The Cost of Lunch, Etc. (11 page)

They were on the outskirts of Derby Line now. A few lights in houses. Two cars passed them, but mostly it was deserted. She turned onto a side street, turned out her lights
and rolled to a stop. “Go ahead. Just keep walking. There’s a line and when you cross it, you’re in Canada. There’s a bus that comes through at ten and stops at the coffee shop. We’ve given you enough Canadian money. Try not to talk much so you don’t give yourself away as American, but ask the driver to let you off for the bus to Montreal. This bus stops everyplace. Takes a long time. Try to sleep. You take it to where you can change for Montreal. Then take a bus to Toronto.” She reached for her purse. “Here’s the phone number of a contact in Montreal. You can stay with her for the night and she’ll take you to the bus in the morning. And here’s the address of help in Toronto, a group set up for guys like you to get you settled.”

She waited till he nodded. He seemed reluctant to get out of the car. She patted his shoulder. “Best to get going before it turns light or starts to really snow. No one’s around yet. Just walk quickly and turn left at the fourth street. The coffee house opens at six. That’s half an hour. You can get something to eat there.”

He opened the car door, turned and stared at her. “Guess I won’t see you again.”

“I hope not. That’d mean trouble for both of us.”

He laughed. “I seen enough trouble to last me a lifetime, if I live that long.” Still he stood looking at her. “Guess I should thank you.”

“Just get moving and stay safe. I appreciate what you’re doing.”

“Nobody else I know would.” Finally he turned and strode off, the knapsack they had given him slung on his back. She sat in the dark car watching him until he had crossed the border and kept walking until she could no longer see him. She felt sad, empty and relieved at once. Into the unknown he walked. Well, she better get out of here before someone wondered what she was doing. She turned the ignition and the car coughed and died. Her heart
skipped and she thought of his safe brother. Neil? She waited a moment so she wouldn’t flood the old engine and tried again and this time it started. She turned around carefully, thankful for the little car’s tight turning radius. Then she headed out of the village. She fished a candy bar out of her purse, saved for this occasion and bit off pieces while she drove carefully toward the entrance to the interstate. The cop who had lurked near the ramp was gone. By the time she entered the interstate, it was snowing harder and soon the plows were out. It would be a slow trip. When she had gone a safe distance, she would stop for breakfast. She imagined him waiting for the bus and hoped he would not be obvious to anyone. She had used that village several times, scouting it beforehand. She could no longer help him, whatever happened. All she could do for those guys who became briefly her charges was to guide them to the border, see them across and then abandon them to whatever destiny they could create or blunder into on the other side. He was not the first and would not be the last. She owed her help, the risk she took, to the ones who decided not to fight. It cost her a day of prep and an all night and half a day drive; it cost those she ferried the rest of their lives. If you wanted to stop the war, this was one of the things you just did again and again.

I had a friend, Simon. He was big, almost bearlike, on the clumsy side with dark hair that flopped over his forehead. He was good looking but thought himself ugly. Something had damaged him already in his mid-twenties.

We worked together against the Vietnam War, against the draft, against imperial ambitions, against racism. We made a good team. We had both tried to work with other people but found ourselves undervalued, run over, our ideas never really considered—me because of being a woman and Simon because he was not an alpha male. We listened to each other. We wrote with me at the typewriter and him pacing behind me. It was a relationship of equals, comfortable for both. We went to demonstrations together and I felt a little protected with his powerful body beside me. I am still proud of what we did together. But in those days, I had multiple emotional and sexual relationships. Sex came easily to me and I enjoyed it. My affections were readily engaged without being possessive.

He grew obsessive. He demanded more and more attention. He resented my other relationships and insulted my friends. Once he threw one of those huge old office typewriters across the office where our group worked, narrowly missing one of my lovers. Another time when I was dancing
at a party, he punched my partner, knocking him down. I thought his jealousy might quiet down if we were lovers and suggested it to him one afternoon when we had finished the pamphlet we were writing for a demonstration against the CIA. But he could not make love to me. He was impotent with me and that made him angry. His anger was terrifying. I withdrew a bit and so did he. We could no longer work together. That made me sad, but I moved on to work with others on different projects in different ways. I was a good organizer in those days.

