Endless Love (43 page)

Life was difficult, awkward; Jade and I experienced the confusion of people whose lives have moved on a faster course than their imaginations. There were lapses into silence that suddenly exposed how fragile our entire enterprise was, collisions of will that came from our unfamiliarity with each other in the practical world. There was the trouble with my panic at finding Jade up to her hips in a stream of people, friends and enemies, lovers, deadlines, private jokes, rivals, and debts. But for the most part, I was filled with wonder at how happy we managed to be. We made love on cool lawns at night. We bathed each other and sang in whispers into each other’s ears. I cooked my half dozen specialties for her and flushed with pleasure when I noticed how pleased she was that I got along with her friends. We took rides in a borrowed Saab, played tennis on a private court owned by a professor of music theory, and when I got a job at a local men’s clothing store Jade met me for lunch every day: tuna sandwiches and iced tea, which we ate on the lawn of an immense Presbyterian church, a crazily huge Gothic structure that could have simultaneously baptized all the children of Vermont.

When I first loved Jade, I had dozens of friends and a good appetite for that orgy of hors d’oeuvres that passes for social life in adolescence. I had pals, confidants, playmates, and loyal co- workers in the clubs I belonged to—the high-school literary magazine, the Student Peace Union. No one knew—or perhaps they knew and didn’t mind—that my gregariousness and slightly acidic cheer were the lucky manifestations of a character that remained essentially isolated. In the privacy of my room—“the privacy of my room” was a catch phrase of my adolescence, as if I felt the world outside submitted me to a constant scrutiny—I wrote, in a vaguely Allen Ginsberg tone of voice, long formless poems about my Loneliness, about my “shrouded self,” which no one knew and which I perceived as a mass of cold fog. My loneliness was completely social then, and when I saw myself reflected in Jade, the first thing I did was to sever my ties with my peers and then my family. Six months with Jade left me virtually friendless—perhaps I was imitating Jade’s own alienation. My world became only Jade and her family; even as I applied to college, I knew I wouldn’t be going. The world, I thought, had been too content to listen to my lies, to fall for the facile tricks of character I’d learned, the world was both too simple and too cruel to claim my allegiance or even be taken seriously. In a sense, I betrayed Jade in this: she’d seen me as a way out of the gravitational swoon of Butterfield family life, but rather than lead her out I burrowed in, becoming, at least in my aspirations, as militantly Butterfieldian as Keith.

But this time in Stoughton, being with Jade had the opposite effect. After nearly five years of having nothing to do with the world, of carrying my inconsolable separateness around as prominently as a picket sign—“Please do not spend your attention and affection on me. I am
Unfair”
—I was finally finding my way back into the world. This time, rather than aping Jade’s isolation, I adopted her friends as my own: housemates, classmates, shopkeepers, professors, virtually everyone she knew became a part of my life as well.

She never said as much, but I knew Jade wanted me to become a part of the world she shared with her friends. She used the phrase “neurotic patterns” to describe what she wanted to avoid with me, and isolation was the principal neurotic pattern to guard against. She knew, of course, that I would have been more than content never to see anyone but her, to spend every free hour in our attic, in bed, in each other’s arms, admitting nothing into our world, and the adoration I offered her was tempting enough to make Jade afraid she might succumb to it. “I want to be with you but not like before. Not less but different.” How could I argue? It would have been like crabbing about the size of our room, the texture of our bed. I had no heart to worry over the details of our being together; that we were together at all overwhelmed everything. I experienced occasional tremors of fear over what I perceived as the “slightly new Jade”—but even in Paradise it’s impossible not to remember now and then that you like a slightly stiffer breeze and have never altogether cared for wisteria.

Friendship with Jade’s friends was not what I wanted. When I had imagined our reunion, I hadn’t bothered to fill in the human landscape. I had fantasized our living out our piece of eternity in some stark version of my grandfather’s planned community in Florida: a window, a bed, a refrigerator, and a shelf of books. But when it became clear that knowing Jade’s friends was going to be a necessary part of living with her, I found myself pursuing my new-found social life with surprising relish. It was nearly deranged how quick and ardent my affections were for virtual strangers. Jade took me to meet old Professor Asbury—Carlyle, after ten minutes; Corky midway through the first drink—who’d been laid up for nearly a year from spraining his back playing tennis on his dewy, shabby back yard court. White-haired, bony, and elegant, Asbury was such a profound campus favorite that students with no interest in music took his music theory course just for his company. I had a perverse impulse to resist his charms, but as we left his little gingerbread cottage I squeezed Jade’s hand and said, “God, what a
nice guy
,” and I don’t know if I was primarily moved by Asbury or my response to him but I practically sobbed as I said it.

