Rich Friends (12 page)

“You would be! It's grubbing. The way my uncles talk for hours about buying truckloads of toilet paper for three cents less a case!” She kissed his ear. “I love you the way you are.”

“I'd have a job. A living.”

“You'd be a sellout.”

“You don't want me to?”

“Never.”

“Then I'll stick,” he said.

“Good,” she whispered, and held him with her full strength. He turned his back to the wheel, and they were kissing hungrily. After a few minutes he whispered, “Are they sleeping, your parents?”

“Like dormice.”

Caroline and Gene, arms around one another, walked through the darkness, pausing to embrace at the back door, she unlocking it, he following quietly into the unused maid's room. An hour later, smiling and flushed, they emerged. Caroline, rather noisily, unlocked the front door, bidding Gene goodnight.

6

The next morning a note was folded in Gene's pigeonhole:

After your section come to my office

LFD

Gene stared at cheap, yellow-lined paper. He's read “Troopship,” he thought.

“Come in,” said LeRoy Duquesne, continuing to scan a blue book. Through an open window came the between-class roar. Gene sat opposite the desk. The hubbub quieted. The electric clock rang. Harsh, abrasive. LeRoy Duquesne's red pencil scratched a grade. “Troopship” has gone down with all hands, Gene thought, otherwise wouldn't he have dropped a life preserver?

“LeRoy, I'll come back.”

“Wait,” LeRoy Duquesne ordered, picking up the next blue book to correct.

Gene waited. What's the worst thing that can happen, he asked himself, seeking nourishment from his thumbnail. The very worst. He'll say it's garbage. Oh God, God. Gene hunched in the comfortless oak chair. For the first time he understood that the quiet man who cannot sing great paeans, the man who cannot dance to the glory of the gods, offers up his gift on paper. And if the gods find his gifts wanting? Gene's mouth went dry. Another blue book shuffled.

The clock was ticking ten thirty-four as LeRoy Duquesne leveled the corrected stack. Without raising his leonine head, he inquired, “Are you still working on that petition?”

We're friends, he knows I am, Gene thought, confused. “Getting noplace fast,” he replied, “but sure.”

“Drop it.”

“Come again?”

“Drop it.”

“LeRoy, I don't understand.”

“Tear the petition in two, in four, in eight. Incinerate the scraps.”

Gene was remembering the fall afternoon that LeRoy Duquesne had encouraged him. “You're kidding,” he said.

The professor was paying exquisite care to the packing of blue books in his attaché case.

And all at once Gene understood.

He examined his fingernails. I must stop biting them, he thought tangentially. He lifted his honest gray eyes to LeRoy Duquesne.

“You signed, didn't you?”

LeRoy Duquesne refused to meet his gaze. “You're one of the few holdouts in the department.”

“But you've been talking as if—”

“Categorically and unequivocally, I am against any form of loyalty oath.”

“Why sign one, then?”

LeRoy Duquesne glanced around his windowed office, desk, bookshelves, framed degrees. It was no answer, yet it said everything.

“You're one of our best teaching assistants,” he said. “You'll be a real addition to the faculty.”

“So this is how it's done,” Gene said, unable to hide his bitterness.

“Don't blame me, Gene, for the monstrous times. The country's out of control, and this is only one small part of it. The witch-hunt is upon us, and God help the holdouts. We'll have martyrs. Historically, there always have been martyrs. The difference is today they'll be denied the dignity of flame or lion. They'll simply be made to appear corrupt and incompetent, both, then thrown out of work.”

“You make it sound inevitable.”

“It is. We liberals are all victims.” At last he met Gene's gaze. “Either public or private victims.”

The look he gave Gene was of unwilling assassin to victim, of lover who has betrayed love. And in that long, silent exchange, Gene's burden of humanity was compelled to admit the uncrossable rift between conviction and action: i.e., between talking and eating. Gene never had felt closer to anyone in his life, not to his parents or Caroline.

“Gene, listen to me. You won't be hired by any university or junior college. Or even high school. Blacklists do exist. These people aren't fools. They mean business.”

Gene's stomach was in peculiar rebellion.

