by Tim O'Brien
"And the Web," said Amy Robinson.
"Am I human?" said Marla.
"You are," said Amy.
"What we need," Jan said, "is a male-type human being. I'd settle for part of one."
"Well, listen," Marla said, "if I'm human, what's wrong with me? Why can't I love anybody?"
"You can, you do," Amy said. "You love David."
"But I'm not in love."
Jan snorted. "Tie him down, we'll do a demo."
"Yeah," said Amy, and she laughed, and in the next instant the temperature seemed to plunge by ten degrees. There was a brief, sharp wind, then lightning, then a much more savage wind, and then the night was broken by a gush of rain and hail.
"My God," Jan said, "I'm coming."
Across campus, in a dim, empty banquet room, Dorothy Stier and David Todd foraged for food. They moved from table to table, grazing from an array of leftovers. "I'm a veggie, you know," Dorothy was telling him, "so I have to be careful. This lovely chicken tarragon, for instance. I won't actually swallow, except for an itsy-bitsy bite."
"Teenie-weenie," said David Todd.
"Disgusting, aren't I? Wow. Why am I so hungry?"
"Protein deficiency," David said. "Acids, they're the building blocks."
"Ah," said Dorothy.
"It's a historical fact."
"Of course it's a fact. And is that crème brûlée? Just a taste. Stop me if I pig out."
"Pig away," David said.
Dorothy ate a drumstick, half a breast "Our own personal banquet," she said. "We should wear bibs. Formal wear. Lord in heaven, it is crème brûlée ... You know, David, I was wondering. What ever happened to the Cold War? Khrushchev? Where the heck is he now? I mean, you were in Vietnam, right?"
"I was," David said. "Didn't spot Khrushchev."
"Well, naturally you didn't. Ducked out, I'll bet." She looked at him. "Very sorry about your leg."
"Yes. Thanks."
"I lost a tit."
David nodded. "I know you did, honey, and I'm sorry for that."
"Totally, totally gone. One minute you're well breasted, next minute you're this lopsided Republican. Kaput."
"I saw. You showed me earlier."
Dorothy frowned. "Did I say tit? Don't tell Ron I said tit, tit, tit."
"Sure won't. Privileged information, Dorothy."
"Not that I'm ashamed. He's rich, you know. Ron is. Tennis freak, control freak, loves his garden. I swear—this is no fib, no exaggeration—he picks up stray leaves by hand. One at a time, you know? Anal Andy. Great father. Flat tummy, quite clean. Doesn't care to dwell on my gone tit. Turns out the lights, pretends I'm twenty-one, perfect C cups. Boy, I am hungry." She wiped a spoon on her red cocktail dress, scooped crème brûlée onto a plate, sat down on the floor to eat. "Is it hot in here or am I tripping?"
"It's hot," said David.
"And that noise? Is that thunder?"
"I think it is."
"Thunder! Well, good!" She dabbed at her mouth and looked at him. "Sit down, for crying out loud. Help me out with this luscious, luscious brûlée. Bring some butter."
David squatted down beside her and they took turns with the spoon. The rain was beating down hard now. Lightning made the banquet room blink bluish white.
"Now let's get serious," Dorothy said. "Once upon a time—say, roughly ages and ages ago, almost forever—way back then I was pretty attractive, wasn't I? In college?"
"Attractive doesn't cover it," said David. "You were dynamite."
"Thank you, sir. And I was just wondering. Give me an honest opinion on this, don't hold back. Do you think I should've let Billy ... How do I say this? I'll whisper. Ready?"
"Ready."
Dorothy swallowed, licked her lips, and leaned toward him. "Don't be Ron, no quibbling," she said. "Should I have let Billy sweep me off to Canada? Make me into Mrs. Benedict Arnold? Don't you dare lie."
"That one's tough," said David.
"Of course it's tough, that's why I'm asking. But, God, I couldn't do it. End of the earth, it seemed. The whole comfort factor. And I was young. Just embarrassing, you know? My family. The way I was brought up. You don't do that. I know what everybody thinks about me, Jan and Amy and everybody, they think I'm this country-club moron, this no-blow-job type. But I'm not. I'm wild. And I'm smart. I can read French, I used to have this excellent-to-perfect body, and I don't see why ... So did I goof up? I mean, you didn't run away."
