The Laws of Our Fathers Page 31

  Love. I've been so lucky! I think all the time. Not in the ordinary outward sense that people have in mind with that phrase. Because, after all, I've had my pratfalls and distractions, my own tough patches, sickness and divorce, the ordinary major miseries of an ordinary existence. But I'm so lucky to have Nikki, to have someone to love, unambiguously and durably, someone for whom my love will never falter. Love, whatever it means, has otherwise been an unreliable thing in my life. With my mother. With men. In my younger years, it made no sense to me that one word referred to sexual relations and your family. You have to get older for all of that to cohere, to understand it comes down to the same thing, intensity, connection, commitment, some Mecca toward which your soul can always pray.

  After dinner, a bath. Nikki frolics, inventing games with Barbie dolls who, except for the moments of their evening drowning, dwell on the tub side in consummate nudity, despairing, no doubt, over the sad fate of their plastic hair, which Nikki's repeated stylings have left a mass of ratted knots.

  'I like Jenna better than Marie,' says Nikki, 'but they're both black.'

  Once again, panic is forestalled. Teach. Always teach.

  'You know, Nikki, whether someone is nice has nothing to do with the color of their skin. You're nice from the inside, not the outside.'

  She pouts, she bugs her eyes. 'Mommy, I know that.' Some propositions are obvious, even to a six-year-old.

  Eventually, I extract her from the tub. Already, I find myself longing for the baby who has only recently disappeared, the three-and four-year-old with her winsome malapropisms. 'It's gark outside.' 'Hum on' for 'come on.' Now she sometimes seems a being of unknown origins, with tastes and even physical attributes I've never encountered in myself or even Charlie. Where does she get these fingers, I wonder as I'm toweling her dry, which look tallowy as melting party candles?

  'Have I told you how wonderful you are?' I ask, kneeling beside Nikki's bed.

  'No,' Nikki answers at once, as she does each evening. 'Well, you're wonderful. You're the most wonderful person I know. Have I told you how much I love you?'

  'No,' she answers, squirming shamefaced against my chest.

  'I love you more than anything in the world.'

  I cuddle her until she sleeps, an indulgence I should not permit,

  but it's a precious moment, again the simplest atom, nucleus, and particle. Asleep, Nikki is soft and smells sweetly of her shampoo.

  Afterwards, in the quiet house, I lounge in the living room. A glass of white wine is spun experimentally by the stem between my fingertips. At long last, I reach the glorious moment when I remove my pantyhose. Now, after the parade of the day is over, I find out what has stuck, before it grows into something new in the hothouse of dreams. Night sounds rise up from the city: wind against the gutters, passing cars, teens a block away exuberant with their mischief. Above the painted brick fireplace a Modigliani hangs, a narrow-faced girl in whose inscrutable pose I have always recognized something of myself. While Charlie lived here, I spent hours staring at that painting, since I was loath to move around while the poet was in the throes of creation. From Charlie's study in the extra bedroom, the strong blue smoke of his hand-rolled cigarettes would penetrate the room. He used tobacco brands you saw in Westerns - Bugler and Flag - and could dip his thick fingers into the pouches and line a paper without ever looking up from the page. His concentration as he wrote was fabulous. He wouldn't have heard The Bomb. But he demanded that the house be still, and so until he finished - and God knew when that would be -1 would work out here with a cup of tea, cringing if the cup even rang on the saucer, love's zombie, an unhappy refugee in my own home.

  And with this memory, as the fretting of the work week recedes, as the courtroom with its tentacles of repulsion and fear falls behind me, I am arrowed by the terrible humbling poignance of the simplest truth. I'm busy, fly-about, overburdened. True enough. But I know this secret, too: In the marrow of the bone, where blood is made and beliefs are gathered, I'm hungry for the intimate company of other humans. I am lonely. And it is not merely a symptom of divorce. There were years, years married to Charlie, when I felt like this, wondering, as I still do, how long it will go on.

  And then unpredictably - stealthy as a thief - the line that went by in passing days ago returns, haloed with all the urgent sincerity with which it was spoken.

