Part Two 13 страница

“Can we afford dessert?” Jade asked at the end of the meal.

I was still so moved when she said “we,” especially when she said it casually.

“I want some of that apple pie with the melted cheese on it,” she said.

“OK. Me too. Coffee?”

“No. Milk. A cold glass of milk. I want to be twelve years old.”

I smiled. Twelve years old. A virgin. No: a “technical” virgin. Making pocket money staging nude dances for Keith’s suddenly numerous friends. Mascara on the down between her legs. Second prize in a citywide children’s painting competition sponsored by the Tribune and bursting into tears at the awards ceremony. Nabbed at Kroch’s and Brentano’s for stealing Fanny Hill. Where was I then? I could have been with her; we could even have been lovers. It would not have been wrong. I needed her then, not like now, but I needed her. I was living in the hush of my family. She was twelve. Keith had been caught in her bed, both of them in their underwear. Hugh dragged Keith out of the room by his hair. Jade was screaming, Hugh was bellowing, and Keith’s face had that inanimate horror of a victim in a news photo.

The waitress appeared, dressed as a cowgirl. I ordered our desserts. The women in the elevator, I remembered, had been dressed as cowgirls, the elevator that had brought Jade to my room at the Hotel McAlpin.

“I like this restaurant,” I said.

“I do too. Even though all the waitresses flirt with you.”

“They do not.”

“Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, poor naïve boy. Even tonight our waitress was leaning over you.”

“A leaning violation?”

“I’m serious! Her breast was almost touching you. That kind of stuff’s always going on.”

“I wish.”

“You don’t need to wish. They all know, everyone does.”

“Know what?”

“That you’re you, who you are. Mr. Fuck-Machine.”

The waitress came with our pie, a coffee for me, and milk for Jade. She got nowhere near me as she placed the cups and plates on the table.

“You see?” Jade said, when the waitress left.

“See what?”

“Oh, you’re just going to argue. You don’t see what I see. And it’s just as well. I need a nonegotistical man. They’re hard to find, you know.”

“I’m not nonegotistical.”

“Pretty much.”

“Not at all. No matter what happened, and no matter what people said about me, I wanted to be with you.”

“That’s not egotism.”

“Yes it is. Because I thought I deserved it. Me and no one else.”

“You’re going to make me cry.”

“Why?”

“Because you touch me where it’s always tender.”

It was dark and starless when we left Rustler’s. The parking lot was right off the highway and you had to nose your car out very carefully because everyone drove fifty or sixty miles per hour and there were no signs or lights to help you. It astonished me that something as planned and official as a restaurant parking lot could be so dangerous; it seemed to mean that life itself was so essentially dicey that there was a limit to how much you could do to make it safe. The high insecty whine of the cars speeding by. The smell of grass, fresh tar. The Beach Boys on the car radio. Jade at the wheel, waiting for an opening in the traffic, a place for us. Her eyes were hooded from the beers we had with dinner—she had no capacity for alcohol. Passing headlights cast strips of white across her face. Jade pressed the accelerator, I prepared for sudden death, and then we were out in traffic, our tires whistling.

It was a five-mile drive home. An old song by Bobby Hebb called “Sunny” came on the radio and I was going to ask Jade if she remembered it, but then I told myself of course she did. I was thinking about Susan Henry, with more ease now because no matter what happened it couldn’t have made much difference, but I was thinking about her all the same. In the restaurant, I’d wanted to ask Jade if she’d ever eaten there with Susan. Ridiculous question. So annoying and without importance. I suppressed it, but it hovered within me, like a sneeze.

Jade turned off the radio when an ad for joining the Army came on.

“I want to thank you,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about being with Susan today and you knew it.”

“Was it hard?”

Jade nodded. “Very.”

I felt my stomach turn.

We moved off Route 2, drove past an abandoned paper mill, and headed toward home. Jade was driving much too fast for narrow streets. It wasn’t like her. She was a great believer in highway safety; she wouldn’t even turn the ignition if you didn’t fasten your safety belt. I thought about watching the back of her head when she was sitting in Susan’s car, about Susan knocking into our shopping cart, and then an image, vaguely sexual, began to take shape in my mind—hands touching, an embrace. I let it recede. Jade continued to speed along. Her jaw was set forward; she seemed deliberately unblinking; her arms were straight and stiff. I didn’t want to look at her because I didn’t want to know what she was thinking. I put my hand out the window and cupped my fingers. The force of the sweet night air as we sped homeward was forceful, oppressive, something alive pressing against me.

