The waitress appeared, dressed as a cowgirl. I ordered our desserts. The women in the elevator, I remembered, had been dressed as cowgirls, the elevator that had brought Jade to my room at the Hotel McAlpin.
“I like this restaurant,” I said.
“I do too. Even though all the waitresses flirt with you.”
“They do not.”
“Oh, you poor, poor, poor, poor, poor naive boy. Even tonight our waitress was leaning over you.”
“A leaning violation?”
“I’m serious! Her breast was almost touching you. That kind of stuff’s always going on.”
“I wish.”
“You don’t need to wish. They all know, everyone does.”
“Know what?”
“That you’re you, who you are. Mr. Fuck-Machine.”
The waitress came with our pie, a coffee for me, and milk for Jade. She got nowhere near me as she placed the cups and plates on the table.
“You see?” Jade said, when the waitress left.
“See what?”
“Oh, you’re just going to argue. You don’t see what I see. And it’s just as well. I need a nonegotistical man. They’re hard to find, you know.”
“I’m not nonegotistical.”
“Pretty much.”
“Not at all. No matter what happened, and no matter what people said about me, I wanted to be with you.”
“That’s not egotism.”
“Yes it is. Because I thought I deserved it. Me and no one else.”
“You’re going to make me cry.”
“Why?”
“Because you touch me where it’s always tender.”
It was dark and starless when we left Rustler’s. The parking lot was right off the highway and you had to nose your car out very carefully because everyone drove fifty or sixty miles per hour and there were no signs or lights to help you. It astonished me that something as planned and official as a restaurant parking lot could be so dangerous; it seemed to mean that life itself was so essentially dicey that there was a limit to how much you could do to make it safe. The high insecty whine of the cars speeding by. The smell of grass, fresh tar. The Beach Boys on the car radio. Jade at the wheel, waiting for an opening in the traffic, a place for us. Her eyes were hooded from the beers we had with dinner—she had no capacity for alcohol. Passing headlights cast strips of white across her face. Jade pressed the accelerator, I prepared for sudden death, and then we were out in traffic, our tires whistling.
It was a five-mile drive home. An old song by Bobby Hebb called “Sunny” came on the radio and I was going to ask Jade if she remembered it, but then I told myself of course she did. I was thinking about Susan Henry, with more ease now because no matter what happened it couldn’t have made much difference, but I was thinking about her all the same. In the restaurant, I’d wanted to ask Jade if she’d ever eaten there with Susan. Ridiculous question. So annoying and without importance. I suppressed it, but it hovered within me, like a sneeze.
Jade turned off the radio when an ad for joining the Army came on.
“I want to thank you,” she said. “I didn’t want to talk about being with Susan today and you knew it.”
“Was it hard?”
Jade nodded. “Very.”
I felt my stomach turn.
We moved off Route 2, drove past an abandoned paper mill, and headed toward home. Jade was driving much too fast for narrow streets. It wasn’t like her. She was a great believer in highway safety; she wouldn’t even turn the ignition if you didn’t fasten your safety belt. I thought about watching the back of her head when she was sitting in Susan’s car, about Susan knocking into our shopping cart, and then an image, vaguely sexual, began to take shape in my mind—hands touching, an embrace. I let it recede. Jade continued to speed along. Her jaw was set forward; she seemed deliberately unblinking; her arms were straight and stiff. I didn’t want to look at her because I didn’t want to know what she was thinking. I put my hand out the window and cupped my fingers. The force of the sweet night air as we sped homeward was forceful, oppressive, something alive pressing against me.
“She frightened me,” Jade said, suddenly. She touched the cigarette lighter with her fingertips and then grabbed the steering wheel again.
“How?”
“By what she thinks. About us. Me. It’s so hard with Susan because she’s always so convinced she’s right. And she is right a lot, of course. She really is perceptive. But sometimes she doesn’t know what the hell she’s talking about, only you can’t tell because she says it in the same super-convinced way. She takes aim and charges right at you, and if you resist it at all, she pushes that much harder. She’s like Keith in a way. I mean she remembers everything. And she can take power with it. Keith doesn’t do that. Keith will throw it in your face if he thinks you’re trying to hurt him, but he doesn’t try to take power. He doesn’t want it, but Susan does.”
“What did she say?”
“A lot of things. But the thing that made me…I don’t know. Here’s what: She says I use you.”
“For what?”
“It’s complicated. No. Not that. It’s just hard to say. It all has to do with my fucked-up family and my feelings about them. She thinks I use you against my family,” Jade said. “But in the most awful way. To really destroy them. She says you were acting as my agent when you set the fire. She says it was really me.”
“No. It was me.”
“I know. But it was you doing what I wanted. Reading my mind. We always do that anyhow. We always know each other right down to the bottom. I wanted something to happen and you made sure it did. I could have seen it in you from the beginning, the possibility. The way you charmed yourself into the middle of everything and then went wild. You know, even the fact that you could virtually become a member of the family galled me, if you want to know. There always seemed to be room for one more and in the meanwhile we got nothing. They took you right in—Ann did. And still does. But there was no room. There may have been room for me to have a lover but there wasn’t any place for a new Butterfield. And that’s what you were becoming. And I knew you would and I also knew that sooner or later the whole thing would explode.”
“I don’t think you knew that. You’re blaming yourself.”
“I think I did. And I wanted it. Even after it happened. I felt so strange. Grief and all that, but mixed up. I was glad, I think, that the family fell apart. I didn’t know it would
“Is this Susan talking or you? You sound convinced.”
“I’m not convinced. I’m spinning. And you being in New York when Hugh got killed doesn’t make it any easier, for obvious reasons. It’s like you were the agent of my murderous spirit again.”
I looked out the window. We’d just sped past our house. Every light was on except in the attic. I turned the side-view mirror and watched the house get smaller. A few hundred feet later, the blacktop turned to gravel; we were heading out toward where a few of the area’s last real farms were. The tires hit the gravel, lifting a spray of stones that bounced and splattered against Colleen’s car.
“Go easy,” I said. But of course all that was really on my mind at that moment was the desire to tell Jade as much of the truth as I knew about Hugh’s death. The pull of that confession was nearly hypnotic, like the urge to leap that sometimes overcomes you when you are on the balcony of a very high building; only now it didn’t seem as if destruction was inevitable, or that it would take a miracle to save me, a violation of nature’s law. It seemed that if I spoke truthfully now I would be doing what was best for both of us, drawing us closer, silencing that persistent hum of ambiguity that droned always between us.
We drove past the growing corn, an indistinct mass in the heavy night. A small farmhouse with the light shining behind gingham curtains. The piercing, suspenseful twitter of crickets. The last of the fireflies, their
