Love Among the Ruins

by Robert Clark

  “I changed it partly because you seemed to think he was just fine.”

  “What was I supposed to think? Good family. The Academy. What was there to be wrong with him?”

  “What would that have to do with anything? I would have thought his being Protestant would concern you a little.”

  Virginia leaned down to pull a colander from a cabinet, and still bent, looked up at Edward. “You’re the one who puts such store in being ecumenical.”

  “Better that than some kind of . . . social register nonsense. Which we don’t know anything about.”

  Virginia stood, holding the battered aluminum colander in her hands like a begging bowl. “You have to go on something,” she said.

  “They’re not even really a prominent family. Not to speak of. The father’s name isn’t even real. He’s a Jew.”

  Virginia regarded him with what seemed to him a faintly amused expression. “Does that concern you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “So why bring it up?”

  “I’m just saying, they—he—isn’t what they seem. You could say we were taken in. Maybe you ought to feel better about that. That we gave them the benefit—”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘they’?”

  “I just mean the family.”

  “Not much of a family. The boy and that . . . suffragette.” Virginia set the colander in the sink. She went to the stove and gave the noodles a poke with her spoon.

  “I thought you didn’t mind her,” Edward said.

  “I didn’t mind him, not her.” She took the saucepan from the stove and poured the boiling water and the noodles into the colander. She was briefly shrouded in steam, and as it began to clear she said, “And I’d just as soon stop hearing how lonely and all-suffering she is.”

  Edward said, “I don’t know that it’s even something I’ve brought up. And maybe her situation is a difficult one. Maybe it’s not unreasonable to acknowledge that.”

  Virginia had a can of tuna in her hand, which she inserted into the opener, once again slapping the lever, sending the can carouselling around the machine. “It’s not. But our concern—your concern—ought to be Emily.”

  “I think you really mean my concern ought to be you, just you.”

  Her back was still to him. She took the can and emptied it into the casserole and then she dumped in the noodles. She turned around and said to him, “I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m just quietly, slowly dying of worry. I thought you might care to notice.”

  “Oh, God, Ginny. Why do we have to do this? To make more problems where there aren’t any?” He put his hands up, imploring her. “I know all of this. You know I do. You know how I feel. I know how you feel. But it doesn’t change anything.”

  “Maybe it should.”

  “Should what?”

  “Change things. Make a difference. Instead of doing nothing.”

  “I’m not doing nothing.”

  “I didn’t say you were.”

  “That’s the implication.”

  “Then it’s in your mind.” Virginia turned back to the counter. She stirred the contents of the casserole, opened the oven door, and pushed the casserole inside.

  “I’ve done everything I can,” Edward was saying. “I call the police every day. I prowl around the bus depot. I talk to these idiot teenagers. I come home and try to have a smile on my face and you just . . . ambush me. With this stuff.”

  Virginia turned back around, giving the dial of the kitchen timer in her hand a twist. “I’m sorry. I really am.” Edward nodded to her. Then she said, “This is all going to drive us mad, isn’t it? And there’s nothing for it—to drive it off. Nothing. I can’t even get myself to pray. To go through the motions of it.”

  “Maybe you could go talk to Father about it.”

  “That’s not doing anything. That’s just more biding time.”

  “It’s only been—it hasn’t even been a week. It could be over tomorrow. Just like that.”

  “Or never.”

  “You’re despairing,” Edward said. “This isn’t you, Ginny.”

  “This isn’t us. This whole business. But it’s happening to us. Whether we like it or not.”

  “I know. I know. But you have to . . .”

  “Have to do what? What? You tell me.”

  “I know. I know how you feel. Just bear with me. We’ll do something. We’ll manage. You’ll see. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Virginia said. “I’ll try. I’m sorry.”

  Edward nodded and with no small relief went to the living room and sat in his chair, the one adjacent to the big sofa where Virginia and the girls customarily sat. He took up the evening paper, scanning the pages blankly, not reading but looking out upon them, as though they were a view he was watching from the window of a bus. He lost himself a little in this way for about twenty minutes, and then he heard the kitchen timer ring, calling him to dinner, to his wife and their life together once more.

