Endless Love (19 page)

Syncopated feelings? God, there is no one on either side of the grave upon whom I’d inflict
that
little phrase, except you. I realize you’ll put up with anything and you would do nothing to threaten this correspondence of ours. I finally understand why some women—or are they all just girls?—answer those box-numbered pleas from prisoners that run in the underground papers and write letters to some total stranger serving time in a penitentiary. Our history being what it’s been, there’s something about a bird in a cage that appeals to women.

Hugh was back in town—speaking of what appeals to women. His girl of the moment, Ingrid Ochester, is about twenty-seven, though she looks as old as Hugh. God only knows what’s aged her. She doesn’t really seem to
do
anything and her only worries are if the glaze will hold on her pots and vases and if her eight-year-old son will land safely in one of his constant shuttles between Ingrid and his father, a Pepsi exec in Saudi Arabia. Ingrid is the sort of woman I could never know, under any circumstances. Comfortable, vague, she seems to come out of nowhere, from nothing. Her past is full of towns like Camden, New Jersey; her parents summered in Easton, Maryland. They made their money selling sofas.

Hugh and I came from very different worlds, but in our case there was, at least, a pleasing polarity. He was from New Orleans and I was from New York, but our families both were faded rich
(very
faded) and they haunted and nagged at us in similar ways. But Ingrid and Hugh? Who could say what they hold in common; I can never even keep it straight how they met. There was somebody’s cousin, a flat tire…But clearly Ingrid is smitten—all of the kids say so—and Hugh revels in it like a cat on his fifth canary.

That’s what is so absurd about him. He is still amazed women fall in love with him and his ego is so weak (yet so insatiable) that he treats every dalliance as the affair of the century. Each time he feels himself the object of some lady’s affections, Hugh will seize the moment with all the rashness and power of his heart. For a man as dead-on attractive as Hugh, he has been dumped by an extraordinary number of women. He holds on with such intensity that your average young lady—who like your average young man simply wishes to
enjoy
life, for God’s sake—beats a hasty retreat. You know nearly as well as I do how wildly serious Hugh can be. How deeply he likes to think, how exactly he likes to remember, how fine and painful the calibrations of his emotions. A brooder, the silent type, Hugh’s liable to do things like get up in the middle of dinner, come to your chair and stand you up, and then put his arms around you and embrace you with great strength and solemnity, while you try not to chew your mouthful of food. Well, most women can’t
take
that kind of stuff.

There comes a certain point in one’s courtship with Hugh when one realizes this is not just something Hugh does to
woo
you, but this is actually the way he
is.
The cataloguing of events—our tenth paella dinner, the fifth anniversary of finding the house, our fifth anniversary of signing the papers for the house, our fifth anniversary of moving into the house. It doesn’t stop, it’s not some stunt, it goes on and on. Seventeen years of marriage and I’d put down my book and have to confront Hugh’s earnest blue eyes, staring silently at me from across the room, trying to fathom me. “Do you want to talk?” I’d say. But he didn’t; he wanted to “communicate.” Coming from a world of
The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,
and adding to the general conversational din all my life, Hugh’s overwhelmingly significant silences had for me a deep sonority. And while my relationship to them gradually became ironic and subversive, I never truly tired of them. I never ceased to believe that
his way
was a higher path and that he had something crucial to teach me.

I used to believe that it was Hugh who pursued me, but the truth is that even his Cambridge pursuit was incurably diffident. Hugh sought me out after I published a story in a local lit. magazine called “Birth Pains.” The magazine was printed in blue ink on yellow paper and my contribution was so arch and pretentious—the usual twaddle about a me-ish young woman dying from her own cultivation and refinement—that I stayed out of sight for a week afterwards. But Hugh managed to find my piece enchanting and tracked me down. A stranger, he wrote me a formal note and asked to meet me for a daiquiri—in my story, the heroine drinks dozens and dozens of daiquiries—at the Parker House. The idea of meeting this well-mannered and apparently well-meaning stranger was too seductive to resist and I appeared at the Parker House wearing a black dress and a string of lilac-tinted glass beads. Hugh was in a double-breasted wheat-colored suit, holding a copy of “Birth Pains,” and drawling to beat the band. (He sensed I would respond to the cliché of the Southern Gentleman.) He advised me as to the extent of his admiration for my story, asked me how I had achieved my anemic, third-hand effects, and, on the whole, interviewed me rather as you yourself did many years later when you came home with those photocopies of my
New Yorker
stories. Except then I was a young, ornery girl in a hotel with a stranger, and a half hour into our conversation (and halfway through my second daiquiri—a perfectly horrid drink, of course) I was hoping that Hugh would make his praise complete by suggesting we take a room.

