Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

  And you! Back in Chicago. I don’t think I could ever go back there. Chicago is a house full of kids and a lawn no one would mow. Hugh’s been back, though. Now that he travels around, like a peddler, though with nothing to sell, of course. Nothing at all. He’s quit his practice and he works when he and his current girl run out of money. He washes dishes, loads trucks. Anything. But Hugh went to Chicago with a purpose and that was you. He’d heard your case was coming up. I suppose you know that when the trouble all came, Hugh got to know the prosecutor fairly well and they’ve remained friends? Hugh learned there was a good chance you’d be getting out of the hospital and he did his best to revive the case against you. He mentioned this to me in his last call, and since we’re on the subject, I may as well add he was bitterly upset because he knew he’d lost and that you were on your way out. Didn’t I tell you you were making a dangerous foe in Hugh? How could you have been so arrogant as to mistake his slowness for laxness? You think that astrology is a joke but Hugh is a classic Taurus. And not a bad clairvoyant. The only reason I didn’t fall into a faint when you called is that months ago Hugh predicted you’d find me and get in touch and in a weird way I’ve been waiting to hear from you ever since.

  Though I’m quite poor, I’m alone and so I can afford a few of my pet indulgences. (Really, I should have been Catholic; no one has a more quantitative sense of pleasure.) It has taken me this long to fully realize that I am never likely to be un-poor—unless, of course, that proverbial rich old man with a twenty-four-carat hole in his heart comes kneeling into my life. Hugh and I started off together with virtually no money but it never seemed altogether serious. We both assumed we were rich, and as educated Protestants we also assumed that the whole society—if not the cosmos—had a stake in keeping us buoyant. We consoled ourselves with that classic semantic sleight-of-hand: we weren’t poor, we were broke. Which in our case made as much sense as a shipwrecked family describing themselves as “on a camping trip.”

  I learned to walk away from many luxuries—and each child caused me to evacuate another set of expensive yearnings. Yet the one that would never die (I protected it like an endangered species) was my love for expensive chocolate. It survived my love of well-made books, magazine subscriptions, alligator purses, and English cigarettes; chocolate survived turquoise and gold, as well as the simpler pleasures of a first-run movie or sending the shirts out to the Chinese laundry. But not only did my adoration of good chocolate survive my other pleasures—it surpassed them. No whiff of a fresh book or feel of Irish linen touched me quite so deeply as the melting, the slow darkening dissolve, of a good piece of Swiss chocolate beneath my tongue.

  Since everyone in your family professed to believe in sharing (what ardent egalitarians you people were!), you were more than a little shocked to learn that I hid my chocolate from my own family. I used to savor my hidden sweets and, in truth, as much melted or went stale as got eaten. I felt a definite jolt when I passed a spot where some was hidden. Sometimes, talking to Hugh or one of the kids, with my hand resting on the maple sewing box that held, stuffed beneath the felt snips and empty spools, five dollars’ worth of Austrian semi-sweet, I felt a blush spreading like a stain across my face and my heart would literally pound. I would think: My God, I’m giving it away. I’m found, ruined! It was like passing one’s lover on the street and he is with his wife and you are with your children—that frightening and that pleasurable. Secrets offer the solace of privacy and possibility. They are the x in your equation, the compassionate unknown. Those caches of hidden candy, those untapped resources stood in for all of the others I pretended were available to me. Even before you made our house your own, the search for my chocolates was a family sport. Sometimes I’d sleep late, come down, and find the house in shambles. The search for my store of chocolate was a ritual, and like other tribal games, no one in that big drafty falling-down house ever quite outgrew it. Even Hugh got in on the act. But no one had a knack for finding my stashes like you had. Of all the people who traipsed through—family, the kids’ friends, the cleaning woman we hired for a month when I had what Hugh liked to call a nervous collapse and what I called simply coming to my senses, and the odd-lots of runaways and dropouts who seemed to land with us because our openness and curiosity was inevitably taken as laxness—of all the dozens with and without names, with and without scruples or conscience, you were the only one who could regularly unearth what I’d hidden. You hadn’t been courting Jade for more than a week before you began producing evidence of my stealth. I mean, David, you discovered chocolate that I’d forgotten. You found the bar at the bottom of the Kleenex box, then the semi-sweet buds in the bookcase, stuffed behind the antique Britannica that no one used because the language was too high-falutin’ for the kids to copy their school papers out of. You found the chocolate in the basement wedged behind a rusty snow shovel and wrapped in rags to protect it from the mice, and you guessed with no apparent effort which brick was loose in the fireplace. Once the others got you into the spirit of the search, the only place safe from you was my bedroom, where I occasionally tucked something into my underwear drawer and where you were—well, what were you, David?—too delicate, too tactful, or too tactical? to look. I must admit it was better to be raided by you. At least you made certain that most of it found its way back to me. You liked to present me with what I’d hidden. You were like a dog with a stick: throw it! hide it! I know you!

