by Robert Clark
William had scarcely heard a word of the poem save something about death and horses and eternity, and he said, “Oh, no. Maybe it’s not gloomy. Maybe it’s just important. Profound.” The latter was a word he had been waiting to use for some weeks.
“Yeah,” Emily said. “And besides, she’s not really gloomy. It’s like she thinks it’s all a little funny and odd—how people are and how God is.” Emily thought of another poem, and flipped through the pages of her book.
“Listen,” she said. “ ‘God is indeed a jealous God/He cannot bear to see/That we had rather not with Him/But with each other play.’”
This time William had been listening, and thought he understood what she was getting at. He wondered how to respond and finally said, “Kind of sacrilegious, isn’t it? Like she’s making fun of God?”
“It’s not like that. Because it’s not like God’s really jealous, like he really minds. The joke’s really on us—that we’re like children.”
“Like we’re having too much fun playing to sit around and worry about God.” William was not sure this last comment had been such a good idea.
“So do you worry about God?” she asked. Her voice was friendly but a little impish. “Or maybe you’re like an agnostic. Like a lot of kids.” William could not tell if this last remark was meant to be helpful.
He struggled to frame a reply. Ordinarily, the term “agnostic” was one that, like “profound,” he would have savored the opportunity to make use of. It did, after all, describe something like what he thought (or felt or intimated). It made his doubt (his confusion, to be more precise) sound considered. It was rather like the way his mother allowed that she thought of herself as a “socialist” rather than a “communist,” although most people in Minnesota were hard pressed to see the difference.
“It’s like I’m a little like that,” William began. “I mean, I think there’s a God, but I don’t know exactly what’s he’s like. If he’s like a spirit or a ruler or an idea.” William continued in this vein, and was soon tangled in analogies, the ground around him strewn with “likes” and “sort ofs” and “kind ofs.”
This reliance on “like,” on analogy, among adolescents tends to be chalked up to their imprecision of thought, to the callow diction of half-baked and lazy minds. But William’s mind was scarcely lazy, and Emily’s was at times stridently energetic. So perhaps when they grappled with the great questions of existence (which becomes rather a penchant when existential terror can be induced by the thought of making a phone call; of choosing high-top over low-top sneakers; of doing or saying any one particular thing rather than another) they were on to something in adopting this mode of discourse. For we do not apprehend ultimate things directly, but approximately. They are unseen and unseeable, we can only picture them—imagine them—sidelong; we are not able to say what they are, but only what they are like.
After a minute or so, William concluded with something along the lines of “So God is like the air. He’s everywhere and in everything, but the whole system, our whole society, is set up to keep you from seeing that.” He thought that was rather fine, and so felt no compunction in asking Emily the same question she had asked him.
“So what do you believe?”
“That God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in the next,” Emily said in a cheery, singsongy voice. Then she smiled and rested her hands in her lap.
William was not entirely sure what he ought to make of this, although he sensed that some levity was intended. “So that’s it? Or are you kind of teasing me?”
“I’m kind of doing both. It’s what we learned when we were little. And I suppose it’s what I believe.” Emily saw that William was, if not troubled, a little at a loss for words. He was getting, before her eyes, a little vague, vaporizing into a curtain of fumes that floated and twisted in the heat. “But you ought to believe whatever you want,” she added. “I mean, I liked what you said.”
“I’m glad,” William said. And then he had an idea, a notion that he thought would please them both, that would recover what had been lost in the last five minutes and record what had been gained. “That last poem, the one about how God’s jealous. It’s short. So you could write it down for me? Couldn’t you?”
“Sure. And then maybe another time you could show me your poems, the ones you wrote.”
“Sure, if you want. I mean, they’re kind of personal. I mean, you might not really like them. I mean, they’re not very good,” William said. “But you can see them. If you want.”
“I want,” Emily said.
Emily said her prayers that night, and she prayed all her usual intentions, which now included the health and safety of William, just as they did that of Monica and Emily’s other friends. She wondered about what William had said about God and why he said it so apologetically when in fact it was more or less what everyone believed these days, even Emily. It was not that she did not still believe the catechism she had parroted for William. But she did not so much believe it as she loved it beyond any mere assent or conviction; she loved it as something she had known from childhood, as she loved her father and mother and sister and grandmother; she loved it with an assurance that entitled her to mock it, as she had done with William.
But the truth was that if she were pressed to talk about it as the college kids at the Scholar doubtless did, she would probably say the kind of things William had said. She wondered if to speak of God in that way—leaving out all the things the church said God does as opposed to merely is—was a sin. If it was a sin, surely it was a sin of omission, made in the interest of getting along with other people. It was, she supposed, ecumenical.
