“So you believe there could be further earthquakes,” an unseen male interviewer said.
“You can’t rule it out. Not after what happened in Peabody on Friday.”
“Dr. Axelrod at MIT told me he thinks the odds of a damaging earthquake in central Boston in the next twelve months are still less than one in a thousand.”
“They could be one in a million, there still shouldn’t be people living in that building.”
“I take it you’re not in agreement with Reverend Stites on the issue of abortion.”
As dr. renee seitchek struggled to reply to this irrelevant question, the camera zoomed in on her until the tiny freckles around her eyelids could be seen. In her right ear she wore three small silver hoops in separate holes. Out-of-focus leaves and sunshine played in the window behind her.
“I don’t think a woman who terminates a pregnancy needs Philip Stites to tell her the significance of what she’s done.”
“Think again,” Libby murmured. “Think again.”
dr. renee seitchek blinked in the bright lights, her face still filling the screen, while the interviewer asked a final question: “If it’s not OK for the state to interfere in a woman’s decision about abortion, why is it OK to interfere with the church members’ decision to live in the Central Avenue apartment block?”
“Because Philip Stites made that decision for them.”
dr. renee seitchek’s reply had apparently continued from here, but the sound was cut off as the reporter brought viewers back to Central Avenue in Chelsea, where a female member of Stites’s Church of Action in Christ was leaving a bleak yellow-brick apartment complex that had sheets of weather-bleached plywood on its windows.
“The reason I live in this yere building,” the woman said. “Is that I trust in God more than I trust in scientists and engineers. This yere’s a building with NO PROTECTION. The unborn have NO PROTECTION. But if God will protect me here, I’ve got the power to protect the unborn.”
“One scientist I spoke to,” the reporter said, “claimed it was Reverend Stites’s persuasion that made you sign the waiver, rather than your own free will.”
The woman held up a placard reading THANKS MOM I LIFE. “The will that moves me,” she told the camera, “is the same will as moves the Reverend Stites, and that is the will of God.”
“How does it feel to go to bed at night knowing that even a small earthquake could send all these bricks down on top of you?”
“There’s no man in this world that wakes up in the morning but by the grace of our Lord.”
The television’s response to this avowal was a perfume ad. Libby Quinn shifted on the sofa, looking around the room selfconsciously, as if she thought Louis and Alec expected her to justify herself. She stood up suddenly. “I’m a mother, Louis. You know I have two girls in high school. And what that little Harvard girl doesn’t understand is that to a lot of these teenagers, an abortion’s like a trip to the dentist. I know for a fact that there’s no one out there telling kids that what they’re flushing into Boston Harbor is tiny babies.”
“Ah, yeah,” Louis said. “Although these pro-lifers aren’t just trying to educate some teenagers.”
“These pro-lifers,” Libby said pointedly, “think it’s important to take responsibility for your sexual behavior.”
“What do you sink, Louis?” Alec said. Libby might have been a controversial film they’d been watching. “You agree with her? Take your time! Your future at this station may be at stake.”
“Let me ask you this, Louis,” Libby said. “Why do you think the people who hate economic greed always want to be excusing sexual greed? Why do you think that is?”
Alec turned expectantly to Louis, sucking his lozenge of amusement, his eyebrows raised.
“Economic greed hurts other people,” Louis said.
Alec’s eyes followed the ball back into Libby’s court.
“Right,” she said with an unhappy smile. “Sexual greed doesn’t hurt anybody. Unless you happen to consider a fetus a victim.”
It was an exit line; she left the room.
“And what does Vanna have to say to that?” Alec asked, changing channels. “No, no, Vanna stands higher than such concerns.”
Louis was trembling. He didn’t understand what he’d done to make Libby turn against him.
Alec leaned back comfortably on the sofa to soak up Wheel-of-Fortune rays. “Libby,” he said, “is an unhappy person. You forgive her, eh? She raised two girls without a husband. The man was no good. He came back and married her when the older girl was two, then left again. Is a hard life for her, Louis. She made a mistake twice. One time, OK, but twice, is hard to live with.”
“She’s selling you out,” Louis said.
Alec shrugged. “I owe her back pay, she’s ambitious. She should have gone to college, but she had her babies. Is hard for her to see girls have abortions now. You forgive her.”
Louis shook his head. He went outside into the twilit parking lot. “Hey, Libby,” he said. She was getting in her car. “Libby!” he said again, but she had closed the door. He watched her drive away.
It may be that to understand is to forgive; but Louis was tired of understanding. Almost everyone he knew seemed to have good reasons for not being kind and polite to him, and he could see these reasons, and yet it didn’t seem fair that it was always him who had to understand and forgive and never them. It seemed like the world was set up so that the unhappy people who did rotten things—the abused child who became a child abuser, the injured Libby who injured Louis and Alec—could always be forgiven because they couldn’t help what they did, while the unhappy people who still refused to do rotten things got more and more hurt by the other people’s rottenness, until they’d been hurt so many times that they too stopped caring what they did to other people, and there was no way out.
