by Tim O'Brien
"What a beautiful, beautiful nightstand," she told him on Christmas morning, 1970.
She grinned furiously.
"I'm blown away," she said. "Just so happy."
In 1973 they bought a house in Bloomington, not far from Met Stadium, and on summer nights, after work, they'd often make the nine-minute drive to take in a Twins game. David would keep a meticulous box score, frowning into a pair of binoculars, analyzing plays or situations that caught his attention. Most of it meant nothing to Marla. To pass time, she would offer her own commentary on what she called the "team costumes," evaluating fashion issues, chattering about cut and color. She liked the bright stadium lights, the seventh-inning stretch, the smells of beer and popcorn. The game itself remained a mystery to her. Even after David's lectures, all his charts and diagrams, Marla still had no idea about the function of a bunt, or why anyone in his right mind would want to execute a hit-and-run. "If you ask me," she'd tell him, "the whole thing sounds pretty shady, pretty crooked." In a way she was kidding, in a way she wasn't, but it was nice to see a smile come to David's lips, to watch him laugh and shake his head and explain all over again.
Early on, Marla worried that these nights at the ballpark might undo the whole rehab process, send him over some wartime edge, but the effect on David was clearly the opposite. Almost always, his mood would soften. The tension would drain from his eyes, flushing away the war, and at night he didn't talk so often in his sleep—not with the same rage or violence. More than anything, it was the late-hour babble that alarmed and sometimes terrified Marla.
She dreaded bedtime. She dreaded the end of baseball season.
In mid-February of 1975, Marla carried a tape recorder into the bedroom, put it on her dresser, and hit the record button.
At breakfast the next morning, she played the cassette for David.
"That voice," she said. "Who is it?"
David didn't look at her. He pushed to his feet, went to the sink, rinsed his cereal bowl, and poured himself a cup of coffee. He kept his back turned.
"This scares me," she said. "That voice. It's you, but it's not you. All the swearing. Whoever it is, I feel like he's dangerous."
"Dangerous?"
"Like he could hurt somebody."
David swung around toward her. For a few seconds his expression went thoughtful.
"Right," he said. "I suppose he could."
"Who?"
"I'm not sure who. Nightmares. Let's try to forget it."
"David, did you listen to the tape? How do I forget? Tell me how."
"I don't know how."
"So that's it? Don't talk about it, don't look at me? I mean, God, let's just play the tape again, have a laugh, pretend it's the comedy hour. Chalk it up to dreamland. Rub it out."
"Hey, stop." David jabbed a finger at her. His voice rose from deep in his chest, from the darkness inside him, a ravening, suddenly brutal sound. "You don't understand. Nothing. If I tried to explain, if I started to explain—" He shook his head hard, reached down, pulled up his right pant leg, and rapped his knuckles against the prosthesis. "See that? Chop off a leg, baby. Watch sixteen guys die. Smell the rot. See if you don't cuss in your sleep."
"I wasn't criticizing, David. I was trying—"
"Trying what? To talk?"
"Yes."
He dropped the pant leg, took a jerky half-step toward her. Something changed in his face. "Excellent," he said. "Let's talk about red Cadillacs. Baby strollers. One leg, honey, but I'm all ears."
Marla looked at him. Outside, an ambulance or a police car went by, its siren at high emergency, and in those miserable moments it occurred to Marla that the world was indifferent to all of this, deaf to betrayal and deceit and petty passion.
David's lips curled into a strange, skewed smile she'd never seen before. "Cat got your tongue? Maybe we should rev up that tape recorder. Capture the silence."
"You knew," she said.
"Day one. Lace panties. I'm not an idiot."
"And you never said anything."
He made a contemptuous spitting sound. "What's to say? 'Pretty-please love me'?"
"David."
"Hard to find words, isn't it?"
He took the cassette out of the tape recorder, tossed it in the garbage.
