3

JOHN HAD been sitting at his desk in the Weasel office for an hour, a sheet of typewriter paper rolled into the old IBM Executive, but he still hadn’t written a damned thing. After weeks of chilling rain, the weather had turned around. He’d propped the door open to let in the air and the light, and the day was too sweet—was really fucking with his head. He wanted to be back in Toronto, back in his apartment in the Annex, even, mirabile dictu, back in grad school. He missed his Martin, missed his band, missed all those things Canadians took for granted—the sanity, the order, the plain old-fashioned good sense of the place. He wanted to walk down Yonge Street and feel like a full-sized human being again. He wanted to play music again. So why was he still in Boston? It was the same answer as always—because he still had something he had to say. Oh, yeah? Really? Like what?

OK, start with the Resistance. They’d folded, closed down their office, advised their members to join SDS. Not a good move, but he couldn’t blame them. They’d been at it a long time now with their draft counseling and sanctuaries; they were tired of helping white middle-class males avoid the draft—and they were just plain tired—but nobody was going to step in and do the work they’d done, and it had been good work. Then there was SDS, and he didn’t like anything coming out of the National Office these days. And the assholes in PL never made any sense. Everybody seemed to be getting serious, getting heavy, talking Lenin and cadres, getting down to it—but getting down to what? He had to lay out an anarchist alternative, and he was stuck—searching for a clear fresh word—and the day outside was too full of promise, too much like spring.

John liked to be alone when he was writing—especially when he was having this much trouble—but Phil Vance wasn’t bugging him at all, was a benign presence actually, musing over his papers spread out on Ethan’s desk. “Anything wonderful?” John said, hoping for a little distraction.

“Not in the capitalist press, that’s for sure.” Phil had gone through the Boston Globe and the New York Times the way he always did; now he was reading the packets from both versions of Liberation News Service. Like damned near every other New Left group these days, LNS had split into hostile factions—the heavy Marxist one in New York and the freaky hippie one in rural Massachusetts—each sending out its own version of the underground news. “Demonstration in Ann Arbor,” Phil said. “Anti-repression teach-in at the University of Michigan. Attack on ROTC building.”

“What kind of attack?”

“It doesn’t say.” Then, glancing over at John with his shy smile, “If they blew it up, they’d probably tell us.”

John laughed. He hadn’t dug Phil Vance when he’d first turned up—had written him off as just another self-righteous academic asshole from the fantasyland of Harvard—but he’d been wrong. Unlike the rest of the SDSers who came and went, Phil turned up every day and went at the Weasel in the same methodical way he’d probably been working on his PhD before he’d abandoned it for the revolution. Phil was always there when John showed up in the morning, was usually still there when John drifted off to get stoned with Tom and Cass. Phil had taken over the HIGH ALERT page. He justified his and everybody else’s columns, made the headlines, collected graphics and filed them neatly in manila envelopes, drove around town to pick up the little bits of coin that came in from the ads. On the nights when they were laying out, he turned up with huge pots of home-cooked vegetarian chili and boxes of doughnuts. He even swept the floors—something neither Ethan nor John had ever bothered to do. Doctrinaire Marxist or not, Phil was a joy forever—and John regarded him now with something that bordered on comradely warmth.

Phil made up for being absolutely and irredeemably bald by wearing a full beard and a thick mustache he cut off as straight as a paintbrush. When you added the wire-rimmed granny glasses, he didn’t look like a hippie so much as a hard-working small-town New England shopkeeper from 1860—but today he’d blown that effect by wearing a sweatshirt that said (he surely couldn’t have been aware of the irony of it): PROPERTY OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY. “Here’s something coming out of the People’s Park struggle,” Phil was saying. “Twelve sheriff ’s deputies indicted on charges of conspiring to mistreat prisoners. Seems like they beat the crap out of everybody they busted. Like routinely.”

“Oh, great. Think they’ll get a conviction?”

“Yeah, right. Fat chance . . . And here’s something else interesting. Group in Philly is publishing a thing on university complicity. Weapons research. Chemical, biological, anti-personnel, and incendiary weapons. Nice, huh? Lists the guilty universities.”

“Can we get that? Reprint some of it?”

“Yeah, we should do that,” and Phil wrote a note to himself to do that.

Then, as John studied Phil (hunched over the desk, staring at the LNS copy, thick brows contracted, chewing on his mustache), he realized that he was looking at the future editor of the Biweekly Weasel. Right, John thought, I stepped in to take over from Ethan, and one of these days Phil’s going to take over from me, and then I’m going to be gone. It was a happy thought—and with that, WHAM, he knew what he had to say. “All the things that made the New Left new,” he wrote, typing quickly, “the spontaneity, the autonomous local organizations, the . . .”

He wasn’t sure what came next, but he had to keep going. He was on a roll. He dropped down several spaces and wrote, “The Man thinks that organizations have to have leaders. To kill an organization, all you have to do is chop off the leaders. But what if there aren’t any leaders? What if everybody’s a leader, flowing into the . . .” Shit, he could finish that one later too. “With the Man, the movement is always top-down, from the center to the margin. With us the movement is from . . .” Somebody at the door. Fuck, he thought. Annoyed. Looked up. Saw that a girl had just walked in.

