Endless Love (37 page)

“Then you’ll be through with school?”

“Just about.”

“I go to Roosevelt.”

Jade made a face.

“I hardly go. But I have to be enrolled. I have to do a lot to show I’m back in the swim of things.”

“Swim of things? That doesn’t sound like you.”

“It’s my parole officer’s phrase. Or maybe my mother’s. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For remembering what doesn’t sound like me, not forgetting.”

“I remember. We were sweet together.”

“We were,” I said.

“I know. It’s a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it’s true. It’s too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when we were too young to handle it.”

“Probably no one handles it very well. I mean it’s big, isn’t it? It’s like an emergency. All the rules are canceled.”

“Are they? Ever? I know that’s what we used to think, all that living in our own world stuff. But we were young. We’re still young but we were really young then. I don’t want to talk about it, anyhow. All that arrogance, craziness, and what it led up to. When I think about it. All the stuff that you said and I believed. I don’t even remember all the stuff
I
said and made you believe. I’m not blaming it on you. But it makes me feel strange to hear about it, like someone telling you everything you said when you were drunk.”

“I haven’t changed,” I said.

“There’s no way, it’s impossible.”

“There’s nothing I said then that I couldn’t say now. I want to, to tell the truth. But I’m afraid. Not of exposing myself because I know that you know I love you—”

“I don’t know that. How can I know that?”

“I love you. I still love you. I love you.”

“It’s an idea. You’ve held on to it.”

“No. It’s real. It’s the only real thing. It stands by itself and it hasn’t changed. Don’t be afraid. You don’t have to do anything about it.”

“It’s not that. It’s just I know it can’t be true. It’s been too long and too much has changed.”

“I haven’t changed.”

“Then you need to believe that,” Jade said. She folded her hands onto her lap and then squeezed them together so tightly that the color left them for a moment. “You need to pick the thread up where it was broken. Maybe as a way of forgiving yourself for what happened. At the end.”

“No.”

“You don’t love me, David. I never came to see you.”

“You couldn’t.”

“I never wrote you.”

“You couldn’t.”

“But when you got out. Then.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s something that can’t be changed.”

“It can be.”

“No.”

“When you give your love to other people. When you find out you can feel the same way about them.”

“I didn’t give love to anyone else.”

“But when you try to.”

“No. Never. There’s one girl, a sculptor, I see her now and then. I just fell into it through friends but we don’t try, we don’t touch.”

Jade shook her head.

“You’re all I care about,” I said. “No. And me. The person I am when I’m with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I’m with you.”

I stood up. The blood came up into my skull like a wave splashing on the shore. The room softened, moved a little; I didn’t know why I was on my feet. I was touching my shirt, poking my fingers in the spaces in between the buttons, discovering the little pool of sweat that had gathered in my chest’s hollow. “We’re together again,” I said. I heard my voice as if it came from another part of the room, perceived it with a kind of woozy clarity: its texture, timbre, its faintly hypnotic monotone.

“I may as well tell you,” Jade said. Teasing?

“What?”

“I knew it would be too late to catch that bus. I was counting on you asking me to stay. For a while.”

I nodded. I walked toward her. The room was so small. I was already next to her, but I still needed to move. I stepped back, forward, and then, finally, down on my knees. Kneeling before her broke open a deep, unexpected store of feeling; I felt it spreading within me like warm gel. I took her hands and held them on her lap.

“Is this all right? “I asked.

She fixed her eyes onto mine. I could see her sinking into her feelings and she knew she held the silence between us—a silence that sung in perfect pitch—could hold it forever and I would not interrupt it, would not lose faith and question it. I held on to her and her pulse was so powerful that I felt its reverberations in her hand.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s all right.”

I didn’t say anything. I lowered my eyes for a moment and then looked back at her.

“I love you,” I said.

She leaned forward and I tugged at her hands until she was out of the armchair and kneeling, her bent knees touching mine. We embraced and I felt a sudden terror, more total and enormous than any I’d ever felt before. It filled me as the sound of an explosion would fill a room and then just as suddenly it was gone. I had let go of my past and it receded from me like an open balloon. We lay on the worn smooth mustard rug, as clumsy and disjointed as invalids who have fallen out of their beds, and I was no longer holding on to anything at all except what was directly before me, except for Jade. Like a horse breaking from the gate, my life had begun.

