Betrayal

Emma’s boss waves a miniature flag to get her attention, and she pretends not to notice. “Got one just for you,” he says, and his tone assumes she is pleased. It’s the second time in six months he has handed out flags. Emma, as soon as he is gone, exchanges the new flag for the old, taped behind her computer. Her boss, who never did time in battle, collects images of war: the battlefields of World War II , Korea , Vietnam and lately Iraq . An explosion in mid-carnage faces her on the wall. Flags flanking the main entranceway make the workplace appear more like a consulate than the data-entry shop that it is.

Emma rejoins the charge of the keyboards, which is noisier than it seems it should be. Her boss finds a compatriot down the row of workstations and stays a while, his laughter rising above the clicking din. Emma thinks Martial music.

At break time, the middle-aged woman in the next station swings away from the keyboard and pulls out a cigarette she’s not allowed to light. Her voice has the easy tone of a running conversation. “Manny thought he was slipping in last night. He had tucked his pajamas behind the couch so I would think he had just gone downstairs if I woke up.” Emma is about to express sympathy, dismay, something, but the woman laughs. “I had exchanged them for one of my gowns. You should have seen the look on his face when he came upstairs. I thought he would puke.” She puts the cigarette in her mouth, then takes it out again, looks away from Emma. “What do I care what Manny does? The more he does, the more it means I can do.”

Emma smiles cautiously.

The woman fixes on Emma in a way that says it is time for reciprocity. “How’s Leon doing? Has he gotten any of his stuff published yet?”

Stunned by the question and its over-familiarity, Emma lowers her eyes and barely grunts.

“My cousin—I’ve told you about Clara, haven’t I?—works at Stage Front Repertory. She handles sales. Why don’t you get Leon to go by there? My cousin knows all the producers and directors. I’m sure she’d be willing to show him around.” She sits taller. Her eyes and smile widen, mimicking enthusiasm. “Maybe he could bring one of his plays.” She freezes the giddy smile, anticipating Emma’s reaction.

Emma is chagrined, resentful. She can’t believe she talked about that to this woman, whom she despises. “I’ll think about it.”

“Ask him.” The voice and manner now drip with indifference. “Well, I’m going to have a smoke.” The woman is standing, tugging at her slacks. “Don’t stay here all your break, dear. Get some air.”

The funny thing is, Emma reflects, Leon would probably go down to the theater with an armful of dog-eared plays if she told him about Clara.

That it is Friday means nothing to Leon , so it’s no surprise he hasn’t called. He probably doesn’t even realize it’s Friday. Weekends mean nothing to him, though he likes to believe that they do. On Sunday, he is just as likely to ask her why she isn’t going to work as to wonder on a weekday morning why she’s dressing to go out. As she attacks the keyboard again, it’s the idea of the weekend, the possibility of doing something of her own, that excites her and not thoughts of Leon .

Yet the first thing she does when she gets in the door that evening is to call Leon .

“So what are you doing?” is her opener.

Though she has tried to make the question sound like a throwaway, it meets with silence—the silence of one who, quick to think somebody is trying to pin him down, is quick to resist. She braves the silence for once, and he rises to the occasion.

“I’m talking to you on the phone.” With that, he laughs and goes right into what’s on his mind. “Have you ever seen that big empty theater up on Lancaster Avenue —”

She feels a letdown. “Yeah, what about it?”

“That place holds—um-m—maybe 1,000 people. I was thinking about putting on one of my plays there. At $20.00 a head, I could come out with some serious money.”

“Are you asking my opinion?”

She can feel his obstinacy through the wires.

“Not really, but go right ahead.”

“In the first place, that theater is a wreck. It’s probably condemned. In the second place—”

“Here we go with the list-making.”

“In the second place, what makes you think you can get 1,000 people to come see the work of a playwright nobody knows anything about?”

“That’s where publicity comes in.”

She ignores that. “What makes you think they would pay twenty dollars, or even one dollar? And even if they would, you haven’t factored in the cost of getting the place in shape, assuming you could borrow money for that, and paying the director and the actors and all the incidentals—like publicity, for example—and—”

“Whoa.” Hurt silence follows this declaration.

He’s done talking, Emma knows, even before he makes what she considers a flimsy excuse to end the call—with no mention of getting together. He doesn’t have any fight. That’s his problem. She is ashamed of the moisture that fills her eyes.

