by Tim O'Brien
"Extremely," said David. "We should get out of here."
"Yes, but here's the deal. Nam and cancer, it's like ... It's not like anything, is it? Once you're there, you're there. You don't come home. Am I right? And what the heck can you even say about it? Not much. I guess you can say wow, or yuck, or hey, or 'Thank you very much but enough of that, I'll take a rain check, I'll take what-the-fuck-eyeK' Whoops! Excuse my mouth."
"Let's go," David said. "Pull your dress up."
"Not yet."
"Right now. We could use the breathing room."
"No, honestly," Dorothy said, "I'm good, I'm not even half there, not a tickle." She giggled. She peered down at her chest. "Whoa, too purple! Purple Stinking Heart!"
In the banquet hall, in an open doorway, Minnesota's lieutenant governor said a breezy farewell to his ex-fiancée, now a Lutheran missionary. His ex-fiancée smiled. "Yeah, bye," she said, then turned to the lieutenant governor's pretty new wife. "We haven't been introduced," she said, "but if you ever need to get yourself good and screwed—I mean, screwed so you don't forget—I recommend the trusty old missionary position."
"What's this?" said the lieutenant governor's bride.
"Screwed royally," said the missionary.
David Todd helped Dorothy get reconfigured, led her back out to the banquet room, sat her down, found some orange juice to loosen up her chemistry.
It was just after 10:30 P.M. The mood had gone dismal. Fifteen or twenty people still lingered at the bar, a few others near the door. Minnesota's lieutenant governor had just departed. Paulette Haslo and Billy McMann were kneeling down to comfort Ellie Abbott, who sat cross-legged on the floor, her face blank and white.
Ellie hugged herself, shivering a little.
The singing had ended. A few people spoke in murmurs, most not at all.
"It's okay," Paulette was saying, "it'll work out, it's better this way No more secrets. That's a huge, huge start."
Ellie didn't speak.
She watched Harmon reach out of the water and try to grip the sky and then slip away from her, dead-eyed and bewildered, a lot like Mark.
Marv Bertel and Spook Spinelli made the rounds, saying their goodbyes. Marv put a hand on Ellie's head, held it there a moment, and then he took Spook by the elbow and guided her toward the doorway, and through it, and back toward their lives.
In the cab, halfway to the airport, Spook leaned against him and said, "How do we tolerate it?"
"Being us, you mean?"
"Us. Anybody."
Marv was quiet for a time. "We were happy once."
"Really?" said Spook.
"Oh, yeah. Or we thought so. Same thing."
Spook brightened.
"Like everything else," she said. "If you don't think you're happy, what good is it?" She moved closer to him. "Let's be married someday."
"Sure," said Marv.
"You and me, happily ever after."
"La-la land," said Marv.
Dorothy Stier and David Todd were already there.
The banquet hall was dark. No lights, no air conditioning, no people, no music, but they were dancing anyway, although not touching, and not to the same beat. Dorothy had removed her pretty red cocktail dress, turned it inside out, and put it on backward. She was proving her courage to Billy McMann, who had departed ten minutes ago with Paulette Haslo.
David danced sitting down.
He'd been here once or twice before.
At one point he heard footsteps and looked up, thinking Marla had come back for him. "Man, I warned you," said Johnny Ever, contemptuous and self-important. "Warnings here, warnings there. Had to be a hero. Had to suck it up and take the heat, thirty years' worth, who knows how much more still to come? Wake up, my man. All you gotta do, you just gotta yell 'Uncle.' I take it from there. I mean, Holy Ghost and shit on a shingle, what the hell's wrong with you people? This ain't Thermopylae, it ain't the movies. You're allowed to quit."
Across town, Paulette Haslo and Billy McMann dropped Ellie at her hotel. "I don't want to go in," Ellie said. "I don't think I can."
"You can," said Billy.
"Go on now," Paulette said. "The whole truth, nothing but. I promise he loves you anyway."
Ellie took a breath, hugged her friends, and got out of the car.
"What do you think?" said Billy.
"Give it a minute, let her catch the elevator." Paulette stared straight ahead. "Then I guess we check in."
