Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  “Hi,” Emily said. She was conscious that this boy was for all intents staring at her, and she wondered if there was something on her face or stuck in her teeth.

  His eyes met hers and then refocused, and he said, “Hi.” He began, it seemed to Emily, to put out his hand in order to have it shaken, but then he pulled it back and put it in his pocket. “I’m Bill,” he said.

  “I know.” She laughed, not, she hoped, in a way he would take as mockery.

  “Just checking, I guess,” William said, and then laughed himself, and looked at his feet. He met her eyes again for an instant and then, hands still in his pockets, swung his gaze back down to and around the floor of the porch, as though he were making an estimate. “So,” he said, and his eyes drifted up towards hers again, “are you ready?”

  “Um . . . sure,” Emily said, although she felt that niceties that somehow ought to be attended to were being ignored, that, far from being swept away, she was being hoisted off her front porch like a piece of furniture destined for the moving van. Then she saw that he was looking at her again as he had done in that very first instant, and it felt a little heady, a little thrilling and dizzying, to be looked at in this way, almost as though she were naked and his gaze were a heat lamp or a spotlight or both.

  What William was seeing then and in the car on the freeway was simply beauty, but he had never seen beauty in a girl before. He had of course seen knockouts and stunners and lookers in films and on the television, and he had encountered some remarkably pretty girls at distances of under ten feet. But those were things he had merely seen, that were as pictures: He had never been in the presence of beauty before, felt it light and warm his own skin, had it sitting next to him not two feet away. As he drove, he stole glances of Emily, trying to take her in, and more particularly to isolate and pinpoint what it was that seemed different about her. He saw that she was wearing a purple hair band and green-and-pink earrings, and that because her hair was back a little he could see her ears, which presumably he had never been in a position to see before. He saw that her nose was small and rather upright and jocular, that there was a dusting of acne to either side of it, and that overall her complexion was very fair, almost a floury white, but he was sure he had noticed all that before.

  William parked at the side of the coffeehouse, which was in a narrow old brick building fronting on a wide and rather dingy street that was in the process of being bridged for a freeway. William had intended to go around and open Emily’s door for her, but she exited the car at the same time he did and stood waiting for him on the sidewalk, her hands clasped together in front of her. William looked at her as he rounded the front of the car, Emily just standing there, and he thought he had never seen anyone stand in exactly that way before, just waiting, eyes downcast, shifting weight from foot to foot, yet radiating something that he hoped only he could see, that was perhaps his alone to apprehend.

  They went inside. The room was high-ceilinged, brick-walled, and studded with tables and candles thrust in wine bottles. Along one wall there was a piano and to its left a sort of stage, although it was perhaps only the crate the piano had come in, laid on its side. William motioned to a little round table to the left of it, and he and Emily sat down. There were perhaps a dozen people in the whole place, plus a waitress dressed in the style Monica had called “art student.” After a time, the waitress came over to them and asked them what they would like. William ordered himself something called a mocha cappuccino and suggested Emily might like the same. “I guess so,” she said, for having looked around the room and observed the other occupants, all college people and really mature-looking, she now felt a little out of her depth. She was liking William—who still had not actually spoken more than a few words to her—for simply having been here before, for not being intimidated by it. She was also getting used to the way his eyes darted up from his lap to look at her, his lips parted slightly as though in surprise.

  When the coffee came, they began to talk. He told her about the Academy and she told him about Annunciation; they talked about which teachers were nice and which subjects they liked, about which kids they hated and why, about how stupid it was and how they couldn’t wait to get out and how, all in all, it was okay. Then the music began, and in truth, that was a relief. Because talking is hard and music talked for them by proxy. It told them what they thought and what they felt, knowing these things before they did. This, the music said, is how it is; is what is important; is the name of the thing you feel.

  The musician was a guitarist with a large head, a babyish face, and wavy hair. He sat on a stool and positioned two microphones before him, one aimed at his guitar and the other at his face. Without a word he began to play. Most of what he played were instrumentals (although he sometimes sang in a rusty moan of whimsy or resignation) and were not exactly what Emily or William understood to be folk music, being neither rousing nor satiric nor sad in direct and straightforward ways. But it was serious and thoughtful, and for Emily and William music was both history and prophecy. It showed them how to see the world and themselves, not because they were empty-headed, but because there was such a surfeit of world and selves to see; because you could sit and stare as William stared at Emily—just one girl in one medium-sized city of no particular account—and be dumbfounded. The music the guitarist played for Emily and William had a kind of melancholy air that reflected the place they lived in, or perhaps a place a little to the north of it. It was music—most of it wordless—that evoked refrigerators and wringer washing machines sitting derelict in fields; cars abandoned on the ice of a frozen lake, waiting forlornly for the thaw; things forsaken and unseen, yet achingly real. The music was a response to the question “If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, did it make a noise, did it fall? Does it even exist?” and the music answered yes. It is a particularly northern view of things. It is a way to smile in the face of a cold so cold that it might freeze a person from the inside out, starting with the heart.