Not a “woman”—even though John had been training himself to say “woman” for every female over the age of six. He saw a skinny long-legged kid wearing hair ribbons, and the politically unreconstructed part of his mind said “girl.” She was already halfway across the office— passing between the layout tables, bounding around the end of Ethan’s collapsing bookcase. Girl? Yes, barely adolescent—fourteen or fifteen maybe—skin-tight powder-blue jeans, no figure whatsoever, and not just hair ribbons but little-kid shoes with broad straps. She saw Phil, smiled at him, slipped a beat-up leather purse off her shoulder and let it fall onto Ethan’s desk: THUNK. “Hey, man,” she said.

Like the nineteenth-century gent he resembled, Phil had risen to his feet. Uneasily, not sure why he was doing it, John did the same thing. “Hey, Pamela,” Phil said, and, turning to John, “This is Pam. She’s been really wanting to meet you, man.”

“Pam Zalman,” she said, stepped forward and offered her hand. John took it, and she seized him with a grip as emphatic as a boy’s. “So you’re Raymond Lee, huh?” She had a heavy New York accent.

“That’s me,” John said, feeling like an asshole.

“I really dig your stuff. I’m an anarchist too.”

“Oh, yeah?” Startled and wary.

“Not too many of us around.”

“No, not too many. Some of the Resistance people . . .”

“But it’s not a numbers game, you dig?” she said. “It’s the coherence of the critique,” and was already gone, across the room where she grabbed up one of the folding chairs, then was back, slamming her chair down directly next to his. She fell onto it as though it was a kind of prop. “Our ideas are in everybody’s minds,” she said.

“Not in mine,” Phil said, laughing.

“Oh, I know that, you Stalinist schmuck,” she said affectionately enough. They were obviously friends. “These assholes never stop with the hyphen,” she was saying to John. “Marxist . . . and that’s OK.. . . but then they’ve got to tack on Leninist . . .”

“You’re goddamned right I’m a Leninist,” Phil said, “because it works. I’m an American. I believe in success.”

“Hey,” she said, still addressing John as though she’d known him for years, “did you hear that? He just told us the truth. Like straight out. They’ll always settle for a technical adjustment of the power structure.”

By now John was getting the full impact of her—a scary high-wire vibe. He pounded a cigarette out of his pack, offered her one. She shook her head.

“I’ve been trying to recruit her for the Weasel.” Phil’s amused eyes were adding some further message, but John couldn’t read it.

“Terrific,” John said, “we always need people.”

Hiding behind the ritual—matches, fire, and smoke—John was examining her. The little-girl look was certainly in at the moment; you saw it everywhere, but not with Movement women, and she wasn’t doing that look anyway, at least not in the way it was laid out in the fashion mags. She had long brandy-colored hair neatly divided into two ponytails tied with ribbons the same color as her jeans—and that was Twiggy enough—but a Levi jacket hanging open, and under it, a boy’s crisp white dress shirt, and under that (bizarre touch) a boy’s white cotton T-shirt. She was so flat-chested she might as well have been a boy. Her Mary Janes looked like she’d walked a hundred miles in them—originally navy but scuffed to beige at the toes—and she was wearing tons of eye makeup—mascara and eyeliner and even a smear of blue on her lids—and Movement women simply didn’t do that. John had years of practice at reading the social messages of clothes, but he couldn’t read hers. Who the hell was she? “What do you want to do?” he asked her.

“I’m a writer.”

“Far out,” he said automatically. Nobody would have called her face beautiful. Too narrow, not enough chin and too much nose, but an appealing face—the kind of homely face that could grow on you. Pale skin that had never seen the sun—and eerie eyes. Hazel that mixed brown with flecks of blue and green. Eyes that were looking at him now. Compelling eyes—no doubt about it. If he looked at those eyes long enough, he might even begin to see that odd little face as beautiful. And something zinged between himself and this weird girl—a coded message, an exchange. Untranslatable, but simple as daylight.

Unnerved, he said, “Did you bring anything with you?”

“Of course she’s brought something with her,” Phil said.

Her compact torso was set upon disproportionately long legs, and she’d settled onto the chair in the screwiest of positions, her left leg drawn up, the heel of one scruffy shoe on the rung, the other leg extended at an oblique angle. Without moving her legs, she swiveled at the waist, and, without being asked, Phil was already handing her the purse she’d left on Ethan’s desk. John felt double-teamed. Were they running some kind of number on him?

She handed him a clean typescript, an article that seemed to be— that certainly was—a political analysis of The Story of 0. “ . . . thus, under the guise of pornography, Pauline Reage has written a profound allegory, as broad in its scope and true to its time as A Pilgrim’s Progress, of daily life under highly evolved spectacular capitalism.”

Jesus fuck, John thought. “Where you from?” he said. “The Cliffe?”

“No. Columbia.”

The word fluttered in the office like a suddenly unfurled battle ensign. Those disturbing hazel eyes were looking directly into his, and he finally got it—she was most definitely not a kid. He skimmed the rest of the article, stopped on a paragraph near the end:

• • •

The powerless are in a constant state of being fucked up the ass by power. Many of us have long ago become inured to that state, our assholes having been methodically stretched by a long, painful education begun in the family, continued in the schools, and completed in marriage or on the job. But to maintain its murderous daily work, power requires far more than a passively resigned submission that has lost the will either to suicide or violence. Like O, the powerless must learn to love being fucked up the ass, to long for it, to beg fervently for the return of that huge, adamantine, arrogant, merciless, commanding cock of power. The effectiveness of Reage’s allegory can be measured by the extent to which it turns on the reader. Are you wet, woman reader? Are you hard, man reader? Yes, of course you are, and therein lies the subversive heart of this charming allegory: we are all turned on because we are all O--for the repression of sexuality can only be maintained by the sexualization of repression.

