candy corn.
“What is it?” I asked, though I fairly well knew.
“I can’t believe how stupid this is,” she said. “Susan. I saw her on the other side of the street and I just don’t have the courage to run into her. It can’t be like this. I have to call her.”
We were inside that variety store and it was like being inside a different decade: old women in faded sweaters, with their eyeglasses hanging onto their bosoms from silvery chains; bins of loose chocolates, bridge mix, peanut brittle; the strange hush of a store lacking Muzak; displays of cheap underwear and thin, powder blue socks; coloring books and cap guns. Jade and I wandered aimlessly through the aisles. Her hands were in her pockets and she kept her eyes cast down. She was walking fast, pulling ahead of me, and I reached out to take her arm. She allowed me to stop her and then I turned her and put my arms around her.
“It seemed so perfectly natural to be with Susan when we were together,” Jade said, as I held her. “But I don’t think I’d be treating her like this if she was a man. It’s because she’s a woman and I loved her.”
The difficulty inherent in choosing to love another woman and now the long pull of conscience in the affair’s aftermath made the time with Susan more intimate and enviable than all of the other parts of Jade’s life that I’d missed. As I held her in that antique dime store and watched the few customers circulating lazily throughout the store—the ten-year-old girls choosing party favors, an old man inspecting a tiny cactus plant—I thought of how the difficulty of a connection increases its intensity. I thought of how alive with courage and desire that love must have been to carry Jade past the boundary of her established sexuality.
We walked around the store. Jade almost took my hand; her fingers brushed against me and then she moved away.
“Susan’s a powerful person,” she said. “The most powerful person I’ve ever known. She lives inside her feelings like a queen in her castle. I admired her so much. Envy too, I guess. She could take herself so seriously and never seem stupid, or self-involved. I had such a case of hero-worship with her, God, it was months before I realized that it was also something more. That I…”
“I don’t know how to be in this conversation,” I said. “I think we have to stop. Just for now.”
Jade nodded. We were in front of a bin of phonograph records.
“I want to know it,” I said. “I just need a little breathing space. I know it was important to you and I suppose it was difficult, too, and maybe even scary. But I was feeling myself starting to get jealous. I know I don’t have a right to—”
“It wasn’t scary,” Jade said. “The only love I’ve ever known that has scared me has been with you. Being with Susan wasn’t frightening. It wasn’t at all.”
“It seems that it was very intense,” I said.
“What else is there? I’m not casual.”
“I know,” I said, my voice slipping away.
“We don’t have to talk about it.”
“No. That’s not what I mean. I just need to hear it in stages. It’s stupid. I have no right to say this. Don’t listen to me. Tell me the rest. Tell me it all.”
“It’s not necessary,” said Jade. “It’s mine.”
And so we dropped all talk of Susan Henry and the silence hovered over us, as watchful as a bird of prey. I longed to ask Jade to speak to me about her love with Susan but, temporarily at least, I’d forfeited the right. We ate dinner at Gertrude that night and Jade didn’t say a word at the table, though we ate with seven others. She went upstairs before me, and when I followed her up to the attic some fifteen minutes later, Jade was in bed and all the lights were off. I got undressed and lay next to her and after a while I put my hands on her breasts. She breathed heavily and didn’t stir; I knew she wasn’t really asleep.
The next morning we were hesitant with each other. It was our turn to do the weekly grocery shopping for the household. We shopped at a huge store called Price Chopper, and it didn’t seem like a piece of remarkable coincidence at all that halfway through our nervous shopping we were once again confronted with Susan Henry.
This time, Jade had no opportunity to flee. Susan appeared from around an aisle corner. She looked tall, tan, willowy, and toothy, rather like Joni Mitchell. Her straight hair was almost white; she wore a loose, pale blue dress and little sandals. Her long arms were bare and she wore turquoise and silver bracelets. Her eyes remained mysterious behind brown-tinted sunglasses.
“Beep beep,” said Susan, giving our cart a small jostle.
“Hello, Susan,” said Jade, her voice a metaphor for nights of cigarettes and grain alcohol.
“Hello,” said Susan. Her voice was lilting, a trifle cute—or trying to be. I could feel her effort and it drew me toward her for an instant.
Jade looked into Susan’s cart. “Still buying junk food?” she said.
“That’s right!” said Susan.
Jade shrugged. Then: “Susan Henry? David Axelrod.” Pointing to us as she said our names.
I offered my handshake. As romantic victor I felt it was my place. Susan looked at me as if the handshake were some archaic salute and then, nodding as if remembering, took my hand and shook it with a certain irony.
“Hello, David,” she said. She gave no indication of ever having heard of me.
“Hello,” I said. I thought the confident thing to do was smile, but I learned later from Jade that it looked more like a leer.
Susan focused her attention on Jade and began telling her something about a friend of theirs named Dina who’d just left for Cologne to study philosophy with someone who’d studied under Wittgenstein. The tone of the anecdote was admiring and ironic. The victory celebration dinner was described. Dina got drunk and spoke German all the rest of the night. Professor Asbury showed up for a while, moving gracefully on his aluminum walker. Et cetera. I wondered if the purpose of the story was to make Jade feel embarrassed at not being invited, but Jade didn’t seem at all upset.
Then, suddenly, the anecdote was over and my wandering attention was stopped short by the silence. Susan dropped her gaze for a moment. She looked jittery, with those kind of raw nerves that you get when you feel doomed to be misunderstood.
“What are the chances of our having a talk?” she said to Jade.
Jade didn’t answer right away—not out of indecision but as a way of acknowledging the difficulty of Susan’s gesture.
“We should talk,” said Jade.
“I’m going to Boston this evening,” Susan said. “For five days.”
Jade nodded. “To stay with Paula?”
“Yes.”
“Say hello, OK?”
“I’d like to have that talk before I leave,” Susan said. Her shyness had passed; she knew as well as I did that Jade would go along.
Jade almost turned toward me to see if that would be acceptable, but she stopped herself. “We can,” she said, with somber, almost corny judiciousness.
The situation struck me as fairly intolerable, but I did my best with it. I slipped my arm around Jade’s waist and pressed her to me for a moment. “Why don’t I finish up with the shopping?” I said. “I’m the best shopper anyhow.”
“OK. That would be fine,” Jade said. She sounded uncertain, formal. Susan was staring off down the aisle, hurtling her attention far away for the moment. She was refusing to look at me. I engaged Jade in a conversation about groceries—did Anemone like creamy or chunky peanut butter? What was the name of that delicious breakfast cereal Oliver had made for us the day before?—and finally Susan backed her cart up and announced she was going to finish her shopping and would meet Jade in a few minutes at the front of the store.
“Well, that’s Susan Henry,” Jade said.
“That’s all right. It had to happen. Running into her.”
“She seems so nervous. It’s not like her. Susan’s totally confident
“Well, people change,” I said, trying to be inconsequential but revealing more of my own resentment than I
