Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

  “Just one moment.”

  “Hello?” said Jade. Her voice was husky. It always made me think of sand and sun, and smoke.

  “I just wanted you to hear it from me,” I said. “Come up. You have my room number?”

  “Yes. I have it.”

  “Or do you want me to come down? Would that be better?”

  “No. I’ll come up.” She paused. “OK?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  I met her at the elevator; she got off with two women wearing short leather skirts and cowgirl hats. Jade was dressed in gray and carried her black nylon travel bag. She smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, and riding on top of those scents like light on a wave was the aroma of lilac water: she must have put it on moments before arriving at the McAlpin.

  We stood looking at each other for a very long while. I heard a high-pitched whoosh, such as aviators must have heard when they flew in uncovered cockpits. The impetuousness that allowed me to grab for her as I had yesterday afternoon was absent now. It was all I could do to look into her eyes, though, of course, I couldn’t have possibly turned my gaze anywhere else.

  She looked exhausted. Her eyes were enormous, injured, and unfocused. Her lips were parched. She wore makeup and streaks of it showed up in the bleak, watery light of the hotel corridor. Her short hair was tucked behind her ears and the tops of her ears, with their hard, broad rims, were red. She had a gold stud in only one earlobe.

  “You’re missing an earring,” I said.

  She touched her right ear. “Oh,” she said. She touched the empty lobe a few times. “Damn.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll get you another,” I said. I winced. It was such an idiotic remark. It was worse than idiotic: it was arrogant and desperate and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d laughed in my face.

  But Jade was looking at me as if she hadn’t heard. My heart pawed at my chest like a huge dog behind a door.

  “Are you surprised?” Jade said. “That I’m here.”

  I shook my head. “You had to come.”

  She narrowed her eyes a little. “No. I chose to. I decided.”

  “Well, I’m glad.”

  She nodded. Her eyes moved as she looked me over. She was noting the ways I’d changed. As her attention flickered over me I felt it like a human touch: it was clear to me that no one had looked at me in years. All of the other attentions had been fleeting, partial, obstructed: now, at a moment’s notice, now and at last, I was seen as I was.

  “Do you want to come into my room?” I asked.

  Jade nodded. “For a minute. I’m on my way to the bus station. The last bus up to Vermont leaves in half an hour.”

  I closed the door and turned on the overhead light. I’d been propped up on the bed, rereading the newspaper by the table lamplight: the bedspread tortuously imitated my form; papers were askew; the tableau was one of disorganization and a certain grubbiness.

  “I wish I could have greeted you in one of those silk smoking jackets with a glass of champagne,” I said.

  She looked as if she didn’t understand why I was saying that. But I knew she did. There was something deliberate in the glance she gave me, something that wanted to insist she was missing the context of my remark. But Jade always could fill in the silence that flanked whatever I said, could picture what I’d seen without my having to describe it. It had been her intuitiveness that first tempted us toward the belief that soon overran every other thought: that we lived together in a world separate and superior to ordinary life. And now, the act of feigning confusion only told me that she still knew exactly what I meant, knew it as she always had and probably always would, for Jade understood me at my source, could trace the genealogy of my words back to their origins: as shifting tides of blood, drives, preconscious terrors.

  “Should I call and have something brought up?” I said, walking across the room and sweeping the newspaper off the bed. “Some coffee, or wine?”

  “If they bring it fast.” She was casting her attention around the room, memorizing it, looking for a place to sit.

  “Wine’s all right?” I said.

  “Yes. Though something’s happened to my enamel and wine stains my teeth now.” She showed me her lower teeth.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and asked for room service. “Would you bring up two glasses of red wine, please?” I said.

  “We’re all getting old,” I said when I hung up.

  “The lucky ones.”

  She seated herself with a purposeful lack of grace, sighed, and zipped open her travel bag. She poked around in her bag and finally withdrew her hand.

  “You have any aspirin?” she asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Damn,” said Jade.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. A mistake.

  She sat slightly more erect, drawing herself away from me. “My father was killed. I was at his funeral. With my fucked-up family. I’m in my period. And I’m on a special all-protein diet to lose ten pounds.” She raised her eyebrows and nodded, as if to ask: Enough?

