Trinity Fields (21 page)

No, I withdraw the notion that the encounter wasn't fraught with potential. I knew at once that something was different, why pretend otherwise? Kip's smile was irrepressible, hers more demure but, for lack of a better image, very much alive. My mother would have said, had she seen them, that they looked sweet. She would not have been wrong. Beatific would be more like it. They looked beatific, and I looked out the window. What I saw framed there, above the vined building across the street, was a dying day, white sky, neither cold nor warming, neither wintry nor quite yet spring. A precarious, equivocal day. This was the time of year people fell in love, I supposed, but maybe the reason the meeting didn't seem too significant was because like a child I refused to admit to myself the quality of emotions I saw revealed in Kip that day. There was nothing equivocal about him. He was transformed in her presence.

—Brice, this is Jessica.

—Hello, she said, and shook my hand, a notably firm grasp.

—Hello, Jessica.

—Jess is fine, she said. She glanced at Kip. How her eyes shined.

—Jess, I said, mesmerized, and looked to Kip myself, neither smiling nor seeing him but trying to remember something, I wasn't sure what, something about her that struck me as familiar beyond her more than passing resemblance to Kip. I thought, God I know this person from somewhere.

Kip broke the lull, —And Jess? For better or worse this is Brice.

Again I brought myself to look at her. She was more worldly than we, I thought, and it was true she looked like Kip. Those wide-set eyes they shared, their depth and darkness and waxmoon shape, invited the admirer in, as I have said, drew him down, captured him in a way. Before I knew what I was doing, the words came out of my mouth, accompanied by a cough, —Do we know each other?

—I'm sorry?

Embarrassed and reddening, —No, I mean—you—

I didn't continue.

Kip left Jessica's side, threw his arm around me, —Don't worry about Brice. He means well. It's just sometimes he loses track of his manners.

—Kip's said a lot about you, Jessica recommenced, and the spell, or whatever it was, broke so that now I recognized I had probably never seen Jessica Rankin before.

—That's good. I guess.

—All good, she said.

—Don't worry, Kip laughed. —I made a few revisions.

She was dressed in a plaid shirt, baggy black corduroys, and though I have no idea what she was wearing on her feet it would be a safe guess they were clogs rather than sandals. Black clogs, with low heel, and worn in well from the first day when she walked them through the Rijks Museum in Amsterdam and along the canals there during a yearlong ramble over Europe and North Africa, by herself most of the way, a free spirit, the year before. Jessica even then was one to affirm her confidence with the resonant tap of a wooden heel. Her hair—a jostle of deep brown, with strands of auburn and premature silvers—was parted on the side, a furrow the work of a meticulous combing that belied her otherwise hearty air of unkempt defiance, and came down in bunches, graceful wild augers and coils, like a thatching. She wore several rings, which set off her fingers, which were long and strong, and on her wrists were bright bracelets of thirties bakelite, which clattered when she gestured. Her eyes were, as I say, the most dark olive brown; astute—quick but not quicksilver. Strong, clear forehead, taut but fluid skin across it and her nose, which was prominent and straight as a ruler. Wide cheeks, the narrow hips of a boy. But not a willowy woman, rather an outright presence.

She was someone to reckon with, it was clear at once. As we used to say, and sometimes still do, she occupied her space. There was a calm to her, a powerful reserve. She didn't trade in airs. Jessica insists to this day she was “almost a virgin” when I met her (what happened to her in Tangiers —Hardly counted because it barely mattered, she maintained) and that I am the third of the three men she's ever been with, but I, wary, stubborn I, used to presume there must have been others. I presumed wrong, I've come now to think. And I never succeeded in getting her to tell me the story of her Moroccan romance. Maybe one day. She is not, as a rule, a withholder of details.

—Wait till you see what we've got, said Kip, lifting high a large heavy white bag, then holding it out to me.

—Where's the kitchen? Jessica asked, at the same time that I opened the bag to see dozens of fresh mussels.

—In here, such as it is.

She rolled up her sleeves, found a big aluminum pot left by a prior tenant in one of the lower cupboards, and soon enough the scents of butter, garlic, white wine, and the salty sea-smell of steamed mussels filled the apartment. It was a feast.

