Hungry for the World

by Kim Barnes

  I felt a new intimacy with David, as though in giving me this story he was allowing me closer to his heart. That boy who had steered the gory hearse home was now the man who taught me to trail in thick cover and listen for the language of birds, who knew the woods as a hermit might, instinctively drawn to the shadows where grouse imagined themselves safe. And that girl who had chased the grouse from their secret places and shot them with BB’s was now a woman seeking a companion, wanting a man who loved what she loved, knew what she needed to know—a man who could find his way into the woods and live there, be happy there, and stay.

  WHEN NOT IN THE MOUNTAINS, David and I went to movies, dined on steak and lobster, had drinks at the bars, where my friends saw me and waved. At first I was embarrassed by David’s gangly, disheveled appearance and by his age, but then I began to feel protective of him. They didn’t know how lovely it was to carry on a conversation about something other than spectacular drunks and fraternity shenanigans. I found myself laughing more, happy to be free of the foolishness of boys.

  Still, I felt I barely knew this man with whom I was beginning to spend every available hour. His desire to be with me was clear. Why, then, hadn’t we moved beyond a simple kiss? The dance of desire I’d braced myself for never happened—not even the first step. David had kept himself from me, intentionally so, not without interest but with absolute control. I wondered if he was afraid, doing this out of old-fashioned respect or some kind of weird hang-up. I had wondered initially if he might be gay, but his attention, even from a distance, was recognizably voracious—something I could almost smell rather than see. Whatever it was, I’d gotten used to it, even comfortable, able for the first time to be alone with a man without worrying that he’d jump me the minute the pleasantries were over. I felt relief from the burden of decision, from the guilt of having given in or having said no, from disappointment and rejection. It was an incredible freedom, one I hadn’t felt since my girlhood, since before that first boy, the preacher’s son, had touched my knee in the parsonage’s dark stairway, whispered in my ear, cleaved me in two with his words of want.

  As David’s celibacy continued, my initial relief grew into an intense curiosity, a hunger I had never felt for John or any other lover. It was not simply sexual; it was intellectual as well. It was a yearning I didn’t recognize but David did—a hunter trained to patience, knowing everything with his eyes.

  ———

  WHEN DAVID FIRST TOOK ME to meet his mother, I believed that I might finally know something more about him than what I’d been able to glean from his stunted narratives. What I found was a strong-boned woman with black hair to her shoulders, a hard smoker, kind but quiet in my presence. The house she and her teenage daughters shared sat at the front of a large lot, sole holdout against the rapid commercialization that surrounded them. The rooms seemed barely inhabited. Dust and smoke had settled onto the lampshades and windowsills in an ancient way, no longer stirred by the current of wind from the doors.

  There was little talk between us that I remember. Nothing seemed safe to offer or ask, as though any question or observation might open a wound, tear the fabric of the present and its fragile balance. I could not say why. There was a tenuousness about the lives lived out in those rooms, some secret kept trapped under the yellowed doilies and mud-stained rugs.

  After dinner I helped David’s youngest sister wash the dishes. She was a tall girl, maybe fourteen, with long hair and glasses—her resemblance to me at her age was startling. I watched David through the window as he made a tour of the weed-ridden backyard, hands in his pockets, the bones of his elbows and shoulders sharp beneath his flannel shirt. He looked suddenly old, worn-out. He must feel responsible, I thought, the only son, the keeper of the family.

  When David came back in, I asked if I could see where his room had been. He led me down a flight of dark stairs, into a small, damp space without windows. Perhaps I’d expected to see the memorabilia of his boy’s life—team posters, an old football, deer antlers hung with baseball caps. Instead, there was a sagging bed and little else.

  “Do you have any pictures?” I asked. I wanted some insight into his life, some proof that we’d walked the same high school hallways, smoked pilfered Marlboros on the same corner lots. He pulled a trunk from the shallow closet, and I felt a twinge of anticipation. He opened it slowly, and what he pulled out was not a yearbook or the stiff, embroidered letters of an athlete, but a cardboard box that jingled with what I thought must be jewelry. Inside, I found a jumble of insignia and medals. I looked at him.

