“It’s not necessary,” said Jade. “It’s mine.”
And so we dropped all talk of Susan Henry and the silence hovered over us, as watchful as a bird of prey. I longed to ask Jade to speak to me about her love with Susan but, temporarily at least, I’d forfeited the right. We ate dinner at Gertrude that night and Jade didn’t say a word at the table, though we ate with seven others. She went upstairs before me, and when I followed her up to the attic some fifteen minutes later, Jade was in bed and all the lights were off. I got undressed and lay next to her and after a while I put my hands on her breasts. She breathed heavily and didn’t stir; I knew she wasn’t really asleep.
The next morning we were hesitant with each other. It was our turn to do the weekly grocery shopping for the household. We shopped at a huge store called Price Chopper, and it didn’t seem like a piece of remarkable coincidence at all that halfway through our nervous shopping we were once again confronted with Susan Henry.
This time, Jade had no opportunity to flee. Susan appeared from around an aisle corner. She looked tall, tan, willowy, and toothy, rather like Joni Mitchell. Her straight hair was almost white; she wore a loose, pale blue dress and little sandals. Her long arms were bare and she wore turquoise and silver bracelets. Her eyes remained mysterious behind brown-tinted sunglasses.
“Beep beep,” said Susan, giving our cart a small jostle.
“Hello, Susan,” said Jade, her voice a metaphor for nights of cigarettes and grain alcohol.
“Hello,” said Susan. Her voice was lilting, a trifle cute—or trying to be. I could feel her effort and it drew me toward her for an instant.
Jade looked into Susan’s cart. “Still buying junk food?” she said.
“That’s right!” said Susan.
Jade shrugged. Then: “Susan Henry? David Axelrod.” Pointing to us as she said our names.
I offered my handshake. As romantic victor I felt it was my place. Susan looked at me as if the handshake were some archaic salute and then, nodding as if remembering, took my hand and shook it with a certain irony.
“Hello, David,” she said. She gave no indication of ever having heard of me.
“Hello,” I said. I thought the confident thing to do was smile, but I learned later from Jade that it looked more like a leer.
Susan focused her attention on Jade and began telling her something about a friend of theirs named Dina who’d just left for Cologne to study philosophy with someone who’d studied under Wittgenstein. The tone of the anecdote was admiring and ironic. The victory celebration dinner was described. Dina got drunk and spoke German all the rest of the night. Professor Asbury showed up for a while, moving gracefully on his aluminum walker. Et cetera. I wondered if the purpose of the story was to make Jade feel embarrassed at not being invited, but Jade didn’t seem at all upset.
Then, suddenly, the anecdote was over and my wandering attention was stopped short by the silence. Susan dropped her gaze for a moment. She looked jittery, with those kind of raw nerves that you get when you feel doomed to be misunderstood.
“What are the chances of our having a talk?” she said to Jade.
Jade didn’t answer right away—not out of indecision but as a way of acknowledging the difficulty of Susan’s gesture.
“We should talk,” said Jade.
“I’m going to Boston this evening,” Susan said. “For five days.”
Jade nodded. “To stay with Paula?”
“Yes.”
“Say hello, OK?”
“I’d like to have that talk before I leave,” Susan said. Her shyness had passed; she knew as well as I did that Jade would go along.
Jade almost turned toward me to see if that would be acceptable, but she stopped herself. “We can,” she said, with somber, almost corny judiciousness.
The situation struck me as fairly intolerable, but I did my best with it. I slipped my arm around Jade’s waist and pressed her to me for a moment. “Why don’t I finish up with the shopping?” I said. “I’m the best shopper anyhow.”
“OK. That would be fine,” Jade said. She sounded uncertain, formal. Susan was staring off down the aisle, hurtling her attention far away for the moment. She was refusing to look at me. I engaged Jade in a conversation about groceries—did Anemone like creamy or chunky peanut butter? What was the name of that delicious breakfast cereal Oliver had made for us the day before?—and finally Susan backed her cart up and announced she was going to finish her shopping and would meet Jade in a few minutes at the front of the store.