“She frightened me,” Jade said, suddenly. She touched the cigarette lighter with her fingertips and then grabbed the steering wheel again.

“How?”

“By what she thinks. About us. Me. It’s so hard with Susan because she’s always so convinced she’s right. And she is right a lot, of course. She really is perceptive. But sometimes she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, only you can’t tell because she says it in the same super-convinced way. She takes aim and charges right at you, and if you resist it at all, she pushes that much harder. She’s like Keith in a way. I mean she remembers everything. And she can take power with it. Keith doesn’t do that. Keith will throw it in your face if he thinks you’re trying to hurt him, but he doesn’t try to take power. He doesn’t want it, but Susan does.”

“What did she say?”

“A lot of things. But the thing that made me…I don’t know. Here’s what: She says I use you.”

“For what?”

“It’s complicated. No. Not that. It’s just hard to say. It all has to do with my fucked-up family and my feelings about them. She thinks I use you against my family,” Jade said. “But in the most awful way. To really destroy them. She says you were acting as my agent when you set the fire. She says it was really me.”

“No. It was me.”

“I know. But it was you doing what I wanted. Reading my mind. We always do that anyhow. We always know each other right down to the bottom. I wanted something to happen and you made sure it did. I could have seen it in you from the beginning, the possibility. The way you charmed yourself into the middle of everything and then went wild. You know, even the fact that you could virtually become a member of the family galled me, if you want to know. There always seemed to be room for one more and in the meanwhile we got nothing. They took you right in—Ann did. And still does. But there was no room. There may have been room for me to have a lover but there wasn’t any place for a new Butterfield. And that’s what you were becoming. And I knew you would and I also knew that sooner or later the whole thing would explode.”

“I don’t think you knew that. You’re blaming yourself.”

“I think I did. And I wanted it. Even after it happened. I felt so strange. Grief and all that, but mixed up. I was glad, I think, that the family fell apart. I didn’t know it would end the family, though I should have figured that out, I see now. But for a while I think I was genuinely relieved. The way you are when you finally say the most horrible thing that’s ever wormed its way into your heart, or when you finally lose your favorite ring. The worst was out. The worst.”

“Is this Susan talking or you? You sound convinced.”

“I’m not convinced. I’m spinning. And you being in New York when Hugh got killed doesn’t make it any easier, for obvious reasons. It’s like you were the agent of my murderous spirit again.”

I looked out the window. We’d just sped past our house. Every light was on except in the attic. I turned the side-view mirror and watched the house get smaller. A few hundred feet later, the blacktop turned to gravel; we were heading out toward where a few of the area’s last real farms were. The tires hit the gravel, lifting a spray of stones that bounced and splattered against Colleen’s car.

“Go easy,” I said. But of course all that was really on my mind at that moment was the desire to tell Jade as much of the truth as I knew about Hugh’s death. The pull of that confession was nearly hypnotic, like the urge to leap that sometimes overcomes you when you are on the balcony of a very high building; only now it didn’t seem as if destruction was inevitable, or that it would take a miracle to save me, a violation of nature’s law. It seemed that if I spoke truthfully now I would be doing what was best for both of us, drawing us closer, silencing that persistent hum of ambiguity that droned always between us.

We drove past the growing corn, an indistinct mass in the heavy night. A small farmhouse with the light shining behind gingham curtains. The piercing, suspenseful twitter of crickets. The last of the fireflies, their phosphorescence bleeding into the humid blackness. The gravel was gone now and the road was packed dirt, with ridges and holes. Jade was still pushing fifty and the old Saab rattled like a trayful of china. We came to a fork in the road and Jade veered to the right. She drove up another few hundred feet on a road that was getting progressively rougher and then suddenly she stepped on the brakes and we lurched to a stop. There was a cornfield on one side of us and on the other a vast, plowed field, which rolled gently toward a distant farmhouse, its tiny windows golden and alive. Accidentally, she let her foot off the clutch and the car bucked forward a few times and stalled out.

