A Little Love Story (11 page)

8

T
HE NEXT MORNING
we slept in later than usual, and made love again when we woke up. Something had changed in the lovemaking, I don’t know how to say it. It was not driven by anything. There was nothing watching us. We could not have talked during it, or about it.

The diner where we had our late breakfast was busy with lunch customers, so instead of sitting in a booth we sat on stools at the counter. We didn’t talk about our feelings for each other, but those feelings had changed, had moved from blossom to fruit. In some strange way, going to visit my brother had been a kind of public statement for us—though a hermit’s house might seem like an odd place for public statements. I wasn’t a sacrilegious person. Ellory knew I wouldn’t take just any date onto the monastery grounds. And, once we’d been there, Janet understood that, too.

The food was oily and real and served on big oval plates—eggs and link sausages and potatoes. Janet liked raspberry jam on buttered wheat toast, almost burned. We drank coffee and grapefruit juice and ice water and afterwards shared one piece of warm apple pie because the pie was sitting in a glass case just in our line of vision. By then I did not want to find the place I had driven all that way to see.

When Janet went to the bathroom I started talking to the man on the stool to my left. He was wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers cap, and the skin of his cheeks was pitted, and he was eating pancakes, and he told me his name was Peter. There was something wounded and friendly about him. We got onto the subject of children, and he told me he had three of them, two almost-grown boys and a girl. They had lived with their mother for a long time now, but everyone still got along pretty well. I asked him what he liked best about having children, and he thought for a few seconds and said, “It’s the closest you can come to being the other person.” And then, after another couple of seconds, “A lot of times, if you try, you can be who you really should be with them, who you want to be.”

I thought about that. I said I thought there was always a distance between who you are and who you want to be. And then, because it was hurting me to think about those things just then, I tried to make a joke. I said, “I have an appointment with disappointment every day.” It was foolish. I was nervous. I waited for the stupid words to drift away. I asked him how to get to the place we were headed for and he gave very careful directions. When I asked him what it looked like he said, “I’ve never gone out there. I’ve seen enough of things like that. I never wanted to go.”

“Where did you see things like that?”

“I flew fixed-wing propeller planes off carriers, in Vietnam.”

I asked if I could buy him breakfast. It wasn’t because of the Vietnam part, but just because I liked him. He said, “Why?”

“I’m just in a mood to.”

“Alright,” he said, after he’d considered the offer a moment. When I got up to go to the bathroom he took hold of the sleeve of my shirt and held me there. “I don’t talk about this with a lot of people, but if you get
Life
magazine and look at the issue for April 1970, you’ll see my picture.”

He was perfectly sane and normal, but I had the feeling that if the waitress had been just slightly rude to him one day, by accident even, he might never come back there. April 1970 had made a mark on his life that could not be erased. He seemed to me to be filled to the eyes with all the awful things he had seen, all the friends he had lost, to be swimming along on a sea of suffering that was invisible to everyone else. I liked him.

The bathroom was very small and clean, but the tiles were broken here and there, and powdered soap poured out of the dispenser if you barely touched it. I turned on the water too hard and it splashed right out of the sink and all over the front of my pants. Coming out of the little room, I took a right instead of a left and walked into the kitchen.

When I made it back to the counter at last, Peter thanked me for the breakfast, and when Janet came back he thanked her, too. He reminded me about the
Life
magazine, and I said I’d be sure to check it out, but I have never done that.

“This town has some odd energy,” Janet said, on the sunny sidewalk. She had been in the bathroom a long time and I worried she was getting sick again already.

“This is the town where the miners were rescued. Over the summer.”

“I saw the ‘God Bless Our Heroes’ sign. I was wondering. That’s not where we’re going, though, is it?”

“Not those heroes, no.”

“Your voice is different today, Jake.”

We drove out of town on a two-lane country highway, past an airport and a two-truck volunteer fire station and a man in a checkered shirt with his hands in his pants pockets, staring at a ten-foot-tall pile of gravel. The land there was woods and farmland, hilly but hard-edged, and you could see the marks of the severe winters on the roof shingles and clapboards. At one point we passed a sign that said:

WELCOME TO SHANKSVILLE

HOME OF THE VIKINGS

A FRIENDLY LITTLE TOWN

ESTABLISHED 1803

Shortly after that we passed a wire fence where someone had tacked up a piece of one-by-ten with
FLIGHT
93
MEMORIAL
and an arrow painted on it. But I did not think Janet noticed.

