The demonstration was centered on that plant entrance. It spilled out to cover the entire road, protestors weaving in their ragged oval, waving their signs, shouting their catchphrases, while local police and private guards contained and controlled them, and the television crews moved and shifted around the perimeter like sharks around a shipwreck. Scuffles kept breaking out in the middle of the action, drawing more observers and participants, but then snuffing themselves out; it was to no one’s advantage to let this confrontation get out of hand, move beyond an acceptable predetermined level of hostility. No side wanted to harm its reputation in Washington and Albany and on Wall Street, where the real decisions would be made.
On the right, the land was wilder, scrubbier, with more underbrush and more visible dead branches or the remains of dead trees. The power company owned this land as well, to protect itself, but didn’t bother to manage it. The shoulder on that side, opposite the plant entrance, was broad and weedy, with a shallow ditch. It seemed to Susan she could leave the blacktop and make her way around the demonstration without getting caught up in it. The alternative was a detour of about fifteen miles, and Grigor was already very tired. She’d chance it.
Up close, the sights and sounds were ugly. Passion and righteousness twisted the faces of the demonstrators, while leashed animal rage froze the faces of the police and guards, and the faces of the TV people bore the placid untouched evil beauty of Dorian Gray. Though the car windows were rolled up, Susan could plainly hear the lust for carnage in all those raised voices, like a primitive tribe psyching itself up to attack another village. Blinking, she drove at a slow and steady pace, the car slanting into the ditch on the right, bumping over the uneven ground.
“They’re right,” Grigor said, looking out the windshield. He sounded unlike himself, bitter and angry and defeated.
They were nearly past when another quick outbreak of violence occurred, just beyond them on their left: a sudden release of pressure, boiling over of rage, like bubbles in lava. Police wands swung, wedges of protestors moved and swayed, and a TV cameraman looking for a better angle backed directly into Susan’s path, forcing her to stop.
She was afraid to sound her horn, not wanting to attract the attention of any of the participants, and while she was waiting there, growing more and more frightened, two people came reeling out of the scrum, a man and a woman, supporting one another. Or he supporting her, his arm around her waist, her hand on his shoulder. He looked up, saw the car, and as he raised his free arm in supplication, she thought, Ben! What’s he doing here?
But of course, it wasn’t Ben Margolin, whom she hadn’t seen since college, whom she’d been madly in love with for one semester (and part of a second). Still, that instant of false recognition predisposed her in his favor, so she nodded as she met his eye, and gestured for them to come to the car. The woman, she could see, had a short diagonal cut on her forehead, a line of dark red blood, straight on its upper side, ragged below, like a line in a graffiti signature.
The TV cameraman moved closer to the action, out of Susan’s path, as the man who wasn’t Ben Margolin opened the rear car door, helped the woman in, and piled in after her. Susan immediately accelerated, bearing down hard on the pedal, the car jouncing, rear wheels spinning before catching hold.
Grigor had the box of Kleenex tissues out of the glove compartment, and had twisted around to offer it to the woman, who gave him a baffled look, then shakily smiled and took two tissues. She was about thirty, dark-haired, exotically attractive, not thin.
The man with her didn’t really look much like Ben at all, except that he was tall and blond and big-boned. But he had a very different face, more open and easygoing and friendly than Ben’s. (Ben had been a tortured intellectual.) He said to Susan, “Thanks for getting us out of that. I think it’s gonna turn bad.”
“It already did turn bad,” Susan said. Clearing the last of the demonstration, getting back onto the road, she could look in the rearview mirror at the woman daubing at her cut forehead with the tissues.
“Worse,” the man said. “Much worse. I’ve seen a lot of these things, I know.”
“You demonstrate a lot?” Susan couldn’t keep the frostiness out of her tone. She didn’t care about the rights or wrongs of specific arguments; all she knew for sure was, when people turned ugly and mean and violent they were wrong, no matter how noble their cause.
“I watch demos a lot,” the man said. “I’m a sociologist at Columbia. I was there to observe this thing, and then this lady got hit by one of the demonstrators’ signs—”
“It was an accident,” the woman said. She had an accent, rough but not unpleasant.
The man grinned at her, easy and comfortable. “I know,” he said. “You got hit by your own team. You still got hit, though. It was still time to get out of there.” Grinning now at Susan in the rearview mirror, he said, “Lucky you came along. Lucky for us, I mean.”
“Glad to help,” Susan said. Something about this man attracted her, but something also — maybe the same something? — made her apprehensive.
The man leaned forward, forearm on the seatback behind Susan’s head. “My name’s Andy Harbinger,” he said.
“Susan Carrigan. And this is Grigor Basmyonov.” She’d become quite practiced by now at saying Grigor’s last name.
They exchanged hellos, and then everyone concentrated on the woman, who looked up from dabbing at her forehead to say, “Oh, yes, excuse me. I am Maria Elena Auston.” She sounded weary, even sad.
17
It was no good. Nothing was any good. Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. Maria Elena’s head throbbed where the sign had grazed her. Riding in the backseat of the car with three strangers, alone in a land she would never understand, she felt sick, exhausted, and in despair. She couldn’t even take part in an anti-nuclear demonstration without being hit in the head by one of her own comrades.
She couldn’t do anything, right, could she? She couldn’t even keep her husband.
At first, it had all been so perfect. She and Jack Auston, together. In Brasilia, every day working with him, every night sleeping with him, his sexual interest a surprising delight, unexpected that such a quiet man could be so voracious in bed.
One day the necessary papers were signed at the city clerk’s office and with the American embassy, and then one other day they went down to the public register and were married in a private ceremony and went back to his apartment — she’d moved in some time before — and made love again, sweet love, and that was their honeymoon.
Jack then had two months remaining on his contract with WHO, and that was the most satisfying time of Maria Elena’s life. Her miserable first marriage with Paco was forgotten, her dead children nearly forgotten, her lost singing career no longer painful to think of, her self-loathing buried so deeply beneath this new self-assurance that she seemed to herself to be a thoroughly new person. And she was going to America.
Her happiness was so great in those days that she barely ever even thought about the original reason for wanting to go to America, for wanting to induce — seduce — John Auston into marrying her. Occasionally the memory would come, particularly when they were in the field at some especially horrifying site, but the fantasy had more or less shrunk from a plan or a hope back to the simple childish fancy it had originally been.
The first month or six weeks in America were dazzling and distracting, the town of Stockbridge in Massachusetts as alien to her as a different planet in a different solar system; yes, even the sun seemed like another sun. Learning to shop at those stores, to drive on those roads, to live in that house, had all been so heady and intense, requiring such concentration, that she couldn’t even count that time as happiness; she was too busy then to be happy. And also too busy to notice for some time that she’d lost Jack.