ONE
Asa was in love. He loved Jean Williams. She had been in his class since the fifth grade—or rather, he had been in hers. Fifth, sixth, and now seventh: Asa and his mother had not moved, and not moved, and not moved again. Now he could let himself count on seeing Jean every day—every moment, if he liked: a glance across the room would produce her. So far, everything he noticed about her was just right, whether it was the lean tension in her hands as she held a book, the sound of her voice pretending to order “riz, petit pois” from a mock restaurant in French class, or the curves of her neck when her hair swayed during field hockey games he watched after school in secret. It all added up to a sum inside him, a simple sum.
Their first meeting had been simple, too. One day midway through the fifth grade she came over during art class and sat sideways in the desk in front of him. Around them kids were gabbing: the art teacher allowed roaming and talking, in the spirit of creative freedom. Jean sat, turned toward him, and leaned one elbow on the edge of his desk. That small gesture, the intrusion into his territory, shook him with a sudden pleasure. It was powerful, and despite the ease with which she placed her elbow, Asa had a sense she knew how daring it was.
She said, “You have moved a lot, haven’t you?”
Asa swallowed. He rarely answered a question without having figured out quickly what thought was behind it and what response was anticipated. This time he didn’t have a clue. So he simply said, “Yes.”
Jean nodded. Her eyes were technically brown, but when she got this close Asa could see they were a lot lighter than could possibly be imagined from a distance, nearer the color of butterscotch. She said, “I figured you had.”
“How?” he asked.
“You work hard,” she said. She leaned her chin lightly on the hand connected to the arm that rested on his desk. His legs tickled. She went on. “You figure things out, and you attack.”
“Attack?” He must have looked horrified, for she laughed and blushed and put out her hand to tap him on the shoulder. Tap, tap. It was like the first time he had been touched by the ocean.
“I don’t mean, like, to do battle,” she said. “I mean—well, you seem to know how to get to people. What I like is, you seem to do it to be nice. And, well—” She looked at him, and with a thrill he saw that she too felt something that made her nervous. “And that’s, well—nice.” She laughed at her own verbal awkwardness, and got up.
That was it. From that point on, Asa had isolated Jean and his feelings about her from the rest of the world. This love—he started calling it that after a while—was his only known instance of simplicity. He wanted to protect it from the usual analysis and calculation that he cast over everything else out there. The protection worked. Things stayed simple. He and Jean became friends. They sometimes talked, mostly about school. They sometimes walked together, if they were going to the same place. Nothing in his behavior could be taken as a sign of the deepness inside him. He never meant to tell her anything about it. Except for wanting, at times, to reach out and touch her on the hand, lightly, very lightly, with a finger, he never meant to do anything direct.
But then, as the beginning of seventh grade approached, an ambition began to grow around the love: somehow, he wanted his feelings to emerge, to be strong in the light of day. He wanted them to do some work in the world. Hiding this fine stuff inside struck him as finicky, almost dishonest. Stand up! he felt like saying to himself; Declare something—to Jean, he supposed.
But he was wary of this newfound boldness. Several times he almost spoke to her—when he found himself next to her in the cafeteria line, or saw her alone in a library aisle, looking at the mysteries—but he stopped short. He was not nervous. He just had the nagging feeling that he lacked some kind of knowledge, not about himself or Jean, but about loving.
Willing for the first time to learn, he realized that he was—had long been—surrounded by public examples of the things lovers did. For two years he had seen the same billboard beside the public library, bearing a gaudy photo of a young man twirling a young woman in some land of dance performed in a wooded dell, with hot-green letters begging to know: IS YOURS A KOOL LOVE? For two years he had watched girls in the hall writhe when a certain boy passed, rolling their eyeballs and pretending to collapse onto the friends giggling beside them; for two years he had watched as most of the other boys in his class drifted uneasily into some kind of sober association with this or that girl. None of these things had called forth a recognition.
His biggest surprise was the music. For years Asa had listened to music for an hour or so every night as he lay in the dark in bed. His transistor radio fit neatly under the curve of his hip beneath the covers, and the pink wire of an earphone snaked invisibly up his side. Several times Dave or his mother had popped into his room while the radio was playing its hidden tunes, and neither had ever detected a thing. He was completely secure. Snug in the dark, lying on his back, he absorbed the songs that came to him through the night. They sank right into his bones. Somehow his mind and body joined up to know these tunes, better than he knew anything. After a while “This Magic Moment” and “Our Day Will Come” and “What’s Your Name” and “It’s Too Late” and fifty others seemed no longer to come to him up the pink wire, but rather to come from him, as if he had only to open his mouth and create them, full blown, in all their sonic blare and nuance.
And what, exactly, did he know from this music? When Chuck Willis’s voice throated upward on each stretched syllable of the phrase “she’s gone” (wailing the two words into nine distinct sounds at one point), when The Drifters dropped into the mysterious swing of the refrain “sweeter than wine…softer than a summer night,” when the distant voices (the Romantics?) sighed with a kind of merry resignation behind Ruby as she promised “and we’ll have everything”—what did this teach him?
