Silent Retreats (23 page)

At dawn Jerome Slater came down the tall, chipping stairs of the carriage house apartment, down to the idling white Camaro in the drive. Behind the wheel, Janet messed with her gloves and he saw the frail blue-white skin of her hands. In the short time he'd known her, a few months, this was what he always noticed—her pallid, almost transparent color. The skin of a woman can make you wonder what you don't know about her.

Sometimes she would stay the night, and if she did she always dressed very early in the morning, and, thinking he was still asleep, she'd slide out the front door and soundlessly descend the rickety stairs. He would climb the ladder to the skylight and watch her as she hurried down the long back sidewalk through the trees, furtive and alone like a neighborhood cat.

He climbed into the car.

"Morning." He pulled the car door shut and slid down into the bucket seat.

"What's the matter?" she said. "You still up for this?"

"You've got rust on the back quarter-panel."

"You're speaking of the car?" She looked at him, smiled. "It's old, give me a break. Do you still want to go?"

"Tell you later," he said. She registered alarm, so he quickly leaned over and kissed her. "Yes, I still do."

They went down Scott Street, turned right onto Main, rumbled north past the college and into Tuscola's business district. The streets were brick and combined with the steel belts in Janet's radials to create a washboard effect. At the four-way stop downtown, Janet said, "Last call." She spoke staring straight ahead. "I'll whip a U-ey and you'll be home in sixty seconds."

"Don't make me keep reassuring you," he said. "I'm going."

Downtown was deserted except for a cluster of cars at the donut shop. She drove on.

Jerome had first met her at Gabby's, a tavern out on the township line. Out there they called her Geneseo because that's how she had introduced herself. He'd observed her from a distance then, as she charmed the construction crews and the guys from the chemical plant, the few professors from the college who ever went out there and, of course, the farmers' sons and all their country girlfriends. She told them long stories about rock and roll, and sometimes she'd even bring her twelve-string and sing old protest songs.

But also sometimes she would get too much to drink and she'd cry, her hair dragging in the water puddles left by her last four bottles of beer. Or halfway through the evening she would make a telltale switch to vodka, retreat to a corner. She had, it turned out, regrets about her former life—whether for having lived it or having lost it, Jerome was not always too clear.

Her former life: Janet had lived in what she called an "intentional community" for quite a number of years; within the past year, she had come to Tuscola to live, leaving her husband and daughter behind.

"Look at it like this," she had said, very good-naturedly. "Remember when communes were in? Back to nature, all that? Someone must have joined them, right?"

Fact was, Jerome knew several people out of New York who'd joined Virginia and Tennessee communes.

"The place was called Geneseo," she said. "On that land the women were all called places. I was an early one there and was named after that very place. Make sense?"

When he first met her, Jerome probably didn't believe half the things she said. Yet she sort of grew on him over the months. She was so soft and likable, and so feisty. Who knew where she'd been in her forty years, or who she'd been with? Who knew where her stories ended and the truth began, as she rambled on about things? Her clothes betrayed an obsession with her life many years ago, beads and shawls, jeans and workshirts. She held him with a kind of desperate, childlike "help me" stare, very level because of the sharp, even brow line against the pale skin. He knew someday he was going to draw those sparse lines of hers and remember her forever.

Now, Janet was heading back to Geneseo to reclaim her daughter, Barbara, and she seemed reassured that Jerome was willing to go, too, and they were heading north out of town. At the hardroad she turned left—the gates were down at the Illinois Central crossing. In a few moments a slick chrome Amtrak flew by.

"That's the famous City of New Orleans," she said. "Steve Goodman's dead, did you know that?"

"No," Jerome said.

"Don't you like music?" Janet turned onto Highway 45. She handed him the map. "You're the co-pilot—get me there. It's along the river."

Jerome wasn't used to getting up this early. "What river would that be?" he said.

Janet laughed, slammed a Beatles tape into the tape player.
Abbey Road
, pretty loud. Jerome pulled it out again. "What river?"

"The Mississippi, dorkus. Maybe
I
better navigate."

He put the cassette in its case, the case in its holder on the console, and went back to scanning the map. For a while they were quiet, and Janet put the first miles behind them at sixty-five.

"How about Steppenwolf—I've got everything they ever did in that box."

