Into the Great Wide Open (30 page)

The house of the father, Kenny thinks—that same ability to judge, though with more of a place to stand than his own father ever had. A tiny planet, a long lever. The women are saying something to each other and Kenny longs to be among them; tiny glimpse of what is slipping away from him, the possibility, the company of women …

“There was a full moon on the way out, across South Dakota,” Kenny says; they stop talking, listen, which he was hoping for. “I took the cutoff through the Badlands there, I wanted to see it anyway so I went through in the moonlight. It was very strange looking anyway, like another planet.”

Kenny stops. A silence. He realizes that he doesn’t have the words to translate the feeling of being there, the desolation in the blue moonlight and the perfect loneliness, the last man on the way to outer space, looking back at the blue Earth … the way he thought of Junie’s baby the whole time, the baby that was never going to be, stuck in purgatory. An idea that would never become a body; and Kenny was jealous, a little—pure possibility, free-floating, free-falling, disembodied. Kenny was coming into his own life and it felt like a loss, all the things he would never be. He was growing the carapace of his own life, as Jacob had: the continuing performance of his Self, performed by Himself. As opposed to driving, floating, the air so clear it filled the windshield with stars. He shut the lights off for a while and drove by moonlight only.

“Then what happened?” Jacob asks.

“Nothing,” Kenny says. He doesn’t want to sell this part of himself to Jacob. He says, “I went to sleep for a couple of hours at this rest stop, and when I woke up there were three busloads of Japanese tourists all around me.”

“Fucking Japanese,” Jacob says.

“Fucking Japanese,” Syd says. “Fucking Germans. Fucking Australians. Fucking Mexicans.”

“OK, OK, OK,” Jacob says.

After lunch, Jacob and Junie take Kenny downstairs to show him the work space, a complex of rooms—darkroom, office, storage, a spare bedroom—that run the length of the house underground. The first room is the only one with windows, a bright room lined with gray, steel print files. A continuous easel for looking at prints runs around the three solid walls, a slanted board with a gutter at the bottom and an elastic strip across the top to hold the pictures in place. The first thing Kenny sees, on the far wall, are three large prints of the same famous picture: a black branch in spring, dark with rainwater, a few slow buds beginning to flower. More green peppers, Kenny thinks. Funeral Home of Dead Art.

Junie looks at him warningly. She knows what he’s thinking. A quick instinctive sorrow, to think of how much they know each other and how little it’s going to count. A million dollars in Confederate money, buggy whips, adding machines.

“I took that here on the island,” Jacob says, “right after I bought the place. Two years later we cut that tree down for firewood.”

Performance, Kenny thinks. What is there to say? I like your work? I
love
your work?

Jacob says, “One of those three is a reject. Which one?”

Kenny sticks his nose right up to the easel, really looking at each one: the delicate shadings from white to gray to deeper gray, the gloss
of water on the petals. They look identical to him. “I can’t tell,” he says.

“June?”

“This one,” she says, pointing to the left-most print, the one nearest the window. She points to a half dozen pinpoints of white among the dark wet leaves in the lower-right corner of the picture.

“Cause?”

“Dust on the negative carrier.”

“Good,” Jacob says. “But that’s not the one—that can be spotted.” He turns to Kenny. “I don’t mind marking out flaws like that—makes every print different. Now watch this.”

Jacob takes a scrap of white exposed printing paper and holds it next to the white blossoms at the tip of the branch. “See?” he says. “Just a little bit darker than white, just enough to give it texture. The only paper-white is in the highlights on the raindrops. If you look at this one”—he moves down a print, holds the scrap of paper in the same position—“you see that print is overexposed.”

The white of the leaves, in this print, and the white of the blank paper are the same. “That’s interesting,” Kenny says.

Jacob takes the middle print from the wall and rips it in half, then in quarters, then stuffs the shreds into a trash basket.

Performance, Kenny thinks again. It’s hard to imagine a life in which a shade of gray would make that big of a difference. He looks around the room at the pictures on the other two walls: leaves, flowers, aspen, models. Then others tucked behind, out of the way.

