Eddie finished his coffee and shrugged. “Whew,” he said, shaking his head. “Just thinking about how the man hates you makes me worried.”
“Why does it make
you
worry?”
“I’m not sure. It just does. Doesn’t it you? Doesn’t it make you worry?”
I shook my head.
“Well, I wish I was that cool. It gives me the creeps.”
The next day was Saturday and I awoke in tears. The dream that usually woke me was one of meeting Jade. She would see me, turn, and flee, and I would race after her, sometimes through Hyde Park, sometimes through a forest. Soon she’d outrun me and disappear but my running never slackened.
This time, however, I dreamed I was weeping in my old room at Rockville. It was sunny and warm and I sat at my childish wooden desk with my head in my hands, crying. There was a knock at the door and I woke up, alone and in the dark because my bedroom was in the back and never got any sunlight. As I came awake, I heard my sobs like the bark of a lonely dog a country mile away.
The tears I shed that morning, rigid in the banal discomfort of my own personal neglect (the lumpy mattress, the stale sheets, the uncovered foam-rubber pillow with its refrigerated zipper), were all I could make of the catastrophic hunger I felt for Jade.
From the moment I set the fire, all of my life was an argument against keeping my love alive. I tried to hold on to what I believed was uniquely mine, fearing that when I lost it I would be nothing at all. But now, I could feel how much of my resolve was already gone. And I could also feel a part of me beginning to wish that my love would finally start to recede. It lay on me like an intolerable heat; it pressed my thoughts like a fever that wouldn’t break. It was worse than mourning because grief was corrupted by hope; I could not even turn my love into memory.
I couldn’t stop myself from longing for her. The feel of her small hard toes as I knelt before her with the tarnished-nickel nail clipper, the oak-colored birthmark on her inner thigh, the double orbit of platinum hairs that circled her belly button. “Trust me,” she said the time we made love and she wouldn’t let me come and she was on top with her hands on my shoulders, moving slower and slower like all human time running down and I was kicking at the mattress as if I were being electrocuted, and the way she said my name as if it were a secret, not softly, yet sometimes in a roomful of people only I’d hear it, which was just one of the thousand things we could never explain—all of these images I thought I was preserving so we could still have them when we were reunited, but now they came unbidden, they did with me whatever they wanted, and they ruled me with their limitless command.
Six days later, I stopped all my careful planning and boarded a 10 a.m. American Airlines flight to New York City. I hadn’t informed my parents, my employer, my school, my doctor, or my parole officer, and now that I was acting in the true bent spirit of utter incaution—admitting, I suppose, that nothing could camouflage the obsessive nature of my trip—I strolled through the great awesome airport, buying magazines, treating myself to a shoe shine, and never venturing a frantic glance over my shoulder. I was the first one on the plane and I took my seat as near to the front of the jet as I could get without sneaking into first class. I’d read somewhere that the nearer to the cockpit you traveled the better your chance of surviving a crash and, though I’d given up the dread of being apprehended in Chicago, my impending reunion with Ann was still so strange and terrifying that I wondered if fate might intervene after all and pluck the long silver plane from the sky and dash it onto some flat unpopulated stretch of Ohio.
Soon enough, the plane filled with passengers to New York. I was sufficiently drunk on the music of my own mission to believe I wasn’t the only passenger off to run one of the heart’s unreasonable errands. A woman in her middle age wearing opaque green sunglasses and asking for a cocktail before takeoff, a soldier holding an innocent bouquet of daisies, an un- shaved man in his thirties carrying a shopping bag filled with clothes—who could say what crucial connections depended on this flight? It was only vanity and discouragement that sometimes made me feel alone with my endless love, but now that I was taking one of the risks my heart had urged upon me I could also feel I was not alone. If endless love was a dream, then it was a dream we all shared, even more than we all shared the dream of never dying or of traveling through time, and if anything set me apart it was not my impulses but my stubbornness, my willingness to take the dream past what had been agreed upon as the reasonable limits, to declare that this dream was not a feverish trick of the mind but was an actuality at least as real as that other, thinner, more unhappy illusion we call normal life. After all, the intimations of endless love were the same now as they were thousands of years before, while normal life had changed a thousand times and in a thousand different ways. Which, then, was more real? In love, and willing to sacrifice anything for it, I felt myself connected to all of human time, to slaves weeping on the auction block, to musicians strumming beneath moon-bright balconies, and, whether she wanted me or not, to Jade. But if I were to turn away from love, if I were to put it at arm’s length and do what was expected of me, who would be my companions then? Newscasters, Rose, and the chief of police.