Break. For a while John did nothing but stare at the wedge-shaped patch of sunlight by the door. She had left as quickly as she’d appeared, leaving behind a powder-blue afterimage in his mind. He read her article—twice. It took the second time to really get it. Brilliant? Yes, absolutely. But highly theoretical, damnably difficult, not exactly the kind of thing the Weasel usually offered its stoned-out readership. Yes, it was anarchist, but she was working from a tradition he didn’t know very well—the Freudian Left—quoting Reich and Laing and the old Viennese trickster himself. He looked up, saw that Phil was looking at him. “OK , man,” John said, “lay it on me. Who the fuck is she?”

Phil laughed. “Yeah, she’s something else, all right. She’s from Columbia SDS . . . one of the women that emerged into a leadership role . . . you know, during the action there.”

“SDS?” John said. That was weird. She didn’t seem like an SDS heavy, at least not like any of the ones he’d ever met.

“Oh, yeah,” Phil said. “She isn’t part of any . . . She doesn’t reflect the National Office, that’s for damned sure. She’s highly critical of the National Office. She says she’s an anarchist, but she seems more like a council communist to me. Heavy into women’s lib. She’s in the Collective . . . you know, with Karen.”

Shit, John thought, that’s all I need. Karen was Phil’s— well, in the old days, you would have said simply “wife,” but that term had dropped out of the correct vocabulary along with “girlfriend,” and Phil usually referred to Karen as “the woman I live with.” And “the Collective” was short for the Boston Radical Women’s Collective—the dolorous BRWC. John didn’t know much about them. No man did. They were a small but influential tendency in the women’s movement—theoretical, far left, highly secretive, even paranoid—and anti-men. The best he could tell, they were heavy-duty, full tilt, no-holds-barred anti-men. But they couldn’t be out-and-out separatists. Karen was still living with Phil.

“The Council’s going to start their own journal,” Phil was saying. “It’s kind of hard because they want it to be woman-produced from beginning to end, all the way to the printing. And Pam wrote that thing, and she doesn’t want to wait. She’s in a hurry. She wants it out right now. I told her to try the Weasel . . . Probably not right for us, huh?”

“I don’t know. What’s she doing in Boston?”

Phil wasn’t sure. A few months ago, Pam had just appeared, had crashed with Phil and Karen for a while; then one of the women in the Collective had split town, and Pam had taken over her apartment. “She’s looking for some kind of action,” Phil said, “like, ‘Come on, everybody, I’m here, so let’s start the motherfucking revolution.’ Oh, yeah, she’s crazy.”

“Good crazy or bad crazy?”

Phil shrugged. “I’ve been telling her to come in and just talk to you, man. She’s crazy like you. I thought you’d dig each other.”

John picked up the loose pages of her article, stacked them, restored the paper clip to the upper left-hand corner. “No, it’s not right for us,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean we can’t do it.”

Later he fought with Ethan over that article. “Shit, man.” Ethan tugged on his beard, crinkled his forehead. “I can’t make heads or tails of it.”

“I don’t care whether you understand it or not. We’ve got to print it.”

“Why?”

“Because if we don’t, we’re damned fools. Because if we don’t, she’ll go write for somebody else. Because it just may turn out to be the most important article we ever ran.”

“Because you got hot pants for her.”

“Oh fuck off, man.”

“Jesus, Ray . . . or John, or Mr. Fucking Jones, or whatever you’re calling yourself today, cool out.” Ethan chuckled, slapped John on the top of the head. “Yeah, who gives a good goddamn what it means? The Cambridge Vice Squad hasn’t been around for a while, might as well give them a good excuse. Yeah, just what we need . . . an article on assholes.”

• • •

SHE MET him in Harvard Square in front of Nini’s. “Hey, man,” she said. A smile lit up her spooky eyes, and he felt the impact of her, the rush—far more stunning than the obsessive tape loop he’d been running in his mind. Alive.

He knew she’d want to hear about her article—all writers like to be praised—so that’s where he started. “It’ll be in the next issue. You’ve got to come in and lay it out. Yeah, it’s great stuff. Amazing. Blew my mind.”

“Thanks, man. I put a lot of work into it.”

“You want to get something to eat?”

He saw her hesitate. “I’ve got a hangup about restaurants. You like to walk?”

With long boyish strides, she was leading him into the green and pleasant pastures of Harvard University. She was still wearing the same heavy eye makeup, the same two ponytails, but bound tonight with bits of black yarn. “One of my best friends went to Harvard,” he said—and caught himself. No, he shouldn’t be talking about old friends—shouldn’t be talking about anything that could identify him, give him a traceable past. Here in Boston, there was no past.

“Oh, yeah?” she said. “It’s a groove, isn’t it? I dig the whole university scene”—expansive gesture—“mystifications and all. Medieval community of scholars. Sanctuary.”

She walked, he thought, the way he used to back in Morgantown when ideas had chased him like Maenads, and he realized that she reminded him of a younger version of himself—how weird. She was glancing back for him now, grinning. She paused so he could catch up. “It’s ours,” she was saying, “anyhow, it should be. Look at how peaceful it is. Never know it was fully complicit with the war machine, would you? Have you checked out Widener? I really dig it. One of the great academic libraries. Shit, man, there’s nothing that’s not in there.”

Maybe young was the key to it—a freaky mental twist like déjà vu. A tangle of things coming together in his mind—almost but not quite connecting. “So tell me about Columbia,” he said.

