Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

  It was obvious pretty early on, however, that the experiment wouldn’t yield any particularly clear results, let alone anything scientifically valid. Her professor, who had endorsed the project, seemed to have allowed Jade to wander into a dead end—but then perhaps that was the point of his agreeing. Jade was grief- stricken and ashamed when she realized that the experiment would yield no significant data—never had she been closer to dropping out of school and setting off to begin a new life with me. But I wouldn’t let her quit, and soon enough she came up with the idea of recording all the experimental flaws in her design and making the anatomy of the fiasco her thesis—much like those reporters who are sent out to interview a reclusive celebrity and write a whole piece on not getting the interview.

  Yet even this idea changed. When Jade finally set to work on her thesis, it was called “Watching Dogs/Myself,” and it was perhaps the first confessional senior’s thesis in ethology. Since all hope for hard data was lost, Jade went to the source of her inspiration and recorded her own reactions to the litters. “This is how Hugh would have done it,” she said, the midnight she solved her dilemma.

  “Dogs,” wrote Jade, “are mirrors more telling than water or glass. In bright reflecting mirrors we see ego-bound versions of what we look like now and fearful apparitions of the future. But dogs can show us how we feel, our relationship to the life around us, and our past. Animals are us in our infancy. A hound baying at the moon is our true self…” Jade and I watched and tended and adored the dogs, and when something seemed to interrupt the flow of life we finally abandoned the last pretense of experimental rigor and stepped right in. A Tiny Tears milk bottle; an Ohio Blue Tip splint. How we loved those dogs and pups, and what a relief it was to have a different medium through which to romance each other. The pups were our first metaphor. We cradled them and looked at each other; we could wonder about ourselves by wondering about them. And every evening as Jade made a long entry into her “Watching Dogs/Myself” diary, I lay on our bed and watched her write—she rocked back and forth like a Talmudic scholar—and I too thought of my beginnings, the slow tortoise-like gropings of my childhood, the years like cool muck. No one’s early life seemed so monolithically dull as my own, but I followed Jade’s lead and did my best to think about it, trying to recover all the information I’d fed to psychiatrists and make it more honest.

  “The blind mother,” wrote Jade. “Sight without sight. Insight without looking. The numbing primacy of instinct. The blind mother eating the birth sack. Voracious. I almost screamed at Queenie to stop. I thought she might eat her first pup alive (Vladimir). An act of self-cannibalization. We are our mother’s self, but what she wants back she takes, and what she can’t admit she attempts to destroy, and what makes it through is what we are. Our first struggle: to get out of the mother. Our second (and lasting) struggle: to remain out, resist reabsorption.…”

  “This is what I want to do,” Jade announced one night. We were walking back into the house after weighing all the pups. “For the first time, I know. I really know. I want to study animals.”

  “I always thought that was what you wanted.”

  “No. I wanted to want it. But it never seemed right. All the scientific method got in my way. Someone else’s shoes. And I’m not suited for it. I’m like Hugh in that way. I think that’s why he became the kind of doctor he was. Homeopathy is more intuitive and personal.” She took my hand and stopped me in my tracks. She pulled me closer to her. “That’s exactly what I want. I want to watch the world; I want to see things that most other people don’t notice. I’d like to go out into the woods for months at a time and do nothing but watch the world. Listen to owls, watch the deer get drunk on those old apples. And see everything for what it is and help myself see me for what I am. I’ll go to graduate school and get all the education I need so people will take me seriously and maybe even pay me, but what I really want to talk about is what it feels like to be related to a grasshopper.” She was smiling, squeezing my arm.

  We went upstairs with a bottle of white wine. Jade wrote for a while and I drank and read from a book of stories by Isaac Babel. Then Jade joined me on the bed and helped finish the wine. Wine wants you to finish it, one of us said.

  “Will you always be my assistant?” Jade asked.

  “Will you pay me?”

  “Half.”

  “A deal.”

  “And my husband?”

  “We’ll have to pay him, too,” I said.

  Jade smiled, laid down with her hands behind her head, her tee shirt tight against her breasts. Letting it pass.

  “I’d love to be married to you,” I said. It was the first time we’d talked about it in years.

  “It doesn’t make any difference. Marriage is probably unlucky, anyhow. It’s not what I think about. It’s something else. It’s raising the puppies with you. Being so close to the beginnings of life and sharing it with you. I think you’d be a great father.”

  “I’d love to have children who looked like you,” I said, almost in a whisper.

  “All we’d have to do is…I mean there’s nothing to it, really, then that would be that. No matter what happened, we would have done that. A child. God, I feel insane, but I really would like that. I want to do it. It seems that until you’re a mother you’re a daughter and it feels ridiculous being a daughter.

  “That’s true. I never felt very comfortable in the daughter role.”

  “Big joke. I’m offering you a chance at changing the universe and you’re making jokes.”

  “Nerves.”

  “It’s no excuse.”

  “Look, you want to have a baby then we’ll do it.”

  “No. You can’t make it mine. It can’t be what I want to do. It has to be mutual, you know.”

