3.

Claire balanced a tray with four glasses of Tang and four Wonder Bread sandwiches as she walked into the den. If she didn’t feed Jill and the boys they’d eat nothing but potato chips.

“Tonight’s about draft demographics,” Jill was saying to the other three—Lawrence, Carlos, and Bird—who were sprawled on the floor and couch. They’d been arguing over whose speech to use at their rally that night.

Lawrence plopped himself dramatically on the couch. “I worked hard on that speech.”

“Me too,” Bird said, pulling his long hair down so it shielded his eyes.

Then Carlos started dancing in the corner of the room. He did the Twist and the Jerk and the Mashed Potato. Often, when tensions rose, he would lie on the floor and wriggle.

Jill ignored him and said to Lawrence, “We’ll use your speech at the next rally. All right?”

They would go on like this until everyone conceded to Jill. But they were content in their roles: Carlos designed flyers and banners and called himself art director. He’d even created a logo for their collective: an outline of Cassius Clay’s head that he stitched onto each of their black masks. Bird was responsible for direct action, calling government officials at dinnertime, posting Carlos’s flyers. And Lawrence was on media, clacking away at his op-eds on a typewriter set up on the den floor.

Carlos was Puerto Rican. Bird was Jewish. Jill was Italian. Lawrence was a Negro. These boys could not have been more different from one another, but even now Claire had a hard time telling them apart. They were inseparable. She called them the Lost Boys in front of Mary. But they weren’t lost.

Her Village apartment had been transformed into the temporary headquarters of their small, rogue collective. She’d stressed “temporary” and had agreed to let them stay until the divorce hearing two months away, no longer.

Claire set the tray on the coffee table and the four said thank you in unison.

It looked as if a bomb had gone off in the den—clothes strewn over the couch, sleeping bags piled in corners. Large strips of fabric with black paint cloaked the backs of chairs. They slept through the afternoon, drank enough beer to sustain an army, and smoked marijuana and cigarettes all day, the windows shut against the cold—all paid for by Bird, unbeknownst to whomever sent him his allowance. But Claire imposed no rules. She wasn’t their mother; she wasn’t anything to them.

Freddie would have hated their cheap beer and smoke, draped as thickly as their rubbish over all the furniture. But she no longer linked the apartment to Freddie. She had re-associated every corner of it; her memories of him, even in their bed, had been overwritten. Claire could just imagine Mary stumbling in and thinking she’d mistaken the address, but Claire hadn’t had Mary over in many months. Her home may have been unrecognizable, but it felt more like home with the boys. There was movement; there was purpose in the air.

“Hey, Claire—you like Elvis?” Carlos asked between sticky bites.

“Yes,” she said, leaning in the doorway. “As a matter of fact, I do.”

All four burst out laughing. “Hey,” Bird said, “Claire likes Bubblegum!”

“It’s not Bubblegum. I like nice music. Like Joni Mitchell. And the Beatles. Not whatever you had on yesterday. The Jugs.”

“The Fugs,” said Lawrence.

They laughed again and she couldn’t keep from smiling. “I’m going to the library for a few hours. Don’t set the couch on fire.” She was a regular at the Sixth Avenue library, where she was attempting and failing to teach herself family law.

Jill raised his sandwich in cheers and grinned at her. “We’ll get to that legal stuff later this week, you bet,” he said, then turned back to the Lost Boys. “Make the poster say two a.m. in the park under the hanging tree.”

Claire left them then. The less she knew, the less Freddie and his legion of lawyers could hold against her if she was found out. And she didn’t want to hear the rest, who they were meeting, what plans. Other young men in black masks, illicit but harmless enough, draping peace flags from the rooftops of office buildings or rallying in front of a politician’s apartment. They always came home smelling of sweat and spray paint.

Jill was the oldest of their gang at twenty-four. He told her he’d flunked out of law school while he was getting high. “Harvard Law,” he’d said with what Claire swore was a touch of pride, despite his disdain toward that lifestyle. He’d offered to help with Claire’s divorce settlement but hadn’t yet found the time. He’d never taken the bar but advertised himself quietly in Village coffee shops as unofficial counsel for draft deferments. There was something thrilling about his confidence and the moodiness that seemed to accompany it. After yelling himself hoarse at a rally, or giving the boys one lecture or another, he would sometimes lock himself in the bathroom, first making sure the others didn’t need it. Claire tried not to imagine what he did in there. Perhaps he only needed the quiet.

