5
When I came home from shopping at the A&P on Saturday, he was there, at my mother’s desk, swiveling in her chair, slumped and belligerent, the way you sit at ice cream counters, like at the Candy Kitchen in Bridgehampton. It was as if he’d always been there, all summer long, occupying that very chair.
A scratchy copper beard dusted his chin, making a wafery layer like penny-colored frost on a windowpane. His hair touched the base of his neck. It was the color of gleaming wheat. Jack might have looked healthy, except that beneath his crystalline blue eyes were velvety pouches, and his cheeks were raw and drawn very far in, like a pair of inside-out parentheses. It was possible he had not eaten or slept in days. It’s strange to realize you have sustained yourself on a memory of a person that has become untrue. The phantom face of my summer was not the face before me. And, yet, it was Jack.
“Your hair grew,” he said. His voice was the same, still so beautiful.
I stopped at the base of the stairs and lowered the groceries to the floor. “I hate it.”
“So cut it,” he said, moving toward me, lifting me, and we spun.
I tested his existence; my hands felt for the body beneath the shell of his clothes. I confirmed the feathery pressure of his hair on my cheeks. The solid wall of his slender chest, the subtle protrusion of his right shoulder blade. He was real, with a smell that was real and a slightly sticky gleam to his skin. I rested my head in the bony basin between his ear and his shoulder.
“Are you crying?” he asked. He tightened his grip. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s just, you kept coming, like a ghost, like, floating.” For a long while I couldn’t speak. “Sometimes I would feel that you were with me, and you seemed so real. Now you’re here, but I’m not sure. You seem less real than before.”
His eyes studied mine, scanning cautiously. He breathed deeply, heavily, as if taking some of me down with the air.
“Have I changed too?” I asked.
“You have.” He drew back my hair one side at a time, trailing with his gaze the path of his fingers. Adding gravely, “But it’s okay.”
Jack kissed me and his lips on mine were dry. He tasted like black licorice, like anise.
“My mother told me everything,” he said, “about Kate’s mom.” He touched my cheek over and over with a chapped finger. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here.”
My eyes opened wide, admitting light from my mother’s desk lamp. If you don’t want to cry, you can stop yourself by looking into light. It’s better to keep grief inside. Grief inside works like bees or ants, building curious and perfect structures, complicating you. Grief outside means you want something from someone, and chances are good you won’t get it.
Later we were sitting on opposite ends of the couch, drinking black coffee. Our legs were interlocking and I was rubbing my feet together beneath Jack’s tailbone. I used to rub my feet behind my dad’s back when he was reading or when he and Marilyn were watching that old detective show, Mannix, or the crazy Dean Martin program, the one with the spiral staircase. My father’s apartment was always freezing.
“They’re whirring like a little machine!” Jack said of my feet, and right then WPLR played “Maybe I’m Amazed.” The song had played the first time we met, and by coincidence we often heard it play, which sort of made it our song, even though everyone said it was queer to like Wings. Jack left my feet exposed when he stood to raise the volume.
“I want to cover this song with the band,” he said, plopping back down. He and Dan Lewis and Dan’s cousin Marvin, also known as Smokey Cologne, had a band—Atomic Tangerine. In a moderate shriek, Jack sang along with the radio. “Der ner ne ner ner ner ne ne.”
When the song was over, we heard a sound behind us. We tilted our heads back over the couch arms. Kate was standing in the entry near the front door.
“Katie!” Jack called. He stood and started to step around the couch, probably to give her a hug or say sorry about her mother dying.
“Hey, Jack,” Kate said dismissively, avoiding eye contact.
There was a pause, which made it hard for him to know what to do. He darkened and returned to me. For a while we just sat. Kate craned her neck to regard herself in the mirror over the fireplace, then she removed her sweater and dropped it playfully on top of me.
“How did Drama Club go?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said, shaking her hair loose. “We did improvisations.”
“A school club on a Saturday?” Jack asked with derision. “Is it a Communist club?”
Kate approached the mantel and stepped on the hearth to regard herself more closely. “It’s theater, Jack,” she said. “You have to be committed.” She turned and smiled falsely. “Oh, well. I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone.” She stomped up the stairs, the door slammed, and her stereo switched on. Her stereo, not the house stereo. All of a sudden there were two. We soon heard the sounds of Joni Mitchell’s “Chelsea Morning” blasting through the ceiling.
“Did she flip her lid when her mother died, or what?” Jack looked to the stairs. “Lovebirds? Theater? She’s turning into f*cking Blanche DuBois.” He plucked her sweater from my chest, pinching it and draping it across the coffee table. “How long has this been going on?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t remember the time before, or the way it used to be. There were the things we used to do, factual things, and those were easy to recall—playing, biking, singing. As for the things we’d conjured and believed, those were harder to recapture. I wondered if ideals existed only because there was so much to be learned in the loss of them.
Jack pulled me close, kissing my head. “I never thought I’d say this, but let’s get the f*ck out of here and go to my house.”
It was almost seven. We had only a half hour to be alone at Jack’s house. His parents were finishing dinner at Gordon’s in Amagansett, where they’d had a six o’clock reservation. At seven-fifteen his mother would deliver his father to the Jitney, and by seven-thirty, she would be home. Mr. Fleming would be back in Manhattan two and a half hours after that. They had an apartment on Madison Avenue and Eighty-seventh Street. He worked at Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency.
