Mahatma Gandhi?” She jerked the electric blanket tighter around her shoulders. “I don’t like what’s happening since we moved to Santa Fe, bud.”
“Meaning?” Pressing his lips against a belch, he raked the tips of his fingers through his short hair.
“Your games with women. Two years ago, after we signed the deal for this place. The lunch that Maxine Morgan and Ron bought us at the Great Books Cookhouse. I should have stayed alert.”
“You’re saying what?”
“How you spooned blackberry flan from her dish.”
“What the hell, Boodie.” It was the name he’d given her after she’d startled him, leaping around the corner like a blonde cricket at Sun Microsystems in Silicon Valley, where she’d edited Sun’s employee newsletter.
The sharp sweetness of blackberries filled his mouth; again he saw Maxine widening those violet-smeared eyes at him.
“And telling Ron Kirkpatrick’s wife at the homeowners’ meeting how you love blue flax. You mean loved her unbuttoned blouse. She’s an easy ten years older than us, Manny.”
Tenderness swamped his insides. He loped around the foot of the bed, pulling Joyce’s mop of blonde hair against his stomach. He felt her shoulders sag, and for the moment didn’t care that she’d decided to let the hair of her armpits and legs grow.
“Boodie, it’s your breasts I love, especially when you rub them on my cock and face.”
“Your flirting scares me. So does wanting us to quit drafting marketing newsletters for Sun and Hewlett-Packard and Cisco. What are we supposed to do, live on the settlement from my divorce?”
“Chuck’s diversified me into green stocks and municipals. I’m in good hands.”
“You’re as naïve as he is. He may be fine as your CPA, but with investments Chuck Ridley’s a fool.” She freed her small head from his grasp and pushed him away. He staggered to the wall—its rough plaster pricked his back. “Stocks are tanking, it’s the deepest bear market in thirty years. We’ll have to sell this place.”
She clutched the sheet to wipe her eyes, then faced him. “We’re planning marriage and a baby before I’m forty-five, aren’t we? I should be ovulating midweek. Moving here makes me nervous. Okay, we got desperate. Christ, in every Bay Area garage some geek is lying on a cot scheming how to infect our lives with nanoelectronics. And I know your therapist suggested you go—don’t stand so far away from me.”
He crossed the four feet between them, plopped on the bed, and threw his sweatshirted arm around her waist. “We’ll cut our spending, Boodie. I won’t need to fly to San Jose for editorial meetings anymore. No hotel bills.”
“Naïve. Hey, I’m tired, too, of grinding out newsletters. And I’m sick of writing poetry. What’s the point? I told Allie at lunch today I want a life of muesli to prepare for the baby. But we can’t afford muesli. Meanwhile, you stir up trouble next door and fantasize I don’t know what about women.”
“Enough, Boodie.” He swallowed against another belch. His gut was crimping and, though clothed in sweats, he’d begun to shiver. The furnace must have quit for the night. “I gotta get my robe.”
He was on his way to the closet when he heard her cry out.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s that scrabbling noise again!”
“Switch on the lamp in your basket.” He yanked his red-plaid robe off the closet floor. Now that a couple of journals wanted to publish her jeremiads, she planned to stop writing? With the Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz axis of evil turning Christian fundamentalism into a world crusade, she and he needed to march, wave signs, and register Democrats to boot out the Bush cabinet next year. She needed to publish all the antiwar poems she could.
“Hear it?” She pointed above the water stain that darkened the wall between her poems. In the brown wool socks she slept in, she bounded from the bed and stood beside the night table, where her book of Sanskrit meditations lay.
“Seems the beast can’t decide which poem to settle down over.”
She mussed her blonde hair, laughing.
What a doll—why her patent-lawyer husband left her for a legal aide with two sons he couldn’t imagine. Except that Joyce couldn’t get pregnant by him. “If Stu decides not to march Sunday, maybe he’ll come help find where the beast’s wriggling through the tarpaper. I wonder what eye patch he’ll wear this time?”
“Who knows—how can we sleep with that noise?”
“We can’t. I want to show you something.” He moved to the bookcase near the stairs, reached below her volumes on nutrition to where he kept his jazz CDs, and yanked out a three-ring binder. He padded to the tattered armchair that had been her father’s near the sliding glass door that led to the lower roof, and flicked on the floor lamp.
“Come here.” He patted the red wool plaid covering his thigh.
“I don’t like this alpha-male habit you’ve developed since leaving the Valley.”
“What habit?”
“Giving me orders.”
“Sorry; you’re right.”
Her buttocks warmed his lap. “What happened to your cheek?” she asked, touching the rawness with two fingers.
“Hey, don’t! I scraped it trying to scramble out of Maxine’s high beams. Forget that. See this?” He flattened his hand against the binder’s cover. “Chuck downloaded it: Rebuilding America’s Defenses. Published in two thousand by a think tank called The Project for the New American Century. Paul Wolfowitz is a member.
“Seventy-six pages laying out why nothing is going to stop us from manhandling the Middle East. Does Bush believe Saddam has weapons of mass destruction? He knows Scott Ritter’s UN team got rid of them in the mid-nineties. Rebuilding America’s Defenses says we’re going to force peace through economic globalization, backed by expanding military beachheads in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. Use designer weapons like nuclear bunker busters and mini bombs.”
“Christ, Manny!”
“The Bush bunch wants to pummel the Axis of Evil, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan into cobbling up American-style democracies. All it takes is persuading two billion followers of Islam to change their faith. Is that crazy? You and I have to do something.”
“Like letting air from Ron’s tire?”
“We ought to let air from the tires of all the American-flag gas-guzzlers in Santa Fe, cop us a slot on TV.”
She jumped off his lap, clamping the light-blue flannel to her chest. “Who’s crazy here? We left your stomach cramps from too much cranial mania back in Palo Alto. Didn’t we? Count me out of your activist dreams, Manny.”
He stiffened and shifted his eyes toward the glass door.
“What in the world?” Joyce whispered.
They
