Freda and Lix, however, were unknown faces so far, and could more safely complete the last leg of the kidnapping on their own,
an innocent young couple, not short, not overweight, with nothing odd about their van except (as you'd expect) the blaring music on their radio-cassette. They'd chosen Weather Report for their escape. A stylish touch, for what kidnapper ever draws attention to himself with raucous, horny jazz? This was during the year of the Melt, remember. In a recent immoderation meant to make the streets more jubilant, many drivers keen to prove their solidarity played their music loud through open windows. Something for pedestrians. Freedom was Amplification in those expressive days. Noise could hide a multitude of sins.
They'd blindfold Marin Scholla as soon as they had slammed the van's rear doors and sent their three comrades off on foot, in three directions. They'd tape his mouth if it was necessary. Be practical, they told themselves. A man like that was bound to make a noise if given half a chance. He'd call for help, perhaps, but not be heard. The panels of the van were triple-clad, metal, wood, and fabric lining. Weather Report would drown him out. If he struggled while Lix was driving off, then Freda would cope. She was a tall and healthy woman after all, and Marin Scholla was a man in his late seventies and as weak as a blown egg, by all accounts. He wore a hearing aid. He used a walking stick. He'd had a minor stroke. His bones would be like breadsticks. Freda could probably knock him over with her earrings.
Within a moment of accepting their delivery, the lovers would be circling the park with its yearlong revelers on Navigation Island, driving sensibly once they had crossed the river (by the perfectly named Deliverance Bridge) into the old city, their music slowly muted, just one more unremarkable vehicle in the mid-afternoon
rush-hour lines. Then they could proceed on the quieter bankside roads until they reached the little Arts Laboratory on the wharf.
Lix had arranged an exclusive matinee performance for his elderly charge. An outing to the theater was never wasted time, especially for a man who, two years previously, had bought the Boston Playhouse, demolished it, and built an arcade. The four surviving and determined members of the Street Beat Renegades, the agitprop group that had so consumed him during his first terms at the academy, would be waiting with their stilts, their light and smoke machines, and their accordions, and with a tripod camera, ready to begin the old man's entertainment:
Meister Scholla's Dirty Dollars,
their hurriedly improvised morality play in the medieval style, based on the fable of the Fat Man and the Cat, with Sin and Virtue unambiguously portrayed for their dullwitted audience of one, and dollars denoted by a bowl of cream (and cream represented on the stage by half a liter of white distemper). They'd give him Music, Tumbling, and Dance. Stiltwalking and Puppetry by “members of the cast.” The script? By Felix Dern himself. Forty minutes (mostly mimed, as Scholla only spoke American). No interval.
Theirs would be an alliance, then, of stage and campus, the intellect and the imagination, politics and pleasure, hope and desire. “Silence for the comrades, please!” RoCoCo Renegades.
How could the chairman not be charmed? Marin Scholla would not truly be their “captive,” after all, and not their “prey,” but just their involuntary guest and only for the afternoon. Was that unreasonable? They'd turn him loose as soon as it was dark,
outside the zoo where city vagrants gathered for their soup each nightâanother clever touch, they thought. They'd make him eat some soup. They'd take a photograph for the press and for their own scrapbooks: the animals, the dispossessed, the humbled businessman, the steaming bowls. Then he could get a taxi back to his ostentatious hotel in time for dinner. No damage doneâexcept perhaps the blunting of his appetite for soup, and bruises on his backside from forty minutes on a wooden chair. Otherwise no harm could come of it.
The RoCoCo Renegades hung on, then, to this colossal self delusion and the courage it provided them: Marin Scholla would be charmed by them, their nerve, their play, their youth, their sincerity, and he would shrug the matter off as he might shrug off the peccadilloes of his own three sons, none of them (according to the gossip press) exactly beyond reproach. Better he'd had children who engaged in politics, who had their say, than those three party animals with their unfastened ways.
The nine conspirators could imagine him, back home in Boston in a week or two, recounting his experiences on a television talk show: “These young people taught me something valuable that I might never have realized otherwise. And I am grateful to them for it.” Studio applause.