“Nothing creative,” Jack would say; he was always quick to set people straight before they tried to connect Jack to his dad. “He’s senior account manager for Schweppes. You know, the carbonated sodas. Schweppervescence.”
“How come your father’s going back on a Saturday?” I asked.
“Because I came home today,” Jack said. “He can’t get away fast enough.”
At the Fleming house, Jack’s sister’s dog Mariah barked, so he gave it a kick. Not really a kick, just a kind of dragging push to one side with the top of his foot. Inside, the air was heavy with the scent of cologne. It spooked me to think of Mr. Fleming’s barrel-chested shadow appearing suddenly to block a doorway.
“What perfume does he wear?” I wrinkled my nose. “Lagerfeld?”
“Cat Piss,” Jack said. He yanked open the refrigerator door. It smacked the counter and glass bottles clanked. “He must think he’s gonna get laid on the bus.” Jack grabbed a yogurt, tore off the lid, and flung it into the sink like a Frisbee. He tilted his head back and drank from the cup. Halfway through he paused. “Want some?”
“What flavor is it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I haven’t hit fruit yet.” He swallowed a little more. “Not the kind you like. It tastes purple.”
“Blueberry,” I said. “Forget it.”
Mariah skulked past our ankles as we moved to the hallway. “Keep away from that beast,” Jack warned. “It’s an operative.”
I asked what an operative was. He said like a spy.
He started up the stairs, his filthy sneakers knocking into the shallow depths. There was something wretched about the sight. “I’ll wait here,” I said. Mr. and Mrs. Fleming didn’t like us to go upstairs when they were out.
Jack reached for my hand. “C’mon, Evie. I swear, we’ll just be a minute.”
On the southwest side of the attic, Jack had constructed a retreat for himself. He liked to say it was the only room in the house uncontaminated by damask and deodorizer. The windows were shuttered, the paint on the walls was charcoal gray, and the floors were bare wood because three months after we’d met, Jack had torn out the rug. It was the day before he was supposed to leave for boarding school—Labor Day Sunday, 1978. He’d intended to destroy the whole room and after that, the whole house, including the carport.
“Especially the carport,” he’d declared. I had no doubt that he meant it. Unlike most people who say they hate their parents, Jack really did.
He’d tried in all sincerity to talk to them, to apologize for certain things, to reason with them about his feelings, to ask them to please let him spend his junior and senior years in East Hampton, to not send him away. I’d gone with him for moral support—only not all the way. I waited at the end of the street, on the porch of the Presbyterian Church. I brought a book, figuring it might take a while. But Jack reappeared in ten minutes.
“That was fast,” I said. “What happened?”
“What happened,” Jack repeated. “Hmmm, let’s see.” He took my book from me and began to slap it against his thigh. “I try to reconcile. I swear to conform. I sit there, totally f*cking humiliating myself. I tell them that I don’t want to lose you.”
“And,” I prodded softly.
“My mother’s sure we’ll stay friends. She says, ‘You can write.’”
I hated to hear his voice sound desperate and alone when it did not have to be, not when I was right there.
“Then,” Jack said, “the fat bastard goes to the barbecue grill, totally ignoring me, and says, ‘C’mon, Susan. I don’t want those ribs to char.’”
“Char,” I said, “Wow. Who uses a word like char?”
“Fat bastards,” Jack stated. “Ad agency homos. Neocons. That’s who.”
At dawn the following morning, he took a knife to his room. After cutting the curtains and shredding the carpet, he’d intended to start on the walls, but beneath the rug in the center of the room, he’d discovered a very old Christmas card with stained edges that looked like it could have been from around the early 1900s. Inside, in childish handwriting, it said, Eveline.
He jammed the open card into my hands. I was in my underwear and a T-shirt, and we were standing in the driveway by the garage because it was early and that was the back way to my bedroom if you didn’t want to wake up other people. He was winded from running and covered in the fine white matter of demolition. He yanked me into the sunlight, handed over the card, set his hands on his thighs, and bent to catch his breath.
I looked from the card to his face. “I don’t understand.”
“I found it! In my room. I was pulling out the carpet.”
I asked was he sure.
“Of course I’m sure!”
“Maybe someone put it there,” I said. “Like, planted it.”
“That rug’s been there for years,” he said. “Besides, no one we know is that interesting. What would be the point?”
He dropped to the dew-soaked grass. I dropped too.
“Listen,” he instructed. “I’m cutting and tearing out the rug, I’m throwing the pieces down the stairs, and I’m raising all kinds of dust and shit to really piss them off, and just when I’m about to bust the windows or pry off the molding, I see this paper on the floor.” Jack gestured with his hands as he spoke, which he almost never did. “I go to the paper, I lift it. It’s a Christmas card. There are angels on front. Did you see the angels?” he asked.
“I saw them,” I said.
“Look at the f*cking angels,” he insisted, pushing the card back at me.
“Yes,” I swore. “I see.”
