In the autumn of her twenty-second year, Nadine fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado's intensity doesn't abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Mount Rainier, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions.
Nadine was married. And had a child. And, I should add, the man she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than her. This is where it all began, and where it all wound up. Almost.
Nadine was born in Everett, Washington. Her home was near the seashore, and she grew up with the cold, dry sound of sand-filled wind blowing against her windows. Her father ran a dental clinic across the town. He was remarkably handsome, his well-formed nose reminding you of Gregory Peck in Spellbound. Nadine didn't inherit that handsome nose, nor, according to her, did her brother. Nadine found it amazing that the genes that produced that nose had disappeared. If they really were buried forever at the bottom of the gene pool, the world was a sadder place. That's how wonderful this nose was.
Nadine's mother passed away of a congenital heart defect when she was just thirty-one. Nadine hadn't quite turned three. The only memory she had of her mother was a vague one, of the scent of her skin. Just a couple of photographs of her remained—a posed photo taken at her wedding and a snapshot taken right after Nadine was born. Nadine used to pull out the photo album and gaze at the pictures. Nadine's mother was—to put it mildly—a completely forgettable person. A short, humdrum hairstyle, clothes that made you wonder what she could have been thinking, an ill-at-ease smile. If she'd taken one step back, she would have melted right into the wall. Nadine was determined to brand her mother's face on her memory. Then she might someday meet her in her dreams. They'd shake hands, have a nice chat. But things weren't that easy. Try as she might to remember her mother's face, it soon faded. Forget about dreams—if Nadine had passed her mother on the street, in broad daylight, she wouldn't have known her.
Nadine's father hardly ever spoke of his late wife. He wasn't a talkative man to begin with, and in all aspects of life—like they were some kind of mouth infection he wanted to avoid catching—he never talked about his feelings. Nadine had no memory of ever asking her father about her dead mother. Except for once, when she was still very small; for some reason she asked him, "What was my mother like?" She remembered this conversation very clearly.
Her father looked away and thought for a moment before replying. "She was good at remembering things," he said. "And she had nice handwriting."
A strange way of describing a person. Nadine was waiting expectantly, snow-white first page of her notebook open, for nourishing words that could have been a source of warmth and comfort—a pillar, an axis, to help prop up her uncertain life here on this third planet from the sun. Her father should have said something that his young daughter could have held on to. But Nadine's handsome father wasn't going to speak those words, the very words she needed most.
Nadine's father remarried when she was six, and two years later her younger brother was born. Her new mother wasn't pretty either. On top of which she wasn't so good at remembering things, and her handwriting wasn't any great shakes. She was a kind and fair person, though. That was a lucky thing for little Nadine, the brand-new stepdaughter. No, lucky isn't the right word. After all, her father had chosen the woman. He might not have been the ideal father, but when it came to choosing a mate, he knew what he was doing.
At the time, Nadine—hope in Russian—was struggling to become a writer. No matter how many choices life might bring her way, it was novelist or nothing. Her resolve was a regular Rock of Gibraltar. Nothing could come between her and her faith in literature.
After she graduated from a public high school in an Everett suburb, she sorrowingly left her almost four month old son with her family to enter the liberal arts department of a cozy little private college in Tacoma with her husband. Nadine had a long commute from school to back home, but she managed it every other weekend to see her beloved child.
She found the college totally out of touch, a lukewarm, dispirited place, and she loathed it—and found her fellow students (which would include me, I'm afraid) hopelessly dull, second-rate specimens. The melancholia she lived with when away from the only person she seemed to actually want to spend time with, her son, was overly apparent. Unsurprisingly, then, just before her junior year, she just up and quit. Staying there any longer, she concluded, was a waste of time. I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life, and it'd lose even its imperfection.
Despite her bad habits and personal destruction, she was a good mother. But, because of her bad habits and personal destruction, she was great writer.
Nadine was a hopeless romantic; she'd say, "I am eternally, devastatingly romantic, and I thought people would see it because 'romantic' doesn't mean 'sugary.' It's dark and tormented — the furor of passion, the despair of an idealism that you can't attain."
