“I don’t know why I call the people there crazy,” I said. “It’s not what they are. It’s a habit, a way of thinking about Rockville and keeping myself separate. You know what it is? All of us have two minds, a private one, which is usually strange, I guess, and symbolic, and a public one, a social one. Most of us stream back and forth between those two minds, drifting around in our private self and then coming forward into the public self whenever we need to. But sometimes you get a little slow making the transition, you drag out the private part of your life and people know you’re doing it. They almost always catch on, knowing that someone is standing before them thinking about things that can’t be shared, like the one monkey that knows where a freshwater pond is. And sometimes the public mind is such a total bummer and the private self is alive with beauty and danger and secrets and things that don’t make any sense but that repeat and repeat and demand to be listened to, and you find it harder and harder to come forward. The pathway between those two states of mind suddenly seems very steep, a hell of a lot of work and not really worth it. Then I think it becomes a matter of what side of the great divide you get caught on. Some people get stuck on the public, approved side and they’re all right, for what it’s worth. And some people get stuck on the completely strange and private side of the divide, and that’s what we call crazy and its not really completely wrong to call it that but it doesn’t say it as it truly is. It’s more like a lack of mobility, a transportation problem, getting stuck, being the us we are in private but not stopping, like those kids you’d know who would continue to curse and point and say the secret things even in school or in front of your parents. They wouldn’t know when to stop; they wouldn’t be the way people wanted them to be. And the thing that made it so terrible for us is that they’d be getting knocked out for doing things that we ourselves did—but we knew when not to do them, we could actually pretend we never ever did that kind of thing, and when it came down to the sticking point, we’d kick them in the ass just as hard as anyone else.”
“Like you and me,” said Jade. “How we used to be.”
“What do you mean? Crazy?”
“Living in our own world. Believing what we felt was separate from everything else. We couldn’t do anything except be together and nothing else was real.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, that’s crazy. And you just said it was, even you.”
“No,” I said, “not when we both believe it. Crazy people are alone and no one understands what they mean. But that’s not our way. We both know and it makes complete sense. It’s not crazy when you both believe it, when you make it true by living it. And other people believe it, too, remember. Believe it about us. Everyone who knows us, sees us together. We have that effect.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t?”
“Don’t talk about it as if it were still happening. It’s not. It’s a long time ago.”
“A long time ago. But now I’m with you and it doesn’t seem that long. I think I could forget all the time in between.”
Jade shook her head and lowered her eyes; her fingers were spread out on her lap, the thumbnails touching, the fingers rising and lowering. “Don’t,” she said. “You don’t know who you’re talking to. You’re walking in air.”
“I know you,” I said, and the statement took on a weight far greater than I expected, as if the simple claim had within it an emotional magnetism that attracted everything that was unknown, unspoken, everything that was vague and hoped for and dreaded as well. I told her that I knew her and the atmosphere between us became as charged as if I’d finally gotten the courage to lean over and kiss her. Yet I had no choice but to come more and more forward, like someone pursuing a ghost: either the vision would recede into light and dust or it would take on weight and substance.
“You don’t know me,” Jade said, finally. “You just remember me.”
“No. You can’t call it remembering. You remember something that’s past, over, but if you want to call it remembering, then I remember you the way you remember how to walk if you’re bedridden. I mean it’s not just looking back, it’s returning.”
“To being crazy together?”
“It wouldn’t matter.”
“To you.”
“To me.”
Jade closed her eyes and shook her head, as if to dislodge an image. “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” she said. “We shouldn’t. It’s painful, isn’t it?”
“For me?”
“That’s what I’m thinking—for you. It must be.”
“No. You?”
She shook her head. “It’s different for me. I’m not a part of this, not in the same way. You’ve been trying to hold on to what we had and I let it go. It’s one of those things when you drop it, it doesn’t bounce back, it just falls away, and falls and falls.”
“But inside.”
“What do you mean?”
“When you drop it, us, it falls but it falls inside you, so no matter how far away it seems, it still is there, close. We’re sealed, tighter than space capsules. We can’t really forget anything.”
“Oh, I think about you,” she said, in a voice that was meant to be casual.
“I think about you all the time,” I said. “When I was in that fucking hospital, and at my parents’, and now in my own apartment.”
“Where do you live?”
“Fifty-three eighteen Kimbark. Two and a half rooms. Second floor.”
Jade nodded. “Kimbark,” she said. “I miss the old neighborhood. We’re lucky to be from there, believe me. Especially when you come east. They really give you hell for being a midwesterner out here, but it helps if you’re from Hyde Park. You can keep up with things.”
“Like what?”
“Talk.” She shrugged. “Stuff. Is the Medici Coffeehouse still open?”
“I think so.”
“Good. When I was in Chicago last time they were saying it might close.”
“When was that? When were you in Chicago?”
“In the winter. The worst time. Worse than Vermont.”
“This winter?”
