What Hearts Read online

  But then, as the beginning of seventh grade approached, an ambition began to grow around the love: somehow, he wanted his feelings to emerge, to be strong in the light of day. He wanted them to do some work in the world. Hiding this fine stuff inside struck him as finicky, almost dishonest. Stand up! he felt like saying to himself; Declare something—to Jean, he supposed.

  But he was wary of this newfound boldness. Several times he almost spoke to her—when he found himself next to her in the cafeteria line, or saw her alone in a library aisle, looking at the mysteries—but he stopped short. He was not nervous. He just had the nagging feeling that he lacked some kind of knowledge, not about himself or Jean, but about loving.

  Willing for the first time to learn, he realized that he was—had long been—surrounded by public examples of the things lovers did. For two years he had seen the same billboard beside the public library, bearing a gaudy photo of a young man twirling a young woman in some land of dance performed in a wooded dell, with hot-green letters begging to know: IS YOURS A KOOL LOVE? For two years he had watched girls in the hall writhe when a certain boy passed, rolling their eyeballs and pretending to collapse onto the friends giggling beside them; for two years he had watched as most of the other boys in his class drifted uneasily into some kind of sober association with this or that girl. None of these things had called forth a recognition.

  His biggest surprise was the music. For years Asa had listened to music for an hour or so every night as he lay in the dark in bed. His transistor radio fit neatly under the curve of his hip beneath the covers, and the pink wire of an earphone snaked invisibly up his side. Several times Dave or his mother had popped into his room while the radio was playing its hidden tunes, and neither had ever detected a thing. He was completely secure. Snug in the dark, lying on his back, he absorbed the songs that came to him through the night. They sank right into his bones. Somehow his mind and body joined up to know these tunes, better than he knew anything. After a while “This Magic Moment” and “Our Day Will Come” and “What’s Your Name” and “It’s Too Late” and fifty others seemed no longer to come to him up the pink wire, but rather to come from him, as if he had only to open his mouth and create them, full blown, in all their sonic blare and nuance.

  And what, exactly, did he know from this music? When Chuck Willis’s voice throated upward on each stretched syllable of the phrase “she’s gone” (wailing the two words into nine distinct sounds at one point), when The Drifters dropped into the mysterious swing of the refrain “sweeter than wine…softer than a summer night,” when the distant voices (the Romantics?) sighed with a kind of merry resignation behind Ruby as she promised “and we’ll have everything”—what did this teach him?

  For two years it taught him nothing he could spell out. Then one night he lay in the dark listening to Timi Yuro say that the love of a boy could change a girl into a woman—and it hit him. The words, all of them he had ever heard, in every song—they were words of love. They were about—or were supposed to be about—his feelings for Jean. Or, perhaps, it was this way: his feelings for Jean were supposed to be what these songs described.

  Chuck Willis had felt what Asa felt? And sung about it? And The Drifters—all that your-lips-touching-mine business—was that supposed to be happening? Was that what he should be wanting? For the next few days he shuddered every time another explicit lyric careened into his awareness; where before he could snap his fingers and cut a quick step while singing “These arms of mine…” he now thought of the actual arms, and what wasn’t between them, and how much they would not know what to do if something were—and then he forced himself to think about something else.

  The pressure began to squeeze. He couldn’t run away, but he couldn’t figure everything out by himself. He faced the fact that he needed some help; he needed to talk to somebody. Somebody who had brought love out of the silence, and put it to work. Somebody who had made love the decisive thing.

  TWO

  Since her last stay in the hospital, Asa’s mother’s life had changed. She came home just before the sixth grade started, and she was very settled. Not depressed: she smiled a great deal, with good humor and all that, but she sat a lot and watched things. Before, most of the time she had been wild with energy, constantly active, sometimes scary, always interesting. When he got home from school, she might be composing a symphonic mystery meal using ten pots and twelve mixing bowls, flour and goo all over the kitchen, a meal that never appeared on the dinner table; she might be on a ladder painting some of the shutters yellow, quitting halfway through and leaving Dave to mutter and Asa to scrape paint for three weekends. Sometimes, too, the whole house was heavy with a day’s worth of darkness, and his mother was asleep. But even the sleep days were extreme enough to be intriguing, in the whole mix of things.

  But for the past year when Asa got home from school every day, his mother was watching old movies on television in the living room. She greeted him cheerily from the sofa, reaching up to pull him down for a kiss. At least one window was always open and the air was pretty fresh, but the blinds were down. She said one or the other of her pills made her eyes sensitive.

  Asa always sat with her for a few minutes in front of the television set, answering her questions about school. She almost never looked at the screen while he was there. She held his hand and asked him about his day. He, on the other hand, found himself watching. If something happened on the screen, he would interrupt his own school report to point it out to her; he did not want her to miss anything on his account. She never even glanced, but continued to regard him with an expectant smile.

  Every day, after fifteen minutes, he got up and went to his room and got her pills. She always had water in the living room, but he brought her an extra glassful anyway. She gulped the pills down with her eyes on the screen; but watching her eyes, he could tell she wasn’t paying attention to the movie at those moments. She was pretending to watch, pretending the pills were nothing, not even a distraction, but in her eyes he saw a flare of terror and disgust as sharp as a struck match. He left her alone for a while then, coming back through the room a few times just to check up silently.