“Well, that’s Susan Henry,” Jade said.
“That’s all right. It had to happen. Running into her.”
“She seems so nervous. It’s not like her. Susan’s totally confident all the time. It’s scary seeing her like this.”
“Well, people change,” I said, trying to be inconsequential but revealing more of my own resentment than I wanted to.
“You’re upset about me having coffee with her?”
“Just as long as coffee is all,” I said—I actually thought I was being lighthearted in this. I produced a loopy grin.
“You said you’d never hound me,” said Jade.
“I won’t. You’re going with her, aren’t you?”
We had to move our shopping cart. We were standing in front of the salad oils. A young mother with pink curlers in her hair and a sleeping infant in a canvas pouch dangling from her back put a giant bottle of Wesson Oil in her nearly overflowing cart. The store manager’s voice had replaced the Muzak on the public address system; he was describing items on sale—chicken breasts, Brillo pads, Folger’s coffee, Duz detergent…
“I’ll meet you back at the house,” I said, taking control of our cart.
Jade nodded. She was about to walk away and pretend that we weren’t going through anything particularly difficult or strange. She still had a deep desire to pretend once in a while that we, like everyone else, were essentially separate. But she stopped herself and said, “I won’t be long.”
“You know what I think?” I said. “Here’s what: if the world ended right now, I’d be happy I got to spend as much time with you as I have. I’m not modern or sophisticated, but I really do want you to do what you want, what you think is best. Because when you’re most like yourself, something good always comes of it.”
I made it a point to be in the back of the Price Chopper when Jade and Susan left. Jade had given me the keys to Colleen MacKay’s Saab and when I thought of driving it home I had a flutter of apprehension. I knew how to drive but I didn’t have a license. I thought of someone accidentally hitting me from behind. The police on the scene. No license? Then the call into headquarters. Finding out about my parole violation. Thrown into jail. Sent back to Illinois. No chance even to call Jade.
Back at the house, nearly everyone was in the kitchen as the groceries were unpacked. It was a Saturday, still early but very warm. Anemone spooned the peanut butter into her mouth. Nina Sternberg prepared a twelve-egg omelette. The kitchen was golden with sunlight and rather quiet considering there were six of us in it. I realized everyone noticed I hadn’t returned with Jade. I was surprised; I didn’t think things like that were noted.
“Jade and I met Susan Henry at the Price Chopper,” I said to no one in particular. I was standing on a metal chair placing cans of baked beans and chicken stock onto the top shelf of a cabinet.
“Can I say something about Miss Henry?” Nina Sternberg said. “Miss Free Spirit borrowed fourteen dollars from me in March and now she hides behind trees when she sees me on campus.”
“Really?” said Anemone, her voice sounding as if she had a cleft palate from all the peanut butter. “She owes me money, too. Ten dollars.”
“Susan’s not too good with other people’s things,” said Colleen. “I loaned her my car and she brought it back with an empty tank.”
I felt weak and alone waiting for Jade and I was grateful when Colleen MacKay informed me that she was making sandwiches and I was invited to eat wi
th her and Oliver Jones on the front porch. She’d set up an old wicker table, covered with an old linen cloth, graced by a Narragansett beer bottle filled with irises. She’d made cheese and cucumber sandwiches and I complimented her on the elegance of her meal. I’d never eaten a cucumber sandwich before. I sat on a little rocking chair and Oliver and Colleen shared a wicker loveseat.
