Revolution Number 9 Read online

  “Ten-fifteen,” he said. “Lotsa time.” He stroked her arm, brushed her breast with the back of his hand. His eyes were wide and liquid. “I wish you could talk Spanish,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because then I could tell you how beautiful you are. I cannot say in English.”

  “That’s sweet, Felipe,” Yvonne said. He beamed. It really was sweet, and she wished he hadn’t said it. It made her job harder; but changed nothing.

  He reached for a Coke can, shook it, drank, offered some to her.

  “Not just now.”

  He drained the rest and tossed the can on the floor. “How is your work?” he asked.

  “The same,” she said. He wasn’t asking about her work. He was asking about Paco. Paco worried him. That was funny. Felipe was under the impression that she was married to a data processor with a nice future and a nice apartment, and that didn’t bother him at all. But the thought of Paco as a rival was a continual source of anxiety.

  Felipe dropped the subject. He wasn’t naturally inquisitive, and that was another bonus. He never asked about her data processing husband, for example. Yvonne had a name all picked out for him, but she didn’t have to use it. Felipe didn’t know where she lived, let alone where she would have told him she lived had he asked. He knew nothing of her background, her friends, her family. All he knew was that a few months before he’d gone into Paco’s after work and noticed a new waitress. Over the next few weeks she’d served him a few times, been reserved at first, then more friendly. After a while he had worked up the nerve to ask her out and she’d surprised him by accepting. Now this.

  “Want some weed?” Felipe said.

  “Not tonight,” Yvonne said. It was a long drive home and she was tired. “Go ahead, if you want.”

  Felipe shook his head. Declining to get stoned without her was a form of gallantry, she knew. She suspected that Delores no longer saw this side of him, if she ever had.

  Their minds might have been running parallel courses, but on different planes, one high, one low, both homing on Delores. “I got a surprise for you,” he said. He stuck a tape in the VCR and pressed buttons. The big TV at the end of the bed glowed to life. After a few seconds of noise, a bed appeared on the screen: the bed they were on. “I got a deal on a camcorder,” Felipe said. He was whispering, as though they were in a theater full of people. “Fits right in the palm of your hand.”

  A copper-colored woman appeared in the frame. She wore see-through black baby doll pajamas. It was Delores. She was older than in the wedding picture. She must have been thirty or so, about ten years younger than Yvonne, but she wasn’t in the kind of shape Yvonne was. Felipe was right. His wife had put on weight since the photograph. Still, it was ungenerous to call her fat, Yvonne thought. More like plump.

  Delores glanced furtively at the camera, looked away. She said something in Spanish. She didn’t sound happy. From off-camera came the voice of Felipe, also in Spanish. He sounded encouraging. Delores stuck her hand under her top and rubbed her breast. The picture jiggled on the screen. Felipe’s hand appeared. He gave her tequila. She drank from the bottle, glanced at the camera again, had another drink. Now she didn’t look so shy.

  Felipe gave her some instructions. Soon she was lying on the bed and the baby dolls were off. Marijuana appeared. Delores inhaled it. Her hips squirmed of their own volition. The motion made her flesh jiggle, but not unpleasantly, Yvonne thought. Now when Delores looked at the camera it was brazen. She exposed herself to it. The focus blurred. When it cleared, Delores’s eyes were glazed and Felipe was no longer issuing instructions.

  In the here and now, Felipe turned Yvonne on her side so they could both see the screen and slid inside her again. This is quite good, thought Yvonne. We’re all so simple, really, so corrupt. To each according to his sexual needs, from each according to his sexual abilities. The hormonal manifesto.

  After, Felipe’s voice was husky. “I’d love to use that camera on you,” he said in her ear.

  “Won’t that be something to look forward to?” Yvonne replied, sitting up.

  “¿Qué?”

  He didn’t get it, neither the text nor the irony. “In the future,” she explained.

  “Next Wednesday?”

  “If you play your cards right. We’ll see.”

  Felipe frowned. She supposed he’d stumbled on the phrase, but it wasn’t that. “Wednesday no good,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “I have overtime. Down at the docks.”

  “The docks?”

  “The bank ships cash to Japan.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Bank of America. We take it to the warehouse. They put it on a boat to Japan.”