  But today he did not leave. She swallowed her pills, settled back with the brief rage in her eyes, and stared at the screen. After a few minutes she looked at him, puzzled.

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I want to ask you about something.” Once again, he did not meet her gaze. On the screen, a young man whose hair was shiny with pomade stared sadly out the window of an elegant apartment at the lights of a city far below. From the slick hair, the rich material of the curtains, and the way he smoked his cigarette, Asa could tell the movie was from the 1930s. The way they filmed cigarettes in the thirties was different: the smoke looked like rich perfume made visible. A closeup showed the man’s eyes gazing out through a swirling haze that would have gagged Asa. But this guy took in a breath and let out a sigh: he had bigger things on his mind than air. Asa coughed.

  “What do you want to ask about?” said his mother. She was watching the screen now too.

  Asa said, “What do you do when you are in love?”

  He had expected her to laugh or something like that. But she spoke very easily, without effort. She said, “Well, you enjoy the way you feel.”

  He waited a respectful moment, then pressed. “Yes, but what do you—you know—do? I mean—if you feel all of a sudden you have to do something?”

  She looked at him. “Well, most people talk.” She said it as if she didn’t think all that highly of talking, or perhaps of doing what most people did. They both looked back at the television. Now there were shots of a young woman with lipstick that looked black buying something in a department store. It was a watch, a man’s watch, rectangular and large. The young woman wore a flat, dense little hat that looked like a round book.

  Asa said, “I suppose you’ve got to talk before you do anything else.”

  His mother was silent for a moment. The youn
g woman on TV was certainly talking, telling the clerk wrapping her watch about what a wonderful fellow she was purchasing it for. She sounded nervous, as if she were auditioning for the role in the movie. Asa’s mother said, “You don’t necessarily have to talk. There are other ways to communicate.”

  “Like what? What—” he hesitated only an instant—“what do you do when you’re in love?”

  She smiled. “Well,” she said, “I’ve always found it very natural to leave town.” Then she laughed, hard enough to make her cough. One of the pills always made her very dry. Asa handed her one of her water glasses, and she drank. Then she took Asa’s hand and looked at him.

  He met her eyes. “Why do I want to do this at all?” he said. “For a long time it’s been enough just to feel things. Now all of a sudden I want to get it out. Why is that?”

  “You want to share something you’ve made. Just like with the comic books you wrote and drew in the fifth grade. You put all this work into making something, and naturally you want to show it off. It’s human nature.”

  “I’m not sure I ‘made’ this.”

  “Oh, yes, you did. It did not just happen to you. It never does. We like to think that sometimes.” Her gaze did not falter, but for an instant something jerked in her eyes. She went on. “When we love someone it is because we built that feeling, bit by bit. It’s a choice. It’s what we make only for ourselves, like me baking three cakes and eating them all while you and Dave were away for the Duke-Carolina game that weekend.”

  He looked away, then back. “Even,” he said, “even love in the family? Even that—you choose that?”

  She thought for a long moment. “No,” she said. “It’s different. Mothers, kids, fathers—you don’t have to choose that. But you do have to make it. You make it, you build it.”

  “Bit,” he said, “by bit.”

  She stared at him. He wondered how they had gotten onto this; here he had started with talk about his feelings for Jean, but in ten minutes he had pulled his mom to the edge of someplace he probably did not want to take her. But she looked away briefly, the moment passed, and she brought herself back to his questions. “There’s another reason you’re feeling this,” she said, with a smile so soft it looked wistful. “You just want to make the girl you love happy.”

  He frowned. “Happy?” On the TV the man with the pomade was sitting at a table in a restaurant. Smoke from a cigarette in his hand curled around his head like a turban; he looked impatient as a spoiled sultan as he asked a waiter what the time was.

  His mother tapped his knee with one finger. “Yes, sweetheart. Happy. Look at me.” He did. She put the one finger under his chin, very gently. “When a girl knows a boy loves her, that—more than anything that can happen to her, until she has a child—gives her happiness.”

  “What if she doesn’t love him?”

  “It has nothing to do with her feelings for him. It’s a gift, that’s all. And when you get a gift, you feel good. Doesn’t matter if you haven’t got a gift ready to give in return. Something as fine as love from someone as nice as you—well, knowing about it means a lot. It can mean everything.”

  There was noise from the screen. They both looked. The young woman was squealing and gasping with her eyes closed, her chin on the dark-wool shoulder of the pomaded man and her hands white on his dark-wool back. His neck was bent forward, but stiff. The light pinged off his hair; the woman was wearing another strange little hat. Asa pointed and said, “Is that it?”

  “Who knows?” his mother said. “You can never tell by looking.”

  They stared as the movie ended with a swell of music. Words rolled by on the screen. Asa looked at his watch. “Be right back,” he said.

  He went upstairs to his room and took another pill from another bottle in his bureau. When he brought it back to his mother, she took it in her hand but did not put it in her mouth right away. “Sit down, honey,” she said. She looked serious.