For two years it taught him nothing he could spell out. Then one night he lay in the dark listening to Timi Yuro say that the love of a boy could change a girl into a woman—and it hit him. The words, all of them he had ever heard, in every song—they were words of love. They were about—or were supposed to be about—his feelings for Jean. Or, perhaps, it was this way: his feelings for Jean were supposed to be what these songs described.
Chuck Willis had felt what Asa felt? And sung about it? And The Drifters—all that your-lips-touching-mine business—was that supposed to be happening? Was that what he should be wanting? For the next few days he shuddered every time another explicit lyric careened into his awareness; where before he could snap his fingers and cut a quick step while singing “These arms of mine…” he now thought of the actual arms, and what wasn’t between them, and how much they would not know what to do if something were—and then he forced himself to think about something else.
The pressure began to squeeze. He couldn’t run away, but he couldn’t figure everything out by himself. He faced the fact that he needed some help; he needed to talk to somebody. Somebody who had brought love out of the silence, and put it to work. Somebody who had made love the decisive thing.
TWO
Since her last stay in the hospital, Asa’s mother’s life had changed. She came home just before the sixth grade started, and she was very settled. Not depressed: she smiled a great deal, with good humor and all that, but she sat a lot and watched things. Before, most of the time she had been wild with energy, constantly active, sometimes scary, always interesting. When he got home from school, she might be composing a symphonic mystery meal using ten pots and twelve mixing bowls, flour and goo all over the kitchen, a meal that never appeared on the dinner table; she might be on a ladder painting some of the shutters yellow, quitting halfway through and leaving Dave to mutter and Asa to scrape paint for three weekends. Sometimes, too, the whole house was heavy with a day’s worth of darkness, and his mother was asleep. But even the sleep days were extreme enough to be intriguing, in the whole mix of things.
But for the past year when Asa got home from school every day, his mother was watching old movies on television in the living room. She greeted him cheerily from the sofa, reaching up to pull him down for a kiss. At least one window was always open and the air was pretty fresh, but the blinds were down. She said one or the other of her pills made her eyes sensitive.
Asa always sat with her for a few minutes in front of the television set, answering her questions about school. She almost never looked at the screen while he was there. She held his hand and asked him about his day. He, on the other hand, found himself watching. If something happened on the screen, he would interrupt his own school report to point it out to her; he did not want her to miss anything on his account. She never even glanced, but continued to regard him with an expectant smile.
Every day, after fifteen minutes, he got up and went to his room and got her pills. She always had water in the living room, but he brought her an extra glassful anyway. She gulped the pills down with her eyes on the screen; but watching her eyes, he could tell she wasn’t paying attention to the movie at those moments. She was pretending to watch, pretending the pills were nothing, not even a distraction, but in her eyes he saw a flare of terror and disgust as sharp as a struck match. He left her alone for a while then, coming back through the room a few times just to check up silently.
But today he did not leave. She swallowed her pills, settled back with the brief rage in her eyes, and stared at the screen. After a few minutes she looked at him, puzzled.
“What is it?” she said.
“I want to ask you about something.” Once again, he did not meet her gaze. On the screen, a young man whose hair was shiny with pomade stared sadly out the window of an elegant apartment at the lights of a city far below. From the slick hair, the rich material of the curtains, and the way he smoked his cigarette, Asa could tell the movie was from the 1930s. The way they filmed cigarettes in the thirties was different: the smoke looked like rich perfume made visible. A closeup showed the man’s eyes gazing out through a swirling haze that would have gagged Asa. But this guy took in a breath and let out a sigh: he had bigger things on his mind than air. Asa coughed.
“What do you want to ask about?” said his mother. She was watching the screen now too.
Asa said, “What do you do when you are in love?”
He had expected her to laugh or something like that. But she spoke very easily, without effort. She said, “Well, you enjoy the way you feel.”
He waited a respectful moment, then pressed. “Yes, but what do you—you know—do? I mean—if you feel all of a sudden you have to do something?”
She looked at him. “Well, most people talk.” She said it as if she didn’t think all that highly of talking, or perhaps of doing what most people did. They both looked back at the television. Now there were shots of a young woman with lipstick that looked black buying something in a department store. It was a watch, a man’s watch, rectangular and large. The young woman wore a flat, dense little hat that looked like a round book.
Asa said, “I suppose you’ve got to talk before you do anything else.”
His mother was silent for a moment. The young woman on TV was certainly talking, telling the clerk wrapping her watch about what a wonderful fellow she was purchasing it for. She sounded nervous, as if she were auditioning for the role in the movie. Asa’s mother said, “You don’t necessarily have to talk. There are other ways to communicate.”
“Like what? What—” he hesitated only an instant—“what do you do when you’re in love?”
She smiled. “Well,” she said, “I’ve always found it very natural to leave town.” Then she laughed, hard enough to make her cough. One of the pills always made her very dry. Asa handed her one of her water glasses, and she drank. Then she took Asa’s hand and looked at him.