Emily’s prayers tolled silently over the city and fell upon its roofs as dust or ash from a fire, unseen. William was still awake as she was praying. He was reading his poems, all six of them, which he had written last winter and typed (entirely in capital letters) on his mother’s Olympia portable. He read them, and despite what he had said to Emily, he thought they were pretty good; they had some catchy lines, like the best songs do. But he was a little chagrined to find that they contained a lot of swear words—one of the things he had thought made them good at the time he composed them—and worried that Emily might be put off by this. There was one poem, for example, that had no theme other than the sheer joy of inscribing curse words on paper: “GOD IT’S A GAS HOW I CAN TYPE/FUCKANDSHITANDASS AND ALLTHAT/PUTTING A GUN TO THE HEAD OF EVERY CLEANANDMORAL-MINDED AMERICAN/AND I CAN’T GET NO IMPRIMATURE FROM CARDINAL-SPELLMAN.” He thought it just as well that Emily not see this one.
Of the remainder, William set one aside as unfinished (the almost preternaturally Nietzschian “THE PHILOSOPHER FUCKING MOTHER-EARTH”) and another as charming but jejune (“SUPPOSING THAT WE ALL WALK OUT OF HERE/AND SPREAD OUR WINGS/AND FLY/AND DROP SHIT ON THEHUMANRACE/I’LL BE THE BOMBARDIER IF YOU’LL HOLD MY HAND/AND WE’LL DUMP THE SYSTEM RIGHT ON THEM”). He thought he would just show her his best effort and leave it at that:
i’ve been watching myself and wondering
who i am
and looking at the sun burning my eyes
i could do something better
so they tell me
if i only had the guts to leave or stay
go out there and play jesus
or i could stay where i am and pretend nothing
exists but my little schzoid sphere and help myself
but who wishes they were me?
i’m sort of walking the line now pretending i’m doing one
or the other
talking to the disciples and defenders of the realm
bitching
bullshitting
loving every minute
asking the questions children ask:
why?
This was, William thought, if not a good poem, at least a very sincere one. It was the truest thing he had written and also the hardest. It was his confession. It was his prayer.
&nb
sp; 11
MONDAY WAS WILLIAM’S FIRST DAY OF WORK. He locked his bicycle in the alley behind Brower’s and went in the freight entrance. No one was there excerpt Mr. Murkowski, the warehouseman to whom William had been told to report by Louis Campion. Mr. Murkowski didn’t so much explain William’s duties to him as grunt and shrug and gesticulate towards various piles of goods that needed to be shifted from one place to another. And that, more or less, was William’s job.
It was dull work moving, say, 125 boxes of Bass Weejuns from a pallet to the shoe stockroom, and stacking them by size and color (William had not even known they came in black). But the place itself had a certain museumlike fascination for him. The main stockroom and its ancillary chambers were larger than the showroom and two stories high, with catwalks and balconies and a little office from which Mr. Murkowski watched him. There were canoes lying on the rafters and stacks of paddles, fishing rods packed in metal tubes, Hudson’s Bay blankets, tents and tent poles, Dutch ovens, fire grates, lanterns, and boots, especially boots, the item Brower’s was most noted for.
William himself had his eye on a pair of boots, the model called the Boot Sauvage, named in honor of the voyageurs who explored and trapped in the far north woods, along the boundary and northward to the boreal zone and the verge of the Arctic. Louis Campion had told him that he could buy items from the store at a thirty percent employee discount, and in addition to the boots (thirty-five dollars), William figured he would investigate a Duluth pack, the traditional haversack of the voyageurs (distinguished by the head strap that helps bear its weight). At home, he had a fair amount of camping equipment—a hatchet, a canteen, a sleeping bag, and a small tent, mostly unused and untried—but what he wanted most of all was a canoe, although by reason of price and practicality (he had no more means to move or to store a canoe than a jetliner) he seemed unlikely ever to attain one. Still, the idea could not but preoccupy him, for every time he looked up to the rafters from his pallets and crates and cartons, there sailed the canoes, six or eight of them in aluminum, fiberglass, and wood laminate.
That was what he told Emily about when they went to the Scholar again that Wednesday night; of dull and pointless work in a chamber full of what were for him fabulous curiosities, of Mr. Murkowski watching him like a fish in a tank, of what seemed to him to be his own daily submersion in the wondrous aroma of leather, canvas, gun oil, and clean wool. All that, and earning almost twelve dollars a day for his trouble, money he didn’t really need; money that, he calculated, could indeed accumulate to an amount equal to the price of a canoe in thirty or so such days.
“You ought to have a canoe, if that’s what you really want,” Emily said. Emily had been to canoe camp in the north of the state.
William was feeling ebullient and a little silly. “What I really want is a GTO. But I’d be at Brower’s until I was twenty-one to save that much,” he said. “I’d be awfully tired of hauling shoe boxes by then.”
“Do you really care about cars that much? About driving around and engines and stuff?”
“I guess not. But it’s beautiful, that car. It’s the most beautiful thing—well maybe not thing, but most beautiful machine I’ve ever seen. Especially in the metallic green, with the front bumper that’s made of this new material so it’s green too. It’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen.”
“I know,” Emily said, though it was hard to say if she meant she was familiar with the car in this regard or if she was expressing a deeper but more general sympathy. “But what do you really want?”