  By the time the guitarist stopped for his break, Emily was both a little giddy from the caffeine and susceptible to whatever influence might present itself and enter her through the tender wound the music had worn in her. After the guitarist stepped down from the stage, she and William faced each other—the table they sat at was scarcely eighteen inches across—and for the first time were able to look at each other without flinching, without turning away every few moments in order to let their gaze catch its breath.

  “He sure is good, isn’t he?” William said.

  “It’s like . . . bells or something.”

  “That’s because it’s a twelve-string.”

  “So you play?”

  “Not really,” William said. “I mean, I can play ‘Michael Row the Boat Ashore’ and ‘Hey Joe’ and the intro of ‘The House of the Rising Sun.’ Which is, I guess, what just about everyone can play.” William laughed. “I pretty much stopped last year.”

  “But you still have a guitar?”

  “A Gibson. My dad got it for me.”

  The latter was a subject Emily was curious about, and even as she sensed her own vulnerability in the wake of the music, she understood that this was a matter she might now enter into. “So your dad . . .”

  “Doesn’t live with us. I mean, he lives in California.”

  “Wow, that’s cool,” said Emily. “I mean that he lives in California, not that he doesn’t live with you. Do you get to go visit him?”

  “I guess I could, but I haven’t. Once in a while he comes here. He and my mom don’t get along.”

  Emily paused and then said, “So they’re . . . divorced.” She uttered this last word cautiously, as though it might have been “insane” or “dead.”

  “Yeah, since I was six or so.” William looked away, and then, bravely, he looked at Emily again. “It’s no big deal.”

  There were several things Emily thought of saying at this juncture, and all of them, she felt, were the wrong thing. Here what seemed called for was
not a response so much as an acknowledgment that she had understood what he meant. But she could not say what it was he meant. It was, she felt, something like what the music had been saying.

  “I know,” she said at last, and if she hadn’t stopped to ask herself what Monica might advise in this situation, she might have put her hand on top of his for a moment. But she felt she had at least gotten the tone right and that it contained nothing of “Poor baby,” because he clearly wanted no sympathy for the fact of his coming from a “broken home.”

  William understood that there was no easy transition that she might make to a related subject with which to keep the conversation in motion, for example, “Oh, my parents are divorced too,” or “Well, when I get older I’m planning on getting divorced.” But as her simple reply settled on him, it came to him that it required no elaboration or extension: that another subject might now be embarked upon, but that the choice of it properly lay with him. But rake his mind as he could, he was unable to find a thing to ask or say to her that did not ring false and hollow, for what he really wanted to know was as yet unspeakable: “Do you like me? Do you really like me?” At last he hit on a serviceable question.

  “Do you like poetry?”

  Emily looked at him as though he had by some peculiar genius unique to him guessed the innermost secret of her heart. “Oh, yes,” she said. “I really, really do.”

  Sensing his success, William plunged on. “Do you like Emily Dickinson?”

  “Oh. Yeah, I really, really do. I like ‘The Chariot’ especially.”

  William was suddenly in a little over his head, for his own acquaintance with this poet was slight, his knowledge of her confined to the fact that she seemed to be one whom girls generally liked. He did not want to say he was familiar with the poem, for that would be a lie, and he believed a lie would poison the atmosphere that seemed to have so nicely risen up around and between them. He thought he might nod, although this was a half-lie, an implication of knowing something he didn’t really know. Then he felt an urge—from where he could not say—to risk everything.

  “I don’t know that one.”

  “I could read it to you sometime,” Emily said. “I could read you that and maybe some Elizabeth Barrett Browning. I like her too.”

  That was another poet William had been given to understand girls liked. “That’d be nice. I’d really like that.” William felt doubly blessed, first by Emily’s response to this line of questioning, and, second, as it came to him, by the realization that the problem of raising the matter of their seeing each other again had been preempted and successfully overcome.

  He added, “I’ve written some poems myself,” and at that moment the guitarist, clutching a glass of ice water, walked past them and hoisted himself up on the platform. As he adjusted his microphones, the waitress came by and asked if they wanted more coffee. Emily, who felt her heart was racing now and that her thoughts were beginning to ferret about more than she cared for, declined, and William declined because she declined. Then, before anything more could be said—all they could do was look at each other, their eyes meeting for the first time at exactly the same moment and same matrix (one might have drawn perfectly parallel lines from Emily’s pupils to William’s)—the music began again.

  It was in much the same mood as before, and for Emily, it was Dickinsonian, although it must be admitted that Emily’s knowledge of Dickinson was limited, having been filtered through both the exigencies of a high school curriculum and the sensibility of Sister Mary Catherine. But that was not really of much concern, because for girls and boys of a certain age and time—approximately the thirty-fifth year of the existential era and one year after the Summer of Love—being was more crucial than doing, and so being the sort of person who read Emily Dickinson mattered rather more than doing the reading itself.

