Conscience

by Alice Mattison

  “She can’t think an independent thought,” he was saying, padding behind us toward the door. He opened it, the heavy New York door with its peephole and two locks. This was a year or two before everyone suddenly had four or five locks. “Whatever I say, she agrees with me—when she’s not just quoting the Black Panthers or Tom Hayden.”

  “I know what you mean,” Helen said. I wished we were back with Daniel, even though he was not what I had thought. “That’s how she thinks—or refuses to think.”

  “Thank you for the drink,” I said. He didn’t answer.

  When we got outside, I asked Helen, “Was that fair?” I’d forgotten to feel bad about the insult to her and was thinking now of Rhoda.

  “Fair to whom?”

  “Rhoda, whoever she is. I hated that.”

  “Oh, you don’t know her,” she said.

  “So you know so much? You think so well?”

  After a long pause, she said, “I’m trying. She’s just repeating what she hears at rallies, singing folk songs. Nothing personal.”

  She turned in the direction she had to go, as if sure I’d follow, but I told her my mother was expecting me for supper. We had to use separate subway entrances to reach opposite platforms in the same station. We hugged, and she touched the beads under her open jacket. Then she said, “I told Daniel I wouldn’t sleep with him if he carried a gun.” Before I could answer, she hurried down the stairs.

  If I’d followed her, would anything that came later have been different? I crossed the street and walked down the downtown stairs and put in my token. The uptown train was just pulling out when I reached the platform, and when it was gone, the platform on the other side of the tracks was empty.

  A week or so after Griff showed up for oatmeal in the middle of my breakfast, I was working late at home, alone, on a difficult chapter from the book about weaving. I have fairly good eyes and a fairly good eye, as they say, but I’m no designer. I prod my authors—many of them visually gifted but not comfortable with words—to write explanations so clear and diagrams so elegantly simple that the reader could start with either, grasp the idea, and confirm it with the other. I’m not the designer, and I’m not the copyeditor—we have a sharp copyeditor—but this was one of the long evenings I spend at my dining room table with a good lamp, looking. I tell my authors that their first job is to teach me the subject. “Confused!” I may write.

  The chapter was about doubleweave—weaving two patterns at the same time, so the top and reverse of the cloth look different. Griff was out, and I was determined to finish a section and its diagrams before getting up and preparing something to eat. Otherwise, I’d forget what I’d just read. I was happy: not quite getting the point but about to, making intellectual progress about a subject that held neither personal meaning nor threat. I wouldn’t even have to thread a loom or weave something to prove myself—just catch on.

  Then Barnaby barked once, and I heard Griff’s car, his steps on the walk. Sometimes the predictable entering bustle of a body that has come home daily for decades proclaims that what’s ordinary saves us; sometimes it’s spam in the inbox. This time it was spam—and then, as his footsteps mounted the porch steps, I grasped what the paragraph I’d read three times meant, glanced at a diagram that had stumped me, and knew that I had it. With my pencil, I made a suggestion that would clarify the ambiguous phrase that had slowed me, and only then came Griff’s call. I turned and saw his face, which looked interestingly odd.

  “What?” I said. The dog was pressing against his legs, and Griff reached absently to touch him.

  Whatever had happened was good but complicated. I looked from the angles in the diagram—the illustrative pattern from which a weaver might work—to the lines in his aging face.

  “Look,” he said, his smile deepening. He put his briefcase on the corner of what I think of as my table and drew out my copy of Bright Morning of Pain.

  I seized it, brought it to my face. The dust jacket, the little rips in the paper. I’d have to write about it after all. A rush of irrational thoughts, then anger again—if he could find it, why hadn’t he found it sooner? “Where?”

  “Jean had it. Jean Argos.” He started to tell me how he discovered that the book was in, of all places, the office of the director of Barker Street Social Services. I said, “Why didn’t she return it?”

  “She was reading it.”

  “She was reading it?”

