From behind, Rachel felt something jerk her, and suddenly the room was tilting, walls and floor spinning end over end. Then everything went gray and slick. She tried to think what was happening, but it was all somehow out of reach.
“Bitch.” A voice crashed into her skull. “I’ll give you what you’ve been asking for.”
Her head seemed to be clearing now, and she felt a fiery ache in her neck, as if she had been skewered by a hot poker.
And she saw.
David. Kneeling over her. Frantically unbuckling his belt, yanking at the zipper on his pants. Oh God. No. Please ...
She felt as if she’d gone mad. All those years had gotten swallowed up somehow. And she was lying on a table in a deserted doctor’s office, hearing the rain pelting the windows, seeing the grotesque white mask of David’s handsome face framed between her hiked-up knees. ...
David was jerking at her legs now, forcing them apart, forcing her out of that long-ago nightmare into the nightmare of now.
“No! No! Stop it!” She found her voice.
She heard something rip. Her skirt, he was tugging it out of the way. Then his weight against her, crushing, suffocating. She couldn’t breathe. Air, she needed air. Something soft and damp pushed between her legs.
“Bitch. You fucking bitch. I want to hear you scream.”
She felt his whole weight heave against her.
But the thing he was pushing against her remained limp.
In a single, wild instant, Rachel understood. She’d been [355] reprieved. He can’t rape me. He can’t get it up. Hysterical laughter clawed at her gut. She clamped her teeth down hard to keep it in. Maybe he can’t rape me, but he could still hurt me.
But then David was collapsing. Rolling off her, letting the air come back into her lungs in a good clean rush. And she knew that it was over, as if a taut line had just snapped in two.
Rachel, sitting up, experienced a disoriented moment, as if she were looking at a surrealist painting. A Dali portrayal of a disheveled, once-handsome man, lying on his back on an oyster carpet amid the melting ice cubes of an overturned drink.
He was weeping, tears trickling out the corners of his eyes, dribbling down into his fashionably long sideburns. His chest jerking up and down, making an awful, dry hacking sound.
“Can’t,” he sobbed, barely coherent, “can’t do it ... not you ... not anyone ... seven years ... oh Jesus ... what did you do? What in fucking Christ’s name did you do to me that night?” His fiery eyes were fixed on her, wet and glittering with malice. “Should’ve killed you, not the kid ... I should have killed you.”
Rachel staggered to her feet. He was sick ... a sick animal ... she wouldn’t listen.
She made it to the door. This time it opened, easily, swinging out as if guided by an electric eye.
Careful now. The stairs. One step at a time. She pressed her hands against her ears to shut out a voice that was following her; but she couldn’t. It seemed to be inside her head, shrieking, “‘I’ll get you. Somehow. I’ll pay you back for what you did to me.”
Outside, blessedly, she saw a cab with its roof light on.
Once into the back seat, the sobs came, wave after wave.
“Lady, you okay?” the cabbie rasped.
“No,” she moaned.
“Someone hurt you? You want the cops?”
“No, no.”
“Hey, lady, I’m sorry, but I gotta make a living. So where to?”
She gave him her address. Yes, Brian. Just Brian, no one else. I need him. Oh God, how I need him.
Her whole body shook, heaving with sobs, dry hurting ones that seemed hacked from her middle somehow, and then it hit her. I can’t. I can’t ... how can I tell him? If I tell him about tonight, then I [356] have to tell him everything. The abortion, everything, how all these years I’ve been lying to him.
She felt herself grow cold all over.
She thought of poor, beaten-up Lila Rodriguez. So this is why she doesn’t fight back. Not fear. Shame. The way I feel now. Dirty. Guilty. As if I deserved what he did to me.
But then she remembered.
There could be a way out of this. There was a chance. She might be pregnant. And then Brian would be so happy. He wouldn’t care about the past. She shut her eyes, and imagined him in Central Park proudly pushing one of those big, shiny English carriages, and then gently, ever so gently, him nudging aside the soft blankets inside for those who paused to peek.
But as hard as she tried to picture it, Rachel could not summon a picture of that imaginary baby’s face.