  “It is. I’d love to be that baby growing inside you. It would be better than being married.”

  “It seems like the next step. We can fuck until we die but after a while it starts wearing thin, doesn’t it?”

  “Not for me.”

  “I don’t mean yet. But it will. And I don’t really know how I feel about childless couples. It seems like cheating.”

  “I could have nothing ever change again and I’d have a better life than I deserve.”

  “I think it’s the normality of the whole thing that excites me,” said Jade. “How simple and perfect and matter of fact. All I have to do is not put in my diaphragm and then we can do what we normally do and then just as simply as that the whole world is different. It really is exciting to me, David. It’s like thinking about screwing for the first time, when all I had to go on was hearsay, one dirty picture, and my imagination.”

  As Ann would say, how the souls of the unborn hovered over us that night. Jade came to bed, her uterus unshielded, and we made love with a gravity and wholeness that exceeded anything we had ever known. It was what making love for the first time would be if we were born with sexual skills, yet even that doesn’t faithfully describe the power of making love without contraception. We were playing long plaintive tunes on our bodies, trying to coax a human life out of the vast invisible jumble of chemistry and fate. A whole new vocabulary of instinct; my ejaculation seemed to hurtle itself deeper into Jade than ever before. The universe based on risk and effort. Sex no longer lifted us up and outside of time, but sent us streaming back and forth, into our own beginnings and toward the shrouded marker of someone’s future.

  “Again,” said Jade after we came. “I feel like a dog. Never so out of control…”

  It wasn’t pleasure, it was destiny. We stared at each other as we made love and barely made a sound. Lovers used to believe that their souls rushed out of them when they made love and we did hold on to each other as if we were endangered. I don’t know how many times we started from the beginning again, but we went on for hours that night. It was the energy, the obsession of our first month together, in Chicago, when Jade went through the days with lilac bruises on her spine and I’d be having dizzy spells. We p
etitioned the universe to make us a family, but it didn’t work out. The next day we both felt we had acted more impulsively than we could sustain and we went back to using birth control. We waited the rest of the month to see if our one try at conception had taken. I was certain it had, but I was wrong. Ten days later, Jade got those pains in her lower back that herald her period. “I’m glad,” she said. “We have too much to decide to have a baby now. You’ve got to straighten things out with the cops. My family doesn’t even know we’re together. I need to graduate and figure out my life. And so do you. You won’t be selling pants all your life, I hope.”

  When her period finally began, we were having lunch on the lawn of the Presbyterian church near my work. “I have to get to a john,” said Jade, putting down her egg salad sandwich. We looked at each other and shrugged. I got up, took Jade’s hand, and pulled her up. We put our arms around each other. “I wasn’t sure,” Jade whispered. I didn’t know if she meant she wasn’t sure if she was going to actually have her period or if she wasn’t sure about having a baby. I didn’t ask. I wanted that baby without exactly knowing why. My desire for it couldn’t refute all of the objections, yet the objections couldn’t diminish the desire. I didn’t know what to say. My heart was racing at twice its normal rate and I just held her.

  August 12, 1973, was the sixth anniversary of the fire; every year on that day the Butterfields gathered at one or another of their homes. This year, they were expected at Keith’s house in Bellows Falls—just ninety miles away. Up until the twelfth, Jade was decided not to go. She’d yet to stop concealing from Ann, Sammy, and Keith that she and I were together again—though I was certain that Ann somehow knew—and the anniversary of the fire seemed like the worst possible occasion to tell that particular truth. Yet on the other hand she didn’t want to spend a whole day with what was left of her family in such a false position.

  “I hate going to Keith’s house,” she said. “I hate that he lives so close. I hate the jobs he works to keep the place going. I hate all the photographs and little scraps of family memories. He must think we’re the Romanovs. And I hate the place as much as he does. He makes you go on a tour each time so he can point out all the little things wrong with his house. The bricks crumbling around the fireplace, the wet spots in the wall, the rotting floorboards. I mean the guy is living in a house built in 1825 and we’re supposed to be upset that it’s not in perfect shape.”

  On the morning of the twelfth I woke to the clock radio and Jade was throwing a change of clothes into her black nylon travel bag. “I’ll probably be back tonight but you never can tell with my family,” she said. It made me late for work but I went with her to the bus station. We were both nervous. Our first separation since spring. The bus was headed toward Boston but it was completely empty. The driver was tall and silver-haired. He looked like an airline pilot and I wondered if some deep character flaw forced him to drive a bus instead. Jade stopped on the bottom step of the bus and hugged my head to her breasts. “I don’t know what I’ll do if they start talking about you,” she said. “It makes me want to murder. I’ll tell them right away that we’re together and they can make anything they want to out of it.”

  Gertrude was empty when I got home from work. Colleen had taken Oliver to Fishkill, ostensibly so Oliver could be a carpenter for Colleen’s mother, who was converting an old garage house into a guest apartment. Anemone Grommers was in Greece. Nina Sternberg was in Los Angeles. The others were simply out somewhere. I fed the dogs. In a few days, the puppies would be old enough to leave their mothers and we’d be taking the kennels down. I sat out in the back yard for a while and watched the pups gnaw on each other. I thought of how close they had brought Jade and me to starting our own family. It seemed truly lunatic to be influenced like that but I embraced our susceptibility.