He met her eyes. “Why do I want to do this at all?” he said. “For a long time it’s been enough just to feel things. Now all of a sudden I want to get it out. Why is that?”
“You want to share something you’ve made. Just like with the comic books you wrote and drew in the fifth grade. You put all this work into making something, and naturally you want to show it off. It’s human nature.”
“I’m not sure I ‘made’ this.”
“Oh, yes, you did. It did not just happen to you. It never does. We like to think that sometimes.” Her gaze did not falter, but for an instant something jerked in her eyes. She went on. “When we love someone it is because we built that feeling, bit by bit. It’s a choice. It’s what we make only for ourselves, like me baking three cakes and eating them all while you and Dave were away for the Duke-Carolina game that weekend.”
He looked away, then back. “Even,” he said, “even love in the family? Even that—you choose that?”
She thought for a long moment. “No,” she said. “It’s different. Mothers, kids, fathers—you don’t have to choose that. But you do have to make it. You make it, you build it.”
“Bit,” he said, “by bit.”
She stared at him. He wondered how they had gotten onto this; here he had started with talk about his feelings for Jean, but in ten minutes he had pulled his mom to the edge of someplace he probably did not want to take her. But she looked away briefly, the moment passed, and she brought herself back to his questions. “There’s another reason you’re feeling this,” she said, with a smile so soft it looked wistful. “You just want to make the girl you love happy.”
He frowned. “Happy?” On the TV the man with the pomade was sitting at a table in a restaurant. Smoke from a cigarette in his hand curled around his head like a turban; he looked impatient as a spoiled sultan as he asked a waiter what the time was.
His mother tapped his knee with one finger. “Yes, sweetheart. Happy. Look at me.” He did. She put the one finger under his chin, very gently. “When a girl knows a boy loves her, that—more than anything that can happen to her, until she has a child—gives her happiness.”
“What if she doesn’t love him?”
“It has nothing to do with her feelings for him. It’s a gift, that’s all. And when you get a gift, you feel good. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t got a gift ready to give in return. Something as fine as love from someone as nice as you—well, knowing about it means a lot. It can mean everything.”
There was noise from the screen. They both looked. The young woman was squealing and gasping with her eyes closed, her chin on the dark-wool shoulder of the pomaded man and her hands white on his dark-wool back. His neck was bent forward, but stiff. The light pinged off his hair; the woman was wearing another strange little hat. Asa pointed and said, “Is that it?”
“Who knows?” his mother said. “You can never tell by looking.”
They stared as the movie ended with a swell of music. Words rolled by on the screen. Asa looked at his watch. “Be right back,” he said.
He went upstairs to his room and took another pill from another bottle in his bureau. When he brought it back to his mother, she took it in her hand but did not put it in her mouth right away. “Sit down, honey,” she said. She looked serious.
“Take your pill,” he said.
“Sit down.”
He sat down. She put the pill in her mouth. He handed her a glass of water, and she sipped and swallowed. “Asa,” she said. “Tell me what this love you feel does, for you. The biggest thing it does. The best thing.”
He thought. She waited. He saw she was on the edge of something again, waiting for his answer. He couldn’t figure out what she might be hoping for or fearing, so he told the truth. “It makes me feel good about everything. Even things in my life that don’t have anything to do with—with her. It—it’s just something that’s always there to feel good about.”
His mother closed her eyes and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”
“Okay,” he said, suddenly flushed.
She looked toward the window. Holding her hand out toward him, she opened it and revealed the pill, a white capsule on her shadowed skin.
“Hey,” he said. “Mom.”
“Feeling good about something—about everything,” she said, still looking the other way. “Whereas this”—she rolled the pill a little on her palm—”this makes you feel good, but about nothing. That’s what it’s for. That’s—whew. Where I am, apparently.” She grunted a chuckle and looked at him. “That’s where I have to start, I guess. But you know what?” She put her hands together and shook them, then made two fists and held them out to him. “You know what, Asa?”
He stared at her, refusing to look at her hands. He tried to appear stern. “You should take that. It’s my responsibility.”
“Here’s what,” she said. Her eyes were bright. “I think it’s been long enough feeling this phony sweetness. Asa—” She opened both of her hands, and he looked despite his resolve; both were empty. She put them on his wrists and squeezed. “Listen—I’ve got it, too. I’ve got enough inside to make me feel good about things.” She patted his arms. “You’ve been a good young man, taking charge of my pills, taking such good care of me. And I’ve been good. I’ve taken every pill except once, when Dave and I were going to dinner and I didn’t want to feel dopey, but we had a fight so I took them later. God, it’s been, what, a year, more. You’ve been perfect. But the treatment’s over.”
“I want you to be okay,” Asa said. “I don’t want you to have trouble.”