"Ex-teachers, what's a guy to do?" he said. "Thought to myself, Hey, give it time, she'll come around. Leg or no leg. So I wait. Five years, three people. You, me, Mr. Teacher. Eat dinner together. Group sex. Christ, I'd watch you sometimes, sailing away to fantasyland, wherever the fuck you'd go." He laughed. "Robot wife. Makes a guy wonder who the cripple is."
He put his coffee cup in the sink, turned on the water, stared at the faucet. He seemed dazed, unfixed to the world. "Writing on the wall. Knew all along."
"Ridiculous," Marla said. "Nobody knows that."
"Yeah, well. In the stars."
"You're saying we're finished?"
He didn't answer.
Marla waited a moment, then went over to him and put a hand on his arm. "I know it's not enough, but I tried hard. That's the truth. Sometimes, though, it felt like you'd already decided everything. Who I was. What I wanted. Almost like you needed to drive me away."
"I'm the villain?"
"No. But people get what they imagine."
David raised his eyebrows, mocking. "Pigtails? Baby strollers?"
"Not that."
"What about the cool Caddy?"
Marla took her hand from his arm. She had the sensation of talking to a new person, someone who'd put on David's face for a Halloween party. "I love you," she said quietly. "But when you suppose from the start that everything's fake and rotten and doomed ... Then it is doomed. That's how I've felt for years, like you wanted me to hurt you." She stopped. Something struck her as wrong. "Pigtails? Where did that come from?"
David made a casual motion with the palms of his hands.
"Little birdie," he said.
"That's not an answer."
"But good enough."
For several seconds David looked at her, sadly, yet also maliciously, and then he grinned and glanced at the water faucet, where Johnny Ever waited. "What a bitch. Give it time, she's out of here. Ta-ta. Gone as Goebbels. Believe me, partner, we're talkin' history here. Future, too. Cooked goose. Roasted romance."
Marla said, "What?"
The marriage lasted four more years. Both Marla and David did what they could to keep it alive, to work toward some condensed version of happiness, and for periods of time they made themselves believe that whatever they had together—the bond, the covenant—might still be salvageable. They didn't quit. Twice a month, David went to see a VA psychiatrist, a woman his own age, also a veteran of the sixties, with whom he'd share a couple of joints and vigorous assurances that Master Sergeant Johnny Ever was no angel, no devil, no ghost, no middleman; that, in fact, the man at the microphone was none other than David himself. This made sense. In a way, somewhere inside him, he'd known all along. He slept better. His dreams went foggy and bland. Only rarely did he hear Ortiz's transistor radio, or yipping sounds, or the murderous drone of the Song Tra Ky.
With Marla, he'd come to an accommodation. Tacitly, as if silence could obliterate pain, they avoided conversations that might wander toward Marla's teacher or David's ordeal at the river. Neither of them asked questions. Neither of them volunteered anything. In 1976, Marla quit her paralegal job and began graduate studies in art history at the University of Minnesota. David's furniture business flourished. On the surface, and sometimes beneath, their lives moved along smoothly enough. They had sex three or four times a month, whenever the pressures accumulated. They ate meals in front of the TV, chatted amiably, laughed sometimes, took vacations, planned an addition to their house, visited with friends, gave up cigarettes, started again, celebrated birthdays and anniversaries, listened to music, bought a Chevrolet, took up yoga, realized none of it was sufficient.
By early 1978 the calm had become excruciating. They never fought, w
hich was like fighting. Acts of kindness had the bite of bribery.
Yet even then they kept trying.
