The Retreat

by David Bergen

  “I’m not a good dancer,” he said. “You’d be better off with a dead tree.”

  Nelson had found a beer and was standing at the edge of the room. Reenie and Lee were dancing and giggling, holding their hands over their mouths. The room was hot and Lizzy smelled her own sweat and the pale sweetness of the perfume she’d put on earlier in anticipation of Raymond coming. She had never touched him in public, and now, as a slower song played, she took his hands and put them around her waist and she laid her head against his chest. She did not talk, because then she would have had to lift her head in order to make herself heard, and she would then have lost the sound of his heart in her ear. Her mother was standing to one side with her hand on her hip, watching. When the song was finished, Lizzy took Raymond’s hand as they walked to the chairs where Reenie and Lee were again sitting. She offered to introduce Lee to Everett, but Lee shook her head no. Reenie chuckled. Her large hands were folded in her lap.

  Against the far wall, Lizzy saw Harris, drinking from a flask. He noticed Lizzy and raised the flask and smiled. Lizzy waved back. She told Raymond that she was going to dance again, in fact she would be dancing all night, and if he wanted to see her, he would have to come find her on the dance floor. Okay? And she turned, not completely willingly, and she scooped up Fish and walked out onto the dance floor. His eyes were bright. He was wearing shorts and she felt his firm, cool legs and this made her think of Raymond’s hand on her breasts several nights earlier. The force of his mouth on hers. She turned and saw Raymond leaning towards Nelson, whispering something. He was looking right at her. She smiled.

  Late into the night they danced. Nelson finally made it out onto the floor with Reenie and Lee. At some point, he was sitting at one of the tables, talking to Everett and moving his hands in the air as if making a point about something. During the slower songs, Lizzy danced with William, and then Raymond again, the movement of his back muscles against her hand, and then with Ian, who kept reaching out to brush her arm or her shoulder. He said that she was good-looking; he’d never really taken note. “That boy. Your main man?” he asked. He moved closer and tried to take her in his arms, but she slid away and went over to where Everett was sitting with Nelson and pulled her brother out onto the floor, letting her wrists rest on his shoulders. Everett told her that Nelson was nice and that he liked chess, just like he did. “That right?” Lizzy said. “I’m happy for you.” Later, the Doctor asked her to dance with him; they moved slowly, an arm’s-length apart. The Doctor’s shirt was unbuttoned halfway and his bony chest was visible. He dipped towards her like a large white bird and then leaned back and moved his hips, as if offering his crotch for assessment. Lizzy wanted to laugh, but she stopped herself, because she knew she would have to explain her laughter to him. Once, looking back over her shoulder at Raymond, she saw her mother talking to him, reaching out a hand as if to drag him out onto the dance floor. He was seated and she was standing, bending over, and Lizzy imagined Raymond might see down her mother’s top and this made her suddenly angry. He saw Lizzy watching and he shook his head. Her mother straightened and backed away.

  She found Lizzy not long after that. Trapped her near the tub of beer and placed a hand on her shoulder and said, “Is that the boy?”

  “What are you talking about, Mother?” Lizzy asked.

  Her mother said that he was handsome, wasn’t he? She said that she was glad to know that her daughter had good taste. “And don’t let people tell you differently,” she said, and she slipped away, seemingly pleased with herself.

  And then, at the end of the song, Raymond came to find her. He told her Nelson and Lee wanted to go. “Already?” she said. She took his hands and tried to lead him onto the dance floor, but he pulled away. At that moment she saw herself as desperate and so she said, “Okay.” Then he said that he would come by the next day, about noon. Maybe they’d drive to town. Or around. He lifted his hand in a slight wave and turned away. Lizzy circled the room, suddenly lonely, and looked for someone. She found Fish and they went over to a chair and sat, Fish on her lap.

