by Susan Choi
For a while there’s nothing but drifting, disconnected sound. Birdcalls, the hollow undertone of a jet somewhere out in the atmosphere. He’s afraid of hearing definitive proof she’s still crying but strains his ears all the same. The brightly colored group of middle-aged couples angles across the field behind where he and Jenny are sitting, back toward the trailhead; the breeze shifts, and their gay, indistinct voices carry over a moment, then fade. Finally Jenny sighs, wipes her face with the hem of her shirt. When she turns back to him he’s startled. He dreams of this distilled gaze of hers all the time but on the few occasions she’s meant it for him, he has quailed before it. He’s looked away, as he looks away now. “Rob,” she says. He nods, waiting. “When you see William, you don’t tell him, do you? About that time we fucked up.”
About that time we fucked up. Frazer abandons caution and looks at her. He doesn’t know what he was thinking: There’s nothing particular there. “You mean,” he says, elongating his words as if groping around in the black vault of memory. “You mean, the last time you saw me? When was that, anyway? I must have a newspaper clipping somewhere that could help peg the date. Maybe it was March 1972, when I saved your ass from prison. I have this vague memory of seeing you then. Is that the fucked-up time you’re thinking of?”
“Rob.”
“Of course I haven’t told him. I always assumed you would, as part of some holy-moly purifying ritual. ‘Forgive me my terrible sin, but I had sex with Frazer.’ Isn’t that your thing? Pure heart, pure life. You can’t hold down a job in the capitalist system at the same time as you fight for revolution and you can’t lie to your lover at the same time as making sure you’re perfect soulmates who never power-trip each other! Right? Every time I go see him I think he’s gonna try to punch me through the Plexiglas window but he’s just all smiles and all love because you never told him. You’re scared to.”
“I am not! It’s just not something I would ever disclose in a letter—that’s real cowardice. When I tell him it’ll be to his face. And what about you? You haven’t had Carol taken away, you could tell her to her face, but you haven’t.”
“Me and Carol don’t believe in monogamy, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh!” She leaps up in frustration. “Why are you here anyway, Rob? Why did you come after me?”
She’s standing now, angrily planted, but he knows she’d rather stride off across the green field, down the worn trail, and get in her car and leave him. He can remember any number of their arguments in the past, arguments ostensibly about ideas but really about his persistence, her refusal, that have ended this way. With Frazer left alone, carefully avoiding all movement because to move is to reanimate a world stopped in its tracks by her violent departure and to reanimate that world is to allow the shroud of humiliation, still hanging uncertainly in the air the way silence hangs uncertainly after a door slams, to complete its descent onto him. He always needs a few moments to get ready for the shroud. He likes to wear it as lightly as possible. In the past Jenny did a lot of her storming off and leaving him in the parking lot of a pancake diner where they’d go on nights that Carol was with her women’s group or her acting class and William was teaching his seminar or working the night shift, nights that were frequent, and they almost always fought, and insulted each other’s characters and reviled each other’s beliefs, but they kept doing it, didn’t they? And didn’t that mean something? Didn’t it mean something bound them, somehow?
