I must have drifted. My fatigue had been pretty much untouched by my few restless hours of sleep so perhaps I dozed off for a moment. I remember thinking of what it would be like if Jade and I had a lot of money. Would we spend it all on ourselves? Give it away? Start a foundation that would award grants to people who wanted to stop everything else in their lives and live by the most romantic, unreasonable impulses of their hearts? A monastery for lovers, though of course not at all monastic. The thought was, to be sure, far from profound, but it had a great many tributaries and perhaps I was paddling my way down one of those when Ann entered the room. I hadn’t heard her wake, hadn’t heard her footsteps, but when I turned away from the glarey windows she was standing at the foot of the sofa, dressed in blue jeans and a red silk shirt.
“How long have you been up?” Ann asked, in a rather sharp voice.
I was certain for a moment that if I’d had any sense, any real idea of how the world worked, then I would have damn well made sure that I was out of there before Ann woke up.
“A few minutes,” I said.
“About last night…” said Ann.
Don’t say it, I thought.
“It’s OK, really,” I said, too quickly.
“Look, if I was Hugh’s new girl I’d write it all off on the stars. Ingrid likes the astrological explanation. Venus goes into one phase and she’s unfaithful. Mars bumps into the moon and she throws a stapler at Hugh.” Suddenly, Ann sneezed, a most diminutive sneeze, gentler than a cat’s. “Oh God, my head. I doubt I got three hours sleep.”
“You don’t feel well?”
“I’m not involved with how I’m feeling.” She covered her face and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. “I was a harpie last night, no, a Medusa. Finally, I owe you an apology.”
“No. We don’t need to explain to each other.”
“I was being mean. I want to explain one thing. About Jade. I think I wanted you to believe that she never thinks about you, never mentions you. For some reason, I thought I wanted you to feel absolutely shipwrecked. But the truth is she does think about you still. Don’t take this in the wrong way, David. I mean I’m quite sure she wouldn’t want me to talk about it with you, but I think it’s fair that you know. You haven’t faded from her…her memory. And maybe that will be consolation for last night, for me putting you on the spot like that.”
I struggled to get up from the couch; my legs were wayward and weak. My deepest impulse was to put my arms around her, in gratitude, in fellowship, but instead I placed my hand on the side of her face. Her skin was soft, amazingly soft, and my fingernails were uneven and lined with dirt. She almost pulled away from my touch but she stopped herself.
“I’m going to kick you out now,” she said.
“For good?”
“For the day anyhow. It’s ten o’clock. I’m going to work.” She gestured with her eyes to the table that held her typewriter.
“Can I call you later?”
“I can’t imagine where we can go from here.”
“We can have dinner.”
“We had dinner yesterday.” She shook her head. “OK. Call me. At six. I want you to. But be prepared for me to give you the brush, OK? I’m still half catatonic and I don’t know what I’m going to feel about last night after my tenth cup of coffee.”
As soon as I was back in my hotel I took off my dirty clothes, brushed my teeth, and sat naked on the bumpy white bedspread with Jade’s phone numbers in front of me. I picked up the phone and gave the operator the first number on the list. I didn’t want to waste any time. I was still sluggish from the night and absolutely high from finding the numbers: there would be no time when I’d be less apprehensive about making the call, less capable of a second thought. I heard whoever ran the phone in the lobby of the McAlpin dialing the Vermont number and the throaty clicking of the turning dial filled me with rapture.
Her phone began to ring. In a panic, I almost hung up, thinking You must be out of your mind. Someone picked up the phone on the third ring, a woman, and said hello with a cheerfulness as vivid as the taste of an orange.
“Is Jade Butterfield home?” I asked.
This is Jade, the woman answered in my imagination, and the thought of it sent my heart soaring upward: my throat throbbed like a bullfrog’s.
“She isn’t here,” the woman said. “Can I take a message?”
I called the second number and let it ring a dozen times before acknowledging it was trilling away in an empty house. Then came the third number, and this time I was answered by a young man who sounded as handsome and relaxed as the first woman had sounded friendly.
“I’m calling Jade,” I said. “Is she there?”
There was a pause—memory of heartbreak? cuckold’s aphasia?—and then he said, “I don’t think she’s here. You want to hang on? So I can check?”
“Please.” He seemed genuinely doubtful whether or not she was there, though I couldn’t say if this meant her presence was in question or if she might not be accepting calls.
“Who’s this?” he asked, the voice friendly and motiveless.
I hesitated. “This is Dave,” I said. Dave? Who was that supposed to befuddle? That wasn’t a mask; it was a false nose. I listened to my intermediary’s footsteps disappear on the other end of the line and imagined him walking through an enormous slipping-away Victorian house, not unlike the Butterfield house in Chicago but much larger, and intersected by drafts, with mattresses on the floor, Marx Brothers posters on the walls, and cartons of milk name-tagged in the Korean War refrigerator. Ah: one of those informal, nonideological college communes. A bunch of great guys and gals pitching in and saving on the rent.
“She’s not here,” said handsome Sean, or Philip, the commune’s champion kyacker. “I didn’t think she was, but you never know with Jade.”
“Oh,” I said, in an amazingly dead voice, as if my throat was lined in brick. “When will she be in? Do you know where I could reach her?”
“She might be at the music barn. I don’t know. She was supposed to go to that thing at Sophie’s farm but I think it was canceled.”
“God.” It was too amazing: music barn, Sophie’s farm, the boy’s voice. I was hovering over Jade’s life like an errant, misled ghost, rattling the shutters in the wrong window. How could I have made this arduous journey and still be without her?
“Do you want to leave a message or something?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, but left it at that.
He waited—I don’t know how long. He had a healthy respect for the unspeakable.
“This is a friend of hers,” I said. I seemed to have wandered back to the beginning of the conversation, like a nervous rat in a maze. I was sprawled on my back, holding the phone with both hands and staring at the texture of the paint on the ceiling. It looked like chicken skin. “You have no idea when she’ll be back?”
“No,” he said softly.
“But this is where she usually stays, isn’t it? At this number?”
“Who is this?”
“Dave. I told you. This is Dave.”
“But who are you?” Well, I knew those long tender sessions that must have taken place at the commune, just as they did at Rockville, those conversations that alternated between anecdote and lament, and it was my foregone conclusion that the name David Axelrod was familiar to that handsome sentinel at heaven’s oak door.
“Oh, I’m an old friend of hers. A friend of the family.” It seemed both risky and unkind to leave a true message. I didn’t want her to come home and find my name thumb-tacked to the communal bulletin board. “I’ll get in touch with her later.”