A Way With Words - Chapter 41b
Sorry for the long delay. I do most of my heavy thinking for this story while driving alone or on long walks, but since I broke my ankle on December 1st I haven't been able to do either. I did get 3 chapter halves partly done during that time, but just couldn't get over that hump to finish them. When I could finally drive 10 days ago, I realized what my problem had been. 42a and 42b are in the beta pipeline and will be posted in the next few days. Thanks to freetraveller15 and rt_in_town for their patience and encouragement.
By the way, in the first entry of my LJ home page you'll find a progress report on the upcoming chapter, so check there if you wonder where the next one is already.
Recaps for chapters 26 to 41 (A parts) are HERE. Recaps for chapters 26b to 40b HERE.
A Google map with story locations marked is HERE.
September 1985
Jay thought I was moving in with her on the Cape. I did too, but shied away from thinking about what I would do after the clam bake season ended. When I called Joe with the news he sounded pleased, but insisted he didn't want to give up the apartment in Brighton. A cousin was starting grad school at MIT and asked to take over my room. Joe would continue to pay half the rent in order to have a base in Boston. A few days after I'd settled into the house in Osterville, two green canvas director's chairs arrived from him, Miss Bergman and Mr. Bogart stenciled on their backs, in honor of the movie Jay and I had seen on our first date. Of course, now I see perfectly clearly in these gestures Joe's ambivalence about my relationship with Jay. Here's a bolt-hole in Boston if things don't work out, he was saying, and Remember what happened to Ilsa and Rick.
Fiercely alive is how I felt that summer. Jay was energized too, though we didn't discuss why. It was years before we talked about that time, and what Elliot's death meant to each of us. Not the fact of his death, but the way he'd lived his final weeks, holed up in his apartment, alone with his memories and regrets. It's ironic that I, who hardly knew him, possessed more clues to his tragic past than did Jay. I still have those poems and cards, the tape and the photo, and when I occasionally read or listen or look (seldom, actually, although I did frame the picture, which I keep in a drawer), his story seems so obvious, as though anyone at all could have filled in the blanks.
At odd moments while I packed up my few belongings, the memory of Elliot falling into his dark-haired lover's arms would flicker through my mind. What had become of that man? I assumed he was dead. That would make a logical narrative: the love of Elliot's life had died of AIDS, and he blamed himself, lost the will to live as he in turn succumbed to the disease. But then, who had taken that filthy cushion from his couch? When he and the man I saw him embrace had rushed up to the apartment, had they not even made it to the bedroom? I'd shake my head, not allowing myself to imagine more, visualizing instead Elliot sinking into the worn striped cushions, wrapped in a blanket, hacking, sweating, leaking…
No way would I end up like Elliot. The previous winter I'd drifted into a hermit-like existence; never again, I swore. Every morning I rose early and ran down to the beach for a swim, no matter what the weather. I would be spending most of my work day on the sand, ordering around two teenagers under the hot sun, but that was my time to be alone in the sea. I would plunge into the surf and slice back and forth, out and back. On days when Jay would be working a later shift, I'd go back to bed afterwards, not bothering to shower first. She liked that, liked licking my salty skin and didn't mind the sand in the sheets.
Jay preferred to swim after work, and if she knew which beach I was working on, and it wasn't far, she'd drive over. I'd watch her swimming her laps while I oversaw the clam bake, or during the cleanup if she came late. There were usually a few leftovers, which we brought home and ate on the back porch.
One evening over clams and corn I told her about my idea for a novel. While swimming, it had come to me. I was not cut out to be a journalist, but I thought I could write about one. Those two internships at newspapers owned by religious nuts, there had to be some good material there. Jay was supportive, clearly relieved that I'd found some intellectual pursuit.
"So what kind of story do you have in mind?" she asked.
"I'm thinking a murder mystery. One of the reporters for a rural newspaper run by a religious sect goes missing, then he's found dead. The editor tries to solve the murder, teaming up with one of the photographers. They, uh, have an affair, too."
I clearly didn't read enough mysteries if I thought this was so original.
"Don't make the photographer a woman. That would feel way too weird for me."
"But then I'd have to make the editor a woman," I pointed out.
"Not necessarily."
I blinked.
She gnawed on a big yellow toothy grin of a corn cob with a gleam in her eye. "Anyway," she said, swallowing, "why couldn't you make the main character a woman?"
I gave nervous laugh. "Give me a break. This is going to be hard enough!"
"Alright, alright," she huffed, bits of corn flying at me. "Just don't make them recognizably us."
I had no idea how to go about writing a novel. Deep down I knew I wouldn't actually complete one but it gave me something to think about while working on the beach. I'd heard that you were supposed to write an outline, but I was too impatient for that. The bits of dialogue and description that took form in my thoughts during the day went into a notebook at night. On the one day of the week we both had off, I'd read them to Jay in bed in the morning, feeling quite disconcerted when a week's worth of scribbling took only five minutes to read aloud; even more so when Jay laughed and told me I had a real knack for comedy.
On Labor Day weekend, I told Jay that I was due to visit my family in Kansas. My mother had called me frequently during the summer and each time she peppered me with questions about my girlfriend, as though she were trying to build up a detailed picture of the female that had managed to slip into my life. I hadn't hidden Jay's existence from my family, but I had deliberately let her place in my life remain vague for them. It was time to bring Jay home and show her off. When I asked her if she wanted to come with me she said yes, as long as we drove there, because she was very curious to see the middle of the country from the ground and not just fly over it. She put in a late request for vacation time in the last week of September; her editor granted it readily as the post-Labor Day period was always a slow one for news.
We started out on a Saturday befitting that first day of autumn - warm and dry with a crystalline blue sky, the trees showing the first touches of scarlet and gold. The route we took was more southerly than the one Joe and I had followed nearly two years earlier. We traversed Pennsylvania diagonally and made sure to pass through Lancaster County; I'd seen the movie Witness early in the year and was curious to see Amish country.
