them

  The telephone rang beside her bed.

  Jules, terrified, nearly jumped up to escape. The ringing got in the way of his thoughts: he could not think. Nadine, sleepily, reached out for the phone. It was yellow. He watched her groping for it, wanting to guide her hand. She pulled the receiver off and let it fall onto the bed. A tiny voice questioned them. “Pick it up! Say hello,” Jules said, alarmed. The receiver began to slide down, about to fall on the floor. Jules picked it up himself. “Who this? Who on the other end?” he said in a vicious Negro accent, then slammed the receiver down.

  Nadine laughed.

  “Who was that? A friend of yours? Your mother?”

  “I don’t know. Why would it be my mother?”

  The telephone rang again. This time Nadine sat up and answered it; she surprised Jules with her sudden coolness. “Hello, Brenda,” she said, her eyes already veiled from him at the sound of that small, strange voice that meant something to her and nothing at all to him. “No, I can’t. Something came up. Call Sue. What? Why not? I don’t know. Mother doesn’t want me to. I guess not. No.”

  Jules wanted to snatch the phone out of her hand and slam it down. It seemed to him offensive that she should talk so casually with a friend of hers, bruised and stained as she was from Jules’s passion.

  “Hang up!” Jules said.

  She said good-by abruptly and hung up.

  “What is your name?” she asked Jules.

  “Jules.”

  “I like that name. That’s a beautiful name for a man. But you can’t push me around like that. You can’t tell me what to do.”

  He did not hear most of what she said, trying to ease himself gently upon her, feeling himself heavy and awkward. He did not want to surprise her with his body. She was so naïvely opaque, so passive and unwondering, that he supposed she hadn’t much idea of what was going to happen to her—the skirt of her white dress had been pulled up onto her thighs and Jules had a longing to pull it back down again, to protect her.

  “I’ll never tell you what to do, never again,” Jules said.

  They lay with their faces pressed together. Jules was drenched with sweat. Nadine’s forehead was wet, with her own sweat or his, he couldn’t tell. He felt as if the boundaries of their bodies were melting with the heat of his love. It was a phenomenon that happened apart from him, from them, a natural fact. He had never been so close to anyone before—as if he were lying with someone he had made up, a girl he’d dreamed into being.

  She seized his wrist and stopped his hand. “Don’t,” she said.

  They were both trembling.

  After a moment, unmoving, she said, “Could you take me somewhere?”

  “What? Where?”

  “Could we go away somewhere? You and me?”

  “You mean run away?”

  “Yes, run away. Could we? Could you take me? Could we go to Mexico?”

  Jules thought for a moment. “All right.”

  “Could we leave today?”

  “Today?”

  “Could we pretend we were married?”

  “Do you want to get married?”

  She said seriously, feverishly, “We can pretend. We could tell anyone who asked…”

  He touched her legs, and she brought her knees hard together, in panic. “No, don’t,” she said.

  She lay sweating in his arms. He had never seen anyone so agitated—it crossed his mind to be afraid of her. Tears made Jules’s eyes ache—for her, for the misery he was enduring, which was part pity, part delirium. He rubbed his face against hers. His own lips were a little sore and his body ached now with a passion that had turned skeptical. They seemed to be together on a boat, a small raft, which was being carried along swiftly, out of Jules’s control; he could not even see where it was headed. The girl murmured, “Jules, Jules,” as if she were somehow making him up, giving him a shape out of her own imagination. There was something halting and experimental about her, but he tried not to think about it. He did not want to be frightened of her. At the height of his joy in this was a strange premonition of madness, his own madness or hers—the fear of madness, Maureen’s blank stare, which might turn out to be his inheritance as well. Their bodies, so sore from the clothes they wore, and so damp, seemed to be drifting somewhere with the pull of a river’s gravity, dragging them miserably downstream, to a climate of black intense heat.

  “Let me come to you,” Jules said.

  She moved from him in terror. He seemed to lose consciousness again, borne rapidly downward and clutching her, feeling the texture of her cotton dress against his straining fingers, forgetting her. It was as if, in a movie, on camera, the tension had grown so strong as to become unendurable: hence a blackout, the end. Jules heard himself groaning as if in pain, surprised at the pain.

