“Then you’ll be through with school?”
“Just about.”
“I go to Roosevelt.”
Jade made a face.
“I hardly go. But I have to be enrolled. I have to do a lot to show I’m back in the swim of things.”
“Swim of things? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“It’s my parole officer’s phrase. Or maybe my mother’s. Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For remembering what doesn’t sound like me, not forgetting.”
“I remember. We were sweet together.”
“We were,” I said.
“I know. It’s a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it’s true. It’s too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when we were too young to handle it.”
“Probably no one handles it very well. I mean it’s big, isn’t it? It’s like an emergency. All the rules are canceled.”
“Are they? Ever? I know that’s what we used to think, all that living in our own world stuff. But we were young. We’re still young but we were really young then. I don’t want to talk about it, anyhow. All that arrogance, craziness, and what it led up to. When I think about it. All the stuff that you said and I believed. I don’t even remember all the stuff I said and made you believe. I’m not blaming it on you. But it makes me feel strange to hear about it, like someone telling you everything you said when you were drunk.”
“I haven’t changed,” I said.
“There’s no way, it’s impossible.”
“There’s nothing I said then that I couldn’t say now. I want to, to tell the truth. But I’m afraid. Not of exposing myself because I know that you know I love you—”
“I don’t know that. How can I know that?”
“I love you. I still love you. I love you.”
“It’s an idea. You’ve held on to it.”
“No. It’s real. It’s the only real thing. It stands by itself and it hasn’t changed. Don’t be afraid. You don’t have to do anything about it.”
“It’s not that. It’s just I know it can’t be true. It’s been too long and too much has changed.”
“I haven’t changed.”
“Then you need to believe that,” Jade said. She folded her hands onto her lap and then squeezed them together so tightly that the color left them for a moment. “You need to pick the thread up where it was broken. Maybe as a way of forgiving yourself for what happened. At the end.”
“No.”
“You don’t love me, David. I never came to see you.”
“You couldn’t.”
“I never wrote you.”
“You couldn’t.”
“But when you got out. Then.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s something that can’t be changed.”
“It can be.”
“No.”
“When you give your love to other people. When you find out you can feel the same way about them.”
“I didn’t give love to anyone else.”
“But when you try to.”
“No. Never. There’s one girl, a sculptor, I see her now and then. I just fell into it through friends but we don’t try, we don’t touch.”
Jade shook her head.
“You’re all I care about,” I said. “No. And me. The person I am when I’m with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I’m with you.”
I stood up. The blood came up into my skull like a wave splashing on the shore. The room softened, moved a little; I didn’t know why I was on my feet. I was touching my shirt, poking my fingers in the spaces in between the buttons, discovering the little pool of sweat that had gathered in my chest’s hollow. “We’re together again,” I said. I heard my voice as if it came from another part of the room, perceived it with a kind of woozy clarity: its texture, timbre, its faintly hypnotic monotone.
“I may as well tell you,” Jade said. Teasing?
“What?”
“I knew it would be too late to catch that bus. I was counting on you asking me to stay. For a while.”
I nodded. I walked toward her. The room was so small. I was already next to her, but I still needed to move. I stepped back, forward, and then, finally, down on my knees. Kneeling before her broke open a deep, unexpected store of feeling; I felt it spreading within me like warm gel. I took her hands and held them on her lap.
“Is this all right? “I asked.
She fixed her eyes onto mine. I could see her sinking into her feelings and she knew she held the silence between us—a silence that sung in perfect pitch—could hold it forever and I would not interrupt it, would not lose faith and question it. I held on to her and her pulse was so powerful that I felt its reverberations in her hand.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s all right.”
I didn’t say anything. I lowered my eyes for a moment and then looked back at her.
“I love you,” I said.
She leaned forward and I tugged at her hands until she was out of the armchair and kneeling, her bent knees touching mine. We embraced and I felt a sudden terror, more total and enormous than any I’d ever felt before. It filled me as the sound of an explosion would fill a room and then just as suddenly it was gone. I had let go of my past and it receded from me like an open balloon. We lay on the worn smooth mustard rug, as clumsy and disjointed as invalids who have fallen out of their beds, and I was no longer holding on to anything at all except what was directly before me, except for Jade. Like a horse breaking from the gate, my life had begun.
“You’ve got to hold me,” Jade whispered. “I feel like I’m just about to faint but like I’ve taken a dexadrine too. I’m going in so many directions. Seeing you. Pappy. God. It’s too strange. I can’t even begin to explain it all, but if you’d only hold me. I broke up with my friend over the weekend. Susan. It was ending for a while but the camping trip finished it. I left her in a place called the Green Mountain Café. I stuck my spoon in a bowl of disgusting oatmeal and hitched home, seventy-five miles. The message to call Mom. And then finding out and then seeing you and being here. No. Really hold me. Not just a little.” She squeezed the back of my hair as if wringing it out.
I held her as tight as I could; it didn’t feel as if my arms had much strength. She arched her back and pressed herself against me. Her head was on a dark stain in the carpet that someone else had left. It surprised me for a moment to notice that, but with Jade I always noticed things that were outside of us—cracks in the wall, the smell of wet maples coming through the window screens—and by registering them I made everything a part of us. It had been the same for Jade. We were both of us impossible to distract. Our consciousnesses, having found their perfect human keys, swung wide open and admitted everything. I stroked the side of her face and pressed my mouth to hers.
I could feel she had kissed many times since our time together. Her lips strange. Flat where they had once protruded. Parted much wider, not out of the moment’s impulse but out of newly acquired reflexes. I wondered if my own lips betrayed how many times I had kissed the pillow, how many times, lost in fantasy, I’d tasted the back of my own hand. I expected no praise or privilege for my long fidelity. It gave me no moral advantage. The fact was I hadn’t been tempted, hadn’t been capable. A kind of hysteria, perhaps. A chance to realize some monastic impulse, the negative erotic drive, the inevitable polarity of my conscious, ceaseless yearnings. Looked at another way it was all quite laughable. Or wilfuclass="underline" a temper tantrum. A chance to sit on the jury in my own trial. Almost never—never—masturbated. It was lunacy and I’d known it all along. The doctors, in this instance, were absolutely right. Dr. Clark had spoken to Rose and Arthur about my need for sexual outlet. Embarrassed, they kept it to themselves. A decent impulse, their respect for my privacy, but perverted by their shame. And Dr. Ecrest going so far as to threaten to terminate treatment unless I began to release my sexual energies. How I hooted at that one! “Now, let me get this straight. If I don’t see you, it’s back to Rockville, right? So what you’re saying is that if I don’t jerk off, you’re going to have me locked up. Right?” I saved my jissom as a prisoner might hoard scraps of cloth—the edges of sheets, shirt collars, cuffs—with the idea of one day making a long cotton chain and lowering himself from the only unprotected stretch of wall.