Would it be better to be honest? He used to try, quite often, to get her to come. He was not bad at it. He would slip down beneath the sheets and stay there until it was done. He seemed to enjoy himself — perhaps feigning for the same reasons she did, perhaps not. She didn’t fake orgasms. No reason to. When he used his mouth she could have them quite easily. Sometimes so intense and shaky that she couldn’t believe they came from within her. But it still didn’t matter. She also did this for him. She didn’t really care if she had the orgasm. She would just as soon have gone to sleep. Because in a way an orgasm is mostly a physical thing, which doesn’t necessarily have to do with desire. Desire was more complex: a desperation and a need you felt before, an imagining and then a realizing during. It required mind and body. Her body was just fine. Her imagination — well, it failed her most of the time.
She wondered if she felt this way because she still longed for Bobby. Because she still, after all these years, remembered his smell, his taste, his touch. Mostly she remembered wanting him deeply. She could also still remember when she had wanted Augie badly. But her desire for Bobby continued, that was the difference. And there was the question: Did she still want Bobby because things didn’t have time to dwindle and disappear the way they did with Augie? Or was it just different, did she just love Bobby more? If she’d met Augie first, would she pine for him? It occurred to her that her shutdown, her unfeeling state, could not last indefinitely. He would catch on, or she would grow too impatient, and it would be over.
Sometimes when she lay on her bed, she considered that there was no longer any point in not giving herself up. She knew she could dwindle only so long and then she would turn herself in after she had made the freedom part of her life as lifeless as any incarceration could possibly be. “There’s no escape.” Yes, but not for the reasons you might think.
When August reached for her, she would order herself to think of her early times with him. The rainy afternoon she visited him at his job site, a large country house. He took her hand and led her into the woods behind the building. Despite the rain, they leaned against a tree, kissing and pulling at clothes. He yanked and adjusted her and then she was on him, both of them clothed and aching for it. She could remember all these moments in her head; she could not remember them in her body. She could not get them to live in her skin, between her legs and then to a shivery platform of interior nerves, forcing the tiniest of anticipatory contractions, the floor of her muscles already quivering. She could not conjure that.
She knew she should change her life. She felt herself to be in such a diminished, subtracted state. It even occurred to her that it might be the name itself — Louise Barrot. She believed taking the name of a dead infant had colored all her possibilities, tinted everything with morbidity. She knew also that the dead infant took on more significance for other reasons. Her underground status had convoluted all context — the fact that she could change her identity so completely changed the very possibility of engagement, or precluded the possibility of real engagement. She regarded everything and everyone from a distance, both ephemeral and abstract.
After a few months of dustiness that progressed into a low-grade disgust for her life with Augie, he began to speak to her about their future with great specificity. Amazingly, Augie had developed a real attachment to her. But it just made her feel trapped, circumscribed, desperate. People with real freedom never do really “free” things, like reinvent themselves, leave lives behind, change everything. Only trapped, desperate people did that. It took such coldness and will. She thought of it constantly. Rephrased it to see if she could find some comfort in it. Not go to jail. But surrender. Resurface. That sounded good, as though she had been drowning underground. She could yield, retire, repent.
She could see her family again. But she would have to go to trial. She would have to convince them she was innocent, which she wasn’t. Repentant? Perhaps. Regretful? Definitely. Or she could make a speech, say she wasn’t sorry, say she’d do it again if she had her life to live over. And then she would certainly go to jail for a long time. Especially if she didn’t give any information about the others, which of course she could never, ever do.
But could she even take a stand? Because the truth of it was she wasn’t sure of the tactics they had chosen, or of the consequences. There wasn’t moral clarity. The truth was she even doubted the intentions, the motivations. This was tragic, a great, terrible tragedy, to do something so clearly full of consequence, so irreparable, and then to have such foundational doubt.
She would stare at the rain outside their bedroom window and recite the narrative of what had happened. She considered, as accurately as she could bear, what exactly she, or they, had done and why.
Bobby had taken convincing, hadn’t he? He wanted to make his movies and leave it at that. He was frightened of action. And she convinced him. It was mostly her, wasn’t it?
Bobby had shown the group the latest of his “protest” films. These were meant to be polemical propaganda pieces. Credited to the SAFE collective, the film really was made solely by Bobby. They sat on the floor, four of them, in the dark, as he ran the projector.
The glare of the sun on the street in unforgiving Kodacolor. An old man leaves his house. He walks to his car. Cut to the same old man walking on the street. He squints at the sun. He is unaware of being filmed. He is outside a monolithic International-style building. He enters, and the door closes behind him. We see again, the same thing, in excruciating real time, the old man walk to his car. We see him leave in the morning, squint in the sun. The camera is stalking him. The third time through the filmmaker appears, or a man one supposes is the filmmaker. He approaches the old man with a hand mike.
“Excuse me, Dr. Fieser?”
The old man looks at him and scowls. He shakes his head.
“Can I ask you a question?”
The old man speeds up.
“Why would you invent napalm? Why?”
The old man stops and turns to the filmmaker. He stares at the microphone and then speaks.
“I am a scientist. I solve problems. I don’t ask what use they are put to. That is not my job. That is the politician’s job.”
“What domestic use did you imagine jellied gasoline could possibly have?”