Jade took me to dinner at her friends Marcia and Trig’s apartment. The place looked like an assassin’s hideout, with slanted linoleum floors and a view over a tarpaper roof onto the back of a peeling garage. We sat on the floor. Marcia and Trig weren’t hippies; they gave us no India print pillows to sit upon. They seemed utterly unconcerned with their personal comfort—or ours. But when they finally served up the meal, it was terrific and delicate. Fish with slivers of pistachio. Newly picked vegetables in a Japanese batter. That they had gone to so much effort with
my
poor pleasure even vaguely in mind touched me like a caress. I ate as slowly as I could and looked at them with warm swimmy eyes as they described the circumstances of their health food store being harassed out of business by thugs they believed to have been hired by the local grocers’ association.

Gertrude had house meetings every Wednesday evening, and now that I was a member of the crew, I was invited to sit with the rest of them around the expansive Formica kitchen table, smoking Camels and drinking Almadén jug wine like all the rest—the Camels and Almadén were ceremonial and virtually required. We talked about chores, expenses, passed judgment on visitors (
I
was no visitor!), and as I looked from face to face—there was Jade, Oliver Jones, Colleen MacKay, Nina Sternberg, Miriam Kay, Boris Hyde, and Anemone Grommers—I often thought to myself: This is the best bunch of people in the world. I felt real patriotic love for Gertrude and its residents, as if we were all members of a gang or a cult or a revolutionary cadre. Of course we were nothing more complicated or grand than a handful of people sharing roof and rent, but all gestures of friendship—no, not even friendship, mere
friendliness
—heated my passion and imagination. In the world of normal discourse I was like a tourist—a
dying
tourist—on a twilight tour of Europe. Each sunset, each spire, each cobblestoned path, each lobby, each glass of local beer is monumental, tragic, and unparalleled.

I did manage to learn that a little more than a year before, Jade had lived in Gertrude with a student named Jon Widman. Jon—bald at twenty, toweringly tall, anemic—was a musical genius, played twelve different instruments, and composed music from blues to string quartets. I also learned of Jade’s affair with a professor of English. This information was given to me—with a certain meanness of spirit, I thought—by one of my housemates, who was ostensibly proving that an affair with a faculty member was an inevitable Stoughton ritual.

But it was Jade herself who talked to me about her love affair with Susan Henry. There were places we could not go, movies and concerts we could not attend, because Jade was worried about meeting Susan.

“It’s my own doing,” she said. “And so useless. I didn’t end it the right way and didn’t call her when we got back.”

“But I thought, I mean the impression you gave me, was the break-up was mostly
her
doing,” I said.

“We were too close for that to matter. At a certain point everything’s mutual.”

And then one day when we were walking down Main Street—I was on my lunch break from Main Street Clothiers and we were crossing the street to go to the stationery store for a notebook—Jade grabbed hold of my upper arm, turned me around, and walked quickly with me into a dime store, with its scent of wooden floors and candy corn.

“What is it?” I asked, though I fairly well knew.

“I can’t believe how stupid this is,” she said. “Susan. I saw her on the other side of the street and I just don’t have the courage to run into her. It can’t be like this. I have to call her.”

We were inside that variety store and it was like being inside a different decade: old women in faded sweaters, with their eyeglasses hanging onto their bosoms from silvery chains; bins of loose chocolates, bridge mix, peanut brittle; the strange hush of a store lacking Muzak; displays of cheap underwear and thin, powder blue socks; coloring books and cap guns. Jade and I wandered aimlessly through the aisles. Her hands were in her pockets and she kept her eyes cast down. She was walking fast, pulling ahead of me, and I reached out to take her arm. She allowed me to stop her and then I turned her and put my arms around her.

“It seemed so perfectly natural to be with Susan when we were together,” Jade said, as I held her. “But I don’t think I’d be treating her like this if she was a man. It’s because she’s a woman and I loved her.”

