The Darling (41 page)

It was nine o’clock. I offered her twenty dollars to come back to my apartment with me, and she said, “Sure, why not?” At the apartment, we drank a bottle of cheap red wine and quickly found ourselves talking like friends from high school, and never got around to having sex that night. She was bright and funny and warm, and at a time when I hated myself for having failed to save the world, she made me feel that I could at least save her.

Her daughter was at a sister’s place, she said, and was okay till midnight, when the sister, who worked the night shift at the clam cannery, went to work. At eleven-thirty, I invited Carol to move in and share my apartment, take the larger of the two bedrooms for herself and her daughter. I’d carry the rent and cover food and other costs until she got herself cleaned up and found a job. She accepted, and shortly after midnight she and Bettina moved in. Two nights later, Carol and I were lovers. In a week, she had a part-time job as a waitress that after a month became full-time.

And look at her now, I thought, a free and independent woman who’s saving someone else. She’s become what I tried to be and couldn’t.

Carol, Zack, and I sat up late drinking beer, smoking pot, and elaborately talking around the difficult question of who was going to end up in bed with Carol. We played an old Neil Young tape over and over, seventies ballads and hymns that celebrated reckless abandon, which didn’t help change the unstated subject. We wandered back and forth between the kitchen and the living room, feigning interest in how Carol had redecorated the place. The walls and woodwork had all been repainted in new colors like mauve and taupe and lapis. My old room was now Bettina’s. The Che Guevara and John Brown posters had been replaced by New Kids on the Block and Paul McCartney in a band called Wings.

Finally, we three found ourselves standing together at the door to the bedroom Carol shared with Zack. The double bed was unmade, and a harried working mother’s clothes draped from chairs and the dresser.

“Sorry about the mess,” Carol said. “Zack’s such a neatnik and takes care of most of the place, but he refuses to pick up after me in the bedroom. It’s the one thing we fight about.”

Zack crossed in front of us and flopped down in the middle of the bed. “C’mere, you,” he said.

“Who?” Carol asked.

“Both of you.”

“Zack,” I said. “I’m not your type, remember? And you’re not mine.” Carol walked over, and sat down on the edge of the bed. Zack began to stroke her bare arm.

“Yeah, but you’re Carol’s type,” he said. “And she’s yours.”

Carol and I looked at each other. When the object of your past desire is placed in front of you like that, sexual nostalgia can be very powerful. There are so many vague, lingering memories of having once been satisfied and so few specific details that you want to revisit the source.

Zack reached over to the bedside table and lighted a chunky blue candle. I hit the wall switch, and he said, “That’s better. Now, c’mon over here with us.”

I stayed put by the door. “Is a threesome what you’re after?”

“I wouldn’t mind. But if you’re not into that, it’s okay by me. There’s other possibilities.”

“What about you, Carol?”

She shrugged. Zack slowly unzipped the back of her dress, and she looked down and smiled coyly.

“Maybe you’d like to watch me and Carol,” Zack said. “Or maybe you’d like me to watch you and Carol. Like I said, there’s other possibilities. I’ve never seen two women make love before. In real life, I mean.”

“Real life,” I said. “Is this real life?”

“It’s not a movie, man,” he said. “Come on over here. You know you want to.”

I took one step, then two, and then I was standing beside Carol on the bed. Zack slid over to make room. I sat down, my ears buzzing like a teenager’s, and placed one hand over hers. With my other hand, I brushed her hair off her shoulder and touched her throat. She turned to face me, closed her eyes, and kissed me on the lips.

And the rest? Well, you know the rest.

No, that’s not true. You don’t know the rest. You don’t know that Zack and I both made love to Carol. You don’t know that while he fucked her I leaned back against the headboard and watched them and touched myself and for the first time in my life was swallowed whole by sexual pleasure. I left my body behind and merged with theirs and had no thoughts, no awareness of my mind or body. You don’t know that afterwards I felt deep, nearly inexplicable gratitude to Zack and Carol, as if they had gone through a terrible, mind- and body-searing ordeal solely for me, so that I would not have to endure it myself. Though, of course, unlike me, all they had done was take their pleasure.