“You mean that I could really have?” This seemed a tricky question, for William felt the correct answer was something along the lines of “world peace” or “the end of poverty” or “civil rights.” But while those were desirable goods that he certainly willed, what he really wanted was the canoe, and more than that, Emily, in the way he was enjoying her right now, but also in every possible way there might be to know and to love her.
“I guess I’d really like the canoe with you and me being able to go in it somewhere,” William said at last.
Emily smiled and then looked away, down at her lap, not in embarrassment or discomfiture but because this remark numbered among the kindest things anyone had ever said to her. It spoke of wanting her and yet of requiring nothing of her save her presence, the mere fact of her being.
William felt that she must have understood what he said in the intended spirit, but then wondered, as she was looking down, if her interpretation might be taking some more negative turn as she pondered it, as she held it in her hands in her lap and examined it.
“That’s what I’d really like,” he finally repeated, as though to underline his intentions.
Emily looked up, and meeting his eyes with hers—which William now saw were a grayish blue, like lake water—said, “I know.” She said this as she might have said “Yeah,” its subject having no apparent object, no particular thing it claimed to know. But William heard it differently, and heard it rightly. Emily knew, and what she knew, what she wanted to know, was William.
Such moments, which depend more on what is heard than what is said, are rare, and rarer still for young people like William and Emily who imagine their every utterance as an inchoate stammer—as opposed to adults, who believe their words are solid objects, like poker chips or cabbages or cakes of soap. And so you might look up and around and see how very ordinary everything is, as from a daydream, and quite reasonably decide that you had not heard the thing you thought you heard, or had attached some fanciful and mistaken meaning to it.
William and Emily did not do this immediately, as they broke the surface of the lake they had been beneath together and saw that it was the same place and the same day as when they had begun. Their hands were still, so to speak, touching, more entangled in each other than in the circumstances and contingencies that were beginning to press in around them demanding to be recognized, to be accorded their due as reality. But whatever had descended upon them had largely vanished by the time they left the Scholar. On the freeway home, the sodium light poured down on them like a wrung-out sun and the tires ground against the concrete and last winter’s pulverized sand and road salt, taking all the beauty away.
When they parked just down from Emily’s house, they were exactly where they had been a week before. Emily had not forgotten her worries about the way she had kissed William, and despite the harmony of her relations with him on Saturday (when the constant presence of one or the other of her parents afforded no opportunity to kiss him again) and tonight, she worried about it now. William’s unmistakable regard for her had registered, but so too had the logic of the inadvisability of the previous week’s kiss.
So when William put the car into park and shifted his body in her direction and looked at her, she looked away and seemed to hold herself—arms pinned to her sides, hands knotted together—not simply self-protectively, but away from him. William’s lips had parted slightly, and they might have spoken something, but he held himself still and finally bent over decorously, brushed her cheek with his lips as he might have done with his hand, and pulled himself back. She looked up, and by way of response nodded in a cursory manner, as though some business had been concluded.
They recovered themselves a little on the way to the door of Emily’s parents’ house. Emily said, “So I’ll see you this weekend?”
“I suppose.” The instant William said it, he knew it had come out stung, petulant, inflected with a kind of obsequious disdain. He quickly added, “I mean, sure.”
Emily read his unhappiness clearly, though she could not tell whether its source was innocent, honest emotional injury or thwarted selfish desire. She offered reassurance as best she could. At the door she touched his hand lightly and said, “It was really nice tonight. It was good.”
“Sure,” William said, but in trying to drain out the bitterness he had drained out every other feeling the word might have. He said, “Good night,” and she said, more tenderly than he could now hear, “See
you soon,” and William shambled down the steps of Emily’s house and into the dark.
That was the end of William’s peace and contentment. He worked joylessly in the warehouse, Mr. Murkowski all the while watching him as though expecting him to steal something. And William felt like stealing something, or more likely hurling a decoy or a set of fireplace tools through Mr. Murkowski’s office window.
He had ruined things with Emily, their past, present, and future. He must have done something wrong, but in endless replays of the evening’s events he could not locate the misstep he had apparently made, the crime for which she wanted to punish him. He imagined and quickly rejected the thought that he had completely misconstrued her behavior: that she had sat back in the car seat not disdainfully but in fact demurely, letting him make the first move, waiting for him to more or less ravish her, as a kind of test of his masculine mettle. But that did not seem to be borne out by the other facts of the evening, nor by what he knew of Emily’s character, which was not cunning or perverse—or at least hadn’t seemed so until now.
That was as far as William could get with Emily’s side of it. As for his, he had in everything he had done (and was doing, for it was Friday and he had not called her, half in confusion and fear, half in spite) made matters worse. He should not have kissed her when she did not kiss him; or should not have kissed her in that way, but in some other way. He should not have been sarcastic—or whatever it was—with her. He should not have skulked off. He should have, right then and there (or maybe after a little cooling-off period), asked her if everything was all right, or he should have just ignored the whole thing and acted like nothing had happened, or maybe he should just take the fucking hint: that she’d changed her mind about him, or he had misread everything from the beginning.