by Jaime Clarke
“The secret is to let them think they’re going to get a piece of everything,” JSB used to tell me. “By the time they figure it out, you’re ready for the next one.” This advice resurfaced in my mind now and again because it was an unusually calculated thing to say, especially coming from a man who so passionately believed in romance. This advice was repeated with a frequency that suggested it was a joke, something he’d picked up from someone who’d said it, or half said it, or was making a joke too.
Erin and her friend are sitting on the steps in the shallow end, leaning back on their elbows. They collapse in laughter and Erin puts her head on the boy’s chest. The boy buries his nose in Erin’s wet hair and JSB puts his hand up to the glass window.
“I should probably go,” I say, wondering where Talie is.
JSB awakens from his trance. “The keys are on the counter,” he says. He pats my knee and smiles.
I nod and he turns his gaze back toward the pool, not able to look away from what shines in front of him.
Essay #3: An Ideal Day Sometime in the Near Future
This is an ideal day sometime in the near future:
I meet someone who can appreciate me for what I can offer and we spend a lot of time together. But we don’t get trapped by love. We just like being together and we realize that it isn’t forever, that eventually we’ll move on, but that we’ll always remember what we had with each other.
And after that relationship is over, I meet someone else who can appreciate me for what I can offer, etc.
Tuesday
Tuesdays, Jane volunteers at the crisis nursery, and Tuesdays put Jane in a good mood. We both always look forward to Tuesday nights, and this Tuesday night seems especially good because afterward, our backs against the crumpled sheets, we solidify the Utopian Love Code:
“If a man makes promises to a woman and does not keep his promises, another man shall fulfill the obligation,” I start. “If a man has stolen another man’s woman, and if that woman was unhappy, that woman shall remain with the man; however, if the woman is said to have been happy, she shall be returned to the man from whom she was stolen.”
This makes Jane giggle and she adds: “If a man has put a spell upon a woman, and has not justified himself, the man shall plunge into the holy river, and if the holy river overcomes him, his intentions are bad; but if the holy river bears him out and shows him innocent, his intentions are good and he may proceed with his sorcery.”
“If a fire breaks out in a woman’s heart and a man extinguishes the fire, he shall be set fire himself.”
“If a man has married a wife and has not made her feelings and her property part of a whole, she is no wife.”
“If a woman’s reputation is besmirched by another male without just cause, he shall throw himself into the holy river for the sake of the purity of Utopia.”
Jane props herself up on her elbow and adds: “A woman’s feelings cannot be hurt, taken for granted, abused, or ridiculed.”
I frown at this and tell her that the rule about besmirched reputations covers this, and she just stares at me and then rolls away, and I guess we’ve pretty much covered the basic tenets, but I review them silently for oversights.
Journal #1
Their days always appear to me this way:
Jenny saunters through the house, opening the curtains, everything in full view. As always, she boils water in the microwave for her morning oatmeal—maple and brown sugar. Gray light pours in as she sits at the table in a white terry-cloth robe, a purple satin nightgown peeking out. After she tilts the bowl and scrapes it twice with her spoon, Jenny rinses it in the sink and walks back to her bedroom, which is on the far side of the house. When Jenny reappears, she is dressed for her job teaching first grade at the elementary school in town.
And when school lets out, Jenny drives home, stopping by the market, browsing through the aisles, wandering back and forth across the store, then, realizing the time, she hurriedly fills a basket.
Ben pulls up as Jenny is unloading the groceries, and he kisses her on the cheek before lifting a paper bag from the station wagon, slipping on the shoveled driveway, catching himself as the bag hits the ground. He picks it up again, pretending nothing has happened.
My stomach turns when I think of Ben—weak, not a challenger, not a contender, kept in only by her will—who is unable to understand Jenny the way I did.
She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me. She loves me not. She loves me but doesn’t know that I still love her, more than anyone in the world, and I see the light in the living room go out, the house dark for a moment, Jenny sitting on the edge of the bed, Jenny smiling when Ben walks in and closes their bedroom door and kisses her on the forehead before he draws the blinds.
