Pauline had been with Corny not long before he left for Paris, though she had known Marie-Claire’s fiancé Yale as well, and Harvie, too, each in their own time. All the girls loved Yale’s zinger, it was just right, but his brothers’ were more like things you might see in a circus sideshow, and for opposite reasons. Harvard’s was the one best known around town, a giant thing, ghostly white, almost scary, with all its veins showing like Invisible Man. Because of it, all the kids called him Hard Yard, which was ironic, not because of its length, but because it was almost always limply adangle, half stiff at best until that stag party the night before John’s wedding, which Pauline also attended. Corny’s, contrarily, was like a tiny twig with only one testicle beneath it no bigger than a schoolyard aggie, but though it didn’t look like a real zinger, more like a plastic toy one, it was rigid as a fork tine all the time and popped and popped off all the time, as his trousers, even back then in high school and his mother Kate still alive to wash them, attested. After nine or ten quick ones one night, Pauline begged him to stop or he might hurt himself, and Corny only looked puzzled and, guiding her hand to the tip of it, spurted again. And then — thup! — again, each time firing well past her hip. Cornell liked most to have her reach under her thigh and squeeze his testicle, if she could find it, as, sometimes three or four times in quick succession, almost like hiccups, he spilled his seed in her, or more precisely into his rubber, stolen from his dad’s drugstore. These rubbers, of course, did not stay on, Pauline had to wear them like a kind of inner lining. Pushing them in there made her feel pretty silly, but fecund Gretchen later proved the wisdom of it, and feeling silly in boy-girl stuff was one thing that never bothered Pauline much. Everything changed that summer for both of them and many years would pass before they would become good friends again, though when it happened it would seem quite natural, even if by then nothing else did, but Pauline would never forget the last time she and Corny were together that summer. It was the night before Pauline went to Gordon’s studio to ask him to take her photograph for the men’s magazines. Cornell had come to the trailer with tears running down his smooth pink cheeks to tell her he was going to Paris and would not be seeing her again soon. “I love you,” he stammered, coming all over her bluejeans. No one had ever said that to Pauline before, nor would she soon hear it said again, and it left her feeling bewildered and, oddly, a bit sad. It made her think of her sister, the one Daddy Duwayne, looking down at his shoes, said ran away to find her mother.
“I love you”: so simple for some to say (for Daphne, it was as common as an expletive), so awkward for many, such as Otis, Snuffy, Marge, and Mitch, while for others — John, for example — so irrelevant, an artifice serving as a kind of functional code in songs and movies, sometimes useful in his lover-as-fool jokes though rarely as a punchline. When his fraternity brother Waldo, lover-as-fool personified, said “I love you,” it was no joke, he truly meant it, no matter who was with him, even if he’d won her in a raffle in the dark, because that was what love was, blind and brief and all that. Lorraine had heard him say it many times, sometimes even to her, and she knew that he meant it and that his meaning it meant nothing, the phrase having passed her own lips but once, then never more. It was often like that: if left unsaid too long the tongue felt clumsied by it. When, that same summer that Corny went to Paris, Harriet was dying, her husband Alf, grieving at her bedside, realized he hadn’t said it since the war years. It seemed to make sense back then, less now, though he found a way of saying it again before she died, pleasing her, he felt, by enclosing it, like John, in story: “Hey, do you remember when …?” John’s mother Opal, having like Alf lost the words somewhere, found them again when her grandchildren came along, but discovered within the phrase a heart-wrenching sorrow she’d not noticed before. When she told her friend Kate about this at Harriet’s funeral, which was shortly after Clarissa was born, what Kate said was: “Grief for ourselves is what makes love for others possible. And grievous. Wise love loves only the unchanging. But to love only the changeless and the eternal, Opal, is to love with a cold heart.” It was not exactly to a thing eternal that warmhearted Veronica avowed her love, though Second John could not be said to have changed much since first she said it, and grief, she’d be quick to agree, was part of it. Clarissa, now grown but untaught as yet in grief, had practiced the line over and over, but had yet to find its right moment, though she had in mind a target for it. She and her friend Jennifer often argued about the right time to say it, before or after, Clarissa usually insisting upon it as a statement of intent, otherwise it was just a corny way to say thank you, Jen wanting to know how you could really be sure until afterwards, wasn’t it more like a question before, and so a kind of tease? It was something that the Model said in Ellsworth’s novel-in-progress (if you’d have asked her the question Jennifer asked, she’d have replied: before or after what?), but not the Artist, who felt the integrity and purity of his art threatened by such irrational declarations: her saying so made his vision blur and his hands shake, such that weeks passed (in fictional time) before he felt he could attempt another drawing of her, and then only from behind her shoulder.
