Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  This was a little more than Emily was prepared to grant. “Just because somebody’s not saying something . . . earth-shattering doesn’t mean they’re automatically lying.”

  “Okay. Not lying, but ignoring. Not speaking out.”

  “Your mom speaks out.”

  “Yeah. But sometimes I think it’s just another way for her to make . . . an impression. Like, ‘Hey, everybody, look at me.’ Because, really, what difference does it make?”

  “So what makes a difference?”

  “I don’t know anymore. Maybe helping people who need help. Changing things. But not just going to school and going to college and coming out and being a robot.”

  “So you want to be a hippie?” Emily laughed.

  “Maybe we could. Maybe we could go to California,” William said.

  Emily laughed again. “We could?”

  “Sure. If the kid in My Side of the Mountain can go live in the mountains, we can go live in California.”

  “What about school?”

  “He didn’t go to school. The woods was his education.”

  “But you’re going to graduate next year.”

  “So? I don’t care. The only reason to graduate is to go to college and do all the rest of it—not doing anything about anything that matters.”

  Emily laughed yet again. “Are you serious? I mean, you have to finish school.”

  “You know why you have to finish school? Because if you’re not in school and then in college, you get drafted.” William said this angrily, although Emily did not feel this anger had anything to do with her. William had his hand under her neck, his fingers in her hair.

  He went on, “So you see, if you don’t do what you’re supposed to do, you go in the army and probably get killed. That’s how they keep us in line. You can go to college, you can even protest a little bit, but you get your deferment. Otherwise . . .”

  “So you do kind of have to stay in school.”

  “Or get away. Or go to Canada or something. Because I wouldn’t let myself get drafted. It’s a bad war. It’s wrong to go.” William turned his head away and said, “And I wouldn’t want to anyway. I think I’d be afraid.”

  “I’d be afraid too. I’d be afraid for you,” Emily said, and she did not want to say anything more or to have William say anything more.

  But he did. “Besides,” he continued, “I’d want to be with you. I’d want you with me.”

  Then Emily heard herself say, “And I’d go. With you.” She had said this without apparent thought. Instead, it seemed a great gulf of purpose and conviction had suddenly opened itself up all around her.

  “To Vietnam?” William looked at her and laughed.

  “Not there. I wouldn’t let them take you. Anywhere but there.”

  “Okay,” he said. “I believe you. I really do.” And he truly did. Emily pulled him close to her and kissed him, and he held her and pressed himself against her. They were down deep in the grass, and although it was a warm evening, they were trying to keep each other warm, out of harm’s way.

  Two weeks later, on a Saturday afternoon, Emily found herself in church. She was killing time, on her way to meet William, and she felt a little sad, partly because she missed him, and partly because she missed what missing him—what coming to care for him so much—had displaced, which was the wide, shallow, and placid stream that used to be her life: not doing anything that she couldn’t happily tell her mother and father about; thinking that working at the New Wave and getting dresses at a discount was the best possible way to pass the summer; being friends with Monica; being like she used to be; being a girl. Not that she wanted to undo anything.

  She went to the Blessed Virgin’s shrine and knelt and prayed, praying by rote, with all the other things that were on her mind streaming through her like a draft that became a wind and a roar. She finished, or rather—so she felt—she gave up, and lit a candle. Confessions were being heard, and on the same impulse that had caused her to pray, she found herself in line and then inside the confessional. She asked the priest—the young new curate, who was known to be “liberal,” who played the guitar—to bless her and told him how long ago she had last made her confession: three months, she reckoned.

  Then Emily confessed the things she habitually confessed: disobeying her parents, thinking ill of others, talking back, being prideful, and sometimes saying curse words, the same sins that she had confessed the very first time she had ever made a confession, years and years ago. And then because she had to, because it was time, she confessed that she had touched herself, and had been doing so even before her last confession or the one before that. The priest asked if there was more, along those lines.

  “I let a boy touch me there. And I touched him back.”

  “More than once?”

  “A couple of times. Maybe three. Or four. Just recently.”

  “I see. And is that all?”

  “That’s all, father.”

  “Well, you know the church says the last thing is a grave sin. Because it’s masturbation and because, with the boy, it’s sexual activity outside of marriage. You know that, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “You see, I know how it is being a young person. And sometimes it’s not so grave. But this is something you need to stop doing, to avoid in the future. Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If you can’t avoid the occasion, then you have to avoid the person. And I suppose you feel strongly about him.”

  “Yes.”

  “So perhaps you should just try to be together when others are present. Just as friends.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, although after she said it—because Emily always said yes to priests and nuns and, despite her reputation as a headstrong girl, to practically everybody—she realized what the priest was asking: that she do what she had already understood she couldn’t do, even with all the will in the world, because it was too late.

  The priest told her she should say a decade of the rosary every night and to ask Our Lady for chastity and forbearance in particular; that Our Lady was the exemplar of these virtues and would grant them to those who prayed to her.

  “Make a good act of contrition and I’ll give you absolution,” the priest continued.

