Suddenly Jade’s body went taut. She straightened her back and a space between us snapped open like a parachute. She rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling with the concentration of a child watching her life reflected in the moving clouds.
“I feel like I’m being pushed,” she said.
“By me?”
“No. Not you. Not only you. Everything. One thing I’ve learned about myself is it’s easy for me to forget who I am. I let things happen. I go along. It’s wrong.”
“I don’t know.”
“It is.”
She scrambled up. I remained still and looked up at her. I suddenly wanted to smile. What had we been doing on the floor? It made no sense—I was encouraged by our lack of thought. I was sure a quotient of mindlessness was required if we were to reconnect.
Jade opened her nylon bag and extracted a little brown envelope, such as banks use to give you your change when you cash your paycheck. I lifted myself up on my elbows and then stood. Jade squeezed the edges of the envelope so it opened into a kind of cup and she peered in.
“Look,” she said, thrusting it toward me. “What’s left.”
It was a small portion of Hugh’s ashes. They were coarse, like broken pieces of peanut brittle. Not altogether black. Silvery and white here and there.
“Everyone took some,” said Jade. “You know, like favors at a wedding. We’re all supposed to scatter our share in some place Pappy loved. I’m supposed to bring mine to the Green Mountains, even though he never went there. But he loved mountains, especially the Alps. Ingriďs throwing hers all over New Jersey and keeping a little in a leather pouch in her van. Keith’s bringing some to Cambridge. Uncle Robert’s bringing really a lot down south with him. Isn’t it the stupidest thing?”
“No. It’s all right.”
Jade watched me look at the ashes and when my gaze ticked away from them, she released the pressure from the sides of the envelope and withdrew it.
“Everything’s happening at once. Ending this long-term thing with my friend. You know, even seeing my family, I mean just on a nothing occasion, takes its toll. One at a time is hard. In a group—murder. Really. It takes so much out of me. I have to fight for everything. I feel so thick in the past. Everything’s exhausting. The family politics don’t stop for death, you know. If anything, they get more nasty and frantic, like a chicken running around with its head cut off. And now you. Of all times, right? When I can handle it least. Everything happens at the wrong time—especially between me and you.”
“I’m not rushing you. I know what I want, to be near you, but I know it’s not simple. I act like I don’t know anything except what I want, but I do know more than that.”
“I don’t feel pushed by you,” Jade said. “I don’t even know if you can reach me yet. You understand? And I’m exhausted. I can feel little parts of me going to sleep. I’m going to call Vermont Transit and they’re going to tell me there’s not another bus until about seven next morning. And then I’m going to have to go to sleep. We’re going to talk about one of us sleeping in this chair, or camping out on the floor. But that’s not going to happen. We’re both going to fall asleep in that double bed and it makes no sense for it to be happening like this. If we are going to reinstate our friendship, won’t this put another hex on it? I was wrong to stay. We should have arranged to meet some other time.”
“I will sleep on the floor,” I said. “I do that a lot anyhow.”
“Why?” Jade asked.
“Sometimes I can’t stand being in a bed.”
“I’ve got to sleep.” She closed the envelope and pushed her portion of Hugh’s ashes into her overnight bag with the impatience of filing a bill you have no intention of paying but don’t dare throw away. It was how she treated the mimeographed multiple-choice test papers she’d done poorly on: Jade’s talents as a student were ones of accumulation and exposition; she had no skill for filling in the blanks. An associative intelligence, deep, transforming, but not quite specific. She saved the examinations to study her mistakes, shoved them into a sideways folder at the bottom of her little yellow desk. A hoarder of debts, mapping out elaborate voyages of self-improvement. Evelyn Woods Speed Reading. The articles razored out of Scientific American. Twenty-five Ways to a Better Memory. Sprigs and leaves gathered on walks and stored in a cigar box for future identification. A collection of snapshots, ticket stubs, matchbooks, and menus shoved into a Woolworth’s bag with her diary, along with scraps of paper inscribed with key words—“Sammy’s stolen bicycle,” “examining breasts,” “rainwalk”—and all waiting for the ideal time to be inscribed in those empty oblong pages: her life as it happened, viewed from the outside. Her great task was to build an intellectual bridge from the universe of insight and feeling to the universe of quantifiable, reportable facts. To be a little more like Keith, able to rattle off her reasons one two three. She could have lived indefinitely in the fertile haze of her instincts and perceptions, but she wanted to learn the outward signals. She was tired of people not realizing exactly how rich and complex her mind was.
But now she was a senior at a good college. She must have learned any number of mental tricks, pared down her thoughts, organized them. Learned how to present herself. Learned how to pass.
She zippered up the bag and slung it over her shoulder. I had a moment’s panic that awakened a bit of cloddishness in me: I thought of throwing myself against the door. But she turned away from me, away from the door out, and faced the bathroom.
“I’ll change in there,” she said.
“OK,” I said. “That’s fine.” I tried to make my voice light but I don’t think I got very close.
She hefted the bag once or twice as if she could tell by the weight if everything was in place.
“You want to use the bathroom first?” she said.
