Circle of Three

  “I thought you were wild,” I said. “I was afraid to speak to you. I’d heard so many stories.” He smiled, but it was true; by eleventh grade, Jess was famous for climbing the Cherry Street water tower to impress a girl, for almost drowning trying to swim across the Leap River on a dare. The best story was that he’d read about an Indian healing ceremony for casting out devils, and performed it himself, nude and in the rain, for the benefit of his crazy mother. A wild boy.

  “But you did speak to me,” he said. “I remember what you said.”

  “Not much. As I recall.” I recalled it perfectly. Over the Christmas holidays, his mother had died in a fire at Brookner’s, the psychiatric facility in Culpeper where she’d been a resident off and on for years. I’d heard the news in homeroom, along with excited whispers that there were suspicious circumstances. Had she set the fire herself? Had she meant to burn the place down or just commit suicide? Overnight, Jess Deeping became an even more interesting character. His mother’s sensational death seemed suitable somehow, in hindsight, maybe even predictable. It was so much the sort of thing people had come to expect from him.

  The kids who knew him were gentle with him in a shy, awkward way, while the kids who didn’t stared at him covertly, fascinated. I was one of the latter. I saw him waiting for his bus outside, by himself on a bench by the concrete walk that led to the school parking lot. Everyone else was either inside, crammed against the fogged-up glass doors in the vestibule, or huddled against the wind under the shallow eaves outside, puffing on forbidden cigarettes. Reserved, standoffish, especially around solitary boys I didn’t know, I can’t say what made me sidle away from my gaggle of laughing girlfriends and go outside to speak to Jess. His aloneness, I suppose. A sadness that hung around him like a coat. I went to him full of trepidation, breathless from my own daring, but with a vague sense that the inevitable was about to happen. I do remember that—it’s not retrospective romanticizing. I really did think, crunching my way across the crusty snow in my new boots, About time.

  He watched me come with a deepening frown; once he even looked over his shoulder to see what else, besides him, I could possibly be headed for. His hair and his shoulders and his thighs were all white from snow. He must be freezing, I thought, with nothing but a hooded sweatshirt, not even zipped up. I stopped in front of him. “Hi,” we both said. He sat up straighter when it was clear I wasn’t passing by, I meant to stay and speak to him. His sharp knees poked out under the worn denim of his jeans. In my sixteen years, I had never seen anything as male as Jess Deeping’s long legs.

  I’m sorry about your mother—that was my only message, the sole purpose for my nerve-stretching trek through the snow, but now I couldn’t get the words out. My hand closed around a pack of gum in my coat pocket. I drew it out and offered it to him. Up close, his face wasn’t as slick and handsome as I’d thought; I could see flaws, pimples on his chin, a patch of beard he’d missed shaving. One eyebrow arched slightly higher than the other, making him look skeptical or reckless. The nails of his big, dry, cold-reddened hands were chewed down to the quick. Oh, I thought, he’s not for me, and I felt relieved and disappointed. He’s just a boy. Then his mouth went wide in a sad, surprised smile, and that was it. A click in the brain. Yes.

  “Thanks.” Delicately, he pulled a silver stick of Wrigley’s from the pack. He looked at it a moment, then slipped it in his sweatshirt pocket. These memories are so vivid to me. I feel the wet snow on my cheeks, I can almost smell spearmint.

  A gust of wind rocked me. “It’s cold,” I said.

  He looked away, beyond my shoulder. “Here comes your bus.”

  Damn, I thought, watching it lumber up the narrow lane to the turnaround. Under the dismay, my heart skipped—he knows my bus number. “I’m sorry you lost your mother,” I said quickly. And Jess’s eyes filled with tears. I was covered with embarrassment. I felt feverish, then freezing. I stared at my feet, sick with distress, in over my head.

  “She didn’t kill herself,” he said. He didn’t hide his face—crying didn’t embarrass him at all. When tears spilled down his cheeks, he swiped them off with the heel of his hand.

  “She didn’t?”

  “No. She didn’t, she was better, she was almost ready to come home again. She was smoking a cigarette in bed.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s how it happened.”

  “Oh.”

