Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  “They’re not. They just have a lot of feeling in them.” Emily realized that she felt rather comfortable this way, lying on the grass, explaining something—what? himself?—to William that he didn’t know. “I mean feeling sad. Or angry about how things are. It’s only natural.”

  “That’s what got me fired.” William, too, liked this; liked the great reassurance that Emily was bestowing upon him, breathing out and blanketing him with, her face all of two feet away.

  “Sure. Like you saw it was unfair and you got mad.”

  “Actually, I was kind of sad. Not about the job.”

  “About . . . ?”

  “Something else,” William said. “But it’s okay now, I guess.” William pulled himself up to a sitting position, resting his hands on his knees, and looked around the park. “Do you want to walk a little?”

  Emily was infinitely happy just where she was, but obliged him. “Sure,” she said.

  “There’s another park across the street. Do you want to go see it?”

  “Sure,” Emily said. Emily knew of this park, but had never been in it, for it was not a park trafficked by children or young people. That was odd, because it had begun its existence as a vacant lot much frequented by neighborhood kids for games and various adventures. But that had been half a century ago. Shortly thereafter, in the 1920s, an heiress—it was said she gave off an aura not only of benefaction but of longstanding and perennial grief—purchased the property, deeded it to the city as a park, and had it furnished with a fountain and a bronze sculpture by an eminent artist. The sculpture, in the middle of the fountain, was of an Indian youth running with his dog, clutching his bow. Adjacent to this was a little stone-and-brick shelter in a Gothic style—like a shrine or a chantry in which an anchorite might shut herself away—with a bench and a poem carved above it. The theme of the poem was the death of childhood. The poem seemed to have infected the place in some manner. At any rate, it was not now a place children were inclined to go.

  William walked his bike across the street with Emily beside him, and they went in. Emily regarded the sculpture and said, “It’s pretty.”

  William said, “He’s meant to be in the woods. He’s a hunter. He knows all the woodcraft and stories and stuff.”

  “I suppose.” Emily looked at the stone shelter. She wished it would rain so she and William could go in it and have a reason to sit and do what they had been doing back across the street; so she could tell him a few more things about himself, and, if it rained for long enough, he could return the favor.

  William had apparently also been looking at the shelter, but had seized on the inscription. “Read it,” he said. He gave her a moment to skim the words, and then said, “I don’t get it. But it’s gloomy.”

  Emily read:

  As from the house your mother sees

  You playing round the garden trees,

  So you may see, if you will look

  Through the windows of this book,

  Another child, far, far away

  And in another garden, play.

  But do not think you can at all,

  By knocking on the window, call

  That child to hear you. He intent

  Is all on his play-business bent.

  He does not hear; he will not look,

  Nor yet be lured out of this book.

  For, long ago, the truth to say,

  He has grown up and gone away,

  And it is but a child of air

  That lingers in the garden there.

  “I don’t think I get it either,” she said. The poem made her reconsider wanting to sit there. She looked at William. “So . . .”

  “You want to get something to drink? Or eat?” William asked. “There’s not much around here. But my house is just a couple of blocks away.” William said this without considering what he was saying, any more than if he had said it to Jim Donnelly or some kid he might have met here in a pickup football scrimmage. “I mean, we have Coke and stuff.”

  The “we” eased Emily’s mind a little, implying the presence of William’s mother, who, being a mother, must be more or less like her mother. Not that Emily was going to ask him straight out, “Is your mother at home?” Anyway, she was hot and thirsty and she felt happy; and the happiness was not unconnected to this boy.

  “Okay,” she said, after what was not really very much of a pause at all. They began to walk, the bicycle between them like a pet or an infant they were tending, and William steered it and them down the street a few blocks and then turned left. This was not a part of town that Emily was much familiar with, since it was separated from her own by the breadth of Summit Avenue. Moreover it bordered on an area that was considered a little risky, and was itself slightly down-at-heel, populated by houses similar in style, age, and size to the ones on her street, but rather less kempt, as well as by apartment buildings, which were virtually unknown in her neighborhood. Emily did not know of anyone living in an apartment except for people’s grandmothers.

