“Do not worry,” the woman said. “There is no need to pay me now.”
“But I’ve got to pay you. A job like this deserves something special.”
“Then I shall ask you for something special. But not now. When I return, you will pay me.” She rose with no sign of weariness. At the door she said, “Goodbye, Laurie Cohen. I am glad I was able to help you.”
“Wait a minute,” Laurie said. “I don’t even know your name.” But she stayed by the window as the woman swung the apartment door shut behind her.
Laurie went into the bedroom, thinking she would lie down for an hour, then take the papers to the post office. Instead, she pulled on her sandals, grabbed her keys and some money, and left the papers behind her to go downstairs to the street. What a wonderful day, she thought, looking up at the sky. The sun was already baking the stiffness from her shoulders, while the slight breeze carried away the heat. She heard a whoosh of noise and turned to see the tree that stood in front of the apartment building shake its branches at her. Laurie laughed. It looked so sparkling in the early light. She wondered if it had rained during the night, for the leaves appeared sprinkled with tiny jewels, each one a different color as it picked up some stray bit of light. If she looked long enough she could imagine objects hidden in the tree: toys, tiny houses, animals crouched on the branches. Laurie walked closer. She’d never realized how tall the tree was. The topmost branches moved gently in the wind far above the apartment building.
She jumped up and grabbed a low branch. Her legs swung in the air until she could brace her foot on a knob, which allowed her to push herself onto a branch. Soon she was surrounded by leaves and wood. She could hear birds, though she couldn’t see any, could hear their chatter and the flap or hum of their wings. At one point she came across a nest of twigs and wire and pieces of paper. Something lay inside—a chick, she thought, or an egg, but when she climbed up to it she saw it was a doll, a plastic baby that some bird must have carried up in its beak. The blank eyes made Laurie laugh so hard she almost lost her footing and had to grab tight to one of the branches.
She felt so good, so free of all the things that worried her. Why did she ever stop climbing trees? If only Jaqe were here. Maybe they could build a tree house. Sitting with her eyes closed and her back to the trunk, she thought of making love with Jaqe, on a platform deep in the woods. Jaqe was different from the other women Laurie had known. Laurie remembered the wild ones, who wanted to do everything, including reaching all the way into each other’s bodies. And the shy ones, who had to take everything step by step, like learning to drive. And the ones who expected her to act like a man, and the ones who got angry if she did anything that in any way resembled a man. But Jaqe—Jaqe knew just what she wanted, what she needed. Sex with her might be slow or fast, noisy or quiet, but never timid, never confused. Sometimes it was Laurie who got scared. Making love with Jaqe could bring her body to a state where her orgasms seemed to go on and on, even after she and Jaqe had finished, officially finished and washed up and gone to eat or just to the supermarket. Her body would have seemed to calm down, to settle into a low tingling, when suddenly something would happen—a look from Jaqe, or a touch of her hand—and it would start up again, waves of orgasm running through her like fever, and she would become scared, because you’re not supposed to live like that; other people didn’t live like that, they kept things clear and separate.
She began to climb again. She could hear the city now, buses, a truck horn, street construction. It all came from far away, like noise from a television left on in another room. She discovered different regions in the tree. In one place she wanted to jump up and down on the branch with happiness. A little farther on she became sad and wanted to howl for every humiliation she’d ever suffered. She climbed a little higher and all the pain left her, as if the wind had blown it away. She stopped now, and looked up through the leaves at the sky. It looked warm and blue and soft, like a baby’s blanket.
In her old bedroom in her parents’ house Jaqe lay asleep beside a stuffed tiger she’d found in a box in the basement. She’d stayed up later than she’d expected, doing something she’d promised herself never to do again—arguing with her parents about Laurie. They’d gone on about Jaqe coming home for the summer when they knew damn well she would stay with Laurie. Of course, what they really meant was leave Laurie altogether, go “back” to what they considered normal desires. She tried to point out that she had never shown any interest in men. A mistake, for her parents told her she couldn’t give something up if she’d never given it a fair chance. Jaqe still might have gotten out of the whole thing if she hadn’t made a further mistake—of comparing her parents with Bill and Janet Cohen. Her mother began crying all over again, and her father went on about sickness, and how parenting wasn’t a popularity contest. By the time Jaqe had calmed them down, it was two in the morning.