I imagine me at their wedding (even though I wasn’t invited): The redbrick church appears to be receding into the pale summer sky, purely an optical illusion brought on by the sun and the whiskey sours I drank earlier, and I wonder if anyone in the church can see me, down the street, hidden behind the drooping oleanders.
I unbutton the vest of my suit and check my hair in the mirror on the visor. The last invited guest arrived ten minutes ago, and I am debating how I will make my entrance: before or after the ceremony? I can imagine the look on Jenny’s face, everyone staring at me, bewildered. I fondle the dozen red roses I’ve been keeping cool in my refrigerator. The street is empty and I stare hard at a lone palm tree swaying back and forth, obscuring part of the church steeple, fanning the heat back toward the shimmering yellow sun.
The doors of the church swing wide and Jenny’s uncle appears, walking hurriedly to his van, not fifty feet from where I am. The van door groans deeply, echoing in my head, and he lifts out his camera bag. I slide down in my seat, and as Jenny’s uncle slams the van door, he recognizes my car. A sweat breaks out on my forehead while he stares, trying to see past the window tint, and he takes a step toward me. I reach down for the gear shift, my hand quivering, and slowly press in the clutch. He sets his camera bag on the neatly manicured lawn, looks both ways, and crosses the street toward me, shaking his head. I feel my body convulse as I pop the car in gear, lurching forward, spilling the roses around my feet, barreling down the street, crying.
Junior year, when my focus should’ve been on my new classmates at Randolph Prep, I met and fell in love with Jenny, a freshman saxophone player at a public school on the west side of Phoenix. Mr. Chandler had given me a saxophone abandoned by one of his foster kids, suggesting that I join band at Randolph as a means of making friends quickly. I knew firsthand that transfer students were easily made pariahs and followed his advice; Jason knew too, which is why he signed up for theater the first day of classes.
The randomness of Jenny and me sitting together on the bus ferrying selected students to the statewide marching competition was not random at all: The months of Saturday practices on the empty fields of Scottsdale Community College had provided hours of close infantry training. The trip to Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, the competition venue, was merely the culmination. Jenny and I sat together on the two-hour trip, flirting. As we neared Flagstaff, I nervously popped my saxophone reed into my mouth, claiming to have to moisten it before the competition. “Try to bite it,” I said playfully, sticking the small reed out like a tiny wooden tongue. I pulled back as Jenny shyly inched forward and snapped at the reed like a guppy. “Try again,” I said. This time I didn’t pull back, watching as she zoomed toward me, her green eyes sparkling. She bit the reed and held it, finally releasing it. “Again,” I said softly, this time dropping the reed in my lap as she leaned in, kissing her, the spark of our long-suffering flirting a danger to the pine trees that whisked past us as the bus entered the Flagstaff city limits.
“She’s a Mormon, dude,” someone said when I confirmed my interest.
I shrugged, unsure of what that meant.
From that time forward, Jenny and I were inseparable. I quickly assimilated into her circle of friends, who we
re exclusively Mormon. The Mormon kids at her school were not a small population and were generally good students and well liked, and I found their approval and acceptance easier than that of the rich kids at Randolph. Jenny’s family was a first-generation conversion (someone her father worked with had convinced them to convert), and when, upon meeting me, her mother asked her in front of me if I was LDS, I had no idea what that meant. Jenny answered that I wasn’t and I let the matter drop, my happiness at being with Jenny blocking out the white noise around me. Her parents wouldn’t allow us to officially date until Jenny turned sixteen, so our courtship took place entirely at her house after school. The matter of where I lived never arose, and it was some time before it surfaced that my birth parents were dead and that I’d been shunted from distant relative to distant relative before landing in Phoenix at the home of my first cousin twice removed. That I attended an all-boys Catholic school didn’t seem to register with them, and I hid from them the fact that I’d recently been legally emancipated.
