Tonight it’s dark out, foggy, and Jen’s a little uncertain on the motor scooter. It’s been so long. She holds the handlebars tight and bends forward into the wind. The helmet slips back on her head and the strap pulls on her chin when she speeds up, cold air numbing her cheeks. She loops around the backstreets, dreading the sharp curves and traffic river road. She admits to herself she’s a little scared. Not of the bike itself. Of the freedom.
She had called Lou after dinner, and made up an excuse to go visit with her. Jace wasn’t thrilled, but there wasn’t much he could say when she’d already put Chris to bed. She told Lou she wanted to ride the scooter again. Lou said she could have the bike back; she doesn’t use it because the wheels are too small. Jen doesn’t care about the wheels, but she’s worried about Jace, his reaction to what she knows will be a unilateral decision. They only have one car, so she gets stuck out on the river a lot, no buses out there. When she buys the bike back, she will be able to get a babysitter and take off now and then. Maybe that’s the real reason Jace didn’t like her having it before, after he took over her car, she thinks. The mobility.
She knows exactly where she’s going, even though it’s more automatic than deliberate. She sees the familiar corner looming ahead of her, and holds on tighter as she swoops around the lazy, winding street. The sign, Bertrand Ave., flashes for a split second in her headlight, and then it’s gone and she’s turning the next corner, going around the block to the other end. This time she turns onto Bertrand, and cuts the throttle to a whimper. This thing is far too noisy to be discreet; she feels naked without a car around her. She catches a glimpse of figures moving in the warm yellow light through the large front window. Saint never could remember to close the front verticals, always said no one could see in. Now that Jen is parked in front of the sprawling ranch, looking from the outside at the house she once called home, she realizes she can see perfectly. And what she sees is Saint, waving her arms at her husband, then pointing her finger, jabbing it into his chest like a knife. Angry, she turns away and looks out the window. Jen feels her heart thud, afraid she’ll be discovered, so she cranks the throttle and speeds off down the street. She doesn’t stop until she sees the lights of the ATM at the plaza three blocks down. She pulls in, determined to buy back the scooter. Jace will have to get used to the idea.
The warm little lobby of the ATM is like a familiar friend. It’s been so long since she’s been here, seven years last October. Jen loves this part of town, so close to the lake, all the well-kept, low slung ranch homes with their fireplaces and radiant heat. In summer the night sky is a rich indigo and the air tingles, gives you that little thrill in your stomach. There are gnarled, aging oaks everywhere, and the streets wind around like snakes.
This is the busiest corner in the neighborhood: a lone bank, convenience store, and tanning salon. It’s like another world. The people who live here think so too. She and Saint had been lucky to get the house; a rental in the north end was, still is, rare.
Saint must have bought it by now if they’re still living there, Jen thinks. The front has all been redone and the windows have been replaced. Jen always knew it was Saint’s house, that she was just passing through, someone to play house with, make rent. Saint would never admit it, made it out to be this heavy partnership that Jen just couldn’t seem to live up to. Maybe she was right, Jen couldn’t. By the looks of things tonight, her husband can’t either. But Jen knew that even back then, that he wouldn’t last. He too was just an idea, something to write about. Saint invented him, so of course she hates him for it. Likely the way she hates Jen, but not quite as bad, because at least she took Jen seriously. Too seriously. Or not enough, Jen’s not sure. She just wants to not care anymore.
Rosemary’s take is that Saint is just some puritanical mad-woman, which is easy to conclude if you read her letters. Rosemary read them all one summer when they’d rented a cottage on a girl’s retreat. Jen felt bad, betraying Saint like that, but she could never have explained the dynamic to Rosemary otherwise, and Rosemary’s good at seeing things, reading between the lines. But in a way, Jen was disappointed with the verdict. Part of her knows it’s not fair, not true. You can’t just dismiss years of friendship with a label and the wave of a hand. If Saint was nuts, what was Jen? If Saint was just some bi-polar Holden Caulfield given to spilling her angst on the page in a juvenile quest for intimacy, what was Jen? Because Jen had written those letters too. Jen had loved their letters until they turned ugly. Those letters were more real to her than the drab grey “ole RW – real world” that they mocked, dissected, eulogized.
