We sat on the porch, the three of us, eating our sandwiches and drinking iced tea, like people in the 1920s, smelling the flowers and enjoying the breeze, watching the bluejays on their headstrong, raucous rounds. The sky was a deep, mild blue, as smooth as the inside of a shell except for one patch of rippled white cloud. I did my best not to think of Jade and Susan and what they might be doing. I was suffering, but what mild agony it was—as long as I remembered how much worse, how infinitely more dreary and without boundaries my unhappiness had been before. Here I was eating Christian delicacies on a shady Vermont porch. Blue skies. Bluejays. Oliver’s sly blue eyes squinting at Colleen as she asked him if he enjoyed kyacking.
“David?” Colleen asked. “You here?” She mimed knocking at a door. “Hello?”
She leaned forward and put her small, slightly puffy hand on my knee. “If you’re worried about Susan Henry, I can tell you you don’t need to be, OK?”
“One always worries about the Susan Henrys of the world,” intoned Oliver. “Just as one worries about influenza or, let’s see, the steering column of your car snapping off.”
“She didn’t seem like a menace,” I said. “The thing is I thought she looked nice.”
“Nice?” Oliver said with a shrug, as if I’d used a discredited term.
“Nice-looking. As vulnerable as anyone else.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Colleen. She looked at her hand on my knee and smiled, as if she were pleasantly surprised to find it there. “You’re who matters to Jade.”
“I know that,” I said.
“I wonder sometimes,” Colleen said. She was glancing at Oliver now, and I could feel the core of her concentration turning toward him. “Men have a knack of being blind to what women feel about them. Men. I shouldn’t say men. People.”
Just then an orange VW pulled up in front of the house, with a black convertible top. I could see Jade’s head on the passenger side, the hair touching the top of her white collar. I couldn’t see further into the car but I knew Susan was facing Jade and they were talking and that the conversation was not an easy one. The little motor percolated and once Susan must have accidentally stepped on the accelerator because the engine raced for a moment, whirring like a power mower in tall grass.
“There. That didn’t take long,” said Colleen. She made a move as if to clear the lunch dishes away but thought better of it, and rested her hands on an arm of the wicker loveseat. She crossed her legs and peered out at the car, like a mother who’s been waiting past curfew for her child’s return.
“Is that Susan’s car?” Oliver mused. “It looks new. Jersey plates, too. I wonder…”
I felt a panic of shyness. It seemed incredible that the two of them could be so near. It was a warm day but the windows of the car were rolled up: I saw the white skid of a sticker that had been only partially peeled away and the dim swaying reflection of an upside-down tree. All of the jealousy I’d been avoiding since leaving the supermarket fell through me now, like suitcases off the luggage rack in a train that’s stopped too fast. My throat was tight, my fingers felt pink and cold. I stared at the car until my eyes glazed over. Oliver was going on about how it couldn’t have been Susan’s car, she must have borrowed if from someone, but who? I couldn’t pay attention, but I was glad he was talking.
Finally, the door on Jade’s side swung open and a few long moments later Jade got out of the car. There were dark streaks on her shirt where she’d sweated against the hot upholstery. Her brown cloth belt was twisted in back and I wondered, obscenely, if it had been like that in the morning. She closed the door. Susan pulled away—not with a roar, as I expected, but casually, hesitating before she swung into the middle of our street, even though there was no traffic. I watched the car leave. The back seat was filled with packages. A good sign: it meant they hadn’t gone back to Susan’s house.
Jade turned around. Expressionless. A passport photo. A memory. She was wearing jeans, Swedish clogs, a blue and white shirt with a white collar. The sun was perched on the chimney and shining directly in her eyes. She squinted toward the porch, noticing us for the first time.
Colleen waved.
Jade walked toward the house. The bushes were obese, making the sidewalk narrow; she ran her hand along the dark green brocade. Her gold chain necklace was gone. A Christmas gift from Susan. I rattled back the ice in my empty glass, tasting the old tea and the sugary sludge.
“Lunch on the porch?” said Jade, mounting the steps.
“A perfect day for it,” said Colleen.
Jade nodded. She looked stern, heartbroken and beleaguered, like an Army medic. “And minding my business, too,” she said.
“There’s no business like Jade’s business,” Oliver half-sang.
Jade made a false smile in Oliver’s direction and then walked by us and into the house, letting the screen door slam behind her.
We were silent for a couple moments. The sound of bees. Me rattling the ice in my glass.
“She has a power to make people feel like assholes,” said Colleen, shaking her head at Oliver, comforting him.
“It’s a power only the victim can bestow,” Oliver said, crossing his long legs.
I got up and drifted lazily toward the door, still holding my glass. I placed my hand on the little cylindrical knob, but didn’t open the door. I stared into the cool shadows on the house through the sagging mesh of screen, looking at the mahogany banister, the mirrored hatstand, the lantern-shaped chandelier, all crosshatched as if objects in an etching.
“I’ll go see her,” I said, and opened the door. I could hear her footsteps going up the third flight of stairs to the attic, the clogs made so goddamned much noise. I took the steps two at a time, chasing quietly after her. There was a pocket of hot, humid air on the second floor, like those little galaxies of warmth we come upon in cool lakes. Someone was taking a shower in the second- floor bathroom, the rush of water, that sweet white noise. Sunlight ignited the pale turquoise bubbles in the half-circular window on the landing—Jade said the world looks like memory through old glass. The staircase was not continuous. I walked down the hall half the width of house before mounting the steps to the attic, narrow, steep steps, wooden and uncovered, almost black except for the third, a plywood replacement the color of wheat.
Jade was standing before the huge, diamond-shaped window set in the lowest part of the attic and overlooking our back yard—with its maple trees and makeshift kennels. She was leaning forward resting her hands on the window frame, her fingers almost touching the ceiling. She didn’t turn around when I closed the door behind me, didn’t even move, and I wondered if I’d made a mistake following her up. I walked halfway across our bedroom and then stopped, feeling awkward and imperiled. But I forced myself to continue, as I would have wanted Jade to if it had been me with my forehead against the window, and when I put my hands on her shoulders she turned quickly toward me and held me with such sudden fierceness that her strength broke my breath in two, snapping that column of air as if it were a twig.
We held each other. I heard the screen door slam downstairs. A bluejay flapped past the window, another, and then two more. I moved my hands down Jade’s back but that was all. She was perfectly still, embracing me with unyielding strength. We went to bed and made love for a very long while. We didn’t talk about Susan, or about anything. I had my mouth on her, pressing her with the insides of my lips and the back part of my tongue, where it is softer, and when she came I thought for a moment that I’d just imitated the way she and Susan made love. But that passed, quickly. I knew Jade was with me. Love, finally, isn’t blind, and when I poured out into her I could feel how much she wanted me. Weren’t we wonderful to each other when we made love? It was different from before, when we were beginning in Chicago. I think we were less happy. There was a death between us now and four years of separation, there were lovers and courts and hospitals and unsent letters and ten thousand hours of terror and doubt, but we were not less for it, just less happy. And perhaps not even less. It could have been that the light of consciousness struck our happiness from a different angle and it wasn’t smaller but less brilliant, and it cast a shadow now, a shadow of itself that was chilling.