  I glanced back at the knot of students queuing up to get on the bus, gauging how many more seconds I could stay before I had to make a run for it. “If my mother died…” But I couldn’t imagine it. “I don’t know, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  He had a two-stage smile. The first was pained and gallant, a hero’s grimace; it came an instant before the real, glad, natural smile. It made him look as if he knew the world was a sad and tricky place, but he was in love with it anyway. “You just do what you always do,” he said. “Only it’s not as good anymore.”

  “Yeah. God, Jess.” Just saying his name made me dizzy. “I have to go now.” He kept his face alert, animated, but I thought, as soon as I was gone, it would sink back into that sadness I’d startled him out of. I didn’t want to go. The last two kids climbed into the school bus and disappeared. “I can’t,” I said, although he hadn’t asked me anything, and ran.

  A coward even then. Why did you miss your bus? my mother would have wanted to know, and already I had misgivings about explaining Jess, anything about Jess, to her. That was no shrewd instinct, no flash of clever intuition. More like grasping a simple law of physics or chemistry: oil and water don’t mix.

  “That was the second time you rescued me, Carrie,” Jess said, and I smiled, recalling the first—the sixth grade playground brawl. “No one else would say anything to me about my mother. As if it had never happened, she’d never died. I thought you were brave.”

  “Me?” What a laugh. Jess was more than I could handle, I knew it in my bones even then. I was young, and I couldn’t stop seeing him through my mother’s eyes. He scared me. Fear and excitement, fear and wanting, fear and love—I twisted and swiveled and pivoted between them for the next two years. Then I lost my courage completely and ran away.

  “Twice you saved me, Carrie, and you didn’t even know me.”

  “Well, but that explains it. It was only after I knew you…” I swallowed. I’d started out playfully, and walked right into the truth. “That I turned into a chicken,” I made myself finish.

  I walked to the bench under the opposite window, put my knee on it, looked around his kitchen with ostentatious alertness. “Your house is so different now. You’ve changed it so much, I’d hardly know it. From the old days.”

  “I ruined it.”

  I smiled uncertainly. “That’s a funny thing to say.”

  “It’s true. It took a while, but I finally figured out why I did it. I’ll tell you, but only if you promise not to laugh.”

  “What do you mean, Jess?”

  “Promise?”

  “No—yes. I won’t laugh.”

  “I was trying to make it a house your mother wouldn’t hate. I blamed you for giving in to her, but then, in a way, I did the same thing. I think it’s turned out that your mother was stronger than both of us.”

  I could only stare at his pained, amused face. How like him to share the blame for my worst mistake.

  “After my father died, and there was no more hope for you and me because we’d both married other people, I started changing my house. I didn’t understand why until it was finished. One day I looked around and it hit me. I’d taken all the country out of it and made it a house Mrs. Danziger wouldn’t be embarrassed to live in. Shit, Carrie, it’s an awful-looking place, isn’t it?”

  I put my hand over my mouth.

  “Don’t you laugh,” he warned, smiling the saddest smile. “My herd’s three times the size of my father’s. I lease farmland to tenants in Oakpark and Locust Dale. I’m prosperous and respectable, I’m a gentleman farmer. Hell, I’m on th
e town council. And I owe it all to your mother.”

  “Jess.”

  “I wanted to show her. Show you, too. And all I did was ruin my mother’s pretty little farmhouse. Don’t you think that’s funny?” He came closer. “Hey, Carrie. Don’t cry. I didn’t tell you that to make you sad.”

  Where was the bitterness, why wasn’t he angry? “Sorry—I cry at everything. Ruth’s back,” I whispered, hearing the car on the hill. “I don’t know what to say to you. Give me some time, Jess. To think of something besides ‘I’m sorry.’ I’m so sick of telling you I’m sorry.” I found my coat and went outside to meet Ruth.

  What would I do with this new knowledge? He was right, it was funny. And so sad. I wished he hadn’t told me—and yet I always knew it. In the car, Ruth thought I was weeping for Stephen. She tried her best to comfort me. The twin absurdities almost did me in: Jess spoiling his house for my mother’s sake, me finding consolation in the lyrics of Belle, formerly of the Storm Sewer Troupers. Oh, my heart could melt with tenderness sometimes. Even when I was drowning, going down for the last time, the people I loved saved me from touching bottom. And lately, thin streaks of happiness had been scoring the dark at lengthy intervals, zigzag spurts of hope in the black sky, reminding me that I was getting better. I was.