I was at the wheel when we came upon a black, horse-drawn buggy with a red triangle on the back. We crept along behind it for half a mile before the opposite lane was clear, while Jay photographed it through the windshield, the tip of her nose flattened against the back of the Nikon as she snapped away and explained the differences between the Amish and the Mennonite communities.
She was unaware of the memories it was stirring up in me. At the sight of that black buggy I flashed back to my winter of self-isolation in Boston when Jay and I had been drifting apart. An inexplicable urge to see Witness again had struck me a few days after my first viewing in February.. It's obvious to me now why the Harrison Ford character's love for a woman whose community he knew he could never really be a part of had struck a nerve in me. As I stared at the reflective red triangle, it became the Citgo sign against the night sky the last time Joe and I had gone to Fenway Park, and I heard again the words that had pierced my heart.
But soon after that I'd met Jay. The young Amish widow turned away from passion and married her quiet Amish suitor. A car zoomed up from behind us and overtook both our car and the buggy, startling me back to the present - the opposite lane was clear. I gave a heavy sigh of relief, accelerated and pulled around the farmer's buggy. Jay laughed and said you had to have patience to drive in that county.
Instead of crossing into Ohio, we dropped down into West Virginia. I'd told Jay that Ohio deserved its reputation as boring, and that a more southerly route through Appalachia would be more interesting. I had no desire to follow the same route that Joe and I had traveled in December. The mild, sunny early fall weather was conducive to meandering through the rolling hills and mountains of Kentucky.
There were other differences between the two trips besides the season. Joe and I had been focused on our destination and had stuck to the interstate; our journey had been one of constant forward movement, fast and steady, our conversations mainly about impersonal topics. Jay insisted on following small, winding roads, with frequent stops to admire the views. Like Joe, she'd brought music to listen to, but switched tapes often, seldom letting one play to the end, and when we had the radio on she changed the station every ten minutes. She asked me questions about my family, and drew out of me stories she hadn't heard before.
We didn't make it beyond West Virginia that first day. Jay stopped many times to take pictures of the lush mountains and green hollows, excited by the landscape after years of making the city her photographic subject. We stayed in a motel at the foot of Mount Gay-Shamrock and the next day drove through Kentucky into southern Missouri. It was tempting to stop and spend time in the Mark Twain National Forest south of Saint Louis, maybe rent a canoe and paddle on the Eleven Point River. But I knew my family was waiting for us. I was convinced that Jay would be desperate to get away from my family after two days, and a visit to the park on the way back would be an excuse to leave that my parents would accept.
We spent the night in Springfield, then drove through southern Kansas along the secondary roads, me at the wheel the whole way, Jay hanging out of the window with her camera, ordering me to slow down or stop every ten minutes so she could shoot yet another picture of the stubbly corn fields or puffy clouds. “The sky is so big here!” was her constant refrain.
The road was blade-straight to the horizon with little traffic. I drove resting my left arm on the edge of the open window and steering with one finger while I watched Jay lean out into the warm rushing air with her Nikon. What a difference between this trip and the same Kansas segment of the one I'd taken with Joe two years earlier. The tension between us had been a third passenger as we cruised silently through the frozen landscape. I hoped Jay would have as good a reception from my family as the one Joe had enjoyed. I was a little nervous about it because Jay's charm switch had a balkier mechanism than Joe's, which flipped on smoothly.
She dropped back down into her seat and pulled up a little lever on top of the camera. "This isn't the way I imagined it would look, where you were from," she said as she cranked the film back into its canister.
"What did you think it was like?" I replied, puzzled. She'd seen The Wizard of Oz like everyone else in America.
"More like where we were yesterday, in Kentucky. I envisioned you in one of those farms in a mountain hollow. More… contained."
"At least you don't think I have a flat personality," I said. "Do you?"
She opened the back of the Nikon and removed the finished Tri-X film. "You don’t seem expansive, that's for sure, and…" she began. When she didn't continue, I glanced at her. She was peering intently through the windshield as she rummaged through her camera bag. "…then suddenly you surprise me. Look at that!"
Several miles ahead was a farmhouse, barn and silo poking up out of the flatness and right above it, casting a wide shadow over the property was an enormous, lone cloud, flat on the bottom and billowing upwards like a squirt of a giant's shaving foam. There were no other clouds in that part of the sky and the house was the only one visible for miles, yet there they were together, unlikely partners.
"When we get close, we have to stop," Jay declared. She was opening a yellow and blue box - Ektachrome.
"Guess we're over the rainbow now, if you're loading color film," I joked, but she didn't reply. We drove in silence for a few miles, then Jay asked me to stop and pull over. We both got out of the car and she took several shots of the cloud and the house. It was hard to believe the white mountain of vapor wouldn't suddenly drop and crush the farm.
After that it was only two hours to my family's home. I told Jay a bit about my parents' history, some of which she'd heard before, and what kind of grilling to expect from my sister if she showed up, which was likely. I'd never brought a woman home before, I explained, so they would all be very curious.
"I was going to bring you to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving this year," she said, smiling at me, "so you'll get the same treatment in a couple months."
"But I met your parents last year at graduation," I pointed out. "They were fine."
"It's not the same when they're in their own environment. You'll see."
It was close to suppertime when we pulled up in front of the house. I could tell because of the cooking smells released into the air when the door opened and everyone came out onto the porch to get a look at us - both my parents, KE, his pregnant wife and their three-year old twin boys, Kathy with a toddler in her arms. One of the boys leaped from the top step onto the gravel before we came to a complete stop. Jay gasped and I jammed on the brakes. We quickly got out of the car and saw either Tyler or Thomas squatting by the front bumper, jabbing his finger at our Massachusetts license plate over and over and counting out loud.
"Thirteen letters in that state!" he yelled. "You came a looong way!"
Jay gave a little snort. "I see it runs in the family."
"What does?" I said. But then my mother was bustling down the porch steps, the rest of my family following.
"So you're Robin!" My mother grabbed Jay's hand, sending out a little puff of flour, and smiled up at her. I could tell from Jay's little grin that Dottie Del Mar precisely fit her mental image of a plump mid-western farm woman.
