Into the Great Wide Open (27 page)

Down the perfumed hallway with its brocade wallpaper and wallpaper music and back with a Coke and a bucket of ice. She was standing wide-eyed at the window, staring out at the parking lot. Something had changed while he was gone. He could feel it in the air, like the aftertaste of a telephone call, words still ringing in the corners of the room … She was going back, he knew it. She wouldn’t look at him.

“Junie,” he said, from across the room. (Sudden vision of them in a house, their own house:
this
was the television and
this
was the sink …)

“Nothing,” she said.

“We’re all right,” Kenny said, and went to her and stood behind her, embraced her, looked over her shoulder at the rainy night outside. What was she looking for? The cars and trucks passed by on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a hundred yards away, a night full of purpose and movement, loneliness, Kenny thought, all of them going away. Here in our house. He said, “I love you. It’s all right.”

“Don’t talk,” she said. “Not right now.”

She was going home, he knew it then. It was amazing that she had come this far with him.

He let his hand drop to her side, her hip; slipped it under the cotton of her skirt and she let him. The cruel line where the strap of her underwear bit into her hip. She was beautiful, she was going, gone. She let him do anything he wanted. They stood at the window with Kenny’s hand touching inside her panties. Panties, cunties, titties, dickies, Kenny thought. The sadness was inches behind him, racing to catch up.

She moved with him from the window to the bed, sat on the
edge of the bed unbuttoning her dress while he moved from switch to switch, shutting off the lights. The marital half-light. He brushed his teeth and then she brushed hers and they met on the cool clean sheets.

“We’re not going to hurt the baby,” Junie whispered. “The doctor told me. Just nothing unusual.”

Still he almost lost his nerve: the language itself was discouraging—uterus, fetus—and Junie was nowhere to be found. She was letting but she wasn’t
with
him; and he remembered the angry fuck, the one after the fight, and the little unmentionable discovery they had made, the animal self. That’s not right, either, Kenny thought; don’t blame it on the animals … then felt her shift, and then she was with him. Mysterious but he could feel it, there in their little house, the only house—he knew it by then—the only house they were ever going to have. No kissing, that was one of the rules. Kenny went along but he didn’t understand. Some sense of urgency. He touched her and she was wet and then he was inside her, more quickly than he wanted to be. His loneliness, he wanted so much; wanted to touch her deep enough so they would never come apart again, a little scar tissue, a place to call his own.
You’re mine
but she had never been, would never be;
of her own free will
she guided him into the place where she needed him, rocked against him with her eyes closed, blind, and then they were both blind and then they were coming, both of them, at the same time and Kenny thought
now
and nothing happened. They fell short.

Junie started to weep.

“What’s the matter?” he asked; knowing at the same time something was wrong, or everything.

“What?”

She shook her head, turned her back to him and gathered her shoulders against him.

“Junie!”

But yelling didn’t help. Suddenly he was angry, she had abandoned
him, led him here to abandon him. Back and forth and back and forth. He didn’t want to be angry with her, he didn’t care, something was wrong; something made him slip the sheet back carefully, where he saw the dark red stain seeping out from between her legs; the miscarriage. Kenny knew the word. Junie had known, all the time they were fucking, she had to. Junie’s secret.

“Jesus,” he said; and pulled the cover back over both of them, and lay naked next to her until she had finished weeping; near dawn.

K
enny ten years later: twenty-seven. He leans against the side of his rental car on an October afternoon and watches the leaves, reflected in the windows of the house in Sherwood Forest. Somebody else lives here now. The winter after Junie finally went to college, her parents divorced. Her mother is dead now, and her father remarried, and Junie still living out West. The house looks
exactly the same
. He expects her to walk out the door any minute, tall and dark and seventeen; or maybe her father, jogging along in his knee brace. Things end and don’t end but they certainly stop.

Kenny stands there like his own ghost, both of him, twenty-seven and seventeen all mixed up. The freedom that he was enjoying a minute ago—a rental car, a town he doesn’t live in anymore, a wallet full of credit cards, and a sunny afternoon to kill—is gone, and in its place is pain. He can feel it physically, an emptiness in his chest. She’s gone, she is still gone. He didn’t bargain for this.

