them

  “Are you a whore or not?” said Loretta.

  “I talked with his wife the other day. She came over.” Maureen began to cry, soundlessly. Her expression was composed, as if she were still in the presence of that woman. She kept darting little glances up at her mother as she spoke. “She told me to leave him alone, that he couldn’t get a divorce and marry me and so I should leave him alone, and she started crying and saying things to me about the children, and I could see…I could see that he did maybe love her at one time but now he loved me more, he couldn’t help it and I couldn’t. So she started screaming at me, a nice woman like that, ready to call me names she’d been thinking up all along. So I explained to her that I was going to marry him and that she could go to hell, what if she is educated or not, what if she has three kids that are his and had two miscarriages, I’d have kids for him too and I wasn’t going to be talked out of it! I heard myself saying all these things, and I was surprised, but it was all true—she said things to me that must have been a surprise to her—and it ended with me saying that I would never give him up, never, that I loved him and that was that, I was in love with him, I was going to marry him, and she could do anything she wanted but she couldn’t change that.”

  Loretta stared. “Jesus, you said all that? You? To his wife?”

  “Right to her face.”

  “My sweet little Maureen?” Loretta said, ironic and surprised.

  “I found the words for it. They came from somewhere.”

  They paused.

  Loretta sat down again, slowly. She expelled her breath and sat at attention, her gaze bright and ironic on Maureen.

  “Well, it sounds like you did what you had to do, honey,” Bridget said.

  “So…you’re getting married to another woman’s husband?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you knew he was married all along? Did you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right from the beginning?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you didn’t let it stop you, huh?”

  “No.”

  “When’s the wedding?”

  “When the divorce is final.”

  “How do you like that,” Loretta said waggishly to Bridget, “when the divorce is final! Talking like that, eh? I should drag you down to see Father Burney, see what his opinion is. When the divorce is final!”

  “These modern things are very complicated,” said Bridget.

  “No, she’s a whore, it’s nothing modern but she’s just a whore.She set out to be one and she succeeded,” Loretta said. She clapped her hands and then rubbed them energetically. “So. So you’re all set. When the divorce is final…and how many kids do they have, did you say three?”

  “Yes, three.”

  “What about them?”

  “How do I know what about them?”

  “They stay with the mother, eh? He pays child support?”

  “Yes.”

  “Aren’t you going to mind that? Child support and alimony?”

  “No.”

  “So you got it all sewed up. How’d you do it?”

  Maureen wiped her tears away. She said, “There’s nothing more for us to talk about tonight. I just wanted to tell you this.”

  “But you don’t think you’re a whore?”

  “Not now.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, not now? You a smart-aleck too?”

  Maureen looked shyly at her mother. She was a little afraid of what she might see, but Loretta’s face was ruddy, indignant, and at the same time reassuring—there was a bond between them, after all. Maureen stood. “Well, thank you,” she said.

  “Thank you for what? You being a smart-aleck again?”

  “I never was a smart-aleck. That was someone else, Betty or Jules,” Maureen said.

  “Jesus, don’t mention them!”

  “But it was never me. Not me, not Maureen. I was someone different.”

  Loretta made a snorting noise. Bridget, embarrassed, walked with Maureen to the stairs. “You’re a real nice girl, real pretty,” she said, not understanding Loretta’s anger and embarrassed by it. “Don’t you worry about your mother. She’ll come around. You sort of surprised her, that’s all. She don’t want you to make any mistakes, like she did herself. You understand? But she loves you a lot, you understand? Right?”

  “I know it,” said Maureen. “I love her too.”