“No. Go ahead.”
She shrugged, as if I’d refused to take her business advice. “OK,” she said, “but I’ll be a while.”
I was on the floor, so rigid that most of my spine did not touch the rug. In my underwear, covered by a thin, butterscotch- colored blanket (butterscotch-Butterfield: the meaningless association Ping-Ponged in my head) and a cushion from the armchair serving as my pillow. I left the two real pillows on the bed for Jade—her luxury. When I’d slept nightly with her we needed three pillows, the third for her to embrace in those private, essential hours of sleep when her back was to me and her life was as closed as an oyster. Sometimes she kept the pillow pressed to her small breasts, but most often it ended tucked between her thighs. That third pillow was often hard to keep hold of; the other kids appropriated it for their hard, monastic beds. A way of stealing our magic, subtly defacing us. Coal- dusted hands reaching through the iron grille and swiping irises from the rich man’s lawn. “I bought that pillow with my own money,” Jade had fairly whined, patrolling the house in her robe and not being as careful as she could have been to keep it belted. Even then I realized the teasing arrogance of much that she did, but I never minded: I’d helped to make it possible by whisking her into happiness. Changed her position in the family from one of ambiguous status to a wild card.
Jade got into bed and noticed both pillows were there. I saw her notice. There was always a physical response to information: a nod, a blink, a subtle realignment of posture. But then I thought that she’d made something different out of it. She guessed that I’d left the pillow there because I planned sooner or later to work myself into bed.
I’d folded down the blanket and smoothed the border of sheet so it would look like the bed was new. The lamp with its little tea-colored shade was on next to her bed. Its switch was made to look like an old-fashioned farmhouse key.
When she first came out of the bathroom she was wearing a light green robe, the color of her eyes. She’d walked right by me without pausing, swiftly, as if she needed to cover a great distance. I had my hands behind my head, flexing my biceps so they’d look reasonably large. I tried not to follow her obviou
sly with my eyes. Her feet looked brutal: hiking boots, crosscountry skis, inexpensive tennis shoes all had squeezed, reddened, and allowed her feet to callus and spread.
I realized when she slipped into bed that I’d placed my head in such a way that even though I was camped like a dog at the foot of the bed I could still enjoy a perfect angle of her face. As long as she came to rest on the side of the bed the lamp was on—which she did.
She tucked the edge of the pillow into the space between the mattress and the headboard. That hadn’t changed. Then she turned off the light. The room didn’t go particularly dark; it was maybe 70 percent dark. It was lit by the lights of the city, the dome of diffusion that was above the city, and my own desire to see. Jade unbuttoned her robe and took it off. She wore pajamas underneath, pajamas cut in an Oriental style. They looked wet and shiny in the weak light. It was a modest gesture, finishing her undressing in the bed under cover of darkness, modest and unnecessary, and it gave evidence of a certain kind and intensity of awareness—awareness of me, that is.
She let the robe drop to the floor and I went dizzy with hope.
“Well, good night,” she said, after a few moments.
I didn’t want to say good night; the word would draw the curtain on the evening. “Sleep deeply,” I said. I was surprised to hear myself say that, disconcerted. Sleep deeply? A reasonable phrase but foreign to me. And seeming to hold within it—now that I thought about it—some lascivious little worm. Sleep deeply and I’ll undress you without your knowing it.
I could sense Jade musing, wondering if there was something more she could say. I thought I heard her lips part; she shifted in bed as if preparing to speak. But then, quite suddenly, I felt her intelligence leave the room like a cat out of the window. She was asleep. The air conditioning hummed louder, making Jade’s breaths inaudible. More of my backbone was touching the floor now and I began to relax into a heavy, sullen sleeplessness. She’d left me with shocking abruptness and I would have liked to chase after her in sleep. But I seemed bound to wakefulness and what I had to do was decide what kind of insomnia it would be: a vacant, open-eyed cousin to sleep or a clumsy, distorted version of waking. It was a question of coming forward and making the most of it or lagging back as close to the border of sleep as I could, hoping to accidentally fall in.
My thoughts raged. I experienced myself as if I were living before the invention of language. Emotions spurted up but I couldn’t name them and without a name they couldn’t be modified or controlled. Emotions presented themselves as colors, as spasms, indecipherable voices: if I’d lived at an earlier time, I would have thought I was possessed; I would have strained to decode the instructions of my surging blood, just as ancient warriors bent their ears toward white rivers to learn their orders.
I sat up and wrapped my arms around my knees. My breath felt strained, as if the familiar passageways had been removed and replaced by bright aluminum tubing, perfectly unobstructed but a little too small. Clear thought returned in the form of lavish self-pity. I thought, Here she is after so much time and here I am on the floor. It felt as if this night—with the dawn already sailing in over the Atlantic—would be our only time together, my last chance. That I had read it wrong. Some daring had been required of me and I hadn’t figured it out. A lunge. Or perhaps strategy. Flirtation, accusation, cartwheels of wit. My opinions on death. The last role I wanted was that of the woeful tenor standing on the apron of a dark, empty stage, clutching at the brocade of his antique costume.