THE NEXT MORNING,
after a breakfast as casual and companionable as if we had been sharing the kitchen for months, Carol drove over to her mother’s apartment in the East End to pick up Bettina, leaving me and Zack for the first time alone in the apartment. I was washing the dishes from breakfast and the night before; he sat at the table smoking a cigarette and reading the sports section of the morning paper. He seemed content. He knew that what happened last night was going to continue for a while, at least until something unforeseen, a factor outside the equation, stopped it. Instead of waiting for Carol and me to betray him in secret and then, after a period of deception, displace him, Zack had right away made me a player in his sexual relations with her. I hadn’t seen that coming. He liked having me watch them make love. It put him in control of the sexual aspect of my relationship with Carol, which was the only part of it that had threatened him.

Zack looked up from the paper and smiled. “So, babe, do you think you’ll go back to Liberia?”

“I have three sons and a husband there.”

“That doesn’t mean you’ll go back, though.”

“No. But I will, as soon as it’s allowed.”

“By whom?”

“The president, Samuel Doe.” I gave him the short version of the events leading up to my departure from Liberia, including the reasons for Charles’s flight and Woodrow’s brief arrest. Mention of Charles brought a wide grin to Zack.

“So my man Charlie is very cool after all,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s true, he skimmed over a million bucks from some fund over there? Him and your husband?”

“Yes.”

“That bastard. I thought he was lying to me. I thought it was all a con.”

“What was?”

“He told me he’s willing to turn a million bucks over to anyone who can spring him from prison and get him out of the country. He’s a very political guy, you know, a guy with large freedom-fighter ideas and big ambitions.”

“No, I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well, he is. A genuine comrade. I was telling him about our years in SDS and Weather, which was naturally of great interest to him. And at some point I told him how Weather had sprung Timothy Leary out of a California prison and got him all the way to Algeria, and Charlie goes nuts for it.”

“Goes nuts for what?” I leaned against the sink and faced him. I wasn’t sure where this was leading, but the conversation made me anxious. I was reasonably certain that Charles was smarter than Zack and probably more cynical, too.

“For having Weather break him out. Doing a Tim Leary. I tell him Weather doesn’t even exist anymore, it’s just a few people still more or less underground, like you, and that’s it. Then he says he’s got a million bucks U.S. stashed in an offshore bank that he’ll turn over to anyone who successfully gets him out of prison and out of the country. He’s got some kind of deal with Ghaddafi, but he’s got to get to Libya, where there’s all these training camps for African freedom fighters looking to liberate their homelands.” Zack looked past me and out the kitchen window to the cloudless, morning sky. “You know, we can do this, babe. You and me.”

“Forget it, Zack.”

“Just hear me out, man. I can’t do it alone, I’m an ex-con and still on parole and can’t get inside to talk to Charles personally and privately. You know, to coordinate things. But you can, Miss Dawn Carrington. Or Musgrave. Or Sundiata. Whoever you are these days. I assume you still know how to cook up a phony passport that would get Charles out of the States.”

I laughed. “Yeah. I can. But tell me why I should do this, Zack. It’s high risk. And for what?”

“For the dough. But also because this guy is the real thing, babe. A Third-World freedom fighter. And he’s got plans for your man, Doe. Big plans. And besides, seems to me you’ve got some interests back there in Liberia that would make you want to get Charles Taylor the hell out of an American prison and back in action in Africa. You’ve got to talk to this guy, man. He’s been
through
it. He’s the kind of revolutionary we were, only we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. This cat is
heavy
. If we can help him get back to Africa, then he’ll be in the right place at the right time. Otherwise, I’m telling you, man, with Charles Taylor in jail here and Samuel Doe in power over there, you may never see your husband and kids again.”

“You don’t understand, Zack. Charles thinks Woodrow flipped him to save his own neck.”

“Not true, babe! He told me Woodrow was cool. Actually, the way I read it, Charlie probably flipped Woodrow and feels bad about it. He didn’t say that exactly, but I got the picture. The bad guy in this is Doe. He’s the one your husband’s got to worry about.”

“I can’t, Zack. I don’t even know what I’m doing here. With you and Carol, I mean. In New Bedford.”

“Just talk to Charles, man. Go out and visit him in Plymouth. It’s real easy. The place is minimum security. All you’ll need is an ID, which you’ve got, and a home address. You can use this address. Just talk to the guy. Then decide. Okay?”