  5

  One afternoon in June of 1967 a young man caught sight of himself in the window of an empty store—he thought for a moment that he was seeing a stranger, possibly an enemy, then he recognized himself. He passed on slowly. He always walked slowly. Where he had come from was a room in a brick building a block away, but the room and the building had passed out of his mind already; where he was heading was a movie house out on Woodward, which changed its bill every Wednesday, yet the movie house had not yet entered his mind. Everything was in a pleasant, fluid suspension. On the corner was a Revco Discount Drugstore, a small dark grocery store…some Negro kids crossed the street in front of him, in a noisy flock…two white girls with long hair sidled toward him…they wore slacks. He let his vision go vague and the girls slipped out of focus as if teasing him, their long hair bright in the sunshine and their hands, gesturing, precise in some melodious language, about to tell him some secret, meant to attract him. But he could not bring them back into focus. He passed by them, indifferent. At the very moment at which his eyes should have moved up onto their faces, taking them up and considering them, showing some agile knowledge, he had forgotten them and passed on.

  The pavement was hot. Only mid-June and already the air had a used-up, flat taste to it. So he had survived for another summer, he would live through another summer! Last fall he had nearly died, carted into a hospital’s emergency ward, blood leaking out of him, but he hadn’t died, he had survived for another summer. He thought of the summer as interminable, though it had only begun. Had it only begun? He could not truly remember any other summer and yet this one seemed endless. The energy of a boy on a motorcycle, speeding past, made Jules flinch—noise, energy, the flash of light on chrome! He had never been that young.

  For many months he had inhabited a body…sewed up, plugged up, maybe stuffed with bloody cotton pads. They had gotten him ready for use again. But gratitude? Did he have to feel gratitude? His mind went dim. He’d outlived himself, in a body. He had become a weight, Jules, an object, throwing a shadow uncertainly before itself but taking up no room…not much room, anyway. Before him was an old man or maybe an old woman…trousers, gray-haired, shaggy, shabby, sleepwalking and throwing a shadow onto the pavement. He fixed his gaze upon this shape. Its legs moved as if fifty or sixty years of practice had made it all easy, a shape with a certain weight and a certain displacement of water, should it ever tumble into water. Walking was a habit…living a habit, mechanical. Shapes, weights! Jules felt them in the very balls of his eyes, irritants. A pressure upon the eyes like the pressure of that big cold machine, wheeled right up to the eyes to take a reading.

  What had those doctors read, looking into Jules’s brain through his bloody eyes?

  Every day he passed the Discount Drugstore. He remembered that now. The store had a fake bright front, very clean and shiny. Inside was a small crowd, Negroes and whites. And every day he headed either to the left, which took him by the smelly Greek grocery store and the three stores in a burned-out block, one of them evidently a laundry, what had been a laundry; or he strolled over toward the right, which took him past big apartment buildings where students from Wayne State University lived, crowded and noisy, in the midst of a clutter of garbage cans and cardboard boxes that the city workers didn’t bother to collect. And he passed Crater’s Pub, where students hung out, on the fringes of student life and nearly in his own kind of life, nearly on the fringe of living itself. A few other burned-out buildings, mysteries. Posters: VOTE FOR…VOTE FOR…V
OTE…Vote and change your life, Jules thought. One of the men running for office had been defaced, unfaced. His eyes inked out. Teeth inked out. The sky would look to him as if he were staring out through a piece of rotten fruit. Some Negro boys were fooling around…lime and grape colors…one of them was shuffling, snapping his fingers, singing in a breathy, anxious voice…

  “Tell me where you’re going

     Ain’t I got a right to know…”

  A mild thought for Jules: nobody asked where he was going, nobody had a right to know or any interest.

  He himself was a man inside a piece of rotten fruit—it kept getting in his mouth. The sky had a melony, overdone, orange-brown cast, a rotten cast to it, unmistakably. The Negro boy’s voice sounded soft, rotten, peeling, decaying, breathy and effeminate. Better not to listen. Jules walked along. He was like the invisible child he had tried to imagine himself years ago. But now he had become truly invisible. In his slightly soiled, worn clothes he had nothing for anyone to envy; his unhurried but unlazy walk, with a slight drag to the heel, spoke of a certain distraction; maybe he was on drugs and might be dangerous—that kept people away, drew only the eyes of reckless girls to him. His face was neither moronic nor shrewd, holding nothing, promising nothing, his eyes fixed and dark and without light. Impressions flowed through him. Nothing caught hold. He was safe from his own past, kicked free of his own past like his uncle walking out of the hospital, disappearing. Jules had disappeared too.

