbrella dripping all over a 1923 issue of Time.

  “My, what a day,” she exclaimed with a shiver. “It’s practically a gale out there.”

  “Well, you blew into the right place,” Demelza said cordially, quickly whisking the vintage magazine out of harm’s way. “We have fresh tea waiting to warm you up.”

  With cup in hand, Beverly looked around. “Well, isn’t this nice,” she said brightly. “And so … cozy.”

  “Cramped, actually,” Demelza corrected her.

  “Atmospheric,” Beverly suggested.

  “Dark,” Demelza said.

  “Don’t your customers find it a little difficult reading in such light?” Beverly could no longer see her hand before her nose without her glasses.

  “Heavens, we don’t encourage our customers to read,” Demelza replied, a wicked little smile playing around the corners of her mouth.

  “What about Karen? I don’t want her to get eyestrain.”

  “Demelza’s teasing you, Mother,” Karen sighed. “There are plenty of lights when we need them, but we think the shop has more ambience this way.”

  “And it saves so much on electricity,” the newly budget-conscious proprietor put in.

  “Ambience?” Beverly echoed with just the slightest hint of disdain.

  “Well, we’re trying for the archival look,” Demelza confided. “You know—dusty, musty, hidden away. Isn’t that where treasures are usually found?”

  “Treasures?” Beverly openly sniffed at Demelza’s array of peace and protest posters.

  “Let me show you,” Karen beamed, leading her mother off to the special glass cases.

  “I don’t know about that woman,” Beverly remarked at dinner several hours later. “She seems very peculiar to me. Don’t you agree, Leo?”

  “I didn’t notice anything very peculiar,” Leo replied, attacking his Peking Duck as though it were a root canal.

  “She’s not peculiar,” Karen defended her friend and employer. “She’s just a little different, that’s all.”

  In the bright light of the Chinese restaurant, Karen wondered where the gray in her mother’s hair had gone.

  “Is she on something?” Beverly asked.

  “What do you mean, on something?”

  “You know—does she take drugs?”

  Karen chuckled. “What do you know about drugs?”

  “Oh, I’m not as cloistered as you might think,” her mother retorted. “I know what goes on in the world.”

  “Well then, you know more than I do,” Karen replied.

  “I smelled a very suspicious odor at that bookshop.”

  “That was incense, Mother.”

  “Are you sure? It was awfully sharp.”

  “I lit it myself, just before you got there.”

  “Well, nevertheless, I don’t want you mixed up with anyone who takes drugs.”

  “If Demelza takes drugs—and I certainly have no knowledge that she does,” Karen asserted, “she’s never done it at the Bookery. As long as she signs my paycheck each week, whatever she might or might not do someplace else is none of my business.”

  Which was a neat way of sidestepping the issue, Karen thought to herself now, as the clanking air conditioner began to have some small effect on the stifling apartment. In the four months since that conversation with her mother, she had discovered that many of Demelza’s friends did indeed smoke marijuana and she was pretty sure that her employer did, too.

  Karen had to confess that the idea of being around people who used marijuana, or pot or grass or weed, as they called it, made her a little uneasy. She knew very little about drugs other than that they were addictive and illegal. Once in a while, someone wandered into the shop behaving a bit off-center, but Demelza usually laughed it off.

  The first time, Karen was shocked. “That guy over there looks weird,” she whispered with wide eyes.

  “The word is stoned,” Demelza told her with a dry chuckle. “Sorry, Peter Pan,” she called to the customer in question, “but this isn’t never-never land.”

  Once, Karen watched as two young men at the back end of one of the aisles exchanged money for a small plastic packet containing something that looked like baby powder.

  “There’s someone over there selling talcum, I think,” she told Demelza.

  This time, the Bookery owner didn’t laugh. “Where?” she demanded and, following Karen’s finger, descended on the two men like a giant bat.

  “You’re history,” she cried, grabbing each by an arm and thrusting them in the direction of the door. “We sell books and magazines in here—and that’s all we sell.”

  “What was that about?” Karen asked.

  “There’s dope and then there’s dope,” Demelza replied. “Some of it’s easy and some of it’s hard. No one deals hard stuff in my place.”

  “Why do people use drugs in the first place?”

  Demelza shrugged. “Different people—different reasons,” she said. “Some do it because it’s fashionable, some because it’s illegal, some because they’ve become dependent. Most of the people I know do it because, for a little while, at least, it makes the pain go away.”

  The doctors had given Karen medicine in the hospital after her “accident” and she could still remember how it made the pain of her broken body subside. She wondered if the drugs that Demelza was talking about worked the same way.

