Endless Love (46 page)
“I don’t know where I’m going,” said Jade. She leaned forward and rested her head on the steering wheel.
“It doesn’t matter.”
We were silent for a while and someone turned up the volume on the night around us. Then Jade said, “Sometimes I think we have an unhappiness all our own waiting for us. In some love affairs the people do each other in, but I really do think that we’re too in love to do that, too much the same person, and what will do us in will be something quite a bit larger than just you or me. It’s the special unhappiness of mutual love and it really scares the shit out of me.”
I suppose I should have said something to the contrary, comforted her. But we believed we were deep enough to face anything, any sort of death, any shadow of fate. Yet even as I nodded slowly I felt a tightening inside, as if a doctor had just given me a fatal diagnosis.
“It’s still possible for me to believe that it won’t happen,” I said. “And in the meanwhile…”
“In the meanwhile.”
“Well, yes. In the meanwhile we can be together and I think we can promise each other all the future that’s ours.”
“Susan scared me, she really did.”
“People like us are easy to scare. We’re out on a limb.” I moved closer to her but we were in bucket seats and the gearshift was between us. Jade put her head against the steering wheel again and when I touched her knee a teardrop, singular and warm, struck the back of my hand.
I knew I wouldn’t tell her about Hugh and I knew also that if justice had anything to do with the unfolding of the human universe, then I no longer quite deserved to be with Jade. Loving her was not the perfect right of my birth but something I would have to get away with. And if love is a bridge that connects time to eternity, then I would have to slip across in some kind of disguise.
I wonder what—exactly—Jade was feeling then. It must have been something similar. She took my hand and pressed it to her, hard. “I want to make love,” she said. “Now. Here. We can do that, can’t we? Not in the car. In that field. I want to feel you. I want to be delirious again. David.”
“I want to,” I said, with my heart beginning to break.
Jade was going to be in a graduation class of one. Once she finished her senior thesis and made up the three courses she had dropped during her sophomore and junior years, it would be December. I don’t know what plans had been made for awarding her her diploma—probably it was just going to casually arrive in the mail sometime later, delivered to an address she no longer occupied. We didn’t know what Jade was going to do after graduation and we never really talked about it, except as fantasy.
Yet even with the end so clearly in sight, Jade often thought of quitting school and going somewhere else with me—somewhere of our own, a cabin in Maine, the southwest, a new city, Europe. I realized it was my place to say no to this, to help her keep her stamina up for the last months of formal education, but I too dreamed of leaving Stoughton with her and living in a world more wholly our own. Sometimes I nodded when she threatened to quit school, but even when I told her she shouldn’t my voice betrayed the true irresponsible depths of my longing to be alone with her and live a more adult life. I didn’t want to live in Gertrude with a lot of people no matter how much I liked them. I didn’t like the peacefulness of campus life and it really did gall me that Jade was forced to sit for hours in front of professors and allowed them to form her mind. I may have been plain and simple jealous of the hold that college had on her and of the worlds it made available, though I don’t think it was that that bothered me.
I thought of us both going to school, together. When I was getting ready to graduate from high school, I’d been accepted by the University of California in Berkeley and I would have liked for us both to go there, get two desks, and turn them so we could face each other while we studied. Jade could do her graduate work in ethology and I might even take courses in astronomy. The energy and promise of my earlier life had worn a little thin, but I still believed that I might one day revive my old ambition.
But meanwhile it was daily life, the hasty Vermont summer—which even in July was autumnal in its dawns—and Jade’s elaborate senior thesis.
I was Jade’s lab assistant and worked every day—before setting out for the Main Street Clothiers and again in the evening—looking after the dogs in the makeshift kennels Jade had built in our back yard. The back yard was a small, patchy square, about seventy by seventy, and presided over by so many huge maples that grass could barely grow. Dandelions and dust, and where the lawn could sprout no one had the heart to cut it back. Jade made pens for the animals out of chicken wire, two-by-fours, tarpaper, and hay, and everyone in the house looked forward to the end of the experiment so the little canine shanty town might be eradicated. That Jade wouldn’t allow any of them to pet or even coo at the pups made it all the worse for the others, but because she wanted to study the behavioral differences between the pups raised by the blind mother and the pups raised by the normal mother she was worried that injudiciously portioned affection might invalidate her findings. When she made her rounds, she carried a stopwatch and timed herself so she wouldn’t spend an instant more (or less) than thirty seconds with each. She let me play with the puppies as well but she watched carefully over me with her stopwatch and said, in a dry, removed voice, “Next,” whenever thirty seconds was up.