“I don’t know where I’m going,” said Jade. She leaned forward and rested her head on the steering wheel.

“It doesn’t matter.”

We were silent for a while and someone turned up the volume on the night around us. Then Jade said, “Sometimes I think we have an unhappiness all our own waiting for us. In some love affairs the people do each other in, but I really do think that we’re too in love to do that, too much the same person, and what will do us in will be something quite a bit larger than just you or me. It’s the special unhappiness of mutual love and it really scares the shit out of me.”

I suppose I should have said something to the contrary, comforted her. But we believed we were deep enough to face anything, any sort of death, any shadow of fate. Yet even as I nodded slowly I felt a tightening inside, as if a doctor had just given me a fatal diagnosis.

“It’s still possible for me to believe that it won’t happen,” I said. “And in the meanwhile…”

“In the meanwhile.”

“Well, yes. In the meanwhile we can be together and I think we can promise each other all the future that’s ours.”

“Susan scared me, she really did.”

“People like us are easy to scare. We’re out on a limb.” I moved closer to her but we were in bucket seats and the gearshift was between us. Jade put her head against the steering wheel again and when I touched her knee a teardrop, singular and warm, struck the back of my hand.

I knew I wouldn’t tell her about Hugh and I knew also that if justice had anything to do with the unfolding of the human universe, then I no longer quite deserved to be with Jade. Loving her was not the perfect right of my birth but something I would have to get away with. And if love is a bridge that connects time to eternity, then I would have to slip across in some kind of disguise.

I wonder what—exactly—Jade was feeling then. It must have been something similar. She took my hand and pressed it to her, hard. “I want to make love,” she said. “Now. Here. We can do that, can’t we? Not in the car. In that field. I want to feel you. I want to be delirious again. David.”

“I want to,” I said, with my heart beginning to break.

 

 

 

Jade was going to be in a graduation class of one. Once she finished her senior thesis and made up the three courses she had dropped during her sophomore and junior years, it would be December. I don’t know what plans had been made for awarding her her diploma—probably it was just going to casually arrive in the mail sometime later, delivered to an address she no longer occupied. We didn’t know what Jade was going to do after graduation and we never really talked about it, except as fantasy.

Yet even with the end so clearly in sight, Jade often thought of quitting school and going somewhere else with me—somewhere of our own, a cabin in Maine, the southwest, a new city, Europe. I realized it was my place to say no to this, to help her keep her stamina up for the last months of formal education, but I too dreamed of leaving Stoughton with her and living in a world more wholly our own. Sometimes I nodded when she threatened to quit school, but even when I told her she shouldn’t my voice betrayed the true irresponsible depths of my longing to be alone with her and live a more adult life. I didn’t want to live in Gertrude with a lot of people no matter how much I liked them. I didn’t like the peacefulness of campus life and it really did gall me that Jade was forced to sit for hours in front of professors and allowed them to form her mind. I may have been plain and simple jealous of the hold that college had on her and of the worlds it made available, though I don’t think it was that that bothered me.

I thought of us both going to school, together. When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I’d been accepted by the University of California in Berkeley and I would have liked for us both to go there, get two desks, and turn them so we could face each other while we studied. Jade could do her graduate work in ethology and I might even take courses in astronomy. The energy and promise of my earlier life had worn a little thin, but I still believed that I might one day revive my old ambition.

But meanwhile it was daily life, the hasty Vermont summer—which even in July was autumnal in its dawns—and Jade’s elaborate senior thesis.

