by Marge Piercy
11
The Competition
Miriam tried hard to locate a permanent apartment in the North End but she could not find anyone who would rent to her. As August progressed, Phil suggested frequently that she move in. She did not take that idea seriously. She was no longer the Complete Scholar she had been, but M.I.T. was a place that habitually set students a rigorous schedule and she liked computer science. Above all she had found a project to work on, which was not only supporting her but could probably be mined for a thesis subject eventually.
Before school started she found a one-room apartment in Cambridge on Upland Road. It was twenty minutes by bus from Phil’s apartment but she bought a bicycle and sometimes she pedaled to M.I.T. or to Phil’s. Her room on the top floor faced small yards where housewives hung out their laundry and put their children to play. Past the back fence the Boston and Maine Railroad ran, shaking the house. The room was light and clean and free from bugs and only typically exorbitant in rent. The street outside was lined with big trees whose branches almost knit.
She was working for a project that was just getting started with a number of biochemists plus her providing the computer know-how. M.I.T. was not like Michigan. It lacked a campus people gathered around, easy meeting places, comfortable hangouts if you overlooked the F&T Diner. She was on campus some, among the modernistic slabs of building, but most of the time she was over at Project MAC, in Tech Square. It was a total environment. Some computer freaks almost lived in. The big computer and the artificial intelligence labs were on the ninth floor but her project office was on eight. Her part was to work on developing an artificial language which biochemists could use to describe such entities as enzyme systems: a language which they would find easy to use without having to know anything about computers and in which they could directly express their problems. She was also working on computer software which could operate with that language, to turn it into machine language, and run simulations of those enzyme systems that the scientists were describing. The computer would simulate them and give the results back to the biochemists. It was an interesting set of problems, way more interesting than the mathematical models she had been diddling with at Michigan.
For one thing, she thought that this work felt real. During her senior year, purer mathematics had come to seem more and more alienated and alienating. She did not want to spend her life manipulating concepts almost nobody understood and nobody could relate to. People might not understand exactly what she did now if they weren’t in her field, but at least they could relate to the products of that work. She thought that her mind was really more suited to this work than to pure mathematics, and the feedback with the machine at one end and the biochemists on the other end was interesting in itself. Even debugging the programs that she wrote was fun.
Because she liked her work, she had essentially different needs than Phil or Jackson. Too many people came percolating through Pearl Street. She wanted a place where she could shut Phil out when she had to, where she could spread out her books and her papers and her flow charts, and come back and find them undisturbed. When she came skipping in from class or from Phil her work waited, beautiful and inviting her to grapple with it.
Phil could be home engulfed in that steady gregarious hum he craved, friends, acquaintances, just faces to turn on with and drink with during all those hours when she worked on her compiler. The structures she generated gave her aesthetic pleasure: there was a neatness, an economy, an elegance to a good program just as there was to a good piece of music, although she could never convince Phil. That sense of economical and functionally elegant shape pleased her, satisfied something that had been hungry for use inside her. She felt surer than ever that she had made a good choice in changing fields.
Tech Square had been built for NASA under Kennedy and now housed corporations like Polaroid and cold-war entities like the Cambridge Project, as well as M.I.T. offshoots. It stood in a vast parking area that had been a working-class neighborhood when Phil was growing up, and towered over two mostly black housing projects from which trashing parties and entrepreneur thieves came raiding. 545, the building she spent so much time in, had a big fancy lobby with security and seemed to have been designed like a lot of M.I.T. to minimize the environmental shock students would experience in moving from school to industry. She shared an office with three other students, windowless and painted luridly, full of science fiction and mild anti-war slogans, with a cot and a hot plate and a calendar run off by computer with Snoopy saying FUCK YOU RED BARON. If she wanted to kill time, she could do it endlessly.
For all of her careful irony to Phil about the place and her sense sometimes of “What am I, daughter of a HUAC victim, doing in the brain of the military-industrial complex?” she was having a good time. Just one floor up were the most exciting toys she could imagine. Besides the big old GE 645, there were elegant small computers, two DEC 10s and a 6 lashed together, and graphics terminals for dynamic modeling. Not to mention the computer-directed robots in the lab where there was so much wiring that the floor quaked when she walked on it, floating on a mass of circuits.
From Brooklyn she had brought whatever clothes she still wanted. Allegra told her she thought Lionel would move out of the flat, and Miriam rather hoped he would. It depressed them all. Even Mark sighed and drooped there. She hung her room with dripping subtle colors, for Phil had got into tie dying. The bare bulb of the ceiling fixture in his room now was muted by a canopy of sheets dyed with golds and browns and reds. He had made a canopy for her ceiling in red and blues he said had the tonality of stained-glass windows that neither of them had ever seen. They would go and see, someday.… They went to rummage sales and the Salvation Army and Good Will on Mount Auburn to get used sheets and plain white curtains and T-shirts. All of these they tie-dyed in big spaghetti pots on the stove.
“I don’t give a shit what you brew up like witches on my stove, so long as you clean it up. I will not have cobalt blue stew poisoning me.” Jackson inspected every pot.
