Endless Love

drainer.

Desperately, I tried to compose a sentence in my mind: I guess I haven’t made much progress with these dishes, is what I came up with. But I couldn’t say it. My tears had become familiar to me yet I couldn’t control them. They had a life of their own. I washed another dish and handed it to my father and he dried it.

“David,” he said. I shook my head and he fell silent. We were silent for a few dishes, for all of the dishes, and then I began on the glasses. I was getting myself under control; my breathing was regular again. I glanced over at my father. His eyes were cloudy and his lips were pressed until they looked ivory and transparent. Oh God, I thought, with a flash of annoyance, he’s worried about me, he wants me to take him off the hook.

“I’m exhausted,” I said. It wasn’t much of an excuse but at least it was true.

He nodded, keeping his eyes on the hot glass in his hand. He turned the dishtowel around and around inside of it, until it cracked a little. “Talk to me, David,” he said, in a voice full of holes.

I knew how to avoid the curiosity—or even the concern—of others and could do it as easily as a cheat can deal off the bottom of the deck: it was basic, rudimentary, and sometimes I did it even when I didn’t altogether want to. I watched myself doing it. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.

“Anything. Whatever’s on your mind.”

I shrugged. I was going to start bawling again and I didn’t know how to stop myself—I didn’t know how to want to. I placed the sponge and a soapy glass on the side of the sink and pressed my hands over my face. I felt the tears running through my fingers, warm and oily.

“I wish I could help you.”

“I’m just very tired,” I said, though I don’t know if it was understandable. I was sobbing heavily now and speech was washed away.

“Is it the party?” Arthur asked. “Did you feel strange with all the people here?”

I shook my head.

“Tell me, David. Talk about it with me. Let me in.” He leaned forward and turned off the water.

“I’m in love,” I said, through my hands and tears.

He touched my shoulder. “I know, David,” he said. “I know.” Then—and I don’t know how to explain this—I heard something that he didn’t say, I heard, “I am, too.”

“What can I do for you, David?” my father asked. “Please. What can I do?”

I heard my mother come into the kitchen. I waited for her to say something but she felt excluded and shy. I turned to face her, with my red ugly eyes. She stepped back and touched her face, looking at me open-mouthed, both embarrassed and ashamed. I turned back toward the window. I felt the misery radiating inside of me, going deeper, getting fiercer and more immense, and I was suddenly very afraid that I wouldn’t be able to stand it. I rubbed my forehead; I clenched my teeth; and then, suddenly, horribly, without even a moment’s warning—or perhaps just one moment, a freezing, sweating instant—my insides contracted and sent spewing up the day’s gin. My vomit splattered onto the sides of the sink and sunk into the soap bubbles.

“Oh God,” said Rose, only half in disgust.

My father grabbed my elbow to support me if I were to swoon. “Press your tongue behind your bottom front teeth,” he said, urgently. I heard a scraping sound behind me. My mother was pulling a chair away from the kitchen table.

“Sit,” she said, in that stern, bossy voice some people adopt when they want to sound reassuring and which has never reassured me.

“I’m all right,” I said, hoarsely.

“You’re not all right,” said Rose.

“If he says he’s all right then he’s all right,” said Arthur, squeezing harder on my elbow.

I turned on the faucet and drank from it, shamelessly squishing the water around in my mouth and then spitting it into the sink. Then I ran some water on my wrists, filled my cupped hands with water, and threw it inaccurately onto my face.

“Are you sick, David?” Rose asked.

I leaned against the sink. Staring into the dark, stinking water, I said, “Why did you throw my letters away?” I waited for an answer but there was silence. Their silence somehow encouraged me—I didn’t want an easy answer and now they seemed to be struggling with my question, my accusation. “Why did you do it?” I said, my voice getting steadier. “I mean, why? That’s all. Why?”

I stood up straight. The sickness was gone. Arthur was looking at Rose, he seemed to be demanding that the answer come from her. I followed his eyes to her guarded face and now both of us were staring at her.

“We did what we thought was best,” she said, calmly, but with an unstable, evasive quality right at the center of her voice.

“Best for who?”

“We didn’t want them around,” she said.

“Then best for you?” I said. “You threw them away because getting rid of them—my letters—was best for you?”

“Why do you want them?” she said, gripping the back of the chair she’d pulled out for me. I thought: I am that chair. And I watched her fingers go white from squeezing it. “Why do you want to repeat every mistake you made, to, to…wallow in something that just about ruined your life?”

“Wallow?” I said, my voice rising in volume and pitch.

“I don’t want to argue over words,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

“I don’t care what you mean,” I said. “I want you to know what I mean. Those letters were mine. They were all I had. I just want you to know that I’ll always want them, I’ll always know that you did this. Nothing will make this memory go away. What’s happening right now, in this room, happens forever.” I stared hard at her; my eyes colored the air between us. It seemed for a moment that she might cry but she clamped her mouth shut and tried to think of how to answer me.

“Don’t you speak to me in that way,” is what she finally said.

“We try to do what we think is best,” Arthur said.

“Oh stop it, stop it, for God’s sake, you are both such liars.” I heard my voice as an alien thing, the words clumsily attached to my emotions. My truest, most solid impulse was to push them down, to kick at them, to cause them some physical agony—I knew there was no inner pain I could inflict that would match mine. And I knew, as well, that I was not going to hurt them, I was not even going to touch them.

“You’re not allowed to see her anyhow,” said Rose. “If you even try to, they can revoke your parole.”

“They’re not going to revoke my parole for reading old letters.”

“We’re afraid for you,” Arthur said. “That’s why the letters aren’t here.”

There was nothing to say. I didn’t want to argue with them. It might have been good for me to enunciate my fury but I wasn’t interested in that sort of psychological housekeeping. I was angry but I was peculiarly bored with my anger. It was connected to a part of my world that I didn’t care very much about—it didn’t connect me to the letters. If I couldn’t live in the center of the life I had known, once, the only life I believed in, then I would rather live in dreams. And so I may have said more. The argument may have sputtered on for another few minutes, but I no longer cared and I don’t remember anything about it. I was gone, elsewhere. I was listening to my heart beat—it was pounding, really. It was going faster than it should but I followed its beat and it took me in, took me away. My eyes remained on Arthur and Rose but what I saw was Jade walking through that enormous model heart in the Museum of Science and Industry, touching the veins with her small hands, gazing this way and that, her mouth a little open, stumbling but not seeming to notice that she had. Then we walked home, back to her house on Dorchester. I took her hand, and she stroked mine with her thumb, knowing that if I wasn’t reassured I would lose courage and let it go. When we reached her house she said she hoped her whole family was home. I asked her why and she said she wanted them all to see me. I was so startled that I asked her why and she did me the kindness of pretending she didn’t hear. Then we walked up to the big wooden porch that circled halfway around the house, like a broken Saturn ring. There were bicycles parked on the porch. A wicker couch, yellow with white cushions. A footstool, a flyswatter, an open book. On a little oak table was a glass of iced coffee, milky, with ice cubes stacked in it like bricks. There were tiny flies swimming around the top of the glass, their wings the size of commas, trying to stay alive. Jade saw this—we both looked in the glass at the same instant, but that kind of thing would always happen to us, until it would no longer surprise us but just make us laugh—and she said something like Oh those poor things, or Poor little beasts—the whole family liked that word: beasts—and she threw the coffee over the