Hearing this, Jamie felt only anger at first, and was tempted to ask whether she’d changed the sheets since. And then he suddenly realized she wasn’t going to give a detailed report on what had transpired in this bed with the poet from Indiana, but was instead only trying to understand why, for the first time in her life, she had felt unsparingly and selflessly devoted to a man who, by all reasonable standards, had been so completely wrong for her. Her voice was soft, scarcely more than a whisper. She lay beside him naked, one arm behind her head, staring up at the ceiling, wondering aloud, searching for clues to her own behavior; he suddenly felt as useless as Mandelbaum. But oddly, the feeling that he was neither necessary nor particularly vital to Joanna’s rambling monologue dissipated as swiftly as had his anger. Holding her in his arms, he listened without rancor or discomfort.
“He was,” she said, “the gentlest man I’d ever known. I’m not talking about when we made love, we did that rarely, in fact. Anyway, no man is really gentle in bed, is he? I mean, the very act demands that he perform aggressively — I hate the word ‘performance,’ don’t you? But it’s what we do actually, isn’t it? In bed, I mean. In a sense, I mean. Perform? Utilize our skills to give pleasure it’s a performance, really, similar to a concert, but not as carefully orchestrated or rehearsed.”
She took a deep breath, and turned into his arms.
“So gentle... in so many different ways,” she said. “I think his age had something to do with it, the very fact that we were eons apart, light-years apart, seventy-three and twenty-four, well, almost twenty-five, and earning a living as a musician — first chair with the City Opera, not bad, huh? — and having the time of my life before I met Harrison. So why him? The gentleness, yes, as though he were dealing with a child. So delicate with me. So careful of my feelings. So tolerant of my moods.”
Abruptly, she stopped. She was silent for what seemed like a long time. Then she said, “I think what I’m trying to say is I never thought I’d ever fall in love with anybody else ever again, not after Harrison. But now, you see, I have.” She smiled wanly, and touched his mouth with her fingertips. “I love you, Jamie,” she said.
He had heard these words before, had spoken them himself to countless teenage girls when he was growing up, had even whispered them into the ear of a Yokohama whore after the war, knowing she couldn’t possibly understand them, and actually believing he did love her, or the comfort of her body, or the safety she represented after months of slogging through the jungle dodging snipers’ bullets. He had heard these words before, he had used these words as easy currency in a free market — except with Connie. With Connie he had meant them, he guessed. With Connie he had always been impeccably honest when saying the three cheapest words in the English language.
As he held Joanna in his arms now, he recognized that “I love you” was only another meaningless bit of pillow talk, the puritanical way of softening the sordidness of sex, sanding down the splintery edges of lust, ridding the basic act of its raw physicality. “I love you” was the unguent of American morality, the salve which when gingerly applied beforehand or immediately afterward eased the shock of animal recognition, and thereby separated all those fornicating beasts of the field from their human counterparts. He knew she didn’t love him; she hardly even knew him.
But then he realized that in the space of — how the hell long had it been since he’d met her on the Vineyard, and who the hell cared how long it was? — in the space of that short a time, that infinitesimally brief moment in the millennium that had been his life till now, he had come to know her — all of her, Joanna La Flute, the professor, Joanna Jewish, each and every one another glittering facet of her unique and singular self — better than he’d known any woman before. Recognizing this, realizing he could never hope to pretend she was merely inconsequential, he made his decision in the form of a fervent wish: I want this to last.
But it was a decision nonetheless, conclusive and unalterable. Without surprise, and this was surprising in itself, he said, “I love you, too,” and believed (Connie notwithstanding) that this was the first time in his life he’d ever really meant the words.
6
Brenner University would have been a bummer except for Judd’s proximity. She called him the minute she got to school that September, at the number he’d given her for Briggs Hall, but he’d moved since and she wasn’t able to make contact till early in October. His new apartment was on Commonwealth Avenue, where he was living with another boy, who, like Judd, had just dropped out of Harvard, the school that kept you till you were eighty once they accepted you, on the assumption that the Harvard Admissions Office never made errors in judgment. The other boy’s name was Joshua Steinberg. He and Judd had lasted through two full semesters of Harvard undergraduate bullshit before deciding they were the ones who’d made the error in judgment. The boys wanted to be rock stars instead of lawyers. Judd played bass guitar and Joshua played lead. Together, they were going to set the musical world on fire.
When Lissie heard this, she immediately thought of her father, who hated rock with a passion. There were, by his exaggerated estimate, no fewer than 15,000 teenage rock groups in the town of Rutledge, Connecticut, an amazing count considering the town’s modest 17,000 population. Moreover, and still according to her father, each of these groups, like the McGruder twins, possessed $75,000 worth of electronic equipment purchased by parents who were being rendered totally deaf by the sheer decibels at any living room rehearsal. Judd and Joshua rehearsed in the living room of the Commonwealth Avenue apartment. The first time Lissie and Judd made love in Boston was during a break in rehearsals. The Beatles had just released Abbey Road and the boys were trying to learn all the songs on the album. Steinberg kept yelling through the closed bedroom door for Judd to hurry it up in there, meanwhile picking out the chords to “Come Together.”
Judd’s last name was Gordon, and the boys billed themselves as Gordon and Steinberg. He told Lissie he was of French-English extraction, the pale blue eyes and blond hair comprising the British half of his heritage, he guessed. His parents, a Dr. and Mrs. James Gordon who lived in—
“That’s my father’s name, too,” Lissie said.
“James Gordon? No kidding! We’re siblings!” Judd said, and kissed her fleetingly on the cheek.
— a Dr. and Mrs. James Gordon who lived in Sarasota, Florida, learned in November that Judd was no longer attending classes at Harvard but was pursuing instead a musical dream of glory with a lead guitarist whose name was Joshua Steinberg. They immediately cut off all funds to him (“A total injustice,” Judd said) and told him they would not send him another penny until he began studying again at a qualified institute of higher education. Guitar lessons, they told Judd, did not in their book or on their block constitute higher education. Gordon and Steinberg were currently playing gigs in this or that Boston bar, usually for sandwiches and beer, but sometimes for three or four bucks each a night. They still had their Harvard meal tickets, which would not expire till June, and ate most of their meals at Radcliffe, where the table manners were better and the scenery more pleasant. It was Lissie who suggested that they change the name of the group—