Jade had one of the worst rooms in the house, a tiny, perfectly square lavender room with a small, too-soft bed and a dull view of the street from its single window. The room’s saving grace was supposedly its close proximity to the second-floor bathroom. Jade herself said, “Well, at least it’s near the bathroom,” and when one of her housemates, Colleen MacKay, was discussing the situation with me one day, she said, “Well, at least Jade’s room is near the john.” This small consolation had probably been described in similar terms since the first student was stuck in that room—and perhaps when the house was occupied by a large, prosperous family man, the middle son who was forced to occupy that room was cajoled with the same shaky reasoning. Of course, I hardly cared what room we stayed in. I would have gladly slept in the tub, or outside, or hanging from my thumbs, for that matter. But it was made clear to me that Jade had been assigned that particular room because she was hardly ever at home anyhow and when our conjugality was recognized—and rewarded!—with a transfer to the attic bedroom, which was vast and private, I felt a deep, vindicated joy that had me literally biting my lip to stop from crying. How kind I thought they were to make new arrangements for us. It was Colleen MacKay who moved out of the attic bedroom. “Don’t thank me now,” she said. “Wait till winter when you’re freezing your asses off up there. Then thank me.” It was supposed to take the softness out of the gesture but it only further weakened my knees. Wait until winter? People were already treating us as if we obviously had a future.
Life was difficult, awkward; Jade and I experienced the confusion of people whose lives have moved on a faster course than their imaginations. There were lapses into silence that suddenly exposed how fragile our entire enterprise was, collisions of will that came from our unfamiliarity with each other in the practical world. There was the trouble with my panic at finding Jade up to her hips in a stream of people, friends and enemies, lovers, deadlines, private jokes, rivals, and debts. But for the most part, I was filled with wonder at how happy we managed to be. We made love on cool lawns at night. We bathed each other and sang in whispers into each other’s ears. I cooked my half dozen specialties for her and flushed with pleasure when I noticed how pleased she was that I got along with her friends. We took rides in a borrowed Saab, played tennis on a private court owned by a professor of music theory, and when I got a job at a local men’s clothing store Jade met me for lunch every day: tuna sandwiches and iced tea, which we ate on the lawn of an immense Presbyterian church, a crazily huge Gothic structure that could have simultaneously baptized all the children of Vermont.
When I first loved Jade, I had dozens of friends and a good appetite for that orgy of hors d’oeuvres that passes for social life in adolescence. I had pals, confidants, playmates, and loyal co- workers in the clubs I belonged to—the high-school literary magazine, the Student Peace Union. No one knew—or perhaps they knew and didn’t mind—that my gregariousness and slightly acidic cheer were the lucky manifestations of a character that remained essentially isolated. In the privacy of my room—“the privacy of my room” was a catch phrase of my adolescence, as if I felt the world outside submitted me to a constant scrutiny—I wrote, in a vaguely Allen Ginsberg tone of voice, long formless poems about my Loneliness, about my “shrouded self,” which no one knew and which I perceived as a mass of cold fog. My loneliness was completely social then, and when I saw myself reflected in Jade, the first thing I did was to sever my ties with my peers and then my family. Six months with Jade left me virtually friendless—perhaps I was imitating Jade’s own alienation. My world became only Jade and her family; even as I applied to college, I knew I wouldn’t be going. The world, I thought, had been too content to listen to my lies, to fall for the facile tricks of character I’d learned, the world was both too simple and too cruel to claim my allegiance or even be taken seriously. In a sense, I betrayed Jade in this: she’d seen me as a way out of the gravitational swoon of Butterfield family life, but rather than lead her out I burrowed in, becoming, at least in my aspirations, as militantly Butterfieldian as Keith.
But this time in Stoughton, being with Jade had the opposite effect. After nearly five years of having nothing to do with the world, of carrying my inconsolable separateness around as prominently as a picket sign—“Please do not spend your attention and affection on me. I am Unfair”—I was finally finding my way back into the world. This time, rather than aping Jade’s isolation, I adopted her friends as my own: housemates, classmates, shopkeepers, professors, virtually everyone she knew became a part of my life as well.
She never said as much, but I knew Jade wanted me to become a part of the world she shared with her friends. She used the phrase “neurotic patterns” to describe what she wanted to avoid with me, and isolation was the principal neurotic pattern to guard against. She knew, of course, that I would have been more than content never to see anyone but her, to spend every free hour in our attic, in bed, in each other’s arms, admitting nothing into our world, and the adoration I offered her was tempting enough to make Jade afraid she might succumb to it. “I want to be with you but not like before. Not less but different.” How could I argue? It would have been like crabbing about the size of our room, the texture of our bed. I had no heart to worry over the details of our being together; that we were together at all overwhelmed everything. I experienced occasional tremors of fear over what I perceived as the “slightly new Jade”—but even in Paradise it’s impossible not to remember now and then that you like a slightly stiffer breeze and have never altogether cared for wisteria.
Friendship with Jade’s friends was not what I wanted. When I had imagined our reunion, I hadn’t bothered to fill in the human landscape. I had fantasized our living out our piece of eternity in some stark version of my grandfather’s planned community in Florida: a window, a bed, a refrigerator, and a shelf of books. But when it became clear that knowing Jade’s friends was going to be a necessary part of living with her, I found myself pursuing my new-found social life with surprising relish. It was nearly deranged how quick and ardent my affections were for virtual strangers. Jade took me to meet old Professor Asbury—Carlyle, after ten minutes; Corky midway through the first drink—who’d been laid up for nearly a year from spraining his back playing tennis on his dewy, shabby back yard court. White-haired, bony, and elegant, Asbury was such a profound campus favorite that students with no interest in music took his music theory course just for his company. I had a perverse impulse to resist his charms, but as we left his little gingerbread cottage I squeezed Jade’s hand and said, “God, what a nice guy,” and I don’t know if I was primarily moved by Asbury or my response to him but I practically sobbed as I said it.
Jade took me to dinner at her friends Marcia and Trig’s apartment. The place looked like an assassin’s hideout, with slanted linoleum floors and a view over a tarpaper roof onto the back of a peeling garage. We sat on the floor. Marcia and Trig weren’t hippies; they gave us no India print pillows to sit upon. They seemed utterly unconcerned with their personal comfort—or ours. But when they finally served up the meal, it was terrific and delicate. Fish with slivers of pistachio. Newly picked vegetables in a Japanese batter. That they had gone to so much effort with my poor pleasure even vaguely in mind touched me like a caress. I ate as slowly as I could and looked at them with warm swimmy eyes as they described the circumstances of their health food store being harassed out of business by thugs they believed to have been hired by the local grocers’ association.