Bob, Maggie, Sarah—you think about all the soap-opera triangles you've seen. Maggie doesn't agree it's a triangle, says it's a square. Sarah's a nurse at the hospital, has many emergencies. Bob is a doctor, lawyer, and successful architect, runs a women's magazine on the side. The two women are wonderful, but different; Bob is different, but wonderful. Everyone is attracted to everyone. Suddenly Sarah inexplicably murders Sylvia, Bob's second wife's first husband's fiancée; Sylvia comes back in dreams, gives Sarah a case of the nerves. Sarah confesses, goes to jail, is found insane in a court of soap-opera law. She studies anthropology while in jail, and Maggie assists Bob at the magazine, starts her own talk show for women.
When Sarah gets out of jail, she and Maggie often meet for coffee, discuss Bob. Oblivious to this, Bob goes on business trips where he has many adventures and close calls with girls on the demographic bubble who look alike and want to be stars in the soap operas. Finally, Bob learns that he's adopted, which makes him sad. Sarah reveals she once knew someone who was adopted. Maggie has a baby, puts it up for adoption. Sarah gets a job at the courthouse.
Amazingly, one day the adopted child comes back and wants to talk to Maggie. The child is now seventeen although everyone else on the soap opera has only aged two weeks. Naturally, Bob, Sarah, and Maggie are astonished. They meet for coffee. Someone steps up and asks Bob to sing, so he does, to the astonishment of the regulars in the nightclub, bar, and/or lunch counter. It turns out Bob is not really Bob—he is David. The bad news is he isn't really a doctor; the good news is he isn't really adopted. David goes to jail for not being Bob. Sarah asks, "But where is Bob!"
"He's getting carried away," Maggie Howe says. The ambulance was very well lighted, large gray whales swimming. I have no clear recollection of the following week.
Later Marguerite tried to cheer me up by telling me how this event had really been the turning point of the whole evening. The group loved it evidently, having a body among them. Late arrivals, she said, assumed it was a gangland hit which missed and some poor bastard from Texas got nailed by accident. She did satires on the artists—the artists wanted to believe, man, that there had been an affair, man, and this babe had kept a secret from this dude too long, man, you know, and he had doggedly sought to learn the truth. She had resisted, and he took her arm, man, sex you know, and he started using this big-guy weight on her, man, and she says enough of this shit and she pulls this little silver piece out of her purse and pop, Jack, she blows him away. Went down like a goddamned tree. Dumb oil company guy anyway. Forget it.
According to Marguerite, it took forty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. On Tuesday, when I woke up, the doctors were on the golf course and a nurse—Bunny, I called her—with a small but crucial chip out of her nose and pointy glasses bent over me and said, "Well hello." Through her white dress I could read the designer's name on the elastic band of her bikini panties.
"What happened to me?" I asked her. No answer.
"Sarah's gone back to Chicago," Marguerite told me when she came to visit.
"What happened?" I asked her.
"Sarah said she was real sorry," Marguerite told me. "She said she didn't know why she did it. She said when she threw it she never thought she'd actually hit you. She said she saw red when she realized you were doing your thing again. She said you really bled and you never seemed like the kind of person to bleed."
I sat up, realizing I was in a hospital. My bed was surrounded by airy yellow curtains. "What happened to me?" I asked her again.
"We covered for you at home—bad fall at a party, nothing serious, you were lucky, home by Friday. Your wife bought it, we think."
"Am I okay?" I asked her. I couldn't see straight. I wasn't sure I could move my toes. She started to talk past my question again. I took hold of her arm. "I need to know what happened to me."
Pretty eyes, she looked down at me. "You got your head bashed, Bob."
You think about women. You know women aren't everything, but once in a while you think they might be. The Sarahs and the Maggie Howes, their pretty smiles and their knitted brows of concern, their hair flying in your eyes. Most of the action is mental, make no mistake. While you may bump into them at the bookstore, they may never know you exist and that you love them. Perhaps no one knows how happy it makes you just to see them walk by. You stare at waitresses. You crane your neck in heavy traffic. You become what they call a womanizer.