Jade nodded.
“But I was there!” I almost stood up.
“I know. I was there with a friend. I thought about calling you. I really did. I almost called your parents to find you. I dropped the dime in the phone but I changed my mind. When I hung up, the dime didn’t come back. Scared me.”
“You should have. It’s so terrible that this is the first time we see each other. Your father’s funeral.”
“It fits,” she said. And then, “Sorry. That was stupid. Anyhow, I said I was with a friend. It wouldn’t have worked out very well.”
“It wouldn’t have mattered. I mean it would be worth it. I’d see you under any circumstances.”
“We were on our way to California, Santa Barbara, her home town. So we stopped to see mine.”
“Susan.”
“What?”
“Her name is Susan. Keith told me about her. Your friend.”
Jade was silent, shrugged, her lips pressed tight, jaw tightened: she’d learned the silent warnings people give who don’t want to be asked certain questions. She had heard more than she could bear about Susan, about being with a woman and loving her. But the stab of jealousy I felt sunk into dead tissue: I’d bled the wounds a thousand times already and there was nothing more to feel and certainly nothing to say.
“Did you go to your house?” I asked.
Jade nodded. “Yes. It was hard but I owed it. It was a good thing, though. It didn’t look as bad in person as it does in dreams. In dreams it’s still on fire—just a little, like out of one window, or on the roof, but burning, always. It was good to see it as it really is. Have you?”
“For me it’s the opposite. It looks so much like it used to. It makes it harder, as if the whole thing comes close to never having happened. You know how it is when you play an event over and over in your mind and you see all the thi
ngs that could have happened that would have made everything so different?”
We went toward the silence, sitting close to each other.
“I wanted to write to you when you were in the hospital,” Jade said, looking away from me. “To see how you were, you know, and tell you where I was going. But everything was so confusing, then. And I thought I might make trouble for you. There was no right thing to do, for me. It seemed wrong to write you after what happened and it felt wrong not to. I don’t approve, you know, I don’t approve of letting things drift. I hate that. But—” and then her voice broke, with a soft, furry click, and the color came rushing into her face. She lowered her head and hunched her shoulders.
I took her hand. No. I laid my hand on top of hers and then, one at a time, I curled my fingers around the heel of her hand until they touched the outer border of her palm. “Tell me,” I said.
“I feel so alone,” she whispered. She’d begun to cry.
“You’re not. I’m with you. I’m always with you.”
Suddenly we were no longer next to each other. Jade was standing, walking across the room, seating herself in the armchair and blotting her eyes with the backs of her hands. “I’m in my senior year at Stoughton,” she said, crossing her legs. She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Next five months I’m going…” she trailed off for a moment; her tears had left a web of moisture on her voice. “Next five months is all independent study. I’ve got two pregnant golden retrievers, one blind. They’re both going to drop their pups in a few more days and I’m going to study how the litters develop, how the ones with the blind mother do compared to the ones with the normal mother. Then do a paper and that’s it.”
“Then you’ll be through with school?”
“Just about.”
“I go to Roosevelt.”
Jade made a face.
“I hardly go. But I have to be enrolled. I have to do a lot to show I’m back in the swim of things.”
“Swim of things? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It’s my parole officer’s phrase. Or maybe my mother’s. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For remembering what doesn’t sound like me, not forgetting.”
“I remember. We were sweet together.”
“We were,” I said.
“I know. It’s a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it’s true. It’s too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when we were too young to handle it.”
“Probably no one handles it very well. I mean it’s big, isn’t it? It’s like an emergency. All the rules are canceled.”
“Are they? Ever? I know that’s what we used to think, all that living in our own world stuff. But we were young. We’re still young but we were really young then. I don’t want to talk about it, anyhow. All that arrogance, craziness, and what it led up to. When I think about it. All the stuff that you said and I believed. I don’t even remember all the stuff I said and made you believe. I’m not blaming it on you. But it makes me feel strange to hear about it, like someone telling you everything you said when you were drunk.”
“I haven’t changed,” I said.
“There’s no way, it’s impossible.”
“There’s nothing I said then that I couldn’t say now. I want to, to tell the truth. But I’m afraid. Not of exposing myself because I know that you know I love you—”
“I don’t know that. How can I know that?”
“I love you. I still love you. I love you.”
“It’s an idea. You’ve held on to it.”
“No. It’s real. It’s the only real thing. It stands by itself and it hasn’t changed. Don’t be afraid. You don’t have to do anything about it.”
“It’s not that. It’s just I know it can’t be true. It’s been too long and too much has changed.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“Then you need to believe that,” Jade said. She folded her hands onto her lap and then squeezed them together so tightly that the color left them for a moment. “You need to pick the thread up where it was broken. Maybe as a way of forgiving yourself for what happened. At the end.”
“No.”
“You don’t love me, David. I never came to see you.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I never wrote you.”
“You couldn’t.”
