Endless Love (38 page)

Jade got into bed and noticed both pillows were there. I saw her notice. There was always a physical response to information: a nod, a blink, a subtle realignment of posture. But then I thought that she’d made something different out of it. She guessed that I’d left the pillow there because I planned sooner or later to work myself into bed.

I’d folded down the blanket and smoothed the border of sheet so it would look like the bed was new. The lamp with its little tea-colored shade was on next to her bed. Its switch was made to look like an old-fashioned farmhouse key.

When she first came out of the bathroom she was wearing a light green robe, the color of her eyes. She’d walked right by me without pausing, swiftly, as if she needed to cover a great distance. I had my hands behind my head, flexing my biceps so they’d look reasonably large. I tried not to follow her obviously with my eyes. Her feet looked brutal: hiking boots, crosscountry skis, inexpensive tennis shoes all had squeezed, reddened, and allowed her feet to callus and spread.

I realized when she slipped into bed that I’d placed my head in such a way that even though I was camped like a dog at the foot of the bed I could still enjoy a perfect angle of her face. As long as she came to rest on the side of the bed the lamp was on—which she did.

She tucked the edge of the pillow into the space between the mattress and the headboard. That hadn’t changed. Then she turned off the light. The room didn’t go particularly dark; it was maybe 70 percent dark. It was lit by the lights of the city, the dome of diffusion that was above the city, and my own desire to see. Jade unbuttoned her robe and took it off. She wore pajamas underneath, pajamas cut in an Oriental style. They looked wet and shiny in the weak light. It was a modest gesture, finishing her undressing in the bed under cover of darkness, modest and unnecessary, and it gave evidence of a certain kind and intensity of awareness—awareness of
me,
that is.

She let the robe drop to the floor and I went dizzy with hope.

“Well, good night,” she said, after a few moments.

I didn’t want to say good night; the word would draw the curtain on the evening. “Sleep deeply,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself say that, disconcerted. Sleep deeply? A reasonable phrase but foreign to me. And seeming to hold within it—now that I thought about it—some lascivious little worm. Sleep deeply and I’ll undress you without your knowing it.

I could sense Jade musing, wondering if there was something more she could say. I thought I heard her lips part; she shifted in bed as if preparing to speak. But then, quite suddenly, I felt her intelligence leave the room like a cat out of the window. She was asleep. The air conditioning hummed louder, making Jade’s breaths inaudible. More of my backbone was touching the floor now and I began to relax into a heavy, sullen sleeplessness. She’d left me with shocking abruptness and I would have liked to chase after her in sleep. But I seemed bound to wakefulness and what I had to do was decide what
kind
of insomnia it would be: a vacant, open-eyed cousin to sleep or a clumsy, distorted version of waking. It was a question of coming forward and making the most of it or lagging back as close to the border of sleep as I could, hoping to accidentally fall in.

My thoughts raged. I experienced myself as if I were living before the invention of language. Emotions spurted up but I couldn’t name them and without a name they couldn’t be modified or controlled. Emotions presented themselves as colors, as spasms, indecipherable voices: if I’d lived at an earlier time, I would have thought I was possessed; I would have strained to decode the instructions of my surging blood, just as ancient warriors bent their ears toward white rivers to learn their orders.

I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. My breath felt strained, as if the familiar passageways had been removed and replaced by bright aluminum tubing, perfectly unobstructed but a little too small. Clear thought returned in the form of lavish self-pity. I thought, Here she is after so much time and here I am on the floor. It felt as if this night—with the dawn already sailing in over the Atlantic—would be our only time together, my last chance. That I had read it wrong. Some daring had been required of me and I hadn’t figured it out. A lunge. Or perhaps strategy. Flirtation, accusation, cartwheels of wit. My opinions on death. The last role I wanted was that of the woeful tenor standing on the apron of a dark, empty stage, clutching at the brocade of his antique costume.

I wanted to stand up, walk to the bedside, and gaze at her sleeping face. But what if she awakened? A scream of fright? Or perhaps she’d grab me and pull me on top of her.

My desire was heavy, feverish. I knew if I wasn’t careful I would elevate my instincts, appoint them to the command.