While I was in the hospital, Marguerite and I had several nice chats, and later she helped me get my things at the hotel and took me to the plane in her little green Rabbit. By that time I knew the whole thing had been a drunken mistake and that she wasn't my UVa fantasy girl, but she was nice, no doubt about it. She lectured me about my chauvinism.
"What's a woman to you?" she asked. She smiled at me, mercifully. "For you a woman is someone to make you feel like a boy. It isn't good for you, Bob, all these lies and deceptions. Think how it makes the women feel, your wife and everybody. Settle down. Get some character."
This is how intimate we got. Marguerite Howe has my blood in the cracks of her hardwood floor. And she told me to get some character.
I went home and cultivated a lull in my life. I imagined my brain was healing. I operated at a basic level. I decided to stop loathing my job and wanting to rush through the office vomiting into the typewriters. I tried to be faithful and truthful. My wife and I went out to eat a lot. I made it a point to eat basic foods, drink to a basic excess, stay away from the girls at the office and on the road, stop watching the waitresses, concentrate on business, and, also, I took up running. I was a little depressed, and I think now that running was a last-ditch attempt to die a heroic and dynamic premature death rather than the shameful, guilty, regressive, gluttonous, wearisome, promiscuous, and despicable premature death I was headed for. I was feeling guilty about my life, and I was thinking a lot about dying.
A shrink once told me at a party that I should give up drinking and align myself with the stars. I guess that's how those guys work. They say something like that to you and it stays in your head because they're a shrink, and later it occurs to you that you might know what they mean. I decided the reasons I was fading so fast were work, drinking, lying, late nights and pretty girls on the road, and, finally, bad organization.
I decided to address head-on, with a high heart and an eye to the future, the problem of bad organization.
I sorted everything. It was a long-range project. Sorting and labeling. I didn't just label things; I labeled the shelves I put them on. I bought staplers and note cards and a couple of two drawer filing cabinets for the home. I had a different stack of note cards for each category of my life. Every paper clip had its place. This went on for several months. There was no doubt about it. It was a large glass, and Sarah had hit me right on the button.
In the meantime, back at work, I was doing even more driving than I used to. After Carl Palmer died on the Blue Ridge in that 727, I wasn't interested in airliners. I leased a Buick and spent my thirty-second year on "cruise."
One day in the spring of the year following the Marguerite Howe disaster, somewhere between Junction City, Kansas, and Denver, I looked into the rearview mirror and there, driving a dark blue BMW, was a beautiful woman, her hair flying in the wind, chic sunglasses, peering coyly around me. When she passed, I watched for her to look my way and I think she might have, just for a second.
I tried to imagine what she must be like, and where she must be going. I tried to imagine the silk threads in her voice, the warm breath. We were on a big four-lane, and I commenced to play a game. For no reason I would signal to change lanes, and move over into the left lane. I was about a quarter of a mile behind her. When we would come to little rise in the road, in which for only a moment we would be obscured from one another, I'd take that moment and switch real quick into the other lane again. For half an hour I did this, supposing that she was watching my every move in her mirror.
Finally, as I was cruising along in t
he right-hand lane, I repeated the process again, signaling so she could see, shifting lanes, then waiting for the rise. When it came, I shifted real quick into the right lane again. When I topped the rise so I could see her, I saw to my absolute glee that she had switched to the left lane. And all the way to Denver we were never in the same lane again. I would switch, she would switch to the other. It was a coded conversation of some kind, a dance. Sometimes I would pass her and speed up ahead, and at the first rise I'd switch lanes. In the flat again I'd look back and see that she had switched, too.
Once, and this was the real surprise, I had to get off the four-lane to get gas. I knew the game was over, but I had no more gas. When I came down the entrance ramp back onto the highway—I couldn't believe my eyes—she was parked on the shoulder waiting and rushed off again ahead of me to play some more.
