Days Like Today

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by Rachel Ingalls


  He had more lucky charms than a tennis player or a teenage girl. And he took them all with him whenever he set out for danger.

  The collection had started a long time ago. Some had been his as a child, others were small trinkets he’d picked up on his travels, usually one per trip. But the majority had been sent to him by fans. Only three had lasted from the very beginning: a silver teddy bear, a blue enameled St Christopher medal and a gold-colored souvenir keg from the neck of a whiskey bottle. The keg was the largest – about the size of a fingernail – but practically weightless.

  Over the years there had been many additions and subtractions as new items were proved to bring either good or bad luck. There was the safety pin, the dime, the brown bead that looked like a vitamin pill, the flat metal ring that might have been the backing for a button; a theater ticket, now no more than an illegible scrap of cardboard; a red metal paperclip. The paperclip had arrived at Christmas and he’d used it to attach an official letter to his passport. It had been responsible for gaining him entry to forbidden territory. It had brought him a lot of luck, so it had been kept.

  He traveled light. A waterproof shoulder bag held the essentials, including the tape recorder, extra notebook, pencil and pen and the Swiss jackknife with its nail file, corkscrew and fish-scaler. There was room for a shirt, two pairs of underpants and socks, a T-shirt, sweater, a raincoat that folded into a pack hardly bigger than a slice of bread; and a pair of sandals in case he lost his shoes or had them stolen.

  The duffel bag contained more shirts, boots, an old wool shawl that could be used as a blanket, a second suit, a portable phone and a laptop computer, which he’d never used. He hardly ever took anything out of the main bag, other than an extra shirt.

  Gradually he had varied his routine of preparing for the front line. At the time when they first became lovers, he allowed Joan to do most of his packing. But after a few years she was hardly permitted to go near the shoulder bag and certainly not to approach the sacred talismans in the security belt, all of which had to be packed in the right order. He might give her a list of what he wanted, but he always took care of the most important things himself. And if he allowed her to slip something in at the last minute, that was an exception.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked one day, coming into the bedroom while he was packing. ‘Your magic underpants?’ She reached over and held up the garment for inspection. He snatched it from her, saying, ‘That’s exactly what they are.’

  ‘Max, they’re full of holes. How did you get them past me? I haven’t been washing anything like this – I would have noticed.’

  ‘It’s all right. I wash all these myself.’

  ‘At least let me sew up the tears.’

  ‘No sewing, no replacement. They’re fine.’

  ‘We could sell them to a museum and say those were bullet holes.’

  ‘Don’t joke about it.’

  She opened her hand above the array of trinkets, being careful not to touch them, which he wouldn’t have liked. They were laid out over the bedspread in a sequence that – apparently – corresponded to the order of acquisition.

  ‘A man of many charms,’ she said. She put her arms around him. And he didn’t push her away, but his mind was on other things. He continued to pack while she rubbed her face against his shirt.

  She didn’t understand how a man of his intelligence could really believe that primitive rituals could save his life. That was faith as misplaced as the extravagant notions held by high-school girls and boys who were anxious to ward off pregnancy

  ‘If you tell the truth and do what’s right,’ he’d once told her, ‘you automatically fall into harmony with the world: your pace is one step ahead of the bomb and one behind the mine going off.’

  ‘Because you deserve to escape?’ she’d asked. ‘Because your good intentions actually mean something?’

  He’d shrugged, saying that he couldn’t explain it any other way and that if there was a chance in hell of his being right, he certainly wasn’t going to start changing his habits: in fact, it made him slightly uneasy to refer to the matter at all.

  He knew as well as she did: there was no physical armor that could protect you against modern weaponry. And as for psychological defenses, they worked only on and against the mind. They got you out there and they got you through it. They were important. But they couldn’t save you.

  She’d thought up many theories to account for the discrepancies in his behavior. One had something to do with surrogate emotion and the suppression of anger. But none of them lasted; in the end she knew him too well to be able to explain him and she stopped trying to question what he was or how he thought. Often she didn’t understand her own motives, either.

  The only time he made a comment about suffering a possible reaction from his work was once when he said to her, ‘The ones who survive are all crackpots.’ He seemed to think that he was just stating a fact and that there was no sense in trying to change it. Presumably the other war correspondents – who weren’t in some way damaged – didn’t survive. He said nothing about the ones who stayed alive and continued to broadcast despite the fact that they were so stupid, lazy and dishonest that they regularly used large chunks of other people’s material, sometimes simply by asking a girlfriend to translate published or broadcast passages for them. He was too engrossed by the iniquities of politics to become exercised about lesser questions: every discipline had its cheats.

  In his profession the cynical were looking for money and fame; the morally committed took their trips into the death zone because they would have liked to be priests and saviors – to make people better, to force them to look at themselves; and to lead them towards an understanding of the brutality and irrationality of certain actions. Max was one of the moral ones: there was no doubt about that. As Joan began to know him better, she sometimes thought of him as a valiant knight, like a figure from a storybook – a man who was driven into danger by his sense of chivalry: to rescue the truth.

