by John Welter
“I need time to be alone and think,” she said.
She was leaving me, and she wasn’t even mine.
“You mean about your marriage?” I asked.
“Yes. The remains of it. I just wanted to tell you this so you wouldn’t think I was abandoning you. I’m sorry I haven’t called. I’ve just been terribly depressed, and maybe I just need to go away, to get so far away from everything that … I don’t know. I don’t know what at all,” she said quietly.
Anything I said would hurt me, so I didn’t say anything.
“Don’t think I’m leaving you,” she said, explaining why she was leaving me.
“I do love you, Doyle. I do. But you’re coming into my life right when everything else is leaving me. Everything hurts too much, and I don’t know what to do about it. So I’m going to go away for a while and escape from everything, in order to confront it.”
She didn’t say anything else, as if it were my turn to talk, but I was too confused and sad to say anything.
“I’m leaving in the morning,” she said, even though she’d already said that.
“What will you do on the retreat?” I asked, because otherwise my silence would hurt us too much.
“Just be alone and think.”
“Can I go on the retreat with you? I won’t bring any guns.”
“It’s a retreat center for women only.”
“I could wear a dress,” I said.
“I’ve never seen you in a dress,” she said quietly, as if wondering what I’d look like in one.
“I think I’d probably look lovely.”
“I think you would, too. But you still can’t go. I’ll be back in a week. That’s not so long. And we can find time to talk then. Will you please wish me well?”
“I wish you better than well. I just wish I could help you.”
“I know. And you can help me by being here when I get back,” she said with something that sounded like hope.
“I’ll be here. Do you mean here, in my apartment, or there, in your apartment?”
“I mean just here to see me. That reminds me. I know this is an awful thing to ask, since you can’t see me now and I’m going away, but could you water my plants while I’m gone?”
“Sure I will. That’s not awful. Maybe I can’t see you, but I can at least see your furniture.”
“Are you mad at me?” she said anxiously.
“No. I just miss you.”
She was silent for a few seconds. I heard her sigh. She said, “You’re one of the dearest men I’ve ever known. But this is a dangerous time for me, Doyle, so I have to be careful how our emotions get mixed together right now. We can talk about that when I get back. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“And also, the key to my apartment will be under a loose brick above the front door.”
“A loose brick,” I said. “Reminds me of my head.”
She laughed and said, “And I also remembered that your spookball game is this coming week. Bastille Day? I’ll be on the retreat, but I thought that, on that day, at noon, I could wave to you from the mountains, as a sort of encouragement. Do you want to do that, wave to me at noon on your game day? Or is that too childish?”
“I’ll wave to you at noon, on Bastille Day. Which mountain will you be on?”
“I don’t know the name of it. Just wave toward all the mountains. You’ll get the right one.”
31
Natelle’s letter was dated July 11th. It was handwritten in black ink on one page of gray paper. She said:
Dear Doyle,
Some of the women I’ve met here talk about coming here to get their heads on straight. I keep expecting to see women with their heads on sideways.
The sanctuary is lovely, but like a resort where no one has any fun. Every day, I sleep late, as if sleeping late were my goal. It seems like I’ve built up a lot of emotional tension, some toxins, over the last year or so, and I think they’re bleeding out of me now, leaking from me like poison from a wound. There’s a certain amount of bitterness and sadness still lodged in me, like a glowing rock.
I’ve taken a few long walks on mountain trails, looking for solitude, and keep running into a dozen or more other women looking for the solitude we keep denying each other. Pain has its comedy.
I feel lonely up here. But then, I felt lonely down there. I wish I knew who I was lonely for. Sometimes I think it’s you. But don’t take that as an offer. It’s a confession. I’m not sure what’s true or what should be true. Sometimes I can’t help wishing I could think of a way to reclaim my marriage, but that would be like picking up a handful of shattered glass. My hands are still bleeding from all the attempts. I give up.
But, now, it’s like I’m trying to remember the years before I was married, to think of what I was doing then, as if I should resume my life at that point. I don’t even remember what that point was. So it’s like I’m trying to learn how to live again, and I can’t remember how. To lose something as profound as love seems like a death, only no one dresses you for the funeral. You have to dress yourself. And you can’t mourn the one who left you. You can only mourn yourself. Maybe that’s what I’m doing. I’m having my funeral. But I hope this death gets over fairly soon, and I will be back.
Remember to wave to me on Bastille Day.
Love,
Natelle
I read the letter three times and was reading it again, pretending she was talking to me and smiling. I put the letter up to my nose to try breathing some faint fragrance of Natelle, and I held the letter over my face, because her hands had touched the letter where it now touched me. And in this sanctuary of paper and hope, in my childlike trance of love, there was a voice.
“Coldiron. Take that goddamn paper off your face.”
It was Doltmeer. We were in a briefing about some visiting politicians from Azerbaijan. I lifted the letter up over my eyes to see Doltmeer and about a dozen agents staring at me in the back of the room.
“Would it be possible for you to pay attention?” Doltmeer said. “Do you even know what country we’re talking about?”
“Arizona?” I said. “It’s one of those Russian places with a ‘z’ in it. I can’t pronounce it. Azer-ba-jam. Apple butter. I forget.”