“And this, did you see this?” Jack opened it again and tapped at my name. It was scrawled in loopy script that dipped to the right, in old-fashioned penmanship—Eveline. “I might have killed him,” he said. “I might have done it this time, if he came up those stairs.” He looked at the ground, numb. “You had to see me. I had a knife in one hand, and in the other hand I had the card.”
He left for boarding school in Kent, Connecticut, later that day without a fight. He took the card with him, and in the Flemings’ driveway, where we said goodbye, he vowed to me privately, but before God and whomever the f*ck else, to take it with him everywhere he went for the rest of his sorry f*cking life, as a mystic but tangible reminder that no matter how far apart he and I might grow, at the core we were one, that we were meant to be one, that things would work out as nature intended, and that no one could prevent destiny’s unfolding, not even us, because we were connected—spiritually. “Understand?” he said, as his sister, Elizabeth, leaned on the horn of the family’s New Yorker.
“I understand,” I said, because truly I did, and to seal the vow we kissed. He popped the passenger door. Before getting in, he gave a final wave of the middle finger to his parents, who were largely concealed behind the living room drapes. Then he left, and he stayed away at Kent until he dropped out at Thanksgiving. He was gone just three months, though it had felt more like a thousand years.
Jack was emptying his knapsack from summer. It smelled like heath and wax and mold, and it was covered in President Carter campaign buttons from 1976: JERSEY LOVES CARTER-MONDALE, UAW FOR CARTER-MONDALE, END THE NIXON LEGACY—VOTE JIMMY CARTER, and Jack’s particular favorite, CARTER é BRAVISSIMO. The smell was probably from camping in the mountains, but with Jack you never knew. He pulled the card from deep inside his bag and laid it on the desktop. I touched it, the inside part with my name, for luck, then I sat on the bed. Jack’s bed was built into the room, wedged square and high into the corner. When you sat, your feet did not touch ground. Attached to the long wall above it was a shelf for shells, fossils, field guides, and bottled things such as butterflies, and also bones and books. A World of Fungi, The Stranger, Demian. In Demian, Jack had found Abraxas.
“Like on the Santana album—Abraxas. There’s a quote from Hermann Hesse on the cover,” he’d said. “How cool is it that Santana reads Hesse?”
Across from the bed, his Technics stereo system was set carefully on milk crates from Schwenk’s, the local dairy farm, twelve of them stacked four wide, three tall, and all filled with albums—some rock, some punk, but mostly jazz and blues. Above that were five guitars, including a 1968 Martin D-28 with a Brazilian rosewood bridge, and a Gibson Les Paul Standard with sunburst finish and humbucking pickups. Near his pillow was a stuffed mouse I’d made in seventh-grade home economics, the only thing I’d ever sewn.
“I can’t believe you still have this mouse,” I said. I was terrible at sewing. “Do you really like it, or do you just feel sorry for me?”
“I really like it. Though I also happen to feel sorry for you.” He kissed my eyelids and lowered himself on top of me.
“Jack,” I whispered uncomfortably, pushing him. “Let’s get out of here.”
We stopped to see the trees on Main Street. The giant elms in East Hampton were dying from Dutch elm disease and many had been marked for removal.
“I went straight to your house,” Jack explained. “I didn’t get a chance to check the trees.”
Jack lay in the grass across from the Hunnting Inn, his head hanging off the curb into the gutter. I watched the car tires whizzing past his extended neck, wondering if he would be decapitated. His untucked Jethro Tull T-shirt crept up his chest, and his jeans slid to reveal the waistband of a pair of boxer shorts. The design on them was of red go-go dancers. The shorts were mine, anyway my father’s, from the fifties. Jack’s apricot belly was marked by a V of muscle low in the center and a narrow ladder of hair that mounted the middle. I crawled through the grass and got next to him, facing up also. “This one’s awesome,” he said. “The branch over Main Street is like an arm bent at the elbow. Pretty soon it will be gone.”
The streets of the village were full of fog. Along the way to the pizza place, I kept putting up my hands as if to part curtains. Jack was saying how in Wyoming juniper trees have round blue cones like grapes and how Rick Ruddle said that inhaling labdanum tranquilizes the mind. Rick Ruddle was Jack’s hike leader and a sound engineer from Portland.
Brothers Four Pizzeria was crowded. Troy Resnick was there with Min Kessler, the eye doctor’s daughter. Jack and Troy slapped loose hands. “How was the trip, man?” Troy asked.
Jack said, “Outrageous, man.”
Troy examined the watermelon-colored Kryps on Jack’s skateboard, and Jack informed Troy that his haircut was butt ugly. I lifted a copy of Dan’s Papers from a stack on the floor and took the front table. Through the ribbon of mist that divided Newtown Lane, the red neon sign from Sam’s Restaurant seemed milky red and noirish, making me think of detective novels—single-bullet shootings. A pop, a body, some footsteps, a detective.
“Catch you later, man,” I heard Jack say.
Troy slurped back cheese. “Meet us at the beach.”
“Which one, Wiborg’s?” Jack asked.
“Indian Wells.”
“Too far,” Jack said. “I don’t have a car, and I’m not driving with you. You suck.”
Other kids starting calling out to Jack. He transmitted a series of apathetic hellos, then declared with annoyance, “Listen, people, I gotta get some f*cking food.”