  After a while she began to sob against his face, “You’ll take me away from here. I’ll get in your car and close the door. They won’t be able to follow me. There’s no mark, nothing left behind…just highways. I’ll kill myself if I can’t get out of this place.”

  Jules could not make sense of her words. He pressed his face against her, not hearing.

  “It doesn’t matter if we get married or not, I don’t care. I want to keep driving and get out of this country and into Mexico—I’ve seen pictures of Mexico. I want to live where people speak another language, so that they can’t talk to me and I can’t talk to them.”

  She seemed not to have understood what had happened to Jules or what was happening yet. Her own excitement was almost violent, but it was in her head and nowhere else—Jules could very nearly feel it, a pressure more painful than the one he had endured.

  “In school I try to make myself sleep. I sit at my desk but I shut my mind off, blotting out part of the room. It’s like a picture puzzle, with parts. I blot out one piece, then another, then another. I can sit there without sleeping and yet my mind is asleep, it’s neutral and not even upset. The girl who called me on the telephone—I don’t have any connection with her, not really, or with anyone. I don’t know why. And now you came along—I don’t even know how you got here. You’re in my room and I can’t remember. People should come along like this, by accident. Nobody else in my life is an accident,” she said and Jules saw himself being marked up as if with a dab of red paint, marked off, a kind of freak. “I’m going to be seventeen but I’m really older than my mother. I don’t want to be like this but I can’t help it. Jules, are you listening to me, do you believe me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why do I want to sleep all the time? Why am I too old for everything? When my mother gets excited about something, it embarrasses me to see how childish she is. You won’t meet my mother. But she’s happy and I’m not. You won’t meet my father either. They’re good people, I like them, but when you’re with them you lose interest in being good. You think, well, if they’re good people I might as well do something else. It makes your head ache. It’s all played out. My father is always in a hurry but he has time to plan things. He sits planning things, drinking milk late at night…he makes plans for five, ten, fifteen years that way, in his business. He’s a vice-president in charge of public relations. You probably don’t even know what that is. He travels all over. I used to love him but now I think I love you. I can hardly remember him when you hold me. I think I’ll forget them all with you. If we could just get out of here and drive somewhere, fast, down to Mexico or Texas.”

  Jules wiped the sweat out of his eyes. “Honey, why Mexico or Texas?”

  “Just an idea I have.”

  “You’re not making this all up?”

  “No.”

  He caressed her vainly, feeling the numbness in her pass over into himself. He understood why ordinary men—gas-station attendants, taxi drivers—killed women, feeling the numbness in them flow violently into themselves, bringing it all to an end.

  Nadine brought herself sharply up on one e
lbow. By the tension of her body Jules knew she was hearing something he couldn’t hear. “My mother is home,” she said.

  He heard a rumbling noise, then a dull thud.

  “She’s coming out of the garage…she’s in the kitchen…”

  Jules heard nothing.

  Nadine got up slowly. She disengaged herself from him politely, as if not wanting to hurt his feelings. He saw with surprise that she looked sick—her face rubbed sore, her hair damp and mussed, her dress wrinkled and smudged. Am I in love? Is this love? Jules asked himself. He was intoxicated with lust but a little soured over it too.

  Nadine brushed her hair angrily back from her face with her hands. “I have to go out or she’ll come in and talk. You can wait for me.”

  If he had wanted to escape, Jules thought, he was too exhausted; his will was flattened out.

  He waited for her. Half an hour passed, an hour. He was not at all afraid. His body was the body of a drowned man, motionless. The worst that might happen would be death, a second death…

  After a while Nadine came back. She approached the bed. “Some people are coming in now for cocktails. I have to talk to them for a while. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t cry or start to scream. It’s because I can’t believe what’s happened, I can’t make sense of it yet.” She smiled at him. “So you’re safe. Will you wait for me?”

  Jules lifted his arms to her. She bent over him and they kissed.

  “Or maybe I’ll call the police, I don’t know,” she said as she left.

