by Joan Silber
I’D WORKED FOR SOME dirty trading companies in Siam, so I don’t even know why I was so outraged, but I was. If I’d been younger, if I’d had more of a skin to save, I might have just stuffed it, as Lincoln used to say. Maybe if I’d been a family man I wouldn’t have stuck out my neck. I knew what I was doing when I wrote to the managing director of Bydex, pointing out what U-Screw hadn’t told them. It is imperative that measures be taken, I wrote, to remove the faulty hardware from aircraft. I would urge these measures as soon as possible. No one was going to thank me, I was reasonably sure.
WHATEVER AMERICANS were fighting for was a matter of life or death, but we couldn’t afford to be so absolutist about a few screws—the clash of those two points was a conflagration in my brain. It made the nightly news uglier. I had a vision now of people in command as panicked, greedy, and given to lying. What I couldn’t stand was the way the government kept sending in new soldiers—escalating—when it didn’t know what it was doing or why. The slipshod crookedness of it shamed me. So on a nice San Francisco Sunday I walked in a peace march with other veterans against the war. I wasn’t a dapper old relic in his uniform (who knew where that was?) but I made my slow way behind the young vets in wheelchairs, with their bandannas and their fatigue jackets and their dog tags. We were glad to see each other—they gave me glances as if I knew something other people couldn’t. I didn’t, not the way they thought—I’d only been in France a few months and missed most of the worst. I hadn’t understood then that desperate old windbags of statesmen, too hardened and wily to scruple about lying, thought it was a fair bargain to let me be roasted alive. You could see from the faces of the men in wheelchairs that they had taken that in.
PEARL WAS VERY upset when I told her I’d marched against the war. “I can’t believe you did that,” she said. “It helps Hanoi.”
There was no way for her to hear my arguments, though I argued anyway. “Were you ever in the Navy?” I said. “You have no idea what Lincoln’s life is like.”
“I know the Navy,” she said. “As it so happens.” She must have been very angry, to make any reference at all to Lincoln’s father.
“That’s not knowing anything,” I said. “That’s not what they call it.”
“My boy sends me letters,” she said. “I don’t see him sending you any letters.”
We really could not be around each other at this time.
I NEVER HEARD FROM Bydex after I wrote. I might have written again, I might have flooded a whole masthead of executives with unwelcome protests. I might have done more. What I did was very little. But my minor burst of flash-in-the-pan outrage was enough to make U-Screw decide to take out an injunction against me. I was not to write any more letters and I had to hire a lawyer and wait to go to court, and my salary was, as they say, frozen.
At night at the bar I kept asking, “What does a person need money for anyway?” Most people said, “I like to eat every day.” I thought of what else I’d always needed it for. To make people listen to me, not to have to listen to them. A person without change in his pocket has to put up with a lot of crap. In Siam I used to look at my silver ticals as if they were trophies, cheers from an admiring horde. Tokens to win women to me. A man with money can show himself in a better light.
But I’d been fine too with just a rucksack on my back, tramping through the jungle. I could still live simply. I had plenty of ways to be simpler, if it came to that. First I stopped drinking Jack Daniel’s and slipped down to house bourbon—much hilarity about that economy. I didn’t have to keep the leather-bound sets of Tacitus and Byron when they could so easily be sold, and some coins from Siam were actually worth something. I could make do fine with the clothes I had. It was not that big a deal to trade in the brand-new, bulging Pontiac for a tinnier, more road-worn car.
This went on for more months than I had planned. I’d always liked being a decent sport, and I hated the penny-pinching and the petty tallying, the waits for bargains. Every two-second phone conversation with the lawyer was a dent in my budget. My deepest monthly expense was Pearl’s rent. It was my honor to always take care of that for her, no matter what we said or didn’t say to each other. Our ties were much more permanent than our passing relations. We had both always understood that, and that understanding was worth everything. There were moments when a blur of resentment rose in me while I was eating a bologna sandwich for dinner. What the hell was Pearl eating? But I was glad to be keeping my word, glad for the luxury of still having that part of me. In this I was still tuan.