If I’d known then what I soon enough learned, it wouldn’t have been any more complicated than my saying, “Oh Hugh, I need to be with you”—Hugh would have been at the front desk in an instant, gulping so hard that his Adam’s apple would be leaping forth like a cuckoo clock. I had no idea of the depths of his shyness and susceptibility: in matters of the flesh, Hugh has always needed permission. The permission granted, he can be the goat of all goats, but before then he is withdrawn, or so tepidly flirtatious that it becomes inconceivable that a real libido lurks beneath. If it hadn’t been for his great good looks, Hugh would have been miserable: all he could do was make himself available; he could not reach out and take. But how was I to know? It took weeks of thought and frustration before I realized that if I was going to have Hugh, then I must initiate it. Thus the famous dinner party in which I announced as I lit the candles: “Abandon all hope of leaving, ye who enter here.”

God, I must be just a little bit lonelier than I thought. Going on about Hugh like this. It’s near the first anniversary of our divorce. That must be it. We sold the house, sold the ten scabby acres in Mississippi that Hugh’s father gave us on our wedding, and stood like waifs in a divorce court in Chicago, lying through our straight white teeth to the judge so our story would be less complicated and unseemly. Hugh’s girl waited outside, double-parked in her infernal van, and I splurged on a taxi to O’Hare so I could get the hell out as quickly as possible.

The divorce was inevitable once the house was gone, just as precious papers get tattered and lost if you don’t have anyplace to store them. That big house on Dorchester had a domestic magnetism at its core that could keep us together—and even in a kind of ramshackle balance. It was our homeland, our space station—well, you remember the magic of that house. We were so lucky to find it and losing it was terrible for us—especially coming at a time in our lives when we needed walls more than ever before, needed the feel of familiar wood, the low comforting groans of our old house’s cellar, the mélange of sky and branch that hung so peacefully before our front window. The house was a touchstone, the progenitor of memory; it had a quality of preservation, of preserving us, our lives, our promises. Driving us out of there was like driving a tribe from its ancestral home: the rituals of community dried up like empty pods. Without the familiar doors to walk through and slam, quarrels went on and on, deepened in import and acrimoniousness. Ah, the arguments in hotels, with the maids in the next room and the Kiwanis Club in the hall. The late-night whispers in my brother’s house in Maine—even with my brother and his family in Boston and we Butterfields on our own for a few days, we tiptoed and mumbled, washing our cups as soon as we used them. We were refugees without a cause, more interested in blame than in bonds.

It’s our link, you know, mine and yours. The blame. I suppose that’s why you feel so free to contact me and why, to me, speaking to you again seems so natural and inevitable. We are, I would suppose, karmic twins. It was you—and you alone—who set the fire, but we’ll never know what could have been saved if it hadn’t been for my cousin’s Care Package from California. When my cousin’s package arrived with ten trips, ten 250-microgram doses of pharmaceutically pure LSD…Well, as
I
remember it, we all felt excited and privileged. We had all been curious—no, more than that: we all were committed to taking it. The only trouble had been our fear of buying it from some lunatic on the street, some flaky teen just as liable to sell us strychnine or horse tranquilizer. But with the genuine article at hand—and the weird blessing of having it come from a lab—we were set. It was my cousin, my letter, and the package had been addressed to me. But we all discussed it, all decided it would work best—be less divisive, less strange and exclusive—if we took it as a family. We were all prepared to learn something miraculous and transforming, and it was a measure, I thought, of our enduring commitment to remain a family that we wanted to take the journey together.

Yet, as it happened, we were as helpless as rabbits on a highway when the time came for us to act swiftly and well. We turned this way and that and learned something that turned out to be impossible to absorb: with life seeming to totter on the edge of oblivion, we were not a family at all—it was each for himself, in a state of panic, fear, and terrible isolation. We were not any of us really capable of holding a thought, but I’m sure all of us felt, to one degree or another, that we were being punished for our transgression against the brain’s holy chemistry, that the fire was a foretaste of the hell we had condemned ourselves to. I’ve often wondered (and lamented) why we were so godawful bloody helpless to get ourselves out of the house in good order and I keep coming back to the emotional memory of
deserving
the worst.

