Endless Love (28 page)

I was crushing my genitals as hard as I could against the sofa and I turned onto my back. The room was slowly brightening and I wondered if it was getting near dawn. No. The windows were still slate black. I got up on one elbow and looked down the corridor toward Ann’s room. I couldn’t see the door but I saw the light from her room, coming out in a thin, pale wedge and stopping about ten feet from where I lay.

Like any visitor, I’d heard a hundred strange, small sounds since I’d turned off the lights. Sounds from the street, from the wall, and I knew enough to pay no attention. But now, I heard a sound from Ann’s room. She was dialing her telephone. Slowly at first, with pauses between each digit, and then faster and louder. The clicking of the dial was like tiny footsteps racing from her to me. My first thought was that Ann was calling the police. She was going to tell them that someone who the court had ordered to keep away from her had broken his parole and was now sleeping in the living room.

I held my breath. There was silence in her room. Silence and more silence. The phone was ringing on the other end of the line. It couldn’t be the police; they pick up right away. I heard Ann shift in her bed and then I heard her murmur:

“Hello, Jonathan. It’s Ann. I’m waking you.”

A few moment’s silence, and then Ann’s voice again.

“I know it’s late. But I’m still awake. I am very much awake…. Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t call up to argue with you. I know it’s very late. You know I don’t do these things. You should know that I was worried about you.…I didn’t know if you came when I was out. Or maybe you decided not to show up after all.…It is? Oh. Well, I’m sorry-glad.…Jonathan. You’re way off target. I’m going to show you how uncomplex I am. Are you listening? I want you to get in a cab and come down here and make love to me.…Yes.…Do I
sound
drunk?…No. I’m not scared, I’m just lonely. But I didn’t call because I’m lonely. I called—…Oh Jonathan. You’re so well trained. Everybody knows what time it is, Jonathan. And we are all acutely aware of your commitments tomorrow morning.”

She hung up. A moment after that she turned off the light.

But a minute or two later Ann turned the light on again. She picked up the phone and began dialing what I guessed was Jonathan’s number. Don’t do it, Ann, I said to myself. Please don’t do it.

In the middle of the fourth or fifth digit, with the dial still clicking in its arc, she dropped the receiver into the cradle and turned off the light, this time for good.

A moment after that, I was unconscious. The last thing I saw was the change in the windows: the glass had turned a flat grayish blue.

11

The next morning I was up long before Ann. The windows were brilliant with sunlight; the dust on their outside looked like a kind of electrical gauze. I crept about like a burglar, wondering if I should leave immediately. The bathroom was halfway between her bed and the living room and as foul, discolored, and weak as I felt I didn’t want to take even one step in her direction. I dressed and slunk into the small kitchen to wash.

I’d forgotten that Ann’s personal phonebook was hanging next to the kitchen phone. Next to that was a pad of notepaper and a felt-tipped pen. I gave myself a moment to reconsider the small social treachery I was about to commit and then, after turning on the hot water and adjusting the faucet so the cloudy steam would hit on the quietest part of the sink, I opened the beige leather phonebook and paged it open to B. There were no Butterfields. I turned to J and there it was, Jade, your phone, your address, my first new knowledge of you in four years. I tore off a page of the notepaper and wrote using my hand as a desk. My handwriting was almost illegible; it looked as if it were reflected in a broken mirror. But in scrawl, in pieces, in lunatic peaks and valleys I recorded what I needed. Had any jewel thief with a bagful of diamonds felt greater exhilaration than mine? Had any skydiver tumbling free through the sweet ether of space felt less subject to the normal rules of life on earth? You were in Stoughton, Vermont, living on a street called West. There were three phone numbers next to your name, all written in different pens, at different times. Even then I realized this meant that you were often away from your home, but the agitation this caused me was nothing to the exhilaration of being closer to you than I’d been since the last time we touched.