“But when you got out. Then.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s something that can’t be changed.”
“It can be.”
“No.”
“When you give your love to other people. When you find out you can feel the same way about them.”
“I didn’t give love to anyone else.”
“But when you try to.”
“No. Never. There’s one girl, a sculptor, I see her now and then. I just fell into it through friends but we don’t try, we don’t touch.”
Jade shook her head.
“You’re all I care about,” I said. “No. And me. The person I am when I’m with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I’m with you.”
I stood up. The blood came up into my skull like a wave splashing on the shore. The room softened, moved a little; I didn’t know why I was on my feet. I was touching my shirt, poking my fingers in the spaces in between the buttons, discovering the little pool of sweat that had gathered in my chest’s hollow. “We’re together again,” I said. I heard my voice as if it came from another part of the room, perceived it with a kind of woozy clarity: its texture, timbre, its faintly hypnotic monotone.
“I may as well tell you,” Jade said. Teasing?
“What?”
“I knew it would be too late to catch that bus. I was counting on you asking me to stay. For a while.”
I nodded. I walked toward her. The room was so small. I was already next to her, but I still needed to move. I stepped back, forward, and then, finally, down on my knees. Kneeling before her broke open a deep, unexpected store of feeling; I felt it spreading within me like warm gel. I took her hands and held them on her lap.
“Is this all right? “I asked.
She fixed her eyes onto mine. I could see her sinking into her feelings and she knew she held the silence between us—a silence that sung in perfect pitch—could hold it forever and I would not interrupt it, would not lose faith and question it. I held on to her and her pulse was so powerful that I felt its reverberations in her hand.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s all right.”
I didn’t say anything. I lowered my eyes for a moment and then looked back at her.
“I love you,” I said.
She leaned forward and I tugged at her hands until she was out of the armchair and kneeling, her bent knees touching mine. We embraced and I felt a sudden terror, more total and enormous than any I’d ever felt before. It filled me as the sound of an explosion would fill a room and then just as suddenly it was gone. I had let go of my past and it receded from me like an open balloon. We lay on the worn smooth mustard rug, as clumsy and disjointed as invalids who have fallen out of their beds, and I was no longer holding on to anything at all except what was directly before me, except for Jade. Like a horse breaking from the gate, my life had begun.
“You’ve got to hold me,” Jade whispered. “I feel like I’m just about to faint but like I’ve taken a dexadrine too. I’m going in so many directions. Seeing you. Pappy. God. It’s too strange. I can’t even begin to explain it all, but if you’d only hold me. I broke up with my friend over the weekend. Susan. It was ending for a while but the camping trip finished it. I left her in a place called the Green Mountain Café. I stuck my spoon in a bowl of disgusting oatmeal and hitched home, seventy-five miles. The message to call Mom. And then finding out and then seeing you and being here. No. Really hold me. Not just a little.” She squeezed the back of my hair as if wringing it out.
I held her as tight as I could; it didn’t feel as if my arms had much strength. She arched her back
and pressed herself against me. Her head was on a dark stain in the carpet that someone else had left. It surprised me for a moment to notice that, but with Jade I always noticed things that were outside of us—cracks in the wall, the smell of wet maples coming through the window screens—and by registering them I made everything a part of us. It had been the same for Jade. We were both of us impossible to distract. Our consciousnesses, having found their perfect human keys, swung wide open and admitted everything. I stroked the side of her face and pressed my mouth to hers.
I could feel she had kissed many times since our time together. Her lips strange. Flat where they had once protruded. Parted much wider, not out of the moment’s impulse but out of newly acquired reflexes. I wondered if my own lips betrayed how many times I had kissed the pillow, how many times, lost in fantasy, I’d tasted the back of my own hand. I expected no praise or privilege for my long fidelity. It gave me no moral advantage. The fact was I hadn’t been tempted, hadn’t been capable. A kind of hysteria, perhaps. A chance to realize some monastic impulse, the negative erotic drive, the inevitable polarity of my conscious, ceaseless yearnings. Looked at another way it was all quite laughable. Or wilful: a temper tantrum. A chance to sit on the jury in my own trial. Almost never—never—masturbated. It was lunacy and I’d known it all along. The doctors, in this instance, were absolutely right. Dr. Clark had spoken to Rose and Arthur about my need for sexual outlet. Embarrassed, they kept it to themselves. A decent impulse, their respect for my privacy, but perverted by their shame. And Dr. Ecrest going so far as to threaten to terminate treatment unless I began to release my sexual energies. How I hooted at that one! “Now, let me get this straight. If I don’t see you, it’s back to Rockville, right? So what you’re saying is that if I don’t jerk off, you’re going to have me locked up. Right?” I saved my jissom as a prisoner might hoard scraps of cloth—the edges of sheets, shirt collars, cuffs—with the idea of one day making a long cotton chain and lowering himself from the only unprotected stretch of wall.
Endless Love Page 29