Part Two 4 страница

She carried my hand to her face and pressed it to her cheek. She closed her eyes and nuzzled against my hand and I leaned toward her and kissed her half on the forehead and half on her hair.

“I need to be with you, Ann.”

“I knew this would happen,” she said. She opened her eyes and I took my hand away from her face. “I think that night, the night I came down and saw you with Jade and then made love with Hugh, I was making love with you, wasn’t I? You know, everyone thought we were lovers, you and I. Not then, not from the very start, but later. I often ached with curiosity to know how you explained yourself to poor Jade.”

“She asked me once. She asked me and I said it wasn’t true.”

“Well, I was flattered,” said Ann. “That the others were finally recognizing I could do such a thing. And that a boy like yourself, you know, certifiably insane with love for such a pretty little girl, that you’d want me. You know, whatever you said to Jade about it didn’t stop her believing it. It must have been a very tepid denial. And that made me believe you liked the others to suspect us and I was glad for that.”

“But Jade knew I could never be with anyone but her.”

“But that’s not so at all, David. She always believed you and I made love. Sometimes she thought it only happened once and other times she was sure we sneaked away together whenever we had the chance.”

“No,” I said. “She never believed that about us. She brought it up only once. It was nothing. I remember it very clearly. It was a beautiful day. We were sitting on the Midway. Jade was wearing sandals, brown shorts, and a sleeveless blouse that buttoned in the back, big tan buttons just the color of her hair. I was a little nervous because you could see in her blouse from the side, at the bottom of the armholes.”

“I’m sure you remember everything,” Ann said.

“No, wait. Listen to me. Jade had her head on my shoulder and when a breeze came up, her hair touched my face. We started talking, about what it would be like when we had kids and I said I’d be very jealous of the baby for having its whole body inside of her. And then she said—and this was so casual, it was right off the top of her head, it seemed—‘What’s going on between you and Mom?’ And I said I liked you, or something like that. Then she lifted her head off my shoulder and looked me right in the eyes and she smiled and said, ‘Did you ever fuck her?’ And I said, ‘Fuck her?’ but really loud so it made us nervous and we laughed. Then Jade said, ‘Well, did you?’ and I said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your gourd. You better tell me what you’ve been smoking because I’m going to try some as soon as we go home.’ And then, and this was the last of it, this was all she said, she said, ‘So you never made love with her or saw her naked or anything?’ I don’t even know why I answered her seriously, but I did. I shook my head and said no, never. And that was the end of it.”

“Except it wasn’t,” said Ann. “It never ended. Jade still believes we were lovers. Even the last time I saw her with the whole family together, or what we call being together these days, which is something very odd and altogether…” Ann fell silent and rubbed her eyes. “Oh God,” she muttered to herself. Then fixing her reddening eyes on me, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m unraveling. What I’m trying to say is Jade still believes we were lovers. At Keith’s a couple of months ago she brought it up in the most remarkably naked and ugly way. It all hinges on the fact that you and I had a secret bond. We were emotional conspirators. Lovers. Whatever Jade thinks of you, David, and I don’t know and don’t want to, but when she said she knew what was going on between us, I mean a few months ago, it was like living in Chicago, standing in the old kitchen. Only now, with everybody a little more bruised and callused, no one tried to smooth things over. They all joined in and they all let me know that they believed then that you and I were lovers and they believe it now. Jade was so relieved she actually wept—and you know how she is about tears, how hard it is for her to cry. It meant she wasn’t crazy, that the whole terror wasn’t the work of her imagination and her unconscious. They all agreed.” Ann took my hand again, gently now, with nothing casual or accidental, and absolutely nothing unconscious; she moved my thumb away from the bulk of my heavy, moist hand, moved it until the tendon stretched and began to hurt.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she said.

“I don’t want to misunderstand you,” I said.

“Everyone thinks we’re lovers, or were, so maybe we ought to do them the favor of making them right,” Ann said. She waited for me to say something. Then she said, “I’d love to go to bed with you. I’d love to feel you in me.”