  “Take your pill,” he said.

  “Sit down.”

  He sat down. She put the pill in her mouth. He handed her a glass of water, and she sipped and swallowed. “Asa,” she said. “Tell me what this love you feel does, for you. The biggest thing it does. The best thing.”

  He thought. She waited. He saw she was on the edge of something again, waiting for his answer. He couldn’t figure out what she might be hoping for or fearing, so he told the truth. “It makes me feel good about everything. Even things in my life that don’t have anything to do with—with her. It—it’s just something that’s always there to feel good about.”

  His mother closed her eyes and smiled. “Yes,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “Okay,” he said, suddenly flushed.

  She looked toward the window. Holding her hand out toward him, she opened it and revealed the pill, a white capsule on her shadowed skin.

  “Hey,” he said. “Mom.”

  “Feeling good about something—about everything,” she said, still looking the other way. “Whereas this”—she rolled the pill a little on her palm—”this makes you feel good, but about nothing. That’s what it’s for. That’s—whew. Where I am, apparently.” She grunted a chuckle and looked at him. “That’s where I have to start, I guess. But you know what?” She put her hands together and shook them, then made two fists and held them out to him. “You know what, Asa?”

  He stared at her, refusing to look at her hands. He tried to appear stern. “You should take that. It’s my responsibility.”

  “Here’s what,” she said. Her eyes were bright. “I think it’s been long enough feeling this phony sweetness. Asa—” She opened both of her hands, and he looked despite his resolve; both were empty. She put them on his wrists and squeezed. “Listen—I’ve got it, too. I’ve got enough inside to make me feel good about things.” She patted his arms. “You’ve been a good young man, taking charge of my pills, taking such good care of me. And I’ve been good. I’ve taken every pill except once, when Dave and I were going to dinner and I didn’t want to feel dopey, but we had a fight so I took them later. God, it’s been, what, a year, more. You’ve been perfect. But the treatment’s over.”

  “I want you to be okay,” Asa said. “I don’t want you to have trouble.”

  She shook his arms. “Trouble,” she said, “doesn’t just come from feeling bad when things are going fine. Trouble can also come from feeling good when you shouldn’t. Hey, listen.” She put her hands up to his face and smiled as deeply as he could remember seeing in recent years. “There’s nothing to be afraid of. Things happen; they don’t stop. Look what’s happened to you while I’ve been sitting here taking feelgood pills and watching TV. You’ve gone and fallen in love and gotten to be man enough to want to do something with it.” She held her hands up. “Probably just as much has happened to me, but I would never know it, not while I keep sitting here smiling at nothing.”

  Asa could not help asking, “What could have happened? To you.”

  She held his eyes, still smiling. “Well,” she said, “I could be in love and not even know it.” They watched each other carefully. Then, only a little more softly, she added: “Or not in love, Asa. And I wouldn’t know that either.”

  He swallowed. His throat was dry. She handed him her water, and he sipped. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll go along. I won’t tell. About not taking the pills.”

  “Then I won’t tell,” she said, “about the love.”

  “Mine?” he asked. “Or yours?”

  She laughed. “Yours is your business,” she said. “Mine—” She shook her head, and he saw the match strike behind her eyes again. “Mine should be only my business, too. But—God help us, Asa—it never ends up that way, does it?”

  She looked at him. He looked at the TV. Another movie was starting.

  THREE

  It took him only a week. He did not force things by trying to get Jean off by herself somewhere; he waited until it happened naturally, as if the movements of the class were some kind of tide
and it was best to let the tide run its course.

  One Tuesday he went in early from recess so that he could take a biography of Mickey Mantle back to the library and renew it. He walked into the classroom, and there she was, sitting at her desk, reading. They were alone.

  She looked up, and watched him approach. He stood beside her desk. Holding her finger in her place, she closed the book. Her desk was in the row nearest the windows; the thin brightness of autumn was shiny around her. She smiled, waiting for whatever it was.

  He had not planned anything. He had hoped the moment would come and he would know what to do. He had hoped it would be simple. It was.

  “I love you, Jean,” he said.

  That was all. His heart was steady; his breath was deep. He waited for a moment, politely, to see if she wanted to respond. When he saw her cheeks flood with color and her eyes widen with something that looked like fear, he made a little bow and withdrew, taking a moment to get the book from his desk. She did not speak, and he did not look back.

  On the way to the library, he felt for the first time the uncanny strength he held in his body: his legs could launch a leap to the corridor ceiling should he choose not to restrain their power in these small strides, and his eyes, if he really opened them, could beam great light upon things, enriching colors, revealing facts. He looked at the book in his hands. Probably he could squeeze it back into wood pulp.

  Jean’s expression had puzzled him for a moment, because he plainly saw that it was fear. She had been afraid. Why? He started to work on this, and in a few moments found the answer: She thinks she is still a child. He smiled. That was it; that was what she thought. Her childhood—that was what she had seen, all of a sudden, from the other side, from her future. He knew, because he had just taken the same step himself. He smiled again. Well, there was time. He would be here, waiting as long as it took. He would be here when Jean began to grow comfortable becoming herself.