Love Among the Ruins Read online

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  LOVE

  Among the

  RUINS

  A NOVEL

  Robert Clark

  W. W. Norton & Company New York | London

  Copyright © 2001 by Robert Clark

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Make Our Garden Grow,” words and music by Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur. Copyright © 1955, 1974 Universal-PolyGram International Publishing, Inc., a division of Universal Studios, Inc. (ASCAP). International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Time of

  the Season” by Rod Argent, copyright © 1968 Verulam Music Co. Ltd. International

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  The text of this book is composed in Electra

  with the display set in Ribbon and Distance

  Composition by Tom Ernst

  Manufacturing by Quebecor Fairfield

  Book design by Chris Welch

  Production manager: Julia Druskin

  Ebook conversion by Erin Campbell, TIPS Technical Publishing, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Clark, Robert, 1952–

  Love among the ruins : a novel / by Robert Clark.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-393-02015-0

  1. Vietnamese Conflict, 1961–1975—Middle West—Fiction. 2. Middle West—Fiction.

  3. Teenagers—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3553.L2878 L68 2001

  813’.54—dc21 2001018006

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

  www.wwnorton.com

  W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., Castle House, 75/76 Wells Street, London W1T 3QT

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0

  For Tessa

  Contents

  Begin Reading

  Love bade me welcome, yet my soul drew back

  Guilty of dust and sin.

  But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack

  From my first entrance in,

  Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning

  If I lack’d any thing.

  —George Herbert, 1633

  Just

  Now

  Dear Emily,

  I went up north this last week, up to the boundary country, and I wanted to write to you about it.

  It hasn’t changed much, even in thirty years. It was cool (doubtless outright cold at night) and there was some snow in the forest, though it was scarcely November. But I remember the water being almost warm in September, swimming naked with you.

  What the hell were we—was I, I suppose, really—thinking, that we could live there?

  There’s a blacktop road to the lake now and I canoed out to the island. The island’s even smaller than I remembered and I didn’t have much trouble finding the site. There isn’t much evidence we were ever there, and I don’t think anyone’s been there since. I could just make out the fire pit, not much more than a depression in the rock with some rusted metal in it, which I suppose we left there. I looked for some of the caches we made. I remember that I lined those things with a ton of rocks, but I couldn’t find even one of them. I suppose the ground just swallowed them up.

  You’d be glad to know the tree’s still there, half rotted away and fallen in on itself where the hollow was. I don’t suppose anything larger than a squirrel could sleep there now. But that’s what thirty years of snow and decay will do, I suppose.

  After that, I canoed back to the car and tried to find the place where the house was, and by dumb luck I found it. There’s a nice road in there now, but the cabin is the same. The name on the driveway is the same too—Jorgensen. I suppose it’s the same family, but a different generation. I think we figured the owners must have been in their fifties when we were there, which makes them eighty-plus now, in nursing homes or dead. So it must be their children that have the place now. I suppose they must all be about fifty now too. I’ve only got two years left until I’m there myself.

  I like to imagine you happy and prosperous out in California. I imagine you married to somebody, too, and maybe playing tennis all day, or maybe designing computer chips. But I imagine you with children, pretty much grown.

  My dad is still living out there. My mom’s just the same, living in the apartment. I’ve got two children, Mark and Jenny, aged twenty and eighteen and both in college. Their mother and I split up some years ago, and I haven’t remarried.

  I love my children very much, but I guess the great discovery of my middle age is how inadequately I do so. I always feel that I have failed them, but I can’t put my finger on how I have failed them, and that vague sense of omission, of dereliction, haunts me these days. To look at and listen to my kids, you wouldn’t think they felt that way. They are cool as cucumbers, and I suppose are resigned to my inadequacies. But then I almost think they—and all their friends—were born to disappointment, to resignation at everything this world could throw at them, incapable of surprise.

  Everyone I know feels this way about their kids, faults them for their lack of idealism, of engagement with everything. They don’t feel that imperative to make a better world; they are content to take life as it comes and make do. But maybe that is their only option. Maybe when we were young, we, their parents, took history and idealism and used them up, sucked them dry. Or just somehow sullied them. And maybe what I feel bad about is having stolen those things from them. Then blamed them for not having the stuff we spent up in our “misspent” youth. Does that make any sense?

  But what we did—I suppose it was a crazy thing, though it seemed so necessary at the time. Now I can’t put my finger on the feeling anymore. The fear of the draft and the cops and some sort of impending totalitarian state, kind of shaggy and half-formed, like something out of the Brothers Grimm. Maybe to understand it you just had to be there. I guess in a way you’re still there, where I left you.

  I wish you could write me back. Even now, after all this time, I find myself still wanting to know everything about you.

