Part Two 7 страница

“I don’t like it when he goes on like that,” Sammy said.

“I don’t much care for it, either. But Keith likes it, and I don’t want to have to draw the line one place or another.”

“Can I take this home with me?” Keith said, holding the framed piece of quilt away from him, offering it to Ann.

“As far as I’m concerned, yes. If you want it so damned badly. But you’ll have to square it with Jade and Sammy.”

Robert Butterfield walked across the room and stood in front of me. “You’re David?” he asked, careful to make his voice unmistakably accepting. When I nodded, he put his hand out to me. “I’m Hugh’s brother, Robert. Ann told me what a help you’ve been. You stepped in when the family couldn’t be here. It means a great deal.” When Hugh was feeling wilful or lonely, we all used to say, his southern accent would sprout, like those wonderful mushrooms that come out after every rain. But here was Hugh’s older brother, still living in New Orleans, with less of an accent than David Brinkley. Straight on, his face was rectangular, at once open and shy, massive and vulnerable. He shook my hand with a gentleness that nearly tipped the fragile balance I’d achieved. Here was all of the gigantic sweetness of Hugh looking at me.

“I’m aware of the complications involved in your participation in this sad ceremony,” Robert was saying. “But as our father said, ‘When you get above the lowest vegetable orders, life turns into a holy mess.’ David, I’d like you to meet my son Hugh.” Robert reached around and draped his immense arm over his son’s shoulders. Hugh was dressed in a light blue suit and wore a tie decorated with tiny flowers. His hair was pure yellow, from tip to root, front to back, and his eyes were gray and blue. At fifteen, he was only a few inches shorter than his father, and from the size of his hands and feet it was probable that, one day, he too would be enormous. I wondered if the elder Hugh, my Hugh, conventionally large, had been small for his family.

“It’s nice to meet you,” said Robert’s son, with a shy, formal half smile. He seemed absolutely ill at ease and had probably considered affixing himself to each of us who had gathered at Ann’s, even me. I put my hand forward and solemnly he shook it. I gazed into his open, slightly frightened face and was aware of (or imagined) the other eyes that were upon me: Keith’s, Ingrid’s.

“Hugh’s one of our middle sons,” Robert said. “We’re eleven in all. Six boys and three young ladies, Christine and me. The rest arrive tonight.” He let out a low sigh. It was as if the thought of his arriving family had touched off a quiver of happiness in him before he remembered the occasion of their journey.

I had been clutching a brown paper bag filled with three large bottles of club soda and three of tonic water. I felt the weight only as a general numbness, and when Ann asked me if I’d remembered to pick up mixers I had to think for a moment.

“Oh, they’re right here,” I said.

“I was wondering what you were holding in there,” she said, with a kind of embryonic brightness that made me fear all the others might turn on us. I knew that Ann was asking me to conspire with her, to move back with her a step or two and view everything with a kind of private, wounded mirth. Surrounded by tragedy, overcome by everyone else’s grief as well as her own, Ann was nostalgic for her irony: she longed for a taste of it, as if that small space that irony places between consciousness and emotion contained the only air she could comfortably breathe. She waited for me to say something, but I only looked at her and then at the bag I was holding, which was dark with moisture. “Well, good,” Ann said. “You brought it. I’ll put it all in the kitchen.”

“No, I will,” I said.

“No, I will,” said Keith. He was at my side in an instant and took the bag from my arms. “I’d like to talk to you,” he said, just above a whisper.

I nodded. “Good.”

“I’ll put this shit away and then we’ll go to Mom’s room and talk.”

“Ann, Ann,” Ingrid was saying, “we have to be clear about everything.” She was rubbing the side of her face and holding her sister’s hand. “We have to make ground rules.”

Ann folded her arms in front of her and nodded. “You’ve been saying that all afternoon, Ingrid. As far as I can see, there’s nothing to be decided. You chose the chapel. The ashes are being divided up. What more is there?”

“There’s a lot. Everything. Everything.” Ingrid looked at her sister—a chubby, mild, nunnish-looking woman—and her sister closed her eyes in that way that means “Go ahead and say it.”

Keith brushed my arm with the back of his hand. “Come on. We’ll talk.”

“Where you going?” Sammy asked.

“We’ll be right back. Stay here,” said Keith.

Sammy shook his head and looked disgusted.

