Jack (Gilead #4)(65)
He walked and walked, bought a hot dog from a cart, and walked some more, waiting for any sign of recognition. It was foolish, far worse than hopeless. He had failed to consider that Teddy’s sweater might stir a sudden bitterness in that girl’s mind, that woman’s mind, since by now she would understand how cheap a fraud had been committed against her childishness. It was that turbulence he carried with him, that black wind. She might see his yellow sweater and suffer a sting of memory, and curse the thought of him for all the grief he had brought her. She would turn away from the sight of him, and he would never know he had been so close to her. Maybe it was really a hope of comforting his father that lay behind it all, so Jack could walk into the old house again, so much at home there that his father would hardly look up from his newspaper.
Since he had gone that far with the idea, he might as well go on with it. His darkest thoughts about what was liable to be the girl’s present life would have led him down some dismal streets, and he did not look for her there, coward that he was. Another cause of regret. He’d certainly have been noticed in that sweater, which said in effect he had a life that allowed him to parade meaningless attainments, to expend effort just for the sake of a little sweat and sunshine on a grassy field, effort having nothing at all to do with shelter or food. Why did this thought make him more ashamed that it wasn’t even his sweater?
When night came, he stepped into a bar and had a few drinks. He went to a hotel, got a room and a key, and went back to the bar. Then he realized that somebody had walked him out to the sidewalk and left him there, leaning against a wall. His wallet was missing and so was his room key. So was that letter. The name of the hotel was written on the tag thing they attach to hotel keys. There were a number of hotels nearby, and they all looked alike, in fact and because he had been drinking. If he happened into the right hotel, they’d probably put him back out again, anyway. His ticket home was safe in the pocket of his shirt. So at worst it was only a matter of waiting for morning. He curled up in a doorway and fell asleep, until a policeman prodded him with his nightstick and said, “Move along, college boy.” He found another doorway near a streetlamp, but this time he couldn’t sleep. The whole day he had been prey to his thoughts, but at least there were women around to distract him from them, to remind him of his purpose.
A small old black man with the look of a hardened insomniac stood at the doorway for a while, smoking and watching the night, as if there were anything to look at. He glanced at Jack, then he flicked a long ash off his cigarette and said, “What would your folks say, seeing you there like that.” Then he strolled away, leaving Jack to think how steady his hand must be to have kept that ash from falling. Without twitch or tremor, a man of good conscience, he decided. Somewhere someone might have been laughing at that letter—Truly, I have no words to express—No way at all to make it right— It was a confession as much as it was an apology. That might always be true. Pointless in either case. He had felt as if the shame in the letter—it was really all about shame—was connected somehow with the perfervid, sulfurous yellow of the sweater, and he knew he would have thought the same thing sober. The locker key was in the shirt pocket with his ticket back to St. Louis. There was a logic in this he found reassuring, which proved that he was still essentially drunk.
A terrible day, wandering the streets, looking with unwelcome interest into the faces of women who might have any traits in any combination but who were still, good Lord, quite young. The use he had made of that sweater. Teddy’s wholesome aspiring rewarded as it usually was, even while he put on Jack’s tie and jacket, the one with cigarette burns on the lapel, sat in Jack’s lectures, and took his exams. Surely the family knew—that B-plus in geology? They had to have known. But some morning Jack might wake up a new man. He might come into himself, as his father said, and find his life waiting for him, a creditable youth already half lived out, suiting him perfectly, though with certain options thoughtfully left open. He might step like Lazarus back into his own life, so familiar, so astonishing. This had never happened. He’d made sure it would not happen. Perhaps he might, for just a moment, have seen his father’s contempt, an agony to his father, who would have sworn to himself a thousand times it would never come to that.
It was that night he was confronted with the indisputable truth that, all by himself in a strange city, he was in a situation and a condition that would indeed cause his mother sorrow and humiliation, send an icy pang into the warmest depths of her bosom. So with his brothers and sisters, after their fashion. Then it was that he had first realized what an exquisite thing harmlessness must be, what an absolute courtesy to things seen and unseen, to the bruised reed and the smoldering wick. If he could not achieve harmlessness, his very failures would give him much to consider. He would abandon all casuistry, surrender all thought of greater and lesser where transgressions were concerned, even drop the distinction between accident and intention. He was struggling in a web of interrelation, setting off consequences in every direction that he could not predict or control or even imagine with any hope of approaching the truth of a matter. He had no doubt read this somewhere. His brain was at least as sticky as his fingers. That old problem of mine and thine made his thinking a trove of unearned and unwilled pretentiousness, and this, he had learned on a number of occasions, was a thing some people took exception to. So that was another kind of offense to be aware of. He would speak only when necessary.