  To have an emptiness in the midst of this city—to keep it to himself, but without selfishness—that had become Jules’s desire. It would be nice to walk out like this every day for the rest of his life, unhurried but not truly lazy, with a certain destination. His feet were drawn along. Promise of some dark movie house and a few hours of movies. Buying food afterward at the Food Fair, or not buying food. Eating or not eating. If he went into the store he would stroll along as if passing through a park, slowly along the aisles, seeing neat wrapped packages of food and mountains of cans, cans in their colorful jackets: it pleased him to know that he wanted nothing. At the front of the store, lounging against the gritty counter, there’d be a Negro policeman, sharing with Jules a certain mordant, agreeable calm. The policeman’s pistol would be holstered and the holster snapped shut. The policeman, a young man with a moustache, would glance at Jules as he glanced at all men who wander about alone, but some confidence in Jules’s step would reassure him. Down here white men were more suspect than Negroes. What were they doing down here? Down here? Had they chosen to live down here?

  Jules crossed the street. A broken-down building, housing the Students’ Revolt Against the War in Vietnam. Angry white lettering. Out front, a few kids loitering. Were they part of the Students’ Revolt or just hanging around? Their eyes were glassy and curious, moving hard onto Jules as if onto a mystery, then dismissing him. In their front room a few days ago one of their people had been killed, an organizer shot to death. An angry cab driver had run in and shot him in the chest. Dead. The cab driver told newspaper reporters that he had a son in Vietnam and was proud.

  One of the girls called out something, maybe to Jules. Part of a song. These girls were always singing, drawling musically. Jules did not look around. Yes, he did look around. The girl was barefoot and he looked only at her foot—a red plastic ring on her little toe. She said something but he did not respond. He did not really hear her. Her voice floated musically upon the air but without weight; it did not seem to be a human voice. Only sound.

  A sign nailed overhead: Hey Friend Now Smile Upon Your Brother Let Me See You Love One Another Right Now!

  Police in a squad car nearby. Waiting. Jules tried not to look at them. He felt a certain pressure on his eyes from them, from their shapes…their weights. The letters in Police danced whitely in his eyes. Someone was looking at him. Jules could not resist; he turned and looked back—a bland cold look exchanged with a policeman, a wondering look. There was something massive and ponderous about the man’s face, a thoughtfulness that made Jules uneasy. Balding, large. Or, rather, in the place where Jules might once have been uneasy, a dull bewilderment stirred; it was not quite an emotion. He smiled. The policeman did not respond. Another policeman, as if sensing danger, turned to watch Jules walk by. His back to them, he felt more vulnerable.

  Halfway across the street he felt someone grip his arm. Not one of the policemen, though, someone else. A young man. “Hey, Jules, I thought that was you! Didn’t you hear me calling you?” This face was grinning and excited. Too hearty. Jules was reluctant to stop but couldn’t pull away. He said something. The two of them crossed the street together. The young man talked. Jules felt a dull anxiety. He didn’t want people to call out Jules! Had he given out his name so freely? He felt a weight beside him, the weight of this young man whose name was Mort. Busy and charming, Mort, his hands zigzagging with talk.

  “You walk in a daze or something, but you’re not high!” He seized Jules playfully by the back of the neck. “You just don’t answer to your name!”

  Jules pushed him away. “I’m in a hurry.”

  “But…but I want to talk to you,” Mort said, hurt. “We want to talk to you, some friends of mine, friends of Marcia’s. I saw you on the street yesterday, heading up Cass, but then you disappeared. Did you go into a store or something?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Where are you in a hurry to?”

  Jules said nothing.

  “My friend,” Mort said, leaning toward him frankly, “the fact is that you have nowhere to go, like me, and that’s exactly what we all want to change—our not having anywhere to go. Oh, I don’t mean love or anything because we’re all in love, more or less. I think even you have a woman and are ‘in love.’ I mean instead something more permanent, something transcendent—”

  “Don’t touch me,” said Jules.

