“Come sit by me,” April said.
The primary problem in Reed’s marriage to Maggie had been his own eventual impotence in her presence. The first few years had been marked by a slow tapering off of desire but this hadn’t really bothered Reed. He believed it to be commonplace and attributed it, partly, to the fact of their physical resemblance. They were comfortable and they were friends. It was when Maggie slept with her secretary, a young woman whom Reed never found attractive, that his ability to perform with her stopped altogether. Maggie called it her fifteen-minute flirtation with lesbianism. Reed didn’t know what to call it. One of the worst things about her sleeping with a woman was that there had been no one to lash out at, no one to hit. The event had fueled his fantasy life for months but despite the fantasies, he could not actually bring himself up to the task of sleeping with Maggie.
Reed was too thrilled to go straight to work so he drove around the block and let himself in Maggie’s front door. He called to her and she said she was in the tub and he went back and sat on the toilet across from her. When she saw the look on his face, she said, “Get the cigarettes.”
Neither of them smoked but when they had been married, it had been their habit to keep a pack of cigarettes around for heart-to-heart talks. Reed found them in the refrigerator in the place set aside for storing butter. They smelled musty and antique, relics from their life together. It had taken almost a year to smoke the pack half empty and would probably take another year to finish it.
He lit a cigarette for Maggie and placed it between her lips while she dried her hands. Both of them took a few shallow drags, warming to the conversation, Reed now sitting on the cold tile, leaning his back against the tub. He turned and flicked his ash into the water. Maggie dropped hers on the soap dish and waited for Reed to begin what he had come to tell her.
“I had sex with April Hoffman,” he said, finally, trying to be matter-of-fact.
“You were able to sleep with her?” Maggie said.
Reed ignored this remark, let it hang in the air like the white wisps of smoke on their breath. He felt good. Maggie lifted one leg from the water and ran a washcloth over it, past her knee, along her calf.
“Where?” she said.
Reed took the washcloth from her and helped her wash her foot and ankle. When he was finished Maggie brought the other leg up and he washed it, too, stopping to dip the cloth back in the water and ring it out. He flipped his tie over his shoulder to keep it dry.
“On the floor of the living room,” he said. He was holding the cigarette in his mouth to wash her leg and his voice was funny. “And in the bedroom.”
“Twice?” she said. “Wow.”
“No, just the one time. The floor was uncomfortable so I carried her back to the bed,” he said.
Her foot was slick with soap and slipped from his hands, splashing him, spotting his blue oxford with water. He was holding his wet hands away from his body and squinting from the smoke in his eyes.
“Damn,” he said.
“Sorry,” she said, smiling. “Run the blow-dryer over that. Clear it right up.”
He took a long drag from his cigarette and jetted the smoke in her direction. She flicked the water off her fingertips at him. Beneath the water her body looked wavy and nondescript. Reed stood and plugged in the blow-dryer near the sink and began making savage passes with it over his shirt. He was looking at her in the mirror.
“I guess, now, they won’t sue us for medical bills,” Maggie said.
“What?” Reed couldn’t hear her over the blow-dryer.
“I guess now they won’t sue.”
“On the contrary,” Reed shouted. “I think a suit is more inevitable now than ever. I did, after all, sleep with the man’s wife.”
He laughed and looked at his own reflection, then back at hers over his shoulder. He couldn’t see her face, because of where the tub was situated, just her knees, rising like little islands from the water. He saw her hand appear briefly, drop an ash into the water between her knees and disappear again. His shirt was drying nicely.
“I wish you wouldn’t sleep with her again,” Maggie said.
“What?” Reed said, not hearing clearly.
“Never mind,” she said.
“What?”
Maggie leaned over the edge of the tub to look at him. In the mirror, he could see her face, flushed from being in the water so long, the damp ends of her hair, her breasts pushed against the wall of the tub. Never mind, she said, again, but still he couldn’t hear her. He could see her lips moving but couldn’t understand what she was trying to say.