She was so close to me and her bravery alone made me want to hold her. And hearing that she wanted me inside of her made me want to make love. Yet it was alien for me to think of a woman so much older than me in sexual terms. I had never loved an older woman. I was not one of those eight-year-old boys who want to marry their mother. I had never had a crush on a teacher, never stared longingly at a friend’s older sister, and wasn’t interested in movie stars or even those naked models in the skin magazines. They were too old and I was blind to them. The most erotic photograph of my early adolescence was from a National Geographic article about the Seychelle Islands and it was of a half-naked African girl walking along the beach—she was just my age or perhaps a year younger.

“I could never go to bed with you, Ann. I could never do that.”

I shook my head. I wanted to put my arms around her and I wanted her arms around me: I was in terror and I wanted her to protect me.

“I think you’re misunderstanding me,” Ann said. “I’m not doing this because of what they said. It’s you. I want you. I want this night with you.”

“I want to be with you,” I said. “I’ve been in agony for half this night but it’s heaven anyhow because it’s here, with you, and this is my real and only life. But I can’t do the other. Don’t laugh at me for saying this, please, but I can’t make love with anyone until I see Jade again, until I can be with her. It’s very difficult but it’s the only way I can do it. It would be worse if I ever went with anyone else. It would put me further from Jade than ever. You know, it’s not even loyalty, probably, it’s fear. I have to wait.”

Ann’s hands were closed into fists and she rested one on either leg. She was flushed, no longer looking at me. If she wanted to hurt me, it was the perfect time to tell me of Jade’s lovers, and I waited for the worst, already telling myself that it wasn’t necessarily true, that Ann was only speaking out of spite.

“I should be angry,” Ann said.

“No.”

“Yes. I should be. I should be furious. It’s elementary, my dear Watson.” She stopped, closed her eyes, amazed she had made light of herself. “This is what all anger is. Being denied. Not being held. Not being satisfied. This is war and mayhem and I should be in a rage. I’m so sick of myself. I’m still waiting for life to begin.”

“I better go,” I said. My heart was pounding; it felt frail and absolutely out of control. I felt very close to dying on the spot and not at all concerned.

Ann got up and went to the windows. I wondered if she was going to do something horrible but she seemed calm.

“I’ll go,” I said, standing. The blood that raced to my head was thick with stars and slashes of colored light. “I’m sorry about tonight. I’d like to call you tomorrow. That’s what I’ll do. But I’ll understand if you don’t let me—”

“It’s late,” Ann said. I could see she was looking at my reflection in the window. “And you don’t know your way around.” She turned toward me, her arms folded over her chest. “Sit down,” she said, and when I did she walked past me and down the hall.

She was back in a moment carrying a pillow, sheets, and a pale blue blanket. “Get up,” she said.

Ann smoothed the sheets onto the sofa. She was squinting, furrowing her forehead, and poking savagely at the corners of the sheets. I stood by, saying nothing. She was finished in a minute. “That’s where you’ll sleep. You’ll be in good company. We’ve all put in our nights on this sofa.” She stepped back and looked down at the sofa, remembering the people who’d slept on it.

“I’ve got pajamas. They belong to Keith and they’ll fit you. Do you need them?”

I shook my head.

“One rule. When I get up, you get up. I write in the morning so it’ll be toast, coffee, and goodbye.”

“OK.”

She nodded. The circles beneath her eyes were royal blue and the texture of crushed velvet. She was looking directly at me now, inviting me to meet her steady, open gaze and come to some silent understanding of what we’d just been through. But I didn’t have the strength to fight my evasive impulses. I glanced from side to side and when I did fix my eyes on hers I wasn’t really seeing anything. The only part of me that was worth calling alive was by now seething with a very simple thought: in moments I would be lying on a spot upon which Jade had lain.

Ann went to her bedroom. I couldn’t tell if she’d closed the door or not. I heard a long unzipping sound but not much else. I turned off the lamps and sat on the edge of the sofa and undressed in the dark. The sheets were cool and softer than any I’d ever touched. The blanket felt like cashmere and when I pulled it over my shoulders the feel of its satiny border touched off a memory of a cell meeting at my parents’. I was very young and on my parents’ bed, where the comrades had dropped their coats. I was caressing the satin lining of someone’s coat. I’d just learned the word grand and I repeated to myself, “This is grand.” Other memories. Coming fast and unbeckoned. Glimpses of things I’d seen years ago. The view from my room in Rockville. Christmas decorations on State Street. The images came in no order and I wasn’t trying to remember or understand. It felt as if a part of my brain was shorting out.

