Trinity Fields (26 page)

“Keep the faith, Kip.”

I read the letter only once, folded it, slipped it back into its pale blue envelope, then hid it at the bottom of my desk drawer. The letter gave rise to polar sentiments in me, yet incongruous as my two responses were, both directed me to bury it deep, under paper, under wraps. Not destroy it, as requested —for what reason, I couldn't begin to guess other than that such a request was typical Kip—but rather cache it. On the one hand, the letter was precious, this private treasure that displayed Kip's intimate fraternity with me. Here was an old, familiar voice, the voice of youthful friendship. On the other hand, the letter aroused in me rich animosity toward Kip, which made me want to get it out of my sight. Surely, the sanguine tone seemed out of place; maybe it was meant to mask deep discouragement.

I couldn't destroy the letter, no, but neither could I fully cherish having received it. I didn't want Jessica to marry Kip, but I did want them to be happy; I didn't want Kip to go off to Vietnam, but I did, didn't I?

Kip and I created our own games, as I've said. I still don't care about baseball one way or the other, but I've always liked the quote of Yogi Berra, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.” Having arrived at a crossroads I decided to look both ways and, as best I could, take them.

What is conviction? It is different from
a
conviction. Conviction when followed with strict, unveering resolve, can lead to arrest and arrest to conviction. Convicts are sometimes convicted because they took their convictions out and did things that might seem crazy to people who did not share those convictions, or at least didn't share them to the degree of intensity that might carry them away into action. The word comes from
convictio
, proof. A person who has proof can therefore believe and can be compelled by belief to act with conviction. And I began to believe, I had proof sufficient to compel me to believe, and so I took my convictions with me, and I acted upon them and with them.

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows, says the jester Trinculo in
The Tempest
. In the same way Los Alamos was a motley of different temperaments, the Movement—and I capitalize the word if only to show how much it became as formulative as the Hill had been—brought me in contact with more contradictory souls in the period of several years than some might encounter in a lifetime.

Epstein was one of many who disappeared into the swirl as the Movement grew; the last time I heard about him he'd become one of the Weathermen, had slipped from radicalism into the nebulous world of pacifist terrorism. Someone told me he'd been shot and killed, someone thought he was incarcerated for having taken part in a bank holdup, an action to liberate capitalist monies to redistribute to the cause, but I discounted these latter stories, since I thought I'd have read about it somewhere or heard about it in law school. The Columbia University Independent Committee on Vietnam came into being to “unite all those who oppose the war regardless of present political affiliation.” Five hundred of us from the university marched in Washington on the seventeenth of April one year, the cherry trees white and pink in bloom below the majestic monuments of the capital, which I thought were beautiful even as our chants, twenty thousand voices strong, drowned out the spring songs of the birds overhead. At the end of that month, we sent another telegram to Ho Chi Minh:
THE STUDENT LEFT WING AT COLUMBIA IS STILL A MINORITY, BUT IT IS AN UNCEASINGLY PERSISTENT GROUP AND AN INCREASINGLY VOCAL ONE AS WELL
. I had no sense of being to left or right, just knew what I knew was wrong. And then came the protest of May seventh against the presence of the ROTC on campus. I was there because I'd stayed with it, got deeper and deeper into the rituals of the Movement. Rancor and keen mistrust of authority pitched themselves at the center of some minds. From others I witnessed the same conundrums I'd never reconciled back on the Hill. Calculated violence—limited and specific—to force peace to come about. It was more than I'd expected, to be in the middle of a riot. I could have stayed at its edges but for once didn't.

I threw rocks. I threw bottles. I threw gassing canisters back at the pigs who'd launched them into our ranks. I threw fists and kicked hard as hell when they tried to get the cuffs on me. I went limp when they carried me to the wagon. I made it so that it took three of them to get me where they wanted me, and by doing that I won a small and fleeting victory by taking three of them away from their positions in the melee.

