Love and Glory

Chapter Ten

Driving Dave Herman’s car up from town I said, “We’ve been out every night this week and we haven’t even made out.”

“I know,” Jennifer said.

“One of these nights I may hook a left up here at Johnson Pond and be all over you,” I said. “So be alert.”

At the fork I bore right.

Jennifer said, “Chicken,” her voice low and full of implication.

I U-turned the old Chrysler and headed out behind Johnson Pond, where freshman year I had scored my only point with the Shark’s kid sister. It was early Friday night. No one else was parked there. The lights swept out across the frozen pond as I turned in and stopped. I shut off the lights but left the engine running. The heater was on high.

I half-turned and looked at her. She was sitting neither next to me nor against the door. The light from the college across the pond made it easy to see in the car. Her oval face was white and her mouth was dark against it. Only her eyes were invisible, dark shadows in her face. The radio played Jimmy Ricks, who used to be the lead singer with the Ravens. He sang “Love Is the Thing” in his bottomless bass voice. Jennifer turned her head and looked at me with her smile and her eyes shadowed. She wore a navy peajacket with collar up and with her dark hair she seemed almost a disembodied face pale and magical in the car. The moment was crystalline, and careful, and unhurried. I put my arm out to her and she slid toward me on the seat and shifted easily so that her face turned up. I closed my arms around her and kissed her and felt my soul go out of me and suffuse us. We kissed for a long time and when we stopped there were tears stinging my eyes wonderfully. She leaned her head against me, looking up, and now I could see her eyes, and a look that I can only call enchantment was in them.

“I love you,” I whispered.

She nodded her head against my shoulder.

“Do you love me?” I said.

She nodded again.

“Say it,” I said.

“I love you,” she said.

“Not right now, I know we’re too young, but later, when we graduate, will you marry me?”

She moved her head against my shoulder again.

“Will you?”

Her head nodded.

“Say it.”

“I’ll marry you,” she said. Her voice was small.

The wind skittered swirls of light snow across the frozen pond so that it looked dusty. We sat perfectly silent listening to the radio, looking out across the pond. I had my arms around her. She had her face pressed against my chest. I was complete. Reunified. Whole.

“I will be special,” I said. “I will be somebody. I will take you where other people couldn’t. I know it sounds braggy and like teenage crap, but I am not like everyone else. I will be special for you.”

She didn’t say anything but shifted slightly and leaned a little harder against me. I felt a kind of vertigo, as my self spiraled down into oblivion, fusing with her and becoming us. I was gone. Even now, looking back from so long a distance, the years before Jennifer, when I was merely I, seem unimaginable, as unreal as baby pictures — the blank, roundfaced infant that is only technically me.

“Shall we get married right after graduation?” I said.

“Maybe.”

“We could get married sooner and live in the vets’ apartments.”

“What would we do for money?”

I put my face against the top of her head. “Money will come,” I said. “You can always get money.”

“How?”

“I could work.”

“What about school?”

“We could quit,” I said.

She was quiet and I had a sense that I was going too fast, that she was maybe a little breathless. A week ago she was dating Nick Taylor. Now I was speaking of quitting school and getting married.

“Or we could wait till graduation,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was muffled against my chest.