The vent window on his side whistled, and Jerome tried tightening it. Then he found himself forgetting the map and watching the barns fly past. Each barn was a different weathered color and bent shape, bent into its surroundings. Janet slammed in a Richie Havens tape.
Alarm Clock
. Here comes the sun. Recently Jerome had taught a summer class in painting at the college. "Don't bring me pictures of barns," he told them.

"Goddamn," he muttered.

"What's wrong?"

"I forgot the thermos. I had it ready. Walked off without it."

"Big hairy deal. Who needs it," she said, reaching behind Jerome's seat, "when we have each other." She pulled two cans of Stroh's out of a Styrofoam cooler, set his on the console, opened hers. "Cheers, my friend! We're on the road!"

It was a good state, Illinois: the middle. Here was the future population of California, Bimini, New England, Alaska, the cities of Texas, being nurtured up in these little farming towns: Strawn, Forrest, Neoga, Watseka, Kankakee, Urbana, Rockford, Plainfield. In the city Jerome had known many artists and Soho-dwellers who'd come from towns like these in the middle states. In fact, his ex-wife, a New York architect, had been raised in Waverly, Iowa.

"There's a picnic table on the spot. Find Galesburg . . ." Janet was reaching over and pointing at the map, trying to hold her beer and drive with the other hand. They swerved a little. "Then find a little town named Joy—it's west of Joy and don't say 'Aren't we all,' because I've heard all possible Joy jokes. Find the picnic table."

"I found Geneseo."

"That's Geneseo the town, not the commune. The commune isn't on the map. Look for a picnic table on the river."

"Now we have three Geneseos?"

"It's a bitch, right? Can you handle it?" She laughed.

He traced the river north from Hannibal with his index finger. "I fixed that damned thermos and then forgot it."

"You're unusual, all right," she said, turning up the music.

The plan was to bring Janet's little girl back to Tuscola to live with her. There were unknowns. For instance, Janet didn't know how things were going at Geneseo these days.

"When I think of places like this, I keep thinking of Jonestown—the congressman's films and all that," he said.

"Of course, you do," Janet said. "How 'bout the commune in
Easy Rider
, remember it? That was a
real
beaut."

She sipped her beer. "The CIA has a plot going with the news media to make these pinko communities look pinko." She laughed. "I love this. You're gonna learn so much." She was smiling and gestured big, a joyful arm-wave that let the car swerve again.

"So tell me about it," he said, reaching back to locate the seat belt. He fastened it.

"My husband, Will . . . I've told you about him, right? He's something. I just hope he's sensible about this. God, that just reminded me of my dream last night." She was staring straight ahead.

"Wonderful."

"You think I talk too much, right?" She smiled right at him. "Tell you what, this was a strange dream. I woke up to a knocking on the door downstairs. Three or four raps, then a pause. Three or four more, pause. No telling how long it had been going on while I was asleep. So I woke up then—I wasn't really awake, just in the dream—and I went to Barbara's room and woke her up. I said, 'Barbara, someone's knocking at the door in the middle of the night.' And she sat up. There she was, except she was about fourteen. I saw what my little eight-year-old will look like when she's a teenager—this is weird."

"No kidding."

"Barbara was sleeping in this guest room in this strange part of the apartment I've never been in—it doesn't exist, actually. She wasn't wearing any clothes." Janet stared ahead as though she were back in the dream. "Amazing."

"Incest," Jerome said, jokingly. He turned down the music.

She looked over at him but then she went back to it. She had her forearms resting over the top of the steering wheel, leaning forward. "She was under a blanket or bedspread or something. I was glad that she was with me again, even though so much time had gone by and she was older and I'd missed—you know—a time in her life."

"Guilt," Jerome said.

She gave him another look.

"Sorry."

"I said, 'Someone's knocking on the door and it's the middle of the night.' Her bed had a window right above it. We could look out and see down in the front yard, but we couldn't see the porch because the porch roof hid who was down there knocking. A couple of more times the knocking came, and we lay on the bed together, real low, watching out the window. Then the knocking stopped and we saw this young woman. She was dressed like—I don't know—like Florence Nightingale or something, that kind of era—the bonnet, you know?—and all in black? She was hurrying away, I mean walking real fast, through the shadows and stuff—where could she have been going?—so fast I almost couldn't see her in the dark, almost couldn't focus on her, but I saw that she was carrying these flowers and they were black. Black flowers."