“Oh, Columbia?” She shrugged—an eloquent motion of her shoulders. “It was a real trip. We debated everything, like for hours and hours and hours. Everybody got to talk. Leaders? When it got down to the action, there weren’t any motherfucking leaders. I walked in on Rudd and Papert, the heavy boys having their heavy debate about strategy, so fucking serious, and they asked me to leave, can you believe it? Said piss on you guys, vanguards suck shit, fell by Fayerweather, dug it there, stayed there, got busted there . . . Mark Rudd? Oh, he’s a good guy but not much of a thinker. A media creation. The TV vultures need leaders. Without leaders, they wouldn’t have anything to spectacularize.”

He loved watching her walk, watching her move. Like a lean-hipped girl athlete, she was built for speed—quicksilver. Tonight she was wearing the same tight powder-blue jeans, but over black boots just as beat-up as her little-kid shoes had been, and a ribbed turtleneck like the ones Cassandra wore, and a fantastic touch—tight leather gloves, navy, the kind of sleek feminine dress gloves that would have gone with a Bonwitt Teller coat. She seemed to like putting things together that didn’t go together—both in her ideas and her clothes.

“Scalp wounds bleed a lot. Oy, I thought I was murdered, but it was just a little cut . . . No, the pigs weren’t bad. When they cleared the buildings, anyway. Out on the streets they were motherfucking Cossacks . . . The revolutionary moment . . . Wow, how things got dealt with. Food, sanitation, sleeping arrangements, it all got taken care of. Anarchism in action. There was the goddamned revolution. But they tried to siphon the women off into shit work the way they always do. Jesus, I must have made a million sandwiches. While the male heavies fought it out. Yeah, a really big show. The praxis faction versus the action faction. The students were like a hundred miles ahead of the so-called leadership . . . just the way it always is. I learned a lot. Eventually I thought, well, screw that, I can talk too. The next time around, the men can make the sandwiches.”

Bedazzled, exhilarated, he trotted behind her. “Where you from?”

“Long Island.” Pronounced Lon-Guyland. “How about you?”

“West Virginia.” Oh, fuck, he thought. That was his second slip. He hadn’t been with her twenty minutes, and he was already blowing his cover.

“West Virginia, huh? I don’t know a damn thing about it. Yeah, I heard your accent too”—he hadn’t said a word about accents, although he’d sure been hearing hers—“but I couldn’t put my finger on it . . . Coal and Mother Jones?”

“Yeah. But that’s downstate. Where I’m from it’s steel and the USWA. What’s on Long Island?”

She laughed. “Nothing, man. Suburbs.”

They’d gone completely around the yard and ended up right back where they’d started—in front of Widener. “Smoke?” he said.

“Sure.” But she made no move to take the pack he was offering her.

Disconcerted, something in him stuttering, flapping loose, he pounded out two cigarettes, passed her one, pressed the other between his lips. Lit hers, then his. She’d come to rest . . . Well, no, it didn’t look like rest—still a coiled energy to her as though she might go bounding off at any moment, but at least she’d put herself on pause, holding her cigarette with a gloved hand. It was not a cold night. Her tight shiny gloves were decorated with bows so small, so discreet, they were almost unnoticeable.

He looked up, found her eyes looking directly into his. His mind was reduced to rubble. Her face was showing— What? Amusement? Something more complex? “I dig boys with long hair,” she said.

Even if he could have thought of something to say, he couldn’t have said it. “It must be a real trip for you guys to feel how sensual it is,” she said.

“Yeah.”

He was trying to find a simple strand in this complex tangle. Why had she said boys instead of the correct word, men? Maybe it had been nothing more than a slip into ordinary language, and she was welcome to call him a boy if she wanted to, but something had just happened; like the Mr. Jones whose name he’d borrowed, John didn’t have a clue what it was. Speak, he told himself. “I haven’t had a haircut in . . . I don’t know. It must be a couple years.”

“Groovy.” He saw something flicker in her eyes—yes, he could call it “amusement”—as though she’d just heard how empty, even parodic, that single word had sounded. Somewhere else, in a gone life, he might have thought she was flirting with him.

She finally broke their locked gaze, looked out and away (at what? at Harvard? at some Platonic ideal of a university?), her thin lips pressed into a firm line. “They called us reformists,” she said, “but it did matter what went down at Columbia. I mean it wasn’t just to force them to call in the pigs, radicalize the campus. We were creating the new world in the shell of the old, you dig? Like I wanted us to say, ‘Fuck the demands, we’re keeping the university.’ Yeah, man, the universities should be ours. Centers for the development of revolutionary theory.”

“Right on.”

“But not so right on for the Leninists. Well, piss on them.”

She dropped her cigarette and stepped on it. “I don’t really smoke. I keep thinking I’m going to dig it, but I never do . . . Hey, I’m worried I’m keeping you from eating. I could probably sit in that Chinese place for a while.”

He’d been hungry when he’d got off the subway, but he was so sick now with the intensity of her he wasn’t sure he could eat even a grain of rice. Still, he said the only thing that seemed possible: “Sure. Chinese sounds fine.”

“I read all your pieces,” she said.

“You did what?”

“Is the first piece you wrote the one on the shift in the Movement after Chicago?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I read all your pieces.” She laughed reflexively.

He didn’t trust himself, not with what he was guessing now—that maybe she was just as old-fashioned kids-in-high-school freaked out as he was. “I was over at Karen’s,” she said, shrugging. “You know, Karen Vance? We’re in the Collective together . . .”

“Yeah, Phil told me.”

