Endless Love

Ann poured two more drinks. She smiled and said, “I knew you’d sit in that chair.”

“How?”

She sipped from her glass. “Because you knew I’d sit on the sofa and you don’t think it would be safe to sit next to me.”

“Safe?”

Ann nodded. Her lips were pressed tightly closed, narrowing her face and deepening the lines at the corners of her mouth. “Sit next to me,” she said. “I want you to.”

I didn’t say anything, nor did I move.

“I think about you,” Ann said. “All the time. I return to my thoughts of you, my memories, my ideas, like a secret vice. You’re my hidden imported chocolates. Hugh used to have these old, I mean really old pictures of naked girls he picked up in Europe during the war, and he kept them—who knows? Somewhere in his underwear drawer. He had a yen for those pictures, even with a wife and a houseful of kids. They were his private sex life. After a tough day or a disappointment in the sack with me, he’d fish out those pictures. Never in front of me. Part of the thrill was sneaking it. It was like a kid and his rag-tag security blanket, but much sadder and more desperate, because the older you get the more sad and desperate everything is—not more serious, mind you, but more irrevocable.” She took another swallow of tequila, a longer one, almost emptying the glass. “I’m rattled,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m talking about.” She closed her eyes. “And it feels so good.”

“Ann,” I said, leaning forward and raising my voice to drown the pounding of my heart and the dark frantic sloshing of my blood, “you have to tell me if Jade—” I stopped; anxiety coated my eyes and I looked at Ann as if through the far end of a telescope. She was shaking her head.

“Sit next to me,” she said. “I don’t want to sit here all alone.”

I stood up. It was like wearing someone else’s glasses, those thick spectacles that flash rainbows when the sun hits them from the side. My legs were long and stringy and my head was a balloon nuzzling the ceiling. Ann was a perfect miniature curled with remarkably human expectations on a sofa rendered in all its simplicity.

Yet when I sat next to her she was as large as ever, even a shade or two larger.

“The only things I regret,” she said, “and the only things I’ll ever regret are things I didn’t do. In the end, that’s what we mourn. The paths we didn’t take. The people we didn’t touch.”

That’s not true, I thought to myself, but I could barely feel my thoughts. I experienced my consciousness as a drowning man sees the shadows on the surface of the water.

“You seem frightened,” Ann said.

I nodded, but thinking of it now I realize that nod could have been taken to mean anything.

“I made love to a young man,” Ann said. “Younger than you. Not long ago. He chewed his nails. He was thin. He wore a white muslin shirt from India, see-through. I seduced him. Very expertly, if I can be allowed…” Her voice trailed off and then she glanced quickly at the black windows, as if she’d seen something. “He was terribly thin and terribly gentle. It was like making love to a butterfly. Too gentle. I hardly knew he was with me. He left in the middle of the night. It was like an erotic dream, except for the little half moons of fingernail in my bed the next morning.” She took my hand. The gesture was neither slow nor sudden. It was like someone engrossed in thought picking up a familiar object and absently feeling its weight, its texture. She skimmed her thumb along the side of my hand. “Are you terribly soft and gentle and careful when you make love, David?”

I waited in silence, hoping something would happen that would make none of this true. The scent of Ann’s perfume rushed toward me, as if she’d just put it on. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Of course you know. It’s absurd for you to be shy. Not at this point.”

“What point?” I said. “I don’t know what point we’re at.”

“We’re at the point where I’m asking you if you’re one of those terribly gentle lovers. And we’re also at the point where we say anything we care to. The mere fact that you’re here, David. For so many hours. We’re at the point where we admit the only reason we’re together is we need someone whom we hold nothing back with. Right now, David, I’m admitting that to you right now.”

She carried my hand to her face and pressed it to her cheek. She closed her eyes and nuzzled against my hand and I leaned toward her and kissed her half on the forehead and half on her hair.

“I need to be with you, Ann.”