  6

  IT WENT ON FOR DAYS AND EVEN WEEKS, BUT DURING these times Edward and Virginia did indeed find moments of peace, of consolation, and some of them were with each other. They made love ten days after the children had gone, and afterwards, as they lay in the dark and the silence, they both felt a curious languor, as though they had never been lovers before; or perhaps had been once long ago. Maybe Edward had been away at war; maybe Virginia had been confined in a sanitarium with a debilitating ailment, a rare disease of the nerves.

  But in the morning, and the mornings to come, it was the same: The very house ached from Emily’s absence, seemed to be wasting away, did not so much breathe as shudder and wheeze. When Edward came home each afternoon he expected to see signs of dereliction: vines insinuating themselves through the doors and windows, blistering paint, shutters flapping on rusted hinges, a glaze of dust on the furnishings, strands of cobweb hanging from the fixtures and doorframes like phlegm.

  Of course, it was not like that at all. The house was, if anything, more immaculate than usual, since Virginia had learned that even a moment of idleness invited despair, and so cleaned like a woman pursued by furies, which indeed she was. She took up attending daily mass, not because she had changed her mind about its accomplishing anything, but because it was one more thing to fill the day. She had learned, contrary to her expectation in the first week, that things did not get worse but stayed the same; and it was precisely in this way that they did get worse, without alteration or surprise or hope, resisting all surmise or speculation, pressing the inexorable conclusion that—since nothing, after all, did, could, or would change—Virginia’s child must be not merely missing but, in fact, dead.

  Edward’s mind had not taken this turn, at least not yet, at least not in its waking state. Rather, he found the means to persuade himself that it was too early to conclude or assume anything at all, although this was in itself a sort of conclusion that kept more definitive conclusions at bay. He figured they were probably still in transit to California, or, if they had gone camping, were going camping for two weeks—for why bother to go on such a trip for only one? Later, he upped this to three weeks, and put this supposition to Virginia, to Jane, and, when they at last saw each other and Edward confessed what had happened, to old Dr. Fields.

  It was the third Friday in September, and it was late in the afternoon. The doctor was refilling their Dixie cups, for the second time, and Edward told him the whole business, which he could now recount in less than thirty seconds.

  “God, Ed, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s been very hard on Ginny. On the boy’s mother, too. It’s bad enough not knowing where they are. Then you think, why?”

  “I’d imagine.”

  Edward downed perhaps a third of the whisky in the cup in one pull. “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t have the slightest. It makes me feel very old and dull. I never heard of kids doing such a thing. Except for Huck Finn, I suppose.” Fields took up his cigarette pack and took out one for each of the
m, handing Edward his without comment. Then he lit them. “During the Depression, I guess kids ran away. Poor ones. On the trains. Other than that, this is beyond my ken. What do the police say?”

  “Nothing at all. I call there every week, and every week they have absolutely nothing to offer. No facts, of course. No theories either. Just that it’s a sort of trend among juveniles. Jane—the boy’s mother—thinks it has to do with politics, with thinking the whole society’s crumbling with riots and assassinations and wanting to get back to nature, to innocence.”

  “For a cause? I don’t see it. But what do I know? I can only think of . . . Hansel and Gretel, or some Grimms thing. Where the kids wander off into the woods and get baked into cookies or some such.”

  “Ouch.”

  “I’m sorry.” Fields paused. “I do suppose it somehow belongs to the realm of the irrational. Just blind love, perhaps. Maybe this is just how kids elope now.”

  “I can’t imagine they just wanted to get married. She’s only sixteen.”

  “That’s exactly my point. And surely there’s some benighted place—Idaho or whatever—where they could legally get married.”

  “I suppose. But I don’t think so.”

  “I’d still say it’s all to do with love. Love and sex.”

  “Sex anyhow. We found out they’d been at it before they left.”