“Why aren’t you speaking to me?” he’d asked MaryAnn Bowles, a week after the previous Easter. She was making pickled beets in a haze of vinegar.
“I’m surprised you have to ask that,” she said.
“Oh, I’ve got a theory. But I wanted to check.”
She stuck a fork into a purple chunk of beet. “Well, Louis,” she said. “I’m not blaming you. But I guess you must know that I am very, very hurt by what’s happened. I am very, very, very hurt.” The sound of her own words made her throat tighten and her face crumple up. “All I can say is this has nothing to do with you. She was only trying to hurt me. And I guess you can see”—her words continued to affect her violently—“that she succeeded very well indeed.”
Louis despised the woman. He loathed her powdered face, her heavy breasts, her naked misery. And the more he loathed her, the more he had the feeling—a caffeinated, weightless feeling—that Lauren really had seduced him on the floor of his bedroom. He had no desire to set the record straight. He became a bad son, subsisting on peanut-butter sandwiches and party food, crashing in people’s off-campus apartments and returning to Dryden Street only when he needed to sleep twelve hours. The Bowleses raised no objections; they didn’t like him anymore.
After his final exams he moved into a two-room apartment in a poor black neighborhood off Holman Street and started work at KILT-FM, doing the board during drive hours and otherwise punching keys. On the day after Commencement he returned to Dryden Street one final time, to collect his books. It was a trip he’d delayed in the hope of running into Lauren, and he was rewarded by the sight of a white VW Beetle in the driveway, with a U of Texas parking sticker on the windshield.
He went into the silent, airconditioned, sun-filled house. The door to the laundry room was ajar, MaryAnn probably ironing underwear in there. Upstairs he almost passed Lauren’s bedroom by, it seemed so much the way he’d seen it last. But today there was an extra element, a woman in a white sundress sitting cross-legged on the bed and reading. She looked up from her book, squinting because the sun was in her eyes. He braced himself for a blast of mockery, but as soon as Lauren recognized
him she dropped her head again, biting her lip and scowling at the book.
“Yeah, surprise surprise,” he said.
The book on her lap was a Bible. She hunched over it determinedly and pretended to read it, evidently hoping he would leave. He remained in the doorway.
“I didn’t think you were still living here,” she murmured. “On my way out right now.”
“Oh. Uh-huh. Lucky you.”
Someone seemed to have pulled the plug on the electrified woman he’d met two months ago. Without makeup and without malice her face looked like an empty page. Her hair was pinned up with a barrette, in the style of a ten-year-old groomed for church. She said, “Is there something you want?”
He stepped inside the room and shut the door. “Can I talk to you?”
“You’re not mad at me?”
“No.”
Her head drooped several inches lower. “I thought you’d be mad at me. I guess you must be a nice person.” She extended her left arm, spreading her fingers as though admiring them. She’d tied a piece of thin white string around her wrist. “You see I gave Emmett his ring back. Emmett’s been thinking about you all the time. I think he wants to kill you.”
Louis looked at her steadily.
“Actually that’s a lie,” she conceded, her eyes still cast down. “But he didn’t seem to think too highly of you. He didn’t think too highly of me either. I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. You know what MaryAnn did? She told me she thought I needed counseling. I just told her she was jealous. She acted like she didn’t know what I meant.” Lauren’s lip curled evilly.
“What are you doing this summer?” Louis said.
“I don’t know yet. Staying at home. Trying to be nice.”
“Can I see you?”
She looked up at him with something like terror. “What do you want to see me for?”
“Why does anybody want to see anybody?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause I told Emmett I wasn’t going to see anybody. He’s working for his dad in Beaumont.”
“So you’re like engaged but not engaged. Fun arrangement.”
She shook her head. “It’s just I already made him so sick. He’s really a nice person, you know, not as smart as you.”
“Yeah, this is another thing. Where do you get the idea I’m so smart?”
“Well I only spent a whole vacation here at Christmas. I only heard how smart you are a couple hundred times. And you see how well I turned the other cheek.” She paused, appearing to consider her own history. “You know what, though? This semester, I got at least a B in every class. And I went swimming every day and I studied on Saturday night. I was on academic probation my whole sophomore year. It was like I’d go into the classroom and lie for an hour. Lie, lie, lie.” She looked up at Louis again and saw his skepticism; her eyes fell. “So anyway. I’m trying to read the Bible.”
“Congratulations?”
“I’m still more at the point where I like how I feel sitting here reading than where I’m actually reading. I go through the laws till I get to the sex laws. The punishment’s always stoning the person until they’re dead. That’s what you get for sodomy. Sodomy’s nice! But it’s an abomination unto the Lord.”
Louis sighed. “What’s with the new costume?”
“What do you mean?”
“The white dress. The, uh, Shirley Temple thing in your hair.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“What’s wrong with it, nothing’s wrong with it. It’s just, like, no offense, but are you on some kind of medication?”
She shook her head and smiled lamely. “No.”
“Lithium? Valium?”
His words sank in. Her eyes grew dark and she straightened her back. “What kind of question is that?”