  “U.S. cash?”

  “I think.”

  Yvonne zipped up her jeans, casual, careful not to look at him. “Why would they do that?”

  Felipe shrugged. “In the bank in Mexico they have U.S. cash. So why not Japan?”

  “Why not, indeed?”

  “Huh?” he said. He must have decided she needed help understanding world economic issues. “Japan is a lot richer than Mexico, Carol. Last time it was fifteen, twenty minutes to unload. Many, many bags.”

  Yvonne laced her sneakers. Her hands didn’t shake at all. “I’ve got a friend who lives near there, Felipe.”

  “Near where?”

  “The docks. She’s in the Jack London condos.” Yvonne looked up at him then, to make sure he was paying attention. “A friend who’ll let me have her place for the night,” she went on, breaking the information into little bits. “For when you’re through down there. I could pick you up. We could spend the whole night together. You could tell Delores it was for work. That has the advantage of being partly true.”

  Felipe missed the last bit, but he got the gist. “The whole night?”

  “I’ll just need to know where you’re making this delivery. So I can pick you up.”

  “Is Nippon-American Import Export,” Felipe said, not even pausing to think about it. “But is better we meet at the condo, okay?”

  “Okay,” Yvonne said. “And Felipe,” she added as she finished dressing, “bring that new camera of yours.”

  “You mean it?”

  Yvonne smiled and went out the door without saying another word. She’d laid it on thick enough already.

  She got into her car and yawned. She had a long drive ahead of her. As she stuck the keys in the ignition, a car turned onto the block. Yvonne ducked down as its head-lights approached. The car parked on the other side of the street. Its motor sputtered a few times and went quiet. A woman in a white nurse’s outfit got out, locked the door, and crossed the street, passing right in front of Yvonne’s bumper. It was Delores. She walked tiredly across the lawn, past the dying palm tree, around the back to the stairs. Yvonne imagined Felipe brushing his teeth, showering, making the bed. Or maybe he didn’t bother. She turned the key and drove away.

  · · ·

  It was after two by the time Yvonne got home. Many leaves hung from the palm tree in her yard, all healthy. She had better air than Felipe and Delores and a cleaner street. She also had a two-story house, modest but her own. Not fair, although exchanging domiciles with Felipe and Delores wasn’t the answer. Power must be grabbed. Her job was to show them how to grab it, not this particular Felipe and Delores but all the Felipes and Deloreses.

  Yvonne went inside. A modest house in her terms, but not inexpensive, and beyond the means of most people, including anyone who had lived the marginal life she had for the past twenty years. Yvonne had occupied the house for much of that time, and that was all it was to her—a building to occupy.

  But the gang liked to meet there; it was more pleasant than any of their places. The members of the gang had in common comfortless homes, as well as an inclination to resistance and burning bridges and a disinclination to compromise and going back. Other than that, there was only difference.

  The gang—they called th
emselves the Committee of the American Resistance, but to Yvonne they were the gang—was waiting in the basement. They had a smell tonight, and it had spread through the house, a convincingly proletarian mix of cigarette smoke and melted cheese. The gang:

  Eli—the youngest, who’d spent a year at Reed and now worked in a cannery. He had a girlfriend, somewhat older. She was in Leavenworth; jailed for life, like the rest of the Santa Clara Five.

  Angel—who came from a rich family in Mexico City but thought that Cuba was the last best hope of mankind. He’d been the lookout during the Santa Clara Five misadventure and had slipped away unnoticed.

  Gus—who looked like a retired wrestler and had been on the pro circuit during the fifties. He’d also been an infantryman in Korea, a longshoreman, a union organizer, a volunteer in Nicaragua. He had planned the Santa Clara action.

  And Annie.

  They were eating pizza and watching a movie on TV; a young Marlon Brando was bleeding heavily. They looked up as Yvonne came down the stairs.

  “Bingo,” she said.

  “Bingo?”

  Yvonne told them what they needed to know.

  “It’s going to involve preparation,” Gus said.

  “Then prepare.”

  “Shouldn’t we discuss our purpose first?” asked Eli.

  “You can if you want,” Yvonne said. “I’m going to bed.”