I followed Keith into Ann’s bedroom and he closed the door behind us. I felt that gesture of closing the door was the beginning of a reprimand—we were certainly not here to exchange confidences as equals—and the dull bloated thud of the heat- warped door felt like one of those ambiguous affronts to your dignity, a hearty slap on the back or a pinch on the cheek.

The windows in Ann’s bedroom, framed by sheer white curtains, looked out onto a reddish brick wall. The glass in the windows had the clean look windows have in houses that haven’t been occupied yet, and you could see the wall with such vivid clarity that it became beautiful, strangely exciting. I turned and saw that Keith was staring at me, his mouth refined down to a thin, pale line.

“So,” said Keith. “Mom tells me you materialized Friday afternoon. Is that true?”

I felt, acutely, that Keith was doing wrong to check my version against what Ann had said, but I nodded. “Late Friday afternoon.”

“Mom says it was about three.”

I paused. “I don’t know. Probably it was.”

“Was she real surprised to see you?”

“What do you think?”

Keith shrugged, and lifted one of the corners of his mouth in a little twitchy smile. “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking you. If I knew…” his voice was absorbed by his largest instinct, which was to say nothing to me.

“She was surprised.”

“Well,” Keith said, drawing out the word, like a small-town cop on television, that long drawl of folksy menace, “I guess it was the next step.”

“I don’t know what you’re going after, Keith. Tell me what you want to know and I’ll tell you.”

“All I’m saying is I guess it was the next step. I mean, if you were busy writing me letters—I mean to me, and you know how I feel—then I guess Mom got quite a few of them. Quite a few. Is that right?”

I had a suspicion that Ann had said something to the contrary. Perhaps she’d confessed only to a note; likely as not, she’d said she never replied. “I found out where you lived in the telephone book.”

“I know. But that’s not how you found Mom. She’s not listed under her name.”

“She’s under her maiden name. Ramsey. I remembered it.”

“You remembered it?” He seemed disturbed that I knew his mother’s family name. I had once again put my fingerprints on his past. “OK,” he said, as much to himself as to me, “so you remembered it. And you wrote her. And you told her how sorry you were, and how lonely, and how it wasn’t fair what happened to you—”

“I never said it wasn’t fair, Keith. What happened to me, I mean to all of us, can’t be touched by words like fair.”

He dismissed what I was saying with a wave. “So you wrote her and said how sorry you were and she wrote you back. What did she say in her letters? That she knew you were sorry and it was time to let bygones be bygones?”

I felt, and was, trapped. It wasn’t a question of whether I should lie to Keith in order to protect Ann, but whether she had already confessed to answering my letters.

“She answered my letters. But she never said she was sorry for me, and you know Ann would never say it was time to let bygones be bygones.”

Keith’s face creased in that sort of smile one makes when the triumph is proving you’ve been betrayed. I knew I’d lost the maneuver, but it was hard to care.

“I thought so,” he said.

I made no reply; there was no point in inviting him to illustrate the deceit he’d uncovered. I’d taken a chance and it flopped: I knew now that Ann had told him she’d never answered my letters.

“I don’t want to argue with you, Keith,” I said. “None of this is important today.”

“Bygones?” He was lifting his spirits. His life was more than a little berserk and it gave him a feeling of control to poke butterfly pins through whatever I said.

“No. I’m not talking about forgetting anything. I don’t believe in forgetting any more than you do.”

“That’s funny,” he said. “I think if I were you there’d be a lot I would want to forget.”

We were standing in the center of Ann’s bedroom. Her bed, covered by an Indian print spread, was on one side of us and a painted dresser and an upholstered chair were on the other. I took a step back so that if Keith tried to hit me, I wouldn’t catch it full force.

“You obviously don’t want me here,” I said. “What did you say when Ann said she wanted to ask me to come?”

Keith stepped forward and I readied myself for defense, but he was moving past me now, toward Ann’s bed. He gazed at it and then softly, as if it were a living thing, set his open hand down upon it. He turned around and sat on the edge of the bed and then, with an abrupt, clumsy motion, he lay down, propped against the simple wooden headboard, with his sandals on the colorful spread. He kept his hands beside him and drummed his fingers slowly, one at a time, as if he were counting down. Then he reached behind him and pulled a pillow from under the bedspread and placed it on his belly.

“You came here to see my sister?”

“Your mother asked me to come.”

