American Woman (42 page)

“So that's why you broke up?” Pauline asked, rather coldly.

“God no,” Sandy moaned, seeming not to have caught Pauline's tone. “It was so much else. Things between us are just so fucked up.”

Jenny didn't sleep well the next several nights. Then Sandy and Tom joyfully reconciled and Tom came by to get Sandy's things. Frazer was mentioned again, but this time it was clear that the ominous note had arisen from Sandy's unhappiness more than the facts. “He was here,” Tom admitted when Jenny asked him. “But, frankly, I didn't think it was worth upsetting you two just to satisfy him. I think he was desperate for money, and wanted to get that book project going again with Pauline.”

“Fat chance,” Pauline said.

Jenny said, “Sandy told us he told you
not
to tell us he'd talked to you.”

“No, no. She's confused. He said not to tell you he'd
been
here. He thought it would make you take off. It was fine if we told you we'd spoken to him. I mean, he asked us to give you a message. Obviously that would mean that we'd spoken to him.”

“What's the message?”

“I don't know. We told him we'd never been in touch with you at all, like you wanted us to. So we couldn't pass on any message. But he gave me a contact number if I ‘happened' to see you. That's another reason I think that it's money. The number is his parents in Vegas, as if he's had to move in there or something. I bet he lost that Manhattan apartment, and he's all out of money. He acted like an absolute asshole to Sandy and me. He kept saying stuff like, ‘Tell the truth, quit the games! This is life or death! Don't be so stupid!'”

“Oh,
God
,” Pauline said.

“Thanks for covering for us,” Jenny told him.

In June Tom retired from band management and went to work for a car customizer. Although at first he claimed to find the entire culture of car customizing laughable, he was swiftly infected by it. When he'd started his employment he hadn't even owned a car; then a sporty brown Gremlin had been advertised on the company bulletin board. Tom bought it and tinted its windows, an investment of almost a month's salary even after his ten percent discount. He drove the car over to show them, and as they all went downstairs together declared gallantly that Jenny and Pauline looked like a commercial for something, with their hats and sunglasses and hair, which was getting so long. Nair hair stuff? Coppertone? Jenny and Pauline were both wearing blue jeans and T-shirts. From the garden they'd both gotten suddenly tan. Jenny was so dark she looked like an Indian, but Pauline was tan also, in a pale-gold way. Tom said he could hardly believe this was the girl he first saw in the barricaded back room of his long-ago coworker's apartment, the girl with the lank lusterless hair and the green circles under her eyes and the skin like the belly of something, death-white and unhealthily damp. The girl who wanted a
dry
burger with absolutely nothing wet or mushy involved, and who smoked constantly. Tom had been terrified for her; now he was the slightest bit terrified
of
her. Pauline laughed merrily and when they got to the car she kept laughing. “This is what you spent your month's salary on?” Pauline teased him. “So people will think you're a pimp?”

“I think it's terrific,” Jenny said, seeing Tom blush at Pauline's reaction. “It could be really useful.”

“For what?” Pauline said. “For making cops think you're a pimp?”

“What do you know about pimps? It looks like a car that a surfer would have. And you really can't see in at all. Doesn't that seem appealing? To drive around knowing no one can see you?”