  · · ·

  She slept, then woke, lying in the darkness. Someone was in the room, someone who moved lightly on little feet.

  “Annie?”

  “I didn’t feel like driving all the way home,” Annie said; she tired easily, like a victim in a Wilkie Collins story. Annie got into the bed, but didn’t touch her. “What happened?” she asked.

  “I said what happened.”

  “I mean the rest of it.”

  “It’s not important.”

  “It is to me.”

  Yvonne told her about Delores, videotape, baby dolls. She didn’t want to be interrogated all night.

  “Why someone like him,” Annie said, “and not me?”

  “It was for a reason. Do you think I enjoyed it?”

  “I don’t know. Did you?”

  Yvonne didn’t answer. They fell silent. The silence went on and on. The two women lay where they were, each on her own side of the bed. After a long time there was a little rustle under the covers, and Annie’s hand touched Yvonne’s thigh.

  “Forget it,” Yvonne said.

  The hand withdrew, and a minute or two later so did Annie, out of bed, out of the bedroom, out of the house. Maybe she was crying, maybe she wasn’t; Yvonne couldn’t tell, didn’t care. That part of their life was long over. What was a condition of Annie’s sexual being had been only an experiment for Yvonne, a failed one. The cause lived on, uniting them.

  But just before she fell asleep, it came to her for the first time that something bitter might be growing inside Annie, bitter and possibly dangerous. She would think about it in the morning.

  Part II

  11

  Mom drove. Ollie, friend of the family, sat beside her. Blake, leaving home, slept in the back. He missed the frontier between urban and rural, missed the climb into green hills and the gradual transition to wooded tranquillity. He awoke in time to see the valley lying below, with the stone campanile of the college chapel rising from its heart; also in time to catch sight of Ollie’s hand between Mom’s legs.

  In the rearview mirror Mom’s eyes shifted, saw her son up and alert. Some silent communication passed from her to Ollie, perhaps through a change in body heat; Ollie’s hand slid away, and he said, “Scenery or what?” He twisted around and smiled at Blake. “Four years of this to look forward to. You’re a lucky young man.” And he was a lucky young man, except that Dad’s company was roaming around the jungle west of someplace that had been censored from his last letter, and he wouldn’t be home till spring. Ollie shook his head at the wonder of Blake’s prospects. He smelled of some cologne with a manly name.

  Mom parked the wagon among all the other wagons in front of the freshman dorm, and she and Ollie helped Blake carry his stuff up to his room. Blake and Ollie handled the trunk; Mom took the baseball bag, with his bats, glove, cleats.

  “How nice,” said Mom, examining everything when they were inside.

  It was nice: a bright room with two desks overlooking the quad, and two small bedrooms off the other side. The slightly larger of the two small bedrooms was already occupied by a mom-dad-son combination. The mom was making the bed; the dad was smoking a cigar; the son was saying: “Maybe I should have applied to Harvard, huh?”

  “You wouldn’t have gotten in,” said his dad. A cylinder of cigar ash fell to the floor.

  Blake took the other bedroom. “Let’s get you unpacked,” said Mom.

  “That’s all right,” Blake told her. “I’ll do it later.” She didn’t argue.

  “Well,” said Ollie, sticking out his hand, “I’ll say good-bye. Good-bye and good luck.”

  Blake forced himself to shake hands. Ollie went out, leaving him alone with his mother. She looked up at him, bit her lip. “Your father …” she began.

  “Yes?”

  There was some more lip biting. Then she said: “He would have loved to be here now.”

  “Yeah.”

  Mom’s eyes filled, but nothing spilled over. She leaned forward for a kiss. Blake forced himself to do that too. “I love you,” she said, her voice breaking.

  Like you love Dad? he thought, but didn’t say it. Mom left. Blake found himself thinking of Hamlet, which he had studied in his last year of high school. Suddenly he understood it a lot better.

  Blake went out into the common room, where the other freshman, pale and bony, had taken possession of the desk that was slightly closer to the window. He had opened a new box of pencils and was sharpening them one by one. “Parents,” he said. “Gotta love ’em.” He looked up, peering through the smudged lenses of his granny glasses. “Stu Levine,” he said. “Guess we’re roommates.”