At the counter he ordered two slices and stared down Dino and Vinny while he waited. They irritated Jack, the way they thought they were masculine. He liked to say that they must have had some very big hairy dicks beneath those oil-stained pizza aprons. For his part, Jack astounded them, the way he was puny and unkempt but had a girl like me. He seemed to personify for them the trouble with America. Dino would just shake his head when he saw us, which pleased Jack infinitely. Jack liked to take me there; we went about three times a week.
Jack deposited two paper plates on the table, each with its own overhanging slice, and the plates swirled a bit from grease coming through. Jack lowered his chin to the plane of the table and bit his folded slice. “Mooks,” he said through his food. He didn’t know what a Mook was, he’d just heard it once in a movie called Mean Streets, which my dad had taken us to see. Ever since then, everybody who pissed him off was a Mook. I tore the crust from my slice and chewed. Jack wanted to know if the pizza guys had given me a hard time while he was gone.
“This is the first time I’ve been here since you left,” I said.
He knocked his head back to suck the soda from his can. His hair fanned out against his shoulders, and I could see his Adam’s apple dip and rise. I don’t like to see them, not ever, Adam’s apples. I turned away; Dino was staring.
“Let’s go, Jack,” I said, standing and pulling my sweater around my shoulders, buttoning one button at the neck. “The movie starts in five minutes. We’re going to miss the oil globs.” Before the beginning of every film, the theater would project wafting oil globs on the screen, kind of like a giant lava lamp.
“Right,” he said, jumping up to grab his skateboard. When I tossed the remainder of my pizza into the garbage, he caught it before it hit the can and crammed it into his mouth.
As we started for the theater, he jumped onto his skateboard and whizzed by me in the street. Jack was handsome, in a seedy and purposeful way, the way a barn in disrepair looks so good in the middle of a lush green field. It was true he had changed over the summer, or maybe it was me who had changed. I said, “I can’t believe we’re finally seniors.”
“I was just thinking that,” he said as he rode up the curb, then popped back off in front of Tony’s Sporting Goods. “Troy’s doing whippets tonight. That’s why he wants to meet later.”
“Isn’t it like breathing into a paper bag?”
“Yeah. It’s so stupid. That’s what makes it fun.” He approached Newtown and Main, and at the corner he twirled smoothly on the rear wheels. His arms were bent at the elbows, his right leg extended, his left leg flexed. His hair windmilled lightly. Then he leapt off, flipping the front end of his board into his ready hand, waiting for me to catch up. We met at the light.
“Your leg ever bother you?” I asked.
“Nah,” he said. “Sometimes.”
Jack was wearing a cast when we met. “The summer of 1978 is a study in bitter irony,” he liked to say. “In the midst of the worst period of a particularly shitty life, I met you.”
Because of his broken leg Jack had had to cancel his annual Outward Bound trip, which meant he was stuck at home with his family. For weeks he wasn’t even able to climb the three flights to his room, so he had to sleep in the den, or, as he said, in the transverse colon of the house, where all the shit sits and ferments before moving through. Jack was forced to endure the petty mechanics of family life—every dinner and phone conversation, every key jingle and cabinet slam.
Once, he and his dad fought so bad that Mr. Fleming called the police.
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I threatened him with a weapon.”
“A gun?”
“No,” he confided, “I couldn’t reach the gun. A knife.”
“A knife? Your leg was broken! He couldn’t possibly have been scared.”
Jack shrugged. “What can I say? I have excellent aim.”
I knew Jack from school; everyone did because of Atomic Tangerine. Prior to that he and Kate had had the same piano teacher, Laura Lipton, a songwriter from Sag Harbor whose dog, Max, was a television actor—Ken-L Ration, Chuck Wagon, and so on. Occasionally Kate’s lesson would encroach upon Jack’s, and she would play with the dog just in order to stick around and listen. She would call me after to say how well Jack Fleming played.
We never actually spoke until the day in early summer when he came with his parents to the Lobster Roll, where his older sister, Elizabeth, was a waitress and I was a busgirl. I watched him from across the room. I’d never seen anyone so uncomfortable in my life. As his father talked without pause, Jack stared through the window out onto Napeague Highway, clanking his spoon against his cast, keeping a secret rhythm. He would lower his face to the table to sip his water. His broken leg was propped onto a second chair.
Elizabeth asked me to carry over the drinks. “Please. I can’t deal with them.”
The cocktail tray rested on the flat of my left forearm, and I bent to deposit each drink carefully. I couldn’t help but notice the way the afternoon sun encountered Jack’s face, the glassine glow to his eyes. When I looked into them, I could not look away. They became a beautiful horizon, dominions of clouds and winds of ice and insinuations of birds. I considered sadly the world he saw through those eyes. Probably nothing in real life could match the purity of vision they beheld.
Mr. Fleming asked my name.
I set down his plastic cup of chardonnay. I said, “Eveline.”
“Eveline? Fan-tas-tic!” He began to sing. Eveline, Evangeline.
I delivered Jack’s Coke, and my breast accidentally grazed his right arm, a little beneath his shoulder. We both kind of froze.
“Which of your parents reads Longfellow?” Mr. Fleming demanded. Jack shifted protectively as though to block me.