After some threatening glances and a surreptitious twenty palmed across the counter, the attendant at the pound agreed to let Reed take Hi John outside for a little while. There was a yard in the back where they took the dogs to do their business. Hi John was being kept in a small cage that they used for solitary confinement, hard cases only. He swaggered past the other dogs in the community cage, a different sort of criminal, and they watched him pass, enviously, a little afraid, the way Reed imagined petty thieves goggled at mob assassins.
Reed left his job at the Historical Preservation Society an hour early every day for his visits. Maggie took the afternoons, Reed the evenings. And the two of them, Reed and Hi John, sat at the fence, looking out, watching the streams of passing cars, Hi John’s head turning slowly to follow each one. Reed brought the bones that April Hoffman had left and told his dog about their affair. About April coming over the last three mornings after her husband was gone. Telling him every detail, the way April breathed, deep and slow even at their most excited, the way her hair kept getting stuck to his lips. He liked that he could smell her on his clothes long after she was gone. The telling pleased him as much as the act itself. He asked about Maggie’s visits, too, but Hi John didn’t have anything to say, just listened without comment, cracking the bones with his teeth, the sound like branches snapping off in winter air.
“What do you two talk about out there?” the attendant said, mockingly, as Reed was on his way out.
“Women,” Reed said.
They looked at each other, not speaking. The man opened his mouth, as if to say something, then snapped it shut and went back to the paperwork on his desk. Reed was surprised to find himself disappointed. Outside, the sun was shocking. It was as bright, Reed thought, as he had ever seen it.
A strange thing happened between Reed and Maggie when they got married. They had been living together for a year already and neither of them believed that a ceremony in a church for the sake of their parents would affect their relationship one way or another. Life would be business as usual, Maggie working for the county prosecutor’s office, Reed overseeing the affairs of local Civil War battlefields for the Preservation Society. After dark, they would come home at roughly the same time, alternate nights cooking dinner, watch Let-terman on the couch, make the kind of genial love they had grown used to, filled still with desire but regular and pretty and easy. Something did happen, though neither of them ever mentioned it, and it had nothing to do with the arm of the law or the eyes of God. It was as if a web, a delicate filigree, had been drawn between them and over the things that were theirs. This thing extended, lightly, over their past together and into the future, giving them shape, the way a sheet is thrown over the invisible man in movies to make him visible. Both of them felt it, though they might have described it differently, comforting and terrifying at the same time.
Maggie didn’t want to talk about Reed’s affair anymore, though he desperately wanted to tell her about it. He had to content himself with Hi John’s quiet listening. She still came over at night or he went to her house and they talked of other things. The presentation that Reed was to make tomorrow to potential benefactors for Shiloh battlefield. The case Maggie was trying. But mostly they talked about Hi John.
“I don’t think they’re treating him well enough, do you?” Maggie said. “He looks like he’s lost weight.”
“Maybe he�
��s gone on a hunger strike,” Reed said.
“Don’t joke,” she said. “I’m serious.”
“I love it when you’re serious,” he said.
“Look out,” she said. “Somebody’s being clever. Hit the dirt.”
Maggie punched his arm playfully and he pretended that it hurt. He tickled her ribs and they rolled off the couch in her attempts to escape his fingers. Maggie pulled his hair and bit his shoulders and ears but not too hard and he kept on tickling her until she was in tears. The two of them rolled around this way, bunching the rug beneath them, until Maggie’s leg, in a spasm of laughter, shot out and kicked a glass off the coffee table. It shattered, sprinkling the floor with shards, and brought them to their senses.
“Look what you made me do,” she said. “Idiot.”
Reed said, “You started it. Moron.”
“Imbecile,” she said.
“Ignoramus.”
“Half-wit.”
Later, Maggie fell asleep, leaning back against Reed on the couch with her head on his shoulder, her face turned slightly inward toward his. The television was on but he watched only her for a long time. In the dark, he could see the colors thrown off by the TV, mostly blues and reds, reflected on her skin. He could feel her breath on his neck and beneath his chin. He wanted to kiss her but he didn’t, just leaned forward gently, awkwardly, so that their cheeks were together, the corners of their lips just slightly touching.
