Endless Love

by Scott Spencer

  She was waiting for me in the visitors’ room, sitting in a low green chair and studying the posters on the wall: gauzy photographs of couples walking hand in hand, swans silhouetted on the water, a waterfall, and a huge red and white striped balloon with the words “Up up and away” written on it. There were about twenty other visitors and as many patients, with five orderlies sitting around, looking the scene over.

  I saw Ann before she knew I’d come into the room. I waited, giving myself a chance to feel whatever it was that seeing her again would awaken in me. I felt slightly nervous, embarrassed because I knew I didn’t look good and because it’s always embarrassing to be locked up. But other than that, my feelings couldn’t come forward; they remained pressed beneath the overwhelming weight of my circumstances. She’d gained a little weight, but it looked good on her. Her hair was almost solid gray—I don’t think time alone could have changed the color of her hair so radically. She wore a brown skirt and a soft, expensive-looking white blouse. She looked so elegant; I glanced around to see if everyone was noticing her, but no one seemed to.

  “Surprise,” I said, dropping down into the chair next to her.

  “David,” she said. Her voice suddenly disappeared, like a coin in a magic trick. Was she going to pull it out of my ear? She cleared her throat; color was rising in her face. “I told them I was your aunt.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m so bad at getting away with things,” she said. “I felt sure I’d get caught in my…”—she glanced around—“…lie. But now that I see you, I think I’ve actually pulled it off.” She smiled. Conspiracy. Triumph.

  A surge of emotion ripped through me. All at once, I took Ann’s hand and held it, and then I lifted it slowly to my lips and kissed the back of her cool, faintly tanned hand. My nose was pressing against her; there was a faint cucumbery taste on her skin, and when I finally stopped kissing her and she let her hand drop into her lap, I saw that her hand was wet. I stared at it, hoping she would wipe it dry and horrified that she might.

  “I’m in town at the behest of my publisher,” she said, quietly. “Promoting my book.”

  “So you finally wrote a book,” I said.

  Ann hesitated, nodded. She’d expected me to know. A slight overestimation of her own celebrity. I felt ashamed for her. How dare she think I would know anything.

  “I miss a lot of what’s going on in here,” I said.

  “Of course. And even if you weren’t here. Maybe ten thousand people in all the world know my name. It’s a small world, the book world.”

  “It’s about time you wrote a book. Think of it: a real book.”

  “You look OK, David,” she said; “You really do.” She glanced around the room, as if to say: Better than the others, at least. Someone was having a coughing fit, a patient. His family was pounding him on the back to make him stop.

  “I saw myself in the mirror yesterday,” I said. “And I thought, ‘Hey boy, you look like someone in a public fucking nuthouse.’”

  “You look good. Your voice is deeper.”

  “It’s the drugs. It relaxes my face and makes me look old. They give you a lot of drugs here. Remember how we used to love drugs? Well, it’s different here. It’s serious. They have to give them to us or else we’d tear the place down. Burn it. That’s why my voice is so low, too. The drugs. I’m glad you noticed. I wasn’t sure it was true, and I didn’t know who to ask.”

  We were silent for a few moments. The cougher was still coughing. An orderly stood with his massive arms folded, watching the family pound the cougher’s back.

  “What do you do while you’re here?” Ann asked.

  “But I’m always here!”

  She looked around, shrugged. “What do you do?”

  “Look. I want to ask a favor. Now you’re a famous writer. Why don’t you write a story about me? But not a story. The truth. What happened to me. I’m sorry. I’m forgetting what I’m not supposed to say. But the point is I’m here and it’s been a very long while, don’t you think? My case is sitting on someone’s desk, on the bottom of the pile. Don’t you think a little publicity would help? If you wrote a story to tell the world what’s happened to me, and maybe others like me too. I just need to get out of here. Even if I seem old and different, I’m still alive. I’m still the exact same person. It’s me, Ann. It’s me. It really is. I’m holding on. I’m making it day by day. But I don’t know, I really couldn’t say how much longer I’ll be able to hold out. They want you to change. That’s what it’s all about. I might even do it if I thought they’d let me out after. But knowing how it is I could turn myself into shit and they’d still keep me here.” I grabbed for her hand again but let it go when I saw her eyes were blurred with tears.

  “I don’t think you belong here, David,” she whispered. “I never thought you did. It’s a damn outrage and you’re absolutely right to be angry.”

  “I’m not angry, I’m dying. And I want to get out.”

  “I never thought you deserved it. That’s why I came, to tell you. My plane leaves at three but I had to chance missing it to tell you and to see you. If there’s anything…” She swallowed a sob, covered her eyes for a moment. “That sounds so false. I’m sorry. But it’s so. If there’s anything I can do, any way I can stand up in your behalf, I will. It’s not a matter of family anymore. It’s a question of right and wrong and it’s plainly wrong for you to be punished any longer.” She started to get up but I held on to her arm.