At home her biggest meal was of hamburgers or hot dogs, but Jackson turned out to be an exacting and inventive cook. On their meager budget he produced good soups and stews and casseroles. In the stores he watched the prices with a sharp eye. He was deeply involved in the local food co-op and always knew when they had paid too much for produce. That was a strange side to this somber man: he always knew how much everything cost. Sonia would have adored him. It piqued her how little he seemed to think of her. Most of the time he ignored her, as if she were some pickup Phil had scraped off the barroom floor.
“You’re a tight bastard, Jackson, when we come down to it. And we always do. You count pennies. You could dwindle into an old bachelor miser saving foil and old twine and with twenty thousand dollars under the mattress in crumpled singles while you tie your pants with an end of rope.” Phil leaned on the refrigerator drinking a beer, whose quality he had just been complaining of.
“Whereas you have a hole in your pocket as big as your mouth. Until we pay the rent, there’s no Tuborg or even Pabst.”
“This Old Bohemian is just Charles River water. Nice and brown.”
“Hmmm.” Jackson regarded him gravely. “I could go down with a bucket and get it directly. Do you fancy the taste of the sewage on the Boston or the Cambridge shore?”
“Aw, the Cambridge sewage is the tastiest. It’s all that academic shit going out to sea. Pound for pound, you can’t beat it.… I know you don’t mean to be tight, Jackson. It’s just your Midwestern toilet training.”
“Yes, we did have them. I expect you’ve found it hard to adjust.”
Phil tensed, coming straight off the refrigerator. Miriam, washing up at the sink, turned quickly drying her hands on her dungarees. “Personally, I think we should eat it for supper. Recycling, Jesus saves. Ecologically sound. Eat shit and cram the empties up your ass.”
“You have a vulgar woman, Philip old buddy,” Jackson drawled, trying to make contact. He had seen Phil tighten a
lso. In their constant sparring, one often pushed the other too far. “Where did you say you found her? Cruising the Square?”
“Wherever I found her, I know how to keep her. And you can jam that up your ass.” Phil stomped into the john and slammed the door. Hunks of the ceiling were heard to fall into the tub. Miriam’s and Jackson’s gazes collided and rebounded. Industriously she scrubbed the mashed potato pot from supper.
When she let out the water, Phil was still sulking in the bathroom and Jackson had quietly laid out the chessboard on the kitchen table. When Phil sauntered out, they were already playing.
“As soon as I’ve finished off this slow-motion general, I’ll come,” she said. They were always playing nowadays.
She thought of it as a kind of heaviness, as if the room tipped or she swelled. It had to do with the way Jackson watched her sometimes. The game was half played. She had two pawns on Jackson, but she had allowed her mind to wander, that wooziness to creep in, and now her bishop had been exchanged for his knight and he was threatening her rook. The same gaps appeared in his game from time to time. Playing chess was something they had fallen into as a war they could legitimately wage on each other.
Phil she could beat easily because, although he played a cunning game at first, he would forget his own grand strategies in flashes of bravado and wild vendettas. He would launch an attack on her queen and in that pursuit sacrifice four other pieces if only he could effect her capture. Jackson was more nearly her match. If he would have accepted handicapping her a pawn or two, he would have beat her a good percentage of the time. But he did not believe in handicaps, he said, and would not enjoy the game if they did not start out apparently even.
She did not really like to play chess with Phil. But in her uneasy facing of Phil’s roommate, chess was useful. It filled the space between them with mock battle. Phil wanted the pleasure of winning, but he wanted it quickly. If she looked away from the board, sometimes Phil would move the pieces, and then laugh like a kid when she caught him. If he lost his temper he would clean the board with a swipe of his forearm. A couple of times when she patiently got the pieces and set them up as they had been, he was amazed. He no longer remembered.
Playing with Phil was playing, not competing. They had so many games. Sometimes an object would start them off: a flowered, flounced dress she got at the Salvation Army while browsing for surfaces to dye, that they would try on each in turn mincing and posing. A torn and ragged suit of tails in which Phil was a magician failing to produce rabbits from a bottomless hat, in which she was a mad conductor leading the orchestra of Phil. Comb and tissue paper could prompt them to kazoo serenades and outlandish versions of Beethoven that sent Jackson howling to a bar. Even when they were in bed what began as love-making might turn over into teasing or acting out an elaborate seduction, one of the other.
But Jackson truly wanted to win. He deliberated maddeningly. He was a slow player and she was fast and sometimes she would fetch a clock and impose a time limit, or bring a book and ostentatiously read while he was brooding. If she let him wait her into fidgetiness, he sometimes won through lapses on her part. When she faced him across the board, it mattered each time who came out on top. It was ridiculous that they cared, but they did. She noticed one morning when she brought up the mail and knocked on his door to give him a letter from his parents in Davenport, Iowa, that on the wooden box beside his mattress now lay My System by Aron Nimzovich and Griffith and Sergeant’s Modern Chess Openings.
