Finally, we fell asleep but it was still light when we woke. The dogs Jade was studying for her senior thesis were yipping out back. The reflection of the leaves moved like fast, cool water on the wooden plank floor.
“I’m sorry if that made you scared today,” Jade said.
“It did. But not too much.”
“It’s funny, because when we were shopping today, I was thinking how of all the things about being with you again shopping is the thing I like the most. I like doing something so normal and everyday with you and, well, you know, to be going absolutely nuts inside because it’s you and me doing it. It’s like a great imposture. Wheeling our cart around looking as common as can be and knowing that in an hour’s time we can be back here completely naked and doing something truly savage.” She reached over and ran her hand over my chest. “I like just doing everyday things with you.”
“I do too.”
“What do you like about being with me?” Jade asked after a while.
“Everything.”
“No. You know what I mean. Specifically what do you like.”
“I like watching you get dressed, especially in the morning when you’ve just had a shower and you’re off to go somewhere. I like the way you button your shirt in front of the mirror and watch your own fingers as you do it. Then you tuck it into your pants and smooth out all the material. You give yourself a nice feel-up before you go out. And if your hair’s wet, it’s even better. You pull it up in little clumps, shake it, so it’ll dry, I guess, with real brisk professional motions like a hairdresser. Everything done with such energy. You seem so incredibly on.”
That evening we went out to supper—my treat. I was making ninety dollars a week at the Main Street Clothiers, selling, among other things, the same Redman Pants I’d been picketing other stores for selling. It did nip at my conscience, but I couldn’t live off Jade and the others and jobs, as usual, were scarce. I did my best to talk customers out of buying Redman Pants, but as much as I wanted the union to prevail, it was one of the very least of my worries. Once I sent ten dollars to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers with an unsigned note wishing the Redman workers well and asking that my contribution be put in a workers’ relief fund, or strike fund. But after sending it I felt real panic. I felt somehow the money would be connected to me, the disappeared picket boy. The postmark deciphered. The police called…I knew it was terribly unlikely, bordering on impossible, but it was unendurable to have the false imagination of such a disaster whip through me. Anyhow, Jade and I went to dinner at a place called Rustler’s, one of those restaurants that seem to encircle Stoughton, with heavy furniture, thick carpets, hamburgers, steaks, and pork chops, and a huge salad bar. Lights hung from a wagon wheel; the water glasses were dark gold; the menu was shaped like a covered wagon. It was for tourists, I suppose, the idea being that as soon as city people get out into the country they think about cowboys. Jade and I liked to eat there because we knew we’d never see anyone she knew. We ordered the cheapest things on the menu and it gave us the right to return as many times as we wanted to the salad bar and to eat more beets, onion rings, and canned chick peas than we would have under any other circumstances.
“Can we afford dessert?” Jade asked at the end of the meal.
I was still so moved when she said “we,” especially when she said it casually.
“I want some of that apple pie with the melted cheese on it,” she said.
“OK. Me too. Coffee?”
“No. Milk. A cold glass of milk. I want to be twelve years old.”
I smiled. Twelve years old. A virgin. No: a “technical” virgin. Making pocket money staging nude dances for Keith’s suddenly numerous friends. Mascara on the down between her legs. Second prize in a citywide children’s painting competition sponsored by the Tribune and bursting into tears at the awards ceremony. Nabbed at Kroch’s and Brentano’s for stealing Fanny Hill. Where was I then? I could have been with her; we could even have been lovers. It would not have been wrong. I needed her then, not like now, but I needed her. I was living in the hush of my family. She was twelve. Keith had been caught in her bed, both of them in their underwear. Hugh dragged Keith out of the room by his hair. Jade was screaming, Hugh was bellowing, and Keith’s face had that inanimate horror of a victim in a news photo.
The waitress appeared, dressed as a cowgirl. I ordered our desserts. The women in the elevator, I remembered, had been dressed as cowgirls, the elevator that had brought Jade to my room at the Hotel McAlpin.