"Ennis told us a lot about you, for him that is," my mother went on, "Well! Don't you look just like that nice friend of his who came at Christmas that time."
Jay looked at me quizzically.
"Joe," I said. "Senior year."
"Oh yes! He was such a charming young man! We were sorry he couldn't stay longer."
"Mighty fine singer," my father put in.
"And so handsome! Big blue eyes, just like yours." My mother beamed at Jay. "Are you related?"
Jay's grin faded. Then Kathy stepped up next to my mother and smiled warmly at Jay. "Ennis told us how beautiful and talented you are," she said, shifting the child on her hip. Her smile when she glanced at me was more sardonic. "In his own unique way, of course."
"I can imagine," Jay replied. I didn't see her expression because I was looking at my foot as I dug my toe into the gravel, but her amused tone was reassuring. I was no good at compliments, or endearments for that matter, only producing a little gem for her once in a while, when she really needed it. My parents' praise for Joe had stirred up memories of that Christmas trip - ones I desperately wanted to remain in the dregs, especially the one from the motel. I looked up at Jay; she did remind me of Joe for a second and before I could think I'd lifted my hand and ran my fingers through her curls. She shifted closer to me and slid her arm around my waist. I saw everyone smile and relax.
My family seemed to like Jay well enough. What they loved was what she represented, but I didn't understand that at the time. That I had a girlfriend, and had been with her for over a year -I had glossed over the gaps in our timeline - reassured them that I was normal. Until the day I came out to my family, it never crossed their minds that I was not straight, but they did know I was a bit… queer and wondered if any female would take an interest in me. My showing up with a young woman who seemed awfully smart, if a bit intensely focused, was a great relief to them. They were indulgent with Jay. Not a natural with the children? Oh, it's different when they're your own. Don't know any Hank Williams? It's fine just to listen, honey, if you're shy. We're sure you have a real nice voice.
The second day, Jay found her way into my family's heart by shooting portraits of them all, individually and in different family configurations. She posed them all over the farm, which kept her out of the kitchen, where my mother hoped to repeat the merry bread-making session she'd enjoyed with Joe.
At the supper table, they all wanted to hear about her job on the Cape Cod Times, so she recounted her more interesting or amusing assignments. Afterwards, when my father and Kathy and I were sitting on the porch swing watching the sun set, he patted me on the back.
"You found a fine little gal, son," he said. "Guess now that you've moved in together, you'll be gettin' married one of these days."
"Ennis is young, Dad," Kathy said, leaning forward to look past me at him. "These days you can live together a long time without getting married. Even have kids. If that's what you want," she added under her breath as she straightened up.
"I want to have kids," I said. "Eventually. But yeah, we're kinda young."
"Well, you better hold onto Robin, then," Kathy said, nudging my side. "I'm not sure there're many women who would put up with you for long."
"I don't want kids," Jay muttered that night. "Just so you know. So how do you spell your sister's baby's name?" We were lounging on the bottom bunk bed in my old room, me on my back with my knees up, Jay leaning against my legs. She'd shot at least half a dozen rolls of film of my family and had marked each one with a number in orange grease pencil. In her reporter's notebook she'd scribbled notes for each one and now she was checking the spelling of their names, as if she'd been on a day-long assignment.
"T-A-Y-L-E-E. I told them we're still young," I said. Then jokingly, "The rate I'm going, I might as well be a stay-at-home dad."
"I mean, ever." She raised her head and looked at me. "Wait, you'd look after them if I supported them?" She laughed. "Check back with me in ten years."
I wasn't sure how to interpret that last remark, so I changed the subject. But it was amazingly prescient.
The next morning after breakfast, my mother asked Jay - in the way of all mothers, who know how to turn a question into a request - if she wanted to feed the chickens, that I'd show her how. I could tell that Jay preferred this chore to playing with my nieces and nephews.
When we reached the coop where the hens were scrabbling noisily in the dirt, I unlatched the door and we stepped in. I showed her how much grain to scatter while I went inside the hen house to collect the eggs. A few moments later I heard my mother calling from the porch.
"Watch out, honey!" she yelled. "That one'll try to… oh there she goes!"
Jay hadn't closed the gate and one of the hens had made for the opening. She dropped the pail and lunged for the door but the hen had squeezed out before my mother finished her warning. Jay bolted through the door and ran after the escapee, bent forward with her arms out trying to herd it back to the coop, zigzagging across the yard. I grinned and for a moment wished I had a camera in my hand so I could capture the image of Jay in a white t-shirt and black jeans chasing the white bird. Instead, I watched and concentrate on the details, so that someday I could describe to my children what their mother had looked like on her first visit to a farm. For I felt at peace at that moment, filled with affection and gratitude for this woman who had made me feel part of my own family again. I was sure she would change her mind about children. I watched and laughed, then ran over and helped her corral the hen into the coop.
If you forget within minutes a moment of what seems like perfect happiness, is it real? I thought I was committing that scene to memory, but I didn't think of it again until Jack and I were in Spain last year, visiting a park that had once been a monastery. A few peacocks roamed the lawns surrounding the cloisters. It was mid-October but very warm and sunny. Jack and I were strolling in companionable silence until he said, Look, and pointed to a white peacock a few yards away. We walked closer and marveled at the way its plumes and feathers had all the usual markings but with no colors, pristine as laundered lace. I'd never imagined such a creature could exist.
A Spanish couple with a little boy, maybe five or six years old, stopped near us to admire the striking bird. The boy asked something in Spanish and his parents laughed. Jack chuckled too, and I asked him what the child had said.
Jack smiled at me. "Is he going to his wedding?" he mimicked in a high, rising voice.
I looked at the peacock, his lacy white tail feathers sliding along behind him, ruffling the green grass. "Yeah," I said. "In drag."
We continued around to the other side of the building. There we saw a man and a woman a few yards away, speaking in German as they followed their tiny daughter, who looked to be three years old at most. She had long white-blond hair and was dressed very impractically in white pants and a white jacket. I stopped short.