She shook his arms. “Trouble,” she said, “doesn’t just come from feeling bad when things are going fine. Trouble can also come from feeling good when you shouldn’t. Hey, listen.” She put her hands up to his face and smiled as deeply as he could remember seeing in recent years. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Things happen; they don’t stop. Look what’s happened to you while I’ve been sitting here taking feelgood pills and watching TV. You’ve gone and fallen in love and gotten to be man enough to want to do something with it.” She held her hands up. “Probably just as much has happened to me, but I would never know it, not while I keep sitting here smiling at nothing.”
Asa could not help asking, “What could have happened? To you.”
She held his eyes, still smiling. “Well,” she said, “I could be in love and not even know it.” They watched each other carefully. Then, only a little more softly, she added: “Or not in love, Asa. And I wouldn’t know that either.”
He swallowed. His throat was dry. She handed him her water, and he sipped. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go along. I won’t tell. About not taking the pills.”
“Then I won’t tell,” she said, “about the love.”
“Mine?” he asked. “Or yours?”
She laughed. “Yours is your business,” she said. “Mine—” She shook her head, and he saw the match strike behind her eyes again. “Mine should be only my business, too. But—God help us, Asa—it never ends up that way, does it?”
She looked at him. He looked at the TV. Another movie was starting.
THREE
It took him only a week. He did not force things by trying to get Jean off by herself somewhere; he waited until it happened naturally, as if the movements of the class were some kind of tide and it was best to let the tide run its course.
One Tuesday he went in early from recess so that he could take a biography of Mickey Mantle back to the library and renew it. He walked into the classroom, and there she was, sitting at her desk, reading. They were alone.
She looked up, and watched him approach. He stood beside her desk. Holding her finger in her place, she closed the book. Her desk was in the row nearest the windows; the thin brightness of autumn was shiny around her. She smiled, waiting for whatever it was.
He had not planned anything. He had hoped the moment would come and he would know what to do. He had hoped it would be simple. It was.
“I love you, Jean,” he said.
That was all. His heart was steady; his breath was deep. He waited for a moment, politely, to see if she wanted to respond. When he saw her cheeks flood with color and her eyes widen with something that looked like fear, he made a little bow and withdrew, taking a moment to get the book from his desk. She did not speak, and he did not look back.
On the way to the library, he felt for the first time the uncanny strength he held in his body: his legs could launch a leap to the corridor ceiling should he choose not to restrain their power in these small strides, and his eyes, if he really opened them, could beam great light upon things, enriching colors, revealing facts. He looked at the book in his hands. Probably he could squeeze it back into wood pulp.
Jean’s expression had puzzled him for a moment, because he plainly saw that it was fear. She had been afraid. Why? He started to work on this, and in a few moments found the answer: She thinks she is still a child. He smiled. That was it; that was what she thought. Her childhood—that was what she had seen, all of a sudden, from the other side, from her future. He knew, because he had just taken the same step himself. He smiled again. Well, there was time. He would be here, waiting as long as it took. He would be here when Jean began to grow comfortable becoming herself.
He ran home from school and arrived with his full wind. On the way up the steps of his house he considered taking a deep breath and blowing the door off its hinges; he actually saw it toppling through the foyer. He chose to open it quietly instead. Then, stepping in, he smelled Dave’s after-shave. He stopped. And he knew. It came to him in a heartbeat why Dave was home at such a weird time of the day. Asa allowed himself a quick, quiet sigh, then rubbed his eyes, stood up straight, got ready. By the time his mother’s voice came from the living room, asking him to come in, he was all set.
He entered the room and glanced at them, sitting in the two chairs, facing the sofa. He saw only shapes. The lights were out, the blinds were down, the curtains were closed, the windows were shut, and the television was off. He dropped onto the sofa like a leaf falling into a dark pool somewhere in a forest.
“Asa,” said his mother. Yes. Amazing: here it came. He almost smiled at the familiarity of it. He wanted to tell her she could stop speaking right there. But he let her go on, and the words sounded again: decision, difficult, respect, no love, divorce, best for all, moving away. He was surprised how well he remembered them, and how nearly they were repeated. There were some differences, of course: he and his mother were not leaving immediately with one suitcase, but tomorrow at noon; they were going not to the beach, but to an apartment Dave had kindly found for them in Raleigh; in fact, Dave—no end to his kindness—was driving them there, in what she clearly called his car.
Another difference this time, of course, was that the man they were leaving was sitting right there, lumpy and still in the dark, listening, presumed to agree, ready to be helpful in delivering them out of his life. Asa looked at Dave and knew with a warm certainty that he and Dave, in silence, were feeling at least one thing the same: surely they were both relieved. There was more, of course—he knew that Dave, as a husband, as a boyfriend from olden times, was possessed by a mess of other feelings. But merely as a stepfather, surely Dave felt relieved, even blessed. Again Asa nearly smiled, tenderly, at the fact that here, at the end of their time together, they had a lot in common: the yearning for freedom from each other.
Asa’s mother finished talking. This time she did not chatter and fret. She spoke with a commanding confidence, in a tone Asa had never heard before. He did not trust it entirely—he had been duped by her chipper bravado before—but at least she seemed to be taking wing this time with a certain forcefulness, and surely that was preferable to wincing and stumbling. In the darkness Asa saw her turn her head pertly toward Dave: it was his turn to say a few words now, if he liked.
