Jade had always been such a deep sleeper. On weekends, it would be nothing unusual for her to sleep until four in the afternoon. She slept in school, she slept on buses, on family outings. Like an old man, she’d doze off at the movies. Naturally, we noted her semi-narcolepsy and realized it was an escape—from her too-rapid growing up, from all of the countless details of life that displeased her, and from us. Once, when she was nine or ten, I found her asleep in the bathtub and I shook her awake, partly because I was afraid she could drown herself like that and partly because I’d been waiting an hour for her to get out of the bathroom. She looked at me with all the defiance she could muster—which was considerable, even then—and said, “I need my sleep.” She was very possessive about her sleep and she defended it as if it were property. If she could have hidden it the way I hid my chocolates there would have been dreams and packets of unconsciousness stashed everywhere. In a household where everything was shared and talked about and where there was much more need than there was ability to satisfy needs, Jade dug her heels into a universe in which she was unapproachable, uncriticizable, and unknowable.
So after years of accommodating her semi-narcolepsy, we then, with you on the scene, had to adjust to Jade’s sleeplessness. When the first symptoms appeared—a certain icing-like quality to her eyes, as well as her own direct testimony that she was getting about twenty hours of sleep a week—Hugh took the homeopathic route and began giving her infinitesimal doses of stimulants. Herbal stimulants to begin with, brewed in with her tea, and then, relaxing his principles, he even crushed in a little bit of dexadrine. Hugh assumed that her body was keeping itself awake because of some internal crisis, some need for wakefulness, and following the homeopathic edict of treating like with like, Hugh attempted to relieve her body of its need to create these symptoms by creating them artificially—thus, he hoped, defusing the control center of her insomnia. Then he set off on homeopathic chase number two, which is a kind of folksy psychoanalysis—usually Hugh’s strongsuit, for some odd reason.
Hugh developed the suspicion that your lovemaking was leaving Jade in a perpetually excited, that is to say unsatisfied, state. This didn’t go very far in explaining your sleeplessness, but your sleeplessness wasn’t awfully much in question. This continual sexual incompleteness may have been sheer fantasy on Hugh’s part, a kind of compromise virginity, but nevertheless he tried to delicately draw her out about her “night life,” as he called it. Jade spared him the realization that he had overstepped his actual courage, that he was not a WASP Freud, willing to face the truth no matter what its content or consequence, and she simply dummied up on the topic of your sex life. She knew, I think, that Hugh wanted to hear that each night you left her dangling, yearning, and whether it was true or not it was more than she could say—her loyalty to you and the world you both now lived in was too fierce—she was virtually patriotic about the emotional ground you’d portioned off for yourselves: My love affair right or wrong! So she sidestepped his questions, the subtle ones, that is, and when he resorted to frontal attack, she screamed, “You’re taking things away from me. You’re making mine into yours.” It was Jade’s genius to use Hugh’s own language when she fought him. Jade dressed in the uniform of Hugh’s troops and fought him from the trees and bushes, whereas I fought him like the colonial British army, straight up and down in a clearing and decked out in red.
And the sleeplessness continued. The nights when you weren’t with us were no better. Jade would go to bed early, clearly anxious for an uninterrupted night, but then there would have to be at least one phonecall to you and as often as not, after an hour or two of sleep, she’d be at her desk composing a letter to you, or drawing your face, or writing a poem to you—sometimes even trying to catch up in her schoolwork. Hugh was convinced that Jade’s short-term memory was unraveling, that she had gotten paler by two full shades. He was even waffling on the question of whether or not to subtly dose her with barbiturates—he was slower to use drugs medically than he was socially.
Well, this was the climate when Jade approached us and asked for a real bed for her room, a double bed as would befit a lady who shared her sleeping quarters with a lover. It’s strange that our compliance in this small matter is what you chose to rattle in my face—and not the far more significant matter of our allowing you into our daughter’s room in the first place. You approve, it would seem, of our belief in the sexual rights of young people, but raise an eyebrow at our choice of furniture. And what about your own terribly moral parents? What was on their minds when they failed to stop you from virtually moving into our house? At least Hugh and I knew where our daughter was—could actually hear her in her room, if we listened closely enough. The truth is that no one had the heart to keep you two from being everything to each other, and the energy of your connection was strangely overpowering. Since we did not believe that making love is a sin or a crime, all we could have objected to was that you and Jade weren’t yet ready somehow for the pleasures of the flesh—but how could we say that when we were nearly mad with envy over your love for each other? You were all of our half-forgotten romantic fantasies suddenly incarnate; denying you would have been like denying ourselves.
And so, yes, I did agree to it, the bed. I believed in you two, in your gestures and in the world you created. It wasn’t until the bed arrived in that Salvation Army truck and was installed in Jade’s little room that I realized Jade’s arguments were wholly based on trickery. Having a double bed didn’t make a dent in her sleeplessness. Nothing could have put you two to sleep. Love—or is it only romance?—is a psychedelic. It’s the flying carpet, the rope trick. It is that singular, and no one who sees it—which means, of course, believing it—can ever hope to be the same. You two stoned-out beasts reigning up there in your used bed. There have been times, David, when I think that just that, just the fact of you two, never minding what it all led to, but just seeing you two and feeling what you meant to each other, and knowing that love is a state of altered consciousness, has been more than I can honestly absorb. And that in certain ways it has destroyed my life.
Ann
8
January is when time begins, and spring is when life begins and, for me, the first day of spring was the day I sneaked into a travel agency on Jackson and State to buy a plane ticket to New York. It was a cold April day, gray, slushy, but the most extravagant promises turned slowly in the belly of the wind. I paid for the ticket with a new hundred-dollar bill, feeling as furtive as a spy. I bought the ticket under a false name and kept the day of departure open. I felt brilliant, brave, and absolutely imperiled. The act of stepping outside the law provoked my imagination and released torrents of fearful criminal passion. I wondered if there was a permanent all-points bulletin out on me and if the sweet-faced woman who sold me the ticket wasn’t in fact looking at a newswire photo of me taped beneath the Formica ledge of the counter. I shoved the ticket into my coat pocket and quick- stepped out with my head down.
I hid my ticket in my apartment and dreamed of my departure. I thought I was going to be quite a bit braver than I turned out to be. Like a person doomed to fail, I thought of the hundred things that could go wrong. I thought of my parole officer Eddie Watanabe making a surprise visit to my school and finding me vanished. I thought of being arrested for jaywalking on 42nd and Broadway and having it discovered I was in New York breaking parole. I thought of Ann slamming her door in my face and calling the police. These were the variables and I was right to think about them, but I could not stop myself. My imagination of disaster tormented me as if it were a separate, vicious self. I longed to stop thinking of consequences, just as we must do when we dive from high boards, leap on our skis down steep sunblind slopes, or play any of the other daredevil games we’ve invented as metaphors for love.