The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

  “That’s how sweet he was! Invents the end of the world, then sounds the alarm. Isn’t that how relativity works? Szilard was a sweetie, Fermi was a pussycat. Just like you and me, William. We’re all such charmers.”

  “If you’re feeling guilty—”

  “Guilt?” she said. “Forget it, man. Guilt went out with culottes. It’s a new world.”

  Sarah crushed out her cigarette and winced and stroked a thick red blister at her lip. It was a blemish that had been recurring for years now, but here, in the flickering light, it seemed to have its own organic mandate. I wanted to reach out and brush it away.

  “Face it,” she said, “we’re established. Donated our scruples to the highest bidder. Buckled, snapped, sold out. Sweet Bobbi will see the change.”

  “Enough,” I said.

  “Am I a nag?”

  “A little.” I watched her massage the blister. It was the color of her nipples, almost exactly, and it did the same thing for me. I locked the door and took off my clothes and squeezed in beside her.

  “You love her, William? Really?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Maybe we should take separate compartments.”

  “If you say so.”

  “But maybe not,” she said. “In a case like this, proximity’s important.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  We made Bonn late the next morning. Sarah wanted to get right down to business—no last-minute waffling, she said—but I needed a day for reconnaissance and planning. No mistakes. Ten years and more I’d been dreaming about this, how one day I’d pack my bags and take off after her, chase her to the ends of the earth, do it right this time, show her what a brave and sane and exciting man I am, make her beg for me, buy her furs and jewels, the things of the world-as-it-is, real things, show her how life is meant to be lived, show her what she’d missed. I was done with half-assed fantasies. I was a pragmatist. Let the world stew in its own bloody juices, it didn’t mean a damn next to Bobbi.

  “You want it too bad,” Sarah said. “You can’t win.”

  I told her to wait and see.

  We found a room near the government district, unpacked, then went out for lunch and a walk. It was the burning end of August. There were giant shade trees along the Rhine, and bridges and boulevards; there was a sidewalk café where we ate sausages on brown bread and drank beer. We were beginning to feel rich. We rode the riverboats, bought cameras, bought clothes, dined elegantly at a high rooftop restaurant. Sarah looked great. She looked tan and aristocratic, silver earrings and a Cyd Charisse dress that was made to dance in, so we danced slow to jazzy music, then we rented a hansom that took us clomping through the wee-hour streets.

  “A question,” I said. “Put yourself in Bobbi’s shoes. A night like this—will it win her over?”

  Sarah snuggled close. She had a shawl around her shoulders. Her shoes were off.

  “Depends on the vibes,” she said.

  “How are they?”

  “Ho-hum, sort of. This is Europe, man, you have to wear your wealth more freely. Take it more for granted.”

  “What about the basics?”

  “Passion,” she said. She showed me a brown leg. “Otherwise it gets soupy and she starts thinking of you as something sweet. Like Fermi and Einstein. Take some chances. Get violent.”

  “Like so?”

  “Harder. We’re talking violence.”

  The hansom circled through a park. I practiced violence for a time, then got sleepy, and Sarah ended up paying the driver and seeing me to the room.

  In bed, she cried.

  “This lip of mine,” she said. “I’m not hideous, am I? I mean, I’m still kissable?”

  “Absolutely.”

  We kissed cautiously. Afterward, with the lights out, Sarah slipped a pillowcase over her head and came in close for warmth.

  “Idiot,” she said, “I love you.”

  In the morning I began making calls. There wasn’t much to go on—a few vague possibilities. All I remembered, really, was that her husband had taken a position as a visiting lecturer in prosody at Bonn University; Bobbi had planned to teach English to the children of embassy officials.

  But all that was nearly a decade in the past.

  “A cold trail,” Sarah told me.

  She lay in bed as I made the calls; after each strikeout she kissed me and said it wasn’t meant to be. I tried the university, the American Embassy, and the central APO mailroom in Bad Godesberg. No one knew anything. In part, it was a problem in detection, teasing out clues, but there were also the complications of language and uncertainty and Sarah.

  “It’s an omen,” she said. She was at the foot of the bed, legs wrapped around a phone book. “Tell you what. Let’s get married.”

  “Not that simple.”

  “It is simple. Get hitched in Istanbul. Honeymoon in Venice and then settle down in some nifty castle on the river Rhone.”

  “Nice thought,” I said, and frowned at her. “Maybe I should try American Express.”