Dave cleared his throat. Asa waited, silently sending Dave a message: You don’t have to make a speech. Dave evidently got the message. After an awkward pause, all he said was, “Sorry, Sport.” Asa stood up and said, “Me too. I’d better go pack.”
So he did. It took longer than he expected. He had to admit he had gotten soft: living in this house for nearly three years had taken the snap out of his reflexes. Once, a few years ago, it had seemed he was packing every other month, and he had refined packing to a crisp drill. Now he started slowly, holding things he had acquired in this place and savoring them a little before putting them into boxes. He reflected on the view from the windows, the light in the room, the smell of mothballs and cedar in the closet. Then he snapped out of it. His old drive returned with a rush of efficiency, the point was to pack, to get ready, to move. It was, to tell the truth, kind of exciting. Moving—what was wrong with it; as a word, as a concept? As a life? Everything had to move; you could not really grow without movement. Pity the people who had to stay stuck in one place. Put it in a box and take to the road.
He finished just after dark. His mother looked in once, to bring him a plate of cold fried chicken and potato salad, while he was finishing with his comic-book collection. She said nothing, just left the plate and blew a kiss he did not look up to receive, nodding an acknowledgment instead: he was a busy guy. They both knew how this whole thing worked; they had shared it before, they were partners, really. His heart swelled with the closeness of it, this partnership, this resumption of the familiar adventure. He had a sense of orderliness now—a conviction that it was good to live the life you had established, especially if you had established it with someone. As he ate, hastily tearing the chicken, he was surrounded by the special bliss that came when someone gave him something. A sense of opportunity came, too—for strength, and no-nonsense action, and perhaps, pride. He was a boy who appreciated an opportunity to be strong, so a wave of gratitude followed his bliss.
He went downstairs when he had finished. The public parts of the house looked much the same; he knew the furniture and stuff would be packed by movers. His mother was finishing in her bedroom. Dave was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was spending the night in a motel or something. That would be decorous of him. Asa went out through the screened porch, into the backyard, for a last look at the moonlight on the sycamore that grew in the middle. But as soon as he stepped onto the grass he smelled Dave’s after-shave again, and heard himself called by name from the darkness.
He walked out toward the tree. There was no moon. In what would have been the tree’s shadow, Dave lay on a long beach chair. He seemed to be doing nothing. Asa realized that in fact he had nothing to do: everyone else was busy packing. He was staying out of their way. No doubt he would be moving, too; but for the moment the act of leaving belonged to Asa and his mother.
Dave moved on the chair. “Sit down with me,” he said. His voice was not soft so much as watery. He did not sound like himself. He sounded injured. Asa, who was feeling so bouncy, wondered if they had so much in common right now after all—or if his own bounciness was all that true. He sat down, and Dave hugged him close.
Asa let himself be hugged; he even tried to lean into it a little. There had been a time, in the first couple of years after Dave and his mother had married, when Asa had wished for the kind of comfortable, casual-hugging relationship he saw other boys have with their dads. He believed he had enjoyed such a relationship with his true father, but he couldn’t really remember. It was surprising that he couldn’t remember, really: he could remember almost everything in his life. Things about himself and his father, back in the days before he knew such things as divorce were possible had been wiped out, as if some hip skepticism looked on his innocence with scorn and obliterated its traces.
Despite his hope, however, he and Dave could never quite get the hang of being offhand. It was not possible for one to touch the other, or say even a few words, with true ease. Everything meant something, to both of them. They were watchful, taut. No hugs.
But now Asa settled in with his back against Dave’s chest, and they sat looking up into the black sky showing through the tree limbs. The sycamore smelled like brown sugar. Dave said, “I don’t know if you know this, but I want you to: I love you.”
“Oh,” said Asa.
Dave sighed. “I don’t blame you. I wouldn’t believe it either. But it’s true. It’s true in spite of how hard I tried to love you.”
Asa frowned. “What?”
Dave shifted a little in the chair, sighed. “Well, see, that was the problem, for a long time. Trying, I mean. See—I knew I had to. I had to love you. It was…necessary. I was marrying your mother, and that meant I was taking you, too. So I just tried like heck. But I’m no good at that, Sport—I hate almost anything I have to try to do. I hate having to do anything.” He waited a moment. “I bet you can understand that part.”
“Yes,” said Asa.
“Right. You don’t like having to do something either. We’re alike in that way. We’re alike a lot of ways, really. That’s one reason we don’t get along better.”
“Maybe so,” said Asa.
Dave chuckled. “You don’t sound like you believe it.”
Asa said, “I guess I see some ways’ we get at each other because we are both guys. There’s that. But I guess I don’t ever feel like we’re the same kind of guys.”
Dave thought about it for a while. He laughed a watery laugh. “I guess you’re right.” He sighed, and hugged Asa closer.