They put x's and o's at the bottom of their grocery lists. They signed up for ballroom dance lessons. In mid-December of 1978, about a year before the end, they began attending services at a Quaker meetinghouse in St. Paul, where silence was the rule, and where they would sit side by side on sturdy oak benches, exhausted skeptics in search of a miracle. "Man, you just plain don't pay attention," Johnny Ever would whisper. "All this wasted effort, it's like watchin' some poor bastard try to breathe underwater. Go ahead, hyperventilate like the dickens, nature just don't work like that. The woman's fadin' fast, Dave. Them gray eyes, that out-of-here stare. Blind man could see it." Sometimes Johnny would sigh, other times he'd chortle. "An' this church crap, Davy. I'll tell you right now, it didn't do jack for oP Bonhoeffer. Your Nam buddies, either. Should've heard 'em—'Dear God, dear God!'—real impressive, except all they ever got for it was hoarse, then dead. See, there's good news, bad news. Bad news: you're gonna end up munchin' your heart out. Good news: everybody dies. Face it now, face it later. I'm church."
In those moments, when the inner dialogue went loopy, David realized he was talking to himself, though it didn't quite seem that way. He'd reach for Marla's hand and grip it hard and wait for something in return, a little pressure, the slightest heat.
"Whoa, Nellie," Johnny would mutter. "You're a scrapper, kid."
Marla met a man in the spring of 1979. She thought it might be love: a younger man, a trader of stocks, a rider of motorcycles, no rivers bubbling through his dreams.
She confessed to David on Christmas Day.
A despicable thing, Marla knew, but the alternative was worse.
She slipped out of bed before daylight. She went to the kitchen, gazed out the window at a neighbor's Christmas lights, returned to the bedroom, lay down beside David, waited for him to wake up, and then moistened her lips and told him.
David put his face in the pillow, Marla got dressed.
There was no sound.
A light snow was falling.
Marla picked up the phone and called her lover and asked him to wait for her down the street. A moment later, as she was hanging up, the thought arose that for David Todd there would never again be another Christmas.
She had some orange juice, half a muffin.
She packed a small knapsack.
At daybreak, she went out the front door and looked down the street to where a black and red Harley waited in the snow.
"The truth is," said Johnny Ever, "I'm not a bad guy. Not a good guy, either, but give me credit. Big John, he deserves one of them blue ribbons in the tell-it-like-it-is contest. Good or bad, up or down, I calls 'em like I sees 'em: broken heart, side pocket. Not much fun. Everybody blames the messenger. No justice in this world, damn little in the afterworld." Johnny sighed. "Got my condolences, man. Heartfelt, et cetera." He sighed again, deeper. "Now comes the tough part."
They divorced in April of 1980. The house was sold for a good deal of money, which they split down the middle, and after a month Marla moved with her stockbroker to Chicago, where she taught art history to business majors, remarried, got pregnant, miscarried, grew restless, grew bored, went through a difficult second divorce, and then found herself back in the blues, alone, not quite happy, not quite miserable, which seemed to her the only way to be.
David took up with his psychiatrist. It lasted six weeks. "You can do better," Johnny said. "Fact is, I'm surprised you even considered it. Just some New Age, doped-up mind meddler. Total pagan, too. Know-it-all. Claims I'm a figment. I mean, seriously, the broad's in for a shock when she finds out what I got waitin' on her down the pike." David didn't speak. He had learned to tune out this chatter, to recognize its origins in his own heart and to let it go at that.
In many ways, he now realized, Marla had been right. He'd believed in his own vision of things, and in the end, to a greater or lesser degree, the belief had birthed the facts. He would miss her forever. He would never quit hoping. He would drink too much, smoke too much, care too little about the consequences. He would never remarry. To his last day, and perhaps beyond, he would regret his own failure of nerve, which was also a failure of imagination, the inability to divine a happy ending.
In 1987 Marla returned to the Twin Cities. David met her at the airport. He helped her find an apartment, loaned her a sofa bed and some dishes.
"I hope it's not charity," Marla said.
"It's fondness," said David.
They remained friends.
Once or twice a year, they'd meet in one of the bars near Darton Hall, talking over their lives, wishing each other well. At college reunions they were inseparable. They held hands and drank together and sometimes slept together. Absently, as if nothing had ever changed, David would sometimes find himself twirling a strand of Marla's hair around his finger, or stroking the small of her back as he talked baseball with an ex-teammate. And for Marla it was the same. A kind of repose. A perfect fit. They seemed destined for each other. They seemed in love. People who knew them well, even some who didn't, would often wonder what went wrong.