"I probably should've," said David.
"Untrue. Don't even say that."
"Okay, forget the 'probably.' I definitely and positively should've run. No doubt at all."
"David, you're a hero, you're one of—"
"What I am," David said, "is a divorced, miserable, drugged-up monster."
Dorothy shook her head unhappily. "I'm very, very, very sure you don't mean that. God, this brûlée!"
"I do mean it."
"No way," she said. "And what about me? Did I make a huge mistake?"
"You did."
"Did?"
"Your shoes, not mine. Seems that way."
Dorothy sighed. "Mistake. Billy loved me, right?"
"No question."
"And now he loves Paulette. Looks at her exactly the way he used to look at me. Gaga."
"I don't know. Does he?"
"Don't let me bawl."
"Right, I won't," David said.
She went blank for a second. "David, did you just say 'blow job'?"
"That was you, Dorothy."
"Me?"
"Pretty sure."
"I said that?"
"Almost positive."
"Holy, holy cow." Dorothy shook her head and looked up at the windows. The pupils of her eyes had vanished. "And is that hail I'm hearing?"
"Acid hail," said David.
"Loud, isn't it?"
"Yeah, it is."
They listened to the hail and rain and thunder, watched the windows flash. After a while Dorothy said, "I'm happy, you know. I have a Volvo. Two, in fact."
In a downtown hotel room, Ellie Abbott lay alone in the sticky July dark. Her TV set was tuned to CNN, but she was watching something else: a dead dentist, a flock of loons. It was 12:12 A.M. Mark had checked out a couple of hours earlier. His suitcase was gone. The note he'd left behind was curt and unpromising. What hurt Ellie now, among many other things, was the fact that she truly loved her husband, and always had, and also the fact that she could not comprehend why she had so systematically ruined her own life. The stupidity stunned her. The self-betrayal, too. In the end, she realized, the affair with Harmon had been an experiment of sorts, a means of testing the proposition that she was more or less happily married, more or less content, more or less a lucky woman. She couldn't cry, couldn't sleep. The rain and thunder weren't helping any, and after a few moments Ellie picked up the remote and began channel surfing: a home decorating show, a weather warning, a Firestone commercial, the Lisbon earthquake, the Hindenburg in flames, Mark eating a white corsage off her blouse, Harmon drowning, an evangelist with colorless eyes and a hearty laugh and a sly Texas drawl.
In the same hotel, two floors down, Billy McMann and Paulette Haslo ordered champagne and lobster salads from room service. They were on the bed, sitting cross-legged, naked and unembarrassed. They had made love twice in the last forty minutes, and now, as they waited for their food, they discussed the issue of turning points. They agreed that a human life mostly erased itself at the instant it was lived. They agreed, too, that out of their own combined time on earth, which amounted to more than a century, only a scant few hours survived in memory. "It's what we decide that sticks," Paulette said. "When we say yes, when we say no. Those over-the-cliff choices we make. Getting married. Getting unmarried. Like when I broke into that poor woman's house, all the consequences, how I'm not even a minister anymore. And like when you headed off for Canada. That's what makes a life a life, because you lose everything else—peeing, soap operas, scabs, vacations, almost every phone conversat
ion you ever had. Huge chunks of time. Like you never used your own life."
"Tonight," Billy said. "We won't lose this."
"No. Not the storm, either. Just listen to it."
"Should I turn off the light?"
"Not yet."
Billy reached out with both hands, lifted her hair from her face. "I'm not sure how to say this. Maybe I shouldn't. But if you really want it, you're still a minister. Small congregation. Low pay."
"Billy and daughter?"
"Right, just the two of us. Three."
"How's the parsonage?"
"Parsonage?"
"Your house, Billy. I gather you're looking for a female live-in minister?"
"Yes, I am," he said, and laughed.
"And what about Dorothy?"
Billy took his hands away. "You know the story?"
"Most of it. Not all."
"I'll need the light out to tell this."
"Turn it out," said Paulette.