Following my friend Peter’s directions, I turned off the highway and we wound along a smaller road lined with fluttering flags. There were streaks of sweat on the steering wheel. We made a right turn onto a steep gravel road called Skyline Drive. Next to that road, outside a house decorated everywhere with stars and stripes, some enterprising folks had set up a gift shop where you could buy souvenirs. We rolled on, over the crest of the hill, and I pulled the truck into a lot where a few other cars had parked and where people had covered the aluminum guardrail with a kind of worshipful graffiti. The land in front of us was desolate land, slanting down and away in stony, weedy slopes with a lot of Queen Anne’s lace growing there, and with sharp-winged brown birds darting back and forth and making shrill cries. I remembered that the site was in fact a filled-in strip mine, but it looked to me like an abandoned cattle ranch where the soil had been too stony and poor to grow meat. Far off to our left, on another hill, sat a rusty strip-mining crane, impossibly big, and there were fences, a farmhouse, the birds squealing, but your eye was drawn straight down the slope to a new chain-link fence that enclosed a more or less rectangular area, several hundred yards long, with a treeline behind. There was an American flag tied to the fence. Janet was looking in that direction.

“You can still see where the trees were burned,” I told her, but it came out in an even newer version of the new voice so that she started looking at me instead of the woods behind the fenced-in area. I tried again. I said, “Let’s go up on this little hill.” But I should have just kept quiet.

You could not get anywhere close to the actual fenced-in site with the burned trees behind it, but on a little rise near the parking lot there was a piece of chain-link, maybe ten feet by twenty feet, that had been erected as a sort of public billboard. Hundreds of people had left things on that scrap of metal, an odd assortment of things: baseball and football caps, rosary beads and medals of saints, Stars of David, crucifixes, a couple of Buddhas, real and plastic flowers, stuffed animals, children’s toys, a T-shirt from a Las Vegas plumbers’ union, flags and flags and flags and not just American, drawings, notes encased in plastic wrap so the rain wouldn’t spoil them—“Let’s Roll” and “God Bless You All” and “For the children who lost a parent, friend, or loved one.” Dollar bills.

I hadn’t wanted to ever come here because I had wanted my own grief and confusion to be private. I did not want anyone making assumptions about what I felt for Giselle, or what she had felt for me. I did not want the newspapers and television to touch even the smallest part of that, not because I believed it was more important or more special or even different from what other men and women and children had felt on that day and afterwards, but because I did not want my feelings cheapened, and the entertainment machine was all about cheapening feelings, about making complicated things simple. That was the whole purpose of it, after making money: to dull the edge of things. Scenes of blown-up discothèques in Haifa one second, and racy commercials for lite beer the next. How could we tolerate it?

Not far from me, a little girl was standing with her father and she said, “These people were good people, Daddy, weren’t they?” But even that was somehow a wrong note.

Janet had drifted away from me. I saw her standing in front of an unofficial plaque that showed the names of the dead. The flags there were fluttering loudly in the wind. I stared past her, down the slope, to the fenced-in area near the line of the woods. One of the things I’d read—when I had started to let myself read about that day—said that, at the very end of the ordeal, the plane’s engines were no longer functioning and it had been coasting along in silence, upside down, as it came over the houses near Shanksville. I had thought about that many times.

Many times, times beyond counting, I had imagined Giselle’s fear, and the feelings of the rest of the people in that plane, and in those other planes, and in those buildings. Every sane soul in the world, it seemed to me, had imagined that.

Janet walked over to another memorial someone had made, with small photographs of the passengers glued onto it, their names and ages. Hours and hours some person had spent doing that. I did not want to see it. I could feel myself starting to cry. Not cry, exactly. I could feel myself starting to weep. So I walked past the chain-link billboard, past a sheriffs car, over a second small rise, and I stood there where no one could see me, with my back to the filled-in strip mine. I put my hands in the pockets of my jeans and I let my head droop down so that a steady salty stream worked into the corners of my mouth and onto my T-shirt, and though I tried to be very quiet, I could not. I walked a little farther away, over another stony rise, and I stayed there a long time, weeping until it was all out of me, and then I wiped my face with the bottom of my T-shirt and looked up into a perfectly empty sky and breathed and breathed.

It seemed to me then that the whole problem with the way the world was designed came from the fact that we lived in separate packages. You could not ever really reach out of your miniature world and into someone else’s and feel what they were feeling. Not really. Not enough. Maybe making love, or maybe during short flashes of conversation with a friend, or maybe, maybe, for a few hours after the world had witnessed something horrifying. Gerard had said to me that when your children were young you could do that. And when my mother had talked to me about her parents’ deaths—which had been slow, hard deaths—she’d said there came a point when you felt something like that. All the dying person’s protection had been burned away, she told me; it seemed as if they opened themselves up to you, cut themselves open and allowed you in.