Keith was silent, his face flushed momentarily and his eyes seemed to recede. He took a slow, deep breath.

“She doesn’t want to see you. She hates you. She knows what you are. You’re using my mother. You’re just using her to get to Jade, but Jade would rather still be trapped in that burning house than see you.”

“Keith, if—”

“And Jade has a lover, you know. She’s had plenty. Terrific appetite on that girl. She has a female lover. Did you know that?”

He waited for me to answer and finally I shook my head.

“Oh? So it’s news? Good. I’m glad I’m the one to tell you. Her name is Susan Henry, Jade’s girlfriend. They sometimes stay at my house in Bellows Falls.” He unfolded his hands and squeezed the pillow he’d lain over his belly. He was flexing his long, perfectly articulated toes against the bottoms of his sandals, in and out like the beating of a heart.

“You don’t have to prove how much you hate me,” I said.

“The reason we couldn’t find Jade is she’s with Susan right now. Camping trip. They love camping trips. They like doing it outside. They do all that woodsy stuff—camping, canoeing, twenty-mile hikes.” Keith smiled, a disassociated grin, deliberately unreal.

I was standing over him now. I reached down, grabbed his shoulders, and with one motion literally lifted him out of bed.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said, holding him, with my face an inch from his. “You really don’t. If you hate me so much you shouldn’t have let your mother ask me over.”

Keith shook loose of my grip and pushed me back with his hard, blunt fingertips. “I said it was all right,” he said, showing his small, squared teeth, “only because Mom wants you. Mom needs to believe in some kind of life outside of the family, even though she knows there isn’t any.” His face flushed red again and he closed his eyes for a moment. If he had lost his composure, broken down and wept, then I would have put my arms around him…

“Keith,” I said. My mouth was dry and filled with a strong, arid taste. “I like you,” I said. “I don’t suppose it’s what you want to hear, but I liked you from the start, when we met, and whenever I think about you, which is a lot, I think…I just like you and respect…And I feel horrible about your father, about Hugh.” I stopped; I was starting to tremble. I could feel my emotions toppling out of me.

“It was me you wanted to kill, wasn’t it?” he said, softly. “When you set the fire, it was me. And I know why.”

“That’s not true. You know—”

“Because I knew you for what you were.” He drew himself up. “I don’t want to talk about it. What you did. Ruined everything. I don’t…My father is dead.”

“Keith—”

“Don’t say my name!” he said, his voice rising. “None of this would be happening if it wasn’t…” He closed his eyes, tightly, and swung out. My arm went up to deflect his blow. He swung again and missed, but scratched the side of my face. He tried to hit me again but I caught his wrist and held it.

“Don’t touch me. Keep your hands off me, you fucking dirty creep.” He pulled away from me, but in fear I held on to him. “Let me go.” He swung at me with his free arm and I let him go. He put his hand on my shoulder and moved me aside. Then he walked by me, brushing into me with his shoulder, and headed back into the front of the apartment.

I waited in Ann’s room for a minute or so, not knowing what to do. Finally, I decided there were really no more decisions to be made: for good or for ill, I belonged with the others.

Ann sat next to Sammy on the sofa, her legs curled, holding him with both arms and resting her head on his shoulder. Ingrid was standing above them, trembling so terribly that the ice chattered in her glass and the carbonated water worked itself into a foam. She was glaring at Ann, and Ann was doing her best to pay no attention; it was Sammy who looked back at Ingrid, fastening his eyes on her with a kind of piercing incredulity.

“All right, all right,” Robert was saying, holding up his huge hands with ceremonial patience. “This is no way to carry on. For Hugh’s sake. Hugh, my God, he was a peaceful man. He’d be scandalized to hear us snarling at each other.” He glanced at his son and then gathered him in, draping his arm around him and holding him close. When Robert kissed his son’s hair, they both momentarily closed their eyes.

“It’s five o’clock,” Keith said, holding up his watch. “Pap’s ashes now. It’s all done.”

“Thank you very much,” said Ingrid’s sister. “We would have perished without the information.” She sensed sides were being drawn up and she wanted to assure Ingrid of her support.

Robert unbuttoned his green and white seersucker jacket. His chest was massive and there were ellipses of sweat on his jacket. He took a folded sheet of air-mail paper out of his inside pocket. He handed his drink to his son and Hugh strode over to the table to place it down, clearly pleased to be serving his father.