At 1:20 A.M., fifteen minutes after the storm passed, Marv Bertel took Spook in his arms, held her for a long moment, and then grinned and slapped her butt and boarded United flight 878 for Denver. The plane was almost empty. He dropped into a window seat, loosened his tie, and sat looking out on the dark, wet tarmac. Flying had never frightened him, but now, like Spook, he had a wicked feeling about this: a rhythmic code in the pit of his stomach. Marv pulled a pint of bourbon from his coat pocket, took a long hit, took another for the road, and then buckled his seat belt and put his head back. No more reunions, he decided. All tease, no payoff. Replay of the old days, except a whole lot worse, because he was no longer a college kid, and because hope came hard, and because the complications finally wore a man down. Spook was Spook. Fadeout.
And what was the point?
Faulty ticker. Clogged arteries. A few more years, he reasoned, and he'd be a spook himself.
The bourbon ironed out the wrinkles in his head, and for some time Marv watched familiar faces drift by—Billy and Jan and David and Ellie and Marla and all the others—each shopworn by what time will do. Hard to believe, he thought. Thirty-plus years. Even harder to believe that it hadn't been a hundred years, or a thousand. Mops and brooms, two rugged marriages, little to show for it beyond a fifty-two-inch waist and pump problems and a paid-ofif mortgage. His own doing, of course, but it seemed impossible that he could've squandered his life this way, dumping it into a pit of lies and laziness and gluttony and fantasy and midnight solitaire. He had always intended to reform himself, next week, next year, but somehow his chromosomes conspired against it. Get trapped in a life you despise, a guy starts to take it personally. Starts to believe he deserves it.
Which was how he felt right now.
Like giving up.
To hell with Weight Watchers. To hell with the heart.
He took another pull off the bottle and listened to a flight attendant provide cheerful emergency instructions. The two plastic cowboys had reappeared, settling in at the rear of the plane. The very pale, ancient-looking woman sat dozing across the aisle from him, back in dreamland, older than the world.
Marv switched off his reading light and closed his eyes.
Well, he thought, and then Spook Spinelli slipped into the seat beside him.
"Fancy this," she said.
Amy and Jan and Marla took shelter in their dorm. They cleaned up, changed into pajamas, and gathered in Amy's room.
Minutes later, the storm ended as abruptly as it started—thunder, then dripping sounds. Amy turned out the lights. The three of them lay crosswise on her bed, sharing a blanket, facing the flame of a small green candle. "Now here's an interesting thought," Amy said. "Right here, in this one bed, we've got three card-carrying sexpots. Zero men. What's up with that?"
"Pitiful," said Marla.
"Correction," said Jan Huebner. "Two sexpots, one slob." She lit a cigarette, exhaled with a cough. "Not that I'll stop hoping."
"No children, either," said Amy. "None of us."
"Sad," Marla said.
"Maybe sad, maybe not," Amy said. "But here's the stumper. Thirty years ago, who would've guessed that three incredible women like us, totally hot, fertile as farmland, who would've thought we'd end up alone? No kids, no guys?"
"I did," Marla said. "I thought so."
"Right," said Jan, "but you're not human."
"I didn't completely mean that," said Marla. "A figure of speech." She took a drag from Jan's cigarette. "Tell the truth. Am I?"
"Human?" said Jan.
"Yes," Marla said.
"Almost," Amy said. "Except for the aluminum."
"I'd forgotten," Jan said. "That aluminum heart of hers, drives people up the wall." She swatted Marla's arm. "Cut the hogwash. You're human. But here's a piece of advice. I don't mean to get pushy, but if I were you, I'd hit the road and go find David. Give him something to remember you by. Ugly girls like me, we don't get second chances. Attack. Make the boy squeal."
"Kinky stuff," said Amy. "Send us a video."
Marla watched the candle. "Where is he right now?"
"Not a problem," Jan said. "Frying up brains with Dorothy. Just go. See you in five years."
"I don't know," Marla said. "I'm afraid. What if it doesn't work out?"
"What if it does?" said Amy.
Marla waited a second, hugged Jan, hugged Amy, and went out the door.
Things were quiet.
"Well, girl," Amy said. "It's down to you and me."
