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See what differs
between what you’re awaiting and what approaches,
breathing fire. Nothing is ever resolved, not to a sufficient
degree of accuracy.“You’ll See a Sailboat,” Jaswinder Bolina
Will is fourteen when they announce the eradication of smallpox. It feels, foolishly, like a sign, like a shard of certain hope.
Will is seventeen when he hears about AIDS, though that’s not what it’s called, and he has no idea what it will mean. Only a sick feeling, like pity, in his chest.
There are other things, too.
He is beginning to feel how little he belongs in the world. It sits in the back of his throat like a stone: the fact of his intrusion on this world.
Jane lifts pragmatic eyebrows, looks at him with her clear, serious eyes. “But Will, you can’t think you’re the first or only person to feel so?”
Will grins at her, against his self-pity. “I’m not so full of myself,” he says lightly, “but thank you for your concern.” It is different though, for Will. Yearning after something known and lost is different than aching for the unknown. He cannot, of course, say this to her.
“Can’t you … ” Jane says, trailing off. A faint, pink cloud of embarrassment shadows her face.
“I’m talking to you,” Will tells her, knowing she would rather he did not, but that despite her inclinations she will listen. Even this veiled, elliptical way of talking around the truth will – help.
They are standing, stalled in line at the post. Jane holds a brown cardboard box for Simon, in America and lacking the comforts (such as they are) of home. She shifts it on her hip, and sends a cautious glance over the people around them. It sends a pang through him, it is so easy to imagine that same action with an entirely different – a truer – motivation backing it. He wants to say to her, “I have fixed it so no one will hear what we have to say to each other – they’ll think we’re discussing your holiday plans and my trip to Malaga.” But of course, he cannot say that, although it is the truth. He lets himself look at Jane, watching her gather together all her formidable powers of compassion and insight, watching her play them against the (mild, quotidian, but very real) horror of speaking the soul aloud.
“You know,” Jane says, “I am sending this box to my brother Simon, who lives, of all places, in a city called Tulsa. I think Americans call it the Heartland, but of course Simon’s heart lies elsewhere, or I would not have to send him this box. Despite this, Simon has excellent reasons for being in Tulsa, and I do not think he regrets his decision, no matter how out of place or discomfited it makes him.” She looks down, a pucker forming above her nose, speaking carefully, heaving her heart into her mouth. “I know he is unhappy and out of place – he tells me as much, not in so many words. But that is only true some of the time. He wants more than he has, and he wants better than he has. But, Will, I myself am sometimes unhappy and out of place, and I want more and better than I have, although I live here, where my heart is, and with a man who loves me, and so I am not altogether sure what my sometime wishing may be pointing me toward. In the end, though, I think it is not such a bad thing, however uncomfortable.” When she meets his gaze, a smile plays around her mouth. “An uneasy business, it is, living,” she says in a broad imitation of Bran’s Welsh.
Will murmurs, “I do not think the situations are symmetrical.”
“Must they be?” Jane asks, fierce. “I have one brother across the ocean and another burying himself in art, and I spent three years thinking I would have to find a convent, like an unwanted medieval daughter, though it would be a hollow sacrifice. But I could think of no other missing piece than God. These lives are not your life, Will, but does that make them irrelevant? Suffering doesn’t mean you’re unique, it just means you’re alive. I am sorry it – living – has hit you so hard, but I’m at a bit of a loss as to why you think it makes you special.”
He forgets too easily Jane’s anger, the true, cruel slash of it. Even now it is like watching another spirit possess her: something clear-eyed and sharp. A falcon, maybe; a snake.
“I’m sorry,” Jane says, repenting even before the adrenaline supplies him with a response. “I’m sorry – that wasn’t fair.”
Will smiles at her, mild and abstracted. “I never knew you thought about becoming a nun.”
“Oh . . .” The pink cloud is back. “I think most girls do. You know, it’s a bit romantic. But I wasn’t suited for it, so it’s lucky I found other things to be.”
“Does Bran know?”
Jane’s eyes go wide and startled. “It wasn’t – it wasn’t that important. Anyway, you’re deflecting.”
“Thank you for your apology,” Will says gravely, neatly.
“Oh ….!” Jane turns away again. They are nearly to the window now, and she reshapes her face from exasperation (layered over pain, over worry, over love) into the smooth, polite lines meant for handing over parcels. Will stays focused on her, the mock gravity of his own expression becoming even more of a joke.
If she looks now, he thinks, it will be like the tail end of a staring contest. We’ll both collapse. Even thinking it makes his chin wobble, and he can see Jane beginning to lose control over the edges of her mouth, her eyes.
She does turn, but ducks her head very quickly to stare at the floor, her back rippling with silent giggles.
“Not very sensitive, you know,” Will rebukes her.
“Oh,” Jane says around laughs, “I am sorry, it’s so inconsiderate of me. I’ll buy first round when we’re out.”
He nods, officious. “It really is the least you can do.”
“You’re – ” but it’s their turn at the window, and she never gets to say.
Outside in the May sunshine, Jane says, “If you’re looking - I mean, if you want something more meaningful than a job in a bookshop, there’s a place open with me. It’s a bit, you know, small and frantic. It’s all people like us, though, or nearly all – if you know what I mean?”
“I thought you liked the bookshop.” But it’s the false-petulance of the youngest sibling – when they are together, he and Barney take turns – and it is true that ringing up bankers looking for the latest, sexiest, stupidest new insult of a novel lacks the punch of Jane’s work with the Consortium. (That aimlessness had originally been something of the shop’s attraction: activity without commitment. Will had an existing engagement, after all.) It is odd but not surprising, not even uncharacteristic, that this conversation should begin with a confession, twist from an argument to laughter, and end with a job offer. The talking cure.
“If you don’t want to do it, you don’t have to,” Jane says mildly, taking him seriously whether or not he deserves the honor.
“Tell me more at the pub, and then Bran can talk me out of it with horror stories about your hours.” He nudges her elbow with his own. “But really, tell me more, Jenny.”