  'How many people,' Seth asked, 'how many people do you get close to in a life?'

  MAY 2, 197o

  Seth

  I did not sleep further after June's visit. It was 3:30 by then and I lay awake, telling myself no, then yes, telling myself it was crazy and wrong, and then that it was right for just that reason. Near 5:00, when I was going to leave, I called Hobie's. Lucy's voice was slurred with sleep. 'He's not here,' she whispered.

  Hobie kept luxurious hours. He read all night and had not attended a morning class throughout college. I was sure that Lucy, pliant as ever, was under instructions to tell me he wasn't there, but when I challenged her, a tide of distress rose through her voice.

  'He hasn't spent the night here all week,' she cried, then went quiet. She said I could leave a message at Cleveland's. 'If anyone picks up the phone,' she added.

  I tried to think. 'How you hanging?' I asked eventually.

  'Shitty.'

  That required no explanation. I told her I needed to see her, to say goodbye if nothing else, and we agreed to meet on Polk Street, where Lucy had an appointment that afternoon. After work, I crawled through the Saturday traffic, in an uneven mood. I had just made my farewells at After Dark. My days as a sci-fi columnist - the only line of work I'd ever felt any pride in - were now at an end. I'd hugged Harley Minx. He gave me a guidebook to Vancouver. Then I'd gone out the swinging back doors, with their rubber bumpers to protect against the damage done by the hand trucks, and left one more portion of my life behind me, knowing it was nothing I'd have chosen to do.

  Polk Street was the usual florid scene. Hell's Angels, drag queens in cheap dresses, and leather cowpokes all paraded on the avenue, while shoppers ran between the cafes and exotics stores. A white-haired woman in a tight sweater stood on a comer with a pure-white cockatoo on her shoulder.

  At the sight of Lucy, I brought the car to a squealing halt. She stood on the corner, looking dazedly into the sun, searching for me perhaps. Blood was streaming down her cheeks.

  I leaned out the window, waving and yelling, and finally drew to the curb. By the time I'd pushed her through the passenger door, horns were sounding in a rough chorus behind me in the traffic. In my sideview, I saw a cop approaching and I jerked the Bug into the street, strangely frightened by the thought of an encounter with the police.

  'Jesus,' I said, 'Jesus. What's going down? What happened to you?' I asked if she wanted to go to the hospital. She had popped her contacts into her open palms and sat with her head thrown back.

  ‘I do it all the time,' she said. ‘I forget I have my lenses in. I cry and then I rub my eyes and it cuts something. Just on the surface of the eyeball. I'll be all right. Oh God,' she said and began to cry again. The tears, now a milder pink, streaked her face. I drove around and finally parked up on Russian Hill.

  She had seen a herbalist, someone she had heard about, a hippie with a tiny third-story shop. 'For what?'

  She faltered. 'My skin.' Lucy was freckled but her complexion was otherwise unblemished.

  'Your skin? What do you have, like a rash?'

  She rolled her eyes at my dullness. One of her contacts was in her mouth, for cleaning, and she had to spit it out before she could speak.

  'Two weeks ago Hobie got rid of the dog? He took it out to Campus Boul and tied it to a parking sign. He said he wasn't going to live with a big white animal.' She peered, waiting for me to understand. 'I heard they have something you chew? You know? For maybe a month? It like works gradually. It makes your skin darker. It like dyes you? It's pigment or something. I don't know. Anyway, the guy didn't have it. He said he'd heard of it, but he
didn't have it and wasn't sure where I could get it. And I just came out of there, I had this feeling like "Oh, man, it's never going to work.'' I mean, my whole life is falling apart, Seth. What am I going to do?'

  My reaction, of course, was that it was crazy. She had tiny prom-queen features - she'd look like a brown white-person, like someone who'd overdone it with Man-Tan. But she was obviously beyond the point of practicality. That Lucy's love, her need for Hobie, was that large - it touched me. It was such a dispiriting contrast to the way Sonny had responded to me.