The fact of his youth alone reminded her of the older man she’d met at the Goethe Institute: at forty-two, she was nearly right in the middle of both their ages, as old to Jill as the man was to her. Jill, a quarter the man’s age, had the same passion for dissent as the gray-haired man had for Wagner and Bordeaux. “You know nothing about your wine, do you?” the well-traveled gentleman had said at a reception. Claire pretended to be offended, then went home with him that afternoon, rubbed against him while it was still light out. Then he took her to the movies: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Elizabeth Taylor was fat for it, and on her fifth husband. Claire said so and the man laughed. But with his hand on her thigh illuminated by the screen, nothing much was funny. She could see more clearly in that dark theater than she could in his uptown apartment with floor-to-ceiling windows and all the sunlight money could buy. She could see so clearly in the dark: this is my life. She wanted to leave, but it was the middle of the movie.

He called her a thinner, better Elizabeth Taylor. She pouted and said most people thought she was a rather plain Lauren Bacall, which was partly true—though Freddie was the only one who’d ever said so, and only once. Claire lay naked on his sofa under a thin quilt not meant to be used. He cooked her dinner, which no man had ever done for her, borscht and brisket. And the next morning he woke her up with Wagner and danced her around the living room and said she made him feel young again. To which she laughed and said, “I’m not young.” And he said to her, “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know anything. Not even wine.”

She stayed with him for three days. He fed her well, as if he knew—a stray, a temporary home. Then he flew to Europe on business and the next time they saw each other nearly a year had passed, too much time, and they smiled across the room and that was all. A silent pact to erase a week. To disengage a memory, to unknow it.

The painting was under the bed. Most nights she would peek at it before going to sleep, a new ritual. It lay on its back, facing her back, and she could swear she felt it like a body, with arms and other parts breathing underneath her.

A week or so into their stay, Claire was walking past the bathroom door when Jill flung it open, startling her. She was terribly afraid he’d think she was spying on him, hovering there in the hall.

“Can I run something past you?” he asked, as if they were in school together, not the door to the toilet.

Claire cleared her throat. “Yes, of course.”

Jill glanced quickly up and down the hall, then grabbed her arm. “Come in here.” Before she could object, Jill pulled her inside and closed the door.

“Read this.” He shoved a copy of The Sad Gay Life into her hand, a paperback novel he must have taken from her bookshelf. His face was inches from hers. She could smell something like clove in his hair. She glanced from the cover, to him, back again. “No,” he said. “Not the book. This.” He flipped to a blank page in the front, now veiled in penciled script. She squinted at it, but could hardly begin to mobilize that portion of her brain. “I know, my handwriting. But I’ve been hammering out this idea,” he said.

“I don’t think I’m the right—” Claire tried.

“It’s like this. So what if I’m not an artist? I know art. At least, I know what I like. And you know how I feel about the war. And these rallies. We can really do something here.” He stopped talking and waited as if he’d asked her a question.

“Yes, I agree. But I don’t understand what…”

“Right. Sorry. I forget sometimes that you can’t read my mind. Feels like you could.” He smiled sheepishly at her. Claire hung her head over the book, shielding her red cheeks with her hair. “It’s like this,” he went on. “I think the real success of this movement has to come from art. That’s how we’re going to reach people. But not cheesy, obvious art like you see at marches. It has to be bigger than that. Like the Surrealists in France. A whole political movement that started with art. We’ve got nothing like that here. Just a bunch of freaks on the street. That’s how they see us, even the middle-class pacifists. They won’t join. They’re too scared. They think it’s just some drugged-out youth movement. It’s not. It’s a people movement.” Jill let out a breath, like he’d been holding onto those words for ages.

“So art could bridge that gap,” Claire said. “But I still don’t see how I would be much use. Have you talked to Carlos?”

Jill’s face sunk. Claire wanted desperately to say something smart and useful and unique. Something to meet the expectations that she didn’t know he had of her until now. He looked proud, and spent. She had to say something.

“I might know someone,” Claire said before she could stop herself. “An artist. She used to live in the neighborhood. Very influential. I heard she was a Freedom Rider.” Jill perked up a little. “But I don’t know that we’ll unearth her. It was a long time ago.”

Now when Claire sat with the painting each night, she dared herself not to think of Nicolette. Running her hand along the canvas, perhaps ruining the painting with the oils of her fingers, but she didn’t care. She laughed at her own strangeness. But she felt comforted by the painting, its new proximity. Like an old lover she didn’t know she missed until they were near once again.

Of course, as soon as she tried not to think of Nicolette, there was no stopping it. Claire often wondered where she was, what adventure. She seemed only to imagine Nicolette in exotic landscapes—beaches, old fortresses—never close by. Perhaps this kept Claire from looking her up, imagining she was unlocatable.

But as soon as Claire became aware of her own daydream, she would cover it with the drop cloth of a more immediate worry: whether she’d be able to pay the electric bill this month.

Bird was on the phone in the kitchen and his back was rocking. Claire paused in the doorway.

“I’m fine. Yes, I’m eating. Is Dad going to get the operation?” he said forcefully, as if he might lift off the ground had he spoke with less weight. There was a pause and then, “If you don’t tell me I’ll kill you.”