Colleen was short, stocky, with powerful swimmer’s legs and dark brown eyes that always seemed a little irritated, as if she’d just gotten out of a chlorinated pool. She dressed in overalls and checked shirts, or once in a while appeared in a dress of such stiff formality that even a stranger would have known she hadn’t chosen it herself. Oliver had moved into Gertrude three years before, when he was in love with a Stoughton student named Sara Richards. He was at that time already in his mid-twenties and long out of school—he’d dropped out of Exeter in his junior year and hadn’t been back to school since, though every so often he’d apply to do graduate work in Oriental Studies at someplace like Stanford or Harvard and wait for a letter of acceptance and a grant before deciding that his “un-schooling,” as he called it, was not yet completed. Sara Richards was killed in a ski lift accident not six months after Oliver moved in, and his staying on in the house was a perfect Oliver Jones mixture of the tragic and the lazy. He had had love affairs with the majority of the women who had passed through the house, though none of the affairs ever lasted long. These affairs usually began in commemoration of one of Oliver’s many personal days of remembrance: Mahler’s birthday; the discovery of Uranus. (That was one of Oliver’s comic bits, the homosexual astronomer discovering a planet and naming it after his lover’s asshole. “Do you know what that is in the sky, you wonderful little monster? That’s your anus.”) The night Oliver and Jade took each other to bed was the anniversary of Sara’s death, a stormy February night that turned all the windows in the house as opaque and white as gravestones. They remained lovers for a week and then one night Oliver got up in the dark complaining of a toothache. He went downstairs to make himself some warm milk and never returned to Jade’s bed again…
We sat on the porch, the three of us, eating our sandwiches and drinking iced tea, like people in the 1920s, smelling the flowers and enjoying the breeze, watching the bluejays on their headstrong, raucous rounds. The sky was a deep, mild blue, as smooth as the inside of a shell except for one patch of rippled white cloud. I did my best not to think of Jade and Susan and what they might be doing. I was suffering, but what mild agony it was—as long as I remembered how much worse, how infinitely more dreary and without boundaries my unhappiness had been before. Here I was eating Christian delicacies on a shady Vermont porch. Blue skies. Bluejays. Oliver’s sly blue eyes squinting at Colleen as she asked him if he enjoyed kyacking.
“David?” Colleen asked. “You here?” She mimed knocking at a door. “Hello?”
She leaned forward and put her small, slightly puffy hand on my knee. “If you’re worried about Susan Henry, I can tell you you don’t need to be, OK?”
“One always worries about the Susan Henrys of the world,” intoned Oliver. “Just as one worries about influenza or, let’s see, the steering column of your car snapping off.”
“She didn’t seem like a menace,” I said. “The thing is I thought she looked nice.”
“Nice?” Oliver said with a shrug, as if I’d used a discredited term.
“Nice-looking. As vulnerable as anyone else.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Colleen. She looked at her hand on my knee and smiled, as if she were pleasantly surprised to find it there. “You’re who matters to Jade.”
“I know that,” I said.
“I wonder sometimes,” Colleen said. She was glancing at Oliver now, and I could feel the core of her concentration turning toward him. “Men have a knack of being blind to what women feel about them. Men. I shouldn’t say men. People.”
Just then an orange VW pulled up in front of the house, with a black convertible top. I could see Jade’s head on the passenger side, the hair touching the top of her white collar. I couldn’t see further into the car but I knew Susan was facing Jade and they were talking and that the conversation was not an easy one. The little motor percolated and once Susan must have accidentally stepped on the accelerator because the engine raced for a moment, whirring like a power mower in tall grass.
“There. That didn’t take long,” said Colleen. She made a move as if to clear the lunch dishes away but thought better of it, and rested her hands on an arm of the wicker loveseat. She crossed her legs and peered out at the car, like a mother who’s been waiting past curfew for her child’s return.
“Is that Susan’s car?” Oliver mused. “It looks new. Jersey plates, too. I wonder…”
I felt a panic of shyness. It seemed incredible that the two of them could be so near. It was a warm day but the windows of the car were rolled up: I saw the white skid of a sticker that had been only partially peeled away and the dim swaying reflection of an upside-down tree. All of the jealousy I’d been avoiding since leaving the supermarket fell through me now, like suitcases off the luggage rack in a train that’s stopped too fast. My throat was tight, my fingers felt pink and cold. I stared at the car until my eyes glazed over. Oliver was going on about how it couldn’t have been Susan’s car, she must have borrowed if from someone, but who? I couldn’t pay attention, but I was glad he was talking.
