Part Two 12 страница

Friendship with Jade’s friends was not what I wanted. When I had imagined our reunion, I hadn’t bothered to fill in the human landscape. I had fantasized our living out our piece of eternity in some stark version of my grandfather’s planned community in Florida: a window, a bed, a refrigerator, and a shelf of books. But when it became clear that knowing Jade’s friends was going to be a necessary part of living with her, I found myself pursuing my new-found social life with surprising relish. It was nearly deranged how quick and ardent my affections were for virtual strangers. Jade took me to meet old Professor Asbury—Carlyle, after ten minutes; Corky midway through the first drink—who’d been laid up for nearly a year from spraining his back playing tennis on his dewy, shabby back yard court. White-haired, bony, and elegant, Asbury was such a profound campus favorite that students with no interest in music took his music theory course just for his company. I had a perverse impulse to resist his charms, but as we left his little gingerbread cottage I squeezed Jade’s hand and said, “God, what a nice guy,” and I don’t know if I was primarily moved by Asbury or my response to him but I practically sobbed as I said it.

Jade took me to dinner at her friends Marcia and Trig’s apartment. The place looked like an assassin’s hideout, with slanted linoleum floors and a view over a tarpaper roof onto the back of a peeling garage. We sat on the floor. Marcia and Trig weren’t hippies; they gave us no India print pillows to sit upon. They seemed utterly unconcerned with their personal comfort—or ours. But when they finally served up the meal, it was terrific and delicate. Fish with slivers of pistachio. Newly picked vegetables in a Japanese batter. That they had gone to so much effort with my poor pleasure even vaguely in mind touched me like a caress. I ate as slowly as I could and looked at them with warm swimmy eyes as they described the circumstances of their health food store being harassed out of business by thugs they believed to have been hired by the local grocers’ association.

Gertrude had house meetings every Wednesday evening, and now that I was a member of the crew, I was invited to sit with the rest of them around the expansive Formica kitchen table, smoking Camels and drinking Almadén jug wine like all the rest—the Camels and Almadén were ceremonial and virtually required. We talked about chores, expenses, passed judgment on visitors (I was no visitor!), and as I looked from face to face—there was Jade, Oliver Jones, Colleen MacKay, Nina Sternberg, Miriam Kay, Boris Hyde, and Anemone Grommers—I often thought to myself: This is the best bunch of people in the world. I felt real patriotic love for Gertrude and its residents, as if we were all members of a gang or a cult or a revolutionary cadre. Of course we were nothing more complicated or grand than a handful of people sharing roof and rent, but all gestures of friendship—no, not even friendship, mere friendliness —heated my passion and imagination. In the world of normal discourse I was like a tourist—a dying tourist—on a twilight tour of Europe. Each sunset, each spire, each cobblestoned path, each lobby, each glass of local beer is monumental, tragic, and unparalleled.

I did manage to learn that a little more than a year before, Jade had lived in Gertrude with a student named Jon Widman. Jon—bald at twenty, toweringly tall, anemic—was a musical genius, played twelve different instruments, and composed music from blues to string quartets. I also learned of Jade’s affair with a professor of English. This information was given to me—with a certain meanness of spirit, I thought—by one of my housemates, who was ostensibly proving that an affair with a faculty member was an inevitable Stoughton ritual.

But it was Jade herself who talked to me about her love affair with Susan Henry. There were places we could not go, movies and concerts we could not attend, because Jade was worried about meeting Susan.

“It’s my own doing,” she said. “And so useless. I didn’t end it the right way and didn’t call her when we got back.”

“But I thought, I mean the impression you gave me, was the break-up was mostly her doing,” I said.

“We were too close for that to matter. At a certain point everything’s mutual.”

And then one day when we were walking down Main Street—I was on my lunch break from Main Street Clothiers and we were crossing the street to go to the stationery store for a notebook—Jade grabbed hold of my upper arm, turned me around, and walked quickly with me into a dime store, with its scent of wooden floors and candy corn.

“What is it?” I asked, though I fairly well knew.

“I can’t believe how stupid this is,” she said. “Susan. I saw her on the other side of the street and I just don’t have the courage to run into her. It can’t be like this. I have to call her.”

