by John Welter
“Don’t worry. I’m not having an affair. I’m not having anything.”
“Well, it’s none of my business anyway,” Melinda said sympathetically.
“It’s none of my business, either.”
“You look depressed.”
“It’s just my emotions. They’ll go away.”
“Well, you shouldn’t sit here and just drink.”
“At a bar? Who would think of that?”
“Let me get you something from the kitchen. On the house. What would you like?”
“Bread.”
“Is that all?”
“I like bread. It reminds me of something.”
What worried me now that I was eating French bread was that every time I ate French bread I’d get an erection. And what for? It wasn’t anything I could use.
Yamato showed up with his smiling face and further depressed me. Yamato was good-natured and even-tempered and almost chronically cheerful. When he sat next to me I looked at him and said, “What’re you smiling about? You depress me.”
“I’m just in a good mood,” he said, still smiling at me, and he ordered a rotch on the skocks, which was what he said one night when he was drunk and trying to say scotch on the rocks, and everyone else started ordering blasses of geer and tin and gonic. Someone was going to order cum and roke, but it sounded too vile.
Yamato sipped his drink and said, “This really spits the hot.”
He was too amusing for me to remain fully depressed, so I looked at him and said, “Shut up.”
“And I’m so happy to see you, too,” he said. “What are you depressed about?”
I couldn’t show him my napkin that said “Ecstasy doesn’t last very long,” because I didn’t want him to think Natelle and I were having an affair. And I sure as hell wasn’t going to tell him about my fantasy that I kissed Natelle’s vagina as she sang “The Farmer in the Dell.” Maybe I should have picked a different song. I couldn’t even tell Natelle about that. At least not soon. Possibly the only person I could tell it to was Dr. Boulan. Was my life so secret I could only share it with strangers?
“Well anyway,” Yamato said, “it’s good to talk with you, even though you’re not saying anything.”
“I’ll say something in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
“Are you depressed about your job?”
“I love my job. It’s an honor to protect drunken diplomats who play Cole Porter songs all day.”
“Cole Porter?”
“He wrote ‘Begin the Beguine.’”
“Begin the what?”
“No one knows what a beguine is. That’s why you can’t begin it.”
“What’re you talking about? Have you lost your mind?” Yamato asked indifferently.
“No. I remember where it is.”
“Which doesn’t necessarily help.”
“Not often.”
That was how we talked. We strayed from everything that mattered and kept it in that region. I think this was because we both wanted to be with women and we both weren’t. So I drank my beer, and Yamato drank his rotch on the skocks, so that at least we could numb our brains so severely we’d have no idea what was missing.
Sometimes I wondered if I was an alcoholic. To me, this was the same as wondering if I was part Norwegian. Did it really matter? Maybe I was only part alcoholic. So I could say I had some Norwegian in my blood, and alcohol, too. I looked at Yamato and said, “How do you become an alcoholic?”
Yamato frowned, as if thinking, and said, “I don’t know. I think you have to fill out an application.”
“Do you ever worry about becoming an alcoholic?” I said, and took a big drink of beer.
“I haven’t even applied,” Yamato said serenely.
That was the thing about alcohol—it was like liquid emotion. You drank it, and soon you had different emotions. Glee. Serenity. Euphoria. Those sounded like women’s names.
“If I ever have a daughter, I’m going to name her ‘Glee,’” I said.
“Really? What made you think of that?” Yamato said.
I looked at my beer bottle and said, “Or maybe I’ll name her ‘Moosehead.’”
“That’s a good name for an infant,” Yamato said. “I think I’ll name my daughter ‘Glenlivet.’”
I remembered thinking, before, that alcohol was a substitute for love. That was probably why I drank. I never had the euphoria of being touched by someone who loved me. And so alcohol was my lover, and I swallowed her, and went home to fall into my liquid, dreamless sleep. And in the mornings, my lover tried to bite through my head to get out of me.
