Endless Love (11 page)

“Oh stop it, stop it, for God’s sake, you are both such liars.” I heard my voice as an alien thing, the words clumsily attached to my emotions. My truest, most solid impulse was to push them down, to kick at them, to cause them some physical agony—I knew there was no inner pain I could inflict that would match mine. And I knew, as well, that I was not going to hurt them, I was not even going to touch them.

“You’re not allowed to see her anyhow,” said Rose. “If you even try to, they can revoke your parole.”

“They’re not going to revoke my parole for reading old letters.”

“We’re afraid for you,” Arthur said. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”

There was nothing to say. I didn’t want to argue with them. It might have been good for me to enunciate my fury but I wasn’t interested in that sort of psychological housekeeping. I was angry but I was peculiarly bored with my anger. It was connected to a part of my world that I didn’t care very much about—it didn’t connect me to the letters. If I couldn’t live in the center of the life I had known, once, the only life I believed in, then I would rather live in dreams. And so I may have said more. The argument may have sputtered on for another few minutes, but I no longer cared and I don’t remember anything about it. I was gone, elsewhere. I was listening to my heart beat—it was pounding, really. It was going faster than it should but I followed its beat and it took me in, took me away. My eyes remained on Arthur and Rose but what I saw was Jade walking through that enormous model heart in the Museum of Science and Industry, touching the veins with her small hands, gazing this way and that, her mouth a little open, stumbling but not seeming to notice that she had. Then we walked home, back to her house on Dorchester. I took her hand, and she stroked mine with her thumb, knowing that if I wasn’t reassured I would lose courage and let it go. When we reached her house she said she hoped her whole family was home. I asked her why and she said she wanted them all to see me. I was so startled that I asked her why and she did me the kindness of pretending she didn’t hear. Then we walked up to the big wooden porch that circled halfway around the house, like a broken Saturn ring. There were bicycles parked on the porch. A wicker couch, yellow with white cushions. A footstool, a flyswatter, an open book. On a little oak table was a glass of iced coffee, milky, with ice cubes stacked in it like bricks. There were tiny flies swimming around the top of the glass, their wings the size of commas, trying to stay alive. Jade saw this—we both looked in the glass at the same instant, but that kind of thing would always happen to us, until it would no longer surprise us but just make us laugh—and she said something like Oh those poor things, or Poor little beasts—the whole family liked that word: beasts—and she threw the coffee over the railing, emptying it out onto their overgrown lawn. Just then Ann came out. It had been her coffee. She had only gone in for a cigarette…

In the middle of the night I woke up, completely. I had been dreaming about Jade. I knew when I dreamed about her. It felt as if a wheel was turning inside of me. I tried to catch the images before they sank back into unknowing but it was like trying to pluck moonlight off of the water. It wasn’t the dream that woke me, though. It was something that my father had said earlier in the kitchen. “That’s why the letters aren’t here,” he’d said. I could hear him saying it and I could see his face, now, the look of pleading, as if he’d been asking me to see through him, to interpret him, to just be patient and give him a chance to be my hero. I kicked the sheet off of me and got out of bed. I didn’t know what I was going to do but I couldn’t stay down with my new knowledge. It rushed through me. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”

But where? There seemed only one logical place: Arthur’s office.

I was frightened—of letting myself down, of betraying myself. I dressed and wondered how I could get from the apartment to my father’s office. I had no money. I wasn’t certain how the buses ran or even if they were still going. The elevated train ran twenty-four hours but I was afraid to ride it. I stood at my window. The glass felt cooler; the rain must have broken the heat. It was two in the morning and no sign of anyone on the street. An almost full moon was out, touching the broken clouds with chromium glow.

I crept out of my room and into the darkened hall. I could hear my father’s deep buzzing snores. Rose must have been sleeping too: if she’d been awake, she’d have poked her husband in the ribs to silence him. Touching the walls for balance, I made my way down the hall, past their bedroom, and toward the entrance foyer. Arthur had taken to leaving his briefcase and keys next to the door. This presumed forgetfulness was new, and I didn’t know if it came from the erosion of age or the delirium of his new romance. But when I reached the door and groped in the dark for the little table upon which he kept his things, all I felt was the smooth, slightly oily surface of the wood. It was Sunday; there was no need to lay out his things.