Still, the ease and speed with which our relationship grew serious might’ve been alarming to Jenny’s parents, but their recent separation consumed them, and Jenny and I were essentially left alone, free to wander her family’s property, an unworked farm outside of Phoenix, a parcel among parcels in what was primarily farmland. We rode the family three-wheeler back and forth to visit her cousin, who lived on an adjoining parcel; sometimes we took her horse, who spooked me. Usually we watched television or listened to music while we shot pool in her living room, her pool skills far superior to mine. I was always aware that her mother was lurking around the house, though, maybe looking out a window, or listening for the quiet that portends making out. Her home was a sanctuary that offered us a place out of time in which to get to know each other. That she had never seen my house (her mother forbade her) or that we didn’t hang out with my friends (a small population, but still) was not a concern. We did manage outside dates of a sort: Every so often a couple of Mormon stakes (each church or ward was part of a stake; Jenny belonged to the Tolsun ward, which in turn belonged to the West Maricopa stake) got together and hosted a dance.
Anyone could participate in the dances, regardless of religion; however, before attending your first dance, you had to acquire a dance card from the local bishop. I made the requisite appointment. The bishop, an older man with prematurely skeletal features, welcomed me and asked me into his spartan office. We exchanged a few pleasantries—I told him about how Jenny was my girlfriend and ran down the roster of my friends who attended the Tolsun ward—and then settled into business. The bishop handed me a small yellow piece of paper, the dance card I’d come for, invalid without the bishop’s signature, which he was happy to sign after I read and consented to the rules on the back of the card:
1. Ages 14–18
2. Valid dance card must be presented at the door for admission. (We will accept valid dance cards from other stakes.) Replacement charge for lost card is $5.00.
3. The Word of Wisdom to be observed: No tobacco, alcohol, or drugs are permitted inside the building or on the premises.
4. BOYS shall wear dress pants (no Levi’s, jeans, denims, or imitations of any color, or other non–dress pants). Shirts must have collars. No sandals are allowed. (Nice tennis shoes are OK.) Socks must be worn with shoes. No hats, earrings, or gloves.
5. GIRLS shall not wear tight-fitting dresses or skirts or have bare shoulders (blouses and dresses must have sleeves). Hemlines of dresses are to be of modest length (to the knee). No dresses or skirts with slits or cuts above the knee.
6. After admittance to the dance, you are to remain inside the building.
7. No loitering or sitting in cars on church grounds.
8. Automobiles shall be driven in a quiet and courteous manner, so as not to disturb the residents in the area.
9. No acrobatics, bear-hugging, bumping, rolling on floor, or exhibitions.
10. Personal conduct and behavior shall be that expected from exemplary young ladies and gentlemen.
“Can you agree to these rules?” the bishop asked.
I said that I could.
“Very good,” he said, taking the slip of paper from me and laboriously signing his name to it. “Have you considered joining our church?” he asked as he handed my dance card back.
I hadn’t. “I might,” I said, knowing that was the answer he wanted to hear. He regarded me cautiously.
“You might attend with Jenny and her family,” the bishop said. I wondered if he knew about Jenny’s parents’ marital status, guessing that he didn’t. The topic was never broached in Jenny’s house, or in her cousin’s house, everyone pretending like the fact that Jenny’s mother and father were still married but not living in the same house was as natural as their counterparts living together.
The next question caught me off guard. “Have you and Jenny been intimate?”
I couldn’t tell if the bishop was joking or not, so I laughed, suppressing a sickening feeling that was building in my stomach. I answered no automatically, not just because it was the truth but because I hoped the answer would stifle the look of surprise on my face.
“Have you been tempted?” he asked.
I fumbled through a series of “ums” and “wells,” stuttering until I gave up and smiled.
“It’s okay,” the bishop said. “We’re all tempted. Moral character is defined by how we react to temptation. I hope you’ll continue to consider your moral character in the face of temptation. And Jenny’s, too.”