  I didn’t realize it first off, but every thought I had was a part of a well-constructed unconscious argument in favor of my calling home. A couple of days after moving to Stoughton I’d sent Rose and Arthur short notes, telling them I was all right. I’d given both letters to Miriam Kay to mail for me, as she was on her way to visit her sister in Toronto and I didn’t want a revealing postmark to give me away. Being outside the law bloats your self-importance and I sat for some time in the kitchen with my hand on the telephone, wondering if my call home would somehow be traced: like the hero of sentimental gangster story, I risked detection—death!—in order to get through to Mama. But finally the laws of civilization worked their way on me. Just as nature endows us with desire so that even the misogynist will reproduce, we bless ourselves with a sense of guilt so that even the heedless will sometimes do the correct, difficult thing. I dialed the Ellis Avenue number and Rose picked up on the fifth ring. She must have been taking a late afternoon nap; there was nowhere in the apartment that far from a phone. Her voice was small, meek, like a little girl who’s been warned not to answer the phone.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  She was silent and the silence continued. The beginning of a word. And then she slammed the phone down and broke the connection.

  I held on, shaking a little but not surprised. I pictured her with her small hands over her face. Then picking up the receiver to see if I was still there. Slamming it down again. Hoping I’d call back. It was like her to be more insulted than worried by the mystery of my whereabouts and hearing my voice—sounding so normal and untroubled—drew on that part of her that felt spurned by me, enraged that I missed the subtle points of her affection. What she offered me was loyalty and the chance to be a better person, and I, instead, took her reserve for coldness and fell for my father’s sloppy love, choosing the overheated embrace over the guiding hand.

  I picked up the phone and dialed her again. This time Arthur answered—I was surprised into silence when I heard his voice.

  “Hello?” he said, two or three times.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  “David. Oh God. I can’t…Where are you? No. That’s OK. You don’t have…”

  “I’m all right. I’m better than all right. I’m fine.”

  “Are you near?”

  “No. Not really. Is everyone looking for me?”

  “We didn’t know where to look. Your grandfather wanted to hire private detectives…We put ads in some of the newspapers, you know, the underground ones.”

  “I mean are the police and all that stuff looking for me?”

  “It can be worked out. Are you coming home?”

  “What’s happened? How come you’re at Mom’s house?”

  “I moved out of my apartment. Apartment! Hole, I should say.”

  “Where’s Barbara?” I asked, and as I did I knew.

  “Dead,” said Arthur, after a silence. “Just a few days after you left. Three in the morning. In her sleep.”

  I started to stand but my legs warned me not to. The extension was picked up. Rose in the bedroom, sitting on the edge of the bed, near the air conditioner: I heard its hoarse, worn note.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “I’m all right. I just wanted to tell you.”

  “You’re all right? Well, I’m very glad. But did it occur to you that we weren’t all right? No. That would be asking too much.”

  “Rose,” Arthur cautioned.

  “You’d better get back here and I mean quick,” Rose said. “Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe there’s still time.”

  “Time for what?” I said.

  “To clean up the mess you’ve made. To be some help around here. To be a son, for once. Where are you, anyhow? You’re with that little…” she left the epithet to my imagination.

  “I’m happy for once,” I said. “It’s like before. I’m alive again.”

  “If you care so much about life then I think you’d better get home,” Rose said. “If you follow my meaning.”

  “Please, Rose,” said Arthur. “David? You don’t have to come home. But maybe you can tell us where you are? It’s terrible not knowing. We won’t call,
we won’t bother you. You’re old enough to make your own decisions and we respect that—”

  “Shit,” said Rose.

  “—but it hurts not to know where you are, to know no matter how important it is we can’t get ahold of you.”

  “He doesn’t think about that,” said Rose. “It’s enough that he knows where we are and if he wants something he’ll call and we’ll come running.”

  “This is costing a lot of money,” I said, “and I’m sort of broke.”

  “Not too broke to leave town and quit your job,” said Rose.

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll tell you. Write it down and keep it somewhere safe, for obvious reasons. I’m in Stoughton, Vermont.” I gave them the phone number.

  “Are you OK, then?” Arthur said.

  “You’re only making it harder on yourself, not coming home and working this whole thing out,” Rose said. Her voice had softened; she hadn’t expected me to compromise.

  We said our goodbyes in another few moments. I promised to call again but no one tried to pin me down as to when. Afterwards, I went out back and played with Cora and Queenie, who were their old selves again now that the pups didn’t need them very much. One of Queenie’s pups had a cold, with little deposits in the corners of his tiny blue eyes. I wiped them clean and held the pup to me, unaccountably worried over its health. I knew the pups were fine but even the minor imperfection made me tremble. “Poor Chetwin,” I said, over and over. The pup nibbled at my thumb with his needle teeth and finally it was starting to hurt and I gave him back to his mother, who rolled him onto his fat back with a long sweep of her tongue.