The house looks beautiful still, kept-up, expensive. The gardens are a little more formal, a little out of place against the insistent naturalness of the house; and Kenny finds himself thinking of Jane Mrs. Dr. Williamson and the fact that she is dead, and Kenny never went to the funeral, he never said good-bye to her. What was the name for what he felt for her? He liked her and disliked her both but it was beyond that. Times when he would be doing things in his life, making decisions, and he would stop and ask himself what Junie’s mother would think, what she might say. He thought of her all the time but never wrote her a letter. A
connection
. An anger at himself, at the world: she belonged to him, there should have been a place for him. And yes he was living his own life and yes he was busy but still. Some part of him continues to believe that if he could find the right
word, the right gesture or sign, if he could write a perfect letter or a poem that they would begin again and the years apart would turn out to be a mistake. Part of him is still waiting.

This is fucked, he thinks, and gets in the car to drive back into the city. He can’t quite leave, though. He can’t quite bring himself. Memory:
this
is the bush that always scraped the side of her car when we drove in.
There
is the door where she appeared in her nightgown and sneakers. The reason country people have different souls: they grow up surrounded by the same things all their lives, the same trees, houses, wells, so all their memories are embedded around them. While Kenny has been uprooted. Part of him will always be left behind here, there, anywhere. Scraps and flutters of Kenny scattered around the landscape.

“Can I help you?” the woman asks.

Kenny blinks, composes himself. She has come from out of the house without his noticing. His eyes are open but he didn’t see her come out, stand at the edge of the yard like the rail of a ship, protected. Kenny gets out of the car, to show that he means no harm.

“I used to know somebody who lived here,” he says. “I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“Mrs. Williamson,” says the woman—white-haired, pink-cheeked, dressed in aqua senior-citizen uniform, some sort of satiny tracksuit. She looks like the Dog Lady on educational TV, hale and practical.

“Actually, I was a friend of her daughter’s,” Kenny says.

“People come by here, all the time,” the woman says. “She must have been a remarkable woman. I wish I could have met her.”

“She liked to help people,” Kenny says.

“I’m sure,” the Dog Lady says. “But it must be more than that. It seems like people are looking for something when they come here. What are you looking for?”

Kenny stands tongue-tied. He doesn’t want to translate what he’s feeling into her words, and it’s none of her business anyway.

“Whatever you’re looking for, it isn’t here,” the Dog Lady says. “It’s just a house. Would you like to come inside and look around? You can, if you’d like. It’s quite a bit different, is what they tell me.”

“Ah, no thanks,” Kenny says, panicking. “I’ve got a thing I’m supposed to …” He makes a vague gesture toward the city as his voice trails off. In fact he would love to see the inside of the house; he just doesn’t want to get caught having feelings, doesn’t want anybody to see, not even this aqua stranger.

“Well, thanks,” he says, though she’s done nothing but allow him to look at the outside of the house. She would have done more, if he had asked. She’s lonely, maybe. Kenny waves as he starts the car, slips it into drive, and slowly circles the dead-end to make his way out, tires slipping on the wet leaves. It’s beautiful here; he’s never coming back. Ache of a missed opportunity: knowing that he could have gone inside if he wanted to, wanting to, not being able to. I’m shy, he thinks, but that isn’t the right word, either. Furtive, secret. The mess inside his chest, the tangle of this feeling and that feeling, and that’s the main thing about the past, it seems to Kenny, its
insolubility
. You think that things are settled and then they come alive again somehow (a stray whiff of perfume, or the sight of her house) and you realize that things were never solved or settled. I have these feelings, Kenny thinks, useless and heavy as uranium. But he doesn’t even
want
to get rid of them.

He lightens up as he turns onto the avenue, his mind drifting forward to the evening, when he is supposed to meet Kim Nichols for dinner; his last official friend in town. Everybody but Kim lives somewhere else now, Kenny included. He’s thinking about the Dog Lady.
Whatever you’re looking for, it isn’t here
. Kim will like that, maybe or maybe not. Kim is in about her seventh year of graduate school, an art historian. She has a nose ring and a girlfriend, really she’s having a pretty good decade, and Kenny—who has been mired in life for years, who has come to think of himself as a solid nowhere brown-fading-to-gray kind of person—feels flattered that she is interested
in him, interested enough to go to dinner, anyway, and maybe more, he isn’t sure. Last time he was in town they came within an inch of sleeping together.