I wanted to stand up, walk to the bedside, and gaze at her sleeping face. But what if she awakened? A scream of fright? Or perhaps she’d grab me and pull me on top of her.
My desire was heavy, feverish. I knew if I wasn’t careful I would elevate my instincts, appoint them to the command.
People make fun of Catholics for confessing to impure thoughts but my own thoughts, reflecting my overcooked passions, were worth confessing to. I would have liked to neatly categorize them into Sin, to gather them in like that and hand them over to someone else. To be absolved. A father confessor.
I had none, of course. The closest I came to a spiritual life was the worship of the very feelings that plagued me now, that closed in on me the way the body does when your temperature is soaring.
Confession. The word stood up in my consciousness, like a monster, a ghost, and every other thought shrank back. Then slowly this one puzzling, unfamiliar word stripped itself down, casting off layers of meaning and association, all the moldy trappings that made it an idea, reflex, a duty. And the more the word confession divested itself of familiar meanings, the larger and brighter it stood within me. I felt I was being told to do something I had no idea how to begin. I couldn’t even tell if my impulse to submit myself to the blind ritual of confession was evidence that somehow in the middle of all this I had taken a turn and wanted to be a different sort of person, or if it meant something much less important—a need to relieve the intense moral pressure, a way of talking myself out from beneath the rock that sat on my chest. Confession as negotiation; confession as show of good faith. Even the Communists had a form of it. They called it self-criticism. You discussed your mistakes and promised your friends you’d do better. They looked at you unpleasantly but forgave you—unless you really fucked up, in which case you were out. My father told me he never went in for self- criticism; he assumed his ideological shortcomings were discussed behind his back anyway. But Rose watched her politics like a sentinel, to the point where her detailed, minute self- criticisms became an expected part of every meeting and came close to becoming a kind of joke. (Rose confessing to white chauvinism and proving her point by reporting she’d given her seat on the bus to a Negro woman who was younger than her.)
Why had my father bothered to tell me that my mother was so committed to the act of self-criticism? Had he wanted to warn me not to be fooled by her sometimes monolithic nature? To remember that behind her small, set face, with its deep stubborn grooves and injured eyes, was a self that never lost the habit of measuring and doubting itself. That she was a critic of others but tougher on herself, etc. Or was he inviting me to share his ironic perceptions of her? He seemed to be fooling with his image of her, just as children watching a color TV will fiddle with the controls when they become bored with the show, turning the faces vermilion, royal blue, orange.
Without a priest or any ceremonies, my own father was my last possible confessor—but what deliverance from sin could I expect from that burly, compulsively kind man? Speaking to him about myself was like falling onto a huge sack of oats, neither comforting nor hard. Arthur’s view of the world alternated between the grandiosely cosmic and the frigidly empty; either we lived in the warm pouch of a universe that loved us wholly and mysteriously or we were simply configurations of protein and water bubbling for an instant in the long curved beaker of time. In any case, judgment was impossible. The Butterfields were for you by examining and ordering your gestures, like cards in a game of solitaire. Arthur’s mode of acceptance was flamboyantly blind. He believed in my fate as a man of passion and principle and wasn’t concerned in amassing data for a proof.
A good boy! A fine son! Oh the joy! Every now and then he would stare at my face to see if I was beginning to look like him. I never came to resemble him but it was no cause for jealousy because I didn’t look like Rose either. “He looks like a Russian—but an aristocrat,” my father used to say of me. It was better, finally, that I resembled no one. He protected me from his fears of his own mediocrity and in the process withheld all of his majesty as well: the lump in his throat as he faced the scowling jury; the tears over the Rosenbergs; losing at poker with his new friends in the Army because they were destined to lives of manual labor. He considered himself corny, coarse, he was ignorant of the beginnings of his feelings and staggered beneath their weight when they were full grown. It was his wish that I not know him. He was someone to depend on, to take my nourishment from, someone to teach me language and rudimentary manners—the id
ea of fairness; the habits of pity. But not to know him: he quarantined me from his deepest self as if from a contagion, convincing himself that somehow he was a rooster who’d been given the responsibility of teaching a hawk how to fly.
He wanted to pass the torch—the torch of romance and heedlessness, the torch that could never ignite in his own hands. And when it was ablaze he shyly stole it back from me. He held it now, he displayed it like mating plumage before Barbara Sherwood, he waved it in Rose’s face and accused her of being afraid of it. How could I confess to him? The process of his blind love had been reversed: now at this relatively late stage he had finally seized upon the idea that he and I were the same sort of people, and since he had never been less capable of judging himself than he was now, I could certainly not expect anything but the most partisan view of me. Now that we had, in his mind, fused into one person and that person was the man he had always wanted to be, I operated with a moral blank check—my mere signature was good anywhere.
Someone was blowing on his automobile horn, that shave and a haircut ditty, as if 34th Street was Elm Street in some midwestern summer town, teenagers out for a night of warm beer and starlight, calling for the class jock. Beep beep. Yo Ed-diiiiie.…
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