The rest of that night is lost to me. I remember a slight, almost embarrassed silence, but it lasted only moments. Jade said her blood felt phosphorescent and at one point I burst into tears but I stopped myself fairly quickly. There was conversation but I don’t remember about what. We just talked. I started to fall asleep but then Jade said something. I don’t know what, but the sound of her voice made me roll on top of her and we made love again, for a long while. Jade said, “No, rest, rest,” and rolled me over and we made love with her on top. She held my face in her hands and held my mouth in a long open kiss and made love very slowly until we both came. More conversation. The windows bright gray. Almost falling into sleep like slipping off the ledge of a cliff. She was on her belly, with one leg almost out of the bed and her soft, flattish rump high. I entered her vagina from behind and only when I cupped my hands on her breasts did I realize she had fallen asleep.
A few hours later, a chambermaid unlocked the door and opened it as far as the safety chain would allow. The sharp metal bang awakened us both and we sat up in bed. The door was open three or four inches. We could see the sherbet green sleeve of the woman’s uniform.
“We’re still sleeping,” I called out.
Jade sank back down into the bed. The room was filled with dull white light now and I looked us over. We were both covered in dried blood. The sheets were stiff with it. If we hadn’t put the chain on, the poor cleaning woman would have walked in on us and perhaps fainted. Immobile, we would have looked like the victims of a savage crime. There was blood on our legs, our thighs, our arms and fingers. There was blood in our hair and in the corners of our lips. Our lips themselves were caked with it.
15
There was nothing to discuss. The next day I went with Jade to the Port Authority Building and when the bus left for Stoughton I boarded it with her. Jade’s overnight bag was bloated like a sick black fish: rather than leave the bloody linens behind, we’d stolen them. We did it to be polite, really, thinking that the small loss suffered by the hotel would be preferable to the experience of the chambermaid having to confront the stiff brown and red sheets. But even though our intentions were good, the moment we stuffed the sheets into Jade’s bag was a shaky one. She said, “Stealing from a crummy hotel,” and shook her head, as if this might reflect on us, our willingness to commit crimes both great and puny, our destiny to be always outside the proper way of doing things.
There were other shaky moments, of course. Paying my hotel bill took all my money and I didn’t have enough cash to buy the ticket to Stoughton. What I wanted to do was cash in my return ticket to Chicago, which was worth about forty-five dollars, but Jade insisted on paying my bus fare. It wasn’t a generous impulse, it seemed to me. The idea of my ticket to Chicago comforted her and her need of it galled me. It was things like that. Our coming into and going out of focus: constantly, we were reminded of how partial our reunion still was. The bus was crowded nearly to capacity, which astounded me. I looked up and down the aisles, shaking my head. “We were lucky to find a seat together,” I said. “I had no idea so many people would be going to Stoughton. It’s incredible.”
Jade frowned at me, took her hand from me. “This bus goes to a lot of places, David,” she said. “Albany, for instance. God. It’s so much like you to think that just because you’re going to Stoughton then everyone is.” I smiled because I actually liked the way Jade speculated about the details of my character, how the net of her intelligence would unexpectedly dip into me, present me with something that had been living and breeding beneath my surface. It was a part of our romance to speculate about each other and I smiled to hear her now, smiled and held the smile, and then felt it die because it took me that long to realize she had been speaking not out of interest but annoyance. And mistrust.
It was a flat, glarey day. The bus seemed to be leaking exhaust, maybe a rusted-out patch of flooring, and a faint stink of gas filled the inside of the bus. Jade held my hand and looked out the window and I leaned back in my seat and looked over her shoulder at her reflection in the tinted glass. Then she leaned her head on my shoulder and dozed off, and I once in a while kissed her hair as lightly as I could, careful not to awaken her. I was never completely certain she was asleep; she was breathing deeply and her face was slack, but the pressure with which she held my hand never let up.
I was living far outside the law and now there was no chance to sneak back into Chicago, to slip back into my old life. The parole was shattered into a thousand pieces and it could never be put together again. The tyranny of parole is the illusion of trust, and I had violated that trust with all the vehemence and flamboyance of my truest self. The judgment of the court—if they captured me and brought me into their domain—would be harsher regarding the broken parole than it had been when faced with a house burned into ruins and five lives hurtled to the very edge of extinction. If that one act earned me three years of constant care and an indefinite period as a ward of the court, then my running away would surely result in a sentence far, far harsher. The truth was that the course I had taken was perfectly outlined in a thin red line of absolute danger, but the truth beyond that was I didn’t much care.
My life over the past four years fell behind me and it was too early for memories or regrets. I was fleeing from one part of my life and toward another, and though I did not know with any certainty what this would finally mean, I nevertheless was wholeheartedly in flight: giddy, proud, and absolutely certain. The only longing I had for the life I was leaving behind was for Ann, and even there the regret was luminous with hope. It was not asking so awfully much of fate, I thought, that one day Ann might be a part of the world Jade and I were destined to create. And so I moved up north to Stoughton, Vermont, with Jade and lived in her house the best I could, making friends with her friends, adjusting my impulses to her schedule, and trying, because it was what she wanted, to find a place for myself in that community, a reason for being there beyond my love for Jade.
The house she lived in was a grander version of the house on Dorchester in Chicago, a Victorian monstrosity but this time swollen to gigantic proportions. The porch itself could have been used for band concerts; the mahogany ball on the banister to the staircase leading to the second floor was as large as a child’s skull. The house had been used for communal student living for at least ten years; it was a house with a reputation, legends, and even a name: Gertrude. People actually said, “I might rent a share in Gertrude next year,” and were actually understood. The place was filled with furniture. It was not the done thing to take your belongings out of Gertrude once they’d become a fixture. The living room was claustrophobic with sofas, ottomans, New England rockers, and potted plants. The kitchen was bursting with the gadgets left behind by the occasional gourmet who drifted in and out of the house’s spell. There were electric toothbrushes galore and, I later found out, even a communal supply of vibrators left behind by women who went on to presumably happier sex lives. One of the Gertrude legends was that on Sunday mornings the place sounded like the inside of an enormous hive from the collective hum of a half dozen vibrators.