Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  Now, as he worked, as he swept, as he tried to carry one too many shoe boxes at once and the whole tower of Weejuns collapsed and fell from his arms and he could have sat down right then and there and wept, he was checkmated and miserable. They could break up, although it was doubtful they had ever been together. They could reconcile, but that involved meeting each other in some way, somebody making an overture, and she would not call him because he was supposed to apologize to her (and girls didn’t make overtures anyway) and he wouldn’t call her because she was supposed to apologize to him (and guys didn’t make overtures when they’d been given to understand that overtures were unwanted). So there they were. William supposed he could do nothing at all, and then they would meet when they were both very old and she would say her whole life had been wasted, that she had been waiting all this time for him to call.

  Mr. Murkowski walked by, as if on his way somewhere, but doubtless to establish the source of the noise he had heard. He found William on his knees, sorting B’s from C’s, brown from cordovan, and when William looked up and began to explain, their eyes met and Mr. Murkowski smiled and seemed to take great satisfaction in William’s present posture. He made no move to help pick up the boxes or to return their contents to them. Finally, he clicked his tongue and said, “Mind the merchandise, son,” and then, “Don’t bite off more than you can chew,” and finally, as he began to turn in the direction of his office, “Make haste slowly.”

  “Fuck you,” William said.

  12

  IT HAD NOT BEEN LOST ON EMILY THAT WILLIAM had turned cold towards her at the end of Wednesday evening and that the kiss was the cause. But she had, at the moment itself, done her best to mollify him, and in the following days she did not worry over the matter. Working in the New Wave department did not encourage introspection, and even in quiet moments, when she was folding and hanging clothes, the garments themselves—extrovert and glossy in form, color, and substance—promoted the view that life was all horizon, broad rather than deep.

  That is not to say that she never thought about William, or the note upon which they had parted. She thought particularly about what he had said to her at the Scholar and how nice it was, and the fact that if he had meant it, he wouldn’t have gone cool on her, particularly not over something like the kiss, which was hers to withhold, it being her kiss. He had kissed her anyway, and she hadn’t objected; she had been a little disappointed, in retrospect, that he hadn’t kissed her longer or on the mouth.

  So he had no right to be angry. It wasn’t fair. Moreover, it bore out the logic of Monica’s argument, for he was only angry because he hadn’t gotten more of something to which he wasn’t especially entitled in the first place and which might have been giving him the wrong idea about Emily (not that the idea that he apparently now entertained of her was the one she had in mind, Emily had to admit). At any rate the ball was in his court, and she would simply wait to see if he called and what he said when he did; although if he didn’t, that would only prove what his interest was to begin with, unless, Emily thought, he was thinking something entirely different—some hermetic and unfathomable boy thing—which could only be discovered by her calling him, which, of course, she could not do.

  By the end of the day on Friday, William could still not decide how to proceed. The correct meaning of Emily’s behavior remained a mystery, a matted and tangled skein of surmises, second and third guesses, dreads and bewilderments that told no more of a coherent story than something he might fish out of the bathtub drain. Thus flummoxed, he could well have simply surrendered and called Emily except for the fact that one of the few credible readings that remained on the table was that she meant for him not to call, not ever.

  William decided to go riding with Jim Donnelly to clear his mind (if that is the correct word to describe sealing himself inside the hulk of the Pontiac with Jim’s fulminating 100mm cigarettes and the beast’s own emissions of gasoline, carbon monoxide, and blue gusts of combusted motor oil). Over the course of an hour’s driving William had no compunction in ladling out his whole dilemma until his friend had a good taste of it.

  Nor are friends like Jim and William shy about offering advice when faced with a problem, no more than they are when the hood of a malfunctioning car is raised and every male within a radius of a mile closes in on it to take a shot at reading the entrails. Jim knew rather less about girls than Monica Reardon knew about boys, which was not very much at all. But on this occasion he was on the money as uncannily as the time when, the best automotive minds of Sacred Heart High School having been stumped, he sidled up to an Olds almost bereft of vital signs and quietly noted that the coil wire was missing.

  Jim said two things, neither of which was strictly true, but which nonetheless effected a solution to William’s dilemma. First he said, with no particular conviction or commitment, “Sounds like she’s kind of testing you.”

  “How’s she doing that?” William asked.

  “Maybe to see what you’ll do. To see if you’re serious or whatever.”

  “Whether I’m serious . . .”

  “I mean, you said she didn’t really freeze you out or anything. That she . . .”

  “Just sort of . . . hung back,” William confirmed.

  “So it’s a test, like the damsels with the Knights of the Round Table. Like with mice, like with B. F. Skinner.”

  “He’s like A. S. Neill, right?”

  “I guess. Anyway, she just wanted to see what you would do.”

  “What if I did the wrong thing?”

  “There’s no right or wrong thing to do, unless you did something really stupid.”

  “I kind of . . .” William was struggling to gauge exactly what he had done. “I kind of . . . well, pouted.”

  “Pouted?” Jim snorted. “That’s cool. You mean you stuck out your lip at her?”

