Perfume River

by Robert Olen Butler

  Robert embraces this understanding. And with it returns the moment at a corner table in the bar on Magazine Street when it was late enough and they both were lubricated enough and the lights in the place were localized enough and dim enough that he and his father seemed all alone in a dark recess, but there was still enough light from somewhere that when his father turned his face slightly, Robert saw the man’s eyes beginning to fill and he thought to reassure him, even though Pops surely understood already, from his own war and from what Robert had just said about his job and duties in Vietnam, but Robert was moved by his father’s worry, and he added, “It’s all right. I’ve got a job inside the wire. I’ll be safe in Vietnam. It’ll be like research. I’ll get home safe.” His father did not speak, did not turn back to him, and the tears that had come to his eyes began to fall. Robert had never seen his father weep. Robert could easily have wept then as well, but he was keenly aware that the pride and appreciation in his father’s tears would be diminished by tears of his own. Robert needed to maintain the composure of a soldier. And he did. He cut the tears off, and he waited for his father to be himself again. Which, slowly, silently, the man became, and they drank some more and then some more, and they did not speak to each other again of war. Not on that evening. Not ever. Not about their personal experience of it.

  But now.

  As a seventy-year-old Robert finds himself as needy and eager to please this man as an adolescent. So he edges his chair as close to the bed as he can. He leans toward his father. He says, “Whether it’s over politics or over religion, it all comes down to whatever nasty gene humans carry that makes us go to war. But once a war’s on, it takes warfare to stop it. From a distance both sides on a battlefield look alike. That doesn’t mean one of them isn’t justified in being there.”

  Though animated by his teenage self, Robert has spoken in the voice of the man he is. And he has heard himself. He thinks: I don’t believe half of that. Not in the way it came out. And his fuller belief hurtles through him, that the very waging of a righteous war, even the very winning of that war, can trigger the dark gene. So the winners go on to fight unrighteous wars. And maybe that’s the real gene that causes all the trouble. The one encoded for righteousness. Politics and religion and just the pure waging and winning of wars all share that.

  But it makes no difference. The Robert who edged his chair toward his father didn’t want to make a nuanced point. His intention was deeper and simpler. Two men. Sharing what they did, what they are. That Robert finds his voice now: “Pops, it’s okay. For us both. We had to go to war. You and I did what we could.”

  And this turns Pops’s face back to him.

  They look at each other.

  Robert waits.

  William struggles with something. Then he says, “I’ve held this inside for a long time.”

  He pauses.

  Robert quickens.

  And William says, “I lost one son utterly.”

  Jimmy.

  Robert regrets that it has to be in contrast to his brother, but he longs for what’s next so much that he puts this regret aside. He even draws a good breath now at how Jimmy has made him even more important to his father.

  And William says, “So I’ve held my tongue. But the truth is you didn’t go to war. You went through the motions. But you turned it into graduate school. You contrived a comfortable place on the edge of the action to go study. You didn’t even let the army decide your fate. You wangled your safe little job with a pre-enlistment deal and avoided the real thing. You told all the others who manned up, ‘Better you do the dirty work, not me. Better your blood than mine.’”

  Robert falls back in his chair in enervated stillness. He would rise, he would go, but he remains.

  His father says, “And look where you put me. What could I have said to you? How could I argue for my son to risk death? How could I do that to your mother? And what would it say about you, that I should have to talk you into it? You already chose.”

  William stops talking.

  He keeps his eyes on Robert.

  Robert is looking at the distant tops of the pines.

  “I probably should have taken this to my grave,” William says.

  Robert does not reply. He thinks he sees the trees quaking. Even from this distance. The wind must be strong today.

  “It’s all over anyway,” William says.

  Robert turns to his father. “I’m sorry I disappointed you.”

  He regrets saying this. He should argue the point. Or he should rise and go without speaking. He should not give a damn what his father thinks. They are both old men. But he has said it. And now, though he regrets this even more, he waits for his father to dispute him: No, Robert. No not at all. I’m not disappointed. I’ve come to be glad. Glad you’re alive. Your brother’s act is my only shame. You did go to Vietnam, after all. I’m proud of you.

  But his father says nothing of the sort. He has already made himself clear.

  Tet comes to mind.

  But Robert has never said a word about what haunts him. His father would only be critical of that. Of course the scholar, having tried to create his comfortable little place, would be haunted by an act that any real soldier, any real man, would have understood as necessary, inevitable, righteous. Would have done proudly.

  When Hue was secure and the men queued through one long night for a phone call home, Robert told his parents only that he was okay. MACV was not overrun. He was safe.

  And later, when the family was safely reunited in America, there were no Vietnam war stories. None offered. None sought. As it had been, mostly, for his father and his war. Robert convinced himself that his own silence was another thing that bound him to his father, that made the man proud.

  And now Robert’s words hang in the air between them. Robert looks away from this man. Back to the trees, the sky.

  William isn’t speaking.

  Robert finally looks at him.

  His father’s eyes are squeezed shut. He is writhing minutely in physical pain. Silently.

  “I’ll get the nurse,” Robert says.