So now she lay in bed and dreamed she was planting a tree. The tree was short and delicate, about half her height, with yellow leaves, and with its roots wrapped in a bag. The bag was full of holes, so that dirt and tiny jewels fell onto Jaqe’s bare feet when she lifted the tree and set it into a hole on the top of a hill. She scooped dirt onto the roots with her fingers, and when she looked up she saw that she was standing in a circle of trees, old dried trees with twisted branches. Somewhere she heard a woman, or maybe a boy, singing. She couldn’t make out the words. When she turned around the tree she’d planted had grown. It reached above her head, the branches still thin and graceful, the leaves bright with sun. She began to cry. No, it wasn’t her crying, it was a child, a little girl sitting on the ground, with her back against the tree. She was wearing yellow overalls and held a bone in each hand. “What is it?” Jaqe said to her. “What’s wrong?”
“My mommy doesn’t love me,” the little girl said. “I did something bad and my mommy took me here and left me.”
“It’s all right,” Jaqe said. She hugged the little girl. “It’s all right. I’ll take you home.”
Jaqe woke up suddenly, as if someone had clapped into her ear. Without waiting for her heart to settle, she rushed downstairs to the phone. She should have called last night. It had just gotten so late, she’d thought either Laurie was working late and shouldn’t be disturbed or Laurie had gone to bed exhausted and shouldn’t be woken up.
It took several rings before a groggy “hello” came over the line. “I love you,” Jaqe said. “I’m sorry I didn’t stay and help you. I’m so stupid. Do you forgive me?”
Laurie laughed. Sleepy, she sounded relaxed, more like the real Laurie than at any time since she’d gone off to graduate school. She said, “I forgive everything you’ve ever done, in this life and all others. How’s that?” When Jaqe didn’t answer right away, Laurie said, “I love you. I love you forever.”
Jaqe said, “What happened with your papers? Did you get them done?”
“Yeah,” Laurie said. Jaqe could hear the smile. “All done. Right on time. Elegant as hell, too.”
“That’s great. So you’ve mailed them off?”
“Uh-uh.”
“What do you mean?”
“I threw them away. Tore them up and threw them down the incinerator.”
“Oh my God,” Jaqe said. “Why?”
“Because I don’t belong there. I had the papers in my hand and I looked at them, and I thought, No, I can’t do it. If I send these now I’ll never get out.”
“What do you mean? What are you going to do?”
“I’ve already done it. I sent in my letter of resignation. I’m free, darling. Free and in love. Are you proud of me?”
Slowly, Jaqe nodded. When she realized Laurie couldn’t see her she said, “I love you. You’re my brave honey. I’m proud of you forever.”
Five
The Treasure of Thorny Woods
It took Laurie only three days to find a job, in a bookstore downtown. The man who owned it, Mark, was the brother of one of the LSU women and was happy to hire Laurie on
his sister’s recommendation. The shop was small and stacked with books in such a cluttered way it amazed Laurie at first that Mark could find anything at all. Mark described the store as specializing in “literature and its friends,” but it really followed the vagaries of Mark’s own taste and fascinations. There were books on archetypal psychology but no self-help best-sellers, books on witchcraft, including spells to be done at different times of the year, but none on manifesting miracles in your job and love life. There were books on African American religion, interspecies communication, the history of cosmology; there were books on flamenco and square dancing (but none on ballet or disco), and books on the structure of international finance (but none on personal investment strategy).
