changing-places-david-lodge

by Unknown

  ' Cash,' said the policeman.

  having given up smoking.

  ' Cash,' he repeated.

  "That's a sharp pair of pants the Professor is wearing, Al.'

  'I don't have that much, and the banks are shut. Will

  'Sure is, Lou.'

  they accept an American Express credit card ?'

  'I like a pair of pants that fits nice and snug around the ass,Al.'

  ' Do you accept credit cards ?' Philip asked the policeman.

  'Me too, Lou.'

  'No.'

  Philip sat down quickly on the wooden bench that ran

  'No, they don't.'

  round the wall, and didn't move until Desiree bailed him out.

  ' I'll get the money somehow,' said Desiree.' Don't worry.'

  'You came just in time,' he told her as they drove away from

  'Oh, I'm not worried,' said Philip miserably. He heard police headquarters.' I should have been raped if I'd stayed Desiree hang up, and put his own receiver down.

  the night.'

  'You're allowed one odier phone call,' said the policeman.

  It was funny in retrospect, but he had no wish to repeat

  ' I'll save it up,' he said.

  the experience. If a posse of cops were to come rushing

  'You got to make it now or not at all. And you better not through Mather Gate right now to arrest them, he thought count on getting bailed out, leastways not till Monday.

  he would probably be among the first to break ranks and You're an alien, see? That can complicate things.'

  flee to the sanctuary of his office. Fortunately it was a quiet

  ' Oh dear. What happens now ?'

  day on campus and the vigil seemed unlikely to provoke a

  'What happens now is that I lock you up. Too bad the breach of the peace. Passers-by just stared and smiled. A misdemeanour cell is full right up widi other folk been taking few made peace signs or Black Power salutes and shouted bricks that don't belong to them. I'm gonna have to put you

  ' Right on!' and' Power to the People!' A television team, a reporter and his cameraman, toting the heavy equipment in the felons' cell.'

  on his back like a bazooka, filmed them for a few minutes,

  'Felons?' The word had a dread sound to his ears, and the lens of the camera slowly traversing along the length of his misgivings were not allayed by the two powerfully built the steps, irresistibly recalling the annual school photograph.

  Negroes who sprang to their feet with feral agility as the cell Sy Gootblatt held a copy of the Euphoric State Daily in front door was opened.

  of his face. 'How do we know they aren't working for the

  'This here's a Professor, boys,' said the policeman, propel-FBI?'he explained.

  ling Philip firmly inside and locking the door.' So mind you

  To begin at the beginning: I was driving through Plotinus one

  speak nice to him.'

  The felons prowled around him.

  189

  ' What you busted for, Professor ? '

  188

  Saturday qfUrnoon - I'd been shopping downtown - and on the way

  'Really? They can't be worth very much, can they? But back I passed the site of a church that was being demolished'and I'll take diem back to the church right away.'

  noticed that lots of people, mostly students, were carrying away the

  ' Nobody's going to church. You got identification ?'

  old bricks in wheelbarrows and supermarket trolleys. I overtook a Philip produced his Faculty Identity Card and British group labouring along with a bad of bricks in paper sacks and driver's licence. The former provoked a curt homily against shopping baskets, and recognized one of my own students . . . Wily professors encouraging their students to violate property, the Smith. With two black friends from the Ashland ghetto and latter provoked deep but silent suspicion. Both documents a white girl in a kaftan and bare feet. They accepted his offer were confiscated. A second police car drew up beside them of a lift to the Garden with alacrity, loaded the bricks into and the occupants began to unload the bricks from Philip's the boot of the Corvair and jumped into the passenger seats.

  car and to transfer them into the police cars. Then they all As Philip drew up at an intersection near the Garden, Wily went to police headquarters.

