The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

by Nicolai Houm

  Finally, Jane gave up. It was pointless saying things like ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I’ve gone the wrong way’. Instead, faced with the crowd of humanity, she joined them and muttered the slogan to herself but in unison with the others: No Justice, No Peace.

  When the march passed Grand Central Station, her eye was caught by a tall young man who was walking just a few steps ahead of her and spoke the words with passion. His hair was halfway to his shoulders and he looked like Abraham Lincoln, if it was possible to imagine the sixteenth president as a twenty-something student who had never carried the responsibility for a nation at war, and dressed like Kurt Cobain. She had seen that guy before but couldn’t think where. Pondering this, she took care not to lose sight of him. Eventually, they came to march side by side and, in the surrounding chaos that made looking every which way quite reasonable, their eyes often met. On East 45th Street, the young man turned to Jane and shouted a question into her ear. Did she know where they were going?

  ‘Don’t you know?’ she shouted back.

  ‘No, I just came along for the ride. I was on my way home.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘I had no idea about the demonstration.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘But now I’m here, which is a good thing.’

  ‘We’re glad you feel the same way,’ she said.

  It took a few weeks before Jane admitted that they had been in the same situation. Meanwhile, they had slept with each other twice and he had bought her a ring from a vending machine, knelt in front of her in the line to a Stone Temple Pilots gig, and asked her to be his lover. It turned out that they were not only at the same university but actually in the same department. Greg had joined the creative writing course and definitely had ambitions to become a writer. Jane was in her second year of the course in English literature and shared his ambition but kept it secret. The similarities between them didn’t end there. They came from the same state, though Greg had grown up in La Crosse. Both used to watch Scooby-Doo after school and, just like Jane, Greg stayed with the programmes that followed it, Gilligan’s Island and The Love Boat, despite the mental pain they caused. Separately, they had both flirted with vegetarianism but only in short bursts because they read the same anxiety-making article in New Scientist about the crucial role of amino acids in brain development (they had both come across the magazine in a dentist’s waiting room). As for beers, Greg preferred Pabst Blue Ribbon, a drink to which Jane’s father had devoted his life, more or less. They discovered that Jane, on her first independent holiday, had stayed at a campsite not at all far from Greg’s childhood home and had actually bought painkillers in a pharmacy run by Greg’s uncle. Before his stroke, that was. And it came back to her where she had seen Greg before. Not in the university – their timetables scarcely overlapped at all – but at a reading in the KGB Bar. It had been hard for her to take her eyes off him on that occasion, too. Later, they read in the Militant (Greg, who was obviously a socialist at the time, subscribed to it) that some 1,200 people had marched in the demo against the church arsonists. And the two individuals who were meant for each other happened to join the procession at exactly the same place! Neither Jane nor Greg was especially religious or superstitious, but they were both at the age when you can’t help letting yourself suspect that there is a plan for the universe and that your name is at least mentioned in it.

  Jane knew already after their first night together in her place on Broome Street that she wanted to marry him. She wanted a quick, unannounced ceremony in some place with no connections to either of them. Partly because she found that scenario much more romantic than dressing up like a cupcake and proceeding to do exactly what billions of couples had done before. But her main reason was to escape her parents who would, without fail, envelop the whole event in the usual murk of pointless grief and disapproval. She saw all this clearly after having woken up before him, rolled over on her side and, supporting herself on her elbow, looking at him in the dust-laden light. She examined his face with its faint grey shadow around the mouth and chin but deep in childish sleep. A long, slender arm stuck out from under the blanket. His fingers twitched. They had none of the repulsiveness of other men’s fingers.

  He woke when she was on her way to the bathroom.

  ‘You’re not going anywhere, are you?’

  She sank down on the bed next to him.

  ‘I should be off to a Sigma Theta Lambda meeting.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘What for? I’ve said I’ll be there, silly. That’s why.’

  They both smoked. In bed. Looking back on it ten years later, it seemed like a ritual from a lost past, as distant as duels with pistols or mummification.

  ‘But you don’t actually want to join a student soc talking shop.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You dislike all that stuff. Basically, you don’t want to be a member of anything.’

  ‘Don’t I?’

  ‘No. You’d like to get out of it. But it worries you to think that not joining in will make you into a sad, lonely person.’

  ‘The things you know.’

  ‘But all true?’

  Jane was twenty-two years old. She was still not sure what kind of person she was. ‘But, well…’

  ‘Now you don’t need to worry about being sad and lonely any more,’ Greg said and caressed her cheek.

  And so, with an untroubled conscience, she did what she truly wanted to do, which was to be on her own or with Greg, busy writing, studying, drifting around New York or being indoors looking out over the big city, or going out for drinks to merge into the crowd, maybe two to three times a month.

  Greg was not particularly involved in student life either, even though he was far more of an extrovert than Jane. He was one of those rare people who is just as much at ease chatting with gang members as passing the time of day with an old lady and making her chortle. He played in a band.