A large man who always wore jeans and a yellow T-shirt, Mark slipped through the stacks of books without knocking them over, a trick beyond Laurie and most of the customers. Writers often came into the store to sit with Mark on folding chairs and drink passion-fruit tea. They complained about publishers, gossiped about other writers, or described the structure of a new novel or the stupidity of rival anthropologists or difficulties in setting up proper controls for a study of human sexual response under stress. At first, Laurie assumed Mark knew as much as all the writers in all their subjects; he could even talk with a woman who had written several books on myth and religion but came in to discuss her earlier work on the history of knitting. Once, after a linguist had left with the solution to a problem that had blocked his work for days, Laurie blurted at Mark, “How do you know all this stuff? Where do you find time to learn it all?”
Mark sucked on a Popsicle the linguist had given him. He said, “I don’t watch TV.” After a while Laurie discovered that Mark knew how to listen—half like a sponge, half like a mirror. “You’ve just got to learn people’s language” he said.
Laurie assumed that Mark had hired her to do the practical work, like taking money when he was talking or stocking the shelves from the piles on the floor. When she’d been working a couple of weeks, however, Mark asked her, “Don’t you like books, Laurie?”
Laurie looked up from the stack she was straightening. “I like books a lot,” she said.
“Well, tell me something to order then.” Nervous, Laurie suggested the work of several Québecoise literary critics who sought to transmute passion into text. Mark scribbled the names on the back of a telephone bill. “Terrific,” he said. “That’s the stuff.” So Laurie began studying catalogues, literary magazines, and even the academic journals she’d despised in school. She and Mark would look at everything that came in, and if she wanted to read something she could take it home, read it through, and bring it back as long as she didn’t smear the pages or bend the spine. “I’m happy,” she told Jaqe. “I’m actually happy.”
“That’s wonderful,” Jaqe said. “When are you going to tell your folks?”
Laurie insisted she couldn’t tell her folks about leaving school until she saw them, and she couldn’t do that until she got some time off from the store, and since summer was the busy season and she’d just started…
One day, Jaqe went into the store and asked Mark for a copy of the I Ching. He brought out his own copy from under the counter, but when he offered her his three Chinese coins, she reached into the pocket of her baseball shirt and brought out three silver coins. About the size of quarters, they showed a turtle on one side and a pair of toads on the other. “Hey,” Mark said, “where’d you get those?”
“Found them in the street,” Jaqe said. “That’s why I thought I better speak to the I Ching. I figure the turtle stands for yin and the toads for yang. What do you think?”
“I think the oracle wants to tell you something.”
In the back of the shop Laurie was examining a box of books to see whether some white flecks meant a man had been masturbating over them. This was a hazard of the book business, Mark had told her. It didn’t matter if you didn’t sell pornography or even serious literature with erotic passages. People got excited about pretty much anything and would slip in the back of the store when no one was looking. Once, Mark said, he’d chased away a masturbator and when he looked at the book that had caused such impatience it turned out to be a field guide to moths and butterflies. Mark told Laurie she wouldn’t have to clean such things up, but she should let him know if she found anything. Laurie was trying to examine the books without getting too close when she heard Jaqe’s voice. “Jaqe!” she shouted, and ran to the front to hug her as if they hadn’t seen each other in months.
Mark said, “Look at the coins Jaqe found.”
Laurie held them in her hand. She ran her fingers along the smooth edges. “They look really old,” she said. “Maybe they’re worth something.”
“I don’t want to sell them,” Jaqe told her. “I just got them.”
A friend of Mark’s had come into the shop and was looking at the coins. This man was writing a long poem he described as “the seeds of all knowledge.” Evenings and weekends he wore a black caftan he claimed he’d stolen from an Iranian cleric. During the day, however, he sold ice cream sandwiches from a counter in a department store and so had to wear a white jacket and pants. Holding Jaqe’s coins, he looked like a lab assistant about to try different kinds of acid on an unknown alloy. “There’s no writing,” he said. “Maybe they’re medallions.” He looked at the turtle side. “The Chinese used tortoises for divination. There’s three of them. You could use them for the I Ching.”
