Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  This line of reasoning was, it seemed to Emily, unanswerable. Yet later, in her bed, she conceived a wonderful compromise. She took up her pen and stationery set and wrote him simply to say that she thanked him for his letter, that she was looking forward to hearing from him again, and that she understood what he meant about everything.

  Satisfied, she sealed the envelope and set it on the bedside table, leaning against the base of the lamp where, even after she switched the lamp off, she could look at it, at his name emblazoned on the envelope, his name written in her handwriting.

  Then she prayed, as it seemed to her that her mother had bidden her especially this night to do so. She prayed the usual prayers for the usual people and the usual intentions, and when she was done with those she wondered if she ought to pray for the boy, for Bill, and if so, what she ought to pray. After she had thought it up, she prayed it, set it, as it were, in motion and pushed it out into the night, paddling through the stars: “Keep him safe, for me, until Wednesday.”

  6

  WHAT DOES ONE DO WITH UNWANTED TIME; TIME unbidden and undesired, nuisance time that grows like hair and cannot be merely thrown away but must be spent? That was the character of Tuesday and the better part of Wednesday for William, and he wished, for once, that he had a summer job. He had not done well in employment in the past. Last summer he had been set up with a sweetheart job as a carpenter’s helper on a construction site through the offices of a family friend. The pay was a mind-boggling three dollars per hour, and all he had to do was lift, shift, or haul as and when he was told to, and otherwise—the bulk of his workday—he simply sat on a pallet or a bundle of shingles and waited for orders.

  Only a fool would complain about such an arrangement. But after little more than a week, William, bored and discontent, went to the foreman and suggested that his time might be more wisely used: that he wanted to make a contribution, to perform honest labor, that this enforced indolence was false and hollow. Perhaps, William suggested, they could find something more, something better, for him to do?

  The foreman looked at him, first with annoyance, then befuddlement, and at last pity, perhaps not pity without mercy, but at any rate pity at a loss as to what to do with itself. “I think you better just go home. I think you’re missing something here. I don’t know what, but there you are. We’ll send you what you’re owed.”

  What William was owed, he discovered a few days later, was not much shy of one hundred dollars, and that went into his passbook account at the First Grand Avenue Bank. He passed the summer riding in various cars or sitting with his Raleigh on the banks of various front yards and the walls and stoops of alleys, parks, and minor public edifices. With what he already had prior to his job and with further windfalls later in the year from his father, he had in excess of $350 by the time the present summer arrived. His allowance (five dollars) covered a new record album or book every week, and so there seemed little point in earning additional income.

  But now he found himself pressed upon not by lack of funds but by the unwanted interval between now and Wednesday night—well, surely it would be okay to call Wednesday afternoon?—that whined in his ear like a mosquito and made reading or listening to music impossible. He pressed lying around to its extremes—on sofas, chairs, ottomans, the floor, and in combination; in postures sprawled and balled up, with legs hooked, splayed, or tucked and with arms flung or knotted in various modes of akimboment—but found no peace in it. He masturbated (which only made him think of Emily) until he could masturbate no more, and in the last resort, pulled himself on the Raleigh and simply rode and rode and rode.

  Emily was more content. She had not only the diversion of her job, but the belief that William’s interest in her was but a further bonus in a life abrim with good things; that at worst, if she found she did not like him, she could simply let the matter rest, let the letters return, as it were, to sender, and her life to where it had been before June 5, 1968. But the truth was, as even by Tuesday lunchtime she could not resist intimating to her workmates, that she already thought she probably liked him.

  Emily might have asked on what grounds this could be, for William was someone with whom she was scarcely acquainted, never mind someone she could in any sense of the word claim to know. But that kind of knowledge is rather beside the point. The one boy Emily had previously liked—Roger Ericksen, whom she had kissed deeply on many occasions over the course of six weeks and who had touched her breasts and once even between her legs—she had liked before they had spoken directly, and she did not stop liking him once she knew him, even though she could not say he acted exactly the way she would have liked him to. When they broke up, she didn’t then dislike him, but the liking had run its course and was spent, like a great enthusiasm; like the summer a couple of years ago she had spent most of making potholders out of cotton loops on a little red frame with spikes around the edges. She had liked it and then it was used up. Someone might say that is really immature and stupid, but that is exactly how it was.