"If only that peacock was…" I began, then was aware of something hard and cool being pushed into my hand. I looked down; I was holding Jack's iPhone. He had already moved away from me and was loping back the way we came.
"Get ready! It's all set up!" he shouted over his shoulder.
I followed the family as they made their way to the other end of the monastery. Then I saw the white peacock scuttle around the corner of the building, straining to drag its train-like tail and stay ahead of Jack, who was flapping his arms slowly, urging the bird on toward the family, his sports jacket opening and closing like wings, calling "cooo coooo".
When he looked over at me I was standing with my arms at my side, smiling stupidly at him, the camera forgotten. He walked up to me and eased the phone from my hand. "Everything okay?" he murmured.
"Yeah," I sighed. "Perfect."
Jay and I left the farm after three nights, Mother Nature providing us with an excuse for an early departure, or at least giving Jay one. A hurricane was crawling up the Atlantic coast and was due to strike New England on the 28th. She wanted to get back in time to cover it, an attitude that completely baffled my parents. She was on vacation, why would she want to rush back to go to work in the middle of a windstorm?
"Because I've never been in a hurricane," she answered matter-of-factly.
"And we need to board up the windows of our house," I added. My parents looked relieved, as if grateful for a reason not to argue with us to stay.
We left early Wednesday morning and took the more direct way back, along the Interstate. The air was warm and humid; Jay had her camera out but didn't take any pictures until Missouri, spending the time monitoring the radio reports of Hurricane Gloria's progress.
Storm clouds were massing to the south; Jay asked me if a tornado would form there.
"It's not the high season for twisters," I told her. "But they can happen anytime. I'm not an expert. There are people who drive around chasing storms, trying to see a funnel cloud touch down and take pictures."
The station we were tuned to began to play the Laura Branigan song Gloria, which we both hated. It was the fifth time we'd heard it since we’d left the farm. Jay switched it off in disgust. "They could at least play the other Gloria, by the Doors," she grumbled.
"Or Patti Smith," I said. "But out here they wouldn't go for a woman singing about fucking a woman."
Jay sat up straight. "I have that tape!" She pawed through the box and soon held up a cassette with HORSES printed on it in black marker. "This song… I have such a great memory of the first time I heard it." She slipped it in the tape deck pressed the advance and reverse buttons, trying to find the track.
"My parents have an apartment in the back of the house that they rent to students from the college," she said. "When I was thirteen… no, fourteen I think, it was two guys and they always watched Saturday Night Live. I only watched it at home if my parents stayed out late - which they hardly ever did because they were boring - because it felt too lame to watch it with them. But one night I could hear through the wall that those guys had it on and I really felt like watching. So I sneaked out around back and knocked on their door. They were cool with it, as long as I didn't tell my dad. He was the advisor of one of them.
"Anyway, Patti Smith was the guest artist and god, when she sang this I just went crazy. I didn't even realize I was standing up and singing along, imitating her, until Ethan put a black tie around my neck, so I looked like her. Then he and Jeff played air guitar on either side of me."
She pounded her breastbone once with her fist and sighed. "That was just the best night. I stayed up till one watching the rest, then sneaked back. After that I went over any Saturday night they were home to watch SNL, until they moved out in June." She was silent a moment. "But I bought this album so I could remember."
I'd already told Jay about listening to Jack Tornado's show, and how he'd been my only friend for a while. Now I described how I'd first discovered the station, and how he'd played the title song of that album for me when I called.
"You know, when I visited the University of Kansas campus the next year, I went to the radio station and saw his picture on a bulletin board. He didn't look at all the way I imagined, and his name wasn't even Jack. I felt like an idiot."
Finally I heard some familiar piano chords and Jay turned up the volume. "Look!" I said, pointing off to the right. "That's gonna be a big storm." Off in the distance across the flat landscape black clouds were massing. Jay rolled down her window and took a few shots. Then she pushed a button between the seats to open the sunroof, unbuckled her seatbelt and stood on her seat. I slowed down some as she poked her head through the roof and propped her elbows on the edge, pointing her camera toward the stormy horizon.
"Hey, be careful," I warned, but she laughed.
"People say beware, but I don't care…" she sang along with Patti Smith. The music was contagious and I began to sing, too, as I gradually sped up. Jay braced herself with one foot against the glove compartment and swayed her hips in time. Pretty soon we were shouting the lyrics at the top of our lungs, "G-L-O-R-I-A … Gloria!"
We were racing home to get to a hurricane, talk about crazy! The storm on the plain didn't produce any twisters but it excited both of us. I wrapped my right arm around her leg, hugging it as she danced in place and I steered with one hand. When I nearly drove off the road Jay dropped back into her seat. We listened to the rest of the tape, and then others we both liked, and talked about her work and my writing and I didn't even notice when we passed the Motel Siesta. We fell exhausted into a motel bed in Ohio well after midnight, then got back on the road in the morning.
In the end, Jay and I didn't return to the Cape together. When we were in Rhode Island, with the storm at our heels, we stopped for gas and she called our answering machine to check for messages. Joe had left two for me, the first one offering the Brighton apartment as a refuge in case we needed to get off the Cape. The second time he called, he more or less begged me to please go there to check on things because his cousin had gone out of town for the week and might have left open a window. This was something the landlord could have dealt with, but I told Jay to drop me at the Providence Amtrak station, that I would ride out the storm in Boston.
What the hell was I thinking? I cringe to remember what a jackass I was to let my girlfriend go off alone into a hurricane so I could go shut a window. Apologizing for that choice was only one of the many "I'm sorry"s I laid at her feet the last year of the decade, and by then so much time had gone by, and other, good things had happened in her life since that day - and because of it - that it was easy for her to wave it away. But the graver wound I inflicted almost exactly three years after the hurricane - she even forgave me for that. So that much later, when she really needed me, I didn't hesitate.