“My mother,” I replied, “teaches poetry. Short stories and Shakespeare too. But I think my name is from Dubliners.”
“Joyce—bah. Overrated,” Mr. Fleming barked dismissively. “Let’s see, let’s see now, Longfellow. It’s been quite some time.”
“Where does she teach, dear?” Mrs. Fleming interrupted.
“Southampton College,” I said. Mr. Fleming cleared his throat and begin to recite. “Gentle Evangeline—et cetera, et cetera, something, something, something—When she had passed it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.”
Jack glowered at him and clapped three times very, very slowly.
“Well, now, Eveline-Evangeline,” Mr. Fleming said. “What do you intend to do with the great fortune you will have amassed by the end of summer?”
“Oh. I’m not sure. Probably just buy paints and stuff. You know, art stuff,” I said.
He was silent—they all were—stunned no doubt by the humorless sincerity of my reply. As I delivered straws and cleared away soiled appetizer plates, I felt for the first of many times the intensity of Jack’s gaze and the blood that pooled darkly in my cheeks.
At the waitress station, Elizabeth garnished glasses of iced tea with lemon wheels, and she spoke of Jack. I listened from the far side of the lattice divider. It was funny to see her face after seeing his—his was so much prettier. Her parents had tried everything, she said. She said that Jack had seen psychiatrists since he was seven, that he was a noncompliant patient, that he had been on more medications than there are states, that he was talented in music, and that he had just been enrolled in boarding school near their grandparents’ house in Connecticut. He was leaving in September. “He tried to kill my father a few weeks ago, you know,” Elizabeth whispered to Sue and Renata.
Renata admitted she’d read about it in The East Hampton Star.
“He should be grateful that he’s going to school instead of prison.” Elizabeth hoisted a tray onto her arm and walked away.
Since I’d never spoken to Jack, I could not really rise to his defense. But I figured that at least I ought to tell him how I felt about what I’d heard. You sort of have an obligation to tell someone that he can trust you more than he can trust his own sister.
No one offered Jack a hand as they prepared to leave. I held his chair for him as he stood, and I followed him to hold open the door.
“Good luck, Lady Evangeline,” Mr. Fleming thundered above his wife’s head as she crossed the vestibule to join him. “Though I don’t expect you’ll need it.”
Jack swung past with his body hanging far over his crutches. “Thanks,” he mumbled, and I went with him into the corridor, which seemed to confuse everyone, including me.
Mr. Fleming winked knowingly. “Meet you outside, son.”
“Sorry about that,” Jack said when they left. “He’s a dick.”
“It’s okay,” I assured him, feeling shy to be the object of his eyes. Inside the enamel blue rings were specks, little stars twinkling. “So when do you get your cast off?”
“Thursday,” he said caustically, dragging the word out. He looked to the ground. Without lifting his head, his eyes returned to mine. To say he was handsome was not quite right, not quite enough: the look in his eyes was transcendent. On the restaurant radio was that Wings song “Maybe I’m Amazed.”
We watched the cars race down Napeague stretch.
“You should come over sometime,” I said.
“What time do you get off?”
I said at five.
“All right,” he said, moving off, “see you at six.”
“Wait,” I called. “You don’t know where I live.”
He paused at the door. “By the tracks,” he said. Then he left, his compact frame ticking gracefully between shiny pale crutches.
People always asked why I went out with him. I just liked him better than anyone else. He didn’t have that ballooned chest or stiff-shouldered look other boys had. Jack was skinny, but fluid, loose in the legs, and, though he was careful with me, the chances he took with himself were real. One night when he, Dan, and Smokey Cologne were out of pot, they smoked oregano leaves and drank codeine cough syrup. On a dare, Smokey did a shot of Downy fabric softener and had to get his stomach pumped. After the hospital, they came to my house and dove kamikaze-style off the back of the couch until Dan broke his nose and they had to go back to the hospital. Jack had tried peyote in New Mexico and LSD at the Roxy during a George Thorogood concert—a rockabilly nightmare, he’d said. He’d snorted speed and done cocaine. He hated coke. “I end up smiling all f*cking night,” Jack complained.
It didn’t really bother me if he got high. His was like a body without skin, and he had to desensitize himself. I didn’t mind the way he predicted his own disappointment, calling everything pointless and existence senseless. I just figured it was a way to protect himself. The only truly threatening thing I ever noticed about Jack was his surplus of confidence—a tremendous ego is a dangerous thing in someone so gloomy. He could not be persuaded away from his blackest convictions, and anyone who disagreed with him was part of the whole f*cking problem to begin with. Though I would never ever have told him so, Jack was very much the son of his father.
“We were sleeping in an open field,” Jack said as we stepped forward with the movie line. “In Montana. After dawn we heard a weird whooshing sound.”
“A UFO!” I said. Jack and I had seen one at Albert’s Landing once. It looked like twin pods, like a salt circle pinched at the center.
“No, almost. A hot air balloon,” he said. “Hovering. Like a rubber rainbow. We jumped out of our sleeping bags and ran after it, all of us naked.” Jack would’ve made a good Indian. He could make fire with a magnifying glass and sleep naked on mountains in the cold. He could tie knots you could not escape from.
“Girls too?” I asked.