On the outskirts of Denver we came to a moment that, I guess, had been inevitable all along. The moment designed to resist loss. We were on a city street by this time, and finally she signaled to pull into a big, empty parking lot. Which she did. After seven hours of this strange game, there was the desire to meet, to say hello. As I went by, I saw her watching me in the mirror. I saw the realization hit her that I was not turning in, that we wouldn't meet. She looked down. I drove on, washed away in traffic. Five minutes later I changed my mind and went back, but she was gone, of course.
Anyway, I'm in a restaurant alone, on the road. I'm watching waitresses. Several of them are clustered in a back booth (all the booths are vinyl, cracked at the wear points). And here comes another one, evidently off-duty. Mary Proletary, I call her in my mind. Bless her—see how she scans the place when she comes through the door. Either she knows herself in some solid, truckstop way, or she doesn't but doesn't know she doesn't.
Anyway, you can tell she pulls no punches. Her cheeks are rosy; she's still young. She isn't a quasi-professional like me, carrying flip charts and slide-tape programs around in her trunk—a labor guy, trying to live the executive illusion. Mary doesn't have to consult, tell people what they already know so they'll pay her. She never has to use the term "application oriented" in anything she does. She never says "bottom line."
She comes into the place in her off-hours—I wonder why. I watch her. She's showing the other waitresses pictures of her baby. They peer down through cigarette smoke and black eye liner. They smile and laugh together, rubbing shoulders as they huddle over the picture. It's interesting to watch them look at her. I'll bet they wonder about Mary, and Mary's boyfriend, whom I estimate to be a trucker from Memphis.
Mary is wearing a sundress, and I can see the straps from her bathing suit Xeroxed into her skin. Her hair is frizzed and peroxide reddish blond. Her walk is steady and solid, straight ahead. Her lower legs are full of the genes of work, her back narrow so the bones show. She's been granted seven years to flower and bear young before she plunges into the dim middle world I'm peering at her from, anonymous, scarred, guilty futile life, totally unrelated to anything a person ever dreamed of or wanted. Lonely, burning, storms. I dread returning to the car and the four-lane highway, using the credit card to call the office and tell them the Dallas estimates drawn from Boston data.
I watch those waitresses. They wonder about old Mary, and Mary's boyfriend whom they've never seen except in the shadow of a baby's snapshot. They wonder, watching her, about how happy she seems, and how she manages to hang on the way the customer in this place tips.
Rosie
Here I was, or part of me, trying to explain to someone, Rosie T., why there's no God, and I was drinking. Almost always on the road I'm drinking—usually Johnny Walker black from a silver hip-flask McClure gave me before he died of the good life—all of this on top of black beans and beer.
"I think about the blood," I was saying. Over the years, I'd become accustomed to the mean anger I could now feel getting loose from me. "Here's God's son, sent to the world to save us. He's going to do this by, what they say, 'dying for our sins'—but first he says 'Do this in remembrance of me' and he starts eating his own body and drinking his own blood. This I'm supposed to explain to my children. Rosie—are you with me? I swear, what in hell was that guy doing? We're talking about the New Testament here."
There sat Rosie, drinking imported beer, gold earrings glinting in the partial light when a breeze lifted her hair. Her eyes were focused down, and her feet were bare.
"I don't know," I said. "When I was in college, I'd get in these arguments with the priests. They drove me whacko with their opposition to abortion, a belief they held up right next to their patriotic tolerance for napalming the citizenry of small . . . never mind, you remember all that. Abortion was bad, but arming ourselves so that we were second to none in our ability to fry the whole planet—that was okay. I said, 'Guys, try to look at it like this: maybe you don't care so much for the already born but instead are genuinely concerned about the unborn. But look here,' I said, 'if we fry the whole planet, think how many unborn babies we might kill.' Of course, this was a wise-ass oversimplification if there ever was one."
Rosie was peeling the label off her bottle. Sometimes her expression would change. I'd see an edge of a smile, an edge of a nod. Faint as these responses were, I chose to accept them as rapt appreciation for the wit of my argument. We were out by the tennis courts, under stars visible through the city haze. Off some distance behind her, the vaguely lit and looming old style hotel waited like a mother ship anchored offshore.