Finally, the door on Jade’s side swung open and a few long moments later Jade got out of the car. There were dark streaks on her shirt where she’d sweated against the hot upholstery. Her brown cloth belt was twisted in back and I wondered, obscenely, if it had been like that in the morning. She closed the door. Susan pulled away—not with a roar, as I expected, but casually, hesitating before she swung into the middle of our street, even though there was no traffic. I watched the car leave. The back seat was filled with packages. A good sign: it meant they hadn’t gone back to Susan’s house.
Jade turned around. Expressionless. A passport photo. A memory. She was wearing jeans, Swedish clogs, a blue and white shirt with a white collar. The sun was perched on the chimney and shining directly in her eyes. She squinted toward the porch, noticing us for the first time.
Colleen waved.
Jade walked toward the house. The bushes were obese, making the sidewalk narrow; she ran her hand along the dark green brocade. Her gold chain necklace was gone. A Christmas gift from Susan. I rattled back the ice in my empty glass, tasting the old tea and the sugary sludge.
“Lunch on the porch?” said Jade, mounting the steps.
“A perfect day for it,” said Colleen.
Jade nodded. She looked stern, heartbroken and beleaguered, like an Army medic. “And minding my business, too,” she said.
“There’s no business like Jade’s business,” Oliver half-sang.
Jade made a false smile in Oliver’s direction and then walked by us and into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.
We were silent for a couple moments. The sound of bees. Me rattling the ice in my glass.
“She has a power to make people feel like assholes,” said Colleen, shaking her head at Oliver, comforting him.
“It’s a power only the victim can bestow,” Oliver said, crossing his long legs.
I got up and drifted lazily toward the door, still holding my glass. I placed my hand on the little cylindrical knob, but didn’t open the door. I stared into the cool shadows on the house through the sagging mesh of screen, looking at the mahogany banister, the mirrored hatstand, the lantern-shaped chandelier, all crosshatched as if objects in an etching.
“I’ll go see her,” I said, and opened the door. I could hear her footsteps going up the third flight of stairs to the attic, the clogs made so goddamned much noise. I took the steps two at a time, chasing quietly after her. There was a pocket of hot, humid air on the second floor, like those little galaxies of warmth we come upon in cool lakes. Someone was taking a shower in the second- floor bat
hroom, the rush of water, that sweet white noise. Sunlight ignited the pale turquoise bubbles in the half-circular window on the landing—Jade said the world looks like memory through old glass. The staircase was not continuous. I walked down the hall half the width of house before mounting the steps to the attic, narrow, steep steps, wooden and uncovered, almost black except for the third, a plywood replacement the color of wheat.
Jade was standing before the huge, diamond-shaped window set in the lowest part of the attic and overlooking our back yard—with its maple trees and makeshift kennels. She was leaning forward resting her hands on the window frame, her fingers almost touching the ceiling. She didn’t turn around when I closed the door behind me, didn’t even move, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake following her up. I walked halfway across our bedroom and then stopped, feeling awkward and imperiled. But I forced myself to continue, as I would have wanted Jade to if it had been me with my forehead against the window, and when I put my hands on her shoulders she turned quickly toward me and held me with such sudden fierceness that her strength broke my breath in two, snapping that column of air as if it were a twig.
We held each other. I heard the screen door slam downstairs. A bluejay flapped past the window, another, and then two more. I moved my hands down Jade’s back but that was all. She was perfectly still, embracing me with unyielding strength. We went to bed and made love for a very long while. We didn’t talk about Susan, or about anything. I had my mouth on her, pressing her with the insides of my lips and the back part of my tongue, where it is softer, and when she came I thought for a moment that I’d just imitated the way she and Susan made love. But that passed, quickly. I knew Jade was with me. Love, finally, isn’t blind, and when I poured out into her I could feel how much she wanted me. Weren’t we wonderful to each other when we made love? It was different from before, when we were beginning in Chicago. I think we were less happy. There was a death between us now and four years of separation, there were lovers and courts and hospitals and unsent letters and ten thousand hours of terror and doubt, but we were not less for it, just less happy. And perhaps not even less. It could have been that the light of consciousness struck our happiness from a different angle and it wasn’t smaller but less brilliant, and it cast a shadow now, a shadow of itself that was chilling.
Endless Love Page 35