People make fun of Catholics for confessing to impure thoughts but my own thoughts, reflecting my overcooked passions, were worth confessing to. I would have liked to neatly categorize them into Sin, to gather them in like that and hand them over to someone else. To be absolved. A father confessor.

I had none, of course. The closest I came to a spiritual life was the worship of the very feelings that plagued me now, that closed in on me the way the body does when your temperature is soaring.

Confession. The word stood up in my consciousness, like a monster, a ghost, and every other thought shrank back. Then slowly this one puzzling, unfamiliar word stripped itself down, casting off layers of meaning and association, all the moldy trappings that made it an
idea,
reflex, a duty. And the more the word
confession
divested itself of familiar meanings, the larger and brighter it stood within me. I felt I was being told to do something I had no idea how to begin. I couldn’t even tell if my impulse to submit myself to the blind ritual of confession was evidence that somehow in the middle of all this I had taken a turn and wanted to be a different sort of person, or if it meant something much less important—a need to relieve the intense moral pressure, a way of talking myself out from beneath the rock that sat on my chest. Confession as negotiation; confession as show of good faith. Even the Communists had a form of it. They called it self-criticism. You discussed your mistakes and promised your friends you’d do better. They looked at you unpleasantly but forgave you—unless you really fucked up, in which case you were out. My father told me he never went in for self- criticism; he assumed his ideological shortcomings were discussed behind his back anyway. But Rose watched her politics like a sentinel, to the point where her detailed, minute self- criticisms became an expected part of every meeting and came close to becoming a kind of joke. (Rose confessing to white chauvinism and proving her point by reporting she’d given her seat on the bus to a Negro woman who was
younger
than her.)

Why had my father bothered to tell me that my mother was so committed to the act of self-criticism? Had he wanted to warn me not to be fooled by her sometimes monolithic nature? To remember that behind her small, set face, with its deep stubborn grooves and injured eyes, was a self that never lost the habit of measuring and doubting itself. That she was a critic of others but tougher on herself, etc. Or was he inviting me to share his ironic perceptions of her? He seemed to be fooling with his image of her, just as children watching a color TV will fiddle with the controls when they become bored with the show, turning the faces vermilion, royal blue, orange.

Without a priest or any ceremonies, my own father was my last possible confessor—but what deliverance from sin could I expect from that burly, compulsively kind man? Speaking to him about myself was like falling onto a huge sack of oats, neither comforting nor hard. Arthur’s view of the world alternated between the grandiosely cosmic and the frigidly empty; either we lived in the warm pouch of a universe that loved us wholly and mysteriously or we were simply configurations of protein and water bubbling for an instant in the long curved beaker of time. In any case, judgment was impossible. The Butterfields were
for
you by examining and ordering your gestures, like cards in a game of solitaire. Arthur’s mode of acceptance was flamboyantly blind. He believed in my
fate
as a man of passion and principle and wasn’t concerned in amassing data for a proof.

A good boy! A fine son! Oh the joy! Every now and then he would stare at my face to see if I was beginning to look like him. I never came to resemble him but it was no cause for jealousy because I didn’t look like Rose either. “He looks like a Russian—but an aristocrat,” my father used to say of me. It was better, finally, that I resembled no one. He protected me from his fears of his own mediocrity and in the process withheld all of his majesty as well: the lump in his throat as he faced the scowling jury; the tears over the Rosenbergs; losing at poker with his new friends in the Army because they were destined to lives of manual labor. He considered himself corny, coarse, he was ignorant of the beginnings of his feelings and staggered beneath their weight when they were full grown. It was his wish that I not know him. He was someone to depend on, to take my nourishment from, someone to teach me language and rudimentary manners—the idea of fairness; the habits of pity. But not to know him: he quarantined me from his deepest self as if from a contagion, convincing himself that somehow he was a rooster who’d been given the responsibility of teaching a hawk how to fly.

He wanted to pass the torch—the torch of romance and heedlessness, the torch that could never ignite in his own hands. And when it was ablaze he shyly stole it back from me. He held it now, he displayed it like mating plumage before Barbara Sherwood, he waved it in Rose’s face and accused her of being afraid of it. How could I confess to him? The process of his blind love had been reversed: now at this relatively late stage he had finally seized upon the idea that he and I were the same sort of people, and since he had never been less capable of judging himself than he was now, I could certainly not expect anything but the most partisan view of me. Now that we had, in his mind, fused into one person and that person was the man he had always wanted to be, I operated with a moral blank check—my mere signature was good
anywhere.