  “What kind of pain do they have?” she asked.

  “Not the kind I think you’re thinking about,” the older woman replied. “Street drugs aren’t for toothaches and back strain. I was referring to the pain of living.”

  “The pain of living.” Karen had never heard that before. She tucked the phrase into the back of her mind. Demelza never spoke of it again, but Karen never forgot.

  Dinner was ready by the time Arlene arrived home from the university. Altho
ugh no one would ever be likely to call Karen a gourmet cook, she had at least mastered the basics.

  “Chef salad, iced tea, and French bread from the bakery,” she announced as her roommate passed the kitchen doorway. “I couldn’t bear the thought of turning on the oven.”

  Arlene grunted her approval, dropped her books on the dining table, and was shedding her clothes before she even reached the bedroom.

  “Look at me,” she cried fifteen minutes later, dripping from the shower, her long blond hair bound up in a towel. “Soaking wet and sticky all over.”

  “I’ll call maintenance again,” Karen promised.

  “If they can put a man on the moon,” Arlene fretted, referring to the incredible event they had recently watched on television, “why can’t they make an air conditioner work?”

  Karen pushed her roommate’s books to one side and set two places at the huge oak table with claw feet they had found at a secondhand store. In fact, the whole apartment was done in what Arlene dubbed Early Salvation Army. The overstuffed sofa and wing chairs were comfortable, if faded; the end tables were solid, if chipped; the bureaus were roomy, if warped; and the dining chairs were sturdy, if plain. But the two girls had had a lot of fun picking out each piece.

  They were halfway through their salads when Karen said, as casually as she could, “Have you ever taken drugs?”

  Arlene bit into a crusty piece of bread. “What kind of drugs?” she asked. “Aspirin? Sleeping pills? Or the mind-control stuff we give the patients at Bellevue?”

  “No, I mean street drugs. Like marijuana.”

  “I tried pot once,” Arlene nodded. “Years ago.”

  “What was it like?”

  Arlene shrugged. “I guess it wasn’t very special. I barely remember, and I’ve had no great urge to do it again.”

  “The effect you got… was it like drinking alcohol?” Lately, and in private, Karen had been learning a great deal about the numbing effects of alcohol.

  “No, it was nothing at all like that. Actually, it was nothing much of anything, as I recall. When you drink booze, you usually get fuzzy and your senses get dulled. When you do pot, you’re supposed to get a real high. You don’t lose awareness, so I’m told, you gain it. Why?”

  “I’ve been invited to a party tomorrow night,” Karen informed her. “And I think there’ll be drugs there.”

  “A party?” Arlene couldn’t keep the surprise out of her voice because Karen rarely accepted invitations.

  “Demelza’s having a few people to her place for dinner and she invited me. We’re even closing the Bookery early.”

  “And she smokes pot?”

  “I’m not really sure about that,” Karen replied, “but I know her friends do and some of them are bound to be there.”

  “Well, if you’re asking for advice,” Arlene said, “I’d say, don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “I am a little curious,” Karen admitted. “You know, to find out what it’s like.” The pain of living, she thought to herself.

  Arlene picked up her glass of iced tea. “Well then,” she said with a careless shrug, “go for it.”

  two

  Long after Arlene had fallen asleep, Karen lay awake in the I humid darkness, listening to the arrhythmic clanking of the air conditioner and thinking about dinner at Demelza’s.

  If she chose, she could count the number of parties she had attended in New York City over the past four years on one hand and have fingers left over. Her social life consisted mostly of a dinner out now and then, several movies, one or two Broadway shows, and an occasional concert at Lincoln Center, usually in the company of Jill or Arlene or Demelza.

  She had a ready excuse for every man who tried to date her, and after a while even the most persistent stopped asking. If she occasionally caught herself yearning for male companionship, she had only to reflect that few men were interested in friendship at arm’s length. With the advent of the contraceptive pill, “free love” was the catchword on everyone’s lips. Even casual dating meant obligatory sex—with all communication carried on between the sheets.

  What a different world it was, she thought with a sigh, and drifted off to sleep thinking about Peter Bauer.

  A brief, apologetic note had arrived at the house on Knightsbridge Road a little over a year after the picnic at Steppingstone Park, wishing Karen well and telling her of his impending marriage.

  “I wonder what took him so long,” Beverly sniffed.

  The nightmare woke her just before dawn and she lay in her bed, sweat-soaked and shivering, until the familiar panic began to subside. It was always the same—something evil chasing her through a thick fog until she couldn’t make her feet run anymore, and then the heavy hand reaching out to grasp her by the throat and cut off her life.

