Any Minute I Can Split (27 page)

“And
you
have to realize,” Starr said, “that anyone who hasn't got money would be happy to exchange that kind of stuff for the kind of shit you get when you're poor.”

Margaret nodded reluctantly. She glanced at De Witt; he was still watching. He would wait for it to get worse before he made any attempt at mediation.

“Are you just getting it off your chest?” Roger asked Starr. “Or do you have an idea?”

Starr shrugged. “I have a lot of ideas. Like why don't you split up the money and let us all buy it?”

Someone whistled.

Roger said, “You're not kidding, are you?”

Starr shook her head.

Silence.

“You're HUNG UP, man!” Harry Kirschner burst out with sudden violence. “You're all hung up on your money! Don't you know that money is shit?”

“Fine,” Roger said calmly. “Go squeeze some out.”

“You know what I mean, man,” Harry said. “How you gonna face the future if you can't get rid of your hangups from the past? Look at me! Look at my body!” He flexed his muscles, pulled up his chambray shirt to reveal a lean sun-tanned torso. “Look at the life I lead! Would you believe I used to be a two-hundred-sixty-four-pound chemical engineer?”

Roger said, “Yes.”

“I'll tell you what's wrong with
you
,” Harry said.

“Why don't you go fuck off?” Roger said. “What's this joker doing here anyway?”

“You see?” Starr said. “You're throwing your weight around already.”

“My God!” Margaret exclaimed. “He's doing exactly what you were doing a few minutes ago with those other men.”

“I've been here a lot longer than he has,” Starr said defensively.

“You mean you'd like a dictatorship of time instead of money?”

“I wouldn't like a dictatorship of anything!” Starr said heatedly. “I'm saying it's bad enough to feel like someone controls your life who's a few hundred miles away, and now you're telling me some guy that walked in a couple of months ago is gonna be able to tell me to go fuck off.”

“Oh, for crying out loud,” Roger said, “nobody's telling
you
to fuck off.”

“You could. Or you'll think you can.”

Of course he would have even without the money but Starr probably didn't realize that. By the time of Roger's arrival Starr had been out of the winter madness and into her new boyfriend and a variety of other projects so that they'd never happened to cross. Roger was smacking his forehead in frustration.

“May I say something?” De Witt asked gently. They all turned to him. “As you know, I'm not against anger as a response to an immediate situation. A way of working out the knots that develop between people. But these
issues we're getting into now, they're not like that . . . they're very large, complex, legitimate problems, that is to say they go beyond personalities. Questions like who has a voice, how you earn the voice, and so on, this isn't a question of clashing personalities, it goes to the heart of our culture and beyond it.”

“Not
our
culture, man,” boomed Harry to the smiling and nods of his chorus.
“Their
culture. Money has no place in our culture.”

“Bullshit,” several people said at once.

“How'd you buy your farm?” Starr demanded.

“I used up what I had in the bank. That was it, I'm finished with money now.”

“Tell that to the tax collector,” Jordan said.

“What if you hadn't had that?” Starr demanded. “You'd have had to find someone who did, right?”

“I'm sorry,” Harry said, standing up and yawning. “I can't get into you people. You're too hung up for me.” And he left, followed by his boys.

“Now it seems to me,” De Witt went on as though he'd never been interrupted, “that there are several related issues involved. Maybe we can take them up one at a time, even if they overlap . . . Now the first question I think only you can answer, Roger, and that is whether the feelings of the group are crucial to you. That is, assuming that Mitchell really means to sell and you're able to raise the money to buy, would the feelings of the rest of the group matter to you to a point where they would cause you to go ahead or stop?”

Margaret held her breath; what admission was he asking of Roger, from whom she'd never heard the words I love you. How could Roger ever admit in public that other people's feelings were important to him?

Long pause. Then Roger said slowly,
“Your
feelings are important to me because we're talking about a partnership . . . Margaret's feelings are important to me because she's my wife . . .”
Mirabile dictul
She exhaled. “The others . . . I care how the others feel but not as much.”

I love you, Roger. I really love you.

“In other words,” De Witt said, “you would prefer that we worked things out as a group.”

Roger nodded. “The group thing seems to be working pretty well. I mean people've got all kinds of problems with themselves and each other . . . but they don't seem to keep the place from functioning.”

“Now everyone knows Roger's feelings,” Starr said belligerently. “And Roger's feelings are more important than anyone else's because Roger has money.”

“Only from a procedural point of view,” De Witt said. “Now I was going to suggest that we go around the room and give everyone a chance to express their feelings.”

“I'll tell you my feelings,” Jordan said, jumping up, scratching his head in an agitated way. “My feeling is, fuck the house and fuck the money and everything else! Who needs it? I don't want to own anything! I don't want to pay taxes! I want freedom, not ownership.”

“Especially from your children,” Carol said.

“What the fuck has that got to do with it?” Jordan demanded.

“Plenty,” Carol said. “It's one thing to talk about keeping on the move when you don't have little kids and something else when you do.”

“Bucky Fuller,” Jordan announced grandly, “says that men are born with feet, not roots.”

“Which is true of their bodies,” Dolores said quietly from her corner. “But not of their minds.” It was exactly what De Witt had said to her once. Which of them had thought of it first? They seemed to have perfect understanding, they never even crossed verbally but seemed to have identical reactions to people and events. If De Witt's attitude toward Mira bespoke tolerance and determination, there was nothing but love and respect for the wife who'd divorced him.

“Right on,” Carol said.

Silence. Mira was deep in meditation. De Witt asked Dolores if there was anything else she wanted to say.