“What’s this?” asked Ingrid. “A will?”

“No,” said Robert. “It’s not. This is a letter from our Hugh. He sent it to us a little more than a year ago.” He unfolded it; it was typed in blue. “I took it along. It’s a rare thing, a letter from Hugh.” Robert looked down at the letter and smiled, as if he saw Hugh’s face looking out from it.

“Read it to us, Uncle Bob,” Sammy said.

“I thought I would pass it around.”

“No. Read it to us.”

“God. Then I suppose it’ll be time to drag out the old pictures, too,” said Ann. She didn’t sound displeased.

“I wish I could do this in Hugh’s voice,” said Robert. “It was his voice that made everything so special.” He looked at Sammy and nodded. “Like yours.”

“Read it, Uncle Bob.”

“‘Dear Bobbo.’” Robert stopped, looked up at Ingrid. “That’s my family name,” he said. He wiped sweat from his forehead and squinted uncertainly at the page, as if it had suddenly become less legible. “‘By now you’ve heard about the divorce and you’ve had a chance to get used to it. I feel like Cousin Derek, the time he wrecked Granddaddy’s Packard and simply moved to Charlotte for a year. Sometimes a man has got to lay low. I remember about eight years ago you and I were having a crayfish pig-out in that little place with the folding chairs right on the Ponchatrain, and you were carrying on a little about Billy Corona because he’d just walked out on Alison and you said something to the effect of what kind of shitass would leave a wife of a decade and a half and I shook my head and clucked like an old gossip on a verandah—say, the summer of ’38 with the trees in full bloom and all our values intact. Do you know what I mean? Those times in our life when everything is simple. And now here I am, doing Billy Corona one better because he left with only two children and I’m leaving three. Fairly grown children, I would say, and they’ve got more of an idea what they’d like to do with their lives than their poor old father has. Gosh, here we are, as always, in our baggy olive shorts and strawberry preserves sticking to the webs of our fingers, and calling ourselves poor old father, registered Republican. It seems so damned unlikely, doesn’t it?’” Robert’s voice broke and he turned the page over. His face was growing darker, a deep orderly flush that began at his neck and moved up, filling his face with color like wine in a glass.

“It’s so Hugh,” said Ann.

“I have a letter Pap sent me,” Sammy said. “I should have brought it.”

“I have poems, a hundred things,” said Ingrid. She covered her eyes, in grief and perhaps, in part, in shame: she had no choice but to angle for her rightful position, yet it humiliated her.

I was standing with my back to the wall, holding a glass of whiskey and soda. My legs ached and with everyone in that room weaving on the brink, I was terrified that my own tears would break free first. The sight of each face seemed to light another fuse that went leaping and hissing toward the impacted, volatile center of my consciousness: each sorrow was separate and unbearably specific, but each was finding its way to that part of me that was ready to detonate. Robert was going on with Hugh’s letter.

“‘What you heads of unbroken families don’t realize is how we wandering fathers love our children,’” Robert read, and I could tell from the way he nodded that he wanted to look at Sammy and Keith to make sure they’d heard that line, but he resisted. Then he read something else, but I don’t know what. I heard Robert’s voice as a dull, wordless murmur and I stared at his open, suffering face with an utterly improper fixity: I simply poured my attentions into the overwhelming reality of his large brown eyes, his dry grayish hair, his closely shaved, slightly jowly cheeks, and his massive chin.

Robert was committed to keeping the peace in the wake of death. He had stepped between Ann and Ingrid and had probably intervened in peace’s behalf when the squabble began about my arrival. He believed in the alchemy that turned all passions into sorrow—all jealousy, all rage, all sickness and fear transformed and laid at the silent altar of the dead. For now, he would not interrupt the rhythms of mourning to express his feeling about me: such emotions were mere luxuries of the living, and to parade them now would violate all the decorum proper to survivors. It would be later for me. Then I would feel the heavy hand on my shoulder, see the steel woven into the wool of Robert’s soft brown eyes. Later, he would judge me as Hugh would have; later, I would be put painfully in my place, accused, and disposed of.