What happened, she wonders, to the yearning that made a trial of every moment she spent at the keyboard—that was so pronounced it seemed to have a spatial quality? Where is the thing she was putting off that she should be engrossed in now? She feels nothing more urgent now than the body’s demands for food, for touch, for sex. She puts her hand on the phone but hesitates, wanting not to be so low as to bribe Leon with an apology.

His mother answers this time.

“He just stepped out.” She sounds sorry for herself. “I don’t know when he’ll be back.”

To occupy her mind, which is threatening to become counterproductive, Emma turns on the television and makes a list of things she must get out of the way on Saturday before she can make the weekend her own: gift for nana, post office, beads.

She is stopped by a special news report. The war has moved North, with fierce battles raging in Afaq and Diwaniya. Sandstorms slowing the march to Baghdad .

Laundromat. Her spirits sink. She doesn’t want to spend any precious time doing laundry this weekend. Feeling unbearably burdened, she makes stray pencil marks around the offending word as if to blot it out.

Leon calls in the morning, delaying her. “Do you have to go to work?”

“It’s Saturday.”

“I know. You’re up early.”

She doesn’t respond.

“Have you had breakfast?”

“I had coffee.”

“I’m only a few blocks away.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we could have breakfast—if you want to.”

She hesitates. Something about the way he puts things always makes it sound as if he’s asking her to come out and play in the sun, where life will be easy and pleasant. Nothing in the words themselves, which are commonplace, but in the way he says them, something of himself that comes through. Some pathology, she thinks, and is amused in spite of herself, in spite of being disaffected as well.

She waits, and there is no follow-up, no request to meet him for breakfast at some little café, an enticement she would certainly give in to, abandoning her plans. Instead, she knows he is waiting for her to invite him over. “I’m on my way out the door,” she says, hoping this simple truth will work to her favor.

Leon pulls his sun in. “I have to meet somebody on the avenue. Maybe I can catch you later?”

“Maybe.”

After she hangs up, she puts on a yellow jacket in an act of defiance. Not just of Leon , but the overcast day, the special reports from Iraq , and her own sense of futility.

Downtown, Emma is surprised and offended that people seem no different than usual. A man in casual clothes walks by, talking to himself—no, talking on a wireless device. Two stout women in swinging skirts hurry into traffic, jaywalking, laughing. A courier wearing headphones maneuvers the sidewalks on skates, while a skinny girl in spandex strides confidently past, her long wig falling to her exposed midriff. Emma searches faces for one that looks as if it might have heard the special reports.

She reprimands herself. What does she expect—can anyone else see the face that her mind believes her to have?

She goes inside a gift shop that also sells beads. The two salesclerks, who never seem to be the same ones she has encountered before, stop talking long enough to eye her but then resume their conversation in softer voices, almost whispering. Emma feels an invisible leash about her person, held firmly in the clerks’ hands. She can’t bear it. Instinctively she looks back at the women, then away. They think I looked back to see if they were watching me.

“Can I help you with something?”

Emma is too guilt-ridden about things she has never done nor thought about doing to say just looking—to say, in effect, leave me alone—so she takes a few steps toward the salesclerks. “I’m looking for a birthday gift for an eighty-year-old woman.” Something specific tendered to loosen the leash.

One of the women points to the opposite side of the room. “We have some nice brooches over there—10 percent off. Or how about a scarf? They’re always nice.” She crosses her arms back over her stomach.

Bending over a case with brooches, all of them too expensive, Emma imagines Leon standing beside her, helping her select something. He leans over the case, his weight on one elbow, and she asks him not to do that. Like a small boy who is used to being corrected, he straightens up without changing expression. She can tell that, having stated his choice of what she should buy, he is impatient for her to take something, anything, to the cash register. She is glad he isn’t there.

Emma settles on an ornate pillbox and, after placing it near the register to verify her intentions, turns her attention to the multitudes of beads in bins along the back wall. Standing over what seems to her little miracles of color and shape and texture, she feels the first connection with the hunger that assails her at work and that mockingly dissipates when she is no longer there, returning full force only when there is no chance of dealing with it. The face that she has, making her selections (imagining the finished images), is one of her best, she is sure. She takes the beads to the register.

The hands holding the brooch have a slight tremor. “She’ll love that. Very appropriate. Should I gift wrap?”

Emma is watching the woman curl the ends of pink ribbon for the package when she hears drumbeats. She looks up.