We were inside that variety store and it was like being inside a different decade: old women in faded sweaters, with their eyeglasses hanging onto their bosoms from silvery chains; bins of loose chocolates, bridge mix, peanut brittle; the strange hush of a store lacking Muzak; displays of cheap underwear and thin, powder blue socks; coloring books and cap guns. Jade and I wandered aimlessly through the aisles. Her hands were in her pockets and she kept her eyes cast down. She was walking fast, pulling ahead of me, and I reached out to take her arm. She allowed me to stop her and then I turned her and put my arms around her.

“It seemed so perfectly natural to be with Susan when we were together,” Jade said, as I held her. “But I don’t think I’d be treating her like this if she was a man. It’s because she’s a woman and I loved her.”

The difficulty inherent in choosing to love another woman and now the long pull of conscience in the affair’s aftermath made the time with Susan more intimate and enviable than all of the other parts of Jade’s life that I’d missed. As I held her in that antique dime store and watched the few customers circulating lazily throughout the store—the ten-year-old girls choosing party favors, an old man inspecting a tiny cactus plant—I thought of how the difficulty of a connection increases its intensity. I thought of how alive with courage and desire that love must have been to carry Jade past the boundary of her established sexuality.

We walked around the store. Jade almost took my hand; her fingers brushed against me and then she moved away.

“Susan’s a powerful person,” she said. “The most powerful person I’ve ever known. She lives inside her feelings like a queen in her castle. I admired her so much. Envy too, I guess. She could take herself so seriously and never seem stupid, or self-involved. I had such a case of hero-worship with her, God, it was months before I realized that it was also something more. That I…”

“I don’t know how to be in this conversation,” I said. “I think we have to stop. Just for now.”

Jade nodded. We were in front of a bin of phonograph records.

“I want to know it,” I said. “I just need a little breathing space. I know it was important to you and I suppose it was difficult, too, and maybe even scary. But I was feeling myself starting to get jealous. I know I don’t have a right to—”

“It wasn’t scary,” Jade said. “The only love I’ve ever known that has scared me has been with you. Being with Susan wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t at all.”

“It seems that it was very intense,” I said.

“What else is there? I’m not casual.”

“I know,” I said, my voice slipping away.

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I just need to hear it in stages. It’s stupid. I have no right to say this. Don’t listen to me. Tell me the rest. Tell me it all.”

“It’s not necessary,” said Jade. “It’s mine.”

And so we dropped all talk of Susan Henry and the silence hovered over us, as watchful as a bird of prey. I longed to ask Jade to speak to me about her love with Susan but, temporarily at least, I’d forfeited the right. We ate dinner at Gertrude that night and Jade didn’t say a word at the table, though we ate with seven others. She went upstairs before me, and when I followed her up to the attic some fifteen minutes later, Jade was in bed and all the lights were off. I got undressed and lay next to her and after a while I put my hands on her breasts. She breathed heavily and didn’t stir; I knew she wasn’t really asleep.

The next morning we were hesitant with each other. It was our turn to do the weekly grocery shopping for the household. We shopped at a huge store called Price Chopper, and it didn’t seem like a piece of remarkable coincidence at all that halfway through our nervous shopping we were once again confronted with Susan Henry.

This time, Jade had no opportunity to flee. Susan appeared from around an aisle corner. She looked tall, tan, willowy, and toothy, rather like Joni Mitchell. Her straight hair was almost white; she wore a loose, pale blue dress and little sandals. Her long arms were bare and she wore turquoise and silver bracelets. Her eyes remained mysterious behind brown-tinted sunglasses.

“Beep beep,” said Susan, giving our cart a small jostle.

“Hello, Susan,” said Jade, her voice a metaphor for nights of cigarettes and grain alcohol.

“Hello,” said Susan. Her voice was lilting, a trifle cute—or trying to be. I could feel her effort and it drew me toward her for an instant.

Jade looked into Susan’s cart. “Still buying junk food?” she said.

“That’s right!” said Susan.

Jade shrugged. Then: “Susan Henry? David Axelrod.” Pointing to us as she said our names.

I offered my handshake. As romantic victor I felt it was my place. Susan looked at me as if the handshake were some archaic salute and then, nodding as if remembering, took my hand and shook it with a certain irony.

“Hello, David,” she said. She gave no indication of ever having heard of me.