“Two for Amityville Horror,” Jack told LizBeth Bennett, who was working in the box office. She tore two pink tickets off a spool. “Yeah,” he said, “Girls too.”
It didn’t bother me that he had seen the girls naked and maybe had sex with them. I was only envious of all the places he’d visited. I’d been to only eight states—mostly with my father. Jack had been to twenty-six—always alone.
He shoved a messy wad of change into his pocket. “I wrote a song about it.”
“About the balloon?” I asked.
“About how you weren’t there to see it,” he said.
We sat in the third row and followed the wafting oil globs on the movie screen. Jack removed his black journal from his coat to show me the stuff he’d collected and recorded and all the songs he’d written for me during his trip. His drawings were compact and obsessively detailed, mathematical almost, like da Vinci’s. Most pages had variations of the same landscape—upside down and tilted. Like a vortex, like water down a bathtub drain.
“That’s in the Tetons,” he explained solemnly. His group had to cross a ridge with tremendous drops on each side, and there was this yellow plastic tag nailed to the point where some guy had fallen off. “It would have been so easy, Evie.” Jack used my name for emphasis, and I listened with care. We were low in our seats, so low that people behind probably couldn’t see our heads, only our knees propped on the chairs in front of us. I held his bicep with two hands wrapped around his red windbreaker. “The free fall. I would have shattered and spread.” His hands pushed out in two opposing directions, “Like, distributed.”
“Re-distributed,” I said. “Like back to raw matter.”
“Re-distributed,” he said, “Exactly, yeah.”
I liked the idea of marking the place where a life ends as opposed to the place a corpse is buried. And also the idea of leaving remains uncollected. It’s bad enough being dead, but it’s worse to have people see you dead, to have living hands feel a dead you, jostle and dress you, push your stiffening arms into clean sleeves and cry over your blood-drained body. At a wake or funeral, people say a dead body is “at rest,” but actually, it is working. The corpse assists the living, it stops time. It helps to postpone the reality of loss. It’s hard to know which is worse, never seeing a loved one again or seeing them again packed with fixative and formaldehyde, with plastic and whey and alkalis and binders, and hearing people mutter, She looks so peaceful, when what they really mean is, She’s stuffed like a glycerol scarecrow. Probably that mountain climber’s spirit was drifting motionlessly like an eagle soaring in place. Flags flap that way, blowing grandly to nowhere.
“I missed you,” Jack said.
I’d missed him too. I took a handful of popcorn, then brought my fist to his mouth, pushing some kernels gently in. He ate until he reached my hand, which he bit lightly. The projector jolted on, and his face flashed to blue snow.
“That death marker thing is cool,” I whispered to cheer him. Jack could be quick to turn, and suddenly he seemed down. “Instead of cemeteries.”
“Ah, forget it. It’s a bogus idea. There’d be bodies everywhere.”
“Not bodies. Markers. Bodies get cremated.”
“True,” he said with new interest. “Highways would be littered.” We hated highways.
“I want my marker to be suspended in midair, only not hitting the mountainside, just like if I died of shock during a fall from a peak. Or maybe projected upward like the Batman logo, if that’s even possible.”
“Sure it is,” Jack speculated, “if you got shot out of a cannon.”
“But you’d have to be a clown to die like that.”
“That would blow,” Jack said. “Dying as a clown.”
I asked him where he would like his marker to be.
Jack said, “Right here.” He touched the inside of my elbow.
One time after Jack and I met, I mentioned him to my friend Denny. Denny and I were lying on the steps outside the barn. The door behind us was open, and light from inside seeped out to form a pale pond around our reclining bodies. We were like seals on an iceberg.
“Seals are fat,” Denny said. “Besides, it’s July.” He was breaking pieces off of sticks and throwing them at fireflies. “Let’s be shipwrecked. On an atoll.”
When I had to pee, I went behind the barn. It would have taken too long to go to the front house, and I never knew when Denny might just take off. He was private with his personal life, and he often made plans he did not share.
“Hey, Den,” I called, “what do you think of Jack Fleming?”
“Jack Fleming?” Denny called back. “He’s cute, if you like the grungy look. Why?”
“I saw him at the restaurant.”
“Not working, I hope,” Denny said. “He’s a little hostile for the service industry.”
“He came in with his mom and dad,” I said when I came back. I lay against Denny’s belly, and he began to play with my hair.
“It’s so fine,” he said of my hair. “Like the white stuff in corn. Those limp fibers inside.”
“He gives me a funny feeling,” I said, meaning Jack, “like I’m supposed to do something.”
“Have you ever heard him sing?” Denny asked. “I was at a party at Dan Lewis’s house and their band was playing. The band sucked, but when Jack sang alone, it was pretty incredible.”
“What did he play?”
“Normal stuff—covers of other people’s songs, I guess.”
“I mean, what instrument.”
Denny said, “Oh, he played the guitar.”
A few weeks later, Jack and I had sex. We were sixteen and we drank rum. It started out when Jack came to find me in the barn. Instead of talking, he leaned against the wall and watched me draw. He had just gotten the cast removed from his leg, and it was the first time I’d seen him without crutches. An orange glow warmed his face; it was from an outdoor light coming through the glass. I wiped my hands on my legs and pushed the loose hair from my eyes with the back of my wrist. When I stood, Jack pulled my face to his, giving me a kiss.