“Parade.” The woman’s eyes stay on the ribbon. “They come through here all the time.”

“I love a parade.” The other clerk goes to the window. “I wonder what kind of day it is today?”

Emma goes outside, package in hand, and is surprised that seconds earlier she could hear so little of what is now evident. A motorcycle escort paces a raggle-taggle group of marchers, some chanting in unison and others shouting slogans in an uneven din. Dirge-like drums add something of alarm, heightened by the presence of more policemen, on foot and horseback, than the sparse numbers of onlookers would seem to indicate. There are no floats, only banners held the way children hold them in school programs, and cardboard signs like those sometimes held by the homeless and the shattered and the shunned, lone crusaders for causes both recognizable and undecipherable. Gay pride, housing, homelessness, AIDS awareness: these are the themes that pass through Emma’s mind until the marchers are close enough for her to read the banners and make out the shouts.

“Support the troops. Bring them home.”

“No more war.”

“No lives for oil.”

Emma backs against the store window. Looking around, she sees the two salespeople pressed against the other side.

A woman marcher raises a bullhorn: “Tell me what democracy looks like!”

The protesters are young, old, middle-aged. One round-shouldered old man wearing glasses walks with a slight limp, a homemade placard fastened to his back. Teenagers dressed in black cavort with deliberate lack of grace to the drumbeats, their pale faces contrasting with hair that is too black to be natural, their white limbs competing with tattoos and losing, piercings in their ears and eyebrows and noses and lips. A bearded middle-aged man commands a second bullhorn. Women in shirtwaist dresses or in baggy slacks hold their banners high on poles. Readable and unreadable signs go up barely above the heads of the crowd and then droop when their makers’ arms tire. Most of the marchers move silently along and carry no signs and have nothing about them that is out of the ordinary. Most are not markedly different from the people watching from the sidewalks.

The answer comes back from the marchers: This is what democracy looks like.

Emma has heard that call and response before, but encountering it now, chanted by protesters stretching as far as she can see, is exhilirating to her.

“It’s a disgrace.”

The voice is close by and familiar. Emma turns to see her boss, Saturday casual in shirtsleeves, waving a set of keys in front of his chest like a small flag. His voice is coarse with contempt. “Look at them. Can you believe it?”

Alarmed by his presence there, Emma looks quickly back at the marchers as though noticing them for the first time, her attention drawn by his words. She knows that her boss, as long as nobody does anything to contradict him, assumes that people around him think about things exactly as he does.

“They should all go to jail. Or,” he adds oddly, “be shipped to Iraq . They’re traitors.”

Emma keeps her eyes on the marchers, moving her head along with them for a moment and then back again in a kind of slow pendulum movement that she hopes her boss will equate with disbelief. He begins to yell at the marchers that they should be ashamed of themselves, which starts a back and forth with one of the placard-holders, giving Emma the opportunity to slip away. A couple of blocks removed, she finds it hard to believe that what she just left, with its passions, is really happening. The complacency of the traffic on all sides, on the sidewalk and street, belies it.

That evening, Emma lays out the new beads alongside the old in a plastic tray on the coffee table. Beside the tray she has lined up the tools of her craft, pliers and shears and tweezers, along with wire and a mat. The television set is off. She picks up a blue bead and a silver bead and holds them together, then puts the silver one down in favor of a darker blue bead of a different shape. The dark blue bead gives way to a black one. And so on. She begins to experience elation, with nothing having been decided, and, sighing a false sigh of displeasure, sits back to let it pass. Elation, she knows, is a treacherous sensation that will make everything she does seem wonderful, that will make tin a precious metal.

She has lined up several possibilities when the doorbell sounds, jarring her. She has known all along that Leon might show up despite their early-morning exchange. Now, although she is torn—she does and does not want to leave the beads, she does and does not want to spend the evening with Leon—she rises with hardly a look back at the beads and goes to let him in. “Why didn’t you call?”

His answer is to move his eyebrows a bit. On his way past, he stops briefly to look at the array on the coffee table but then sits on the sofa without commenting. Emma wishes she had put the beads away. At the same time, she has wanted him to see them, to let him know without telling him that she has other things on her mind besides him. Now that maneuver seems to have backfired as he makes himself comfortable and the wonder of the beads shrinks in the scheme of things.