I breathed and breathed, wiped my face. After a long time, when I was more or less calm again, I turned and walked back toward my truck. From the top of the second rise, I could see, over the white roof of the sheriff’s SUV, that Janet had put down the tailgate of my pickup and was sitting there in her summer dress, dangling her legs over, watching for me. I looked away. Another few steps and I looked back and when I was up close to her she put a hand on my shoulder, leaned forward, and licked the salt from my face.

9

T
HE TRUTH IS
that Janet and I did not talk about Shanksville on the first part of the long ride home. The silence was uncomfortable. At the same time, there was a way in which we were at peace with that discomfort. The distance between us felt like an honest distance, unthreatening.

I could not help thinking that, with Giselle, if things had happened differently, we would have talked and talked, about the memorial, about America, about former lovers and families, and God and pain and death and mysteries. We would have filled the cab of the truck with words because that was the territory we had gone to in order to try to escape the loneliness we felt with each other, the vague, nagging, secret disappointment. If she had not been on that particular plane on that particular day, if we had been able to work out the trouble between us, then Giselle and I would have grown old together sitting on a porch somewhere, reading aloud to each other from sections of the Sunday newspaper, waiting for the grandchildren to call.

The road away from Shanksville lifted and dipped, curling along high slopes over wide red and gold valleys, with sparking rivers slicing through them, and the long rich hills rising on either side like blanket-covered bodies sleeping at some distance to one another. Janet and I listened to one CD—Derek and the Dominos, made before either of us was born—then just rode quietly. She had started coughing again, intermittently. The sound of it stabbed at me like a dull blade.

We stopped for lunch, and for a gas fill-up for the old machine, and afterwards Janet asked if she could drive for a while and I said, “Of course.” She was an intent, careful driver, speed limit minus five. I closed my eyes and moved in and out of a half-sleep infested with smoky dreams.

Somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania she pulled over. We switched places, but still didn’t say much. Darkness fell when we were in New York State, on 684. The highway was a necklace of white and red lights looping toward home.

In Connecticut she said, “I went to prep school near here. My mother thought it would be good for me to go away after my father died. We argued about it. I wanted to stay with her and I was really private about taking medicines and so on. The last thing on earth I wanted was to have a roommate watching me use the inhalers and the vest and so on. She’s sweet, my Ma—you’ll see when you meet her—but she has this drill-sergeant/kung-fu master side that comes out when she’s worried about me. So I applied, got a scholarship, ended up with a bulimic genius roommate and some great friends. Senior year I had a boyfriend named Alonzo. From this fabulously wealthy family in Venezuela. He invited me to go home with him for Christmas, and my mother said I could go—his family was paying—but I didn’t want to.”

“Were you sick?”

“Not that sick then, no. I just wanted to be home at Christmas. I knew my mother was having a hard time and trying to pretend otherwise for my sake, and I wanted to be around her. Anyway, Alonzo and I used to go out for walks in the woods near the campus and just kiss and hold hands. We never did make love. The summer after graduation we wrote a lot of letters. And then every year I was in college he’d write to me in November and ask if I wanted to come to Caracas for the Christmas holidays. I always said no. Senior year, for some reason or another, I went. I was really starting to feel not so good by then, maybe that’s why. Maybe I was starting to understand that no one would ever marry me, and I knew that Alonzo had always had a special thing for me. Plus, a friend of mine I’d been in the hospital with a few times had already died … Anyway, I went. It was about like you’d expect: the family lived in a twenty-room house with servants and they were very gracious with me and we had a feast on Christmas Eve and went to church the next day and had another feast after church. I had my inhaler and my pills and my vest, and I was feeling okay, but I could see it made Alonzo uncomfortable, you know, how much sicker I’d gotten since high school, the progression of things, the medications. I think, since then, I’ve always been sensitive about that, on dates especially. One of the things I liked about you in Diem Bo was that you didn’t seem bothered.

“Anyway, they were a very kind family. I went horseback riding with his sisters. I’d never been on a horse. The next day Alonzo and I drove to a beach house they had near a place called Puerto La Cruz, which was a beautiful little city with pastel houses and a stony beach. It was warm, we took a swim, we had crab legs and this delicious white wine for dinner, I remember. We went back to the house and went to bed together for the first time and we kissed and everything and it was just like before except that I was coughing a lot and when it came time to … he was, he couldn’t … he was impotent. He felt horrible. Eventually we went to sleep, but in the morning it was the same. It didn’t matter to me very much, but to him it was terrible. For the rest of the time I was there he could barely look at me. All the way back to Caracas he talked and talked, but he could barely look at me. Has that ever happened to you, Jake?”

“Once.”

“I’ve always believed it was because my being sick turned him off so much.”