It was a bare ascetic room, replica of the New York basement cell. His books were still in boxes, his socks and underwear in laundry bag or suitcase. Covered with an army blanket, the aged mattress lay on the floor with his boots beside it. A broken shade hung partway off the window that he seemed to leave open three or four inches now in November just as he had when she had first seen the room, in June. It was a room she entered seldom, and never without knocking and identifying herself and her purpose.
Her feelings remained sore that he was not friendlier. They always seemed rivals for Phil’s attention and respect. Chess was the one thing he would admit wanting to do with her, the one opening he gave her, and that was a poor way to win him over. Obviously he found her presence in the flat an irritant. Phil and she had been used to wandering around naked and it was difficult to remember always to wrap herself in a sheet or put on Phil’s shirt before she trotted to the bathroom or got a beer for Phil or ran into the living room to change a record. Phil did not bother. He marched out as he was regardless of who was sitting in the kitchen. Not defiantly or ostentatiously, just without thinking.
Now Jackson forced her back from that naturalness. He forced her into a false modesty. He dropped remarks and comments and made hard faces. He forced her to become conscious of her body in a bad way, as if it were something he must be protected from, a time bomb in his eye that might explode if left uncovered. He did not treat Phil’s nakedness as aimed at him, a weapon, a taunt, but for her to walk about as she was he regarded as an act of aggression.
One afternoon in December Phil was putting Jackson on about being inhibited. “You can’t touch anybody. Can’t ever give me a pat or hug. It’s like you have a barbed-wire fence around your skin, or one of those force fields from science fiction that nobody can cross. Look at old Miriam. She’s a toucher. Watch her make out sometime with dogs and cats and kiddies. But you’re scared. All the time she’s around here, you’ve never put a finger on her.”
Miriam laughed. “It’s true, Jackson. Everybody else comes through, they kiss hello, they shake hands, they give a pat or a hug. I’ve never seen you touch another person. I’m not quite sure you touch yourself. Except for scratching!”
“Oh. You want me to touch her.” Jackson looked very tight and mean. “Fine. How about this?” He walked up behind her where she sat at the table and ran his hand slowly and deliberately along her throat and into her shirt to close over her breast. She sat stark still. His hand felt hot and bony and more callused than Phil’s. She did not think she remembered to breathe for several minutes. Jackson was glaring at Phil, who was glaring at Jackson.
She got up abruptly and pushed Jackson out of the way. “I am not a tool with which to beat each other. If you want to touch me, you may not do so in lieu of hitting him. Is that clear?”
“He was provoking me,” Jackson said mildly and sat down at the table with his head in his hands.
“Only because you claim you cannot be provoked.” Miriam went to stand by Phil. “Come, Philip, come. I have to go home soon and do my duty to God and Computer. Cuddle with me and leave Jackson in the solitude he so richly deserves.”
“If you ever do that again, I’ll kick the shit out of you,” Phil said between gritted teeth.
“Are you sure you can?” Jackson still had his head in his hands. “Why should you care? She isn’t faithful to you anyhow.”
“What do you know about what or who I’m faithful to?” Miriam stepped forward, clenching and unclenching her fists. “What do you know about us as a couple? How I care for Phil or how he cares for me?”
“I see him chewed up by jealousy.”
“But you don’t see him suffocating with boredom. There’s a choice. We made it consciously.”
“She’s on target.” Phil stretched himself, suddenly less angry. “You want to fit us in your notions, put the strait jacket on whether it fits or not.” He put an arm around Miriam. “I’m not going to fuck one woman for thirty years, or pretend that’s what it’s all about. Don’t you understand I found her and I taught her? I opened her into the woman she is, the woman that suits me.”
When Phil spoke about her as if she were a clay doll he had found lumpish in Brooklyn and molded into a woman, she felt uncomfortable. But after all he had been her teacher. He could open her up to what was on her mind as nobody else ever could. Besides, he liked to sound off in an exaggerated way, and especially he liked to boast in front of Jackson.
“Maybe. And is that what she wants?”
“A fool and his honey are soon parted.” Jackson leaned back in the kitchen chair, scratching his shoulder.
As they lay face to face in Phil’s bed she asked, “What was that all about?”
“Oh, he gets the itch around here—the two of us going at it like jack rabbits day and night.” Phil was grinning, golden and wicked and proud of himself. “He just needs some pussy. He always gets very moral when he’s horny.”
Her body still prickled, her pride was sore. So coldly deliberate. Or was he attracted to her? She felt he was always punishing her for being alive. “He doesn’t like me. Thinks I’m no good for you.”
“Aw, he’s a bit jealous. We’ve been friends a long, long time, pigeon. I was a punk kid, and I wouldn’t have come through Nam alive except for him. We been through a whole lot of different scenes. Lots of women have come and women have gone. Like Sissy, his wife. She never could stand me, though I’ll say she was a good-looking piece, and one time he accused me of being after her, one time when he was drunk. It’s the fact that I can talk to you, that’s the rub. He thinks I take you too seriously, that’s what he says.”
“Too seriously! Am I some kind of joke?”
“He thinks you take yourself too seriously.”