“You’ve got to hold me,” Jade whispered. “I feel like I’m just about to faint but like I’ve taken a dexadrine too. I’m going in so many directions. Seeing you. Pappy. God. It’s too strange. I can’t even begin to explain it all, but if you’d only hold me. I broke up with my friend over the weekend. Susan. It was ending for a while but the camping trip finished it. I left her in a place called the Green Mountain Café. I stuck my spoon in a bowl of disgusting oatmeal and hitched home, seventy-five miles. The message to call Mom. And then finding out and then seeing you and being here. No. Really hold me. Not just a little.” She squeezed the back of my hair as if wringing it out.

I held her as tight as I could; it didn’t feel as if my arms had much strength. She arched her back and pressed herself against me. Her head was on a dark stain in the carpet that someone else had left. It surprised me for a moment to notice that, but with Jade I always noticed things that were outside of us—cracks in the wall, the smell of wet maples coming through the window screens—and by registering them I made everything a part of us. It had been the same for Jade. We were both of us impossible to distract. Our consciousnesses, having found their perfect human keys, swung wide open and admitted everything. I stroked the side of her face and pressed my mouth to hers.

I could feel she had kissed many times since our time together. Her lips strange. Flat where they had once protruded. Parted much wider, not out of the moment’s impulse but out of newly acquired reflexes. I wondered if my own lips betrayed how many times I had kissed the pillow, how many times, lost in fantasy, I’d tasted the back of my own hand. I expected no praise or privilege for my long fidelity. It gave me no moral advantage. The fact was I hadn’t been tempted, hadn’t been capable. A kind of hysteria, perhaps. A chance to realize some monastic impulse, the negative erotic drive, the inevitable polarity of my conscious, ceaseless yearnings. Looked at another way it was all quite laughable. Or wilful: a temper tantrum. A chance to sit on the jury in my own trial. Almost never—
never
—masturbated. It was lunacy and I’d known it all along. The doctors, in this instance, were absolutely right. Dr. Clark had spoken to Rose and Arthur about my need for sexual outlet. Embarrassed, they kept it to themselves. A decent impulse, their respect for my privacy, but perverted by their shame. And Dr. Ecrest going so far as to threaten to terminate treatment unless I began to release my sexual energies. How I hooted at that one! “Now, let me get this straight. If I don’t see you, it’s back to Rockville, right? So what you’re saying is that if I don’t jerk off, you’re going to have me locked up. Right?” I saved my jissom as a prisoner might hoard scraps of cloth—the edges of sheets, shirt collars, cuffs—with the idea of one day making a long cotton chain and lowering himself from the only unprotected stretch of wall.

Suddenly Jade’s body went taut. She straightened her back and a space between us snapped open like a parachute. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling with the concentration of a child watching her life reflected in the moving clouds.

“I feel like I’m being pushed,” she said.

“By me?”

“No. Not you. Not only you. Everything. One thing I’ve learned about myself is it’s easy for me to forget who I am. I let things happen. I go along. It’s wrong.”

“I don’t know.”

“It is.”

She scrambled up. I remained still and looked up at her. I suddenly wanted to smile. What had we been doing on the floor? It made no sense—I was encouraged by our lack of thought. I was sure a quotient of mindlessness was required if we were to reconnect.

Jade opened her nylon bag and extracted a little brown envelope, such as banks use to give you your change when you cash your paycheck. I lifted myself up on my elbows and then stood. Jade squeezed the edges of the envelope so it opened into a kind of cup and she peered in.

“Look,” she said, thrusting it toward me. “What’s left.”

It was a small portion of Hugh’s ashes. They were coarse, like broken pieces of peanut brittle. Not altogether black. Silvery and white here and there.

“Everyone took some,” said Jade. “You know, like favors at a wedding. We’re all supposed to scatter our share in some place Pappy loved. I’m supposed to bring mine to the Green Mountains, even though he never went there. But he loved mountains, especially the Alps. Ingriďs throwing hers all over New Jersey and keeping a little in a leather pouch in her van. Keith’s bringing some to Cambridge. Uncle Robert’s bringing really a lot down south with him. Isn’t it the stupidest thing?”

“No. It’s all right.”

Jade watched me look at the ashes and when my gaze ticked away from them, she released the pressure from the sides of the envelope and withdrew it.