Claire had never heard Bird speak like this. He was always the playful follower. Being the youngest seemed to make him feel special.

“I won’t kill you,” he said, softer now. “I’m just mad. I want to know. Call me if Mom says anything. Promise…cross your heart…I don’t hear you crossing your heart.” A leaden sigh. “Yeah, yeah, I love you, too.” Bird set down the receiver, breathing shallowly.

So they had worlds outside of this apartment, this movement. They had problems and people and anger and other injustices to contend with.

Claire stood where she was, couldn’t make herself move toward him. She could so easily lie and say, “Little Bird, it will be all right. Nothing is so bad in the end.” But there seemed to be an invisible shield around the room. She couldn’t go forward. She couldn’t be good. Her bag slipped from her shoulder with a thud.

As Bird turned toward the noise, Claire slipped down the hall to her bedroom, away from him. She heard him call after her, “Who’s there? Carlos? Don’t be a jerk.”

Why couldn’t she be good?

Taking a cue from Jill, Claire found respite in the quiet of her bathroom. She needed to better herself, she felt desperate in that. Perhaps if she looked happier. In the mirror, she made a face like Julie Andrews dancing in the Alps, that doltish, open-toothed smile, those dewy eyes. But it wasn’t her face. Claire put on her rarely worn eyeglasses and studied herself. She’d always been told her eyes were beautiful, cat-like, until she was forced to hide them behind frames. When she noticed the lack of compliments, she’d stopped wearing them, only to get lost in her own neighborhood.

Still, something had shifted since Freddie. Around these boys, she could see the change more clearly. She smiled more freely, laughed at their impressions of LBJ, and of Claire, too—Bird got her pout right, and the way she said, “Be careful, use a coaster,” though she’d given up on that after their third day.

But it wasn’t enough. She was no good to anyone.

Claire went back into the kitchen and found Bird still sitting there, deeply concentrating on his Coca-Cola. “My father isn’t doing so well these days either,” she said from the door.

Bird turned to her and she sat down beside him. He played with the condensation on the bottle. “Does he need to have an operation, too?”

“No,” Claire said. “I don’t know what that’s like.”

Bird only nodded. Then he slid over his sticky, half-finished soda. An offering.

Whenever Claire walked home from the library in the fresh air with a touch of spring, only to enter the muggy dungeon of stench the boys had built up around themselves, this thought entered her mind: where were the women?

When she asked why they never invited girls around to help out, and that she couldn’t imagine none of them had girlfriends, Bird replied that girls were gossips and might spoil their covert missions. Lawrence flicked Bird’s ear and said that what Bird meant was they wouldn’t take risks if they cared about girls. “What if they got hurt because of us? Better to have just men,” he said. And Claire asked, “What does that make me?” Jill shrugged and said that if she wanted more women around, she should find that artist she’d mentioned.

“I’ve looked,” Claire said. “I can’t find her anywhere. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

Claire had, in fact, cracked open one phonebook. Nicolette wasn’t listed.

At the kitchen table, Jill’s toe touched the arch of her foot and stayed there and he gave no sign that he even noticed. Claire glared at the papers spread before her, smothered in legalese.

“If you don’t get some coffin-dodger for a judge,” Jill was saying, “it’s possible just to get your separation converted. Still, might be easier to go down to Mexico to get divorced. If your husband—ex-husband—if he can afford it.”

She moved her foot away, careful to make it seem as if she were not moving her foot away.

“With the apartment, you have a chance,” he went on. “You’ve been living here alone the past however many years.”

“Seven,” Claire said. The boys were playing the Fugs in the other room. Nothing, nothing, nothing, the lyrics rattled. She didn’t like this new song.

“He owns it nominally, but he’s got a new apartment—”

“Equipped with a new girl.”

“You haven’t met anyone?”

Claire stood and rummaged through the junk drawer, looking for a pack of cigarettes. “Can I borrow a smoke?”

Jill took out his pack, beat it on his palm, and handed her one from the middle. He lit it for her as he spoke. “He should be paying your legal fees, do you know that? You have to ask him for ancillary relief. You shouldn’t be representing yourself.”

Claire laughed softly.

“What?” Jill asked, as if she’d laughed at him.

“To represent yourself. You can only do it in a court of law.”

“If you get a lawyer, this could all work out for you, Claire. The wife’s usually favored. Unless there’s some scandal you don’t want unearthed.” Jill chuckled awkwardly.

“What about the painting?” Claire asked.

“What am I supposed to say? You won’t even let me see it.”

Claire walked around the table to close the blinds. It was getting dark.

“It was a gift?” Jill asked. “Allan commissioned it?”

“Who?”

“Your ex-husband. Allan.”

“Oh. He never went by Allan. That was his legal name. But, yes, he commissioned the portrait for my birthday.”

