Endless Love (36 page)

I longed to return the gesture with a caress of my own, but I knew better. I knew she meant more than one thing by her touch. I was someone she used to know who she was seeing on the day of her father’s funeral. It could have meant as little as that. It could have meant even less: exhaustion, sadness, that depletion of spirit that comes when we surrender to another’s will. Ye I was sure it was otherwise. There was something specific and deliberate in her touch. She was not merely laying her head against me. There was life in her muscles, in her neck and shoulders; she was making certain not to lean on me too hard. She was touching me and holding back in a way that seemed wholly calibrated, judging where to touch me and how hard, and that meant that not only was the center of her brow touching me but all of her. It added the dimension of decision to her gesture, of measurement and risk, and that made leaning against me as intimate as touching my face or taking my hand and pressing it against her breast. Moments passed, moments and moments, and it felt as if the whole of her being was concentrated in that stretch of brow that homed in on me, just as the entirety of a singer seems concentrated in her mouth as she hits her highest note.

I couldn’t put my arm around her without causing her to move her head, so I reached over and laid my hand on her leg, just above the knee. I laid it flat, without closing or even curling my fingers, so it wouldn’t seem as if I were trying to take possession of her, or even hold her.

I took measured breaths and tried to ignore my mind’s chaotic bursts of speculation and joy, but even so I was trembling.

Jade lifted her head and leaned away from me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have known I couldn’t touch you.” I pulled my hand away from her, but I continued to quiver. I stood up and walked to the window. I felt my heart pounding, felt it at the back of my throat, in my stomach, the tip of my penis, my legs. I leaned against the window and looked out. Moving above me was a piece of the black and gray nighttime sky. It could all end here, I thought, my life, all life, it wouldn’t matter. And the thought seemed so reasonable and did such justice to the wildness of my feelings that I almost said it aloud.

“Are you going to make trouble for yourself by coming here?” Jade asked.

“No.”

“But you’re not supposed to see any of us. You’re on parole. I’ll bet no one knows you’re here.”

“It doesn’t matter. No one will find out. I’ve been gone some of Friday and today. The weekend doesn’t count.”

She looked at me skeptically but didn’t want to pursue the thought: she had inherited from Ann the stylized belief that the best way to be
for
someone is not to show much concern over what they
do.

“You know who I met on the plane coming out here?” I said. “Stuart Neihardt.”

Jade shrugged.

“You don’t remember him. He was in my class at Hyde Park High. He works for a dentist now and he’s in New York having gold teeth made.”

Jade nodded. She suspected I was inviting her to make an ironic remark about Neihardt and she wouldn’t do it. She was either too close to other people to make fun of them, or too far above them to bother: it depended on her mood.

“He remembers us,” I said. “He has this really sick grief over people he knew who were happy together. He was super lonely and got to hate all of us who weren’t. It was strange hearing about us from him. I never think about him so it was weird being remembered.”

“I don’t remember that name. What does he look like?”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you knew him. But he said ridiculous things about us. He said he looked in your blouse when you were leaning over some exhibit at the science fair.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

“It made me fantastically jealous. I grabbed his lip and twisted it.”

Jade winced. “God, David. You’re so violent and crazy.”

“No I’m not.”

“You are. You don’t know it but you are.”

“I’m not. What I feel, it isn’t violence or craziness. I don’t like violence, and craziness is sad and boring and frightening. I was with a lot of crazy people, you know, and was treated like one, too. I mean there were times when I wondered if I was insane, and then for a long while I
wanted
to be crazy, just for a way to be, a way to have it make sense being there. Something to occupy me, make me less the person I was, who was in so much pain, and more like some other person, someone unknown, whom I could watch. But I wasn’t crazy. That was the thing. I wasn’t crazy at all, though I know that’s the best way to prove you are, saying you’re not. All it took for me to get out—I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on—all it took was pretending I was changing, that I was starting to feel differently about myself and—” I paused for a moment, to give her a chance to diminish her attention if she wanted to “—about you. All it took was pretending that I was getting over you, that was all.” I was sitting next to her again.

“I don’t know why I call the people there crazy,” I said. “It’s not what they are. It’s a habit, a way of thinking about Rockville and keeping myself separate. You know what it is? All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they’re all right, for what it’s worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that’s what we call crazy and its not really completely wrong to call it that but it doesn’t say it as it truly is. It’s more like a lack of mobility, a transportation problem, getting stuck, being the us we are in private but not stopping, like those kids you’d know who would continue to curse and point and say the secret things even in school or in front of your parents. They wouldn’t know when to stop; they wouldn’t be the way people wanted them to be. And the thing that made it so terrible for us is that they’d be getting knocked out for doing things that we ourselves did—but we knew when not to do them, we could actually pretend we never ever did that kind of thing, and when it came down to the sticking point, we’d kick them in the ass just as hard as anyone else.”

“Like you and me,” said Jade. “How
we
used to be.”

“What do you mean? Crazy?”

“Living in our own world. Believing what we felt was separate from everything else. We couldn’t do anything except be together and nothing else was real.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s crazy. And you just said it was, even you.”

“No,” I said, “not when we both believe it. Crazy people are alone and no one understands what they mean. But that’s not our way. We both know and it makes complete sense. It’s not crazy when you both believe it, when you make it true by living it. And other people believe it, too, remember. Believe it about us. Everyone who knows us, sees us together. We have that effect.”

“Don’t.”

“Don’t?”