  I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and I’ve decided that because you were starting out fresh, with no resentments or hurt feelings, you could muster an understanding of me that in some ways surpassed my family’s—the rest were too anxious to discover I was somehow warmer, more capable, that I had a secret store of womanliness, motherliness, and selflessness, and they saw everything through a mist of expectations. I always thought you had some special instinctual understanding of me—though what we call understanding is as often as not appreciation decked out in robes. With you I could talk with the confidence that everything I said wasn’t going to be automatically husked for the kernel of true meaning. I could joke with you and talk around what I meant. I could hint—what a relief that was. All of the rest of them were so bloody explicit.

  And you were the only one who was genuinely thrilled that I’d been a writer. When you found that I’d once sold two stories to The New Yorker, you went that very day to the University of Chicago library to read what I’d published and came back to the house that night with damp, chilly white-on-black photocopies of those old stories. Who weren’t you courting, is what I want to know. Those stories were more than eighteen years old but they trembled in your hands and looked new and alive as if they’d just rolled off the press. You gazed at them and at me as if I were still the person who had composed them. You wanted to talk about everything; you interviewed me as if I were Rebecca West, asking me what had inspired me and asking me why I’d chosen one word and not another.

  I was the first person you’d ever met who had published anything, and I knew your enthusiasm was naive but I cherished it and drew it out of you. I made us a pot of coffee and we drank Tia Maria out of those orange juice glasses that Sammy had swiped from a cafeteria. Who were you? I mean then, that night. My daughter’s high- school sweetheart. Another newcomer to our household. But you seemed to promise so much. Your big intense eyes and the absolutely masterful trick of slowing your flattery down with little stammers. Before long the family, including Hugh and then Jade, went upstairs to bed, and you and I were alone beneath the kitchen light in an otherwise darkened house. It was nearly eleven but we were far from exhausting our conversation. It felt so damned wonderful to be talking about those stories, and you, I see now, were very cleverly staking a claim, marking off for yourself not only spatial territory but temporal territory as well. In a night you established a crucial precedent—that is, it was no longer expected that you would leave at a normal, decent hour. I remember hoping that Hugh would be asleep by the time I came to bed because I’d sensed e
arlier that evening that he wanted to, as he actually liked to say, “have me,” and I was not in the mood at all. At all. And I remember wondering if Jade lay in her bed, cursing me for monopolizing her new beau. But it just felt too damn right to be drinking and talking with you for me to worry about the others. I told myself that if old Hugh wanted me so badly he could come down for me, and if Jade suffered teen-age jealousy then she could confront me with it, and if you, beneath the opacity of your charm, sensed you should be somewhere else—home or with Jade—then you could simply pick yourself up and go there. I was so happy.

  I know you feel we somehow lured you into accepting the ways of our family, lured you into becoming one of us. And others, I suppose, feel the same way, that we got what we deserved from you because we tempted you into waters that finally were over your head. The fire you set was, to some, I suppose, the flames of the hell we so richly deserved. I know that your innocence was not proved (or provable) but even your sentence—treatment rather than punishment—seems to hold within it a certain condemnation of us, as if you were driven mad by the circumstances of your life in our household. I see it otherwise.

