I’m sorry if that spoils the reunion. No, I’m not sorry. Talk about divorce if you really like, if you think that these are sufficient grounds. But I truly believe that we do not have to pay for what she’s done. She has to pay. You can’t save her. And now I’ve proven it. Our negotiations with Mock are over? You’ve missed the point all the way through. It’s the negotiations with our daughter that are over. If you’d use the good sense God gave you, you’d see that’s what she’s doing. Playing games because she can. That’s the whole point of this revolution of hers. Send a nobody to try to collect twenty thousand dollars in exchange for a telephone call or quick visit. Well, I’m on to them. Guy Mock overplayed his hand.
And I’m not quitting the damned Board of Regents either.
SARA JANE MOORE HAS a grilled cheese sandwich, coleslaw, and a 7-Up arrayed in front of her on a flattened brown paper bag. See, the problem is that white bread grills faster than wheat. There are added sugars in the white bread, reason enough to avoid it, and so it causes the bread to brown quickly. It’s a fact of nature, a process named caramelization that she learned about during one of the many desultory and unfocused stretches she’s served, this one at an institution called the Western States Culinary Academy. So the cheese is barely melted when they remove it from the grill, see? She phoned in the order, stipulating wheat. Made the man read it back to her: wheat. The sandwich is delivered to the office where she’s temping as a general ledger accountant. White.
She’s looking at a copy of Silver Screen that the girl she’s replacing for two weeks left behind. On Sara Jane’s first day, the girl had sort of shown her around the desk. “Training her,” as she put it. She’d introduced her to her collection of stuffed animals perched and roosted here and there on her desk and in the empty spaces of her bookshelf, making the introductions with solemn formality. “This is Sir Jenkins,” she’d said, “this here is Daisy.”
She’s reading about The Tragic Truth Behind Peter Duel’s Suicide. “He was an actor on the way up, with money in the bank and his clean-cut cowboy image in just about every young girl’s heart.” Sara Jane doesn’t really remember the young man’s show, Alias Smith and Jones. Happy western buddy-buddy stuff, men patting the hindquarters of horses?
Lois Kane of Silver Screen just doesn’t understand what could lead such a young man to shoot himself. The roots of his mad act simply are not visible. To Sara Jane this is hardly a matter of mystery of the week. It is so easy to feel hemmed in, unappreciated, underutilized, taken for granted.
The young man was crazy about ecology and hated pollution. “He would not use plastic cups on the set — only glass ones. He would not use anything that would not dissolve and go back into the earth.”
Sara Jane tosses the sandwich into the wastepaper basket. She speculates that the young man probably felt that he’d thrown in his lot with the wrong people. It can be a very difficult situation. Someone seems to want you, to need you, and it is natural for a warm and friendly person to respond to that in kind. And then you find out it was all a put-on.
Speaking of guns, Sara Jane has one right here. She’s been carrying it in her purse lately. She hasn’t needed it so far but you never know. People are still mad about Popeye. But he had put her on. Thomas Polhaus had put her on. But you needed protection.
Five minutes later she’s on the street, getting into her car. Mrs. McCarthy had sneaked up behind her, Do you need something to do, Are you looking for something to do. If you need something to do just speak right up. Whatever she’d said. Office manager drivel.
Speak right up. “Train” her. Like she is a spaniel or hound, begging for dinner table scraps.
Just looking at that gun gave her the courage, the nerve, to tell that McCarthy bitch off and walk out, past all the dumb faces of those drones working there. She forgot to get her time card signed, but that’s OK. The gun makes her feel better about that too. Money becomes so abstract, the nitpicky refuge of the chickenhearted, at the uplifting sight of a gun, its pure power to convert whatever you need or desire into something you actually have.
NIETFELDT HAS A ONE — BEDROOM apartment on Lupine, a little spur off Geary. The building is built into the side of a hill, so that his third-floor apartment is reached by entering the building’s lobby and walking down a flight. The whole building is low ceilings, long corridors, right angles, dark corners, and the thin institutional smell of ammonia. Utterly claustrophobic.
Gradually he’s turned into one of those men with great bundles of dirty laundry piled in the corners, leftover pizza in the refrigerator, old newspapers on top of the stove. For someone else the rooms would be a rebuke, the embodiment of his seclusion, the measure of his digression from the norm, but for him this is the norm. So his wives had discovered. Anything else would be cosmetic, a disguise. Still, he avoids the apartment as much as he can. Checks in long enough to get the mail, put it on the table.
Tonight he takes the time to open a beer and have another look at Joan Shimada’s file. Here’s a new wrinkle. Susan Rorvik’s logged eight trips to Soledad over the last three years for the purpose of visiting William Clay, Joan Shimada’s former lover and comrade-in-arms. He finds that in the Shimada file, right in front of his face all this time. If that were the only connection between Susan and Joan, Nietfeldt wouldn’t be all that impressed; a steady stream of pilgrims from the East Bay have gone to call on Willie Clay. What has impressed him is the discovery that working side by side at the Plate of Brasse with “Susan Anger” is a certain Meg Speice. Speice is a Jersey girl who was a dead end in the Shimada investigation three years ago. She admitted then that she and Joan were friends but that Joan had long since gone on her way and she hadn’t seen or heard from her. No reason to think Speice was lying in 1972. But now she pops up here in San Francisco right around when the summer hidey-hole had to have been abandoned, working side by side with a known SLA sympathizer with links to Guy Mock. His chain is looking longer and stronger.
He has the vague feeling that he’ll regret it, but what he needs is to have an agent in Southern California head out to Palmdale to pay the Rorviks a visit. He could go himself, but Gary Haff was extrasensitive about getting his toes stepped on. Brilliant work he’d done on the case last May. Just brilliant.
Summer Chronicle
The women’s collective meets, possibly for the last time as such. The members have decided to set aside their work for the time being to pursue more absolutely the goal of revolution, in keeping with Teko’s intense desire to begin blowing things up.
On the agenda is the matter of prostitution. They are attempting to decide if sexual entrepreneurialism is liberating, oppressive, or simply retrograde. Tania, “troop scribe,” as Joan has dubbed her, jots down the minutes.
Susan suggests that a woman who is in business for herself, who controls the means of production, is more correct, politically, than one who’s been turned out by a pimp. Cf. her own experience as an actress v. her experience waiting tables; oh there are some quite long reminiscences.
Joan speculates that in the socialist or barter economy that might exist in an emerging postrevolutionary state, such “entrepreneurs” might then be politically obliged to stop seeking payment for their services and thus be placed in a position of slavery all over again, trading sexual favors for subsistence. She seems to enjoy lobbing such near paradoxes into their midst.