I stood in the hall. A layer, and then another, of darkness receded and I could see shapes now. The plastered-over beams in the ceiling, the picture frames on the wall, the soft obsidian gap that was the entrance to the kitchen. I slipped off my shoes. My heart was like a barrel end-over-ending down a flight of stairs. With a murderer’s stealth I crept down the hall toward my parents’ bedroom.

Before Rose and Arthur lost control over me and could no longer stop me from spending my nights at the Butterfields’, I had sneaked into and through the apartment a hundred times. I knew just where to step. I knew which spots on the floor twittered beneath my weight and I knew how fast to open a door to stop the hinges from creaking. My way was not the soundless, shadowy glide it had once been—the door to their room, even though ajar, groaned slightly when I pushed it open and the doorknob touched the wall with a hollow click—but in less than a minute I was standing in the faint moonlight of my parents’ bedroom, my feet planted at the edge of their bed’s long shadow, and I had done nothing to ruffle their slumber.

My father wore no night shirt and the cover on his side of the bed had slipped down, revealing his soft, hairy chest and the dark birthmark (the “chocolate patch” of my childhood) on the top of his ribcage. His large head sunk into the center of his pillow and his chin was slightly raised. His snores were steady and sounded every bit as loud as those given out by those big dopey, innocent animals in old cartoons. It was the sound of the fake snore I used to give when I meant to say I was bored. Next to him, Rose slept in her nightgown. She slept on her side with her half-closed fists touching Arthur’s shoulders. Her breathing was regular, deep, and absolutely soundless; oxygen filled her lungs and fed her blood with botanical silence. The light of the moon, divided into twelve bars by the Venetian blinds, quivered slightly on the wall. I stood before my parents’ unconscious forms, my heart beating with a terror more befitting a patricide.

My parents were the very models of tidiness and “good habits.” Newspapers, if not to be saved permanently, were thrown out immediately after reading. A glass that was used for a midday drink of juice was always rinsed out and placed in the blue plastic drainer. Lights were not left to burn in empty rooms and no unoccupied shoe would ever dare show more than its very tip, peeking out from beneath a fringed bedspread. And so as I surveyed their room, looking for a wallet that might pay my way downtown and a set of keys that would allow me to enter my father’s office, I saw nothing but clear surfaces—no piles of change, no rings of keys, no dropped (or even carefully folded) clothing.

Slowly, slowly, slowly I crept across their bedroom, casting my shadow first over the square of broken moonlight on the wall and then laying it like a sword over my parents’ sleeping faces. Finally, I opened their closet. The scent of mothballs, the lumpy darkness. I reached forward, rustling the hanging clothes, chiming the metal hangers. Blind, I felt a suit or a dress wrapped in the dry cleaner’s crackling plastic, a silkish shirt, cool and melancholy to the touch, my mother’s nylon robe. Then came my father’s suit, colorless, made of mystery-fabric, but unmistakably his. I stuffed my hand into its pockets—empty.

There was a break in my father’s snoring. I turned toward the bed. Rose rolled away from Arthur and raised one half- closed hand above her head, grazing the bedboard with her knuckles before dropping her unformed fist onto the pillow. Arthur’s body seemed to veer toward hers, as if to follow its tiny nocturnal migration, but his journey toward her steady, familiar warmth was only hinted at. He remained flat on his back and the snores returned, deeper now, as if coming from a more resigned part of him.

O mother, O father. To be standing in your room. Conscious of you as you were conscious of me during my slumbers, to watch your progress in the womb of sleep, to have the power to plant invisible kisses on your nearly blank faces, or to kneel at your sides and practice the grief of your deaths. I stretched out my hand, as if to touch you, to steady your hold on sleep. My hand completely erased you from my sight, and I marveled at this as I had as a child when I could prove my thumbnail was larger than the moon. I felt myself filling with emotion, as a room might fill with light.

With my back to my parents again, I searched through the unvarying blackness of their closet, and though I must not have stood there very long (because Arthur’s sport jacket was the eighth piece of clothing I inspected and in it I found his wallet and his keys) I would not have been surprised to face the room again and find it lightening with the first spray of dawn. With Arthur’s heavy, tarnished ring of keys on my thumb and a mint- fresh twenty-dollar bill, I slipped out of the room, moving so silently that I was only intermittently conscious of myself.