  It was not until they turned towards his door that Emily realized that William lived in such a place, entered by way not of a door and a threshold, but of a lobby, as though it were an office or a hotel or a hospital; it had mailboxes set in the wall like teeth and floors that looked as though they were buffed with a machine.

  That made Emily a little uncomfortable. And when William remarked in an offhand manner as he unlocked the door that his mother was not in fact home, she was a little alarmed. It seemed to her that this was clearly someplace they should not be; that they entered it as trespassers or thieves or fools blundering into a haunted house. Then William felt it too: that this was the home of people he did not know; of real but unknown persons whose presences echoed in its sleeping carpets and vacated furniture, its rightful inhabitants having left some hours before.

  William guided Emily through the rooms, or rather pointed at them as though they were exhibits in a museum devoted to the anthropology and culture of the people who used to live there. He did not turn on any lights until they got to the kitchen. Emily looked around. It was not like the kitchen at her house. It had a bay window on the far wall through which came the only sunshine. The overhead light William switched on was covered by a round shade made of paper segmented into concentric rings like a Chinese lantern. The walls were an orangey dark red, and there were two framed prints hanging on them, one by the artist she knew as Sister Corita and the other, in a rather similar style, child-like, as though drawn in crayon, of a hand clasping a bouquet. There were magazines piled on the table and on the radiator, and the room smelled of lemon or vinegar and herbs and cigarette smoke.

  William opened the refrigerator. “There’s no Coke,” he said. “There’s orange juice, though.”

  “Okay,” Emily said. “I mean, that’s fine.”

  William poured some juice into a clear glass tumbler that was very tall and thin. “Do you want ice? I’m getting some ice water.”

  “No. That’s okay.”

  William withdrew an ice tray from the freezer and ratcheted the handle upward. “So where’s your mom?” Emily asked.

  “At the state convention. The Democrats, I mean. She’s a delegate.”

  “Oh. That’s kind of cool. So she gets to vote on stuff, like who gets nominated?”

  “Yeah. And maybe go to the national convention too,” William said. “But I think it’s pretty much already decided. For Humphrey, I mean.”

  “Your mom likes McCarthy, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you liked Kennedy.”

  “Yeah,” William said. “But don’t tell my mom.” He laughed.

  “I guess my parents would have voted for Kennedy. Because he’s a Kennedy. Because he’s Catholic. Now I suppose they’re for Humphrey. Don’t tell your mother,” she added.

  “I won’t.” William filled his glass at the tap and turned around. “So do you want to sit down? In the living room?”

  Emily had just begun to feel some ease, but
this query unnerved her a little again. “Sure,” she said. “I suppose.” She was afraid, but of what she could not say.

  They went back down the dark hall, past the front door, and into the room that William had indicated earlier. There were curtains of a material a little like burlap and furniture upholstered in brown and orangey red, a small sofa and two armchairs, plus a coffee table. Against the wall stood another table with a record player—white and modern-looking and configured in several parts—with records stacked upright beneath it.

  “You have a lot of albums,” Emily commented. She was trying to figure out where and in what manner to sit.

  “They’re mostly my mom’s.”

  “That’s weird. I mean, it’s different. My parents hardly have any. They have South Pacific and some Christmas carols.”

  “My mom’s got a lot of classical stuff. And Dave Brubeck.” William sat down on the little sofa, and Emily sat down on the edge of one of the armchairs opposite him and a little to the left, and it was as if this mere change of posture had rendered both of them mute.

  William reached out and put his glass down on the coffee table, onto a magazine with pictures of Sirhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray on the cover. He opened his mouth and what came out was “So . . . ?” and his face devolved into an expression of panic or futile desperation. Or that is how it seemed to Emily, who felt these same things, whether William did or did not. They were already as mirrors to each other, and placed together in an empty space with few or no distractions, what they saw was a little unbearable.