The Fourth of July fireworks erupted over Main Beach as we made our way from my house to his. When you walk at night in East Hampton, the sidewalk goes black before you, and the world pitches left. It’s the massive roots of the trees that split the concrete walkways.
“You okay?” he kept asking, and I kept saying, “Yes.”
David’s Lane is stately and broad. I’d passed Jack’s house on my bicycle about a thousand times, but it looked brand-new now that I knew that Jack lived there. An open plaza of grass led to a beige colonial fa?ade. Inside was beige as well, parchment-colored and bland, with furnishings that were measured and moderate.
Things were the opposite at my house. My mother was constantly picking up some moldering armoire or fusty wall-mount ironing board at the dump and hauling it home. I would find her waiting for me on the front lawn, bewitched by some relic. “I practically had to wrestle Dump Keith out of his wheelchair for this one,” she’d say.
Somehow we were always alone on those nights; it was possible that she didn’t want distraction or interference. “You and I can move furniture better than any two men,” Mom would call out proudly as we maneuvered hulking items through doors and up staircases. Every corner of the house became eligible for overhaul. Phones would be moved, drawer contents rotated, bedrooms swapped, bulb wattages finessed, chairs recovered. Surrounded by staple guns and fabric remnants and tools given to her by my father, we would pick at TV dinners of meat loaf and apple cobbler as we rewired old lamps, antiqued the woodwork, anchored mirrors into brick, and outfitted tables with perfectly pleated fabric skirts.
To make space for a new piece, she would give others away. Nargis Lata, her professor friend from the college, took the “electric couch,” a bizarre wooden chaise with embedded metal plates for heating the extremities. Big John got the hassock embroidered with black leprechauns, Dad and Marilyn got the Balinese crèche, and for Christmas one year, Walter the mailman got the knee-high copper cannon. He came to collect it on a Sunday in his sagging blue station wagon. My mother said that out of his postal uniform, Walter looked “laid bare and brought to the light of day.” His Rottweiler wouldn’t let us near his car.
“There’s a fine bit of irony, Walter,” Powell said. “Usually dogs prevent your approach.”
I navigated the Fleming house, listening to the pressurized pops of fireworks exploding, counting booms—sixteen, seventeen, twenty. On the kitchen counter, beneath a fawn Princess wall phone was a prescription bottle with his mother’s name on it: Susan Fleming, 500 mg, BID. Refill 3. Three refills seemed like a lot. Three seemed like a condition. Next to a list for Rita the maid was a neat stack of stamped envelopes—paid bills to mail. A pair of men’s leather strap sandals were near the back door on a new straw mat, and hanging from a hook on the white wainscoted laundry room wall was a key chain with a shiny BMW tag. The dryer bounced confidently. I was pretty sure that the Flemings never had checks returned or put locks on the telephone dial to keep people from using it or walked around collecting all the lightbulbs in a straw basket and putting them in the car trunk whenever the Lilco bill got too high. The last time Mom did that, someone rear-ended the Scamp and all the bulbs broke.
I wondered how it felt to be rich, or to have money, or at least to have some sense of sufficiency. At my house we lived in chronic fear of what the next day would bring. The only time that terror got suspended was on a birthday. That’s probably the point of birthdays, to give people a break from black unknowns, to indulge the person for a day. You hear it all the time—For Christ’s sake, it’s my birthday.
And yet, despite his family’s means, it did not seem wrong to say that Jack’s had been a life of deprivation. Except for his record collection and his guitars, all the items in that house belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Fleming exclusively. When we were at my house or in town, it was easy to forget about his relations—he was just Jack. But the more familiar I became with his home, the more inextricably bound to those people I found him to be. His parents maintained control largely through tactics of guilt and fear, through threats of withholding, by calling what they’d accumulated “their own,” as though whatever had been earned hadn’t been drawn from the bank of family time, against family interest.
Jack patted the kitchen counter, gesturing for me to sit. He reached into a cabinet above the wall oven and got the rum. “One hundred eighty-one proof,” he informed me. “My old man picked it up in Jamaica. On a golf trip. With his lady friend.”
“He has a girlfriend?” It seemed hard to believe. It would have made more sense for Jack’s mom to have someone else. She was actually attractive.
“A lady friend,” Jack corrected. He hopped up next to me, breathing in through clenched teeth because his leg was still sore. “He’s had several that I know of. He loads them up on gimlets and recounts his sob story of white male supremacy—prep school, Ivy League, two cars, Madison Avenue apartment, house in the Hamptons, condo in Bermuda, spoiled kids, spendthrift wife. Women feel sympathetic, thinking he’s devoted but misunderstood. Then he drags them back to his lair—our place in New York—and he pops them. The family is his script. He gets his money’s worth for supporting us.”
Jack took a few belts from the bottle, drinking expertly, but when it was my turn to take a mouthful, I held my breath, knocking the liquid down like screwing a cap on a jar with the heel of my hand.
I said, “That’s really gross.”
“The rum?”
