Atomic Love

by Jennie Fields

  He must sense her watching, because he turns. “Morning,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind. I found a towel. I took a shower.” She’s surprised that most of the things that had been set down on the counter last night appear to have been put away.

  “Did you . . . Have you been cleaning up?”

  “I just put a few things away while waiting for the kettle to boil. Probably did it all wrong, but they left a row of things in practically every cupboard. I tried to detect a pattern.”

  “Thank you. That was nice of you.”

  “I have to get into the office. No going home for fresh clothes, so I figured at least a shower . . .”

  “Of course,” she says. “I’d give you ten towels for staying last night. I’m sorry I don’t have coffee in the house.”

  “I rarely drink it,” he says. “I found the Lipton’s. As soon as the kettle boils. Slowest kettle in the world.”

  “I know. It’s the stove. It looks modern and sleek, but it’s not very powerful. I’ve got some British tea that Wea . . .” She stops.

  “That Weaver brought you?”

  She nods.

  “Sounds good.”

  “I just need to run to the . . .” She points to the bathroom. “Then I’ll take over and make breakfast,” she says.

  “I need to leave soon.”

  “It won’t take any time to fix you eggs.”

  “I am pretty hungry, actually.” He smiles. She can feel that he’s taking her in: the lavender seersucker robe, no makeup, the hair uncombed. And yet, his eyes are approving.

  “How was the sofa?” she asks.

  “Honestly? After the war, the whole world seems pretty comfortable to me.”

  On the way to the bathroom, she passes a chair where his holster hangs, a gun weighing it down. It confounds her. She’s never thought of Charlie wearing a gun. She sees its handle sticking out. What would it be like to carry that every day? She also passes the linen closet and realizes the mound of tossed-down towels and sheets is gone from the floor. She was too upset to make sense of it last night. Opening the door, she sees he’s put everything back. The sheets are folded with military precision. The towels rolled. What man does that sort of thing? And with only one hand—how?

  When she steps out of the bathroom, having brushed her teeth and hair and rubbed on some rouge, he’s buttoned his shirt and is standing looking at his tie like it might bite him.

  “Everything okay?” she asks.

  “I’m no good at ties,” he says. “Wasn’t even with two hands.”

  “I can tie a tie. I’d be happy to.”

  “Really? Would you?”

  It’s a pretty silk foulard as blue as his eyes. She gently takes it.

  “Who normally ties your ties?” she asks. “You wear one every day.”

  He doesn’t answer.

  She waits, and nothing.

  Why has it never occurred to her before? A lot of men don’t wear wedding bands. Could Charlie Szydlo be married? For a moment, she has a horrible sinking feeling. No. A man answered the telephone at his place last night. A roommate, she assumed. And he didn’t call a wife last night to warn her he wouldn’t be coming home. Funny, though, how the idea of him being married upsets her.

  “Come here,” she says, pointing to one of the two dining chairs. “You’re too tall for me to tie it when you’re standing.” Once he sits, she drapes the tie around his neck and, standing in front of him, biting her lip, she ties the knot Henry showed her when she was a little girl. Left over right, wrap it around, pull it up the back, tuck it in. She wriggles up the knot and makes sure his collar lies smoothly over it. He smells of her soap. His hair is so short, it can’t hold much water on the sides, but she spots tiny droplets caught in its thatch. She’s tempted to brush her hand over his flattop, to sense the damp on her fingertips and feel the tickling sharp edges of the cut.

  “That must have hurt,” she says, touching a ghostly scar on his neck. And she notes a comma-shaped one by his mouth. “Something from your wild childhood?”

  “Something from the war,” he says vaguely.

  “Ah.” She finishes the knot. “You look dapper.”

  “Hardly . . . without a shave in twenty-four hours. I borrowed your Pepsodent and brushed my teeth with my finger, though,” he says. “I say yes to those eggs, by the way.”

  “Good.”

  Rosalind sets about cracking and scrambling. “Cheese in your scrambled eggs?”