  The roommates talked. They talked about where they came from, what courses they were taking, what music they liked. Stu Levine didn’t mention his SAT scores—760, math; 720, verbal—until at least five and possibly ten minutes had elapsed. Blake’s SATs were good but not that good. He kept them to himself.

  Not long after, the baseball coach came in and welcomed Blake to the school. He invited him to drop in at the field house anytime.

  “You’re a jock, huh?” said Stu Levine after the coach left, not looking happy about it. “Far out.” He slotted Blake in that category for a week or two, until late one night he heard him playing his saxophone. Then he knocked on the door of Blake’s bedroom, said “Far out” again, and offered him half a tab.

  “Made it myself,” he said, not without pride.

  “You made it yourself?”

  “In the lab, last spring. It’s not hard.”

  Blake had never dropped acid before, but refusing would have been awkward, like turning down someone’s homemade peanut butter cookies. He put the tiny offering on his tongue, swallowed it, and played the saxophone nonstop till noon the next day. Then he laughed for a while, laid down and tried to close his eyes. They wouldn’t stay closed. From somewhere in the room, Stu Levine said, “Two weeks and I’m already hopelessly behind in all my courses. Hopelessly hopelessly hopelessly. Fucked fucked fucked. Do you get my meaning?”

  “You’re not optimistic.”

  Stu Levine started laughing. It turned to crying. He cried for a long time. Blake felt uncomfortable. “Hey now,” he said.

  “I hate it here,” said Stu Levine. “My father’s the biggest asshole you could imagine.”

  “Mine’s a captain in the airborne,” Blake said.

  Stu Levine stopped crying. “You mean like killing Vietnamese?”

  Blake looked at his roommate, sitting on the floor, half-behind the dresser. Light glinted off Stu Levine’s glasses, forming silver facets edged in blue; th
ey grew and shrank in crystal shapes. Blake watched the pulsating crystals until they turned red.

  Stu Levine cleared his throat. It sounded like a backfiring truck. “No offense, huh?” he said. “Like about the Vietnamese?” Stu left the room without further conversation. That was the end of their only real bull session. The light show lingered in Stu’s absence.

  · · ·

  “What’s the point of this expedition?” said Svenson. “I don’t get it.”

  “The horse knows the way,” Mr. G replied.

  Svenson sighed. He’d been disputing Charlie’s choice of destination for the past forty or fifty miles, ever since the flat tire. Charlie, sitting in the middle of the backseat, glanced at Svenson. His lips were everted in a pout, absurd and girlish, and hard to reconcile with the relish for violence he’d demonstrated on the cigarette boat hours before. Svenson was in a bad mood. Perhaps it was the air-conditioning, Charlie thought, which was producing nothing but noise, or the fact that he’d had to help the driver change the tire and now had grease stains on his rugby shirt and on the borrowed jeans.

  “Some limo,” Svenson said, confirming Charlie’s guess.

  “Get used to it,” Mr. G told him.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “This is the limousine of the American future,” Mr. G answered.

  “Huh?”

  Mr. G did not elaborate.

  The limo of the American future swayed on its heavy suspension as it climbed into hills that Charlie had not seen in twenty-two years. Had anything changed? Not that Charlie could see—all around lay nature green and undegraded. The difference was one of perspective. Twenty-two years ago these hills had been scenery, the backdrop of college life. Now Charlie was aware of their enduring power, and wondered at the way that he and Rebecca and Malik and so many others had behaved like giants in what they took to be a stage set built just for them.

  “Tripping down Memory Lane?” asked Svenson.

  Charlie ignored him. The limo topped the last rise and dipped down toward the valley. The first thing Charlie saw was the stone campanile of the chapel. Bong, bong, bong, bong. Four peals of the brass bell, and the fifth that never came. Tripping down Memory Lane was a crude way to put it, but not untrue. Charlie was moving back in space and time, all the way back to the Big Bang. Hadn’t the universe begun with an explosion, and hadn’t its character been determined by the nature of that explosion? Most people couldn’t trace themselves back to a personal Big Bang, but Charlie Ochs could. Bong, bong, bong, bong—the sinful start of his own universe. With memory, as with a powerful telescope, you could see all the way back to the beginning, but you couldn’t do anything about it.