13

Jack slid the barn door open, and his left arm in a cherry-red windbreaker jerked the handle right, two times, reminding me of a madman reloading a shotgun. First there was darkness, then the darkness changed to light, and, suddenly, all the faces.

A chorus of voices screamed, “Surprise!” A cold beer made its way into my hand. There was music, the birthday song by the Beatles. Damp lips grazed my face and many hands held me, hugging, touching, kissing.

“Happy Birthday, Evie!”

“Congratulations!”

Kate tried to steer me into the lurching pack, but I resisted. Denny took my hand. “I’ll take you around. Okay, honey?”

Lots of people were there—Jack’s friends and Kate’s and Denny’s, and a few who could possibly be classified as mine, like Ray and Mike and Marty from the yearbook and also several cheerleaders. Part of my brain, the thinking part, appreciated everyone’s excellent intentions. But the remainder, the loose piles of random brain shavings and brain bits, feared the lazy swag of streamers and the humiliated balloons and the smell of spilled beer on the buckling barn floor. I burrowed under Jack’s jacket, hiding there.

After the Beatles came a loud laser beat—zung, zung, zung. Then plunging whistles, tripping bweeps, manufactured claps, aboriginal whoops, and the deep fishy vociferousness of disco.

“Let’s dance!” Denny called from the center of the room, and everyone joined him.

Jack threw his palms over his ears. “Who put this shit on?” he shouted.

“What is it?” Dan asked. He raised his head and furrowed his brows as though trying to discern one particular ingredient in a complex stew. He was on the ladder to the loft, rewiring a broken light. He pushed his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose with his wrist.

“It’s the fucking Salsoul Orchestra!” Jack complained bitterly.

“Actually,” Dan said, “I think it’s Parliament.”

“Whatever it is,” Jack said, heading to the stereo, “it’s gotta go.”

I grabbed him, saying to wait. “Maybe it will keep them all, you know, occupied.”

Jack relented—partly because it was my birthday, partly because it pleased him when I was intolerant of others. He wrapped his arms about me from behind, and together we gazed at the shocking and incongruous sight of disco dancers in the barn. It was somewhat like watching your house burn to the ground from the opposite side of the street. Aunt Lowie always says the two biggest concerns about throwing a party are worrying that no one will come, then worrying that they’ll never leave.

Denny kept calling me out to the dance floor. He loved to show off what we’d learned from Uncle Archer. Denny’s uncle was a retired Broadway choreographer and dance teacher. We’d been taking lessons for years, ever since Saturday Night Fever.

“Maybe later,” I suggested.

“Go ahead,” Jack insisted, though he was being insincere. He hated me to dance in public. Once he’d gone to Teen Night at a local club with me, and when he saw me and Mike Stern dancing to “Brick House” on a platform, he had some kind of an optic seizure. His left eye stayed bloodshot for days.

“What’s an optic seizure?” Kate had asked afterward.

“I guess your blood pressure goes up and your veins pop.”

“That’s a stroke!” she’d exclaimed.

“Yeah,” I’d said, “maybe it is.”

On the far side of the barn, past the writhing trunks and ticking heads of the dancers, I noticed what appeared to be a cardboard playhouse. “What’s that?” I asked Jack, and when he didn’t reply, I wiggled past the loose gate of his arms and crossed the room. Against the wall near the door was a refrigerator box with a window cut into the center of its face. Painted above the hole was a message: To Evie from Jack. The writing looked like spilled nails.

There was clapping. Voices calling, “Open it, open it.”

I lifted the flap. Hanging from a pink ribbon, in the dead center of the box, was a large, uninflated balloon. I looked back to Jack. He stood as I’d left him, leaning a little to his right. I touched the balloon tentatively. Inside was something resistant.

“Pull it off,” Denny yelled.

“Don’t just stand there,” Kate said. “Open it. Aren’t you curious?”

I shook my head. I was not curious. I knew exactly what it was.

Earlier that day, we were reclining in the sun on a wooden footbridge in back of the nature trail at the end of Huntting Lane. It was where we always went; once Jack had carved the outline of our joined hands there, chiseling them into wood. We would close our eyes and pretend we were hanging by our backs from the belly of the earth, and we could almost feel the spinning. It was as though we were riding; we felt so light. We weighed a flawless weight, a liquid and inconsequent weight, like cylinders half-filled and lying on their sides. We swore we would never impress too deeply, never demand too much.

