Begin to Exit Here (12 page)

“Drive faster,” I said, and she did.

T
he mountain we were on we called This Mountain, after the respected tradition of arbitrarily and abruptly naming a mountain anything you wanted because no one could stop you. Janice knew the real name of the mountain but she promised not to tell me. I was tired of facts, tired of precise knowledge and one more thing to memorize and clutter my cluttered head.

“It's just you and me, Janice. No facts.”

“Very well,” she said, like someone in a British movie. “We'll just proceed with innocence and ignorance, the qualities we have at birth.”

“I still have them,” I said.

“You're not innocent,” she said.

“Well, I still have one of them,” I said.

She laughed, and said, “So do I.”

We were walking up the little dirt trail toward the top of the mountain, holding hands, and Janice said, “This Mountain is a good name for this mountain.”

“Yeah. See how well it works?” I said. “A hundred years ago or something, people probably stood on this mountain saying, ‘What should we call this mountain?' And I'd have said, ‘
That's
it. Call it This Mountain.'”

“Sometimes,” Janice said, “you're alarmingly brilliant.”

“I'll be quiet.”

“Don't. I don't like it when you're quiet.”

We both were in astonishingly good moods, like exuberance, one of those words you think you know precisely but actually you just say it because it hints at what you are. But Janice kissed me on the lips real hard and said she was just exuberant and that I looked the same, so we decided we were exuberant. It was about ten in the morning, Saturday, and we made love at the hotel and took a nap, then here we were on the mountain, just walking up this trail because there was a trail and it went up. Something we didn't say, didn't speak, the way you did with most observations, was that we were in love with each other and we knew it. It was as if this had to hit us spontaneously at the same time, and you could just tell, you could sense it. It was as plainly there as if a big breeze came up, and we didn't
have to say to each other ‘The breeze is here.' I could look into her eyes for the longest time, and she'd stare back, like we were entering each other. We did that once on the trail, just stopped walking and were about a foot apart and stared into each other's eyes, as if there were something we had to say that language was no good for, so even if you talked about it, it would just sound stupid. Janice sighed, and then I sighed.

“This reminds me of the only line from the Bible I've memorized,” I said. “‘The heart sighs when it's too full for words.'”

She looked surprised or astonished or something, then smiled at me real delicately and hugged me.

“I'm glad you were born,” she said.

It made me start to cry, not like I was hurt, but that I wanted this woman so badly and there she was, and she wanted
me.
I didn't know why. I kissed her hair and tried not to cry, which wasn't working completely.

“Don't cry. I have you,” she said. “And you have me. See how nicely that works?”

“Yes. It keeps working.”

“Don't cry, Kurty,” she said, kissing my ear.

“Kurty? When did you start calling me Kurty?”

“Just now, Kurty. I think it fits you.”

“Even if it doesn't, I can tell you're going to keep calling me that.”

“You're right, Kurty.”

And up the trail we started again, side-by-side under a brilliant hot sun, with no more precise a goal than reaching the top of This Mountain so we could look across at the surrounding mountains and feel wondrously remote from everything but each other.

On the long walk up, I started singing, for some reason, the lyrics to “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore.”

“He rowed the boat ashore on a mountain?” Janice said. “Sounds like Michael got lost.”

“Yeah. He was a rowin' son of a bitch, that Michael.”

After about an hour of laborious but kind of pleasant walking, we were at the fairly flat, slanted top of the mountain where we expected to be able to look off for ten or fifteen miles in any direction and see all the other huge mountains. But all there was immediately around us were more trees.

“Well,
goddammit
,” I said with exaggerated annoyance. “We climb up six thousand feet to the top of a mountain to get a view of the
trees
growing up here? Janice, there's something seriously wrong with this state. The only place they don't have trees is in the ocean.”

“I think you're right,” Janice said as we stared around at the forest. She took her camera from her backpack and said, “Stand there in front of those trees. I want to get a picture of you at the top of the mountain where you can't even tell it's a mountain.”

“Okay.”

“And try to act like you're real high up, so people will know,” she said.

“I'm real high up,” I said, and she took my picture.

We did some brief exploring and stuff and finally found a big rocky area with almost no trees at all where we could look off into the vast, hazy distance where dark mountains rose and drooped into each other gently.

“And look! Real cliffs!” I said happily, pointing at the massive rocks where it looked like you could easily fall and die. “Mountains aren't real unless they have huge cliffs where you can fall and die. Boy, I bet you could fall a thousand feet from here.”

“Let's eat some sandwiches first,” Janice said, grinning at me.

“That's right,” I said. “You don't want to die on an empty stomach.”

“Let's sit over here on the rock, since all there is is rock,” Janice said.

“You're a realist. I like that.”

She had fixed us some peanut butter and grape jelly sandwiches, which we ate with Fritos as we stared off at the sloping, jumbled mountains that looked as soft as velvet, except for an open spot here or there where you could see some kind of little building or part of a road. Sometimes we'd see a hawk or an eagle drifting way off in the faint blue sky, just floating and not really appearing to have anything in mind, except floating.

As Janice stared off at some of the distant bigness, I tried to calculate which part of it she was looking at so I could look at it, too. I wanted to see what she was seeing. I told her that. She smiled and patted my cheek, like I'd done something pleasant.

“You're such a child,” she said, kind of matter-of-factly. “Do you know that? Here we are on the top of a mountain, staring off miles away at mountains and shadows and clouds, and when you realize I'm looking and wondering at some very particular thing out of all that, you want to see it, too, to see it
with
me.”

“I do not,” I said, lying. Then I suddenly looked down at some ants on the cliff and said, “See that ant carrying away the leg of a dead grasshopper? I was looking at that.”

She smiled. “Kurt, you're such a boy,” she said. “A wistful boy.”

