Endless Love

judging himself than he was now, I could certainly not expect anything but the most partisan view of me. Now that we had, in his mind, fused into one person and that person was the man he had always wanted to be, I operated with a moral blank check—my mere signature was good anywhere.

Someone was blowing on his automobile horn, that shave and a haircut ditty, as if 34th Street was Elm Street in some midwestern summer town, teenagers out for a night of warm beer and starlight, calling for the class jock. Beep beep. Yo Ed-diiiiie.…

“David?” whispered Jade. Her voice was steady, but turned a bit on its side from the brief sleep.

I answered with a sound.

“You can’t sleep on the floor?” she said. She stretched her legs, pointing her toes and urging them toward the edge of the bed. I heard it. She let out a low moan as she climbed further out of sleep. I sat up again and looked at her. Her head was half propped up on the pillow. Chin on her chest, reverberating out in a ring of flesh, more like an infant’s than an old woman’s. Her eyes closed again, shuddered, submitting their sightless wanderings to the curious hum of her intelligence. Opened. Looking down at me.

“I’m not trying to sleep,” I said.

“Is the floor too hard?” she said.

I was going to say no but I caught myself, realizing she wanted a different answer. “No, it’s OK,” I said, in a polite voice, deliberately uncertain. What coyness, but easy to forgive. The formal little bow before the sweaty whirling ecstasy of a barn dance.

“It feels ridiculous, you on the floor,” she said. Her neck swelled, lower lip fattened: she was suppressing a yawn, didn’t want me to know she was still half gone.

“Always a gentleman,” I said.

“Well,” said Jade. A pause. It couldn’t have been a more sultry silence if she’d practiced it for years—before the mirror, in the woods alone, spare moments. “May as well climb in.” Summer camp lingo. An older sister offering an hour’s comfort to poor Peewee after his nightmare.

You’re sure? I was going to say. But I had no hope of feigning such innocence. “I want to,” I said. I clambered to my feet. A breeze from somewhere rippled across the room, a wavy line, an electrical current. My penis was erect and felt harder than any part of my body—my teeth, my skull. The tip of my cock poked through the fold of my Hanes underwear: it looked so clumsy, comic and frightened, like a stagehand caught on the wrong side of the curtain.

She tossed the second pillow onto what was now my side of the bed, the pillow she had embraced, anointed. The top buttons of her pajama jacket were unfastened; I could have glanced in and seen her breasts. Like Stu Neihardt. I got into bed carefully. She was right on the edge of her side. I settled myself near the edge of mine. On my back, staring at the ceiling, blinking often so she wouldn’t fail to notice I was wide awake. She was on her side, turned away from me, arm around the pillow, left leg straight and the right bent at the knee. She was covered to the shoulder by the sheet, but the blanket on her side had been pulled down to her waist.

“Well, here we are again,” said Jade.

There was a sense of humor somewhere in that. It confused me, put me on guard. I chose not to answer.

“It just seemed ridiculous, you on the floor,” she said after a few moments.

We lay in silence, yet there is no question but that we engaged in deep cellular conversation and were in a sense already beginning to make love. I listened to Jade breathe, noted minute shiftings of her weight. I wanted to empty my mind so I could penetrate Jade’s thoughts: I wasn’t sure if I believed in trances and ESP but I wanted to be totally receptive to any message she might send me. I think my fantasy was that I would be able to decode her silent request, to make it explicit and encouraging: that in the hush of my brain I would hear her voice saying, “David, touch me.” I heard nothing of the sort; it wouldn’t be that easy after all. But I did rid myself of the ceaseless nervous internal chatter. Frivolous, passing awareness was receding. I listened to her lungs fill, felt the oxygen balloon and press against the pink wet walls, then make an acrobat’s turn on the exhale. I carefully touched my erection. It felt as if its root spanned my entire body, ganglia down through my thighs, the backs of my legs, clinging to the soles of my feet and up through my belly, shooting straight up to my throat. A fly slowly ticked against a windowshade, or a lampshade, something paper. Jade changed position, slightly. She rubbed the back of her foot against the sheet—nervousness? Or satisfying an itch? A signal of wakeful- ness, like my batting eyes.

I was on my side now, facing her back, the ends of her hair just over the satin collar of her pajamas, her body and its illusion of massiveness in the near dark.

I fixed my eyes and all their energies onto the back of her head. Psychic trick from fifth grade. Make someone turn around. Make Arlene Davenport blush by staring at the backs of her ears. Make Ira Millman scratch the back of his head by fixing the old beady eyes on his silky black hair. Works, too.

“It’s so goddamned hot in here,” mumbled Jade. As if to herself? Not sure. She squirmed beneath the covers, moved her arm. About to rip them off her. But no. “Like August,” she said.

The heat. Did she mean I was moving too close to her? Pressing the warmth of my own blood in on her.

I thought of her blood and in a dizzy leap of hunger and exhaustion I longed to be her blood, to be the stuff that made the constant circuit through every inch of her.

Her menstrual blood.

The Tampax string curled into her pubic hair.

Her vagina. The lips yielding to my touch, moistening, opening. To look inside the body. To be inside her body. Joined.

The oak-colored birthmark on the inside of her thigh.

Covering her belly with kisses, lips cupped over her belly button, tongue touching the wrinkled recess, the twin orbits of down rising in excitement.

Her hand on the top of my head. Pushing me down. Gently. Further, oh a little further.

Jade rolled onto her back. Knees raised, feet flat on mattress, hands folded beneath the sheet, resting on her belly. Looking at me through the corners of her eyes.

“What are you thinking?” she said.

But she hated that question. She thought it pushed people apart, made it more difficult to speak the truth. A simultaneous violation of privacy and intimacy.

She’d changed.

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said.

She shook her head. Sighed. “Stupid question,” she said. “Sorry.” She turned her head away for a moment and then returned her open gaze to the ceiling.

Looking at her profile. Her narrow nose. (“The Jewish girls hate me for my nose.”) The deep chin furrow. The large U- shaped forehead that always looked too delicate, like painted glass.

“I don’t know, David,” she whispered—the sudden whisper was like being pulled into an alcove. “One of us might have to sleep on the floor after all.”

I reached across and touched her shoulder. She allowed herself no reaction and in my confusion of feelings I almost withdrew again, but I kept my touch upon her.

She turned her head. We were directly face to face.

“It’s so strange, isn’t it?” she said.

I nodded, but not in a way that meant I thought it was strange. It meant that I heard her. It only meant yes, a larger, inclusive yes. An intoxicated yes…

We were silent again. The silences were larger now, richer, more familiar: there was no dead air in them. I felt her streaming toward me in the silence. We were suddenly and again at the point where not making an effort brought us closer.

My touch became heavier. I didn’t move closer to her but the thought of it seemed to shift my weight.

“I wanted you to touch me,” Jade said. She had an impulse to turn away from me but she didn’t.

“I wasn’t sure,” I said. My voice surprised me; it was thick, unstable, something swollen out of its normal confines.

“But we better stop,” she said. “I feel so restless. It’s a sexual thing. Hungry. That old desperate thing. You get to depend on sex. Depend on coming, on a goddamned release, to be perfectly frank. And there’s a way in which you could be anyone, David. I really feel it would be unfair.” As she said it, she brought