Simon tried to work with several other activists, but he could not mesh his creativity, his drive, his ideas with theirs. Finally he withdrew from politics. He became a carpenter. He said that working with his hands was more honest than working with words. He made furniture. It was ugly. His bookcases leaned to one side. His chairs wobbled. His tables were untrustworthy. We got back in touch socially but that was all. He seemed to have fully recovered from his obsession with me, although he did present me with a lopsided bookcase.

Six months later he found G-d, an Orthodox Jewish god, male, frowning like a storm cloud. He grew a beard and let his sideburns grow, hoping for
peyeses.
He prayed loudly morning, afternoon and night and joined a
shul
with a charismatic rabbi. He would not eat in restaurants unless they were kosher. I served him swordfish but it was not kosher enough and he shoved his plate away. He tried to get me to dress more modestly—without success. He said his blessings every five minutes. I grew up with an Orthodox
bobbelah
who gave me my religious education, but my Hannah was a pagan compared to him.

I left New York for several months. When I returned, the beard was gone and he had a new girlfriend who was not Jewish. She was the blond perky suburban daughter of a successful real estate entrepreneur. They got engaged
quickly and her father brought him into his business. For several months, all he could talk about was flipping houses and developing malls. I found him a total bore and avoided him, didn’t return his calls. His interest in real estate and his engagement ended abruptly. A period of heavy drinking and drug use followed. He was often incoherent. He wept on my sofa and fell asleep face down.

He went back to school, having talked his parents into funding a graduate degree in psychology so he could become a therapist. He freely analyzed my problems over an Indian restaurant meal. He said he was coming to understand that I had been a replacement for his unhealthy love for his mother. Now all was clear to him. Mental health was the most important thing in the world. If we could all face our inner conflicts, there would be no war, no racism, no misery. My problem was that I felt unloved and replaced true commitment with promiscuity. He wondered if he shouldn’t take a medical degree instead and then study psychoanalysis. He had a wonderful new psychiatrist. He was, he said, no longer self-medicating. His doctor had him on a new antidepressant that was working wonders for him. I hoped so. His period of heavy drugging had scared me. In all Simon’s transformations, he was inherently lovable—something sweet and at the same time desperate in all his attempts.

I can sound flippant and above it all with his changes, but in truth I still cared about him and I hoped he would settle into something that made him happier or at least more engaged for the long run. I still felt guilty about having let him try a sexual relationship as a means of quieting his jealousy so he’d stop making scenes. I had offered myself to him as a sort of sop to make him behave in public. I wondered if only I hadn’t done so, would we still be working together—a time he had felt fulfilled. I had not yet learned I could not be a sort of sexual mustard plaster to the sad and repressed.

I left New York in the early ’70s when many politicos and hippies were moving to the country, including me. I still had many friends and attachments in the city, so I went back and forth every couple of months. The next time I saw him, he had shaved his head and wore loose saffron robes. He told me he was meditating daily, up to two hours at a time. He was fasting once a week. His mind was clear at last. He was now a vegan, so as not to injure any living thing. He was moving, too—to Sedona to be with his new guru. “I’ve been too materialistic. I want to enrich my soul, to live purely. I’m seeking my spiritual center. I need to be in a community that supports my evolving consciousness.”

After that I lost touch with him for over a decade. I thought of him sometimes. I had a photo I had taken of him at a be-in in Central Park where he was lounging on the grass like a big overgrown puppy, smiling, relaxed, momentarily at peace. I could remember that day vividly, like a Medieval Fair come alive, the colors, the wild clothes, the music, the dancing, all spontaneous—and the smoke from maryjane. It was from the time we worked together, a time when he smiled often and was able to enjoy his life at least sometimes. A friend who’d been underground and gone to prison ran into him after she was free. He was still seeking fulfillment, as if seven years had not passed since they met. She shook her head in disbelief. He was making freeform artistic videos.