  “Sure.”

  Scrambled eggs are one of the few things she’s learned to cook well. She keeps the temperature low and whips them continually so the curds are soft and large, just as she’d learned in the Look Before You Cook cookbook.

  “It’s nice, having someone cook for me,” Charlie says.

  “I’m a terrible cook. But I can make eggs. You don’t have a wife to cook for you?” Why not ask? Why not find out?

  He laughs. “I live in the basement of my sister’s house,” he says. “I’m not the marrying type, I guess.”

  “Oh.” She feels relief flow from her neck, her arms, the release of a long breath. Why does she care if he’s married? This is the person who’s injected Weaver back into her life. Something draws her to him, though, and not just his good looks.

  “I had dinner with Peggy—that’s my sister—and her family last night. She would happily cook for me if I let her. But I’m always in a hurry in the morning and come home late most nights. Since you asked, my sister ties my ties, leaves them half-tied in my closet. I guess I didn’t want to say.”

  “Why not?”

  “A man should be able to tie his own ties.”

  She dismisses him with a shake of the head. Men are so foolishly proud.

  “Your sister must be special.”

  “I came back in rough shape from the war. I was with my dad for a while. When he got ill, she took us both in.”

  “My sister took me in when I was a baby,” Roz says. “And she took in my father, too, right before he died.”

  He nods. “Your sister cared for you when you were . . . not doing so well after Weaver, too, didn’t she?”

  Feeling ashamed, she turns back to fill the plates with eggs. “Is there anything about me you don’t know?”

  “Truthfully, there’s a lot about you I’d like to know.” His voice is so sincere, it stops her for a moment. She’s afraid to look up.

  “There’s not much to tell.” She shares the eggs between the dishes, giving him about two thirds. When she sets his plate down, she avoids his eyes, sits across from him.

  “For instance, I’m curious what it was about Weaver that attracted you.”

  Her lips part. How does one explain attraction? A force far less predictable than atomic energy. “Weaver was . . . confident, smart, good-looking. And, he was interested in me.”

  “I always thought women didn’t like men who were interested in them . . .”

  “Whoever told you that?”

  He shrugs. “Maybe that’s why I’m not married. I read the wrong book.”

  She laughs, then can’t help looking at him. Handsome. Magnetic in his indecipherable aloneness. “Do you want to be married?”

  “Do you?” he asks. Neither of them answers. They eat their eggs in companionable silence.

  “I’m going to have two people assigned to watch out for you, by the way,” Charlie says. “One during daylight hours. Another at night. Lots of red tape to have that happen, so you might not get them until tomorrow. Or even the next day.”

  “Oh . . .”

  “I don’t think you’re in danger. Not really. But after the break-in . . . I want you to have peace of mind.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I wish I could do it myself,” he says. “But of course, I can’t.”

  “No. Of course not.”


  “I’ll have each of the men introduce himself so you won’t be spooked, okay?”

  “Yes. That would be best.” She finds it hard to imagine having her own bodyguards. Will they count the times Weaver comes? How long he stays? Will they report in to Charlie? And if Weaver spots them, what will he think? She’ll have to insist on going to his place. She watches the neat, delicate way Charlie eats, noting once more the odd way he presses his other hand against his ribs.

  “What happened to your hand, Charlie?” she asks softly. She can hardly believe she’s asked, bites at the inside of her cheek, regretting it.

  “Oh . . . ,” he says.

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  His blue eyes grow opaque. A flush creeps from his hairline across his brow—like rosy clouds moving in.

  “It happened because of a pair of shoes.”

  “A pair of shoes?”

  He nods. “I was a POW. When they moved us from the Philippines to Japan, the first thing they did was burn our clothes and shoes because we were covered in lice. The Japanese didn’t make clothes to fit someone like me.” He runs his hand over the top of his hair, stares off to a place she cannot see. “I didn’t dare complain. One of my fellow prisoners pointed out that there was a tear in the seam of his trousers, and they beat him to death. He had three children, that guy.”

