Scott Spencer - Endless Love

The hall got lighter as I walked toward the front of Ann’s apartment, and when I was in the living room the light was almost overwhelming. The entire south wall was casement windows and most of the west wall was glass as well. The bamboo shades were raised and Ann had hung small prisms that dangled on thin threads and blazed red and green as sunlight passed through them. The floors were wooden and bare. There was a white sofa and three director’s chairs grouped around a glass- topped table. Off to one side of the room was a small yellow desk, such as you might find in a college dorm. A red manual typewriter and an open box of typing paper. Bookshelves, mostly empty. It was hard to say where the kitchen was, or if it even existed. Perhaps behind the closed double doors.

“Where should I sit?” I said.

“Assuming you should,” she said.

“Yes. Assuming.”

“Why don’t you look out the windows first? I like to show my view when newcomers arrive.”

The view was of a series of slate peaks, the roof of a church. The black slate looked liquid in the sunlight. Beyond the church was a tall white stone and glass loft building with scallop shells and coats of arms carved in beneath each tier of windows. A photographer’s strobe flashed like summer lightning from the top floor. Ann stood next to me; she’d always liked showing things to people and then trying to see the familiar through new eyes. Long strands of down stood up on her cheekbones, caught in the light. I felt the beginnings of an overpowering shyness in myself.

Ann glided across the room and sat on the white sofa, drawing her feet up and leaning her chin onto her open palm.

“It’s nice here,” I said. “Your new home.”

“Three hundred and ten dollars and eight cents a month,” she said. “For this, a pullman kitchen, and a small bedroom. It’s insane. I’m always broke. A friend has a place on the West Side, six enormous rooms, for less than I’m paying here. But I’m too timid to live on the West Side. It’s so ridiculous, but that’s how I was raised, to be afraid to live on the West Side. Do you know Mother used to make a point of telling people she hadn’t been west of Fifth Avenue in twenty years? ‘I went to hear that Jewish violinist at Carnegie Hall. My, what an adventure that was.’” Ann laughed, shortly. “But oh if only we’d had the dough to justify our little eccentricities. But without money it was all so stupid and awkward, like chimpanzees dressed up in formal gowns.”

“Ann…”

“Sitting at little toy pianos.”

“Ann,” I said, “do you mind if I sit down?”

She pointed to one of the director’s chairs. “Brand new,” she said.

“Tell me if you want me to leave,” I said.

Ann shook her head. “You’re still doing it? Still giving people permission to say what’s on their mind?”

I sat down. The chair seemed to give a little beneath me and its fragility made me feel huge, clumsy, and potentially destructive.

“If there’s one thing wonderful about you—I mean, just one—it’s that I can say anything at all to you, David, and never have to feel the slightest degree of guilt.”

“That’s true,” I said. “Not only now but always.”

We sat in silence. I wanted to look directly into Ann’s eyes but I knew she found that sort of gesture more pressuring than frank. (“People invade your privacy as if they were helping you overcome a fault.”) I fixed my gaze on a section of quilt, blue and pink pyramids in a row, burned at the edges, and hanging above Ann in a rough wooden frame.

“Look familiar?” Ann asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s from the house. Maybe we weren’t using it during your tenure. It’s part of a quilt—all that’s left of it—Grandmother gave me when I set off for Bryn Mawr. Very sentimental. I’ve been defending it like the Grail these past couple years. From Keith. I told you Keith just left here, didn’t I? Yesterday.”

“Is Keith still the Butterfield historian?” My voice cracked slightly.

“Of course. He brings a portable tape recorder on his visits now and attempts to interview me. I feel like a perfect idiot speaking into the microphone. Immortality without revision? Who needs it?”

I felt my cheeks go hot. Every word she said made her more familiar to me and I was struck with the image of myself falling to my knees before Ann and pressing her hand to my lips—a knight returned to his Queen.

She turned around and patted the glass that covered the quilt. “Don’t feel too bad about it being burned. It was on its way to oblivion anyhow, like most of what we owned. The only thing was that this was the quilt I had on my bed when Hugh got back from the war. The night he just appeared. He’d been in Baltimore recovering and I hadn’t even gone down to visit him. I didn’t know what our relationship was, or what it was supposed to be. But when he appeared I knew something. We didn’t even get under the covers and that was the night that sealed all of our fates because that’s when Keith was conceived.”

“Is that why he wants it? The quilt?”

“Naturally. Evidence. Talisman. Keith’s theory is that if I hadn’t gotten myself pregnant, then Hugh and I would never have married. And according to Keith this gives me a tripartite role: part son, part father, part husband. Proving, I suppose, that all gall is divided into three parts.”

A laugh exploded out of me like a sneeze. “That’s wonderful,” I said.

“I’ve used it a hundred times, the line, that is. Is that what you meant?”

“Ann,” I said. I could think of nothing else to say; my mind was dull gray light.

She allowed the silence to continue. Then: “What brings you to New York, David?”

“You.”

What did I expect? For her to hold her hand out to me? To confess that she’d hoped for my arrival? She nodded, as if my declaration concerned only me. Ann’s opaque gestures had always, in my eyes, been a sign of her elegance and artfulness. Yet now with my life breaking beneath the weight of my vast load of unexpressed feeling, I wanted her to be less herself and more what I needed. I looked at her and felt myself sinking—and it was like waiting for a cat to rescue you from drowning.

“How could I bring you to New York?” she said, finally.

“I wanted to see you, talk to you.”

“Ah. But that’s not me: that’s you.”

“I don’t try and fool myself. I wasn’t sitting on the plane thinking you were going to find it easy, seeing me. I’ve been here since one trying to get the courage to call you.”

“That’s because you’re not in love with me and so you still can remind yourself there’s a difference between you and me. If you were in love with me, if you felt something you’d just assume I did, too.”

I bowed my head. I thought I was just lowering my eyes to collect my thoughts but when my head tilted down it stayed there.

“Have you come to quiz me about the others?” Ann asked.

There was no place to be polite and so I said, “Partly.”

“And what else, then?”

“To be with you. I miss you all the time and hearing from you makes me miss you more.” Finally, I could look up again. Ann’s features had softened. She touched her glasses as if to remove them and reveal herself to me, but her hand dropped into her lap and she sighed.

“I’m being mean to you. I feel it,” she said. “Covering for myself. This way if anyone finds out you were here and asks any questions I can recall all the mean and teasing things I said and I’ll get their approval. The last thing I’d want to say is I was glad to see you.”

“But is that it? How do you feel?”