“And I picked up the Weasel . . . saw the last piece you did. Thought wow, a coherent anarchist, far fucking out. Went through every back issue and found all your articles.” She shrugged—wry, self-depreciating. “I even made notes. Some things I’d like to rap about . . . if you wouldn’t mind . . . Like . . .” She shrugged, didn’t finish the sentence.

Up until then, he would have characterized her voice as loud and brash, even abrasive; suddenly it was different. “I can sit in the Chinese restaurant for a while,” she said in a low, muted, nearly singing tone. Weird, he thought. “Do you want to do that?” she said.

• • •

“BUDDHA’S FEAST,” she said, “and please don’t put any sauce on it.”

“You want plain?”

“Yes,” firmly, “I want plain.” Most people, John thought, would have left it at that, but she didn’t, was staring directly into the face of their waiter—“Nothing on it. Nothing.”

“Sweet and sour pork,” John said apologetically.

She turned back to John. “You know, the, ah . . . Shit, I hate all the old terminology, but the united-front line. That’s what the Weasel’s taking at the moment, isn’t it?”

Yes, it was old terminology—Old Left—but he knew exactly what she meant. “Right,” he said, “the broadest-based possible opposition.”

“And it has worked up till now.” Tugging carefully on each finger, she drew off her gloves, pressed them flat, folded them, and laid them aside at the edge of their table. Her hands were just as thin and white as her face. Her nails were short but neatly filed. “But I don’t know how much longer it’s going to work. I loved the last editorial in the Weasel . . . ‘If we don’t hang together . . . ’ Yeah, really dug that invocation of all those old American symbols. The pigs don’t own those symbols, even though they think they do, so it’s great to see a détournment on them.”

Détournment? he thought. What’s she been reading? “But look,” she was saying, “maybe some people we can’t hang with . . . because they don’t want to hang with us . . . Like you said in one of your articles, the Leninists have always sold us out every chance they got . . .”

“Right, the First International, Spain, the Ukraine, Kronstadt . . .”

“Yeah, yeah, right, all that shit,” she said impatiently, “and they’ll sell us out again. So if you’re going to have to split with them later, why not now? The question is . . . at what point do you start drawing lines? Like with PL, for instance. PL’s not part of the Movement. I don’t think it ever was.”

“And SDS still is?”

“Yeah, man. SDS is central to the Movement . . . Oh, I know what you mean about RYM”—he hadn’t said a word about RYM— “its incoherence . . . its failure to engage with the concrete historical situation. But all that crap’s in direct reaction to PL. The NO’s been forced to take some goddamn line, for Christ’s sake. With PL at you all the fucking time, you’ve got to be able to defend yourself. Those sectarian bastards are parasitic on the Movement . . . goddamned miserable vermin. Those motherfuckers suck shit.”

Her vehemence made him nervous. He was afraid that there was still living inside himself a hopelessly nice West Virginia boy who wanted even the most heated political debate to be conducted with a certain civility, one that would exclude the reduction of one’s opponents to the status of shit-sucking motherfuckers, but she obviously didn’t feel any such bourgeois constraint. She was so angry her eyes were sizzling. God, she did have beautiful eyes—huge, luminous. Picking up the color from the walls, they looked green as jade.

Well, OK, he thought, PL might suck shit, but nobody was any better organized. You could always count on them to turn out the bodies, and surely that had to count for something. “It just seems to me,” he said, “there’s not a lot to choose from in SDS these days. Do you want your repressive top-down mind-fuck Leninist vanguard kissing Ho Chi Minh’s ass or Chairman Mao’s?”

At the last SDS National Council meeting, the two factions had tried to chant each other down, the RYM faction with “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” and the PL faction with “Mao Mao Mao Tse-tung.” She laughed. “Yeah. It’s pathetic. I was there when they did that, couldn’t fucking believe it, man. This is the so-called leadership? This bunch of high school cheerleaders? But at least the NO’s stumbling vaguely forward in the right direction.”

“Is it?”

He was a hell of a lot more interested in her than in anything she was saying, but still he was trying to follow her line of thought. He wasn’t any great fan of PL, but the people in the National Office seemed like morons to him, and, anyhow, he felt a million miles away from that intensely sectarian, tempest-in-a-teapot shit going down in SDS. All he knew about it was what he read—mostly in Liberation News Service. If he was being honest with her, he’d have to say that he didn’t think the leadership of SDS mattered all that much; the kids on the campuses were what counted. But she was obviously heavy into the internal SDS debates, so of course all that shit mattered to her—and he’d better watch his mouth.

She was still talking. “You know what I get called? Old Left. Well, if “Old Left” means you bother to think about something before you write a manifesto on it, then I’m Old Left. Fuck it, man, I don’t know where . . .”

Their dinners arrived, and she stopped in mid-sentence to stare at the steamy bowls. Her eyes had turned off, gone inward; the set of her mouth was tight and disgruntled. He didn’t blame her. Without any sauce, her Buddha’s feast was nothing but vegetables and tofu; he couldn’t imagine how anybody could get off on eating that crap. He offered her some of his sweet and sour pork; she shook her head. “Rice?” he said. Again she shook her head. She began to separate the vegetables, creating small discrete sections on her plate—a row of bean sprouts, another of green peppers, another of carrots . . . “Are you a vegetarian?” he asked her.

“Not exactly.” She looked him in the eye. “Ray?”

It took him a heartbeat to remember that Ray was his name. “Yeah?”

“Don’t watch me eat, OK?”

“Yeah, sure. OK.”