“Your dad.” Though the rum was gross too. “Does your mother know?” I didn’t like to know something about her life that she didn’t know. If there was a code, that would surely be breaking it. Sometimes life is irreverent, and you accidentally discover you are a party to irreverence, and it’s hard to know what to do.
Jack shrugged. “His most recent conquest is the receptionist from Ogilvy. She’s not the sexy type of receptionist a*sholes snag in movies,” he related in his darkest drawl, “but the terrifying type they end up with in real life.”
“You saw her?”
“I walked in on them screwing in the maid’s room. I came into the city on a Tuesday to go to the frigging orthodontist. He must not have gotten the message, but what else is new? Elizabeth was in a coma once for two days after a bike accident before we found him—he’d called in sick to work, then took off for a ‘midweek getaway,’ neglecting to mention it to my mother. Anyway, I got to the apartment and heard gagging from near the kitchen. I thought someone was choking. I figured the super had come up to fix a leak, maybe, then swallowed a chicken bone during his lunch break. Unfortunately, no one was dying.”
I took the bottle from his hand and placed it behind me, out of reach. His hands came together in his lap. I hadn’t yet heard him talk that much. His delivery was controlled, his voice made richer by the lack of inflection.
“Couple years ago, I found a stash of creepy love letters in the basement ceiling rafters. I run to my mother, thinking, She’s free. But she refused to read them, saying that I was mistaken, that I was out to demean my father, that I needed more therapy. Even if I could have gotten her to admit the affairs were true, she probably would have taken the blame for the failed relationship, for her frigidity—that’s his descriptor of choice. Frigidity? More like common sense. Who knows who he’s been with?
“I admire his originality,” Jack said sarcastically. “Instead of being grateful that my mother and sister give him the f*cking time of day, that worthless piece of shit wakes up and says, ‘I have an empty apartment, an absent family, a high-paying job, and I live in a city full of desperate women—What damage can I inflict today?’ It’s like a criminal with a loaded gun and a full tank of gas, or a plantation master with a whip and a horse. They’re all thinking the same thing: if I don’t use these conditions to my advantage, what a waste of weapons.”
I put my hand on the back of his neck and swept aside his hair. He had beautiful white-blond hair to his shoulders. He never brushed it—it just twisted and tangled softly.
He looked from his hands to my face. His ice-blue eyes worked in earnest, as though taking in more of me than I could present. The fireworks were still popping, but the finale would soon be coming. “C’mon. Let’s go upstairs,” he said.
As we mounted the first and second flights of stairs to his room, I felt somewhat like a trespasser, especially after Jack’s story. But the third set was thinner and steeper. It had a curious turn at the top and a feeble light at the end, giving it the feel of a tunnel leading from one world to another. With each step we detached ourselves further from everything and everyone we had ever known. The privacy we felt was unlike any other, coming as it did when we needed it most. Ours was a very lucky privacy.
Jack was before me, we were near the bed, we were kissing, we were lying back, descending. The smell of his bed was the smell of him, only multiplied. It confused me to be initiated into his aloneness; it confused me to know such a place existed, such a repository of untried masculinity and pathetic virility, such a site of self-love and self-abuse. The quilt bubbled around my body and the weight of Jack was good, reminding me of the times I have been buried in sand. I pressed my hips into his because it seemed like the right thing to do, although the part that longed for pressure was farther down and deeper in. My muscles raised me, uncertainly at first, in a practicing way, each time squeezing more expertly, each time tightening an invisible tube inside.
I thought we might have been waiting for something. I thought maybe it was me. My hand journeyed from his shoulder, drifting fitfully down, and he lifted himself so I could reach where he seemed to know I was going. He was leaning and supporting his body on his left knee, making room. His head hung to watch, his hair cascading around my face like a paper waterfall. With my finger I traced the teeth of his zipper upward from its base to its flap, and as I started to draw it down, the zipper pushed itself open from pressure. Everyone knows about the parts of a woman, but you never hear about the parts of a man, not in any specific regard. Even in great artwork, men’s genitals are under-realized, scribbled or shadowy, as if the artist wanted to be courageous, but only sort of. As if there were some incentive to keeping men mythic, as if the part and the man were the same, and preserving the mystique of one meant preserving the power of the other.
But in my hand was a contradiction of skin and muscle, something solid but fragile, potent but meager, something both majestic and vile. Jack seemed helpless to the way it stood parallel to his belly. It occurred to me that grown-up men such as teachers and coaches know but keep secret the way erections make boys defenseless. Maybe women know, but maybe it’s late already when they find out. It seems like something girls should know too, and earlier, the way boys are capable of such delicate reversals.
On our way out of the house that night, we passed the piano. Jack faltered, touching it. Though he used to perform for his parents, now he only played when they were out. He tried to deprive them of pleasure whenever possible, he said, but I knew it was because they made him feel hateful, and he couldn’t touch something he loved so much with hating hands. He sat on the ebony bench, and just when I thought he’d forgotten I was there, he reached to pull me to his side.
“Eric Satie,” he said of the music he played for me. “Trois Gymnopedies, Number 2.” Then he tried something melodic and easy, something you’d hear on the radio. Over and over he practiced the same few bars with a single hand.
“Whose is that?” I asked. “It’s pretty.”
“No one’s,” he answered. “I just made it up.”