As I was about to go to bed one evening, already in my bathrobe with my hair braided, the phone rang. It was a friend I had stayed in touch with from my New York era. “Do you remember Simon?”

“Sure, though I haven’t seen him in ten years. What’s he into now?”

A silence. “He killed himself two days ago.”

“Where?” A stupid question that filled in for “Why” and so much else.

“Madison. He was back in school in computer science but he couldn’t seem to get into his thesis—some kind of computer language he was creating. The woman he was living with said he had been very depressed. He kept writing letters to old friends and tearing them up. She didn’t think he’d mailed any.”

“How did he do it?” Why do we always ask that about a death?

“He hung himself in his bedroom.”

There would be a memorial in Madison but it was at a time I was already booked on a flight to London for a women’s conference, so I could not attend. This is my memorial for a friend I lost, who lost himself though he tried again and again and again to fill an emptiness that tormented him. Memory is all that I have of him now.

The matter began simply enough, when Cam and Vicki lost their roommate Janice. Janice moved out when she broke off her engagement to Allen Miner, a clever fellow who works in market research. Janice took an extended vacation and then set up in a studio by herself. I knew Janice from our mutual gym and a couple of coffees together, but I’d never met her roommates. Winning back my freedom in court recently had cost me so much I answered their ad and was glad to move into the spacious apartment in a 1920s-era brick apartment house. The living room was light, with a worn parquet floor and we each had our room. Vicki paid a little less than Cam and I since she had the ex-maid’s room off the kitchen. Being three years older than Cam and seven years older than Vicki, I was determined not to play mama to them. Not my style.

A few weeks after I moved in, I saw Cam climbing out of Allen’s Miata out front. So the next evening as we puttered around the kitchen, I said, “Guess it’s lucky Janice moved out. Might be a bit awkward otherwise.”

“What do you mean?” Cam is naturally defensive. She dresses to underplay her figure. Her face is gentle and sprinkled with freckles, her hair a natural light redhead—almost orange. Naturally soft-spoken, she has a stiff protective manner.

“With you seeing Allen. He got over Janice fast.”

“You’re misinterpreting.” Her voice was husky with rebuke. “He’s upset and he needs to talk with someone. He wants to patch things up with her, but Janice won’t take his calls.”

“So you’re consoling him.”

“Eve, I’m listening, that’s all. While he was seeing Janice, I barely knew him, but I’m learning he’s one of the good ones. Janice really hurt him.”

Cam works for a pharmaceutical company torturing rats and bunnies. She’d be much happier as a social worker or a counselor. We lunched together last week—I’m the personnel director in a computer hosting and repair company with offices not that far from where Cam works. When I went to fetch her, she was all white-coated with her face bolted shut pretending to be a scientist. She’s an oversensitive type who likes to act detached, even stolid, but I’m not fooled. In her veins runs butterscotch syrup. So I wasn’t surprised when consoling Allen settled in to a full-time job. She told me she’d been engaged to a specialist in the army but when his deployment in Afghanistan ended, he broke things off with her almost without explanation. She said he had changed completely. She was convinced she had somehow failed him. Yet she seemed to be the wounded one.

Finally readjusting Allen needed all night. Vicki came bursting into my room Sunday morning—Vicki always explodes through doors. She’s long-legged and thin only because she jumps around too much for the fat to settle, because she eats more than Cam and I put together. She’s a year out of community college, working as a secretary. I can imagine her mixing up the files one day because she feels sorry for the poor neglected ones in the back. “Cam’s not back!”

“Good. Been waiting for that.”

“But with Allen? How could she?

“Why, is he a known eunuch?”

“He’s still in love with Janice.”

“That doesn’t mean birdseed at one in the morning.”

“I just don’t want her to get hurt.”

When Cam walked in, Vicki was waiting like an underage mommy. “Where were you?”

Cam yawned broadly. “At Allen’s, of course.”