She handled her chopsticks with deft expertise—picked up one bean sprout, put it in her mouth, and chewed on it. How the hell long, he thought, could it possibly take to chew up a bean sprout? She picked up a piece of green pepper. “We really need good theory now,” she said. “Can’t just go it on guts anymore. Everything’s got too fucking heavy and weird . . . Like what do you do with . . . ? OK, there’s the united-front line. And it’s worked up till now. Like you said, we really are all in it together and the pigs can’t tell us apart, but . . . Well, what about women and men? If the split comes along that line, what does that do to your broad base?”

The sweet and sour pork turned to a sour mass of sludge in his stomach. He watched her pick up a small square of tofu.

Before he could assemble anything to say, she kept on going: “Dig it, the relationship between women and men is the basic power relationship. Engels had it right. Everything builds from that. Everything. All the hierarchies all the way up to the repressive capitalist state. It’s fundamental, man. Basic. If you don’t deal with the oppression of women, you don’t deal with anything.”

She gave him an unreadable smile and that eloquent shrug he’d realized by now must be one of her defining gestures. “You want to hear how I’m hung up? The Collective’s far fucking out. I love the Collective. But about half the women in there are radical feminists, and they don’t want to have anything to do with men . . . shit, not even a cup of coffee. And the other half are Movement women, still attached to SDS . . . and they’re all Leninists.” She laughed.

“OK, and then there’s SDS. And I’m just so fucking sick of the male chauvinism in SDS I could puke. But we’re kind of . . . We’re trying to deal with it. We did elect Bernardine . . . but then she comes out with all this crap in New Left Notes. She thinks the women’s groups are bourgeois, says we’re flailing at our own middle-class images. Well, piss on her. She’s a great one to talk with her miniskirts and Italian leather boots, oh, so sexy . . .

“Well, nobody in the fucking NO’s a deep thinker. Their politics is like rudimentary, man, infantile. Most of those people who are running around now calling themselves revolutionary communists wouldn’t know Comrade Stalin if he shot them through the head. But it was good to see a woman in a leadership position for a change. And Bernardine is sexy, damn it. I don’t know what to think about that. Part of me wants to dump on her for it, and another part of me says, ‘Right on, sister.’”

If he sat there in stunned silence much longer, she’d probably notice, but he still couldn’t find anything safe to say. It was no wonder she had trouble with male chauvinism in SDS. Those pea-brained heavy macho dudes would never take her seriously—not with her child’s thin white face and her tons of inky black mascara and her twin ponytails and her hair ribbons—but he was taking her seriously, far more seriously than he would have taken any man. And that, of course, was a kind of male chauvinism too—he couldn’t let himself off the hook on that one—but no matter how seriously he took her ideas, he couldn’t imagine any way he could stop seeing her as female, responding to her on that level, balancing on the high bright tension of his desire.

“Sometimes I think the radical feminists are right,” she was saying. “At this particular historical moment we shouldn’t have anything to do with men. Not until we’ve got our shit together. Men . . . even well-meaning men . . . are just going to fuck us up. And then other times I think, hey, wait a minute, who says I can’t do both? Help build an autonomous women’s movement and work with men on something else? Something where there’s the possibility of theoretical agreement? You see, we get caught in this phony either-or bullshit all the time . . . But if the relationship between men and women is the basic power relationship, shouldn’t that be the place to start? Isn’t that what has to be totally transformed? You dig?”

“Yes,” he said, “I do.”

• • •

ONCE AGAIN he found himself running his old paranoid tape loop: Could she be an agent? It wasn’t impossible. Everybody in the Resistance had been fond of–harmless old Dave with his sad watery eyes and stringy salt-and-pepper beard and gentle smile. He’d told them stories about the Spanish Civil War and led them in chants of Om and turned out to be on the payroll of the Sheriff ’s Department. Then there had been that live-wire photographer Stan who’d showed up one day eager to work for the Weasel. He’d said he was on the staff at Ramparts, and he’d been so convincing he’d been hanging around for a month before some odd nagging suspicion had made John call Ramparts to discover that they’d never heard of anybody named Stan. When John and Ethan had confronted him—“OK, man, who the fuck are you?”—Stan had stuck to his story, but they’d never seen him again.

But wouldn’t an agent blend in more than Pam did? No, not necessarily. Both Dave and Stan had stood out. But would a real agent know as much as she did? Maybe—if she was a highly trained professional, an honest-to-God mole from some creepy agency deep in the shadows. But come on, he told himself—Cassandra’s line— paranoia’s got to stop somewhere.

They were in Pam’s minuscule apartment a short walk from Harvard Square—on the second floor of an old Queen Anne subdivided into student housing. Following her lead, he’d pulled his boots off at the door, had stepped into a space that was white and clean and uncluttered, everything in its place, not a trace of dust on any of the surfaces, not even on the hardwood floor. The light from the huge bay window would be wonderful in the daytime. There was no separate bedroom; a double bed was partially hidden behind a Japanese paper screen. He’d been surprised to see that the white bedspread was decorated with eyelet lace, and with that, he’d begun to pick up something more than merely a love of good order— something artful and planned, something peaceful, something he felt as intensely feminine.

She’d told him a few things about herself—probably because he’d asked her. She wasn’t an undergrad; she was working on her PhD in anthropology—which meant that she was a lot older than she looked. For someone who’d participated in the Columbia action, she seemed oddly proud of her school—or at least proud of her department: “Yeah, Boas founded it, Jules Henry went there. We’re really radical, man.” The only thing she still had left was her thesis: “And I haven’t written a word of it, not a single freaking word. I was going to do something on ballet”—ballet? he thought—“but then the historical situation pretty much blew me away. I don’t know,” with a wry smile, “maybe I’ll do an ethnographic study of the Movement. But then I think, why would a full-time revolutionary want a PhD?”

