Authors: Colin Harrison
Outside, alone finally, with taxis racing the trash blowing along Market Street, Peter paused at a magazine stand, where his gaze wandered stupidly over the women’s magazines with their fake awareness and hard sell, the exercise magazines (the new genre of soft porn), the usual straight and gay porn, both upscale and blue-collar, the news and business magazines, both mainstream and hip—in all, hundreds of happy photogenic faces bounced and sparkled and laughed in static beauty before him, competing for his dollar, for his emotional response, for his mind. And what was the quest for beauty but the quest for love? How much American culture twisted and squirmed and cried out—an amorphous choir of souls—that it wanted to be loved. People, people, people, driving and pushing and crowding and killing to step into the limelight of love, wishing to be declared a genius, a billionaire, an artist, a somebody worthy of collective attention. People equated fame with love and there was a great need for many famous people, more than ever before. Didn’t anybody realize that history was choked with the lives of people such as this? Always there would be the ever-burgeoning numbers of people who wanted to be someone. It was a stupid world, and he was stuck in it.
SO, AFTER A LONG DAY
that had dug its nails deep into his scalp, at least now there existed some prospect that he would find Janice. Maybe Vinnie would help him out. In the evening, at home, he glanced at the
mail and turned on the most sensationalistic of the local news stations. At the top of the broadcast the Mayor told reporters he was disappointed the suspect had been released but that he had full faith in the District Attorney’s office. Then the camera cut to a street interview, crowds of black teenagers smiling and goofing in front of the camera while an older man said: “I think they covering up who did it. Maybe it’s some white guy—no black person would do
that.
They wanted to
get
that boy and they arrested a black man and then they realized they couldn’t get away with it.” Then the reporter turned to the camera and said solemnly, “And
so,
despite the many theories about what motivated this most tragic of murders, for the Mayor and for the families of Johnetta Henry and Darryl Whitlock, the hope that justice will be done … must begin again.”
The real justice would be if television reporters and their solemn, quasi-grammatical phrasings would disappear from the face of the earth. The news was followed by the opening music of an unbearably stupid show with a beautiful, leggy girl who climbed slowly out of a swimming pool and walked wetly toward the camera. The growing problem, of course, was sex. He wanted it, but without much else that went with it. In the absence of a loving wife, all that he wanted—what any man would want—was some stacked, gorgeous somebody whom he could fuck until the cows came home. The absolute lack of self-respect in such an idea was inversely proportional to the pleasure of it. Of course it was childish; that was what made it so terrific. He sat at the small writing desk in the living room and gazed at Janice’s picture. Sex had become
remystified
to him lately—he seemed to suddenly desire it to the same improvident degree as when he was young—but it was attended now by dark reverberations of fecundity and death. Sex was no longer simple and fun, not as it was when he was fifteen and argued his high-school girlfriend into giving him what he wanted, however fast and fearful and awkward it had been. Subsequent encounters—many of them, most fun and easy—had taken him farther from where he had wished to go. By twenty he had slept with enough girls to understand he hadn’t loved any of them.
The summer before his senior year he’d worked as a dishwasher on Nantucket for twelve weeks. Within the bright noise of bars and tanned
faces, he became involved with a wealthy, divorced young mother who required only one thing, really, and with little attempt at concealment, either. Hers was the hunger of bitterness, and what she wished for most of all was an obliteration of the previous ten years of her life. In this he’d seen the true inconsequentiality of himself, and how their physical passion was both fraudulent and wasteful. One day, with her children at the beach with a nanny, they went to bed. He watched the clock by the bed, curious to see how long the human male could copulate. After nearly an hour, when she realized what he was doing, she saw her insult turned back upon herself and was furious. He’d sworn off all involvements then and began to spend his nights reading. It was then he realized how easy his life had been.
That fall he saw Janice. Her blue eyes stared out from beneath dark, inquisitive eyebrows, and he’d felt a sudden riotous calm. He lost all his glib confidence. She was nineteen and did not trust him. He suffered willfully and remained persistent. The vulnerability of his devotion won her over to him, and she conceded to talking. She was on full scholarship from a large suburban public high school. Thus she had earned her chance at an excellent education, and not been provided it by birth. He saw in her an elemental loneliness, forged in her effort to escape a childhood that otherwise would have destroyed her. It was this childhood she described haltingly, shamed about her origins. Yet she displayed the surety of one who has decided to create her own fate, a young woman whose father had broken her arm when she was eight, who now attended class with girls who complained that they had not gone skiing during Christmas vacation.