  William was of the same persuasion, not that he had needed any persuading: not after watching the bilgewater of the war in Asia rise through the whole transit of his adolescence; not after being fired by Mortensen Home Builders, Inc., for merely being principled (not to say helpful); not with the equally distasteful alternatives of college or the draft facing him in less than a year. But the touchstones of his conviction were more diffuse than Emily’s. If he had been pressed he would have named the beat poets together with Alan Watts, Paul Goodman, and A. S. Neill as his chief mentors, although, in common with Emily, he had not read deeply in any of them save for one volume of Neill, which he read twice. (He had lobbied his mother for the better part of a year to send him to Neill’s free school in England, Summerhill, until she convinced him that it was very far away and that he wouldn’t like the food.)

  But it was really Jack London for whom William had the greatest affinity, although in an odd reversal of the being/doing principle of knowledge, William had no acquaintance with London. For William would have liked nothing so much as to face down the entire Canadian boreal zone with three matches, a jackknife, and, for tinder, the last remaining documentary proof of his claim to the richest vein in the Yukon. Emily might like to live contemplatively, growing ever smarter and more whimsical, in an empty parsonage (friends could visit; there could be a phone, she supposed), but William would, all things being equal, like to howl at the moon. Prior to Summerhill, the first and only book that had produced an epiphany in him was the story (read aloud over a succession of weeks by William’s pretty third-grade teacher) of a city boy who runs away to the Adirondacks and lives in a hollow tree.

  After the music was over, or had to be over for them, since Emily needed to be home by ten o’clock, they walked to the car, side by side, William’s hands in his pockets but his left elbow nearly touching Emily’s arm. The sun had gone down perhaps half an hour before, the air beginning to cool but still thick with the day’s residual heat, now pressed into waves between the pulsing of the crickets. They walked together to the passenger door, and they stood there a moment, neither William attempting to unlock it nor Emily to open it. It seemed like something of importance or great necessity was going to be said or done, but when the sensation came into William and Emily’s consciousness, they backed away from it, from each other.

  William got the key from his pocket and unlocked Emily’s door. He opened it and she slid in, closing it from her side before he had a chance to shut it himself. Then she reached over and pulled up the lock on his door so that all he had to do was open it and get in. The vinyl seat was cool and dry. It might have been a shelf of rock at the edge of a lake where they sat watching the water lap.

  William put the key in the ignition and started the motor, saying, “That was nice.”

  “That was really nice,” Emily said, not to correct him, but to encourage him, to thank him. William took the remark as it was intended; he could scarcely mistake it. It seemed to have the same quality of being projected as did the presence of her beauty earlier in the evening, of being a kind of weather or light that emanated from her.

  They drove mostly in silence as before, but it was not the silence of chatter repressed or paralyzed, but of the music. They were moving, in the sodium light of the freeway and the hum of the tires, as though gliding or skating on that same beautiful ice of desolation. “I could do that again,” Emily said.

  “Next week if you want,” he said, blurting it out before realizing that voicing the idea ought to cause him anxiety.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call you about it.”

  “Sure, anytime you like.”

  “You could read me the poem. ‘The— ’ ”

  “ ‘The Chariot,’” she said. “Like this,” she added, patting the seat of the car.

  “A Buick. Some chariot.” William continued, “You could read it to me on the phone.”

  “You could come over. My parents don’t bite.”

  “I could,” William agreed, and thought how suddenly, in the space of a couple of hours, everything was abrim with potential, with what could be.

  He pulled the car up to the c
urb in front of her house and put the transmission into park. “So . . .” he said.

  “So,” she said, and smoothed her dress over her legs. “So you’ll call me?”

  “Tomorrow. Or the next day.”

  “Okay.” She smoothed her dress again and looked at him. “I suppose we’d better do this now instead of at the door,” she said, and she put her hands on his shoulders and kissed him on his right cheek and let her lips rest there awhile before pulling away, so that he would know that he ought to come back to her, that she would be waiting. He began to open the door, to go around and get her, and, for a moment, he cupped his hand to his cheek as if he were clasping something against it.

  9

  EMILY RODE THE NUMBER THREE BUS THAT NEXT morning in a state perhaps not of elation but of confident hope. She was not by any stretch of the imagination head over heels or snowed or sodden or sappy with love for William Lowry. She did not really know quite what to make of him, or herself in relation to him. She knew that she liked him, that she thought he was cute, but also that there was, as Monica had said, something a little weird about him. On further reflection, however, as the bus careened down the Oakland Avenue hill, she thought that perhaps she also liked whatever this thing was that was a little weird about him.

  That thing was a little hard to put her finger on. In part, it had something to do with his gaze swiveling around like a lighthouse beam, intent upon you, and then petering out and off in other directions and then coming back after a moment full force. That vague and indeterminate impression was the best Emily could do, but in fact, she had stumbled upon the essential truth of the matter: William Lowry was, at bottom, vague and indeterminate. He was, at least viewed from without, liquid rather than solid; he moved through the world in waves, lappings, drips, and oozes.