  She loved to listen to him talk about his work. Even when the facts were unpleasant, in the recounting he could transform them into something close to art. He told her stories of poverty, disease, political and military mismanagement, torture and imprisonment. The long stream of reported injustice would have been too much for her to bear if it hadn’t been for the fact that among the victims and dispossessed there turned out to be as many liars, chiselers, frauds and killers as among their oppressors. That added a touch of monstrous comedy to the tales. At times she thought of his job as a combination of police work, priesthood and stage management. And he seemed to know everyone.

  His acquaintance included soldiers of every rank, ambulance drivers, librarians, poets, assassins, Red Cross workers, photographers, health inspectors, forgers, explorers, helicopter pilots: anyone who wanted to talk. And women; women from all over, of differing ages and shapes and various degrees of beauty, suffering, health, deviousness, intelligence and despair.

  What he got up to out there with other women didn’t matter to her. Out there would stay where it was. She was sure that any amorous adventure he might engage in while on an assignment would be a thing he’d consider, from the very outset, temporary. She didn’t really believe that he’d ever be tempted, because he was so fascinated, appalled and excited by his work that nothing could distract him. While his concentration was fixed on it, warfare itself became a substitute for the erotic.

  *

  The first marriage hadn’t been in such bad shape as he’d hinted. Not that his version was dishonest: as anyone sensible or practical would do, he tried out the new relationship before deciding to leave the old one. And Joan, knowing that he was married, had still been eager to hand over her life to him. She’d wanted to throw herself into her fate, making the attachment more intensely romantic by believing that right from the start it was too late to turn back. But as soon as she really fell in love with him, she stopped having fun being the other woman. She wanted to be the main woman –
the real one. She was ready to fight for him.

  Then came the surprise: there wasn’t any fight. The first wife stood back, agreed to a divorce: disappeared.

  Joan grabbed her good fortune and held on. She and Max married. They settled down; they had children. They continued to love and, for a while, to be happy.

  *

  For the first three years of their marriage she was able to concentrate on him to the exclusion of everything else. And after the children were born, she usually managed – in the early days – to get them tucked in for the night so that she and he could be alone. But with time, that changed. When the family was suddenly all together again, the children needed reassurance that she still loved them; they’d call down from their rooms that they couldn’t sleep; they’d ask for glasses of water and – simplest of all – they’d cry. Even the baby would become additionally demanding when Max was at home. And then Joan would worry that because of her need to be with him, she was neglecting her children.

  Sometimes it seemed to her that he’d passed his fears on to her: that she’d been delegated to keep them safe until he got back – that he left all the dangerous emotions with her and took with him only his talismans, his special clothes, his lucky boots – like a child going off to war with a pea-shooter and a rabbit’s foot.

  She worried about his comfort, feared for his safety and his sanity. Within moments of his departure she longed for him to come back. And the more she feared, the more surely she believed that, while he was gone, he was protected by the way she felt about him.

  On the two occasions when he’d been wounded, she’d known about it before being told. The first time, she was in the kitchen and about to reach up for a coffee cup; the second time, she was with a friend at a play. That initial warning instant, at home in the kitchen, hadn’t told her what her alarm might indicate, other than that something was wrong. When the same thing happened again, she knew that it had to do with Max. She was convinced that when he was closest to death, her love was what shielded him.

  She was glad that his first wife hadn’t wanted children. That had been one of his greatest disappointments in the marriage: his wife had refused to have children until he changed to a less dangerous branch of his work.

  Joan had imagined that children would bind her and Max more closely to each other, but soon it began to seem that always – at just those moments when it was important that he and she should be together – the kids did what they could to come between them; they wanted him all to themselves and at the same time they resented him for interrupting their hold on her. Max would load on the entertainment for a solid two hours and then pick up the phone for a baby-sitter.

  They’d go out to restaurants. They’d walk arm in arm. Once they checked into a hotel for a couple of days, leaving the kids with relatives who boasted afterwards about how well-behaved the children were: good as gold – no trouble at all.

  While he was away she read the children bedtime stories. All they ever wanted to hear about was kings and queens, fairy-tale princesses, castles and dragons: the past as it never was, the era of Romance. She loved their insistence on the stereotypes and clichés of good fortune. She saw it as an innocence to be fostered. When they grew up, they’d be bored by the trials of true love and the daring of knights on horseback. They might even want pictures of car crashes and machine-gun massacres, blood and wreckage. They’d be able to appreciate their father’s work and to know why he’d had to be away from them so often. But until they were older, his absences were going to disarrange what should have been the regular pattern of their lives.