She’s wearing a pair of old, faded, paint-covered jeans that Frazer hasn’t been looking at closely, but now that she’s standing, hands on hips, poised to depart, and he’s leaning back on his elbows and pretending to gaze unconcerned into the distance while actually looking at her, he can see that these jeans, so splattered with recent activity, are a pair she’s had for years and years, a pair that used to be nice, and that he remembers because they have seams on their fronts. Pointless, decorative seams, stitched with gold thread to form a thin ridge of denim running like a highway stripe down the centers of her thighs, over her kneecaps, and the rest of the way to her ankles. These were Jenny’s signature jeans. He remembers one night years ago, when they all still lived in California, and when none of them were in prison, and when they were feeling that unalloyed excitement about being together, about being a group of friends that felt more like a family, like the sort of dream-family nobody had and that doesn’t exist. Carol had been trying for weeks to talk them into playing a game from her acting class and everyone had been pretending to think it was stupid, but this night they were all high and goofy, and William said, Let’s play Carol’s game. And perhaps because they all secretly wanted to, or perhaps because it was William suggesting it, on this night they agreed. Scattered through the house to find scarves and stockings for blindfolds, then reconvened in the living room, laughing nervously, sucking last hits off joints or last slugs from bottles for more kick, or more courage. Carol explained that the point of the game was to pretend as if one was a newborn baby, or an alien. Without knowledge of anything, not furniture or carpet or LPs or human beings or beer bottles. The game only involved turning off all the lights, and blindfolding themselves, and crawling around on the floor trying to imagine they didn’t know what things were, but somehow they all sensed, as the lights went out and the eruptions of Ouch! and Shh! and Fuck you, man! finally faded away into eerie, shuffling, shifting, sighing hush, that the game wasn’t going to be about amnesia. Hands found shoulders, faces, tried to identify with the minimum of touch. Recoiled or lingered, were received with breathless stillness or flinched from. Frazer, inching out of the living room onto the smooth, cool wood floor of the corridor, came against a person sitting perfectly still, and was so startled he gasped—then extended one finger very slowly before him until he found a bent knee, felt the ridge of denim running over it. Jenny.
His hand meant to fly away, but it didn’t. Tentatively, questioningly, he followed the ridge with his finger. Surprised by how much care was needed, in his blindness, to keep it squarely beneath the pad of his fingertip. He could hear her breath then, as careful and slow as his touch. Down the incline of her thigh and over rumpled territory to her waist. She didn’t move, and so he extended the line, upward, over the warm curve of her breast, the shock of her nipple. Hard. He almost came, closed his hand around her, but that wasn’t the game that he’d started, and though this threshold would become one of the premier erotic episodes of his generally eventful and unrestrained sex life, it lasted only for a sliver of a second before he forced himself onward, his line up her body uninterrupted as it left her breast, skimmed over her collarbone, traced her neck to the down-dusted earlobe and then moved away, through her hair, to the void. From the living room he heard a crash, and then a peal of laughter: Carol’s. He swiveled in panic, thinking the lights might come on, and crawled hurriedly back to the living room like a dumb frightened animal.
There are the famous jeans now, wash-worn almost white and caked with dots and streaks of different kinds of paint. Their tantalizing ridges obscured. Take your cue from the pants, Rob, he thinks. The past is obscured. Now, the future. The middle-aged couples are gone. They’re completely alone.
“Sit down,” he says. “I’d rather say this without yelling.”
All the while he’s been looking for her he’s also been rehearsing, not with unease but with fidgety eagerness, even euphoria, the speech he’d deliver. But now the moment has come and the speech is gone, in a tumble of parallels and hypotheticals and other half-baked attempts at suspense. Say a person like you, people like you. Principled people, pursued by the state they oppose! Time running out . . . needing refuge, as you did—and do—
Instead he says, sounding dully pragmatic, “Your current situation doesn’t look like much of an improvement over living with Helen and Dick. That old lady doesn’t pay you, I bet. Or she can’t pay you much.”
“What are you saying?” she asks, and from the stillness of her face, her concealed al
arm, he can tell he’s guessed right.
“What I mean is you don’t have a plan, Jenny, do you? You’re running, from everyone, from me, even, but you don’t have anywhere to run to.”
“I might.”
“Oh, really? Where?”
“None of your business.”
Then he knows that she truly has nowhere to go, and knows as well that she knows it. His excitement, his almost evangelical joy at the opportunity that has befallen him—them—returns to him, and some of the speech along with it. “What if I were to tell you that I’ve recently met with some people. People whose principles we basically agree with, though we might find their tactics a little way out. People who are in trouble, the way you’ve been in trouble, although I should say they’re in trouble to a way, way, way bigger degree. They need a safe haven immediately. What would you say to all that?”
