Tracy was standing in the bathroom snapping tissues from the slit in the wall; from where Charlie sat on the bed he could see her yanking the stiff little skirts of white; the motel made sure you could not steal a box of them. She wiped her face, then washed it with a facecloth, reapplied lipstick, and returned to the room. His relief returned as well; it had never gone far. This was going to be over and that was all that mattered. And then Tracy—boy, how people could surprise you—said something insanely funny. She said, “I thought you had the character to help me out.”
He asked her to repeat it, and she did, looking slightly wary. He sat down on the bed and laughed and laughed. It was not a pleasant sound, and soon he was able to stop. “I miss it,” he said, finally, wiping his sleeve across his face. She looked at him now with a faint sense of irritation. “Character,” he added. “I miss it.”
Those days seemed like ancient times, back when character was thought to mean everything, as though character were the altar before which all decency bowed. That science now showed genetics to be determinative just threw all that character stuff right over the waterfall. That anxiety was wired, or became wired after events of trauma, that one was not strong or weak, only made a certain way— Yes, he missed character! The nobility of it. Why, it was like being forced to give up religion once you’d been confronted with its base and primitive aspects, like having to view the Catholic Church with its nest of pedophilia and endless cover-ups and popes that worked with Hitler or Mussolini—Charlie was not Catholic, and the few Catholics he knew did continue to go to mass, but he could not see how, faced as they were with the chipping away of the brilliant fa?ade; of course the Church was failing. But so was the Protestant concept of hard work and decency and character. Character! Who ever used that word anymore?
Tracy did. Tracy used that word. He looked over at her, the eyes still smudged black with that mascara. “Hey, kid,” he said. “Hey, Tracy,” and opened his arms to her.
Quietly she said, “My name isn’t Tracy.” After a moment she added, “And that license is fake. Just so you know. The whole thing is fake.” She leaned forward and whispered, “Fake.”
A sound came from him. It was not unusual; he often made sounds without planning to. It happened sometimes in public, and it scared people. In a library once, a young person had looked at him, and Charlie understood that he had made a noise, a growl. Marilyn, idiot woman, whispered to the boy, “He was in the war.”
And the kid didn’t know what Marilyn meant.
Many young people did not know the name of the war he had served in. Was it because it was a conflict instead of a war? Was it because the country in its shame had pushed this war behind it like a child who in public was still being obstreperous, embarrassing? Or was it just the way that history went? He did not know. But when he heard a young person with those perfect teeth they all had now say, “Wait, what was that? I’m sorry—，” followed by the self-deprecating grimace that was utterly false in its apology, trying to gauge how old Charlie was: “Sorry, uhm, was that in the first Iraq?” Then Charlie wanted to cry, he wanted to bawl, he wanted to bellow: “We did that and for what, for what, for what?”
He had never rid himself of an abiding dislike for all Asians.
And women who looked at him with fear.
“Here’s an idea.” Charlie stood up. “Let’s go.”
She hoisted her bag over her shoulder and waited. She did not look at him with fear. She did not look at him at all.
The hangers in the closet twanged against one another as he got his coat, metal hangers whose tops wrapped completely around the pole so they could not be stolen. “All set?” he asked in a cheerful voice, slipping on his coat, and he stood back to let her go through the door before him. There was the same familiar oddness of watching himself. The bewilderment of how much he loved her—yet that was more knowledge now than feeling—when not on any conceivable level did it make sense, except for the only one that mattered: She had saved him, given him the space within which he could breathe. Or he had, through her, given this to himself, because watching her he saw nothing—not one thing—that could have caused him to feel as he did; still desiring her, he found the sight of her puzzling. But it was over, praise God; there was still that open space of relief.
“Follow me in your car,” he said.
He headed back toward the center of this town about which he knew almost nothing except for his forays to this motel. He knew the department store on Main Street and the Victorian-looking bed-and-breakfast that always had a VACANCY sign out front, yet always looked welcoming wearing its fresh color of pale blue like a shy child who had kindness within. He did not know where a branch of his bank might be, but he drove as though it would appear, only glancing once in the rearview mirror to see her following him; she was biting on her lip, a gesture so familiar to him he knew not to look in the mirror again. He drove with the fully set sun off to his right, and he noted once more that he felt okay. Passing an old church he thought that if she had not been following, he might have pulled over just to look at it from the road.