It was obvious pretty early on, however, that the experiment wouldn’t yield any particularly clear results, let alone anything scientifically valid. Her professor, who had endorsed the project, seemed to have allowed Jade to wander into a dead end—but then perhaps that was the point of his agreeing. Jade was grief- stricken and ashamed when she realized that the experiment would yield no significant data—never had she been closer to dropping out of school and setting off to begin a new life with me. But I wouldn’t let her quit, and soon enough she came up with the idea of recording all the experimental flaws in her design and making the anatomy of the fiasco her thesis—much like those reporters who are sent out to interview a reclusive celebrity and write a whole piece on
not
getting the interview.
Yet even this idea changed. When Jade finally set to work on her thesis, it was called “Watching Dogs/Myself,” and it was perhaps the first confessional senior’s thesis in ethology. Since all hope for hard data was lost, Jade went to the source of her inspiration and recorded her own reactions to the litters. “This is how Hugh would have done it,” she said, the midnight she solved her dilemma.
“Dogs,” wrote Jade, “are mirrors more telling than water or glass. In bright reflecting mirrors we see ego-bound versions of what we look like now and fearful apparitions of the future. But dogs can show us how we feel, our relationship to the life around us, and our past. Animals are us in our infancy. A hound baying at the moon is our true self…” Jade and I watched and tended and adored the dogs, and when something seemed to interrupt the flow of life we finally abandoned the last pretense of experimental rigor and stepped right in. A Tiny Tears milk bottle; an Ohio Blue Tip splint. How we loved those dogs and pups, and what a relief it was to have a different medium through which to romance each other. The pups were our first metaphor. We cradled them and looked at each other; we could wonder about ourselves by wondering about them. And every evening as Jade made a long entry into her “Watching Dogs/Myself” diary, I lay on our bed and watched her write—she rocked back and forth like a Talmudic scholar—and I too thought of my beginnings, the slow tortoise-like gropings of my childhood, the years like cool muck. No one’s early life seemed so monolithically dull as my own, but I followed Jade’s lead and did my best to think about it, trying to recover all the information I’d fed to psychiatrists and make it more honest.
“The blind mother,” wrote Jade. “Sight without sight. Insight without looking. The numbing primacy of instinct. The blind mother eating the birth sack. Voracious. I almost screamed at Queenie to stop. I thought she might eat her first pup alive (Vladimir). An act of self-cannibalization. We are our mother’s self, but what she wants back she takes, and what she can’t admit she attempts to destroy, and what makes it through is what we are. Our first struggle: to get out of the mother. Our second (and lasting) struggle: to remain out, resist reabsorption.…”
“This is what I want to do,” Jade announced one night. We were walking back into the house after weighing all the pups. “For the first time, I know. I really know. I want to study animals.”
“I always thought that was what you wanted.”
“No. I wanted to want it. But it never seemed right. All the scientific method got in my way. Someone else’s shoes. And I’m not suited for it. I’m like Hugh in that way. I think that’s why he became the kind of doctor he was. Homeopathy is more intuitive and personal.” She took my hand and stopped me in my tracks. She pulled me closer to her. “That’s exactly what I want. I want to watch the world; I want to see things that most other people don’t notice. I’d like to go out into the woods for months at a time and do nothing but watch the world. Listen to owls, watch the deer get drunk on those old apples. And see everything for what it is and help myself see me for what I am. I’ll go to graduate school and get all the education I need so people will take me seriously and maybe even pay me, but what I really want to talk about is what it feels like to be related to a grasshopper.” She was smiling, squeezing my arm.
We went upstairs with a bottle of white wine. Jade wrote for a while and I drank and read from a book of stories by Isaac Babel. Then Jade joined me on the bed and helped finish the wine. Wine wants you to finish it, one of us said.
“Will you always be my assistant?” Jade asked.
