I hung around, but it didn't do any good. Governor Stanton sat in the living room and had another drink by himself and looked over the evening paper. We clung together in the porch swing, and listen to his paper rattle when he turned the page, and whispered that we loved each other. Then we just clung without talking, for the words began to lose their meaning, and listened to the rain beat the trees.
When a little break came in the rain, I got up, went inside, and shook hands with the Governor, then came out, kissed Anne good-bye, and left. It was a stiff cold-lipped kiss, as though the summer never had been at all, or hadn't been what if had been.
I went on back to Stat. I felt that I couldn't wait for Christmas when she would come home. We wrote every day, but the letters began to seem like checks drawn on the summer's capital. There had been a lot in the bank, but it is never good business practice to live on your capital, and I had the feeling, somehow, of living on the capital and watching dwindle. At the same time, I was wild to see her.
I saw her Christmas, for ten days. It wasn't like the summer. She told me she loved me and was going to marry me, and she let me go pretty far. But she wouldn't marry me then, and she wouldn't go the limit. We had a row about that just before she left. She had been willing to in September, but now she wouldn't. It seemed that she was, in a way, breaking a promise, and so I got pretty mad. I told her she didn't love me. She said she did. I wanted to know why she wouldn't go on, then. "It's not because I'm afraid and it's not because I don't love you. Oh, I do love you, Jackie, I do," she said, "and it's not because I'm a nasty old nicey-pants. It's because you are the way you are, Jackie."
"Yeah," I sneered, "you mean you don't trust me, you think I wouldn't marry you and then you'd be the ruined maid."
"I know you'd marry me," she said, "it's just because you're the way you are."
But she wouldn't say any more. So we had an awful row. I went back to State a nervous wreck.
She didn't write to me for a month. I held out about two weeks, and then began to apologize. So the letters began again, and far off somewhere in the great bookkeeping system of the universe somebody punched some red buttons every day on a posting machine and some red figures went on the ledger sheet.
She was back at the Landing in June for a few days. But the Governor was not well and before long the doctors packed him off to Maine to get him out of the heat. He took Anne with him. Before she left, it was just like Christmas, and not like the summer before. It was even worse than Christmas, for I had my B. A. now and it was time for me to get into the Law School. We had a row about that. Or was it about that? She said something about law and I blew up. We made it up, by letter, after she had been in Maine six weeks, and the letters began again and the red figures fell like bloody little bird tracks on that ledger leaf bearing my name in the sky, and I lay around Judge Irwin's house and read American history, not for school, not because I had to, but because I had, by accident, stepped through he thin, crackly crust of the present, and felt the first pull of the quicksand about my ankles. When she came back for a week or so in the fall, with her father, before she went off to some refined female college in Virginia, we spent a lot of time in the bay and in the roadster, and made all the motions we had made before. She flew down from the diving tower like a bird. She lay in my arms in the moonlight, when there was moonlight it was not the way it had been.
For one thing, there was the incident of the new kiss. About the second or third time we were together that fall, she kissed me in a new way, a way she had never used before. And she didn't do it in the discriminating, experimental way she had done thing the summer before. She just did it, in the heat of the moment, you might say. I knew right away she had picked it up from some man up in Maine that summer, some summer bastard in white flannel pants with vowels that clicked like dominoes. I told her I knew she'd been fooling with some fellows in Maine. She didn't deny it, not even for an instant. She just said, "Yes," as cool as could be, and asked me how I knew. I told her. Then she said, "Oh, of course," and I got pretty mad and pulled away from her. She had kept her arm around my neck the whole time.
She just looked at me, still cool, and said, "Jack, I did kiss a man up in Maine. He was a nice boy, Jack, and I liked him a lot and he was fun to be with. But I didn't love him. And if you and I hadn't had that row and I hadn't felt that the world had sort of come to an end and I wouldn't be with you again, I wouldn't have done it. Maybe I wanted to fall in love with him. To fill up the empty place you left, Jackie.–Oh, Jackie, there was a place, an awful big place–" And with a simple unthinking gestured, she laid her right hand on her heart. "But I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't fall in love with him. And I quit kissing him. Even before we made up, you and I." She reached out and laid her right hand on one of my hands, and leaned toward me. "For we did make up, you and I," she asked, "didn't we, Jackie-Bird?" She laughed a quick laugh that welled up in her throat, then asked, "Didn't we, Jackie-Boy? Didn't we? And I'm happy again!"
"Yeah," I said, "we did."
"Aren't you happy?" she asked, leaning.
"Sure," I said, and was as happy, I suppose, as I deserved to be. But the thing was there all the time, breathing back there in the dark of my mind and waiting to pounce. Even though I forgot it was there. Then, the next night when she didn't kiss me in the new way, I felt the thing stir. And the next night. Because she didn't kiss that new way I was even angrier than I had been when she had. So I kissed her the way that man in Maine had done. She drew back from me immediately and said, quite quietly, "I know why you did that."
"You liked it well enough up in Maine," I said.
"Oh, Jackie," she said, "there isn't any place called Maine and never was, there just isn't anything but you and you are all forty-eight states together and I loved you all the time. Now will you be good? And kiss me our way?"
So I did that, but the world is a great snowball rolling downhill and it never rolls uphill to unwind itself back to nothing at all and nonhappening.
Even though the summer just past had not been like the summer before, I went on to State again and got my job hashing and did some newspaper reporting and entered the Law School and loathed it. Meanwhile I wrote letters to Anne at the very refines female college in Virginia, and the capital on which those checks were drawn dwindled and dwindled. Till Christmas, when I came home and Anne came home. I told her I simply loathed the Law School, and expected (and, in a twisted way, wanted) hell to pop. But hell did not pop. She merely reached over and patted my hand. (We were sitting on the couch in the Stanton living room, where we had clutched and clung until we had finally fallen apart from each other, she in a kind of withdrawn melancholy, and I in the fatigue and irritation of desire too long protracted and frustrated.) She patted my hand, and said, "Well, don't study law, then. You don't have to study aw."
"What do you want me to do then?"
"Jackie, I never wanted you to study law. It was your idea."
"Oh, was it?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, and patted my hand again. "Do what you want to, Jackie. I want you to do what you want. And I don't care if you don't make money. I told you long back I'd live on red beans with you."