“I guess so,” Dolores said. “I guess I want to say that I'm for anything that lets us hold onto this place. If Roger wants to buy it, fine, if there's some sort of share system where we share taxes or a mortgage, whatever, I'll try to pay my share, neither way freaks me out especially. But to me it's very important to have a home. Someplace to come back to, as Carol said. When I was on the move all the time, I came to dread the next time I'd have to pick up and go again. Once I had this place I could travel for fun again. Maybe it's just having been raised on a farm, having a strong sense of land, of place . . . but I think it's more than that.”

“I think it's age,” Jordan said, grinning. “You're over the hill, kid, how old are you, thirty-five or some fucking crazy number like that?”

Dolores laughed but Carol pointed out to him angrily that everyone grows older.

“Not me!” Jordan said, “I have this plan where every year when my birthday comes to get me I'm gonna be too busy fucking.”

“I feel the same as Dolores,” Butterscotch said timorously. “I don't know how I can contribute my share, but . . .”

“If you do just what you've always done,” De Witt told her, “you'll be giving your share.”

Silence.

“I think,” Mira said in her Super Celibate Angel voice, “that it's a beautiful idea to have someone own the farm who's really deeply involved with it.”

“Then it should be ten times as good having ten people own it who're really deeply involved,” Starr said.

“What're you proposing?” Roger asked.

“Nothing,” Starr said. “I'm just saying whatever comes into my head.”

Her boyfriend stared at her adoringly.

“I'm not dividing up the money,” Roger said. “It would be a phony trip, pretending to divide it up and then laying down a condition it has to go to the farm. I'm not even sure I can get what's needed, I'm going to
have to sweat for it, kiss my old man's ass, I mean, and I'm not willing to have someone take a few grand of that sweat and spin out for San Francisco or something.”

“One of the problems we've had in the past,” De Witt said after a long silence, “is with this question of indebtedness. Of how one has to be with people to whom one is indebted.”

“Or to put it in English,” Jordan said, “Mitchell acts like a fucking asshole half the time he's here and no one ever tells him so.”

“Except me,” Starr said.

“Except her,” Jordan admitted. “And Mitchell's decided she's that way with everyone so it's cool. But if everyone decided the hell with him and his fucking hippie-capitalist ego trip and called him on his shit, we know damn well what'd happen.”

“It's happening anyway,” Carol said sadly.

“Maybe it was inevitable,” De Witt said. “He had to really grow and learn and become part of the farm, or get tired of his plaything and give it up.”

Silence.

“All right,” Roger said abruptly. “How about dividing it up after I buy it?”

Margaret stared at him. If in the past she'd felt strained and exhausted by his high-wire articulation and callous inflexibility, she was beginning to feel threatened by this new Roger, whose reactions she couldn't anticipate, whose actions she couldn't predict. She didn't mind his giving away what they didn't have yet; it was a more basic feeling, as though he were snatching out from under her a spot of ledge where she was trying to gain a toehold. Not that he hadn't given away money and possessions before; it was the way he'd allowed himself to be questioned and moved from his original intention!

“Not to do us a favor,” Starr said, eyeing him cautiously.

“All right,” Roger said. “Not to do you a favor. To keep the group together.”

“You mean it.”

“Yeah. I mean it. I don't mean the big land parcel. If I get that it's going to go into beef cattle or big-scale farming, and if someone wants to go in with De Witt and me, that'll be a different thing. And I'm not talking about splitting with any two-year-old that drops in for a meal and a quick lay.”

“Don't be a shit,” Starr said, “just because you're giving something away.”

“Don't notice it for the first time just because you're being given something.”

“I'm not used to that,” Starr said seriously.

“We'll get it all over with quickly,” Roger said, “so you can forget about it.”

“If you're serious about this,” De Witt said to Roger, “I think you'll have some details to work out on paper.”

“Oh, shit,” Jordan said, “I'm not into legal documents.”

“That's all ownership is,” De Witt pointed out.

“There's Margaret and me,” Roger said. “De Witt and Mira. Carol and Jordan, Starr and Paul, Dolores, Butterscotch. Makes ten shares. We can make provision where if someone new comes in they can have a share if they want it after a certain amount of time.”

“What about taxes and stuff?” Margaret asked.

“They shouldn't be too hard to handle,” De Witt said. “Split ten ways. Especially if we can persuade Mitchell to let us give him a portion of the money in cash so that the records don't show too high a purchase price to the assessor.”

“I'm not sure I'm into all this,” Jordan said. “Can I sell my share?”

“No!” several people shouted at once.

“What're you trying to turn this into, man?” Roger asked. “Cherry Grove?”

“There're going to be so many things to work out,” Margaret said apprehensively.

“Mmm,” Roger said. “But first Philadelphia.”

“Is that where your house is?” Carol asked.

“No,” Roger said, “that's where my parents live. Ardmore, actually. If we can get enough money there we won't have to wait for the sale of our own house to buy here.”

“We,” Starr repeated, kissing Roger's cheek loudly. “He said
we.
Let's have a party!”

M
ARGARET
dreamed that her mother was walking along the edge of a fog-shrouded island not unlike the one in the Isle of the Dead, reaching out desperately over the water, calling in a pleading echo-heavy voice, “Don't go to Roger's side for the money, darling! Come to meeeeeee! Come to meeeeeeee!” When she awakened, puzzled and upset, Roger was already dressed. She felt a surge of resentment toward him. Because he was dragging her back to Philadelphia? Or was it a carryover from her dream? When Roger came near the bed she pretended she was still asleep.