I was Jade’s lab assistant and worked every day—before setting out for the Main Street Clothiers and again in the evening—looking after the dogs in the makeshift kennels Jade had built in our back yard. The back yard was a small, patchy square, about seventy by seventy, and presided over by so many huge maples that grass could barely grow. Dandelions and dust, and where the lawn could sprout no one had the heart to cut it back. Jade made pens for the animals out of chicken wire, two-by-fours, tarpaper, and hay, and everyone in the house looked forward to the end of the experiment so the little canine shanty town might be eradicated. That Jade wouldn’t allow any of them to pet or even coo at the pups made it all the worse for the others, but because she wanted to study the behavioral differences between the pups raised by the blind mother and the pups raised by the normal mother she was worried that injudiciously portioned affection might invalidate her findings. When she made her rounds, she carried a stopwatch and timed herself so she wouldn’t spend an instant more (or less) than thirty seconds with each. She let me play with the puppies as well but she watched carefully over me with her stopwatch and said, in a dry, removed voice, “Next,” whenever thirty seconds was up.

It was obvious pretty early on, however, that the experiment wouldn’t yield any particularly clear results, let alone anything scientifically valid. Her professor, who had endorsed the project, seemed to have allowed Jade to wander into a dead end—but then perhaps that was the point of his agreeing. Jade was grief- stricken and ashamed when she realized that the experiment would yield no significant data—never had she been closer to dropping out of school and setting off to begin a new life with me. But I wouldn’t let her quit, and soon enough she came up with the idea of recording all the experimental flaws in her design and making the anatomy of the fiasco her thesis—much like those reporters who are sent out to interview a reclusive celebrity and write a whole piece on not getting the interview.

Yet even this idea changed. When Jade finally set to work on her thesis, it was called “Watching Dogs/Myself,” and it was perhaps the first confessional senior’s thesis in ethology. Since all hope for hard data was lost, Jade went to the source of her inspiration and recorded her own reactions to the litters. “This is how Hugh would have done it,” she said, the midnight she solved her dilemma.

“Dogs,” wrote Jade, “are mirrors more telling than water or glass. In bright reflecting mirrors we see ego-bound versions of what we look like now and fearful apparitions of the future. But dogs can show us how we feel, our relationship to the life around us, and our past. Animals are us in our infancy. A hound baying at the moon is our true self…” Jade and I watched and tended and adored the dogs, and when something seemed to interrupt the flow of life we finally abandoned the last pretense of experimental rigor and stepped right in. A Tiny Tears milk bottle; an Ohio Blue Tip splint. How we loved those dogs and pups, and what a relief it was to have a different medium through which to romance each other. The pups were our first metaphor. We cradled them and looked at each other; we could wonder about ourselves by wondering about them. And every evening as Jade made a long entry into her “Watching Dogs/Myself” diary, I lay on our bed and watched her write—she rocked back and forth like a Talmudic scholar—and I too thought of my beginnings, the slow tortoise-like gropings of my childhood, the years like cool muck. No one’s early life seemed so monolithically dull as my own, but I followed Jade’s lead and did my best to think about it, trying to recover all the information I’d fed to psychiatrists and make it more honest.

“The blind mother,” wrote Jade. “Sight without sight. Insight without looking. The numbing primacy of instinct. The blind mother eating the birth sack. Voracious. I almost screamed at Queenie to stop. I thought she might eat her first pup alive (Vladimir). An act of self-cannibalization. We are our mother’s self, but what she wants back she takes, and what she can’t admit she attempts to destroy, and what makes it through is what we are. Our first struggle: to get out of the mother. Our second (and lasting) struggle: to remain out, resist reabsorption.…”

“This is what I want to do,” Jade announced one night. We were walking back into the house after weighing all the pups. “For the first time, I know. I really know. I want to study animals.”

“I always thought that was what you wanted.”

“No. I wanted to want it. But it never seemed right. All the scientific method got in my way. Someone else’s shoes. And I’m not suited for it. I’m like Hugh in that way. I think that’s why he became the kind of doctor he was. Homeopathy is more intuitive and personal.” She took my hand and stopped me in my tracks. She pulled me closer to her. “That’s exactly what I want. I want to watch the world; I want to see things that most other people don’t notice. I’d like to go out into the woods for months at a time and do nothing but watch the world. Listen to owls, watch the deer get drunk on those old apples. And see everything for what it is and help myself see me for what I am. I’ll go to graduate school and get all the education I need so people will take me seriously and maybe even pay me, but what I really want to talk about is what it feels like to be related to a grasshopper.” She was smiling, squeezing my arm.

