I offered my handshake. As romantic victor I felt it was my place. Susan looked at me as if the handshake were some archaic salute and then, nodding as if remembering, took my hand and shook it with a certain irony.
“Hello, David,” she said. She gave no indication of ever having heard of me.
“Hello,” I said. I thought the confident thing to do was smile, but I learned later from Jade that it looked more like a leer.
Susan focused her attention on Jade and began telling her something about a friend of theirs named Dina who’d just left for Cologne to study philosophy with someone who’d studied under Wittgenstein. The tone of the anecdote was admiring and ironic. The victory celebration dinner was described. Dina got drunk and spoke German all the rest of the night. Professor Asbury showed up for a while, moving gracefully on his aluminum walker. Et cetera. I wondered if the purpose of the story was to make Jade feel embarrassed at not being invited, but Jade didn’t seem at all upset.
Then, suddenly, the anecdote was over and my wandering attention was stopped short by the silence. Susan dropped her gaze for a moment. She looked jittery, with those kind of raw nerves that you get when you feel doomed to be misunderstood.
“What are the chances of our having a talk?” she said to Jade.
Jade didn’t answer right away—not out of indecision but as a way of acknowledging the difficulty of Susan’s gesture.
“We should talk,” said Jade.
“I’m going to Boston this evening,” Susan said. “For five days.”
Jade nodded. “To stay with Paula?”
“Yes.”
“Say hello, OK?”
“I’d like to have that talk before I leave,” Susan said. Her shyness had passed; she knew as well as I did that Jade would go along.
Jade almost turned toward me to see if that would be acceptable, but she stopped herself. “We can,” she said, with somber, almost corny judiciousness.
The situation struck me as fairly intolerable, but I did my best with it. I slipped my arm around Jade’s waist and pressed her to me for a moment. “Why don’t I finish up with the shopping?” I said. “I’m the best shopper anyhow.”
“OK. That would be fine,” Jade said. She sounded uncertain, formal. Susan was staring off down the aisle, hurtling her attention far away for the moment. She was refusing to look at me. I engaged Jade in a conversation about groceries—did Anemone like creamy or chunky peanut butter? What was the name of that delicious breakfast cereal Oliver had made for us the day before?—and finally Susan backed her cart up and announced she was going to finish her shopping and would meet Jade in a few minutes at the front of the store.
“Well, that’s Susan Henry,” Jade said.
“That’s all right. It had to happen. Running into her.”
“She seems so nervous. It’s not like her. Susan’s totally confident all the time. It’s scary seeing her like this.”
“Well, people change,” I said, trying to be inconsequential but revealing more of my own resentment than I wanted to.
“You’re upset about me having coffee with her?”
“Just as long as coffee is all,” I said—I actually thought I was being lighthearted in this. I produced a loopy grin.
“You said you’d never hound me,” said Jade.
“I won’t. You’re going with her, aren’t you?”
We had to move our shopping cart. We were standing in front of the salad oils. A young mother with pink curlers in her hair and a sleeping infant in a canvas pouch dangling from her back put a giant bottle of Wesson Oil in her nearly overflowing cart. The store manager’s voice had replaced the Muzak on the public address system; he was describing items on sale—chicken breasts, Brillo pads, Folger’s coffee, Duz detergent…
“I’ll meet you back at the house,” I said, taking control of our cart.
Jade nodded. She was about to walk away and pretend that we weren’t going through anything particularly difficult or strange. She still had a deep desire to pretend once in a while that we, like everyone else, were essentially separate. But she stopped herself and said, “I won’t be long.”
“You know what I think?” I said. “Here’s what: if the world ended right now, I’d be happy I got to spend as much time with you as I have. I’m not modern or sophisticated, but I really do want you to do what you want, what you think is best. Because when you’re most like yourself, something good always comes of it.”
I made it a point to be in the back of the Price Chopper when Jade and Susan left. Jade had given me the keys to Colleen MacKay’s Saab and when I thought of driving it home I had a flutter of apprehension. I knew how to drive but I didn’t have a license. I thought of someone accidentally hitting me from behind. The police on the scene. No license? Then the call into headquarters. Finding out about my parole violation. Thrown into jail. Sent back to Illinois. No chance even to call Jade.
Back at the house, nearly everyone was in the kitchen as the groceries were unpacked. It was a Saturday, still early but very warm. Anemone spooned the peanut butter into her mouth. Nina Sternberg prepared a twelve-egg omelette. The kitchen was golden with sunlight and rather quiet considering there were six of us in it. I realized everyone noticed I hadn’t returned with Jade. I was surprised; I didn’t think things like that were noted.
“Jade and I met Susan Henry at the Price Chopper,” I said to no one in particular. I was standing on a metal chair placing cans of baked beans and chicken stock onto the top shelf of a cabinet.
“Can I say something about Miss Henry?” Nina Sternberg said. “Miss Free Spirit borrowed fourteen dollars from me in March and now she hides behind trees when she sees me on campus.”
“Really?” said Anemone, her voice sounding as if she had a cleft palate from all the peanut butter. “She owes me money, too. Ten dollars.”
“Susan’s not too good with other people’s things,” said Colleen. “I loaned her my car and she brought it back with an empty tank.”
I felt weak and alone waiting for Jade and I was grateful when Colleen MacKay informed me that she was making sandwiches and I was invited to eat with her and Oliver Jones on the front porch. She’d set up an old wicker table, covered with an old linen cloth, graced by a Narragansett beer bottle filled with irises. She’d made cheese and cucumber sandwiches and I complimented her on the elegance of her meal. I’d never eaten a cucumber sandwich before. I sat on a little rocking chair and Oliver and Colleen shared a wicker loveseat.
Colleen was short, stocky, with powerful swimmer’s legs and dark brown eyes that always seemed a little irritated, as if she’d just gotten out of a chlorinated pool. She dressed in overalls and checked shirts, or once in a while appeared in a dress of such stiff formality that even a stranger would have known she hadn’t chosen it herself. Oliver had moved into Gertrude three years before, when he was in love with a Stoughton student named Sara Richards. He was at that time already in his mid-twenties and long out of school—he’d dropped out of Exeter in his junior year and hadn’t been back to school since, though every so often he’d apply to do graduate work in Oriental Studies at someplace like Stanford or Harvard and wait for a letter of acceptance and a grant before deciding that his “un-schooling,” as he called it, was not yet completed. Sara Richards was killed in a ski lift accident not six months after Oliver moved in, and his staying on in the house was a perfect Oliver Jones mixture of the tragic and the lazy. He had had love affairs with the majority of the women who had passed through the house, though none of the affairs ever lasted long. These affairs usually began in commemoration of one of Oliver’s many personal days of remembrance: Mahler’s birthday; the discovery of Uranus. (That was one of Oliver’s comic bits, the homosexual astronomer discovering a planet and naming it after his lover’s asshole. “Do you know what that is in the sky, you wonderful little monster? That’s your anus.”) The night Oliver and Jade took each other to bed was the anniversary of Sara’s death, a stormy February night that turned all the windows in the house as opaque and white as gravestones. They remained lovers for a week and then one night Oliver got up in the dark complaining of a toothache. He went downstairs to make himself some warm milk and never returned to Jade’s bed again…