  Sarah put her head in my lap while I dialed.

  “Man and wife,” she said lightly, not quite teasing. “We’ll do it right. Have portraits done. Those rich, dark oil jobbies that age so nicely. Hang them in your hunting den. You’ll call me Lady, I’ll call you Sir William. Dine each evening at eight sharp. Very proper, you know. I’ll run charity balls and you can chase foxes with your friends. Late at night we’ll talk pornography. We can do it.”

  American Express had never heard of Bobbi Scholheimer.

  “William, for God’s sake, don’t you love me?”

  We had breakfast in bed, then I tried several hotels and pensions, then the German-American Club, then each of the banks. I was getting desperate. Somehow, for all the wasted years, I’d always thought that when the time came it would be easy. Ring her up and plead my case and start making children. I’d run through the image a million times.

  “Hey, look here,” Sarah said. She went up into a handstand at the foot of the bed. “Command performance. How does Bobbi match up?”

  “Stop it.”

  “I’ll bet she can barely stand on her feet.”

  “Sarah—”

  “Balance, man.”

  She curled her toes toward the ceiling, the muscles at her hips correcting for the wobble in the bedsprings.

  “Is she cuter? Perkier? No shit, I can be perky, too.” Sarah came down to the kneeling position. “Coy and shy and mysterious. Demure as all get-out. Sublime. You want sublime?” She crossed her arms on her chest, bowed her head, and smiled. “Gee golly, sir, I don’t commit Congress on the first date. Am I blushing?”

  I looked away.

  “Listen,” I said gently, “we can’t accomplish anything this way.”

  “Accomplish me, William.”

  “Let’s just—”

  “I’m sublime! I am, I’m brilliant. You can wear my Phi Beta Kappa key around your neck, we’ll go steady. My doctor says I’ve got this gorgeous womb—ovaries like hand grenades—I’m built for motherhood—I can cook and rob banks and manage money. I can sew. I know how to make pickles. Just name it.”

  “Get dressed.”

  Sarah sighed. “I hope she’s dead.”

  “Then there’ll be ghosts.”

  “Who cares? Hope she got hit by a tank—nothing left but tread marks and maggots. We’ll build a memorial to her somewhere in southern Illinois.”

  We spent two days making the rounds of every school in the city. Sarah complained that it was too much like FBI work, like tracking down Most Wanteds, but still she insisted on tagging along. It was rough on both of us. We interrogated teachers and headmasters, paged through old yearbooks, wasted hours at the embassy, placed ads in the three daily newspapers. Nothing. At night, while Sarah slept, I’d sit up and study Martian Travel. It was all I really had of her. And a few threadbare images: the way she moved, the blondness and blue eyes, the voice that never seemed to alight on nouns or verbs. I remembered the phon
e call—her light laugh when I declared myself. Flattered, she’d said. She understood. Dreams were wonderful, but we had to be practical, we had to be adults, and then she’d gotten around to the business about being married.

  Well fine, I thought. If it was practicality she wanted, acceptance of the world-as-it-was, I was ready now to take her on a uranium ride to the ends of the earth. I’d be dead-hard practical; I’d toe the line; I’d take her as my wife and build a house and lay in supplies to last a lifetime—whatever she wanted, whatever practicality could buy—and then, when the lights went out, when the established planet went hot like a cinder, then we’d uncork that last bottle of Beaujolais and turn to the civil defense channels and congratulate each other on how splendidly adult we were. It didn’t bother me a bit. All I wanted was to end the world with Bobbi close by.

  And there was Sarah, too.

  As we went into the second week of the search, she began moping. She slept in a closet. She drove the bellhops crazy with elaborate late-night orders and penny-pinching tips. At lunch one day she gave me a memento of our times together, a lavender envelope containing the scented shavings of pubic hair. “It isn’t grass,” she told me, “but it’ll grow on you.”

  She was relieved, then depressed, with each new dead end.

  “A proposition,” she said one evening. “What we’ll do is, we’ll set up a basic-training business for all the up-and-coming provocateurs. Like at Sagua la Grande, only franchise it, spread the risks around, establish branches in all the major capitals. Terror’s the fashionable thing. A wide-open field—Beirut, Jerusalem—the market’s there. Say the word.”

  “I’ll sleep on it,” I told her.

  She smiled. “You do that. Dream the good dreams. The closet’s all yours.”

