“Just tell me,” he said.
“Ten.”
He stayed exactly where he was. On the small table next to the bed his cellphone suddenly vibrated. Tracy leaned to look. “Your wife,” she said, just reporting. Indifferent.
Charlie walked to the phone and slipped it into his pocket, where it shuddered in his palm a few moments before stopping. He said to Tracy, who remained sitting on the bed, “I can’t, sweetheart.”
“But you can.” Clearly she had not expected this, and that was a surprise to him.
“No. I can’t.”
“You have plenty of money, Charlie.”
“I have a wife and children and grandchildren, is what I have.”
He had bought champagne because she liked it, and he watched as she noticed it now on the bureau top in the plastic motel bucket he’d filled with ice. She looked back at him ruefully. “You break my heart,” she said. “Of all—”
He laughed, a bark of a sound. “Of all your johns I break your heart the most.”
“But it’s true.” She stood and walked to the champagne. “And don’t be crass, Charlie. I have clients, and you’re not one of them.”
“I know you have clients,” he said.
“ ‘Johns’ is so…yesterday, for Christ’s sake, Charlie.”
“Forget it.”
“No, I’m not forgetting it.”
“Tracy, stop. You and I—right now—are about to act out one of the oldest stories in the book. And I don’t care to. I know all the lines, I know all the background music. I don’t want”—he opened his palm—“to do it, that’s all. And I won’t.”
The pain that moved briefly across her face gratified him; he had always felt she loved him, as he did her. But there was suddenly a refreshing simplicity that seemed to move into the room, an unexpected and huge relief, a straightening out of—things. Go home and get your things in order, a doctor would say. No. Affairs. Go home and get your affairs in order. That clarification—he couldn’t help it—struck Charlie as funny. He was, in the tiniest way, delighted, as though all those people whose lives had occurred long before he’d been born had known these things, phrases used for years: Go home and get your affairs in order.
Inside his pocket his phone vibrated again, and he brought it out to see. Marilyn was printed in blue across the screen.
“Want me to step out?” The question was intimate because it had been asked so many times in the past. The tone was conversational, familiar.
He nodded.
She slipped her coat back on, and he gave her a room key.
He said, “They have that tiny lobby—” But she said her car was fine, she’d listen to the radio, really, it was no problem. She had always been pretty wonderful that way. It was her job to be wonderful that way. But even after the day she’d told him her real name—sitting fully dressed in the chair by the desk, “I want to tell you my real name”—and brought out her driver’s license to prove it, she was still wonderful that way. After the day she showed him her license, she’d insisted that he not offer her money again. Perhaps she’d been mulling this over, and now figured she was owed. Perhaps she was. The door closed quietly behind her. He resisted the urge to look through the blind slats and watch her get into her car.
The peculiar hopefulness had not left him, the pleasing understanding that the situation would be over soon, was—essentially—over already. And it felt quite survivable, which he had somehow not known.
His wife was crying on the phone. “Charlie? Oh, I’m sorry to bother you, really I am. You’re supposed to be having fun—well, I know it’s not fun, but I mean I know it’s your time, and—”
“What’s happened?” He felt no alarm.
“Oh, Charlie, she was mean to me again. I called, you know, to see if the girls were all set with their Thanksgiving dresses, and Janet said to me, she said, ‘Marilyn, I’m asking you, no, I’m telling you, I’m just going to come right out and tell you, Marilyn, that you call here too much. This is my house and Stevie is my husband, and we need some space.’ That’s what she said, Charlie. And Stevie, who even knows if he was home, does he have any spine, our son—”
Charlie stopped listening. He was absolutely and silently on the side of his children, and on the side of his son’s wife. He sat down on the bed.
“Charlie?” she said.
“I’m here.” Inadvertently he glanced at himself in the mirror. He had long ago stopped looking like anyone familiar.
In a few minutes he had calmed his wife enough to hang up. She’d apologized once more for disturbing him, and said he had made her feel better. He’d answered, “Okay then, Marilyn.”
