Scott Spencer - Endless Love

We went silent for a time. We were strangers and half terrified in each other’s presence: we were seeing ghosts, both of us. How strange to be having a supernatural experience in that small hotel room. We should go out, I thought, we should be walking. But just as I was afraid to clear my throat, I was afraid to suggest anything.

There was a knock at the door. When I heard the knock I realized that Jade and I were staring at each other, quite boldly, and I had no idea how long our gazes had been locked.

I got up. “That’s the wine, probably,” I said.

“I have to go pretty soon.”

I wanted to shake my head but I stopped myself. “It’s good to be with you,” I said.

“Like you expected?” There was a slight smirk in her voice, from shyness.

I paused, to emphasize that I wasn’t just answering out of politeness. “Yes. Like I expected.”

The wine came in a heavy glass carafe. Two wineglasses and a foil package of peanuts. I signed for it, like a man of the world, and gave the man who delivered it a dollar bill because I didn’t want to ruffle the surface of the moment by digging in my pockets for change. I placed the tray on the table next to Jade.

“Shall I pour?” I said.

“The wine’s so dark. It looks black.”

“No. It’s the light in this room.” I poured some wine into her glass and held it in front of the light. It turned bright red. “See?”

Jade nodded and took the glass from me. I wondered if she would let her fingers touch mine accidentally, but she didn’t. I was disappointed, sensually let down, because I wanted to feel her, but it was better, I knew, that we not permit ourselves coy gestures. What better way to emphasize our strangeness than to flirt?

I poured my wine and stood in front of Jade. I would have liked to propose a toast but I knew I wasn’t going to. I returned to the edge of the bed. “I’ve been trying to find you,” I said.

“I know.”

“Your family protects you from me. I asked Keith and your mother, but they wouldn’t give me a clue where you were. I sent Sammy a letter to pass on to you.”

“I know, I know, David. I know.”

“Did he?”

Jade nodded.

I waited for a moment and then I nodded, too. “You didn’t answer.”

“There was nothing to answer. They weren’t your words, or don’t you remember? You sent me someone else’s letter. Charles Dickens.”

“It was all I could say,” I said. “I don’t know why. I was afraid to send something in my own words. I needed someone else to talk for me.”

“That’s not how I remember you,” Jade said.

“All I needed was one word from you,” I said, “and I would have sent you a hundred letters. I wrote them but I didn’t send them. I didn’t know where to send them or if you wanted me to.”

Jade sipped the wine and then ran her tongue over her top teeth, to wipe them clean. Each gesture drove the flag of her reality deeper into me; each movement made it seem more certain we could never be apart.

“I want to ask you a lot of things,” she said. “And tell you things. It’s too strange. I’ve just been to my father’s funeral and I want to ask you how you’ve been doing. I can’t handle it. This doesn’t make any sense.”

“How have I been?” I asked. “You can ask that. I mean, I can tell you. It’s not very difficult because I’m just how you think of me.”

“How do you know the way I think of you?”

“OK. I didn’t mean that. I mean I’m just the way I was the last time we saw each other.”

Jade looked away and rubbed her fingers together in that nervous way people do when they’re used to reaching for a cigarette but they’ve given them up. I could see the picture she had of herself in that moment, lighting the cigarette, drawing on it and keeping the smoke in her lungs for three or four moments, and then expelling it along with her breath and a sigh.

“The last time we saw each other,” she said, “was in Chicago and you were in my house after you set it on fire. Is that how you are now, too?”

I answered without hesitation. “Yes.”

She immediately consulted her wristwatch. “It’s time to go,” she said. “I’ve got twelve minutes to get eight blocks. I’ll be lucky if I make it.”

I had already hit upon my plan. I would offer to go with her to the bus station. I didn’t know where it was in New York but if it was like most cities it probably wasn’t in a safe area. I would insist. She would accept. And then I would tamper with the pace of our journey and cause her to miss her bus. But instead of offering to accompany her, I leaned forward and said, “No. Don’t go. Miss the bus. Stay. Stay with me. We haven’t talked in so long and I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again.”

She stood up and it felt as if that gesture was duplicated by a replica of her within me, displacing the blood in my mid-section and sending it in a rush to the five outermost points of my body. I forgot I was holding a wineglass and it dropped out of my hands; it landed upright but then it fell down.

Jade watched the mustard-colored carpet absorb the wine. She was nodding her head in that way that sometimes accompanies thought and sometimes means a tentative yes.

“Please,” I said, trying to impress my will on the moments as they flowed away from me, like a child lobbing stones into the sea.

She took a quick gulp of breath and then swallowed. She looked so tired and frightened. A pulse was beating in her forehead; her ears remained an astounding dark red.

“All right,” Jade said, in a careful voice, a voice that only pronounced the words, such as you might do if you were making a recording to teach English. “I better call the bus station and see when the next bus is.”

I thought she was going for the telephone but she took the three steps separating her from the edge of the bed and sat next to me.

I didn’t want to touch her or look at her or do anything to confuse the impulse that had brought her so close to me. I looked straight ahead at the spot she’d been sitting in and I felt her weight shifting. I felt her looking at the side of my face and then she leaned over and rested her forehead on my shoulder.

I longed to return the gesture with a caress of my own, but I knew better. I knew she meant more than one thing by her touch. I was someone she used to know who she was seeing on the day of her father’s funeral. It could have meant as little as that. It could have meant even less: exhaustion, sadness, that depletion of spirit that comes when we surrender to another’s will. Ye I was sure it was otherwise. There was something specific and deliberate in her touch. She was not merely laying her head against me. There was life in her muscles, in her neck and shoulders; she was making certain not to lean on me too hard. She was touching me and holding back in a way that seemed wholly calibrated, judging where to touch me and how hard, and that meant that not only was the center of her brow touching me but all of her. It added the dimension of decision to her gesture, of measurement and risk, and that made leaning against me as intimate as touching my face or taking my hand and pressing it against her breast. Moments passed, moments and moments, and it felt as if the whole of her being was concentrated in that stretch of brow that homed in on me, just as the entirety of a singer seems concentrated in her mouth as she hits her highest note.

I couldn’t put my arm around her without causing her to move her head, so I reached over and laid my hand on her leg, just above the knee. I laid it flat, without closing or even curling my fingers, so it wouldn’t seem as if I were trying to take possession of her, or even hold her.

I took measured breaths and tried to ignore my mind’s chaotic bursts of speculation and joy, but even so I was trembling.