When Janice had first undressed before him, he felt humbled by the trust implied by her. And, simply, she was beautiful, impossibly perfect, her breasts large and high, her skin slightly olive. She stated quite matter-of-factly that she did not
really
know what to do, a fact that amazed and thrilled him. His ache for her was complete, unfettered by memories of previous women, a reverent, clean want.
They became inseparable, and life seemed to hold a fierce clarity. It was, Peter supposed now, only the clarity of passion, an emotion doomed by its intensity, and perhaps he was a sentimental fool, but these memories were all he
had.
The warm spring night they’d driven down by the
freight tracks to the Schuylkill River and undressed in the car—he remembered it perfectly. They’d slipped into the dark muddy water and swam out. He dove down, surfaced. She was a ways off, a dark head in the water. “You hear that?” he yelled. The sound rolled through the dark trees, the back-to-back diesel engines, rail ties creaking, couplers vibrating, wheels grinching the rails, clacking. They swam in, and he pulled himself up the bank and ran naked to the train. Hoppers and tank cars and box cars rolled past, big shadowed letters:
READING RAILROAD, CONRAIL, UNION CARBIDE.
A hundred cars, easily. The sound was enormous. His naked shadow wavered against the cars. Janice stood at the river’s edge with a towel. Then she ran to him. The noise was around them and yet he felt the heart under her wet skin. He yelled as loudly as he could, to be heard above the freight train:
I love you, and I swear I always will.
She laid her wet head on the back of his shoulder and shut her eyes.
Always,
he repeated.
After college, they went to Europe for a month. In Nice they walked the streets and shopped for bread and fruit and fresh fish. They swam in the Mediterranean and laughed with the beach vendors who hawked refreshments in a mix of languages. Janice relaxed, visibly, and wanted, like any first-time traveler to Europe, to see everything. He was happy to indulge her, and was thus transformed into a loaded, flapping pack mule bulging with maps, train tickets, Florentine paper masks, guidebooks, French T-shirts, Italian shoes, Swiss chocolate, postcards, and so on—whatever her eye fancied. In Venice, a city of soft light and softer lines, they walked the narrow, pestilential streets, pausing at the small bridges that arced over the canals. In the low hotel room off a crooked, wet alleyway, they made love like a man and a woman—that is, they took their time.
And on one of those evenings—he remembered this vividly—they bought a big bottle of cheap red wine and watched the crowds and gassy lights of the Piazza San Marco. Then, sufficiently drunk and removed from America to say it, Janice finally told him about how, after her mother had killed herself and before she had escaped to college, her father would come to her bed, once or twice a week. She had desired a father’s love and got something else, worse than if she had been ignored. Peter was just old enough then to know she wanted to be told she was
not disgraced or fouled or guilty; she had been exploited and abused, and nothing less. Hers was the kind of father, she said, who a girl will give anything to forget. The man, destroyed by the loneliness he had sown for himself, now drifted somewhere in the American Northwest, lost.
Outside their room, gondolas had glided through the canals. The long, glossy black boats sagged low in the water with drunken American tourists listening happily to third-rate tenors croon love songs. Peter and Janice sat naked on the sheets, ignoring the mosquitoes. She explained how she had wanted to tell him before but hadn’t dared to, because she felt ashamed of herself, how as a young girl it had taken too long for her confusion and paralysis to give way to the horror of what was being done to her. She had wept while her father was on top of her, twisting her head from side to side, her hands pushing against his doughy chest, begging him to stop, saying she hated
it,
hated what he was doing to her. And then, after her father never responded to this, she had realized with a child’s perfect clarity that her cries fed all that was sick in him. She resolved that he would receive as little satisfaction as possible.
