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 childhood 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.