I wondered if Ann was staying in her room because she was waiting for me to leave. I couldn’t tell from the sun what time it was but I was sure it was at least noon. I stripped the sheets and blanket off the sofa and folded everything as best I could. Then I looked through
The New Yorker,
pretending to myself that I was looking for a good jazz club or a terrific play. Next to my return ticket to Chicago, my only assets were ninety dollars. I owed the hotel at least twenty and though I already had much more than I’d expected the trip to bring me, I was quickly plunged into despair at the thought of having to leave New York because I was out of money. I continued to flip through the magazine, glancing at the cartoons and squinting at the ads: fur coats, ruby bracelets, Scotch that advertised itself as the most expensive in the world. It amazed me how much money other people had—truly astonished me, as if it was the first I’d heard of it.

I must have drifted. My fatigue had been pretty much untouched by my few restless hours of sleep so perhaps I dozed off for a moment. I remember thinking of what it would be like if Jade and I had a lot of money. Would we spend it all on ourselves? Give it away? Start a foundation that would award grants to people who wanted to stop everything else in their lives and live by the most romantic, unreasonable impulses of their hearts? A monastery for lovers, though of course not at all monastic. The thought was, to be sure, far from profound, but it had a great many tributaries and perhaps I was paddling my way down one of those when Ann entered the room. I hadn’t heard her wake, hadn’t heard her footsteps, but when I turned away from the glarey windows she was standing at the foot of the sofa, dressed in blue jeans and a red silk shirt.

“How long have you been up?” Ann asked, in a rather sharp voice.

I was certain for a moment that if I’d had any sense, any real idea of how the world worked, then I would have damn well made sure that I was out of there before Ann woke up.

“A few minutes,” I said.

“About last night…” said Ann.

Don’t say it, I thought.

“It’s OK, really,” I said, too quickly.

“Look, if I was Hugh’s new girl I’d write it all off on the stars. Ingrid likes the astrological explanation. Venus goes into one phase and she’s unfaithful. Mars bumps into the moon and she throws a stapler at Hugh.” Suddenly, Ann sneezed, a most diminutive sneeze, gentler than a cat’s. “Oh God, my head. I doubt I got three hours sleep.”

“You don’t feel well?”

“I’m not involved with how I’m feeling.” She covered her face and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. “I was a harpie last night, no, a Medusa. Finally, I owe
you
an apology.”

“No. We don’t need to explain to each other.”

“I was being mean. I want to explain one thing. About Jade. I think I wanted you to believe that she never thinks about you, never mentions you. For some reason, I thought I wanted you to feel absolutely shipwrecked. But the truth is she does think about you still. Don’t take this in the wrong way, David. I mean I’m quite sure she wouldn’t want me to talk about it with
you,
but I think it’s fair that you know. You haven’t faded from her…her memory. And maybe that will be consolation for last night, for me putting you on the spot like that.”

I struggled to get up from the couch; my legs were wayward and weak. My deepest impulse was to put my arms around her, in gratitude, in fellowship, but instead I placed my hand on the side of her face. Her skin was soft, amazingly soft, and my fingernails were uneven and lined with dirt. She almost pulled away from my touch but she stopped herself.

“I’m going to kick you out now,” she said.

“For good?”

“For the day anyhow. It’s ten o’clock. I’m going to work.” She gestured with her eyes to the table that held her typewriter.

“Can I call you later?”

“I can’t imagine where we can go from here.”

“We can have dinner.”

“We had dinner yesterday.” She shook her head. “OK. Call me. At six. I want you to. But be prepared for me to give you the brush, OK? I’m still half catatonic and I don’t know what I’m going to feel about last night after my tenth cup of coffee.”

As soon as I was back in my hotel I took off my dirty clothes, brushed my teeth, and sat naked on the bumpy white bedspread with Jade’s phone numbers in front of me. I picked up the phone and gave the operator the first number on the list. I didn’t want to waste any time. I was still sluggish from the night and absolutely high from finding the numbers: there would be no time when I’d be less apprehensive about making the call, less capable of a second thought. I heard whoever ran the phone in the lobby of the McAlpin dialing the Vermont number and the throaty clicking of the turning dial filled me with rapture.

Her phone began to ring. In a panic, I almost hung up, thinking
You must be out of your mind.
Someone picked up the phone on the third ring, a woman, and said hello with a cheerfulness as vivid as the taste of an orange.

“Is Jade Butterfield home?” I asked.

This is Jade,
the woman answered in my imagination, and the thought of it sent my heart soaring upward: my throat throbbed like a bullfrog’s.