No matter where the conversation drifted, she always brought it back to politics. Now she was telling him about the Situationist International—some crazy French group that had been involved in the May Days. A couple of their books already lay at his feet waiting to go home with him. “Best stuff I’ve seen in a long time. Blew me fucking away, man.”

Was there anything she didn’t know? “Like Vaneigem says,” she was telling him, “the decision to live is a political decision. But then he says, like, why would you want to join a group that expects you to leave your dreams and desires in the cloakroom? So subjectivity is where we start, but if we stop there, then all we’ll have is a partial critique, and all partial critiques will fail as they have in the past. Like any illusion of totality will only maintain the totality of the illusion.”

She’d rolled a tight perfect joint and passed it to him now with the ritualized courtesy of the true pothead—if you roll it, you give it to someone else to light. As he dragged on it, he tasted the surprise of licorice paper. “So I’ll tell you my story, you tell me yours,” she said. “You start with, ‘I’m fucked up in such and such a way because of what happened to me.’ Like Laing says, the politics of experience. And we can figure out concrete actions to take right now, in this historical moment. That’s the beginnings of a council, man.”

He passed her the joint. She took a deep drag, held it. “Whew,” she said, expelling smoke, “it’s new every time.”

“Yeah,” he said, and it was new every time—the rush, the openings in the mind, the weird connections—so why couldn’t he just get behind it, go with the flow? Because he had a problem to solve—collecting clues, trying to fit them together until they made a grand pattern, one that would tell him clearly who she was. Under her old scuffed boots she wore not what anybody else would have worn—bulky athletic socks—but instead little white ankle socks; juxtaposed against the flaring cuffs of her jeans, her feet looked improbably dainty. Her voice commanded so much space, ran on so much energy, it gave her an enormous psychic presence, but she really was a small girl, so thin he couldn’t imagine her any thinner— and yet there was a bathroom scale by her bed. She couldn’t possibly be worried about her weight, could she? But maybe her scanty dinner in the Chinese restaurant had been part of some bizarre diet.

She was passing the joint back to him. He took it and dragged. It was good dope; his brainstem was smoldering like a fuse. Ah, and the whiteness in her apartment was nearly totemic—white walls, white woodwork, white sheers on the window, and all of that white reflected back from a full-length mirror in a white frame. But a pink—yes, pink!—throw rug, and, on the largest wall, a huge framed print of two pink flowers. A lavender vase filled with pearly grey pussy willows rested on the top of a white dresser. Floating mysteriously on the wall near her bed was a pale pink ribbon tied into a bow. The desk and the bookshelves were white pine. Over the desk was the picture of a lady from another era; she looked like a stern-faced schoolteacher, somebody’s long-dead maiden aunt. “You know her, man,” with a hint of a smile. She must have followed his eyes. She must have been just as keenly aware of him as he was of her. “That’s Rosa Luxemburg.”

“Oh, yeah? Far out. I’ve never seen a picture of her.”

“No, probably not. You can’t just walk into a store and buy one. Che and Fidel and Ho and Mao, yes . . . and even Stalin. Shit, can you believe it? You can even buy posters of that pig.”

He passed the joint back to her; she took it, held it. Looked away, her eyes focusing on some distant abstract point, her mouth pressed into that firm line he was beginning to recognize—signaling what? “Yeah. So when all those little groups start clumping together,” she said, “then we’ve got the beginnings of the councils, and when they begin to act, then we’re moving into the revolutionary moment.” She inhaled smoke, held it, blew it out. “And only then are we moving into a total critique.”

Her doggedness, her persistence, the way she kept coming back to some point she absolutely had to make—it felt compulsive to him, even obsessive, as though she was driven to it, as though she was required to sell him something. Wasn’t that exactly what an agent would do?

“That’s why I can’t just go with the radical feminists the whole way,” she was saying, “even though I’m sorely tempted. Because I want total power. Half the human race . . . well, slightly less than half . . . are men.” She seemed to have forgotten his turn; she dragged on the joint again. “But yeah, I’m tempted. A feminist separatist position is really attractive because it’s so goddamn pure.”

“Like some kinds of anarchism,” he said automatically.

“Yeah, exactly.”

Forget any hope of her going to bed with him; it was amazing that she was even talking to him—and who was he to be thinking about going to bed with anyone anyway? Flavored now like licorice, a waft of his old dark sorrow drifted toward him on the pungent weed, threatened him with the pothead’s ultimate nightmare—a fucking bummer. Scrambling for safety, his mind began talking to him, producing words and yet more words. Yeah, he probably was doomed to having a series of close women friends who were exactly that—friends—but never lovers. But why should that be? He didn’t know for sure, but it was somehow a given, and he’d been doing it for so long by now that it had begun to feel almost normal. In Toronto he’d had plenty of women in his life—friends, not lovers. Usually somebody else’s wife or girlfriend so she’d be safe. He liked women, liked being with them, and— Ah, and here was the dark center of the eclipse where he didn’t want to go— But anyhow, he’d rather be Pam’s Platonic anarchist comrade than not have her in his life at all. Unless, of course, she was an agent.

“But purity just doesn’t work,” she was saying. “The concrete historical situation is always a mess. Things happen every which way for crazy reasons, and you’ve got to be able to move with that.” And finally she offered him the joint. There wasn’t much of it left.