  Smith suddenly yelled 'Pigs!' three of the car's doors flew The room they put him in first was small, windowless and open simultaneously and Philip's passengers fled in four airless. He was strongly cautioned against damaging it or different directions. The two policemen in the car that drew defacing the walls with obscenities, frisked for weapons, and up behind him did not bother to pursue them. They homed left alone for half an hour to meditate on his sins. Then they in on Philip, sitting at the wheel, paralysed with fright. 'Did brought him out and booked him. His faculty identity card I go through a red light or something?' he quavered.

  and British driver's licence were scrutinized again. The

  'Open up your trunk, please.'

  contents of his pockets were itemized and confiscated - a

  ' It's only got some old bricks in it.'

  discomfiting experience, which reminded him of a game

  'Just open up the trunk.'

  played long ago on Pythagoras Drive. There was much He was so flustered he forgot the Corvair was a rear-amusement around the duty-sergeant's desk at the appear-engined car and opened the engine cowling by mistake.

  ance of a marble, belonging to Darcy, in his jacket pocket

  'Don't play games with me, Mac, I haven't the time.'

  ('Ho, ho, you're sure losing your marbles now, hey Pro-

  'Terribly sorry!' Philip opened up the luggage com-fessor?') turning into moral disapproval mingled with prurient envy when it became evident that the car he was partment.

  driving and the house he was living in belonged to a woman

  ' Where'd those bricks come from ?'

  other than the wife whose portrait was in his wallet. He was

  'The, er, there's a building, a church, being demolished photographed, and his fingerprints taken. After that he was down the road, you must have seen it. Lots of people are allowed his phone call to Desiree and then he was locked up taking the old bricks away.'

  with the felons. De'sire'e succeeded in bailing him out at

  ' You have written permission to take those bricks ?'

  seven in the evening, just when he had given up hope of

  'Look, officer, / didn't take the bricks. Those students being out before Monday. She was waiting for him in the who were in the car had them. I was just giving them a lobby of the Hall of Justice, cool, crisp and confident in a lift.'

  cream-coloured trouser-suit, her red hair drawn back in a

  'What are their names and addresses ?'

  bun. He fell on her neck.

  Philip hesitated. He knew Wily Smith's address, and it was

  ' De"sir6e... Thank God you came.'

  his habit to tell the truth, especially to policemen.

  'Hey, you look strung out. They been beating you up or

  ' I don't know,' he said.' I assumed they had permission.'

  something?'

  ' Nobody had permission. Those bricks are stolen goods.'

  190

  'No, no, but it w a s . . . upsetting.'

  blood to the Viet Cong, obtain leaflets on first-aid in gas Desir6e was gentle, even tender, for the first time in their attacks, sign a petition to legalize pot, and express yourself acquaintance. She stood on her toes to kiss him on the lips, in a hundred other interesting ways. On the street side of the linked arms and drew him towards the exit. 'Tell me all plaza, a fundamentalist preacher and a group of chanting about it,' she said.

  Buddhist monks vied with each other for the souk of those He told her in rambling, disconnected sentences. It less committed to the things of this world. It was a relative-wasn't just the shock of relief: as once before, the unexpected ly quiet
day in Plotinus. Although there were State Troopers kiss had melted some glacier within him - unsuspected stationed on every intersection along Cable Avenue, emotions and forgotten sensations were suddenly in full directing the traffic, keeping the pavements clear, pre-flood. He wasn't thinking about the arrest any more. He venting people from congregating, there was little tension in was thinking that it was the first time they had touched one the air, and the crowds were patient and good-humoured. It another. And it almost seemed as if D6sir£e was thinking the was a kind of hiatus between the violence, gassing and blood-same thing. To his disconnected remarks, she gave dis-shed of the recent past and the unpredictable future of the connected answers; driving home, she took her eyes off the Great March. The Gardeners were busy with their pre-road for dangerously long periods to look at him, she laughed parations for that event; and the police, having had some and swore a little hysterically. Observing and interpreting bad publicity for their role in the Garden riots, were keeping these signs he felt still more excited and bewildered. His a low profile. It was business as usual along Cable Avenue, limbs trembled uncontrollably as he got out of the car, and though several windows were shattered and boarded up, and went into the house. 'Where are the twins?' he asked.