“The woman I was with that night wasn’t sick,” I said.

“Was it Giselle?”

It was the first time either of us had spoken that name. I shook my head.

We rode on. After a few minutes I asked Janet why she had told me the Venezuela story just then, and she said she didn’t know.

“Was he the great love of your life?”

“No, you are,” she said, just straight and plain and serious like that, without any drama. And then, “Was Giselle the love of your life?”

I shook my head without looking at her, and then looked. She was almost smiling and seemed very calm. I drove along. We were past the little knot of Hartford by then. “We met in a bar on Boylston Street,” I said. “Three and a half years ago. We had a good time at first. I had my first show, sold a couple of paintings. We went to Mexico. We went up to Quebec City a couple of times. Everything was nice. We fought a lot—stupid little fights—but everything was going along pretty well. She was selling mobile phones and she was good at it, and then she got promoted to regional sales manager and, I don’t know, things started to go sour. She wanted to start having children and I was fine with that idea. But she had a whole plan—three children, a certain kind of house in the suburbs—and I kept saying I’d grown up in a family with three children in a nice house in the suburbs, and there was nothing wrong with it, I just didn’t really want to do it all over again exactly that way. She was pushing me to go back to med school. I kept saying I didn’t want to go back to med school, I wanted to paint. It got to be a regular thing for us—”

“I didn’t know you went to medical school.”

“I quit after the first year. I … we’d go along fine for a few days or a week, sometimes two weeks, then we’d get into the med school discussion, the suburbs discussion.”

“Ellory said you were planning to get married.”

I looked over at her. In that quick glance across the shadowy cab I couldn’t read her face, but there had been a kind of sad, bending note in her voice when she said “married.” It surprised me.

“I thought he might have said something.”

“I asked about the picture on his bookshelf. He said she’d died, he didn’t say how, but he told me you’d been engaged.”

“No,” I said. “We’d talked about it, but no.”

“No ring?”

When she said “ring,” I heard the bending note a second time.

“No.”

“I interrupted you. I’m jealous, I’m sorry. Keep going now, and then after this we never have to talk about it again, alright?”

“Alright. Giselle had grown up poor—her parents were from Brazil, actually. After she met me, she started to make a lot of money and then she started to worry that if she stopped to have kids she’d be poor again. But she didn’t want to leave the kids and fly all over the place every few weeks. It was a big confusion for her. I have plenty of money, you know. I make a good amount from carpentry. I sell a few paintings every year, the apartment is paid for and worth a lot. She knew all that. But … I don’t know … everything got tense. She started to travel more. She started to talk about this guy she worked with. They traveled to sales conferences once or twice together. I met him once. I knew there was nothing going on. But then some more time went by and I wasn’t sure there was nothing going on. I asked her. She got upset. Nothing was going on, nothing. Then the next day she told me they’d gone out for a drink at the last conference and they’d kissed afterwards and made out a little, but she hadn’t gone to bed with him. So I didn’t like that, naturally…She said it was wrong, she was sorry, she would never do anything like that again. From there, somehow, we got into another three-kids-in-the-suburbs fight. A few days went by. We made up. It was rocky for a month or so—this was the summer before this one, a year ago, a little more than a year…She had a meeting in New York and then a conference in San Francisco, and, I don’t know, we were talking on the phone when she was in New York and I had a bad moment—I thought I was done being angry and jealous but I wasn’t—and I asked her if this guy—Brian, his name was—if he was going on the trip with her the next day and she said he wasn’t, and we left it there…And then, afterwards, you know, after the day and the funeral services and everything, I went about three months without checking and then I had another bad moment and I looked up the list of the people who’d been on the plane and Brian’s name was there.”

“She could have just wanted you not to be jealous and that’s why she didn’t tell you.”

“I know that.”

“But you still didn’t go out with anyone else for a year?”

I nodded. I promised myself not to say anything else about it, and then I immediately said, “I did that for myself, for my own guilt. I wasn’t in good shape. Gerard used to take me places like I was a little kid—to his daughters’ dance recitals, to museums, to scuba classes. I was a little zombie-ish for a while. There was so much talk about it, naturally, in the papers every day, on TV every night. People who had lost husbands and wives and children. I stopped reading the papers, stopped watching TV. I banged nails and painted and got through the winter, and in the spring I started driving into the country alone on weekends and sleeping out in the woods in a sleeping bag, or going for long hikes, or going to see Ellory. It was rough for a while and then not so rough, and then I was starting to feel semi-alright again. I remember calling you that first afternoon, from work. Just sort of peeking my nose back into the dating world.”

“And I responded so nicely,” Janet said.

“I was almost better by then. I knew when I put the phone down, after you said no, that I was most of the way better.”