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “Your father told me. Weeks ago. I called.”

  “That must have been weird. Was it all right?”

  “Your mother got on the line. She started to scream at me. Your father hung up and then I did. It was weird. I have to go. I want you to take care of yourself. You—”

  “Does Jade have a baby yet? Is she all right?”

  “She’s OK. Her husband was transferred to Brussels. She doesn’t much care for it. And no, they don’t have children.”

  “Yet.”

  “I don’t think she’s anxious to. I think I’ve queered her on motherhood.”

  “What’s your book about?”

  “Hugh. I’ll send you a copy.”

  “Hugh?”

  “You’re in it, too. But not as you. It’s not what you think. It’s about before. Falling in love with him. The beginning.” She stood up.

  “It was very nice of you…” My head was dropping. I covered my eyes and then I was afraid to uncover them and find her already gone. I felt her hand on my shoulder. I stood.

  “Don’t lose faith in yourself, David,” she said. We were standing very close; I could smell her perfume. I breathed deeply, drawing the scent into my blood.

  “I don’t have any faith in myself.”

  “Yes you do. You’ve just got to find it. It’s no wonder you can’t here. You’ve got to get out. You don’t belong here.” She reached up, put her hand against my face. She held me in her eyes for a moment; I wanted to hug her but something told me not to. I felt tears streaming down my cheeks. Ann stepped back, looked at me in the way you do when you want to commit someone to memory, and then she turned.

  I watched her walk across the visitors’ room, toward the glass doors. Her shoulders were back and she was trying not to walk fast. In a moment she’d be gone.

  “Thank you,” I called out to her, cupping my hands over my mouth like a man at sea.

  She raised her hand without looking round. She waved goodbye with her fingers, lowering them one at a time, as if counting down. Five, four, three, two, one.

  The next September my father died, at home, in his sleep. A massive heart attack, though I don’t know if it would have taken a huge shove to loosen his grip on life. As soon as he was gone, it was clear to me that he’d been preparing his own death since Barbara Sherwood’s. Rose came to Fox Run to break the news. We were alone in the visitors’ room, on a Wednesday. Her face looked utterly white, as if she were hovering in a state of
semi- shock: there are windows in the wall separating life from death and when you peer through one of them it changes you. I knew something was wrong as soon as I sat next to Rose, and when she laid her cold, small hand on my wrist I was ready for the worst. It was already three days after the fact: Arthur died at eleven thirty Sunday night; his body, as per his promise, was already in the University of Chicago Medical School, “donated to science.” I felt too neglected, too behind the roll of events to cry. I felt only a deep soreness within, as might be caused by a disease.

  A month later I was given a round of psychological tests. Nothing new. Adding columns of numbers. Who was the first President of the United States? What is the sun? Questions to see if my brains were addled, if my hold on reality was at all sequential and ordinary. Inkblot tests, complete-the-story tests, spatial perception tests, memory exercises, and finally a kind of Ph.D. oral in front of a panel of three psychiatrists, in which I spoke of myself and answered their questions. If you could have any job in the whole wide world, what would it be? If you loved a gal and she didn’t love you, what would you do? I was weak from the effort to appear normal, and I had even forced myself up toward a level of acuity in which I recognized that if my efforts were too apparent—or too successful—then I would be defeating myself. It was important to remain at all times vulnerable to their judgments of me; confidence and determination would be interpreted as symptoms of disassociation.

  Two weeks after my round of tests, I was informed by Dr. Donner, who was supposed to be my psychiatrist, though I only saw him an hour and a half weekly, that I was fit to “take a crack” at being in the world again. He gave me several words of friendly advice, said I should “think seriously” about seeing a psychiatrist once I was released, that I should “feel free” to call on him if I had a problem I wanted to discuss, and that he hoped I’d learned about myself and how to deal with my problems while I was at Fox Run. “Especially with the hospital under constant attack by intolerant community people and opportunistic budget-cutters, it feels fine to be sending someone home with the feeling that we’ve done him a measure of good.”

  And so I was released. I left Fox Run, walking across a bridge made of your marriage and Arthur’s death. I returned to the old apartment on Ellis, to recover from my long hospitalization and adjust to my freedom. I’d been through it all before, but what made it different was now I hadn’t the slightest illusion that everything might be transformed suddenly by the huge unreasonable magic of Reunion. I never once expected to see you from my window, even as I got out of the bed I’d slept in when I first joined my heart to you, the bed I had lain in in agony, waiting to rejoin you. When the phone rang I never thought it was you and the sight of the mailman shouldering his big leather pouch of letters and cards never tempted me to even wish. Arthur’s small estate had gone to Rose, but she divided it in half and so I was, for the first time in my life, solvent. Now, I could move out whenever I was ready, but I wasn’t ready. I needed to be home and Rose needed me there, too.