  I waited to say something but no words came forth. I thought of offering to rub her temples and the base of her neck but that gesture was clearly not mine. And then I made the stupid, compulsive error of thinking of her in her period, of envisioning the inch of Tampax string curled in her pubic hair and that was followed by a memory of me plucking at the string with the nails of my thumb and forefinger and then wrapping the string once around my finger as if for a yo-yo loop and pulling the blood-streaked cotton tube out of her. It was not, for all of its deliberateness and detail, a welcome thought: it was enough to experience Jade in three dimensions; the pull of intimacy, even remembered intimacy, and its inevitable quick heat, practically made me squirm.

  “I want to ask you about the funeral,” I said. “But I don’t know how.”

  “It was terrible, terrible. You know, boring in a crazy way. I couldn’t get it through my head that that was Pappy in the jar. I think it’s crazy, cremation. Or if you’re going to do it, then let’s do it right. A bonfire. With all of us there. How am I supposed to believe the guy’s really dead? I get a goddamned phonecall, spend a few hours with a lot of hysterical drunks, and then sit on a folding chair with about fifty other people listening to organ music and staring at an urn. I don’t have any proof that anything really happened. I mean, everyone tells me he’s dead, but I’m not sure. They could have gotten those ashes anywhere.” She shrugged and hooked her finger around her gold chain.

  “Fifty people,” I said.

  “And a lot I didn’t know. Also unreal. Ingrid’s sloppy crowd. I like her, though. Probably for the same reason Pappy did. Her earnestness. Her sexiness. How much she cried. Mom was very cool. She seemed impatient with the whole business. Ingrid was crying so loud that it made a lot of other people cry, you know, people who might not have otherwise. But Mom leans over to me and says something like Why don’t we get a bucket of ice water and pour it over the woman’s head? She’s a strange lady, my poor mother. Lonely. Getting a little bitter, I think. Uncle Bob spoke, about Pap and growing up. It was actually quite beautiful, to tell the truth. I didn’t think Bob had it in him. But he was almost singing and I could see even from where I was sitting that he had tears in his eyes. It made me cry, but you always cry at funerals, no matter what’s said. I looked over at Mom when Uncle Bob was talking. She held on to my hand and I looked at her. I could see she fucking wanted to cry but goddamn if she was going to let herself. The tears were Ingrid’s, I suppose that’s what she was thinking, let Ingrid cry. Like Mom knew Pappy too well to cry for him. That’s how she swindles herself out of practically everything.”

  “I was with Ann when she found out,” I said. I wondered if this would be the first that Jade had heard of it.

  “I know. She told me.” She narrowed her eyes for a moment.

  “She cried then,” I said. “A lot. I mean if that matters to you.”

  We went silent for a time. We were strangers and half terrifie
d in each other’s presence: we were seeing ghosts, both of us. How strange to be having a supernatural experience in that small hotel room. We should go out, I thought, we should be walking. But just as I was afraid to clear my throat, I was afraid to suggest anything.

  There was a knock at the door. When I heard the knock I realized that Jade and I were staring at each other, quite boldly, and I had no idea how long our gazes had been locked.

  I got up. “That’s the wine, probably,” I said.

  “I have to go pretty soon.”

  I wanted to shake my head but I stopped myself. “It’s good to be with you,” I said.

  “Like you expected?” There was a slight smirk in her voice, from shyness.

  I paused, to emphasize that I wasn’t just answering out of politeness. “Yes. Like I expected.”

  The wine came in a heavy glass carafe. Two wineglasses and a foil package of peanuts. I signed for it, like a man of the world, and gave the man who delivered it a dollar bill because I didn’t want to ruffle the surface of the moment by digging in my pockets for change. I placed the tray on the table next to Jade.

  “Shall I pour?” I said.

  “The wine’s so dark. It looks black.”

  “No. It’s the light in this room.” I poured some wine into her glass and held it in front of the light. It turned bright red. “See?”