“Hello,” I said. I thought the confident thing to do was smile, but I learned later from Jade that it looked more like a leer.

Susan focused her attention on Jade and began telling her something about a friend of theirs named Dina who’d just left for Cologne to study philosophy with someone who’d studied under Wittgenstein. The tone of the anecdote was admiring and ironic. The victory celebration dinner was described. Dina got drunk and spoke German all the rest of the night. Professor Asbury showed up for a while, moving gracefully on his aluminum walker. Et cetera. I wondered if the purpose of the story was to make Jade feel embarrassed at not being invited, but Jade didn’t seem at all upset.

Then, suddenly, the anecdote was over and my wandering attention was stopped short by the silence. Susan dropped her gaze for a moment. She looked jittery, with those kind of raw nerves that you get when you feel doomed to be misunderstood.

“What are the chances of our having a talk?” she said to Jade.

Jade didn’t answer right away—not out of indecision but as a way of acknowledging the difficulty of Susan’s gesture.

“We should talk,” said Jade.

“I’m going to Boston this evening,” Susan said. “For five days.”

Jade nodded. “To stay with Paula?”

“Yes.”

“Say hello, OK?”

“I’d like to have that talk before I leave,” Susan said. Her shyness had passed; she knew as well as I did that Jade would go along.

Jade almost turned toward me to see if that would be acceptable, but she stopped herself. “We can,” she said, with somber, almost corny judiciousness.

The situation struck me as fairly intolerable, but I did my best with it. I slipped my arm around Jade’s waist and pressed her to me for a moment. “Why don’t I finish up with the shopping?” I said. “I’m the best shopper anyhow.”

“OK. That would be fine,” Jade said. She sounded uncertain, formal. Susan was staring off down the aisle, hurtling her attention far away for the moment. She was refusing to look at me. I engaged Jade in a conversation about groceries—did Anemone like creamy or chunky peanut butter? What was the name of that delicious breakfast cereal Oliver had made for us the day before?—and finally Susan backed her cart up and announced she was going to finish her shopping and would meet Jade in a few minutes at the front of the store.

“Well, that’s Susan Henry,” Jade said.

“That’s all right. It had to happen. Running into her.”

“She seems so nervous. It’s not like her. Susan’s totally confident all the time. It’s scary seeing her like this.”

“Well, people change,” I said, trying to be inconsequential but revealing more of my own resentment than I wanted to.

“You’re upset about me having coffee with her?”

“Just as long as coffee is all,” I said—I actually thought I was being lighthearted in this. I produced a loopy grin.

“You said you’d never hound me,” said Jade.

“I won’t. You’re going with her, aren’t you?”

We had to move our shopping cart. We were standing in front of the salad oils. A young mother with pink curlers in her hair and a sleeping infant in a canvas pouch dangling from her back put a giant bottle of Wesson Oil in her nearly overflowing cart. The store manager’s voice had replaced the Muzak on the public address system; he was describing items on sale—chicken breasts, Brillo pads, Folger’s coffee, Duz detergent…

“I’ll meet you back at the house,” I said, taking control of our cart.

Jade nodded. She was about to walk away and pretend that we weren’t going through anything particularly difficult or strange. She still had a deep desire to pretend once in a while that we, like everyone else, were essentially separate. But she stopped herself and said, “I won’t be long.”

“You know what I think?” I said. “Here’s what: if the world ended right now, I’d be happy I got to spend as much time with you as I have. I’m not modern or sophisticated, but I really do want you to do what you want, what you think is best. Because when you’re most like yourself, something good always comes of it.”

I made it a point to be in the back of the Price Chopper when Jade and Susan left. Jade had given me the keys to Colleen MacKay’s Saab and when I thought of driving it home I had a flutter of apprehension. I knew how to drive but I didn’t have a license. I thought of someone accidentally hitting me from behind. The police on the scene. No license? Then the call into headquarters. Finding out about my parole violation. Thrown into jail. Sent back to Illinois. No chance even to call Jade.

Back at the house, nearly everyone was in the kitchen as the groceries were unpacked. It was a Saturday, still early but very warm. Anemone spooned the peanut butter into her mouth. Nina Sternberg prepared a twelve-egg omelette. The kitchen was golden with sunlight and rather quiet considering there were six of us in it. I realized everyone noticed I hadn’t returned with Jade. I was surprised; I didn’t think things like that were noted.

