24
Jack was kissing me by the barn, and I was wondering about all this stuff, such as school and Kate and where sod is farmed and how to spell ankh and how I’d never seen a single episode of Saturday Night Live or Eight Is Enough. Our lips pressed together lifelessly. I wondered about the lifeless quality to Jack’s kisses. It occurred to me that they’d always been that way. Kissing him was like kissing a heel of bread, if in fact there was bread that tasted like Blistex.
Kate ran down to the base of the stairs, her hair in a series of elaborate pigtails, and she was wearing silk pajamas. She pressed her hands onto the screen door, talking through to us. “Coco just called. There’s a party tonight at Mark Ashby’s house.”
“And there are rings around Saturn,” Jack said. “That doesn’t mean we’re going.”
As usual, we got high, and for a change, we played dice, the three of us sitting on the kitchen floor, listening to Let’s Cha Cha with Puente with the volume up to ten. “What’s your favorite?” Jack shouted as he jiggled the dice. “‘Cha Cha Fiesta,’ ‘Lindo Cha Cha,’ or ‘Let’s Cha Cha’?”
“‘Cha Cha Mungo,’” Kate yelled back. “Hurry up and roll.”
This made them laugh, and they laughed and laughed, and, as they did, I could see into their heads. I could see Kate’s teeth and Jack’s teeth, base to base archways, like propped-open coon traps. Teeth ought to be clandestine, like spies meeting down alleys. Jack stuck his head into the refrigerator because he became asthmatic, and Kate smacked the oven door repeatedly with the back of her head saying “Ouch” every time. Her silk shirt caught the light the way pearls do, the way pearls in light look like milk on fire.
When Jack peed, he did not close the door to the bathroom all the way. His pee made a bright bursting sound before the toilet flush concealed it. I switched from the floor up to a chair, and with a pen I found I played a dumb game, which was taking one finger and skittering it around the center of the pen, making a windmill on the table. Then I drew on the bottom of my sneaker, trailing the rubber passageways until I got frustrated. Kate just stayed on the floor, pinching and sucking a wooly strand of hair. Her shoulders sloped downward. With her right hand she scraped at the tile grout with a giant safety pin. It bothered me; everything bothered me. It was like I was standing in the center of a cube that was collapsing—phoom, phoom, phoom. I was feeling three sides down—one more coming.
Jack came out. I said, “I’m going for a walk.”
He said, “Where to?”
I said, “The tracks.”
They followed me to the living room. Jack offered me his Dartmouth sweatshirt that Elizabeth had given to him. It was pine-green. It slid past my head and hips to my thighs. Kate knelt for a moment to pet the cat, then started up the stairs.
“See you, Kate,” I said, wishing there was some way to make her happy, knowing there was not, wondering if she felt the same. Yes, I thought, she did feel the same, and had felt the same, only she’d felt it sooner. I supposed an end was as simple as contradictory wishes. Baby birds abandon the only world known to them: the treasure is flight.
The door creaked when I opened it, and the cat bolted. I plunged down the porch steps and was rushed by night. It carried me the way wind carries a hat. I looked back to Jack. He was gripping the banister and paused at the bottom step. The pallid light from the landing upstairs broke through the bars of the stair rails, slitting his features.
“Good night, Katie,” I heard him say, then he followed.
Our house was shielded from the railroad by a massive barrier of gnarled vines on the south side of the driveway. When the train went past, the beacons of light would flood the property before fading away. At the end of the driveway on the other side of Osborne Lane, there is a streetlamp; its light made a spacious pool at the base. Jack had already reached the outer rim of that light and was turning onto the tracks. I wondered was he moving very fast, or was I going very slow. One of us was out of time.
I kept my eye on him as I walked the length of rail between us. When I sat, he sat with me. My hands stroked the rail. It was blistered from the load of the train, and yet improved by the blisters, by the inference of endurance. I asked Jack where the rails run to and why.
He reached to tie his shoelace. His jaw was lightly bearded and red, and it drew his concave cheeks down. His hair spilled forward. “They run the train’s distance. They go where the train needs them.”
His voice was near, so near that it seemed to originate in my own head, and it reminded me—mostly that I had to be reminded. And me, did I remind him, or anyone, of anything? I felt sad. “No,” I said, “they run their own distance. Separate from the train. It’s the thing they do. They have their own purpose.”
He poked at the tar with a stick, his chest low by his feet.
“Jack,” I said, regretting the sound of my voice. Its sheerness, its vicinity. He did not lift his head but rotated it obligingly, leaning to rest his chin on the back of my hand. His face came into the ring of lamplight. His eyes were there—a very conspicuous blue.