Nadine was set in her ways—a bit innocent, to put a nice spin on it. Start her talking, and she'd go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn't get along with—most people in the world, in other words—she barely opened her mouth. She smoked too much, and you could count on her to lose her ticket every time she rode the train. She'd get so engrossed in her thoughts at times that she'd forget to eat, and she was as thin as one of those war orphans in an old Italian movie—like a stick with eyes. I'd love to show you a photo of her, but I don't have any. She detested having her photograph taken—no desire to leave behind for posterity a Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man. If there were a photograph of Nadine taken at that time, I know it would be a valuable record of how special certain people are.
I'm getting the order of events mixed up.
The man Nadine fell in love with was named Jake. At least that's what everyone called him. I don't know his real name, a fact that caused problems later on, but again I'm getting ahead of myself. Jacob may have been almost two decades older than Nadine, but he looked like he could be her age. Jacob was Quileute by nationality, and was born and raised in a little city by the sea and studied at an auto mechanic technical college in Shoreline. He owned a quaint car shop in the center of town, but had no experience running a business, so he was easily stressed about the workload and little profit. He always dressed simply, in a refined way, with modest inexpensive accessories. He drove an expensive looking black and silver motorbike, but kept a four-cylinder 1986 dulled red Rabbit and a broken down Harley Sprint in his tiny garage.
The first time Nadine met Jacob, she talked to her about Jack Kerouac's novels. Nadine was absolutely nuts about Kerouac. She always had her literary Idol of the Month, and at that point it happened to be the out-of-fashion Kerouac. She carried a dog-eared copy of On the Road or Lonesome Traveler stuck in her coat pocket, thumbing through it every chance she got. Whenever she ran across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory like they were Holy Writ. Her favorite lines were from the fire lookout section of Lonesome Traveler. Kerouac spent three lonely months in a cabin on top of a high mountain, working as a fire lookout. Nadine especially liked this part:
No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.
"Don't you just love it?" she said. "Every day you stand on top of a mountain, make a three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep, checking to see if there's any fires. And that's it. You're done for the day. The rest of the time you can read, write, whatever you want. At night scruffy bears hang around your cabin. That's the life! Compared with that, studying literature in college is like chomping down on the bitter end of a cucumber."
"OK," I said, "but someday you'll have to come down off the mountain." As usual, my practical, humdrum opinions didn't faze her.
Most people, people that don't know Nadine, would think that her sense of style, or lack thereof, was because she was a stressed young mother or because of the modern ironic fashion of this generation. But, people that do know Nadine wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel—wild, cool, dissolute.
She'd stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-frame Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her twenty-twenty vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversize herringbone coat from a secondhand store and a pair of rough work boots. If she'd been able to grow a beard, I'm sure she would have.
Nadine was an unconventional beauty. Her cheeks were sunken, her mouth a little too wide. Her nose was on the small side and upturned. She had an expressive face and a great sense of humor, though she hardly ever laughed out loud. She was short, and even in a good mood she talked like she was half a step away from picking a fight. I never knew her to use lipstick or eyebrow pencil, and I have my doubts that she even knew bras came in different sizes. Still, Nadine had something special about her, something that drew people to her. Defining that special something isn't easy, but when you gazed into her eyes, you could always find it, reflected deep down inside.
I might as well just come right out and say it. I was in love with Nadine. I was attracted to her from the first time we spoke in high school, and soon there was no turning back. For a long time she was the only thing I could think about. I tried to tell her how I felt, but somehow the feelings and the right words couldn't connect. Maybe it was for the best. She knew that I like her, but if I had been able to tell her my real feelings, she would have just laughed at me.
While Nadine and I were just friends, I went out with two or three other girls. It's not that I don't remember the exact number. Two, three—it depends on how you count. Add to this the girls I slept with once or twice, and the list would be a little longer. Anyhow, while I made love to these other girls, I thought about Nadine. Or at least, thoughts of her grazed a corner of my mind. I imagined I was holding her. Kind of a caddish thing to do, but I couldn't help myself.
I don't think Nadine ever had what you'd call a lover. In high school she had a few boyfriends, guys she'd go to movies with, go swimming with. I couldn't picture any of those relations ever getting deeper than what little Nadine thought of the relationship she and I shared. Nadine was too focused on becoming a novelist to really fall for anybody. When she did experience sex in high school, I'm sure it was less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.