“What's a signature? This is what you're made for, and you know it. Don't be a fool.”

Gene wanted to reply,
I'm stuck with being one
. But his stomach was churning, and if he opened his mouth he knew a terrible ululation would spurt like vomit from him. He hurried from the office (“Gene,” LeRoy Duquesne was calling, “Gene!”), moving down the dusty stairs to his desk, hunching in a beam of sunshine, his arms wrapped around his chest as if he were naked in snow.

LeRoy signed months ago, he thought. And the thought was a heavy stone idol falling, crashing on the supportive blocks of his political belief, which was constructed of the fragile human element. LeRoy Duquesne signed before Thanksgiving, he thought. That ties it. He opened his top drawer, mechanically removing three yellow pencil stubs, rubber bands, paper clips, a very clear snapshot of Caroline making a cross-eyed face. LeRoy signed, Gene thought, and his throat clogged with tears, routine tribute to a fallen god.

“Cleaning?” asked Caroline.

He looked up at her.

“Hey,” she said, and despite three other TAs bent over their desks in the big office, she rested a cheek to his forehead, cuddling him to her breasts. “Wha' hoppen?”

“The boom was just lowered. Sign or else.”

“Who says?”

“LeRoy. He signed last Thanksgiving.”

“And all this time he's been talking big liberal!” she cried. “And to
you.
”

“I think I understand. He needed someone to carry the flag for him.”

“Come the revolution, we shoot rats like him.”

“He's got a wife and career to support.”

Caroline held Gene's cheeks in her palms, staring at him. “Maybe he's right,” she said. “Why not? It's no lie. You're not in the party. And this
is
what your life's all about. Genebo, the price isn't all that high.”

“Caroline, not you.”

Blue eyes shrewd, Van Vliet eyes. Caroline let her little finger play an eraser across the cluttered desk. “Listen, what's the rush for us to get married? That's old-fashioned jazz. Your parents'll let you stay in the house. Why don't you just write?”

“Write?” Gene's lips formed the word slowly, like a child sounding out the difficult syllable. “Write? I went in there thinking we were about to rip apart ‘Troopship.' I was plenty anxious. But once LeRoy started in on the Oath business, I never gave it another thought. Until you mentioned it, I'd completely forgotten I ever wrote anything.”

“Mitigating circumstances.”

“Never. Writing is something you have to care about. Really care. Give total dedication. You can sell out your mother, your father, your wife, your ideals, but you must be serious about one thing. Writing.”

“Gene, you're
good.
”

“And you're loyal.”

“Weren't you published all over?”

“Everywhere. School papers.”

“You never tried the others.”

“Forget it, please,” he said wearily.

On his desk lay books, papers, his
Thesaurus
, his Modern Library
Portrait of a Lady
, clippings of his UN columns for
The Bruin
(these had turned praline brown), slick copies of
Claw, The New Yorker
with Hersey's
Hiroshima
, his lecture notes, his looseleaf of ideas for novels, the detritus of years with that intricate blending of smells, must, metal, ripe banana, smells that were familiar and suddenly dear to a teaching assistant who has come to the end of the line.

“Which'll we toss out?” Caroline asked.

“Everything.”

Together they filled two large, institutional wastebaskets. “Not that,” Gene said, pocketing the snapshot of her.

She straightened, saying, “I swear it. I'll leave the minute you bark like Uncle Hend or give the glad hand like Uncle Richard.”

“Caroline, it's what you really want.”

“I know it,” she said. Fishing a Kleenex from her purse, she blew a sob through her nose. “I'm a rotten winner.”

A chill wind raked the portico. It was 1:00
P
.
M
., Tuesday, the twenty-third of February, 1950. The sun was shining. The wind blew leaves and tugged at coeds' long skirts. On Royce steps a cluster of SAE pledges burst into ribald laughter. The chimes started “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning.” A moment to remember. For Gene knew that although he had stood up for his principles, on a subtler level, at 1:00
P
.
M
., the twenty-third of February, he had sold out. He was walking away from everything (or almost everything) that he wanted from life. His face was grave. Yet his down-slanted eyes were bright with anticipation. Crossing the quad, he smiled at Caroline.