Alone in the room with silence he understood the previous hiatus, which had now returned to him, that spaciousness of calm: Long ago he’d assigned a private name to it. The hit-thumb theory. On his grandfather’s roof as a child one summer, hammering tiles down hard, he’d discovered that if you hammered your thumb by mistake, there was a split second when you thought: Hey, this isn’t so bad, considering how hard I was hit….And then—after that moment of false, bewildered, and grateful relief—came the crash and crush of real pain. In the war this had happened so often, in so many forms, he’d sometimes thought he was brilliant—the analogy was that apt. In the war he had learned many things, and not one of them had he heard any psychologist mention during any of the meetings that Marilyn now thought he was attending.
Charlie stood up. He felt the itch of desire that was carnal, corporeal; it included much and was not a stranger to him. Arms crossed, he walked back and forth in front of the queen-size bed with its spread that was made of fibers—he knew from having felt it many times—meant to endure all things. Back and forth he walked, back and forth. He had sometimes walked back and forth for hours. A warmth of emotion came to him.
He had not, at the time of its construction, been interested in the Memorial. No, Charlie Macauley had not been interested a bit. And yet one day—after many nights of being bombarded repeatedly with the memories of Khe Sanh—he took a bus by himself all the way to Washington, and what a thing he found there. He had wept without sound or self-consciousness, walking along the dark granite wall, seeing names he recalled, touching them with his coarsened fingertips. And people nearby—he could sense them, tourists most likely—left him alone with respect; this he could feel, that they were respecting him as he wept! He had never thought such a thing possible.
Back in Carlisle he told Marilyn, “It was good I went.” She surprised him by saying only “I’m glad, Charlie.” And then later that night she said, “Listen. You go back whenever you need to, I mean it. We have enough money for you to make that trip any time you need it.” People could surprise you. Not just their kindness, but also their sudden ability to express things the right way.
He felt he never expressed anything the right way.
Once he had been in a department store with his son and daughter-in-law; Janet had needed a sweatshirt. Charlie had just been following along, not interested one way or another. But his son was interested, and when Charlie glanced over, suddenly paying attention, he saw his son talking thoughtfully and earnestly to his wife—Janet was a plain and pleasant woman—and it was the glimpse of this, the engagement of his son in this small domestic exchange, that almost brought Charlie to his knees. What a son! What a man he was, this grown boy, who would stand so decently and discuss with his wife exactly what sweatshirt she desired in a store that smelled like a circus tent of cheap candy and peanuts and who knows what. His son caught his eye, his face opened. “Hey, Dad, how you doing there? Ready to go?”
The word arrived: Clean. His son was clean.
“I’m good,” Charlie said, raising a hand slightly. “Take your time.”
And because he was Charlie, who years ago had fouled himself profoundly, because he was Charlie and not someone else, he could not say to his son: You are decent and strong, and none of this has anything to do with me; but you came through it, that child
hood that wasn’t all roses, and I’m proud of you, I’m amazed by you. Charlie could not even say a watered-down version of whatever that feeling would be. He could not even clap his son on the shoulder in greeting, or when saying goodbye.
At the open door of the motel room, he stood gazing at the parking lot so she would know to return, and as she walked from the car toward him he was aware that she was aware of being watched—except he wasn’t really watching her, because the smell of autumn had accosted him, the sudden chill, and that earthy, loamy fragrance came over him with something akin to excitement. Careful, he thought. Careful. He stepped back to let her enter.
Tracy did not remove her coat this time, and she sat in the chair by the desk instead of on the bed. He saw in her face that she had been preparing. “Please, Charlie. Now please just trust me. I need the money.”
“I know you need it.”
“Then please.”
Perhaps perversely he was waiting to see if she would say he owed it to her, and then for the first time since he’d known her he saw her eyes fill with water. “Ah, Tracy. Tell me. Come on, babe, what is it?”
“My son.”