Whether or not I was part alcoholic or part Norwegian, I had one more beer to sustain the ones I’d already had.
At ten o’clock I went home and was a little bit drunk, pleasantly and not badly, and I knew what was missing and I looked out the window toward Natelle’s apartment across town. There were buildings in the way. I was going to call her, but I was afraid she didn’t need me, that because she’d already seen me a few hours earlier it would be annoying to her that I needed her again already. If she was in love with me, she wouldn’t be annoyed. I picked up the phone and listened to the dial tone, then quickly hung up, in case she was trying to call me at that very instant and she’d get a busy signal. The phone didn’t ring. She might not even be home. Possibly she was home listening to the dial tone and hanging up. She could be watching TV. Maybe she met a man, someone I didn’t know. I wasn’t especially needed. If anyone in the world needed me, they hadn’t said so. They. They was Natelle. She might be asleep, sadly asleep after she called me and I wasn’t home and she was afraid to call back because it might annoy me. But if she was asleep, what if she got mad because I woke her up and I wasn’t her lover and why was I acting like I was?
I didn’t know. There was something wrong with me. I missed her. I was anxious. I wanted to see her face, to touch her fingers, to have her breathe on me. I wasn’t going to cry. Yes I was. No, I wasn’t. It seemed like I was. I called her.
The phone rang. Rang again. Rang three times. What if she was mad? She might not be home. Rang again.
“Hello?” she said.
“It’s me.” I didn’t know what to tell her. There’s something wrong with me. I love you.
“Doyle. How are you?” She sounded tired.
“I’m fine. I just wanted to call and see how you are. Did I wake you up?”
“No. And thank you for calling. I’m a little anxious tonight.”
“Me too. What’s wrong?”
“I thought you said you were fine.”
“Did I? I was wrong. I’m anxious, too.”
“What’s wrong?” she wondered.
I couldn’t just suddenly say something as reckless as the truth, that I missed her, and thought of her voluntarily and involuntarily, and wanted to hold her face in my hands and fall asleep with her breath on my neck.
“I don’t know. Yes, I do. I miss you.”
“You do? I think I miss you, too.”
“You think? When will you be sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“That was fast.”
“I’m glad you called. I’m lonely. It’s not very late. I have some wine. Would it bother you if I asked you to come over and visit me for a while?”
“Why would I come visit you just because I miss you?”
“Do you remember how to get here?”
“Do I re-mem-ber? Do I re-MEM-ber?”
“You’re repeating yourself.”
“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
HER COUCH, where we’d been talking and drinking white wine, was just twenty feet from her bedroom, where I assumed we weren’t going, because of perfectly good reasons that we wouldn’t talk about, so I wouldn’t know what they were. She had her life and I had mine. And in the spontaneous rush to blend our lives together for one more night, seldom with any real certainty about what had been shared and which parts of us were still strangers to each other, she fell
asleep in my lap, with her head resting against my erection in my pants—my stupid, foolish erection, which was obviously waiting for an event in someone else’s life. I wondered if she could feel it, if she liked that sensation, if she felt something like it herself that we’d talk about some other day. The Farmer in the Dell. I was the farmer. She was the dell. With her head on my erection, I was feeling highly agricultural. I thought of waking her up and saying, “Natelle. We need to farm.”
But she slept.