  Until she met Greg, Jane had been lonely. Lonely as an only child, lonely hanging out with Alice and other girls, lonely going out with boys who made out they were listening while all their attention was in their pawing hands. College had saved her from the dreariness of the Midwest, and literature from the sensation of being somehow locked into her own head. In Greg she had found the first person with whom she could connect strongly. It felt like having searched radio frequencies all alone for twenty-two years before finding a voice at last.

  With him, she did things she had never done with her old boyfriends back in Wisconsin.

  ‘Oh-la-la…’ Alice said when Jane told her this.

  Jane had to explain.

  ‘Not that kind of thing. Or, yes. That, too. But what I really meant was things like sitting on a moth-eaten sofa listening while he practises with his band. When he went back to La Crosse for his uncle’s funeral, I had to keep sniffing at a T-shirt he had left behind.’

  After a month with Greg, she met his parents. He had told her in advance that they were much like her own mother and father: tedious, cold, loveless. The weekend in New York with Peggy and John Noland made Jane wonder what other features of their life together Greg had hyped up for her. Not that it really mattered; she took his wanting to be more like her as an incomprehensible but tremendous compliment.

  John, Greg’s father, was a jovial, bearded man who wrote books on local history. He spent weekends and holidays re-enacting Civil War battles in the company of other jovial, bearded men. He had rigged up a real cannon on his driveway and fired it once a year where it stood, regardless of any local police permission. He was also a pacifist. He had fought in Vietnam and learnt a thing or two about people, as he said. Peggy had been Miss Teen Colorado and later kicked up a lot of controversy by stating in public that beauty competitions were not only bad news for women in general but also gave the master of ceremonies opportunities to fiddle with underage girls. The only conceivably tedious side of Peggy and John Noland was that they owned and ran a company trading in spare
parts for agricultural machinery. As for loveless, this seemed to apply exclusively in the physical sense. At a lunch in Central Park, they spoke openly about their plan to divorce when Greg had started school. This had been postponed because of the children and, having reached the last milestone when Greg’s little brother Jeff moved out of the parental home, they had become so accustomed to their platonic marriage that they could not imagine another kind of relationship.

  ‘Anyway, we are working together,’ Peggy explained.

  ‘Sex, now, we’ve forgotten what it’s about,’ John added. He glanced at Greg. ‘I hope there’s no more you’ll need to ask on the subject, son.’

  ‘We sure couldn’t help you with that kind of thing,’ Peggy said.

  Then they laughed so loudly people at the tables around them turned and stared.

  This was who they were, Peggy and John Noland. They had a lot to do with Greg being who he was. More than before, Jane dreaded him meeting her parents; their eccentricities were the opposite of fun. Also, they were older than his parents: she had been their longed-for child, a late blessing, even though it rarely felt like that.

  As she said to Greg after the weekend with his parents, ‘You know I told you how I think of my childhood? As a cryptic place populated by people you can’t help feeling are strangers? And you nodded.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I nodded because I thought that was beautifully put,’ Greg said.

  Jane found that describing her parents’ oddities to Greg was a surprisingly positive experience. This was not only because he often laughed but also because she came across as an almost more interesting person against the grim background, just as the story of any passionate emotion can add a new dimension to one’s opinion of somebody. But her stories had been given a wry, anecdotal quality and been subject to her own edits; for Greg to meet her parents in real life would be quite different. What would he think when her father came out with one of his conspiratorial monologues about America as the lost paradise? Probably that it helped to explain her prevailing pessimism. And when her mother tried to cover up another attack of depression by dishing up a non-stop series of labour-intensive meals and snacks – would Greg fear that her agitated version of melancholia was heritable? Would he realize why their house did not feel like a home but a small, rock-panelled shrine that served as a place of refuge from life?

  After their decision to spend Christmas with her parents – just how they came to agree on it was permanently clouded by the enigmatic fog of love – her worries grew more precise. What would Greg make of the tradition of having three Christmas trees (one natural and green, one coated in silver and another in blinding white), spray-painted by her father in the garage, decorated by her mother in a manic pre-Christmas frenzy but seen only by very few others because her parents hardly ever had guests?

  ‘Jane, listen,’ he said while they waited for Robert to pick them up outside the arrivals hall at Mitchell Airport. ‘For all I care, your parents could have lobster claws and glow in the dark. It’s you I want.’

  The full range of Greg’s social skills was revealed to her during that Christmas holiday. If she had not been in love with him, she might just have found his behaviour rather too chameleon-like. Had she not married him and spent eighteen years at his side, Jane might even have remembered him as manipulative.

  Consider, for example, his reaction to the quiet hours.

  ‘The quiet hours?’ Greg’s face had the expression of someone ready to be told of a new party game.

  All four of them were in the living room on the first night of the visit. Jane considered grabbing the marble ashtray on the coffee table and beating herself senseless with it.

  ‘Jane can explain what it is,’ Robert said. ‘She has grown up with our quiet hours.’

