The Constant Heart

by Craig Nova

  I became an astronomer and my fascination with it started in the library with those pictures from the Hubble Telescope, the Horsehead Nebula, those glowing pink clouds of gas (pink, the same color as Sara’s underwear).

  One Saturday afternoon, when my parents were gone, Sara had taken me by the hand into my bedroom, pushed me so I sat on my bed, and when I reached for her hand, she pushed it away, but then began to take off her clothes, which she dropped on the floor. But when she got down to just her panties, she said, “This isn’t a good idea.”

  “Why?” I said.

  She began to put her clothes back on, picking them up like something she had spilled. The hook on her brassiere made a little tick. Then she pulled on her jeans and zipped them up. They were so tight she had to jump a little to get into them.

  “Why?” she said. “It might mean something.”

  “So, you might care?” I said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I’m saying I’m getting the fuck out of here,” she said. Then she went out of my room, through the living room, and closed the door behind her with a bang. This just goes to show that things are more connected than they sometimes seem: the birth of stars and how much I was in love.

  The library was a brick building with a tower that held a winding staircase. Across the street stood a squat yellow warehouse-like place that looked like it had gone out of business after years of manufacturing lightbulbs, but was, in fact, a women’s prison. Actually, it was just a jail where women waited to be tried if they couldn’t make bail or while the state got around to finding a place for them, if they had been sentenced, in a real prison, like the one Sara’s mother was in upstate. So we called it a prison, but it was only a jail.

  The physics books were kept in a room on the second floor of the library, and Mrs. Kilmer, the librarian, guarded the stairs like a creature from the underworld, a previously unknown one. She existed not like someone who rowed the dead across an inky river, but someone whose job it was to make sure the panhandlers couldn’t go upstairs to piss on the calculus books. She had some other motives, too.

  So, two days after Sara and I had overheard my parents, I took the bus to the library.

  Mrs. Kilmer wore a black dress and her hair in a bun. Her hands went over the meticulous, almost Dickensian records that had to do with library fines. Her clothes gave off the stench of mothballs. Her eyes met mine: Did she know what was in my heart? That I was giddy about Sara?

  It wasn’t a small town, about eighty thousand people, Danville, about thirty miles from Albany, but it was hard to keep a secret. For instance, Mary Baxter, a girl in my class, brought her mother’s vibrator to school (a thing filled with little colored balls like small jelly beans) and took it out when we were reading Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” The buzz was just like the high-tension lines. Mary Baxter’s mother hid for a month. Then she found a job, at lower pay, in a failing lightbulb factory in Troy. Mary Baxter had bruises for a week.

  “What do you want up there?” Mrs. Kilmer said.

  “Books about physics,” I said.

  “They’re too hard for you. We’ve got a group for young women studying calculus.”

  I shrugged.

  “I’d like to try,” I said.

  “Of course,” she said. “Of course.” Her voice had a sort of symphony of emotion, since this was the scale of her hopes for my failure. But if I got shirty with her, how would I get to the books? I learned to be insulted.

  “Well, you’ll find Sara McGill up there. I guess if I let someone like that in, why, you can go, too. If she smokes marijuana up there, I’m going to call the cops. Will you tell me if you see her do it?”

  I looked her right in the eyes and stood up straight, as though I were in the army.

  “No,” I said.

  I was already on her shit list. Because I had done, as my father had taught me, the honorable thing: One doesn’t rat out a friend, surely not a woman you love. Mrs. Kilmer hated honor. It got in the way of being capricious. It meant that you believed something and stuck to it, and if a man did that, he was the enemy.

  She buzzed the lock on the door, which was like the small gates they have in courtrooms.

  “Go on,” she said. She sighed.

  Sara sat at the long table in the middle of the room that looked like where a jury deliberated about giving someone the death penalty: oak, long, shiny, and with that scent of paste furniture polish, the yellow stuff the color of Dial soap. Sara took a joint out of the pocket of her shirt, a black one that was stretchy and showed her ribs, her small breasts, her nipples.

  “Hey, Jake,” she said. “So how are things at home? Is your father acting like an asshole yet? He was pretty calm the other night, but maybe he got to thinking about it. That brings out the worst. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “He’s not an asshole,” I said.

  “Whoa,” she said. “Father-son solidarity. Amazing.”

  “You know better than that. Say it,” I said.

  “All right,” said Sara. “I’m sorry, Jake. I know better than that.”

  “Say it,” I said.

  “He’s not an asshole. I know that,” she said. “Do you want to get high?”

  “Mrs. Kilmer said she’d call the cops if you lit that up,” I said.

  “You think the cops scare me? Let them try. Do you think Mrs. Kilmer scares me?”

  “No,” I said.

  “I’m thinking about settling her hash,” said Sara. “How about an ad in an online S and M paper? Hot mom seeks someone who is cruel enough . . . No limits. Have enema bag. Give the address and tell the geeks who read the ad to bring roses to the library. Then they take out a whip and a mouth ball. Of course, we will say that her resistance is the way she has orgasms. Huh?”