Then she sensed a dampness between her legs. A small, insistent cramp in her lower abdomen. She thought, Oh God, no ... please ... no.
But there could be no mistaking it. Her period.
Music from the radio drifted into the back seat. Bobbie Gentry singing in a smoky voice about the night Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchi Bridge.
Staring out at the blur of headlights, flashing traffic signals, the lighted store windows along Madison Avenue with their haughty, stiffly posed mannequins, Rachel wished she, too, could jump off a bridge.
Chapter 23
Brian looked out at his audience. A hundred or so, he judged offhand. Mostly veterans, a few wives, seated in gray metal folding chairs. Hard faces. Frustrated, angry, weary faces. Faces whose stony expressions said: There ain’t nothing bad that I ain’t already seen.
He straightened, shuffled his index cards. What could they expect from him? Hope? Hope that he somehow might have a key, a cure to whatever was messing up their lives?
Brian felt himself sweating under his denim jacket. How can I help them? he asked himself. I don’t even know what’s messing up my own life, Rachel and me.
So many people wanted to hear what he had to say. Nam vets mostly. Men who couldn’t find the right words, who needed a voice. A grunt like them who would speak out, tell it like it was. Someone to remind them that what they’d gone through wasn’t the end of everything, that there was still good to be had in this world.
All this flap about Watergate now, he thought, the hearings, everyone speculating. Will Nixon confess? It’s like the whole country has amnesia. They’ve forgotten Vietnam ever happened. Dirt swept under the rug. And these men who’d served in combat, just a bunch of unwelcome reminders.
“When I was growing up,” he began, stepping out from behind the podium, leaning up against it on one elbow, “the kids in my neighborhood knew every four-letter word in the English language. Spanish, Italian, and Yiddish ones, too. And when we weren’t shouting them at each other, we were marking them on the sides of buildings. But there was one dirty word we didn’t know. It hadn’t been invented back then.” He paused, waiting for the last rustle to die down. Then into the stillness he said: “Vietnam.”
“Damn straight!” someone yelled from the audience.
Brian smiled. “You guys know what I’m talking about,” he went on. “It’s a word no one wants to hear, right? You mention [358] Nam, and they look away. Or they get mad, accuse you of murdering women and babies over there. They say we had no business being there in the first place.” He paused, saw several men nodding. “So you learn to keep your mouth shut, bottle it up. Maybe they even got you feeling like you’re a bad guy. And then you say to yourselves, ‘Hey, man, that ain’t fair. I fought for my country. I’m supposed to be a hero!’ He waited a beat, then brought his fist down with a hollow thud on the podium. “Well, forget about being a hero. I’m here to tell you we aren’t heroes. We aren’t bad guys either. Just men. Men who did what they thought they were supposed to do, and got kicked in the ass for it. ...”
Half an hour later, Brian could see that those hard faces in the audience had cracked. Here and there men were weeping silently, tears running down their scarred faces. The applause gathered slowly, breaking in an angry, almost violent wave of acknowledgment.
I’m lucky. I wrote about it, got it out of my system. Didn’t even care at the time if anyone would
ever read it.
If he could compare the writing of Double Eagle to any other experience, Brian thought, it would be like having malaria. The words burning in him like a fever, leaving him at the end of the day exhausted, limp, drenched with sweat. That it had a proper ending, emerged in a form resembling a novel, was thanks to Rachel. She’d read each page as it rolled off the typewriter, offered suggestions, solace, helped shape the hot, angry explosion of words into a real story.
He remembered those days and nights of her residency, when she would arrive home, exhausted, yet somehow still have the energy to go over the pages he’d written that day. He could see her in his mind, a picture precise as a snapshot, Rachel in the plaid seat-sprung sofa in his den, typewritten pages spread over her lap, a pencil clenched in her teeth. Like a kid in school, she absently chewed her pencils, wearing them down to the lead. Yeah, and she didn’t look much older than that, with her hair braided, in the big old shirts—his castoffs—she wore over jeans. Seeing her like that, his heart would catch suddenly, squeezing the breath out of him.
