Vida (7 page)

She would block him from discussing her with Susannah, mostly because it was dangerous to her, but also because she would not permit him that additional measure of intimacy with Susannah that would come from turning herself, Vida, into matter for their communication. She felt better, as if an enemy had come into the open where she could fight. He too was in a more affectionate mood. Being honest about Susannah had made him more relaxed after the initial sparring at the table. I will survive her, I will, she thought. She can keep him warm and feed him and enjoy him, but she can’t take him away from me. I won’t let her.

She drew in the sharp smell of the sea edge, the damp tossed-up seaweed, the crushed shells of small salmon-colored crabs, the salt, until her body rang with energy. Snakes of surf coiled in, slithering white up to her feet.
Thalassa, thalassa,
the surf said, as it did in calm weather, singing its name.
Ta thalassa.
Leigh’s arm was sharp and bony against her rib like an umbrella.

Brown-and-buff birds at the water’s edge pattered after the waves’ retreat, danced back from each advance. Eva would know what they were. She was always pointing to a bird on a wire and telling Vida its name, so that Vida felt as if she should bow and acknowledge the introduction. As soon as Eva told her the name of a bird, Vida started seeing it all over the place, as if naming made it appear. Suddenly Say’s phoebe or the house wren was sailing for insects everywhere. She opened her mouth to tell Leigh and shut it. Enough other names circled them like sea gulls crying. She realized he did not know Eva, who had not been part of their New York scene before becoming a fugitive. She remembered the first time Eva had pointed out a roadrunner to her; she had thought roadrunners cartoon figures, not live birds, and they had enchanted her. In the desert the fugitives were training for an action. She felt displaced with Leigh, remembering Eva, remembering herself preparing for the pipe bombing of the offices of a landlord notorious for rent gouging and burning out his own tenants—arson at a profit, with a little incidental death of three Chicano children the week before. Her group was taking reprisal on property valued over children.

They walked a couple of miles, picking up shells to admire and dropping them again.

”Remember that place we had in Montauk?”

“That was a great summer” he said. “You baked that bluefish whole stuffed with a caper dressing. And when the crew from the
Roach
was out, you made bouillabaisse … Let’s turn around.”

By the time they hiked back to the motel, Leigh was talking about lunch. He got out his briefcase and sent her for ice from the machine to chill a Hanns Kornell champagne. Riesling.

She commented, “You’ve got into California wines.”

“Maybe you can drink French wines at current prices, but I’ve had to look around. Besides, it’s fun to explore. There’s a lot of good California wines from small producers these days” He tapped the bottle cooling in the ice bucket. “I visited that winery.”

With Susannah? And when? And why had he come and gone in California without seeing her?

He added at once, second-guessing her, “I was just out there for a broadcast-journalism conference at Stanford. Rented a car and made a couple of excursions.”

“Does Susannah drive?”

“Sure. Like you, she thinks I’m a menace on wheels.”

He loved to learn something new, enter a field of expertise, and obviously Susannah had shared that exploration with him. She was determined not to give way to jealousy again. He was with her and she was going to repair their intimacy. While the champagne was chilling they showered together. Afterward she slipped into her kimono and knelt on the bed smiling at him. He slid his hand under her robe and began to caress her breast. How strange his body felt to her still, covered with a pelt of curly hair. It was like being in bed with a lean and sinewy raccoon. “You have such a neat body.” He was staring at her in a way that made her feel clumsy. “You’re a gorgeous woman. Neat, that’s the right word. Not an ounce of flab and yet all the furniture’s in place.”

He was not comparing her with somebody, he was not; he was just being appreciative. She wriggled out of her kimono and pulled him down on her, remembering where and how he liked to be stroked. Strange and familiar at once, his weight and bones and curly hair, the chugging of his buttocks that were long and pale half-moons, the jungle of his thighs, the savanna of his back, his beard tickling her ear. She squirmed and settled into his rhythm and began to float backward, to move out on that long arc where words faded, where the mind dipped into the flesh and happily drowned, where she strained and hauled on him and pressed upward, where she ballooned out more urgent and she had to have, had to and then finally pleasure quickened, held, teased and then broke inside and fanned outward, flushing hot in her arms and breasts, and at last ebbed.