Last time: he remembers the moment when it was decided that they wouldn’t sleep together, the moment after dinner, over coffee, when he asked Kim if she and Junie were lovers for real. He knew this was out of bounds, knew she wouldn’t answer, but he couldn’t stop himself: and then he asked, and saw her soul retreat from her face, her eyes closing down and the old closed Kim instead, saying: maybe you’d better ask Junie about that. I don’t really want to talk about that. She’s not dead, you know.

She’s just in California, Kenny said, the next best thing.

That isn’t funny, Kim said. She called me from the hospital last time.

Is she OK?

She went
back
to him when she got out, Kim said; and then the evening was over, and each of them gone inside. Better to live in the present, better to live in the flesh: to stay faithful to what is, and not what might have been. Maybe he was making it up; but there was something when he telephoned Kim to arrange things, a faint, flirtatious … Time will tell. A dinner at one of the new restaurants on Columbia Road, they will eat Indian or Thai or Mexican or Ethiopian, the world spread out before them. The Ethiop will make us dinner, Kenny thought, and I shall pay for it with my Visa card. Artistic conversation—Kim kept up with her poets and painters—and then at some point she would enforce dancing or maybe just drinks or a retreat to her apartment or maybe the sanitized motel room, house of loneliness, and suddenly he is back in it, the words
motel room
triggering a dive into the insoluble past.

I belong here, Kenny tells himself. I love the present: a girl with a nose ring (a
woman
, he corrects himself), dinner, money in my pocket, and a full tank of gas. God bless the Ground! Then remembers the way the silences would fill up with the memory of Junie, his
last evening with Kim; how they sat—not all through dinner, but once or twice—like orphans waiting for a bus, motherless children; her name unspoken. The thing is, he can go for years without remembering; or rather he remembers it safely, a youthful folly, the public joke of first love, moon June croon. The official story, official sentiments: time works its slow erosion on us all, all passionate feeling …

It’s only here that it comes alive again. Here: driving down Massachusetts Avenue at a quarter to four in the afternoon, beautiful sunlight and golden leaves, the traffic already stacking up in the other direction; but Kenny is elsewhere, riding down this same road in the moonlight, dead of winter, the only car on the road. It’s maybe three in the morning or four, coming back from her house. He’s wearing Junie’s pants. What? Just the silence of the houses, the families sleeping inside them and Kenny the only one awake, King of the World. The stoplights blink for him alone. His dick is still warm from being inside her. The phantom Kenny, the adult one, shrinks from the word
dick
but that’s the only word for it. They were literal, both of them. She made his dick hard. He made her come, he made her bleed. She made Kenny bleed; but that was later, the continuing train wreck … A winter’s night, anyway. He’s wearing her pants. King of the World. Not happiness, exactly, but something close, a place in the world, it was hard to find the words for it, then remembers the words: he loved her. He loved her and believed himself loved and then she was gone. My
tragedy
, Kenny thinks; but the loss would not be laughed into silence. The voice inside:
Where are you?

K
enny is standing at the dock, looking out over the lake toward Jacob’s island, and the clouds rushing through the sky overhead and reflecting in the water make him feel like he is still driving. The sky is narrow, between forested hills, which makes the clouds look like they are moving at a tremendous speed. He honks the horn of Junie’s father’s Jeep again, and the noise echoes across the water and loses itself in the dark pines on the far shore.

Then Junie comes out of the house and waves to him across the water and he waves back. There’s something strange about her. He can’t figure it out and then he sees: she has a cast on her arm. This is news to Kenny, but everything is so strange to him right now—he’s been driving for four days, all the way from Maryland—that the cast is just one more item. He watches her start the outboard and pilot the little aluminum boat across the water, trailing a stream of blue oil smoke and a shallow V-shaped wake, calling to him over the ring-ding of the motor: “Kenny, Jesus, it’s you!”