  Jade nodded and took the glass from me. I wondered if she would let her fingers touch mine accidentally, but she didn’t. I was disappointed, sensually let down, because I wanted to feel her, but it was better, I knew, that we not permit ourselves coy gestures. What better way to emphasize our strangeness than to flirt?

  I poured my wine and stood in front of Jade. I would have liked to propose a toast but I knew I wasn’t going to. I returned to the edge of the bed. “I’ve been trying to find you,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “Your family protects you from me. I asked Keith and your mother, but they wouldn’t give me a clue where you were. I sent Sammy a letter to pass on to you.”

  “I know, I know, David. I know.”

  “Did he?”

  Jade nodded.

  I waited for a moment and then I nodded, too. “You didn’t answer.”

  “There was nothing to answer. They weren’t your words, or don’t you remember? You sent me someone else’s letter. Charles Dickens.”

  “It was all I could say,” I said. “I don’t know why. I was afraid to send something in my own words. I needed someone else to talk for me.”

  “That’s not how I remember you,” Jade said.

  “All I needed was one word from you,” I said, “and I would have sent you a hundred letters. I wrote them but I didn’t send them. I didn’t know where to send them or if you wanted me to.”

  Jade sipped the wine and then ran her tongue over her top teeth, to wipe them clean. Each gesture drove the flag of her reality deeper into me; each movement made it seem more certain we could never be apart.

  “I want to ask you a lot of things,” she said. “And tell you things. It’s too strange. I’ve just been to my father’s funeral and I want to ask you how you’ve been doing. I can’t handle it. This doesn’t make any sense.”

  “How have I been?” I asked. “You can ask that. I mean, I can tell you. It’s not very difficult because I’m just how you think of me.”

  “How do you know the way I think of you?”

  “OK. I didn’t mean that. I mean I’m just the way I was the last time we saw each other.”

  Jade looked away and rubbed her fingers together in that nervous way people do when they’re used to reaching for a cigarette but they’ve given them up. I could see the picture she had of herself in that moment, lighting the cigarette, drawing on it and keeping the smoke in her lungs for three or four moments, and then expelling it along with her breath and a sigh.

  “The last time we saw each other,” she said, “was in Chicago and you were in my house after you set it on fire. Is that how you are now, too?”

  I answered without hesitation. “Yes.”

  She immediately consulted her wristwatch. “It’s time to go,” she said. “I’ve got twelve minutes to get eight blocks. I’ll be lucky if I make it.”

  I had already hit upon my plan. I would offer to go with her to the bus station. I didn’t know where it was in New York but if it was like most cities it probably wasn’t in a safe area. I would insist. She would accept. And then I would tamper with the pace of our journey and cause her to miss her bus. But instead of offering to accompany her, I leaned forward and said, “No. Don’t go. Miss the bus. Stay. Stay with me. We haven’t talked in so long and I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again.”

  She stood up and it felt as if that gesture was duplicated by a replica of her within me, displacing the blood in my mid-section and sending it in a rush to the five outermost points of my body. I forgot I was holding a wineglass and it dropped out of my hands; it landed upright but then it fell down.

  Jade watched the mustard-colored carpet absorb the wine. She was nodding her head in that way that sometimes accompanies thought and sometimes means a tentative yes.

  “Please,” I said, trying to impress my will on the moments as they flowed away from me, like a child lobbing stones into the sea.

  She took a quick gulp of breath and then swallowed. She looked so tired and frightened. A pulse was beating in her forehead; her ears remained an astounding dark red.

  “All right,” Jade said, in a careful voice, a voice that only pronounced the words, such as you might do if you were making a recording to teach English. “I better call the bus station and see when the next bus is.”

  I thought she was going for the telephone but she took the three steps separating her from the edge of the bed and sat next to me.

  I didn’t want to touch her or look at her or do anything to confuse the impulse that had brought her so close to me. I looked straight ahead at the spot she’d been sitting in and I felt her weight shifting. I felt her looking at the side of my face and then she leaned over and rested her forehead on my shoulder.

