She went to the University of Iowa and pledged a sorority and dated football players and golfers and in the homecoming parade sat decked out like Princess Di on a sorority float made out to be Buckingham Palace. When she had the chance to go to London for her junior year she jumped at it. Her father died while she was away, a sudden heart attack, and she returned just long enough to bury him and sell the house in Solon and cash out his pension before returning to England, an orphan with money to spend. That’s where she met a boy named Saffron Hyde.
“He was a poet,” she told me. “I met him in a pub in Southgate, a rock club. He came up to me and asked me to buy him a pint and I did. He was skinny and nervous and unlike anyone I had ever met before. There were no Saffron Hydes in Iowa. I had an apartment in the North End and he came home with me that night, more like a stray puppy dog than a seducer, but he moved in the next day. We drank a lot, I quit school, he wrote poetry about me, we made sweet love, but he wasn’t really interested, which was fine, actually, and every night we went to the art films at the museum.”
“What was his poetry like?” I asked.
“Dark, jittery. Much of it was very funny, but there was always a black loneliness behind the jokes. I thought it breathtaking.”
“Did he publish it?”
“No. He let me see it, some of his friends, but that was it. He said it was the poetry that mattered, not how many people read it.”
“That sounds like an excuse.”
“Well, he was a great one for excuses.”
“How did he live? How did he support himself?”
“I supported him.”
“And before you?”
She shrugged, an absurd little shrug, calm and matter-of-fact, despite her wrists being bound to the bedposts. “I didn’t ask, he never said.”
“Did you love him?”
“More than anything before or since. He was the love of my life, the prince I had been dreaming of since my girlhood. So when he burst in one afternoon, drunk and full of excitement, and said we just had to go to India, I said ‘When,’ he said, ‘Right this instant,’ I said, ‘Fine.’”
They took the ferry and backpacked through Europe, Spain, France, Holland, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, living like royalty, for backpackers, staying in pensions and rooming houses, eating in restaurants with tablecloths. They took a meandering route, flitting off to wherever seemed the most interesting, but always heading east, taking trains, hitchhiking, boats, Greece, Crete, Turkey, Iran, always on a route toward India. He had to see the Ganges, he said, bathe himself in the holy river, tap into a spiritual source centuries older than his Saxon heritage. He had read Hermann Hesse, it had changed his life, he needed to immerse himself in the sacred waters, he said.
“Remember when Hermann Hesse used to change lives?” I asked.
“You have to read it at a certain age,” she said.
“I read Siddhartha when I was fourteen,” I said. “I think I was too old even then.”
“That’s to your pity.”
It was a wonderful trip, she continued, revelatory actually. She was ecstatic and the further away she moved from Iowa the freer she became, swimming naked in the public beaches on the French Riviera, trading her blue jeans for peasant skirts in Corfu, buying drugs in the open-air markets outside Constantinople.
“Drugs?” I asked.
“Yes, that was Saffron at the start, big spliffs of hash in the rock clubs in Amsterdam, than later cocaine in Florence and Greece. I didn’t join in at first, but as we continued, the trip seemed more and more dreamlike. Drugs just seemed to fit in.”
“That was pretty stupid for an American.”
“Yes, but after a while we seemed to have stripped away our nationalities, we were just travelers. It was no longer the goal of India propelling us forward, it was just the urge to move, to see more, to go ever further on. Then in Iran, on the way to Pakistan, we had the accident.”
They had tried to catch the bus from Teheran but it was full, and the next day’s was full too. They didn’t know when there would be an opening, but at the bus station there was a man, black silk shirt, gap-toothed smile. He sidled up and said he was going to the border and would take them for a small fee, less than the bus, only 2,000 toman. The next thing they knew they were in the back seat of a battered blue Mercedes van, sitting on stiff seats with no padding, the van filled with women in black chador holding babies, unshaven men sweating in their grimy shirts, two handsome young men drinking orange Schwepps. With the top of the van piled high with luggage they barreled down the hills outside Teheran, past signs with warnings of falling rocks, into the salt desert on the ancient silk road into Pakistan. They discovered shortly into the trip that the other travelers were being smuggled out of the country, dissidents, young men trying to skip the army service, and the surreptitious nature of the journey thrilled Saffron no end. In a late evening rest stop just outside Isfahan they had drunk some bad water and now Saffron was throwing up, to the amusement of the other passengers, sticking his head out a window, banging his cheek on the frame, heaving loudly, the van shaking like a carnival ride. At a narrow switchback just through one of the tunnels south of Isfahan on the way to Shiraz, the driver barely braked as he swung wildly around, descending into the darkness, the van tilting over the hill as it rushed into the turn. A truck coming up the other way blared its horn and the driver swerved right, the wheels slipped off the road, and, like a gymnast in slow motion, the van tumbled down, down the slope, falling down until it broke apart on a rocky desert ledge.
Veronica had been fine, a bruised shoulder, a sprained wrist, but Saffron, sitting beside the window, had been a mess. In the Shiraz hospital where they had been taken, the doctors set his broken arm and stitched up the gashes in his face, but the real problem was his back, a compression fracture of three vertebrae, which Saffron was adamant about not letting the Iranian doctors set. Instead he gritted his teeth through the pain and, once released, took the next bus out, a modern bus with padded seats and shock absorbers and a bathroom in the back. By the time they reached Pakistan, Saffron was delirious with pain, crying out for drugs, limping alone into the first market he could find and bringing back a reddish gray powder, a local herb, he said, which he snorted first and then mixed with tobacco and smoked and which seemed to give him some measure of blessed relief. She tried it too, mixed with the tobacco of a cigarette.
“It was sweet, numbing, terrific really,” she said. “Later I found out it was heroin, but I didn’t know at first and when I found out it was too late.”
“You really didn’t know?”
“I was from Iowa. Within a week he was shooting up three times a day and I was joining him. Everything after that turned into a nightmare, unreal, smoky, disastrous.”
“Jesus.”
“Untie me, Victor.”
I untied her. Without rubbing her wrists she pulled her arms tight into her torso and turned away from me. I put my hand on her arm to reassure her but she shrugged me off. I didn’t want to hear any more, I wished I had never asked the question about her and Jimmy, wondered how the councilman entered into her story anyway.
“Through Pakistan and India he grew thinner and thinner, he was skinny to begin with, but he turned into a ghost. All night he shook, he sweated, his teeth started falling out. He was feverish. I begged him to come with me to America to get treatment. I told him they would fix his back, get him off the drug, we could live in Iowa, I told him, or New York, but he insisted on reaching the Ganges. His arm got infected, it swelled, it began to stink, he started limping from an abscess in his foot. His fever made him delusional in the nights. He was too weak to carry anything, so I emptied out half my stuff and put his clothes in my pack. He stopped eating anything but fruit, drank only water. He could barely talk when we arrived in Varanasi. We went right to the river and he wrapped himself in a white sheet and stepped down the ghat, slowly, mournfully. He turned and waved at me and then stepped down into the water of the Ganges until he was submerged.