Jen decides she must learn how to become one with the road. She fingers the crisp bills in her pocket. This bike might save her life.
She drives back to Lou’s, happy with her decision, euphoric from either her imagined defiance of Jace, or the actual pleasure of riding again. She gives the throttle too much gas going into the driveway, and sends up a spray of gravel. She thrusts down her foot for control and cuts the engine. Lou is looking out her front window, waving. She always waves like a little girl, it’s one of her things. Part of childhood she’s unwilling to relinquish. Her voice is young too, slightly affected like a Hassidic Tinkerbelle, which is why people are disarmed by the words that come out of her mouth, especially the insights. She opens the door wide and smiles wider.
“Was it fun?” she asks.
Jen nods, trying to get the helmet off.
“Soooo, do you want it back?” she asks.
“Yup, I went to the ATM. But I need to leave it here tonight because I have the car,” Jen says.
Okay by Lou. She decides they’ll have hot chocolate, to celebrate, and Jen sits at the kitchen table while Lou rummages in the cupboard. Jen feels calm and at one with things, the kind of feeling you get after a rainy day, when you’re sitting in the warm yellow light with a fluffy white towel around you, droplets dripping down your temples and cheeks, caressing them. That’s how she feels, even though it isn’t raining. Everything seems different when this happens.
Lou sits down at the table, waiting for the kettle. She wants to know where Jen went.
“Just around the back streets, out in the North End,” Jen says.
“You mean, by Bertrand?” she asks. Jen rolls her eyes. Lou’s a little psychic, and sometimes it’s annoying having a friend you can’t lie to.
“Yeah,” Jen admits, “by Bertrand.”
“I had a feeling, you know, that that was where you were going. You had a look about you,” Lou says.
“I saw her today, at Comfy’s. It brought back a lot.”
“Why don’t you just call, say you’re sorry, let’s have lunch. Get it over with. This has been going on as long as I’ve known you, you must get tired of it,” Lou reaches across the table and pats Jen’s hand.
“Yeah, I’m tired of it, I never know what to do if I see her. It doesn’t happen very often, it’s like a jolt from another world,” Jen says, distracted and increasingly sorry she said she’d stay for hot chocolate. She doesn’t feel like she can utter a single word aloud. Exhaustion replaces her brief euphoria.
“You’ll see her a lot more now. This isn’t a very big place. I mean, it was years ago. People forget things. Everything changes. The only place things are the same is in your head, y’know.”
“And her head.”
“You don’t know that,” counters Lou.
“Yes, I do. I know how her mind works. It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the real world, in her mind, nothing has changed,” Jen says, feeling her anger rising.
“You don’t give her much credit.”
“I suppose that’s half the problem. Always has been.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then I guess you’re just as guilty as she is, aren’t you? I mean, don’t you always say she tried to put you in a box, define you as a known substance. Objectify you? How are you different, if you say she can’t change, never will?”
“Okay, Lou, you’ve got a point, but there’s a lot more to it than that.”
“Is there? Are you sure you just don’t want to make it complicated to justify all the problems you had. I mean, all friendships are like that in a way, aren’t they?”
“I guess. But this was different. I can’t explain it. You had to be there. There’s something evil about it, someone trying to live through you, toy with your life. It was a game, a very serious game, and I lost a lot.”
“What did you lose, Jen?”
“A lot. I lost a lot. I’ll never be able to trust anyone’s thoughts.”
“You mean, you lost your innocence? We all lose our innocence, Jen.”
“It’s more than that. I don’t really want to talk about it right now, okay? I mean, it’s all so far behind me, under the bridge.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah, it is.”
Lou knows when to stop…just. She takes the kettle off the stove and makes their hot chocolate. Jen is certain Lou knows she’s lying, but she just doesn’t have the energy to get into it. Why did she drive by, spying like a teenaged boy? She doesn’t want to think about that too much. She just knows that part of her is gone, and she supposes she’s started looking for it.