  When he came home, he wanted to tell her about what he’d seen and what he thought about it – everything he’d been through. She understood that and it saddened her that the constant interruption of children’s complaints and questions, the ringing of the telephone with urgent messages about mothers’ meetings and car-pool dates and so on, interfered with her desire to know his news, his mood and his heart; with her capacity for listening and his to tell; and eventually, with their ability to keep in step with each other.

  She didn’t mind the professional bond that drew him to seek the company of fellow newsmen and television cronies as soon as he arrived home. What began to make her anxious was the knowledge that two or three of his favorite lunching companions were pretty young women in the business. As soon as she was certain that he’d slept with one – and then another – of them, she felt a spectral presence beside her of the first wife: the one to whom she’d so casually done a greater wrong than at the time she could have imagined being done to her. How could the same thing ever happen to her? She was the one who loved. And if you loved, you were in the right.

  *

  He had a friend named Bruno. Ever since she was introduced to him, Bruno had flirted with her in a way that was more than just single-minded: he was hoping to start something up with her that would be serious enough to threaten her marriage – to get her away from Max and to marry her himself; or not to. Maybe what he had in mind was to seduce her, expose her to Max and drop her without warning while her husband walked out on her with any one of the many women who were in love with him.

  She’d seen from the beginning that what Bruno wanted was to outdo Max and because he didn’t have the drive, the brilliance of expression or the quality of mind to equal Max professionally, he’d always be willing to take a stab at his personal life instead. The flirtation had nothing to do with her, although often – especially when a party ended up with Max being surrounded by good-looking, younger women for whom he was putting on a show – she was glad of the distraction. Her party talks with Bruno could sometimes make her feel desirable and, because she was always saying no in the nicest way, respected. This game of lies had been carried on between them for years. Since both of them were getting something out of it, she’d developed a kind of fondness for Bruno in spite of what she thought of his motives and what she suspected was his real opinion of her.

  At Max’s most recent homecoming party, she and Bruno spent the end of the evening sitting side by side on a staircase and looking down into a room filled with a loudly animated crowd of guests. Bruno said, ‘I can’t stand it any longer, Joan. There’s never been anybody but you. Why do you think it broke up between me and Pam? I keep thinking about you. I dream about you.’

  She turned to him sweetly, as if not wanting to hurt him. Beyond his face puffed with drink, his hangdog eyes beginning to water, his whisper trembling with urgency, she saw a flash of malice that would have made her nervous if she’d been on her own. There was nothing this man wouldn’t do, she thought, to pay Max back for being better. What Bruno needed was victory. All the wars Max had observed were caused by quarrelsome, greedy, envious and petty men like this one: he thought that taking her away could damage Max. And if it destroyed her, he wouldn’t care. He despised her anyway.

  For the first time she understood how intelligent she’d been to remain gentle, to play dumb, to pretend that she felt sympathy and believed him to be an honorable man who was struggling with his passions. She said lightly, ‘You’re supposed to be my husband’s friend.’

  As soon as he realized that she was definitely saying no for the evening, he pulled back, pretending to be drunker than he was. He had the look all of a sudden of a man who was about to say something really wounding because it would give him such pleasure to get it out. She added quickly, ‘It isn’t that I mind being asked, because I’ve always liked you, so I’m flattered. But I don’t want to start doing what everybody else does – and against a husband I love.’

  ‘He does it, too. With Alice. You know – that girl on my team. There she is, over there.’

  She looked. She saw Alice: face to face with Max, a packed mass of noisy people around them. The fact that they were nearly close enough to be dancing could have been excused by the crush of other guests, but not that – as he was about to raise his glass to his lips and the girl began the same gesture with her own glass – Max brushed his ha
nd against hers, the knuckle of his little finger rubbing back and forth against the edge of her hand.

  It happened so quickly that the next moment all anyone could have seen was two people sipping their drinks and talking.

  The speed and minuteness of the movement helped to make it seem the kind of intimate contact two illicit lovers might feel they could get away with: allowing themselves the indulgence of touch while the rest of the world looked on.

  Nothing Bruno had to say could have made her so unhappy as seeing – from all the way across the room – that tiny joining of finger and hand. It was a love gesture. What caused Joan such pain was not that it was something Max had done before, with her – part of their private code: on the contrary, it was new. He’d thought it up for the other woman at that moment, or perhaps he’d invented it at some earlier party and now it was incorporated into their special language. Maybe it had even been started by the hateful Alice. And now the two of them were using it between themselves like a wink.

  She’d have liked to storm down there, push the girl aside and tell her, ‘Get your own husband.’

  ‘See what I mean?’ Bruno asked.

  He couldn’t be referring to what she’d seen. She said, ‘Even if he did, I still don’t see why I should start to act that way too, just to make other people feel better about being unfaithful.’ She smiled, and said, ‘You were only offering to pinch-hit anyway, weren’t you?’

  He started to protest. She stood up. He promised to change the subject. He spent the rest of the evening telling her entertaining anecdotes about his colleagues. She concentrated on remembering what he was saying while her mind was on Alice and Max.

 

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