His eyes kept coming back to the painting of the two flowers. One was arranged in front of the other, partially obscuring it. The flower in the back was a cool bluish pink; the one in the front was a warm pink nearly the color of human flesh. Their petals swirled in curves that felt unabashedly sexual; their spiky centers were black and deep maroon. As he stared at the flowers, he began to sense that they were far more than merely decorative; they gave off an energy that radiated throughout the entire apartment—another clue.

The dope, or maybe the intensity of his need to understand her, had clarified his vision until it felt scraped clean, and then he flashed on it—the pattern. The lavender vase was an exact match for the hint of lavender in the background of the painting; the pearly pussy willows picked up a patch of wispy blue-grey in the painting near the left-hand bottom. The throw rug on the floor matched the warm pink; the strange ribbon on the wall matched the cool pink. If what he was discovering was true—wasn’t just some freaky solipsistic trick his mind was playing on him—then he’d have to find somewhere that black and deep maroon, and he found it. He and Pam were sitting on two basket chairs; both had been draped with a coarse fabric with interwoven colors of exactly that black and deep maroon. Hey, he thought, far fucking out.

She’d been talking—of course she’d been talking; she never stopped—but he’d lost track of anything she’d been saying. He didn’t care. “This is really trippy,” he said, interrupting her. “It’s like you built everything around that painting.”

He’d become used to her laugh—the wry cutting edge to it—but the way she laughed now was entirely different. Then, as though the full power of the dope had suddenly jumped her, she began rapping with the cheery abandonment of a whacked-out teenager: “Hey, man, far out, you’re the first person who’s noticed. Yeah, man, that’s exactly what I did. When I moved in here, that’s all that . . . Deb had left me the O’Keeffe. She’s an O’Keeffe freak, and she didn’t . . . She’s out in New Mexico now, in O’Keeffe country, you dig? Like she just looks out the window, and she’s got it, and it was supposed to remind me . . . She keeps telling me I’ve got to get out of the city. Carcinogenic, man, like the city makes nothing but war. So anyhow, the walls were white. I crashed on the floor and woke up in the morning with all that beautiful light streaming in, and I thought, OK, here’s where I start my new life in Boston. White and O’Keeffe. Everything will be organized around that. Do you like it?”

“Oh, yeah. I love it.”

“Not too bourgeois for you?”

“Oh, hell no. It’s peaceful. What the hell’s ‘bourgeois’ mean anyway? Who says it’s bourgeois?”

“Oh, I get shit from some of my girlfriends . . . Oops. Women friends. But I’m allowed to say that because I am one.”

Her eyes were looking directly into his, and he couldn’t look away. He felt like . . . a deer in the headlights, a snake in front of the charmer . . . Jesus, what corny images. Her hazel eyes picked up the colors around her; saturated with white, they looked as eerily pale and luminous as the morning star. “You’re the first man who’s ever been in here,” she said.

He wished to God he could fight clear of the dope. Everything was tangling up. His fear was a physical entity, was ice. “Thank you,” he heard himself saying.

“You’re welcome,” she said in a voice that was a mockery of his distant formal tone. He saw again that glitter he’d called “amusement”—although he knew now that’s not what it was. “I feel like I should curtsy,” she said.

If she was an agent, he thought, she had to be the most unlikely agent in the entire history of American espionage.

“You don’t give away much, man,” she said.

Now was the time to leave. He could find a way to do it, something to say. They’d been talking non-stop for—God, over five hours. It was getting late. He couldn’t take much more. And, in a freaky flash, his mind gave him the same phrase it had when he’d first met Natalie so many years ago—this girl is special. But “special” didn’t even come close. Yes, that sickening bittersweet intensity, that melodramatic teenage madly-in-love downward spiral he hadn’t felt since Morgantown—go ahead, asshole, jump over the edge, who gives a shit if you splatter on the rocks?

There was something else, of course, something obvious: she radiated an eerie boy-girl luminescence—like Cassandra at fourteen, Natalie at seventeen. Then he knew it was himself he didn’t trust, his ability to deal with any of this shit, because that part of himself he’d been trying to forget, or at least bracket off, still sometimes wished he’d been born a girl. So what he should do, before things got any weirder, was get up and walk out—but if he did that, what would he win? He’d be protecting himself, that’s all. He’d be safe—just another male chauvinist pig who couldn’t take her seriously. Right. But how much more seriously could he take her than taking her at her word? What if she’d meant exactly what she’d said: “If the relationship between women and men is the basic power relationship . . . isn’t that what has to be totally transformed?” He could hear his own heartbeat like a dim thump at the bottom of a lake.

“My name’s not Raymond Lee,” he said. “My name’s John Dupre. I’m a draft resister. I went to Canada in sixty-five. Worked with the Toronto Anti-Draft Program. I came to Boston after Chicago, and I’ve been here ever since . . . I’m not sure why. Just that I’ve got to do something, although it never feels like enough. I write my pieces in the Weasel. Just like you, I try to figure everything out. Before I got . . . How’d you put it? Blown away by history? . . . I was working on an MA at York. I was a musician, for Christ’s sake. I had a damned good life in Canada, and most of the time I wish I was back there. I’m on the FBI wanted list, and if you’re an agent, I’ve just fucked myself good.”

“God, you must really trust me.” And then, in a little kid’s involuntary gesture, she slapped her fingertips against her lips. Her eyes had never left his.

“Yeah, I must,” he said.

“Thank you . . . Now I feel like I really should curtsy,” and, blowing his mind yet again, she rose to her feet and did exactly that.