  Next morning we turned up our first hard lead. The Dean of Faculty at Bonn University remembered Scholheimer and Bobbi. “Lovebirds,” the man said, and shook his head. “They go kaputt.” He was a portly old gentleman with red cheeks and an ivory cane. Leaning forward, wheezing, he pulled out a soiled old photograph and carefully presented it to me. It was Bobbi in pigtails. “Liebchen,” he said. “Make many men cry. Auf Wiedersehen, Scholheimer.”

  “In other words,” said Sarah, “a bad-ass bimbo.”

  The old man nodded.

  “Bobbi, she squeeze the juice out of rock, freilich. Break the husband heart.”

  “Right,” Sarah said. “Yours, too, I’ll bet.”

  “Bitte?”

  “Keep talking.”

  The language barrier was formidable but Sarah managed it. Apparently the marriage had not been a long one—Bobbi had walked out after two months; Scholheimer had returned to the States with a chastened perspective and a pocketful of poems. “Bimbo,” the old man said sadly. He fingered the hem on Sarah’s skirt and went on to explain that Bobbi had taken a job teaching sixth-graders at the American Air Force base in Wiesbaden, 130 kilometers southwest of Bonn.

  The man’s eyes dampened. He patted Sarah’s knee.

  “All many years ago,” he said. “Herzen und Schmerzen. You find my Bobbi, you say I still love. Alles vergessen.”

  Sarah put the snapshot in her purse.

  “Count on it,” she said grimly, “I’ll deliver the message.”

  That afternoon we rented a car and drove for almost an hour along the Rhine, through Königswinter and Remagen, then a straight shot to Wiesbaden.

  An adjutant recognized Bobbi’s photograph.

  “Angel,” he said. “Sweetest thing on earth. She your sister?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Some sister.”

  “I know that. The whole family knows.”

  “An angel,” he said flatly. “Wings. All of it. How’d she hook up with that bastard hubby of hers? Schlum, Schultz?”

  “Scholheimer.”

  The adjutant bit down on a pipe. He was a trim, polite man of forty-five or so, whiskey lines along the nose and cheekbones, but still healthy-looking, the ruddy tightness of a long-distance runner. “Scholheimer,” he muttered. “Shit on a shingle. Bobbi deserved better.”

  “Angels do,” said Sarah. She crossed her legs and looked at him with understanding. “You knew her pretty well?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “I mean, you knew her. That way. I can tell.”

  The man wanted to smile. He filled his pipe from a leather pouch, tamped it down, and struck a match against his desk. There was a hesitation before he shrugged. “Yes, ma’am, I guess you could say that. She was my daughter’s teacher—damn fine teacher, too. Kids loved her. So the marriage goes bad, hubby’s out of the picture. I took up some slack.” He turned toward me. “But, sir, I’ll tell you something, it was real romance. Your sister, she was no troop groupie. I hope that’s understood.”

  I nodded.

  “Romance,” he said, “the genuine article. She used to slip poems under my pillow.”

  “God,” said Sarah, “she must’ve been a darling.”

  “Roger that. Even my daughter said so.”

  The adjutant pulled a piece of ruled paper from his desk drawer. He smoothed the edges and passed it across to me.

  “Martian Travel,” he said. “Go ahead, read it.”

  “I already have.”

  “Your sister’s got talent. One day I woke up, she was gone, and maybe a week later I found that poem in my Class A’s. Made me feel like a million bucks. She had this way with words.”

  “Sure,” Sarah said. “Like a Xerox machine.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “Nothing. She writes like Shakespeare.”

  “Affirmative,” said the adjutant. “Maybe better.”

  It was easy after that. At last report, he said, Bobbi had returned to grad school, this time the University of Minnesota. She was a Golden Gopher. Early the next morning we boarded a Lufthansa flight for New York.

  “The thing that gets me,” Sarah said at forty thousand feet, “is the way you’ve written off our whole relationship. You don’t talk about it, you don’t think about it. All Bobbi. No Sarah. What the hell happened?”

  Her eyes showed fatigue. She was quiet for a moment, then searched for my hand.

  “William, I’m quitting.”

  “No.”

  “I am. I’ve had it. The end. Give it up, otherwise I’m bailing out.”

  “One more week?”

  “Impossible.”

  “Sarah, I need time.”

  Eyes closed, she glided over the clouds. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m done.”