"I'm telling you," I told her, "there's nothing more unsatisfying than trying to nail a bunch of priests for inconsistency."
It's lucky I was drinking, because God is a big topic—bigger than sex, bigger than fossil fuels, I tried to tell myself, bigger than ennui, consternation, thwartment, and other characteristics of my professional life. To address the nonexistence of God, or to presume to address it, required drinking, which in turn provided me with a good excuse for the quality of my argument.
"Now, the idea was that he was going to save us by letting us hang him on the cross and bleed to death, or, I guess, God was going to save us by letting us do that to his son. We hang him up there between a couple of thugs and the whole business comes to pass just like the prophets had predicted. Naturally, since they had predicted it, we had to go ahead and do it."
Rosie's crisp gray skirt and white blouse glowed, her gold necklace, long and graceful, glittered in the light and shadow.
"Then—let me know when I'm being offensive—he rises again on the third day, opening the question of 'Is it really such a sacrifice to send your only begotten son to die on the cross if you have the power to bring him back in glory three days later at the drop of a hat?' You with me?"
Rosie was in the company, out of Boston. I was from Dallas. She took a sip from her green bottle and smiled. On other trips, before this evening, I'd seen her at meetings. She had one of those faces I'd keep seeing, and sometimes we'd even exchange glances. I'd been surprised this evening when, after the last afternoon panel discussion had ended, suddenly it was just the two of us drifting down Connecticut toward a Mexican restaurant she knew about, beyond the embassies, the arches, the long bridge.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said. "I oppose abortion too."
I watched her peel the label, and took another hit from the flask.
"God," I said. "Is that me? Is that my breath I smell?"
Rosie laughed abruptly, her eyes flashing up to mine, bright, clear, very pretty. "You could have said you don't like Mexican food," she muttered, razzing me. Finally, a verbal response.
"I love Mexican food. I was just checking to see if you're listening. I love Mexican food." I relaxed a moment. I could smell her perfume when the cool breeze came around just right. "Jesus," I said, "I'm starting to depress myself."
Rosie brushed at her dark hair. She was a beautiful girl. When in the past I had seen her, she would be sitting in corners of hotel bars, in intense conversations with someone, or striding down hallways among her friends, laughing
and gesturing big. There was something captivating about her movement—bold, confident, but still very soft.
"I don't drink like this at home," I told her. Her eyes were down again now. "The blitherings of a drunk. By the way, I don't mean to run roughshod over whatever it is you believe—I'm not doing that, am I? You have to look at these as the blitherings of a corporate drunk or whatever—quick, change the subject. Extricate me."
She was looking down, no signals. Her hands folded now, motionless in her lap. Her beer on the table almost gone.
"I told those priests, I said, 'Look guys, if there's a God, why isn't war a sin? What do you want?' I said. 'War contains rape and lying, insanity—sometimes people even get killed. There's inebriation and profanity, stealing, promiscuity—what do you want?'"
I heard myself resort to old letters-to-the-editor, old complaining missives to the draft board, old 1960's runnings-off-of-the-mouth.
"'So where's the mainstream American church which follows the footsteps of the Prince of Peace and says absolutely no to war?' I said to them, 'Some churches say no to dancing. A lot of them take very brave stands on gambling and birth control. On the topic of frying the planet, however, there's some question. Right? You get high-level debate on that one. You get damned near to the Amish before you find religions extreme enough to oppose war.'" Rosie just sat there. I was wearing out.
Now she looked up and muttered, "So you say there's no God because of what churches do?"
"Hell,” I said, "I don't know. There probably is a God. He probably planned all this as a test."
I was now beginning to feel like I'd been drinking the scotch through my eyes. Rosie remained at rest, her legs up on the wrought-iron table (skirt perfectly tucked and folded for modesty), her face rosy-cheeked from imported beer and the night air.
Silent Retreats Page 16