We talked, the three of us, into the night, our conversation punctuated by the clatter of black shells dropping into a bowl. Kip drifted in and out of a kind of proprietorship, as I understood it, manifest by the hand on her shoulder, the many smiles, complemented by moments in which he'd jump up, midthought or midsentence, and still thinking or talking, leave the room to get more bread or a bottle of wine from the refrigerator, leave us sitting there until he burst in once more picking up where he'd left off, or where we'd proceeded. Was that a warning, that look he'd give me? Instinct proposed that his little moves were made more for my benefit than Jessica's. That was fine by me. She was interesting but didn't interest me, I told myself at the time, and still seem to want to—that is with regard to our first encounter—though subsequent events would come to contradict any claim of indifference on my part, or intimidation on his.

We talked about music. We talked about school—Jessica was two years older than we, had graduated from Barnard with a degree in biology and resolved not to go on to graduate school as her parents hoped, hitched overseas, and returned broke to the Upper West Side until her next direction showed itself. We talked about poverty, our own but more the ghetto poverty of others. Though now, as she put it, she checked coats at a restaurant for the rich, she hoped one day to be able somehow to provide them for the poor. She, too, was an idealist, I remember thinking. After all, surely she hadn't paid for the mussels and wine any more than she had for the food her employers provided, anonymously and in ignorance, to a neighborhood shelter where on weekends Jessica worked as a volunteer.

Inevitably, as the wine bottles emptied, we talked about Vietnam and the unrest it was beginning to cause on campus.

By that spring the war was developing into an obsession of mine, one that would join, if not replace, my passion against the bomb. Kip had learned to hate it when I brought up Vietnam, much as Bonnie Jean had fled the room when I carried on about nuclear weapons. He even shocked me, some months before this introduction to Jessica, by saying, —World War Two was what brought us together, are you gonna let Vietnam pull us apart?

—Listen, I already know you're for Vietnam—

—I don't know enough about it to be for or against it, and neither do you.

—If you were against it, you wouldn't be doing those ridiculous drills with all your rotsy friends.

—They're not friends. And stop calling it rotsy.

—You bet they're not friends, man. They're the enemy.

—And so am I, is that what you're saying?

—I don't know what I'm saying.

—If you don't know what you're saying, why are you talking?

All this was the result of my urging Kip to sign a petition that was being circulated by several professors—Dean, Kahn, and Martin—which called for a “stop to the bombings” and for the parties to begin “work toward a negotiated settlement.”

—I'm not going to be kahned by Dean Martin, he laughed.

I had already showed the temerity of signing, with a hundred and fifty other students, a telegram of sympathy to Ho Chi Minh:
WE ARE AMERICANS WHO ARE DEEPLY OPPOSED TO THE UNITED STATES BOMBING RAIDS AGAINST THE PEOPLE OF THE DRV. WE ARE DOING WHAT WE CAN TO STOP THESE BARBAROUS ATTACKS. YOU HAVE OUR RESPECT AND SYMPATHY.

Kip said, —As if Ho Chi Minh is actually going to sit down and read a telegram from a bunch of college kids.

Whether it had to do with my father's role at Los Alamos or not, whether I would have arrived at these same convictions about Vietnam even if he'd not learned here at Columbia—over in Pupin Hall, where Fermi had gotten the football players to stack graphite columns, where Segrè, Rabi, and others had worked before joining the Manhattan Project—what he would later use in Los Alamos to make his contribution to the military industrial complex, I can't be sure about to this day. Either way, I was getting into it deeper and deeper. I'd attended a teach-in at the McMillin Theatre in the basement of Dodge Hall, eight hours of speeches, over a hundred faculty members there, from midnight until morning, a gathering sponsored by the Ad Hoc Teaching Committee on Vietnam, and whatever Kip said to the contrary I was beginning to know enough to be not just against the war but adamant in my horror of what we were getting ourselves into there.

That night, when the subject came around, I remember that Kip and I fell into debate in front of Jessica. —Advisors? those weren't advisors, I said.