  “All right, then.”

  “Sure. All right.”

  But over New York she said she loved me; at Kennedy International she said she’d give it a while longer.

  We took a nonstop to Minneapolis, spent the night in separate beds, then walked across town to the U of M. It was bright September. Freshman season, kickoff, the rush, and the campus was clean with Swedes and maroon and gold and Big Ten fever. We’d won the peace for them. Hair was out, health food was in. And it was our labor of a decade ago that made all this possible—straight-legged jeans, Jantzen shirts, ears wired for sound, the serenity of higher education. “Memories moribundus,” Sarah murmured. In the administration building, she hummed a tune that had been fashionable during occupations of such places, or in jail, or in torchlit parades for amity on earth. Her voice was husky. Boys in letter jackets stopped to ogle. She wore high heels that went snap-click in the waxed hallways. Her nylons gleamed. She had the posture of a model, a moneyed alumna, classy and chic, stunning; she could still stop traffic. She hummed and ignored the jocks while I bribed the assistant registrar. “Inflation,” the man said crisply, “is the evil of our era,” for his price was high; then he slipped me the records.

  Bobbi had enrolled in 1978—a master’s candidate in fine arts. She’d completed the program in ten months, record time, and the transcript was monotonous with A’s and B’s. A professor named Rudolph was responsible for the A’s. We found him in the faculty loung
e, a tall and very bitter man. “She deserved A’s,” he snapped. “Johnson gave her B’s—Johnson’s the one she ran off with. Should’ve flunked her ass!” Then the anger came. Last he’d heard, she was working as a tour guide at the United Nations. “The princess of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza,” he said. “What a waste. All those goddamn A’s.”

  “This Johnson?” I said.

  “B’s! Claimed she needed incentive.”

  “And now?”

  Rudolph cackled. “The scrap heap. B’s didn’t cut it. Hope he’s peddling candied apples, that’s what I hope. Hope she dumped him hard.”

  In Manhattan, we took two rooms. Sarah insisted. That evening we talked tactics, went out to dinner, then spent the night together. There wasn’t a word spoken. I kissed her on the lips, a healing kiss, tracing that red blister with my tongue, memorizing its shape and texture, knowing it would eventually be all I remembered, or almost all. In the morning she was back in her own room. I spent an hour in a barbershop. At noon, by arrangement, I met Sarah outside the hotel. We went arm in arm toward the East River.

  Twice we circled the UN, then Sarah led me inside.

  She spotted Bobbi outside the Security Council.

  “There’s the jackpot,” Sarah said. “I’ll retire to Rio. Good luck.”

  “You’re a neat lady.”

  “She looks adorable. Really, she does. I’m crazy about her uniform.”

  “Well.”

  “You’re sorry, I know.”

  “More than that. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll—you know—I’ll arrange another search party. You know?”

  “Rio,” Sarah said. She was backing away, still holding my hand. “I’ll leave a trail of bread crumbs. You be Hansel, I’ll be Snow White.”

  “I am sorry.”

  Sarah’s eyes were colorless.

  “I’ll grant you this, she’s one in a million. You’ll get your money’s worth. Everything you deserve.” Sarah walked out the revolving door. Then she came in again and slugged me on the shoulder.

  “Bye,” I said.

  “You’re an asshole.”

  “Rio.”

  We bought a limo and drove to Helena and took over the top floor of my motel.

  I stayed away from nostalgia. Sarah had warned me about that. “You’ve led a nasty life,” I said, and I ticked off the betrayals—me and the navigator and TWA and Scholheimer and NYU and the Air Force and Rudolph and Johnson and the United Nations. It was a hard speech. Here and there I shouted. “You can’t stick. You don’t know what commitment is. You can’t want a thing and get it and still want it. You quit. You’re unfaithful. Iron deficiency. Anemia of the will. No magnetic glue. You drop off men like leaves off trees, by the season. You’re selfish. You’re fickle. You don’t attach to things. You don’t believe in causes or people, and what else is there? Essence, existence—you can’t cope with either. You flit like a fucking fruit fly. You can’t hold on. You can’t endure. You’re shallow and cowardly and vain and disgusting—you’re probably mad—that’s what madness is—can’t stick, always sliding—you’re an ice rider, a melter, gutless and hopeless, and I love you with all my heart, and I swear to God—I swear it—I’ll never let you go. Never. That means never.”