  Perhaps William simply asked Emily to like him, and Emily simply agreed to his request. Although one of Emily’s teachers, Sister Mary Catherine, had said we ought to be careful about asking for what we think we want rather than what God knows we need, sometimes someone does indeed ask and it is given unto them, just like that. And it does not seem that there was much more to it than that they asked, and someone else didn’t. But there is more. For surely Emily in some way was expecting and awaiting this, and was in some way disposed to respond to it in the affirmative. Something particular to that time and place befell her or shaped her in some guise or took her up into itself, so that her head had already begun to nod, her lips to form a whispered “yes,” even as she was unsealing the first of William’s letters.

  At lunch that day, in the employee cafeteria, in the basement where the naked, unwigged manikins lined the corridors like chemotherapy patients under the fluorescent lamps, like schizophrenics queued up for the Pneumanol syrup Emily’s father sold to the state hospital, someone asked Emily if she liked anyone.

  Emily picked up a french fry, desiccated from spending an hour under the heat lamp at the far end of the steam table next to the sullen, faintly mustachioed cashier lady. She said, “Yeah, there’s a guy I like.”

  That is how love comes, how it shows itself: not ardent or loud, aflame and thundering, nor, on the other hand, timid, weary, and faint. It is but a yes that merely says, in reply to the declaration “I am,” “Indeed you are.”

  7

  WILLIAM PUT THE BRIGHT YELLOW PAGE BACK into its matching envelope—a slice of grace, of sun on sun, of butter on sweet corn—and went down the hall and into the apartment, intent on the phone, but then realized he would have to get Emily’s phone number from her earlier letter that was cached in his room. He dove into his closet, pushed aside its debris of loafers, ice skates, and sneakers stiff as dried codfish, and retrieved the letter from under the floorboard. He returned to the hall, went to the living room, and picked up the telephone extension there, ready to dial, to seal his fate.

  He heard Jane’s voice. “—and of course all the farm counties belong to Hubert,” and then, “Billy? Is that you? I’m talking with Frances. I’ll just be a minute more.”

  “Okay,” William said, and put down the receiver. He idled on the sofa, one ear cocked toward the kitchen, towards the distant susurrations of his mother, and leafed through the new Life, with RFK on the cover, running on the beach with a dog, his feet sprung, spiraling upward as though he were going to pirouette right off the sand. He regarded that and then the contents inside. There was an advertisement for the Pontiac GTO in exactly the shade of olivey green he coveted. Then he was conscious of silence from the kitchen, of footsteps coming toward him, and his mother put her head in the door. “It’s all yours now,” she said.

  “Thanks,” William said, and after allowing an interval for his mother to return to her perch at the kitchen table, he dialed, and with each rotation and winding back
of the dial he felt he was doing the bravest and most momentous thing of his life, that he was risking everything in a moment that was nothing less, he thought, than existential.

  The first ring purred and then the second and by the third he was hoping no one would answer, so that he could put down the receiver and this could stop. But just then a voice came on and said, “Hello.” It was the voice of an adult, possessed of authority, of the well-exercised capacity to issue edicts and assessments and prison sentences.

  William said, “Is Emily there?”

  “No, she’s at work,” the voice said. “This is her mother. May I tell her who called?”

  “Um . . . it’s Bill—William Lowry, please. Mrs. Byrne, I mean.”

  There was a pause. The voice said, “Oh . . . I see.” Then more briskly, “Shall I have her call you, William?”

  He thought for a moment. He did not know the protocol. But then, as he decided that in any case he would not be able to bear the waiting for her call, the voice interjected, “I expect she’ll be home by five-thirty.”

  “I’ll call her then,” William said. There was a silence for what seemed a moment too long. “Okay?” he added.

  “Yes. Very well then,” the voice said. “Goodbye.”