I assured him I would, and we both stood, shaking hands. I excused myself and wandered through the empty church halls, treading on the brown carpet past the chapel, stocked with plain wooden pews. I couldn’t imagine then that the room would be the venue for one of my most dramatic and regrettable performances.
Wednesday
I know Jane can’t leave me. She knows I’m irreplaceable, and I’m glad because frankly I don’t want to replace her. We have got a good thing and not everyone can keep a perfect balance like we do.
“Are you coming with me or not?” Jane demands.
“Why does it matter where you live?” I ask. “I don’t want to live in California.”
“Well, I do,” she says.
“Why can’t we just keep doing what we’re doing here?”
“I’m tired of being here.”
Then I say: “Look, I want you to stay.”
Jane starts to melt and I feel a little guilty for employing such tactics, but the truth is I do want her to stay. But I also know it’s only because I want to sustain what we have and that someday our relationship will inevitably ebb and float away.
“I can’t imagine staying here.” Her voice softens.
“What you imagine happening somewhere else is exactly what will happen here,” I say.
“What does that mean?”
“It means that if you’re going to run, make sure you’re running to, and not away.”
“I’m not running away from anything,” she shoots back.
“What are you running to, then?” I ask.
“I’m not running, period.” Her voice grows louder. “I’m simply just tired of here.” The emphasis on “tired” insinuates that she is tired of me, too, but I pretend that I’m oblivious and I just sit there and smirk.
“Why do you have to be so confrontational all the time?” I ask, knowing what this will do to her.
“Me? You’re the one that’s confrontational.”
“And defensive, too. You’re always defensive about something.” I am pouring gas over the fire.
“You are probably the most impossibly”—she angrily spits the words out at me—“most fucking impossibly … stupid fuck—”
“Stupid? Is that the best you can do?”
Jane lunges for me, at first in anger, but soon we are both on the floor of my living room, laughing so hard we have to hold ourselves.
“You really are stupid,” Jane says, still laughing. “You know that, right?
”
“Yeah, I know. So are you.” I kiss Jane on the forehead. We lie there silent for a minute, and then I tell her, “I hope you stay.” It comes out sounding like an apology, and in a lot of ways, it is.
Journal #2
When I was first shipped to Phoenix, we took a car trip to a cabin my first cousin twice removed owned up on the northern rim of the Grand Canyon. As we ascended out of the valley, I remember worshipping the beautiful red rock formations and the cacti and the vast sky that opened up in front of me. But I also remember feeling afraid. I stared at a cactus in the distance and thought, I could get hurt out there. I stared at an endless brown field, every acre a carbon copy of the rest, and thought, Everything here is dead.
We stopped in Sedona for lunch. I went into the gift store of the restaurant to look around while my first cousin twice removed finished eating.
“Don’t dawdle,” my guardian warned. I was careful not to linger looking at any one thing for too long. I wanted a magazine for the ride back. The gift shop didn’t seem to have any. I really wasn’t surprised when I returned to our table and my guardian was gone.
Without panicking, I walked out to the parking lot to confirm that I’d been left behind. I headed back toward Phoenix on foot, looking over my shoulder now and then to see if any of the approaching cars were being driven by my first cousin twice removed. None were.
Less than a mile out of Sedona a white pickup truck pulled over.
“Where you going?” the guy—a rancher—asked, vaguely concerned.
“Phoenix.”
“This is your lucky day,” he told me.
I hopped in the truck, which smelled of dust and sweat and dogs, and we raced down the highway. The rancher asked me typical hitchhiker questions, and I made up a story about how I was seeing America via my thumb. The rancher liked this story, as much as he didn’t believe it, and launched into one of his own about how the youth of America weren’t as patriotic as they were in his day and how more people should get a feel for the land, to cultivate an appreciation for what nourishes and sustains them, and I nodded my head all the way back to Phoenix, thinking, Christ, what a bummer.