I managed each month by robbing Peter to pay Paul, putting off one debt to settle another. A person might think there wasn’t money in the account to pay my rent and Pearl’s too, but a person might get by through not believing this. I recalculated and adjusted and made allowances. I had everyone pacified in small amounts, I never kept the same ones waiting. Until the check for my own rent bounced, returned with a sullen note from my landlord.
And then I did turn hotly against Pearl for always taking the rent money from me. How many years? And now we hardly spoke anyway. I tried to keep myself angry in order to do what I had to do. My note, telling her I was no longer paying, was direct and plain. I might have been a utility company turning her off.
She didn’t answer either, but why would she? I couldn’t get used to being a man who’d done this. It ate into my heart, and then I was another drunk without a heart, which every bar is full of. In the afternoons the other patrons entertained themselves advising me on the chances of my lawsuit. U-Screw had deeper pockets to pay its legal help than I did, but who knew how far it could go? In the end (as my lawyer had predicted) the charges were dropped, just before we went to court, and the company was satisfied just to take away my pension.
I hadn’t deliberated very long before I sent the letter to Bydex, but I’d had plenty of time to mull it over since. I had always assumed my big adventures were in my years overseas. I trekked those perilous jungle trails just to find the glint of ore in a mound of earth or the particles washed out of streams—eons of earth’s compression spilling bits of glitter into our sacks. I had thought my life here, on the highway to peddle hardware, was duller and weaker in risk, and yet I, Owen the rumpled suit, had now managed to spectacularly combust decades of gainful employment and blown the income of my golden years to smithereens. Who knew I had it in me?
Quelle surprise, as Thea used to say. When I was in Siam, I was always irritated by the English and the other Europeans, and I used to sneer at the laughable puffery of the self-righteous, but I could see now that self-righteousness had its rewards, its consolations. I liked my own virtue (it was mine to like) and I tried to like my sacrifices too. I could see why Dilys had been so confident and brisk, so cheerful under adversity. I was still not sure she’d done any Siamese any good, but I felt some degree of kinship with her and with the bracing effects of principle. Me like Dilys! If you live long enough, everything happens to you.
WHAT I DID DECIDE, once the thing was definitely over, was that I had to have a rule against drinking at home. Otherwise, without a job, I was going to just flush myself down the tubes. I had no other prospects, and if I was going to get by on Social Security, I was going to have to be more careful than I liked to be.
I woke up every day with a policy. Why didn’t I subscribe to a Malayasian newspaper so I could get back into the language again? Why didn’t I go on rockhound walks with organized clubs who hiked around the hills with hammers? Why wasn’t I planning strategy as an elder statesman among antiwar veterans? I believed I would do at least one of these things very soon.
I’d been told at my favorite bar that I couldn’t say, “Screw those screws,” one more time. I said that was enough to make me switch bars, but I didn’t. Booze withers some people right away, and others it seems to fuel. I was one of the fortunate ones. I wouldn’t have had my accident if I hadn’t decided to take a detour home because I didn’t want to walk on a deserted street at that hour. This prudence caused me to g
et confused at a crossing, and in turning to orient myself I slipped in a puddle and knocked myself out.
AT THE HOSPITAL THE nurses found the old ID card from Universal Screw and Supply in my wallet, and I overheard them tittering about the company name. I wanted to tell them it was run by wolfish thugs, but I was in no shape to speak. On the back of the card was Pearl’s number as an emergency contact, and I thought I heard them read it aloud, but I slept on and off, so when Pearl showed up at my bed, I felt I had dreamt her. She had a new short haircut and a bright scarf tied around her neck in some complicated way.
“The haircut’s good on you,” I said.
I was afraid I was dying, that was why she had come. It scared me to look at her.
“What are they feeding you?” she said. “You want me to get some egg drop soup?”
“Can I eat?” I said.
“Of course you can eat,” she said. “You don’t have to go to medical school to know a person has to eat. You want it from Double Happiness? They don’t make it too salty.”