Later, driving home along the river road, Jen’s swamped with memories of the teenage trips home she made, wretched, drunk at four in the morning, lines doubling and eyes peeled for flashing red lights to mark another encounter with authority. Her problem was she had far too much money as a teenager. She worked for every penny of it, no handouts in her family. But she had her first car at sixteen, and made enough in tips at her waitressing job to ensure that she never drove it sober. She marvels at the fact that she’s even alive.
She remembers one night in particular. She had been crying so hard she could barely stay on the road, screaming and slamming her fist on the steering wheel. She had just come from Roly’s house, had left him huddled naked in the corner of his living room, the blue cast from the TV glinting off the tears rolling down his cheek. She wasn’t even sure what started it; nothing logical happens when you’re drunk. Maybe she just had to have a dramatic moment every few months. Who knows? But she remembers clearly what she’d said as she stormed out the door. “You’re dust,” she’d said. That was all. She didn’t look back. At least, not for a few years. She doesn’t know if either of them ever understood what happened. She just asserted her will, her right to be somewhere else. She had known he was a drunk, white trash—in a charming way—a prole. That hadn’t bothered her. In fact, it may have been the attraction. It was all fun and games until he mentioned babies, and moving in. She was seventeen, he was twenty-five, and it hadn’t occurred to her that one of them was playing for real. She remembers the anger; it was herself she was angry at. In a strange way, she loved him more than anyone since. Love that courses through your veins like fire, the kind of love she decided could never last. At least, not for her.
Jen pulls off to the side of the road for a minute, to collect herself. Maybe she’s dreading going home, wants a few more minutes to herself. She looks out at the river and the pristine beams of white light shimmering on it from the other side. She can’t look at those lights without thinking they’re elevens. On her eleventh birthday, when her family moved downriver, her dad said he had them light it for her. She knew better, was a tough crowd, resented that they chose to move on her birthday, but looking back, it was sweet all the same. She’s rummaging through the years, looking for clues. She’s not sure what happened, how everything got turned around.
She closes her eyes, and she’s 17. She sees Roly, his compact little body sprawled across the tangled bed sheets, bleached morning light peeping through the corners of the window where the Led Zeppelin banner didn’t cover. She sees herself, wide awake, even though they had only gone to bed a few hours ago. She’d been too excited to sleep. She wanted to wake him up, make him breakfast, go for a walk. She should have been hung-over, but wasn’t.
She touched his cheek lightly. He twitched his moustache and raised his arm as if to bat an insect away. She hugged the worn, white sheets to her chest, pleased with the sensuality of light cotton on nakedness. She felt very womanly. Her mother always said she thought like a man. She now knew this wasn’t true, she just wanted it all. But this day, this day, she felt like she could even sew or knit if she had to. She luxuriated a while longer, then grew bored and slid out of bed. She padded down the stairs to the kitchen, and poured some orange juice. She was on her way to the living room, to open the curtains, when she noticed someone on the couch. She didn’t remember anyone staying, was sure they’d all left before she and Roly had went to bed. She stole back upstairs to get dressed, and went down for a closer look.
It was a woman from the party the night before. Her long, jet black hair was tangled and there were mascara stains all down her cheeks and on her eyelids. On the floor, there was an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. Then Jen noticed the empty pill bottle. She was too frightened to move, to touch her. She sat down for a minute, trying to get a handle on herself. She knew she shouldn’t panic, that she had to walk over and take a pulse. She waited another eternity, praying she would see her breathe, twitch, anything. Finally, Jen got up, one foot in front of the other, and made her way over. The woman’s arm was cold. Dead stone cold. Jen felt the woman’s neck. Cold. She ran upstairs to Roly, reeling in disbelief. She shook him until he sat up. He reached over to hug her, and that’s when she started crying. She managed to tell him, and he ran downstairs, right away, like he could save her. Jen followed him, watched him giving her mouth-to-mouth, screaming Francis, wake up. He started to pump her chest. Jen was stunned, useless, and didn’t know what to do.