Except for the persistence of my erection, which I knew would give up eventually and go away, I felt peaceful. Kind of exultant and peaceful, as if finally my life was working, when really it wasn’t. She’d wake up and go away. I didn’t have her. For her to have fallen asleep in my lap didn’t necessarily mean she was in love with me or even close to it. It might only have meant she was sleepy, and felt safe enough with me to sleep in my lap, free from such predatory forces as me and my futile erection. And so, once more, I was a stupid man, gratefully holding this woman like a gift I hadn’t been offered yet. This was as close to having her as my lover as I’d ever been, just holding her in the night as she slept and didn’t even remember she was with me. Very gently I put my hand on her chest above her breasts, to feel her warmth and her softness and the rising and falling of her chest as she breathed. She moved a little bit and didn’t open her eyes. I was afraid she’d sense my hand on her chest so close to her breasts, and she’d be mad at me, as if I was trying to satisfy some concealed lust while she slept, and she’d think I was reprehensible. She didn’t say anything. With her eyes still closed, she put her hand on top of mine and slid my hand onto her breast. She didn’t move anymore, and seemed to be asleep, or returned to sleep. I wondered if she’d mistakenly put my hand on her breast. No, I decided, a woman knew where her breasts were and when they were being touched. That was what she wanted. Ecstasy didn’t last very long, but it sometimes came back.
22
Early in the morning when I’d woken and Natelle was asleep in my lap with her nose against my stomach, my hand was still on her breast. And we’d done nothing, as if we were having a secret love so exquisitely hidden that even we didn’t know about it. I’d felt her breast under my hand and her breathing against my stomach, and I had tingled and was dizzy, almost like I was falling through her and into her in some spiritual descent where I’d realized I was part of this sleeping woman who didn’t know any of this was happening. I had thought of waking her up and whispering, I’m part of you, now. But she was still married, and that would have been like having two ghosts in her—one leaving, and one just arriving. The similarity between insanity and love wasn’t as disturbing as it probably should’ve been.
I remembered this now, in Aramilo’s office, where I was overcome with the warm disorder of missing Natelle and wondering if she missed me, or if she regretted our newest and unexplained closeness, or if in her office she wistfully imagined lying down on me and couldn’t stop thinking of me, or already had. Life wasn’t presented in any understandable fashion. It just happened, and you either knew what it meant, or painstakingly misunderstood it all.
I felt my forehead to see if I was hot. I wondered if Natelle was feeling her forehead. I wanted to feel it for her.
Aramilo sat at his desk, quietly sipping a cup of hot tea and vodka as he read some kind of government report and simultaneously watched a PBS documentary on television about the cowboys of Indonesia. That’s what it sounded like when I asked him what he was watching. Either his speech was slurred, or my hearing was. Someone knocked twice at the door and opened it. It was Maria, the chargé d’affaires, looking more somber and preposterous than usual.
Aramilo said, “What?” an Americanism he’d picked up. Instead of saying a complete sentence, such as, “Maria, what do you need to tell me?” Aramilo just looked at her and said, “What?”
“May I speak with you in private?” Maria said insistently, and I left the room to stand out in the hall. About two minutes later, Maria opened the door and walked somberly past me, saying nothing. I walked back in to the office to see Aramilo at his desk staring into the distance.
“Bad news?” I asked.
“We’re at war,” he said.
“Who is?”
“The PDF attacked Rio D’Iguana.”
Rio D’Iguana was the capital of Indizal. This was the first time in my life I’d ever been in the presence of someone who announced the start of a war, and I didn’t know what to say, as if I should buy Aramilo a Hallmark card that said “Sorry about your war. Hope you feel better.” I already had my war. I wasn’t interested in another one.
“The PDF,” Aramilo said with curiosity. “We don’t even know who they are, and they’re attacking us. They attacked part of the city this morning with rockets and mortars and automatic rifles. Maria says our own troops repelled them, but we can expect more fighting. And now I’m a target.”
“You?” I said. “Who’d want to kill you?”
“Why?” Aramilo said. “Don’t you think I’m worth killing?”
“I wouldn’t want to be.”
“Do you think I’m not important enough to be killed?” Aramilo said resentfully.
All he did was play piano. People weren’t usually killed for that. But I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, so I said, “I’m sure your death would be widely acclaimed.”
Ignoring me, Aramilo stood up to look at the world map on the wall behind his desk, and I walked over beside him to look at the map, which was embarrassing. Indizal was such a new country that it wasn’t printed on the map. Someone had used a pen to draw a little blue dot in the Atlantic off the coast of West Africa to show the existence of Indizal. It probably wasn’t much bigger than Walt Disney World and didn’t have any rides. Aramilo looked anxious and confused, and I wanted to make him feel better.