“She isn’t here,” the woman said. “Can I take a message?”

I called the second number and let it ring a dozen times before acknowledging it was trilling away in an empty house. Then came the third number, and this time I was answered by a young man who sounded as handsome and relaxed as the first woman had sounded friendly.

“I’m calling Jade,” I said. “Is she there?”

There was a pause—memory of heartbreak? cuckold’s aphasia?—and then he said, “I don’t
think
she’s here. You want to hang on? So I can check?”

“Please.” He seemed genuinely doubtful whether or not she was there, though I couldn’t say if this meant her presence was in question or if she might not be accepting calls.

“Who’s this?” he asked, the voice friendly and motiveless.

I hesitated. “This is Dave,” I said. Dave? Who was that supposed to befuddle? That wasn’t a mask; it was a false nose. I listened to my intermediary’s footsteps disappear on the other end of the line and imagined him walking through an enormous slipping-away Victorian house, not unlike the Butterfield house in Chicago but much larger, and intersected by drafts, with mattresses on the floor, Marx Brothers posters on the walls, and cartons of milk name-tagged in the Korean War refrigerator. Ah: one of those informal, nonideological college communes. A bunch of great guys and gals pitching in and saving on the rent.

“She’s not here,” said handsome Sean, or Philip, the commune’s champion kyacker. “I didn’t
think
she was, but you never know with Jade.”

“Oh,” I said, in an amazingly dead voice, as if my throat was lined in brick. “When will she be in? Do you know where I could reach her?”

“She
might
be at the music barn. I don’t know. She was
supposed
to go to that thing at Sophie’s farm but I
think
it was canceled.”

“God.” It was too amazing: music barn, Sophie’s farm, the boy’s voice. I was hovering over Jade’s life like an errant, misled ghost, rattling the shutters in the wrong window. How could I have made this arduous journey and still be without her?

“Do you want to leave a message or something?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, but left it at that.

He waited—I don’t know how long. He had a healthy respect for the unspeakable.

“This is a friend of hers,” I said. I seemed to have wandered back to the beginning of the conversation, like a nervous rat in a maze. I was sprawled on my back, holding the phone with both hands and staring at the texture of the paint on the ceiling. It looked like chicken skin. “You have no idea when she’ll be back?”

“No,” he said softly.

“But this is where she usually stays, isn’t it? At this number?”

“Who
is
this?”

“Dave. I told you. This is Dave.”

“But who
are
you?” Well, I knew those long tender sessions that must have taken place at the commune, just as they did at Rockville, those conversations that alternated between anecdote and lament, and it was my foregone conclusion that the name David Axelrod was familiar to that handsome sentinel at heaven’s oak door.

“Oh, I’m an old friend of hers. A friend of the family.” It seemed both risky and unkind to leave a true message. I didn’t want her to come home and find my name thumb-tacked to the communal bulletin board. “I’ll get in touch with her later.”

“I’ll tell her you called, Dave.”

“No, that’s all right.” I wanted to warn him not to, but seizing on a bit of strategy with all the subtlety of an opera tenor plunging a knife into his breast, I said, “It’s no big deal. I’ll catch up with her.”

“OK,” he said.

“Don’t even mention anything,” I said.

“OK, Dave. A friend of the family.”

“No! That’s the whole thing. Don’t even mention it.” I thought for a moment and was seized from behind by what seemed a rather brilliant idea. “Dave’s not even my name,” I said.

“OK. Who
is
this?”

I very quietly hung up and kept my hands on the phone, just as I did when I was in Chicago and allowing myself just a few calls a day from my list of Butterfields. A wave of futility came over me, followed by an equally powerful wave of humiliation. It wasn’t until I placed the phone on the bedside table and buried my face in the cool, barely yielding pillow that I remembered this hadn’t been one of my ordinary long-shot phonecalls: I’d just been very close to Jade; I still had the phone numbers; I still had an address; and I was loose in the world and unstoppable.

I showered and rang up room service and had them send me French toast (what Hugh called “lost bread”), ham, orange juice, and a pot of coffee. I had a wedge-shaped view from my window and I watched the Saturday shoppers ten floors below streaming past me like the world viewed from a box camera. How beautiful it all seemed…