  Jules must have slept; when he came to it was nearly dark outside. He sprang to his feet, testing himself. He was still himself. His face was sore, his body ached, when he stretched his mouth his lips cracked in several places, yet it was all recognizable. He felt cheerful. His fate was obviously prepared for him and could not be averted now. He looked through her bureau drawers to get to know her—pajamas, sweaters, slips, underwear—a real girl after all, an ordinary girl. He opened the door to her closet. A light came on automatically. He looked through her dresses, handling them gently, pleased with their bright colors. He touched her shoes with the tip of his own shoe, pleased. He supposed he did love her. She was accessible in these objects, clothing and shoes, in spite of her high price. Perhaps he could fill up the vacuum in her with something of his own. Why not run away with her? It was time for him to run away again, permanently, to Mexico or Texas. Fate had arranged it. He gnawed at the flowers he’d brought her, in idleness, joking to himself, and then spat them out on the carpet.

  She returned. She came to him silently, and they embraced. Old friends. Old lovers. She said in a bright, tense whisper, “You’re very handsome. Are you going to take me away?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you have any money?”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Just in the bank, but the bank is closed. Don’t you have any?”

  “A little.”

  “We don’t need much, do we?”

  They lay down again, gently. Jules kissed her and at the back of her mind saw something that frightened him, but he lost sight of it. She stroked his hair. She stroked the back of his neck. They smiled at each other as if just meeting, just catching sight of each other. The house was dangerous, Jules knew, but he was wooed by inertia; he did not care to move. The thought of Mexico seemed improbable.

  “I could stay here. I could live here, in your room, for the rest of my life,” he said.

  Nadine left him reluctantly. She went to the mirror and looked at herself. “No wonder they stared at me. Mother asked me if I’d had anything to eat today. Well, I won’t have to look at myself again, not here,” she said with satisfaction. There was something hard and intelligent about her after all, Jules thought. She began to heap pieces of clothing together, swiftly and impatiently, as if alone.

  Jules lay on the bed and watched her. “You’re not really serious about this?” he said.

  “I’m always serious.”

  He liked that answer. “Good,” he said. “And you have your mind set for Mexico?”

  “I would rather leave with you than go by myself,” she said. “I had it in my mind to leave anyway. I kept thinking of leaving, going away. I don’t know why. I don’t want to bum around exactly. I don’t want to see other kids—all that crap. I want to get out somewhere empty, where they speak another language. I’ll try it. And I didn’t choose you, you came along. It isn’t my fault. It must mean something, it must be a sign. I couldn’t stop you from coming up here and I love your name and your face. I don’t love anyone else, I’m dead to them, asleep to them. I didn’t make this happen though. You did. You came in the front door. It isn’t my fault.”

  “Not my fault either,” Jules said cheerfully.

  They waited a few more hours. They sat side by side on her bed, Jules smoking a cigarette and Nadine waving the smoke away, as if setting up a pattern for the next forty years. She talked. From time to time he saw her face contract into a mask of tiny, impatient wrinkles, irritated by something. Jules leaned over to kiss her shoulder. She caressed his face lightly, tenderly, with a kind of surprise at herself for being so tender. Around one o’clock they prepared to leave. Jules felt that he was leaving a room in which he had spent a good part of his life.

  “Are you nervous?” he said.

  “Yes. Are you?”

  “I’m ready.”

  They went downstairs. A single light was burning in the foyer. Jules respected the house, felt humble inside it, and yet impersonal; it was quite right that he should be stealing this girl from it. Nadine took his hand and led him up to the front door. “And now—now what are we going to do?” she said.

  “Steal a car, honey.”

  “Steal a car? Where?”

  “I only need it to get back to Detroit to pick up my own car. I have a car. Are there friends of yours, neighbors?”

  “Right next door. I don’t know their name. But how can you steal a car?”

  “Just go in and steal it if the key’s in the ignition.”

  “It will be in the wife’s car, in that ignition,” Nadine said. She carried her clothing stuffed in a paper bag, not very large. It was the lightsome burden of their new life.

  Without fear, trusting to fate, Jules went around the back of an immense home to its garage. The door was open. There were three cars and in one of them the keys were stuck, waiting.