“I’ll call my government to let them know about the fighting,” I said, trying to comfort him. “They’ll issue orders for some kind of surveillance and intelligence-gathering in Indizal. We have networks to find out if there are any plans for violence here in Washington. I wouldn’t worry. The PDF couldn’t be very big. I doubt they could afford to send somebody over here.”
Actually, the Secret Service and the CIA probably had no reason to care about a tiny war in Indizal. They probably wouldn’t order any surveillance. They’d probably ask me to be “more alert,” and that would be the extent of our security.
“Do you think anyone will try to kill me?” Aramilo asked.
“If they do, I’ll kill them first. That’s what I’m trained for.”
“Are you sure?”
“Am I sure what I’m trained for? Yes.”
“No. How do you know you’ll kill them first?”
“It’s the sequence I prefer.”
“Did you ever kill anyone in Vietnam?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You were in a war and you don’t know if you killed anyone?”
“I shot at people. I assume I hit them sometimes. And when they were dead, I didn’t want to know who killed them. I didn’t want to look at a body and say ‘That’s my corpse. I did that.’ That’s crazy, Hobar. I have a lot of flaws, but I don’t think I’m crazy.”
No, I wasn’t crazy. Unless you counted my nervous breakdown. Unless you counted the fact that I was deeply in love with a woman who might never want me. But that wasn’t crazy. That was just my normal life.
“Well, I assume you’re highly qualified to shoot people,” Aramilo said apologetically.
“Thank you for your faith.”
23
A dog was glancing at me unpleasantly. It was a big Rottweiler on a leash held by a foreign-looking man whose nationality I couldn’t identify. He and the unpleasant Rottweiler gazed at me in front of the embassy while I waited for Aramilo to come out and get in the limousine to go talk with the deputy secretary of state or someone about the war in Indizal and possible PDF terrorism in Washington. As innately su
spicious of all humans and animals as I’d been trained to be, I regarded the dog and the man as a threat to Aramilo, and therefore to me. The dog and the man stood still on the sidewalk, not taking a walk but staying there, waiting. The dog, which I estimated to be about 110 pounds—just 60 pounds lighter than me—seemed to stare at me with ill will, as if he knew I was in the Service, as if he knew Aramilo was coming. The man, who wore sunglasses and a white windbreaker, under which any number of guns could be concealed, stared off toward the other side of the street, as if uninterested in me, although there was no reason for him to just stand there. I wasn’t going to let him. This was the crazy part of my job, where I had to be suspicious of everyone, without reason, because it was impossible to look at a stranger and know if he or she was harmless, which nearly everyone was, or if the stranger was preparing to kill me and whoever I was protecting.
“You have to move,” I said loudly to the man, as if I knew this as a fact and I was educating him. I walked down the embassy steps toward the man and the dog. The dog looked at me more unpleasantly and growled. I had my arms crossed over my chest with my hand inside my jacket, holding onto my machine gun. The man stared at me with a slightly troubled or curious expression.
“Pardon me?” he said in an accent unlike Aramilo’s but which I couldn’t name. He didn’t move, and the dog was still growling.
“You have to move. You’re standing in a secure area. It’s not allowed.”
“It’s not? And who the hell are you?” he said in a more combative tone.
“A foreign embassy is private property protected by the federal government, for which I work. I recommend that you move.”
“Well, I don’t give a goddamn who you are. I’m an American citizen. You can’t tell me where to stand on the sidewalk.”
“Yes, I can. I can have you arrested. I can have your dog arrested. The best thing for you to do is walk away. Now.”
“You can have me arrested for standing here?” he said in a tone that seemed to make the dog growl more.
“Sir. Don’t fuck with me. It isn’t safe,” I said, pulling back my jacket far enough to show him part of my machine gun.