  This is what happened.

  Ruth had just turned five, the sweetest, brightest little girl, the reason for my life. For Stephen and me, the best was ending, if best meant the time for believing your life was a rising line, everything gradually improving, enlarging, like a stock market graphic in good times. My expectations had begun to diminish in the early years after Ruth was born, a time that coincided with Stephen’s retreat, the start of his metamorphosis into the subdued, closed-off man he would be until he died. It’s ironic that what attracted me in the beginning was what repelled me in the end, and that was no one’s fault but mine. I profoundly misunderstood him. So—the best was over, but I didn’t know it was over because I was living in it, I was in the distraught but hopeful stage, when repairing our married lives still seemed possible, if only because the alternative was unthinkable. Leave my baby fatherless? Not if I could help it. And I still had energy then, a sense of myself as an actor, a doer. A person who could change.

  We’d left Washington the same year Ruth was born, moved to Chicago for Stephen’s new teaching appointment. That he wasn’t going to set the math world on fire, either as a theorist or a teacher, was another dawning downer around that time, and I didn’t appreciate until too late how much his professional failures demoralized him. I should have, but I’d made another wrong presumption—that wife and child were the main ingredients in a happy man’s life. Not in Stephen’s. But his childhood was awful, one loss after another; how could he not be a sad man, a careful, withholding, brittle man?

  We’d been planning for weeks to go home for a long weekend—my home, Clayborne—to see my parents, and to go to my fifteen-year high school reunion. A day or two before, we had an argument. I don’t remember what provoked it, just that it was worse than usual because for once Stephen participated in it. Whatever started it, soon enough we were blaming each other for our unhappiness, dredging up old resentments and unveiling new ones, saying hurtful things for no reason except that they were true. When it was over, it seemed that for a change a destination might have been reached, a place where the road might actually fork. We were barely speaking. He refused to go home with me—and that may have been his goal all along, it occurred to me later, since he hated that kind of thing, obligatory social occasions at which, as husband of, he was even more peripheral than he wanted to be. In the end Ruth and I went by ourselves, and stayed in my old room in my parents’ house (now the guest room, all traces of young Carrie long since swept away during one of my mother’s remodeling binges). Stephen had to go to a last-minute math conference, I told Mama, and she believed me.

  They had the reunion at the Madison Hotel, downtown Clayborne’s finest. What happened seems inevitable now, but at the time, every minute unfolded like a slow surprise, the revelation of a complicated secret. Jess and I hadn’t kept in touch, no Christmas cards, no wedding congratulations; when he and Bonnie divorced, I wrote him a very short note saying I was sorry, but then I tore it up. We hadn’t seen each other since the year after our high school graduation.

  We shook hands cordially in a group of people shaking hands the same way. Chameleons, we were, blending right in. We did it so well, even I didn’t suspect us. For half the night we did a dance of separating and coming together, parting and finding, until at last we just stayed put—for me, a matter of giving up pretending I wanted to be anywhere else.

  It wasn’t that we picked up where we’d left off, as if the intervening fifteen years had never happened. For one thing, Jess had changed. Obviously—he was thirty-three, not eighteen—but it was more than that. His house wasn’t the only thing he’d toned down, I see now; he’d done it to himself, too—tried to. He’d moderated himself, conventionalized himself—those aren’t the right words, I can’t describe the new phenomenon of Jess. Anyway, the important thing is that it didn’t matter, because it didn’t work. I saw through his dark suit and paisley tie then, his side-parted hair and his sober, diffident manner, and I still do.

  We talked. I told him everything I could about my life except that I wasn’t happy. Which meant I had to leave out a lot. He did the same, scrupulously avoiding all but the most general references to his ex-wife. We never danced, never touched. We stayed to the end, through the toasts and jokes and speeches and prizes. He walked me to my car and we said good-bye. “’Bye, Jess.” “Good night, Carrie.” We touched hands, and he said, “Or you could come home with me,” and I said, “All right,” and we got in his car and drove to his house.