“I like this restaurant,” I said.
“I do too. Even though all the waitresses flirt with you.”
“They do not.”
“Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, poor naïve boy. Even tonight our waitress was leaning over you.”
“A leaning violation?”
“I’m serious! Her breast was almost touching you. That kind of stuff’s always going on.”
“I wish.”
“You don’t need to wish. They all know, everyone does.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re you, who you are. Mr. Fuck-Machine.”
The waitress came with our pie, a coffee for me, and milk for Jade. She got nowhere near me as she placed the cups and plates on the table.
“You see?” Jade said, when the waitress left.
“See what?”
“Oh, you’re just going to argue. You don’t see what I see. And it’s just as well. I need a nonegotistical man. They’re hard to find, you know.”
“I’m not nonegotistical.”
“Pretty much.”
“Not at all. No matter what happened, and no matter what people said about me, I wanted to be with you.”
“That’s not egotism.”
“Yes it is. Because I thought I deserved it. Me and no one else.”
“You’re going to make me cry.”
“Why?”
“Because you touch me where it’s always tender.”
It was dark and starless when we left Rustler’s. The parking lot was right off the highway and you had to nose your car out very carefully because everyone drove fifty or sixty miles per hour and there were no signs or lights to help you. It astonished me that something as planned and official as a restaurant parking lot could be so dangerous; it seemed to mean that life itself was so essentially dicey that there was a limit to how much you could do to make it safe. The high insecty whine of the cars speeding by. The smell of grass, fresh tar. The Beach Boys on the car radio. Jade at the wheel, waiting for an opening in the traffic, a place for us. Her eyes were hooded from the beers we had with dinner—she had no capacity for alcohol. Passing headlights cast strips of white across her face. Jade pressed the accelerator, I prepared for sudden death, and then we were out in traffic, our tires whistling.
It was a five-mile drive home. An old song by Bobby Hebb called “Sunny” came on the radio and I was going to ask Jade if she remembered it, but then I told myself of course she did. I was thinking about Susan Henry, with more ease now because no matter what happened it couldn’t have made much difference, but I was thinking about her all the same. In the restaurant, I’d wanted to ask Jade if she’d ever eaten there with Susan. Ridiculous question. So annoying and without importance. I suppressed it, but it hovered within me, like a sneeze.
Jade turned off the radio when an ad for joining the Army came on.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about being with Susan today and you knew it.”
“Was it hard?”
Jade nodded. “Very.”
I felt my stomach turn.
We moved off Route 2, drove past an abandoned paper mill, and headed toward home. Jade was driving much too fast for narrow streets. It wasn’t like her. She was a great believer in highway safety; she wouldn’t even turn the ignition if you didn’t fasten your safety belt. I thought about watching the back of her head when she was sitting in Susan’s car, about Susan knocking into our shopping cart, and then an
image, vaguely sexual, began to take shape in my mind—hands touching, an embrace. I let it recede. Jade continued to speed along. Her jaw was set forward; she seemed deliberately unblinking; her arms were straight and stiff. I didn’t want to look at her because I didn’t want to know what she was thinking. I put my hand out the window and cupped my fingers. The force of the sweet night air as we sped homeward was forceful, oppressive, something alive pressing against me.
“She frightened me,” Jade said, suddenly. She touched the cigarette lighter with her fingertips and then grabbed the steering wheel again.
“How?”
“By what she thinks. About us. Me. It’s so hard with Susan because she’s always so convinced she’s right. And she is right a lot, of course. She really is perceptive. But sometimes she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, only you can’t tell because she says it in the same super-convinced way. She takes aim and charges right at you, and if you resist it at all, she pushes that much harder. She’s like Keith in a way. I mean she remembers everything. And she can take power with it. Keith doesn’t do that. Keith will throw it in your face if he thinks you’re trying to hurt him, but he doesn’t try to take power. He doesn’t want it, but Susan does.”
