“I don’t know where she is these days,” I said.
“Jade,” Neihardt said.
“What about her?”
“That was her name, right? Jade Butterfield. She had that whole weird family. Her father was some kind of faith healer or something.”
“No. He was a doctor. He had an MD. He just was into a different kind of medicine.”
Stu shrugged, as if I were splitting hairs. “I knew her brother Keith. He was a brainy one. What’s he doing now?”
“I don’t know.”
“He was weird, too. He never wanted to be friends with anyone but then he’d come up to you and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about you. Can we talk after school?’ He actually pulled that on me, if you can believe it. And I was stupid enough to go along with it.” Stu smiled and shook his head.
“What did he say?” I asked. I felt caught in the logic and momentum of our conversation: it was like being accosted by one of the black kids after school and being taunted and misunderstood into insulting him, at which point you’d have to fight.
“Oh, I don’t know. Psychological bullshit. You knew him better than I did. But the weird thing was it made me think he’d been studying up on me behind my back and all I knew about him was he never raised his hand in class but every time he got called on he knew the answer. Where’d you say he was now?”
“I said I didn’t know.”
“That’s how it goes,” Stu said, with satisfaction. He looked at me and raised his large eyebrows, inviting me to ask him to share his wisdom.
“That’s how what goes?”
“All the great high-school romances. I always thought I was missing out on the best but you see I wasn’t missing a thing. You and Jade were such a big deal, right? And now—poof—you don’t even know where she lives. Am I right?”
“That I don’t know where she lives?”
“No, David. The whole thing. Did you know Kenny Fox?”
“Slightly.”
“Well, I see him around. Remember him and Arlene Kirsch? They went steady for two years, she had an abortion because of him, the whole bit. So what does Kenny do when I mention Arlene? He smiles. He can hardly even remember her. She goes to college in Florida and they don’t even write each other.”
“You sound pleased.”
“No, it’s just interesting. Here’s me feeling like Mr. Asshole all through high school because I’m not part of some big romance. Never knowing what I’ll be doing on New Year’s Eve. Everyone and his brother losing their cherry and me going steady with Mrs. Thumb and her four skinny daughters.”
“Sounds pretty normal to me,” I said.
“Hey,” said Neihardt, his voice sharpening. His aggressions were beginning to show more clearly; it was like ice melting off a pond, exposing the dark, brackish water beneath. ’I know it was normal. I don’t need you to tell me what’s normal, for Christ’s sake. I’m just telling you what it feels like for someone like me. Who felt so out of it. And who now sees all that shit he felt left out of didn’t mean so much after all. I can’t believe you’re not getting what I’m saying because I’m really being honest with you.”
The stewardess was next to us now, asking what we’d like to drink. I asked for an orange juice and Stu said, “Make that two, honey.” As she poured our juices, Stu said, “What else you have today, huh?” The stewardess, who was at least five years older than us, began to rattle off the various fruit juices and soft drinks available, but Stu broke in, saying, “No, I was just kidding.”
Stu finished his juice in one swallow and pushed back in his seat as far as it would recline. “I remember you two walking around the halls of old Hyde Park High,” he said. “Couple of first-class hand-holders. Jesus Christ, you hand-holders used to drive me nuts. I mean, what was it? A school or a fucking lover’s lane? You know what I mean? Kenny and Arlene were the same way—worse! One day I’m walking out of trig and goddamned Kenny whips his finger under my nose and says, ‘Breathe deep, old pal. I just finger-fucked Arlene.’” Stu made one of those old-fashioned rueful laughs. “High school. Four years of torture. You know the only girl’s tits I ever saw for that whole time were Jade’s? And that was an accident. It was at the science fair. We were both looking at Marsha Bercovitch’s water-pressure project and Jade—I didn’t even know her, except she was your chick—leans over to get a closer look and I see her blouse hanging away from her body. So I say to myself, ‘Peek in, Stuie, and maybe you’ll get lucky.’ So I take a quick look and there they are, what there was of them. Like two fried eggs shaking on a plate. And you know the pink part, you know whatever you fucking call that part that goes around the nipple—it was no bigger than a dime and it was wrinkled and tight. Christ. That’s the famous Stu Neihardt sex life in four years of high school. You know if—”
I don’t know what he was about to add to his little tale. I’d been wondering if I should punch him in the face, but I felt too vulnerable because of my broken parole. Still, if I let him go on, the whole purpose of my flight to New York would be weakened—the reunion with the best part of myself would be that much more unlikely. And so I leaned toward Stu and as quickly as you’d move your hand to catch a housefly I grabbed his lower lip between my thumb and forefinger. He tried to jerk his head back but I had him too tightly. “Why are you telling me this?” I whispered. I turned his lip like the key in the back of a mechanical toy—90 degrees, 120 degrees, a full 180.
He screamed and he grabbed my hand and pulled it loose, but it only hurt him more. He tried to rear back to hit at me but all motion increased the painfulness of my grip. My thumb was slipping a little on his saliva and his noises were attracting attention. I let him go, wondering what he would do to retaliate. But he merely sat back, rubbing his mouth and muttering. He had nothing at stake in fighting me or even knowing me and I’d frightened him.
“Are you crazy?” he asked.
“Could be,” I said. The only people who gave any indication of having noticed the flare-up were three nicely dressed old women sitting across the aisle from us. But when I glanced at them, they averted their eyes, moving in unison the way young best friends or sisters sometimes do. Repeatedly, a little obsessively, I wiped my fingers on my pants, trying to fix my attention on the Antarctica of clouds that streamed beneath the silver and orange wing of the jet. My pulse was racing; the violence of my impulses toward Neihardt was still within me, like the sharp end of a splinter improperly removed. I didn’t yet know if his remarks were merely gross or if they proved some cunning foreknowledge of my life’s condition. But what was worse was the sudden plummet into a fact of my life that I’d been able to absorb up until this point but that was now grown in its immensity: tearing at Stu’s lip had been yet another instance of my war with all the world since Hugh Butterfield told me in 1967 that I couldn’t see his daughter for thirty days.
And now here I was on yet another desperate mission and what possible reason did I have for not believing that it would lead to more disaster? I’d violated parole, deserted my parents, ditched out on my doctor, and was probably going to lose my job. Was it all for the delirium of love? Was the path I walked flanked by ruin on one side and emptiness on the other? Or was there no path at all and was ruination and emptiness where I was really heading all along? I’m sure it is only the very wicked who think of themselves as Good, but sitting in that seat two miles above somewhere or other, I doubted myself as never before—not my prospects, not my sanity, but the nature of my ineffable, essential self: I was beginning to feel that at my root I was not at all good. It wasn’t guilt and it wasn’t really shame. I felt trapped and repelled by the person I was.