  I asked again about Hobie. She had no idea where he'd gone. She thought he'd been with Cleveland, but she'd called the police station and he hadn't been arrested. He had been appearing at home sporadically for weeks now, seemingly arriving only in order to tell her that he couldn't keep living with a white girl. The implication, which Lucy refused to acknowledge, was that he was coming back to find out if she'd left.

  'What's he doing? Where do you think he is?' I asked.

  ‘I don't know. He still goes to school, but after that?'

  'What about this bomb? At the ARC? Did he have anything to do with that?'

  She turned quickly to the window. She said nothing at first.

  'You know about that stuff, right?' she asked. 'That he bought?'

  'Right.' The battery acid and sandbags. I knew about that stuff.

  'I think he kind of figured out what it was for. Eventually. I mean, nobody told him. He just sort of added things up. I don't know, Seth. He didn't say much.'

  'But he didn't plant the bomb, did he? He didn't help plan?'

  'Hobie? No. God, no. He couldn't have, could he?'

  I reconsidered June's warning. Perhaps she merely meant that if the dominoes fell, Hobie would be in trouble. One arrest would lead to another. I had some powerful vision of Hobie, but it left me as bitter as I was concerned. In the interval, Lucy had started crying once more.

  'God, Seth,' she said again, 'what am I going to do?'

  Lucy was raised in what used to be called a 'broken home.' Her parents had divorced when she was three. Her father, a well-known lawyer, sent lots of money but appeared infrequently. Her mother was a sort of airy socialite: a martini in one hand, a cigarette in the other, and usually a man nearby to light it. Lucy had come of age in an atmosphere of unfaltering politeness, which as a child left her baffled about whether the air of restraint she always sensed was refinement or indifference. As a teen, she'd tried to find out. She'd run away to a macrobiotic commune in Vermont when she was sixteen. Then, when she was supposed to have been back on track, she took up with Hobie. Lucy told her mother all about her boyfriend, except that he was black, news which my mother-in-law absorbed at once when she came home early one evening during a holiday break and found them fucking away in one of the living-room wing chairs, Lucy's slender freckled legs wrapped around Hobie's medium-brown behind.

  In college, as a freshman, Lucy depended on Hobie helplessly. He picked her courses, approved her dresses, gave her books to read. And he relished her slavish attentions. Then every two or

  three months he would do her wrong. Some girl would take an interest and Hobie would disappear to her dorm room, often for days. Lucy would hang out with me, go to coffee, and beat me at two-handed bridge with an ease I found baffling, since I had not yet recognized the brainpower obscured behind her self-doubts. For the most part, however, she would simply pine incredibly until Hobie returned. There was even one occasion when she stood outside the dormitory where Hobie and the new girl had repaired and moaned for him, a gesture which Hobie was frank enough to admit he had found quite stimulating. Somehow Lucy never seemed to give a thought to saying enough was enough. She groaned even now at the thought of losing him.

  'Look, my place will be empty in a few days. Why don't you move in there?'

  'God,' she said, 'God, I don't want to be alone, Seth.' The one word, 'alone,' emerged in a tone I sometimes heard in the singing in temple during the High Holidays. An age-old lament, a permanent misery. I held her.

  'Then move in today. You'll have company until Monday. That's my induction date. I have to take off for the great North then.' The recollection of June, their plan, the kidnapping recurred. A percussive feeling radiated through me as it had at many moments since the bombing of the ARC. I felt unmoored. The Eddgars' power seemed dominating, because they alone pointed unhesitatingly in a known direction.

  'Maybe I'll come, too,' Lucy said. 'To Canada?'

  'Sure,' I said. There was nothing else to say, but she took note of my tone, dead of enthusiasm. She stared desolately out the window, trying not to cry. Suddenly, I took hold of Lucy and spoke to her largely as I had spoken to myself since the morning.

  'Look. You've got to leave it behind. We both do. All of it. Hobie. Everything else. Everything is changing, every-thing. It's like what we wanted and now we're getting it, and it's happened, and whether it's good or bad, we have to go with it. We just have to go with it.' I gripped her shoulders, much as June had gripped mine, and peered into Lucy's small, bright eyes, hoping to see there some sign, some spark, so that I would know I'd persuaded her and, therefore, myself.