Silently, in the humid dark, Jan Huebner, Amy Robinson, and Marla Dempsey walked across the deserted campus. It was 11:10 P.M., the temperature still in the mid-nineties. They sat on the steps to their dorm, shared a cigarette, said nothing at all for some time.
Then Marla said, "It was my fault, you know."
"What was?" said Amy. "David?"
"That, too. But I meant the reunion. Class secretary, responsible Marla, but last year I totally forgot to book it. Announcements, reservations, catering, everything. And then this year—you see what happened—this year I almost forgot again. Idiot. Best I could do was set it for July."
"Oh, well," Jan said, and looked at Amy.
Amy looked back.
Neither of them saw any gain in bringing up unpleasant questions.
"Actually," Amy said, "it was nice this way. Band of brothers, all that. Had the place to ourselves." She paused. She couldn't resist. "Forgot how?"
Marla shook her head.
"Electrical overload, blown fuses," she said. "I'm not human."
21. WHAT WENT WRONG
ON THE LAST DAY of July 1969, David Todd arrived at the Hubert H. Humphrey VA Hospital just outside Minneapolis. His right leg had been amputated in Japan. His left leg was in dispute. Over the next three and a half weeks, off and on, a number of meditative, glutinous-sounding voices discussed the possibility of another amputation, the pros and cons. David himself was too far gone to care. He was back at the Song Tra Ky, conferring with angels, watching a colony of ants consume his feet. Fascinating, he decided. Feet to food. The morphine took him to places he had never visited before, black holes and white dwarfs, ancient cemeteries, the walls of Troy, a ditch outside Tu Cung, the gaudy bedroom of a corrupt, complacent, leg-eating, gone-in-the-teeth Cleopatra. He witnessed his own decorous conception. He played shortstop for the '27 Yankees. He was there in Sugamo Prison, a few minutes past midnight on December 22, 1948, looking on as Hideki To jo dropped out of time through a squeaky gallows trapdoor. He bossed mules for Wellington. He scrubbed the ovens at Dachau, rode point at Washita, sat in on LBJ's war briefings, attended a mediocre comedy at Ford's Theatre, listened to the insane blather of Hector Ortiz's transistor radio. At one point, near the end of his first week in the hospital, David took vaporous note of Marla Dempsey leaning over him, her lips poised in concern, her eyes filled with something just short of love. His own imagination, he reasoned. Or maybe not. Either way, when Marla smiled and kissed his forehead, or seemed to, David screamed. He couldn't help it: there was pain in the most delicate touch, in the simplest sound or passing image.
He started to apologize, to sit up, but Marla was no longer present. Nor was David, entirely. He could hear the Song Tra Ky bubbling nearby. He could smell dead friends and mildew and his own rotting feet.
Days later, in a moment of narcotic clarity, Marla Dempsey appeared again. She murmured endearments. She promised to be true. When she vanished, however, someone issued a chuckle from the hospital ethers. "Relax, my friend, it ain't what you think. You're alive, just like I swore, but from here on, that's basically the whole shitty shebang. Gotta be honest. One of the rules, right? This honesty thing, Davy, it drives me nuts. Bureaucracy up the bazoo. Boss lets me exaggerate all I want, wax eloquent, but I don't get to tell no fibs. Real temptation, too. Hate to break hearts." Johnny Ever clicked his tongue in false exasperation. "Anyhow, here's the scoop. What the lady feels right now—Miss Marla, that is—what she feels is real extra sad. Not much else. Maybe some guilt tossed in, which is why she's gonn
a marry your ass. Pure pity, man. I seen it plenty times before. Eva Braun, Dale Evans." He chuckled again. "Giddyap, cripple."
David was released from the hospital on Christmas Day, 1969. He and Marla were married in the Darton Hall chapel on New Year's Eve, a few friends, nothing elaborate. "I'll try hard," Marla told him during their honeymoon in Miami, on a crowded white beach behind the hotel. "The thing is, you need to know how scared I am. My whole life, David, I never thought I'd end up married, not to anybody, and I have to admit it's a strange feeling." She paused. Her eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. "You know me, David. I'm not a welcome-home-honey housewife. I'll need room. Time to be myself."
"Fine," David said. "I just hope it isn't charity."
