JODY AFTER THE WAR
LIGHT LAY bloody on the mountainside. From our promontory jutting above the scrub pine, we looked out over the city. Denver spread from horizon to horizon. The tower of the U.S. Capitol Building caught the sun blindingly. We watched the contrail of a Concorde II jetliner making its subsonic approach into McNicholls Field, banking in a sweeping curve over the pine-lined foothills. Directly below us, a road coiled among rocks and trees. A campfire fed smoke into the November air. The wind nudged the smoke trail our way and I smelled the acrid tang of wood smoke. We watched the kaleidoscope of cloud shadows crosshatch the city.
Jody and I sat close, my arm around her shoulders. No words, no facial expressions as afternoon faded out to dusk. My feet gradually went to sleep.
“Hey.”
“Mmh?” she said, startled.
“You look pensive.”
Her face stayed blank.
“What are you thinking?”
“I’m not. I’m just feeling.” She turned back to the city. “What are you thinking?”
“Uh, not much,” I said. Lie; I’d been thinking about survivors. “Well, thinking how beautiful you are.” Banal, but only half an evasion. I mean she was beautiful. Jody was imprinted in my mind the first time I saw her, when I peered up out of the anesthetic fog and managed to focus on her standing beside my hospital bed: the half-Indian face with the high cheekbones. Her eyes the color of dark smoke. I couldn’t remember what she’d worn then. Today she wore faded blue jeans and a blue chambray work shirt, several sizes too large. No shoes. Typically, she had climbed the mountain barefoot.
Without looking back at me, she said, “You were thinking more than that.”
I hesitated. I flashed a sudden mental image of Jody’s face the way she had described it in her nightmares: pocked with red and black spots that oozed blood and pus, open sores that gaped where her hair had grown, her skin. . .
Jody squeezed my hand. It was as if she were thinking, that’s all right, Paul, if you don’t want to talk to me now, that’s fine.
I never was any good with evasions, except perhaps with myself. Survivors. Back after the A-bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese had called them hibakusha - which translates roughly as “sufferers.” Here in America we just called them survivors, after the Chinese suicided their psychotic society in the seventies, and destroyed most of urban America in the process. I guess I was lucky; I was just a kid in the middle of Nevada when the missiles hit. I’d hardly known what happened east of the Mississippi and west of the Sierras. But Jody had been with her parents somewhere close to Pittsburgh. So she became a survivor; one of millions. Most of them weren’t even hurt in the bombings. Not physically.
Jody was a survivor. And I was lonely. I had thought we could give each other something that would help. But I wasn’t sure anymore. I wondered if I had a choice after all. And I was scared.
Jody leaned against me and shared the warmth of my heavy windbreaker. The wind across the heaped boulders of the mountainside was chill, with the sun barely down. Jody pressed her head under my chin. I felt the crisp hair against my jaw. She rested quietly for a minute, then turned her face up toward mine.
“Remember the first time?”
“Here?”
She nodded. “A Sunday like this, only not so cold. I’d just gotten in from that Hayes Theatre assignment in Seattle when you phoned. I hadn’t even unpacked. Then you called and got me up here for a picnic.” She smiled. In the new shadows her teeth were very white. “What a god-awful time.”
That picnic. A summer and about fourteen hundred miles had separated us while she set up PR holograms of Hamlet and I haunted Denver phone booths.
Then here on the mountainside we’d fought bitterly. We had hurt each other with words and Jody had begun to cry and I’d held her. We kissed and the barbed words stopped. Through her tears, Jody whispered that she loved me and I told her how much I loved her. That was the last time either of us said those words. Funny how you use a word so glibly when you don’t really understand it; then switch to euphemisms when you do.
“You’re very far away.”
“It’s nothing.” I fished for easy words. “The usual,” I said. “My future with Ma Bell, going back to school, moving to Seattle to try writing for the network.” Everything but—Liar! sneered something inside. Why didn’t you include damaged chromosomes in the list, and leukemia, and paranoia, and frigidity, and . . . ? Shut up!
“Poor Paul,” Jody said. “Hemmed in. Doesn’t know which way to turn. For Christmas I think I’ll get you a lifesize ‘gram from Hamlet. I know a guy at the Hayes who can get me one.”
“Hamlet, right. That’s me.” I lightly kissed her forehead. “There, I feel better. You ought to be a therapist.”
Jody looked at me strangely and there was a quick silence I couldn’t fill.
She smiled then and said, “All right, I’m a therapist. Be a good patient and eat. The thermos won’t keep the coffee hot all night.”
She reached into the canvas knapsack I’d packed up the mountain and took out the thermos and some foil parcels. “Soybeef,” she said, pointing to the sandwiches. “The salt’s in with the hard- boiled eggs. There’s cake for dessert.”
Filling my stomach was easier than stripping my soul, so I ate. But the taste died in my mouth when I thought about Jody fixing meals all the rest of our lives. Food for two, three times a day, seven days a week, an average of thirty days a . . . Always unvarying. Always food for two. God, I wanted children! I concentrated on chewing.
After the meal, we drank beer and watched the city below as five million Denverites turned on their lights. I knew I was getting too high too fast when I confused pulling the tabs off self-cooling beer cans with plucking petals from daisies.
She loves me.
Funny how melodrama crops up in real life. My life. Like when I met her.