So Marin Scholla had been transformed in their imaginations before they'd even laid an eye or hand on him. The more they pictured him, delivered into their brief care, the more they redefined him as a sort of willing guest, an eager volunteer in their debate about the future of their city and the world. At best, they were the sons and daughters he'd never have. They were his natural
heirs. At worst, RoCoCo and the Renegades would have provided him an interesting and an improving interlude that he would want to think about, digest, and not dismiss completely. No worse than that. No need for police or any prosecutions, then. He was endowing an arts complex, after all. And what was this but art? A happening. An offspring of the Melt. They'd make him understand before release, before they delivered him into the backseat of his taxi, that theirs had only been a bit of heartfelt fun. Where would we be without the creeds and dogmas of the young?
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“FOUR MORE DAYS until our first anniversary,” Freda reminded Lix, reaching forward from the back of their hired van to rub the side of his best cheek. “A month! I haven't stayed with anyone this long before. What shall we do to celebrate? What would you like to do?” She beat out the remaining days, with playful toughness and her knuckles, on the bony lump behind his ear. “One. Two. Three. And then you're in my record book.”
“That can only hurt.”
“I like to hurt you.” She pressed her face against Lix's and blew into his ear. He'd suffered her lips, her knuckles, and her fingertips that day, bruising indicatorsâor so he'd found in those four weeksâthat Freda was feeling anxious rather than amorous, despite the promise of her words.
For once she liked the way he'd dressed. He'd dressed for the occasion. The linen scarf tied at the throat had been her choice, her first and only gift for him. It made him look a touch more
dangerous and jaunty than usual, more like the Czech she'd so often fantasized about, more like the kidnapper he'd prove to be within the hour. An ear of cloth stuck out beneath his chin like the blue touch paper of a firework, hoping to be lit. If things went well with Scholla, she'd light this lover up herself later, release the chairman at the zoo, and then release her lover's linen scarf, release him from his trousers and his shirt, release herself from all the prospects and the tensions of the day, with kiss and punch and stroke.
Freda was captivated by Lix. Her feelings were not insincere, though she'd deny it for the most part of her life. She was not captivated by his looks. Nor by his questionable energy. But by his fear and reticence, which she mistook for the saintly attribute of patriots and revolutionaries like Nyerere, Cezar, and Mandela, a kind of granite sweetness which showed no malice and no alarm, which never raised its voice without good cause. He had what she would never have, she thought, the Gift of Sympathy.
He loved her, of course, like everybody else, though love like his defied analysis. To contemplate it was to stare into a maze and volunteer to lose yourself. It was uncharted, inexplicable. He loved her with a perseverance and an abandon that would startle anyone who knows him now. He'd take the maddest risks for her, he could persuade himself, eat glass and fire, walk on coals, obey, obey. She was his driving force. This kidnapping would mark the proof and climax of their love.
She tugged his kerchief ears and said again, “Come on then, say. What would you like to do, Comrade Felix Dern? To celebrate our thirty-one days?”
He'd like, he thought, to spend the day in bed with her; he'd like, indeed, to put their madcap plan on hold and, instead, clamber right then, at once, into the metal-ribbed and windowless asylum of the van's carcass to seek out something fresh and new with her, one of those many deeds he'd heard about and seen in films and read about in American novels and even simulated on the stage but not yet tried.
What shall we do to celebrate? he asked himself. Let's
soixante-neuf.
Let's see what sex is like for colonizing tongues and lips. Let's snuffle in between each other's legs.