And so after forming the idle idea that they might drive around unseen in Tom's car, one day the impulse seizes them and without pausing to reconsider they borrow the car and just go—Jenny driving, Pauline navigating—to the house that Pauline grew up in. More than a year has passed since Pauline was kidnapped. Now it's even been more than a year since the tape was broadcast on which Pauline declared she would stay with her captors. And more than a year since all but two of those captors were killed. In the heyday of the case, before the eerie lull after the last tape, the eulogy tape, the house had been a round-the-clock circus; for months without pause television vans lined the street until the neighbors complained and the trucks had to pile up in the long arc-shaped driveway, and the drivers of the trucks had to post their names on the windshields and wear name tags themselves so their colleagues, both brothers-in-arms and combatants in the ongoing battle for news, could locate them if they needed to move; then the maddening Chinese puzzle of inching out, one after the other, to idle in the street until the one van had pulled itself free; and then the reassemblage of the van parking lot and return to the business at hand. In the heyday, there had been a bank of telephone booths near the curb on the lawn, their cables snaking away through the lush shrubbery to the nearest phone pole; a courtesy from Pacific Bell to spare the family from opening their home and their phone to hundreds of reporters. Klieg lights standing at the ready on their mantislike legs, near the podium bristling with microphones that had come to seem like a permanent part of the portico. The grass had been trampled flat and gouged full of holes until the family, with greatest respect and gratitude for the media's efforts, issued a gentle request that the walkway be used, and then had the whole lawn resodded. It looks resodded now. A light fuzz of new growth mars the level blade surface. The box hedges have grown just the slightest bit shaggy. The portico is swept clean but there's a telltale barrenness to it that isn't just the absence of klieg lights and podium. When they first came home to San Francisco they never dreamed of coming here. FBI agents had been camped on the lawn with the news trucks, maybe even tucked away in the house. A chosen few given the children's old bedrooms and the old playroom for all their equipment. Jenny and Pauline don't know what the equipment would have been exactly, but it isn't hard to imagine the wire-sprouting boxes and punchcards and printouts, the twin wheels of the huge tape recorders like a grim caravan rolling into the night. Agents padding up and down the halls in their bathrobes and slippers, clutching big mugs of acrid black coffee. Her parents had declined to let the press into the house, asking not just for its cooperation but for its proud participation: The press ought to proudly assist this defense of the family's last shred of privacy. While all the while, in the shadow of such grand pronouncements, they were harboring FBI agents. Feeling, perhaps, that unlike capitulation to the press this was a worthy crown to their martyrdom, because so elitist. Only the innermost circle of agents, the chiefs of their tribe. Cook told to be on her toes day and night, brewing coffee and making nice sandwiches. Driver with careful instructions on smuggling the men in the family limo, with its black-tinted windows. At least, this is Pauline's vision of the exigencies of that time, as she and Jenny sit in the friendlier darkness of Tom's Gremlin, the windows of which are a sepia shade sort of like Coca-Cola, to go with the burnt-orange pinstripes. Now even the house's hidden encampments have been dismantled. Drapery hangs in the windows, and if they were to go inside they would find the house furnished luxuriously, but devoid of inhabitants. Pauline's parents have moved into their pied-à-terre on Russian Hill, and the house is discreetly for sale. The luxurious furniture has been provided by the real estate agency, because a house can be sold for more money if shown nicely furnished, and at this level the difference might be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This is the kind of thing Pauline knows about, the brand of arcana that weaves itself into her musings as she and Jenny dare themselves to sit idling at the curb opposite the house one full minute, then one minute more, each of them having mastered the art of keeping excruciating track of the time even while feeling lost in the scene before her. Pauline's parents' departure from the house has been portrayed by the press as a grief-stricken retreat from a nest that was emptied by violence, although Pauline lived away from home for a year before she was kidnapped. In this way things haven't changed much from the first few days after the kidnapping, all those eons ago, when Pauline's parents tried to imply that she'd been seized from their home like a child, when she'd really been seized—no less terrifyingly, but still,
differently
—at her own apartment, where she'd lived with a boyfriend. “Now they say that they can't bear to live there alone, but they lived in that house for a year after I went to college, and it wasn't too big for them then,” Pauline says, gazing at the irregular lawn, at the bare portico. She lights a cigarette and cracks the dark window to let the smoke out.

After a while she adds, “The first time the cadre let me watch TV with them, it was right after they'd made the demand that my mother resign from that board, as a gesture of good faith to them. My parents had said there was no way they could meet the ransom, because of the structure of the family trust. Well, I'd told the cadre that might really be true. I wasn't sure, but it seemed like it might be. So they went back and said the ransom could maybe come down, but my parents had to make a real gesture to show their good faith. And the gesture was, that my mother resign from that board. The board of a company that sponsors military coups in South America. That uses child labor. That does terrible stuff. And, not that this matters compared to those issues, but a company my mother doesn't even—you know, it wasn't
hers
. She just sat on the board. Like she sat on the board of the opera. And my mother came on the TV, she was standing right there, and she said, “I don't tell
these people
how they should live, and they will not dictate how
we
will live,” and she stayed on that board. Because she said if she resigned it would send me a signal, that she wasn't fighting as hard as she could! And I thought at that moment, I'm finished with them. I was so terrified. I felt dead.”