  There was something about you that exacerbated every muted struggle, all of the divisions, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings that until then had hung in a precarious balance among us. I still don’t wholly understand how you did it. Our house was always open for all manner of roughneck and maladjusted teens, for grubby little geniuses, for the science fair winners and the folk singers, and every kid who passed through us had an effect—to be sure—but no one played Prometheus to our huddled masses, no one really changed the way we felt about each other, and no one ever caused us to renegotiate the complex of treaties that held us together—as all families are held together, if there is no single, dictatorial power.

  I think it was how you were changing us, more than any other factor, that finally caused Jade to confront Hugh and say, “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you be a father and say no? Get me out of this.” I know you like to believe that the decision to quarantine you from our house for a month was basically Hugh’s, with perhaps Keith’s jealousy and my perverse nostalgia for the old rules thrown in. But it was really Jade who wanted it, Jade who felt everything was slipping away: Hugh and I were actually too stoned and too obsessed with what we so proudly hailed as “Our New Sexual Freedom” to make any decisions. Our lives were hanging so abruptly, so convulsively, that just hanging on was like a rodeo stunt; we felt brave, certainly, and completely in advance of our contemporaries—we didn’t have a good friend our own age, by then. But we also felt utterly shaky and so new to our new ways of living that we didn’t feel adult enough to devise codes of behavior for Jade, or for you, or for anyone else. At that point, the best we could do was Judge Not Lest We Be Judged. And it took Jade staggering into our room with a fistful of my newly acquired Thorazines (perfect for short-circuiting bum trips) to prod us into action. “What should I do?” Hugh asked her, with that helplessness he liked to think represented open-mindedness. I occupied myself with prying the Thorazines out of Jade’s hand—God, they could seep through the skin of her wet palms and put her into shock. And by the end of the evening, Hugh would have stepped in and been a Daddy such as Jade longed for and he would prove the efficacy of his Daddyhood by keeping you away from our house for a full thirty days and, as well, keep Jade away from you for the duration.

  But of course it was already too late. Jade was trying to do more than make a last-ditch retreat into daughterdom, and she had more on her mind than somehow recovering her balance—connected to her need to be cared for by us, to live more normally, was her suspicion that a girl her age oughtn’t to have a lover and certainly oughtn’t to have that lover in her own home. With you in her bed, Jade had no place to be a young girl; with the traces of your lovemaking on her every night she could never sleep the innocent pink sleep she often felt she needed. Yet it was only partly her own self she wished to save by banishing you for the month: it was for all of us, especially Hugh and me.

  Everyone who ever came traipsing through our lives brought a message and a challenge, taught us something. Maybe it was because Hugh and I met when we were in college, but we were born students, taking notes on the life we glimpsed through others. It was the privilege of having an open house; even the desperadoes came bearing gifts. Hugh and I, and to a lesser extent our kids, let this rich antic life stream around us; we acknowledged the runaways, the curious, the overnight visitors, as if they were so many minstrels wandering through a vast medieval fair. We were susceptible, we were, in fact, suckers—totally willing to believe that teenagers and even the kids Sammy’s age were planting the seedlings of a new consciousness and that we, Hugh and I, were lucky to be learning from them. But no one of them had the effect on us that you did. It took us by surprise, or rather you did, because compared to such characters as Alex Ahern and Crazy Hector and that Billy Sandburg who beat on his belly like a bongo drum and rolled his eyes back so far that only cloudy white showed in his sockets, compared to some of the real daredevils and casualties we saw, you were relatively a straight arrow. It took me weeks to become interested in you, now that I think of it.

