Robert Parker - Love and Glory

“You’re too closed in, Boonie,” Jennifer said. “You’re the most entirely autonomous person I’ve ever met, but you pay a high price for it.”

“Not as high a price as I paid when I wasn’t autonomous,” I said. “When you married Merchent I nearly went under. By the time I bottomed in L.A. a derelict, I was dying. If autonomy means being in control of your life, I had none. Now I do. And I will never lose it again.”

It was the first time I’d ever spoken with her in anything but general terms about the bad years. And I found my voice thick with intensity when I spoke of it now. I realized as I heard the intensity how vital my self-control was, how much it meant to me to have dragged myself up out of the bad years. Jennifer heard the intensity too.

“Would you like to tell me about it?” she said.

The vacuum cleaner on the floor above continued. The tone of its hum alternated slightly as it moved forward and backward over the industrial carpeting. Jennifer was leaning forward at her desk, her chin resting on her folded hands.

“Yes,” I said. “I would. I can’t remember long stretches of it, but I can give you some highlights.”

I talked for nearly an hour in surprisingly lucid chronology. The keeping of my journal probably helped the sequence of events in my head, and some of what I told her I remembered from my journal entries rather than from the events themselves.

The vacuum cleaner had gone by the time I finished speaking, and when I finished, the silence was complete. Jennifer had not moved, her enormous eyes steady on my face, her chin still resting on her hands.

“My God,” she said.

I was quiet. I felt complicated. There was triumph of a sort; I had finally told her what she’d done to me. But I was embarrassed too, embarrassed that I felt triumph, and embarrassed that I had confessed something shameful. I was risking my control; I had closed the emotional distance between us, and I knew it and it frightened me. I had always fancied myself as one bearing pain with dignity, and this torrential confession seemed antithetical to my fancy.

“How did you stop?” Jennifer said. “What turned you around?”

“I had to have a purpose,” I said. “I decided to get you back.”

She didn’t waver. Maybe she already knew it without exactly saying it. Now, as the words hung between us in the untidy little room, she kept her eyes on me.

“So you stopped drinking, and began the weightlifting,” she said, “and the running, and the books?”

“And the nutrition and not smoking and the carpentry and the boxing and the courses and the whole...” I searched for a word.

“Self-improvement,” she murmured.

“The whole self-improvement,” I said.

“For me?”

“If I were going to get you, I had to deserve you.”

“For you too,” she said.

“Absolutely. It saved me.”

Jennifer moved her chin slightly, rubbing it against her hands.

“And now?”

“It continues to save me,” I said. “It’s what I do. It is my single stay against confusion... hell, against dissolution. Without you I would dissipate.”

“Still?”

“Still.”

“But you’re so contained, Boonie. So sure of your integrity, so” — she lifted her chin and spread her hands — “so integrated.”

“As long as I can believe in you,” I said. “If I can believe in you, I can believe in me. But without you... I can find no other purpose in life. It’s the difference between love and masturbation. I have to love someone besides myself.”

“But you must love yourself too,” Jennifer said.

“I was dying,” I said. “I needed something to live for. Having someone to love makes life livable, but I think probably I have to be loved back to love myself.”

“And it has to be me?”

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t it be simpler to fall in love with someone who will love you back?”

“I don’t make the news,” I said. “I just report it.”

“I don’t understand that,” she said. “I don’t understand why you are so centered on me, why you don’t find a woman who is single and loving and responsive and everything you want.”

“I have chosen you,” I said. “I have made a free commitment. There was a woman in L.A. I could have chosen. I didn’t. I chose you. I have faith in you. I, by free act of will, love you, and choose always to love you.”

Jennifer shook her head sadly. “You want the wrong person,” she said. “You don’t know me. I’ll never be what you want me to be.”

I felt the bottom falling out, the blackness beneath. Control. I took in a deep breath. Control.

“It doesn’t matter what you are,” I said. “I choose to love you, and I won’t choose not to.”

“Boonie, I—” She stopped, tightened her mouth, and let her breath out through her nose.

“I know,” I said. “There’s nothing to say. Just know that I won’t quit, and that you can ask me for anything.”

“I’ve always known that,” she said.