There have been plenty of days in the past fifteen years when I wondered aloud what in the world I’d been thinking when I said yes to her, and declared that now we were more than even. But she knows I got exactly what I wanted.
Chapter 42a >>
Click on the buggy picture to see a clip from Witness. Click on Patti Smith to see her performance of Gloria on SNL.
By the way, in the first entry of my LJ home page you'll find a progress report on the upcoming chapter, so check there if you wonder where the next one is already.
Recaps for chapters 26 to 41 (A parts) are HERE. Recaps for chapters 26b to 40b HERE.
A Google map with story locations marked is HERE.
September 1985
Jay thought I was moving in with her on the Cape. I did too, but shied away from thinking about what I would do after the clam bake season ended. When I called Joe with the news he sounded pleased, but insisted he didn't want to give up the apartment in Brighton. A cousin was starting grad school at MIT and asked to take over my room. Joe would continue to pay half the rent in order to have a base in Boston. A few days after I'd settled into the house in Osterville, two green canvas director's chairs arrived from him, Miss Bergman and Mr. Bogart stenciled on their backs, in honor of the movie Jay and I had seen on our first date. Of course, now I see perfectly clearly in these gestures Joe's ambivalence about my relationship with Jay. Here's a bolt-hole in Boston if things don't work out, he was saying, and Remember what happened to Ilsa and Rick.
Fiercely alive is how I felt that summer. Jay was energized too, though we didn't discuss why. It was years before we talked about that time, and what Elliot's death meant to each of us. Not the fact of his death, but the way he'd lived his final weeks, holed up in his apartment, alone with his memories and regrets. It's ironic that I, who hardly knew him, possessed more clues to his tragic past than did Jay. I still have those poems and cards, the tape and the photo, and when I occasionally read or listen or look (seldom, actually, although I did frame the picture, which I keep in a drawer), his story seems so obvious, as though anyone at all could have filled in the blanks.
At odd moments while I packed up my few belongings, the memory of Elliot falling into his dark-haired lover's arms would flicker through my mind. What had become of that man? I assumed he was dead. That would make a logical narrative: the love of Elliot's life had died of AIDS, and he blamed himself, lost the will to live as he in turn succumbed to the disease. But then, who had taken that filthy cushion from his couch? When he and the man I saw him embrace had rushed up to the apartment, had they not even made it to the bedroom? I'd shake my head, not allowing myself to imagine more, visualizing instead Elliot sinking into the worn striped cushions, wrapped in a blanket, hacking, sweating, leaking…
No way would I end up like Elliot. The previous winter I'd drifted into a hermit-like existence; never again, I swore. Every morning I rose early and ran down to the beach for a swim, no matter what the weather. I would be spending most of my work day on the sand, ordering around two teenagers under the hot sun, but that was my time to be alone in the sea. I would plunge into the surf and slice back and forth, out and back. On days when Jay would be working a later shift, I'd go back to bed afterwards, not bothering to shower first. She liked that, liked licking my salty skin and didn't mind the sand in the sheets.
Jay preferred to swim after work, and if she knew which beach I was working on, and it wasn't far, she'd drive over. I'd watch her swimming her laps while I oversaw the clam bake, or during the cleanup if she came late. There were usually a few leftovers, which we brought home and ate on the back porch.
One evening over clams and corn I told her about my idea for a novel. While swimming, it had come to me. I was not cut out to be a journalist, but I thought I could write about one. Those two internships at newspapers owned by religious nuts, there had to be some good material there. Jay was supportive, clearly relieved that I'd found some intellectual pursuit.
"So what kind of story do you have in mind?" she asked.
"I'm thinking a murder mystery. One of the reporters for a rural newspaper run by a religious sect goes missing, then he's found dead. The editor tries to solve the murder, teaming up with one of the photographers. They, uh, have an affair, too."
I clearly didn't read enough mysteries if I thought this was so original.
"Don't make the photographer a woman. That would feel way too weird for me."
"But then I'd have to make the editor a woman," I pointed out.
"Not necessarily."
I blinked.
She gnawed on a big yellow toothy grin of a corn cob with a gleam in her eye. "Anyway," she said, swallowing, "why couldn't you make the main character a woman?"
I gave nervous laugh. "Give me a break. This is going to be hard enough!"
"Alright, alright," she huffed, bits of corn flying at me. "Just don't make them recognizably us."
I had no idea how to go about writing a novel. Deep down I knew I wouldn't actually complete one but it gave me something to think about while working on the beach. I'd heard that you were supposed to write an outline, but I was too impatient for that. The bits of dialogue and description that took form in my thoughts during the day went into a notebook at night. On the one day of the week we both had off, I'd read them to Jay in bed in the morning, feeling quite disconcerted when a week's worth of scribbling took only five minutes to read aloud; even more so when Jay laughed and told me I had a real knack for comedy.
On Labor Day weekend, I told Jay that I was due to visit my family in Kansas. My mother had called me frequently during the summer and each time she peppered me with questions about my girlfriend, as though she were trying to build up a detailed picture of the female that had managed to slip into my life. I hadn't hidden Jay's existence from my family, but I had deliberately let her place in my life remain vague for them. It was time to bring Jay home and show her off. When I asked her if she wanted to come with me she said yes, as long as we drove there, because she was very curious to see the middle of the country from the ground and not just fly over it. She put in a late request for vacation time in the last week of September; her editor granted it readily as the post-Labor Day period was always a slow one for news.
We started out on a Saturday befitting that first day of autumn - warm and dry with a crystalline blue sky, the trees showing the first touches of scarlet and gold. The route we took was more southerly than the one Joe and I had followed nearly two years earlier. We traversed Pennsylvania diagonally and made sure to pass through Lancaster County; I'd seen the movie Witness early in the year and was curious to see Amish country.
I was at the wheel when we came upon a black, horse-drawn buggy with a red triangle on the back. We crept along behind it for half a mile before the opposite lane was clear, while Jay photographed it through the windshield, the tip of her nose flattened against the back of the Nikon as she snapped away and explained the differences between the Amish and the Mennonite communities.
