Hardscrabble Road(92)

Charisse had sat down on the edge of her desk and punched in the numbers for the hot line. Marla closed her eyes and listened very carefully for the moment when she would say Frank’s name into the receiver, and it would all be as real as it would ever get.





2


Growing up, Kate Daniel had always wanted, anxiously, to be perfect— to be perfectly obedient, really, so that nobody would ever be angry with her, and she would never do anything wrong. She remembered that time of her life with a kind of wonder. She could still feel the grinding anxiety of it just under the surface of her skin, like a ghost that had lost the capacity to haunt her. Other girls violated dress codes or rolled their skirts up in the girls’ room after classes were over. Kate checked the dress code twice before she allowed herself to leave her room in the morning, and her skirts always fell precisely at the middle of her knees. Other girls smoked in the boiler room and told the housemother they needed to pick up feminine hygiene products at the drugstore so that they could meet boys in town. Kate never smoked anything, anywhere, and the only boys she knew were the ones who came to the subscription dances her parents brought her to over the long vacations. She could see some point in the way she had been when she’d still been a teenager and in boarding school, but the habit had followed her to college, and then into law school, and then into her marriage. Feminist magazines imagined the “pioneers,” the women who broke the sex barrier in the law schools and medical schools, as bold and angry. Kate had been timid and afraid, and most afraid of all that she would be discovered doing something wrong. Maybe it was just that she felt guilty all the time, although at this moment she could not think of what she would have thought she was guilty of. She did know that she had always felt as if she were about to be caught at something.

Of course, it was possible that it was that very timidity, that long history of anxiety, that had made her what she was now. She had never smoked cigarettes in boarding school or college or law school, but she had smoked marijuana in that little one-room hole she had rented when she’d first left Neil and come to New York. She had never known any boys her parents would have disapproved of, but after she’d ended her marriage she’d lived three years with an activist lawyer from a working-class family who gave fiery speeches about how it was necessary to end private property and bring the rich to justice. If you start at one extreme, you go to the other. It bothered her that she was still going to extremes. Surely she should have grown out of all that by now. She ought to be more than ready to play by the rules. That was what the law was all about.

Chickie George was standing at the door to her office, looking— unhappy. Actually, he looked furious. That was the word Kate had been trying so hard not to think. That seemed to be left over, too. She still didn’t want some people to be mad at her.

She had a pile of papers on the desk. She moved them around. She had a pen in a penholder. She took it out, put it down on the green felt blotter, picked it up, and put it back again. She wondered why they still had blotters for desks. People didn’t use quill pens anymore. They didn’t even use fountain pens most of the time. They didn’t even use pens. Here was a way the computer had changed everything. The office wasn’t paperless, but every-body’s handwriting shat.

“Do you mind if I come in for a moment?” Chickie George said.

“I was just thinking about this man I lived with when I first came to New York,” Kate said. “He was, I don’t know, the kind of man women like me lived with in that time and place. His father worked in a factory. His mother was a school librarian. He’d gone to somewhere, the State University of New York at Buffalo, I think. He wanted the revolution to come tomorrow, with bells on.”

Chickie came into the room and sat down in the guest’s chair without asking if he could. “We need to talk about something,” he said.

“Are there people like that anymore?” Kate asked him. “People who want the revolution to come tomorrow? Does anybody take them seriously? It got to the point where I couldn’t stand to be around them. The revolution isn’t going to come tomorrow, and it shouldn’t. Socialism is dead, and if any of us had had any sense to begin with, we’d have known that before the Berlin Wall fell. Stalin and Pol Pot are the revolution personified. It was never going to be any better than that.”

“We need to talk about something,” Chickie said again. “I don’t think the revolution comes into it, at the moment.”

“Don’t you? I think the revolution comes into everything. People can’t imagine incremental change. They want perfection. I don’t want perfection anymore. I want a country where everybody who works for a living can live decently, eat decently, and send their kids to good schools right through their PhDs. And I want a country where the people who are really unable to take care of themselves are taken care of. And I want it now. But I don’t want a revolution anymore. I don’t expect the world to be perfect.”