Endless Love

Two weeks after my round of tests, I was informed by Dr. Donner, who was supposed to be my psychiatrist, though I only saw him an hour and a half weekly, that I was fit to “take a crack” at being in the world again. He gave me several words of friendly advice, said I should “think seriously” about seeing a psychiatrist once I was released, that I should “feel free” to call on him if I had a problem I wanted to discuss, and that he hoped I’d learned about myself and how to deal with my problems while I was at Fox Run. “Especially with the hospital under constant attack by intolerant community people and opportunistic budget-cutters, it feels fine to be sending someone home with the feeling that we’ve done him a measure of good.”

And so I was released. I left Fox Run, walking across a bridge made of your marriage and Arthur’s death. I returned to the old apartment on Ellis, to recover from my long hospitalization and adjust to my freedom. I’d been through it all before, but what made it different was now I hadn’t the slightest illusion that everything might be transformed suddenly by the huge unreasonable magic of Reunion. I never once expected to see you from my window, even as I got out of the bed I’d slept in when I first joined my heart to you, the bed I had lain in in agony, waiting to rejoin you. When the phone rang I never thought it was you and the sight of the mailman shouldering his big leather pouch of letters and cards never tempted me to even wish. Arthur’s small estate had gone to Rose, but she divided it in half and so I was, for the first time in my life, solvent. Now, I could move out whenever I was ready, but I wasn’t ready. I needed to be home and Rose needed me there, too.

Jade. I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t…

It was difficult to find a job. I had a criminal record and it was worse for me to have been punished in a hospital than in a prison, in terms of how other people looked at me. I had very little education and not much of a work history. I was close to twenty-eight years old. I wanted a job in a large company, something to put me in contact with many people. Friends of the family tried to help but no one had anything for me; everyone was retired or simply too old to have much influence. I lived on my small legacy and took courses at Roosevelt University. It doesn’t matter what I took, though it wasn’t astronomy. I needed something that I was sure would help me find work and everyone told me that astronomers were having a very hard time of it.

On the good days, I felt like a shipwrecked man spotting the signs of some nearing but still invisible shore: a taste in the wind, a softness in the light, a sudden passage of gulls.

I hope this day finds you well. You don’t have to read a word of this, you know. I don’t want to make your husband nervous, or to embarrass you, or to make you remember things you’ve decided are best forgotten. I’ve come to the end, finally. Not of love. But of my power to say another word. I’ve no more need. My life is taking shape. I’m living with a woman and maybe someday we will marry, though I doubt it. She paints, too, by the way. Even better than you used to. She teaches at a university and is a full inch taller than I am. I won’t bother to tell you where I’m living now; it makes a more perfect sense for you not to know.

I don’t want to say it, I truly don’t, but if you’ve gone this far I suppose it’s obvious that what was ignited when I loved you continues to burn. But that’s of small importance to you now, and that’s how it should be.

Everything is in its place. The past rests, breathing faintly in the darkness. It no longer holds me as it used to; now I must reach back to touch it. It is night and I am alone and there is still time, a moment more. I am standing on a long black stage, with a circle of light on me, which is my love for you, enduring. I have escaped—or have been expelled—from eternity and am back in time. But I step out once more to sing this aria, this confession, this testament without end. My arms open wide, not to embrace you but to embrace the world, the mystery we are caught in. There is no orchestra, no audience; it is an empty theater in the middle of the night and all the clocks in the world are ticking. And now for this last time, Jade, I don’t mind, or even ask if it is madness: I see your face, I see you, you; I see you in every seat.

A Biography of Scott Spencer

Scott Spencer is the New York Times—bestselling and award-winning author of ten novels, including the National Book Award finalists Endless Love (1979) and A Ship Made of Paper (2003).

Born in 1945 in Washington, D.C., Spencer moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago at age two. His father, Charles, had been in the army before beginning work in a hot and noisy Chicago steel mill. Charles later wrote and self-published a book titled Blue Collar (1978) about the experience. Spencer remembers his childhood as peaceful despite his family’s tight finances and his parents’ concern over the political climate during the McCarthy Era, both of which were kept secret from Spencer at the time. Charles was a dissident in his union and, Spencer remembers, “sometimes feared for his safety and even his life. There were mornings when he checked under the hood of his car for a bomb before igniting the engine.” The far South Side of Chicago was at the time the set of atrocious racial violence, which Spencer’s parents steadfastly resisted, adding to the home’s sense of peril and purpose.

Spencer was an avid reader from an early age, a passion that his parents encouraged. At age sixteen, he discovered the beatnik subculture and was very much influenced by that literary movement. Though he studied at the University of Illinois and Chicago’s Roosevelt University before earning his B.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin, Spencer considers himself above all to be “an alumnus of the Chicago public library system.”

All of Spencer’s novels are intimately related to his life. He wrote his first novel, Last Night at the Brain Thieves Ball (1975), during and directly following his college years. The novel centers on a control-hungry experimental psychologist and his dangerous experiments, which reflected Spencer’s own experimentation with mind-altering drugs and his studies in behavioral psychology at the time. His second novel, Preservation Hall (1976), is about an ambitious man’s fateful encounter with his ex- convict step-brother while the two are snowed in together in an isolated rural house, not unlike the one Spencer would move to later in life in Rhinebeck, New York. His next novel, Endless Love, explores the obsessive and all-consuming relationship between a young couple and was his first major success, selling more than two million copies worldwide. Endless Love was universally hailed by critics, establishing Spencer as a leading American author, and inspiring the film directed by Franco Zeffirelli.

In 1986, Spencer published Waking the Dead, the story of the tragic love between a career politician and a progressive activist living in Chicago. The book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times and later became a film produced by Jodi Foster and starring Billy Crudup and Jennifer Connelly. Spencer followed the success of Waking the Dead with Secret Anniversaries (1990), a coming-of-age story of a young woman in mid-twentieth- century Washington, D.C., and Men in Black (1995), a comedic novel about a struggling author’s unexpected success after penning a book about UFOs. Secret Anniversaries and Men in Black is set partly in the fictional town of Leyden, New York, a town that Spencer revisits in many of his novels. Leyden and many of its residents are modeled after Rhinebeck, and Spencer says that, though he doesn’t directly base his characters on real people, he does draw from them and join different people’s traits together, “giving a red head a limp, a lawyer a dog.”

After Men in Black, Spencer published The Rich Man’s Table (1998), about the strained relationship between a Bob Dylan—like American music icon and his unacknowledged son. Most recently, Spencer has published the novels A Ship Made of Paper (2003), Willing (2008), and Man in the Woods (2010). Spencer’s nonfiction journalism has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and GQ. He has also taught fiction writing at Columbia University and at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

This photo, taken around 1945, features four of the people who most influenced Spencer’s life. His father, Charles, is seen in his military uniform (second from the right), with Spencer’s aunt Elfride and uncle Harold to Charles’s right and his mother, Jean, to Charles’s left. Elfride and Harold both moved to Cuba after the 1960 Cuban