I watched the ground crew checking beneath the wing. They peered at something for a few moments, nodded to each other, and walked away. One of the men gave the wing a little pat, as if it were his big silver pet. The gesture struck me as being so unconsciously tender, it made me want to know him. I turned away from the window. I’d sensed someone had sat next to me, and when I nodded hello I noticed that it was a fellow my own age and he was grinning broadly right in my face.
“I thought it was you,” he said. “David Axelrod, right?”
I had what I like to think is a normal impulse to deny my identity but force of habit had me nodding.
“You don’t recognize me?” he said, touching his dark mustache as if to remove it. “Hyde Park High. I’m Stu.” He was, of course. He was Stu Neihardt. His forehead was high and as uncreased as the inside of his arm. His hair was dark brown and curly and his eyes swam cheerfully behind his thick glasses. He was, to me, one of those people you know in school but never think of. He’d had, until now, no reality outside of the classes we’d endured together: sitting at the edge of a chlorine-bright swimming pool, diagramming a sentence on the blackboard, banging a tray against a lunchroom table on the day of the schoolwide protest against civil defense drills.
“I can’t
believe
this!” Stu said, taking my elbow and shaking it a few times.
“Small world, small plane,” I said.
“Going to New York?”
“New York?” I said. “I’m supposed to be going to Denver!” I made a move as if to get up.
Stu smiled openly, with his quickness of feeling and his complete willingness to be amused. “You haven’t changed, Axelrod.” Even when people mean to be pleasant when they say that, the phrase can’t escape its censorious overtones. But far more than the implication that I somehow hadn’t managed to mature enough, I wondered if his remark carried the knowledge of what I’d done and where I’d been since the last time we’d seen each other. Our graduation class had been enormous and divided into at least two dozen cliques. I didn’t remember who Stu’s crowd was and the few people who considered me a friend didn’t know Stu. If I was lucky, the last thing he had heard about my life was that I was planning to go to the University of California—I didn’t recall what school Stu had chosen; the name Bates College came to mind for some reason.
“So,” said Stu, fastening his seat belt and squashing out his cigarette, “what have you been doing?”
“I’m working for a union. I do historical research for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers.”
Stu nodded. “Same old Axelrod,” he said, with apparent (if not enthusiastic) approval. He placed a new cigarette between his large, dry lips, noticed the No Smoking sign was lit on the panel above our seats, took it out of his mouth and placed it carefully back in the pack.
“You were always into causes,” Stu said. “Back then.”
“Back then? What are you, Stu? Sixty years old.” I made a kind of laugh. “Anyhow, unions isn’t a cause.” I turned away and looked out the window. We were beginning to roll toward the runway. Is this really happening? I asked myself.
The stewardesses were in the aisles demonstrating how to use the supplementary oxygen, pointing out the emergency exits, and generally preparing us for a tranquil journey. The jet picked up speed, little muted bells rang, and one stewardess raced up the aisle making certain everyone’s seat was in the upright position.
“She’s not wearing a girdle,” Stu told me through the side of his mouth when the stewardess passed. “And the little bitch up there with the oxygen mask isn’t wearing a bra. I’ve been on fifty planes this year and this is the first I’ve seen of this—no bras, no girdles. They must be fucking the pilots up in the cockpit and didn’t have time to get dressed.”
“Women don’t wear bras and girdles anymore,” I said.
“Look. Here comes the midget again. Look at that ass go. That’s my favorite.”
We were airborne. The jets roared, the windows shook in their moldings, and the altitude turned the world below into a joke.
“So,” said Stu, after the take-off, “why you going to New York?”
“Visiting.”
“Isn’t that where you go to school? You got into Columbia, right?”
