I’ve had a lot of time to think about this and I’ve decided that because you were starting out fresh, with no resentments or hurt feelings, you could muster an understanding of me that in some ways surpassed my family’s—the rest were too anxious to discover I was somehow warmer, more capable, that I had a secret store of womanliness, motherliness, and selflessness, and they saw everything through a mist of expectations. I always thought you had some special instinctual understanding of me—though what we call understanding is as often as not appreciation decked out in robes. With you I could talk with the confidence that everything I said wasn’t going to be automatically husked for the kernel of true meaning. I could joke with you and talk around what I meant. I could hint—what a relief that was. All of the rest of them were so bloody explicit.
And you were the only one who was genuinely thrilled that I’d been a writer. When you found that I’d once sold two stories to The New Yorker, you went that very day to the University of Chicago library to read what I’d published and came back to the house that night with damp, chilly white-on-black photocopies of those old stories. Who weren’t you courting, is what I want to know. Those stories were more than eighteen years old but they trembled in your hands and looked new and alive as if they’d just rolled off the press. You gazed at them and at me as if I were still the person who had composed them. You wanted to talk about everything; you interviewed me as if I were Rebecca West, asking me what had inspired me and asking me why I’d chosen one word and not another.
I was the first person you’d ever met who had published anything, and I knew your enthusiasm was naive but I cherished it and drew it out of you. I made us a pot of coffee and we drank Tia Maria out of those orange juice glasses that Sammy had swiped from a cafeteria. Who were you? I mean then, that night. My daughter’s high- school sweetheart. Another newcomer to our household. But you seemed to promise so much. Your big intense eyes and the absolutely masterful trick of slowing your flattery down with little stammers. Before long the family, including Hugh and then Jade, went upstairs to bed, and you and I were alone beneath the kitchen light in an otherwise darkened house. It was nearly eleven but we were far from exhausting our conversation. It felt so damned wonderful to be talking about those stories, and you, I see now, were very cleverly staking a claim, marking off for yourself not only spatial territory but temporal territory as well. In a night you established a crucial precedent—that is, it was no longer expected that you would leave at a normal, decent hour. I remember hoping that Hugh would be asleep by the time I came to bed because I’d sensed earlier that evening that he wanted to, as he actually liked to say, “have me,” and I was not in the mood at all. At all. And I remember wondering if Jade lay in her bed, cursing me for monopolizing her new beau. But it just felt too damn right to be drinking and talking with you for me to worry about the others. I told myself that if old Hugh wanted me so badly he could come down for me, and if Jade suffered teen-age jealousy then she could confront me with it, and if you, beneath the opacity of your charm, sensed you should be somewhere else—home or with Jade—then you could simply pick yourself up and go there. I was so happy.
I know you feel we somehow lured you into accepting the ways of our family, lured you into becoming one of us. And others, I suppose, feel the same way, that we got what we deserved from you because we tempted you into waters that finally were over your head. The fire you set was, to some, I suppose, the flames of the hell we so richly deserved. I know that your innocence was not proved (or provable) but even your sentence—treatment rather than punishment—seems to hold within it a certain condemnation of us, as if you were driven mad by the circumstances of your life in our household. I see it otherwise.
There was something about you that exacerbated every muted struggle, all of the divisions, misunderstandings, and hurt feelings that until then had hung in a precarious balance among us. I still don’t wholly understand how you did it. Our house was always open for all manner of roughneck and maladjusted teens, for grubby little geniuses, for the science fair winners and the folk singers, and every kid who passed through us had an effect—to be sure—but no one played Prometheus to our huddled masses, no one really changed the way we felt about each other, and no one ever caused us to renegotiate the complex of treaties that held us together—as all families are held together, if there is no single, dictatorial power.
I think it was how you were changing us, more than any other factor, that finally caused Jade to confront Hugh and say, “Why don’t you do something? Why don’t you be a father and say no? Get me out of this.” I know you like to believe that the decision to quarantine you from our house for a month was basically Hugh’s, with perhaps Keith’s jealousy and my perverse nostalgia for the old rules thrown in. But it was really Jade who wanted it, Jade who felt everything was slipping away: Hugh and I were actually too stoned and too obsessed with what we so proudly hailed as “Our New Sexual Freedom” to make any decisions. Our lives were hanging so abruptly, so convulsively, that just hanging on was like a rodeo stunt; we felt brave, certainly, and completely in advance of our contemporaries—we didn’t have a good friend our own age, by then. But we also felt utterly shaky and so new to our new ways of living that we didn’t feel adult enough to devise codes of behavior for Jade, or for you, or for anyone else. At that point, the best we could do was Judge Not Lest We Be Judged. And it took Jade staggering into our room with a fistful of my newly acquired Thorazines (perfect for short-circuiting bum trips) to prod us into action. “What should I do?” Hugh asked her, with that helplessness he liked to think represented open-mindedness. I occupied myself with prying the Thorazines out of Jade’s hand—God, they could seep through the skin of her wet palms and put her into shock. And by the end of the evening, Hugh would have stepped in and been a Daddy such as Jade longed for and he would prove the efficacy of his Daddyhood by keeping you away from our house for a full thirty days and, as well, keep Jade away from you for the duration.