The difficulty inherent in choosing to love another woman and now the long pull of conscience in the affair’s aftermath made the time with Susan more intimate and enviable than all of the other parts of Jade’s life that I’d missed. As I held her in that antique dime store and watched the few customers circulating lazily throughout the store—the ten-year-old girls choosing party favors, an old man inspecting a tiny cactus plant—I thought of how the difficulty of a connection increases its intensity. I thought of how alive with courage and desire that love must have been to carry Jade past the boundary of her established sexuality.

We walked around the store. Jade almost took my hand; her fingers brushed against me and then she moved away.

“Susan’s a powerful person,” she said. “The most powerful person I’ve ever known. She lives inside her feelings like a queen in her castle. I admired her so much. Envy too, I guess. She could take herself so seriously and never seem stupid, or self-involved. I had such a case of hero-worship with her, God, it was months before I realized that it was also something more. That I…”

“I don’t know how to be in this conversation,” I said. “I think we have to stop. Just for now.”

Jade nodded. We were in front of a bin of phonograph records.

“I want to know it,” I said. “I just need a little breathing space. I know it was important to you and I suppose it was difficult, too, and maybe even scary. But I was feeling myself starting to get jealous. I know I don’t have a right to—”

“It wasn’t scary,” Jade said. “The only love I’ve ever known that has scared me has been with you. Being with Susan wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t at all.”

“It seems that it was very intense,” I said.

“What else is there? I’m not casual.”

“I know,” I said, my voice slipping away.

“We don’t have to talk about it.”

“No. That’s not what I mean. I just need to hear it in stages. It’s stupid. I have no right to say this. Don’t listen to me. Tell me the rest. Tell me it all.”

“It’s not necessary,” said Jade. “It’s mine.”

And so we dropped all talk of Susan Henry and the silence hovered over us, as watchful as a bird of prey. I longed to ask Jade to speak to me about her love with Susan but, temporarily at least, I’d forfeited the right. We ate dinner at Gertrude that night and Jade didn’t say a word at the table, though we ate with seven others. She went upstairs before me, and when I followed her up to the attic some fifteen minutes later, Jade was in bed and all the lights were off. I got undressed and lay next to her and after a while I put my hands on her breasts. She breathed heavily and didn’t stir; I knew she wasn’t really asleep.

The next morning we were hesitant with each other. It was our turn to do the weekly grocery shopping for the household. We shopped at a huge store called Price Chopper, and it didn’t seem like a piece of remarkable coincidence at all that halfway through our nervous shopping we were once again confronted with Susan Henry.

This time, Jade had no opportunity to flee. Susan appeared from around an aisle corner. She looked tall, tan, willowy, and toothy, rather like Joni Mitchell. Her straight hair was almost white; she wore a loose, pale blue dress and little sandals. Her long arms were bare and she wore turquoise and silver bracelets. Her eyes remained mysterious behind brown-tinted sunglasses.

“Beep beep,” said Susan, giving our cart a small jostle.

“Hello, Susan,” said Jade, her voice a metaphor for nights of cigarettes and grain alcohol.

“Hello,” said Susan. Her voice was lilting, a trifle cute—or trying to be. I could feel her effort and it drew me toward her for an instant.

Jade looked into Susan’s cart. “Still buying junk food?” she said.

“That’s right!” said Susan.

Jade shrugged. Then: “Susan Henry? David Axelrod.” Pointing to us as she said our names.

I offered my handshake. As romantic victor I felt it was my place. Susan looked at me as if the handshake were some archaic salute and then, nodding as if remembering, took my hand and shook it with a certain irony.

“Hello, David,” she said. She gave no indication of ever having heard of me.

“Hello,” I said. I thought the confident thing to do was smile, but I learned later from Jade that it looked more like a leer.

Susan focused her attention on Jade and began telling her something about a friend of theirs named Dina who’d just left for Cologne to study philosophy with someone who’d studied under Wittgenstein. The tone of the anecdote was admiring and ironic. The victory celebration dinner was described. Dina got drunk and spoke German all the rest of the night. Professor Asbury showed up for a while, moving gracefully on his aluminum walker. Et cetera. I wondered if the purpose of the story was to make Jade feel embarrassed at not being invited, but Jade didn’t seem at all upset.