  William said, “I could . . .” although he was unable to say what he might or might not do. And Emily said, before he could finish, “That’s okay.”

  William picked up his glass, drank from it, and licked the water from his lips. Then, suddenly, with his other hand he grabbed the magazine the glass had been resting on and held it up. “So did you see . . .” and it seemed that he might not know what it was he was going to refer to. “Did you see the pictures of the train—of all the people waiting for it to go by?”

  “No,” Emily said.

  “I’ll show you,” William said, and he pulled the magazine towards him, as though to pull Emily with it.

  “Okay,” Emily said. She got up and came around the edge of the coffee table and sat at the edge of the couch, close to William, because the couch was small.

  “Here,” William said. But he couldn’t say any more because he’d stopped breathing, or else all his breath had gathered into the top of his throat and would not go back down. He opened the magazine, and took her hand, his own hand shaking, and put it down on a page as though he were steering her fingers across a line of Braille. “See?” he managed.

  Emily nodded, his hand still atop her hand, and then her hand lifted and found his back, his waist, his belt near a belt loop, and rested there. And William’s hand found the same place on her, only a little higher, and then they had turned and were facing each other and Emily kissed him, not on the cheek, but on the mouth, because that was somehow where their faces simply met. They kissed that way for a long time, and you could not really say if William was kissing Emily or Emily was kissing William.

  After a time, they stopped—stopping together just as they had started together—and opened their eyes as if awaking in a strange room; to see, as it were, who it was they had been kissing.

  William’s panic had translated itself to a glorious urgency, and he was still breathless. He looked at Emily, who indeed looked a little as if she had awoken from a nap, her hair a bit disheveled, her face a bit ruddy and damp. He looked at her and smiled. “I thought you didn’t want . . .”

  “To . . . ?”

  “Do . . .”

  “That?”

  “I mean, in the car. The other night.”

  “Oh, that,” she said. “Silly . . .” And they began to kiss again. Their hands did not move. They merely pulled each other closer, pulled each other in.

  When they stopped, William continued, “I mean, it seemed like you didn’t want to the way you did the first time.”

  Emily was enjoying this kissing very much and took almost an offhand if not scolding tone with him for interrupting it. “It’s not that I didn’t want to. It’s that I didn’t want you to think that I wanted to . . . too much.”

  “So you wanted to, but you didn’t want me to think you wanted to.”

  “More or less.”

  “Well, that’s pretty silly too.”

  William, who two minutes earlier could not have told you his own last name, had now recovered enough self-possession to think thoughts along these lines and to utter them as well. But Emily was in her body, just as you might say she was in the water if she were swimming. She was happy to listen to and respond to (in a rather cursory manner) William’s words, but they came to her as though through water, refracted and vague, as though William in those brief moments had thrust his head above the surface to speak.

  They went back to what they had been doing, which was really not much more than a very urgent sort of cuddling, save for the fact they were deeply connected at the mouth. It was nothing they had not done before with other people. But it was different in degree, in amplitude: more pleasurable and more joyful, but also more driven, as if by an imperative that had to do with ordinary desire, but also by some other powerful outside influence. You might say they kissed almost in desperation, as though they were fighting for breath itself.

  Emily was in her body, but William, although just as caught up in the moment, had thoughts: in the first instance, whether this was really happening to him and, when he ascertained that it indeed was, what if anything he needed to do about it to sustain or further it. “Further” is perhaps the crucial word, for his main preoccupation was to what extent he might go in that direction. Certainly the erection butting against his fly weighed in on the matter; so too did his hands, which had tracked their way up from Emily’s waist and whose thumbs were now cradled in the concavities of her shoulder blades, whose fingers were now mulling over the buried outlines of her bra straps.