  She took several deep breaths to settle her heart and thought about trying for another hour of sleep, but fantasies of Demelza’s Greenwich Village loft kept her awake. Karen had never been inside a real Village apartment, and she couldn’t wait to see what one was like.

  Demelza had described her place as a cross between a church and a brothel. It was a fair assessment. The dirty brick building on Bleecker Street had once been a ribbon factory. Visitors reached the loft by means of a rickety self-service elevator with a heavy wooden gate that had to be raised and lowered manually. Karen arrived to find some two dozen of the Bookery regulars already there. She stepped out of the elevator and stood openmouthed at the edge of the single enormous room.

  Exposed brick Walls alternated with giant arched windows, and the vaulted ceiling was at least twenty feet high. One section of the loft was furnished with Victorian velvet sofas and ornate side tables, another had two massive pews squaring off over a refectory table, and a third was strewn with half a dozen mattresses, heaped with colorful pillows. Each section was separated by a curtain of beads suspended by wires from the ceiling. Candles burned everywhere, and in the mixture of odors Karen detected the familiar scent of incense. It was different, bohemian, more than a little bizarre, and it suited Demelza perfectly.

  “You made it,” the hefty hostess cried, descending on Karen with a highball in one hand and a plate of crudit6s in the other. “Welcome to my heaven on earth.”

  “This is fantastic,” Karen said, searching for the right adjective. “It’s so, well, it’s so … eclectic.”

  “Actually, I think you could call it MGM Extravagant,” Demelza replied. “And it took years of careful planning.”

  “It’s definitely you.”

  “Well, don’t just stand there and gawk,” the Bookery owner urged, taking her guest’s bulky coat. “Take a deep breath and jump on in. You know everybody.”

  Obediently, Karen took a few steps forward.

  “Hey, Karen,” someone said immediately.

  “Hey, Ethan.” She smiled at the slightly off-balanced skeleton beside her.

  “You look different,” Ethan observed shyly. “Not like you do at the shop.”

  Karen glanced down at the simple blue cotton skirt and loose-fitting, high-collared blouse she had worn to work.

  “It must be the clothes,” she teased.

  “Exactly,” Ethan agreed. “You know, your skirt matches your eyes. And your eyes are the color of a cloudless sky.”

  Her eyes were more the color of a stormy sky, but she smiled at him anyway. Ethan came from Nebraska, she knew, and was on his way to Canada. He was a regular at the Bookery and rather bashful, hovering as he did on the fringe of the group. But he managed to screw up enough courage to test her knowledge of the shop’s inventory on a daily basis. Not more than eighteen, with straight straw-colored hair that he kept pushing out of green eyes, something about him always reminded her of a lost puppy.

  “My momma’s cornflowers are the same bright blue,” he told her, “and they grow clean up to the sky.”

  “Sounds lovely.”

  He sighed wistfully. “I sure hope I get to see them again someday.”

 
“I hope you do, too.”

  “But it probably won’t be till after my daddy dies.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “He threw me out—called me a coward and threw me out. He said he didn’t have a son no more.”

  “Because you didn’t want to go to Vietnam?”

  “Yeah.” Ethan shook his head sadly. “He lost a leg on Guadalcanal. I just don’t know how he’s running the factory without me.”

  She could see his pain and wondered how many families across the country were being destroyed by this war of somebody else’s that so many young men didn’t want to fight.

  Ethan pulled out a ragged kind of cigarette and lit it “Wanna hit?” he offered after several deep puffs.

  Karen knew what it was. She took a half step back.

  “No,” she said firmly. “No, thank you.”

  Ethan grinned. “Demelza said you were a virgin. I didn’t believe her.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She said you’d never used grass.”

  “Why didn’t you believe her?” Karen asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “There’s just something about you—a look in your eyes, maybe, that says you’ve been there and back.”

  “You know, you’re different here than at the Bookery, too,” she told him, neatly changing the subject. “Much more open.” She nodded at the joint. “Is it because of that?”

  “I guess so,” he replied, taking another hit. “It sort of smooths out the edges and makes everything mellow.”

  Karen wondered how it would feel to be mellow. She tried to recall an occasion in the past, but more and more, her memory of that other life was fading into nothingness.

  “What’s it like,” she asked, “to be mellow?”

  “It’s like wearing rose-colored glasses to a horror flick,” he replied.

  “Marijuana makes you feel like that?”

  He offered the joint. “Don’t take my word for it”

  This time she was tempted. “Maybe later,” she said. “Right now, I’m hungry.”

  “The food’s behind that screen,” Ethan directed. “On the other side of the pew.”