  You knew you were up against a lot of competition and it wasn’t enough for you to court Jade. You had to make yourself interesting—indispensable!—to the rest of us. Of course you could go a long way toward seducing each of us and you could outdistance the other passers-through in terms of sheer charm—no one else could have possibly tried so hard, no one else had your determination or cared about making an impression nearly so much. So it was botany and folk music with Keith—while he could still stand you—and karate workouts with Sammy, and Jewish novelists with me, and a kind of fawning obsequiousness for Hugh, which, unfortunately for you and your strategy, could never quite wriggle free of the superiority complex that spawned it. And for all of us Latvian folk tales you made up to get us laughing and Marxist dogma to impress us with your erudition and to inform us that while you seemed to be living for no principle loftier than your own pleasure you were, in fact, guided by huge historical considerations. Beneath it all, you were a revolutionary something-or-other, and you knew we would be enchanted by your ideals, by their certainty and their hidden promise of a transcendent life. Scorning the liberals was, at least for us, a version of strolling around Hyde Park blasted out of our minds: a way of being in the world and above it at the same time, immune to comparison or judgment.

  But forget Latvia and the Russian Revolution, forget Gimpel the Fool and your periodic thank yous to Hugh for his hand in winning World War II. The thing that made you vivid to us, in the end, was the one thing you did effortlessly. And that was loving Jade. And it was Hugh, you should know, who recognized it first—not the love, which I saw as inevitable when all you two were doing was wanting each other, but the weird, unique force the two of you generated, which Hugh saw months before we finally banished you from the house.

  It was one thing to allow our daughter the freedom to express love (especially when she had such a hard time expressing it within the family), but quite another matter to see this liberty catapult her into a relationship every bit as intense as what Hugh and I called “mature love.” We were OK on letting her be sexual, OK on letting her find her individuality outside of the family structure, but I must say Hugh and I were assuming Jade would begin her sexual life with some sort of puppy love, something more quintessentially adolescent, which was to say something filled with doubts, lapses in concentration, some connection that more distinctly expressed the peculiar mixture of child and woman she was at that time. We felt as if we’d given a child permission to experiment with a little chemistry set only to find she was an undiscovered genius—solving ancient alchemical riddles, bonding once incompatible molecules, filling the cellar with luminous smoke. We simply had no idea of what we were in for; we totally underestimated the incredible emotional reach she was capable of. We were too accustomed to seeing Jade in one way. Yawnin
g, slightly withdrawn, orderly, conservative, evasive, with not much of a relationship with her own body, save worrying abstractly over her weight and lamenting the smallness of her breasts.

  It drove Hugh mad; it tore him in half. It absolutely galled him to think of his precious daughter naked in bed with a boy. Left alone, I’m sure that Hugh’s incestuous fantasies would have atrophied. But having Jade embrace the sexual life just when she was at the juncture between childhood and womanhood triggered a deep, conflicted, painful yearning in Hugh, and he wanted you to go away because he wanted it to go away. He’d been raised to believe it was OK to be protective and even possessive about your daughter, but poor Hugh was too closely attuned to the truth and ambiguity of his own feelings: more purely passionate than anyone in his family, he could not ignore the measure of sheer jealousy in his feelings about you and Jade.

  But, on the other hand, you two had the same effect on poor Hugh that you had on nearly everyone else. That is, you made him recall the most inarticulate, unreasonable romantic hopes he had ever had. All that was betrayed and lost, all that was refined and diminished, all of that raging wilderness of feeling came rushing back to Hugh. I was different; seeing you two in love only made me mourn for the person I never was, for the risks I’d never taken, for my life more or less on the sidelines. But Hugh actually recognized himself in you two. Actual faces, actual moments, the precise emotional content of broken promises came back to him. With me it was mere jealousy; but Hugh experienced all the ecstasy and sorrow of memory.

  Hugh was wide open for the sucker punch of your example. I saw him reeling and I took advantage. I encouraged him to believe that our lives might safely hop track, that instead of growing older we might grow younger, and instead of becoming more encumbered we might catapult into a vast, vast freedom. The house, our precariously balanced budget, the carefully tended and mended clothes hanging in our closets, the boiled eggs, the tarnished spoons, the Klee prints in their homemade frames—none of it, I argued, need define the real limits of our life. We could do anything.