  All my best wishes and, yes, even now, love,

  Bill

  One

  The

  Beguilement

  1

  THE FIRST TIME WILLIAM LOWRY WROTE EMILY Byrne was more than thirty years before, in the war summer of 1968. After he had written the letter and sealed it in an envelope, William asked his mother, “Is it trespassing or anything to go up on someone’s porch to put something in their mailbox?”

  His mother looked up from her magazine. She picked up her cigarette from the ashtray and drew on it quickly and said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” She put the cigarette back down and took up her coffee mug. “Is it a letter?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then you could just mail it. Do you need a stamp?”

  “They’re in the desk in the hall.”

  “So there you are.” She tapped her fingertips on the kitchen table and closed her magazine. On the cover there was a drawing of the president, dressed in knight’s ar
mor and holding a lance that drooped like a tired vegetable.

  “Thanks,” William said. “I’m going to go out until dinner. On my bike.”

  “Sure,” said his mother as she tamped out her cigarette and began to dig in her pack for another. “Pick us up a pound of butter, okay? Money’s in my purse.”

  Bill nodded. He went to the little rolltop desk in the hall and got a stamp from the roll in the drawer and fished a dollar bill out of his mother’s woven straw bag. He put the stamp on the letter, pushed the money into his back pants pocket, and went out the door, into the hallway of the apartment house, and down the half flight of steps to the back entrance, where his bicycle was padlocked to the stair rail.

  Mounting the bicycle, he wove down the alley, clutching the letter against the left-hand handlebar, gaining speed. It took him perhaps ten minutes to ride to Emily’s house and he pedaled by at headlong speed, taking in the address—919—with a furtive sidelong glance. He thought he could mail the letter in a corner mailbox, but he realized he had no pen with which to write in the address. And he did not want to take the chance that on the very day he mailed this letter, someone would an hour later drop a cherry bomb into the box or, under cover of darkness, boost up a friend by the knees so he could piss through the open slot onto the letters heaped up inside.

  William rode downtown, down the great hill to the main post office by the train station, and he took a pen and wrote in Emily’s address and double-checked her zip code in the massive directory, and took the letter up to a window and watched the clerk carry it and drop it into the canvas hamper on wheels. Then, after another clerk came and rolled away the hamper into the back of the building, William went back outside to his bicycle and pedaled up the great hill home.

  Twenty minutes later, as he was about to turn into the alley that led to the back door of the apartment house, he realized he had not bought the butter. He spun the wheel around and began to pedal off towards the grocery store, and then he stopped, suddenly aware that mischance was about to settle itself upon him.

  He felt inside the back pocket of his pants but retrieved nothing more than the foil butt of a spent roll of Life Savers. He dug into his other pockets, which yielded only his wallet (whose sole occupants, his driver’s license and a library card, faced each other on either side of the fold, a diptych of a life as yet unoccupied and so, it might seem, unlived) and twenty cents in change.

  William explored his pockets once more, and concluded, more in embarrassment than despair, that the dollar bill had worked its way out of his pocket at some point, most likely as he pumped the bicycle up the hill. His own funds would neither cover the cost of the butter nor allow for the change his mother would expect. He did not for one second consider reporting what seemed to be the truth, which in any case seemed much less credible than any number of other explanations he was already beginning to concoct. He imagined his clumsy shame as he recounted how the dollar bill had, through some kind of Ouija-style self-propelling friction, wiggled its way out of his pocket and fallen unnoticed on the long asphalt path that ascended the cathedral hill; imagined his mother’s cresting eyebrows meeting her brow wrinkled in exasperation, then the incredulous sputter launched on an exhalation of smoke, and—worst of all—her laughing at him.

  William, had, in the space of perhaps twenty seconds, constructed two narratives. In the first, which he thought would appeal to his mother’s sensibility and interests, he had encountered a group of college students downtown who were raising money for the farmworkers in California and was so moved that he handed the dollar over to them without a thought; in the second, which he found the more dramatically compelling, he had been accosted by a group of hoods in the vaguely seedy quarter between Seven Corners and the bottom of the hill and they had taken the dollar and let him escape with his Raleigh and his life.

  He chained his bicycle and went inside. He opened the door, went down the hall, and, eyes downcast, found his mother in the kitchen, washing asparagus.

  He looked up at her and then addressed the toecaps of his sneakers. “The money? For the butter? I don’t have it. . . .”

  William’s mother set down an asparagus spear on the drainboard and turned to face him. Her mouth formed a tight, brittle smile, and she said, “I suppose you bought magic beans instead.” Then she set her hands on her hips.