When he came too and slackened inside her, she tried to go on holding him. After a while he slipped out and then turned with a deep sigh onto his back. She curled sideways facing him, fitted into the curve of his arm. The scent of sweat like fine erotic perfume. The smells of aftersex, sail marsh, salt sweat, rank and soothing. She couldn’t remain still but crouched over him, kissing gently his flat cheeks, his drooping eyelids, his pointed beard, his nipples, his wet slippery shriveled cock, his bony square kneecaps. She adored him. “Leigh! Leigh, I missed you. I missed you so much. I love you!”

His lids fluttered. “Love you too, babes … Good together”

After sex they’d used to share a cigarette, passing it back and forth. In ‘67 Leigh had given up smoking because he realized it was coarsening his voice. One morning as he coughed and spat, he announced he was done with it. He never smoked another cigarette. She admired his willpower, crouching over him. He indulged himself but he also drove himself; in some ways she thought of him as the essence of what she loved most in New York.

In midafternoon he unpacked the dark bread, smoked oysters, and another good pate from his briefcase. “Let’s catch some sun.”

“Aren’t you going to play some of your programs for me?” She wanted to hear what he had been doing politically.

He hefted the champagne bottle. “Let’s picnic now. I’ll take the programs along. How about the lighthouse?”

“Leigh, the fishermen will be shoulder to shoulder for the stripers. What’s that other park, where we used to swim?”

Hither Hills, it was called. Leigh said it was next to Thither Holes, where the locals sank the tourists in quicksand when they got out of hand. The campsites looked full and they kept away from that part of the beach, following a trail into the dunes and piny woods. The sun was strong by now, and the beach was settling with families and couples.

On the blanket filched from the motel she sat eating slowly and trying in memorize each moment. She felt distended with happiness. Leigh took off his shirt and lay propped on an elbow, savoring the champagne drunk out of a paper cup. That was Leigh, all right: the best for his palate and he’d eat it out of an old shoe. A champagne picnic on a scuzzy blanket. That was so typical and so reminiscent of good times together in the past that she had to clutch herself to keep from crawling all over him with affection the way he detested. Instead, she finally got him to play two of his specials on his little cassette player, one about longshoremen and the other about an old folks’ commune. He gave her a couple to carry away to hear when she could. Then she would burn them; her life at times reeked of burning tapes, tapes the Network sometimes used to communicate internally and with the outside world. She wished he had played the programs in the motel room. She had trouble concentrating under the mild blue sky and the warm soporific sun.

A couple ran over the dune. Immediately she shut off the player. The man and woman were photographing each other, mugging, posing, shooting from a crouch, lying back languorously. She would have liked a picture of Leigh to carry with her. She would have liked to give him a photo of her, not to forget her, to carry her with him, but that was a pleasure as forbidden as strolling into her own building, greeting Julio and gossiping a few minutes as she picked up her mail, riding up in the elevator and walking into her own apartment. Among the furniture they had bought together so long ago she would sit down with one of her own books. In the wonderful old tub long enough to lie down in, she would run the water very hot and pour in her pomander bath oil. Then she would dry and come into her own bedroom with the red velvet draperies or into Leigh’s with the Venetian blinds and the blue burlap curtains.