Asa sat for a while, being hugged. He could leave it at that. He could sit quietly and in another twenty hours this guy would be out of his life. Certainly a year ago he could have exercised a strategic restraint, he could have skipped the last, few fine points. But something had changed. He said, “You don’t know who I am.”
Dave said nothing. Asa went on. “You know who you’d like me to be, and I think that’s the kid you love.”
He felt Dave tense a little, harden up in the chest, and start to speak. But then Dave relaxed again, and said only: “I guess I should say I’m sorry.”
Asa smiled at the clever phrase. “Are you sorry, then?” he pressed.
Dave struggled for a moment, then gave in. “No,” he said, forcefully. “No, by God, I’m not.”
“Ah,” said Asa.
“Because,” said Dave, warming up, “because maybe who I want you to be is better than who you are. And I’ll tell you one thing for sure—you can bet I only want it to help you, help you be a better person, have a better life.”
“Even if it’s someone else’s life.”
Dave laughed, shallow and bitter. “Fine, son. All righty. You go ahead and enjoy your own precious self and your own precious life. Have a ball. To me, though, the prospects don’t look all that hot. I hoped maybe you learned some things. You’re in for some surprises, see; the world isn’t just sitting out there waiting for Asa to be who he is in all his glory, so it can bestow it’s blessing. You have to meet the world halfway.”
Asa waited a moment, then said, “Halfway doesn’t sound bad.”
Dave snapped, “What do you mean by that?”
Asa sighed. He was tired. “Just what I said. Halfway would be fine. You always came more than halfway. You came right up into my face. No room left. But never mind. I’m cold. I’m going in. I’m sorry about you and Mom. I know it’s been hard having me along, stuck into the whole thing. I’m sorry you had to try to love me and it didn’t work.”
“But I told you,” said Dave with a kind of pleading, as Asa stood up. “I told you: I do love you, Asa. I don’t know why. There’s a lot of reasons I shouldn’t on the face of it”
Asa laughed. “Thanks a lot.”
Dave ignored him. “But you’ve got to believe me, son. And I’ll miss you. I know I’m going to miss you. Bad.”
Asa faced him. In the darkness he could just see the outline of Dave’s head, the pale motion of his mouth. He looked at the man. It was incredible that this indistinct thing had been the source of so many excruciatingly exact requirements in his life. He sighed again, and shivered. Time to go.
“Well,” he said, “good night.”
“Good night, Asa.” Dave’s voice was watery again. Almost in a whisper, he added: “I love you.”
Asa started to go, then hesitated. He looked at the dark outline. Politely, gently, with all the cheery-but-sober charm he could muster, he said, “Then I’d like to say: I love you too.”
He turned away. But it wasn’t enough. From the chair Dave called for the certainty of clarification: “You do, Asa? Do you?”
Asa stopped. He heard the pleading. It was almost soft. It was almost openhearted. It was almost, almost halfway.
One more time, Dave asked: “Then you do, Asa? You love me?”
Standing still in the dark, Asa said nothing. What was he waiting for? Why not just snap the obvious answer at Dave and leave him in pain? After all, Asa knew the answer, did he not? Well—that was where the hesitation took hold. Asa realized with a shiver that suddenly he was not so certain; it was not so easy after all to say “No.” The question hung in the dark air, Do you love me, too? and for the first time in his life Asa did not want to know an answer. If the heart could betray one’s good sense—if love could take such liberties as to fasten onto stepfathers—then what hope was there for a boy of intelligence and will? What justice? Asa did not want to know. He stood there with his eyes closed, trying to feel absolutely nothing, holding his breath in the hope that enlightenment, for once, would pass him by. Then, quietly, without a word, he began to walk back toward the house.
FOUR
The morning at school got away from him. Withdrawing required a lot of little official duties. He looked for Jean before homeroom, but she wasn’t with her usual friends on the grounds. She came into homeroom at the last minute, just before roll call; then Asa was called out, to go down to the office. He wanted to tell her himself, that he was moving away. He wanted to tell her things did not change because of this. He hoped this was actually true, in some wild way he couldn’t imagine. He wanted to say it, anyhow.
Then, before first period, Jean’s friend Brenda rushed up to him outside the classroom doorway. She looked at him quickly as if he were something between a hero and a ferocious animal, and she pressed a balled-up paper napkin into his hand. “From Jean,” she said. “She means it.”
Carrying the napkin, he took his seat, and stared over at Jean. She was looking down into her lap, at nothing.
In the middle of class he was called down to the office again; as he left he zipped a glance at Jean. She wasn’t even watching him. In the hall, he stopped and unwadded the napkin.
Inside were two small candy hearts, one pale purple, the other white. They were the kind kids gave out at Valentine’s Day, with pink letters printed on them; his heart sank as he remembered such messages as “Squeeze me!” and “Cute Guy!” Maybe she was still a kid. That would make leaving a little easier, perhaps.
But then he straightened the hearts out on his palm and read them. On each of them, the letters said: I love you. Twice: I love you. I love you. Two. In other words, I love you, too. He read them again. It was a smart bit of wordplay. He believed the smartness, and the hearts. He believed Jean. Okay: she loved him, too. He straightened himself. His feelings balled up and dropped, right through the bottoms of his feet.