“But now you're finished with the cadre, also.”

“It doesn't mean I'll go back.” Pauline stares out the window. “I am finished with the cadre. They used me just like my parents used me. I hate them.” Her cigarette hand shakes and she reaches for the ashtray and misses. The ash falls on her jeans and when she swipes it away leaves a long messy smear of gray ash. She glares at Jenny, lip trembling. “Let's
go
,” she says impatiently.

Jenny writes more and more often to William, neglecting her journal and instead directing all chroniclings and debates, all notations and outpourings, into letters to him; like the philandering husband who brings his wife flowers, she knows she is prompted by guilt. She isn't sure she can see him again. He has become a magnetic pole, a singular point by which to navigate, a confessor, but she doesn't think she can see him and still retain hold of her delicate sense of herself. She might not love him anymore. She'll be jarred by the thought on the nights she and Pauline stay up so late on the porch talking, in the dark, that their faces slowly evolve out of the void like dim moons. If they go to bed at all on these nights they pretend that they've fallen asleep right away, or sleep never will come. That's their ritual of separation: giving each other silence as a prelude to sleep, and then hearing the other one's breath in the compromised darkness. Their room, sad with forms in the dawn. She chalks up the sadness she feels to the light, to its eerie betweenness, not thinking of the fact that this time is the only time they spend apart. They're in the same room, but they've opened a silence between them. She knows they talk themselves exhausted each night because they're both afraid not to fall asleep first, and be left lying there all alone. They're both aware of their losses—not of the lives they once had, or the people they knew, but of all the attachments they felt.

By August their garden has been so productive they've given grocery bags of vegetables away, to Tom and Sandy and Mike, and Mr. Minski and Joanne and Lena. Something about those vegetables, how quickly and how huge they grow, seems to them like a sign. They sit in the kitchen, the Dutch door standing open, the warm breeze pussyfooting around them. Birds are rioting out in the yard, a tape's playing low in the front room. The tape recorder was donated by Joanne's friend Julie, who's also interested in feminist issues. They're considering letting her into their group. Their life, now, is so hushed—not furtive, but serene. It's so still they discern subtleties they've never noticed before. Things that might have once seemed self-indulgent to them are important, and they've made their peace with them: flowers in a vase on the table, a pretty cloth Jenny found at the thrift store. When their first zucchini had been big enough to harvest they'd spent the whole day making dinner: ratatouille of mostly zucchini, and a salad and homemade bread, and a cake, just for them—how absurd! And a bottle of wine . . . bourgeois things, but are they? Aren't they beautiful things? Jenny isn't so sure anymore; part of the letter to William addresses these issues. Pauline reads a passage and chews on her pen thoughtfully. Lately Jenny gives her letters to Pauline to read over and edit and Pauline pores over them, spreads them on the kitchen table and ponders them, a pen in her mouth. The two of them have been laboriously co-composing this particular letter for so long it's become a long letter between them, and they still haven't mailed it. ‘“We feel bad if we want to be happy,'” Pauline reads, and then says, “But it can't be so selfish. I used to think so, I used to think I was rotten. But is it really so wrong?”

And yet, as quiet as their life is, their ears have not become hyper-tuned. This might have been the case, once. On the farm, when quietness bred sensitivity, to an exquisite degree. Now their senses are softened a little, as with wine; they're just a touch intoxicated, not stupid. Serene. Sometimes you see serene people on the sidewalk, and they don't see or hear, but those people aren't stupid. If their thoughts are elsewhere, it's a good elsewhere. They don't hear the make and model of the car sliding past in the street. Or perhaps they're inside, in the kitchen; they don't hear the soft tread, on the outside stairs, though the Dutch door is open. They don't sense the man's approach until he's there, as surprised as they are, his weapon gripped tight in both hands. He points it at them. Pauline drops the pen with which she's been sketching out her idea of when it's all right to be happy. Jenny's body, still hoping, leaps up from the table, but her mind knows, and her inner voice echoes the man's: “Freeze! Put your hands up!”