It was about a year before, when I’d just gotten a job with Mountain Bell as a SMART—that’s their clever acronym for Service Maintenance and Repair Trainee. In a city the size of Denver there are more than half a million public pay phones, of which at least a third are out of order at any given time; vandals mostly, sometimes mechanical failure. Someone has to go out and spot- check the phones, then fix the ones that are broken. That was my job. Simple.
I’d gone into a bad area, Five Points, where service was estimated to be eighty percent blanked out. I should have been smart enough to take a partner along, or maybe to wear blackface. But I was a lot younger then. I ended up on a bright Tuesday afternoon, sprawled in my own blood on the sidewalk in front of a grocery store after a Chicano gang had kicked the hell out of me.
After about an hour somebody called an ambulance. Jody. On the phone I’d just repaired before I got stomped. She’d wandered by with a field crew on some documentary assignment, snapping holograms of the poverty conditions.
She loves me not.
I remembered what we’d quarreled about in September. Back in early August a friend of Jody’s and mine had come back from Seattle. He was an audio engineer who’d worked free-lance with the Hayes Theatre. He’d seen Jody.
“Man, talk about wild!” my friend said. “She must’ve got covered by everything with pants from Oregon to Vancouver.” He looked at my face. “Uh, you have something going with her?”
She loves me.
“What’s so hard to understand?” Jody had said. “Didn’t you ever meet a survivor before? Didn’t you ever think about survivors? What it’s like to see death so plainly all around?” Her voice was low and very intense. “And what about feeling you ought never to have babies, and not wanting even to come close to taking the chance?” Her voice became dull and passionless. “Then there was Seattle, Paul, and there’s the paradox. The only real defense against death is not to feel. But I want to feel sometimes and that’s why—” She broke off and began to cry. “Paul, that’s why there were so many of them. But they couldn’t—I can’t make it. Not with anyone.”
Confused, I held her.
“I want you.”
And it didn’t matter which of us had said that first.
She loves me not.
“Why don’t you ever say what you think?”
“It’s easy,” I said, a little bitter. “Try being a lonely stoic all your life. It gets to be habit after a while.”
“You think I don’t know?” She rolled over, turned to the wall. “I’m trying to get through.” Her voice was muffled by the blankets.
“Yeah. Me too.”
She sat up suddenly, the sheets falling away from her. “Listen! I told you it would be like this. You can have me. But you have to accept what I am.”
“I will.”
Neither of us said anything more until morning.
She loves me.
Another night she woke up screaming. I stroked her hair and kissed her face lightly.
“Another one?”
She nodded.
“Bad?”
“Yes.”
“You want to talk about it?”
There was hesitation, then a slow nod.
“I was in front of a mirror in some incredibly baroque old bedroom,” she said. “I was vomiting blood and my hair was coming out and falling down on my shoulders. It wound around my throat and I couldn’t breathe. I opened my mouth and there was blood running from my gums. And my skin—it was completely covered with black and red pustules. They—” She paused and closed her eyes. “They were strangely beautiful.” She whimpered. “The worst—” She clung to me tightly. “Oh, God! The worst part was that I was pregnant.”
She roughly pushed herself away and wouldn’t let me try to comfort her. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling. Finally, childlike, she took my hand. She held my fingers very tight all the rest of the night.
She loves me not.
But she did, I thought. She does. In her own way, just as you love her. It’s never going to be the way you imagined it as a kid. But you love her. Ask her. Ask her now.
“What’s going on?” Jody asked, craning her neck to look directly below our ledge. Far down we saw a pair of headlights, a car sliding around the hairpin turns in the foothills road. The whine of a racing turbine rasped our ears.
“I don’t know. Some clown in a hurry to park with his girl.”
The car approached the crest of a hill and for an instant the headlights shone directly at us, dazzling our eyes. Jody jerked back and screamed. “The sun! So bright! God, Pittsburgh—” Her strength seemed to drain; I lowered her gently to the ledge and sat down beside her. The rock was rough and cold as the day’s heat left. I couldn’t see Jody’s face, except as a blur in the darkness. There was light from the city and a little from the stars, but the moon hadn’t risen.
“Please kiss me.”
I kissed her and used the forbidden words. “I love you.”
I touched her breast; she shivered against me and whispered something I couldn’t quite understand. A while later my hand touched the waist of her jeans and she drew away.
“Paul, no.”
“Why not?” The beer and my emotional jag pulsed in the back of my skull. I ached.
“You know.”
I knew. For a while she didn’t say anything more, nor did I. We felt tension build its barrier. Then she relaxed and put her cheek against mine. Somehow we both laughed and the tension eased.
Ask her. And I knew I couldn’t delay longer. “Damn it,” I said, “I still love you. And I know what I’m getting into.” I paused to breathe. “After Christmas I’m taking off for Seattle. I want you to marry me there.”
I felt her muscles tense. Jody pulled away from me and got to her feet. She walked to the end of the ledge and looked out beyond the city. She turned to face me and her hands were clenched.
“I don’t know,” she said. “At the end of summer I’d have said ‘no’ immediately. Now—”
I sat silent.
“We’d better go,” she said after a while, her voice calm and even. “It’s very late.”
We climbed down from the rocks then, with the November chill a well of silence between us.