Hugh developed the suspicion that your lovemaking was leaving Jade in a perpetually excited, that is to say unsatisfied, state. This didn’t go very far in explaining your sleeplessness, but your sleeplessness wasn’t awfully much in question. This continual sexual incompleteness may have been sheer fantasy on Hugh’s part, a kind of compromise virginity, but nevertheless he tried to delicately draw her out about her “night life,” as he called it. Jade spared him the realization that he had overstepped his actual courage, that he was not a WASP Freud, willing to face the truth no matter what its content or consequence, and she simply dummied up on the topic of your sex life. She knew, I think, that Hugh wanted to hear that each night you left her dangling, yearning, and whether it was true or not it was more than she could say—her loyalty to you and the world you both now lived in was too fierce—she was virtually patriotic about the emotional ground you’d portioned off for yourselves: My love affair right or wrong! So she sidestepped his questions, the subtle ones, that is, and when he resorted to frontal attack, she screamed, “You’re taking things away from me. You’re making mine into yours.” It was Jade’s genius to use Hugh’s own language when she fought him. Jade dressed in the uniform of Hugh’s troops and fought him from the trees and bushes, whereas I fought him like the colonial British army, straight up and down in a clearing and decked out in red.
And the sleeplessness continued. The nights when you weren’t with us were no better. Jade would go to bed early, clearly anxious for an uninterrupted night, but then there would have to be at least one phonecall to you and as often as not, after an hour or two of sleep, she’d be at her desk composing a letter to you, or drawing your face, or writing a poem to you—sometimes even trying to catch up in her schoolwork. Hugh was convinced that Jade’s short-term memory was unraveling, that she had gotten paler by two full shades. He was even waffling on the question of whether or not to subtly dose her with barbiturates—he was slower to use drugs medically than he was socially.
Well, this was the climate when Jade approached us and asked for a real bed for her room, a double bed as would befit a lady who shared her sleeping quarters with a lover. It’s strange that our compliance in this small matter is what you chose to rattle in my face—and not the far more significant matter of our allowing you into our daughter’s room in the first place. You approve, it would seem, of our belief in the sexual rights of young people, but raise an eyebrow at our choice of furniture. And what about your own terribly moral parents? What was on their minds when they failed to stop you from virtually moving into our house? At least Hugh and I knew where our daughter was—could actually hear her in her room, if we listened closely enough. The truth is that no one had the heart to keep you two from being everything to each other, and the energy of your connection was strangely overpowering. Since we did not believe that making love is a sin or a crime, all we could have objected to was that you and Jade weren’t yet ready somehow for the pleasures of the flesh—but how could we say that when we were nearly mad with envy over your love for each other? You were all of our half-forgotten romantic fantasies suddenly incarnate; denying you would have been like denying ourselves.
And so, yes, I did agree to it, the bed. I believed in you two, in your gestures and in the world you created. It wasn’t until the bed arrived in that Salvation Army truck and was installed in Jade’s little room that I realized Jade’s arguments were wholly based on trickery. Having a double bed didn’t make a dent in her sleeplessness. Nothing could have put you two to sleep. Love—or is it only romance?—is a psychedelic. It’s the flying carpet, the rope trick. It is that singular, and no one who sees it—which means, of course, believing it—can ever hope to be the same. You two stoned-out beasts reigning up there in your used bed. There have been times, David, when I think that just that, just the fact of you two, never minding what it all led to, but just seeing you two and feeling what you meant to each other, and knowing that love is a state of altered consciousness, has been more than I can honestly absorb. And that in certain ways it has destroyed my life.
Ann
8
January is when time begins, and spring is when life begins and, for me, the first day of spring was the day I sneaked into a travel agency on Jackson and State to buy a plane ticket to New York. It was a cold April day, gray, slushy, but the most extravagant promises turned slowly in the belly of the wind. I paid for the ticket with a new hundred-dollar bill, feeling as furtive as a spy. I bought the ticket under a false name and kept the day of departure open. I felt brilliant, brave, and absolutely imperiled. The act of stepping outside the law provoked my imagination and released torrents of fearful criminal passion. I wondered if there was a permanent all-points bulletin out on me and if the sweet-faced woman who sold me the ticket wasn’t in fact looking at a newswire photo of me taped beneath the Formica ledge of the counter. I shoved the ticket into my coat pocket and quick- stepped out with my head down.
I hid my ticket in my apartment and dreamed of my departure. I thought I was going to be quite a bit braver than I turned out to be. Like a person doomed to fail, I thought of the hundred things that could go wrong. I thought of my parole officer Eddie Watanabe making a surprise visit to my school and finding me vanished. I thought of being arrested for jaywalking on 42nd and Broadway and having it discovered I was in New York breaking parole. I thought of Ann slamming her door in my face and calling the police. These were the variables and I was right to think about them, but I could not stop myself. My imagination of disaster tormented me as if it were a separate, vicious self. I longed to stop thinking of consequences, just as we must do when we dive from high boards, leap on our skis down steep sunblind slopes, or play any of the other daredevil games we’ve invented as metaphors for love.