I talked with Dr. Boulan on my lunch break, sitting in a chair next to her and showing her the folded-up letter I carried with me in my pocket like the latest mystical proof that Natelle existed, and I couldn’t let the proof go.
“Well, I think you want me to tell you that perhaps you’re a little bit crazy,” Dr. Boulan said, calmly rubbing the tips of her fingers together and smiling lightly. “You have this almost comical need to be told you’re a little bit crazy, and that isn’t so bad.”
“You mean I’m not crazy?” I said, absentmindedly holding Natelle’s letter against my cheek.
“It’s not ‘crazy’ of you to look at a letter from a woman you love and be thoroughly transfixed by it, and keep it with you. Possibly it could interfere with work, yes. And possibly it could be regarded by some people as wrong or inappropriate for a grown man to sit in a serious meeting with a love letter over his face.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do, or you wouldn’t have asked me about it. You do, like everyone else in the world, have a few things wrong with you, but being in love isn’t per se one of them, unless you elevate that love to the status of the only possible good in the world, which I suspect you sometimes do.”
“Well, I don’t think I quite do that,” I said, because she was right.
“No? Well then, what else in the world would you put on an equal level with Natelle?”
I couldn’t think of anything.
“So,” I said. “What’s wrong with loving her more than anything else?”
“Possibly nothing, unless one of the things you think Natelle is going to do for you is save you.”
“Save me? She hasn’t done that so far. Nothing has.”
“Do you think you need
to be saved?”
“We all need to be saved from something.”
“And what would you like to be saved from?”
“Being alone.”
I held the letter in the fingers of both hands, to be able to touch it the most.
“So even with Natelle, you still feel alone?”
“I’m not with her,” I said quietly. “I don’t have her. I never do. You know, maybe when you grow up, if you grow up right, and I don’t think I did, you’re supposed to be able to go out into the world every day with the feeling, maybe some natural or intuitive or subconscious feeling, that regardless of what might be wrong in your life, there’s always something you can go back to that will make you feel safe. I just have me. So I think what I need to be saved from is being the only one I have. And I don’t expect or hope that Natelle could save me in some profound and final instance that can’t be undone. Everything can be undone. Nothing is final, except certain purchases at department stores. But you know what I’d like? I’d like to be saved maybe just once or twice a week. And by ‘saved,’ I mean … I don’t know. But I’d like to be able to make love with someone who loves me, even if it was just a fiction, a stupid, convincing lie that I was telling myself. This is supposed to be ordinary, isn’t it? This is supposed to be a common part of daily life. Not for me. For me, it’s like fantasy. For me, it’s like a myth from ten thousand years ago. For me, it’s like the goddamn afterlife. Maybe when you die, someone holds you. They don’t do it now. It won’t happen.
“And you see? You see why I do stupid things like keeping this letter in my hands? Because it came from her. It came from her and it’s all I have. I have this piece of paper with part of her heart written down on it, and she names me in her heart, and I don’t want to let it go. I just want to hold it,” I said, and I closed my eyes and sighed.
“It’s perfectly healthy for people to keep relics or objects of their loved ones with them,” Dr. Boulan said encouragingly. “And what does it mean? It means you love them. I’ve known women who mailed their panties to their husbands or lovers.”
I looked up at Dr. Boulan. “Maybe I should go check the mail again,” I said.
At Natelle’s apartment that evening, when I went to water her plants and look at her furniture and think, “There’s her chair. She sits in it,” “There’s her light. She turns it on,” “There’s her bed. She sleeps in it,” I opened her dresser and looked at all the panties and brassieres and slips folded and piled together in their blues and blacks and whites and pinks and lavenders, like a garden of lingerie, and I rested my face in the middle of their softness, like resting my face in Natelle. I said, “Come home,” knowing she was two hundred miles away, maybe trying to decide if she had a home, or if I belonged in it. I picked up a pair of black silky panties and held them to my face and breathed in, hoping they’d smell like Natelle. I tried to breathe in the tiniest remaining scent of Natelle, but all I could breathe in was maybe the scent of laundry detergent.
Far away, beyond your reach,
I detect your scent;
It’s Tide with bleach.
32
At the Nevermore Bar & Grill, where Yamato and Widdiker and I had gone to do what men without women did together, which was get reasonably drunk and distract each other with amusing and usually pointless remarks, we spent another evening patiently wasting our lives. One serious subject I could have mentioned and wasn’t about to was Natelle’s black panties folded in my pants pocket. A lot of people, maybe even Yamato and Widdiker, would’ve regarded that as inexcusably weird. Maybe even depraved. I didn’t. The panties were like an icon; an article of religious devotion. Usually an icon was a picture of some religious figure with a burning candle in front of it. I didn’t want any burning candles in my pants. The panties, along with the letter in the same pocket, were how I felt closer to Natelle. It was my attempt at magic. Or primitive religion. Being devoted to someone who, I knew, might never be devoted to me. So having her panties in my pocket was really an expression of faith. Actually, I wasn’t sure whether it was faith or idiocy. I felt like I’d mastered both.
