“Jane, have you read that short story yet?”
“Ye-es,” she said hesitatingly.
She made for the bathroom and locked the door behind her, but heard his voice through the plasterboard walls.
“What do you think? Why haven’t you said anything?”
The double question meant that she could delay a little longer.
“I guess I was waiting for you to ask.”
To see your own mirror image, not the face of the man you were talking to.
“Well?” Greg said.
She turned her lower lip inside out, moved her lower jaw from side to side.
“Well… what?” she said in the end.
“What do you think?”
Both toothbrushes stood in a plastic glass on the shelf above the sink. She pushed her toothbrush closer to his so that the bristles touched. She had waited too long to reply.
“I think it was good.”
She dreaded leaving the bathroom. If she had to tell him the truth, he was sure to react as he had when he was asked to give up playing in the band—with exaggerated reasonableness.
(Without his knowledge The Hard Stains had been booked to do a demo tour with a professional skateboard team. They would play in twelve cities during the summer and actually be paid to play while the skaters performed for the audience. The contract had been negotiated without Greg as a partner in the deal.)
Bursts of rain hammered on a small window above the toilet. She somehow heard him waiting for her answer, imagined him lying on the bed with his hands under his head and looking up at the motionless fan in the ceiling. She had a vision of herself emerging naked from the bathroom, going over to sit on him and make him forget about asking questions.
The truth was this: Greg was incisive, clear-headed, and intuitive, but when he put pen to paper, he wrote like a man who had lost control. She had almost come to think of it as a failure of coordination, a brain-hand issue, like that affecting Drew back in elementary school, who simply couldn’t place his right hand on his heart and recite the first words in the Pledge of Allegiance at the same time. However many years he practiced, it made no difference. In moments of honesty with herself, Jane had to admit that Greg seemed to create a literary world of shadows where there was little genuine thought and too many knowing literary devices. His work might give an impression of profundity at first but, on closer reading, the text was only obscure. A leading character might be thinking something, using too many words, while walking city streets or possibly looking out through a window. There seemed to be little else. Apart, that is, from a dream of being a writer. In his latest short story—the one he wanted her to talk about now—one thing had left a serious impression on her. It was a major mistake made on the first page where a casual reference to a dog had surely slipped into the description of the male protagonist. The text read: He lit another cigarette. Then he crossed the walkway on his hind legs.
Jane felt it should be possible to charm her way out of all this. She showered, for what could be more natural after a long journey in a car? She joined Greg on the bed afterward and said something about great forward movement in his narrative, a very special atmosphere. That kind of thing.
“That kind of thing?”
“Yes.”
The next morning, standing outside Updike’s childhood home, he kept prodding her. The fight that followed contained pointers to how their respective roles would play out whenever they disagreed: She got angry even though it was he who had reason to be, while he grew talkative even though she was better at using words. When he felt hurt, he expressed it. When she felt hurt, she started a counterattack.
Afterward, Jane couldn’t remember much of what had been said, other than her telling Greg the truth about his writing—but in a raised voice, as if he had offended her. Much clearer in her mind was the impression left by Updike’s house, which had become a doctor’s office. It had a nameplate on the wall and the open area in front was littered with broken branches and rubbish, blown there like driftwood. A narrow, flagstone path led to the doctor’s waiting room. Because patients were lumbering past now and then, they had to light new cigarettes and try not to sound as if they were dealing with a crisis. During these interruptions, standing in that mercilessly exposed place, they learned what it feels like to fight with the person you love when you have no experience of what it is like to fight with the person you love. It means the method of arguing, the phrases, the very facial expressions are taken straight out of films and novels, or out of possible memories of arguments between your parents. The desperation stays in your mind, and the taste in your mouth of all the cigarettes that were dragged on and then dropped in the grass and flattened under the smooth sole of a stupid cowboy boot. You still don’t know from experience that arguments usually end by your swift return to the all-forgiving present, with your self-regard still largely intact. And you still believe in the serious intent of every word said, and dread losing the person you love because it will kill you, and you sink into solemn grief because you have not yet been ground down by life into a less self-important version of yourself.
Despite the lasting bad feeling between them, they completed one more stage in the planned journey: the Edgar Allan Poe museum, which was very appropriately unnerving. Greg did not seem bitter but the dancing lightness in him was gone. He must have been so deeply shaken that Jane could hardly bear her own bad conscience. They dragged themselves from room to room, looking at Poe’s handwritten manuscripts, which neither of them had the energy to try to decipher. The shrill voice of the guide. The feeling of being awkwardly young and prone to nervous yawning and febrile sweating and unable to follow anything that was said.
This silver-plated coffee jug belonged to Poe’s sister’s foster family. This pair of Old Sheffield candlesticks belonged to a woman to whom Poe dedicated a poem.
This shabby, narrow Gothic chair tells you nothing because your heart beats far too fast and, besides, you have developed a strange heat eczema that is crawling down your neck and breasts and will make him hate you even more.
Cigarettes and more cigarettes, and afterward, in the parking lot, you see no fewer than four young women wearing the same skirt as you. And his hand is limp, it doesn’t squeeze yours hard in return.
So they returned home, Jane to Broome Street and Greg to Brooklyn, and she heard nothing more from him.
She left long messages on his answering machine, using more stock phrases from films and TV series. She told him things she hadn’t said to anyone before and would never say again. There is an age for telling someone I’m nothing without you and sounding truthful, perhaps because it is true. Then, it is possible to believe that you are who you are only because the person you love has loved you.
She called Peggy Noland, who told her that Greg was not at home with them in La Crosse.
“I thought you two would’ve got to somewhere in Tennessee by now?”
She went round to his place and listened at the door. She waited in the stairs until four in the morning but he didn’t come. The summer heat in New York and the grief over her love turned into one and the same thing. Sleep was impossible, thought was impossible.
After a week, he stood outside her door. He was wearing a red-checked shirt with cutoff sleeves and a baseball cap with a Marshall logo. She feared that all he wanted was to pick his things up, that they would never meet again. At the same time, she was relieved that the torment of waiting would be over. Recently, she’d worried that it might bring on a ruptured blood vessel in her brain and speculated about how many days in a row you can tolerate a high pulse rate before the damage is done.