  I longed to return the gesture with a caress of my own, but I knew better. I knew she meant more than one thing by her touch. I was someone she used to know who she was seeing on the day of her father’s funeral. It could have meant as little as that. It could have meant even less: exhaustion, sadness, that depletion of spirit that comes when we surrender to another’s will. Ye I was sure it was otherwise. There was something specific and deliberate in her touch. She was not merely laying her head against me. There was life in her muscles, in her neck and shoulders; she was making certain not to lean on me too hard. She was touching me and holding back in a way that seemed wholly calibrated, judging where to touch me and how hard, and that meant that not only was the center of her brow touching me but all of her. It added the dimension of decision to her gesture, of measurement and risk, and that made leaning against me as intimate as touching my face or taking my hand and pressing it against her breast. Moments passed, moments and moments, and it felt as if the whole of her being was concentrated in that stretch of brow that homed in on me, just as the entirety of a singer seems concentrated in her mouth as she hits her highest note.

  I couldn’t put my arm around her without causing her to move her head, so I reached over and laid my hand on her leg, just above the knee. I laid it flat, without closing or even curling my fingers, so it wouldn’t seem as if I were trying to take possession of her, or even hold her.

  I took measured breaths and tried to ignore my mind’s chaotic bursts of speculation and joy, but even so I was trembling.

  Jade lifted her head and leaned away from me.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have known I couldn’t touch you.” I pulled my hand away from her, but I continued to quiver. I stood up and walked to the window. I felt my heart pounding, felt it at the back of my throat, in my stomach, the tip of my penis, my legs. I leaned against the window and looke
d out. Moving above me was a piece of the black and gray nighttime sky. It could all end here, I thought, my life, all life, it wouldn’t matter. And the thought seemed so reasonable and did such justice to the wildness of my feelings that I almost said it aloud.

  “Are you going to make trouble for yourself by coming here?” Jade asked.

  “No.”

  “But you’re not supposed to see any of us. You’re on parole. I’ll bet no one knows you’re here.”

  “It doesn’t matter. No one will find out. I’ve been gone some of Friday and today. The weekend doesn’t count.”

  She looked at me skeptically but didn’t want to pursue the thought: she had inherited from Ann the stylized belief that the best way to be for someone is not to show much concern over what they do.

  “You know who I met on the plane coming out here?” I said. “Stuart Neihardt.”

  Jade shrugged.

  “You don’t remember him. He was in my class at Hyde Park High. He works for a dentist now and he’s in New York having gold teeth made.”

  Jade nodded. She suspected I was inviting her to make an ironic remark about Neihardt and she wouldn’t do it. She was either too close to other people to make fun of them, or too far above them to bother: it depended on her mood.

  “He remembers us,” I said. “He has this really sick grief over people he knew who were happy together. He was super lonely and got to hate all of us who weren’t. It was strange hearing about us from him. I never think about him so it was weird being remembered.”

  “I don’t remember that name. What does he look like?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I don’t think you knew him. But he said ridiculous things about us. He said he looked in your blouse when you were leaning over some exhibit at the science fair.”

  “Thanks for telling me.”

  “It made me fantastically jealous. I grabbed his lip and twisted it.”

  Jade winced. “God, David. You’re so violent and crazy.”

  “No I’m not.”

  “You are. You don’t know it but you are.”

  “I’m not. What I feel, it isn’t violence or craziness. I don’t like violence, and craziness is sad and boring and frightening. I was with a lot of crazy people, you know, and was treated like one, too. I mean there were times when I wondered if I was insane, and then for a long while I wanted to be crazy, just for a way to be, a way to have it make sense being there. Something to occupy me, make me less the person I was, who was in so much pain, and more like some other person, someone unknown, whom I could watch. But I wasn’t crazy. That was the thing. I wasn’t crazy at all, though I know that’s the best way to prove you are, saying you’re not. All it took for me to get out—I don’t know why it took me so long to catch on—all it took was pretending I was changing, that I was starting to feel differently about myself and—” I paused for a moment, to give her a chance to diminish her attention if she wanted to “—about you. All it took was pretending that I was getting over you, that was all.” I was sitting next to her again.