  Everything was under an enchantment.

  Minutes later, free and rushing down Lakeshore Drive, Jules reached over to take hold of her hand. He kissed it, like a new husband. She had begun to cry. “Nothing can stop us,” Jules declared.

  6

  His breath was drawn from him in slow, languorous, painful sighs. He could not get the object of his yearning into focus. Sleeping, he tried to shake his way free of sleep, wanting to get this clear—what was so painful, what penetrated him so bitterly? He wanted nothing more than to understand. Pictures of undreamed dreams flashed to him, like cards. He remembered first grade, cards with words and numbers on them. He remembered Sister Mary Jerome. Her pale, vivid face flashed into his mind and was then lost. He thought of his mother, unpacking groceries from a bag. He thought of Maureen. He woke.

  It was very early, too early to wake. From the window a steamy bright light outlined the shade; in several cracks light was outlined. It looked as if they had been made with a magic pencil. Jules closed his eyes quickly, hoping to sleep longer. The days of driving, of being on the run, were too much for him, and he would feel, half an hour after getting up, as if he hadn’t gone to bed at all. But outside on the highway traffic was noisy, awake hours ahead of him. He had felt the vibrations of big trucks passing all night long. And, very late, there had been shouts out there—kids, probably drunk, hitchhiking or on their way out to farm homes, exactly Jules’s age but no kin to him. The highway was a big black line on the map he and Nadine studied, but he could not remember its na
me or number. Were they already in Arkansas, or had they passed through Arkansas? Were they in Texas? Jules opened his eyes suddenly, afraid that the maps lied. Once you were running you might never make any progress, and one landscape might blend into another. Michigan, Illinois, Arkansas, Texas—there were no signs in the earth to show where one left off and another began.

  Beside him Nadine lay with her back to him. Her tangled, shining hair was mixed up with the pain of his sleep. He would have liked to move against her, sliding his arms around her, burying his face in her, and sleep again, but he couldn’t do this. He could not disturb her. For some reason he was reminded of a child he had come across in Detroit once, lost, at night. It wasn’t that strange to see kids wandering around and most of the time they knew where they were going or where they belonged and they’d go back home, after a while, but this kid had touched Jules’s heart because he was really lost and his terror had set him apart from everything around him. He had been about six years old, a white boy. His hair had been long and matted with days of neglect, his clothes filthy, but when Jules had asked him, “You lost, kid?” he had been afraid to answer. The boy’s eyes had been liquidy with a spread, exhaustive terror, and he had seemed not to hear or see Jules though aware of Jules’s presence. It had been about three in the morning, the street fairly busy with stragglers, and there the boy had stood by the doorway of a darkened liquor store, in front of the grating, just standing. He had stood a few feet away from Jules but in a terrible vacuum, in a dream Jules did not dare to enter. He had the idea that if he were to touch the boy the boy would sink his teeth into his hand, like an animal.

  Nadine was like that, he thought. Her prettiness was distance in itself. If he were to bury himself in her, finally, throwing his body on hers in a last demand for mercy, she would wake from her lethargic sweetness and change at once into an animal, ready to struggle to the death.

  “No, don’t touch me. I can’t. I’m afraid,” she was always saying.

  He touched her hair with his fingertips. She slept. Every night she fell off to sleep like a drugged child, leaving him awake; out on the highway trucks roared past and made the cabin or room they had rented for the night shudder. Jules certainly could not sleep, awake with his thoughts and with all this noise. He was growing keener, more intelligent, as his flesh was wearing away from him—he had lost weight, but there seemed to him a kind of spiritual leanness also, an intensity. What did he want except this girl? But his brain could do nothing with her, could not reason with her or dismiss her. He could not reason with himself. She was eerily sweet, lying in his arms, fully dressed though her clothes were always rumpled and pulled awry and Jules’s own clothes wet with the anguish of his body, but still she kept pure her own image of herself, if he loved her he would not hurt her—making plans for them that dissolved every evening when Jules made her understand they could not drive any farther that day, he was finished. Her sad, evil vision of purity kept him pure. He could not contaminate her with his lust; she seemed to feel nothing.