We went upstairs with a bottle of white wine. Jade wrote for a while and I drank and read from a book of stories by Isaac Babel. Then Jade joined me on the bed and helped finish the wine. Wine wants you to finish it, one of us said.

“Will you always be my assistant?” Jade asked.

“Will you pay me?”

“Half.”

“A deal.”

“And my husband?”

“We’ll have to pay him, too,” I said.

Jade smiled, laid down with her hands behind her head, her tee shirt tight against her breasts. Letting it pass.

“I’d love to be married to you,” I said. It was the first time we’d talked about it in years.

“It doesn’t make any difference. Marriage is probably unlucky, anyhow. It’s not what I think about. It’s something else. It’s raising the puppies with you. Being so close to the beginnings of life and sharing it with you. I think you’d be a great father.”

“I’d love to have children who looked like you,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“All we’d have to do is…I mean there’s nothing to it, really, then that would be that. No matter what happened, we would have done that. A child. God, I feel insane, but I really would like that. I want to do it. It seems that until you’re a mother you’re a daughter and it feels ridiculous being a daughter.

“That’s true. I never felt very comfortable in the daughter role.”

“Big joke. I’m offering you a chance at changing the universe and you’re making jokes.”

“Nerves.”

“It’s no excuse.”

“Look, you want to have a baby then we’ll do it.”

“No. You can’t make it mine. It can’t be what I want to do. It has to be mutual, you know.”

“It is. I’d love to be that baby growing inside you. It would be better than being married.”

“It seems like the next step. We can fuck until we die but after a while it starts wearing thin, doesn’t it?”

“Not for me.”

“I don’t mean yet. But it will. And I don’t really know how I feel about childless couples. It seems like cheating.”

“I could have nothing ever change again and I’d have a better life than I deserve.”

“I think it’s the normality of the whole thing that excites me,” said Jade. “How simple and perfect and matter of fact. All I have to do is not put in my diaphragm and then we can do what we normally do and then just as simply as that the whole world is different. It really is exciting to me, David. It’s like thinking about screwing for the first time, when all I had to go on was hearsay, one dirty picture, and my imagination.”

As Ann would say, how the souls of the unborn hovered over us that night. Jade came to bed, her uterus unshielded, and we made love with a gravity and wholeness that exceeded anything we had ever known. It was what making love for the first time would be if we were born with sexual skills, yet even that doesn’t faithfully describe the power of making love without contraception. We were playing long plaintive tunes on our bodies, trying to coax a human life out of the vast invisible jumble of chemistry and fate. A whole new vocabulary of instinct; my ejaculation seemed to hurtle itself deeper into Jade than ever before. The universe based on risk and effort. Sex no longer lifted us up and outside of time, but sent us streaming back and forth, into our own beginnings and toward the shrouded marker of someone’s future.

“Again,” said Jade after we came. “I feel like a dog. Never so out of control…”

It wasn’t pleasure, it was destiny. We stared at each other as we made love and barely made a sound. Lovers used to believe that their souls rushed out of them when they made love and we did hold on to each other as if we were endangered. I don’t know how many times we started from the beginning again, but we went on for hours that night. It was the energy, the obsession of our first month together, in Chicago, when Jade went through the days with lilac bruises on her spine and I’d be having dizzy spells. We petitioned the universe to make us a family, but it didn’t work out. The next day we both felt we had acted more impulsively than we could sustain and we went back to using birth control. We waited the rest of the month to see if our one try at conception had taken. I was certain it had, but I was wrong. Ten days later, Jade got those pains in her lower back that herald her period. “I’m glad,” she said. “We have too much to decide to have a baby now. You’ve got to straighten things out with the cops. My family doesn’t even know we’re together. I need to graduate and figure out my life. And so do you. You won’t be selling pants all your life, I hope.”

When her period finally began, we were having lunch on the lawn of the Presbyterian church near my work. “I have to get to a john,” said Jade, putting down her egg salad sandwich. We looked at each other and shrugged. I got up, took Jade’s hand, and pulled her up. We put our arms around each other. “I wasn’t sure,” Jade whispered. I didn’t know if she meant she wasn’t sure if she was going to actually have her period or if she wasn’t sure about having a baby. I didn’t ask. I wanted that baby without exactly knowing why. My desire for it couldn’t refute all of the objections, yet the objections couldn’t diminish the desire. I didn’t know what to say. My heart was racing at twice its normal rate and I just held her.