“Wistful?” I said, wondering if she knew that or if she was guessing. “I shouldn't be wistful now. I'm with you.”

“That's what I keep telling you. When are you gonna know that, Kurty?” she said, and scooted around on the rock behind me, putting her legs around my waist and pulling me to her so my head was right under her chin.

“What do you know about me that I haven't told you?” I said.

“That you're sad,” she said. “It's one of the things I
first knew about you. When I met you at Annie's party, and we started talking for such a long time, and you made me laugh. You were so funny, and you hardly even smiled, like it was something you knew how to do, that you'd studied very well, but it didn't always make
you
smile. And you'd always get this sort of remote, wounded look, as if a lot of bad things had happened to you and they hadn't really left you. At first, you just worried me, like who
is
this weird, sad guy who keeps being so suddenly funny. And then, I don't know why, you quit worrying me and I just thought you were charming or something. So I waited to see if that would wear off, and it didn't. You were so damn funny and endearing. When you got quiet, I'd look at you, and you were sad again. I wanted to kiss you.”

“You did,” I said, nestling my head against her chest. “I was glad.”

She put her hands on my stomach, one hand above the other. “What happened to you? What makes you sad? Did bad women hurt you?”

“Not really. Most of the women who hurt me were good women, but that's part of it, yes. I'm used to being in love and being abandoned that way. I don't really blame anybody, or say they're wrong. But it happened to me three or four times in the last ten years, and I don't think I ever really recovered completely. I'm bad that way. Maybe I'm just weak. I don't know. I think I hurt too well. Like if you're born with an acute ability to feel emotions
real hard, and real long, I'm one of those guys. I have a genetic or spiritual disorder. I hurt too well. And each time I always lost somebody again, I'd try to remember that stupid, stupid saying, ‘Time heals all wounds,' like it was supposed to work for me if I just thought of that saying. But it didn't work. Lying bastards. It didn't work. Although, actually, maybe it never had a chance to work, because I lost consecutive women. Maybe you're supposed to only lose
one
woman, and feel
that
agony, and then you get over it and find someone you don't lose. I did it completely wrong. I lost three or four in a row. All that ever really mattered to me was to love someone who loved me, and every time I found someone, they left. It was like the world, or some god, was dispassionately looking at me and saying, ‘I know what we'll do. This'll be neat. See that guy down there who hurts too well? Three or four times in a row, we'll let him fall in love. And just when it begins to work and the woman is part of his own spirit and he loves her so much that, at night when she's sleeping, he likes to breathe her own breath, like it's a gift, right then, we'll make the woman realize he's the wrong man and abandon him, abruptly taking away everything that matters and replacing it with nothing.
Then
he'll hurt, and get good at it.'

“And I did. I don't want to be good at it anymore,” I said, and held Janice's hands on my stomach. She began
swaying very slowly, from left to right. I realized she was rocking me.

“That's a very mean god,” she said. “Do you think it's still happening?”

“I don't want it to be.”

“Do you still pray? Pray about me?” she said, still rocking.

“Yes,” I said.

“What do you pray?” she said, sliding her hands up to my chest and very gently squeezing me.

“I pray that I'll get to love you, and that you won't go away.”

I could feel her sigh. My head rose up on her chest and she sighed. “That's a good prayer,” she said. “I won't go away, Kurt. I'm glad the other women did. Not because it made you so sad, but because here you are, and I get you. In return, you get me. Is that enough?”

“Enough?” I said. “I don't think of you as being enough. I think of you as being
it.”

“It?” she wondered. “Kurt, that's so impersonal when you're trying to say you love me.
It
is when you can't identify something, like ‘Eww, what
is
it?'”

“Okay, you're not
it
, then,” I said. “I didn't mean to compare you to something you'd find on the side of the road. All I mean is I love you, and quit trying to trick me into saying that.”

“I love you, too, and quit telling me which tricks I can
use if I feel like it. I'm your best friend and your lover. That means I get to be as maddening to you as I want, because you'll always want me.”

“I don't know if it's
fair,”
I said skeptically as she rocked me. “But if we get to madden each other, at least it's equal.”

“Already you're maddening me,” she said.

“I'm fast.”

N
ow that we'd sort of formalized our love for each other and were happy about being alive, we sat on the edge of the cliff and talked about dying. Janice sipped some red Italian table wine from her thermos, and I drank Coke from mine and smoked a Camel Light. We sat with our thighs touching and our legs dangling over the cliff that went almost completely straight down for maybe three hundred feet or more to where there was a small outcrop or something, and we couldn't see how much farther down the cliff went. Being on a cliff always reminded people of death, so we talked about it.

“Death is stupid,” Janice said.

“I know, like calling it names will embarrass it,” I said.

“Death is an asshole,” she said, smiling at me.

I decided it was my turn to say slanderous things about death. “Death is such a dick,” I said.

“Have we libeled death?” Janice said.

“I'm not sure. I have an AP stylebook and libel manual at work, but I've never read the part about libel. That's because I think if you're really good at libel, you don't have to read a book about it.”

Janice laughed, and wiped some sweat from her eyelids. We stared down at the tops of pine trees so far below us that they almost looked like moss, or shrubs.

“Do you know what I hate about death?” Janice said, taking a sip of wine and reaching for my cigarette.

“That it exists?” I said.

“That, too,” she said. “But let's say death is going to exist and you can't stop it. Nothing, so far, will prevent it. What I hate then is that death doesn't care how or when it destroys. A baby might die thirty seconds after birth from a malformed heart. It might die at seventeen from being drunk and falling off a hotel balcony during a prom. Or you could live to be eighty and choke to death on soup. It's not like death is some noble, mystical force that we should learn to deal with. Death is just this capricious, random killer,” she said, frowning and looking at me for agreement.