  It was a soft June night, heat lightning in the distance, I remember, and no moon but a skyful of stars. If that matters. One looks for culprits in retrospect, villains to blame, even inanimate ones, anything to spread the blame around. When it was over, I remember wishing I’d had too much to drink so I could add alcohol to my litany of motivations. But no luck: I was sober and clearheaded, and everything I did was deliberate and on purpose. There. Mea culpa can’t be any more ecumenical than that.

  I hope I haven’t passed any of this sexual guilt down to Ruth. I don’t even know where it comes from. Litany, meaculpa, ecumenical—I’m not even a Catholic! And what about this—the only consolation I found in the aftermath of sleeping with Jess came from knowing that at least I hadn’t enjoyed it. At least it wasn’t a transcendent experience for either of us. The night ended in awkwardness and sorrow, and I suffered for it long after with regret and depression and guilt. My mother didn’t teach me this, did she? I’m accustomed to blaming her for most of my flaws, in particular my failures of courage; but if she’s in here, it’s not as a towering moral figure. Maybe a social one. The goddess of snobbery, observing a tawdry one-nighter.

  We never made it upstairs. Looking back, I wondered if Jess had been afraid from the beginning it wouldn’t work, and had made love with me on the couch in his living room to give me less time to think. If so, that broke my heart, because it was so unlike him. Neither of us pretended we’d come to his house to talk. We were kissing before we were all the way through the door, deep, passionate kisses that felt like the past and present coming together, as if the years in between didn’t exist. We hardly talked at all—how could we? Everything depended on no words being spoken. In the end, though, it was our guilty, unnatural silence that helped break the spell. I disengaged; went cold. It wasn’t a return to sanity; more a gathering hopelessness, like a dark, dirty fog blearing a prospect that had been bright and sharp seconds ago. This couldn’t work, it hurt too many people. The deeper we went, the more irredeemable it felt. I started to cry before it was over.

  Jess stopped, put his clothes on, told me he would drive me back to my car. Before that, I have no idea what it meant to him. Did he like it, did he think we were good together
? I don’t think so. It was too full of shadows, and too frantic at the end. I remember the kissing more than the sex. I think my brain shut down when he came inside me, I think it was just too much. Too much. Now I can say it happened too soon, that I was still involved in my marriage, that by no means had I severed emotional ties to Stephen, that I wasn’t ready for another man, even Jess, especially Jess. But at the time, it only felt like a calamity.

  The rest is an embarrassing blur. I kept apologizing—he got quieter and quieter. I promised never to hurt him again—he said that wasn’t possible. I cried some more. Understandably, he didn’t want to prolong the conversation. He made me get out of his car and into mine, but I kept stalling. I wanted to comfort him and I wanted him to forgive me. Stupid, selfish, impossible.

  For years I thought, What a drip I was. What a drip. I wished Jess had gotten angry, or shown it if he was angry, because at least that would’ve sharpened the squishy, drippy edges, given us something meaty to look back on, something to sink our teeth into. Really I wanted it all ways—for it not to have happened, for it to have happened and been wonderful, or for it to have happened and been awful, but with dignity. Instead I got the worst of all the possibilities.

  I never told Stephen. He already knew about Jess; my “high school sweetheart,” I’d called him, and once I’d gone so far as to say, “I guess I was in love with him.” He took my casualness at face value, never questioned it or probed deeper. I would have. If Stephen had loved someone before me, I’d have wanted to know everything. What was she like, why did you like her, how did it end? His disinterest in the details of Jess was typical, though; one might even say emblematic.

  On the airplane ride home, I made a decision to rededicate myself to making my marriage work. Something good might still come from the debacle with Jess, I reasoned, and besides, I owed it to Ruth—good as gold, chattering to herself as she turned the pages of a book, her feet sticking straight out in the patent leather Mary Janes her grandmother had bought her. The thought that I might have jeopardized my baby’s safe, stable world froze me with horror. Anything, anything I had to do to keep the family together was worth it. No sinner ever embraced her penance more willingly.