Brian remembered other times, too—the three weeks on Fire Island every August, before she became too busy with the clinic. The two of them, racing along the tide line until they tumbled, [359] breathless, onto the warm sand. Sweet slow kisses late at night by a driftwood fire. Making love on sandy sheets, their bodies stinging from too much sun.
Rachel. God, we were good for each other, weren’t we?
Brian felt a pang. He’d been thinking of their happiness in the past tense.
No, that wasn’t true. He loved her now as much as ever. It just wasn’t the same. Back then, it was as if they had both inhabited one space, breathed in the same air ... and now they were living in two separate spheres. He thought of the His and Hers towel set one of his cousins had sent as a wedding present. How they’d laughed at the time. Now it didn’t seem so funny. His and Hers. Yeah, that just about said it all, didn’t it?
Now the auditorium was emptying out, a handful lingering, reluctant to let go, men wanting to be freed of Vietnam, and at the same time wanting to recapture the kick-ass camaraderie they’d had over there, the kind of closeness they didn’t get from their wives or with the guys down at the plant.
Snatches of conversation floated toward him as he descended from the speaker’s platform.
“One hundred first? No kidding? Me too. Delta Company. You guys fragged our asses at Phu Bai, after Tet. ...”
“... dicking around on the ground. Shit, man, we were up in the air taking all the flak. Ever been up in a Slick and had your fucking tail shot out from under you? ...”
Brian suddenly wished they would all leave. He could feel a headache beginning to bore in at his temples. A dull throbbing in his sinuses. What he wanted most right now was to go home ... and find Rachel waiting for him there. Fixing supper. Or just hanging out. Waiting for him to walk through the door and take her in his arms ...
Get off it, man. She won’t be there. She’s at the clinic or the hospital. Saving a life probably. And one thing you can be sure of, it ain’t yours. You had your turn.
Brian looked up, and saw a woman moving out from the shadow of the far right aisle. For a crazy split second, he thought it was Rachel. He felt a surge of happiness. She had gone out of her way to meet him. Wonderful. Fantastic.
Then he saw with a stab of disappointment it wasn’t Rachel. [360] Too tall. Too dark. And she was wearing a hat that partially shaded her face. Rachel never wore hats. She always said that hats were for tall women; short women looked like mushrooms in them.
This one was no mushroom. A willow, tall, graceful. He watched her as she wound her way around the knots of men, her white cotton skirt fluttering at her golden-skinned calves. Something familiar tugged at him. ...
The woman lifted her chin, and the brim of the hat tilted up. Brian caught sight of her face, and felt his breath suddenly leave him, as if he’d been given a hard whack across the chest with a baseball bat.
Rose. Good Lord. What’s she doing here?
He watched her purposefully cut ahead of three men headed toward him, then she was stretching her hand out, long slim fingers wrapping about his, warm and surprisingly soft. She tipped her head back slightly, a shy smile peeking out from under the brim of her hat. Brian’s discomfort was immediately lost in a rush of tenderness.
In his mind he saw a little girl standing alone in a schoolyard, scabby knees sticking out from under a dress that was too small, her face pinched with misery. He remembered taking her by the hand, and the smile she had given him then, a look of such radiance it had somehow turned that shy, ugly duckling of a kid into someone so beautiful his breath had gotten all choked up in his throat.
Brian felt that way now, as if he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs. “Rose. What on earth are you doing here?”
“That’s a fine way to greet an old friend.” She laughed, and he was relieved to hear the easy ring to it. No, this was not going to be a replay of London. “I came to see you, of course. Well, to hear you, anyway. I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the front with all these people. But I’m glad I did. I want to tell you, you were wonderful up there. I always knew you could write, but that ... well, you really knocked me out.” She sounded sincere.
Suddenly he was very glad she was here. “Listen, can you wait a few minutes? There are some guys here I still have to talk to. Then what do you say we grab a cup of coffee somewhere? There’s a diner up at the corner.”