  “Why not?” he said. Then he added, “She didn’t know how it got there,” and interrupted himself to tell me about a different occasion, which he’d forgotten until then, when he stepped into her office in her absence to use the phone—he rarely remembers to charge up his phone—and apparently left the book.

  The mention of Barker Street had made me remember what had occupied him that night: a board meeting. I interrupted. “Wait, were you elected?”

  He took a step back and looked guilty but unable to keep from smiling. I told myself that I didn’t want to stop him from doing what he actually wanted to do, just to stop him from doing what he’d persuaded himself he ought to do. Except that that wasn’t true. I wanted him home and noticing me—not on the phone, not maneuvering through the inevitable crises entailed in the management of a nonprofit. I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sorry this doesn’t suit you,” he said, all but formally. The excitement had gone; the friendliness had gone.

  I had hurt his feelings. What was there to say? It didn’t suit me. I wanted to be the sort of person who’d congratulate him and ask for details, but I wasn’t. I said, “Have you eaten?” Hunger made me impatient. I’d eat, with him or without. “Are you going out again?”

  “I’m interrupting you,” he said.

  “Are . . . you . . . hungry?”

  He smiled. It made me want to touch him, but though I lifted my arm, I didn’t.

  “Yes,” he said. “Hungry. You?”

  I turned off my desk lamp. “Very. I’ll cook something quickly.” I stretched. My back hurt. His phone rang.

  “But why, Ollie?” he said ten minutes later, coming into the kitchen behind me. I’d fed the dog and was boiling water for spaghetti, cracking eggs for carbonara.

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you still mad?”

  I rummaged in the fridge for something green and found a package of baby spinach, not disgustingly old, that I could stir into the pasta with the egg. Not for the first time, I wished Griff and I could drink wine together. At least he didn’t mind when I did. He’d never liked wine. I poured him some iced tea and found an open bottle of cabernet.

  “For the same reason I was always mad.”

  “You’re not being fair,” he said. “Of course I should have remembered where I’d been that Thursday. . . .”

  “Oh.” I stood up. “That’s not why I’m mad. I’m mad that you got yourself elected president of that board.”

  “So you forgive me for losing the book?” Which is exactly the way he thinks. I laughed. Then I understood that, indeed, I was no longer angry about the book.

  “So what’s she like?” I said. “Does she want you to be president of her board?”

  “No.”

  I was more interested in the details than in preserving my antagonism. I sipped wine; I whisked eggs. “Tell me,” I said. The wine helped.

  I heard a long account of the many issues about which Jean Argos was correct or wrong. “She’s smart,” he said. “I couldn’t work with someone dumb.”

  “But?”

  “She has too many good ideas,” he said. “Remember the science teacher?”

  I remembered the young, idealistic science teacher at his school, whose good ideas had included a predawn trip up a forested hill to hear birdcalls, during which a boy broke a leg and had to be rescued by EMTs. Griff had given permission—that was the problem. He felt responsible, all these years later, for the leg.

  “I promised to send her a copy of Val’s book,” he said. “I’ll overnight it.”
/>
  “Why?”

  “I snatched it out of her hands.”

  “But it wasn’t hers!”

  “But I promised.” He arranged our plates and silverware on the table. I put spaghetti into the boiling water. “I think I should invite her to that dinner,” he said then.

  “What dinner?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to worry about it—you can hide upstairs,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll want to. If not leave altogether.”

  “What are you talking about? You’re planning to invite a woman to dinner and I’m supposed to leave? Are you going to seduce her?”

  “No,” he said soberly, looking particularly elderly and distinguished. “Others will be present. Six or seven.”

  He thought he’d told me. He insisted we’d had at least two conversations about this dinner—which was the result of a silent auction, a fundraiser for his school. Someone from the PTA had persuaded him to cook a dinner for the highest bidder. He’d been studying cookbooks. I now remembered the cookbook lying around upstairs.