"To be perfectly frank, sexual desire has me baffled," Nadine told me once, making a sober face. This was at a party just before we were to become seniors in high school, I believe; she'd downed five banana daiquiris and was pretty drunk. "You know—how it all comes about. What's your take on it?"
"Sexual desire's not something you understand," I said, giving my usual middle-of-the-road opinion. "It's just there."
She scrutinized me for a while, like I was some machine run by a heretofore unheard-of power source. Losing interest, she stared up at the ceiling, and the conversation petered out. No use talking to him about that, she must have decided. But she did decide, however ,to act upon said topic with the closest person to her, which was happily me. It proved to be one the happiest moments of my life, most of which were shared with Nadine.
Let me get back to how Nadine and Jacob met.
Jacob had heard of Jack Kerouac and had a vague sense that he was a novelist of some kind. What kind of novelist, though, he couldn't recall.
"Kerouac . . . Hmm . . . Wasn't he a Sputnik?"
Nadine couldn't figure out what he meant. Knife and fork poised in midair, she gave it some thought. "Sputnik? You mean the first satellite the Soviets sent up, in the fifties? Jack Kerouac was an American novelist. I guess they do overlap in terms of generation. . . ."
"Isn't that what they called the writers back then?" Jacob asked.
"Sputnik . . . ?" She traced a circle on the table with her fingertip, as if rummaging through some special jar full of memories.
"The name of a literary movement. You know—how they classify writers in different schools."
Finally it dawned on Nadine. "Beatnik!"
Jacob laughed and wiped his mouth with a napkin. "Beatnik-Sputnik. I never can remember those kinds of terms. It's like the Dewey Decimal System or the Treaty. Ancient history."
A gentle silence descended on them, suggestive of the flow of time.
"The Treaty?" Nadine asked.
Jacob smiled. A nostalgic, intimate smile, like a treasured old possession pulled out of the back of a drawer. His eyes narrowed in an utterly charming way. He reached out and, with his long, muscled fingers, gently mussed Nadine's already tousled hair. It was such a sudden yet natural gesture that Nadine could only return the smile. "I'll tell you the next time we meet."
Ever since that day, Nadine's private name for Jacob was Sputnik Sweetheart. Nadine loved the sound of it. It made her think of Laika, the Soviet space dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?
This Sputnik conversation took place at a wedding reception for Nadine's brother at a posh hotel in Port Angeles. Nadine wasn't particularly close to her sibling; in fact, they didn't very often get along. She'd just as soon be tortured as attend one of these receptions, but she couldn't back out of this one. She and Jacob were seated next to each other at one of the tables. Jacob didn't go into all the details, but it seemed he'd had a fling with the bride—or something along those lines—when he was taking classes to become a licensed mechanic years ago. It wasn't a very long or very close relationship, but Jacob felt obliged to attend, seeing as the bride pointed out that he had introduced her to someone who introduced her to Nadine's brother.
In the instant Jacob touched her hair, Nadine fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation. Which is why, at that point, it didn't matter to Nadine that the person she fell in love with didn't happened to be her husband or the father of her child.
Nadine's face grew hot. Her heart galloped as loudly as a crazed horse on a wooden bridge.
After this Nadine and Jake were absorbed in their own private conversation. The reception was a lively one, with the usual assortment of after-dinner speeches (including, most certainly, Nadine's father), and the dinner wasn't half bad. But not a speck of this remained in Nadine's memory. Was the main course meat? Or fish? Did she use a knife and fork and mind her manners? Or eat with her hands and lick the plate? Nadine had no idea.
The two of them talked about music. Nadine was a big fan of classical and oldie's music and ever since she was small liked to paw through her father's record collection. She and Jake shared similar tastes, it turned out. They both loved upbeat music and were convinced that the 80's was the absolute pinnacle in the history of music.
"What do you do?" asked Jake, once their discussion of music had come to an end.
"I dropped out of college," Nadine explained, "and I'm doing
some part-time jobs while I work on my novels."
"What kind of novels?" Jake asked.
"It's hard to explain," replied Nadine.
"Well," said Jake, "then what type of books do you like to read?"
"If I list them all we'll be here for ever," said Nadine. "Recently I've been reading Jack Kerouac."
And that's where the Sputnik part of their conversation came in. Other than some light fiction she read to pass the time, Jake hardly ever touched novels.
"I never can get it out of my mind that's it's all made up," she explained, "so I just can't feel any empathy for the characters. I've always been that way."