Speaking of blame. I think I’d like to defend myself against
your
accusation. I quote: “…when I began spending nights at your house you decided that Jade wasn’t getting enough sleep and your solution was to get us a double bed, a used bed from the Salvation Army which we sprayed for bugs and drenched in Chanel No.5.”

My idea? Perhaps the Chanel No. 5 was my idea—it was certainly
my
Chanel. But the bed was Jade’s idea—and, I daresay, yours. Does it seem at all likely to you that it was
me
who dreamed up the idea of getting a double bed? Do you have any memory of my proposing it to you? Or are you calling my lack of objection to the idea a form of advocacy? You don’t understand. I realized you two were hardly sleeping—but that seemed connected to the bizarre power of your love for each other. You made me crave sleeplessness because I recognized what it was in you two—a refusal to be separated. It was the
privacy
of sleep that horrified you. You didn’t want to sleep. Those long late-night walks. We thought you were trying to tire yourselves out but now I realize the purpose of those two- mile strolls. You were reviving yourselves, probably stopping at the Medici for a cup of espresso before coming home.

Jade had always been such a deep sleeper. On weekends, it would be nothing unusual for her to sleep until four in the afternoon. She slept in school, she slept on buses, on family outings. Like an old man, she’d doze off at the movies. Naturally, we noted her semi-narcolepsy and realized it was an escape—from her too-rapid growing up, from all of the countless details of life that displeased her, and from us. Once, when she was nine or ten, I found her asleep in the bathtub and I shook her awake, partly because I was afraid she could drown herself like that and partly because I’d been waiting an hour for her to get out of the bathroom. She looked at me with all the defiance she could muster—which was considerable, even then—and said, “I need my sleep.” She was very possessive about her sleep and she defended it as if it were property. If she could have hidden it the way I hid my chocolates there would have been dreams and packets of unconsciousness stashed everywhere. In a household where everything was shared and talked about and where there was much more need than there was ability to satisfy needs, Jade dug her heels into a universe in which she was unapproachable, uncriticizable, and unknowable.

So after years of accommodating her semi-narcolepsy, we then, with you on the scene, had to adjust to Jade’s sleeplessness. When the first symptoms appeared—a certain icing-like quality to her eyes, as well as her own direct testimony that she was getting about twenty hours of sleep a week—Hugh took the homeopathic route and began giving her infinitesimal doses of stimulants. Herbal stimulants to begin with, brewed in with her tea, and then, relaxing his principles, he even crushed in a little bit of dexadrine. Hugh assumed that her body was keeping itself awake because of some internal crisis, some need for wakefulness, and following the homeopathic edict of treating like with like, Hugh attempted to relieve her body of its need to create these symptoms by creating them artificially—thus, he hoped, defusing the control center of her insomnia. Then he set off on homeopathic chase number two, which is a kind of folksy psychoanalysis—usually Hugh’s strongsuit, for some odd reason.

Hugh developed the suspicion that your lovemaking was leaving Jade in a perpetually excited, that is to say unsatisfied, state. This didn’t go very far in explaining
your
sleeplessness, but your sleeplessness wasn’t awfully much in question. This continual sexual incompleteness may have been sheer fantasy on Hugh’s part, a kind of compromise virginity, but nevertheless he tried to delicately draw her out about her “night life,” as he called it. Jade spared him the realization that he had overstepped his actual courage, that he was not a WASP Freud, willing to face the truth no matter what its content or consequence, and she simply dummied up on the topic of your sex life. She knew, I think, that Hugh wanted to hear that each night you left her dangling, yearning, and whether it was true or not it was more than she could say—her loyalty to you and the world you both now lived in was too fierce—she was virtually patriotic about the emotional ground you’d portioned off for yourselves: My love affair right or wrong! So she sidestepped his questions, the subtle ones, that is, and when he resorted to frontal attack, she screamed, “You’re taking things away from me. You’re making mine into yours.” It was Jade’s genius to use Hugh’s own language when she fought him. Jade dressed in the uniform of Hugh’s troops and fought him from the trees and bushes, whereas I fought him like the colonial British army, straight up and down in a clearing and decked out in red.