He sees the bare foot at the edge of one, and the black line of the shutter release, and at first he doesn’t recognize it though it fills him with a powerful sadness, a dense, crushing … It’s one of her nakeds, he sees it, one of the pictures with the sleeper’s eyeshade. A flicker of jealousy but mostly this other feeling, this sadness, loneliness. Maybe it’s the smell of developer and fix from the darkroom next to them.
Smell is the sense of memory
. That feeling of being back
at the beginning, free, full of possibility. Nothing has happened, nothing will ever happen.

Jacob says, “That’s all I’m trying to do. I’m trying to make some small perfect thing, you know? A little battle against entropy. You can only make perfection where you have control, so it has to be small.”

“Let’s go look at the darkroom,” Junie says.

Out on the water, two hours later, Junie sits in the bow of the canoe trailing her good hand in the water while Kenny paddles in the stern. The wind blows them sideways, the waves make watery battering sounds against the aluminum sides. She sets a course for straight across. Halfway there, she points solemnly behind them, and Kenny puts his paddle up to look: a line of mountains had cleared the trees, the usual, majestic … It’s beautiful, there’s no other word, the way the granite stands against the clear dark blue of the sky, pockets of snow. Kenny won’t surrender to it, though. It’s only scenery.

“Glacier Park,” she says. “That’s thirty miles away.”

“That’s nice,” he says, and starts to paddle again.

“What are you mad at me about?” she asks. “Why are you being an asshole?”

Kenny doesn’t say anything, keeps paddling, listening to the slap of water against the canoe. At the far shore they beach it onto the pebbles, the metal noise sends a deer running for its life. Kenny catches a quick glimpse, more a motion than a thing: escape. Best wishes, Kenny thinks.

They lug the canoe into the brush and start up the trail, Junie first, to point the way. The afternoon is dry, and hot, and still. Nothing is moving but the two of them. The trail runs along a creek for the first part, a damp spongy bottom of cedar and ferns—hobbit-land, Kenny thinks. All charity has deserted him. After twenty minutes
or so they turn, and start to switchback up a hillside of tightly closed forest, pine of some kind, he guesses. Kenny is still weak from driving, he can feel it in his hard breathing as he tries to keep up with Junie, driving and cigarettes. She walks ahead of him up the steep trail, silent as an Indian, swinging her cast.

He can’t help imagining them together, his bald head and perfectionism. His belly against hers, his mouth on Junie’s breast. Other things. Jacob calls her June, a new name. Kenny feels a specific weakness when he thinks of this, an emptiness down in his belly, lower then his navel, inside.

Junie waits for him an hour up the trail, in a little ragged clearing. She sits in the sun at the edge of the woods, on a fallen log that rain and winters have bleached white. Buffalo skull, Kenny thinks. Take a picture. Kenny stands next to her, but looking out over the meadow. The grass here is luxury green, a grown-out golf course, long and soft. A few wildflowers persist, big floppy yellow flowers and little purple ones. He sips from the canteen, then hands it to her, and she drinks from it.

“I’ve been wanting you to see this place,” she says. “I thought we might see some elk up in here—there’s a herd in this meadow all the time. Once I saw a bear.”

You’re fucking him, right?
He almost says it; but what good would it do? He’s almost certain anyway. And Kenny can’t tell if he’s got any rights at all in this matter.

“You’ve changed,” he says instead; just a noise to make with his mouth but she takes it seriously, considers before answering.

“I had to,” Junie finally says.

He waits for more but that’s all she has to say. The air is still but changeable, the cool breeze coming down out of the forest and then this other, warmer air that smells like pinecones and sunlight. Kenny takes his shirt off, slides down in the soft grass.

“What have you been working on?” he asks, eyes closed.

“Just the same,” she says. “More of the nature stuff. It’s not so
much Jacob’s influence as that’s what he does, you know? As long as I’m here I might as well learn it.”

“Are you sick of it yet?”

“It’s more interesting than you might think,” Junie says. “You’re mad at me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Why?”

Then Kenny has to decide whether he wants to talk about the missing photograph, the naked of himself; has to decide whether he wants to accuse her of lying, when he hasn’t been 100 percent himself, what Mrs. Connolly would call
bad faith
.

“You’re leaving me,” he says; a lie and a truth, all at once. “I love you. It’s not a lot more complicated than that.”