  But Emily said, “I really can’t. Not just now. I’m sorry.” The priest said something else, something she could not or would not hear, and Emily said, “I’ll come back later. Soon. Okay?” And she got up from her knees and left.

  17

  IT IS HIGH SUMMER SOMETIME IN AUGUST; the time when it will get no hotter, but only cooler; when there is a month or so until harvest and the crops are in; when the tomatoes are as ripe as they are going to get before they burst and rot. By the time it arrives, in the middle of the month or just before, it seems as though it has always been summer, that the heat and thrum of the air is the element in which we have always lived, even if we know it will not be so for much longer. It is a realm as close to paradise as we are vouchsafed on this earth, for in it we might well do without clothes or shelter or concern for our next meal, since we could easily go about naked under the sun and sleep open under the stars and pluck our dinner from the vine or the tree. It is a time in which surely one has no right to be unhappy; or at least ought to be content.

  That was when Emily and William became lovers in the full and true sense, not much more than two months after their first date. You may say that they were hasty or that they were a little timorous, but it seemed to them they had exhausted every other possibility before exploring this one, and that it could not be refused—not on account of its being a craving or an urge, but because it was their history, the gravity by which they were falling through life. That, and also because it seemed that all there was in the whole world was each other, and any separation of one from the other, in body or soul, was intolerable.

  It happened in their usual place, just as it was getting dark. They had been touching each other for some weeks now
, and because the spot they lay in was pretty much invisible they had fallen into a comfortable routine, Emily’s underpants removed and her dress above her hips, William’s trousers and underpants down at knee level, pressing together, stroking, pressing. In one of these latter moments, the head of William’s penis found itself farther between Emily’s legs than it was usually accustomed to go. William and Emily looked at each other for a scant half-second, as though with a shrug of the shoulders, smiled to each other, and Emily put her hands on him and just guided him inside her.

  It was done in no time at all, so little time that neither was sure they had technically completed the act they had begun. They lay very quietly together for a few minutes, and then William was hard again and they did it again, more slowly and surely and deliberately, and as William rocked in and out of her, Emily began to weep. He stopped and asked her what was wrong and she said, “Nothing. Nothing at all,” and she pulled him back inside her and they went on, just them in the rustle of the grass and the boil of the crickets.

  Later, when she climbed the steps of her parents’ house, she had been thinking, That was really no big deal. But at the same time, as she reached the porch and went inside, she felt as though she were naked and carrying her clothing before her for modesty’s sake, as though she had fallen into a lake and gotten thoroughly soaked.

  She went inside and the rest of the evening passed like any other. She got ready for bed and her parents kissed her good night, and this was the way it always was, save in two particulars. First, when her father kissed her good night, she wondered if she must smell different in some detectable way, of a deep and metallic nitrogenous tang. Second, when her parents were gone and the light was out and Emily began to pray, and directed herself to Our Lady, as was her custom, she realized that her prayers were no longer the prayers of a virgin.

  This worried her, but not because she suddenly felt ashamed or feared that her prayers were no longer efficacious. Emily had never imagined she was consecrated to virginity as the nuns were, but neither had she given much thought to being anyone’s wife. Now she was somewhere between these two states, and she wondered whose prayers these really were and what purpose they might serve.

  Jane left for Chicago on a Sunday afternoon, and William drove her to the airport. And since mass, a family visit to her grandmother, and lunch were all complete, Emily went with them, rather as if Emily and William were the parents and Jane were being sent off to college; and since Jane was not a little giddy in the face of her journey, that was not far from the truth.

  Inside the terminal they waited together in a long line so that Jane could check her suitcase, and then they went down the concourse to the gate. They waited in another line and the woman at the desk peeled a sticker off a chart of the seats on the plane and put it on Jane’s ticket. They waited a little more, and at last Jane went down the passage and into the plane, waving to them with one hand and rooting in her bag with the other as though she feared she had forgotten something. Then she turned around, waved to them one more time, and was gone.

  William and Emily walked slowly back down the concourse, regarding the names of the destinations posted above the check-in desks. The airport was as far from home as you could go without leaving home: From here you could go to New York or California (nonstop, twice a day) and then pretty much anywhere you wanted, and they would show you a movie on the way. William proposed that they drive out by the end of the runway and watch the planes come and go, and Emily agreed this would be pretty cool.

  There were one or two other cars parked when they arrived, and in the distance they could see a plane coming towards them, preparing to land. They got out and William took Emily’s hand and pulled her up onto the hood of the car, and they sat there waiting. Then the plane roared over their heads—Emily thought she might almost reach up and brush the fat tires with her fingers—and touched down perhaps one hundred yards beyond them, its howl and racket shaking in their ears like a thundercrack. As the plane landed, another pulled up near the end of the runaway waiting to take off, and William decided this was probably his mother’s plane. They watched it rumble off down the runway. After it was no more than a mote in the sky, William said, “So she’s gone.” He said this as though her return were in some doubt; as though his mother and her anti-Vietnam candidate might not only lose to Hubert Humphrey and the Lyndon Johnson war party, but perish in the effort.

