Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  Emily cast her eyes down. She did not like it when William talked that way. It made her feel a little despairing and nauseated.

  “Do you want to go out?” she said, indicating the French doors.

  “Sure.”

  Emily opened the two doors, which came away a little stubbornly, and then they were standing at the rail, out among the treetops and the crests of neighboring roofs, up in the hot clear blue of the summer sky.

  William looked out and then back to Emily. “A long time ago, before I really knew you, I’d come by your house and I’d look up here. And I guess I was thinking maybe you would come out and I’d see you.”

  “You mean you were thinking about me then?” said Emily.

  “All the time. Even back then. I suppose that’s kind of weird.”

  “No. It’s sweet,” Emily said, and took his hand. “And now here we are.” They moved to face each other, to press up against each other.

  “I want to,” Emily said. “Right here.” She looked at the floor of metal flashing and asphalt patching. “Maybe not right here,” she added, and drew him by the hand back inside.

  They went to a spot near the dollhouse, where two carpets were heaped side by side. They kneeled before each other, and each unfastened the other, and they touched each other while they kissed.

  “I don’t have a . . .” said William after a time.

  “A safe?” said Emily. “I don’t think it matters. I think I’ve pretty much got my . . . time.” She stopped. Her breath was in his ear. “Do you care?”

  “No. Not at all. I mean, I kind of want you that way,” William said. “I mean, all the ways. All the ways you could be.”

  They lay down together. The breeze drifted in through the open doors and sometimes the distant buzz of a plane or the tires of a car rolling down Furness Street. After he had been inside her for a while, Emily clutched William’s shoulder and watched a constellation of dust spin in the sunlight over her sister’s dollhouse, and she said in a whisper, like a vapor or a sigh, “You know I would do anything for you.”

  After dinner Emily watched the convention with her parents and her sister, Susan. Susan had arrived at dinnertime from the end of her summer job—camp counseling up at Crane Lake—and would be staying through the weekend. Then she was going to visit some college friends in Wisconsin until it was time to return for fall semester. Susan sat on the couch with her parents while Emily perched in a chair. This was just like old times, Emily thought, except that when she was smaller she would have sat on the couch too, or right in front of it on the floor, at her father’s feet.

  On the TV were more speeches and even more rioting than the previous evening. Now people had been killed. People were going to storm the amphitheater. Edward, Virginia, Susan, and Emily watched in silence, save when Edward asked Susan, “So do you know any kids who are . . . involved in this?”

  “I know some people who knew some people from Madison who were going to go. But it’s not anything kids from our school are that much into. It’s more a Madison, Ann Arbor kind of thing.”

  “I guess we should be happy about that,” said Virginia.

  “I think it’s very important,” said Emily. “It’s evil. What’s going on.”

  “It’s very sad, if nothing else,” said Edward. Emily thought that at this point Susan would weigh in as their resident expert on studenthood, opine something in that way of hers that sounded assured and grown-up but merely assented to adult suppositions, that was complaisance dressed up as maturity. But she said nothing.

  They listened to Humphrey’s acceptance speech, its exhortations to joy and to progress, for a while before preparing for bed. They knew as long-time constituents of his that it was likely as not to continue well past bedtime; that long after the earth was no more than a cinder or mankind had simply extinguished itself, the last thirty or so minutes of one or another Hubert Humphrey speech would still be rolling and echoing around distant galaxies.

  After Emily’s parents had retired, after Emily herself had finished what she was reading and was about to turn out her light, Susan put her head through Emily’s door. “Can I come in?” she asked.

  “Sure,” said Emily, and Susan came and sat down at the side of the bed. She was attired not in a nightgown as was Emily, as Susan herself scarcely a year ago would have been, but in an outsize football jersey, big enough to reach nearly to her knees.

  “So how’ve you been?” Emily’s sister said to her.

  “Oh, fine.”

  “Did you like your job?”

  “Oh, yeah. It was great. I got”— and Emily thought here of going to her closet and showing Susan, but changed her mind—“some cool things. I saved almost three hundred dollars.”

  “That’s great. Anything else exciting happen?”

  “Not really.”

  Susan looked at her and smiled. Not with a friendly smile, for she and Emily had not really been friends since they had ceased to be playmates, which was around the time Susan entered the fourth grade. So this was, Emily supposed, a sisterly smile, or a smile she had learned this summer at her job, for use in consoling homesick campers.

  Finally Susan said, “Mom says you have a boyfriend.”

  Emily wanted to deny this, not because it wasn’t true or on grounds of secrecy, but because she didn’t want her sister saying it, appropriating her and William, defining them. Emily said, “Well, I guess it’s a little like that. But not really. Or exactly.”

  “Do you like him?”

  “Sure.”

  “A lot?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Come on. I’m your big sister.”

  “None of your beeswax,” Emily said, and Susan took this as a friendly, teasing rejoinder that amounted to confirmation, although Emily—smiling as she said it—was very much in earnest.

  “Is he nice?” It seemed to Emily that in this phrase Susan sounded precisely like their mother.

  “No,” she said slowly. “He’s an utter beast.”