This happened when Kip was still in New Mexico, on leave from school, putting affairs in order. In the same way the death of his parents freed him to make certain decisions, to begin acting on his convictions, Kip's absence from New York freed me to act upon mine. History is not a backdrop to our lives, I came to presume, but is an agent, interactor. It was in my hands.

Jess bailed me out. She took my arm and walked me down the street.

—It's in the newspapers.

—Good, I said.

—Your shirt is torn, she said.

—As well it should be.

—I think you're a fool to have done this.

—If you think I'm such a fool, why did you bail me out?

—Don't be dense, Brice. You know I'm proud of you, too.

—You should come with me next time.

—Who'd bail you out of jail?

Gently, I removed my arm from hers and we continued along in silence. After a while, I said, —Don't be proud of me, Jess.

—Why not?

—I don't know exactly. Just don't.

When he came back to the city, closeness and distance between us began an interplay. He brought presents. For me, a Hopi ceremonial sash his father had kept draped over the back of his reading chair, its strict geometric patterns woven with vegetable-dyed wools of dark green and bright red, eggplant purple and black, all on a sheep-white ground. It was long, with fringed ends, and I put it over my shoulders like a minister does his tippet. I thanked him, embraced him.

Jessica was exuberant. —Sweet Kip, she called him, presenting him an armful of irises and tulips. When he handed her a small, squarish box with white string around it tied to look like ribbon, I knew what was inside and about to happen, but didn't know why Kip felt it necessary that I be there to witness. The ring was modest. Navajo, old, a silver band with just a bit of ornamentation to set the little oval of deep-green turquoise.

—I hope it'll fit, he said, and it did fit her little finger. —My new family, he said, then, his right arm over Jessica's shoulder, his left up over mine.

She moved in with us, some few days later, and when she did I was seized by the desire to leave. Kip argued, —This is where you live, Brice, you're not going anywhere, we're kin here. For her part, Jessica, whose side Kip now seldom left, was—so far as I could fathom—not less enthusiastic than he about my staying on. Once more I drifted in a wobbling ellipse around them.

It wasn't a horrible existence, this our brief experiment in Fourierism; it had its rewards. They made me feel at home and even as I felt that they were children and I the guardian, Kip and Jess no doubt looked on me as their ward. For weeks that accumulated into a month, I basked in the reflected glow of their sexual warmth. And it was true, wasn't it, after all, that we were kin?

Jessica took it upon herself to find me a “companion”—her word for it. She had not told Kip about my participation in the May seventh riot, or about my arrest. I saw it as an act of complicity, and withheld the story from Kip as well, in part because I didn't want to hear his comments, in part because I saw the shared secret as a declaration of her separate intimacy with me. More and more I could see how all things might lead to Jessica. How nothing I saw didn't have her face in it, nothing I felt failed to bring me back to thinking about her. It was another conviction, and one to resist with a far greater strength than I'd resisted my first arrest.

—I've got someone I want you to meet.

—I don't want to meet anybody, I said.

—Come on, don't be stubborn.

—Jess. You know that line, You can't push the river?

—You're not a river.

—And what is
that
supposed to mean?

—She's really great, I promise. Her name is Marisa.

Pushable river, I said, —All right, already.