“Don’t talk about it as if it were still happening. It’s not. It’s a long time ago.”

“A long time ago. But now I’m with you and it doesn’t seem that long. I think I could forget all the time in between.”

Jade shook her head and lowered her eyes; her fingers were spread out on her lap, the thumbnails touching, the fingers rising and lowering. “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. You’re walking in air.”

“I know you,” I said, and the statement took on a weight far greater than I expected, as if the simple claim had within it an emotional magnetism that attracted everything that was unknown, unspoken, everything that was vague and hoped for and dreaded as well. I told her that I knew her and the atmosphere between us became as charged as if I’d finally gotten the courage to lean over and kiss her. Yet I had no choice but to come more and more forward, like someone pursuing a ghost: either the vision would recede into light and dust or it would take on weight and substance.

“You don’t know me,” Jade said, finally. “You just remember me.”

“No. You can’t call it remembering. You remember something that’s past, over, but if you want to call it remembering, then I remember you the way you remember how to walk if you’re bedridden. I mean it’s not just looking back, it’s returning.”

“To being crazy together?”

“It wouldn’t matter.”

“To you.”

“To me.”

Jade closed her eyes and shook her head, as if to dislodge an image. “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” she said. “We shouldn’t. It’s painful, isn’t it?”

“For me?”

“That’s what I’m thinking—for you. It must be.”

“No. You?”

She shook her head. “It’s different for me. I’m not a part of this, not in the same way. You’ve been trying to hold on to what we had and I let it go. It’s one of those things when you drop it, it doesn’t bounce back, it just falls away, and falls and falls.”

“But inside.”

“What do you mean?”

“When you drop it, us, it falls but it falls inside you, so no matter how far away it seems, it still is there, close. We’re sealed, tighter than space capsules. We can’t really forget anything.”

“Oh, I think about you,” she said, in a voice that was meant to be casual.

“I think about you all the time,” I said. “When I was in that fucking hospital, and at my parents’, and now in my own apartment.”

“Where do you live?”

“Fifty-three eighteen Kimbark. Two and a half rooms. Second floor.”

Jade nodded. “Kimbark,” she said. “I miss the old neighborhood. We’re lucky to be from there, believe me. Especially when you come east. They really give you hell for being a midwesterner out here, but it helps if you’re from Hyde Park. You can keep up with things.”

“Like what?”

“Talk.” She shrugged. “Stuff. Is the Medici Coffeehouse still open?”

“I think so.”

“Good. When I was in Chicago last time they were saying it might close.”

“When was that? When were you in Chicago?”

“In the winter. The worst time. Worse than Vermont.”

“This winter?”

Jade nodded.

“But
I
was there!” I almost stood up.

“I know. I was there with a friend. I thought about calling you. I really did. I almost called your parents to find you. I dropped the dime in the phone but I changed my mind. When I hung up, the dime didn’t come back. Scared me.”

“You should have. It’s so terrible that this is the first time we see each other. Your father’s funeral.”

“It fits,” she said. And then, “Sorry. That was stupid. Anyhow, I said I was with a friend. It wouldn’t have worked out very well.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered. I mean it would be worth it. I’d see you under any circumstances.”

“We were on our way to California, Santa Barbara, her home town. So we stopped to see mine.”

“Susan.”

“What?”

“Her name is Susan. Keith told me about her. Your friend.”

Jade was silent, shrugged, her lips pressed tight, jaw tightened: she’d learned the silent warnings people give who don’t want to be asked certain questions. She had heard more than she could bear about Susan, about being with a woman and loving her. But the stab of jealousy I felt sunk into dead tissue: I’d bled the wounds a thousand times already and there was nothing more to feel and certainly nothing to say.

“Did you go to your house?” I asked.

Jade nodded. “Yes. It was hard but I owed it. It was a good thing, though. It didn’t look as bad in person as it does in dreams. In dreams it’s still on fire—just a little, like out of one window, or on the roof, but burning, always. It was good to see it as it really is. Have you?”

“For me it’s the opposite. It looks so much like it used to. It makes it harder, as if the whole thing comes close to never having happened. You know how it is when you play an event over and over in your mind and you see all the things that could have happened that would have made everything so different?”

We went toward the silence, sitting close to each other.

“I wanted to write to you when you were in the hospital,” Jade said, looking away from me. “To see how you were, you know, and tell you where I was going. But everything was so confusing, then. And I thought I might make trouble for you. There was no right thing to do, for me. It seemed wrong to write you after what happened and it felt wrong not to. I don’t approve, you know, I don’t approve of letting things drift. I hate that. But—” and then her voice broke, with a soft, furry click, and the color came rushing into her face. She lowered her head and hunched her shoulders.

I took her hand. No. I laid my hand on top of hers and then, one at a time, I curled my fingers around the heel of her hand until they touched the outer border of her palm. “Tell me,” I said.

“I feel so alone,” she whispered. She’d begun to cry.

“You’re not. I’m with you. I’m always with you.”

Suddenly we were no longer next to each other. Jade was standing, walking across the room, seating herself in the armchair and blotting her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’m in my senior year at Stoughton,” she said, crossing her legs. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Next five months I’m going…” she trailed off for a moment; her tears had left a web of moisture on her voice. “Next five months is all independent study. I’ve got two pregnant golden retrievers, one blind. They’re both going to drop their pups in a few more days and I’m going to study how the litters develop, how the ones with the blind mother do compared to the ones with the normal mother. Then do a paper and that’s it.”