  William drove Emily home. He came in for an hour and they watched television and ate potato chips. Emily’s mother suggested he come for dinner the next night. He said he would, and left Emily’s house about five-thirty. The city was perhaps as quiet as it ever got during the daylight hours: the end of Sunday afternoon, tools and toys being put away, dinner being assembled, no one going anywhere, every creature in its home.

  William opened the door to the apartment, and felt the vibration of its emptiness, the dust spinning in the window light like nebulae, the distant hum of the refrigerator, water somewhere trickling down a pipe; that—all that—and nothing more. It was terribly lonely, he felt, but only for an instant, because this feeling was quickly surmounted by a burgeoning vision of the freedom—absolute provided he didn’t make too much noise and kept the shades down—he might now enjoy here. That freedom, which was really the condition of being perfectly hidden, seemed to belong completely to the sphere of his and Emily’s secrets, but without its attendant anxiety, the fear—of discovery and punishment and shame—in which the secrets came wrapped and that could never be completely shed in the car or the hillside below the park.

  This was a joyful realization, and the first thing William did was take off all his clothes and masturbate, brazenly and with luxurious deliberateness, right there in the living room, on the very couch on which he and Emily had made out. As was his custom, he called out Emily’s name as he stroked himself, nearly sang it when his orgasm came and his ejaculation cannonballed over the back of the couch and landed on the lower stile of the frame containing his mother’s print of Childe Hassam’s Late Afternoon, New York: Winter, 1900. He ambled down the hall, a thread of fluid swinging from his penis, and fetched a tissue to clean himself and the picture frame up, and then he sat and flipped through the new issue of Life, already contemplating perhaps a follow-up bout of masturbation later in the evening, following a chopped sirloin TV dinner.

  William has, of course, been aware of the possibilities of the coming week and even made some preparations (having, for example, filched a pack of prophylactics from the drugstore he delivers for), but he has forgone their contemplation until now. For example, it turns out Emily will be working only during the mornings this week, and thereafter not at all, since it is but a week until Labor Day. They will be able to pass the afternoons here, and, although it will necessitate a little dissembling, perhaps some evenings. The only intrusions will be his mother’s phone calls from Chicago, and the first of these, the very next day, just before Emily arrives, is no impediment to anyone’s pleasure: Jane in fact reports that contrary to her pessimism, there is much talk of a McCarthy/Edward Kennedy “dream ticket” or at least a last-ditch compromise Kennedy candidacy with a strongly worded antiwar plank in the party platform.

  When Emily is at last inside the apartment and the front door is locked behind them, what William would like to happen is for both of them to shed their clothes then and there. But Emily is cagey, or perhaps is just savoring the moment. She walks through the apartment, William in tow, remarking on its rooms and fixtures in the manner of a real estate agent or a docent in a museum. Then, having come at last to William’s room, Emily simply lies down, shoes and all, upon his bed, and William shuts the door and, unbidden, begins to undress her. He takes off her shoes and her socks; her cutoff shorts; her blouse; her bra (which she does indeed normally wear); and finally her underpants. Then he removes all his own clothes, and they are upon each other.

  That part is fine, but the best is after. For they had never seen each other completely naked and they t
ake the time to look at each other, to inspect and touch each other in places that until now have been a little off the map: Emily’s little feet and toes; William’s calves and shoulders; and both their derrières. Emily’s inclination is to cover herself up with William’s bedspread, but both the heat and William argue against this. Eventually, he persuades her to come out into the apartment with him, to walk down the hall, and finish up before the mirror on the closet door in his mother’s room.

  They stand there for some time. They stare as into a square frame: on the left is the dark of the open closet, the dresses and shoes and coats huddled in its shadows and depths; and on the right the brilliance of the mirror, with a man and a woman standing naked inside it. It is wondrous not just that William and Emily see each other naked together for the first time, but that they see each other together—separate from themselves as they look on—at all. Here, for the first time, they are real and substantial, undeniable. They have not been imagining themselves after all.

  They are very beautiful. William is not that handsome and Emily is not that pretty, but here, framed in the shining glass and bounded by the perfectly ordinary world, they are beautiful. They are young, of course; every part of their skin and musculature defies shadow and gravity, but heretofore neither has had an especially good opinion of his or her physique, and at the worst of times both have hated and feared their own flesh as ungainly and even ugly. But together they seem very fine to each other, nor is their mutual appreciation purely awestruck or solemn. William’s penis, which Emily has never before seen unerect, looks stringy and forlorn and a little insulted, like a fish dumped in the bottom of a boat. The hair on Emily’s pubis betrays a little of her childhood red, and her stomach has a suggestion of toddler roundness; her rump is gloriously fleshy, and William would like to bury his face in and on it. Emily would like to cradle in the crotch of William’s armpit and perhaps idly tousle his limp and docile penis. All that will happen, but what they do now—and this is the best thing of all—is return to William’s room and William’s bed and sleep together for an hour, tangled in arm and leg, breathing together like twins. And when they are done, they return to the mirror once more, just to make sure.