I turned away from Robert and looked at Ingrid: she was sobbing openly now and looking back at me, her eyes puzzled behind the tears. I was certain that the memory of me standing not ten feet from Hugh was stirring within her, straining to become articulate, like those voices some people claim to hear at a séance: the windows of memory rattle, the curtains blow, the table shakes, but no one is there. She cocked her head and parted her full, colorless lips. There was disapproval in her stare and for a moment I was sure that the first layer of her memory of me had come into focus, but then I realized she was asking me to take my eyes off of her, to give her her sorrow in the artificial privacy of averted eyes. I shifted my gaze to Ingrid’s sister, a large-boned, heavy-set woman in a shapeless gray dress, dark stockings, and shiny black shoes.

It was at that moment that Keith, sitting perhaps twenty feet from where I stood, threw his tall, fragile glass at me. I don’t know if he meant to hit me or terrify me, or even if he’d considered anything at all, but the glass exploded against the wall, a foot, or perhaps even less, from my head. I thought it was glass spraying into my face but there were no cuts so I suppose it was only crushed ice. The clear base on the glass came to rest on my shoulder and later I found chunks of glass in my shirt pocket. It took a long moment to realize what had happened. I heard the crash and even had a shadowy, peripheral vision of Keith sitting forward and letting the glass fly. But it took a moment to understand that it all had to do with me. I felt the spray of liquor on my hair, my face, my shirt, and noticed, as dimly as a film projected on a black cloth, that everyone was looking at me. Robert stopped reading and Nancy clutched Ingrid’s shoulder as both of them gasped. I covered my face, finally, and turned away, stooping and shaking my head.

“Oh, Keith,” said Ann. “Keith.” Her voice sounded exhausted, more hurt than disapproving.

“He’s out! He is out of here!” Keith was shouting. I turned to face him, shaking my hands to get the moisture off of them, still half crouched as if to ward off subsequent blows. Keith was standing up and panting like a racehorse. It was awesome to see the passion and intensity of his respiration. His ribcage moved up and down like enormous wings and I don’t think I was the only one wondering what I would do if Keith suddenly keeled over. “I can’t feel anything with him here. It’s only him back again to do more harm. Jesus, it is incredible. He can’t stay. He’s out.” And then, pointing at me, he repeated: “Out, out.”

I looked at Ann. “I’ll go,” I said.

“Out, out,” said Keith. “Out, out, out.”

“Shut up,” said Sammy. He grabbed for Keith’s arm but when he missed, he didn’t try a second time.

Ann covered her eyes and shook her head. Don’t leave? Don’t stay?

“I’ll leave,” I said, as much to myself as to Keith.

I looked around the room; no one quite dared to return my gaze. I nodded, stupidly trying to act normal. In a feverish blur I saw that Keith had picked up another glass from the table and then it was sailing toward me, slowly, horizontally, the ice and whiskey cascading out, the glass capturing the lamplight. This time it collided with the wall a good distance from me. A hanging curtain of moisture appeared on the white wall. I stepped forward and crushed a large piece of glass beneath my foot; the shards scratched against the wooden floor and made a miserable, tearing noise. I covered my face—I thought I’d seen yet another glass flying at me, but Keith was standing still, his hands slightly in front of him, holding them as if I might attack him.

I turned quickly and walked down the long hall and let myself out. No one, of course, called to stop me. I closed the door behind me but the latch didn’t catch and it remained ajar. I didn’t dare wait for the elevator and I found the stairs in the center of the floor. I ran down a couple of flights and then had to sit down because I found that my legs weren’t really responding to me anymore. It felt as if a cluster of nerves had been severed, and I sat on the marble steps and pinched at my calves and pounded my knees for quite some time before any feeling came back.

As I left Ann’s building a taxi cab was pulling up. Its tires whined against the curb and the next thing I remember is the back door opening and Jade standing in front of me. She was larger, though not very much. Her long hair was gone. Now she had a short, athletic cut, perfectly straight, parted in the center and combed to the sides, shored off from the wind by a dark blue plastic headband. She wore a yellow blouse, opened two buttons worth at the top. Her neck was creased, three deep grooves, and then a small gold chain. Khaki pants, high-waisted and billowing. A black overnight bag, nylon. She was tan, tanned all over. Staring at me.

The cab pulled away. Jade took one step forward. Her lips parted and then came tightly together. I came slowly forward, and when I stopped, the points of my shoes were practically touching hers.

“Mom told me you were here,” Jade said.

