“Jesus, Lizzie!”
She said nothing; she had shocked herself too. He gaped at her, then touched his fingers tentatively to his leg. They came away dark with blood in the moonlight.
“Jesus, Lizzie,” Mike said again, more softly; and, trying to make a joke out of it, “You’re worse than the NVA.”
“Friendly fire,” Liz said. She stood up and started walking south. Away from the campsite, away from him. Mike was slow to get to his feet, and she got a good head start, and it took him a long time to catch her. By the time he did, he was frankly limping in the loose sand.
He reached for her shoulder to slow her, and she shook his hand off. She was striding hard, almost trotting, and he really couldn’t keep up. She wondered how the hell he had managed it, slogging through all those patrols with a pack and a weapon, leading the company up and down hills, through brush and jungle and rice paddies. But he wasn’t going to talk about that.
Ahead of her there were no lights at all. If you looked north, you could see the lights of several piers, but looking south there was only darkness, the pale beach and the blackness of the grass-covered dunes, the white churn of the surf and the endless night sea beyond.
Mike caught her again, got a step ahead, and faced her, gripping both her shoulders, stopping her.
“Lizzie,” he said. “For God’s sake.”
She tried to get by him, but he held her firm, and after a moment she stopped struggling. Mike let her go and stood facing her, panting but still alert, in case she tried to bolt again.
“We’re not going to make it, are we?” Liz said. “You’re not going to be able to talk about it. I’m not going to be able to talk about it. And it’s going to kill us. It’s going to take us down.”
“I don’t know,” Mike said. “I reckon it’s a little soon to say. We’ve hardly even started trying, the way I see it.”
She shook her head.
“Let’s sit down again,” he said. “Okay? Please? My fucking leg is killing me.”
“Imagine that,” Liz said, but she turned and moved toward the dry sand. Mike paused to rinse the blood from his calf in an incoming wave, then limped after her. They sat down side by side in silence, not touching, and looked out at the ocean. Mike took a handkerchief from his pocket—he’d been carrying handkerchiefs everywhere they went since his return because Liz was crying so much—and pressed it to the wound on his leg. Liz saw the white cotton go dark, instantly. She’d really torn him open.
“Ask me one question,” Mike said.
Liz blinked, caught off guard, then gave him a grudging smile. It had been one of the little rituals of their courtship, their private version of truth or dare. One question each, for all the marbles, no waffling allowed. The last time they had played it had been more than a dozen years ago. She had asked Mike, “Do you love me?” and he had said, simply, yes. And he had asked her if she would marry him.
She thought for a moment now, then said, “How did you feel, when you heard that Khe Sanh had been closed down?”
Mike shrugged. The Khe Sanh combat base had been quietly abandoned in June, the airstrip torn up, the bunkers filled in, the whole thing packed up and hauled away, like a carnival, leaving only the trash and the roiled dirt behind. The government had tried to keep it out of the headlines, but some reporter had gotten wind of the closing, and it had been a pretty big deal for a while, after all that talk about having to hold the damned place.
“One other rule,” Liz said. “You’re not allowed to say the words ‘not that big a deal.’”
“I wasn’t even there by then,” Mike said. “We were somewhere northwest of Hue, by that time.”
“You must have felt something.”
“We’d fought, and bled, and a lot of good, good men had died for the damn place,” Mike said. “We fought and bled and died and won, and while we were doing that, our country decided somehow that we’d lost, and gave it all away. How did I feel? I felt stabbed in the fucking back. Is that what you want to hear?”
“I want to hear the truth,” Liz said. “That’s the point. I just want to hear the truth.” Her husband shook his head, fiercely. She said, feeling relentless, “Did you know that Danny asked me, the other day, how to spell Pyrrhic?”
“Ouch,” Mike said.
“He’s too young, don’t you think, to know what a Pyrrhic victory is?”
“How the fuck old do you have to be?”
Liz conceded the point with a shrug. They sat in silence for another moment, and then Mike said, “My turn?”
Liz considered. It had been a start. That was all she had wanted, a start. She said, “Your turn.”
“What color were her eyes?”
Liz opened her mouth to answer and found that her breath was gone. Like Anna, she thought: that little mouth, gaping, gasping for air with lungs that would never be enough.
“They were brown,” she said. “They looked just like yours.”
Mike nodded and looked at the ocean, and after a moment his shoulders began to shake. She reached for him, laying her hand on his back, wincing at the shuddering. It was like touching a live wire, electric with pain. But he never made a sound. He shook and shook and finally subsided, and she left her hand on his back.
They were silent for a long time. Liz realized that the waves were still rolling in, that the moonlight glittered on the water, that the night was cool and peaceful. It only seemed like everything had been on fire for a while; it only seemed that the world should be charred and ruined.
“I love you,” she said softly. Mike didn’t respond, and Liz thought for a terrifying moment that he was ignoring her. Then she remembered that his right ear was his bad ear, that he probably hadn’t heard anything but the eternal ringing of the mortar round.
