We didn’t drink as much as the others, but we didn’t seem to need to — we got into the arguing and the clowning and the repudiating of theories at just as high a volume without it. We were testing how to be right. Richard was the most dogged in posing questions.
“Joe,” he would say, “what would you do if you caught a man stealing your wallet? Would you have him arrested?”
Joe was against prisons, we all were. Kropotkin had called them “universities of crime.” “I’d grab my wallet and really talk to him,” Joe said.
“Oh, that talk,” Betsy said. “Maybe he’d rather be in jail.”
But I thought it was a good answer.
I brought up Tolstoy’s hero in Resurrection, who decided prisons had never, ever done any good. “Listen to her,” Joe said. “Are you listening?” Everyone knew I’d read more than Betsy.
“Tolstoy said money was a new form of slavery,” I said. “People don’t read his essays.”
“Only you have set eyes on them, I guess,” Richard said. “Don’t brag, it’s never effective.” This embarrassed me and I really did stop bragging after that.
Dorothy, a friend of Richard’s who liked to drink with us, said, “I’ve been in jail. It didn’t reform me.” She was in her late twenties, older than we were, and she’d once been arrested in a march for women’s suffrage. And now she never voted, because she’d come to believe that voting was colluding. I admired these scruples.
I liked watching Joe when he waited to speak, his solid chin, his dark, soft eyes. My mother had told me that the first years of her marriage were the hardest ones, but the shock of cohabitation went fine for us, mostly. We had the fire and puzzle of ideas, a goad to keep our better selves showing. And we had all those other people around.
None of us slept enough. The others went out after midnight to drink at a speakeasy a few blocks away. They had less regular jobs, looser hours — they wrote articles for magazines, they sketched ladies’ fashions for department store ads, and I thought Betsy had money from her family. Joe had found work in a print shop uptown, and I had a job painting letters for a sign and banner place in the neighborhood. I had always liked to draw and sketch and used to do all the decorating in the church.
This was a very good time for us. Joe loved the long debates, but at the end of any evening, once we were in our room, he would say, “I am so tired,” and make a big joke of collapsing against me, where lust took over whatever fatigue either of us had. How luxuriant those nights were, our secret lives of excess.
We’d come to the city in the thick heat of late summer, but within a month we were in an autumn of clear days, of morning air with light in every molecule. I made a vow to walk to my job, to get more time in the sudden freshness outside, but this excellent habit lasted two days. I envied our friend Dorothy, who owned a tiny, unheated bungalow by the beach in Staten Island. A very nice man named Forster stayed with her there on weekends, when he wasn’t working in the city. They claimed to live on bootleg wine and the fish he caught. Once they brought us a basket of lovely shells that smelled like drying seaweed and I put the shells all around our room, big white whelks and nacreous jingle shells, thin as paper, and blue cockles striped with yellow, on the mantel and the bed table. “Think of this as your island hideaway,” I said to Joe, as I flipped down the covers. “Where the roaring surf echoes the passion of mortals.”
“I hear it, I hear it,” Joe said.
Joe had never been to the ocean, but I had. My mother walked with me along the Jersey shore when she was trying to talk me into giving up Joe. I was busy thinking at that moment how the rhythm of the surf sounded like a great animal breathing, sounded like the pulse of sex. I knew what sex was, or thought I did — my mind was entirely colored by the few chances Joe and I had taken. I sat with my mother on a bench along the sands, watching the curling froth and trough of the waves, and I had remembrances that made me feel smug in her company.
“We can take the ferry to Coney Island sometime,” Joe said, taking off his shoes.
“This is our island,” I said to Joe, setting my palm on the bed.
Joe liked this sort of beckoning frankness. (He was reaching for me now, while he turned down the lamp with his other hand.) As long as it wasn’t too frank. If my praise of his body ran to candid exactness, if I was moved to use blunt and stumbling language to exalt something we’d done, he would laugh and say, “Yes, yes,” but not happily. So I stopped doing that. Everyone thought Joe was the bolder of us, but no one knows how a couple fits together. The twists in that knot. For his part, Joe had learned not to talk so much when we were already lying in bed at night, not to squander this time reflecting on his day until we were too sleepy for love. The quarrels we had turned each of us huffy but caused useful corrections.
Dorothy had said that their beach was glorious at night, with tall, skinny pines against the sky and lights in the houses along the shore and the rolling surf invisible and tremendous in the dark, and I was thinking of that now, while Joe and I entered our own night, our own sea. We stayed awake so long we could hear the clop of the horse’s hooves outside when the milk truck went by in the very early morning.
In the morning, when Joe and I got up, only the dog — a big mongrel with some police dog in him — was awake and pacing the kitchen. The others always slept late. But I sort of liked being someone who went to work, and I didn’t mind my job. Nothing fascinating, but I could lose myself in it.
I spent a perfectly pleasant afternoon painting — in dark brown and ivy-green — a sign that suggested to all passersby
ADAMS CHICLETS
“Genuinely and Truly Delightful to All”
with a spearmint leaf below. The leaf was easy and I took pride in adding serrated edges, tiny veins, a jaunty stem.
It was true that chewing gum was a worthless product, a clever vendor’s dream of packaged nothing. Betsy refused to buy it. My father had banned chewing gum for all his daughters, who were not to be seen masticating like cows. My poor father. In India the people used to chew beeda after a meal, to freshen the mouth and aid digestion — a leaf with sweet spices rolled into it. My mother was in anguish, close to tears, when men spit its red juice in the street.
My unhappy mother. What an effort she always strove to make. Sometimes now she wrote me letters. Regards to my dearest son-in-law. I hope that he is enjoying your cooking! She would never really like Joe, never forgive him for wanting to dishonor me. I made fun of her letters to my friends, as if I were the sort of person who wanted a bluffer, franker mother.
When I finished the sign, my boss, Mr. Frances, said, “The leaf looks like a caterpillar somebody stepped on.”
“It’s mint,” I said. “We used to grow it in our yard.”
“Do I pay you to be an imbecile?” Mr. Frances said. “I’m the imbecile then, aren’t I?” He talked to all of us like that.
Sometimes he docked our pay when he didn’t like the way the signs turned out. Ten cents, or even twenty cents, enough for a meal. He called it fining us for artistic offenses. Or he’d have us stay late into the night to paint a sign over again. “Right is right,” he’d say. A few times I’d passed out union literature to try to organize our little group of workers, but that was as far as my bravery went.
“You’re one of the sloppiest, least talented sign-painters I’ve had the misfortune to be around,” Mr. Frances said, “and anyone can see it. Isn’t that true?”