Marla turned toward him.
"My leg," said David. "Ex-leg. I'm not looking for pity."
"That's absurd."
"Is it?"
"Yes," Marla said. "It's our honeymoon, isn't it?"
David looked away.
He was tempted to spend the next few minutes discussing morphine and shot feet and a certain cocksure disc jockey wired into the silver-hot center of the universe. Instead, he shrugged. He covered his prosthesis with a towel and stared down the beach at a group of college-age kids playing volleyball. They were drunk. They were happy. They were ignorant. They had their legs. They did not hear voices in their sleep, nor have access to the appalling drift of things to come.
He looked back at Marla.
"Sorry," he said. "But you'd tell me, right? If you just felt pity for me?"
"David, I do feel pity. Losing your leg, all those baseball dreams. It's ghastly. Not to mention stupid. The war, I mean, not you. How it's wrecked things for so many people. Honestly, I'd be a moron not to feel angry and sick about it. Even some pity. But that's not why we're married."
"Except you're not sure?"
"I didn't say that. I said I was scared."
"Which sounds unsure."
There was a moment of severe silence. Marla pulled off her sunglasses, rubbed her eyes, sighed, and glanced down at her wedding ring as if it were something she'd picked up off the beach. "David, you're precious to me," she said. "True, I'm not the beaming bride. That's not the person you married. A hard thing to explain. I don't understand what it is or where it came from, but there's something inside me that's just totally alone, totally private. Like a rainy day that goes on and on."
David nodded and said, "Fine, then."
"Not fine," said Marla. "But the truth. I won't lie about it."
Then she rose to her feet, tossed her sunglasses aside, waded into the Atlantic, dove under, and spent thirty seconds of her honeymoon near the bottom, remorseful and frightened, exploring her life, telling herself she should never have gotten married, not in a thousand years, and certainly not to a decent, loving man like David Todd.
In the autumn of her junior year at Darton Hall, while dating David, Marla Dempsey began an affair with a former high school teacher, a married man. The romance lasted just over a month, not long by some measures, a light-year by others. During those four weeks in 1967, Marla seemed to float from spot to spot in a great sparkling bubble. She found herself shopping for sexy clothes—lace panties, see-through negligees—things she'd once despised and ridiculed.
People noticed the change. David, too.
"Query," he said one morning. "Where's Marla these days?"
His tone was cheerful. His eyes showed concern.
For a time Marla said nothing, considering her options, and then she said, "On vacation, I guess. A brain resort."
In mid-October the affair ended in the parking lot of Marla's dorm. Lovely day. Antique red Cadillac. Engine idling, windows open to the autumn air. The high school teacher, a blond, dark-eyed, poisonously handsome specimen named Jim Anderson, explained the dynamic to her. His voice was slow and condescending, as if he were teaching phonics to a class of dimwits. He talked about guilt and insomnia and issues of honor.
Maybe in another life, he said.
Maybe if x ever intersected with an unlikely y.
"I follow you perfectly," said Marla.
She got out of the car, went up to her room, sat on the floor, filed her nails, dialed David's number, hung up after two rings, screamed an obscenity, changed into shorts and sneakers, and jogged three miles to the teacher's house in a middle-class suburb of St. Paul. The antique Cadillac was parked in the driveway. Nearby, under clear plastic, was what appeared to be a brand-new baby stroller.
Just before dusk Marla rang the doorbell.
Why she was there, or what she expected, was unclear to her, and when Jim Anderson's wife opened the door, Marla found herself unable to think or speak. The woman was an emaciated, brittle-looking creature, thirty-five or so, her reddish brown hair arranged in a pair of pigtails secured by rubber bands. She wore faded blue jeans, a yellow gauze blouse loose at the waist. In her left hand she gripped a plastic spatula. A TV set blared at full volume in the room behind her: the evening news, trouble in Asia. Dense odors of broccoli and frying pork chops swamped the doorway. These details—the spatula, the pigtails, the smells, the evening news—would remain with Marla Dempsey forever.
The woman seemed to nod.
There was an instant of silence, succeeded by a dull explosion on the TV, succeeded by the sound of a flushing toilet.