Or bondage possibly. Some blindfolds and a gag, the ones they'd set aside for Marin Scholla should he prove to be a problem, would be irresistible on Freda. Not that Lix had much appetite for deviations of that kind, and never would, but his four weeks with her had been appallingly frustrating. Sometimes it seemed she loved him with her fingernails and teeth, but little else. And so his imagination had been running wild. They'd not had any intercourse so far in which he had felt free to give expression to himself. Not proper intercourse. If
proper
is the proper word. Penetration was “for men,” she'd said, and though they'd consummated their relationship in the legal sense, penetration had become either his last and unencouraged port of call, allowed when she'd lost interest anyway, or just a station to the cross of Freda's pleasure, the cross he had to bear. What bodily encounters they had regularly indulged inâmutual masturbation mostly, and oral sex, unreciprocatedâserved her “right to orgasm,” she said. She'd not be used by any man. For militants like her, “the front line is the bed.” Lix understood how right she was.
He understood and sympathized until those moments when his brains went south and he required and hopedâjust onceâto be in charge of her.
He'd like to love her standing up, for instance. A memory revisited. Or fuck her on the kitchen floor, for goodness' sake. Uncomplicated sex. No politics. Or make love to her out on the river in a rowboat when she was wearing something other than black. He'd seen the couples making love in their hired thirty-minute skiffs, in their white summer shirts, lapping at each other in the shadows of the bankside candy trees. He'd like to join the gang. Or him on top, for a change: she'd always straddled him when they'd played almost-sex, when sheâclimaxed herselfâfinally permitted him to come into her. She always liked to be the playground bully who had won the fight, her full weight on his shoulders or her hands pressed down against his wrists, inviting penetration but only just allowing it. Submit to me. Defer, defer. Not mainstream cinema at all. Perhaps they'd never truly fornicate in ways he wanted to. Though he could always live in hope. And hope was justified. She'd said she had a treat for him once Scholla was released. At last, she'd promised it. Something for “the man.” As soon as they had finished with the chairman, she'd come back with him to his little room, above those once trod stairs. She'd be his captive for the night, she said.
So Lix had not only rehearsed for
Meister Scholla's Dirty Dollars
, he had also prepared for the Afteract with Freda. He'd cleaned his room, tidied up the scattered careless clues to the compromiser he really was.
Binoculars
, a German magazine, products from companies that he ought to boycott, postcards from his mother,
tubs (unused) of nevus masking cream, pajamas from his teens. What kind of love affair was this, that he felt safer when he hid himself from her? He'd bought new bedclothes, too. Blue sheets. He'd primed the gramophone with music he knew she liked. Not Weather Report, with Wayne Shorter crazy on the sax, but Souta's
Chinese Symphony
. He'd purchased decent coffee and a pair of pretty cups. No bread and beans for her. No vagrant's soup. He'd got fresh Maizies and fruit preserves and joss sticks bunched together in a metal vase. He'd scrubbed his dirty little sink. He'd torn the corner off a pack of contraceptives and slipped them underneath the bed. He wouldn't want to battle with the cellophane in case his moment passed.
Lix's moment, actually, was perilously close. Their appointment with the chairman was for three-fifteen. He'd not be late. By five-fifteen,
Meister Scholla's Dirty Dollars
would have been premiered and the charmed and blindfolded captive bundled back into the van. By six, the chairman would be home for tea. Fredalix's madcap afternoon would soon be in the past. Like 1968.
“What are you thinking about right now?” She broke into his fantasies.
“Umm, 1968. To tell the truth.”
She was startled. “Me, too,” she said. And then, “I'm waiting for your answer, anyway.”
“What answer's that?”
“Our little anniversary.”
What could they do to celebrate then? He had his answers, but he didn't dare say He said, “You choose.” There was no point in voicing his desires, he thought. They were too shoddy and infantile,
and dangerously mature, to speak out loud. Besides, in twenty-seven days of love, he'd learned that Freda always called the shots.
He'd learned, as well, to his surprise, that in extremis Freda had a timid facet to her character, not that she trembled with alarm when any hazard offered itselfâas it was being offered there and then, with Marin Scholla on his wayâor would even take a single, compromising side step to avoid a conflict or a test. No, her apprehension took a more reactionary form. She turned into a sort of harebrained girl, a teenager, a chatterer. Perhaps this was the vestige of the privileged daughter she had once been and was frightened of becoming again but needed to hold on to like a child might need its security blanket. This was how she drove off doubt and fear: with chattering.