I tried to prepare myself. I packed my suitcase. I bought The New York Times and The Village Voice. I leafed through books of photographs of New York. When I heard a jet pass overhead, I searched the skies for it. I methodically withdrew money from my small savings account, as if it were being monitored by federal agents. I said to Dr. Ecrest, “You know what? I’d like to go to New York.” He asked why and I quickly shrugged, cursing myself for so profitlessly risking detection. I really liked him and it had been difficult all along to keep from confessing the dozens of long-distance phonecalls I’d made and the letters I’d written and the huge, nourishing letters I’d received from Ann. It was an agony often to think how I wasted my time and Ecrest’s, especially when I felt stuck and fed up with my own character. I didn’t much believe in psychiatry, but the fact was that I’d been given a chance to talk for years to highly trained, expensive doctors and I’d made very little of it because of my commitment to keep my secrets safe.
The clothing workers union had taken me off the picket line and into their regional offices, where I worked for a fellow named Guy Parker. Guy was a few years older than me and had convinced the Amalgamated to hire him to make a thirty-minute film “depicting the Union’s struggle, from the sweatshops of the past to the challenge of the future.” Parker’s approach to the film clips and snapshots in the union’s informal archives was wholly passionate. Looking at a picture of women leaping to their death during the Triangle Factory fire, Guy would tap his big ivory finger against his high, slightly flushed brow and muse, “Each one of these gals had a family. You know, parents, husbands, boyfriends, maybe kids. Each one. A life. And then out the window. Think of it.” Guy wanted every incident to work into a Big Scene. Negotiations bored him, cooperative housing projects made him practically whinny with impatience: he needed strikes, boycotts, fires, goons, death tolls. Parker’s vision of union history was one of unstinting hysteria; I suggested we call his movie Oh My God! Here Come the Bosses!
However, working for Guy was a lot better than pacing in front of a store, and since I was Parker’s researcher there was an implicit understanding that sooner or later my work would take me to New York, where the national office of the union had a “treasure trov
e” of photographs and documents and where such early union heroes as Alma Hillman and Jacob Potofsky still lived.
Guy knew nothing and cared less about my personal life—though he liked the way I listened and often asked me out for dinner or drinks. Nevertheless, because fate is not only fickle but also flirtatious, Guy incessantly referred to my upcoming New York trip, alluding to it one day, postponing it the next, until I was half-convinced that the whole deal was an elaborate trap and I refused to react to his promises any more. However, I did use the possible opportunity as a means of putting my toe into the water of consequence if I were to suddenly use my own ticket to fly east. Meeting with Eddie Watanabe, I casually mentioned that “my work” might send me to New York for a week or so. And Eddie, answering so quickly that I wondered if he hadn’t been expecting me to say this, said, “No way, David. No way on earth.”
“Why not?” I said. “Even if I got a written statement from my boss that I had to go to New York?”
“No way, no how.”
Two weeks later, I met again with Eddie. It was evening and spring had receded. A chilly rain was falling and the sky was a dark porcelain blue and looked as if a thunderclap might shatter it into a thousand pieces. Rather than meet at Eddie’s office, we were going to have our talk at the Wimpy’s in the shopping center near my apartment. Eddie was already seated in a booth when I came in. He wore a suburban car coat of a slightly gauzy wool, with long narrow wooden buttons. He’d just gotten a haircut. He was wearing his hair like a businessman now and his practically translucent golden ears looked larval and vulnerable. He smelled of peppermint and new car. As I sat down, he thrust his hand out for me to shake.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re not late. I was early.” He snapped his fingers to get the waitress’s attention, like a clumsy boy trying to act tough and worldly for his date. The waitress came over and took out her order pad, making it a point not to look at us. Eddie ordered coffee and I asked for a root beer.
“How come you wanted to meet here?” I asked. Wimpy’s had been one of the principal Hyde Park hangouts for years and Jade and I had eaten a hundred hamburgers there, some of them while seated in the very booth Eddie and I now occupied.
“I like meeting outside of my office. I get depressed sitting in my office all day. And I get the idea that the place puts you up tight. I’d like you to really relax and get loose with me and maybe, just maybe, you understand, you’d have a bit more luck being honest with me if we were to have our meeting in a nicer place.”
There were not many things in the world I despised more than listening to Eddie Watanabe.
The waitress brought our order and placed it before us. Eddie dropped a saccharine tablet into his coffee and stirred it from the bottom up, as if ladling the sediment from the bottom of a pot of soup.
“You still dreaming about going to New York?” he asked.
In a moment’s confusion, I forgot I’d spoken to him about it last time and I felt exposed, panicked. But then I recalled our discussion and I shrugged.
“What’s that mean?” he asked. “A shrug could mean yes or it could mean no or maybe it means you don’t feel like answering. So?”
“It means I haven’t been thinking about it. What’s the use?”
