But of course it was already too late. Jade was trying to do more than make a last-ditch retreat into daughterdom, and she had more on her mind than somehow recovering her balance—connected to her need to be cared for by us, to live more normally, was her suspicion that a girl her age oughtn’t to have a lover and certainly oughtn’t to have that lover in her own home. With you in her bed, Jade had no place to be a young girl; with the traces of your lovemaking on her every night she could never sleep the innocent pink sleep she often felt she needed. Yet it was only partly her own self she wished to save by banishing you for the month: it was for all of us, especially Hugh and me.
Everyone who ever came traipsing through our lives brought a message and a challenge, taught us something. Maybe it was because Hugh and I met when we were in college, but we were born students, taking notes on the life we glimpsed through others. It was the privilege of having an open house; even the desperadoes came bearing gifts. Hugh and I, and to a lesser extent our kids, let this rich antic life stream around us; we acknowledged the runaways, the curious, the overnight visitors, as if they were so many minstrels wandering through a vast medieval fair. We were susceptible, we were, in fact, suckers—totally willing to believe that teenagers and even the kids Sammy’s age were planting the seedlings of a new consciousness and that we, Hugh and I, were lucky to be learning from them. But no one of them had the effect on us that you did. It took us by surprise, or rather you did, because compared to such characters as Alex Ahern and Crazy Hector and that Billy Sandburg who beat on his belly like a bongo drum and rolled his eyes back so far that only cloudy white showed in his sockets, compared to some of the real daredevils and casualties we saw, you were relatively a straight arrow. It took me weeks to become interested in you, now that I think of it.
You knew you were up against a lot of competition and it wasn’t enough for you to court Jade. You had to make yourself interesting—indispensable!—to the rest of us. Of course you could go a long way toward seducing each of us and you could outdistance the other passers-through in terms of sheer charm—no one else could have possibly tried so hard, no one else had your determination or cared about making an impression nearly so much. So it was botany and folk music with Keith—while he could still stand you—and karate workouts with Sammy, and Jewish novelists with me, and a kind of fawning obsequiousness for Hugh, which, unfortunately for you and your strategy, could never quite wriggle free of the superiority complex that spawned it. And for all of us Latvian folk tales you made up to get us laughing and Marxist dogma to impress us with your erudition and to inform us that while you seemed to be living for no principle loftier than your own pleasure you were, in fact, guided by huge historical considerations. Beneath it all, you were a revolutionary something-or-other, and you knew we would be enchanted by your ideals, by their certainty and their hidden promise of a transcendent life. Scorning the liberals was, at least for us, a version of strolling around Hyde Park blasted out of our minds: a way of being in the world and above it at the same time, immune to comparison or judgment.
But forget Latvia and the Russian Revolution, forget Gimpel the Fool and your periodic thank yous to Hugh for his hand in winning World War II. The thing that made you vivid to us, in the end, was the one thing you did effortlessly. And that was loving Jade. And it was Hugh, you should know, who recognized it first—not the love, which I saw as inevitable when all you two were doing was wanting each other, but the weird, unique force the two of you generated, which Hugh saw months before we finally banished you from the house.
It was one thing to allow our daughter the freedom to express love (especially when she had such a hard time expressing it within the family), but quite another matter to see this liberty catapult her into a relationship every bit as intense as what Hugh and I called “mature love.” We were OK on letting her be sexual, OK on letting her find her individuality outside of the family structure, but I must say Hugh and I were assuming Jade would begin her sexual life with some sort of puppy love, something more quintessentially adolescent, which was to say something filled with doubts, lapses in concentration, some connection that more distinctly expressed the peculiar mixture of child and woman she was at that time. We felt as if we’d given a child permission to experiment with a little chemistry set only to find she was an undiscovered genius—solving ancient alchemical riddles, bonding once incompatible molecules, filling the cellar with luminous smoke. We simply had no idea of what we were in for; we totally underestimated the incredible emotional reach she was capable of. We were too accustomed to seeing Jade in one way. Yawning, slightly withdrawn, orderly, conservative, evasive, with not much of a relationship with her own body, save worrying abstractly over her weight and lamenting the smallness of her breasts.
It drove Hugh mad; it tore him in half. It absolutely galled him to think of his precious daughter naked in bed with a boy. Left alone, I’m sure that Hugh’s incestuous fantasies would have atrophied. But having Jade embrace the sexual life just when she was at the juncture between childhood and womanhood triggered a deep, conflicted, painful yearning in Hugh, and he wanted you to go away because he wanted it to go away. He’d been raised to believe it was OK to be protective and even possessive about your daughter, but poor Hugh was too closely attuned to the truth and ambiguity of his own feelings: more purely passionate than anyone in his family, he could not ignore the measure of sheer jealousy in his feelings about you and Jade.
But, on the other hand, you two had the same effect on poor Hugh that you had on nearly everyone else. That is, you made him recall the most inarticulate, unreasonable romantic hopes he had ever had. All that was betrayed and lost, all that was refined and diminished, all of that raging wilderness of feeling came rushing back to Hugh. I was different; seeing you two in love only made me mourn for the person I never was, for the risks I’d never taken, for my life more or less on the sidelines. But Hugh actually recognized himself in you two. Actual faces, actual moments, the precise emotional content of broken promises came back to him. With me it was mere jealousy; but Hugh experienced all the ecstasy and sorrow of memory.
Hugh was wide open for the sucker punch of your example. I saw him reeling and I took advantage. I encouraged him to believe that our lives might safely hop track, that instead of growing older we might grow younger, and instead of becoming more encumbered we might catapult into a vast, vast freedom. The house, our precariously balanced budget, the carefully tended and mended clothes hanging in our closets, the boiled eggs, the tarnished spoons, the Klee prints in their homemade frames—none of it, I argued, need define the real limits of our life. We could do anything.
And the rest, as they say, is history. I took one lover and he took a dozen. I smoked a joint and he smoked a pound. I hinted at the contradictions in my character and he poured forth torrents of confession. I shed a tear and he wept copiously. And then when I began to wonder if perhaps we were being a tad indulgent and letting our paternal responsibilities go a little too much, Hugh went into a shuddering panic, reaching out for the familiar controls that now eluded him, or wouldn’t respond to his touch. What happened to the family meetings? Who was ironing his shirts? He said he felt like the pilot of a fighter whose tail’s been hit—loss of altitude, sudden shifts of direction, the high whistle of impending doom.