There was a flicker. Jack did not move exactly, but his figure conveyed new poise. He turned stable as he shut down against me, and the self-protection completed him, leaving me to wonder if I’d ever really seen him, known him. I was made mindful of my sacrifice. I imagined the places he would go, the people he would meet. I thought of his music, of me listening anonymously and in vain for my residence in his songs, of his offering to others the words that had once passed from his lips to my ears. I thought back on the dreams we’d shared, and on how our lives had not been actual—we’d never once felt entitled or precious about the fact of ourselves. We’d never once taken for granted the smallness of our place, or the magnitude of our liberty. Though it could be a consolation to no one, I would regret the loss of him for the rest of my life. Almost as painful as the loss would be the inevitable public impression that I’d loved him less than I’d been loved by him. This was not so; I’d loved him truly.
“Sometimes I feel myself falling,” I confessed, “then I see it, as if the falling thing is not me anymore. When I reach to grab myself, my hands catch nothing.”
He frowned. “You’ll never have to worry about being caught, Eveline,” he said. “It’s all there for you, the whole world, waiting.”
I looked past his eyes, to the stars. The millions of stars, joined into one avenue that draped over his head like a cowl. A terrible premonition seized me; I began to cry.
“Did you ever think how pointless it is to cherish the stars,” he said, taking up the object of my focus, “when they’ve all extinguished by the time the light reaches us?”
“Jack,” I said. “Don’t.”
He continued anyway. “Love is exactly like starlight. Just a signal, a flare, diminishing in brilliance from the point of origin, dead by the time you receive it.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. I f*cked up,” he said lifelessly. “It was my fault, not yours.”
I lowered my head between my knees, and for a long time we sat. We did not hurry, in case it was to be one of the last times sitting. When he stood, I stood as well, and at the street we parted. He walked to the corner, his figure bouncing down and away like a ball shooting out of reach.
I stumbled down the driveway as if drugged, kicking gravel, wasting time. I lifted my ear to the sky and listened for the wail of the train. Sometimes you can hear it, even if it’s not there—sonorous and low, riveting and heroic, dejected and alone.
I began to spin, rolling along the row of privet that divided the front and side lawns from the driveway. At the farthest end, I spun off, singing the words to a song I’d never heard, something about trees, trees, trees, and lights out. When I came to a stop, there was the sound of the train—mournful and clear. I wished I knew enough about music to name the note. In it I heard a calling, a cry to life.
Rourke was there, standing and waiting. He said, “Hi.”
I swayed slightly, saying hi. “I didn’t see your car.” I glanced back. It was definitely there—on the street near the top of the driveway. I could see the white body in pieces through the leaves. It looked like a horse, waiting knowingly, chewing grass. Twigs were on my sweatshirt—Jack’s sweatshirt. I brushed them off. It was funny, I hadn’t thought of Rourke all night. Actually, that wasn’t true; I’d thought of him constantly. I wondered if he was still angry. He didn’t seem to be. He was just leaning against the side of the barn near the forsythia. Forsythia is first to bloom, first to vanish. Every year it flowers without my noticing. Every year I vow to catch it next time. I moved closer and pulled at some petals.
“I just got back from Jersey,” he said. “I was driving by.”
If there was something to say, I could not think of it. I might have asked about driving past my house when it wasn’t on his way, or how long he’d been in Jersey and when he was going back, or how much older was he than I, and did he love me too.
“Forsythia,” I said, opening my hands to show the yellow. “It always blooms without me.” I nudged the torn flowers in my hand. I was sorry for what I’d done. I could not refasten the petals to the stem, I could only cast them off, and I did, watching them spin down like lemony propellers. It was true that I was still a little high. You know that leaning kind of reasoning, like a glass on one side and all the contents tipped against an edge.
I was walking, he was also walking, and sometimes our hands would touch. We stopped near the back door to my bedroom. His face was close to mine, and his eyes. To stand before him was to stand before a body of natural consequence, an orchid, a stallion, something maverick and elemental, something too exquisite to be sustainable and so you feel strange pain. I tore a splinter of cedar from a shingle. I wondered if he knew about Jack and me breaking up. Probably—he seemed to know everything. If he were normal and I were normal, I might have solicited his sympathetic regard and allowed myself to be persuaded by it. But it was not tenderness I wanted, and it was not tenderness he would have expressed, only self-interest. Maybe all tenderness is self-interest anyway.
He looked at me like he was comparing me to surrounding things, to the trees, to the dark, like he was seeing me as he would have had me seen, as he would have had me see myself, and then he smiled, coldly, professionally, expressing himself in his heat and his prime, making my grief over losing Jack into the nothing it surely was.
I twisted the doorknob and entered my room, half-hoping he would follow. Half-hoping because no matter what I wanted for me, I wanted more for him. I wanted him to be superior to my need. We stood on opposing sides of the threshold. Behind my back, my little room, velvety and moonlit, a jewel box—at the end of the driveway, his car, grazing.
I closed my door. I rested my forehead against it. A long time passed before I heard his footsteps and the muffled thump of his car door and the churn of the engine, and, when finally he had gone, I spent the remainder of my night in cardinal desolation, comforted only by the knowledge that his was spent in the same way.