And so entered Marisa, for a time. It was true that she was great. She straddled the two subcultures of beat and hippie. She had been present when Ginsberg, Corso, and Orlovsky read to an audience of over a thousand at Columbia back in 1959. She was one of a handful of students who protested former president Truman's presence on campus that same year, when he came to deliver a series of lectures, and I liked her for that. She was possessed of a wryness toward things around her that was endearing. She read
Mexico City Blues
and
The Dharma Bums
, she read
Howl
and
Kaddish
, and the hash was burning one night at our place, soon after Jess had made her introduction, and the incense—Marisa's aura was the color of a patchouli blossom, she told me—too, and the room vanished behind a willowy scrim of sour-sweet smoke as Marisa intoned, “. . . who bared their brains to heaven, waltzed by, tricked us” as only words and the music of words can trick you, and made us realize how holy we were indeed and in fact, and the toke pipe went around again and though it made me cough and turn crimson I smoked with the others, tried to keep up, and though I had doubts about the value of what Marisa was reading, I listened to her read on, “who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt of marijuana for New York, who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating,” and I began to feel unleashed despite myself, and yes, sexed up and very much alive in my body, “with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares,” went the poem . . . and in my delirium looked over to Kip, watched him while he lay back on the pillows, big floppy pillows Jessica'd sewed together using some old curtain fabric, and saw that they were kissing while Marisa kept reading, “whispering facts and memories and anecdotes” . . . and I thought, Brice, this is two things, this is easy on you and this is not easy on you, it's easy because these are your two best friends on earth and not easy because you want, you've always wanted, to be Kip, or at least the Kip that's kissing Jessica. And you simply cannot have her and you cannot be Kip. You must be Brice. You are Brice. For better or worse, in sickness and in health, and so it is you are married to yourself as if there were an undetectable wedding between you and yourself that occurred at your birth. And I am thinking, That is genius—isn't it? the idea that you are married to yourself, a shotgun wedding, with your progenitor's penis as shotgun. Then I realized that I was not thinking with my straight mind, and I came back into the room there to join the others, such as they were.

“. . . grandfather night,” the poem ribboned forth, Marisa transfixed in its sonorities and beautiful impudence. She looked at me and smiled. She laid her head in my lap and held the book above her face, her long brown or was it black hair flowed over my thighs. She meant every one of those words with a fervor that suggested more than just that she believed the poem, but believed she'd even written it, out of her own pain and hipster wisdom, and she kept going, she was too much, exotic and authentic, wise in her way, and as I listened to her I understood she wouldn't hate me if I kissed her forehead, would not resist if I lay my hand on the flat curve of her shoulder, began to move the tips of my fingers across the toffeelike skin of her neck and down underneath the fabric of her blouse.

And so it was I lost my worthless virginity.

Our days and nights were lived without much distinction made between one and the next. Marisa left, but seemed to return when she pleased, sometimes wearing the same clothes, in different clothes other times. She would drift in, a sack of groceries cradled in her arms, and proceed to make a deep dish of lasagna and a great salad of lettuce and sprouts. Once she arrived with two large pair of fresh shad roe, said they'd been a gift of a friend of hers who'd been on the Hudson fishing and who though it was late in the season had caught his limit that day, and proceeded to fry them with rings upon rings of onion in bacon grease.

—I thought you were a vegetarian, I said.

—Not when the shad are running, said Marisa.

I liked her for her inconsistencies. She kept erratic, nocturnal hours and yet seemed always to be the first person awake and out of bed in the morning, to have chicory black coffee made—she detested herb tea—and set out for her daily constitutional of some ten miles or so. —When you wake up you get up, that's what my great grandmother says, and she is closing in on a hundred years old, so she ought to know. Marisa was hard and quaint at the same time. Plain and strange, giving and parsimonious all at once.

Did I love Marisa? Kip wondered.

I loved her, I supposed, in my own way, just as she probably loved me in hers.

When she vanished, at the end of the summer, I was disappointed though not surprised. I was disheartened less because Marisa had run away—no, not run: faded away is more like it—than because her absence left me free to begin weaving my fantasies about Jessica again, an exercise I resisted as best I could, with varying results.

Jessica is maternal. Not smothering—mothering with the
s
of squeezing, or suffocating, or short-pantsing in the fore of it—not maternal in a mama kind of way, just warm, and kindly disposed, especially toward the hurt. She wanted me, in her Jessica way, to be somehow more distressed by Marisa's leaving than I was.

—I knew she was out there, but I wouldn't have expected her to just up and go without saying something to you.

—But that's Marisa for you. To be fair about it, she never promised anything different.