Jack

by Marilynne Robinson

  She said, “Finish that couplet and leave the book on the porch and we’ll be even.”

  “Spoken like a teacher.”

  After a minute, she said, “I’ll probably be doing that for the rest of my life, no matter what happens. Talking like that. You start thinking in a certain way, thinking you have something to say to people. That they ought to listen to.”

  “Like a preacher.”

  “Worse. A preacher still has an air about him, even if his last church chased him out and barred the door behind him. He can still cite texts. People never quite ignore that.”

  “Things might turn out all right. You might be talking to adolescents about couplets for decades to come. An excellent life. I mean that. Really.”

  “Well, it is. Especially since I seem to be looking back on it.”

  “Well,” he said, “you listen to this, now. Diligent effort has gone into this—what do you call it?—recitation. It sounds better if you shout it, but, you know, neither the time nor the place. I have to remember how it begins. Yes. ‘Before their eyes in sudden view appear / The secrets of the hoary deep; a dark / Illimitable ocean, without bound, / Without dimension, where length, breadth, and height, / And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night / And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold / Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise / Of endless wars, and by confusion stand.’ John Milton. The greatest Presbyterian poet, my father said.”

  “He wasn’t Presbyterian.”

  “True, but he wasn’t anything else, either. My father found everything he wrote highly persuasive, which meant he must be Presbyterian, whether he knew it or not. He’d say he was joking, but if anybody pressed the issue, he’d get a little cranky.” Then he said, “My point was, though, that I memorized that to impress an English teacher with whom I was briefly in love. I was fourteen at the time. I never did recite it. It has never been my nature to do what I ought to, for my own sake, even. She’d probably have thought better of me. But I remember it sometimes, and it pleases me that it’s still in my brain. Along with not much else. So you never know what effect you might have had.”

  “And I never will know. I might never be in that room again. Never even have a chance to say goodbye to them. I’m beginning to realize I liked them better than I thought I did.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “My last memory will be them laughing at me over that song.”

  “Things might turn out all right. I suppose there’s something about sitting here in the dark that makes it seem unlikely. But you never know.” He laughed. “And I’ll never know. The end of this strange tale, I mean. How things work out. It will worry me. So. I will worry so.”

  They were quiet.

  She said, “I’ll set a book in the window.”

  “Which window?”

  “The one by the front door.”

  “All right. Will it mean good news or bad news?”

  “Good news.”

  “All right. Don’t forget.”

  “I promise.”

  He said, “What if it’s a while before you know for sure? What if they deliberate or something? It could take weeks. No book in the window—”

  “I’ll put a plant in the window. A sprig of ivy. So you’ll know I still don’t know.”

  “Without the book.”

  “With the book, if things seem to be going well enough.”

  “Otherwise, just the sprig.”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded. “That woman—is it Lorraine?—she might see the book there and think that’s a strange place for it to be and put it away, or walk off with it.”

  “I’ll be careful to use one she’s already read.”

  “All right. I suppose that could work.”

  “I’ll make sure it works.”

  “That will be kind of you.”

  “It’s kind of you to worry.”

  “So.”

  “Yes,” she said. They were quiet. Then she said, “‘So’ is a word they would use after the world ended. Or maybe they wouldn’t need it anymore. Because they’d know what it means. Everything would just be what you think it would be.”

  “It’s so dark,” he said. “The night is so long. We’d step across a threshold of some kind. Utter darkness and endless time. That would be the way of things. No more ‘so.’”

  “Sometimes I feel like we’ve just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That’s how it would seem to us when we looked back.”

  He nodded. “That’s how it seems to me now.”

  She had leaned down, cupping her poor toes in her hands, cheek on her knee, facing him in the dark. There was an odd loveliness about it. Why did he think she seemed content? He believed her eyes were closed. Had my heart an unbroken string, your touch would set it trembling. He had almost penciled that into her book, then thought better of it. It wasn’t a very good line. Trembling doesn’t really have three syllables. And touch. What might she find suggested in that word. I will ruin this, he thought. I almost did, writing in those words, before I even imagined it would happen. I never would have imagined. If he touched her face now, ever so lightly, things would be different afterward. That’s how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed. Which meant that question was already in his mind—what would be left if the fragile were tested, pushed nearer the edge of the shelf, if that tension were sprung and the fragile thing, the essence of it, lost. This strange night lost, fallen into shivers and shards of embarrassment and distrust and regret. It crossed his mind that if he touched her dark cheek in the dark night, an elegant curve, bodiless as geometry, objectively speaking, if he followed the curve of it with just the tip of a finger, there would be a delicacy in the experiment she would understand if he could explain it to her. Pure touch, almost undistracted. He said, “Talk about something.” Too abrupt. “Let’s talk,” he said, “about something.”

  She lifted her head. “I guess I was asleep. I was dreaming.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It was a pretty ordinary dream. I couldn’t find something I needed, I didn’t even know what it was. I was all worked up about it. Now I’m here in the dark, sitting on the steps of a tomb beside a strange man I can’t quite see. That’s more like a dream.”

