Then her green eyes became like dark nostrils that flared, that is the image that came to him as he watched her: her eyes moving like the nostrils of a horse, pulled up, pulled back. “My son’s going to be dead if I can’t come up with this money.” No tears now. Her breath came in little bursts.
Very slowly Charlie seated himself on the edge of the bed, facing her. Finally, quietly, he said, “You understand I had no idea you had a son.”
“Well, of course I didn’t tell you.”
“But why not?” His question was genuine, puzzled.
“Let’s see.” She put a ringed finger to her chin in an exaggerated form of contemplation. “Because maybe if I explained the situation you’d think less of me?”
“Tracy, lots of people have kids in trouble.” Her sarcasm bothered him. It seemed a knife abrading his arm. “I’d think less of you?” he echoed.
“Hah! That’s right, how could you possibly think less of—”
“Stop it. Goddamn it. Stop it now. Stop it.” He stood up.
She said quietly, “And you stop with the liberal white pity.”
Just in time—but in time, always Charlie was just in time—he prevented himself from the slap across her face he could practically feel tingling throughout his hand. She turned from him with disdain, and so he did not apologize. Disdain did not become her; there was an element of theatricality to it, he felt.
There had been a chaplain. God, what a nice guy he was, simple. “God weeps with us,” he had said, and you couldn’t get mad at him for that. After the night at Khe Sanh they’d brought in another chaplain, a phony. Theatrical. “Jesus is your friend,” the new chaplain would say, with silly pontification, as though he were dispensing Jesus Pills that only he was in charge of.
Once he had gone to the hospital, and they had asked him to come back to attend a group. It was helpful, they suggested, to hear what others had to say. But it had included—oh, it made Charlie’s head heavy to picture it—the circle of folding chairs, the younger ones in their fatigues, and it was mostly the younger ones who were there; they told of going into Iraqi towns, they told of not sleeping, they told of drinking too much, and Charlie could not stand them. Some were still young enough to have pimples. He had given orders to kids this young, and they made him sick to see. That horrified him: that he loathed these people. Being there with them exacerbated the very thing he thought he might die from, because he could tell—and he had feared this—that the fellow running the group did not really know what to do. Because there was nothing to do. Talk about it. Sure thing. Take a cigarette break, talk about it more. At the third meeting he left when they broke for cigarettes, and then he was truly frightened.
Robin he met through her ad on the Internet. He drove the two hours from Carlisle to Peoria, and first greeted her in the lobby of the town’s oldest hotel. The hotel had recently been refurbished, and the lobby sparkled with glass and waterfalls, the elevators pinged politely off to the right as he and Robin sat in the downstairs bar. They talked quietly, and he was, oh God almighty, he was the closest thing to happy he had been for years. A light-skinned black woman with green eyes, she gave off a sense of quiet self-assuredness; the lambency of this lightly worn authority made him right away love the space between her two front teeth, the kohl pencil line above her eyelashes, how she’d listen and nod and say, “That’s right.” She was forty years old, and she had two daughters who stayed with their grandmother when Robin could not be with them. He had taken a room on the top floor with a view of the river, and he noticed she discreetly kept an eye on her time, told him when he had gone over, added an hour, but she was smooth and calm and polite, and this quality remained even beneath the sweet outbursts of her sexuality, which, from the start, he had never felt to be faked, and so he was always able to feel okay. It was something.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked. “They must all wonder,” he added.
“Some do, most don’t. For money,” she said, sitting up, shrugging slightly. “That simple.” The bumps of her spine lined up perfectly beneath her skin, and took his breath away.
It was her suggestion a few months later that they meet at the motel, a half hour from Peoria, that the money saved from not being in the fancy hotel could be used for them to see each other more. Only he couldn’t see her more than he already was, he couldn’t get away, so they had continued at the motel and he gave her the extra money, and then they fell in love—he had loved her, really, from the start, and she said she had fallen in love with him too, and told him her name was Tracy, while she sat fully clothed, right in that chair. And that was how it had been for seven months now: desperately in love. Charlie did not like desperate.