  Susan laughed. “Come on,” she said, and slid a little closer to her sister.

  “He is. He only wants one thing.”

  “Oh, come on. Really.”

  “And what he wants, he takes.”

  “You’re sure as silly as ever, Em,” Susan said. “So really.”

  “Really what?”

  “Are you guys . . . serious?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, don’t do anything dumb.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Oh, come on,” Susan said. “Like going all the way. You know.”

  Emily said nothing, and after moment, Susan put her hands on her thighs and leaned forward towards her sister. “You aren’t, are you?”

  Emily looked away, off over her shoulder, and said, “I already told you. How he is. I daren’t say more.”

  “Oh stop,” Susan laughed. “Anyway, don’t do anything stupid, okay?” She lowered her voice. “Or if you think you might, use something.”

  “Something?” Emily said. “Something what?”

  “You know.” Susan lowered her voice yet another tone, to nearly a hiss. “You know what? It’s a secret.”

  “What?”

  “I got the pill. I’m taking it.”

  “From where? Why?”

  “From the student health service.”

  “Isn’t that against the law?”

  “No. Not if you’re college-age.”

  Emily suddenly felt strangely close to Susan; she regretted teasing her, mocking her without her even knowing she was being mocked; being cruel, secretly. She leaned towards her sister, and their heads were almost touching. “So is there someone you . . . like?” Emily said in a whisper. “That much?”

  “No. Or maybe. We’ll see when I get back to school.”

  “So why . . .”

  “Just in case. Just to be ready.” Susan paused. “You never know when it might happen.”

  “I guess not,” Emily said, and sh
ook her head in commiseration. She had not felt this close to her sister in a very long time. She wanted to take her in her arms and hug her. But then Susan said, as though completing a sentence she had already begun, “So you be careful. When you’re ready. When you’re older.”

  The next afternoon, Friday, in the apartment, William and Emily made love and looked at the newspaper, and he said to her, “So now do you see? About the system and the draft and everything?” He did not intend this to sound mean—he was merely in the grip of an intention, a new one undergirded by fear and panic—but it sounded cruel to Emily. It could almost have undone all that they had become to each other, except that the past five days had been perfect, and everything outside of them had been shown to be evil and false; and that, or at least the contrast between the two of them and the world, Emily understood with complete clarity.

  “I see. And I didn’t ever not believe you. Not ever,” she said.

  William felt the awful paltriness of his faith, his ingratitude and blindness, and the forgiveness Emily’s response contained. “I know. I don’t why I said that. I guess I’m scared.”

  “I’m scared too.”

  “So what do you do?”

  “I’m not sure. I’m not you.”

  William said, “Yes you are. We’re each other now, even if everything else falls apart. Right?”

  Emily said, “Right.” She said this not in acquiescence, but as a statement of fact, of what she believed entirely.

  William went on. “So you be me. Tell me what we think.”

  Emily paused, and then she licked her lips and spoke. She told him that all our life is some form of religion, and all our action some belief. In his case, she thought he was called upon to do his duty to himself; that is, to God in the end.

  William asked, “Are you going with me?”

  And Emily said, “I suppose I am.”

  They made their arrangements quietly. William’s mother returned on that evening, and Emily’s sister left on Sunday. Another five days passed. Then they told their parents that they were going to the big Grandstand concert at the State Fair on Tuesday, the last day of the fair and two days before school started. They would have to leave early, maybe as early as seven o’clock in the morning, to get in line and get tickets. The concert ran through the day and into the evening.

  Emily had organized her gear the night before and concealed it under her bed. She rose at five-thirty, and the very last thing she did before she boarded the number three bus to meet William downtown at the depot was to mail the postcard. She opened the door to the mailbox that stood just half a block up from the bus stop, thrust her hand in, and, after a moment, let the card drop inside. There, she thought. Now I have to go. Because how else could I explain?

  Two

  The

  Beggar

  Maid

  1

  THE TUESDAY BEFORE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION in Chicago, Edward was working in the Medical Arts Building, and at the far end of the hall, as he emerged from the office of Dr. Frederick Marling (Dermatology), he saw a figure he thought he recognized exiting the office of Dr. Anthony Petti (Internal Medicine). She wore a russet shift and flat shoes and had dark chin-length hair, with perhaps a streak of gray in it, and he realized this was the boy’s mother.

  He called out to her, and she turned and looked at him, trying to ascertain who it was and if she knew him. He moved down the hall towards her in long strides, reached her, and set his case down by his side. “Edward Byrne. Emily’s father,” he said.

  “I know,” Jane said, and looked at him with a smile and raised eyebrows, as though he was a little silly to think she would not know him.

  “I was making some calls in the building and I saw you,” Edward continued, sounding rather as if he was making an excuse for being there at all. “Are you well?” he said, and then, realizing that this was not an entirely unweighty question when asked in this particular situation, he added, “We really enjoyed having you come by.”

  “I’m perfectly fine. Just the usual annual checkup. To make sure I’m in fighting form for Chicago next week, I suppose.”

  “Oh, yes. The convention. You must be very excited.”

