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 which 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 fa?ade; 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?”
He had never rid himself of an abiding dislike for all Asians.
And women who looked at him with fear.
“Here’s an idea.” Charlie stood up. “Let’s go.”
She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and waited. She did not look at him with fear. She did not look at him at all.
The hangers in the closet twanged against one another as he got his coat, metal hangers whose tops wrapped completely around the pole so they could not be stolen. “All set?” he asked in a cheerful voice, slipping on his coat, and he stood back to let her go through the door before him. There was the same familiar oddness of watching himself. The bewilderment of how much he loved her—yet that was more knowledge now than feeling—when not on any conceivable level did it make sense, except for the only one that mattered: She had saved him, given him the space within which he could breathe. Or he had, through her, given this to himself, because watching her he saw nothing—not one thing—that could have caused him to feel as he did; still desiring her, he found the sight of her puzzling. But it was over, praise God; there was still that open space of relief.