  But his answer to the question of “further?” was “no,” not unless there was some tacit encouragement from Emily herself; not given their recent misunderstanding about the kiss last Wednesday. And that was a wise decision. For although Emily might very well have, in the heat of the moment (nearly ninety outside; God knows how hot at various points of flesh contact between William and Emily), permitted him to go further and might very well have enjoyed his doing so, it would have been problematic in the long run. Because what they were presently doing was not in Emily’s estimation being “fast” in social terms or “unchaste” in moral and/or theological ones, whereas moving beyond that into the territory covered by “further” would entail a reassessment.

  So it was that Emily and William continued in this mode, and were very content with it, for twenty minutes or more. When they finally pulled themselves apart far enough to see each other in the way they had seen each other until now—as distinct objects framed by space and air and light, rather than mingled together in the humid soup of making out—it was unclear to either of them what they ought to say. It was a little like coming out with a friend into the daylight from a movie one had been moved by and wondering what to say about it, because maybe the friend hadn’t felt that way at all.

  William was more troubled by this than Emily. It was, after all, his house, his couch. He was, so to speak, the host, but the idea of inquiring just now whether Emily would like some more juice did not seem a way of extricating himself from the moment. Emily saved him.

  “Ummm,” she said, stretching her arms upward as though awaking from a long and pleasant nap. “That was . . . nice.” She drew this last word out, not unchastely, but rather as her cat might have done after a good rub around the ears and beneath the chin. William was both pleased and a little taken aback by this: pleased that she had no objection to what had happened between them, but taken aback that her reaction was so frank and seemed to
have as its object not him or them together, but a kind of “that,” an activity or pastime in which it was pleasant to engage. With him. Or maybe with anybody.

  William did not dwell on this latter possibility. It did not accord with anything he knew about love or about Emily. But it puzzled him even as he put it out of his mind, as he laid it down among those riddles and mysteries which he would take out and examine from time to time for the rest of his life and put away again, unsolved. For it seemed to him unfathomable that whatever it was he and Emily were doing (or perhaps making) together was not unique to them or was somehow merely physical, that it was not a particular expression of them rather than something that anybody could do, interchangeably, with anybody else, less a one-of-a-kind painting or poem than a croquet set that anyone possessed of a body might use.

  But for William the pressing issue of the moment was what to say or do that was not too jarring, because for a while they had been so tightly joined that, now separated, it seemed as if they might not recognize each other; that they would blink and then say, “Oh, it’s you,” their intimacy in some uncanny way having made them strangers. Which is why it would have been nice to say “I love you,” not as a pledge or a declaration, but as the merest sign of recognition, as if to say “We are just you and me again, but I haven’t forgotten us.” But what William said was, mirroring Emily, “Yeah, that was nice”; and then he did indeed ask her if she would like some more juice, for who is to say that, too, is not a kind of tenderness?

  None of this troubled Emily. It did not even occur to her. That was not because she was not thoughtful, but because the distinction between thought and sensation, between mind and body, was a little indistinct for her. She knew she had a soul and a body as she knew she had ten fingers and ten toes, and she knew she had the capacity for something called reason, but where a “mind” (was it more or less the same as a soul?) fit in was a matter neither the catechism nor the nuns had ever addressed. There had been a great deal of talk about chasteness, but this quality had as much to do with the soul as the body; and indeed argued for their inseparability, and so did seemingly everything else the church and the nuns taught her. For what was the whole drama of Christianity if not the fact of God taking on a body? What was the point of the mass if not the body of Christ? What made Our Lady’s bodily assumption glorious if not Her body’s being assumed? Emily lived in a nation and a culture at war with the body and its more troubling manifestations (its unseemly and inconvenient needs and wants and especially its penchant for death); a whole culture dedicated to pitting the virtues of the mind against pesky corporeality. But she—on account of her experience, her education, and her own disposition—secretly inhabited a realm in which the physical and the bodily was the expression of the divine, expressed in the body: the only way it could be expressed for us and also in us, its created creatures, its beautiful emanations. And if love had a voice, from what but a mouth could it speak?