  “My God.”

  “I have size fourteen feet. So I ripped open the toes off the canvas shoes they issued and let my feet poke through. Then I wrapped the fronts in burlap from the sacks the shoes had been shipped in.” How must this tall, elegant man have looked to the Japanese, his eyes so blue? Foreign. Imposing. Walking in shoes wrapped in burlap.

  “There was one kind guard in our camp in the mountains. Gorou. The guards all had medical or mental problems; otherwise they would have been off fighting. And most hated us. The concept of surrender to the Japanese . . . well, they couldn’t understand why we wouldn’t prefer to die. There were a few decent men who just did their jobs. But some would hit us, kick us, any chance they got. Made us wish we were dead. Gorou was a kind, polite older man who bowed and smiled. He had something wrong with his hip and a limp—that and his age is why he’d been left behind. Maybe it’s what made him sensitive to the fact that I was limping. He spoke some English. At the camp in the Philippines, I’d learned basic Japanese. Anyway, Gorou asked me to unwrap my feet and he saw that my toes were bleeding, that I had no soles under the front halves of my feet. We were building a hydroelectric dam for the city of Nagoya. I was outside working on jagged rocks with nothing beneath my toes.”

  By now, Rosalind has set down her fork.

  “So Gorou measured my feet with a piece of string and somehow got hold of two pairs of the black canvas shoes we prisoners wore. I don’t know if he bought them or stole them, but he cut both pairs apart and joined the fronts and backs with a sewing machine so I could have real shoes under my toes. He even managed to melt some kind of rubber or wax to join the sole so rain wouldn’t pour into the gap between the pairs.” He sets his own fork down, rubs his forehead. She watches the emotions moving through him like a dark tide. “It was autumn, in the mountains, freezing. If he hadn’t given them to me, I’d have gotten frostbite and probably died of gangrene. I actually cried the day he gave them to me—cried over a pair of canvas shoes.” He shakes his head and she can see his eyes filling now. How she would love to comfort him, tell him she understands.

  “Each morning, I put on those shoes and wrapped them in the old burlap so no one would know what he’d done for me.”

  “Charlie . . . ,” Rosalind says.

  “You probably wonder what that has to do with my hand.”

  She nods.

  “One night, the head of the camp burst into our barracks in the middle of the night, snapped on the lights. They told us we all had to empty our sleeping slabs and put whatever we had on the floor. Turns out someone had stolen two cans of sardines from the mess.

  “When I emptied my bunk, I made sure my shoes were wrapped in the burlap. But that’s what caught the officer’s eye. A place to hide a can of sardines, I guess he thought. He pulled the burlap off and discovered my secret.

  “‘Who did this for you?’ he asked in Japanese. I understood him. But I pretended I didn’t. They would have beheaded Gorou for his act of kindness. The officer hit me with the buckle of his belt. He aimed for my face but I was too tall, so it caught my neck. I already had a wound there from being hit with a bamboo pole. The belt buckle opened the scar. That’s what you saw when you tied my tie.”

  “Oh, Charlie . . .”

  “Anyway, the officer said, ‘Who made these shoes? Tell us or we kill you.’ I decided I preferred to die rather than betray Gorou. His act of kindness was the only thing that made my life worth living anyway. Those shoes said another human being valued me.

  “When I wouldn’t tell them, they dragged me to a cell in another building.” Charlie is silent for a moment, staring at his hands—his good hand, his bad hand. She doesn’t know if he’ll go on, sees that it’s hard for him, somehow knows that he’s rarely told this story.

  “Were you there for long?” she asks.

  “A night, then a whole day. There wasn’t a single thing in that cell. No blankets, no wood. Just concrete all around, and a trench for a toilet. I’ve never been so cold sleeping curled up in the corner on concrete. My neck bled and bled. I prayed when they came for me, I’d be dead. Frozen to death or having bled out. No such luck. The next evening, they walked me back to the barracks. There was a fire pit in the floor in the middle of each section of the barracks. The fires burned three hours a night to supposedly heat the room.