22. CLASS OF '69
THERE WERE late-hour thunderstorms just west of Minneapolis, sheet lightning and heavy rain and hail. Marv Bertel's flight had been delayed by an hour and a half. To fill the time, and to smooth out the farewells, Spook led him over to a do-it-yourself photo booth across from the departure gate. It was a tight squeeze. Spook drew the curtain, snuggled in, told him to smile at the camera. "Say Samoa," she said.
"Samoa," said Marv.
"Say someday."
"Someday," Marv said, and the camera flashed.
Afterward they sat in plastic chairs, locked arms, and watched their reflections in the tinted airport windows. There were no signs of the approaching storm. It was a hot, sultry Saturday night, July 8, 2000, close to midnight, close to Sunday, and the concourse was almost entirely deserted. Six passengers sat waiting for the flight to Denver. To Spook's left, a pair of improbable cowboys in fancy shirts and feathered Stetsons spoke in mellifluous voices about the delay, whether they should bag it and find a hotel and try their luck in the morning. Across from them, a very pale, very elderly woman sat dozing in her plastic chair, lips fluttering, mumbling in her sleep.
Spook sighed and handed Marv one of the new photographs. "Add it to your collection," she said.
"I certainly will," said Marv.
"Our secret, yes?"
He looked at her with curiosity. "Give me a hint. Which secret would that be?"
"Samoa. Someday."
"Oh, someday," Marv said. "One of those deep dark secrets. Even from me."
"You don't believe in it?"
"Afraid not."
"Not even for these few tiny minutes?"
"No. Can't."
"Well, then," Spook said, "that's a problem. You don't believe in me."
"I'd like to."
"Then do it. Try."
"I could, couldn't I?" Marv said. "Except you've already told me how it ends. Heartache, I recall."
"Did I say that?"
"You said it. Loud and clear."
"In those words? Direct quote?"
"Pretty close."
Spook worried the subject for a few seconds. "All right, I must've told the truth. But that doesn't rule out someday, somewhere, somehow. Who knows when. After I've changed my whole personality. When I'm eight hundred years old."
"Maybe then," Marv said.
"I just want to hope."
Marv tucked the photograph in his wallet. Streaks of rain were now trickling down the window in front of them. The two cowboys had gone off for a smoke; the pale old woman snoozed on, mumbling in her sleep.
After some time had gone by, Marv looked at his wristwatch and stood up. "I should call Sandra," he said. "Back in a jiff."
"Give the queen my love."
"Sure thing," he said. "Consider it done."
Marv was
away only a few minutes. When he returned, the night had gone wild with electricity. A ferocious rain blew horizontally across the tarmac.
"Cancel," Spook said. "Go tomorrow."
"Tonight, tomorrow, what's the difference?"
"I don't mean that. This weird, creepy feeling, Marv. I don't want you on that airplane."
"Feeling how? What?"
"Stay one more night."
For a while Marv said nothing. It struck him that he was not yet an old man, that he could always try another diet, another life, walk away from Sandra and mops and lifelong unhappiness. It also occurred to him that he had been drinking heavily that evening.
"Comes down to this," he said. "If I thought there was the slightest hope, I'd toss you into my suitcase right now. Book a flight to who cares where. But I know better." He looked at her. "Want to know why?"
"I do."
"Because you're Spook. Because I'm Marv."
"You're getting on that plane?"
"If I fit."
"Jesus, did you hear me? Creepy. I'm serious."
"I heard you," Marv said.
Just after midnight, as the storm approached, Jan Huebner and Amy Robinson and Marla Dempsey sat on the steps of their dorm, exhausted and forlorn, a little restless, a little depressed, reluctant to go up to their rooms. "Boy, things've changed," Jan said. "Used to be, we'd order a pizza about now, put slick moves on the delivery guy. Now it's cold cream and Letterman."