What did it? I ask.
I just couldn’t take the hypocrisy, she says.
Which?
Do I have to pick?
And because we are young and this has the cadence of a joke, we laugh. But of course she has to pick. Who doesn’t have to pick?
Amy was a pastor’s kid, see. Her father, Pastor Bob, was our family’s pastor, a man I found fatuous and condescending at the time but who in retrospect probably deserved better. Amy loved him, of course, and took his faith as her own. So there must be more. I press Amy, and she tells me — about the varieties of life and belief she’s encountered away from home and can’t believe lead briskly to hell. I bite down the irony, the irony of me. I know I should have given Amy more grief, then and all along, but we grow into our toughness like snakes, molting hope. And before you judge me, understand: Amy and I are different; we are the only ones who would come here to avoid the heat; the only ones who look at these fine pages of violent dreaming and think how delicate and timid a lunge at optimism should be. We spent our childhoods under the same southern sun, where possibilities grew and budded or withered silently within us, and we had only each other to look at for confirmation or its opposite. No one parted Amy’s legs when they were as young and faultless as they are that day in the bookstore. Someone should have. Youth should be used. It should be ruined and swallowed. We all know this. What else is youth for?
Amy blushes the way she does. Less from embarrassment, I think, than from the surprise of continuing to encounter herself, the white stone of her own stubbornness, beneath everything. I know the look from the days in high school when she would pass me in the hall and whisper, Hey, we’re going out to…, thumb and forefinger pinched to her lips. And then in the catalpa grove, among the hackberries, with the floral musk of spring in the air like sex, we passed the joint around, our little group. We stole for a time too. Bras and soda, eyeliner, chewing gum. Anything you could slip into a pocket or purse. We were devout, we weren’t prudes. And what I saw at last was that Amy would have found it easier not to steal, and so she stole.
This petty theft ended the day the cops were called. A crowd gathered on the curb to watch as they handcuffed Amy and put her in the car. She was weeping. She kept asking the cops whether it wasn’t all part of God’s plan. Doesn’t everything happen for a reason? she said again and again. Don’t you think everything happens for a reason?
And I am sure this is what we all would like to know, but really, what reason would you devise for a scene like this? Tell me, because I’ll take a good lie over a pitiless truth. Did I expect the wind to rise up and free Amy? No, I can’t believe I did. We had been taught from a young age to put great faith in the unseen drama of our lives, but even as a kid I think I had a good sense of where the literal and figurative began and ended. Pastor Bob liked to rest a hand on the church wall and say, This is not the church. Then he would point to all of us and say, This is the church. But the building had been a department store not long before, and we could all remember the rows of perfume and sandals, the fishing tackle and cotton dresses, lining these same floors. Pastor Bob must have known as well as I did that he was correcting a mistake none of us had made. And the question begged: What then as the church did we make up? What did our privacies sum to?
The hopeless things we want to know. I try again in the bookstore. I ask Amy, Why now? as though she can tell me something meaningful about where, in the fluid process, sentiment hardens into conviction, decision into action, or molten spirit into the rock of belief.
It wasn’t like that, she says. It was like … You know when you’re on the phone with someone you’re into, and you don’t even realize you’re speaking in this weird, airy voice? It was like that. Like realizing I was speaking in a weird voice and stopping. Returning to my normal voice.
She looks at the open book in her lap. There is a little universe inside it, wonderfully still.
But how do you know? I say. How do you know which is which?
She considers this. I guess you don’t, she says. One just feels more natural. Other answers begin to make more sense.
Uh-huh, I say. Uh-huh. And only now do I wonder: What is an answer? What satisfies us?
How did her parents take it, I ask. Dad threw up, she says. She stares straight ahead. But you know, we took the boat out the other night, just the two of us. We’d been fighting for days and we went out on the lake at dusk. We didn’t say anything, just held hands. And I kept thinking, In a way I should be dead to him. If I’m serious, I should be a little dead. But we just sat there watching the mist rise off the lake.
I don’t know what I saw then. What I see now is the twilit lake, soot clouds in the distance, sky that faint humid orange blur it could be some summer nights, a burning calico, heat rising from the water like the ghost life within it. I see Amy staring out into the dim luster at the edges of enveloping shadow, like out there somewhere are the small girls we once were, without a hard decision to our name, tottering happily after a mindless joy, and I think, Those poor, unready girls!
Are we ever prepared for the things we find ourselves incapable of agreeing to or helpless to pursue? Our twelfth-grade English teacher, Mr. Gerard, liked to say that you hate what reveals the part of you you hope to hide and love what reveals the heroic part of you looking for its cause. And who would say that, say a thing like that to teenagers, already riven with the bladelike purity of our desires? But we loved him for it, for telling us what we already believed.
Hey, guess what? I say. I stopped spelling my name with the i. You stopped … Amy looks at me, perplexed, her confusion melting slowly into a concerned and even delicate understanding. And as I watch it settle over her, I am brought back to the last Y.G. trip we took as seniors, when hiking in the Ozarks that hot, bright day, in the sunshine and scented air, I sensed my feelings for Amy slip into a higher register, on the order of righteousness or selfless virtue, when even the need of them, crippling and illicit — illicit in God’s eyes — seemed to me as natural as the day itself, the trees and scattered light, the birds in the wind-shaken trees, when high in the mountains where the breeze swept the humidity from the air I confessed myself to Amy.
I love you too, Jessie, she said — that same look.
But no, no, you have come too far to be misunderstood. No, Amy, you say, and you explain.
And she listens, with patience and sympathy, so much it makes you sick. Because even then you know where these things stand next to lust.
(II)
A few years later I am moving to Baltimore—
No. Let’s try something different. Step back, get outside my head. If Amy’s reinventions make a mess of the perspective, shivering it glasslike in a cheap cubism, can we say that my constancy deserves no less? Can we grant that if there is no clean angle in on my friend, there isn’t one in on me either? Yes? From the top then.
A few years later Jesse is moving to Baltimore.
How’s that?
A short young woman stands in a hallway. She has just arrived. She wears her hair shorn close, a faint rip-curl at the front, a black tank top, shorts. Dirtied brass numbers call out the apartments, the corridor steeped in a residuum of cigarettes and takeout. It is summer, hot. She shrugs under the weight of her bags. Sweat blossoms on her body in the stillness. The woman who finally opens the door is Dot, she explains, Amy’s roommate and a fellow student in the literature program. Amy will be back in a little bit. Jesse sets her stuff down, the duffel bag, the painting she made Amy as a gift. It is of a naked woman in the woods, wearing the bloodied head of a slaughtered stag. This is Jesse’s idea of a joke.