“Jade and I met Susan Henry at the Price Chopper,” I said to no one in particular. I was standing on a metal chair placing cans of baked beans and chicken stock onto the top shelf of a cabinet.

“Can I say something about Miss Henry?” Nina Sternberg said. “Miss Free Spirit borrowed fourteen dollars from me in March and now she hides behind trees when she sees me on campus.”

“Really?” said Anemone, her voice sounding as if she had a cleft palate from all the peanut butter. “She owes me money, too. Ten dollars.”

“Susan’s not too good with other people’s things,” said Colleen. “I loaned her my car and she brought it back with an empty tank.”

I felt weak and alone waiting for Jade and I was grateful when Colleen MacKay informed me that she was making sandwiches and I was invited to eat with her and Oliver Jones on the front porch. She’d set up an old wicker table, covered with an old linen cloth, graced by a Narragansett beer bottle filled with irises. She’d made cheese and cucumber sandwiches and I complimented her on the elegance of her meal. I’d never eaten a cucumber sandwich before. I sat on a little rocking chair and Oliver and Colleen shared a wicker loveseat.

Colleen was short, stocky, with powerful swimmer’s legs and dark brown eyes that always seemed a little irritated, as if she’d just gotten out of a chlorinated pool. She dressed in overalls and checked shirts, or once in a while appeared in a dress of such stiff formality that even a stranger would have known she hadn’t chosen it herself. Oliver had moved into Gertrude three years before, when he was in love with a Stoughton student named Sara Richards. He was at that time already in his mid-twenties and long out of school—he’d dropped out of Exeter in his junior year and hadn’t been back to school since, though every so often he’d apply to do graduate work in Oriental Studies at someplace like Stanford or Harvard and wait for a letter of acceptance and a grant before deciding that his “un-schooling,” as he called it, was not yet completed. Sara Richards was killed in a ski lift accident not six months after Oliver moved in, and his staying on in the house was a perfect Oliver Jones mixture of the tragic and the lazy. He had had love affairs with the majority of the women who had passed through the house, though none of the affairs ever lasted long. These affairs usually began in commemoration of one of Oliver’s many personal days of remembrance: Mahler’s birthday; the discovery of Uranus. (That was one of Oliver’s comic bits, the homosexual astronomer discovering a planet and naming it after his lover’s asshole. “Do you know what that is in the sky, you wonderful little monster? That’s your anus.”) The night Oliver and Jade took each other to bed was the anniversary of Sara’s death, a stormy February night that turned all the windows in the house as opaque and white as gravestones. They remained lovers for a week and then one night Oliver got up in the dark complaining of a toothache. He went downstairs to make himself some warm milk and never returned to Jade’s bed again…

We sat on the porch, the three of us, eating our sandwiches and drinking iced tea, like people in the 1920s, smelling the flowers and enjoying the breeze, watching the bluejays on their headstrong, raucous rounds. The sky was a deep, mild blue, as smooth as the inside of a shell except for one patch of rippled white cloud. I did my best not to think of Jade and Susan and what they might be doing. I was suffering, but what mild agony it was—as long as I remembered how much worse, how infinitely more dreary and without boundaries my unhappiness had been before. Here I was eating Christian delicacies on a shady Vermont porch. Blue skies. Bluejays. Oliver’s sly blue eyes squinting at Colleen as she asked him if he enjoyed kyacking.

“David?” Colleen asked. “You here?” She mimed knocking at a door. “Hello?”

She leaned forward and put her small, slightly puffy hand on my knee. “If you’re worried about Susan Henry, I can tell you you don’t need to be, OK?”

“One always worries about the Susan Henrys of the world,” intoned Oliver. “Just as one worries about influenza or, let’s see, the steering column of your car snapping off.”

“She didn’t seem like a menace,” I said. “The thing is I thought she looked nice.”

“Nice?” Oliver said with a shrug, as if I’d used a discredited term.

“Nice-looking. As vulnerable as anyone else.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Colleen. She looked at her hand on my knee and smiled, as if she were pleasantly surprised to find it there. “You’re who matters to Jade.”

“I know that,” I said.