She was unaware of the memories it was stirring up in me. At the sight of that black buggy I flashed back to my winter of self-isolation in Boston when Jay and I had been drifting apart. An inexplicable urge to see Witness again had struck me a few days after my first viewing in February.. It's obvious to me now why the Harrison Ford character's love for a woman whose community he knew he could never really be a part of had struck a nerve in me. As I stared at the reflective red triangle, it became the Citgo sign against the night sky the last time Joe and I had gone to Fenway Park, and I heard again the words that had pierced my heart.
But soon after that I'd met Jay. The young Amish widow turned away from passion and married her quiet Amish suitor. A car zoomed up from behind us and overtook both our car and the buggy, startling me back to the present - the opposite lane was clear. I gave a heavy sigh of relief, accelerated and pulled around the farmer's buggy. Jay laughed and said you had to have patience to drive in that county.
Instead of crossing into Ohio, we dropped down into West Virginia. I'd told Jay that Ohio deserved its reputation as boring, and that a more southerly route through Appalachia would be more interesting. I had no desire to follow the same route that Joe and I had traveled in December. The mild, sunny early fall weather was conducive to meandering through the rolling hills and mountains of Kentucky.
There were other differences between the two trips besides the season. Joe and I had been focused on our destination and had stuck to the interstate; our journey had been one of constant forward movement, fast and steady, our conversations mainly about impersonal topics. Jay insisted on following small, winding roads, with frequent stops to admire the views. Like Joe, she'd brought music to listen to, but switched tapes often, seldom letting one play to the end, and when we had the radio on she changed the station every ten minutes. She asked me questions about my family, and drew out of me stories she hadn't heard before.
We didn't make it beyond West Virginia that first day. Jay stopped many times to take pictures of the lush mountains and green hollows, excited by the landscape after years of making the city her photographic subject. We stayed in a motel at the foot of Mount Gay-Shamrock and the next day drove through Kentucky into southern Missouri. It was tempting to stop and spend time in the Mark Twain National Forest south of Saint Louis, maybe rent a canoe and paddle on the Eleven Point River. But I knew my family was waiting for us. I was convinced that Jay would be desperate to get away from my family after two days, and a visit to the park on the way back would be an excuse to leave that my parents would accept.
We spent the night in Springfield, then drove through southern Kansas along the secondary roads, me at the wheel the whole way, Jay hanging out of the window with her camera, ordering me to slow down or stop every ten minutes so she could shoot yet another picture of the stubbly corn fields or puffy clouds. “The sky is so big here!” was her constant refrain.
The road was blade-straight to the horizon with little traffic. I drove resting my left arm on the edge of the open window and steering with one finger while I watched Jay lean out into the warm rushing air with her Nikon. What a difference between this trip and the same Kansas segment of the one I'd taken with Joe two years earlier. The tension between us had been a third passenger as we cruised silently through the frozen landscape. I hoped Jay would have as good a reception from my family as the one Joe had enjoyed. I was a little nervous about it because Jay's charm switch had a balkier mechanism than Joe's, which flipped on smoothly.
She dropped back down into her seat and pulled up a little lever on top of the camera. "This isn't the way I imagined it would look, where you were from," she said as she cranked the film back into its canister.
"What did you think it was like?" I replied, puzzled. She'd seen The Wizard of Oz like everyone else in America.
"More like where we were yesterday, in Kentucky. I envisioned you in one of those farms in a mountain hollow. More… contained."
"At least you don't think I have a flat personality," I said. "Do you?"
She opened the back of the Nikon and removed the finished Tri-X film. "You don’t seem expansive, that's for sure, and…" she began. When she didn't continue, I glanced at her. She was peering intently through the windshield as she rummaged through her camera bag. "…then suddenly you surprise me. Look at that!"
Several miles ahead was a farmhouse, barn and silo poking up out of the flatness and right above it, casting a wide shadow over the property was an enormous, lone cloud, flat on the bottom and billowing upwards like a squirt of a giant's shaving foam. There were no other clouds in that part of the sky and the house was the only one visible for miles, yet there they were together, unlikely partners.
"When we get close, we have to stop," Jay declared. She was opening a yellow and blue box - Ektachrome.
"Guess we're over the rainbow now, if you're loading color film," I joked, but she didn't reply. We drove in silence for a few miles, then Jay asked me to stop and pull over. We both got out of the car and she took several shots of the cloud and the house. It was hard to believe the white mountain of vapor wouldn't suddenly drop and crush the farm.
After that it was only two hours to my family's home. I told Jay a bit about my parents' history, some of which she'd heard before, and what kind of grilling to expect from my sister if she showed up, which was likely. I'd never brought a woman home before, I explained, so they would all be very curious.
"I was going to bring you to Philadelphia for Thanksgiving this year," she said, smiling at me, "so you'll get the same treatment in a couple months."
"But I met your parents last year at graduation," I pointed out. "They were fine."
"It's not the same when they're in their own environment. You'll see."
It was close to suppertime when we pulled up in front of the house. I could tell because of the cooking smells released into the air when the door opened and everyone came out onto the porch to get a look at us - both my parents, KE, his pregnant wife and their three-year old twin boys, Kathy with a toddler in her arms. One of the boys leaped from the top step onto the gravel before we came to a complete stop. Jay gasped and I jammed on the brakes. We quickly got out of the car and saw either Tyler or Thomas squatting by the front bumper, jabbing his finger at our Massachusetts license plate over and over and counting out loud.
"Thirteen letters in that state!" he yelled. "You came a looong way!"
Jay gave a little snort. "I see it runs in the family."
"What does?" I said. But then my mother was bustling down the porch steps, the rest of my family following.
"So you're Robin!" My mother grabbed Jay's hand, sending out a little puff of flour, and smiled up at her. I could tell from Jay's little grin that Dottie Del Mar precisely fit her mental image of a plump mid-western farm woman.
"Ennis told us a lot about you, for him that is," my mother went on, "Well! Don't you look just like that nice friend of his who came at Christmas that time."