  “Vietnam,” he said, as though in that small container, in the name of the country itself, lay the answers to all of my questions.

  I remembered the peace patches and love beads I’d worn, the POW bracelet, the soldier whose name I’d kept at my pulse. What little else I knew about Vietnam had come via the evening news I watched when visiting my grandmother and from my relatives’ rants against “Hanoi Jane” Fonda. In the church parking lot, I’d seen the bumper stickers: AMERICA—LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT. I came to realize that the government, like my father and the church, did not allow dissent. I’d found that this was yet another thing I could not accept, and I’d cast in my lot with the protestors. When news came of the massacre at Kent State, I’d wept and wished that I had been there to bear witness to such horror or to die at the hands of the oppressor. I had a dramatist’s bent for the tragic—a crusader, a youth pastor once said, for all the wrong causes.

  In David’s trunk I found a sheaf of newspaper clippings that tore between my fingers. I laid them aside and pulled out a photograph. The men I saw there were my age, a year or two out of high school. They looked like boys, all ears and teeth, dirty and slouched in their jungle fatigues, but there was something used-up about them—the way they shrank in on themselves like old men.

  David stood over me. I could smell his smoky breath, the sour permeation of fried meat on his clothes.

  “Which one’s me?” he asked.

  I was already looking at the faces, the eyes, the hands that held the M-16’s. Some of the men were standing, others kneeling—even their height offered no clue.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  David pointed, and still I struggled to make the connection. The young man I saw looked fragile in his skin. I ran my finger across the smooth face. I raised my eyes and looked at David: his long hair, his beard and mustache untrimmed and thick. Only the mask of his eyes and nose was visible, the narrow slit of his mouth.

  I picked up one of the medals, surprised by its weight in my hand.

  “What was this for?”

  David rose from the bed, felt in his front jeans pocket for his lighter. “I was a gunner,” he said, “on a Huey.”

  I shook my head, unversed in the language of war.

  “Helicopters,” David said. “I shot from the door.” He walked to a corner of the room, stood there as though contemplating the walls’ triangulation. He was different now, turning away from me, not looking.

  “We were under fire. This guy had gone down. I told the pilot to circle back. I jumped out, grabbed him, dragged him up into the chopper.” David shrugged. “Made a big deal out of it. Wasn’t anything I thought about. I just did it.”

  I picked up the bundle of newsprint, saw the word HERO in large print.

  “Come on,” David said. “I want to get home.”

  I replaced the medals, the ribbons and pins, folded the box back together, closed the trunk lid. I followed David back up the stairs, through the rooms with their quiet light, seeing the photographs on the walls of young men and women I didn’t recognize, their faces, necks, and shoulders airbrushed into gauzy pastels, delicate blues and pinks and yellows, sweaters and ties, pearls and lapels—like the high school portraits of my mother and father during that time before the war that wasn’t a war, when the world seemed a sure place, when the soldiers came home to gold stars in the windows. I thought then of the words I myself had used in protest—Baby killers; Remem
ber My Lai.

  Front line, I know now—the death and suffering, the trauma heaped on men too young to have yet made for themselves a life to balance such terror. What so many brought back with them was not a sense of victory or even pride but a desperate need to continue the methods of escape they’d learned while in country: LSD and heroin, barbiturates and hashish, Jack Daniels and Cuervo Gold. Brought back with them, too, the skills necessary to their survival—the wariness and hair-trigger reactions, the ability to remain silent and still—along with the codes that defined their continued existence: take the pain; extract what pleasure exists in the moment; the whole fucking world is your enemy.

  I thought I could save David from the wreckage of his past, somehow give back to him all that his family and country had stolen. That night, when he dropped me at my door, I reached for his arm when he turned to leave, pulled him gently against me, as though I still believed my touch alone were enough to heal. The porch light caught his eyes as he bent stiffly to accept my kiss, then he stepped away, and I knew that there was nothing I could do or say that would keep him there.