  On the far side of the room, her parents were dancing. Her mother had her face against her father’s chest. He was talking into her ear, talking and talking, and then she smiled and pushed away from him. She found Lizzy and came to her and bent over, touching her mouth to Lizzy’s temple. “Can you put the boys to bed? Now that your boyfriend is gone.” Her orange blouse, the tops of her breasts; Lizzy saw what Raymond would have seen. And then, without waiting for a response, she went to Lewis, took his hand, and they left. Lizzy watched them go, feeling sad and jealous in some odd way, and confused by how easily her mother could call Raymond a boyfriend.

  William had already gone up to the cabin. Ian and Jill were slow dancing to some French-sounding song with an accordion in the background. Harris had sipped his way into a dreamlike state and was tapping at the arm of his wheelchair with his right hand. Emma had disappeared long ago with Franz.

  After the last song, Lizzy passed Fish off to Everett and asked him to take him back and put him to bed. She went to Harris and told him she would bring him to his cabin. He said that she should not feel sorry for him. They went out of the Hall and up the path. In the moonlight she saw the back of Harris’s head, his slight shoulders, his hands gathered in his lap.

  He said that he had to empty his bottle. Could they pass by the bathroom.

  She pushed him up towards the outhouse, thinking how proper he was, calling it a bathroom when it wasn’t that at all. It was a shack with two holes. A shithouse. The door was open and there was the smell, which always depressed Lizzy, and she breathed through her mouth.

  Harris set the brakes on his wheelchair and pushed himself upwards. He picked up his bottle and clutched it.

  “Here,” Lizzy said, and she held his arm as he hobbled forward.

  “I’m fine,” he said, and closed the door behind him.

  She walked down the path and waited. A mosquito landed on her neck and she slapped at it. A long while later, the door opened and Harris stumbled and almost fell forward into the darkness. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Back in the chair, he sighed and said, “Kill me already.” It was like the cry of a small bird.

  At his cabin, Lizzy parked the wheelchair under the awning and helped Harris up the stairs.

  “Come in,” he said. “Please.”

  She continued inside, holding his arm. He lit a lamp and sat on a chair, breathing heavily. He motioned at the desk in the corner. “There’s a bottle of Scotch in the drawer, and two glasses. Have a drink with me. I’ve been drinking all evening but it would be nice to have company.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lizzy said. “I gotta get back to my brothers.”

  Harris waved a hand. “They’ll be fine. Everett’s a big boy.” Then he said, “He’s a different one, Everett.”

  “What are you talking about?” She went to get the bottle.

  “He might not know it yet, but I can see it. There is a marked circle in which we all exist, and Everett is at the edge of the circle, on the verge of leaping out.”

  “He’s just Ev,” Lizzy said. “Doesn’t talk much, but knows everything that’s going on.”

  Harris shrugged but didn’t pursue the topic. He took the Scotch from Lizzy’s hand, squeaked open the cork, and poured two glasses. “Here.” He handed her a glass and then he drank from his own.

  Lizzy looked at her glass and then drank. The liquor burned her tongue and passed down her throat and she coughed.

  “Good for you,” he said. “Sit.” He motioned at a second chair by the desk, and she sat cross-legged, aware of the room now in the dim flickering light. There were the two beds, both made. There was a bookshelf and a desk and a table with Emma’s butterfly paraphernalia. Against the far wall stood a wardrobe, and beside that was an easel and brushes, and beside that another desk that held a typewriter and nothing else.

  “You’re wondering where my wife is,” Harris said.

&nbs
p; Lizzy didn’t answer.

  “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. We have this arrangement that must be obvious to everyone else. Though she always makes it back here, so that she can help me. Tonight, I fear, she forgot me. Didn’t she?” He looked at his glass, which was empty, and he poured himself more. “Highland Scotch,” he said. “Not as musky as the Lowland.” He drank. “Quite the saviour.” Then he smiled and said that it was unfortunate that a girl her age should have to witness the idiotic failings of adults. “I love my wife,” he said. “And I need her.” He gestured at his legs. “With these useless legs, what else would I do? Hire a girl like you? You’re rather a good dancer, by the way.”