“I wonder sometimes,” Colleen said. She was glancing at Oliver now, and I could feel the core of her concentration turning toward him. “Men have a knack of being blind to what women feel about them. Men. I shouldn’t say men. People.”

Just then an orange VW pulled up in front of the house, with a black convertible top. I could see Jade’s head on the passenger side, the hair touching the top of her white collar. I couldn’t see further into the car but I knew Susan was facing Jade and they were talking and that the conversation was not an easy one. The little motor percolated and once Susan must have accidentally stepped on the accelerator because the engine raced for a moment, whirring like a power mower in tall grass.

“There. That didn’t take long,” said Colleen. She made a move as if to clear the lunch dishes away but thought better of it, and rested her hands on an arm of the wicker loveseat. She crossed her legs and peered out at the car, like a mother who’s been waiting past curfew for her child’s return.

“Is that Susan’s car?” Oliver mused. “It looks new. Jersey plates, too. I wonder…”

I felt a panic of shyness. It seemed incredible that the two of them could be so near. It was a warm day but the windows of the car were rolled up: I saw the white skid of a sticker that had been only partially peeled away and the dim swaying reflection of an upside-down tree. All of the jealousy I’d been avoiding since leaving the supermarket fell through me now, like suitcases off the luggage rack in a train that’s stopped too fast. My throat was tight, my fingers felt pink and cold. I stared at the car until my eyes glazed over. Oliver was going on about how it couldn’t have been Susan’s car, she must have borrowed if from someone, but who? I couldn’t pay attention, but I was glad he was talking.

Finally, the door on Jade’s side swung open and a few long moments later Jade got out of the car. There were dark streaks on her shirt where she’d sweated against the hot upholstery. Her brown cloth belt was twisted in back and I wondered, obscenely, if it had been like that in the morning. She closed the door. Susan pulled away—not with a roar, as I expected, but casually, hesitating before she swung into the middle of our street, even though there was no traffic. I watched the car leave. The back seat was filled with packages. A good sign: it meant they hadn’t gone back to Susan’s house.

Jade turned around. Expressionless. A passport photo. A memory. She was wearing jeans, Swedish clogs, a blue and white shirt with a white collar. The sun was perched on the chimney and shining directly in her eyes. She squinted toward the porch, noticing us for the first time.

Colleen waved.

Jade walked toward the house. The bushes were obese, making the sidewalk narrow; she ran her hand along the dark green brocade. Her gold chain necklace was gone. A Christmas gift from Susan. I rattled back the ice in my empty glass, tasting the old tea and the sugary sludge.

“Lunch on the porch?” said Jade, mounting the steps.

“A perfect day for it,” said Colleen.

Jade nodded. She looked stern, heartbroken and beleaguered, like an Army medic. “And minding my business, too,” she said.

“There’s no business like Jade’s business,” Oliver half-sang.

Jade made a false smile in Oliver’s direction and then walked by us and into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.

We were silent for a couple moments. The sound of bees. Me rattling the ice in my glass.

“She has a power to make people feel like assholes,” said Colleen, shaking her head at Oliver, comforting him.

“It’s a power only the victim can bestow,” Oliver said, crossing his long legs.

I got up and drifted lazily toward the door, still holding my glass. I placed my hand on the little cylindrical knob, but didn’t open the door. I stared into the cool shadows on the house through the sagging mesh of screen, looking at the mahogany banister, the mirrored hatstand, the lantern-shaped chandelier, all crosshatched as if objects in an etching.

“I’ll go see her,” I said, and opened the door. I could hear her footsteps going up the third flight of stairs to the attic, the clogs made so goddamned much noise. I took the steps two at a time, chasing quietly after her. There was a pocket of hot, humid air on the second floor, like those little galaxies of warmth we come upon in cool lakes. Someone was taking a shower in the second- floor bathroom, the rush of water, that sweet white noise. Sunlight ignited the pale turquoise bubbles in the half-circular window on the landing—Jade said the world looks like memory through old glass. The staircase was not continuous. I walked down the hall half the width of house before mounting the steps to the attic, narrow, steep steps, wooden and uncovered, almost black except for the third, a plywood replacement the color of wheat.