“No. Berkeley.” I glanced at him. Was he really in the dark or was he merely inviting me to confess? “But I didn’t go.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. How about you? You go to Bates College or what?”
“Where’s that?” Stu asked.
“Oh, I thought that’s where you got in.”
“No. I’m at Downstate.”
This was how Chicagoans referred to the University of Illinois in Urbana. Urbana was only a half hour’s drive from my alma mater in Wyon—in fact, some of the Rockville staff took courses at the University. Once, on one of our outings, my parents took me to Urbana to hear Oscar Peterson play in an auditorium that looked like a cross between a gymnasium and a space station. We were of course surrounded by students my own age. They were a serene lot, for the times—Urbana had more fuzzy sweaters and plaid pants than most college towns in the late sixties. I did my best to enjoy the music but my sense of isolation finally degenerated into feelings of true hatred. Rose frowned at me and shook her head and I realized I was scowling so outrageously my face hurt. We left during the intermission, stalking up the inclined aisle like a defeated minority caucus leaving a convention. The trip back to Rockville was a screamer, with me making my parents feel guilty for submitting me to the humiliation of viewing two thousand unencumbered college students, Arthur shouting his apology that was mixed with the implication that he’d known all along it was a bad idea, and Rose exploding into a fury of human pain—accusing me of making the day more difficult than it needed to be, accusing Arthur of hypocritically avoiding responsibility, and accusing the both of us of using any opportunity to conspire against her. “I’m always on the outside. You two want me to feel like a piece of dirt.” Sitting next to Stu, with the nose of the jet still pointed up, I heard Rose’s voice so clearly it made me shudder. It was summer and her school was closed. I knew she was feeling monstrously alone.
“How come you fly around so much?” I asked. I threw the conversation back to Stu, like a medicine ball.
“Summer job. I work for this guy named Dr. Schaeffer. Ever hear of him? He’s the best dentist in Chicago.”
“No.”
“I mean he’s famous. He’s been on Kup’s show, there’s been stuff about him in the papers. He’s fantastic.” Stu pulled a large attaché case from beneath his seat. “He has his crowns and inlays made by this terrific place in New York. It’s right above an art gallery and they’re the best in the world.” Stu snapped open the case and revealed a dozen or so plaster molds of Dr. Schaef- fer’s patients’ mouths. “I drop these off and they do the rest. While I’m there they give me the crowns they made the week before. Each one comes in a little box, lined with purple felt, like you’d buy a diamond.”
I tried to think of something to say and we drifted into silence. Clouds and vapor rushed by the windows as if we were flying through fire. Stu tapped my knee and cocked his head toward the front of the plane. A stewardess wheeled a cart filled with plastic cups, ice, soft drinks, and miniature liquor bottles.
“You like?” he asked with a friendly smile. I wished I knew him better so I could tell him to shut up. I shrugged, creating the impression, I suppose, that I didn’t know what to make of the stewardess.
“Say,” Stu said, “what ever happened to that chick you were going with? She was the best-looking flat-chested girl I ever saw.”
I noticed a slight tension in the muscles around his scrupulously shaved jaw and it struck me with great, sickening force that Stu knew full well where I’d been the past years, knew all about the fire and the trial, and was for some reason teasing me with it. Maybe he was too shy, or too embarrassed for me and the wreck I’d made of my life, to simply admit his knowledge. Or perhaps some old adolescent score was being settled, some slight I’d forgotten. He’d never been treated as if he were terribly interesting or important and I was now conceivably ensnared in his dreary revenge.
“I don’t know where she is these days,” I said.
“Jade,” Neihardt said.
“What about her?”
“That was her name, right? Jade Butterfield. She had that whole weird family. Her father was some kind of faith healer or something.”
“No. He was a doctor. He had an MD. He just was into a different kind of medicine.”
Stu shrugged, as if I were splitting hairs. “I knew her brother Keith. He was a brainy one. What’s he doing now?”
“I don’t know.”
“He was weird, too. He never wanted to be friends with anyone but then he’d come up to you and say, ‘I’ve been thinking about you. Can we talk after school?’ He actually pulled that on me, if you can believe it. And I was stupid enough to go along with it.” Stu smiled and shook his head.