  Lizzy wondered if he was going to cry, and she wondered what she would do then. She thought she should be frightened, but she wasn’t. He leaned forward and watched her circumspectly. His nose was suddenly large. His glasses had slipped slightly. He drank again and then said, “I hear you’re reading the novels I gave you, first to last. Your mother told me, she was proud of the fact, though I’m sure there are better things to be read.” He paused, studied her, and then said that he wasn’t going to ask what she thought, because it wouldn’t make any difference, he wasn’t going to change anything. “These days I’m like a dull moth banging at an unlit lantern.” He drank and then said that he seemed to have lost his muse at about the same time he lost the use of his legs. “I was loved,” he said. “And I loved back, ferociously, and now I appear to be flapping uselessly in the wind. Funny.”

  Lizzy didn’t respond. She thought she should leave, but she was curious too. This frail man, with his sticks for legs, and his clumsy hands, was so different from the man who fumed and ranted in All Leer’s Women, the novel Harris had handed to her one day. It was the story of a real estate salesman, Richard Leer, who talks his way into the underwear of every woman he meets, young or old. Maybe Harris would try to seduce her, though she could easily outrun him. The possibility intrigued her. She wanted him to be pathetic. She wanted to say no to him.

  He was moving his crooked fingers, as if attempting to pick some slippery idea up off the floor. He said that once upon a time there was a man who took his wife on a long trip to southern Europe, and then across the Mediterranean to Egypt and on to Tanzania. This was not long ago. Three years, maybe two. The man’s wife was unhappy; she suffered melancholy, she was dissatisfied, she wanted to hold something in her hands that she had not yet held. He said that this was not unusual, especially as one grew older and discovered the darkness at the edges of the path. He said that the man thought that he could cure his wife of her unhappiness, and travelling might be that cure. One afternoon, in Egypt, in a place called Aswan, the two of them sat on a small balcony and watched a crowd of men with horses gather in the courtyard below. There was much yelling and shouting, and then a stallion was brought out and it was made to mount one of the mares. When the stallion was finished, one of the men jumped on the mare’s back and another man took off a shoe and hit the mare on the rear end and the mare took off madly down the road and then returned. A celebration ensued and then the process was repeated with another mare. The man and woman watched this for a while and then the crowd of men and the horses disappeared and it seemed as if the scene had never actually happened, that the horses and the men and the shouting had all been imagined, though there was horse dung on the cobblestones below.

  Harris stopped as he poured himself more Scotch. Held up the glass and dipped towards it as if he were a bumblebee hovering over a newly opened flower. Lizzy saw the shadow of his mouth through the bottom of the glass; the candle flame mirrored there as well. Harris recalled that the daylight disappeared quickly. It fell away as if a curtain had been suddenly drawn. The woman was cold and so the couple went into their room and lit a candle and drank some wine and ate some pita and shared the boiled eggs that they had purchased in the market. The woman went to bed early and the man stayed sitting in the chair and he watched her sleep beneath the mosquito net and then, finally, because he too was cold, he climbed in beside her and she woke and said that she had dreamed of the horses.

  Harris paused. Lizzy wondered if he was about to fall asleep, but he was simply resting. He said, “The next day they flew to Tanzania, and that is where we meet Franz.” The flame from the candle on the desk wavered, and then renewed itself. Harris shifted and looked at his empty glass and then at Lizzy and he said that he would drink a little more. He said that the story he was telling was long and it didn’t have an ending yet. As he poured more Scotch, he said that his wife had been jealous of his success. “It was as if I had been anointed in some way, or perhaps it was simply chance that threw success my way, and suddenly the world was at my feet and Emma did not recognize the man she had married. Or she did not like what I had become. Or she wanted what I had. I do not know.” He said that she had wanted children, and when that proved to be impossible, she became interested in insects. In bugs. Then he said, “Look at your mother. Four children, like four novels with endings yet to be written. Wonderful. Emma would have liked that.”

  And this idea appeared to rejuvenate him and he sat up and said that in Tanzania the man and the woman fought. They fought as soon as they woke and they fought through breakfast and on into the day. The arguments were about African politics or the efficacy of malaria pills, or whether or not the fish had been cooked enough, or about money. Pointless disagreements, he said. But beneath the arguments was a deep sadness, as if they both knew that the man’s increasing inability to walk was a symptom of everything wrong in the marriage. “Suddenly, she had the advantage,” he said. “And she was merciless.”