  “No, I just sort of acted a little put-out.”

  “And did she act pissed-off back?”

  “No.”

  “So no big deal. So do you want to call her?”

  “I don’t know if I’m supposed to.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  William pondered this, and realized that all the feelings of the last two days had come to a tinge of regret overlain by an unnamable sadness. Then he said, “Yeah, I guess I want to call her,” and with that succeeded in putting a name to his affliction: that he missed her, and that was pretty much all of it.

  “So do it,” Jim said.

  “Suppose she doesn’t want me to?”

  “Then she can hang up. Or she’ll have her mom tell you she’s doing her homework.”

  “School’s out.”

  “Okay. Then she’s douching or something.” Jim snorted again, and the Pontiac’s sclerotic exhaust manifold seemed to echo him.

  William would have liked to hit Jim for that, but he needed Jim to give him a ride home. He mentioned then, only in passing, that he had been fired from Brower’s, and, as Jim pressed him, explained the exact cause.

  “Boy, you’ve got some mouth,” Jim said, swinging his head in admiration. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “Better learn some respect for authority, boy,” Jim said as they pulled up outside William’s house. “Gonna get yourself drafted.”

  “I probably will anyway,” said William, and with that he got out of the car and went inside.

  Jane and her friends were in the kitchen, oiling themselves with liquor for the convention tomorrow, and William moved scarcely noticed through their muttered conversation and smoke. He went to the living room, took the phone, settled sideways onto the love seat, scissoring his legs over the arm, and began to dial. Three digits into Emily’s number (now committed to memory as fixedly as his bike-lock combination), he felt his breath leave him, replaced by a woozy upward pressure from his gut ending in his throat at the point where nausea generally begins to form. But he kept dialing. A voice answered, and it was Emily’s fa
ther’s voice.

  “Is Emily there?” William asked.

  “I’ll see,” said the voice, level, bland, and dark with authority. Then in the same tone it added, “Can I say who’s calling?” and with that second obstacle set down, the voice seemed that not merely of a guard or a cop, but of the three-headed dog that minds the door to Hell. William coughed out his name and then he heard steps going away and a burst of television noise, and then other steps, brisker, lighter, the tapping of the heels a little slurred as they skipped here and there in their passage; then, like an exhalation after a long holding of breath, a voice.

  “Hello?”

  “Emily?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s Bill.”

  “I know.” Emily said this half a beat too early and too brightly for it to register the hint of slight indifference, of coolness, that she and Monica had settled on as the optimal response to William’s call when it came. Instead, coming so soon after William’s announcement of his presence, his name, it seemed to affirm these, even to convey excitement at the prospect of them. Or that is how William took it, and so in turn he abandoned the plan that he and Jim had concocted: that he should simply pretend nothing unusual or untoward had ever taken place.

  Instead it required whole bolts and spools of restraint to prevent himself from blurting “I’m sorry” and “I missed you” and to settle on the more moderate course of “So, hi. How are you? I really—” at which point Emily fortunately cut him off with “Oh, fine!” Emily was still thinking she might be able to reel herself in a little, but then William said, “I’m really glad,” which made the flat and neutral tone she had been considering sound not self-possessed but petulant. She almost said “I’m glad you’re glad,” but caught herself. Trying to slow down, she responded, finally, “So how have you been?”—the “been” underlined in a fashion that would have caused Monica to wag her head sideways in despair.

  “Oh, fine,” William said. He still wanted to say that he had missed her, but settled for “Actually, I lost my job.”

  “Really?” Emily said.

  “The foreman had it in for me.”

  “So he got you fired?”

  “I told him off.” Because I was thinking about you, William might have said. Instead he offered, “It’s a long story.”

  “So what are you going to do? With the rest of the summer?”

  “Oh, I’ll find something.” William coiled himself and lurched forward into the question. “So are you doing anything tomorrow?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “So do you want to meet up?”

  “Sure.” The notion of “neutral ground” came into Emily’s mind. “Maybe the park?”

  William had a notion too, and it did not include crossing paths with his friends or, more likely, her friends and getting tangled up in hanging out with them en masse. “How about the park by Summit and Western. The one with the statue.” He added, “It’s nice there.”

  That had not been what Emily had in mind. The fraction of herself that was still determined to approach William as much on her terms as possible had indeed calculated the advantage of being able to withdraw to the cover of the friends likely to be in St. Clair Park. But as their conversation progressed it was less and less clear exactly what those terms consisted of, or even if her “terms” had any relation to her “desires,” to what she wanted, which was now, she understood, to see William on whatever terms presented themselves.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Maybe around one?”

  “Sure,” said Emily, and added, as though to signify that the water had closed over the breach between them so that it almost might never have existed, “And bring your poems, okay?”

  Love wants to shout itself from the rooftops but in equal measure wants to be secret—both to proclaim itself to the world and take shelter against the world, to be herald and prophet, hermit and mute. It is that way, too, with persons of Emily’s and William’s age: The self that they are not busy disclosing they are busy concealing. Perhaps on that account they are seen to be deceitful when in fact they are merely protecting and conserving from profanation what is sacred and meant to be unseen and unsaid.