I felt ridiculous asking the nurse if I could eat. I didn’t like Pearl seeing me so cautious and whispery and banged up. I had a concussion and a terrible headache. “I bet I look a hundred,” I said to Pearl.
“You’ve looked better,” she said.
The nurse wouldn’t let me eat. With a concussion, they have to watch you awhile, to make sure you wake up if you sleep. I stayed another night at the hospital, and then Pearl decided she was going to be my watcher.
THE HOSPITAL MADE me leave in a wheelchair, and I had to lean on Pearl’s arm and let her help me slide into the seat of her car. I was fine, she didn’t need to hook herself under my shoulder to walk me into her apartment. She gave me the room that had been Lincoln’s room. Jerry Lee Lewis was murdering a piano in a poster over the bed. “I bet there are old copies of Playboy under the mattress,” I said.
“Don’t check,” she said. “You’re not supposed to get too thrilled.”
When I woke up in the night, I thought I was sleeping in the street. I was curled up under a bridge, wrapping butcher paper around me to keep warm. The paper kept blowing away. In the morning Pearl was standing over the bed.
“It’s alive,” I said, rising up with my arms out stiff. The line was from a horror movie Lincoln liked.
“Nothing wrong with you,” she said.
PEARL TOOK CARE of me without any nonsense, the way she had Lincoln. I had not been tended by a woman since the days in Siam. “I was more lordly then,” I said. “Servants were cheap cheap cheap.” I was kidding, but not entirely. She’d already heard all my stories anyway.
“Young girls fanning you with banana leaves,” she said. “Coolies begging you to hire them.”
They did beg. Even after I fired them or docked their pay for laziness. It’s not always a pleasing thing to remember one’s youth. I’d been glad enough when Zain beat a coolie with a stick for being too drunk to work one day. I thanked him for thinking to do it! That was the way of it then. I had not been exceptional.
This was the first time in my life I’d gone against the way of it. My own quixotic effort. My father, I thought, would have been sorry to see me end my life with so little money to my name. Though my father had been stripped of his holdings too, duped by lying debtors. “First rule always: don’t believe what people say,” Pearl said. Nothing in these stories surprised Pearl.
I thought then of how Chinese Pearl was, after all—unshockable, hardheaded, tuned for survival. (I knew now she’d been raised in Los Angeles, where her family still was, and that Lincoln’s father had fought in the Pacific and had a wife and kid.) How hard she’d worked all her life, in ways that didn’t always bear thinking about, to have something to hold on to—coin of the realm you could bite to test—and now her sure thing had failed her. I was the theory that had fallen through. In school they used to make us read poems about doing what we ought and ne’er counting the cost. I had not counted the cost, actually, in this most recent phase—not added or prefigured or seen ahead—but now I had too much time to think. I was afraid of my lessened value to Pearl, and I didn’t hold it against her either.
PEARL HAD NEVER been much of a cook. While I was there, I could make meals from cheap things—chicken livers and lamb neck and baked bean casserole. The new frugal Owen. Bachelor with a spatula. “Who knew you were so handy?” Pearl said.
I took a bus to the market I liked—I hadn’t had a car of any kind for while. Pearl thought it wasn’t right that I was carrying bags of groceries up and down the hills. All by myself, how did I do it? “The buses are fine,” I said. “You just have to be patient.” I had to keep telling her over and over I wasn’t going to blow a fuse and have a stroke every time I walked up the hill. It was a sore subject.
So I got ready to go back to my own apartment. Only, that week, Pearl needed me to let the plumber in if he ever showed up. And then it was too hard to get me moved during several days of terrible rainstorms. “Relax,” Pearl said, “and stop hopping around. I don’t see why you’re always in such a big hurry.” She had a box of books picked up for me from my apartment, so I had stuff to read while I waited. Once I was through the first layer of books, the prospect of my leaving appeared to both of us to be an unnecessarily violent solution
We kept out of each other’s hair. At night we were often in our separate rooms. I hated what she watched on TV. Once I was well enough, I went off a few nights a week to drink at my old local, and Pearl wasn’t even awake to check what state I was in when I came home. What was it to her? And I liked the leisurely days on my own, the hours all to myself, taking sandwiches to the park, walking along the wharf while the light changed. When I showed up for an antiwar demonstration in Golden Gate Park, I didn’t feel a need to tell Pearl.