Roly shouted at her to call 911, then to go home, so she wouldn’t have to be there when the ambulance and police came. Jen was grateful, and left quickly. On the way home, she realized she should have stayed, she was always a little slow figuring out the right thing. She later felt she shouldn’t have left him alone to deal with it. Then she started wondering why Francis did it. Deep down, she knew why, but she wanted to be wrong. You only had to see her once in a room with him to know she was in love with Roly. Jen didn’t really know her, stayed away from her at parties, she was always a little sappy and not too bright; like most of the women at those parties. Jen kept thinking maybe Roly would have liked her if she hadn’t been around, playing house. Maybe they were better suited, would understand each other. She knew he never understood her. And that was the attraction there, she thought. He always told her she was too good for him, and he sounded like he meant it. Jen knew that when a man tells you that, you should believe him. And she did, but she didn’t want to do anything about it. She was having fun, annoying her friends and family with forbidden love. She didn’t learn the word gratuitous until later in life.
But Jen knows she loved him, okay, so maybe the way a Jew loves pork. And she knows that Francis died, and nothing will bring her back. And sometimes she thinks that her feelings of guilt over Francis’s death was what caused her to break it off with Roly, to wake up and realize that she didn’t belong in his world. But then she gets angry at the idiot woman who drank herself to death on his couch while her own oblivious self was toying with newfound sex in the form of Roly, trying on her womanly wiles upstairs. If Francis loved him so much, why did she hurt him that way? Why hurt someone you love? Why not wait it out? If Jen is honest, she was furious at the woman who felt her life was worth ending out of spite. Such a waste.
Then, a month later, Jen hurt him in a different place. She found out later, from a friend of his, that he’d left his roommates and rented that house because he thought they’d be moving in together soon. He used to joke about it, and Jen would say: Why on earth would we want to do that? He’d just laugh and maul her. What the hell, she was just a kid who thought differently. Don’t all kids.
Saint never thought so, always said Jen knew exactly what she was doing. That she was experiencing life, suffering for her art so she could learn how different she really was, from his ‘type’, that is. That he didn’t matter at all, Jen just wanted someone to love, the more unlikely, outrageous, the better. Saint had a point, but she forgot one thing. Jen believed it, at least for a while. She still believes it. She still thinks she loved him, that sweet, dislocated southern shyness and pain buried under all the numbing vice. He was her first and last gentleman.
Saint was surprised at how bad Jen felt, how guilty. In a way, Saint had ruined it for her, talking about it all the time, abstracting it. Jen talked for a while too, too much. But then she got sick of it, started feeling like she was a movie. The less Jen talked, the more jealous Saint got. Over the summer, her letters would get nasty. She’d accuse Jen of sending her weather letters, said she couldn’t seem to write anything but shit when she was in love. This was deemed to be a bad thing.
And then, somewhere in there came that awful letter of hers.
Saint had gone back to her dad’s for the summer to work on the farm. It wasn’t much of a life, he was so strict—hated Jen too—he’d found some of her letters one night when Saint was babysitting the neighbor’s kids. So then she was grounded for a month, just for knowing Jen. Well, that and forgetting to unload the dishwasher before she left.
The next day Saint ran some errands for him in town and sent an email from the internet cafe. Told her not to send any more letters for now, that he’d hit the roof. And whatever she did, not to call the cell.
Jen couldn’t believe she didn’t tell him off for going through her stuff, but she was like that. Terrified of him. The other thing that bugged Jen was that Saint’s letters were way worse—it seemed so unfair. But of course Saint would renounce Jen to save her own ass. Worse, part of her believed him, Jen suspected.
So it was tough for them to really talk much that summer; Jen was too busy anyway, between waitressing and angsting. The private thoughts, the deep stuff she just kept in a file of letters like a diary to give Saint in the fall, filled with musings of Roly and the breakup and the ripple effect of Francis’s suicide among all her friends at the restaurant, through whom she’d met Roly and his crowd in the first place.