“Everything’s happening at once. Ending this long-term thing with my friend. You know, even seeing my family, I mean just on a nothing occasion, takes its toll. One at a time is hard. In a group—murder. Really. It takes so much out of me. I have to fight for everything. I feel so thick in the past. Everything’s exhausting. The family politics don’t stop for death, you know. If anything, they get more nasty and frantic, like a chicken running around with its head cut off. And now you. Of all times, right? When I can handle it least. Everything happens at the wrong time—especially between me and you.”

“I’m not rushing you. I know what I want, to be near you, but I know it’s not simple. I act like I don’t know anything except what I want, but I do know more than that.”

“I don’t feel pushed by you,” Jade said. “I don’t even know if you can reach me yet. You understand? And I’m exhausted. I can feel little parts of me going to sleep. I’m going to call Vermont Transit and they’re going to tell me there’s not another bus until about seven next morning. And then I’m going to have to go to sleep. We’re going to talk about one of us sleeping in this chair, or camping out on the floor. But that’s not going to happen. We’re both going to fall asleep in that double bed and it makes no sense for it to be happening like this. If we are going to reinstate our friendship, won’t this put another hex on it? I was wrong to stay. We should have arranged to meet some other time.”

“I
will
sleep on the floor,” I said. “I do that a lot anyhow.”

“Why?” Jade asked.

“Sometimes I can’t stand being in a bed.”

“I’ve got to sleep.” She closed the envelope and pushed her portion of Hugh’s ashes into her overnight bag with the impatience of filing a bill you have no intention of paying but don’t dare throw away. It was how she treated the mimeographed multiple-choice test papers she’d done poorly on: Jade’s talents as a student were ones of accumulation and exposition; she had no skill for filling in the blanks. An associative intelligence, deep, transforming, but not quite specific. She saved the examinations to study her mistakes, shoved them into a sideways folder at the bottom of her little yellow desk. A hoarder of debts, mapping out elaborate voyages of self-improvement. Evelyn Woods Speed Reading. The articles razored out of
Scientific American. Twenty-five Ways to a Better Memory.
Sprigs and leaves gathered on walks and stored in a cigar box for future identification. A collection of snapshots, ticket stubs, matchbooks, and menus shoved into a Woolworth’s bag with her diary, along with scraps of paper inscribed with key words—“Sammy’s stolen bicycle,” “examining breasts,” “rainwalk”—and all waiting for the ideal time to be inscribed in those empty oblong pages: her life as it happened, viewed from the
outside.
Her great task was to build an intellectual bridge from the universe of insight and feeling to the universe of quantifiable, reportable facts. To be a little more like Keith, able to rattle off her reasons one two three. She could have lived indefinitely in the fertile haze of her instincts and perceptions, but she wanted to learn the outward signals. She was tired of people not realizing exactly how rich and complex her mind was.

But now she was a senior at a good college. She must have learned any number of mental tricks, pared down her thoughts, organized them. Learned how to present herself. Learned how to pass.

She zippered up the bag and slung it over her shoulder. I had a moment’s panic that awakened a bit of cloddishness in me: I thought of throwing myself against the door. But she turned away from me, away from the door out, and faced the bathroom.

“I’ll change in there,” she said.

“OK,” I said. “That’s fine.” I tried to make my voice light but I don’t think I got very close.

She hefted the bag once or twice as if she could tell by the weight if everything was in place.

“You want to use the bathroom first?” she said.

“No. Go ahead.”

She shrugged, as if I’d refused to take her business advice. “OK,” she said, “but I’ll be a while.”

I was on the floor, so rigid that most of my spine did not touch the rug. In my underwear, covered by a thin, butterscotch- colored blanket (butterscotch-Butterfield: the meaningless association Ping-Ponged in my head) and a cushion from the armchair serving as my pillow. I left the two real pillows on the bed for Jade—her luxury. When I’d slept nightly with her we needed three pillows, the third for her to embrace in those private, essential hours of sleep when her back was to me and her life was as closed as an oyster. Sometimes she kept the pillow pressed to her small breasts, but most often it ended tucked between her thighs. That third pillow was often hard to keep hold of; the other kids appropriated it for their hard, monastic beds. A way of stealing our magic, subtly defacing us. Coal- dusted hands reaching through the iron grille and swiping irises from the rich man’s lawn. “I bought that pillow with my own money,” Jade had fairly whined, patrolling the house in her robe and not being as careful as she could have been to keep it belted. Even then I realized the teasing arrogance of much that she did, but I never minded: I’d helped to make it possible by whisking her into happiness. Changed her position in the family from one of ambiguous status to a wild card.