“I am. I’m here.” And then I placed my hands on her shoulders and drew her close to me. I could feel the stutter of her resistance but it was faint. I put my arms around her, and just as I’d imagined ten thousand times, I embraced her. I wondered—fleetingly—if I was forcing myself on her. I felt her breasts against me, smelled the brilliance of her perfumes, immortalized the architecture of her bones. She rested her hands on my arms. Did not return my embrace. Did not push me away.

I held her for as long as I dared, and when I let her go I didn’t look at her because I knew she didn’t want me to. I faced straight ahead and listened first to her breathing, then to that ruminative silence as she struggled for one simple thing to say, and finally to the soft, jittery click of her footsteps as she walked toward the door to Ann’s building. I didn’t move until she was gone and then I still resisted turning around. I walked at full speed, squeezing my hands and talking to myself, running, stopping, walking again, and finally just sitting on the corner of 29th and Park, on the sidewalk with my back against a mailbox, waiting.

 

 

 

Twenty-eight hours later, the telephone rang in my hotel room and I picked it up in the middle of the first ring. It was the front desk.

“Mr. Axelrod?”

“Yes.”

“You have a visitor.” He paused. “May I send her up?”

“Let me speak to her, please.”

“Just one moment.”

“Hello?” said Jade. Her voice was husky. It always made me think of sand and sun, and smoke.

“I just wanted you to hear it from me,” I said. “Come up. You have my room number?”

“Yes. I have it.”

“Or do you want me to come down? Would that be better?”

“No. I’ll come up.” She paused. “OK?”

“Yes. Please.”

I met her at the elevator; she got off with two women wearing short leather skirts and cowgirl hats. Jade was dressed in gray and carried her black nylon travel bag. She smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, and riding on top of those scents like light on a wave was the aroma of lilac water: she must have put it on moments before arriving at the McAlpin.

We stood looking at each other for a very long while. I heard a high-pitched whoosh, such as aviators must have heard when they flew in uncovered cockpits. The impetuousness that allowed me to grab for her as I had yesterday afternoon was absent now. It was all I could do to look into her eyes, though, of course, I couldn’t have possibly turned my gaze anywhere else.

She looked exhausted. Her eyes were enormous, injured, and unfocused. Her lips were parched. She wore makeup and streaks of it showed up in the bleak, watery light of the hotel corridor. Her short hair was tucked behind her ears and the tops of her ears, with their hard, broad rims, were red. She had a gold stud in only one earlobe.

“You’re missing an earring,” I said.

She touched her right ear. “Oh,” she said. She touched the empty lobe a few times. “Damn.”

I shrugged. “We’ll get you another,” I said. I winced. It was such an idiotic remark. It was worse than idiotic: it was arrogant and desperate and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d laughed in my face.

But Jade was looking at me as if she hadn’t heard. My heart pawed at my chest like a huge dog behind a door.

“Are you surprised?” Jade said. “That I’m here.”

I shook my head. “You had to come.”

She narrowed her eyes a little. “No. I chose to. I decided.”

“Well, I’m glad.”

She nodded. Her eyes moved as she looked me over. She was noting the ways I’d changed. As her attention flickered over me I felt it like a human touch: it was clear to me that no one had looked at me in years. All of the other attentions had been fleeting, partial, obstructed: now, at a moment’s notice, now and at last, I was seen as I was.

“Do you want to come into my room?” I asked.

Jade nodded. “For a minute. I’m on my way to the bus station. The last bus up to Vermont leaves in half an hour.”

I closed the door and turned on the overhead light. I’d been propped up on the bed, rereading the newspaper by the table lamplight: the bedspread tortuously imitated my form; papers were askew; the tableau was one of disorganization and a certain grubbiness.

“I wish I could have greeted you in one of those silk smoking jackets with a glass of champagne,” I said.

She looked as if she didn’t understand why I was saying that. But I knew she did. There was something deliberate in the glance she gave me, something that wanted to insist she was missing the context of my remark. But Jade always could fill in the silence that flanked whatever I said, could picture what I’d seen without my having to describe it. It had been her intuitiveness that first tempted us toward the belief that soon overran every other thought: that we lived together in a world separate and superior to ordinary life. And now, the act of feigning confusion only told me that she still knew exactly what I meant, knew it as she always had and probably always would, for Jade understood me at my source, could trace the genealogy of my words back to their origins: as shifting tides of blood, drives, preconscious terrors.