  He rises. He walks out of the room. He stops at the nurses’ station and tells the first nurse who looks at him that William Quinlan is hurting.

  Then he goes down in the elevator and crosses the lobby and pushes through the door and finds his car and gets in.

  He sits for a moment quaking like the tops of the pines all around him.

  And he drives away.

  Darla sits at her desk, fingers poising over her keyboard and then falling away, again and again, trying to signify with her words what it was that she felt before the Confederate monument yesterday, what it was that she understood; but trying first to distinguish her understanding from her feeling; and as she fails at that, trying to decide whether trying to distinguish understanding from feeling isn’t, in fact, a fallacy, whether the very act of intellectualizing what was signified by the monument doesn’t, in fact, miss the whole point. Which brings her to the kiss. The kiss she gave her husband this morning.

  She parted her lips to him. But she placed the kiss on his cheek. Would she have preferred his lips? Yes. Is that preference associated with her fingertips poised but inoperative once again over the keyboard? Perhaps. Yes. After her communion yesterday with the fair and faithful ladies of nineteenth-century Florida, the ardor of her lips longed this morning for Robert’s mouth. But she understood him: With his father on his mind, it was hardly the right moment. Her thought trumped her feeling.

  Her hands fall.

  Still, if she’d kissed him on the lips would she have the right words now for this thing her ladies built?

  She lifts her hands once more, curls her fingers over the keys.

  The front door latch clacks. He’s home.

  She has left her office door open for this. An invitation to him.

  The rustle of him now in the foyer.

  She puts her hands on the desktop.

  She waits.

 
; She hears nothing.

  She turns in her chair.

  He has not silently appeared. Perhaps he assumed the open door of her office meant that she was elsewhere.

  Or perhaps he needs to be alone. This is an interpretation she expects to wish to be true. She shouldn’t want to hear about his hospitalized father, a man she has always found insufferable. But, in fact, she wishes Robert had understood the open door and rushed to it.

  He has done no such thing.

  And her mind, following along in its own path, yields this: William Quinlan is the product of a victorious army, its monuments boilerplated with conventional self-congratulation.

  She turns back to her computer. But she looks beyond its monitor, through the window, out to the live oak. This tree was already massive when her ladies were composing their words. She invites them. She arranges them beneath her oak, their skirts spread out around them, basket lunches at hand.

  Unexpectedly, they turn their faces to her.

  And she rises to look for her husband. She steps from her office. She moves along the hallway, past the foyer, and she stops at the bottom of the staircase. She listens upward.

  But the sound that catches her attention is the ricochet chirp of a cardinal. Distant, but not a sound to be heard from where she is standing.

  She steps into the living room.

  At the far end a French door is open. Robert is framed there, his back to her. He stands very still, looking out to the oak.

  She remains still as well. She watches him for what feels like a long time.

  Then his head dips abruptly down. Something has finished in him. He turns and starts at her presence.

  “Sorry,” she says, moving toward him.

  He steps in. “I didn’t know where you were,” he says.

  They approach each other but stop short, not touching for a moment as she tries to read him and he tries to collect himself. She looks him carefully in the eyes, his green eyes, which she resolved to do night before last in the bed, in the dark, drawn into a long-set-aside memory. How deep their color seemed to her when they first met, but they are paler to her now, green but not Monet green at all. Were they ever? Have they diminished over the years, gradually, she simply never noticing? Were they never what she thought? Or is this grief she sees in them?

  She steps into her husband, putting her arms around him, turning her face and laying her head against his shoulder, telling the ladies beneath the oak to hush.

  He pulls her gently close.

  The two of them say nothing till they pull apart just as gently.

  She looks again into his eyes. They are saturated but unblinking, refusing to express a tear.

  “What’s happened?” she asks, instead of asking more directly, Has he died?

  Robert’s eyes stay fixed on hers but his head twitches ever so slightly to the right. She takes this as: Happened? He broke his hip is what happened. What he’s really thought does not, of course, occur to Darla: Happened? How do you know? Has he said these things about me to you?

  She tries to clarify. “I thought perhaps he took a turn for the worse.”

  “He’s bad enough.”

  “I understand,” she says, feeling clumsy, caught in the implication that Robert’s sadness could be caused only by his father having died. She assumed that mere suffering would simply bring out the abrasive worst in William Quinlan, a worst that would primarily irritate Robert. “He must be in a lot of pain,” she says.

  Robert simply shrugs.

  Something has happened, she decides. Just not death. Now she assumes it’s something William has said. But other than expressions of quotidian grumpiness or reflex jingoism—none of which, surely, would affect Robert like this—she cannot imagine what.

  Robert turns away, wishing to sit down. Only once, many years ago, did he voice his delusion to Darla. He submitted to her his father’s pride in his Vietnam service to help explain how he ended up a soldier in the war that this beautiful and righteously impassioned woman despised. And he submitted it along with a manifestly mature clearheadedness about his need for his father’s approval, which allowed the delusion to be unquestioningly shared by them both.