  “Hmm. It sounds like a very bad dream.”

  “Yes, but it doesn’t feel like one. It’s the feeling you have that makes a dream bad. I just realized that.”

  He nodded. “Interesting.” Then he said, “You know, I actually sort of enjoy my life. I know I shouldn’t. It could stand a lot of improvement. But maybe it’s the feeling you have that makes a life bad. Or makes it all right enough most of the time.” He said, “I aspire to utter harmlessness. It’s a contest I have with myself. I have no real aptitude for harmlessness, which makes it interesting.” He said, “Spiders and flies are completely safe around me. Mice. Vermin generally. I’ve learned there is a kind of pleasure in considering all the things and people I’ve never harmed. Never even made them notice me there, appraising their vulnerabilities. Which, I’ll admit, is something I do.” Then he said, “Sometimes.” What a stupid thing to have said to her. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “Yes. All right. This step is really hard.”

  “Cold.”

  “Damp.”

  “I’m sorry I woke you up. There’s nothing like sleep for passing the time.”

  She said, “You should come to my place for Thanksgiving.”

  He laughed. “What have I done to deserve that?”

  “Thanksgiving isn’t something a person has to deserve. That’s the whole point of it. Anyway, you’ve been about as harmless as you could possibly be. I appreciate that. It’s not a thing I take for granted.” Resting her head on her knees, looking at where he was, smiling. He knew that from her voice.

  He said, “You could introduce me to your dad. ‘The Prince of Darkness, Papa. I found him in a cemetery. He says he’s harmless. The bruised reed he will
not break, probably. Though he might be the one who bruised it.’”

  “Don’t joke like that. Anyway, I’m not going home this year. I mean, you should come to my place. You know, where you leave any books you decide to return?”

  “I know it well.”

  “Just knock on the door this time. Stop being so sneaky.”

  He said, “You don’t know what you’re asking. Can the leopard change his spots? Besides, I always lose track of Thanksgiving. It moves around. It’s not for people with disorderly lives.”

  She shrugged. “You might make an effort, just this once.”

  “I can’t promise anything.”

  She said, “Oh, I know that.”

  * * *

  So here I am, he thought. And here she was, Della, the woman he had recruited into his daydreams to make up for a paucity of meaning and event he sometimes found oppressive. No harm done. She was safe in his daydreams. Cherished, really. He had returned often enough to that one regrettable night, or that one almost regrettable hour in an otherwise wonderful night, to have put things right in his imagination, though not, of course, in his memory. A lingering farewell. Good night rather than goodbye. That was something.

  Her sleeve stirred against him. The plum-colored cloth of her coat. He had once asked himself which colors yield to darkness first, and which of them float in it for a while. Twilight has nothing black about it, so black would be absorbed much more gradually than plum. She was clothed in twilight. That is the kind of thought I’ll have when this is over and she is gone. Those ridiculous poems I never write down. In fact, she will be a respectable woman with a job and a street address, reading her newspaper over breakfast in the morning light. I’ll walk by, and she won’t see me. Or she might be on a train to Memphis, rehearsing the words she will say to her mother, her father, accepting disgrace because it would be easier, would require fewer words, after all the excuses and apologies she’d have made already. Never mentioning me, wishing she never had seen me, putting this night out of mind altogether.

  Chilly as he was, his shirt dampened. He could not protect her at all. This sham, squiring her through the tombstones, when the fact was that, if she had just spoken to the guard while she still looked respectable and her flowers had not wilted completely, if she had told the man her wistful little lie, he would have opened a gate for her, after the usual sermon about personal responsibility and the like, of course, which was hard to begrudge him, since it was simply an added small compensation for walking around all night. Jack had been too surprised at seeing her there to think this through, and then he had been so pleased to fall into the role of gentleman, which in fact overtook him as often as he had a clean shirt on but was vastly more inescapable with this particular lady on his arm, and in the darkness that so kindly hid the marks of an ungentlemanly life. He actually could have rescued her by telling her to sit on that bench and wait for the guard, standing well back to keep an eye on her, for what that was worth. Then she’d have had the walk home in the dark, which would be bad but probably not as bad as the same walk home by daylight. He had his excuses. Surprise itself accounted for most of it. But excuses only meant that he had done harm he did not intend, which was another proof that he did harm inevitably, intentions be damned.

  He said, “I actually believe in predestination. I’m serious.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, of course you don’t. Destiny has made you a Methodist.”

  “So you were just talking to yourself?”

  “An old habit.”

  “You said you were harmless, even though you have no gift for it. Does that mean you’re fated to be something you’re not? That doesn’t make much sense.”

  “I said I act harmless. Insofar as in me lies. That doesn’t mean I succeed in being harmless. I don’t usually guess right about what harmlessness would require in a particular situation. And so on. It doesn’t even mean that I won’t give up on the whole business sometime. Won’t just relax and let myself be the rotter I am.”

  She was quiet.

  He said, “Now I’ve scared you. You see what I mean. That’s the last thing in the world I meant to do.”

