The story of the gunman on the observation deck was one of many events that spring that contributed to Jane and Greg’s suspicion—typical of their age and time—that the world was fucking with them. The feeling of injustice stayed with Jane, for how was one to live in a world that seemed especially intent on killing off young and good people?
There was just an ounce of truth in this immature intimation of martyrdom. Young adults are easy prey. Greg and Jane noticed it as soon as they sneaked outside: he in his secondhand clothes, she still shy about her femininity, and both so polite and diffident, with outrage just below the skin and cash from casual jobs in their pockets. Their unease at not being taken seriously would radiate from them with blushing, shining rays that attracted all the assholes they ever met:
“You look like you could do with our bargain offer on a year’s supply of essential vitamins and minerals.” Or:
“Correct, there is legislation establishing tenants’ rights in New York, but in this case the rent can be raised with immediate effect because…” Or:
“Do you have to sit at this table? This gang here is a whole law firm that…”
All of which added to Jane’s conviction that the two of them were up against an entire world full of warmongers, financed by advertising.
They made love and made love again, and planted chili and pepper seeds in pots lined up on the windowsill in an attempt to save money, but their optimism faded as they observed the sad-looking, black soil; they listened to post-hardcore rock tapes featuring Shelter or Fugazi and became militant vegans (though they were not quite sure what the “militant” bit entailed).
And he stared at her body and wanted to have her all the time but not in that way, it wasn’t like that, because she could see straight through to his innermost self, and it no longer bothered her that he was not a guitarist in a band, he could be what he liked and it wouldn’t change anything. Unless he was a brewery salesman or a trader in agricultural spare parts.
Christ, no. Never, never become the living dead, like Robert and Dorothy.
Like Robert and Dorothy? You’ve got to be kidding. They love each other, for a start. But check out my parents! My mom and dad—what can I say? Just think about it. Divorced in spirit ages ago. Sticking together mostly to have each other to pick at. Like an everlasting negotiation. Spaces they define as his or hers, just to get away from each other.
So? What about my dad’s workshop? Have you thought about that?
A shed workshop, that’s nothing. My dad is like an impotent museum curator. He has the largest collection of Union Army-issue water canteens in the world.
I know, but it’s so much better to own loads of water canteens than to have no reason for living at all, like my mom.
True. But I love you and we’ll never become like them.
No, we’ll never be like that.
Never.
Jane and Greg had their first serious argument outside John Updike’s childhood home in Shillington, Pennsylvania. They had been together for a year and now it was summer again. Shillington was the first stop on their Great Literary Odyssey—that is, a four-day road trip. The trip had acquired its splendid title during a night of scribbling down possible places to visit on the back of a coaster. They would go from New York to Shillington, and then head south, to Richmond, where Edgar Allan Poe spent his childhood years. Next, they would cross the border into North Carolina and try to find O. Henry’s birthplace in Greensboro before ending their long journey in what they felt was the mecca for devotees of the art of fiction: Savannah, Georgia, where Flannery O’Connor had bred peafowl and written her stories.
This itinerary that, without time for breaks, added up to more than twenty-four hours of driving, proved something about their youthful chutzpah and lack of common sense as well as—and this was the conclusion Jane and Greg preferred when they recalled that summer holiday—that they loved each other very much. They had borrowed a Civic without air conditioning and bought a carton of Marlboros. She was going to wear knee-length skirts in flowery materials and cowboy boots, like the young, rootless women in the films about violence and romance that were much admired at the time. He was to take black-and-white pictures of her. Both would enter inspired fragments of writing in the leather-bound notebooks each had brought. Clearly, a plan with scope for disappointments.
A storm front was chasing them during their first day on the road. At dusk, when they reached Shillington, a bruise-blue cloud bank rolled over the car roof toward the horizon where it spread out and, by then fit to burst, erupted in flashes of lightning. Shillington was not a town on its own, as they had thought, but a development on the edge of Reading, which wasn’t much of a town in the first place. The wind grew stronger as they drove endlessly along the ruler-straight roads lined with neat, two-story brick houses and kept a lookout for Philadelphia Avenue. John Updike presented a problem, anyway: he was alive. Jane found this especially troubling. Because the other three writers on their itinerary were long since dead and buried, tracing them was a romantic pilgrimage, an appealing as well as appropriate task for young people with an interest in literature. On the other hand, rubbernecking outside the childhood home of a great living author was somehow quite different. It felt like hero-worship or the kind of thing crazy people did.
The wind blew over the roofs of the buildings and through the heavy summer canopies of the trees. Wet, green leaves rained down on the car and briefly jammed the wipers before fluttering nervously and disappearing across the windshield. No one was to be seen on the trim lawns. It wasn’t the weather for enjoying the hammocks on the porches, where they were swinging senselessly on thin chains. There was no access to cell phones or GPS navigation; it would be another year before Google became a registered trademark. Their map was a poor copy taken from a road atlas in the New York Public Library, and when they saw a street name that meant they had driven even farther away from the avenue where Updike had once lived, they homed in, like insects, on the dome of light over the football stadium. They tried three times to find someone in the stadium parking lot to ask the way, but despite all the parked cars it was as deserted as everywhere else, so they gave up and found a Best Western in Reading.
The room had a double bed that vibrated if you fed a quarter in a slot and was covered with a pale brown, knobbly bedspread. The seed of their disagreement was sown in this room. The background was that, a week earlier, Greg had asked Jane to read a short story he had written. Critiquing his work was one of her least favorite things. She had told herself during the past year that her sense of unease about Greg’s writing was due to her being so close to the writer that their very closeness prevented her from relating to the text in an appropriate way. It was an excellent explanation, as such: it was complex, made sense psychologically, was nicely linked to their relationship and shared high-flown ideas about the complexity of reading and writing. It was even in line with the dominant literary theory at the time, which insisted that proper reading must be done without reference to the lived life of the author. The only problem was that the explanation did not fit the case.