Indecision (28 page)

“The thoughts you have to think!” I said. “The things you have to know!”

“But even I am not a socialist exactly.”

“Come on, have the balls to say so, you are too, I can tell! Alice—my sister—she’s one, so I can tell. I’m actually much smarter about this kind of thing than we’ll ever know. So—”

“Okay.” She put a hand to her plump-lipped mischievous mouth. “There is something I must tell you at the last. You will be angry that I waited. But please think of the other things you have also waited for.”

“What? You’re not”—I rose up on my elbows to kiss her—“you’re not a Communist are you?” Kiss. “Because I can deal with socialism maybe, but . . .” Kiss. “Or you aren’t an anarchist, I hope, because”—kiss—“I don’t know, I mean I have
some
black clothes, but they’re not”—kiss—“torn and dirty. And I have some dirty and torn clothes, but they’re not black, so—” I wanted to kiss her all I could before learning that she wished to smash the State. “Don’t you think the State will always have a role to play?”

Bridge had gone looking for something in her wallet and I feared she was on the verge of taking out a twenty and explaining to me the hidden meaning of money. But then I saw she was displaying between her thumb and index finger one of those passport-sized photos taken by a coin-operated booth; and in it you could see—if you could believe it—Alice and me! This was back somewhere in the eighties, maybe at the Millerton Mall, and Alice, grinning in the mouth, looked sad in the eyes, while I was sporting that strange expectant dog’s look I’d seen on dad’s wall some eight completely unbelievable days before.

Brigid was holding the picture in front of her heart and smiling. I was sure I hadn’t brought my own lost copy for her to filch; I didn’t see how she could have downloaded it, much less
printed
it, off of my mind, or even off the world wide web; and meanwhile in my bewilderment I suspected that at the ten-year reunion people were going to have to be told by the nurse accompanying me that I was our Form’s designated drug casualty.

“Do you see the plot?” Brigid asked.

“No.” I put my hands over my eyes and closed my eyes behind my hands. “Bonne nuit.” I took leave of even pretending to be compos mentis. I would have to retire gibbering and broken to my teenage bedroom in the Lakeville house, the ward of my dad. Someone would come to feed me with a spoon. “Mom!”

Bridge’s lips were suddenly on mine with eloquent kisses—a nice surprise. Usually sane people can’t relate very well to society’s more broken-minded individuals and therefore refuse to kiss them.

“I am sorry, but Alice has only tricked you for your good. Already she thought we were complementary to each other, she said to me, Brigid, he is just what—what you require.”

I chalked up my incomprehension to insanity and just let her talk.

“For a while if you can believe it Alice was—ridiculous to say, but she was acting as my psychoanalyst. I don’t know, I want so much to be believed, this is something we learned together—”

“I’ll believe anything,” I said.

“This is what Alice says, he will believe you. Dwight will.
You,
” she said to me.

“How are you like channeling Alice?” Was everyone psychic but me?

“Of course there are some men who think more or less the same as I do. But in spite of their claims really they don’t like for a woman to be like me. I am disagreeable, severe, maybe strong-headed. Or else these men are no fun. Mais—ouvre tes yeux.”

I consented to these few words I could parse, and looked up into her wide eyes almost eclipsed by the pupils. Brigid straddled me with her knees to either side of my chest and, taking my right hand, she placed it below her ribs, near the valvey heart. I felt they should send in fleets of such women to all the asylums.

“Or simply I don’t
like
these other men. And many men who are leftists, really they are not quite good-looking, I don’t know why this is, an anthropologist should study it. But you—you are almost like Alice would say.” She looked truly happy about whatever this meant. “Ever since the moment in the airport I have the sensation that
you take me, you accept me.
So it was very unusual that you didn’t touch me. Usually only after sex does the question come of whether to accept one another. Which—finally—no, I never have. And yet to
you
—it seems to me . . .”

“Yeah?” I asked.

Slowly she said, “It seems to
me
that it seems to
you
that I am like a piece of nature. Simply you take me like a bush or a snake or a bird—”

I was laughing, just kind of cosmically shaking my ruined head.

“—or like a waterfall or a pig or a swan—”

“I
love
you Brigid.” Oops: was I not supposed to say that yet? “But I’m insane!”

“But you love me? Now I don’t think you are insane.”

“But Alice—Alice—how is Alice—how—”

“She gave the picture for proof. Don’t you believe me? I was her student in New York. She advised my thesis—also advised me to end it. Don’t you see?”

My astonishment somehow stayed level as my sanity returned. Reaching inside my boxers and fondling and stroking me for a moment, then fortunately forgetting about it, since this was my
sister
she was talking about, Brigid explained that as soon as Alice heard how I might come to Ecuador to see Natasha—“A very pleasant woman,” Brigid interrupted herself. “Now I think we are friends”—she, this was Alice, had come up with the idea of putting me together with her, this was Brigid, who was in Ecuador already and had just abandoned her doomed dissertation. “And it was not so difficult for Natasha to accord with this, because frankly she was alarmed that you should really visit. Of course there were inconveniences, such as we must pack up Natasha’s apartment so you will believe she has left, and you mustn’t suspect—oh, yes, I am very sorry, there was no abortion, Natasha is not pregnant, not that I know. But I couldn’t let you rush to the airport. Perhaps there is not even a flight to Holland that day. At any rate, Alice insisted that you are a very trusting person, very ready to believe, and you don’t know Spanish. You
do
have a fantastic woman for your sister.”

“Treacherous too.” I could hardly believe it.

Brigid ministered to me a little and then semi-shamefacedly smiled. “You are not too angry?”

Above us there were soft cornices of chalky soil mirroring the ones on the opposite side of the valley. And flowing beneath the pale cornices or cliffs was all this tassely grass, green nearby but getting more and more purplish the farther it spread away. Brigid touched me in the time-honored style as all the bending grass brushed as one in loose obedience to the breeze’s course. “Ah,” I said, lying down on my back. The sun was flaying all sorts of light from Bridge’s dark, dark hair; and off to the right of her head I caught sight of the tilting plane of a hawk on an updraft. He was really sailing, or she was. So apparently I was the object of a friendly conspiracy of remarkable women. The discovery had me feeling pretty blessed, and I sat up and began slipping Brigid out of her shirt. “No, I’m not mad.” Her bra seemed as unnecessary as eye patches over perfectly healthy eyes, and I took it off too. The bare shuddering breasts made me laugh, and Brigid said, “But you must promise you will be less silly when you age.”

“I promise. I’ll be somber. Later.” I distinctly felt I would be.

For the time being however I alternated blessing-style kisses on the top of her head with some intense Belgian-style lip action, and lots of lambent tonguing of the alert budding nipples. Brigid was making the first of those awesome female sounds that can eventually portend a crisis of pleasure. Yet out of respect to Mademoiselle or Señorita Brigid Lerman I want at this point to execute a temporary narrative fade-out and just content the reader with the suggestion that for two curious and mutually attracted young socialists without a condom between them to swap oral sex 69-style on the soft grass of a picturesque equatorial hillside while they more or less peak on an intensely sensitizing drug trip can really boost their relations to a great new stage, especially when, in an epileptic fit of an orgasm, the woman finally comes above the young man who, as it happens, is ejaculating like a garden hose, and I’d definitely recommend these activities.

Afterwards we lay down beside ourselves on the grass. Omne animal post coitum triste est? No way! Now that I was a socialist fucking made me joyous, and I wanted to do it again right away.

“So that was the fruit, huh? Now I’m on to you, Bridge. You’re the fruit!”

She looked a little triste, maybe, at the mention of the fruit with its overtones of expulsion from nice places. Nevertheless I busted out our tomates de árbol. I wanted to eat one while my hard-on revived, and offered her the other. I figured actual fruit might replace the more troublesome symbolical kind and include no penalty for eating it then. Using my Swiss Army knife I peeled the tomate de árbol until it was nothing but facets of wet flesh, then I sank my teeth in.

“These damn tree tomatoes are so fucking good. They’re like the marriage of peach and apple—but superior to either. Can’t
this
be our fruit? I promise I won’t try to patent it.” The stuff seemed to smack in its sweet grain of our anomalous romance.