  “The officer in charge called all the men to gather around the fire pit. Listen, Rosalind, I don’t have to go on. You don’t need to hear this.”

  “Tell me,” she says, her voice choked. When was the last time she took a breath?

  “They asked me again, ‘Who gave you the shoes?’ When I wouldn’t say, three of the guards forced me to my knees. They asked one more time, and I just shook my head. So two of the men grabbed my arm and pushed my hand into the flames all the way until my fingers touched the coals. They held it there . . . for a long time. All my fellow prisoners stood around the fire pit watching. I looked up into their faces, and what I recall is blankness. Utter blankness. Not horror. Not sympathy. Nothing. Then I passed out.” Charlie’s face is masklike. He shakes his head. “We were broken by then, you see. We were all barely human.”

  “Dear God.” She discovers that she’s weeping. How could any human being treat another with so much hate? How could a man survive it?

  “Afterward, my hand was infected . . . They brought in the British medic because ours had died. He said he needed to cut it off, but I begged him not to. He told me I’d die. I prayed I would.” His voice wavers only slightly. “And then, your bombs saved me.”

  Your bombs. Two words she never wants to hear together.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t be sorry. You saved me. I’m grateful. You saved me even when I didn’t want to be saved.” She saved him. For a moment, the horror of what she helped bring to the world is lit with a single beam of light. For a moment, her heart lifts. This man wouldn’t be here if not for her bombs.

  “I’m glad you survived,” she says breathlessly. How she yearns to reach out for him, slip her arms around him. She aches with longing to feel his strong chest pressed to her breasts. “You were meant to live, Charlie. I’m so glad.”

  He looks up at her shyly, then looks away.

  “Does it give you much pain?” she whispers.

  He shrugs, gathers his thoughts. “Have you ever heard of a phantom limb?” She shakes her head. “When a man loses a hand or foot he often still feels it’s there, feels pain where there is nothing. I have no feeling when I t
ouch my hand, as though it’s dead or gone, yet it wakes me with its burning. Mostly, I hate for other people to . . . look at it. It mortifies me.”

  “It’s not that noticeable,” she says.

  “Don’t sweet-talk me. It’s a prop from a horror movie. I know it. I hate for anyone to see it. Especially you.”

  Especially her?

  “I should go.” He stands suddenly, folds his napkin deftly with one hand and sets it by his plate. His movements are like a magician’s.

  “Charlie. Wait.”

  Getting up, she comes around the table and carefully reaches for the injured hand. He recoils and looks shocked as she takes it tenderly. She wonders if other women have touched him this way. Cradling his hand in one of hers, she strokes it with the other.

  “Don’t look at it,” he says and starts to withdraw, but she won’t let him.

  The skin, as she’d imagined, is raised and thickened, ropy with scars, but it isn’t repugnant to her. It’s still soft. Still warm. Still human.

  “I don’t find your hand horrifying,” she says. “It’s part of you. It’s been through a lot. I feel sad for it.” She lifts it up and presses it to her cheek.

  His lips part as though he wants to speak but doesn’t quite know what to say. He closes his eyes. Is he blocking out the sight of her holding his injured hand, or is he touched that she’s not afraid to caress it?

  “Please,” he says.

  “I refuse to let you think your hand is awful. You seem so capable. You don’t let it stop you.”

  “I’ve been told it’s awful,” he says. “Someone I loved once told me it’s awful.”

  His words strike her. “That someone is a fool,” she says softly.

  In his eyes, she sees complexity and desire. Emotion too deep for her to plumb. And what she feels for him is sharp and full of longing.

  “I should go,” he says. “I need to go.”

  She nods. “I know you do.”

  When she lets go of the hand, her fingers still tingle from having touched it. Like the sizzle off a match, it sets a ripple of fire moving through her whole being, smoldering long, long after he’s gone.