April Hoffman called in the morning to tell him that she wouldn’t be stopping by today. She said it just like that. I won’t be stopping by today. Reed played the moment over in his head, then went further back, like rewinding a tape, searching his memory for something he might have done wrong, something he might have said. He couldn’t remember anything. Reed wasn’t certain how he was supposed to feel. He knew he was supposed to feel something. At the time, he was sitting on a high stool in the kitchen, his feet hooked into its rungs, the phone on the wall near him. He felt along his arms, first one then the other, squeezing gently with his fingers, pressing against the bones, as if checking for fractures. At the elbow of the second arm, he stopped, satisfied, and let his mind wander to the coming evening. He smiled, thinking of telling Maggie that his affair was over and wondering how she would react to the news.
On his way to work, Reed ran into Joan Bishop. She was standing at the curb, rifling through the morning’s mail, her hair tied down with a crimson scarf. The spaniel was with her and trotted a circle around the car. He idled behind her and rolled down the passenger window.
“Good morning, Joan,” he said, leaning across the seat, smiling.
She glanced at him over her shoulder and scowled. This time of year her roses were in full bloom, practically glowing on her lawn, open to the morning, each bush surrounded by a small chicken wire fence to keep the dogs away.
“Is there something wrong?” Reed said when she didn’t answer.
“Don’t talk to me,” she said, tucking the envelopes into her purse. She stalked away, up the gently sloping driveway toward her house, swinging her arms angrily. The dog padded along in her wake.
“Mrs. Bishop, wait,” Reed said, putting the car in park and getting out. “Why don’t you like me? What have I ever done to you? Is this about Hi John and your rosebushes? Is this about the dogs?”
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said without looking back.
Reed had been disconcerted by this meeting and believed it was the reason his presentation wasn’t going as well as he had hoped. He began at Shiloh with a bad imitation of A. S. Johnston saying to his officers, “Gentlemen, tonight we water our horses in the Tennessee.” It was a nice beginning, he thought, accenting both the foolish optimism of the Confederates and the poignancy of Johnston’s death in the battle. He drove the man and woman who had come this morning over the field in a golf cart, trying to conjure for them images that would be moving enough to inspire donation. The abandoned campfires, left by Union troops in the face of a surprise attack, coffeepots still warm. The small watering hole where wounded of both sides crawled for a drink, reddening the muddy water with their blood. He showed them the place where Johnston’s officers cradled his head in death. The patch of ground where Beauregard’s tent stood, in which he wrote to Jefferson Davis, “Grant is beaten. Will mop him up in the morning.” Monuments marked each site and Reed paused a moment after he was finished to let them read. He thought if he could just get the telling right, and he told these same sad stories all the time, then they would understand the need for preservation.
“Don’t you think all this glorifies the South’s participation in the war?” the man said. “We have quite a few black employees and I don’t know how happy it would make them to give money to something like this. The South was, after all, fighting to perpetuate slavery.”
“What we are trying to glorify here, sir, is bravery,” Reed said, “on both sides. We want people to come out here and be reminded of how horrible the war was. But also, to recognize the character of the participants. We can learn quite a bit from the past.”
The man nodded but Reed could tell he was still unconvinced. The cart whined up a hill toward a Union graveyard, showing through a knot of trees, and the family there, taking pictures, their little boy holding a souvenir Confederate flag.
The woman said, “This isn’t what I expected. I’m having a hard time seeing the big picture. I think I was expecting a football field or something.”
Reed said, “That’s my point. The whole thing has been trivialized by time. We need to get people out here. To sort of run the history through their fingers, if you get my meaning.”
“I think someone is calling you,” the man said, pointing.
Reed stopped the cart and all of them turned to look. They were parked on a cobbled path that divided a manicured lawn. To their right were rows of dilapidated cannon along a split rail fence and past those, a peach orchard, where pink and white petals blanketed the grass, pulled loose by their own creamy, lustrous weight. In the other direction, they could see a figure running through the trees, spindly white oaks, waving one arm wildly and shouting Reed’s name. He must have cut over from the parking lot. They waited to let him catch up and as he got closer, Reed recognized Bill Hoffman.