  ‘Oh, Dad,’ she hissed.

  ‘Jane,’ Dorothy whispered, perched on the edge of her armchair.

  The small decorative cushions crowded Jane where she sat next to Greg on the two-seater sofa. The spotless, moss-green carpet was a quagmire about to swallow her tennis sock-clad feet.

  Dorothy’s eyes somehow showed that her jaw muscles had tightened beneath her plump cheeks.

  Robert turned to Greg. ‘It’s simple. We have agreed to be completely at rest between five and seven in the afternoon.’

  Jane had an urge to add that this was in consideration of her mother’s state of mind, and that the quiet hours had actually been advised by a psychotherapist, but realized that the information would hardly help to normalize the family ritual.

  Greg looked from one to the other, then raised his index finger and said, ‘I truly get this. People don’t take the time off just to be any more. Everyone seems to have forgotten the importance of… contemplation. How much space do we give it nowadays?’

  She saw her father look appraisingly at Greg and allocate him to the category ‘self-important college kid’. She noticed how Greg’s slightly hooked, lovable Lincoln-nose seemed larger seen sideways on and wanted to pull him back in the sofa and out of the danger zone. But he avoided looking at her and, with a big smile on his face, addressed Dorothy.

  ‘And besides it’s good to chill now and then.’

  Unbelievably, this made her parents burst out laughing.

  Greg glanced at the clock.

  ‘But there are still six more minutes to go before the quiet hours begin,’ he said. ‘Now, how shall we pass the time?’

  He was teasing them. He was the first person in history to tease anyone inside the Ashland family house. But it seemed to work all right.

  ‘Jane tells me you play in a rock band,’ Robert said.

  Dorothy rose to tidy away their juice glasses and the crumb-filled platter that had held their hot tuna sandwiches.

  Greg replied, ‘I play lead guitar.’And went on explaining, as if it would interest her father in the slightest – her dad, whose music recordings amounted to two Kris Kristofferson cassettes for respectively the car and the workshop: ‘Strictly speaking, I shouldn’t call it lead because I’m the band’s only guitarist.’

  The rectangular shadow of the mailman’s van rumbled past on the snowy road at the end of their drive. It reached the stop sign and its brake lights cast a red glow in between the curtains.

  ‘Are you Jewish, Gregory?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Now and then people ask me, though.’

  ‘Jane tells us that you’re a socialist,’ her father continued.

  ‘Guilty as charged,’ Greg said loudly and put his hand up.

  Dorothy’s tidying took on the darting speed of a reptile. Jane clutched Greg’s hand and glanced at her father only to find that his face didn’t look as she had expected. His bluish jowls shuddered like a basset hound’s and his eyes were rimmed with moist resignation.

  ‘To the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met a socialist before.’

  The next day, Greg was entrusted with spray-painting the silver tree. Jane stood in the garage doorway and watched. Robert held the tree at arm’s length; Greg wore a face mask and carried out his painting task with easy, almost dancing movements.

  ‘Suppose you’ve had experience with all the graffiti,’ Robert said.

  Greg even managed to encourage her mother into uttering more than two or three sentences at a time. He praised the stuffing for the goose and paid attention when she told him about the classic recipe by James Beard and the critical balance to be struck between prunes and Madeira.

  ‘She can be quite interesting, don’t you think?’ was how Greg put it when they were alone in Jane’s room. ‘She has an artistic soul.’

  ‘But no artistic talent.’

  ‘Could be.’

  They didn’t make love in Jane’s old room but she felt as if they had; as if she had returned inside a different body, desecrated her childhood home and then rejected it (like an ex-prisoner spending the night, just as a joke, in the old, now abandoned prison – this was the best metaphor the asp
iring writer could come up with). Just being there with Greg and thinking never again; never again the absolute stillness of the Sunday mornings, never again her mother’s half-hour of pretend-reading the same double-page spread in the Milwaukee Journal. Never again the feeling that love was a limited commodity that had to be rationed.

  At night, she lay with Greg and held him tightly until she sensed her grip on him slip as sleep came. Then she dreamt that Greg was not there and that she was Jane alone, in Jane’s bed. And Jane was not a student of literature with her own home address on Broome Street, New York City – only Jane. Alone.

  The whole spring semester had felt like only a few days. They were young, in love, full of hope and living in the place better suited to such people than anywhere else in the world (eight years later, they made a honeymoon trip to Paris, a city they agreed afterwards to be a great deal sadder and shabbier than New York). They wrote. They read. They hung out with Greg’s friends in the band and frequented small, smoke-filled music bars. Until the band dropped him.

  Jane had never played an instrument but it became obvious even to her that Greg was not a great guitarist. Listening to the others speaking about him, especially towards the end, opened her eyes. She suspected that he had been asked to join them because of his alternative-style persona, the way he dressed, wore his hair and, not least, his easy charm. But, seemingly, he lacked the crucial thing.