“Listen,” Jack whispered. “A warbler.”

With my eyes closed, I found it: the high stutter, the tiny drill. I could hear it, but also I heard nothing. In my body was a quiescent dizziness, a chiasma of consciousness and unconsciousness. I felt myself float. Listen, he’d said, a warbler. How beautiful Jack was in my mind, how striking and direct. How good it must have felt to be him, so intellectually capable and morally sure. The way his ideas were clever and his pronunciation clear. The way his integrity was not dormant but volatile. The way his beliefs switched over into language. To know Jack was to know there would never be anyone like him. I love him, I thought. I’ll always love him.

“There it is Evie, look.”

Jack nudged me twice and I forced my eyes open. The winter light coming in was burning and bright, like first opening your eyes underwater. He was pointing into the air, his thin arm bobbing wretchedly to chase the able bird. I could see his arm attached to his body, his body connected to the ground, the ground not spinning. I wanted to close my eyes and go back to the place in my mind. Things were better there. Oh my God, I thought—Jack, me—the tragedy of us.

I turned, saying, “Jack,” but before I could say more, he stopped me.

He rolled nearer to me and pressed his forehead to mine. “The way you say my name. I can hear myself in it.”

We returned to town with him leading; Main Street seemed particularly immense. I had my hand in his coat pocket and the seam of the pouch cut against my wrist. His jacket smelled waxy; it had that special coating to block the rain. Jack was unusually quiet; I wondered if he could sense the space between us.

As we walked past the window of Rose Jeweler’s I noticed an iridescent egg-shaped opal framed by a brocade of gold and attached to a chainlike thread. The necklace rested securely in the cinched center of a sapphirine cushion, like a bug in a palm. I stopped dead, pulling back my hand. It looked just like one of Jack’s eyes.

“What is it?” he asked, turning. He came up slowly behind me. The reflection of his eyes joined the jewel in the glass, all three swimming.

I couldn’t help myself. I began to cry.

“What’s wrong?” he asked again.

I pointed to the opal. “Don’t you see? It’s the color of your eyes.”

I pulled the necklace from the deflated balloon. Jack was behind me, removing the chain from my hands, unclasping it, hanging it about my neck, arranging it on my collarbone. I felt its frail burden. I did not like the bubbling sputters the people made or the thoughts they were surely thinking. They knew nothing about the warbler or the eye, nothing about Rourke.

“Speech, speech!”

I said nothing. Jack’s lips met mine. His kiss was flat. “Here,” he said, handing me something blue and small. I swallowed it.

When quiet came, it came loudly, like an explosion, like an avalanche of nothingness.

Denny laid the gifts on my lap. I looked to see the people, but the people had gone. Okay, okay, Denny kept saying to no one in particular. Hold on, and, I’m not ready, or I’m coming.

Kate was there on the floor next to us, with me on the bench, and Jack across the room leaning against a broken dresser. Jack was watching me with the living-dead look of a portrait. I wondered what it was in me that interested him so.

Denny dropped down next to Kate. He was exhausted, he said. I thought he should sleep. I thought we should lie down and I would pull the threads from the hem of his dress shirt and say all the things I’d never said. That I loved him. That it didn’t matter to me that he was gay, which I’d never said, which of course I did not have to say. I wanted to tell him he did not need to hide himself from me or from anyone. That he was chivalrous and so very handsome.

Save the ribbon, Denny said with a wink. I’ll make you a hat.

I pushed my back against the wall and bit at the rubber tag of my tongue. I opened the first gift. Everything felt a little imperious, a little rigid but also light, like a Japanese tea ceremony, though I had never been to one. I wondered when would I get to Japan, how would I ever find the time? Denny and Kate were at my feet, Jack still at the dresser. Packages were coming apart, their innards passing off to the right and the left before I could even see.

Don’t worry, Kate said. I’m making a list.

Open the heavy one, Denny said. It’s from me.

It was a Janson’s History of Art. Between the beige twill covers, the sheets were cool and superior, unlike newspapers which are cheap with leaking ink because their origins are local and insurgent, as if they have been made in basements by the thinking people you know.