He went to the office and signed whatever he had to sign, then came back to class. He nodded at Mrs. Halterman at the blackboard and made his way to his seat. He did not look at Jean, but he could see that her face was turned toward him. It stayed that way, throughout the class: her head was erect and her face shone at him like a spotlight. He could see it. He could feel it. Her attention pulled at him like a great, calm tide.
It was clear: she knew now that he had read the hearts. She had hidden from him that morning like a child, until her message was delivered. Now, with her new power, she demanded that he meet her feelings, face to face. It was just the way he had felt when he told her he loved her. It was her turn now.
With five minutes left in class, he could not resist. He looked over at her.
She was waiting for him. Her face was clear—no hope or fear or adoration or humor. It was a naked face. It looked as if it had never been bared to the world before. Now it was bared only to him. Her eyes were bright and fixed, and at a glance someone might have said they looked almost fierce, hungry. But they were, not fierce; they were not hungry. They simply looked at what was outside—Asa—and showed what was inside—Jean. Showed, and gave: in her open, naked, brilliant gaze, Jean was giving herself to him, child, girl, and woman.
He could not look away. He had no idea what his face showed—fear, like hers yesterday? Grief? A giving of his own?—because he had no idea what he was feeling. Things whirled before him, demanding consideration. There was Jean, right here; there was a call of mystery from the life he would start tomorrow, somewhere else, a life in which the spirit of adventure was ready to clear the heart of longings best left behind; there was his mother, spiraling close and familiar, spiraling strange and away.
He was certain of only one thing: He knew he would always move, inside and out. But Jean’s face, more than anything, was still. It offered itself in silence and stillness: to explore, to accept what was being given, one would have to join the silence, find the stillness, stop moving. He knew: his moving would never stop. And he knew, somehow; that this showed.
In case it didn’t, Mrs. Halterman stopped the lesson a minute before the bell and began to speak. He heard his name. Without looking away, he listened; he could see Jean do the same. “We are very sorry,” Mrs. Halterman was saying, “that we are losing Asa. Today is his last day in our school, and we want to wish him luck and tell him that we will miss him.”
Other faces turned his way, and a ripple of sound passed quickly over the class: disappointment, then curiosity. Asa had to look away from Jean to glance around, smile, nod. The bell rang. With a few more looks at him and a couple of waves, the kids left. That was it. One day he had stood outside their classroom door waiting to get in, and they had let him in. He had been completely in there for these years, hadn’t he? It really was the inside, wasn’t it? But now things had turned inside out again. He was to go. Good-bye, Ace, have a nice life.
He heard a sound from Jean’s direction and turned. She was up, Brenda was glaring at him, together they were rushing out, Brenda’s arm around the smaller girl’s shoulders, which were down, sunk, moving. Brenda was hating him hard with her eyes; he could barely look past them to Jean, but he got a glimpse of her face, and with a shock he saw there was no sadness there. There was only fury. She shook with it; the tears that caught the overhead light on her cheeks were tears of rage. He rose in his desk, tried to say something, but Brenda had her out the door. He stayed halfway up, awkward, staring after them. The room was empty. Nobody came back. Furious! The heat of it prickled his face like sunburn. Well, what did he expect? Sadness, probably, was for kids.
FIVE
On the way out of town they had a flat tire. Asa helped Dave jack the car up, and he took the lug nuts Dave handed him and placed them in the hubcap of the afflicted wheel. But when they had secured the spare and jacked the car down, they discovered that the spare was flat too. Dave cursed. Asa volunteered to hitchhike to a service station they had passed a couple of miles back. Strangely enough, he was allowed to do this. The first car that came along stopped for him. In it were three people, two men and a woman, who hastily and urgently asked him about his religion while spitting politely into Dixie cups every sentence or so. He said he loved Jesus just fine, and asked them why they spit so much. They told him they “took snuff,” adding that it was godlier than smoking cigarettes. At the filling station he thanked them and got out.
He waited in the station while the tow truck went and fetched Dave and his mother and the car. The three of them waited for a while, to find out that a tire would have to be ordered from a station across town; the car would not be ready for another two hours. Asa, drinking Dr Pepper and studying random maps of the U.S. pulled from a dispenser, was content. But his mother and Dave seemed restless, and began to exchange odd looks.
“You know—” said his mom.
“Yeah—”said Dave.
“It’s already so late—”
“Wasting time—”
“So close to home—”
“Movers aren’t coming ’til tomorrow afternoon—”
“Make better time—”
“The boy’s exhausted—”
Asa watched this dialogue pass between them, looking up from the highways of Colorado. He could see them collaborating on an idea, showing more and more with each comment that they thought the same thing; he could see, too, that they both knew the idea was bogus. But safe, somehow: in the artificiality of this sudden free time, seemingly forced upon them, they could trick themselves and not get into trouble.