“A gift is considered personal property, not marriage property. So you shouldn’t have a problem. Taking it from someone’s wall like you did, I mean, that might be used to prove some sort of prior unstable behavior, but it shouldn’t mean he gets to keep the damn thing.”

Claire sat again, smoking quickly as if it would burn out. “I paid someone, a long time ago, right after it was painted. I paid someone to destroy it. Obviously he didn’t.”

“If you’d just let me see it, Claire.”

From the den, the lyrics drifted in, Nothing, nothing, nothing, lots and lots of nothing.

“How can I help you if you don’t tell me anything?” Jill stood and started pacing. “Maybe they’ll argue the painting reverts back to him, then. If they can prove it’s a gift you tried to get rid of. And,” he looked down at her, “who knows, Mrs. Bishop, they might hold your silence against you, too, because, because you’re too silent. To me.”

Jill stopped his pacing abruptly and headed out of the room. He paused in the doorway. “What did you call him? Your husband. Will you tell me that?”

“Freddie,” she said, looking down at Freddie’s handwriting.

Jill stood on a small stool under the arch of Washington Square Park. They’d managed a good turnout—three hundred people at least, Claire guessed. She stood on her tiptoes and saw Mary a few feet away and waved to her. They smiled and embraced, muscles rigid in the cold. Claire didn’t know how to hold her friend with that pregnant belly in the way. It was eight months large and it irked her. Claire pretended to listen to Jill with his megaphone, but she couldn’t force her eyes off Mary’s swollen profile, the loose white shirt that fell around her in a way that made Claire think: summer. Something about the scene made her want to flee.

“Dear, he’s talking about you,” Mary said.

“Don’t say that. He is not.”

“‘Anonymous women who give their souls to the cause?’ You’re right, that can’t be you.” Mary rolled her eyes. “You do know those boys are madly in love with you.”

“Oh please. I’m old enough to be their grandmother.”

“You spend an awful lot of time with them. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

Mary’s tone was arch, but she wasn’t smiling. Claire didn’t know what to say, except, “They live with me.”

Mary studied her, forming some conclusion Claire was certain she would have been insulted by. “I should leave,” Mary said.

Claire didn’t know why she had been avoiding Mary—ever since she’d started showing. Mary had only cared to share her pregnancy with Claire when she couldn’t hide it any longer. She’d waited so long to tell her. And that had hurt.

But Claire didn’t have room for it now, or time. She didn’t have what it took to simply stand beside her friend. Claire struggled to say, “So soon?”

“I thought it was going to be a small rally,” Mary said.

“It’s good, don’t you think? They need the numbers.”

“I don’t want the baby to get hurt at a peace rally. It would be too ironic to bear.”

As if to prove her point, a man leaned out of his fifth-story window overlooking the park and yelled, “Commie criminals!”

Claire grimaced. “Of course. They don’t need me here. I’ll leave with you.”

They inched out of the crowd. “Walk me to my place a ways?” Mary said.

“Oh, I would. I should go home. The hearing’s only a couple weeks away. I can’t tell you how much reading there is to do. Anyway, better if you take a cab.”

“That’s right. The hearing. I should have known,” Mary said. “And here I am, worrying about my baby.” She stopped walking and turned to Claire, one hand on her belly. “You haven’t even asked how I am, Claire.”

“I didn’t? I was going to,” Claire tried.

“Forget it.”

Mary turned north to hail a cab. Claire backed away, nodding stupidly, and walked into a group of pigeons—they flew up and toward her, too dumb to fly away.

The house was empty. She needed a few moments of quiet. But there was nothing quiet in her head, hunched over her divorce papers at the kitchen table. She was furious with Mary for her self-righteousness, for saying those things to her. None of it was true.

The door—she heard it open and close and thought, just for a moment, that it was Freddie. That was the life tucked inside these files, all those nights in the kitchen alone, hearing the sound of coming and going that had nothing to do with her.

She could feel him behind her but she couldn’t turn around. Jill stood for a while in the kitchen doorway before asking, “Are you okay?”

When she didn’t answer, he walked up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She imagined his hands moving up her neck, down again. She could imagine it all. How his skinny body would be clammy against her own, his freckled arms around her in her bed. He was so thin.

“I wrote that speech for you,” Jill said.

She opened another file. “I can’t understand this,” she said vaguely.

“I’ll help.” He was still touching her shoulder. With his other hand, he reached around her to close the file.

She turned to face Jill. “The man I asked to destroy the painting—he’s the superintendent here. We were involved.”

“I can help,” Jill said again. He hadn’t seemed to hear her. Then he leaned in and kissed her.

She did not move toward him or away from him. She stood perfectly still. His lips were sticky as he pulled away.

“I’m too old for you,” she said. “I don’t want you talking about me at your rallies.”

“That’s not true,” he said, taking a step back.