Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Of course.” As soon as he says it, Robert hears the easily inferred subtext: I would not be speaking to you otherwise. He did not intend it.

  But Jimmy does make the inference. “You did your duty,” he says.

  In the thumping finality of Jimmy’s tone, Robert hears his brother’s subtext—So now that you’ve done it, hang up—and Robert regrets his part in turning the call so quickly into this. They’re on the phone together after forty-something years. No matter how it came to pass, why not say a few things? Robert does not hate his brother. He is not angry with his brother. Or even disappointed in him. Over the years Robert has come simply to feel nothing. As if his brother died. Died pretty young—right after college—before the two of them had a chance to mature comfortably into an adult, brotherly friendship. He’s dead, and whatever grieving that entailed is long over with. No one even visits the grave anymore.

  But his brother is alive at the other end of the line. So Robert says, “This isn’t about her.” He pauses, not quite knowing how to further soften things.

  Jimmy says, “Is he dead, then?”

  “No.”

  “Is it all overblown?”

  “No. Just not dead yet.”

  “I have no interest in seeing him. Dead or alive.”

  “I suspect he feels the same way.” This didn’t come out the way Robert wanted.

  Jimmy does not reply. He thinks: At least he’s saying it straight.

  But Robert tries to fix it: “Not that it means a damn thing to anyone, what he feels.” And he thinks: That sounds sarcastic. Critical.

  And Jimmy thinks: So much for straight.

  Robert says, “I admire that in you, not giving that particular damn.”

  “What?” Jimmy draws the word out to clearly mean Bullshit.

  Robert considers bailing now.

  But he doubles down. “I admire it and I share it.”

  “When did that happen?”

  “We’re neither of us twenty-two anymore.”

  “You figure you actually grew out of trying to please him?”

  “The price was too high,” Robert says. He has not put it this way to himself. The banyan and the man in the dark have been too close to him lately. They were big-ticket items on the bill he paid.

  The words surprise Jimmy too. This is an admission he could not have expected.

  The consequent silence between the brothers persists long enough that Robert finally says, “Are you there?”

  “I am,” Jimmy says.

  Robert realizes he is standing at the veranda doors. He does not remember rising and crossing the room. He is looking at his live oak but has not seen it till this moment.

  Jimmy is standing at the kitchen window. A hundred yards off, the white pines are jammed close, side by side, like a cordoned crowd before a burning building. For many years he understood his brother’s defining act that Labor Day afternoon as a betrayal. He thinks: Not from his point of view. It was an act of loyalty. Behind his eyes, he was being William Quinlan’s loyal son. His only son. Of course the price was too high.

  “I won’t come,” Jimmy says.

  “I understand,” Robert says.

  “You know it was different for me with him.”

  “I know.”

  “It was different for me because of how it was for you.”

  Robert might have expected this from Jimmy but not so simply or directly. Where they both now are, in mind and heart, is the result of way too much life lived incommunicado. Robert realizes they’re teetering on the brink of forty-six years’ worth of unexpressed blame and justification, anger and regret, jealousy and insecurity.

  Jimmy has come to much the same realization.

  Neither wants to tumble into all that.

  Both, though, in spite of the telephonic silence swelling in their heads, are reluctant simply to hang up.

  This time it’s Jimmy who says, “You there?”

  “I’m here,” Robert says.

  They know a little something about each other, the knowledge having been arrived at in the same way. At some point in the last few years, at some moment late at night, pajamaed and weak-willed, caught up in the technogeist and visited by a soap-operatic curiosity about the past, each began to Google names. For Robert: the lenient commanding officer at MACV in Hue, who had his own girlfriend in a back alley room and who was glad just to get Robert back alive at Tet, and who died in 1998 after two decades as an insurance executive in Omaha; Lien, who was untraceable; a sloe-eyed girl from high school; and Jimmy. For Jimmy: Mark Satin, the director of the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme; the first woman Jimmy slept with after he and Linda sensibly established how freely free love would remain in their lives; Heather, whose Facebook picture album was full of pub parties and her child; and Robert.

  Jimmy says, “I understand you teach.”

  Only for a moment does it surprise Robert that Jimmy knows something about his present life. He realizes, from his own knowledge of Jimmy, that there need be nothing sentimental about this, much less affectionate.

  “Yes,” Robert says. “At Florida State University. History.”

  “Sounds like where you’d go from Tulane.”

  Robert hears, as well: Not to Vietnam.

  Though Jimmy did not intend this.

  Robert says, “American history. Usually Southern. Early-twentieth-century particularly.”

  “I saw your bio at the school site.”

  “And you make leather goods,” Robert says.

  “I do.”

  “Bags.”

  “And other things. But bags are our specialty.”

  If Robert knows about this, so does their mother, and Jimmy almost adds: So does she own one? But there is no way to ask that and make it simultaneously clear that he doesn’t give a damn.

  Robert almost says something about the glowing reviews and press coverage at Jimmy’s website, about the special things Jimmy does to the leather, but Robert can’t immediately shape those words concisely or clearly and maintain the appropriate tone of benignly tepid small talk.