  “I’m sorry. I got carried away,” Mort said. He was olive-skinned and sickly beneath his energy; he tried to smile at Jules. As they walked his swinging arm came close to Jules’s arm. An itching. An irritant. The touch of other people, the sudden glimpse of teeth in smiles, slightly decaying, rotten…

  Mort talked. He talked about the black population. The Afro Commune. Heckling, walking out of a rally on campus by the Students for Peace. The UUAP. What was the UUAP? Mort said, his voice level and serious, “It’s almost sure to be this weekend. I heard it from Coleman himself, he’s the president of the, you know, the UUAP, and when it comes we’ve got things ready, we’ve got certain plans, only I’m terrified things will get out of control and he doesn’t seem to realize the extent of the…the possible damage. We can’t seem to get organized. People come and go. After all, how much practice have any of us had? It scares them. What do we know about fighting in the streets?”

  Jules looked at him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What do you mean, fighting in the streets?”

  “When the riot comes we’re going to stop the city. But I worry all the time. I can’t sleep at night—I take sleeping pills and they have no effect at all—I keep thinking, what if this gets out of our hands?”

  “What riot?” said Jules.

  “The riot is set for this weekend, we’re almost certain. Saturday night. Unless it rains or something.”

  “A riot?”

  “A riot—you know.”

  Jules laughed. “There isn’t going to be any riot,” he said. They were standing in front of an antique store, a junk store, and the quiet dusty furniture behind the dusty window showed how correct his words were. How could anything happen on this earth? How could anything begin to move? Everything was stationary, weighed down. Mort was an object of a certain weight. It had a face—yes, a face—of ordinary proportions, dull olivish skin, dissatisfied and excited, with a short-trimmed black beard that gave it an outline, a fixity. The street seemed to Jules very flat and open and yet nothing could move upon it without great effo
rt.

  “Jules, come with me and we can talk! I want so much to talk to you—and some friends of mine want to talk to you—where do you keep yourself? Marcia says you come around but she never knows when to expect you. Is she at work now?”

  “Yes, at work.”

  “She’s a wonderful woman! You’re very lucky, but…I don’t want to offend you—I’m always offending people with my big mouth. Come with me, Jules?”

  Jules hesitated. Then he said, “Could I borrow twenty dollars?”

  “Twenty? Why do you need so much?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “But didn’t I lend you fifty dollars the other week? Was that you or was that someone else?” He looked genuinely baffled, as if he could not remember.

  “I don’t remember,” Jules said.

  “Well, if you really need it. I cashed my check this morning, so I suppose…” Embarrassed, he took out his billfold and counted out twenty dollars for Jules.

  Jules took it and wadded it and put it in his pocket. His own billfold had been missing for some time, probably stolen.

  They walked along, Mort leading the way. “I admire you and I admire Marcia—not that I know either of you, certainly I don’t know you—but I want us to come together, to have a dialogue, to help each other. All of us would like to help you. And I feel you would like to help us, that you know things we need to know. We’ve got to talk! Organize! Time is running out for the city, and if we don’t take control other people will. The Afros are splintering off—they won’t communicate except for their president, who’s a very intelligent young man but emotional, and the rest of them are emotional also—we’ve got to get things settled, organized, assigned…”

  Jules thought of Marcia. He visited her occasionally; it surprised him to hear their names mentioned together. Why had Mort mentioned their names together? Thinking of Marcia, he began to think of Faye…cold and silvery, a blond whose face he had seen back in April on the society page of the newspaper…Faye metamorphosed into someone’s wife, of Bloomfield Hills…arriving at Meadowbrook Theater with her husband and another couple…she had ended up a face in a newspaper yet no less real than Marcia. There was something of Faye in Marcia, whom he wouldn’t have time to know, some waspish, self-effacing, self-confident blondness, inexplicable.