In defiance, Emma sits and stares at her unfinished work, which means sitting beside him, but finds herself so distracted by his presence, which has shrunk the room and left too little space for herself, that the beads become little orbs of glass and metal that she could believe, if she allowed herself to, only a fool would take seriously.

“What did you do all day while I was running errands?” she asks, and is surprised to see that he appears lost in his own thoughts.

After a while, he counters, “What did you do all day while I was arranging to have one of my plays produced?”

She sits back and tries to read his eyes. They say Ah-hah, a triumph that allows him to answer her question, though he still refuses to look at her.

“I talked to some people,” he says.

“What people are those?”

His face fills with warmth, her misstep forgiven. “I met this guy who runs—or used to run—a theater in L.A. This guy is amazing, Emma.” He laughs a little. “He’s done it all—acting, directing, writing. Been on location in Mexico City —”

“So, what’s he doing here?”

“Get this.” He sits up. “He’s thinking about starting a theater right on the avenue. I told him to count me in, any way I can be a part. This may be what I’m looking for.”

“What happened to the theater in L.A. ?”

“You know how these people are—they don’t stay in one place. They have to keep moving. No, maybe that’s something you don’t understand.”

She lets the comment pass. “Who else did you see? You said ‘some people.’”

He shrugs. “He had a couple of roadies with him.”

Emma stares at the sofa fabric, swings her foot. “Well, we’ll see.” Her voice, like her enthusiasm, is lackluster.

Leon stiffens, then gets up and paces, his breathing unsettled. “You want to know what I did all day?”

It is clear he is upset, but Emma, watching him pace, is untroubled. She notes his general ungainliness—his premature paunch and the rounded effects on his upper body of years of indifference to posture. There is something of the small boy about him, a kind of naive but assertive energy that is both appealing and irritating. She acknowledges to herself her sense of superiority in the moment and is neither proud nor ashamed of it.

“I did what I do every day.” The resentfulness in his voice struggles with pride, and he pauses, perhaps to give the latter the upper hand. “I get up, get something to eat, talk with my moms, and then go for a walk.

“The other day I came across a turtle in my path. A turtle! How did a turtle get to a city square? Some kid’s parent must have tired of him and brought him there. Anyway, there he was, right in the middle of the path, tucked into his shell. He must have heard me coming and gone in to protect himself. It was funny. He probably thought no harm could come to him, and there I was with my big shoes standing right over him. I could have done anything I wanted to do to him. I could have squashed him. I thought that was really funny, him thinking he was safe.”

He hesitates and seems to search for the point of the story and why he is telling it, then picks up somewhere else. “Sometimes I sit in Rittenhouse Square and watch people—women with strollers, old guys playing checkers, joggers. Kids playing hooky. If I stay long enough, I feel like I’m disappearing. I like that feeling. I start hearing sounds really well, and then everything just cancels me out. I go with that for a bit, and when I come back to myself, I go over to Spoonie’s Place and write for a while.”

Pausing, he stares at the top of Emma’s head, which she is holding as if she has a headache. What he can’t see is that her eyes are fixed on the tray of beads. He says, “All of this is boring you.”

She is considering how far away the beads seem even though they are right there in front of her, with the implements, which she never got a chance to use, still in place. She remembers to shake her head. “I just don’t know what it means.”

Leon ’s chin goes up as he smiles. “See, I know that. I know you’re confused.” He circles the room again—“You don’t talk to me, Em”—and then goes back to sit beside her.

She is taking apart the combinations she created and putting the beads back in their respective boxes. After gathering the tools, she picks all of it up together. Leon rubs her back. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”

“You didn’t.”

He pats the sofa when she returns. “Come here, sit.”

What first attracted Emma to Leon was his warmth. His potbellied, sluggish warmth that seems to endear him to the moment, whatever it is. Now he puts his arm around her and draws her to him.

“Put your head on my shoulder,” he says. “Now isn’t that better?”

She tries to cuddle up to him but feels angular and alien against his amorphously warm-blooded mass, which, after the initial minutes, begins exerting a stronger influence on her than any antipathies she might have. He kisses her, and his hands begin to explore, urging her thoughts aside.

When she awakens after what seems longer than the half-hour she has slept, Emma goes into the kitchen and heats up a pot of chicken soup with vegetables. Soon afterward, she hears Leon get up, perhaps enabled by the odor of food. He would deny he was hungry if asked and would lie there famished forever, she is sure, if she didn’t make the first decisive move.