“I’d say that you’ll probably help them, and they’ll be far more grateful than I was.”
“Not me. You. You’ll be the hero who helps them.” She’s resisting the vision, but he’s expected her to, at the outset. “Because you have the underground know-how, the wisdom. Yes, I’m saying you have nothing to lose, it’s the truth, but more I’m saying you have everything to gain! Jenny, listen to me. These people, who need us—who need you—aren’t just any group of people. They’re people who have such a sensational story to tell that if they could just get a safe haven, and write it all down, they would make tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. For their cause, and for the people who help them. But,” he holds up a cautioning hand, “it’s tricky. Because these people need someone aboveground, who’s not compromised, to make the arrangements for them. And they need someone belowground—like you—to take care of the everyday things. The grocery shopping. The phone calls. Someone like you, who can serve as the go-between—between these people, for example, and me.”
“But I only move around because I have to. It’s risky for me.”
“Nowhere near as risky as it is for people who are in Time magazine every week. Who are on fucking TV every night, Jenny, whose story is wanted by everyone—”
Now she’s staring at him, very pale. “My God,” she says. “You’re not talking about who I think you are, are you?”
“What if I was?” he replies, and his long effort to contain himself finally fails. He grins giddily at her.
“This is just what I was always afraid of,” she gasps. “You think you’re so suave, and you’re really so reckless! You think you’re discreet but you talk—don’t tell me you came from those people to me. You met with those people, and then you came and found me!” She looks around wildly. “I’m going.”
“Don’t do that,” he says.
But she’s not even staying to argue. Before he can take in what’s happening she’s back on her feet and then actually running from him, her form receding across the deep field and slipping into the trees. He’s abruptly, completely alone. One half-circle around him the trees Jenny’s disappeared into, the other the far-off horizon. Himself at the center, as if he’s awoken on top of this mountain and everything else was a dream. He hears a ship’s horn, perhaps down on the river, perhaps a hundred miles away on the sea. Under these weird acoustical conditions it seems he might hear her heart if he tried. He hasn’t heard her car engine. He shoots up and goes sprinting across the field himself—you can take the quarterback out of the game but you can’t take the game out of the quarterback—and bursts through the trees into the parking lot, but it’s empty, apart from his car.
3.
There’s the long way and then there’s the very long way, much farther west into mountains before turning east by way of angling south, which means rolling gradually down through the foothills instead of precipitately through the gorge. Even though she’s on none of the roads that she used to come up, she’s still glancing in her rearview so often she keeps crunching onto the shoulder. Rule number one is don’t drive, and if you must, please don’t drive like you’re sleeping or drunk. She tries not to drive all the time, but now she’s a regular face on the train. Known and liked by the different conductors: another rule broken. Hey, Iris. Going down to Poughkeepsie today? Knowing it’s bad that she smiles and says Hey. Bad that she’s friends with the ticket seller at the station because he sits all day reading the paper. Bad that she’s a familiar face in Rhinebeck, also, in spite of sometimes shopping down the river in Poughkeepsie, and getting her mail two towns over in Red Hook, and saving serious emotional collapses for the spot she’s just left, because the view is worth the risk of the bridge. Bad that she’s rooted in the transient train, the anonymous post office box, precisely the places that Frazer has managed to find her.
