I turned quickly and walked down the long hall and let myself out. No one, of course, called to stop me. I closed the door behind me but the latch didn’t catch and it remained ajar. I didn’t dare wait for the elevator and I found the stairs in the center of the floor. I ran down a couple of flights and then had to sit down because I found that my legs weren’t really responding to me anymore. It felt as if a cluster of nerves had been severed, and I sat on the marble steps and pinched at my calves and pounded my knees for quite some time before any feeling came back.
As I left Ann’s building a taxi cab was pulling up. Its tires whined against the curb and the next thing I remember is the back door opening and Jade standing in front of me. She was larger, though not very much. Her long hair was gone. Now she had a short, athletic cut, perfectly straight, parted in the center and combed to the sides, shored off from the wind by a dark blue plastic headband. She wore a yellow blouse, opened two buttons worth at the top. Her neck was creased, three deep grooves, and then a small gold chain. Khaki pants, high-waisted and billowing. A black overnight bag, nylon. She was tan, tanned all over. Staring at me.
The cab pulled away. Jade took one step forward. Her lips parted and then came tightly together. I came slowly forward, and when I stopped, the points of my shoes were practically touching hers.
“Mom told me you were here,” Jade said.
“I am. I’m here.” And then I placed my hands on her shoulders and drew her close to me. I could feel the stutter of her resistance but it was faint. I put my arms around her, and just as I’d imagined ten thousand times, I embraced her. I wondered—fleetingly—if I was forcing myself on her. I felt her breasts against me, smelled the brilliance of her perfumes, immortalized the architecture of her bones. She rested her hands on my arms. Did not return my embrace. Did not push me away.
I held her for as long as I dared, and when I let her go I didn’t look at her because I knew she didn’t want me to. I faced straight ahead and listened first to her breathing, then to that ruminative silence as she struggled for one simple thing to say, and finally to the soft, jittery click of her footsteps as she walked toward the door to Ann’s building. I didn’t move until she was gone and then I still resisted turning around. I walked at full speed, squeezing my hands and talking to myself, running, stopping, walking again, and finally just sitting on the corner of 29th and Park, on the sidewalk with my back against a mailbox, waiting.
14
Twenty-eight hours later, the telephone rang in my hotel room and I picked it up in the middle of the first ring. It was the front desk.
“Mr. Axelrod?”
“Yes.”
“You have a visitor.” He paused. “May I send her up?”
“Let me speak to her, please.”
“Just one moment.”
“Hello?” said Jade. Her voice was husky. It always made me think of sand and sun, and smoke.
“I just wanted you to hear it from me,” I said. “Come up. You have my room number?”
“Yes. I have it.”
“Or do you want me to come down? Would that be better?”
“No. I’ll come up.” She paused. “OK?”
“Yes. Please.”
I met her at the elevator; she got off with two women wearing short leather skirts and cowgirl hats. Jade was dressed in gray and carried her black nylon travel bag. She smelled of cigarettes and alcohol, and riding on top of those scents like light on a wave was the aroma of lilac water: she must have put it on moments before arriving at the McAlpin.
We stood looking at each other for a very long while. I heard a high-pitched whoosh, such as aviators must have heard when they flew in uncovered cockpits. The impetuousness that allowed me to grab for her as I had yesterday afternoon was absent now. It was all I could do to look into her eyes, though, of course, I couldn’t have possibly turned my gaze anywhere else.
She looked exhausted. Her eyes were enormous, injured, and unfocused. Her lips were parched. She wore makeup and streaks of it showed up in the bleak, watery light of the hotel corridor. Her short hair was tucked behind her ears and the tops of her ears, with their hard, broad rims, were red. She had a gold stud in only one earlobe.
“You’re missing an earring,” I said.
She touched her right ear. “Oh,” she said. She touched the empty lobe a few times. “Damn.”
I shrugged. “We’ll get you another,” I said. I winced. It was such an idiotic remark. It was worse than idiotic: it was arrogant and desperate and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d laughed in my face.
But Jade was looking at me as if she hadn’t heard. My heart pawed at my chest like a huge dog behind a door.
“Are you surprised?” Jade said. “That I’m here.”
I shook my head. “You had to come.”
She narrowed her eyes a little. “No. I chose to. I decided.”
“Well, I’m glad.”
She nodded. Her eyes moved as she looked me over. She was noting the ways I’d changed. As her attention flickered over me I felt it like a human touch: it was clear to me that no one had looked at me in years. All of the other attentions had been fleeting, partial, obstructed: now, at a moment’s notice, now and at last, I was seen as I was.
“Do you want to come into my room?” I asked.
Jade nodded. “For a minute. I’m on my way to the bus station. The last bus up to Vermont leaves in half an hour.”
I closed the door and turned on the overhead light. I’d been propped up on the bed, rereading the newspaper by the table lamplight: the bedspread tortuously imitated my form; papers were askew; the tableau was one of disorganization and a certain grubbiness.
“I wish I could have greeted you in one of those silk smoking jackets with a glass of champagne,” I said.
She looked as if she didn’t understand why I was saying that. But I knew she did. There was something deliberate in the glance she gave me, something that wanted to insist she was missing the context of my remark. But Jade always could fill in the silence that flanked whatever I said, could picture what I’d seen without my having to describe it. It had been her intuitiveness that first tempted us toward the belief that soon overran every other thought: that we lived together in a world separate and superior to ordinary life. And now, the act of feigning confusion only told me that she still knew exactly what I meant, knew it as she always had and probably always would, for Jade understood me at my source, could trace the genealogy of my words back to their origins: as shifting tides of blood, drives, preconscious terrors.
“Should I call and have something brought up?” I said, walking across the room and sweeping the newspaper off the bed. “Some coffee, or wine?”
“If they bring it fast.” She was casting her attention around the room, memorizing it, looking for a place to sit.
“Wine’s all right?” I said.
“Yes. Though something’s happened to my enamel and wine stains my teeth now.” She showed me her lower teeth.
I sat on the edge of the bed and asked for room service. “Would you bring up two glasses of red wine, please?” I said.
“We’re all getting old,” I said when I hung up.
“The lucky ones.”
She seated herself with a purposeful lack of grace, sighed, and zipped open her travel bag. She poked around in her bag and finally withdrew her hand.
“You have any aspirin?” she asked.
I shook my head.
“Damn,” said Jade.