At the table, ladling the soup into a bowl as he watches, Emma is annoyed by the slightly idiotic, contented smile on his face which she thinks results more from his satisfaction with himself—a matter more of his lack of sophistication than of arrogance—than from anything else. She is embarrassed, too, to have to admit to herself that he is a good lover. It seems she should have cause to complain to herself about that as well.

Because she wants to get rid of the stupid look on his face and thinks some reference to the war will do it, she asks, “Did you see the protest march today?”

He keeps the look. “No, where was it?”

She doesn’t want to talk about it but pushes on.

“On Market Street . I don’t know where it started.”

“No, I didn’t see that. Did you join in? Aren’t you one of those people?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

His voice is flat. He doesn’t want to talk about it either. “I thought you were one of them.”

She hates the sarcasm.

“I always thought you were. You string beads and live in an arty neighborhood and all that.”

“You sound kind of simple.” She notes that he is spooning up the soup as though this boon is independent of anything else going on between them.

Leon wags his head. “Okay, I’m simple. I met somebody today who might be able to produce my plays. I have many more plays that I want to write. I was working on one just before I came over here. If that’s simple, then I’m simple.”

“No, that’s a non sequitur.”

Not looking at Emma , Leon pushes his bowl aside and then, with just the slightest bit of hesitation, gets up. “I had hoped to have a little relaxation with somebody I care about. Maybe share a few of my good experiences of the day.”

Emma has a vague sense of wanting to right things and another sense that she is justified in keeping silent even though she doesn’t want him to leave. She feels confused and empty. She has reneged on some pact with herself for the weekend, something she perceives through its defection and her resulting sense of loss rather than by any clear notion of what has been forfeited. Although she is desperate for Leon to stay and is sure he would do so with some encouragement, she can’t bring herself to stop him from going. And after he leaves, she waits for a while before she throws the bolt on her apartment door. Afterwards, she reflects that Leon is, if anything, more opposed to the war than she is, a fact that renders their vexed communication all the more silly.

He just doesn’t have any fight.

The beads hold no interest for her now, and nothing worthwhile is on television. She looks at her list and crosses off everything but the task she most dreads.

At midnight , there aren’t many people in the laundromat, even on the weekend. Emma puts her pre-sorted clothes and linens in the washers and goes to sit down on a long bench at the front of the room. Her eyes are drifting upwards to one of the three television sets mounted in the ceiling when she notices a small boy standing a few feet away, staring at her. She ventures a smile, and he responds in kind, turning his head aside in shy dismay. She is thinking to ask him how old he is when a woman looks up from the oversized wash she is dragging out of one of the machines—looks up first at the boy and then at Emma. She calls the boy, and something in her face and voice makes Emma feel chastised.

On the television screen, an attractive man in plaid shorts sits on a sofa explaining at length why he voted a certain woman out of the house he shares with the other participants. Emma listens for a while and then looks toward a farther screen where a comic is holding forth, eliciting canned laughter. She tries to make out the words and, failing, closes her eyes.

When she opens them again—it has been only minutes—overcome by self-consciousness and a certain anxiety that calls to mind Leon ’s turtle, the reality drama is off and the news has come on. There are oddly languid shots of the battlefield and an interview with an ex-general about the progress of the war. Then the focus becomes local, and the scene changes to one that Emma’s instincts respond to before her reason can sort it out.

At noon , on Market Street , a small anti-war protest.

It was not small , Emma thinks.

She sees the drummers again, and the young people in black. The camera picks up the message on a couple of banners and briefly shows a few marchers. Then the report shifts to the newscaster: “Some individuals along the route launched their own impromptu counter-protest.” His eyes shift off camera to the scene that now comes onscreen: Emma’s boss shouting at the marchers, and, before she can decide where else to focus, herself in her bright yellow jacket, more evident than she has cause to be, standing right beside him.

“They should all go to jail. Or be shipped to Iraq . They’re traitors.”

She sees herself raise her head to look up at him, then sees herself turn back to the marchers. But something else happens first, something she does not remember, something she can’t believe happened—something that, she tells herself, must have been manufactured. She nods, not once but twice, and not ambiguously.

To Emma’s chagrin, the camera seems to linger on those nods longer than on anything else. A woman standing nearby in the laundromat, leaning back against one of the washers, with her eyes also on the newscast, turns toward Emma inquiringly, and Emma raises her hand across her features, as if to blot them out.