  When the lights of his pickup had disappeared around the corner, I found my way through the darkness of my living room and into my kitchen. I did not want the stark brilliance of the lamps and fixtures; if I could not have David with me, what I wanted was muted solitude so that I could think, consider, decipher. I’d never met anyone like him; he seemed nearly unknowable. For that reason alone, he drew me. He was a riddle, a conundrum—one I believed I could understand if I applied myself more diligently.

  Sitting on my kitchen counter, the window wide open and letting in the night air, I began to wonder what it would take to make him let go his control. If, only moments before, my own desire had been to salve his emotional wounds, what I felt now had less to do with easing his pain than bringing him to a point of sensual distress. I had to know where his weakness lay; I had to know what might tempt him.

  SUMMER COMES EARLY to Lewiston, and the fast heat pulled me to the open doors. The bank was boring me with its rigid schedule; the elderly customers irritated me with the pennies they hoarded and asked me to count.

  John, perhaps out of regret or a delayed sense of propriety, continued to show up at my door, sorrowful and longing for things to be as they once were. Whatever claims he had on me were yet another thing I yearned to shake. I worried that David might be offended, put off by such baggage. But rather than demand that I save my attention for him alone, David encouraged me to keep seeing John and to date other men, and if at first I thought this odd, I came to see it as a mark of his maturity and self-confidence.

  But there was no one else I wanted to be with, no one whose company I wanted to keep more than David’s. With him, I could move freely between those parts of myself that had for so long remained disconnected; with David, I felt independent, nearly equal. I could be both masculine and feminine, physical and cerebral. Unlike some men, he was never intimidated by my knowledge or my questions, whether they pertained to Remingtons or Rastafarianism. Like my father, he was at ease with himself, it seemed, believing that there was nothing he could not know and understand, no place in the world he could not walk. It was not that he said so—there was a certain modesty about him—but it was there, that belief he had in his own absolute presence.

  For me, David represented a new life, a life still grounded in the steadying clay of my childhood—the forest, the rituals of the hunt, the patriarchal guidance. He gave me a sense of new direction, away from the boredom, the loneliness, the everyday sameness of workdays and weekends. His job as a truck driver spoke of travel, of journey. He brought me trinkets from Seattle: a small grass basket that smelled of sandalwood; a necklace of threaded shells. He came and went, crossed over and back, and I longed to go with him, free and wandering but not lost. The road was his home, he said. He was a bum, a hobo on wheels, while I stood like an inmate behind the bars of my cage, nine to five, five days a week. The windows through which I viewed the world were double-paned, wired and taped, draped and shaded from ceiling to floor. The doors were heavy with locks. In the basement the walk-in safe yawned open each morning, revealing walls of metal boxes, each doubled-keyed, each holding its priceless contracts and securities.

  I wanted out.

  A friend, a local life insurance agent, suggested I try and get on with her company. It sounded wonderful: make my own hours (sleep in, work late), take prospective clients to lunch, have my own office and phone, be free of immediate supervision and the daily pressure of counting every last dime. All I had to do was convince people they needed a policy. I might make enough money to rent a bigger apartment and buy the little green Mercury Capri I’d seen parked along the road with a FOR SALE sign in its window.

  When I turned twenty that May, David feigned shock. “I was dating a teenager,” he said, and smiled.

  Reaching such a milestone gave me even more reason to shift gears, steer my life toward something less sedate than tallying and retallying miscalculated bank statements. And there were other things I longed to leave behind: fueled by alcohol, the simmering quarrels between John and his father had turned vicious. When John packed his bags and left home, his mother called me. “It’s your fault,” she said. “You talked him into this. You’ve turned him against us.”

  I gave up protesting. Let them blame me, I thought. It would make it easier on all of us. Now I had an excuse: John’s mother hated me; we wouldn’t be able to work together. I placed the phone in its cradle, waited a few seconds, then dialed Mr. Paul. I told him I was quitting. I wouldn’t be there to open come Monday.

  I never said good-bye to Charlene, who might have told me a thing or two about the course my life was taking. Perhaps she had been there already. Perhaps she knew I wouldn’t have listened.