  there was a strong, peppery smell of gas in the Beta Book-

  'Next door,' said D£sir£e, looking at him strangely. She shop, a favourite gathering-place for radicals into which the shut the front door, and took off her jacket. And her shoes.

  police had lobbed so many gas grenades it was said you could And her trousers. And her shirt. And her panties. She didn't tell which students in your class had bought their books wear a bra.

  there by the tears streaming down their faces. The more

  •Excuse me, Phil,' Sy Gootblatt whispered. 'But I think wholesome and appetizing fumes of hamburger, toasted you're having an erection and it doesn't look nice at a vigil.'

  cheese and pastrami, coffee and cigars, seeped into the street from crowded bars and cafes, the record shops were playing At about 12.30, the vigil came to an uneventful end, and the latest rock-gospel hit Oh Happy Day through their ex-the demonstrators dispersed, chattering, for lunch. Philip ternal speakers, the bead curtains rattled in the breeze out-had a shrimp salad sandwich with Sy Gootblatt in the Silver side Indian novelty shops reeking of joss-sticks, and the Steer restaurant on campus. Afterwards, Sy went back to his strains of taped sitar music mingled with the sounds of office to pound out another Hooker article on his electric radios tuned to twenty-five possible stations in the Bay area typewriter. Philip, too restless to work (he hadn't read a coming from the open windows of cars jammed nose to tail book, not a real book, right through, for weeks) took the air.

  in the narrow roadway.

  He strolled across Howie Plaza, soaking up the sunshine, Philip snapped up a tiny vacant table at the open window past the booths and stalls of student political groups - a of Pierre's cafe*, ordered himself an ice-cream and Irish kind of ideological fair, this, at which you could join SDS, coffee, and sat back to observe the passing parade: the young buy the literature of the Black Panthers, contribute to the bearded Jesuses and their barefoot Magdalenes in cotton Garden Bail Fund, pledge yourself to Save the Bay, give maxis, Negroes with Afro haircuts like mushroom clouds and 19a

  193

  metallic-lensed sunglasses flashing heliographed messages of American literature that the European now looked for a revolution to their brothers across the street, junkies and mirror-image of his quest. He thought of James's The Am-potheads stoned out of their minds groping their way along bassadors and Strether's injunction to Little Bilham, in the the kerb or sitting on the pavement with their backs to a Paris garden, to 'Live . . . live all you can; it's a mistake sunny wall, ghetto kids and huckleberry runaways hustling not to,' feeling himself to partake of both characters, the the parking meters, begging dimes from drivers who paid up speaker who had discovered this insight too late, and the for fear of getting their fenders scratched, priests and police-young man who might still profit by it. He thought of Henry men, bill-posters and garbage collectors, a young man dis-Miller sitting over a beer in some scruffy Parisian cafe with tributing, without conviction, leaflets about courses in his notebook on his knee and the smell of cunt still lingering Scientology, hippies in scarred and tattered leather jackets on his fingers and he felt some distant kinship with that toting guitars, and girls, girls of every shape and size and coarse, uneven, priapic imagination. He understood Ameri-description, girls with long straight hair to their waists, girls can Literature for the first time in his life that afternoon, in plaits, girls in curls, girls in short skirts, girls in long sitting in Pierre's on Cable Avenue as the river of Plotinus skirts, girls in jeans, girls in flared trousers, girls in Bermuda life flowed past, understood its prodigality and indecorum, shorts, girls without bras, girls very probably without panties, its yea-saying heterogeneity, understood Walt Whitman girls white, brown, yellow, black, girls in kaftans, saris, who laid end to end words never seen in each other's com-skinny sweaters, bloomers, shifts, muu-muus, granny-gowns, pany before outside of a dictionary, and Herman Melville combat jackets, sandals, sneakers, boots, Persian slippers, who split the atom of the traditional novel in the effort to bare feet, girls with beads, flowers, slave bangles, ankle make whaling a universal metaphor and smuggled into a bracelets, earrings, straw boaters, coolie hats, sombreros, book addressed to the most puritanical reading public the Castro caps, girls fat and thin, short and tall, clean and world has ever known a chapter on the whale's foreskin and dirty, girls with big breasts and girls with flat chests, girls got away with it; understood why Mark Twain nearly with tight, supple, arrogant buttocks and girls with loose wrote a sequel to Huckleberry Firm in which Tom Sawyer was globes of pendant flesh wobbling at every step and one girl to sell Huck into slavery, and why Stephen Crane wrote his who particularly caught Philip's attention as she waited at great war-novel first and experienced war afterwards, and the kerb to cross the street, dressed in a crotch-high mini what Gertrude Stein meant when she said that 'anything with long bare white legs and high up one thigh a perfect, one is remembering is a repetition, but existing as a human mouth-shaped bruise.