  “And you were surprised?”

  “No, I guess not. Teenagers are just awash . . . in hormones. We should put saltpeter in their food. Lock them up when they’re in heat. Except that’s all the time.”

  “You don’t think it’s all just sex, surely?” said Fields. “Not in your own daughter’s case.”

  “You mean that would dignify it? If she’d been feeling some noble sentiments towards this boy? I suppose. But then it just complicates things that much more.” Edward inhaled and drank. “The idea that it’s just stupid instinct is cleaner. It’s like an infection she could get over, get back to normal afterward. But love—love you have to reckon with.”

  “I’m not terribly clear on the difference between sex and love. As distinct entities, I should say. Never could get that straight. Because I really can’t help but believe it’s always love—this complex, profound thing rather than this simple brute base thing—and even when people say it’s just lust, just this itch that wants scratching, they’re not being truthful: that it’s something deep and frightening, and they don’t want to look at it too closely. So when somebody says ‘It’s just sex,’ it’s really a species of love they’re not prepared to admit to. Shamefaced love.”

  “This is all very . . . idealistic. For you.” Edward laughed.

  “But it’s true.” Fields smiled and quickly sipped from his cup. “I know about these things. Take a man with a prostitute, an ugly prostitute, if you want. It happens all the time. He reaches his climax and he calls out, ‘I love you.’ To this stranger, this wretch.”

  “It’s just the heat of the moment.”

  “But then why say that? Just then? It’s hardly a moment when one’s likely to be calculating. Why not just grunt? Or tell her how dirty and low she is?”

  “It’s wishful thinking. It’s pretending that it’s love. To dress it up, ease the guilt.”

  “Why pretend? How could one cook this whole charade up when your whole central nervous system is going into a state of total . . . release? It makes more sense that, just then, we’d be inclined to call things by their real names.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “The guilt, if there’s guilt, comes afterward. I’d agree it happens. Although maybe it’s shame. Or embarrassment. That you did in fact love this person, just for an instant. That’s what’s a little unbearable about it: not that you just ejaculated into this person at a convenient moment, that maybe you used her, but that you did love her for an instant, and then you reneged. So you’re ashamed. It strikes me that you should be. It’s blasphemy, isn’t it? To renounce love, to renounce God? Isn’t that what your people say? Bishop Sheen or whoever?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not a theologian,” Edward said. “I’m pretty sure the church frowns on sex with prostitutes.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m addressing. Hypocrisy. Of the gravest sort. Hypocrisy against love.”

  “I’m not following this.” Edward paused. “And that’s kind of the point. Because my own experience doesn’t jibe with any of this. Ginny and I met. We loved each other. And we had sex. All at the same time, the sex and the love, I mean.”

  “You said you’d been with prostitutes.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yes, during the war.”

  “So I did.”

  “And you felt nothing for these fräuleins or Polynesians or whatever?”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. I don’t know what I felt.”

  “I don’t believe you. I think you’re cheating me a little.”

  “I was very young.”

  “So much the better. For intensity. For sensation that leaves a mark.”

  “All right. I was . . . floored. Swept away.”

  “That’s better,” Fields said. “So you see. You communed with the beautiful. Nothing paltry about that. You wished for nothing more than that girl’s total existence—for her to simply be. The fact of her and you. That’s love. You were swept away. You felt the swoon, the swoon of liberty.”

  Edward sipped the last of his drink. “You certainly ran away with that ball.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  Edward smiled. “How could I want to? It’s too much.”

  “It doesn’t matter what you want. Joe Louis, blessed be his name, said a very wise thing once: ‘You can run, but you can’t hide.’”

  “So be it,” said Edward. “It beats me.”

  7

  DURING ALL THIS TIME, THROUGH THE END OF September and into the first week of October, Edward continued to see Jane. They had a certain routine. He came by perhaps three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and they had two drinks and sat in the living room and talked and listened to music. Normally he arrived around four-thirty and in no case left earlier than five-thirty; and this schedule put him at his own front door at about the same time he would have arrived there if he had not stopped at Jane’s at all.