“I love you,” she repeated, clear and firm this time, and he reached for her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, leaving his head bowed over it, holding his lips there.
“Do you remember that time on the beach in Maryland?” he asked. “That one bonfire party, the year we got married?”
“The one where Larry had just gotten his bongos?”
“Maria sang ‘Amazing Grace,’ a cappella. And later, you and I—”
“I remember,” Liz said.
“When I got hit—” Mike said, “I was thinking of that night.”
He raised his head at last, his eyes dark in the moonlight. Liz wondered if she would ever be able to meet those eyes again without thinking of Anna. And then she thought, as he kissed her and her own eyes closed over the image, That’s not such a bad thing.
They moved into lovemaking slowly. He eased her T-shirt over her head, eased her back onto the warm sand, and found the cesarean scar in the moonlight. Liz winced as he traced it with his finger, but he persisted, tenderly, and finally she relaxed and he kissed the length of the cut, then raised his eyes to meet hers. She held his look, and he straightened and slipped his own T-shirt off, and she touched the baffling legion of scars, the old ones first, and then the new ones, one by one. Her breathing had slowed and grown peaceful, and she felt Mike’s calm and peace, their edges melting at last, and when he entered her it was almost imperceptible, a deeper caress, merely, a firmer communion.
Afterward, they lay together in each other’s arms, and she felt him smiling.
“What?” Liz asked.
“We have to go in the water now,” Mike said.
“No way.”
“Oh, yes. It’s part of the, uh—”
“Ritual?”
“I was going to say ‘tradition.’”
“It’s part of the tradition to drown?”
“Once you’re past the breakers, it’s like a lake out there.”
“Your leg is probably still bleeding. What about sharks?”
“Sharks are stupid, not foolish,” Mike said. “If any come around, I’ll just establish an atmosphere of mutual respect.”
Liz laughed. That was her man: prepared to reason with sharks
on their own terms. “You’re a madman, Michael Francis O’Reilly.”
“You knew that when you married me,” he smiled. He stood up and held out his hand.
“I didn’t know anything when I married you,” Liz said, but she took his hand.
The late-summer water was cool at first touch and then warm. They waded in hand in hand, and as the first breaker approached and curled over them, they dived through it together, and Liz felt the thrum and churn and surfaced on the other side. A second wave swelled, and then a third, and they dived under both of them, and then they were beyond them, and the avenue of moonlight stretched untroubled to the horizon. Liz felt the sea buoying her and remembered, with a thrill, how much she loved to swim. It was amazing what you forgot.
She reached for Mike’s hand, and he eased her toward him and put his arms around her, holding her up, treading water in that tireless, effortless way of his. She had forgotten that too. They floated together, quietly, as if they could float together forever, and she kissed him, tasting salt, her tears, perhaps, or his, or maybe it was just the sea.
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Lizzie’s War
A Letter from Tim Farrington
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Limping: An Author’s Reflection on the Creative Process
Dear Reader,
When I first learned that the paperback edition of Lizzie’s War would be done as a PLUS edition, with lots of extra material at the back of the book to enhance its appeal—a sort of literary variant on the “director’s cut” version of movies that CDs have made possible and popular—I was as happy as any rational human being interested in his work being made more accessible, and in paying the rent, could be. Part of my own homework for the sake of this edition was to be a personal essay, a few thousand words with an eye toward heightening readers’ interest in the book, and deepening their sense of its processes, its background, and the intricate threads connecting it to my own life. I thought, in the first flush of pleasure, that it would be easy: what could be simpler, after all, than to say a few words about what Lizzie’s War—and the writing process itself—means to me, and why? Of course, I would have to set aside my novel-in-progress for a few days to get the essay written, but what’s a few days in the long course of any novel, or any life? And so I told my editor, a good friend whom I like and respect a lot, no problem. Glad to do it.
But this was my afternoon self speaking. The next morning I woke, as is my practice, around four in the morning, started the coffee, and smoked my first cigarette at the window. I sat for meditation and rummaged through the Psalms for some inspiration for the day, and in the course of this, my usual ritual of digging in to the realest place I know on the planet, I realized that my afternoon self, that cheerful idiot, had once again gotten me in over my head.
I thought, in the first flush of pleasure, that it would be easy: what could be simpler, after all, than to say a few words about what Lizzie’s War—and the writing process itself—means to me, and why?
There is a story about Jacob, in Genesis, that I have long felt speaks to the process of writing a novel as I know it. Jacob, alone on a journey, finds himself wrestling through the night with a stranger. Neither of them can win; the struggle just goes on and on through the wee hours. But as the light starts to come up, the stranger, who has apparently been keeping a trick or two in reserve, dislocates Jacob’s hip, and says (I am partial to the King James Version), “Let me go, for the day breaketh.” And Jacob replies, “I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.”
“And he said unto him, What is thy name? And he said, Jacob.