Two miles away, in a downtown hotel room, Ellie Abbott was shepherded through her sorrows by a TV evangelist, a man with a pot belly and doughy skin and colorless eyes and a large, jowly, almost featureless face. "C'mon people," he was saying. "I want all you folks in deep trouble to pry yourselves off the couch, off the bed, wherever you're parked right now. All the insomniacs. All you cuckolds and psychos and second-guessers and lovesick sin freaks, I want you to mosey right up close to your TV. Just reach out. Wrap your arms around me, hold on tight."
The man's water-clear eyes had an amused, charming, weirdly familiar twinkle. He seemed to wink into the camera.
"That means you, darlin'," he said. "Upsy-daisy."
Two floors down, Billy McMann had just finished sketching out the story of his years in Winnipeg. "You nailed it earlier," he told Paulette Haslo. "What we choose is what we are. Everything else gets sucked away. All the boring, junk-food nonsense." He chuckled. "I guess that sounds pretentious."
"A tad," said Paulette.
"I'll shut up."
"No, you're allowed to be smart. What you mean is, like when I sat in your lap tonight. That was a choice, obviously, and a very good one."
"Yes," he said. "Like that."
Paulette lay with her head to Billy's heart. She took a breath. She had never wholly loved before. "And right now," she said. "This might be one of those times."
"It might be."
"I'm pretty fried out, Billy. You don't mind if I'm confused? Just a few days ago, I thought my life was over. I honestly thought that." She sat up in the dark. "What if we ruin this?"
"We won't."
"Should we get married?"
"Okay," he said.
Paulette laughed and said, "Just okay?"
"Terrifically okay," Billy said.
"What'll Dorothy say?"
Billy shrugged. "She'll say, 'Oh.'"
Eight and a half blocks from the Darton Hall campus, in an old brick house on Summit Avenue, Minnesota's lieutenant governor was up late, sipping milk, reevaluating his political future. The storm had awakened him forty minutes earlier. He had gone down to the kitchen, poured himself a glass of skim milk, and then, for almost an hour, he'd stood watching the heavy rain and hail and lightning.
Now the storm had lumbered off to the east. Stars were out. There was a yellow moon.
Yet even in the freshened nighttime quiet, the lieutenant governor found himself restless and regretful, ill at ease with history. Thirty years ago he had forfeited one dream for another. He h
ad mortgaged love and idealism and a good portion of his youth, choosing politics over romance, breaking off an engagement to a lovely, big-hearted classmate. He had explained to the girl—cogently, he thought—that the missionary life was simply not for him, that he needed to be at the center of things, needed the heat, and that as much as he loved her, as much as it hurt to say this, he could not imagine himself rotting away in some squalid Peruvian backwater.
"How practical," the girl had said, and nothing else.
She went off to become a Lutheran missionary. He became a man of influence. The shame had never left him. Not through four tedious years as a party organizer, then five years as chairman, then eight years in the state senate, then six years—the best years—as attorney general.
Now a two-term lieutenant governor.
Heir apparent, he liked to think, but in fact it was somewhat less than apparent. Fifty-three years old. Longtime hack. Not washed up, not quite yet, but still a political bridesmaid. A catcher of bouquets, a raiser of toasts, a beaming, backslapping, ever hopeful member of the wedding.
Just after 1:45 A.M., the lieutenant governor rinsed his glass, went to a telephone, and began to dial.
Then he laughed at himself.
He said, "Peru," slapped down the phone, and returned to bed. He was a realist. In the morning, he knew, this sentimental slop would be history.
"What I'm thinking right now," said Dorothy Stier, "is that we could do one more of those ... What do you call them?"
David laughed.
"Blotters, sheets," he said. "I wouldn't press my luck."
"No, really, I'm in sensational shape. Tiptop perfect."
"But easy does it. First-timer, right?"
"Might possibly be, might possibly not."
"Either way. Plenty's adequate."
"Spoilsport," Dorothy said. "If you don't watch your manners, I'll sulk. Believe me, I know how."
David laughed again and handed her a half-smoked cigarette. Forty-five minutes ago the storm had passed, and now they lay transported on the banquet room floor. They had shed their bodies. The walls were moving. It was approaching 2 A.M.