Love and Glory

Chapter Thirty-Five

Jennifer sat with me in my office with one of the journals spread open between us on my desk, and the rest of them in a large cardboard box that said on the side ROLLING ROCK.

She shook her head a little. “They are... they are simply remarkable, Boonie, they are...” She hunched her shoulders a little and shook her head again. “I understand you. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything that so fully articulates...” She hunched her shoulders again and held them hunched while she searched for the proper phrase. Then she let them drop in a kind of resignation. “I understand you.”

“But do you respect me,” I said.

She smiled. “I respect you like hell,” she said.

“Do you remember the circumstances when we saw Nichols and May?”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “You were on your first leave from basic training and I met you in New York. You didn’t even have civilian clothes.”

“In a way it’s like thinking about other people,” I said, “like thinking about our children. We slept together in the same room at the Biltmore and we didn’t have sex.

“You thought it would be ignoble,” Jennifer said. “I was afraid I’d get pregnant.”

“What do you think I have to do to make this journal into literature?”

“It’s hermetic,” Jennifer said. “It is entirely internal. It might have all taken place in a cave as far as connecting with the larger world is concerned.”

“Yes. It’s just you and me.”

“No. It’s just you, I’m in there only as I impinge on you. There needs to be more. Not necessarily more of me. More of life. More landscape. More chronical.”

I nodded.

“The way you are is not common, but it must be human. I’d like to see us connect it some way to other human experiences, so that a person reading it could say, ‘Yes, yes, that’s right.’ ”

“You seem to be suggesting a lot of work,” I said.

“Yes,” Jennifer said, “a lot. But it’s not more work than we can do.”

“There isn’t anything that is more than we could do.”

“I know.”

“You make me better than I could be alone. I am more than my own sum, with you.”

“I know, Boonie. You have done that for me. I am much more than I could have been if you hadn’t come back.”

“That’s not my doing,” I said. “That’s yours.”

“I deserve credit,” Jennifer said. “I’ve become almost a whole other person, and I’m proud to have done it. I had gone back to school before you returned. But once you returned you embodied possibility.”

“Lazarus,” I said.

“Yes. Rebirth was possible. And more, you were someone who would always approve of... no, that’s wrong. You wouldn’t always approve. And you shouldn’t. That’s nursery-school gobbledygook. You were someone who was absolute. You were certainty. Approve or disapprove, you were irrevocably mine. Whatever I did would not change you; the world would not change you.”

“You were right,” I said.

“Yes. I know. I always knew. Even when I married John I knew that he wasn’t the one I could count on. You were. It made life more possible. It was a certainty. As I grew older I found there were no other certainties.”

“So how come you married John?” We were in the midst of the afternoon. Students wandered up and down the corridor outside my office door, keeping appointments with professors, keening over grades, and puzzling over comments in the margins. From the main office there was the sound of typewriters and the mimeograph machine and the photocopy machine. But in my office the silence seemed to spiral back down a dwindling quarter-century as I asked, out loud, for the first time, the question to whose drumbeat I had stepped since 1954.

“You wanted all of me, Boonie. Not just to love me, to own me. To possess me, to own my soul, to own all of me. I don’t think I quite knew it then. But now I do, and one way that I do is because now you love me. Just love me. Don’t wish to hold me in vile duress. Now you can trust me, and so now I can trust you.”

“You’ve made me whole,” I said.

She shook her head. “The commitment made you whole. Even if we were never to be lovers you’d be whole.”

“Ever wilt thou love,” I said. “And she be fair.”

She nodded. “Something like that.”

“But if we were never lovers, I wouldn’t be happy,” I said. “I would always want to be.”

“But you’d be whole.”

I nodded.

Jennifer’s face was steady on mine. I listened to the sound of my breath going in and out. I heard myself swallow once.

“Nineteen fifty-four was too early,” Jennifer said. “Neither of us was whole then.” I could feel myself rocking slightly in my chair, volitionless, thick with silence, faintly dizzy. Jennifer got up and went to the office door and closed it and turned and looked at me and said, “Now we are.”