MY BUDGET WAS a little better once I let my apartment go, but I had to watch myself about spending. The last thing I wanted was to lean on Pearl. The injustice of sudden rises in prices made me nuts. Pearl said I developed an entirely new streak as a killjoy. I was the one who groused about how much a movie cost, the one who said, “None of my beeswax, but you might be sorry at the end of the month,” when she came home with a cashmere coat. “Relax, my friend,” Pearl said.
Lincoln’s letters were chatty and short. You would have thought the war consisted of nothing but hot weather and homesickness, to read them. In March, just when Pearl was busy with tax season, the letters suddenly stopped coming. There was nothing in the mail one week, or the next week, or the next. Pearl phoned whatever office she could at the Navy, but no one knew a thing.
“You’d think they would tell me something,” Pearl said. I was more and more afraid of what they weren’t telling her, the bits no one wanted to say. After work she went to a temple in the neighborhood. To chant, she said. Chant what? The name of the Eternal Buddha. Over and over. How could someone like Pearl want to do that? “You don’t know a thing,” she said. “How did you get to be so old and not know anything?” But in the evenings she liked to play poker with me, or Scrabble (my innovation), and once in the pause between rounds she took my hand and drew it to her mouth and kissed the knuckle. I was so startled I chuckled in embarrassment.
THAT NIGHT I HAD a dream about my own war. In my dream I was surprised to find that it was all still going on. I was in a miserable, rain-soaked ditch in France, with no weapon. I was hoping Pearl didn’t know where I was, since she had enough on her mind. Then it seemed that in the muddy ditch with me was a crocodile. I saw its bulging eyes above the water, the rough ridge of its back. And I got hold of the idea that I shouldn’t be afraid, because I was already so old, what did it matter? Ah, it’s not a problem, I thought, and I was glad of it. When I woke up, I thought with some amusement how few crocodiles there had been in France. Hardly a lizard even. I wished I could die for Lincoln. I was more than ready to trade my body in a minute, why not, why not, and the unfairness of it being not possible was hard on me.
THE NEWS CAME in a phone call. I was
out walking on Ocean Beach and when I came home, Pearl was sitting at the kitchen table with her head in her hands. From behind her cupped palms she said, “It’s not what you think.” Lincoln was in a hospital in Da Nang. His ship had been “shelled by enemy shore batteries”—whatever that meant—and shrapnel had lodged in his thigh. Once he could be moved, they were flying him to a hospital in the States.
“He’s coming home,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I was so relieved I didn’t ask enough about the wound. Is that terrible? That’s terrible.”
THEY PUT HIM in a hospital in Texas, of all places, and Pearl stayed in a motel nearby for a month before they came home together. When I picked them up at the airport, Lincoln, who was walking with a crutch, said, “Hey, the place is still here.” His voice was flat and he had a haircut that made him look pinheaded.
“Your town,” I said. “It’s been waiting for you.”
It was Pearl who looked really bad. Her face was blurred and pinched, even under her careful makeup. “Have to get this boy home,” she said.
“Chop-chop,” he said.
He was edgy and quiet, but he wasn’t as bad as I’d feared. I’d cleared my things out of his room, and when he sat down on the bed, he said, “I guess everybody has a mother, right?”
“If you’re lucky.”
“Lucky boy home come.”
He was sarcastic about almost everything, but I thought he was entitled. His first meal, on his request, was porterhouse steak and baked potato. I was the one who cooked it. He made a big joke out of trying to eat it with chopsticks. “Messy boy,” Pearl said. One thing that was new was his making fun of being Chinese.