“I love you, too,” she says; immediately, without question. Kenny sees this with pain: they do, they love each other, and they are still going to manage to fuck this thing up.

“This is idiotic,” Kenny says.

“What?”

“The
waste
of it,” he says. “A perfectly good feeling.”

“I’m still here,” Junie says.

What percentage?
He doesn’t ask. Part of him is elsewhere, too, although the best part of him is here.

“Let’s just stay here,” Junie says. “We can build a little house out of branches and leaves, send away to Kalispell for groceries.”

“A
wikiup
,” Kenny says.

“Think about it: just coming out in the morning and two feet of snow on the ground, and then you could build up a fire. The Indians used to do it.”

“Grubbing around in the dirt,” Kenny says.

“I’m not unhappy,” Junie says. She comes down off her perch on the log, comes over to sit next to him in the soft grass, takes his hand. “I miss you all the time,” she says. “That’s not what I mean. But I’ve got my own life moving, Kenny, I feel like it belongs to me.”

“OK,” he said. She was lying about something.

“This isn’t against you,” she said. “You don’t have to be angry with me.”

“I don’t know,” he said; staring into the blank face of the fact again, she was going, he was gone.
Implacable
, he thought; and leaned toward her, and kissed her, and started to unbutton her shirt.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“That seems kind of obvious.”

“I don’t want to do anything,” she says. “I didn’t bring anything.”

“We could improvise,” he says.

“Not now. We can lie here if you want to, though, I do it sometimes just to feel the sun. If you just want to lie here.”

“Whatever.”

“I don’t want to torture you.”

Kenny shrugs; she looks at his face, looking for something, not finding it. She unbuttons her shirt the rest of the way, lays it carefully out on the silver-bleached log, takes her brassiere off and then stands and steps out of her shorts. Standing naked above him and awkward, in and out of the sun. Her cast seems to be unbalancing her. Then she lies face down in the grass and says, “Your turn.”

All that has been given to him, and all that has been lost: he stands to take his own clothes off, remembering what was permitted at the Girl Scout camp, that delicate torture, swell of her back … He lies down next to her in the grass, feeling the sun on his own body, the soft bent blades of grass rising again to tickle his neck. What? He’s trying not to get a hard-on, trying to make this OK. He wants to be inside her again, unprotected. Instead she’s turning into a nude beside him, a beautiful body, a commodity. Kenny doesn’t know: he’s in love, he’s angry. I’m no good at this, he thinks, and this makes him even angrier; and then out of his anger he finds his dick rising again, thinking
I want to fuck you
, thinking
fuck you
. He doesn’t know. The wind blows through the pines. He turns his
thoughts deliberately toward the one thing that can always dispel a hard-on, the thought of his mother, trapped in Baltimore, staring out the window, waiting for Kenny to come and keep her company.

“How much work do you have left to do?” Kenny asks. “Are we going to see you again tonight?”

Junie gives him a look, and so does Syd, but it’s a legitimate question. “We’ll work till we’re done,” Jacob says. “There’s no telling how long that will be.”

“Oh,” says Kenny, and watches them descend into the darkroom. “Good luck,” he calls after them. “Have fun.”

OK, I’m an asshole, he thinks to himself. What do I do now?

He helps Syd with the dishes, which isn’t hard because there’s a special way to do everything and he doesn’t know any of it, so she does everything. He takes a shower. He sits in his room, drinking a beer, reading Frank O’Hara and trying to concentrate but the sex keeps getting in the way,
a tongue given wholly to luxurious usages
. Junie is downstairs with Jacob and Kenny is left out. It’s only partly simple jealousy. What? This fantasy, this tiny marriage … Maybe she’s right, maybe he only wants her to belong to him. This is a
step forward
for her …

“Shit,” he says aloud.

“What?” Syd asks him.

“Nothing,” Kenny says. “I’m going for a walk.”

“You want some company?”

“No thanks,” he says; and Syd blinks, he’s hurt her feelings; or maybe not, maybe she’s staring at him, measuring him for the clown outfit. Everybody knows, he thinks, even I know for once. Kenny says, “I just want to think about something, I’ll be back in a little while. We can smoke cigarettes.”