We were just sitting at the bar because the bar was there; Widdiker said, “Do you think every moment of life is precious?”
Yamato looked perplexed. I was.
“I was just thinking that,” Widdiker said. “People say every moment of life is precious.”
“Not this one,” Yamato said.
“I had a precious moment a few days ago,” I said. “I forget why.”
A few moments passed and we were silent, each of us staring off at different people we didn’t know. And so we sat there and drank. Alcohol was a good drug. It made you feel serene when there was no natural cause for that emotion. It made you seem happy without any memory of why you should be, because there was no memory. Alcohol was a bad drug, and we liked it.
“What’s this I hear about you and L. D. Krite?” Widdiker said abruptly, glancing at Yamato.
Yamato looked defensive and a little bit anguished, although he smiled. “I don’t know. What’d you hear?”
“I hear you have a crush on her,” Widdiker said.
“A crush,” Yamato said contemplatively, and sipped some beer. “That’s one of the strangest words in the English language. You ‘crush’ fruit. You ‘crush’ your enemy. Why would ‘crush’ have anything to do with affection?”
“Irrelevant,” Widdiker said. “Strike that from the record. You don’t want to answer my question, do you?”
“No,” Yamato said.
“She’s pretty,” Widdiker said. “I saw her picture in the paper, when she was being taken to police headquarters in handcuffs. I could understand being attracted to her. Are you going to ask her out?”
“Shut up,” Yamato said, smiling with embarrassment.
“I think if you testify against her, she won’t go to the movies with you,” Widdiker said.
“I know. I’m thinking about having amnesia,” Yamato said.
“In court?”
“I don’t want to testify against her. I like her,” Yamato said, and sighed. He looked at me and said, “Will you testify against her, so she’ll hate you and not me?”
“Sure. I don’t mind being hated,” I said.
“She still won’t like you,” Widdiker said. “You arrested her.”
“But it was just a formality. It wasn’t personal,” Yamato said with a remorseful look, and it seemed more and more certain that Yamato genuinely was infatuated with L. D. Krite. I felt sympathy for him. We both had romances that involved ourselves and women who didn’t particularly want us.
“Have you sent her flowers?” Widdiker said.
“No.”
“Chocolates?”
“No.”
“Lingerie?”
“No.”
“Bail?”
“I’m getting tired of you. Why don’t I pull your intestines out and choke you with them?”
“That’d be a felony,” Widdiker said. “Then you could go to jail and see L. D. Krite.”
“Well, I guess your death is worth one date,” Yamato said.
“Whose death?” someone said, and we all turned to see Lou Benador and Ricky Kee behind us.
“Uh-oh. Spooks,” I said. Benador and Kee stepped to the bar beside Widdiker and ordered scotch.
“Have you found out where the game is?” Yamato said.
“What game?” Benador said.
“Don’t feign ignorance,” Yamato said.
“He’s not. He really is ignorant,” Widdiker said, repeating his favorite line.
“What’s the name of your team?” Yamato said.
“What makes you think we have a team?” Kee said.
“Well, if you don’t, we’ll kick your ass,” I said.
“That’s the only way you’d kick our ass,” Benador said.
“What’s the name of your team?” Yamato said.
“The Assassins?” Widdiker said.
“Spooks-R-Us
?” Yamato said.
“The Buttfuckers?” Widdiker suggested.
“Your vulgarity shocks me,” Benador said indifferently.
“The CIA’s incapable of shock, unless it’s an electrical charge you’re applying to someone during an interview,” I said.
Benador smiled at us dramatically and said, “But after I tell you, you have to tell us the name of your team.”
“Sure. Go on.”
“All right,” Benador said, taking a drink of scotch and staring at each of us with a cold and intimidating look. “We’ve named ourselves the Raging Tree Frogs.”
“The Raging Tree Frogs?” Widdiker said. “What a stupid name.”
“Yeah. Ours is better,” Yamato said.
“It’s more dignified,” I said.
“Well, what is it?”
“The Avenging Blowfish,” Yamato said.
“See? We told you it was more dignified,” I said.
“You guys are the Avenging Blowfish? What a stupid name,” Kee said.
“It’s not any stupider than your name,” Widdiker said.
“Why don’t you call yourselves the Avenging Blowjob?” Benador asked.
“We wanted to name ourselves after an animal. A blowjob’s not an animal,” I said.
“By the way … where’s the game being played?” Yamato said.
“Outdoors,” Benador said.
“Oh. I know where that is,” I said.
“So you don’t know where it’s being played?” Widdiker said, sneering at them.
“As if you do?” Benador said, sneering back.
“It doesn’t matter if we don’t know where the game is,” Widdiker said. “We’ll play one wherever we want to.”
“That’s a violation of the rules,” Kee said.
“Violation is our rule,” Widdiker said.
33
On top of the pool table in the back room of Papa Doc’s, the fashionably tasteless bar where we went when we didn’t want to be middle-class, Widdiker arranged a large stack of black-and-white aerial photos of the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area, which all of us in the Avenging Blowfish looked at curiously as we stood around the pool table with bottles of beer, like members of the Allied Supreme Command preparing for a final strike against Nazi Germany.