Gertrude had house meetings every Wednesday evening, and now that I was a member of the crew, I was invited to sit with the rest of them around the expansive Formica kitchen table, smoking Camels and drinking Almadén jug wine like all the rest—the Camels and Almadén were ceremonial and virtually required. We talked about chores, expenses, passed judgment on visitors (I was no visitor!), and as I looked from face to face—there was Jade, Oliver Jones, Colleen MacKay, Nina Sternberg, Miriam Kay, Boris Hyde, and Anemone Grommers—I often thought to myself: This is the best bunch of people in the world. I felt real patriotic love for Gertrude and its residents, as if we were all members of a gang or a cult or a revolutionary cadre. Of course we were nothing more complicated or grand than a handful of people sharing roof and rent, but all gestures of friendship—no, not even friendship, mere friendliness—heated my passion and imagination. In the world of normal discourse I was like a tourist—a dying tourist—on a twilight tour of Europe. Each sunset, each spire, each cobblestoned path, each lobby, each glass of local beer is monumental, tragic, and unparalleled.
I did manage to learn that a little more than a year before, Jade had lived in Gertrude with a student named Jon Widman. Jon—bald at twenty, toweringly tall, anemic—was a musical genius, played twelve different instruments, and composed music from blues to string quartets. I also learned of Jade’s affair with a professor of English. This information was given to me—with a certain meanness of spirit, I thought—by one of my housemates, who was ostensibly proving that an affair with a faculty member was an inevitable Stoughton ritual.
But it was Jade herself who talked to me about her love affair with Susan Henry. There were places we could not go, movies and concerts we could not attend, because Jade was worried about meeting Susan.
“It’s my own doing,” she said. “And so useless. I didn’t end it the right way and didn’t call her when we got back.”
“But I thought, I mean the impression you gave me, was the break-up was mostly her doing,” I said.
“We were too close for that to matter. At a certain point everything’s mutual.”
And then one day when we were walking down Main Street—I was on my lunch break from Main Street Clothiers and we were crossing the street to go to the stationery store for a notebook—Jade grabbed hold of my upper arm, turned me around, and walked quickly with me into a dime store, with its scent of wooden floors and candy corn.
“What is it?” I asked, though I fairly well knew.
“I can’t believe how stupid this is,” she said. “Susan. I saw her on the other side of the street and I just don’t have the courage to run into her. It can’t be like this. I have to call her.”
We were inside that variety store and it was like being inside a different decade: old women in faded sweaters, with their eyeglasses hanging onto their bosoms from silvery chains; bins of loose chocolates, bridge mix, peanut brittle; the strange hush of a store lacking Muzak; displays of cheap underwear and thin, powder blue socks; coloring books and cap guns. Jade and I wandered aimlessly through the aisles. Her hands were in her pockets and she kept her eyes cast down. She was walking fast, pulling ahead of me, and I reached out to take her arm. She allowed me to stop her and then I turned her and put my arms around her.
“It seemed so perfectly natural to be with Susan when we were together,” Jade said, as I held her. “But I don’t think I’d be treating her like this if she was a man. It’s because she’s a woman and I loved her.”
The difficulty inherent in choosing to love another woman and now the long pull of conscience in the affair’s aftermath made the time with Susan more intimate and enviable than all of the other parts of Jade’s life that I’d missed. As I held her in that antique dime store and watched the few customers circulating lazily throughout the store—the ten-year-old girls choosing party favors, an old man inspecting a tiny cactus plant—I thought of how the difficulty of a connection increases its intensity. I thought of how alive with courage and desire that love must have been to carry Jade past the boundary of her established sexuality.
We walked around the store. Jade almost took my hand; her fingers brushed against me and then she moved away.
“Susan’s a powerful person,” she said. “The most powerful person I’ve ever known. She lives inside her feelings like a queen in her castle. I admired her so much. Envy too, I guess. She could take herself so seriously and never seem stupid, or self-involved. I had such a case of hero-worship with her, God, it was months before I realized that it was also something more. That I…”
“I don’t know how to be in this conversation,” I said. “I think we have to stop. Just for now.”
Jade nodded. We were in front of a bin of phonograph records.
“I want to know it,” I said. “I just need a little breathing space. I know it was important to you and I suppose it was difficult, too, and maybe even scary. But I was feeling myself starting to get jealous. I know I don’t have a right to—”
“It wasn’t scary,” Jade said. “The only love I’ve ever known that has scared me has been with you. Being with Susan wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t at all.”
“It seems that it was very intense,” I said.
“What else is there? I’m not casual.”
“I know,” I said, my voice slipping away.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. I just need to hear it in stages. It’s stupid. I have no right to say this. Don’t listen to me. Tell me the rest. Tell me it all.”
“It’s not necessary,” said Jade. “It’s mine.”
And so we dropped all talk of Susan Henry and the silence hovered over us, as watchful as a bird of prey. I longed to ask Jade to speak to me about her love with Susan but, temporarily at least, I’d forfeited the right. We ate dinner at Gertrude that night and Jade didn’t say a word at the table, though we ate with seven others. She went upstairs before me, and when I followed her up to the attic some fifteen minutes later, Jade was in bed and all the lights were off. I got undressed and lay next to her and after a while I put my hands on her breasts. She breathed heavily and didn’t stir; I knew she wasn’t really asleep.
The next morning we were hesitant with each other. It was our turn to do the weekly grocery shopping for the household. We shopped at a huge store called Price Chopper, and it didn’t seem like a piece of remarkable coincidence at all that halfway through our nervous shopping we were once again confronted with Susan Henry.
This time, Jade had no opportunity to flee. Susan appeared from around an aisle corner. She looked tall, tan, willowy, and toothy, rather like Joni Mitchell. Her straight hair was almost white; she wore a loose, pale blue dress and little sandals. Her long arms were bare and she wore turquoise and silver bracelets. Her eyes remained mysterious behind brown-tinted sunglasses.
“Beep beep,” said Susan, giving our cart a small jostle.
“Hello, Susan,” said Jade, her voice a metaphor for nights of cigarettes and grain alcohol.
“Hello,” said Susan. Her voice was lilting, a trifle cute—or trying to be. I could feel her effort and it drew me toward her for an instant.
Jade looked into Susan’s cart. “Still buying junk food?” she said.
“That’s right!” said Susan.
Jade shrugged. Then: “Susan Henry? David Axelrod.” Pointing to us as she said our names.