—Of course they were advisors, Kip disagreed.

—They weren't any more advisors then than what we're dropping now on the Ho Chi Minh Trail are water balloons filled with eau de cologne.

—All right, so what were they?

—What they were was scouts. Like outriders not much different from what the cavalry sends out in a bad cowboy movie, and all they were there to do was get the lowdown on the situation so the Pentagon would know how many troops to deploy.

—He's starting to sound like a broken record, Kip assured Jessica.

—When people can't hear you, you have to repeat what you've said. It's only polite, I retorted.

—Tedium unto death!

But, in fact, Jessica seemed to agree with me about the mistakes Kennedy had made committing so many so-called advisors to the conflict.

—It's a civil war. We don't have any right to be poking our imperialist noses in there.

Kip scoffed, both at the meaning of my rhetoric, and at the rhetoric itself. —Listen to you, Brice. “Imperialist noses”? Come on. Anyway, it's less a civil war than an ideological war, Communism against democracy.

Jessica said, —It's both civil and ideological. I think Brice is right, it's terrible and we don't belong there.

—Oh no, not you too.

By then I would be deep into a monologue, thoughtful if humorless. —We should have let the French fix it if it needed fixing. They were the ones who were in there profiting right along from confusion and colonialism. What use is it to us even if we do get South Vietnam under control?

—It would halt the spread of Communism, which is looking to me more and more like the same virus we had to fight against twenty years ago. You of all people don't want to see it build to that, do you, Brice? Nuclear deterrence becomes nuclear holocaust when local wars get out of hand. Am I wrong?

—I don't think it will ever come to that.

—Haven't you ever heard of the domino theory?

—That domino business is for the birds, cultures don't behave like little flat black blocks lined up in a row and toppled one against the next. Leave it to a war hero to come up with such an arrogant idea. Dear Dwight Eisenhower, screw
you
. Yours sincerely, Brice. I mean, the contempt, the kind of ridiculous superiority it takes to compare societies of human beings—people, man,
people
—with dominoes. Listen, Kip, we're the ones with dominoes clattering around in our heads, thinking that these people are yellow, rice-fed weaklings who are going to fall to Communism a country at a time, like mindless blocks of wood.

I have forgotten how the quarrel ended that night. Likely, I shrugged my shoulders and went off to bed feeling ashamed at my vehemence. On other nights the debate went on until it devolved into shouting, or simply wore itself out and meandered into silence. Though around Jessica he remained at least somewhat aloof, Kip could be brutal, especially when cornered. He might curse, he might sneer, but either way he would do everything possible to offset, if not invalidate, my rhetorical victory. He would suddenly become silent. Eyes rolled back under their lids, his tongue out and head fallen on his shoulders as—one hand grasping an invisible rope over his head—his whole body lifted, he bore himself upward by the invisible noose around his neck. The pantomime of self-hanging. Then would come forth a slow laugh.

—You win, Brice, you win, he would say. And I'd know I had lost. This mime of his never failed to invoke my deep defensiveness with regard to all things Kip. He knew me too well. No one, I expect, will ever know me better. But, of course, being known by another human leaves one open to incursion, to cast it in military parlance. Being known is being witnessed is being exposed is being made vulnerable is being placed in danger.

I can appreciate Kip's impatience. —Brice, he said, one night after the three of us had eaten dinner together and Jessica had gone home, —Brice, you've got to stop this harping about Vietnam. I want to talk about love, you want to talk war all the time.

—Get off it. If you want to talk about love, maybe it's better you talk about it without me around.

—Good idea.

—How come you're always inviting me, anyway?

—Fair enough question.

—I mean, seriously.

—Because you're lonely and love is compassionate.

This was a form of the peppers game, I had come to understand.

—Kip, seriously, just leave me out of it from now on.

—Hey look, Brice. For some reason, don't ask me why, Jessie likes you.

When Jessica wasn't around, Kip and I indulged ourselves in talk, at length and in as much depth as we could manage, about her. Who we thought she reminded us of from back home, what we thought she loved about Kip and what she didn't, what her parents must be like, and so on. Who was Jessica Rankin?