She hesitated, and for an instant her smile wavered and the light flickered out in her eyes. Then she answered, “I could use some [361] coffee, actually. I’m working on a brief. I’ll probably be at it all night. In fact, I shouldn’t even be here. I just couldn’t resist when I read the notice in the paper. My place is only a few blocks from here.”
“Great. Give me five minutes.”
Brian turned back toward the group waiting for him by the podium, but a commotion at the far end of the auditorium, near the exit, caught his attention. Two men fighting. He caught the flash of a knife. Holy shit.
Brian felt his own anger rise. Damn. Didn’t they get it? The war was over.
He lunged down the center aisle, half-aware of the milling crowd falling back, metal chairs skittering and clanging into one another. A knot of onlookers had formed around the scufflers, and he plowed into their midst, elbowing them aside. Inside the circle, Brian caught the blur of fists, contorted faces, a checked cowboy shirt torn at the sleeve. A skinny white man, he saw, was pummeling the shit out of a heavyset black.
“Fuck you, man!” cowboy shirt spat. “I was there in sixty-eight, I saw action in Hue. I ain’t no rear echelon motherfucker!”
“Hey, REMF,” the black man snarled, “I lost a leg in the Tet offensive, so don’t you be talkin’ to me ’bout action.”
Brian noticed he was standing at an odd angle, one hip hitched higher than the other—a prosthesis. But, hell, he was game, no, spoiling for this.
Cowboy lunged forward, knife in hand, and Brian felt something in his brain click, his combat instincts snapping home like a chambered round. It was all there, just like Nam, the hot surge of adrenaline, the humming in his ears, the sudden loss of gravity.
Brian sprang at Cowboy, catching him by the wrist, locking his other arm behind his back. He heard a grunt of rage, and felt muscles and tendons strain and buck in his grasp ... then abruptly go slack. The knife clattered to the floor.
Cowboy sagged, then crumpled. Brian caught him in a hard embrace, and felt his chest heave in a wrenched sob.
“It’s okay, man,” Brian murmured. “You don’t have to prove anything. It’s over. The war’s over.”
Brian held him while he sobbed, and saw the others looking on, some with disdain, some in pity, most faces a mixture of both. [362] We aren’t supposed to cry, Brian thought, but that’s the trouble, isn’t it? That’s why we fight.
But, damn it, what do you do when you don’t know who or what your enemy is? he wondered, think
ing of his marriage, wishing he could deflect whatever was wrong there as simply as he had this guy’s knife.
Now Cowboy was drawing away with an embarrassed grunt, and shuffling off toward the exit with a couple of his buddies. The one-legged black man had disappeared.
“Take it easy!” Brian called after him. But Cowboy didn’t look up.
Then Brian felt a gentle touch against his shoulder. He turned, and there was Rose, her black eyes huge and luminous, her expression soft.
“I’d forgotten, how you used to break up all those fights out in the schoolyard,” she said. “You haven’t changed, Brian. One of these days, you’re going to hurt yourself trying to keep somebody out of trouble.”
He shrugged. “These guys ... it’s like they’re walking hand grenades. It doesn’t take much to pull their pins. They’re not really out to hurt anyone.”
“But people get hurt ... even when you don’t mean for them to.” He thought he saw a shadow flit across her handsome face, then she ducked her head quickly, slipping her arm into his. “Shall we get that coffee now? I think we could both use it.”
A short while later, sitting across from each another in a red vinyl booth at the City Diner on Twenty-third, Rose sipped her coffee, and said, “I think I understand now ... what you were talking about tonight ... about how it is with a lot of these guys. A few months ago, I had a client. He’d killed a man for cutting him off on the Jersey Turnpike. All that rage over such a little thing. It didn’t make sense to me then. Now it does.”
Brian had an urge to reach across the table and touch her hand, but he fought it. Steam rose from the white mug in front of her, making her face shimmer like a mirage.
“The anger is only part of it,” he said. “There’s also the guilt. You saw so many of your buddies die over there, and you wonder why you got the brass ring. What makes you so special. And when [363] you keep coming up blank on that one, you begin to think maybe you aren’t special at all, that maybe you did deserve to die.”
Garden of Lies Page 41