Jade was standing before the huge, diamond-shaped window set in the lowest part of the attic and overlooking our back yard—with its maple trees and makeshift kennels. She was leaning forward resting her hands on the window frame, her fingers almost touching the ceiling. She didn’t turn around when I closed the door behind me, didn’t even move, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake following her up. I walked halfway across our bedroom and then stopped, feeling awkward and imperiled. But I forced myself to continue, as I would have wanted Jade to if it had been me with my forehead against the window, and when I put my hands on her shoulders she turned quickly toward me and held me with such sudden fierceness that her strength broke my breath in two, snapping that column of air as if it were a twig.

We held each other. I heard the screen door slam downstairs. A bluejay flapped past the window, another, and then two more. I moved my hands down Jade’s back but that was all. She was perfectly still, embracing me with unyielding strength. We went to bed and made love for a very long while. We didn’t talk about Susan, or about anything. I had my mouth on her, pressing her with the insides of my lips and the back part of my tongue, where it is softer, and when she came I thought for a moment that I’d just imitated the way she and Susan made love. But that passed, quickly. I knew Jade was with me. Love, finally, isn’t blind, and when I poured out into her I could feel how much she wanted me. Weren’t we wonderful to each other when we made love? It was different from before, when we were beginning in Chicago. I think we were less happy. There was a death between us now and four years of separation, there were lovers and courts and hospitals and unsent letters and ten thousand hours of terror and doubt, but we were not less for it, just less happy. And perhaps not even less. It could have been that the light of consciousness struck our happiness from a different angle and it wasn’t smaller but less brilliant, and it cast a shadow now, a shadow of itself that was chilling.

Finally, we fell asleep but it was still light when we woke. The dogs Jade was studying for her senior thesis were yipping out back. The reflection of the leaves moved like fast, cool water on the wooden plank floor.

“I’m sorry if that made you scared today,” Jade said.

“It did. But not too much.”

“It’s funny, because when we were shopping today, I was thinking how of all the things about being with you again shopping is the thing I like the most. I like doing something so normal and everyday with you and, well, you know, to be going absolutely nuts inside because it’s you and me doing it. It’s like a great imposture. Wheeling our cart around looking as common as can be and knowing that in an hour’s time we can be back here completely naked and doing something truly savage.” She reached over and ran her hand over my chest. “I like just doing everyday things with you.”

“I do too.”

“What do you like about being with me?” Jade asked after a while.

“Everything.”

“No. You know what I mean. Specifically what do you like.”

“I like watching you get dressed, especially in the morning when you’ve just had a shower and you’re off to go somewhere. I like the way you button your shirt in front of the mirror and watch your own fingers as you do it. Then you tuck it into your pants and smooth out all the material. You give yourself a nice feel-up before you go out. And if your hair’s wet, it’s even better. You pull it up in little clumps, shake it, so it’ll dry, I guess, with real brisk professional motions like a hairdresser. Everything done with such energy. You seem so incredibly on.”

That evening we went out to supper—my treat. I was making ninety dollars a week at the Main Street Clothiers, selling, among other things, the same Redman Pants I’d been picketing other stores for selling. It did nip at my conscience, but I couldn’t live off Jade and the others and jobs, as usual, were scarce. I did my best to talk customers out of buying Redman Pants, but as much as I wanted the union to prevail, it was one of the very least of my worries. Once I sent ten dollars to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers with an unsigned note wishing the Redman workers well and asking that my contribution be put in a workers’ relief fund, or strike fund. But after sending it I felt real panic. I felt somehow the money would be connected to me, the disappeared picket boy. The postmark deciphered. The police called…I knew it was terribly unlikely, bordering on impossible, but it was unendurable to have the false imagination of such a disaster whip through me. Anyhow, Jade and I went to dinner at a place called Rustler’s, one of those restaurants that seem to encircle Stoughton, with heavy furniture, thick carpets, hamburgers, steaks, and pork chops, and a huge salad bar. Lights hung from a wagon wheel; the water glasses were dark gold; the menu was shaped like a covered wagon. It was for tourists, I suppose, the idea being that as soon as city people get out into the country they think about cowboys. Jade and I liked to eat there because we knew we’d never see anyone she knew. We ordered the cheapest things on the menu and it gave us the right to return as many times as we wanted to the salad bar and to eat more beets, onion rings, and canned chick peas than we would have under any other circumstances.