  “You didn’t sound interested,” he said, “so I’ve been assuming you’d stay upstairs or leave. You can walk through, if you want—or whatever else you want. You can eat.” He paused. “I don’t know how to cook for so many people.”

  I tried to make sense of this. Griff, my husband, had agreed to host a dinner at our house (in the speech I was making in my mind, I said “our home,” a locution I detest), which he assumed I would not attend. As if I’m always leaving—I, whose trip to Boston was my first time away from him in months, who works only three days a week and is home by 6:00 p.m. on the in-office days, who is otherwise home every minute.

  “But who goes out in this marriage? Who is always out somewhere?”

  He looked at me, surprised.

  “Right this minute,” I continued. “Who spent the evening here in this house”—it was almost nine—“and who was out?” I drained the spaghetti. Facing the sink, with my back to him, I said, “Who was out getting elected president so as to spend even more time out? You accuse me of not wanting to stay home for your fucking dinner?” While I mixed up the spaghetti in the hot pan with the eggs, I began on all the breakfasts he missed.

  “Grated cheese,” I said, interrupting my tirade.

  “I know,” he said. I looked over my shoulder, and he was sitting there at the table, grating a big block of parmesan. “I know how you fix this.”

  “You do?” Something about this kind of attention stopped me. “You watched what I was doing?”

  I put the food on the table. We ate. I drank wine.

  He said eventually, “That’s not fair. You don’t want me here when you’re working.”

  Which was often true. He’ll never get over the fact that all those years ago I’d insisted on a separation—first sending him to live in the apartment that had emptied out upstairs, then sending him elsewhere. And indeed, that evening, I had not been glad to hear his footsteps.

  There was a pause. Then I asked him about the dinner party. It was fairly soon, it turned out, and he had no plans.

  “I’ll cook,” I said. I wanted to meet this formidable Jean, who had tried to steal my book. Or I wanted to take back what I’d said. I was not an adept giver of dinner parties, but I was better than Griff.

  “Thank you. I didn’t expect this.”

  “Obviously not, if you didn’t even tell me about it.”

  “I did tell you.”

  “Well.”

  “Thank you,” he said again, with a look I hadn’t seen since the day he borrowed Bright Morning of Pain.

  When I stood at the end of the meal, I touched the back of his neck with one finger, and he stood as well.

  “Let’s leave the dishes,” he said. “I’ll put them in to soak.” I knew what he meant. It wasn’t the most thrilling coupling that ever took place, but when we were done, Griff rested his warm hand on my belly.

  Still, auctioning off a dinner with the principal didn’t seem like a great idea to me, and I said so often in the next few days. When I volunteered to cook it, I thought I was doing Griff a favor, but it was a favor to the school, or the auction committee, or the guests who had bid on it, and I had little interest in them. I insisted that Griff find out how much the winners had paid and how many people had bid.

  “It’s a small school. Most of the kids are poor,” he said, as if I didn’t know. I also knew there was a volunteer fundraising committee—outsiders, people who were not poor.

  There had been eight bids on the dinner, he reported, and the winner had paid one hundred eighty-four dollars.

  “Eight bids? How many people bid?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So the same two people bid back and forth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was eating oatmeal—again—standing up.

  “One hundred eighty-four? How do you get to one hundred eighty-four in eight bids?”

  “I can’t imagine.” He ran water into his dish, put it into the sink, and turned to leave.

  “Sit down,” I said. “Drink coffee.”

  He sat down.

  I kissed the bald top of his head as I walked past him, and he touched his pate as if to learn whether the kiss was still there. I couldn’t have said why I kissed him. Possibly because when he came closer, I noticed him—spotted him as one might spot a walking figure in a painting of a storm, after first observing the swirl of weather. I was not seriously unhappy with Griff those weeks, not having fantasies of throwing him out, but it was rare to like him, much less love him.

  Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, and Helen showed up at my house in tears. When we talked, eventually, I told her about a paper I was working on, and she mentioned one she’d written. “I didn’t know you did homework,” I said.

  “Oh, Olivia,” Helen said.

  Shortly after that evening came the student rebellion at Columbia. Black students—and Helen—marched against the gymnasium. The mostly white antiwar group, to which Helen also belonged, had learned that Columbia was working with the government on developing weapons, and the protest against the gym turned into an antiwar protest. Students occupied university offices, even the office of the president. Helen didn’t camp in one of the offices, but she relayed messages and food. At first she was engaged, happy, phoning me to report as the occupation went unchallenged. Changing the world was easy. Then the police beat up the antiwar students. I was shocked; Helen said I was naïve.

  I associate my meetings with Helen in the spring of 1968 with the topics we discussed. There was an argument—I recall that we were hungry, but there was nothing in the refrigerator—about Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy’s chances of being the presidential candidate instead of Hubert Humphrey. We exhausted ourselves, waiting for someone—a roommate or a boyfriend—so we couldn’t leave, in those days before cell phones. Eventually we gave up and ate at the neighborhood place, irritable with hunger.

  Back at her place, we kept talking—about men, I think. I changed the subject to talk about Patrick—I was making more of that connection than there would ever be—and because talking about the war scared me. I would suddenly realize I could lose her, and back off. I couldn’t get her interested in the question of whether I should be faithful to Patrick, who didn’t care whether I was or not. I accused her of finding my boring sex life boring. She said, “Maybe it is boring. There are more important things.”

  I said, “You are so goddamn pure; I can’t stand you,” and then she cried.

  It was too late to go home, but eventually we were friends again, and Helen said I should sleep over on the sofa. I phoned my parents. Helen got into pajamas and offered me a pair, but I knew they wouldn’t fit. She found me a blanket, and we turned off the light. Sometime later we got up, hungry again, and cooked spaghetti, throwing frozen peas into the pot at the end, and crumbling dry American cheese on top. We ate in the dark, drinking Chianti, listening to angry music coming from one of her ro
ommates’ bedrooms. I heard Helen eating rapidly and could just see her on her mattress, hunched over her plate as I was, trying to keep the peas from rolling off.

  I said, “You never used to eat.”

  “I ate.”

  “Yes, of course you ate,” I said. “You didn’t die. I meant I never saw you eat.”

  “In high school, we were rarely together at mealtimes,” Helen said, with precise emphasis. “And that cafeteria took my appetite away.”

  She sounded offended again, but I persisted. “That’s not what I meant. You were different.”

  She seemed to let it go. I saw in the dim light from a streetlamp outside that she put the plate and fork on the floor next to her bed and lay down. “If I fall asleep,” she said, “put the plates in the sink when you’re done. We try to keep the bugs in one room.”

  I continued eating. Then she said, out of the dark, “I’m different in lots of ways.”

  “You’ve had these boyfriends.”

  “Not that. I used to be a liberal. Now I’m a radical.”

  I considered this. Was that so different from what I was? “We’re all pretty radical these days,” I said. “What other choice is there?”

  All I really wanted was to change the subject, but she wouldn’t, reminding me yet again how many people had already died in this war, which was badly planned and badly waged and couldn’t be won. All that. “No,” she concluded. “You’re a liberal. You’re trying to decide between McCarthy and Kennedy, for God’s sake.”

  “One of those men will be president,” I said. “Humphrey, McCarthy, Kennedy. If we’re lucky. We have to nominate the best one.”

  “Maybe not,” said Helen.

  “Maybe not?”

  “If we make enough trouble, maybe not,” she said. “They’ll be too busy putting down our rebellion to hold an election. Maybe they’ll be too busy to send more troops over there.”

  “Oh, don’t be silly. And my God, Helen, don’t we want an election? We give up elections, who knows what could happen?” I was a liberal.