  She rolled the joint back and forth, licked it, then held it. This was the hard thing to know: what was bluff and what was real. She was just testing me, that’s all.

  “You wouldn’t tell her if I lit up, would you?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But if you did, she might let you off the hook for book fines and stuff like that.”

  “No,” I said.

  She got up, stepped closer so I came into the scent of her skin, like baby powder and a slight, distant musk, the perfume of her tugging on me as though it had grabbed me by my hair.

  “Why, Jake, you’re honorable. Dangerous stuff.”

  She stuck the joint back in her pocket.

  “Let’s look at the women’s prison,” she said. “I’ll show you where you can see in. Some of them are pretty hot. You know, pacing back and forth and about ready to jump out of their skins.”

  The rows of books were musty and gave her scent all the more gravity. We went along the polished floor, the walls of books on both sides of us, the titles still glittering here and there, at least the ones that had been gilt when they had first been printed. Old glue, dust, like time itself. The window was at the end of the row, covered with glass that had wire in it, although I am not sure that the library had to worry about break-ins so much anymore, or if someone came in they would be more likely to steal the fluorescent fixtures than The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad.

  The prison was made out of yellow brick and the windows seemed to be made from the same wire-filled glass. The place sat there like a monument to pent-up desire, as though the punishments these women were given had to do with the lack of a caress, the touch of a man they cared about, or a child. That and the knowledge that a friend was going after their boyfriends or husbands right then.

  “Stand on your toes. No. Wait,” said Sara.

  She took a dictionary, an atlas, and a couple of volumes, in blue cloth, of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad and some of his novellas, too, from the shelf, put them on the floor, and we both stood on them, my face near hers, the scent of her skin so close I was about to fall into it. Her hot breath made a cloud against the glass.

  “There. See?”


  At the end of the building, which must have been where the hall between the cells came to the last window, a woman appeared: Her hair was blond and her lips large, sort of like a slum-goddess version of a Versace ad, and as she stood there, her arms crossed under her breasts, she shifted her weight, took a deep breath, and looked at the sky between the buildings. Longing personified.

  “I’ve thrown her a joint,” said Sara. “She waved. I threw her another joint. Mostly it bounces off the windowsill, but every now and then she catches it.”

  “What is she in for?”

  “Who knows?” said Sara. “But, you see, that was just the first step. I’m going to start writing notes to her.”

  “About what?”

  She leaned closer.

  “You and I have to have a little talk,” she said.

  The atlas and The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad made a little sigh, or so I thought, when I sat down on them. As though they knew, or at least the presence of Joseph Conrad knew, what it meant when someone said, “We’ve got to have a little talk.”

  Sara’s scent settled over me as she sat on the books next to me, the baby powder and skin perfume falling like the finest dust imaginable, like infinitely small snowflakes. I leaned against her and took her hand, and there, from her skin to mine, came a warm flow, one that to me, as strange as it sounds, had a gold coloring to it, a variety of infinite promise that made me flow, too, or so I thought, right back into her.

  “You’re going to ask me if I feel it,” she said. “Aren’t you? Does the barrier between two people disappear when they touch like that, if they really care?”

  “Don’t you?” I said.

  “Why would I want to?” she said. “Even if I did. But don’t get the idea I do.”

  “It’s not a matter of discussion,” I said. “It’s a fact. Either you feel it or you don’t.”

  “Oh, my junior astronomer,” she said. “So, you want to deal in facts. Well, what about my mother and father. Did they feel it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “So, you want more facts?” she said. “What about . . . ”

  She put her hand down on Joseph Conrad, and I wondered if Heart of Darkness was in there, in that collection, the book being warmed by her rear end. Down the row, in front of us, between the stacks of dusty books, leading out to the jury table, was that long, polished linoleum, like ice on a dirty pond. She felt it, and here’s how I knew: She was going to ask about my mother and father and what had happened the other night, but she didn’t want to do that. So, instead, she squeezed my hand.

  “That’s why we stopped before getting into bed,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to be tricked. By this illusion, this caring, this fucking romance. I don’t see what it got anyone anything but grief. See?”

  “It’s not a trick,” I said.

  “Yeah?” she said. “Tell it to my father.”

  The traffic went by outside, that sad tooting of horns, the cars that needed new mufflers but were obviously driven by people who didn’t have the money to buy them, who would soon get a ticket for not having that money.

  “Come on,” she said.

  From the pile of books, the prison seemed more like a warehouse than ever, the bricks dusty and the roof flat, and inside, through the windows, the shapes of women, filled with desire, swept back and forth, like shadows looking for a person to cast them.

  “So here’s the bet, Jake,” she said. “You think you care about me, right? You think there’s something special that runs through us, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And you read all that crap, Yeats and stuff, white man’s stuff,” she said.

  “I’m not a white man,” I said. “I’m a human being. When you use that word you are calling me a nigger, a wop, a spick, a redskin, a fag, a wog, a jigaboo . . . ”

  “Touchy,” she said. “You are trying to raise my consciousness, aren’t you?”

  “I’m telling you something,” I said.