Both very slowly, and immediately—this is how Charlie experienced it—he understood. Her son was in trouble with drugs. Owed a man ten thousand dollars. This knowledge entered the room like a large dark bird, its wingspan wide and frightening. He asked her directly.
She nodded, the tears coming down her cheeks then, coming, coming. He was oddly fascinated, having never seen her weep before, by the large tracks of mascara dripping onto her clothes, onto the turquoise-colored nylon blouse, the skirt of black, even her boots. His wife had never worn any makeup at all.
“Ah, Tracy. Kid, hey, sweetheart.” He opened one arm to her, and believed he saw her desire to move to him, and maybe she would have, but he said, “Tracy, you’re in danger yourself if you do this.”
Something about that seemed to offend her deeply, and she shook her head and made fists with her many-ringed hands. “What the fuck do you know? You think you know shit—well, excuse-fucking-me, you don’t know shit.”
In this way she helped him. “I can’t do it,” he said, easily. “I can’t withdraw ten thousand dollars from a bank account just like that—and not have Marilyn know. And I’m not going to, anyway.”
Then her green eyes became like dark nostrils that flared, that is the image that came to him as he watched her: her eyes moving like the nostrils of a horse, pulled up, pulled back. “My son’s going to be dead if I can’t come up with this money.” No tears now. Her breath came in little bursts.
Very slowly Charlie seated himself on the edge of the bed, facing her. Finally, quietly, he said, “You understand I had no idea you had a son.”
“Well, of course I didn’t tell you.”
“But why not?” His question was genuine, puzzled.
“Let’s see.” She put a ringed finger to her chin in an exaggerated form of contemplation. “Because maybe if I explained the situation you’d think less of me?”
“Tracy, lots of people have kids in trouble.” Her sarcasm bothered him. It seemed a knife abrading his arm. “I’d think less of you?” he echoed.
“Hah! That’s right, how could you possibly think less of—”
“Stop it. Goddamn it. Stop it now. Stop it.” He stood up.
She said quietly, “And you stop with the liberal white pity.”
Just in time—but in time, always Charlie was just in time—he prevented himself from the slap across her face he could practically feel tingling throughout his hand. She turned from him with disdain, and so he did not apologize. Disdain did not become her; there was an element of theatricality to it, he felt.
There had been a chaplain. God, what a nice guy he was, simple. “God weeps with us,” he had said, and you couldn’t get mad at him for that. After the night at Khe Sanh they’d brought in another chaplain, a phony. Theatrical. “Jesus is your friend,” the new chaplain would say, with silly pontification, as though he were dispensing Jesus Pills that only he was in charge of.
Once he had gone to the hospital, and they had asked him to come back to attend a group. It was helpful, they suggested, to hear what others had to say. But it had included—oh, it made Charlie’s head heavy to picture it—the circle of folding chairs, the younger ones in their fatigues, and it was mostly the younger ones who were there; they told of going into Iraqi towns, they told of not sleeping, they told of drinking too much, and Charlie could not stand them. Some were still young enough to have pimples. He had given orders to kids this young, and they made him sick to see. That horrified him: that he loathed these people. Being there with them exacerbated the very thing he thought he might die from, because he could tell—and he had feared this—that the fellow running the group did not really know what to do. Because there was nothing to do. Talk about it. Sure thing. Take a cigarette break, talk about it more. At the third meeting he left when they broke for cigarettes, and then he was truly frightened.