  “You don’t scare me, especially. You’re just like everybody else. You seem to think other people aren’t doing the same thing you are, more or less. I don’t go around revealing my innermost thoughts, I can tell you that. The minute I did, you’d be scared of me.”

  He laughed.

  “Don’t laugh!”

  He said, “I apologize. That was terribly insensitive.”

  They laughed.

  She said, “I actually am full of rage. Wrath. I think I feel a little like God must feel the second before He just gives up and rains brimstone. I’ve heard people blame Him for that! I don’t blame Him. I can imagine the satisfaction. I have to wonder when that last exasperation will come and I burst into flames. Nothing in particular, everything in general, plus one more thing, maybe one very tiny thing. Whoosh.”

  “Really?”

  “Do I sound like I’m joking?”

  “Not a bit. You’ve actually scared me.”

  “Don’t worry too much. All my life I’ve been a perfect Christian lady. It’s nothing I can help, I guess. Something to be grateful for, really. It makes my mother happy. I plan to keep on with it.”

  They were quiet for a while, and then she said, “Sometimes I shut myself in my room and throw myself down on my bed and I just let it run through me. All that wrath. In every bone in my body. Then it seems to sort of wear itself out and I can go for a walk or something. But it never goes away.” And then she said, “You’re very quiet.”

  “Yes. I’m just thinking of the major exasperations I’ve added to the list. I’ll spend the next month adding up the minor ones. The ones that seem minor to me. I’m no judge, of course.”

  She said, “I don’t think of it as a list. It’s more like a mass, a weight. You know, when a cloud gets very heavy, and it begins to have its own life. It begins stirring inside itself, growling, making lightning. Maybe it was only one raindrop that changed it from a plain old gray cloud no one would ever notice. Just a handful of droplets would make the difference. Somebody’s breath rising up, somebody saying something mean, telling some vicious tale.” Her voice was very soft.

  He said, “From now on I’m going to be so careful.”

  “Bring me my book.”

  “Oh, lady! I will do it as soon as humanly possible!”

  She laughed. “I don’t really believe that. It doesn’t much matter. You’ve probably made a mess of it, anyway.” She turned her face away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have told you all that. I can’t talk about being mad without—being mad. But I’m all right now.”

  “Well, I guess we have one thing in common.”

  “What? What do we have in common?”

  He was quiet. He had meant something so anodyne he was a little relieved at not having to go on. We are not as we appear. The Christian lady and the harmless man. The Prince of Darkness and the vial of divine wrath. There was some truth in it.

  A night can seem endless, he thought. Insects going about their lives, very intent. Why all the chirping? His father saw him once with a mayonnaise jar with some grass in it and a caterpillar, holes punched in the lid in the approved style. He actually did plan to put water in, too, to watch for bubbles, since he had been wondering if caterpillars actually breathed. But he hadn’t made the experiment yet. His father stood there with his hands in his pockets, looking off at the trees. “The creatures do want their lives,” he remarked. “The ugliest little one of them. People don’t notice it sometimes, but it’s true.” Yes, it is. Such lives. All that purpose. Always on their way somewhere. You had to admire. Maybe a chirp meant “I exist!” and then “I exist!,” as if it could matter. But it must, since they all do it.

  There wasn’t much wrong with her book. It shouldn’t have spent so much time in his pocket. They call it foxing, when a bo
ok gets that worn look. He’d almost thought of selling it once. Really he was just making conversation with the clerk in a bookstore, one day when he felt like talking to someone. He hadn’t really meant to sell it, and the clerk hadn’t come up with a decent price, which was fortunate, considering. For a while he thought he might wander past her doorstep sometime, so he had kept it with him. But after he got that cut, that scar, he knew he never would. Here she was, and he didn’t have a word to say to her.

  Finally she said, “What are you thinking about?”

  “I’m thinking about bugs.”

  “The gangster? The bunny?”

  “Insects. Did you ever watch a spider swim? They’re surprisingly good at it. I mean, I was surprised.”

  She shook her head. “I guess I never noticed.” He thought, A spider isn’t an insect. He didn’t actually say that it was one, but that’s how it must have sounded. She said, “You’re the first person I ever spoke to about that. That rage. You’re the only one. You’ll probably be the last one, too.”

  What is it people say? “Would you like to talk about it? You might feel better—”

  “No, I wouldn’t. And I don’t. I’m sorry. It’s nothing to do with you. I suppose it’s just the night and the tombstones.” She stood up, and she began walking down the hill toward the lake. He watched her go until he could discern her, just. A gentle disturbance in the darkness, a warmer darkness where she was. That plum coat. She might be walking away from him, weary of him. He thought he might as well follow. What could it matter? At the first hint that he was not welcome, he would step away. Actually, it would be the second hint, if her walking away was the first. A little injury to his pride, no matter. But she must have heard his footsteps in the grass, because she paused till he was beside her, and she put her hand in the crook of his arm. They came to the edge of the water, shockingly cold and stony, and stood there together for a while, anyway, and then she said, “You have to be a little bit kind to yourself.”