She did not smile back.

Chapter Five

1

Beverly Schorer curled around herself.

Trapped between sleeping and waking, she imagined she could hear Philip breathing. Sometimes in these dreamlike moments, the three phases of her life merged: she was at the same time a girl, a young wife, and a woman waiting out a divorce to marry her lover. She heard water running in Alix's, her daughter's, bathroom. Beverly pushed herself from bed, glimpsing herself in the mirror. She looked wan and crumpled. Last night was a Business Evening, and (inevitably, inescapably) they had argued, she and Dan. She squeezed toothpaste and told herself not to think about the argument. Instead, she found herself thinking (inevitably, inescapably) about Philip—well, not exactly about Philip, but her guilt toward him.

She had met Philip Schorer about a year after the rainy night she'd broken up with Dan Grossblatt. A bad year, but she had dated various boys in the spasmodic way of the forties. Philip was a blind date. As Beverly entered the living room he rose. Tall, tanned, dark-haired, with perfect features. She had remained in the doorway a few seconds. How could a man be so beautiful? She felt as if she had moved into another dimension. Her skin flushed. Philip was half-Jewish, enough, certainly, to satisfy the Lindes. His father, the Jewish half, owned a small but growing furniture plant. Philip worked with him.

Philip edged his words in a faintly ironic tone that made him sound superior. After they were married, she realized his irony was an act of separation from himself. He wasn't quite sure whether he were scorned for being a mix. This made her feel closer to him. Philip, unfortunately, did not care to be close. They had a daughter, Alix, and two years later, Jamie, their boy. They bought a charming Cape Cod house, a boat—Philip loved sailing, and Beverly learned to love it, too. Yet she was no nearer her husband.

They never argued. Philip, annoyed, would intensify his mocking tone until it was frozen.

To others—and maybe to Philip—they were an exemplary couple. They had been married twelve years that night of the Mortons' big, loud party. The Dan Grossblatts were guests, too. Dan had asked her to dance, and during “Mack the Knife” had moved in, saying, “Who can catch up with all this racket? Let's have lunch.” She was about to refuse when he, smiling, traced under her lip as he had years before, and she knew she absolutely must refuse. Must.

Dan took her to the thin-walled bachelor apartment he kept—he made no effort to hide the fact—for “lunches.” It was rotten. She never before had been unfaithful. Philip was handsome, considerate. What was she doing, her naked thighs clutched around a man who habitually fooled around? It wasn't for many weeks that she was able to accept the simple answer. She wouldn't have been in that position if she hadn't still loved Dan. Love—impossible. Love was veneered with more betrayals than adultery. Love was the enemy. Yet instead of keeping at her easel, she returned to the apartment. Guilty, always guilty. That hot summer and chill winter, Dan would draw acid-green drapes, for a couple of hours closing off her guilts. Beverly had experienced few of the possibilities of physical love. By nature she was a voluptuary, but the times she had elaborated on Philip's joinings, he had lost desire. She bought flowered sheets for the convertible bed, and with Dan on lavender peonies intuited a call girl's skill. Not that it was all sex. They could be as open with one another as they'd ever been. Talking, talking. Dan told her that when, after their breakup, he had left his father's business, his father had ranted in his harsh accent, hitting at Dan with a chair, an old man's terrible weakness.
You'll fail without me
, the old man had screamed. “I managed to patch things up,” Dan said. “But after that, you think I could take one penny? When he died—God, I was a mess—I told Justin, my brother-in-law, he should run S&G Shoes. Justin's a
schlemiel
, but what the hell. How could I touch it?” In underwater-green shadows they talked of everything. Except that most guilt-provoking word. Love.

Then, one smoggy afternoon, Beverly could no longer hold back. “I love you,” she murmured miserably. “Me, too. I need you with me all the time,” Dan said. His tone angry. The women he once had brought here never had impinged on his sense of family responsibility. DeeDee, whatever else she might or might not be, was his wife, and their two little boys were adopted, which to his mind increased his obligation. He loved them. And Beverly loved her children fiercely. Her bond with Philip, however tenuous the strands appeared, was strong.