  So when Emily told Virginia that she was that afternoon going to “the park,” correctly presuming that her mother would assume this meant St. Clair Park, Emily was learning a little of the grown-up truth about telling the truth: that sometimes in deciding in what way to speak it, we are not offered a choice between good and evil, but between larger and lesser harms.

  Emily walked all the way down Summit Avenue, moving like a fish through pools of light and shade, over the sidewalk, over pavers cracked and heaved by roots and frost like a fractured icefield, like a sea of floating headstones. She came into the park as into an arena from a tunnel, an arena ringed with trees, the air a green mist of heat and leaf-filtered light. William was sitting on the grass, his bike splayed beside him, and as she pressed past the trees and through the hedge, out into the space where he was, he began to rise.

  “So, hi,” William said.

  “Hi,” Emily said.

  William put out his hand palm up and parallel to the ground, bidding her to take a seat. She settled into the grass and crossed her legs beneath her. They were sitting not quite opposite each other, Emily being a little to the left of him. Neither had given any real thought to what they would do next or what they would say, and they were without music or her parents’ house or any other particular context that might inform their actions or direct their speech. They were in the grass with the sky overhead and the elms looming all around and the temperature just cresting eighty-five degrees.

  Emily broke the silence. “So how’d you lose your job?”

  “This guy, this Mr. Murkowski who runs the warehouse, he was looking for an excuse. Watching me all the time, waiting for me to screw up without ever telling me what I was supposed to really be doing.”

  “So . . .”

  “So I dropped a bunch of stuff, a bunch of shoe boxes, nothing breakable, and he comes over and just stands there. Not helping, just kind of laughing at me, but not out loud. Then he started laying these . . . proverbs on me. So I told him to, well, fuck off.”

  “Wow,” Emily said. “Just like that.”

  “Just like that.”

  “So you kind of lost your temper?”

  “Kind of. But when I said it, it was like I was really calm. Like I was taking a stand. Like nonviolence. Like King.”

  “And then?”

  “Then he went off and got me a check and I was out of there by two o’clock. I got maybe thirty bucks.”

  “That seems like a lot,” Emily said.

  “They were paying me one sixty-five an hour.”

  “That’s a lot more than I get.”

  “Well, it’s like warehouse work. I suppose guys from the Teamsters do it, usually.”

  “So now what?”

  “I don’t know. Take it easy. Read. Relax,” William said. “It’s my last summer before I graduate. Before I go to college. Or into the army. So I might as well enjoy it.” And with that William lowered himself onto his elbow and cradled his head in his hand.

  Emily leaned forward. “Did you bring your poems?”

  “Yeah, a couple.” He reached into his back pocket and removed some sheets of paper, folded in four. He opened them out and offered them to Emily. “They’re really meant to be read, you know, silently. So if you want . . .”

  Emily nodded and took the pages. She began to read, and as she read she lowered herself onto the grass, onto her belly and elbows, with her calves and feet in the air. William watched her and saw that her feet were moving, as though tapping against the sky. He lay a little deeper in the grass, now prone himself, pulling out a leaf here and there and regarding the curiously raw-looking striations the grass had made on his elbow where he’d rested on it. There was birdsong, the sound of a far-off plane, and the hiss and seethe of the warming air.

&nbs
p; Emily, too, was conscious of the bite of the grass against her elbows, and the strata of heat and shade lying over them. But she truly was reading William’s poems, reading them more than once. She might have thought they had a certain pulse to them and a kind of heedless, headlong energy and also that as poetry they were pretty dreadful. But she was not so much reading them as poetry as she was regarding them like snapshots or pages in an album, as records and traces of things that William had once done or said, as the residue of moods and feelings in which he had once been immersed. So she did not expect them to aspire to the condition of art—to contain those occasions within them, transformed into signs that were now themselves occasions—and that was probably a good thing. What, after all, is a poem or a painting or even a symphony, when you are fashioning your whole life—its scherzos and silences, its rhythms and themes, its lines and chiaroscuros—each day; when you are just now, lying belly down in the grass, embarking on its magnum opus, the work about love and loving?

  Emily looked up.

  “So?” William asked.

  “I really like them.”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Emily said. “I mean, they’re really kind of . . . you. Really feeling these things, really . . .” Emily was a little lost. “Really . . .” she finally concluded, “passionately.”

  “You mean like Browning or Byron or somebody?” William was not sure these were apt examples, but had heard they were considered “romantic,” which must be very similar to “passionate.”

  “Maybe like Elizabeth Browning,” said Emily in a tone that suggested some expertise.

  “You mean like ‘romantic’?”

  “I mean really felt deeply. Like the passion of Jesus or something.”

  William fingered the grass, a little puzzled. “You mean Jesus was in love? I thought he was . . . above that kind of thing.”

  “It doesn’t really mean that kind of passion. It’s more like his suffering, the pain he felt.”

  William looked at Emily a little apologetically. “I didn’t mean them to be mopey or anything.”