Jim Anderson's wife stepped back and used her free hand to tug at one of the pigtails. "Aren't we cute?" she said. Her voice was matter-of-fact. "Awful young to be a husband fucker."
Marla had nothing to say. But she now realized that this woman's sad, unsurprised, washed-out face offered exactly what she'd needed, everything she'd run three miles for, which was to know that she would never be forgiven.
After the honeymoon, David and Marla rented a two-bedroom house in St. Paul, walking distance from the college. Money was a problem. David's disability checks helped a little, but still they needed a bed and a sofa and hot water and something to eat. They had student loans to repay. Their parents could contribute almost nothing. After some discussion, Marla postponed graduate school and went to work as a paralegal in downtown Minneapolis, which seemed fine at first, but which in the end amounted to little more than a poorly paid, coffee-fetching go-fership.
She was advised to widen her smile, shorten her skirts. It was 1970.
Through their first month of marriage, David continued with his rehab, four hours a day, six days a week, learning to use escalators and climb stairs and navigate slippery surfaces with the aid of a mahogany cane. Progress was slow. Sometimes his stump felt as if it were plugged into an electrical outlet; other times he'd find himself scratching at thin air where his shin or ankle used to be. In a physical sense, David knew he'd make it. His head was something else. At night, often for hours, he lay awake listening to the accusatory chatter of dead friends, Kaz Maples and Buddy Bond and Alvin Campbell and all the others. He watched Doc Paladino get sucked away into the tall, dry grass. "Man, I told you," Johnny Ever whispered. "All them shot-up buddies of yours, they got scads of time on their hands. Eons, you could say. Just harps and halos and virgin-ass angels. Nothin' much to do except talk their guts out." Johnny paused to admire his own gift of gab. "No offense, Davy, but I'll tell you one more thing. Them dudes got long memories. We're talking forever. And I fear they ain't gonna let you forget, neither. Survivor guilt, it's a bitch. Killed Custer's horse. Would've killed Custer."
In late April of 1970 David took a part-time job refinishing furniture. The work brought in some cash, boosted his morale, made him feel a little more whole. He was good at it. After two months he opened his own shop in the garage, building customized cabinets and a few finely made desks and dining tables. The business prospered, and near the end of the summer David expanded his operation into a closed-down gas station off Snelling Avenue. He hung up a handmade sign and hired a helper. "You should be proud," Marla said, and in many ways David was. Carpentry was not baseball, not the majors, but it was something he enjoyed. He
liked the feel of tools in his hands. He liked the scent of good wood, the satisfaction of coming up with tidy solutions to problems of geometry. Also, the work helped to push away the voices, kept his mind off the Song Tra Ky.
A week before Christmas he built a delicate black-walnut nightstand as a gift for Marla. While he sanded and stained and oiled, humming to himself, David daydreamed about the big leagues. He had his legs. He was quick on the pivot. He was happily married. He would stay that way. The prophecies were bullshit, nothing but smoke, and Johnny Ever was one more blowhard with a microphone.
From the start, in too many ways, Marla and David were uncomfortable in the marriage. Distracted and wary. Always on edge. Sometimes frightened.
On her part, Marla could never eradicate the high school teacher from her thoughts. The man lounged in her head as if he'd taken up residence inside her, uninvited, sharing her pillow at night, pulling up a chair at meals. Marla missed him. And she missed the happy, wildly infatuated young woman of 1967, bowled-over-Marla, girl-Marla, the Marla Dempsey who for a few incredible weeks had floated around campus in a bubble. Now the black days were back. Not despair exactly, not even unhappiness. Just that familiar old passivity, a cool and listless neutrality of spirit. Nothing moved her. Nothing hurt. She felt sealed off from things: from pain, from joy, from her own emotions. No big ups. No miserable downs. At times, Marla thought, it was as if she'd been pumped full of some powerful drug, Valium or a handful of those new knock-you-dead sleeping pills. She could move through an entire day, sometimes a week, without once laughing. Sex was fine, never more than fine. Life was good, never more than good. Still, as if to balance things out, her daily routine had a sumptuous tranquillity, the sort of peace that attends a solid marriage to a solid man like David Todd. And the last thing Marla wanted was to hurt him. Which meant faking things.