Someone was blowing on his automobile horn, that shave and a haircut ditty, as if 34th Street was Elm Street in some midwestern summer town, teenagers out for a night of warm beer and starlight, calling for the class jock. Beep beep. Yo Ed-diiiiie.…

“David?” whispered Jade. Her voice was steady, but turned a bit on its side from the brief sleep.

I answered with a sound.

“You can’t sleep on the floor?” she said. She stretched her legs, pointing her toes and urging them toward the edge of the bed. I heard it. She let out a low moan as she climbed further out of sleep. I sat up again and looked at her. Her head was half propped up on the pillow. Chin on her chest, reverberating out in a ring of flesh, more like an infant’s than an old woman’s. Her eyes closed again, shuddered, submitting their sightless wanderings to the curious hum of her intelligence. Opened. Looking down at me.

“I’m not trying to sleep,” I said.

“Is the floor too hard?” she said.

I was going to say no but I caught myself, realizing she wanted a different answer. “No, it’s OK,” I said, in a polite voice, deliberately uncertain. What coyness, but easy to forgive. The formal little bow before the sweaty whirling ecstasy of a barn dance.

“It feels ridiculous, you on the floor,” she said. Her neck swelled, lower lip fattened: she was suppressing a yawn, didn’t want me to know she was still half gone.

“Always a gentleman,” I said.

“Well,” said Jade. A pause. It couldn’t have been a more sultry silence if she’d practiced it for years—before the mirror, in the woods alone, spare moments. “May as well climb in.” Summer camp lingo. An older sister offering an hour’s comfort to poor Peewee after his nightmare.

You’re sure? I was going to say. But I had no hope of feigning such innocence. “I want to,” I said. I clambered to my feet. A breeze from somewhere rippled across the room, a wavy line, an electrical current. My penis was erect and felt harder than any part of my body—my teeth, my skull. The tip of my cock poked through the fold of my Hanes underwear: it looked so clumsy, comic and frightened, like a stagehand caught on the wrong side of the curtain.

She tossed the second pillow onto what was now my side of the bed, the pillow she had embraced, anointed. The top buttons of her pajama jacket were unfastened; I could have glanced in and seen her breasts. Like Stu Neihardt. I got into bed carefully. She was right on the edge of her side. I settled myself near the edge of mine. On my back, staring at the ceiling, blinking often so she wouldn’t fail to notice I was wide awake. She was on her side, turned away from me, arm around the pillow, left leg straight and the right bent at the knee. She was covered to the shoulder by the sheet, but the blanket on her side had been pulled down to her waist.

“Well, here we are again,” said Jade.

There was a sense of humor somewhere in that. It confused me, put me on guard. I chose not to answer.

“It just seemed ridiculous, you on the floor,” she said after a few moments.

We lay in silence, yet there is no question but that we engaged in deep cellular conversation and were in a sense already beginning to make love. I listened to Jade breathe, noted minute shiftings of her weight. I wanted to empty my mind so I could penetrate Jade’s thoughts: I wasn’t sure if I believed in trances and ESP but I wanted to be totally receptive to any message she might send me. I think my fantasy was that I would be able to decode her silent request, to make it explicit and encouraging: that in the hush of my brain I would hear her voice saying, “David, touch me.” I heard nothing of the sort; it wouldn’t be that easy after all. But I did rid myself of the ceaseless nervous internal chatter. Frivolous, passing awareness was receding. I listened to her lungs fill, felt the oxygen balloon and press against the pink wet walls, then make an acrobat’s turn on the exhale. I carefully touched my erection. It felt as if its root spanned my entire body, ganglia down through my thighs, the backs of my legs, clinging to the soles of my feet and up through my belly, shooting straight up to my throat. A fly slowly ticked against a windowshade, or a lampshade, something paper. Jade changed position, slightly. She rubbed the back of her foot against the sheet—nervousness? Or satisfying an itch? A signal of wakeful- ness, like my batting eyes.