  Jane had turned her head away for a moment and brought her hand up and under her hair on the right side of her face, and she raked it absentmindedly with her fingers, slowly, exposing her ear and the nether side of her throat. She said, “Oh, yes, I am. I guess I must be.” She laughed.

  Edward was looking at her all this while, although he did not realize this until her gaze intersected his and rested there a moment before darting away, somewhere else—to her hands, her watch, her bag. Edward thought perhaps he had been staring, that he might be making her nervous. But then she looked back and began to speak.

  “I saw your daughter with Billy yesterday. Walking down Summit Avenue holding hands. Near the little park with the Indian brave. I thought it was sweet. Like childhood’s end.” Jane shrugged. “Or something . . . enchanted, like that.” Jane realized she was going off in some direction and that she herself did not know where it lay or went. She had been, she knew, rather distracted lately. “Anyway, she’s a very nice girl,” Jane said, as though handily mopping up a small spill.

  “We think so,” Edward said. “And Bill’s a nice boy.”

  “He seems that way, but what would I know?” They had been regarding each other all this while, and then Jane smiled and looked away, and Edward turned his head and cleared his throat, as though coughing into his fist. He looked back and saw her eyes were slowly rising upward, towards him again. He was not sure what to do next. He rather enjoyed conversing with this woman—not bantering, but just standing there with a faintly incredulous but amused expression, almost needling her, gently teasing her about her worldliness, her earnest immersion in human tragedy and her own self. He sensed that she rather liked it too; that they were sharing a private joke, invisible to others, and that although it was a little at her expense, their amusement was more or less congruent; that it arose from knowing each other a very long time, although they had scarcely met.

  “He seems very dependable,” Edward said.

  “Oh, he is. He’ll be on his own next week, and it’s the least of my worries. I’ll come back, and he will have washed the dishes and vacuumed the apartment.”

  “While you’ve been dodging ward heelers and bagmen in Chicago?”

  “And worse.” Jane looked at Edward with utmost seriousness, without a shred of coyness or guile. “It could really have been something. Really accomplished something. We came this close.”

  “Maybe you still will.”

  “I don’t think the numbers add up. But it’s a nice idea.”

  This is what preoccupies her, Edward thought: beauty, goodness, and truth, or something akin to it. Everything the world fails to be for us; that we fail to be for each other. “We could have Bill over for dinner while you’re gone,” he said. “Just to give him some company, to make sure everything’s okay.”

  “That’s very kind. But I suspect he already imposes enough.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well,” Jane said. “I suppose you need to be going.” That was true enough, but Edward did not particularly want to stop. He enjoyed what they were doing, even as he was aware that it made him a little uneasy; that it refused to declare its destination or purpose, the category of relation into which it might be put and thence filed away. It was as if, whether he said goodbye and walked away or not, this conversation would continue; as if it could not be brought to a close with the handing over of a sample or a pen and pencil set or a handshake or even a kiss on the cheek. The truth was, they needed to find something to talk to each other about, a subject that might be brought to a conclusion, agreement, or stalemate, some content to give a beginning, a middle, and an end to their interaction. As it stood, it was pure form, pure process, and it might as well go on indefinitely.

  After her encounter with Edward, Jane drives home slowly.
The days until Chicago are like an ice cube melting in her glass, the solid metamorphosing into the formless; at the last, a little chip of itself afloat in its own unraveling; and then not a trace. This is how time passes and perhaps how the world will end. It is, at the very least, the way this August seems, this one in particular.

  Jane has not until now given much thought to the Byrnes. At their lunch together, she found Virginia to be rather the hausfrau and Edward the pedestrian husband and father, but strapping: He made Jane a little bashful. Still, they are nice in the nicest possible way, and the girl is nice too. Her son could be worse occupied, and occupied he is indeed, almost every day. Sometimes she finds them in her kitchen, and once she spied them ensconced before the hi-fi in the living room. Another time, driving down Summit Avenue, she saw them walking, holding hands, and by the time she was done being charmed by this scene and then realized who it was, they were blots in the disappearing horizon of her rearview mirror; and the girl might very well have been someone Jane herself used to be, thirty summers ago.

  That is not wistfulness or nostalgia or sentimentality. It is grasping the hard fact that time runs in only one direction, that we have already died a thousand deaths and will die a thousand more, and that there is no remedy for it but love, though we are sure we have never seen love except in the rearview mirror, in the sad and tawdry puddle at the bottom of the glass.

  At about the same time Jane is speaking with Virginia’s husband, Virginia herself is taking a break from her chores. She leafs through the new issue of McCall’s without much interest, but in fact she prays that its articles—their fretting over fractured families and troubled adolescents—will continue not to apply to her situation; that things will go on pretty much as they are.

  Virginia has some reason to believe this might be the case. For example, her daughter Emily is not a secretive girl, and although she is closer to Edward, rather as Susan is closer to Virginia, Emily does not seem to regard her mother with the wary belligerence so common among teenage daughters. There is nothing about her life that Emily would not tell Virginia, Virginia feels; and there is next to nothing about Emily’s life that Virginia does not, she feels, indeed already know.