“No, I don’t.” She stared oddly at her purse. It seemed a foreign and ridiculous object. Then she was at a loss, fixated on the leather shoulder bag. Caroline forced her attention back to Berry and tried to think of something to say, something to keep the mood going. But she shouldn’t have worried, Berry would never allow conversation to lag for too long. She just needed to take another hit off the joint. Berry tilted backward in her chair until it hit the wall behind her. She smiled as she looked at Caroline.
“Well? Aren’t you going to tell me about the big heartache you seem so sad about?”
Caroline shrugged.
“C’mon, what’s the big mystery? Was he a married man? Was he a woman?”
Caroline sipped her wine. “He was a Republican.”
Berry giggled and coughed on the wine. “I have always had a thing for David Eisenhower, myself,” Berry said. “Or even Nixon. I’m serious. I watch him on TV, going down, angry, trembling, scotch on his breath, hunched in his awful suit. And I think I’m attracted in some perverse way. His repression—”
“Okay, enough.”
“Do you think I should bring that up at the next CR meeting? Oh, Mel, I’d like to discuss my sexual fantasies about the president.”
“I met him at a demonstration,” Caroline said.
“Where?”
“Berkeley. He was active in, you know, the usual groups. It’s like you always see the same people at the demonstrations. Well, he stood out. He was from L.A., but he became involved in the campus activities around San Francisco. He was very plugged into the scene, you know, everything I wasn’t.”
“I met Sandy at a demonstration. I picked him up the first time I saw him,” Berry said. She munched on a fat, cigar-shaped pretzel stick in between tokes and playing with her hair and sips of wine. Crumbs landed on her breasts, and she brushed them off without really breaking her chewing stride. “Do you want to know what I said to him?”
“Sure,” Caroline said.
“I seriously said this, Caroline. I’m not kidding.”
“What?”
“I said, ‘Do you want to come home with me and get high and screw?’”
“That was clever,” Caroline said.
“He didn’t say a word, just followed me right out of there.”
“You don’t say.”
“I was very pleased with myself. I just picked him and that was it. What is his name?” Berry spoke through her now soggy pretzel stick, still perched cigarlike in the corner of her lips.
“Who?”
“Your man. The heartbreaker.”
“Bobby.” Caroline was pretty high, and she also thought she just wanted to say his name, feel it come out of her mouth, hear it hang in the air for a second. But then Berry repeated the name, and when Caroline heard Berry utter it, she wished she could take it back. She felt the hollow in her stomach, then a queasy, drunk feeling. Berry smiled and waited for her to speak again. Fuck it, Caroline thought.
“He had a lot of creative ideas about the world. He was buoyant and possible in a way that most people aren’t. And he fell in love with me, which was probably the thing I found most impressive.” Berry crossed her legs on the chair and leaned forward. She looked pretty in the candlelight. They were listening to the latest Dylan “comeback” album, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Berry played “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” three times in a row. They both agreed it was the only good song on the album. Caroline thought Berry looked like the women Dylan wrote about, bejeweled and disheveled and bewitching, ornate in body and soul, or at least it looked that way from where Caroline sat, stoned and a little drunk.
“I never had a lot of men interested in me,” Caroline said.
“C’mon,” Berry said. “That’s not true.”
“No, it is true. But I wasn’t interested in a career in men. So it wasn’t a problem. I was interested in, well, society. Improvement. Moral perfection. I could have been a nun. But he was playful and passionate. Always very bright, and unfailingly convincing. And he had incredible confidence in his opinions.”
“Like what?”
“Like?” Caroline paused and collected herself. She shrugged. “Hmm. Like Dylan was great because he went electric. Or my Beach Boys records were shallow or even reactionary. Or that you should only smoke pot in a pipe. Or that the business world was more the enemy than the government. Or that you should be a vegetarian. He was certain of a lot of things. I was not certain, but I was learning to be. Anyway, I was certain of him, at some point.”
“So what happened?”
Caroline watched Berry get up and cross the room. She sucked at the pretzel as she walked and tossed the record she was playing on a pile of other uncovered records. She pulled out a Roberta Flack album and put the record on the turntable. She began to sing along to the music, looking at Caroline.
“I can’t talk about it yet. If that’s okay.” Caroline was too tired, too high to figure out how to lie or not lie at this point. “I can’t talk about it.”
There was a pause. Berry finally chomped down on her pretzel, chewed briefly and swallowed.
“The first time ever I saw your face,” Berry sang to the record and started laughing. Caroline also laughed, suddenly relieved, then sang with her a bit, laughing harder. Berry choked on bits of pretzel dust in her throat.
“I’m sorry,” she said, laughing even harder.
“No, it’s funny.”
“Love is very heavy,” Berry said, not laughing any longer. Caroline began to understand she could just not say anything, and people would make up their own lies for her. She just had to remember to say less and less. Say and do less and less.
In August, Caroline started up a tiny cafe at the Black & Red. She had been at it only a few weeks when Bobby came up again. Mel sat in the back office talking on the phone. She nodded as Caroline entered. Caroline looked at the books and newsletters on Mel’s desk. She must have had every counterculture rag in existence. The top paper was the issue of Rat with the infamous Radical Lesbian’s declaration in it. Caroline figured Mel had positioned it for effect. The cover was smudged and hard to read. Why must revolutions always have crappy type and poor ink quality? Why aren’t they beautiful? Mel finally said, “Okay, thanks,” and hung up the phone.
“Bobby wants you to know he’s okay,” she said to Caroline. Caroline felt her chest completely empty out.
“What?”
Mel just looked at her.
Just breathe in, Caroline thought, and say nothing. But she heard what Mel said.
“How did you know?” Caroline finally said, her voice choked.
“I didn’t know, I just suspected.”
“Did you talk with Bobby?”
“No, I didn’t. I think he was at a safe house in Los Angeles a while back, but I don’t know where he is now.”
Caroline felt enormous relief. He was safe somewhere. Then, more than relief, she felt suddenly hurt that he hadn’t really tried to contact her. That there really was no message. Some part of her believed somehow, still, that she would be in contact with him. And there was only Mel, staring at her.
“Look, I don’t want to talk about this with you. You are safe here for now. I’m the only one who’s figured it out. But who knows how long that will last. You better be prepared to move soon. You’re still hot, you know that, don’t you? You have to keep moving, especially the first couple of years, and everywhere you go you endanger what’s going on there.”