I thanked Denny, I thought I did, I definitely did because he nodded several times, and he blew a kind of kiss. He was eating a baked potato. I did not know where it had come from. When he lifted it, it sagged in the center and curled at the edges like a canoe.

Now mine, Kate said, handing me a box with silver wrap. Inside was a rust-red cashmere sweater—Maman’s. I drew it to my skin, breathing deeply. I was not trying to recall Maman’s smell or how it had felt to hold her. I just liked the shield the sweater made, the way I could hide behind the barrier. When I dropped the sweater down, Denny and Kate were still there. They had not moved; their faces were like moons at my knees. Jack was in the same place too, though surely time had passed. I wondered, did Jack feel what I felt when what I felt was so very high? Did he feel he wanted to move but couldn’t, that his legs were sponge? But no, I was wrong, my legs were moving, I could see them rise up like puppets being lifted by hidden hands. And me going up too.

Denny surrounded me with bear arms. Oh, honey. Kate’s hand light on my shoulder. I thanked them both, for everything. Everything.

Jack and I were alone. I told him I wanted to dance.

He said, Oh, shit.

I careened to the stereo and shuffled through the horizontal strip of records. I was flicking them—right, right, right. Going fast to find an album. Something exactly right, I didn’t know what, but I knew I wanted it instantly. Not instantly, previously. Instantly was too late. Drugs make you insane over time. Drug time is a window between the moment you feel high and the moment you feel less high. I found a record. I pulled it from its jacket.

What did you pick? Jack asked dryly. Bee Gees?

The Cars, I said, and I dropped the arm over the turntable. The needle slipped, making a choking parrot sound.

Jesus, Jack said, take it easy.

As I danced, I felt the wiggly pressurized feeling of diving to the bottom of a pool, then swimming rapidly to the top. When your hair sweeps back from your skull and your arms are limp like fins that trail the central chesty force of your movement. I felt elastic and wet like a cheerful dolphin. In the water you don’t worry about the action of your hands; hands are always engaged in water. I was dancing, making figure eights with my body, using all my muscles, going ever so slightly up and down.

Jack sat at the table, his feet propped on a chair. He was carving a candle with a cake knife. Evil hips, he said. You didn’t learn that from me.

You’re all I’ve got tonight. You’re all I’ve got tonight.
I need you tonight.

Later we were lying in the center of the room, overlapping. I could not tell where I ended and Jack began. We were two halves of something the same, each of us companionless. We were both our essential parts; and yet, for all that we were, we were nothing that we were not. I wished Denny had stayed; his stomach made a nice pillow.

I sighed sadly.

Jack asked what happened to the cheerful dolphin.

I miss Denny, I said.

To make me happy Jack put on the White Album. I’d left it on the dashboard in summer and the vinyl had warped into wide scalloped waves that bubbled hypnotically off the turntable. I liked to watch the record circle lazily, up and down, up and down, like a Hawaiian flower. My head was on Jack’s shoulder. If I closed one eye, the zipper tag dangling from the neck of his sweater became like a skyscraper. Pigs were snorting—that meant next came “Rocky Raccoon.”

I asked him please to sing. He said I would have to wait for “Julia.”

He fed me a piece of my birthday cake, pressing bits into my mouth. It tasted cheap, like box cake with crackled tricks inside; they could have been anything, since Denny made it. Once he filled a cake with Barbie shoes. I spit out the stuff in my mouth. It landed on the floor and I looked at it. My mouth had transformed the cake from black into trenchy brown, and the proof of that internal operation nauseated me. I thought I might vomit.

Don’t leave, I said to Jack, dropping back.

Never, he promised.

The floor near my legs creaked eerily. Jack was kneeling over my belly, making a bridge with his groin. His hunched body cast a huge shadow against the wall. When “Julia” came he did not sing. I tried to say this, but nothing came out. I kept moving my head all the way from one side to the other. I was not sure why, except to say that my head was my only mobile part.

What’s that, baby, Jack asked, not really asking.

I couldn’t remember, though I knew it had been important. I did not like him to call me baby.

I thought I felt him undressing me. I thought I felt the rimy wind pass through the tunnel made by the small of my back arching off the filthy plank floor. I thought I felt his fingertips touch the recesses beneath my hip bones. He may have had sex with me. I thought he did; I wasn’t sure.