  His first impulse is to sit in his reading chair. It’s angled away from everything in the room except the French doors. It faces the oak, which is on his mind. He has never said a word to Darla about killing the man in the dark. He has never said a word to anyone. He is weary and he wants his chair for the privacy of his present thoughts. But he does not want to snub his wife. So he moves to the sofa, which also faces the veranda, and he sits there at one end.

  Darla has watched him make this choice. She senses he’s made it to acknowledge her presence. But he does so without looking her way, without saying a word, and he has placed his back to her. So she circles the sofa but stops at the far end. “Would you prefer some privacy?” she asks.

  He looks at her. “No,” he says. “Sorry. I just needed to rest.”

  She sits too. Not next to him but not quite apart.

  They say nothing.

  Darla will not press him for words.

  Robert’s mind is full of them: It would be better if I’d fully earned his scorn in the way he pictured me. If I’d stayed behind the walls of MACV that night and never killed. Or simply killed from there in an indeterminate way, as I may have done sometime during the next few days, spraying rifle fire with others into trees and building facades and down the street, aiming at muzzle flash. It would even be better if I’d not gotten lucky that first night: not found my way to the gates of MACV; not arrived in the middle of a battle lull with the right cries and somebody to hear them so I could make a dash to the gate; not dodged, at the last moments, some surprised enemy fire. Better if I’d simply died that first night trying to get back. Would my father, to his surprise, have perceived some sort of courage in a dead body in the street with a pistol in its hand? Would he? Of course he wouldn’t. Of course not. He would have known my actions for what they were: headlong flight into cover, more proof of my instinctive cowardice. But at least I never would have heard about it. Fuck you, Pops. Fuck you.

  And in the lull from a heartfelt fuck-you, Robert becomes aware of his wife next to him. He turns his face to her.

  Gazing beyond the veranda as a pair of mated cardinals spanks across the yard, Darla senses Robert at once and looks at him.

  And the lull in him ceases. He looks away from her, but she has replaced his father in his head. It wasn’t until we’d had sex, until we were quiet at last and slick with sweat, that I explained my work in Vietnam, my work so like research, my work so unlike that of a man who was ready to kill for his country. But when she’d finally asked how it was for me there, my carefully arranged job was all I spoke of. All she wished to know. She was relieved. I was no killer but I was no coward. I was perfect for her. She was glad I was alive. What would she have thought if I’d gone on to tell her about my man in the dark? If I’d told her how I killed a man when he might have been anyone? How he frightened me, so I shot the man down. Decades later she would bitterly criticize two high-profile Florida cases of men acquitted of murder for standing their ground. Back then, at the beginning for us, in her antiwar passion, would she have gotten up at once and gone to the bathroom and closed the door and washed me off her body forever? Or because she was already falling in love with me would she have been glad I hadn’t taken the risk?

  Something in Robert fillips a perverse little impulse into his mind: Tell her. Tell her now. Tell her you killed this man. But tell her as if this were your old man sitting here next to you. Give it to her with the spin he might actually respect, a spin I fervently wish were true: I was alone on what constituted a battlefield in Vietnam. So I did what men do on a battlefield. I may have gone to Vietnam to minimize my risks, but when the real war came to me, I stood in the dark alone and raised a steady hand and I killed and I’m content with that.

  The impulse lingers in Robert for a few beats. If in response she
flares at him, if she throws aside her supportive concern for him, even as his father is dying, and vociferates the politics of pragmatic pacifism, if she declares her deep disappointment in him and vanishes into her office for the night, then Robert would know: By the same tale his father might soften; his father might approve; his father might reconsider.

  And all of this suddenly sounds crazy to him. Crazy that he still gives a goddamn about his father’s regard. Crazy that he’d even fantasize about saying something that risks his wife’s love. Crazy that his obsession over the first man he killed—with such mitigating circumstances—should have renewed itself all these decades later. Crazy to think that the twenty-three-year-old in 1968 has anything whatsoever to do with the man he is in 2015. And this last thought instantly seems crazy to him the other way round as well, that the twenty-three-year-old should have anything but a deep connection to the seventy-year-old. He is a historian, after all.

  This facile chaos of thoughts beclouds a simpler truth he has ignored for decades: He could never have won the respect—never have won the love—of both his wife and his father. He always had to choose.

  He lifts his arm, presses his wrist hard against his forehead.

  Darla watches. She edges closer to Robert and arrives at the wrong conclusion about the gesture: He is moved by his father’s suffering.

  Robert is wrong about her, as well. If he were to say what he thought to say a few moments ago, even spun for his father’s approval, he would not have risked her love. Would not even have done so in 1968. She did not ask for the details of his military service—though she knew she must eventually—until she could sleep with him at least once.

  She wanted him strong-handed and even rough and she wanted to feel in the midst of it that this man might have been a killer. Wanted him that way but it was okay because it was by her desire, by her initiation, by her permission that he was fucking her. She was in control of the pounding of him inside her. It was she clutching him tight and it was she crying out for more and for harder and so it was okay, she was the boss. And she could assume he’d been a killer, but that was in another country, and here and now, in this bed in America, she had the power to reform him. She had the power to forgive him, a man who killed and maybe killed some more and killed and killed. Dangerous as he was, he needed her. He needed her to bring him back even from that.