I didn’t answer. Then, after a few seconds, I heard myself say, “Okay. I’ll talk to Charles. Once.”

“That’s all I’m asking.”

“No, it’s not, Zack,” I said and grabbed his empty coffee cup and overflowing ashtray. “You’re also asking me to wash your dirty dishes.”

“Hey, no way, babe!” He took the cup and ashtray back. “Here, let me do that.”

IT MAY SEEM STRANGE
to you, but something about prisons, jails, cages comforts me. All my life I’ve run from confinement and tried to keep others, even animals, from being imprisoned. Yet whenever I come close to an actual place of confinement, whenever I’m physically in its proximity, something inside me clicks off and something else clicks on. Dread gets replaced by complacent, almost grateful acceptance. When with hundreds of other demonstrators I was arrested and jailed in Mississippi and Louisiana and later in Washington and Chicago and spent a night or two in a cell awaiting bail and quick release, while the others rattled their cages and chanted in continuing protest and sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Amazing Grace,” I sat quietly cross-legged on the floor in a corner of the cell and gave myself over to the logic and clarity of imprisonment, as if, having relinquished my physical freedom, I was somehow free in a new and more satisfying way. In later years, driving past the high, razor-wired walls of state or federal prisons or catching a passing glimpse of the barred windows of a county jail, after the first flush of fear and anxiety passed, a certain restfulness came over me, and an ease that was almost a longing took my mind. In zoos I gazed into the cages and pens with an edge of envy. When I cared for the chimps all those years, partly it was so that I could vicariously join them in their iron-barred boxes. It still goes on. Today, at my farm in Keene Valley, even though I’m ideologically committed to providing my livestock and birds, all my animals, with as much free range as possible, I confess that I regularly have to argue away a desire to set Anthea and the girls to work building fences, pens, and cages for them. The freedom of the dogs to roam the woods, to abandon the farm any time they wish and race through the forest in pursuit of deer, threatens me. Something low in me wants to lock them in the barn, keep them on leashes tied to the porch railing, or just keep the beasts locked inside the house.

I know, of course, that it’s what I want done to me, not to my poor dogs. Not to my sheep and ducks and geese and my hens. Not to my dreamers. And not to Charles Taylor. Though when I visited him that day in federal prison in Plymouth, I did think, as I parked my mother’s car in the lot and saw the stately, brick, Victorian residence of the superintendent, the barracks that housed the security personnel, the neatly trimmed, sun-splashed lawns and spreading oak trees, and the sprawling complex of what looked like the dormitories of a small, slightly impoverished state college, and the high chain-link fence topped with strands of barbed wire that surrounded the prison, I did think,
Charles must be very happy here.

He was not happy. He was furious. Even before he sat down at the table in the visiting room, he was talking full speed, practically spitting the words in that loud, high-dramatic mode that West African men use in response to perceived insult and impersonal injustice taken personally. “This a bad t’ing they done t’ me, all of ’em! Doe, him an’ the U.S. gov’ment them, an’ your sweet li’l husband, Woodrow, too, especially him, Hannah!” He scraped his chair up to the table and glowered at me.

“Dawn,” I said in a low voice. “Dawn Carrington.” The room was a low-ceilinged hall half the size of a high school cafeteria with a dozen square tables placed so as to be in plain view of a guard, who monitored the room from behind a desk on an elevated stage at the front. A row of food- and drink-vending machines were posted along one wall. Seated at several of the other tables a half-dozen inmates with their lawyers, wives, and girlfriends engaged in quiet conversation, domestic problems mixed with legal and financial strategies.

“How’s that?” Charles lifted his eyebrows in puzzlement.

“My name. It’s Dawn. Here.”

“Oh, okay.” He smiled knowingly. “Okay by me. Who tol’ you where I was? Who sent you here?” He looked healthy and strong, as if he’d been lifting weights. He wore a tight, white tee shirt and loose-fitting dungarees and sneakers. I’d never seen him without a tailored suit and tie or the occasional pressed and starched guayabera shirt. Charles was strikingly handsome back then. His smooth, round face shone with health and vigor and self-confidence, and he looked like a professional athlete. His hair was cut tight to his skull like a glistening black cap, and his skin was the color of polished old mahogany.