Jennifer and I didn’t speak of love again. As long as she took courses, I’d take courses. I was her friend. We went places. In spring of 1968 a group of graduate students had a party in a second-floor walkup off Magazine Street in Cambridge.

“John doesn’t feel that it is appropriate for a professor to mingle socially like that with the grad students,” Jennifer said.

I nodded.

We were sitting cross-legged on the floor in the living room drinking mulled cider with cinnamon. The stereo was playing something that sounded like the oriental music I used to pick up on the radio in Korea. One string being plucked lethargically.

“I guess they’re not having anything to drink,” Jennifer said. She wore a lavender dress and beige high-heeled shoes. Her gold earrings were big loops and her lipstick was glossy and her eyes shadowed dark. In her honor I wore my blue blazer and my polished cordovans and my rep tie. Our hostess wore a flowered ankle-length dress and bare feet. Her boyfriend wore sandals and cutoff jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. The air was thick with marijuana smoke. Two graduate students sat silently on the couch. The boy in paint-stained jeans and moccasins and a collarless green-striped shirt. The girl had on hiking boots and Swiss army shorts and a blue denim shirt with the sleeves cut off. They moved their heads slightly in what might have been time with the one-stringed noises that came from the stereo.

In front of the couch was a coffee table made from an old cable spool. A big yellow tiger cat uncurled and jumped down from it.

“Hey, Jane,” I said to the hostess, “what’s the cat’s name?”

Jane looked startled, as if I’d just awakened her.

“Hester Prynne,” she said.

“Cute name,” I said.

She nodded. Jennifer murmured to me, “Boy, you are some conversationist.”

“If they had a black lab they’d name it Othello,” I said.

“Oh, now,” Jennifer said, “they’re not so bad.”

“Like hell they’re not,” I said. “They are more predictable than Prussian noblemen. They dress the same, they talk the same, they are cute in the same way, they have the same furniture, the same attitudes. All the women look the same: No makeup, pseudo-proletarian clothes, granny glasses as needed.”

“God,” Jennifer whispered, “they must think I’m a whore.”

“No booze,” I went on. “A lot of grass. East Indian zither music or whatever the hell that is. Bookcases made with bricks and boards.”

“You’re so absolute, Boonie. You’re scary sometimes. Hard to live up to.”

“I’m thirty-six years old,” I said. “I’ve done a lot of things and I’ve thought about all of them. Sometime in life you have to stop speculating and start deciding. I’ve done that.”

“You’ve had more experience than most of us.”

“It’s not the experience,” I said. I wanted her to understand. Maybe I even wanted to instruct her a little. “It’s what you do with it. It’s what you turn it into.”

“Why turn it into anything,” Jennifer said. “Why does it have to be systematized?”

“So you won’t kick around like a grasshopper on a hot afternoon,” I said.

Our host in the tie-dyed T-shirt said, “Boone, you were in the army.”

“Yes.”

He shook his head. They had been talking about Vietnam.

“How’d you let them get you?”

I’d had the conversation before. I knew how it would go. It was like talking sex with a virgin. I sighed softly. Jennifer looked at me.

“They were going to get somebody,” I said. “I didn’t see any reason why it shouldn’t be me.”

Jane said, “Wow, they had you brainwashed, didn’t they?”

“A different time,” I said. “For a lot of us then it was a rite of passage. Now resisting it is a rite of passage.”

“That’s all you think the antiwar movement is?” the host said.

“Barry,” I said, “I don’t think about movements any more than I have to. Trying to assign a single motive to a movement is like trying to catch minnows in your fist.”

“It’s that attitude that permits it,” Barry said. “People that don’t concern themselves. Easy for you, Boone, I suppose. They can’t draft you.”

I smiled at Jennifer. “At least I understand that,” I said to her. “I can identify with not wanting to get drafted.”

“That’s a legitimate concern, Boonie,” Jennifer said.

Barry was inflamed. “That’s not it,” he said. “That’s not where it’s at. That’s not what it’s about. Our commitment is to change. The world’s gone too long this way, the masses like cattle herded into the military to be massacred in wars of imperialism. People who serve in a war are traitors and it’s themselves they betray.”