  “Bye,” he said softly, and wondered what it was or wasn’t that was “very well.” He leaned back into the sofa. He felt as awful as he had at any moment during the last three days. Although nothing had materially changed from a half hour before, William could not see himself bearing the wait until five-thirty; no amount of magazines or bicycle pedaling or touching his penis could stanch the flow of what was leaching out of him.

  It is cynics that are said not to believe in love, or at least who are willing to utter the thought publicly. But we are all so often faithless in that way. We deny and betray it; we cannot hold it safe in our hearts even from noon to the end of the day.

  Emily’s mother had alerted her to William’s earlier call when she came home, just ahead of schedule at twenty past five. There were three telephones in the Byrnes’ house, one in the front hall on the table, another in the kitchen, and a third in Emily’s parents’ bedroom. Emily’s mother was in the kitchen, assembling dinner, and Emily could not decide whether to position herself by the front-hall telephone or the kitchen door, where she would be in a position to get to the receiver there before her mother would have a chance to pick it up.

  In the end, she hovered between the two, just behind the landing of the stairs, at the head of the hallway that ran ten feet back to the kitchen. She took her place at almost precisely five-thirty. The telephone rang at five thirty-eight, and Emily shouted, “I’ll get it,” in the direction of the kitchen, spun herself around, and sprinted towards the hall table, arriving just as the second ring began. She put her hand on the receiver and felt its vibration run up her arm. With her other arm she touched her hair, regarding herself in the mirror that hung over the hall table. Then, the second ring barely having spent itself, she picked up the receiver.

  “Hello,” she said, or—so it seemed to her—she croaked.

  “Ah . . . is Emily there?” said a voice, thin as water.

  Emily tried to clear her throat silently. Then she said, more loudly than before, “This is her. I mean she.” There seemed to be no response. She pitched herself a half octave higher. “I mean, it’s me. It’s Emily.”

  “Hi, Emily,” said the voice, taking a swallow in mid-phrase, and then, with an upturn at the end as though it were putting a question, “It’s Bill Lowry.”

  “I know,” said Emily. “I mean, I guessed. My mom said you’d called before.”

  “Yeah, it was really stupid of me . . .”

  “. . . but I was at work.”

  “Right. But your letter was really nice so I thought . . .”

  “Your letters were really nice too . . .”

  “. . . that I’d call a little early . . .”

  “. . . kind of thoughtful. Not dopey and immature.”

  “. . . because I couldn’t wait. So I’m sorry . . .”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about.”

  “. . . unless you don’t want me to be.”

  “No, I don’t want you to,” concluded Emily. “So . . .” she added.

  “So . . .” said William. “Do you want—do you still want to go to the Scholar with me? Tomorrow? I can drive. . . .”

  Emily thought for a moment that she could not speak, that her mouth and throat were dried beyond the possibility of utterance. But what she said was, “Yes, I’d really, really like to.”

  8

  AFTER WILLIAM’S PHONE CALL—AFTER THEY worked through the details of his picking her up, during which Emily had turned her back to the wall and settled herself to the floor—Emily told Virginia their plans and Virginia, sliding the casserole into the oven, agreed to them. Then Emily went upstairs and sat very quietly on the edge of her bed for a minute, before she stood, went to her parents’ room, and telephoned Monica Reardon.

  Monica, who had been a comparatively disinterested party in her previous conversations with Emily about William Lowry, now demanded and received without resistance a full debriefing and transcription of the telephone call. They peeled it like a tangerine whose rind they planned to preserve entire, which took nearly ten minutes, whereas the conversation itself had taken scarcely two. When they were done, Monica did not offer an opinion about the wisdom or prospects of what was to occur the following evening. (She privately held that William was, if not an out-and-out spastic, more than a little weird, but then she also thought Emily was just a shade kooky herself.) She did ask Emily what she was going to wear.

  “God, I don’t know,” Emily said. “Maybe my yellow shift.”

  “Not to the West Bank,” said Monica, a little darkly.

  “Well, I can’t wear . . . dungarees or something. It’s a date. It’s like a concert.”