  And so they fall silent one last time.

  Both men turn from the windows they are facing.

  Then Jimmy says, “You understand?”

  “That you won’t come to see him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell her to let go of this.”

  “I’ll try.”

  Both houses tick with morning silence. The brothers feel the vague impulse to say a little something more before they end the conversation, but neither can possibly imagine what it might be.

  “Good-bye then,” Jimmy says.

  “Good-bye,” Robert says.

  They disconnect.

  Each takes the cordless phone away from his ear and looks at it for a moment as if it were a faded Polaroid found in a shoe box.

  Jimmy’s four women workers have gone off together for their monthly lunch at Mavis’s house and he is glad now to be able to sit at his worktable and have the barn to himself. Linda has not yet checked in with him. It must be going badly at their friends’ house.

  He has taken up his deer tine and his softest square of camel hide and has hunched into the furious burnishing of the edges of half a dozen messenger bags, filling himself with the smell of warming beeswax and edge paint, emptying himself of Robert’s voice and the family he has left behind.

  But shortly he hears the middle bay door creak open and closed. He looks across the floor.

  It’s Linda, and he thinks: Good. The antidote. Whatever of Robert and Peggy and William he has not been able to burnish away will vanish in five minutes with Linda.

  She is flushed from the sun and the cold and sheds her quilted coat as she approaches. Beneath, she is turtlenecked to her chin and is long-legged and slim-hipped in black dress-up jeans.

  She stops before him.

  She strips off her knit hat and shakes her hair down. “Your women are gone,” she says.

&nbs
p; “This is their day for Mavis’s wife to make them venison stew.”

  She obviously hasn’t noticed the phenomenon.

  “A start-ups tradition,” he says.

  “Ah,” she says.

  She grows still, her coat over her arm, her hat in her hand. She is staring at him but he has no sense that she’s seeing him. She’s considering something, he senses.

  Becca no doubt has confided in her. Linda wants to speak of it but has probably made a vow not to. Linda takes that sort of pact seriously.

  “You’ve got a tale to tell,” he says.

  She makes a small sound, deep in her throat. Not quite a sound of assent. More meditative.

  Jimmy waits for Linda to figure out what she’s free to reveal.

  Then she says, “When will they be back?”

  He’s thinking of their friends splitting up and hears this wrong. His puzzlement must be showing. Linda clarifies. “Your women.”

  “My women …” he says, drawing out the phrase to add an unspoken as you oddly insist on calling them, “… usually take an hour and a half or a little longer on stew day. They make it up at the end of the afternoon.”

  “And they left recently?”

  “Twenty minutes perhaps.”

  Linda nods and lays her coat and hat on the near edge of Jimmy’s worktable, and she says, “Then let’s go sit on the couch together for a few minutes.”

  “All right,” Jimmy says.

  He follows her to the south end of the barn and into the break room next to their office.

  “The coffee’s fresh,” he says.

  “I’m good,” she says, and she heads for the flannel chesterfield. He follows her.

  She arranges herself sideways at one end, her legs drawn up beneath her. A long story to come.

  Jimmy sits in the middle of the couch, within reaching distance, holding distance if need be. He turns toward her and waits.

  She is still working something out in her mind. Then she says, “They’re finished, Becca and Paul. Forever and for the best.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jimmy says.

  “No,” Linda says. “It is for the best. For everyone concerned.”

  A recent image of the couple flickers into Jimmy’s head: a restaurant in Toronto, the two of them side by side on the bench seats, Paul’s pugilist jaw and horn-rimmed reader’s eyes, Becca’s ballerina bun and Bardot pout. They are nearly two decades younger than Jimmy and Linda but the four of them are joined together by New Democratic Party politics, halibut fishing on Hudson Bay, and a couples’ chemistry that synthesizes compassion and snark.

  Before Jimmy can consider this image, it flickers out again with Linda reaching into his lap and lifting his hand toward her. She leans to it and kisses him on the very spot where a wedding ring would be if they were to wear them.

  “My darling,” she says as she replaces the hand in his lap.

  But he instantly senses what is happening.

  “I need to go away for a week or two,” she says.

  If he objectively considers this, there is the possibility that she will, as Becca’s best friend, simply stay with her or go away with her to help her through the first wave of trauma over the dissolution of her marriage. Paul is once divorced; Becca has never been.

  But Jimmy understands. Linda is invoking the agreement that allowed the two of them to officially wed. A quarter of a century ago it was what they both wanted, equally, philosophically. It was how they’d sorted out the world together—before marriage and after—with regard to equality and rights and interpersonal power and the nature of love. All these things freely given and received and shared.

  Jimmy has always been content with this.

  He has wanted it.

  But now in the center of his head he feels a hot dilation, like the frame of a Saturday movie serial sticking in the projector and its image splitting and searing and burning through.

  “I’ll be back soon, my sweet Jimmy,” she says.

  He does not say anything.