“What did she say?”
“A lot of things. But the thing that made me…I don’t know. Here’s what: She says I use you.”
“For what?”
“It’s complicated. No. Not that. It’s just hard to say. It all has to do with my fucked-up family and my feelings about them. She thinks I use you against my family,” Jade said. “But in the most awful way. To really destroy them. She says you were acting as my agent when you set the fire. She says it was really me.”
“No. It was me.”
“I know. But it was you doing what I wanted. Reading my mind. We always do that anyhow. We always know each other right down to the bottom. I wanted something to happen and you made sure it did. I could have seen it in you from the beginning, the possibility. The way you charmed yourself into the middle of everything and then went wild. You know, even the fact that you could virtually become a member of the family galled me, if you want to know. There always seemed to be room for one more and in the meanwhile we got nothing. They took you right in—Ann did. And still does. But there was no room. There may have been room for me to have a lover but there wasn’t any place for a new Butterfield. And that’s what you were becoming. And I knew you would and I also knew that sooner or later the whole thing would explode.”
“I don’t think you knew that. You’re blaming yourself.”
“I think I did. And I wanted it. Even after it happened. I felt so strange. Grief and all that, but mixed up. I was glad, I think, that the family fell apart. I didn’t know it would end the family, though I should have figured that out, I see now. But for a while I think I was genuinely relieved. The way you are when you finally say the most horrible thing that’s ever wormed its way into your heart, or when you finally lose your favorite ring. The worst was out. The worst.”
“Is this Susan talking or you? You sound convinced.”
“I’m not convinced. I’m spinning. And you being in New York when Hugh got killed doesn’t make it any easier, for obvious reasons. It’s like you were the agent of my murderous spirit again.”
I looked out the window. We’d just sped past our house. Every light was on except in the attic. I turned the side-view mirror and watched the house get smaller. A few hundred feet later, the blacktop turned to gravel; we were heading out toward where a few of the area’s last real farms were. The tires hit the gravel, lifting a spray of stones that bounced and splattered against Colleen’s car.
“Go easy,” I said. But of course all that was really on my mind at that moment was the desire to tell Jade as much of the truth as I knew about Hugh’s death. The pull of that confession was nearly hypnotic, like the urge to leap that sometimes overcomes you when you are on the balcony of a very high building; only now it didn’t seem as if destruction was inevitable, or that it would take a miracle to save me, a violation of nature’s law. It seemed that if I spoke truthfully now I would be doing what was best for both of us, drawing us closer, silencing that persistent hum of ambiguity that droned always between us.
We drove past the growing corn, an indistinct mass in the heavy night. A small farmhouse with the light shining behind gingham curtains. The piercing, suspenseful twitter of crickets. The last of the fireflies, their phosphorescence bleeding into the humid blackness. The gravel was gone now and the road was packed dirt, with ridges and holes. Jade was still pushing fifty and the old Saab rattled like a trayful of china. We came to a fork in the road and Jade veered to the right. She drove up another few hundred feet on a road that was getting progressively rougher and then suddenly she stepped on the brakes and we lurched to a stop. There was a cornfield on one side of us and on the other a vast, plowed field, which rolled gently toward a distant farmhouse, its tiny windows golden and alive. Accidentally, she let her foot off the clutch and the car bucked forward a few times and stalled out.
“I don’t know where I’m going,” said Jade. She leaned forward and rested her head on the steering wheel.
“It doesn’t matter.”
We were silent for a while and someone turned up the volume on the night around us. Then Jade said, “Sometimes I think we have an unhappiness all our own waiting for us. In some love affairs the people do each other in, but I really do think that we’re too in love to do that, too much the same person, and what will do us in will be something quite a bit larger than just you or me. It’s the special unhappiness of mutual love and it really scares the shit out of me.”
I suppose I should have said something to the contrary, comforted her. But we believed we were deep enough to face anything, any sort of death, any shadow of fate. Yet even as I nodded slowly I felt a tightening inside, as if a doctor had just given me a fatal diagnosis.
