Endless Love

inside of her made me want to make love. Yet it was alien for me to think of a woman so much older than me in sexual terms. I had never loved an older woman. I was not one of those eight-year-old boys who want to marry their mother. I had never had a crush on a teacher, never stared longingly at a friend’s older sister, and wasn’t interested in movie stars or even those naked models in the skin magazines. They were too old and I was blind to them. The most erotic photograph of my early adolescence was from a National Geographic article about the Seychelle Islands and it was of a half-naked African girl walking along the beach—she was just my age or perhaps a year younger.

“I could never go to bed with you, Ann. I could never do that.”

I shook my head. I wanted to put my arms around her and I wanted her arms around me: I was in terror and I wanted her to protect me.

“I think you’re misunderstanding me,” Ann said. “I’m not doing this because of what they said. It’s you. I want you. I want this night with you.”

“I want to be with you,” I said. “I’ve been in agony for half this night but it’s heaven anyhow because it’s here, with you, and this is my real and only life. But I can’t do the other. Don’t laugh at me for saying this, please, but I can’t make love with anyone until I see Jade again, until I can be with her. It’s very difficult but it’s the only way I can do it. It would be worse if I ever went with anyone else. It would put me further from Jade than ever. You know, it’s not even loyalty, probably, it’s fear. I have to wait.”

Ann’s hands were closed into fists and she rested one on either leg. She was flushed, no longer looking at me. If she wanted to hurt me, it was the perfect time to tell me of Jade’s lovers, and I waited for the worst, already telling myself that it wasn’t necessarily true, that Ann was only speaking out of spite.

“I should be angry,” Ann said.

“No.”

“Yes. I should be. I should be furious. It’s elementary, my dear Watson.” She stopped, closed her eyes, amazed she had made light of herself. “This is what all anger is. Being denied. Not being held. Not being satisfied. This is war and mayhem and I should be in a rage. I’m so sick of myself. I’m still waiting for life to begin.”

“I better go,” I said. My heart was pounding; it felt frail and absolutely out of control. I felt very close to dying on the spot and not at all concerned.

Ann got up and went to the windows. I wondered if she was going to do something horrible but she seemed calm.

“I’ll go,” I said, standing. The blood that raced to my head was thick with stars and slashes of colored light. “I’m sorry about tonight. I’d like to call you tomorrow. That’s what I’ll do. But I’ll understand if you don’t let me —”

“It’s late,” Ann said. I could see she was looking at my reflection in the window. “And you don’t know your way around.” She turned toward me, her arms folded over her chest. “Sit down,” she said, and when I did she walked past me and down the hall.

She was back in a moment carrying a pillow, sheets, and a pale blue blanket. “Get up,” she said.

Ann smoothed the sheets onto the sofa. She was squinting, furrowing her forehead, and poking savagely at the corners of the sheets. I stood by, saying nothing. She was finished in a minute. “That’s where you’ll sleep. You’ll be in good company. We’ve all put in our nights on this sofa.” She stepped back and looked down at the sofa, remembering the people who’d slept on it.

“I’ve got pajamas. They belong to Keith and they’ll fit you. Do you need them?”

I shook my head.

“One rule. When I get up, you get up. I write in the morning so it’ll be toast, coffee, and goodbye.”

“OK.”

She nodded. The circles beneath her eyes were royal blue and the texture of crushed velvet. She was looking directly at me now, inviting me to meet her steady, open gaze and come to some silent understanding of what we’d just been through. But I didn’t have the strength to fight my evasive impulses. I glanced from side to side and when I did fix my eyes on hers I wasn’t really seeing anything. The only part of me that was worth calling alive was by now seething with a very simple thought: in moments I would be lying on a spot upon which Jade had lain.

Ann went to her bedroom. I couldn’t tell if she’d closed the door or not. I heard a long unzipping sound but not much else. I turned off the lamps and sat on the edge of the sofa and undressed in the dark. The sheets were cool and softer than any I’d ever touched. The blanket felt like cashmere and when I pulled it over my shoulders the feel of its satiny border touched off a memory of a cell meeting at my parents’. I was very young and on my parents’ bed, where the comrades had dropped their coats. I was caressing the satin lining of someone’s coat. I’d just learned the word grand and I repeated to myself, “This is grand.” Other memories. Coming fast and unbeckoned. Glimpses of things I’d seen years ago. The view from my room in Rockville. Christmas decorations on State Street. The images came in no order and I wasn’t trying to remember or understand. It felt as if a part of my brain was shorting out.

I didn’t want to think, yet I didn’t want to fall asleep too quickly. I wanted to be awake on the sofa Jade had slept on. I rolled onto my stomach and held the pillow close, so it touched me from my lips to my belly. The blanket had slipped half off me but I wasn’t cold. The room was very warm and the only reason Ann gave me a blanket was she remembered I liked to sleep with some weight covering my body. And how Jade sweated through summer nights with me, steaming with me beneath the blanket through a long martyring July.

I was crushing my genitals as hard as I could against the sofa and I turned onto my back. The room was slowly brightening and I wondered if it was getting near dawn. No. The windows were still slate black. I got up on one elbow and looked down the corridor toward Ann’s room. I couldn’t see the door but I saw the light from her room, coming out in a thin, pale wedge and stopping about ten feet from where I lay.

Like any visitor, I’d heard a hundred strange, small sounds since I’d turned off the lights. Sounds from the street, from the wall, and I knew enough to pay no attention. But now, I heard a sound from Ann’s room. She was dialing her telephone. Slowly at first, with pauses between each digit, and then faster and louder. The clicking of the dial was like tiny footsteps racing from her to me. My first thought was that Ann was calling the police. She was going to tell them that someone who the court had ordered to keep away from her had broken his parole and was now sleeping in the living room.

I held my breath. There was silence in her room. Silence and more silence. The phone was ringing on the other end of the line. It couldn’t be the police; they pick up right away. I heard Ann shift in her bed and then I heard her murmur:

“Hello, Jonathan. It’s Ann. I’m waking you.”

A few moment’s silence, and then Ann’s voice again.

“I know it’s late. But I’m still awake. I am very much awake…. Please. I’m sorry. I didn’t call up to argue with you. I know it’s very late. You know I don’t do these things. You should know that I was worried about you.…I didn’t know if you came when I was out. Or maybe you decided not to show up after all.…It is? Oh. Well, I’m sorry-glad. …Jonathan. You’re way off target. I’m going to show you how uncomplex I am. Are you listening? I want you to get in a cab and come down here and make love to me.…Yes.…Do I sound drunk?…No. I’m not scared, I’m just lonely. But I didn’t call because I’m lonely. I called—…Oh Jonathan. You’re so well trained. Everybody knows what time it is, Jonathan. And we are all acutely aware of your commitments tomorrow morning.”

She hung up. A moment after that she turned off the light.

But a minute or two later Ann turned the light on again. She picked up the phone and began dialing what I guessed was Jonathan’s number. Don’t do it, Ann, I said to myself. Please don’t do it.

In the middle of the fourth or fifth digit, with the dial still clicking in its arc, she dropped the receiver into the cradle and turned off the light, this time for good.

A moment after that, I was unconscious. The last thing I saw was the change in the windows: the glass had turned a flat grayish blue.

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