August 12, 1973, was the sixth anniversary of the fire; every year on that day the Butterfields gathered at one or another of their homes. This year, they were expected at Keith’s house in Bellows Falls—just ninety miles away. Up until the twelfth, Jade was decided not to go. She’d yet to stop concealing from Ann, Sammy, and Keith that she and I were together again—though I was certain that Ann somehow knew—and the anniversary of the fire seemed like the worst possible occasion to tell that particular truth. Yet on the other hand she didn’t want to spend a whole day with what was left of her family in such a false position.

“I hate going to Keith’s house,” she said. “I hate that he lives so close. I hate the jobs he works to keep the place going. I hate all the photographs and little scraps of family memories. He must think we’re the Romanovs. And I hate the place as much as he does. He makes you go on a tour each time so he can point out all the little things wrong with his house. The bricks crumbling around the fireplace, the wet spots in the wall, the rotting floorboards. I mean the guy is living in a house built in 1825 and we’re supposed to be upset that it’s not in perfect shape.”

On the morning of the twelfth I woke to the clock radio and Jade was throwing a change of clothes into her black nylon travel bag. “I’ll probably be back tonight but you never can tell with my family,” she said. It made me late for work but I went with her to the bus station. We were both nervous. Our first separation since spring. The bus was headed toward Boston but it was completely empty. The driver was tall and silver-haired. He looked like an airline pilot and I wondered if some deep character flaw forced him to drive a bus instead. Jade stopped on the bottom step of the bus and hugged my head to her breasts. “I don’t know what I’ll do if they start talking about you,” she said. “It makes me want to murder. I’ll tell them right away that we’re together and they can make anything they want to out of it.”

Gertrude was empty when I got home from work. Colleen had taken Oliver to Fishkill, ostensibly so Oliver could be a carpenter for Colleen’s mother, who was converting an old garage house into a guest apartment. Anemone Grommers was in Greece. Nina Sternberg was in Los Angeles. The others were simply out somewhere. I fed the dogs. In a few days, the puppies would be old enough to leave their mothers and we’d be taking the kennels down. I sat out in the back yard for a while and watched the pups gnaw on each other. I thought of how close they had brought Jade and me to starting our own family. It seemed truly lunatic to be influenced like that but I embraced our susceptibility.

I didn’t realize it first off, but every thought I had was a part of a well-constructed unconscious argument in favor of my calling home. A couple of days after moving to Stoughton I’d sent Rose and Arthur short notes, telling them I was all right. I’d given both letters to Miriam Kay to mail for me, as she was on her way to visit her sister in Toronto and I didn’t want a revealing postmark to give me away. Being outside the law bloats your self-importance and I sat for some time in the kitchen with my hand on the telephone, wondering if my call home would somehow be traced: like the hero of sentimental gangster story, I risked detection—death!—in order to get through to Mama. But finally the laws of civilization worked their way on me. Just as nature endows us with desire so that even the misogynist will reproduce, we bless ourselves with a sense of guilt so that even the heedless will sometimes do the correct, difficult thing. I dialed the Ellis Avenue number and Rose picked up on the fifth ring. She must have been taking a late afternoon nap; there was nowhere in the apartment that far from a phone. Her voice was small, meek, like a little girl who’s been warned not to answer the phone.

“It’s me,” I said.

She was silent and the silence continued. The beginning of a word. And then she slammed the phone down and broke the connection.

I held on, shaking a little but not surprised. I pictured her with her small hands over her face. Then picking up the receiver to see if I was still there. Slamming it down again. Hoping I’d call back. It was like her to be more insulted than worried by the mystery of my whereabouts and hearing my voice—sounding so normal and untroubled—drew on that part of her that felt spurned by me, enraged that I missed the subtle points of her affection. What she offered me was loyalty and the chance to be a better person, and I, instead, took her reserve for coldness and fell for my father’s sloppy love, choosing the overheated embrace over the guiding hand.