I closed their door with a soft, final click and went to the end of the foyer. I turned on a light and opened the Yellow Pages to find the number of a taxi fleet. I chose the one with the largest ad and after I spoke to the dispatcher I sneaked into the kitchen and drank what was left of the Gordon’s gin straight from the bottle.

A few minutes later I was sitting on the steps in front of our apartment building, breathing the free night air. It was my first time out on my own but the momentousness of the occasion barely grazed me as it passed. It was three in the morning and whoever was having a late Saturday night was having it elsewhere. The street was empty. The first headlights I saw coming down Ellis Avenue belonged to the cab I’d called, a battered yellow hulk with a checkered fringe painted around its roof.

“Hello,” I said, opening the back door. I wasn’t so stupid as to think that you greeted cab drivers like that, but I did it anyhow. I had put myself in a trance to make it through the time separating my calling the cab and its arrival and I needed to make contact with someone outside of me. The driver was a youngish man. He wore a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled and had a pony tail. A huge portable radio next to him competed with the two-way radio from which his company’s dispatcher honked and squeaked like an electronic goose. The driver nodded at my hello and placed his hand on the meter’s lever so he could pull it the moment my backside touched his upholstery. “I’ve got to get downtown,” I said, still not getting into the cab. I was afraid to. My first time out of the house alone should have been a walk around the neighborhood in the sunlight, not a cab ride downtown in the hot darkness, with stolen money and stolen keys in my pocket.

I got in the back seat, gave the driver the address, and began to tremble. I tried to put myself in an adventurous frame of mind, to imagine a trenchcoat on my shoulders and a cigarette plugged into the corner of my mouth—a man with a mission, a man alone. But those second-hand images could only flicker, they could not sustain me. I couldn’t even bear to look out the window, and each time the cab made a turn I felt my insides lurch. My legs were crossed tightly and I hugged myself, with my elbows digging into my ribs and my hands clutching my biceps. I heard a weak, low moan and it took me a moment to realize that it was coming from me.

Too soon, we were in front of my father’s office. It was on Wabash underneath the elevated tracks. I looked out of the cab’s rear window at the deserted street. The streetlights shined down on emptiness. The stores had steel gates over the windows.

“Four-fifty,” said the driver, not turning around.

“All I’ve got is a twenty,” I said, digging it out of my pants.

The driver muttered something and opened a cigar box next to his portable radio and thumbed through a stack of bills. Next to the cigar box was a billy club with nails driven halfway in. He began counting out my change.

“Say, I wonder if you could wait,” I said. “I won’t be very long.”

“The meter’s off,” he said.

I stopped to consider what this meant; it made no sense to me.

“I’ll be about ten minutes. Then I’m going right back to Hyde Park. It’ll be hard for me to get a cab. Could you please wait? Here. Take the twenty, OK? That way you’ll know I’m coming back.” I handed him the twenty and put my hand on the back door handle but didn’t open it. I wanted him to reassure me that he would wait. “OK?” I said.

He put the twenty on the dashboard and turned off his motor, the lights.

I’d been to my father’s building dozens of times. As a young boy I’d pretended to be his partner, lunging for the phone whenever it rang, stuffing my shirt pockets with his pens, riding on the sliding library ladder. It was a small, whitish building, filled with the offices of marginal enterprises: importers of knickknacks, jewelry repair, the editorial offices of a Serbo- Croatian newspaper, a chiropractor, a Hong Kong tailor. I tried the street door on the off-chance it was unlocked, but it wasn’t. There were seven keys on my father’s ring and the first one I tried unlocked the door. (A measure of my state of mind was the intense, practically religious exultation I felt at this.) Inside, I found myself beneath a flickering fluorescent light. I listened for footsteps—perhaps they kept a maintenance man on twenty- four-hour duty. I stood there, transfixed, much longer than necessary. Something in me wanted to stay right there, to not walk up the one flight of stairs to my father’s office. It was the first time in three years that someone in control didn’t know exactly where I was; now, at last, my aloneness was complete and it terrified me. The only cord connecting me to the known world was that cab outside—or had it already left? I didn’t dare look and finally the thought of the driver making off with my money and abandoning me was more palpably frightening than anything else and I ran to the steep, dingy stairway and raced up it three steps at a time.