I didn’t want to think, yet I didn’t want to fall asleep too quickly. I wanted to be awake on the sofa Jade had slept on. I rolled onto my stomach and held the pillow close, so it touched me from my lips to my belly. The blanket had slipped half off me but I wasn’t cold. The room was very warm and the only reason Ann gave me a blanket was she remembered I liked to sleep with some weight covering my body. And how Jade sweated through summer nights with me, steaming with me beneath the blanket through a long martyring July.

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.

 

 

 

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…

I read the newspaper as I ate breakfast like a man with a stable life. Despite the agonies of expectation, I felt I sat in the lap of towering luxury. I ate as slowly as I could, read as slowly as I could, and would have liked to have tied sandbags to the hands of time. Since the day of the fire I had wanted no more of time than for it to move swiftly and humbly along, like a nun in the rain, but now my life had texture again.

I noticed in the newspaper that Krapp’s Last Tape was being performed that night in a small theater on the East Side. It was my favorite Beckett play and I remembered that Ann liked it, too. Tickets only cost four dollars and I could actually afford to attend. Impulsively, I called Ann.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “But I was wondering if you’d like to see a play tonight?”

“Not really. Hugh called.”

“That’s good,” I said. I don’t know what I meant. I might have been feeling all of us coming together again.

“Hugh’s in town with his new girl,” Ann said. “They went to Chinatown. They’re buying spices and oils. She’s also going to introduce Hugh to a healer, a Chinaman much older than the century, who’s going to divulge certain secrets of herbal teas. She’s so much better for him than I am.”

“So are you going to see Hugh tonight?”

“No. They’re going back to New Jersey. Where I’m sure they belong.” Ann laughed; she sounded edgy and she was poking around trying to locate the exact dimensions of her sadness, jabbing at her feelings as if with a stick.

“And you don’t want to see Krapp’s Last Tape?”

“I don’t think so.”

“My treat?”

“I said no. ”

We were silent for a moment.

“So should I still give you a call around six?” I said.

“Only if you want to,” answered Ann.

Suddenly restless, I left the hotel and headed for the streets.

I wandered uptown on Fifth Avenue starting at 34th, gazing into the generous-looking windows of electronics shops that featured pocket cameras, battery-operated tape recorders, and short-wave radios. While somewhere near, across the street, or perhaps next door, Hugh and Ingrid were smiling uncertainly at a small circular window with eight-inch glass behind which stood a miniature red wagon that held a pair of diamond and emerald earrings. It was their mild misfortune to have the tastes and appetites of the rich and to suffer the wanting of things they couldn’t even remotely afford—whereas I walked the same street and noted that the carved Mexican chess set could be mine if I wanted it, likewise the Austrian binoculars, and likewise the Japanese setting for eight, with soup bowls and a covered dish, painted my favorite shades of blue and yellow, and marked down from thirty-five dollars to nine.

I could explain this so much better if I’d lived in some other time, if the story of my love was a true ballad, if I could shake my fist at the sky and believe not that I was gesturing at layers of ozone and oxygen, at chunks of mineral and pockets of gas, but at heaven, at a real heaven, alive with intelligence, churning out time and circumstance.

I was walking up Fifth Avenue to pass an hour or two before it was time to call Ann. Hugh was with his new lover remembering the things he’d been taught to want when he was young. Who knows how many people were out there with us? A million seems a fair guess. New York is the place in America where you’re most likely to meet someone you know; it’s our capital of surprise encounters. If you stay there long enough you might see everyone you ever knew.

I’m thinking of a skeleton bent expectantly over a radar screen and Hugh and I are blips of light heading into each other’s path with the blind imperiousness of comets.

We are blind to the future. We can barely hold on to our strange versions of the past. We see only a little of what is directly before us. We know almost nothing. The only way we can stand it is not to care. I care and I can’t stand it.

I should just breathe in and out and be brave. But not knowing what is going to happen next and living with the hope that whatever it is it won’t be too difficult to understand is like driving at top speed with the windshield completely painted over with a picture of where you used to live.