They decided, face to face, with a last long look. Then Dave went to ask the station owner to run them back to town, and Asa’s mother came over to him. He looked up. Her eyes were gleaming.
“Honey,” she said. “Guess what! We’re going home, for one more night.”
They piled into an old Mercury that sagged badly to the passenger side. Asa rode in front. On the seat between him and the driver was a fuel pump; at his feet were two parts of a clutch assembly. As soon as they arrived home, Dave and his mother went out into the yard to sit on the long beach chair together. Asa watched them sit, then went to the telephone.
He had memorized Jean’s number long before, not because he had ever come close to calling her, but merely because it was one more thing about her that could be committed to the sum inside him. As he dialed, he realized he had designed a speech in the back of his mind while he looked over those maps. He was ready for her anger, ready to rediscover his strength, to rely on the undeniable goodness of his feelings. Nothing could go wrong if he stuck to them, if he stuck to love.
She answered. He hesitated: her voice sounded quite chirpy. This was not what he had expected, but he spoke anyway: “Jean. This is Asa.”
She said, “Oh! Hi!” He filtered every iota of the two syllables through his finest scrutiny, but he could not find the slightest tone of anger, regret, frustration. There was only good cheer, nice and shallow, open and free.
“I wanted to talk about today,” he began.
She laughed. “What a crazy day!” she said. Something about the way she said it—something about that crazy—warned him off. With a shiver he knew she wasn’t referring to his part of the day, but to something that had happened later, after he left. He forced himself to remember that he had left halfway. Hey, there was a whole afternoon remaining, for crazy stuff to happen!
She seemed eager to talk, so he simply said, “Oh, yes?”
“Well,” she said, laughing again, “it was pretty weird. I certainly never expected it—I mean, I wasn’t even paying attention much or anything. But—well, do you know Robert Pontiac?” He did, slightly; Robert Pontiac was the only kid in school as small as Asa, and nearly as shrewd. Somehow Robert capitalized on his smallness in a way that made him cute to the girls and appealingly funky to the boys. He could talk dirty with a certain daring that passed for funniness, he got C’s and D’s, he had the perfect careless walk; he carried off much more of a rough-and-tumble swagger than could be expected from a runt. His older brothers were famous athletes in the school’s history. His nickname, an honor strictly among the boys, was Booger. Asa said, “Yes, I know Robert.”
“Well—” And off Jean went in a narrative romp. It seemed she was eating her lunch, and a friend of Robert’s called Brenda over, and then the friend took Brenda to where Robert was sitting, and then Brenda came back, alone, and sat down breathless. And then, amazing as it was, Brenda told her that Robert liked her.
“Can you imagine that?” Jean said, with an incredulous laugh.
“Can I imagine liking you?” Asa said, incredulous in his turn. But she breezed on: Robert Pontiac! What in the world did he like about her? She knew he was a pretty bad student, and he hung around with all those athlete types. Whereas she—she was just this brainy type, always buried in a book. How in the world had he come upon her?
Asa knew, of course. He knew what had been released from Jean in all its radiance, and how the wind picked it up and spread it like light and scent and sound. He had not taken it in, so out it went, and Robert Pontiac was just the sort of keenly alert weasel to snatch the signs from the air and zero in.
But Asa said nothing. The funny thing was—Jean was really asking. She really didn’t know. He could tell she wasn’t even sure he did, either, but just in case, she was checking. And certainly he could explain. He almost did, too, with a resigned goodwill, out of habit. But it was too much to ask; he flared at the cruelty of her lightness, her fleet forgetting. Then he thought: who was he to get angry? What rights remained that he had not refused? So he said nothing; he let her run on with her query until she trailed off. Then it was obvious to both of them that the conversation was over.
“Well,” she said, “guess I’ve got to go.”
“Sure,” he said. “Me too.” But he could not just drop away. Some sense of honor compelled him to a last task: to acknowledge with gratitude, at least, the first declaration of love he had ever received from a woman. Whatever hopes he had tricked up for this phone call had been foolish. He had to accept that. But before he moved on, a grace was called for.
“Jean,” he said, sounding formal even to himself, but so what? This was, after all, a kind of formality: “Jean, I just want you to know—that the hearts will always mean everything to me.”
And an instant after speaking, he knew with a pierce of insight exactly what Jean was going to say. It gave him an extra heartbeat to get ready—to understand that grace is given, not always received; to clench his honor closed before her words slipped in and undid it. He moved, gently but quickly, to hang up the phone, just as she asked, with all the simplicity of a memory wiped clean by new ardor, “What hearts?”
A moment later, sitting in the darkening living room, he felt better. Why not? He had the hearts, after all; he had the words, I love you I love you, printed clean. He had gotten them in what was suddenly his past, but they needn’t stay there. He pulled out the candies. In the twilight he could just read them, pale on his palm. I love you I love you. He had the words. There was a good thing about words: they could rise away from circumstances, they could take their meaning with them, they could move right along with you. And if a fellow had these words, these above all, then surely, something was in store in the future. Somewhere down the road, surely, these words would be made good.