“I knew this would happen,” she said. She opened her eyes and I took my hand away from her face. “I think that night, the night I came down and saw you with Jade and then made love with Hugh, I was making love with you, wasn’t I? You know, everyone thought we were lovers, you and I. Not then, not from the very start, but later. I often ached with curiosity to know how you explained yourself to poor Jade.”

“She asked me once. She asked me and I said it wasn’t true.”

“Well, I was flattered,” said Ann. “That the others were finally recognizing I could do such a thing. And that a boy like yourself, you know, certifiably insane with love for such a pretty little girl, that you’d want me. You know, whatever you said to Jade about it didn’t stop her believing it. It must have been a very tepid denial. And that made me believe you liked the others to suspect us and I was glad for that.”

“But Jade knew I could never be with anyone but her.”

“But that’s not so at all, David. She always believed you and I made love. Sometimes she thought it only happened once and other times she was sure we sneaked away together whenever we had the chance.”

“No,” I said. “She never believed that about us. She brought it up only once. It was nothing. I remember it very clearly. It was a beautiful day. We were sitting on the Midway. Jade was wearing sandals, brown shorts, and a sleeveless blouse that buttoned in the back, big tan buttons just the color of her hair. I was a little nervous because you could see in her blouse from the side, at the bottom of the armholes.”

“I’m sure you remember everything,” Ann said.

“No, wait. Listen to me. Jade had her head on my shoulder and when a breeze came up, her hair touched my face. We started talking, about what it would be like when we had kids and I said I’d be very jealous of the baby for having its whole body inside of her. And then she said—and this was so casual, it was right off the top of her head, it seemed—‘What’s going on between you and Mom?’ And I said I liked you, or something like that. Then she lifted her head off my shoulder and looked me right in the eyes and she smiled and said, ‘Did you ever fuck her?’ And I said, ‘Fuck her?’ but really loud so it made us nervous and we laughed. Then Jade said, ‘Well, did you?’ and I said, ‘You’ve got to be out of your gourd. You better tell me what you’ve been smoking because I’m going to try some as soon as we go home.’ And then, and this was the last of it, this was all she said, she said, ‘So you never made love with her or saw her naked or anything?’ I don’t even know why I answered her seriously, but I did. I shook my head and said no, never. And that was the end of it.”

“Except it wasn’t,” said Ann. “It never ended. Jade still believes we were lovers. Even the last time I saw her with the whole family together, or what we call being together these days, which is something very odd and altogether…” Ann fell silent and rubbed her eyes. “Oh God,” she muttered to herself. Then fixing her reddening eyes on me, she said, “I’m sorry. I’m unraveling. What I’m trying to say is Jade still believes we were lovers. At Keith’s a couple of months ago she brought it up in the most remarkably naked and ugly way. It all hinges on the fact that you and I had a secret bond. We were emotional conspirators. Lovers. Whatever Jade thinks of you, David, and I don’t know and don’t want to, but when she said she knew what was going on between us, I mean a few months ago, it was like living in Chicago, standing in the old kitchen. Only now, with everybody a little more bruised and callused, no one tried to smooth things over. They all joined in and they all let me know that they believed then that you and I were lovers and they believe it now. Jade was so relieved she actually wept—and you know how she is about tears, how hard it is for her to cry. It meant she wasn’t crazy, that the whole terror wasn’t the work of her imagination and her unconscious. They all agreed.” Ann took my hand again, gently now, with nothing casual or accidental, and absolutely nothing unconscious; she moved my thumb away from the bulk of my heavy, moist hand, moved it until the tendon stretched and began to hurt.

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she said.

“I don’t want to misunderstand you,” I said.

“Everyone thinks we’re lovers, or were, so maybe we ought to do them the favor of making them right,” Ann said. She waited for me to say something. Then she said, “I’d love to go to bed with you. I’d love to feel you in me.”

She was so close to me and her bravery alone made me want to hold her. And hearing that she wanted me