“What a wonderful idea,” said Jaqe. She picked up the gray book. “And look, here’s the I Ching now.”
Mark said, “What do you want to ask it?”
“Should Laurie take this weekend off and visit her parents?”
“Hey, wait a minute,” Laurie said.
Mark said to Jaqe, “Are you going to toss them? Maybe Laurie should do it.”
Laurie said, “Maybe I should toss them back in the street.”
Jaqe thought a moment. “It affects all of us, so maybe we should all do it. Two lines apiece.” She turned to the poet. “I’m sorry to leave you out, but there’re only six lines.” He waved a hand.
Jaqe did the first two lines, then Mark. Complaining about “communal destiny,” Laurie did the top lines. The hexagram was 48, “The Well.” It explained how people came and went, but the well stayed the same.
“Great,” Jaqe said. “It’s settled.”
“What’s settled?” Laurie said.
“We’re visiting your folks.”
“It doesn’t say a word about my parents.”
“It talks about the source, doesn’t it?”
The poet said, “Sounds clear to me.”
Laurie said, “Jesus Christ, you didn’t even throw any coins.”
“How’s this?” Mark said. “You can leave early on Saturday afternoon and come in late on Tuesday.”
“All right,” Laurie said. “I don’t believe this. All right. We’ll go see my parents.”
“And you’ll tell them?”
Laurie made a face. “Yeah. I’ll tell them.”
It always made Jaqe smile to see the Thorny Woods “bus station,” the parking lot of a hardware store, with tickets sold in a coffee shop across the street. Laurie’s parents were already there when the bus pulled in, Bill in loose white slacks and a blue shirt with large yellow flowers, Janet in a sleeveless orange dress with a flared miniskirt bottom. “Your mother looks great,” Jaqe said as she waved through the window. “Great legs.”
“Better than mine?” Laurie asked.
“Nothing’s better than yours. Especially wrapped around mine.”
“Just remember that.”
“Will you stop it?” Jaqe said. “You’ve been such a pain since we left the city.”
“This was your idea, remember?” Laurie stood up to yank her tote bag from the overhead rack. “Come on,” she said, “or the bus’ll pull out before we can get off. And wouldn’t that be a shame?”
Jaqe held her hand. “Kiss me first.”
/> Laurie said, “This is Thorny Woods. Girls don’t kiss in Thorny Woods.”
“I don’t care,” Jaqe said. “Kiss me right now or I’ll scream.” Laurie shrugged and then she looked around at the curious faces.
“Hey,” the bus driver called, “you two getting off or what?” Laurie grinned and grabbed Jaqe in her arms. “Jesus,” the bus driver said. Laurie heard a wolf whistle and slow applause as she and Laurie dashed off the bus.
Outside, Bill was laughing and shaking his head. He did a kind of shimmy while Laurie hugged her mother. “You two are really something,” he said. “Better watch out or you’ll start a forest fire.” When he hugged her, Jaqe found herself putting her head on his shoulder. It felt so solid, so welcoming.
On the way to the car Janet put her arm through Laurie’s. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. Jaqe smiled at the sound of that voice, like a pastel painting of rolling hills.
Bill fingered Jaqe’s hair. “You could use a cut,” he said. “Want me to do it?”
“Wow,” Jaqe said. “That’d be great. You sure you have time?”
He put on a fake tough-guy voice. “For you, sweetheart,” he said, “I’ve always got time.” Jaqe laughed.
Laurie had planned to tell her parents after dinner, but on the way home to pick up Ellen and change for a restaurant, Bill said, “So how’s the life of the scholar? Getting a good rest?”
“Sure,” Laurie said. “I mean, I’m working hard at the store, but that’s kind of like a rest.” She yelped as Jaqe poked her with her elbow.
“Are you all right?” Janet asked.
“Look,” Laurie said, “there’s something I’ve got to tell you.”
Janet’s face tightened, and Jaqe thought how she suddenly looked like a mother. “Go on,” Janet said.
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