  They had, some weeks before, exhausted the topic of the children, their whereabouts, and their intentions, and in fact, the main point of their meetings became the very avoidance of this topic. Although Edward continued to check in weekly with the insouciant and contemptible Lieutenant O’Connor—if only to radiate contempt and disgust back at him as best he could over the telephone—there was no news from this quarter and so nothing that bore mentioning. Thus freed (however temporarily, however uneasily) from the perpetual cares of the last month, Jane and Edward found they genuinely enjoyed each other’s company. It seemed to Edward that they had finally become friends and that they could discuss even fairly personal matters without awkwardness, without untoward or bothersome sensations arising.

  This may have come about, at least as far as Edward was concerned, because Jane was meeting him on a more equal footing, not as grieving mother or damsel in distress or flirty ingenue of a certain age, but as a chum, even as a teacher. For example, she taught him a great deal about music, and they often listened together. More and more they did this without speaking, for the music seemed to require it of them, and they had become easy enough in each other’s presence to manage it.

  Of late, Jane had put Edward onto the works of Gustav Mahler, and she did this as though initiating him into a Gnostic cult. She said of Mahler, “He is Beethoven for our time,” and said this in deadly earnest. With equal intensity and rather more glee, after her second gin-and-tonic, she liked to say, “There is but one Mahler, and Lenny is his prophet.”

  Jane quoted Bernstein on Mahler, how his music “foretold all,” the bomb, the holocaust, and all the rest, and this could not but raise the question of whether, say, the Fourth Symphony somehow f
oretold the disappearance of the children, or at least the world—California or the forest or the underworld—into which they had disappeared. Jane felt it did—that they had run away from exactly the horrors and repression of the present age. Against that, Edward had only Dr. Fields’s stupendous notions about love—the erotic holocaust, the existential bomb—and his own about an extended camping trip, about the children getting waylaid at the Greyhound station in Elko, Nevada.

  Yet Jane and Edward took comfort in the music too. In what it said in its brutal marches and tender adagios; and, with Jane quoting Mahler again, in the dilemmas the composer had said he was trying to address: “What did you live for? Why did you suffer? Is it only just a vast, terrifying joke? We have to answer those questions somehow if we are to go on living—indeed, even if we are only to go on dying.”

  Perhaps it was Virginia who most epitomized this last state; Virginia, from whom life was ebbing out each day, for she had lost her child and now it seemed she was losing her husband too. She and Edward might have been two castaways—heretofore strangers to each other—who found themselves washed up on the same island, sharing a common plight, behaving with courtesy towards each other, but helpless to effect any change in each other’s condition. But because, of course, they did have a history together, had pursued a common purpose in tandem for twenty years, they could not simply amicably bide their time. Edward, deep in his heart, believed that Virginia must now hold him in contempt; and so she did a little—not, as he thought, because he was somehow failing to rescue Emily, but because he was failing to save the two of them; to believe in her and their life together. He had thought their marriage and family had survived by luck and by labor, whereas Virginia knew it perdured chiefly on faith; and Edward, because he could do nothing, had lost his.

  Thus it was that Edward came to prefer Jane’s company over Virginia’s. He had no obligation to Jane—there was nothing in her home it was his job to fix—and so whatever he brought to her was purely a gift, freely given. Even his sorrow and despair were a gift, for they made no demands on Jane, save that she acknowledge their existence. By the same token, they spent many hours talking about Jane’s life; about how, by virtue of her family’s fallen position, her divorce, her failure to make either much of a career or a home—an entire life of doing the wrong thing for the right reasons—and now her son’s abandonment of her, she was more or less spoiled, even rather ruined as a woman of any serious consequence or worth. And Edward heard these stories—for to him they were stories rather than problems in search of solutions—with sympathy and a certain pleasure that they should be confided to him. The pity of these stories, the very thing that was unbearable in Virginia, was endearing in Jane.