  I called my father at work. He was there six days a week, reliably. Although it was Saturday, he never departed before 5:00.

  'Dad, you haven't gotten any goofy calls or anything, have you, from some guys out here?'

  I heard him calculating, drumming. A symphony soughed faintly from a small console radio he kept behind his desk.

  'Calls? You refer to what, Seth?'

  'There are some guys here. Nuts. I've seen them around the building. I don't know who they are or what they are. Somebody says they're witches.'

  'Vitches!' Back in Kindle County, my father was astounded by such a thing.

  'I don't know. Satanists. They call themselves the Dark Revolution. You can't believe the goofballs out here, Dad. Jesus. One of these guys has got an Afro that's literally dyed the colors of the spectrum. I'm not kidding. Red hair, blue hair, purple hair. For-real.'

  My father grunted in disbelief.

  'Anyway, a guy I know pretty well, he came to me yesterday, strictly on the q.t., and he says these guys, the Dark Revolution guys, have been talking about holding me for ransom because I'm Bernard Weissman's son.'

  'Oh, for God's sake,' said my father. Fur Gott sake. 'For God's sake. Have you explained?'

  'Sure, I explained. "Not that Weissman. No relation of any kind." I said it all. But I'm not sure this other guy believed me. I just wondered. He said they'd had this plan for like a long time, you know? And they got nervous or something because they heard I'm about to leave? I thought maybe they were going to do something. I don't know.'

  'Have you contacted the police?'

  'The police? What'll they do?'

  'The police will do what the police do. Investigate. Look into matters.'

  'Pa, Jesus - if they investigated every person in Damon, California, who said weird things, they'd work from dawn to dusk and never finish going down Campus Boul. That's all I have to do is piss these guys off. The thing for me is just to collect my crap and get out of the country.'

  After a pause, my father said, 'That is no solution.'

  June sat watching me, near the phone. She was close enough to whisper. She held a notepad and a pen, but she had not added a word yet. Instead, she was faintly smiling. I was well past the dialogue we'd rehearsed, flying free, and feeling a distinct glee in secretly holding the upper hand on my father.

  'Look, let's not fight about this. I'll call you in a couple of days.'

  'Seth, I want your word that we will have a further discussion before you take any ultimate steps. I expect such a promise.'

  'Yeah, I promise. But something has to happen by Monday. Look, Pa. Don't say anything to Mama, okay?'

  He snorted. Of course not. In her state. Ransom demands. That is the last thing she needs to hear. 'It would be straight to the asylum,' he said.

  'That was great,' said June, as
she took the phone. 'What?'

  My father's last remark about the asylum was like a stab wound.

  'We've talked about this,' June said. 'Your safety will never be in doubt. They'll know you're safe at every moment. It will simply be a question of your release.'

  The insanity of this, the debased frantic nature of everything, inside me and elsewhere, swam over me. Eddgar came down to my apartment in a few minutes. It was just as everyone said: he was never present when anything of consequence occurred. June related all the plans. Eddgar sat beside her, brittle as glass, the muscles popping up along his jaw. Occasionally, when something required discussion, the two of them left the room.

  'Everything's all right,' June said. He nodded remotely, so that even now you could not say for certain he knew what she was talking about.

  Out on the landing, there were footsteps, a heavy thump, before a piffling knock on the door. Eddgar had wheeled with alarm, but when he threw the door back, Lucy was there, whipping her hair out of her eyes and sniffling. She wore her backpack. A huge green duffel, stuffed oozingly, slumped over the threshold. Her pillow was beneath her arm. She considered the three of us, seeming to hold her ground.

  'I'm coming to Canada,' she told me.

  'we have your son,' the note read. As in the movies, the message was a collage of letters clipped out of the newspaper and pasted on the page. The words had been surprisingly easy to find. A Sears ad in the Chronicle proclaimed, 'we have your size! Sale on Friday.' June had stood over the opened pages. She said, 'Fate.'