Robin he met through her ad on the Internet. He drove the two hours from Carlisle to Peoria, and first greeted her in the lobby of the town’s oldest hotel. The hotel had recently been refurbished, and the lobby sparkled with glass and waterfalls, the elevators pinged politely off to the right as he and Robin sat in the downstairs bar. They talked quietly, and he was, oh God almighty, he was the closest thing to happy he had been for years. A light-skinned black woman with green eyes, she gave off a sense of quiet self-assuredness; the lambency of this lightly worn authority made him right away love the space between her two front teeth, the kohl pencil line above her eyelashes, how she’d listen and nod and say, “That’s right.” She was forty years old, and she had two daughters who stayed with their grandmother when Robin could not be with them. He had taken a room on the top floor with a view of the river, and he noticed she discreetly kept an eye on her time, told him when he had gone over, added an hour, but she was smooth and calm and polite, and this quality remained even beneath the sweet outbursts of her sexuality, which, from the start, he had never felt to be faked, and so he was always able to feel okay. It was something.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “They must all wonder,” he added.
“Some do, most don’t. For money,” she said, sitting up, shrugging slightly. “That simple.” The bumps of her spine lined up perfectly beneath her skin, and took his breath away.
It was her suggestion a few months later that they meet at the motel, a half hour from Peoria, that the money saved from not being in the fancy hotel could be used for them to see each other more. Only he couldn’t see her more than he already was, he couldn’t get away, so they had continued at the motel and he gave her the extra money, and then they fell in love—he had loved her, really, from the start, and she said she had fallen in love with him too, and told him her name was Tracy, while she sat fully clothed, right in that chair. And that was how it had been for seven months now: desperately in love. Charlie did not like desperate.
Tracy was standing in the bathroom snapping tissues from the slit in the wall; from where Charlie sat on the bed he could see her yanking the stiff little skirts of white; the motel made sure you could not steal a box of them. She wiped her face, then washed it with a facecloth, reapplied lipstick, and returned to the room. His relief returned as well; it had never gone far. This was going to be over and that was all that mattered. And then Tracy—boy, how people could surprise you—said something insanely funny. She said, “I thought you had the character to help me out.”
He asked her to repeat it, and she did, looking slightly wary. He sat down on the bed and laughed and laughed. It was not a pleasant sound, and soon he was able to stop. “I miss it,” he said, finally, wiping his sleeve across his face. She looked at him now with a faint sense of irritation. “Character,” he added. “I miss it.”
Those days seemed like ancient times, back when character was thought to mean everything, as though character were the altar before whi
ch all decency bowed. That science now showed genetics to be determinative just threw all that character stuff right over the waterfall. That anxiety was wired, or became wired after events of trauma, that one was not strong or weak, only made a certain way— Yes, he missed character! The nobility of it. Why, it was like being forced to give up religion once you’d been confronted with its base and primitive aspects, like having to view the Catholic Church with its nest of pedophilia and endless cover-ups and popes that worked with Hitler or Mussolini—Charlie was not Catholic, and the few Catholics he knew did continue to go to mass, but he could not see how, faced as they were with the chipping away of the brilliant façade; of course the Church was failing. But so was the Protestant concept of hard work and decency and character. Character! Who ever used that word anymore?
Tracy did. Tracy used that word. He looked over at her, the eyes still smudged black with that mascara. “Hey, kid,” he said. “Hey, Tracy,” and opened his arms to her.
Quietly she said, “My name isn’t Tracy.” After a moment she added, “And that license is fake. Just so you know. The whole thing is fake.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Fake.”
A sound came from him. It was not unusual; he often made sounds without planning to. It happened sometimes in public, and it scared people. In a library once, a young person had looked at him, and Charlie understood that he had made a noise, a growl. Marilyn, idiot woman, whispered to the boy, “He was in the war.”
And the kid didn’t know what Marilyn meant.
Many young people did not know the name of the war he had served in. Was it because it was a conflict instead of a war? Was it because the country in its shame had pushed this war behind it like a child who in public was still being obstreperous, embarrassing? Or was it just the way that history went? He did not know. But when he heard a young person with those perfect teeth they all had now say, “Wait, what was that? I’m sorry—,” followed by the self-deprecating grimace that was utterly false in its apology, trying to gauge how old Charlie was: “Sorry, uhm, was that in the first Iraq?” Then Charlie wanted to cry, he wanted to bawl, he wanted to bellow: “We did that and for what, for what, for what?”