Russell Banks - The Darling

A trusting, utterly honest woman, Carol was small, almost child size, with urchin eyes, wide, round, and dark. Stubborn like a child and willful, she was always exactly who she seemed and claimed to be, my extreme opposite, in a way. To her, I was the distant, gruff, skeptical woman a few years older than she whose presence in her life kept her from falling in love again with the kind of man who would beat her and cheat on her, a man like her daughter Bettina’s father. Though she had been on the streets for years, I was more worldly than she, skeptical and sharp edged. “You make me stronger than I am,” she used to whisper to me, and I would say, “Cut the shit, Carol. You’re as strong as you want to be.” And it was not “Dawn” that she called me, but “Don.” Sometimes she wrote it in little love notes left on the kitchen table for me to find when I left the house early for work, while she slept till Bettina woke her for breakfast. Good morning, Don. I wanted to wake you up when I got in but it was too late and you looked too peaceful asleep. I’m off tonight so let’s go have a cookout at the beach when you get home. XXX

Neither Carol nor I was a bona fide lesbian. We were just sick of men, and lonely. We’d both gotten to the same place, but by rather different and class-specific routes. A mill-town bad girl, Carol was homeless and hooked on speed by fourteen; married, pregnant, and abandoned by sixteen; turning tricks for rent and food money by eighteen. I was a veteran communard by the time we met, someone whose bourgeois sexual conditioning and power structure had been attacked and revamped by months of group critique, group sex, and recreational drugs. Carol and I both, in our own way, just wanted to be alone for a while, and that’s what we provided for each other, a comforting solitude.

For the first year and a half that we were together, I was only marginally a Weatherman, filling coded mail orders for phony IDs and passports, a specialty I’d developed in Cleveland and was able to practice easily in Boston, thanks to my job at the hospital, which provided opportunistic access to the IDs of the dead and dying, and a flirty friendship with the teenaged kid who ran the hospital print shop. I was able to think of myself as a revolutionary, but didn’t have to put myself at high risk.

Then one night, after I’d put Bettina to bed. Carol was working at the bar, and I was as usual flopped on the mattress on the floor of my room in the apartment, a book-cluttered sanctuary from which I had barred both Bettina and Carol. “This is where I work ,” I told Carol. “It’s where I read and write and think , and those are things you do alone, in private. It’s like going to the bathroom, taking a shit. You understand?” She understood. I was reading — who knows what, probably Franz Fanon or Régis Debray — and listening to music on my portable stereo, classical, I’m sure, because Carol hated classical. It made her insecure, she said, and I only played it when she was at work, because I couldn’t stand her insecurity sometimes.

I remember at one point, very late, I dimly heard the door buzzer from down the hall, a steady, unbroken, irritated noise made by someone kept waiting too long. This was more than unusual. We never had uninvited nighttime visitors. The police , I thought, the FBI, U.S. marshals — oh, Jesus, the pigs!

I panicked and looked around my room, suddenly seeing it with a cop’s eye. In a shoe box under the bed: aha! a batch of unfinished phony IDs and half a dozen stolen Massachusetts driver’s licenses. And in the dresser drawer: an ounce and a half of marijuana. And over there on the table: a spiral notebook with the names and addresses of four or five people who’ll find themselves being interviewed by the FBI tomorrow. Stupid! Stupid!

There was someone banging on the door now, and a man hollering my name, my real name, “Hannah! Hey, Hannah, open up!”

So it wasn’t the cops. I tiptoed down the hall to the door and listened. Silence. Then a man’s voice, “Shit,” and an audible sigh.

“Who’s there?”

“Hannah? Hey, it’s me, babe. Zack.”

“Who?”

“Zack Procter, for Christ’s sake.”

“Jesus! Shut up. Are you alone?”

He laughed. “Yeah, I’m alone. Lemme in.”

I jerked the door open, grabbed his sleeve, pulled him inside, and shut and locked the door. “Asshole!”

“You’re hard to find, babe, but not that hard.” He talked as he walked ahead of me down the hall to the kitchen, dragging a large army-surplus duffel and carrying a paper bag that he set onto the table. “Dawn Carrington, eh? Where’d you get that one? Sounds like a character from a TV soap opera. Want a beer?” He pulled a six-pack from the bag, opened a bottle for himself, and sat down at the table. He studied me, a mocking smile on his face, took a long, slurping pull from his beer and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “Oh, man, I needed that!”

I watched him from the door, my arms crossed at my waist. Zack was even thinner than he’d been in college, and his face had turned craggy, wearing a new set of vertical lines on either side of his mouth, as if he’d actually done a little suffering in the intervening years. But it was only a fresh mask, I decided; he still looked like a gleefully defiant boy.

“You shouldn’t have called me Hannah,” I said evenly. “I’m glad my roommate isn’t here and her kid’s asleep.”

He apologized in that easy way of a man who knows he’s quickly forgiven, and asked if I’d like to know how he’d found me, which in fact I did, but hadn’t wanted to ask. He explained that he’d bumped into a couple of old Brandeis SDS contacts who’d stayed more or less out of trouble but were still politically active in the Boston area, and they’d put him in touch with New York Weatherman, people who, he said, took him in and really turned his head around on what’s going down here in the States. From them he heard about my having been busted during the Days of Rage pillage and riot three years earlier and that I’d gone underground, was still more or less Weather, and camped out here in New Bedford. He said word had come down from the Weather Bureau that he should come here and crank up a functioning cell with me, generate a little more action than manufacturing phony IDs. “So I went to Detroit for a crash course in bomb-making, which was cool, and caught the Greyhound for New Bedford,” he said. “They told me about the Dawn Carrington bit; it’s not that big a secret, babe, which is why I figured if I called you Dawn you’d freak and think it was the pigs or something, but if I called you Hannah you’d definitely open the door for me. Maybe you oughta change your name again, babe,” he said and drained the bottle. “Sure you don’t want a beer?”

“Yeah, okay, give me one,” I said and sat down across from him, believing about half his story.

Gradually, Zack brought me up to date on his life. “Changes, man, big changes.” After his tour as a Peace Corps volunteer in Ghana, he’d taken our generation’s version of the Grand Tour. Though he didn’t say it, I knew he’d been financed by his trust fund as he drifted through most of the Third World, with extended stops in Tangier, Calcutta, Nepal, and Thailand for drugs and enlightenment, shorter visits to Saigon, Mexico City, and Havana for politics, and had ended back in the States, convinced that a worldwide revolution was inevitable and imminent. For Zack, the introductory music for the Revolution had already been struck up, and the theme song was “Street Fighting Man.”

“The past is prelude, man, and the prelude has passed. We’re in it now!”

Around two in the morning, Carol came home, and I introduced Zack as my cousin. From his extreme height, he splashed kindly attention onto her, and she responded with surprised pleasure and quick affection, and when he asked if he could crash at our apartment until he found a job and a place of his own, she readily agreed, without so much as a sideways glance in my direction.