And because she’s taken the very long way she hasn’t managed to get back before tea. She’s usually ensconced deep in the house by now, after having boiled the water and spilled the box of cookies onto the dish and decanted the milk into the creamer and dropped the cubes of sugar in the sugar bowl with tongs—Miss Dolly is scrupulous about the use of tongs, to prevent spread of germs—and carried the rattling tray onto the porch with the old woman bringing up the rear in her fragile, methodical way. And then politely ducking off to some project-in-progress, before any visitor comes up the path. By that time she’ll be lying well out of reach and very nearly out of sight beneath the library ceiling, on her jerry-rigged scaffold with a bowl of soapy bleach-water, gently wiping away at one hundred years of brown pipe-smoke residue. And listening. Hiding from the ritual of teatime but anxiously listening. How’s that lovely Oriental girl working out? So-and-so saw her at Buell’s Hardware shopping for tools. Where is it she hails from, originally? Coming around the last bend in the Wildmoor road she can see that someone has already arrived, and unhooked the chain, and turned around the little sign from the side saying HOUSE TOURS to the side saying JOIN US FOR TEA. 4–6 P.M. DAILY. It’s just ten past four. Miss Dolly’s visitors are all extremely punctual and ancient, the men thin and erect and slow-moving, like large wading birds, the women tiny and blurry and loud. They all seem to have lived on the river for eons, and never had jobs. Whoever has unhooked the chain has left it lying in the dirt across the drive, and after she bumps over it she gets out of the car and pulls it properly off to one side, noticing as she does that there’s a small white streak of bird shit on the sign. She scratches it off with her thumbnail. The sign looks old and faded already. It’s one of the first things she made when she came here.
She drives the rest of the way through the trees and tries to slip in the back door, but then someone calls out “Iris!” from the porch. “Yes!” she calls back. Her voice snags and she falls over coughing. Too many smokes. “Come visit with us for a minute!” The speaker, unsubtly sing-songing, is clearly relishing some innuendo. Not Dolly, but Mrs. Fowler, the lady from the historical society who leads the house tours. Jenny’s heart picks up speed; the body’s quick fear, always five beats ahead of the brain’s. Still, she keeps moving and hacking toward the front of the house until she comes into the dining room and catches sight of herself in the huge sideboard mirror. Gray-skinned and red-eyed and with hair like Medusa’s, matted up from the wind, sticking straight off her head. She looks cringing and hunted and ugly but she also looks like herself, an upsetting coincidence, and though she can’t now put particular words to it, her shock has something to do with existence, with the continuing presence of her through these worlds upon worlds. She wants to sit down, on the nearest solid surface, but all her hand finds is the shiny gnarled upright of a thronelike velvet chair, and it doesn’t seem right to sit there. Is it all right to sit on the floor? Her body gives a panicked twitch the way it used to when she was so miserably high on something William had given her that she was secretly sure she was dying, that each labored beat of her heart was its last, that her lungs were somehow blocked from filling properly—she would involuntarily twitch out of fear she was dead. She leans heavily against the thronelike chair until the room stops moving and the
n sneaks a look at her reflection again—no real change. She turns very carefully around and edges her way through the rest of the house to the porch with her eyes on the floor. Miss Dolly is perched in her usual chair, stiff-necked, looking slightly bemused. Mrs. Fowler is bent over the tea tray, but when Jenny comes out she nearly pounces on top of her. “You’ve had a visitor!” she trills. Jenny has long suspected that Mrs. Fowler’s ideas about her involve rock gardens and tea ceremonies and slender bamboo writing tools; that Mrs. Fowler, a connoisseur of the Arts of the Orient, is stubbornly awaiting from Jenny some endorsement of her, Mrs. Fowler’s, very own aesthetic gifts. Mrs. Fowler has previously attributed Jenny’s avoidance of her to mist-enshrouded Oriental remoteness. Now she seems delighted to have Jenny on the spot. She picks an envelope up off the tea tray and waggles it suggestively. “I knew you had an admirer. From the way he asked questions about you, I could just tell that he’d met you before. He was trying to be subtle but I’m a very canny reader of men! And he just now dropped by here again with some adorable story about wanting to ask your advice about having his house painted. We tried to make him stay for tea but he wouldn’t, he just scribbled you a little note and then asked for an envelope for it. I was just saying to Dolly, We’ve got hot tea right here, we ought to steam it open! For heaven’s sake I’m teasing you, Iris. I’d never. Are you all right? You look green. Have some tea. Sit right there and I’ll get you some tea and we can open the envelope.”