“You’re just very different,” he said.
“I’m the way I want to be. So you can leave me alone, all right? Get out of my room!”
Louis, gratified by her response, was about to apologize when he was struck in the ear by the spine of a flying Bible. He leaned his head on the door and held his hurt ear. Lauren hopped off the bed and picked up the floppy Bible by one corner, as if it were a pelt, and sat down with it again. “Are you OK?”
“Yeah.”
“I haven’t been very nice to you, have I? I guess I must have a problem with you. I must not like you or something.”
He laughed sadly.
“It’s not personal. You’re obviously a nice person. But it’s better if you just keep away from me, don’t you think? So goodbye, OK?”
Louis felt exactly like a casual lover being discarded.
Later, though, after he’d driven home with his books and drunk a beer, he decided that the only explanation for how she’d acted was that she recognized his existence and had strong feelings about him. His logic was confirmed empirically the following week, when she called him on the telephone. Again there was a curious lack of connection between present and immediate past. She just started telling him what she was doing, which was mainly that she’d enrolled in a couple of summer-session courses at U of Houston. She wanted to graduate after one more semester in Austin and so she was taking a course about the Incas and the Mayas and also Introductory Chemistry, the latter because she’d gotten an F in high-school chemistry and she wanted to try to do something really hard now, as penance. She didn’t ask Louis about his own life, but at one point she did stop talking long enough for him to suggest they get together sometime. There was a silence. “Sure,” she said. “I don’t care. Just not at my house.”
He was waiting outside the physical sciences building at the U of H after her first chemistry lecture. A thousand grackles were conversing in the quadrangle, and there was an alien, a freak, among the students leaving the building. It was Lauren. She’d cut her hair off and shaved her head.
She was glaring at every student who looked at her. Her head was small and very white, almost as white as her dress, and the half-moons of bruise-colored pigment beneath her eyes seemed darker. She asked Louis, in a nasty voice, how she looked.
“Like a pretty girl who shaved her head.”
She turned away, disgusted. “You think I care what you think?”
As they walked to the parking lot he almost hoped some man passing by would be rude to her so he could knock him down. When they got inside her Beetle she didn’t start it right away. She twisted her head around as if she needed to feel its bareness. Her knuckles, on the steering wheel, were white. “Do you still want to sleep with me?”
“When you put it like that?”
“It’s what you wanted, right? I’ll do it if you want me to. But it has to be now.”
“I only want to if you want to.”
“Well I’m never going to want to, ever. So this is your chance.”
“Well so I guess that means no.”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off the windshield. “Don’t forget, OK? You had your chance.”
On the stoops in the neighborhood north of U of H, not much more than a mile from downtown, middle-aged men drank beer from quart bottles and listened to low-volume hip-hop on twenty-year-old transistors. The hoods of rusted yellow, orange, green wingtips were raised in the driveways of shotgun shacks that squatted in the sandy mud. The early evening air was still and smelled like the black hamlets at the end of gravel roads in backwoods Mississippi.
At a Vietnamese restaurant up the street from the King of Glory holiness church, Louis ordered pork with lemon grass. It came with sticky, translucent rice pancakes which when wrapped around the meat and lettuce and mint and bean sprouts bore an uncanny resemblance to condoms. Lauren looked at them with grim amusement. She’d ordered coffee that she wasn’t drinking. She tore the tops off sugar packets and made them wink at her. Finally, reluctantly, miserably, she said, “What’s an electron?”
“An electron?” It was as if she’d mentioned the name of Louis’s best friend. “A su
batomic particle. It’s the smallest unit of negative electric charge.”
“Oh thanks.” She was disgusted again. “That really helps me. I have a dictionary.”
“You can also think of it as kind of an imaginary construct—”
“I’m sorry I asked. I am very sorry” She looked around wildly, as if she wanted to walk out on him. “What is it about this stuff? It’s like the smart people aren’t really learning about science, they’re just learning how to sound like assholes.”
“What don’t you understand?” said Louis quietly.
“I don’t understand what the thing is. I don’t understand what it looks like. What’s it for?” Coffee sloshed from her cup as she shoved it away. “I can’t even explain this. I just thought you might be able to help me a little. It’s very hard for me and it’s not because I’m so stupid. I just can’t sit there and nod intelligently like everybody else when the professor goes on about electrons and protons. I want to understand it.”
“I can help you understand it.”
She sneered. “I bet you can.”
“We can get together and talk about it, if you want.”
She rifled her purse for a cigarette, shaking her head all the while. “It was just going to be me,” she said. “I was going to read and I was going to study something really hard for me. And now you want to come in and bullshit everything up.”
“Yeah, but . . . who called who? Who just asked what an electron is?”
“I was happy. I thought you cared about me. I’d had this idea and I wanted to tell somebody. But you’re just in it for yourself. You’re going to think I’m going to owe you something. You’re going to think you can put your arm around me, when I already said.”
“I just want to see you. That’s all I want.”
She’d inhaled a fifth of the cigarette, and now it seemed the exodus of smoke from her nostrils would never stop.