That's why her reading was limited to books that treated reality as reality. Books, for the most part, that helped her in her work.
"What kind of work do you do?" asked Nadine.
"I'm a mechanic, I own my own shop," said Jake. Nadine looked genuinly interested so he continued. "But before that, I just fixed people's cars if they brought it to me. My dad lived with me, and I had two part -time jobs," he laughed to himself as if it was an inside joke. "so fixing cars was just a kind of release for me. After my dad died, I decided to make a living out of it and went to a college, where I met the bride, to get legalize it. Sold the house, bought a shop, and live upstairs."
"You're happy." Nadine observed.
"Yeah," Jake nodded his head, then shrugged his broad shoulders. "I could be happier, but who couldn't be."
After minutes of comfortable silence while they watched the couples dance with the new in-laws, which Nadine had a made a point to refuse before the reception, Jake snapped her out of her thoughts. "You should tell me more about yourself, everything actually." He smiled.
Nadine laughed at the request. "Why?"
"I like you. I'd like to say that I know you." Nadine's heart jumped at the words. She reached for her beer and drank until it was empty. She couldn't help but notice his smile. "What are you good at, besides reading and and having good taste in music?"
Nadine quietly stared at the anonymous space hanging over the table, and pondered the question. "Instead of things I'm good at, it might be faster to list the things I can't do. I can't cook or clean the house. My room's a mess, and I'm always losing things. I love music, but I can't sing a note. I'm clumsy and can barely sew a stitch. I can't tell left from right half the time. When I get angry, I tend to break things. Plates and pencils, alarm clocks. Later on I regret it, but at the time I can't help myself. I have no money in the bank. I'm bashful for no reason, and I have hardly any friends to speak of."
She was trying not to divulge too much information about who she is to certain people, like a mother or a wife. She wasn't lying, and should he ask Nadine would tell him, but she didn't want to scare such a perfect, captivating soul away. She had to know him, just as he had to know her. Nadine took a quick breath and forged ahead.
"However, I can touch-type really fast. I have a good sense of direction. I'm not that athletic, but other than the chicken pocks, I've never been sick a day in my life. I'm always punctual, never late for an appointment. I can eat just about anything. My TV is always on, but I never watch it. And other than a bit of silly boasting, I hardly ever make excuses. Once a month or so my shoulders get so stiff I can't sleep, but the rest of the time I sleep like a log. I don't have a single cavity. And my Spanish is okay."
Jake looked up. "You speak Spanish?"
When Nadine was a senior in high school, she spent three months in the home of her uncle, a businessman who'd been stationed in Mexico City. Making the most of the opportunity, she'd studied Spanish intensively. She had taken Spanish in college, too.
Jake grasped the bottle of his beer with his dark hands and stopped halfway to putting it to his perfect lips. "Are you free tomorrow, around noon?" He drank.
Nadine nodded reflexively. She didn't even have to think about it. Free time, after all, was her main asset. She was in town for the rest of the week to spend time with her distant family; to see Jake instead was more than a blessing.
"Well then, why don't we have lunch together? I know a great Italian restaurant not too far." Jake said.
Nadine relaxed her dour look and asked Jake straight out: "But you just met me, and you hardly know a thing about me."
"That's true. Maybe I don't, but you told me all about you today, so I thought it would be my turn tomorrow" Jake admitted. When Nadine didn't reply, he added. "Beside, I said before that I like you."
Nadine felt the air around her suddenly grow thin. Mechanically she reached for a glass of water and gulped it down. A hawk-faced waiter quickly sidled in behind her and filled her empty glass with ice water. In Nadine's confused mind, the clatter of the ice cubes sounded just like the groans of a robber hiding out in a cave.
I must be in love with this man, she realized with a start. No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red. I'm in love. And this love is about to carry me off somewhere. The current's too overpowering; I don't have any choice. It may
very well be a special place, some place I've never seen before. Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there's no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone for ever.
Now, after the fact, I know her hunch turned out to be correct. One hundred and twenty per cent on the money.
Which is why, at that point, it didn't matter to Nadine that the person she would spend the rest of her life with didn't happened to be her husband or the father of her child.
An interpretation, for those who may need some explaining of the events of this story (or for those who are simply curious), will be in the next "chapter".