Ann smoothed the sheets onto the sofa. She was squinting, furrowing her forehead, and poking savagely at the corners of the sheets. I stood by, saying nothing. She was finished in a minute. “That’s where you’ll sleep. You’ll be in good company. We’ve all put in our nights on this sofa.” She stepped back and looked down at the sofa, remembering the people who’d slept on it.
“I’ve got pajamas. They belong to Keith and they’ll fit you. Do you need them?”
I shook my head.
“One rule. When I get up, you get up. I write in the morning so it’ll be toast, coffee, and goodbye.”
“OK.”
She nodded. The circles beneath her eyes were royal blue and the texture of crushed velvet. She was looking directly at me now, inviting me to meet her steady, open gaze and come to some silent understanding of what we’d just been through. But I didn’t have the strength to fight my evasive impulses. I glanced from side to side and when I did fix my eyes on hers I wasn’t really seeing anything. The only part of me that was worth calling alive was by now seething with a very simple thought: in moments I would be lying on a spot upon which Jade had lain.
Ann went to her bedroom. I couldn’t tell if she’d closed the door or not. I heard a long unzipping sound but not much else. I turned off the lamps and sat on the edge of the sofa and undressed in the dark. The sheets were cool and softer than any I’d ever touched. The blanket felt like cashmere and when I pulled it over my shoulders the feel of its satiny border touched off a memory of a cell meeting at my parents’. I was very young and on my parents’ bed, where the comrades had dropped their coats. I was caressing the satin lining of someone’s coat. I’d just learned the word grand and I repeated to myself, “This is grand.” Other memories. Coming fast and unbeckoned. Glimpses of things I’d seen years ago. The view from my room in Rockville. Christmas decorations on State Street. The images came in no order and I wasn’t trying to remember or understand. It felt as if a part of my brain was shorting out.
I didn’t want to think, yet I didn’t want to fall asleep too quickly. I wanted to be awake on the sofa Jade had slept on. I rolled onto my stomach and held the pillow close, so it touched me from my lips to my belly. The blanket had slipped half off me but I wasn’t cold. The room was very warm and the only reason Ann gave me a blanket was she remembered I liked to sleep with some weight covering my body. And how Jade sweated through summer nights with me, steaming with me beneath the blanket through a long martyring July.
I was crushing my genitals as hard as I could against the sofa and I turned onto my back. The room was slowly brightening and I wondered if it was getting near dawn. No. The windows were still slate black. I got up on one elbow and looked down the corridor toward Ann’s room. I couldn’t see the door but I saw the light from her room, coming out in a thin, pale wedge and stopping about ten feet from where I lay.
Like any visitor, I’d heard a hundred strange, small sounds since I’d turned off the lights. Sounds from the street, from the wall, and I knew enough to pay no attention. But now, I heard a sound from Ann’s room. She was dialing her telephone. Slowly at first, with pauses between each digit, and then faster and louder. The clicking of the dial was like tiny footsteps racing from her to me. My first thought was that Ann was calling the police. She was going to tell them that someone who the court had ordered to keep away from her had broken his parole and was now sleeping in the living room.
I held my breath. There was silence in her room. Silence and more silence. The phone was ringing on the other end of the line. It couldn’t be the police; they pick up right away. I heard Ann shift in her bed and then I heard her murmur:
“Hello, Jonathan. It’s Ann. I’m waking you.”
A few moment’s silence, and then Ann’s voice again.
“I know it’s late. But I’m still awake. I am very much awake…. Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t call up to argue with you. I know it’s very late. You know I don’t do these things. You should know that I was worried about you.…I didn’t know if you came when I was out. Or maybe you decided not to show up after all.…It is? Oh. Well, I’m sorry-glad.…Jonathan. You’re way off target. I’m going to show you how uncomplex I am. Are you listening? I want you to get in a cab and come down here and make love to me.…Yes.…Do I sound drunk?…No. I’m not scared, I’m just lonely. But I didn’t call because I’m lonely. I called—…Oh Jonathan. You’re so well trained. Everybody knows what time it is, Jonathan. And we are all acutely aware of your commitments tomorrow morning.”
She hung up. A moment after that she turned off the light.
But a minute or two later Ann turned the light on again. She picked up the phone and began dialing what I guessed was Jonathan’s number. Don’t do it, Ann, I said to myself. Please don’t do it.
In the middle of the fourth or fifth digit, with the dial still clicking in its arc, she dropped the receiver into the cradle and turned off the light, this time for good.
A moment after that, I was unconscious. The last thing I saw was the change in the windows: the glass had turned a flat grayish blue.
11
The next morning I was up long before Ann. The windows were brilliant with sunlight; the dust on their outside looked like a kind of electrical gauze. I crept about like a burglar, wondering if I should leave immediately. The bathroom was halfway between her bed and the living room and as foul, discolored, and weak as I felt I didn’t want to take even one step in her direction. I dressed and slunk into the small kitchen to wash.
I’d forgotten that Ann’s personal phonebook was hanging next to the kitchen phone. Next to that was a pad of notepaper and a felt-tipped pen. I gave myself a moment to reconsider the small social treachery I was about to commit and then, after turning on the hot water and adjusting the faucet so the cloudy steam would hit on the quietest part of the sink, I opened the beige leather phonebook and paged it open to B. There were no Butterfields. I turned to J and there it was, Jade, your phone, your address, my first new knowledge of you in four years. I tore off a page of the notepaper and wrote using my hand as a desk. My handwriting was almost illegible; it looked as if it were reflected in a broken mirror. But in scrawl, in pieces, in lunatic peaks and valleys I recorded what I needed. Had any jewel thief with a bagful of diamonds felt greater exhilaration than mine? Had any skydiver tumbling free through the sweet ether of space felt less subject to the normal rules of life on earth? You were in Stoughton, Vermont, living on a street called West. There were three phone numbers next to your name, all written in different pens, at different times. Even then I realized this meant that you were often away from your home, but the agitation this caused me was nothing to the exhilaration of being closer to you than I’d been since the last time we touched.
I wondered if Ann was staying in her room because she was waiting for me to leave. I couldn’t tell from the sun what time it was but I was sure it was at least noon. I stripped the sheets and blanket off the sofa and folded everything as best I could. Then I looked through The New Yorker, pretending to myself that I was looking for a good jazz club or a terrific play. Next to my return ticket to Chicago, my only assets were ninety dollars. I owed the hotel at least twenty and though I already had much more than I’d expected the trip to bring me, I was quickly plunged into despair at the thought of having to leave New York because I was out of money. I continued to flip through the magazine, glancing at the cartoons and squinting at the ads: fur coats, ruby bracelets, Scotch that advertised itself as the most expensive in the world. It amazed me how much money other people had—truly astonished me, as if it was the first I’d heard of it.