“In fact I had thought of a different fruit—a very difficult, a dangerous—”

“All right.” Now that I was a brave person I supposed I had to be one all the time. “Tell me about this dangerous fruit. I eat what you eat. Mi casa, su casa or whatever.”

Around this time I felt the first tug of sunset and noticed a certain taint of gold decay slipping a few parts per thousand into the still-strong light.

“A fruit. Or it could be a drug. Ça m’est égal.” I didn’t know those words. “But what I imagined before is a fruit which simply to eat will cause an enormous change in the world. You eat it, yes, and it tastes very great, but then a change takes place.”

“That’s exactly the behavior that’ll get you expelled!”

She shrugged—pretty recklessly, in my opinion. “When you eat from this fruit then whenever you put your hand on a product, a commodity, an article, then, at the moment of your touch, how this commodity came into your hands becomes plainly evident to you. Now there is no more mystification of labor, no more of a world in which the object arrives by magic—scrubbed, clean, no past, all of its history washed away. Do you see? Once we eat this fruit or drug—”

As now we’d done—that was the alarming part.

“—now whenever we touch something that was grown or made we will sense how it was grown or made.”

It was terrible, it was wonderful, I had met someone as philosophical as me.

“We will feel it,” she was saying of the drug which we could perhaps dump into America’s water supply, “like a shock from the door handle. And of course if there was pain involved in the making of the product, the provision of a service, we will feel this. Of course it would be a difficult world to bear with this drug. And so then—changes.”

“But I feel so bad for all the poor consumers.”

“But you say you are a socialist.”

“I guess I did say that.” I reflected. “But all the people in the West—in the North—in the rich countries—everyone will start wearing gloves whenever they touch anything.”

I had the other tomate de árbol in my hand. Gently I started peeling it. “Ah fuck, how will we ever be happy again, Brigid? I was afraid of this happening.” I sliced the skin off the fruit in red-yellow-green scabs. But this was only on autopilot and beneath or through the careless actions of my hands I was looking at something else. It was like flying over water and then when you looked down to the ocean the skim of mirror was yanked off, so that the water became transparent, and there the sea was, filled with what you knew had always been there: the rubbery gardens and drowned mountains, the creatures from plankton up to nekton, the swimming bodies and the unburied skeletons, and now you—or I—I saw it all at once. And so in this fucked-up San Pedrified way the entire world system of neoliberal capitalism disclosed itself to me, and I felt somewhat grim.

I looked at Brigid, who was saying, “I want you to be happy. But I also want you to be with me in your mind. That is why I invented the fruit. Which doesn’t exist! Isn’t this so strange?”

Now I was tearful too, feeling definitely a little apprehensive about the hard study of political economy that I would have to do to confirm my undeniable intuition. But I wanted to go ahead anyway, not only for sake of truth, but also because Brigid struck me as a very attractive being even in the ways that she wasn’t yet. And where she wasn’t yet beautiful, maybe she would become more so once her life was more consistently brightened by my consistently more enlightened company. “Here.” I’d cut the fruit in segments and was offering her some.

“But you have cut yourself.”

It was true—blood from my index stained the mango-colored flesh. Nevertheless she took the sullied piece from my hand and ate it. “I hope you don’t have AIDS,” she said before sucking the blood off my thumb.

Things were maybe getting cheesy. But at least they possessed the dignity of taking place.

I pulled Brigid up to her feet. And then we were walking back laterally across the hillside, following a ditch that we had reason to believe would convey us back to the pensión/spa.

“It would feel wrong—” I began.

“To go back the same way? I agree.”

It remained necessary to watch out for spiders. But for me the creatures had returned to their mere nature and I forgave them for what they couldn’t help being. Humans like me were different, I reasoned: they could help almost anything.

We walked along in silence, hand in hand when we could manage, until at length we came to a path that descended toward the hostel. Moving down it single file, we also seemed to come down in our minds, the drug subsiding in time with the light, and at last at the end of the path we were standing before the grounds of the spa, some of the cottages already lit up against the duskiness falling everywhere.