Jay looked at me quizzically.
"Joe," I said. "Senior year."
"Oh yes! He was such a charming young man! We were sorry he couldn't stay longer."
"Mighty fine singer," my father put in.
"And so handsome! Big blue eyes, just like yours." My mother beamed at Jay. "Are you related?"
Jay's grin faded. Then Kathy stepped up next to my mother and smiled warmly at Jay. "Ennis told us how beautiful and talented you are," she said, shifting the child on her hip. Her smile when she glanced at me was more sardonic. "In his own unique way, of course."
"I can imagine," Jay replied. I didn't see her expression because I was looking at my foot as I dug my toe into the gravel, but her amused tone was reassuring. I was no good at compliments, or endearments for that matter, only producing a little gem for her once in a while, when she really needed it. My parents' praise for Joe had stirred up memories of that Christmas trip - ones I desperately wanted to remain in the dregs, especially the one from the motel. I looked up at Jay; she did remind me of Joe for a second and before I could think I'd lifted my hand and ran my fingers through her curls. She shifted closer to me and slid her arm around my waist. I saw everyone smile and relax.
My family seemed to like Jay well enough. What they loved was what she represented, but I didn't understand that at the time. That I had a girlfriend, and had been with her for over a year -I had glossed over the gaps in our timeline - reassured them that I was normal. Until the day I came out to my family, it never crossed their minds that I was not straight, but they did know I was a bit… queer and wondered if any female would take an interest in me. My showing up with a young woman who seemed awfully smart, if a bit intensely focused, was a great relief to them. They were indulgent with Jay. Not a natural with the children? Oh, it's different when they're your own. Don't know any Hank Williams? It's fine just to listen, honey, if you're shy. We're sure you have a real nice voice.
The second day, Jay found her way into my family's heart by shooting portraits of them all, individually and in different family configurations. She posed them all over the farm, which kept her out of the kitchen, where my mother hoped to repeat the merry bread-making session she'd enjoyed with Joe.
At the supper table, they all wanted to hear about her job on the Cape Cod Times, so she recounted her more interesting or amusing assignments. Afterwards, when my father and Kathy and I were sitting on the porch swing watching the sun set, he patted me on the back.
"You found a fine little gal, son," he said. "Guess now that you've moved in together, you'll be gettin' married one of these days."
"Ennis is young, Dad," Kathy said, leaning forward to look past me at him. "These days you can live together a long time without getting married. Even have kids. If that's what you want," she added under her breath as she straightened up.
"I want to have kids," I said. "Eventually. But yeah, we're kinda young."
"Well, you better hold onto Robin, then," Kathy said, nudging my side. "I'm not sure there're many women who would put up with you for long."
"I don't want kids," Jay muttered that night. "Just so you know. So how do you spell your sister's baby's name?" We were lounging on the bottom bunk bed in my old room, me on my back with my knees up, Jay leaning against my legs. She'd shot at least half a dozen rolls of film of my family and had marked each one with a number in orange grease pencil. In her reporter's notebook she'd scribbled notes for each one and now she was checking the spelling of their names, as if she'd been on a day-long assignment.
"T-A-Y-L-E-E. I told them we're still young," I said. Then jokingly, "The rate I'm going, I might as well be a stay-at-home dad."
"I mean, ever." She raised her head and looked at me. "Wait, you'd look after them if I supported them?" She laughed. "Check back with me in ten years."
I wasn't sure how to interpret that last remark, so I changed the subject. But it was amazingly prescient.
The next morning after breakfast, my mother asked Jay - in the way of all mothers, who know how to turn a question into a request - if she wanted to feed the chickens, that I'd show her how. I could tell that Jay preferred this chore to playing with my nieces and nephews.
When we reached the coop where the hens were scrabbling noisily in the dirt, I unlatched the door and we stepped in. I showed her how much grain to scatter while I went inside the hen house to collect the eggs. A few moments later I heard my mother calling from the porch.
"Watch out, honey!" she yelled. "That one'll try to… oh there she goes!"
Jay hadn't closed the gate and one of the hens had made for the opening. She dropped the pail and lunged for the door but the hen had squeezed out before my mother finished her warning. Jay bolted through the door and ran after the escapee, bent forward with her arms out trying to herd it back to the coop, zigzagging across the yard. I grinned and for a moment wished I had a camera in my hand so I could capture the image of Jay in a white t-shirt and black jeans chasing the white bird. Instead, I watched and concentrate on the details, so that someday I could describe to my children what their mother had looked like on her first visit to a farm. For I felt at peace at that moment, filled with affection and gratitude for this woman who had made me feel part of my own family again. I was sure she would change her mind about children. I watched and laughed, then ran over and helped her corral the hen into the coop.
If you forget within minutes a moment of what seems like perfect happiness, is it real? I thought I was committing that scene to memory, but I didn't think of it again until Jack and I were in Spain last year, visiting a park that had once been a monastery. A few peacocks roamed the lawns surrounding the cloisters. It was mid-October but very warm and sunny. Jack and I were strolling in companionable silence until he said, Look, and pointed to a white peacock a few yards away. We walked closer and marveled at the way its plumes and feathers had all the usual markings but with no colors, pristine as laundered lace. I'd never imagined such a creature could exist.
A Spanish couple with a little boy, maybe five or six years old, stopped near us to admire the striking bird. The boy asked something in Spanish and his parents laughed. Jack chuckled too, and I asked him what the child had said.
Jack smiled at me. "Is he going to his wedding?" he mimicked in a high, rising voice.
I looked at the peacock, his lacy white tail feathers sliding along behind him, ruffling the green grass. "Yeah," I said. "In drag."
We continued around to the other side of the building. There we saw a man and a woman a few yards away, speaking in German as they followed their tiny daughter, who looked to be three years old at most. She had long white-blond hair and was dressed very impractically in white pants and a white jacket. I stopped short.
"If only that peacock was…" I began, then was aware of something hard and cool being pushed into my hand. I looked down; I was holding Jack's iPhone. He had already moved away from me and was loping back the way we came.