  being, that is being, listening and hearing is never repetition'; Sitting there, taking it all in with the same leisurely relish understood all that, though he couldn't have explained it to as he sucked the fortified black coffee through its filter of his students, some thoughts do often lie too deep for seminars, whipped cream, Philip felt himself finally converted to and understood, too, at last, what it was that he wanted to expatriation; and he saw himself, too, as part of a great his-tell Hilary.

  torical process - a reversal of that cultural Gulf Stream which had in the past swept so many Americans to Europe Because I've changed, Hilary, changed more than I should hem in search of Experience. Now it was not Europe but the thought possible. Vve not only, as you know, been lodging with West Coast of America that was the furthest rim of experi-Disirie ZaPP s^nce *** "^Snt of the landslip, I've also been sleeping ment in life and art, to which one made one's pilgrimage in with her quite regularly since the day of my arrest, and to be honest I search of liberation and enlightenment; and so it was to can't seem to work up any guilt or regret about it. Ishould be very sorry,

  *95

  naturally, to cause you any pain, but when I ask myself what injury

  'I think one has to accept,' Philip said earnestly into the

  have I done to you, what have I taken away from you that you had

  Q X Y Z microphone, 'that those who originally conceived

  before, I come up with the answer: nothing. It's not my relationship

  the Garden were radicals looking for an issue on which to

  with Disirie that has been wrong, it seems to me, but our marriage.

  confront the Establishment. It was an essentially political

  We have poisessed each other totally, but without joy. I suppose, in

 
act by the radical Left, designed to provoke an extreme

  the thirteenyears of our married life, this trip of mine to America has

  display of force by the law-and-order agencies, thus de-

  been the only occasion on which we have been separated for more than

  monstrating the revolutionary thesis that this allegedly

  a day or two. In all that time I don't suppose there was one hour when

  democratic society is in fact totalitarian, repressive and in-

  you didn't know, or couldn't guess, what I was doing, and when I

  tolerant.'

  didn't know, or couldn't guess what you were doing. I think we even

  ' If I understand you correctly, Professor Swallow,' said

  knew, each of us, what the other was thinking, so that it was scarcely

  the nasal-voiced caller, 'you're saying that the people who

  necessary for us even to talk to each other. Every day was pretty much

  started the Garden were ultimately responsible for all the

  like the last one, and the next one was sure to be like this one. We

  violence that followed.'

  knew what we both believed in: industry, thrift, education, modera-

  * Is that what you're saying, Phil ?' Boon cut in.

  tion. Our marriage - the home, the children — was like a machine

  ' I n a sense, yes. But there's another sense, perhaps a

  which we served, and serviced, with the silent economy of two techni-

  more important one, in which the thesis has been proved

  cians who have worked together for so long that they never have to ask

  right. I mean, when you have two thousand troops camped

  for the appropriate tool, never bump into each other, never make an

  in this small community, helicopters buzzing overhead all

  error or have a disagreement and are bored out of their minds by the

  day, a curfew at night, people shot in the streets, gassed,

  job.

  arrested indiscriminately, and all to suppress a little public