For Jennifer’s father, “I love you” was a call from earth to his tripping Trixie, guiding her home again. Though drugs were off the menu since their move into the manse, Beatrice still sometimes, involuntarily, revisited trips from the past, and though these episodes were never (so she said) an unpleasant experience, and could even be, as best she could remember, spiritually enlightening, they were not held by this community of skeptical prairie folk to be in any serious sense visionary, and so complicated at times Reverend Lenny’s ministerial career, even while enlivening his sermons. He would find her, for example, sprawled out in her socks and underpants on the cold linoleum floor of the church basement, her head pillowed perhaps (thanks to some good Christian) by her own cast-off clothing or the cushion from the piano stool, her eyes focused on some distant unnamed galaxy beyond the perforated plasterboard ceiling. He would kneel down beside her, put his mouth by her ear, and whisper to her his incantation of love as though sending a radio signal out into the cosmos, meanwhile thinking: How can I use this on Sunday morning? Thus, his famous “Sleeping Beauty” sermon: God awakening us with his love from life’s deep sleep. And his sermon on the efficacy of prayer: learning to whisper “I love you” into God’s cosmic ear. Sometimes it helped to reach inside her panties and stroke her there, pulling her back to this world by activitating her own magnetic field, as it were, and when she awoke, not knowing how she had got where she was, she would often say that his voice was like a call beyond a distant door, which his fingers were slowly opening. Lenny hadn’t figured out yet how to get finger-fucking into one of his sermons, but he knew it could be done. God was great.
Maynard Junior had said “I love you” in his head over and over, but like Lorraine, out loud only once in his life, and that time to a urinal. This was back at the time of his cousin John’s wedding. His dad was the mayor in those days, and he was then known to the locals as Mayo or Mayor Nerd, and more commonly, as simply the Nerd. Three years away in prelaw at Duke had not changed this. The Nerd was a man, in this town, iconocized and so condemned. As one of John’s groomsmen, Maynard felt obliged to paste a smile on his face that weekend and go along with everything like a good sport, even though he felt wrenched apart inside with fury, bitterness, and grief. During dessert at the rehearsal dinner down at the old Pioneer Hotel, someone made a lighthearted remark about the marriage bed, and the horrific image of his loathsome hairy-assed cousin assaulting the angelic thighs of his beloved, which he had managed to keep repressed all evening, rose suddenly and brought the night’s banquet up with it — he barely had time to lurch away from the table and hurl himself into the men’s room before it all roared out of him like a last violent goodbye. “I love you!” he bellowed as he geysered forth, though it was doubtful that the others heard anything but “woof” or “barf.” “The Nerd has very tender sensibilities,” someone was explaining to a roomful of laughter as he returned (even the bride had a smile on her precious face), and his weak damp-eyed rejoinder was, “That’s right, happens to me every time some damn fool gets married.” The party moved from the banquet room into the hotel bar where the drinks were on Uncle Mitch and the bawdy songs and stupid jokes courtesy of John’s drunken frat-rat brothers, the older men and even some of their wives joining in for a while, though most of the ladies understood they were no longer all that welcome. Though Maynard felt, not for the first or last time in his life, like the last frail bastion of sanity in a sickeningly mad world, he joined in as best he could and even contributed a verse to “Roll Your Leg Over” that won him a round of applause, redemption of sorts, though she who mattered was no longer there to witness it: