But he had no problem with his feeling for Joan. He wanted to live with her and they agreed to by the end of their first week together. To his amazement, this caused some difficulty. Louise didn’t approve, nor did Ann; they thought he was too young. Louise worried that Joan wasn’t serious and a quick affair would disturb Richard, while Ann felt it was Richard who would quickly desert Joan. He was enraged by their opinions. Joan was used to this kind of self-important advice and went off to have lunches with them, unperturbed by Louise’s probing questions or Ann’s analysis that Joan was refusing to grow up. She told Richard about them and was surprised by the fit he threw.
“That’s just like Louise. She’s a dumb jerk!” She laughed and he stared at her. “I’m serious. Do you know that because she knows I’ve had big fucking arguments with my father, she apologizes to me for any contact she has with him.”
“Babes, you’re being incoherent,” Joan said.
“Look. When we were there for dinner yesterday, remember? She had a letter from my father, a perfectly normal letter. You said look how neat his handwriting is and she said, ‘That! It’s so uptight.’ And she looked at me as if I would approve. And then when that friend of theirs asked if I would be going to Vermont during the summer in order to write, she said that I had a hard time writing when living with my parents.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“She said it. And I don’t know how she got that idea.”
“You shouldn’t let that bother you, sweetheart. That’s the way she is about everybody she likes. She’s very protective.”
“Oh, come on! That’s egotism. I don’t understand why when people are finished having dinner they don’t pay her fifty bucks for the therapy session that’s thrown in.”
Joan didn’t like his sarcasm about Louise and he instinctively shut it off. They were having a love affair, he realized, and he followed its mood. They had breakfasts at three in the afternoon and dinner in the middle of the night. He liked the isolation they fell into and he didn’t lose his secret pride in being able to fuck for months.
When they finally did go out, they went to Leo and Louise’s apartment. They always seemed to have guests, most of them political people. His experience with Mark had taught him to be careful with them; he did so because he wanted their respect.
So he listened and gathered rather quickly their rules of behavior. The men never generalized about women and no one generalized about Third World people. Though Joan would occasionally joke about the absurdity that calling all females women could create—I saw two nine-year-old women skipping rope—it was a major sin to call an eighteen-year-old a girl. Relationships with men were dubious: he was terribly embarrassed one evening when an intense young woman said that she would never get into that fucked up isolated trip with a man, where you don’t go out or see anyone else for months. She was a member of Joan’s group and she looked at Richard when saying it. He worried about it and immediately said no whenever Joan asked him if he minded that she had to go out. He went so far as to ask her if she was seeing enough people, but he stopped that when she looked at him as if he were mad.
He watched his brother when the women talked liberation and followed his lead. So when the story was told that two women just out of college had decided to be gay and live together, he behaved as if this was great: nodding and smiling along with the others, though he couldn’t figure out why Leo and Louise seemed constrained in their approval. But when he found out that one of the women, a month into the lesbian relationship, had begun vomiting whenever she went out and had developed such severe psychosomatic symptoms that she had started going to a psychiatrist, he couldn’t contain a slight outburst, “That’s terrible.”
“Well, her father has really fucked her up,” he was told, and he accepted it as fact, repressing the obvious conclusion. He forced himself to believe their interpretation.
He told himself these were necessary failures. There were so many successes. Joan, Louise, and Ann had a freedom of expression that other women lacked; they faced the world and didn’t put on the coy ignorance that being chauvinized apparently produced. He had great respect for them, and since they credited the women’s movement for their openness, he was careful about his attitudes toward it.
And then Mayday, the massive demonstration on Washington, was called. The talk about it was depressed: people spoke of the repressive Nixon regime and the heavy busts they expected to come down. Richard was too scared to go. He imagined the brutality others described happening to him and no amount of self-goading could overcome his terror. He expected Joan to be disgusted with him but she was just as frightened and had no intention of going. But having company didn’t lessen his shame at being left in New York with the reactionaries and the apolitical young while the good and strong people were gassed and jailed.
So Richard insisted that they go to New Haven in the spring to support Black Panthers Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins while the jury was deliberating on their case.
They were driven there by Leo and Louise, and his tension about it was dissipated by the strong feeling that they were just sightseeing. When they pulled up in the large square that faces the courthouse and Richard saw people milling around a wooden platform with a large banner saying, FREE BOBBY AND ERICKA, it seemed just like the picnic that Mao says politics isn’t.
They went out and sat on the grass, people coming over to talk with Leo, everyone watching the police watching them. Richard was excited by the experience and he chatted away happily. “Look,” he said, and pointed to the line of police across the street, their helmets a deep blue that reflected the sun. “I’m disappointed that there’s no swelling music to accompany them.”
But no one else was having fun. A friend of theirs, Salvatore, came over and said, “It’s so depressing. There’s nobody new here.”
Louise objected and introduced Richard. Salvatore’s kinky hair was a tall bush that the sun lit up. “Hi,” he said, and stepped back to give a quiet gesture with his fist. “Salvatore. Panther Defense Committee. New Haven Branch.” Everybody laughed. Richard couldn’t get over it. It was the first time he heard the machismo that the Panthers inspired being mocked.
Richard expected someone to deliver a speech because of the continual activity on the platform, but nothing happened until he heard a cry that the jury was leaving, and suddenly swarms of people crowded the sidewalks that faced the courthouse.
He didn’t understand why the sudden shock of activity had started. The police ran up and down the block, stopping traffic at both ends of the street and lining up opposite the demonstrators. A big yellow school bus had pulled up in front of the pretentious steps to the building. A moment before there was a soft breeze, the quiet broken only by occasional bursts of laughter from the relaxed picnickers. Now, in a steady exhilarating roar, a jammed mass of people waving banners were chanting, “Free Bobby! Free Ericka!”
Behind the barricades the police had put up to block traffic, Richard could see the respectable citizens of New Haven looking slightly bored. He couldn’t understand that. The chanting was strong and real, the whole mass raising fists in unison and roaring for Bobby’s and Ericka’s release.
“What’s going on?” he yelled at Louise in between shouts.
“We’re doing this for the jury when it goes out,” she said.
A group of people to their right began another chant. They named members of the jury, exhorted the blacks to support their brothers and sisters, and gave specific advice to the whites according to their professions. This caused a fuss. Leo and a few others were approached by a Panther leader, and after a brief conference they went over to that group and told them to stop. A few did but others kept it up. Then a voice boomed out over all the noise: “Listen! People! The lawyers have told us not to use the jury chant. It scares them. And it may have a bad effect.” Richard turned and saw a young black woman saying this over the loudspeaker system hooked up to the platform. The chant stopped and Richard heard Salvatore say to Louise, “Those fucking YAWF people.”