  This declaration is clearer than is their custom.

  She keeps her eyes on his. Nothing intense in her gaze. This is how it has always been for them. They have always treated each other’s lacunae with loving tact. It is what they want.

  The conversation is meant to stop here.

  They will hold hands. They might kiss. They might even make love now, here on the chesterfield, to assert their abiding connection.

  But the burning is done in Jimmy’s head and there is only a blank screen. A tabula rasa. And from it he asks, “Were you the reason for the breakup?”

  Minutely—but minutely is significant for Linda, Jimmy knows—minutely she flinches. Then she composes herself once more.

  She takes his hand again. “They’ve never meant as much to you as to me,” she says. “You’re not worried about the breakup.”

  She’s right about that. Nor is it the issue. But he does not say so.

  “Nothing has changed between you and me,” she says, squeezing his hand gently.

  Then he hears himself ask another question. “Which of them is it?” He realizes only in the asking that he does not know, could not guess.

  She lets go of his hand, but her voice remains gentle: “I think the way we’ve always handled these things is best, don’t you?”

  Now he asks, “Does the other one know?” But obviously not. Otherwise none of this would now be a surprise to him. He would surely have heard from the excluded one.

  Linda straightens before him, taking a deep breath. Her eyes do not narrow or harden or flare, as they can do when he and she argue. If anything, they soften for him. He feels a twist of admiration over this. Then a tighter twist, of tenderness. And then a sudden chest-clamping regret.

  She says, “Are we wrong, my darling? Surely not. We have always been so smart about this. Love on this earth is not a singularity. It is a profusion. As simple as a kind word at a checkout counter. As complex as you and I. But love always has boundaries. By the parts of us—mind, body, heart—that are involved, or not involved. And to what degree. And for how long. I feel certain this is a partial thing now before me and a brief thing. Our love for each other—yours and mine—is the bedrock for any other experience in this fleeting gift of my life. It’s the same for you, isn’t it? We’ve said so to each other. Often. Aren’t we grateful for that?”

  And at this she lifts her hand and touches his cheek and says, “Whichever of us dies first, I want our lips to touch in that moment.”

  She pauses, and she says, “I love you, Jimmy.”

  She waits, her fingertips lingering on him.

  He can think of nothing to say.

  He is not moving.

  He can’t imagine what’s showing on his face.

  She withdraws her hand.

  She shifts her legs, squares her shoulders to him a bit more.

  She says, “Why don’t you spend a couple of weeks with that girl Heather. She would like nothing better, I’m sure.”

  He still can find no words.

  She says, “Maybe she’ll help you stop worrying about what’s next.”

  Just before noon Robert answers the foyer phone. As he expects, it’s his mother. “Darling, he’s off the morphine drip and starting to wake up.”

  “I’ll be there within the hour.”

  Peggy rightly takes these as his last words and jumps in. “Before you hang up. I’m out in the hallway. I need to ask. Did you try?”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Of course Jimmy.”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “He’s not coming.”

  Robert hopes that will be it.

  He waits for her.

  She waits for him.

  Not for long. “Why are you doing this to me?” she says. “What did he say?”

  “Do you really want details?”

  “Yes.”

  “There aren’t many. We didn’t instantly turn into chums.” Robert hesitates only very
slightly before the lie: “I don’t recall the exact words.” He recalls them quite clearly. “But it amounts to this: Nothing has changed. We all need to let him go.”

  Robert waits for a dramatic sound on the other end of the phone. A stricken word. A sob even. But there’s only silence.

  This troubles Robert more than her usual emoting. Better for her to be angry. She needs to be fighting. He says, “We’re still toxic to him.”

  “Did he say that?” This comes out sharply. Her dukes are up. Good.

  “No,” Robert says. “Not those words.”

  “What words?”

  “I’m not going to be his proxy in an argument with you, Mom. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  “Toxic,” she says.

  “Listen. The only way this thing could have been made right was for Pops to reach out. Not Jimmy. Years ago. At the latest when Carter gave the amnesty. Pops should have told Jimmy to come home. Told him—God forbid—that he understood, that he didn’t condemn him.”

  Robert has said all he intended to, and Peggy delays only long enough to draw a breath. She says, “I am so sick and tired of the men in this family.”

  Robert lets her have her big curtain line unchallenged.

  But she stays on the phone.

  So does he, though she’s no longer on his mind. He wonders at Jimmy, at how firmly he grasped his own life and held it close all these years.

  “Are you still there?” Peggy finally asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Why? Come up here to me.”

  And a short time later he is passing the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church. He turns his face to it, puzzles over what that was all about yesterday morning. A man in coveralls is carrying a ladder along the side of the church building.

  And then the church vanishes with a run of pine along Apalachee Parkway.

  Peggy is waiting for Robert in the hallway outside his father’s room. She steps toward him.

  “Have you been waiting out here all this time?” he says.

  “No,” Peggy says, keeping her voice hushed and flapping her hand at him to do the same. “It’s been an hour. You’ve always been punctual.”