Endless Love

The next morning I was up long before Ann. The windows were brilliant with sunlight; the dust on their outside looked like a kind of electrical gauze. I crept about like a burglar, wondering if I should leave immediately. The bathroom was halfway between her bed and the living room and as foul, discolored, and weak as I felt I didn’t want to take even one step in her direction. I dressed and slunk into the small kitchen to wash.

I’d forgotten that Ann’s personal phonebook was hanging next to the kitchen phone. Next to that was a pad of notepaper and a felt-tipped pen. I gave myself a moment to reconsider the small social treachery I was about to commit and then, after turning on the hot water and adjusting the faucet so the cloudy steam would hit on the quietest part of the sink, I opened the beige leather phonebook and paged it open to B. There were no Butterfields. I turned to J and there it was, Jade, your phone, your address, my first new knowledge of you in four years. I tore off a page of the notepaper and wrote using my hand as a desk. My handwriting was almost illegible; it looked as if it were reflected in a broken mirror. But in scrawl, in pieces, in lunatic peaks and valleys I recorded what I needed. Had any jewel thief with a bagful of diamonds felt greater exhilaration than mine? Had any skydiver tumbling free through the sweet ether of space felt less subject to the normal rules of life on earth? You were in Stoughton, Vermont, living on a street called West. There were three phone numbers next to your name, all written in different pens, at different times. Even then I realized this meant that you were often away from your home, but the agitation this caused me was nothing to the exhilaration of being closer to you than I’d been since the last time we touched.

I wondered if Ann was staying in her room because she was waiting for me to leave. I couldn’t tell from the sun what time it was but I was sure it was at least noon. I stripped the sheets and blanket off the sofa and folded everything as best I could. Then I looked through The New Yorker, pretending to myself that I was looking for a good jazz club or a terrific play. Next to my return ticket to Chicago, my only assets were ninety dollars. I owed the hotel at least twenty and though I already had much more than I’d expected the trip to bring me, I was quickly plunged into despair at the thought of having to leave New York because I was out of money. I continued to flip through the magazine, glancing at the cartoons and squinting at the ads: fur coats, ruby bracelets, Scotch that advertised itself as the most expensive in the world. It amazed me how much money other people had—truly astonished me, as if it was the first I’d heard of it.

I must have drifted. My fatigue had been pretty much untouched by my few restless hours of sleep so perhaps I dozed off for a moment. I remember thinking of what it would be like if Jade and I had a lot of money. Would we spend it all on ourselves? Give it away? Start a foundation that would award grants to people who wanted to stop everything else in their lives and live by the most romantic, unreasonable impulses of their hearts? A monastery for lovers, though of course not at all monastic. The thought was, to be sure, far from profound, but it had a great many tributaries and perhaps I was paddling my way down one of those when Ann entered the room. I hadn’t heard her wake, hadn’t heard her footsteps, but when I turned away from the glarey windows she was standing at the foot of the sofa, dressed in blue jeans and a red silk shirt.

“How long have you been up?” Ann asked, in a rather sharp voice.

I was certain for a moment that if I’d had any sense, any real idea of how the world worked, then I would have damn well made sure that I was out of there before Ann woke up.

“A few minutes,” I said.

“About last night…” said Ann.

Don’t say it, I thought.

“It’s OK, really,” I said, too quickly.

“Look, if I was Hugh’s new girl I’d write it all off on the stars. Ingrid likes the astrological explanation. Venus goes into one phase and she’s unfaithful. Mars bumps into the moon and she throws a stapler at Hugh.” Suddenly, Ann sneezed, a most diminutive sneeze, gentler than a cat’s. “Oh God, my head. I doubt I got three hours sleep.”

“You don’t feel well?”

“I’m not involved with how I’m feeling.” She covered her face and rubbed her eyes with her fingertips. “I was a harpie last night, no, a Medusa. Finally, I owe you an apology.”

“No. We don’t need to explain to each other.”

“I was being mean. I want to explain one thing. About Jade. I think I wanted you to believe that she never thinks about you, never mentions you. For some reason, I thought I wanted you to feel absolutely shipwrecked. But the truth is she does think about you still. Don’t take this in the wrong way, David. I mean I’m quite sure she wouldn’t want me to talk about it with you, but I think it’s fair that you know. You haven’t faded from her…her memory. And maybe that will be consolation for last night, for me putting you on the spot like that.”

I struggled to get up from the couch; my legs were wayward and weak. My deepest impulse was to put my arms around her, in gratitude, in fellowship, but instead I placed my hand on the side of her face. Her skin was soft, amazingly soft, and my fingernails were uneven and lined with dirt. She almost pulled away from my touch but she stopped herself.

“I’m going to kick you out now,” she said.

“For good?”

“For the day anyhow. It’s ten o’clock. I’m going to work.” She gestured with her eyes to the table that held her typewriter.

“Can I call you later?”

“I can’t imagine where we can go from here.”

“We can have dinner.”

“We had dinner yesterday.” She shook her head. “OK. Call me. At six. I want you to. But be prepared for me to give you the brush, OK? I’m still half catatonic and I don’t know what I’m going to feel about last night after my tenth cup of coffee.”

As soon as I was back in my hotel I took off my dirty clothes, brushed my teeth, and sat naked on the bumpy white bedspread with Jade’s phone numbers in front of me. I picked up the phone and gave the operator the first number on the list. I didn’t want to waste any time. I was still sluggish from the night and absolutely high from finding the numbers: there would be no time when I’d be less apprehensive about making the call, less capable of a second thought. I heard whoever ran the phone in the lobby of the McAlpin dialing the Vermont number and the throaty clicking of the turning dial filled me with rapture.

Her phone began to ring. In a panic, I almost hung up, thinking You must be out of your mind. Someone picked up the phone on the third ring, a woman, and said hello with a cheerfulness as vivid as the taste of an orange.

“Is Jade Butterfield home?” I asked.

This is Jade, the woman answered in my imagination, and the thought of it sent my heart soaring upward: my throat throbbed like a bullfrog’s.

“She isn’t here,” the woman said. “Can I take a message?”

I called the second number and let it ring a dozen times before acknowledging it was trilling away in an empty house. Then came the third number, and this time I was answered by a young man who sounded as handsome and relaxed as the first woman had sounded friendly.

“I’m calling Jade,” I said. “Is she there?”

There was a pause—memory of heartbreak? cuckold’s aphasia?—and then he said, “I don’t think she’s here. You want to hang on? So I can check?”

“Please.” He seemed genuinely doubtful whether or not she was there, though I couldn’t say if this meant her presence was in question or if she might not be accepting calls.

“Who’s this?” he asked, the voice friendly and motiveless.

I hesitated. “This is Dave,” I said. Dave? Who was that supposed to befuddle? That wasn’t a mask; it was a false nose. I listened to my intermediary’s footsteps disappear on the other end of the line and imagined him walking through an enormous slipping-away Victorian house, not unlike the Butterfield house in Chicago but much larger, and intersected by drafts, with mattresses on the floor, Marx Brothers posters on the walls, and cartons of milk name-tagged in the Korean War refrigerator. Ah: one of those informal, nonideological college communes. A bunch of great guys and gals pitching in and saving on the rent.

“She’s not here,” said handsome Sean, or Philip, the commune’s champion kyacker. “I didn’t