And they laughed, together.
≤
Next their paths crossed at the train station. She sat on the bench with a beaten up paperback copy of East of Eden on her lap. They remembered each other’s names, and smiled about the Chaplinesque aspect of their first meeting. He told her how much he liked Steinbeck and she went through her personal ratings of the author’s canon: East of Eden in the lead, with The Grapes of Wrath second, then the others following in a blanket-finish. Except for Tortilla Flat, which left her cold; it seemed that Steinbeck wanted to make the paisanos sympathetic, but had managed only to show them comic at best and pathetic at worst. Directly he and she agreed to sit together on the train ride to Old Chicago. They both loved books, and with that mutual love a bridge sprung up between them. This, their first real conversation, was effortlessly rich and resonant. He reveled not only in her words but in her lilting soprano voice and her brilliant smile, which burst into view repeatedly. She liked his ready sense of humor, his unusual but not grating laugh. For emphasis of a point, she at one moment lightly poked and tapped his upper arm. To him it was as if she were gingerly testing a stovetop pan or pot, making sure it was not too hot to touch. The small gesture captivated him. Before they left the train, they had planned a date.
Over subsequent months they went downtown and walked the shores of Lake Michigan. They watched neighborhood softball games and flew kites and met at each other’s home to eat together and play board games. They taught each other favorite songs. They took turns reading aloud all manner of books—Augustine’s Confessions and Kierkegaard and Michel Serres and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Every occasion, whatever else it involved, was an opportunity to talk and to listen, to learn more about the other, sometimes in sips and sometimes in gulps, but never with the thirst for their company slaked. For each of them the other was a new world to be explored, brimming with wonders and some dangers (those helped keep you alert). After a few months it seemed that there was nothing either would hide from the other. They related not only triumphs and amusing foibles, but what they considered the darkest, most shameful parts of themselves. They learned to be confident in their them-ness as a single planet securely encompassing both their worlds, both their lives past and to come. The only passion neither could evoke in the other was humiliation or embarrassment.
Naturally their spiritual and emotional intimacy was accompanied by physical intimacy. At first they simply learned how to fit each other’s lips together, keeping noses out of the way. But since they found each other’s outer selves as endlessly fascinating as their inner selves, their bodily explorations advanced quickly. One summer night she arrived at his place in cutoff jean shorts and a T-shirt. A lean woman in cutoffs was irresistible to him. They were on the couch, necking, before she had time to ask for the glass of water she needed after her walk from across the neighborhood. He caressed her rump and thighs as his tongue slid into her ear. Wait a minute—he felt goosebumps, but only on one leg. A probing tongue in her right ear raised bumps on her right leg, though not the left. He kissed across her face, grazing her cheek, the tip of her nose, her lips, the other cheek, then slyly flicked his tongue in her left ear. Now there were goosebumps on her left leg, though not the right. For the next five minutes he delectably repeated the experiment. The hypothesis was validated, and with amused pleasure he informed her of his discovery.
“Wow,” she said. “You’re teaching me things about myself that I never knew.”
“A sweet victory of the scientific method,” he humbly demurred.
This was a woman and a man in their mid-twenties, playing as grownups do. Yet though they were not ashamed or feeling guilty, a shadow hung over their sexual activities. That shadow was the National Anti-Natal Law. If she were to become pregnant, the baby would be removed from them and they both would suffer penalties. Certainly they would be separated, which itself would be an unbearable punishment. So they took precautions.
Their parents, at first encouraging of their relationship, had grown cooler on it as it became apparent how serious the two were about one another. They took occasion to remind their adult children, not always subtly, about the NAN laws and the fact that subordinates—unlike constituents—always suffered their consequences. Eventually, his father became especially insistent that the two should, as he put it, “slow down.” Then one night they dropped by her parents’ house and found his father there. What was he doing? The parents were briefly sheepish, blushing and clearly caught in the act of something. They quickly picked up the bobbled ball of their conversation and put it back into play. But he had taken note, and at the end of the evening he followed his father out the door. As they walked together, he queried about what his father and her parents had discussed before their children arrived. He learned that his father was pressing with her parents the case that the two of them should “take a break,” and maybe resume their friendship in few years, when both were at least twenty-eight years old.
He was outraged at his father’s meddling. He wanted a promise that his father would drop the suit against their relationship, and never again present it to her parents. His father stalled and attempted to divert the discussion from any such vow. The heights of the son’s sense of injustice then rose, and it was from atop a wall of righteous anger that he threw down an ultimatum. He demanded that his father immediately promise to desist, or else the son would quit not his relationship with his lover, but his relationship with his father. In quiet but unrepentant sorrow, the elder responded that the younger couple’s love was a fine thing in itself and at the same time too hazardous to continue. “Then that’s it. It’s decided,” the son said. And he stalked away from his father into the night, until darkness obscured each from the other’s sight.
The following day he and Val were alone, in his apartment. They lay together on his bed, in the big cave at the end of the long, tunneling flat. An early fall breeze blew through the open windows at the front of the apartment. The yellowed trees rocked their boughs gently. They rested in each other’s arms. She told of her disappointment with her parents, and he told her about the confrontation and then the break with his father. She wept. Then they were kissing and embracing desperately. Clothes came off as if of their own volition. At some point they were both naked. This was the point when they normally paused and saw to their precautions.
But now, in the swirl of anger and desire, he wanted nothing between them. Nothing—no parent, no law, no withholding thin skin—nothing could keep them apart, not by a millimeter or a million miles. She was no less caught up in desire than he, but not so angry. There was a moment when she started to say something, but then his hips were cradled by her opened legs, and she could not and did not want to stop it. For months and years later he would look back on that first instant when he was fully inside her. He would want to forget it, but he knew that at that moment he felt an onrushing ecstasy and yet held back a piece of himself, reserving it for anger, for spite of his father. The ecstasy rolled, gained momentum, then crested and broke over him like a wave. It washed away the anger and engulfed him in the love he shared with this woman. But still, it was clear and undeniable that he had interrupted their fusing and tainted it with the dishonoring of his father.
What was it about a man, he wondered as she drifted off in a nap, that made him turn love against love, working death in himself by that which is good? He decided he should not completely trust himself. He turned to her with a resolve to build and fashion a love that was pure, that did not rely on spite or hatefulness or any kind of exclusion for its definition and animation. He reclaimed her and them on the basis of this resolution, poised like a marathon runner with eyes on the distant goal of pure love.
≤
But then, barely two months later, she was gone. That was what people said about people who had died. They were “passed away,” “departed,” “no longer with us”—in short, finally and irrevocably “gone.” His life, like a calendar hinged on the advent of a new millennium, pivoted on this before and after. The before was when she was not gone. Those were the days when it was not too hard, usually, to imagine God smiling on creation: in spring sunshine, in soft rains, in the raucous play of children and the full gallop of a fine horse. The after was when she was and would always be gone. In the after he was numb to the surrounding world, rain or shine, imploded into the black hole of himself. His laughter, when it came, rang hollow to his own ears. Eventually