“That’s the spirit. What’s the use is exactly how you should look at it. I was getting worried about you, if you don’t mind hearing the truth. You’re an intelligent guy, you know.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Oh, a lot. That’s been one of my theories since I got into this business, that the system doesn’t work for the guy with the higher than average intelligence. Either it breaks him into bits or he figures out a way to scout around it, but there’s no blessed way on earth the system we’ve got now, as it exists I mean, at the present time, is going to meet the punishment needs of the guy with the higher than average intelligence. That’s why a guy like yourself, David, is a personal challenge for me, professionally speaking. I can learn ten times as much about penology from an intelligent guy like yourself than I can from some goofball who gets busted trying to rob Mr. Goldberg’s grocery store.”
“Ah, do I detect a bit of anti-Semitism?”
“Screw. I’m not anti anything. If anything, I’m anti-anti and you know it. Jesus, David, you don’t know when you’ve got a good thing. Especially seeing as you’ve got a parole officer whose been doing his share of standing up for you lately.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“OK,” said Watanabe with a rather theatrical sigh, “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I may as well.” This was his customary preamble when he wanted to inform me of my lack of rights.
“Tell me,” I said.
“All right. The father was in town this week.”
“The father? Whose?”
“Butterfield’s.”
“Hugh was here?”
“That’s right.
“You saw him?”
“No way. I’m not interested in him. My thing is you, not him. You.”
“How do you know he was here if you didn’t see him? Did he call you?”
“OK. I’ll tell you. I wasn’t sure I was going to, but since you’re asking. Butterfíeld is tight with Kevin DeSoto. You know, the D.A. who prosecuted you. DeSoto’s into that weird kind of medicine Butterfíeld specializes in. So Butterfíeld blows into town and—”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. From nowhere. What’s the difference? Anyhow, he shows up at DeSoto’s office and he says he has new information for a case against you.”
“What kind of case? My case is over. I can’t be put on trial again.”
“Butterfield wants to have your parole revoked.”
“What’s he saying? What’s his reason?”
“Who knows? DeSoto won’t say. It’s probably nothing, right?”
I nodded.
“But Butterfield is hot and bothered that you’re not locked up in a dungeon and getting nothing but bread and water. DeSoto lets him know that you’re on a tight parole and then DeSoto calls my boss and talks it over and then my boss meets with Butterfield.
“This Butterfield thinks you’re going to get mixed up with his family again. He’s pretty damn emotional, the way I hear it. You’d think it was yesterday, the fire you set. When my boss said we had no intention of revoking your parole, Butterfield practically went nuts. He said you hadn’t been punished. That the hospital we had you in was like a country club. He said you were free to do whatever you wanted. And then you know what he said?”
I shook my head, but I knew.
“He said you wrote his son a letter.”
“That’s a total lie,” I said, quickly and with great feeling.
“I figured. In fact, that’s what I called it when my boss asked my opinion. A lie. I said Butterfield was underestimating your intelligence. The guy was a little nuts, the way he was going on. There he is in my boss’s office, taking up my boss’s valuable time and just standing there beating himself on the chest and saying that he’s made himself a promise that you’ll never see his daughter or anyone else in his family for as long as he lives. My boss says, ‘That’s our job, Mr. Butterfield, not your job.’ And Butterfield screams that we’re not doing our job and that makes it his job.”
Eddie finished his coffee and shrugged. “Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about how the man hates you makes me worried.”
“Why does it make you worry?”
“I’m not sure. It just does. Doesn’t it you? Doesn’t it make you worry?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I wish I was that cool. It gives me the creeps.”
The next day was Saturday and I awoke in tears. The dream that usually woke me was one of meeting Jade. She would see me, turn, and flee, and I would race after her, sometimes through Hyde Park, sometimes through a forest. Soon she’d outrun me and disappear but my running never slackened.
This
time, however, I dreamed I was weeping in my old room at Rockville. It was sunny and warm and I sat at my childish wooden desk with my head in my hands, crying. There was a knock at the door and I woke up, alone and in the dark because my bedroom was in the back and never got any sunlight. As I came awake, I heard my sobs like the bark of a lonely dog a country mile away.
The tears I shed that morning, rigid in the banal discomfort of my own personal neglect (the lumpy mattress, the stale sheets, the uncovered foam-rubber pillow with its refrigerated zipper), were all I could make of the catastrophic hunger I felt for Jade.
From the moment I set the fire, all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive. I tried to hold on to what I believed was uniquely mine, fearing that when I lost it I would be nothing at all. But now, I could feel how much of my resolve was already gone. And I could also feel a part of me beginning to wish that my love would finally start to recede. It lay on me like an intolerable heat; it pressed my thoughts like a fever that wouldn’t break. It was worse than mourning because grief was corrupted by hope; I could not even turn my love into memory.
I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. The feel of her small hard toes as I knelt before her with the tarnished-nickel nail clipper, the oak-colored birthmark on her inner thigh, the double orbit of platinum hairs that circled her belly button. “Trust me,” she said the time we made love and she wouldn’t let me come and she was on top with her hands on my shoulders, moving slower and slower like all human time running down and I was kicking at the mattress as if I were being electrocuted, and the way she said my name as if it were a secret, not softly, yet sometimes in a roomful of people only I’d hear it, which was just one of the thousand things we could never explain—all of these images I thought I was preserving so we could still have them when we were reunited, but now they came unbidden, they did with me whatever they wanted, and they ruled me with their limitless command.
Endless Love Page 16