“We’re being charged,” the woman said.
“Shit,” Reed said.
“Excuse me?” the man said.
Bill Hoffman reached them, gasping, and stood a moment, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath. He was wearing a suit and tie and his cast jutted out from beneath his sleeve. His fingers were mottled blue.
“What are you doing here, Bill?” Reed said, stepping from the cart.
“Christ,” Hoffman said. “Wait a minute. I haven’t run that far since high school.”
“Bill?” Reed said.
“What?” Hoffman said. “What, goddamnit?”
He glanced up at Reed and their eyes met, just briefly, just long enough for Reed to notice that Hoffman’s eyes were startlingly blue. Pool water blue. April must have told him everything. He doesn’t know what else to do, Reed thought. He knew that feeling, desperate and weak and helpless with loss. They cut the look short at the exact same moment and both of them blushed, faces going hot, each of them having seen something private in the other’s eyes.
“You don’t have to go through with this,” Reed said.
“You slept with my wife,” Hoffman said, still breathing hard. Then to the others, pointing with his cast, “This man slept with my wife.”
They were absolutely still, frozen like awkward bronze monuments.
“Look, Bill, I’m not going to do this. I won’t fight you,” Reed said.
Right then, Hoffman straightened and hit Reed in the temple with his cast. From the ground, Reed could see Hoffman, doubled over in pain, clutching his injured arm to his chest and he could see the sky behind him, pale, brushed occasionally with clouds. He had been about to say, it was an accident, we hadn’t planned anything,
it meant nothing, though all of those things, he knew, were just things you said at a time like that, even if they were true. He had been about to say, I know how you feel, I’m sorry. He didn’t hurt as much as he would have expected, was just sort of dreamy and light. The man was waving his arms, the woman shouting wildly for help. Reed got to his feet, shakily, not knowing what else to do, and kicked Bill Hoffman in the groin. In the process, he lost his balance and fell on top of Hoffman and they began beating each other as best they could in such close quarters, Hoffman with his cast, pulling Reed’s hair with his good hand. Reed held Hoffman in tight so he couldn’t use the cast effectively and butted with his head, used his knees and elbows. They fought halfheartedly, dutifully, almost sadly, doing no less damage to each other for their lack of passion, rolling down a subtle incline, picking up fallen leaves and twigs in their hair and on their clothes, until they fell apart exhausted. The two of them lay on the grass, side by side, Hoffman’s arm, the one with the cast, draped across Reed’s chest, rising and falling to the rhythm of his breathing. Reed wanted to ask Hoffman if, now that he knew, he was still in love with his wife, but he didn’t say anything. After a few minutes, Bill Hoffman pushed himself up and left without another word.
Reed drove to Maggie’s house and let himself in the back door with the key she kept beneath an empty red clay flowerpot. He lay down on the couch in the living room and waited for her to come home. With his eyes closed, he took stock of his injuries. He must have somehow bitten his tongue, because it was swollen and felt heavy in his mouth, and by pressing it against the insides of his cheeks, he discovered a loose tooth. His face burned, as if someone had held him by the hair and dragged it back and forth across thick carpet. There was a throbbing, slow and even and only a little painful, in his temple. He could picture the bruise, a vivid discoloration, spreading back into his hairline, like a tattoo. Reed hadn’t minded the horrified stares that strangers in other cars had given him on his way home. He believed, as surely as he had ever believed anything, that he deserved them. He thought of Joan Bishop, living alone in that house since her husband died. Of the morning she had called him and Maggie into her yard to tell them what Hi John had done. The roses drooping heavily on their stems that day, the petals browning at the edges. They’re so fragile, she had said, they can’t bear even the slightest mistreatment. He had seen Joan Bishop in the rain, another time, tying trash bags over the little wire cages to keep the flowers from being drowned.
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