They had always had separate rooms. Leigh’s overflowed with clippings, tapes he was editing, splicing equipment, files, a dandruff of loose papers she could not endure. Leigh suffered from occasional fierce insomnia, stands of nights when he could not bear anyone in the bed with him, when he would get up and read at 3
A.M.,
work on an article, record his ideas or projects. Her room had been consciously sensual, a place to make love, to sleep, to talk hour after hour curled among heaped cushions on the big bed under the Cretan hanging, a room with two mirrors and a hanging light with a stained-glass shade, a modern imitation of Tiffany but lovely, lavender, cobalt, maroon …

“Do you and Susannah have separate bedrooms?” she asked.

“What?” He was shielding his eyes from the sun, stripped down to his swim trunks now. “I had to move the bed out of my office a while ago. I’ve got too many files. I put in a couch. It’s big enough for fucking” He grinned. “Black Naugahyde, looks like a doctor’s office. I can do decent recording there. I had it soundproofed. Not studio quality, but decent.”

Time was spinning faster and faster. When the couple wandered off, she turned on the cassette player again, listening as Leigh dozed. She bent over him. He had gained some weight. He had a visible soft stomach, but he was in remarkable shape considering he almost never did any physical exercise beyond making love and climbing steps out of the subway. He did walk a lot, blocks, miles around New York, often preferring to walk from 69th to 42nd or from their apartment up to Columbia, rather than take public transportation or a taxi. Somehow he burned up the good eating.

As he dozed, stirring in his sleep, grimacing slightly, she sat over him while his rich voice came tiny from the cassette interviewing a multitude of other New York voices. He was aging some, nicely. White hair flecked his beard, glinting in his brows. Lines were etched under his eyes; a deep furrow stood between. How good it would be to grow into middle age talking, incessantly talking, chewing over their life together, tasting and trying and learning, always learning, coming home again to talk it all over. She loved him. He was a permanent part of her. They had helped to shape each other. He had the key to her body. They had much in common and could have so much more if permitted. Yet in the early morning they would separate, and she must depend on luck and the inefficiency of the government to let them come together again.

The cassette was over. She liked the programs, but it seemed to her he was growing perceptibly less political. The push of the times was away from social content. A couple of years before, he would have made economic points about the old folks and why they couldn’t manage; now his emphasis was on human interest. She did not think he was aware of the drift. He needed her too, to keep him honest.

4

Monday morning over 5 A
.M.
breakfast on the highway, Vida had to hit Leigh for money. After failing to get any from Hank, she had all of thirteen dollars and thirty-eight cents. She wished that Leigh would mention money himself. Over breakfast he was abstracted, moving already into the day’s, the week’s business. With the road dark outside the plate-glass window, she felt as if they had been wrenched from sleep and dumped into a cold river of traffic. “I’ll have to park the damned car somewhere and then return it on my lunch hour,” he was grumbling. “Otherwise I’ll never make it to work on time.”

“Leigh … I’m completely broke. Do you have something to share with me?” So awkward. At first she’d used simply to tell him what she wanted. After all, he had their bank accounts, the furniture, books, stereo, audio equipment, all their joint property and assets. But as time passed and passed and passed, she had begun to feel like a poor relation begging.

“How can you travel around broke? That’s dangerous in itself. Suppose something happens?”

“I’m always in the situation of having to make nothing happen, unless I’m making it happen.” She waited.

Finally he yawned, reaching for his wallet. “Good thing I remembered to stop at the bank. Actually, Susannah reminded me—I was supposed to be going to Chicago.” He counted out a hundred in twenties, paused, met her gaze, slowly counted out a second hundred.

She was disappointed. After all, he usually gave her eighty or a hundred every month whenever he saw her. Since they’d missed so many months, she expected him to be a little more generous, but she did not want to fight about it their last hour together. Next time she would take up the issue of money with him.

“Next Tuesday at 10 A
.M.
I’ll call your pay phone. Then back to the first Tuesday in the month at 10 A
.M.
If the first call fails, a follow-up Wednesday, same time, same phones. Okay?”

He sighed. “Sure” He roused himself to pat her hand. “It’s been beautiful to see you. You’re looking good, kid. I hope you’re making it okay.”