Janet was quiet for a while. She stared up the road. Finally, Jerome said, "Guilt. And death."

She punched him on the leg good-naturedly, then opened her window and chucked the can, rolled the window back up, and opened another beer.

He looked up the highway, trying to think of a way to change the subject. "Why didn't you bring Barbara with you when you left the place?"

"I didn't know what in hell I was doing—I was just getting out." Janet ran her fingers through her hair, shook her head. "I don't know. Don't ask me that. I was nuts."

The road was narrow, the old kind. The grass grew right up to the edge. The land was fairly flat, so the road was straight. In his mind, Jerome sketched it, stick and ink, the very subtle contours of the retreating tree lines and pastures, the clusters of houses, the receding road in the flatness. He wrestled with the colors in his mind, trying to paint it. In this season, the values were close, tans and grays, blacks and browns. In art school he'd drawn and painted a lot of landscapes, efforts he had long ago ditched.

Janet cut back the heat. She reached up on the dashboard and found a picture, which she handed to him. It was a wrinkled-up Polaroid of a little blond girl next to a tire swing. "I need this little girl in my life." Now there were tears. "Any way," she said, wiping them, "Geneseo's an anarchist community, founded by libertarians. That was the name of the game in 1969 or whenever. The main guy's still there—Stephen Boyce."

Jerome was still looking at the picture.

"These communities, if you're wondering, aren't all drugs and free love like the CIA says. They often turn out to be more rigid than ordinary society or whatever. Believe that?"

Someone passed them in a van, honking. She stared into the cab as they went by. "Speed on, hell ain't half full." She toasted them with her beer. "Sometimes we'd get kids from Chicago or St. Louis, and they'd think they wanted to join. But they wouldn't work. We'd always split over what to do about it. One side believed that if these creeps wouldn't work they should be gone. And you had these other people over here who believed in the 'process' of anarchism. Very big idea. They believed the kids should be allowed to stay and that the process of community would convert them to work and the cooperative life."

They went on up the road a while. They were coming into the west side of Champaign. Jerome said, "So tell me about Stephen Boyce."

"He's like . . . the main person."

They shot under a sign for Interstate 74, and Jerome pointed her onto the cloverleaf. The van ahead of them was gone. Janet rolled down her window and chucked the can.

"As he gets older, he settles down more and more. He's a father figure there now. Beard's getting gray, that sort of thing." She smiled. "He's a literature buff, however, and big on Kafka, so anything can happen. He makes money for us by giving speeches about community and communes and stuff."

They were passing an enormous salvage yard with piles of old cars.

"I have a friend there named Clay City. Forgot her real name. May seem odd to you, but she's just Clay City to me, plain as day. She runs the school. Has a son there about Barbara's age. She and I were tight—she used to be a teacher, in the world."

Jerome put the picture of Barbara back on the dashboard. "A very pretty little girl," he said. He reached to cut the heat, discovered she'd already done it, and cracked his window. He heard her pop another Stroh's.

"She had been a teacher—out in Kansas somewhere. A terrible thing happened to her."

"Isn't that usually the deal? Something terrible has happened, so people join a commune?"

"You're so smart," she said, raising her can in a toast, smiling at him. "You're going to learn so much."

"Will I learn how the old hippie rationalizes throwing these cans out on the highway?"

She looked over at him. "Sorry," she said. She took a deep breath.
"Anyway."
She smiled at him. "So anyway, Clay City was living with her sister, both of them teaching. But Clay City was dating someone, and one day she found out she was pregnant. And listen, this wasn't any of that sexual revolution 1960's shit—it's just something that happened, you know? Like it happens?" She stared at Jerome. The car swerved again. "Men don't understand this stuff, and I'm not kidding. Why do I bother? Anyway, she was ashamed, and you can bet she was never going to get an abortion, and so she headed back to her parents' home—somewhere, I forget—leaving her sister in Kansas to teach. She'd be back when the baby was born. Well, it's incredible, but while she was home having her baby, her sister, alone back in Kansas, twenty-seven years old, something like that, died. Believe it?"