"Get ready! It's all set up!" he shouted over his shoulder.
I followed the family as they made their way to the other end of the monastery. Then I saw the white peacock scuttle around the corner of the building, straining to drag its train-like tail and stay ahead of Jack, who was flapping his arms slowly, urging the bird on toward the family, his sports jacket opening and closing like wings, calling "cooo coooo".
When he looked over at me I was standing with my arms at my side, smiling stupidly at him, the camera forgotten. He walked up to me and eased the phone from my hand. "Everything okay?" he murmured.
"Yeah," I sighed. "Perfect."
Jay and I left the farm after three nights, Mother Nature providing us with an excuse for an early departure, or at least giving Jay one. A hurricane was crawling up the Atlantic coast and was due to strike New England on the 28th. She wanted to get back in time to cover it, an attitude that completely baffled my parents. She was on vacation, why would she want to rush back to go to work in the middle of a windstorm?
"Because I've never been in a hurricane," she answered matter-of-factly.
"And we need to board up the windows of our house," I added. My parents looked relieved, as if grateful for a reason not to argue with us to stay.
We left early Wednesday morning and took the more direct way back, along the Interstate. The air was warm and humid; Jay had her camera out but didn't take any pictures until Missouri, spending the time monitoring the radio reports of Hurricane Gloria's progress.
Storm clouds were massing to the south; Jay asked me if a tornado would form there.
"It's not the high season for twisters," I told her. "But they can happen anytime. I'm not an expert. There are people who drive around chasing storms, trying to see a funnel cloud touch down and take pictures."
The station we were tuned to began to play the Laura Branigan song Gloria, which we both hated. It was the fifth time we'd heard it since we’d left the farm. Jay switched it off in disgust. "They could at least play the other Gloria, by the Doors," she grumbled.
"Or Patti Smith," I said. "But out here they wouldn't go for a woman singing about fucking a woman."
Jay sat up straight. "I have that tape!" She pawed through the box and soon held up a cassette with HORSES printed on it in black marker. "This song… I have such a great memory of the first time I heard it." She slipped it in the tape deck pressed the advance and reverse buttons, trying to find the track.
"My parents have an apartment in the back of the house that they rent to students from the college," she said. "When I was thirteen… no, fourteen I think, it was two guys and they always watched Saturday Night Live. I only watched it at home if my parents stayed out late - which they hardly ever did because they were boring - because it felt too lame to watch it with them. But one night I could hear through the wall that those guys had it on and I really felt like watching. So I sneaked out around back and knocked on their door. They were cool with it, as long as I didn't tell my dad. He was the advisor of one of them.
"Anyway, Patti Smith was the guest artist and god, when she sang this I just went crazy. I didn't even realize I was standing up and singing along, imitating her, until Ethan put a black tie around my neck, so I looked like her. Then he and Jeff played air guitar on either side of me."
She pounded her breastbone once with her fist and sighed. "That was just the best night. I stayed up till one watching the rest, then sneaked back. After that I went over any Saturday night they were home to watch SNL, until they moved out in June." She was silent a moment. "But I bought this album so I could remember."
I'd already told Jay about listening to Jack Tornado's show, and how he'd been my only friend for a while. Now I described how I'd first discovered the station, and how he'd played the title song of that album for me when I called.
"You know, when I visited the University of Kansas campus the next year, I went to the radio station and saw his picture on a bulletin board. He didn't look at all the way I imagined, and his name wasn't even Jack. I felt like an idiot."
Finally I heard some familiar piano chords and Jay turned up the volume. "Look!" I said, pointing off to the right. "That's gonna be a big storm." Off in the distance across the flat landscape black clouds were massing. Jay rolled down her window and took a few shots. Then she pushed a button between the seats to open the sunroof, unbuckled her seatbelt and stood on her seat. I slowed down some as she poked her head through the roof and propped her elbows on the edge, pointing her camera toward the stormy horizon.
"Hey, be careful," I warned, but she laughed.
"People say beware, but I don't care…" she sang along with Patti Smith. The music was contagious and I began to sing, too, as I gradually sped up. Jay braced herself with one foot against the glove compartment and swayed her hips in time. Pretty soon we were shouting the lyrics at the top of our lungs, "G-L-O-R-I-A … Gloria!"
We were racing home to get to a hurricane, talk about crazy! The storm on the plain didn't produce any twisters but it excited both of us. I wrapped my right arm around her leg, hugging it as she danced in place and I steered with one hand. When I nearly drove off the road Jay dropped back into her seat. We listened to the rest of the tape, and then others we both liked, and talked about her work and my writing and I didn't even notice when we passed the Motel Siesta. We fell exhausted into a motel bed in Ohio well after midnight, then got back on the road in the morning.
In the end, Jay and I didn't return to the Cape together. When we were in Rhode Island, with the storm at our heels, we stopped for gas and she called our answering machine to check for messages. Joe had left two for me, the first one offering the Brighton apartment as a refuge in case we needed to get off the Cape. The second time he called, he more or less begged me to please go there to check on things because his cousin had gone out of town for the week and might have left open a window. This was something the landlord could have dealt with, but I told Jay to drop me at the Providence Amtrak station, that I would ride out the storm in Boston.
What the hell was I thinking? I cringe to remember what a jackass I was to let my girlfriend go off alone into a hurricane so I could go shut a window. Apologizing for that choice was only one of the many "I'm sorry"s I laid at her feet the last year of the decade, and by then so much time had gone by, and other, good things had happened in her life since that day - and because of it - that it was easy for her to wave it away. But the graver wound I inflicted almost exactly three years after the hurricane - she even forgave me for that. So that much later, when she really needed me, I didn't hesitate.
There have been plenty of days in the past fifteen years when I wondered aloud what in the world I’d been thinking when I said yes to her, and declared that now we were more than even. But she knows I got exactly what I wanted.
Chapter 42a >>
Click on the buggy picture to see a clip from Witness. Click on Patti Smith to see her performance of Gloria on SNL.