In this moment something was destroyed in her and something else created. In the future it would allow her to leave anybody. It was not heartlessness, but a deeper desire for survival. And so when her father returned, as she knew he would, she mutely accepted him, her head turned to the wall, silent and rigid and abstracted, far away from his sweaty, ugly body, far away—for now—from the ever-mounting debt of pain. As Peter had listened that night in an old city, a critical intersection of vocation and love began for him; that anyone had raped or beaten someone he loved angered him and bespoke the incomprehensible cruelty visited on other innocent lives. They talked the whole night, gradually sobering into the strengthened vision that together they could forge a future and transcend a past. He decided he wanted to marry her, for her suffering and strength elicited the best of his nature, and this brought him to himself.
In law school that next year he had dutifully slogged through torts and contract classes. It was criminal law that awakened him. He skipped classes to visit City Hall and heard the stories told by the raped, the
stabbed, the beaten. Because of Janice, he began to see the sanctity of life, and how it must be protected from the stupid, the vicious, the disturbed, the angry, and the uncaring. He saw, too, the elusiveness of justice. His love for her had brought him from cloistered privilege to a budding awareness of the human capacity for brutality. He was righteous, full of energy, and very bright. He had been alive for the first time, and known it.
And later, they sat on the west bank of the Schuylkill, watching the crew teams carry gleaming wooden shells from the boathouses. “Let’s get an apartment,” she’d suggested. And when they stood in the peeling three-room walk-up in West Philadelphia near the law school and looked at each other, the oppression and worry faded from her eyes. She painted rooms and found cheap furniture, joined a food co-op and stuffed the kitchen with vegetables and grains and fruit. She waxed the wooden floors. She was, she’d told him, the happiest ever.
Late in the evenings then she would put on her nightgown and get in bed. Then call to him. He would slip beneath the covers. Always it was good. Afterward he would rub her back and wait for her breathing to settle out, then dress in the darkness and go to the other room and read law. Civil procedure, constitutional law, advanced torts, domestic relations, execution of wills. The reading went slowly, and often he would repeat sentences, forcing comprehension into his tired head.”… state of mind often may be proved circumstantially from statements of the person whose mental outlook is at issue. Statements used in this way are not hearsay because the jurors are not concerned with whether the statements reflect reality; they are only concerned with what the fact that the statements were spoken implies about the declarant’s belief…” When his eyes wearied, he slipped outside to walk the sidewalks of West Philadelphia, by the student boardinghouses and apartments, where laughter and conversation drifted out to the street.
The night before his first law exam, Janice asked him when they would get married. He replied that he didn’t know, but would be happy to discuss it after he took the exam. She responded that he cared more for the exam than for her. He said at the moment he did care more about the exam but of course in the large scheme of things he cared more for her. He was anxious to do well, he said. It was only natural. She started
to cry and said she felt alone. He tried to reassure her. She said he didn’t love her, not really. This seemed ludicrous to him, for he didn’t understand what would make her say such a thing. Hadn’t his pledge been enough? Then he told her he could not afford to indulge her that evening. They got into it from there, and when he finally left the apartment at two
A.M.
he walked with a cold, hateful resolve to an all-night convenience store and filled a bag with coffee, Pepsi, and chocolate bars. He found an open classroom in the law center and at his table built a fortress of heavy law books around him. After the exam, on which he performed well, they went out and saw
Casablanca
at a revival house. It was December and a light snow had dusted the city streets. They had, he recalled, a great weekend.
But in truth he had never been content in those days. He worried about her happiness, money, and his future, for the process of becoming a lawyer was narrowing and honing him, imposing architectures on his thinking, removing colors from his perceptions. Thought had become navigation by logic; he tacked back and forth in subroutines of inference when no tailwind of certainty carried him straight toward an answer. Increasingly, life appeared to be a series of planned manipulations and strategic intentions. This change was a matter of grief, for it implied not only the absolute death of childhood but of a way of thought, the murder of pure intuition. And yet the evenings he walked alone, there would come a moment when he’d turn the corner and see their darkened apartment window above the street and know she slept there waiting for him. This had been enough. Wasn’t it she who would preserve in him the sense of wonder? When he returned to the bedroom, always he softly whispered reassuring noises. She needed to know it was him, for otherwise she might hear the creak of the bed and jump awake, terrified.