  Jade. I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t…

  It was difficult to find a job. I had a criminal record and it was worse for me to have been punished in a hospital than in a prison, in terms of how other people looked at me. I had very little education and not much of a work history. I was close to twenty-eight years old. I wanted a job in a large company, something to put me in contact with many people. Friends of the family tried to help but no one had anything for me; everyone was retired or simply too old to have much influence. I lived on my small legacy and took courses at Roosevelt University. It doesn’t matter what I took, though it wasn’t astronomy. I needed something that I was sure would help me find work and everyone told me that astronomers were having a very hard time of it.

  On the good days, I felt like a shipwrecked man spotting the signs of some nearing but still invisible shore: a taste in the wind, a softness in the light, a sudden passage of gulls.

  I hope this day finds you well. You don’t have to read a word of this, you know. I don’t want to make your husband nervous, or to embarrass you, or to make you remember things you’ve decided are best forgotten. I’ve come to the end, finally. Not of love. But of my power to say another word. I’ve no more need. My life is taking shape. I’m living with a woman and maybe someday we will marry, though I doubt it. She paints, too, by the way. Even better than you used to. She teaches at a university and is a full inch taller than I am. I won’t bother to tell you where I’m living now; it makes a more perfect sense for you not to know.

  I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t, but if you’ve gone this far I suppose it’s obvious that what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn. But that’s of small importance to you now, and that’s how it should be.

  Everything is in its place. The past rests, breathing faintly in the darkness. It no longer holds me as it used to; now I must reach back to touch it. It is night and I am alone and there is still time, a moment more. I am standing on a long black stage, with a circle of light on me, which is my love for you, enduring. I have escaped—or have been expelled—from eternity and am back in time. But I step out once more to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end. My arms open wide, not to embrace you but to embrace the world, the mystery we are caught in. There is no orchestra, no audience; it is an empty theater in the middle of the night and all the clocks in the world are ticking. And now for this last time, Jade, I don’t mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.

  A Biography of Scott Spencer

  Scott Spencer is the New York Times—bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, including the National Book Award finalists Endless Love (1979) and A Ship Made of Paper (2003).

  Born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., Spencer moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago at age two. His father, Charles, had been in the army before beginning work in a hot and noisy Chicago steel mill. Charles later wrote and self-published a book titled Blue Collar (1978) about the experience. Spencer remembers his childhood as peaceful despite his family’s tight finances and his parents’ concern over the political climate during the McCarthy Era, both of which were kept secret from Spencer at the time. Charles was a dissident in his union and, Spencer remembers, “sometimes feared for his safety and even his life. There were mornings when he checked under the hood of his car for a bomb before igniting the engine.” The far South Side of Chicago was at the time the set of atrocious racial violence, which Spencer’s parents steadfastly resisted, adding to the home’s sense of peril and purpose.

  Spencer was an avid reader from an early age, a passion that his parents encouraged. At age sixteen, he discovered the beatnik subculture and was very much influenced by that literary movement. Though he studied at the University of Illinois and Chicago’s Roosevelt University before earning his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Spencer considers himself above all to be “an alumnus of the Chicago public library system.”

  All of Spencer’s novels are intimately related to his life. He wrote his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975), during and directly following his college years. The novel centers on a control-hungry experimental psychologist and his dangerous experiments, which reflected Spencer’s own experimentation with mind-altering drugs and his studies in behavioral psychology at the time. His second novel, Preservation Hall (1976), is about an ambitious man’s fateful encounter with his ex-convict step-brother while the two are snowed in together in an isolated rural house, not unlike the one Spencer would move to later in life in Rhinebeck, New York. His next novel, Endless Love, explores the obsessive and all-consuming relationship between a young couple and was his first major success, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Endless Love was universally hailed by critics, establishing Spencer as a leading American author, and inspiring the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli.

  In 1986, Spencer published Waking the Dead, the story of the t
ragic love between a career politician and a progressive activist living in Chicago. The book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and later became a film produced by Jodi Foster and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Spencer followed the success of Waking the Dead with Secret Anniversaries (1990), a coming-of-age story of a young woman in mid-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., and Men in Black (1995), a comedic novel about a struggling author’s unexpected success after penning a book about UFOs. Secret Anniversaries and Men in Black is set partly in the fictional town of Leyden, New York, a town that Spencer revisits in many of his novels. Leyden and many of its residents are modeled after Rhinebeck, and Spencer says that, though he doesn’t directly base his characters on real people, he does draw from them and join different people’s traits together, “giving a red head a limp, a lawyer a dog.”

  After Men in Black, Spencer published The Rich Man’s Table (1998), about the strained relationship between a Bob Dylan—like American music icon and his unacknowledged son. Most recently, Spencer has published the novels A Ship Made of Paper (2003), Willing (2008), and Man in the Woods (2010). Spencer’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has also taught fiction writing at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

  This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban Revolution.

  Spencer’s fourth grade class at Burnham Elementary School on Chicago’s South Side. Spencer is in the second row, fifth from the left.