“And he said, Thy name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men, and hast prevailed.”
Just before the guy goes, Jacob asks him his name:
“And he said, Wherefore is it that thou dost ask after my name? And he blessed him there.”
The traditional interpretation of the story is that the stranger was an angel, and Jacob’s wrestling with the angel is taken now as a matter of course. But it seems to me that angels have names. Jacob was wrestling with the Unnamable. The name “Israel” itself means, in Hebrew, “God fought,” or “God contended,” and so, by implication, Israel means “one who fought with God.” Jacob was wrestling with the One who spoke to Moses many generations later from the burning bush on Horeb; the One who told Moses, who also asked His name, “I AM THAT I AM: say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.”
But it seems to me that angels have names. Jacob was wrestling with the Unnamable.
The One who, when Moses asked to see Him in his complete glory, told him, “No man shall see my face and live,” and hid Moses in a crack among the rocks, and covered him with His hand when He passed by to protect him from the unbearable fullness of that vision.
“And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel: for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.”
“Preserved” really doesn’t convey the terror, awe, and mystified astonishment of Jacob’s exclamation here; much closer, I think, to the original spirit would be, “Holy shit, that was God, and I survived.” And, just in case he might have been inclined to forget that awe and terror and astonishment, to gloss over the humbling unlikelihood of his survival, he hobbled through the rest of his life with a savage limp from that divinely dislocated hip.
There is something incongruous, if not paradoxical, in talking about the vicissitudes of the mortal encounter with the divine, in just about any context. It’s certainly not something I foresaw thirty years ago when I found my way into writing novels through a prolonged crisis of soul, during which the only other real alternative seemed to me to be swimming out to sea. The gift of vocation is quite literally the gift of life for a certain kind of person, but you really start to sound like a babbling idiot if you talk about it much. Like the Blues Brothers, I am on a mission from God. But through all the decades of my complete obscurity, poverty, and consistent failure, the inherent strangeness of talking about that wasn’t particularly a problem. I didn’t have to talk about anything; I just did my work. It’s what I’m suited for. It was only when I began to find myself in situations where it was understood that I would share some of the aspects of my writing process and the deeper background of my novels that it began to dawn on me that talking about the bedrock truth of my personal existence, the fact that what I do “for a living” seems to me like wrestling in the dark on a daily basis with I AM THAT I AM, would become an issue.
Like the Blues Brothers, I am on a mission from God.
My mother, an actress and passionate lover of literature, used to recite poetry and snatches of the great playwrights to us at bedtime, in addition to and often in lieu of Winnie the Pooh and Mother Goose. This is one of those charming little personal tidbits that probably should be the substance of this essay, one of the personal background things that people delight in. But in truth it is a huge part of the problem here. When “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is one of your bedtime stories, it becomes likely that one day you will find yourself sitting at a desk, with your morning self struggling to complete the incongruous task your afternoon self has promised your beloved editor, and all that will come to mind after your discussion of Jacob is,
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
On the first morning after I promised to do my best to produce a charming and genial essay on Lizzie’s War, I set about reconfiguring my writing desk for the task, a ritual process of a degree of delicacy and intricacy somewhere between the retooling of an assembly line for Swiss watches and the reconsecration of an al
tar. I set aside the pile of folders of my work in progress and went in search of the archive box stuffed with all the notes, early drafts, and accumulated papers for Lizzie. I found it beneath a stack of three milk crates that were serving as shelves for all the books I had already run through since finishing the novel. The box was somewhat quixotically labeled Careers of Faith, which had been the novel’s working title through most of its development.
I did all the heavy labor, rummaged through the dizzying chaos of paper that underlies any book’s creation, marveled as usual that anything at all had come of that mess. Eventually I surfaced with the journal I kept during the writing of the book, along with the inch-and-a-half-thick folder crammed with all the notes, quotes, and notions I had accumulated through the nearly twenty years of mulling and composting that preceded the actual writing of the novel, and the three-inch-thick folder full of outtakes, unused scenes, and variants. These I arrayed on my desk in the places vacated by the work in progress. I made myself a fresh cup of coffee and sat down to work.
Not to get overdramatic about it, but for me the working state of inner preoccupation that it takes to write a novel is a little like getting a powerful race car up to speed.
Having spent the previous several months tuning myself into an ever finer obliviousness to the world’s demands in the service of my work-in-progress, I found the abrupt necessity for entry into other considerations…well, disruptive, let’s say. Not to get overdramatic about it, but for me the working state of inner preoccupation that it takes to write a novel is a little like getting a powerful race car up to speed. It takes some time, it takes quite a while, actually, but eventually you are cruising at a steady rate of, say, 180 miles per hour, and if you just keep your focus and stay on your lines through the turns, you really hardly know you’re moving. Until, that is, you get distracted or complacent and yank the wheel a little too hard and the car yaws, fishtails, and flips, and tumbles about forty-three times before coming to a scattered stop in dozens of burning pieces.
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