  “Sure, sure,” she said. “Here’s the bet that will fix your ideas about romance. I’ll get you in there, overnight, and then after they’ve passed you from cell to cell, we’ll talk about how you feel about things. Me included.”

  “You don’t want me to care about you?” I said.

  “Oh, Jake,” she said. “Just take the bet.”

  She turned and ran her fingers along the titles of books, seventeenth-century verse and prose, Donne, Lovelace, etc., and then down farther to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater . Cognitive dissonance in a nutshell: If she hurt me, she guessed, she wouldn’t hurt herself. She had a practical existence, and what she wanted to believe and what she felt weren’t the same. The prison would fix all that.

  “So, it’s a deal,” she said. “We’ll bet. It’ll change the way you feel.”

  “What would they want with someone who’s seventeen?”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” she said. “I bet I can find a way to get you in there. Let me work on it.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “I never kid,” she said. “I’ll get you in through the back. That’s where the trash goes out. That ought to be about right. Maybe that woman I’ve thrown a joint to will help. They’ll have to give you a shower with that soap they have in the school bathroom to get the smell of garbage off you. Or maybe you should bring a bar of soap. I’ll have to think about it.”

  Sara nodded to the woman who stood at the end of the cell block. The woman put a hand to her blond hair, which looked like she had slept under a bridge.

  “So, how’s your father?” she said.

  “OK,” I said.

  “That chocolate thing was pretty fucking good,” said Sara.

  “What happens if I take the bet, spend the night in there, and still feel the same way about you?”

  “No promises, Jake,” she said. “But I don’t think that’s the way it’s going to be.”

  “Let the bet resolve that,” I said.

  Sarah stood on the dictionaries and stared at me like women prosecutors on TV.

  The women’s prison glowed a deep yellow as the sun hit its cheap bricks.

  “Yeah,” said Sara. “Won’t this be something? I’ll start this afternoon. The first thing is to throw her another joint.”

  “But you’re up to something, too,” I said.

  She turned those green eyes on me.

  “That’s right, Mr. Junior Astronomer. I’m going to prove what ‘atoms in a void’ means. Nothing more. See? Then we can just forget all this nonsense about you holding my hand and maybe me feeling some bullshit everyone tells me is bullshit.”

  We leaned together. Pigeons, like prayers or just flecks of dust, flew around the prison.

  “But,” I said, “a bet isn’t a one-way thing.”

  “I knew you would come up with something,” she said. “You just have to make things complicated.”

  “You didn’t answer me. You just gave me an opinion. If I go in there, if I take the dare, and I come out and I still want to sit here with you, what then?”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” she said. “After you get tested for every known STD, and after they do research for new ones. Which you will probably be carrying by then. Why, you can probably get things from just sitting on those sheets over there. If they have sheets.”

  She wouldn’t give in. Wouldn’t admit that there was even a possibility that something existed, that something real was in that touch of my hand on her arm. Classic dissonance: She believed one thing and felt another.

  She put her chin on the sill and looked through the glass of the window, so cloudy and dirty that it seemed like a cataract.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I bet I can get you in from the back, by the garbage chute. Come back tomorrow. Oh boy, are you going to have a story to tell.”

  She stepped down from the pile of books and went up the aisle between the shelves, the walls of them seeming more confining than befor
e, still musty, still filled with mysteries, as though just sitting on the shelf had given them some substance they hadn’t had before. She ran her finger along them, then put it in her mouth, and then touched the books again and tasted her finger, as though the taste of knowledge was exciting.

  It took about five minutes, but Sara went downstairs, got buzzed out by Mrs. Kilmer, who probably gave her a look of hatred perfectly mixed with envy, and I am sure Sara swayed her hips for Mrs. Kilmer just the way she did when she appeared on the street, on the sidewalk, between the library and the prison. She had that sultry walk, her posture perfect, as though she had been a model. The traffic had a dreary, daily business cadence, delivery trucks and taxicabs and people on the way to buy new tires, new coffee makers, and the like. It made Sara stand out even more: I want to say she had something of the goddess about her, but maybe that was just youth. Or the power that an attractive young woman possesses: too big to be summed up, like those pictures from the Hubble. At the end of the block, by the wall of the prison, where the distance between the fence and the yellow bricks of the place was most narrow, Sara stopped and put her hands on her hips: She was impatient, she seemed to say, and she didn’t have all the time in the world. What were prisons to her? The woman with the blond hair waved. Sara waved back. Then Sara flicked the joint, like the butt of a cigarette, up to the window where the woman stood. This was the one place where the wire-filled glass could be opened, like a normal window.

  The twig-shaped joint hit the bars, fell to the sill, rolled to the edge, and stopped. The woman inside moved her head one way and then the other, her mass of hair swinging like a flag of desire, and then she reached out, between the bars with just two fingers. They trembled and she pushed them against the concrete of the sill. Slowly and with great patience, as though she were playing chess, her fingers came out like something that usually is hidden in a burrow. But she couldn’t reach the joint. So she disappeared and then came back with a little clip that women used to use in their hair, and with that she reached out and took the joint like a small tube with a pair of pliers. Sara waved.