The Friday before school started again, Jen got Saint’s letter. It said:
I cry for all the things I’ve known and touched and breathed life into and sucked life from. One step could have changed the outcome but one step cost far too much for a creature of pride and sin. The course is furrowed deep into the mottled heart that will not unstick from my throat. The destination does not change; only the names we give to it, only the style and grace with which we meet it, only the length of time required for our private reckonings with the dismal abyss of mortality.
I feel death’s flesh upon my bones. If I were vain, I would wax and flex it, begging for stasis, preservation. There is no call for this. No high and mighty whisper of my name. In the absence of the word, I will answer only to that which waits in indifference. There are no heroes in the place where heroes live. I am no hero; I face only things which I create. And now from that too I turn away.
Jen, the Gatsby is the highest form of self-delusion and the sole salvation of one’s self. But I cannot dance toward the green light when I recognize it to be a mirage. I can only shroud myself in the black curtain that knows my name and every fiber of my existence and will swallow me whole, will swallow my pain and my joy in one beat, one breath.
Jen, Dad, Mom, Listen:
Forgive my self-absorption for it is an honest approach to my existence. It is my own right, my only right that I exercise in meeting my dark stranger, my ungodly Pan on the shore tonight.
Do not delude yourselves by thinking man has any other rights. Do not console yourselves by extracting rights you feel owed to you from others. They are a fallacy ingeniously devised to enable you to control each other. Nothing more.
Try and MAKE it your right to resent my death. You will only suffer, and the suffering will be self-wrought.
And so I flourish, free from the gravity of altruism, unable to bear down, to play games that you rule. I capsize the board with a wave of self-indulgence and do not ask your forgiveness—it is not yours to give. I leave you to pick up your pieces; to choose your own means to your end where we may meet and merge and yield.
Jen was stunned. Saint would get a little morbid here and there, the odd letter straight from left field, but she always seemed okay in the real world. But then Jen kept thinking about all those nights at the private beach they used to sneak into, how Saint would swim out into the black horizon, for what felt like forever; how everyone on shore was always worried she’d not come back. How she admitted at times she wanted to be lost in the mystery of it, to give herself over to the undertow. So Jen became frantic with the notion that Saint was actually planning to kill herself – the death of Francis was still fresh in her mind, which didn’t help. She called and called and called the house phone, desperate. Saint was only allowed to use her cell in emergencies, and her dad checked the bill each month to make sure. But Jen was desperate, so she called Saint’s cell. She shouldn’t have been surprised when Saint’s father answered, but she was. She sputtered and rambled away between sobs until his words started getting through.
“Ann is out back doing chores. I don’t know what kinda drugs you’re on but if you call Ann one more time I’m going to call your folks and tell ‘em about your letters. I shoulda anyway, but she begged me not to…An’ I’m gonna tell her mom she better not be lettin’ Ann run with your type this year either or I’ll pull her from that fancy-ass city school of yours pronto even if I have to go to court to get custody.”
The phone slammed in Jen’s ear.
At first, Jen failed to see the humor in a fake suicide letter. She felt hurt, gullible, stupid. Saint never ceased to find the humor in it. The first day back at school, Jen saw her in the hallway and Saint started laughing so hard she fell on her ass, couldn’t catch her breath.
There was something about the way she laughed that it was hard not to join in. It sounded funny. After a minute, Jen laughed too. Then they couldn’t stop. By the time Jen got around to calling her a bitch, her stomach hurt and tears were rolling down her face. All morning in class they’d look at one another and burst out giggling. It drove the teacher nuts.
Everything was fine after that, for a while. Back to normal, almost. Saint would go on about Jen having given up her one true primal love. By then Saint realized, saw what was happening to Jen. Saw that they were careening toward a sharp curve, where they’d cross-over and wear each other like a badge. Take the parts they wanted from the wreckage, then hate each other for it. But that was years away. They had only just started down that road.