“Will you pay me?”
“Half.”
“A deal.”
“And my husband?”
“We’ll have to pay him, too,” I said.
Jade smiled, laid down with her hands behind her head, her tee shirt tight against her breasts. Letting it pass.
“I’d love to be married to you,” I said. It was the first time we’d talked about it in years.
“It doesn’t make any difference. Marriage is probably unlucky, anyhow. It’s not what I think about. It’s something else. It’s raising the puppies with you. Being so close to the beginnings of life and sharing it with you. I think you’d be a great father.”
“I’d love to have children who looked like you,” I said, almost in a whisper.
“All we’d have to do is…I mean there’s nothing to it, really, then that would be that. No matter what happened, we would have done that. A child. God, I feel insane, but I really would like that. I want to do it. It seems that until you’re a mother you’re a daughter and it feels ridiculous being a daughter.
“That’s true. I never felt very comfortable in the daughter role.”
“Big joke. I’m offering you a chance at changing the universe and you’re making jokes.”
“Nerves.”
“It’s no excuse.”
“Look, you want to have a baby then we’ll do it.”
“No. You can’t make it mine. It can’t be what
I
want to do. It has to be mutual, you know.”
“It is. I’d love to be that baby growing inside you. It would be better than being married.”
“It seems like the next step. We can fuck until we die but after a while it starts wearing thin, doesn’t it?”
“Not for me.”
“I don’t mean
yet.
But it will. And I don’t really know how I feel about childless couples. It seems like cheating.”
“I could have nothing ever change again and I’d have a better life than I deserve.”
“I think it’s the normality of the whole thing that excites me,” said Jade. “How simple and perfect and matter of fact. All I have to do is not put in my diaphragm and then we can do what we normally do and then just as simply as that the whole world is different. It really is exciting to me, David. It’s like thinking about screwing for the first time, when all I had to go on was hearsay, one dirty picture, and my imagination.”
As Ann would say, how the souls of the unborn hovered over us that night. Jade came to bed, her uterus unshielded, and we made love with a gravity and wholeness that exceeded anything we had ever known. It was what making love for the first time would be if we were born with sexual skills, yet even that doesn’t faithfully describe the power of making love without contraception. We were playing long plaintive tunes on our bodies, trying to coax a human life out of the vast invisible jumble of chemistry and fate. A whole new vocabulary of instinct; my ejaculation seemed to hurtle itself deeper into Jade than ever before. The universe based on risk and effort. Sex no longer lifted us up and outside of time, but sent us streaming back and forth, into our own beginnings and toward the shrouded marker of someone’s future.
“Again,” said Jade after we came. “I feel like a dog. Never so out of control…”
It wasn’t pleasure, it was destiny. We stared at each other as we made love and barely made a sound. Lovers used to believe that their souls rushed out of them when they made love and we did hold on to each other as if we were endangered. I don’t know how many times we started from the beginning again, but we went on for hours that night. It was the energy, the obsession of our first month together, in Chicago, when Jade went through the days with lilac bruises on her spine and I’d be having dizzy spells. We petitioned the universe to make us a family, but it didn’t work out. The next day we both felt we had acted more impulsively than we could sustain and we went back to using birth control. We waited the rest of the month to see if our one try at conception had taken. I was certain it had, but I was wrong. Ten days later, Jade got those pains in her lower back that herald her period. “I’m glad,” she said. “We have too much to decide to have a baby now. You’ve got to straighten things out with the cops. My family doesn’t even know we’re together. I need to graduate and figure out my life. And so do you. You won’t be selling pants all your life, I hope.”
When her period finally began, we were having lunch on the lawn of the Presbyterian church near my work. “I have to get to a john,” said Jade, putting down her egg salad sandwich. We looked at each other and shrugged. I got up, took Jade’s hand, and pulled her up. We put our arms around each other. “I wasn’t sure,” Jade whispered. I didn’t know if she meant she wasn’t sure if she was going to actually have her period or if she wasn’t sure about having a baby. I didn’t ask. I wanted that baby without exactly knowing why. My desire for it couldn’t refute all of the objections, yet the objections couldn’t diminish the desire. I didn’t know what to say. My heart was racing at twice its normal rate and I just held her.