  I SOLD MY IMPALA and took out a loan on the Capri. I cashed in my benefits from the bank and bought a convincing briefcase, an A-line skirt that meant business, and a pair of solidly built pumps. I left my sink at the window and moved into a larger apartment with a shower, garbage disposal, and air conditioning, part of a complex inhabited mostly by elderly women who tended their sidewalk gardens with meticulous care. Hollyhocks, marigolds, double-blooming mums, parsley, lavender, and chives sprung up around every corner bedroom except mine. I knew they disapproved of everything about me—John’s sporadic midnight knocking at my door, his loud imploring, David’s shoulder-length hair—and I knew as well that they kept a sharp eye on all my comings and goings. I would see the red gingham curtains of Mrs. Daniels, my closest neighbor, part with a jerk, then drop in decisive disgust. I ignored her scowls as David helped me ferry my belongings, ignored her repeated rap of protest against the wall as David helped me hammer together my bedstead and hang my rifle rack on the wall. I was pleased that he was there to see me reappointing my life, on my way toward something better.

  The next week I began making calls to relatives and high school classmates. I met them for lunch, for drinks after work. I showed up in my new clothes, stylishly dressed. I paid for their sandwiches and beer, sold a few policies. The insurance company fronted me a loan until my commission came through, which I spent to catch up on utilities and car payments. When that was gone, I called my creditors, got extensions, promised full payment soon. I lived on Top Ramen and toast. I smoked away my hunger. On Wednesdays David took me out for dinner, and sometimes he cooked for me, his lean body bent over the oven, pulling out venison roast and pepper gravy.

  It was not until the heart of the summer that I realized there was a reason my accounts weren’t soaring; I was not comfortable cajoling people into buying what I was selling. It wasn’t worth it, I thought—the hours spent going through high school annuals, newspaper announcements of births and marriages, the phone book. The perpetual pleasantries, the superficial conversations, the veneer of goodwill and genuine interest. Even when the contracts were signed, the sheaf of papers folded and tucked into its vinyl cover, I felt less fulfillment than I did phonines
s. I left the office nearly nauseous, unable to imagine the next call, the next meeting, the next sincerity-laced pitch, until, finally, I sat for hours in front of the telephone, thinking that I’d dial the number in five more minutes, then ten, waiting for the courage and conviction that never came.

  Instead, I called my cousin Les and asked her to meet me for a drink. I’d already hit Les up for a $10,000 policy. She’d taken out $20,000 instead, betting she’d die before the company could realize a dime off her premiums. A year out of high school, she was living with Marc, once a state-champion wrestler and now a lumberjack, a man I believed might hold his own against her if push came to shove.

  We met at the Airport Lounge, where we sat drinking Fogcutters—thick, green concoctions made of seven different kinds of alcohol that went down easy. Drink four, the bar’s mantra went, and if you can still walk, the fifth one’s on us. There were bills to pay, yet here I was, spending my last ten dollars on a surefire hangover.

  I told Les I couldn’t stand the calls to friends, asking for a few minutes of their time, peddling policies for something no one really wanted to think about. Let’s talk about death, or perhaps only dismemberment, the loss of a limb or an eye. I felt like a parasite, sucking away whatever goodwill existed between me and those I could only see as potential clients.

  “To hell with selling insurance,” Les said. “Do something else.”

  “Like what? What else is there to do in this town?”

  “I don’t know,” Les said. “Be a secretary or something.”

  What I knew about Les was that she would never sell life insurance or be a secretary. Les’s goals ran toward risk and wealth, and the men in that room knew it; the swish of her legs crossing stopped their conversations mid-sentence. I envied the ease of her command, the way she both absorbed and ignored the men’s concentrated attention.

  We drank ourselves into bravery that night, the kind of bravery we needed to go home and face the lives we had fashioned for ourselves. Sometimes, when Marc and David were working out of town, Les and I spent the night together as we had when we were girls, sleeping in the same bed, whispering our secrets long past midnight. But the secrets we told were no secrets at all—the true secrets would come later, in the years ahead when Les’s life would twist and contort into a knotted story only she can tell, and my own life would become a narrative of shame.