Finally, we fell asleep but it was still light when we woke. The dogs Jade was studying for her senior thesis were yipping out back. The reflection of the leaves moved like fast, cool water on the wooden plank floor.
“I’m sorry if that made you scared today,” Jade said.
“It did. But not too much.”
“It’s funny, because when we were shopping today, I was thinking how of all the things about being with you again shopping is the thing I like the most. I like doing something so normal and everyday with you and, well, you know, to be going absolutely nuts inside because it’s you and me doing it. It’s like a great imposture. Wheeling our cart around looking as common as can be and knowing that in an hour’s time we can be back here completely naked and doing something truly savage.” She reached over and ran her hand over my chest. “I like just doing everyday things with you.”
“I do too.”
“What do you like about being with me?” Jade asked after a while.
“Everything.”
“No. You know what I mean. Specifically what do you like.”
“I like watching you get dressed, especially in the morning when you’ve just had a shower and you’re off to go somewhere. I like the way you button your shirt in front of the mirror and watch your own fingers as you do it. Then you tuck it into your pants and smooth out all the material. You give yourself a nice feel-up before you go out. And if your hair’s wet, it’s even better. You pull it up in little clumps, shake it, so it’ll dry, I guess, with real brisk professional motions like a hairdresser. Everything done with such energy. You seem so incredibly on.”
That evening we went out to supper—my treat. I was making ninety dollars a week at the Main Street Clothiers, selling, among other things, the same Redman Pants I’d been picketing other stores for selling. It did nip at my conscience, but I couldn’t live off Jade and the others and jobs, as usual, were scarce. I did my best to talk customers out of buying Redman Pants, but as much as I wanted the union to prevail, it was one of the very least of my worries. Once I sent ten dollars to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers with an unsigned note wishing the Redman workers well and asking that my contribution be put in a workers’ relief fund, or strike fund. But after sending it I felt real panic. I felt somehow the money would be connected to me, the disappeared picket boy. The postmark deciphered. The police called…I knew it was terribly unlikely, bordering on impossible, but it was unendurable to have the false imagination of such a disaster whip through me. Anyhow, Jade and I went to dinner at a place called Rustler’s, one of those restaurants that seem to encircle Stoughton, with heavy furniture, thick carpets, hamburgers, steaks, and pork chops, and a huge salad bar. Lights hung from a wagon wheel; the water glasses were dark gold; the menu was shaped like a covered wagon. It was for tourists, I suppose, the idea being that as soon as city people get out into the country they think about cowboys. Jade and I liked to eat there because we knew we’d never see anyone she knew. We ordered the cheapest things on the menu and it gave us the right to return as many times as we wanted to the salad bar and to eat more beets, onion rings, and canned chick peas than we would have under any other circumstances.
“Can we afford dessert?” Jade asked at the end of the meal.
I was still so moved when she said “we,” especially when she said it casually.
“I want some of that apple pie with the melted cheese on it,” she said.
“OK. Me too. Coffee?”
“No. Milk. A cold glass of milk. I want to be twelve years old.”
I smiled. Twelve years old. A virgin. No: a “technical” virgin. Making pocket money staging nude dances for Keith’s suddenly numerous friends. Mascara on the down between her legs. Second prize in a citywide children’s painting competition sponsored by the Tribune and bursting into tears at the awards ceremony. Nabbed at Kroch’s and Brentano’s for stealing Fanny Hill. Where was I then? I could have been with her; we could even have been lovers. It would not have been wrong. I needed her then, not like now, but I needed her. I was living in the hush of my family. She was twelve. Keith had been caught in her bed, both of them in their underwear. Hugh dragged Keith out of the room by his hair. Jade was screaming, Hugh was bellowing, and Keith’s face had that inanimate horror of a victim in a news photo.
The waitress appeared, dressed as a cowgirl. I ordered our desserts. The women in the elevator, I remembered, had been dressed as cowgirls, the elevator that had brought Jade to my room at the Hotel McAlpin.
“I like this restaurant,” I said.
“I do too. Even though all the waitresses flirt with you.”
“They do not.”
“Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, poor naïve boy. Even tonight our waitress was leaning over you.”
“A leaning violation?”
“I’m serious! Her breast was almost touching you. That kind of stuff’s always going on.”
“I wish.”
“You don’t need to wish. They all know, everyone does.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re you, who you are. Mr. Fuck-Machine.”
The waitress came with our pie, a coffee for me, and milk for Jade. She got nowhere near me as she placed the cups and plates on the table.
“You see?” Jade said, when the waitress left.
“See what?”
“Oh, you’re just going to argue. You don’t see what I see. And it’s just as well. I need a nonegotistical man. They’re hard to find, you know.”
“I’m not nonegotistical.”
“Pretty much.”
“Not at all. No matter what happened, and no matter what people said about me, I wanted to be with you.”
“That’s not egotism.”
“Yes it is. Because I thought I deserved it. Me and no one else.”
“You’re going to make me cry.”
“Why?”
“Because you touch me where it’s always tender.”
It was dark and starless when we left Rustler’s. The parking lot was right off the highway and you had to nose your car out very carefully because everyone drove fifty or sixty miles per hour and there were no signs or lights to help you. It astonished me that something as planned and official as a restaurant parking lot could be so dangerous; it seemed to mean that life itself was so essentially dicey that there was a limit to how much you could do to make it safe. The high insecty whine of the cars speeding by. The smell of grass, fresh tar. The Beach Boys on the car radio. Jade at the wheel, waiting for an opening in the traffic, a place for us. Her eyes were hooded from the beers we had with dinner—she had no capacity for alcohol. Passing headlights cast strips of white across her face. Jade pressed the accelerator, I prepared for sudden death, and then we were out in traffic, our tires whistling.
It was a five-mile drive home. An old song by Bobby Hebb called “Sunny” came on the radio and I was going to ask Jade if she remembered it, but then I told myself of course she did. I was thinking about Susan Henry, with more ease now because no matter what happened it couldn’t have made much difference, but I was thinking about her all the same. In the restaurant, I’d wanted to ask Jade if she’d ever eaten there with Susan. Ridiculous question. So annoying and without importance. I suppressed it, but it hovered within me, like a sneeze.