  “It’s a coffeehouse, so they dress like college kids. Some of them like Ivy League, some like hippies or art students.”

  “I don’t know about art students.”

  “It’s pretty much beatnik, only no sandals and always all black.”

  “I don’t have anything like that.”

  “It’s not really your look anyhow,” said Monica. “Just think of Joan Baez or Judy Collins.”

  “I’m not sure I have anything like that,” Emily said. Then she brightened. “But there’s things in New Wave. I get the discount, and one of the girls told me the manager will even sort of advance you stuff. Because I don’t get paid for ten more days.”

  “Well, that’d be cool,” Monica allowed.

  And that was how the matter was left. The next day at work, Emily reconnoitered, and in concert with the department manager (who was herself a junior at the U) found a dress in exactly the mode Monica had suggested, a floral print in purple, blue, and apricot, A-line, cut mid-thigh, but with short sleeves and gathered at the bodice to accentuate the bust a little. With these she would wear the round-toed single-strap shoes with slightly stacked heels. She would wear no stockings, a scrawl of eye pencil, and earrings, tiny pink-and-green wedges of watermelon.

  William also put some thought into his attire, but emerged from his room with considerably less confidence that he had made the right choices. All he had to choose from was various combinations of shirts and pants—khaki and twill, button-down, polo, or surfer-style—that were much the same. But the question at hand was not so much what he was going to wear but who he was going to be. He could find, in six or seven pages of Life, three or four characters that were conceivably aspects of himself, persons he was or felt he ought to be: the serious-minded college student (Dartmouth? Columbia?), a political science or sociology major volunteering spring quarter for McCarthy; the guitar player and poet in a fringe jacket sitting cross-legged in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park whose girlfriend is studying mime; the guy with sunglasses and a tan (with, as well, the sailboat, and the blond girl, also in sunglasses) who dr
ives the olive-green GTO.

  On close inspection his closet and chest of drawers yielded only a yellow long-sleeved button-down shirt, a navy turtleneck, and a pair of slightly rumpled but fundamentally clean khaki pants. Choosing the turtleneck over the button-down, he strode to his mother’s car as the Dartmouth student from the waist down and the poet/guitarist or the GTO owner from the waist up.

  In the car, which he had washed that morning before the heat could leave cloudy spots of evaporated rinse water on the hood and roof, he turned on the radio and drove slowly in the direction of Emily’s house. The distance might be covered in less than five minutes, but William had left twenty-five minutes before their appointed meeting time of seven o’clock. He had, once again, time to kill, to burn up like a jetliner dumping fuel in order to land, and he circled the perimeter of Emily’s neighborhood, and with each circuit moved a street closer to her, bearing down on her. Finally he docked the car just west of her house and waited until the clock in the car said seven. He pulled the car forward the thirty feet to the curb in front of her house, set the parking brake, and got out, looking first across the street and then up it to the east, as though to give the impression that he was not quite sure which house was Emily’s. Then he ambled (or rather feigned ambling) up to Emily’s door.

  William worried as he pressed the bell that the father would answer; that he would be called upon to engage in that combination of forelock-tugging obsequiousness and punch-in-the-arm joshing that characterizes intercourse between young men and older men that are neither relatives nor authority figures, but to whom both respect and cordiality need to be shown; who need to be feared but in a friendly sort of way. But he did not much relish the alternative, the mother, whose tone on the phone seemed more than a little formidable, like Joan Crawford in her capacity as chairwoman of the Pepsi Company.

  But he saw it was Emily who opened the door, or rather someone who looked like Emily but was different from Emily as he had heretofore seen her, either in life or in his mind. He seemed to look at her for a long time, forgetting that he ought to greet her, that he ought to do anything other than regard her. For he had always thought Emily was pretty (although in most of the world’s estimation she was merely “cute”), but now she had become more than that. She had acquired another dimension, that of depth, and William could see around her, could see her distinct from the background in which she stood, against which, it seemed to him, she now shone, although she was nothing more than a girl standing in the doorway of a house on a summer’s evening.