  “No,” William said, and he felt himself push off, riding the sled of his fabrication as it barreled down the hill. “There were some Mexican kids. In Rice Park. They said they needed some money to get home to California, to Delano, to pick grapes. And they were kind of tough. So—”

  “Billy. Please. I’ve got people coming for dinner and the election returns. I don’t have time. I’ve got to make hollandaise.” Her hands dropped from her hips and shaped a plaintive gesture. “Take another dollar from my purse,” she enunciated. “Actually, take two. Get me a bottle of quinine water too. Schweppes, not Canada Dry.”

  William nodded. His face had colored and now he felt it cooling. He spun around and returned to the straw bag in the hall, the bicycle on the chain and the lock, and rode off. The street was roofed over with elm leaves. He was moving through its shadows like dark places in water, inconsequential as a minnow, ruddy-faced, tight-breathed, with the tingle of being caught out still unreeling itself in his solar plexus.

  2

  ON THE DAY IN JUNE THAT WILLIAM MAILED very first letter to Emily Byrne, her father, Edward, had spent the better part of the day prowling the Medical Arts Building on St. Peter Street. He was talking up his company’s new tranquilizer, Placidox, and something new they had just gotten approval on and would be releasing in the fall called Melanchor, a tricyclic antidepressant.

  The doctors took their samples, the notepads, the pen and pencil sets, and the paperweights with a model of a dendrite caught in it like a house spider in aspic. They took them with grunts, with nods, sometimes with the brush of a hand across Edward’s forearm or his shoulder blade, kindly but distractedly. They rarely had time to talk, although Edward had signed on fifteen years before because it was the only job in the sales business where a college-educated man could routinely talk to other college-educated men about science.

  In all the Medical Arts Building, only old Dr. Fields could be counted on for a real conversation. Edward thought he might have fancied himself a philosopher, or that medicine had made him into one, as though through all that contact with human bodies and their frailties he had absorbed a certain worldly wisdom.

  The nurse brought him into Fields’s inner office, and Fields passed him the cigarette box and they smoked together. It had been four months since their last encounter, and as Edward replied to Fields’s various queries about the state of the pharmaceutical business, he felt that Fields might be taking a history of the body politic.

  “It was a good spring for Histamane,” Edward was saying.

  “Good pollen counts. The wife was just commenting on how well the garden is going, excepting the weeds.”

  “So how are you finding Placidox? Anything worth noting to headquarters?”

  “Oh no,” Fields said, exhaling smoke and leaning forward as he slid his chair back a little. “Swell stuff. Mother’s milk. Cracker Jacks. The brains of half the membership of the Junior League are awash in it.”

  “We’re pretty excited about this new thing, Melanchor.”

  “That’s for depression?” Fields put down his cigarette, cupped his hands behind his head, and leaned back, gazing up at the ceiling for a moment. “I think that’s the coming thing,” he said, and looked again at Edward. “Stress followed by despair. There’s a historical pattern to it. Like when I was in college. World War I: the horror of the trenches, the exhilaration of victory, then the tawdriness of Versailles and the influenza epidemic. All that for nothing more than this. And so feelings of worthlessness, torpor, anomie, flat-out nothingness.”

  “The last war didn’t end that way. With twenty-three years and counting.”

  �
�Maybe give it time. Anyhow, that was different. Watch how the current one turns out. You’ll sell a ton of this—what do you call it—Melchior?” Fields halted. “No, that’s one of the three wise men, the Negro, I think.”

  “Melanchor. So the Age of . . . what, Anxiety’s over?”

  “Superseded. At least some time soon. By the Age of Black Bile. Of Acedia.”

  “Which is . . .” Edward queried.

  “The denial of God’s love, his reality, I guess, on account of spiritual sloth, of despair.” Fields grinned and then formed an expression of feigned wistfulness. “You could call your drug Acedex, or some such thing. Or Despond, after the infamous slough.”

  Edward stood, rising lazily. “Well, doctor, I have dope to peddle.” Edward picked up his case. “Anything I can offer you? Notepads, playing cards, desk calendars? I have a nice cast model of a bladder we’re using in connection with Micturon.”

  “I think I’ve got one of those. How about something more exotic—a vagina dentata, or some such?”

  “I’m a good Catholic boy,” said Edward. “I don’t want to know what that means.”

  “If you’re a good Catholic boy, you know enough Latin to already know what it means.”

  “So maybe I do. But we like to have it both ways. It’s the distinguishing mark of our faith.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.”

  “It’s been a pleasure, doctor,” said Edward.

  “Until next time, Ed. Come and see us again.”

  Edward’s case was nearly empty, and it was a few minutes before five. He drove home in the apotheosis of the afternoon to his wife and his daughter. It was the first Tuesday in June, a beautiful day, and life was good, better, he sensed, than he could begin to know. For example, as he drove up the hill, a piece of paper blew across the road in front of him, which he could have sworn was not litter but a crisp new dollar bill.