“It’s still possible for me to believe that it won’t happen,” I said. “And in the meanwhile…”
“In the meanwhile.”
“Well, yes. In the meanwhile we can be together and I think we can promise each other all the future that’s ours.”
“Susan scared me, she really did.”
“People like us are easy to scare. We’re out on a limb.” I moved closer to her but we were in bucket seats and the gearshift was between us. Jade put her head against the steering wheel again and when I touched her knee a teardrop, singular and warm, struck the back of my hand.
I knew I wouldn’t tell her about Hugh and I knew also that if justice had anything to do with the unfolding of the human universe, then I no longer quite deserved to be with Jade. Loving her was not the perfect right of my birth but something I would have to get away with. And if love is a bridge that connects time to eternity, then I would have to slip across in some kind of disguise.
I wonder what—exactly—Jade was feeling then. It must have been something similar. She took my hand and pressed it to her, hard. “I want to make love,” she said. “Now. Here. We can do that, can’t we? Not in the car. In that field. I want to feel you. I want to be delirious again. David.”
“I want to,” I said, with my heart beginning to break.
16
Jade was going to be in a graduation class of one. Once she finished her senior thesis and made up the three courses she had dropped during her sophomore and junior years, it would be December. I don’t know what plans had been made for awarding her her diploma—probably it was just going to casually arrive in the mail sometime later, delivered to an address she no longer occupied. We didn’t know what Jade was going to do after graduation and we never really talked about it, except as fantasy.
Yet even with the end so clearly in sight, Jade often thought of quitting school and going somewhere else with me—somewhere of our own, a cabin in Maine, the southwest, a new city, Europe. I realized it was my place to say no to this, to help her keep her stamina up for the last
months of formal education, but I too dreamed of leaving Stoughton with her and living in a world more wholly our own. Sometimes I nodded when she threatened to quit school, but even when I told her she shouldn’t my voice betrayed the true irresponsible depths of my longing to be alone with her and live a more adult life. I didn’t want to live in Gertrude with a lot of people no matter how much I liked them. I didn’t like the peacefulness of campus life and it really did gall me that Jade was forced to sit for hours in front of professors and allowed them to form her mind. I may have been plain and simple jealous of the hold that college had on her and of the worlds it made available, though I don’t think it was that that bothered me.
I thought of us both going to school, together. When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I’d been accepted by the University of California in Berkeley and I would have liked for us both to go there, get two desks, and turn them so we could face each other while we studied. Jade could do her graduate work in ethology and I might even take courses in astronomy. The energy and promise of my earlier life had worn a little thin, but I still believed that I might one day revive my old ambition.
But meanwhile it was daily life, the hasty Vermont summer—which even in July was autumnal in its dawns—and Jade’s elaborate senior thesis.
I was Jade’s lab assistant and worked every day—before setting out for the Main Street Clothiers and again in the evening—looking after the dogs in the makeshift kennels Jade had built in our back yard. The back yard was a small, patchy square, about seventy by seventy, and presided over by so many huge maples that grass could barely grow. Dandelions and dust, and where the lawn could sprout no one had the heart to cut it back. Jade made pens for the animals out of chicken wire, two-by-fours, tarpaper, and hay, and everyone in the house looked forward to the end of the experiment so the little canine shanty town might be eradicated. That Jade wouldn’t allow any of them to pet or even coo at the pups made it all the worse for the others, but because she wanted to study the behavioral differences between the pups raised by the blind mother and the pups raised by the normal mother she was worried that injudiciously portioned affection might invalidate her findings. When she made her rounds, she carried a stopwatch and timed herself so she wouldn’t spend an instant more (or less) than thirty seconds with each. She let me play with the puppies as well but she watched carefully over me with her stopwatch and said, in a dry, removed voice, “Next,” whenever thirty seconds was up.
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