  He said that they flew over to Zanzibar and hired a car to take them up to Chwaka where they stayed at a run-down villa that had, in its prime, been an estate of a German family. It belonged to the government now and it was in disrepair. Rats had made homes in the mattresses, the windows were broken, the few chairs left were wobbly and unsafe. There was little to eat and they made do with fish that was delivered by a local villager.

  Harris said that it was impossible to predict how a decision, like his and Emma’s choice to spend a week in Chwaka, could change one’s whole life, but this was what happened, and it was only in hindsight that the evidence could be sifted through and understood. Or sometimes not understood. He said that on a weekend afternoon, while sitting out on the beach, he and Emma met a German man who was staying in a house up the coast. The man invited them for dinner. Emma accepted with great alacrity and this surprised Harris because usually she was hermetic and antisocial. He couldn’t walk to the house, and so the German man, who was Franz, picked them up by jeep and drove them to his villa, which was beautiful and well kept, with the requisite cook and gardener and liquor cabinet and a fine view of the ocean. In a large room just off a wide hallway, Franz had a solarium in which there were plants and mounted animals. The animals weren’t all large, in fact the majority were lizards and birds and all of them were placed strategically in trees and on rocks, so the effect was surreal. Harris said that it was like walking into a photograph. Franz was very proud of his stuffed animals, and of course, Emma was intrigued. After all, she collected butterflies.

  Harris paused, drank, and then said that it was a fascinating thing to observe the disintegration of a marriage. This last gasp. He said that love should not be taken for granted. “It is so often a doomed enterprise, and typically perceived by the outsider to be doomed before the players are even slightly cognizant of the carnage. Franz knew immediately. And, delicately, as if he were a man who might wish later to claim innocence, he seduced my wife.”

  Here, Harris stopped talking. He closed his eyes for a long time, and then he opened them and said that he knew that the point of view was awry in this story, but would Lizzy bear with him? Please? In any case, it wasn’t necessary that she follow exactly, and wasn’t it more interesting to have to work at the threads of the narrative? He said that there were moments when he was overcome with anger and shame and he saw
his wife as a whore. But he said that there was also curiosity and a certain macabre objectivity. “As all of this was happening,” he said, “I imagined writing a story about a cripple whose wife takes on a lover and the three of them, the two men and one woman, live together and in fact quite easily fit into the quotidian of eating meals together and travelling, but never really talking about what is actually happening. My own life was producing the fodder for my next novel.” He said that he was a puppeteer. That was what he did for a living. He wondered though if he had been deceiving himself all along, and that in real life, his life, the life of Emma and Franz, and even in Lizzy’s life, they weren’t all puppets being manipulated by some higher puppeteer, some malevolent and disinterested God who smiled benignly at his puppets’ foibles. “Perhaps there is nothing more than this. A kind of luck or fate. Or not even that, because that is being too generous. Luck implies the possibility of blessing, hope, redemption. I have given up on all of those.” He chuckled. Not happily. And then he said that it was unfortunate that she, at her young age, should have to listen to the indiscriminate musings of a disappointed cripple. “I do not wish to steal hope from you.”

  And then he was quiet and Lizzy waited, but he did not say anything more, though he had promised more. She had listened to his voice lift and fall and she had wondered if the story he was telling was true or if it had been made up for her benefit, as if he might be trying to tell her something about her parents, or even about herself. Harris had been watching her dance all evening, and he had seen her with Raymond, and though he had said nothing, and she had asked nothing of him, she did wonder if he was trying to protect her in some way. In the light of the flame, Lizzy saw that his eyes had closed and that his glass was slipping from his hand. She took the glass and put it on the table, and then she stood and looked at Harris, and knowing that she couldn’t leave him in his chair, she shook him awake and said, “Harris, you should go to bed.” She stepped backwards and then turned and left the cabin.