Silent Retreats (16 page)

"What is it about Angel?"

Roberta is in bed, stretched out under white sheets. It's several nights later. "I don't know," she says. "Like what?"

I'm in the bathroom staring in the mirror. It's my apartment. Roberta makes me feel old. I try to imagine why she wants to be with me. She didn't know me when I was younger and had more hair and didn't have the beginnings of a paunch.

"She's been single a long time," Roberta offers. "I think she's had it with men, is why she may have seemed a little tough."

"Not at all."

"I asked her if she was going out. She said she'd been dating a Ph.D. named Brad off and on for about a year but it ended. Said he was fine, a real high-energy guy, as they say, and they had fun and all that—he was making big dollars somewhere and they traveled a little. Then suddenly he seemed to sort of lose it, got all soft in the neck, and shortly after that asked her to marry him."

In the mirror I examine my neck.

"Plus, you know. She's teaching, and college is a hard nut to crack when you're . . . whatever they call it."

"A woman?"

"No!" She laughs. "Adjunct."

"Ah. Adjunct."

I hear nothing from Roberta for a few seconds. Then she says, "What are you
doing
in there?"

"Do you have any pictures of Michelle yet?" I say. Inside, I'm thinking of death, my own, alone out here in an apartment with a shopping center across the street. I think of Michelle rocking in the carpeted dark of her casket when it's bumped. I'm wondering if a woman exists whom I might lose control of myself with and fall in love again. I'm wondering if maybe I haven't drifted too far from church. I'm thinking I should call home.

"She was a pretty girl. What are you
doing
in there?" Roberta sounds half irritated, half bored. Muttering, she gets up. It's almost dawn. She, dances into a robe of mine, steps into my mirror. "What're you doing?" she asks me.

"Thinking."

"About what?"

I try to give it words. "I just try to imagine how Michelle's husband must feel, knowing she's buried in the ground."

"What does he care about that? His wife is dead. That's the sad thing."

I stare at the mirror. What a composition, the two of us there before me. Who is this girl? Is she an actress portraying my dream girl, portraying my wife? It's like I'm waking up in a strange place after amnesia.

"Did you know I played baseball in college?" I ask her. Her eyes go down. "Did you know I used to work for the paper in New Haven, Connecticut?"

"C'mon," she says. "What's the deal?"

"Did you know I walked Wisconsin for Eugene McCarthy?"

She shakes her head, smiling. "Gosh. You're pretty old." She tickles me in the side, trying to bring me along.

"It's gone if you don't know about it."

"Are you going to start pumping me full of the sixties stuff again? I tell you, it isn't healthy to think your era—or whatever—is the center of the world. Plus, to people like me, it's boring."

"I know."

"You miss your family?" she asks me. That's something that has always amazed me about her. Roberta listens very well. "I understand that," she says. Her arm is around me, hand resting in the small of my back, so comfortable.

"Tell me something," I say. "Did Michelle go to church or anything?"

"Unitarian or . . . one of those. Why?"

"I just . . . I wonder what she thought would become of herself when she died." Hearing myself say this drives me into retreat. "I don't know. I can't get it out of my mind how those little kids actually bumped the box."

"Daniel, the casket didn't move. It wasn't going to fall. Haven't you ever been a pallbearer? Those things are heavy. And anyway, don't make Michelle's tragedy yours. Let
her
have it. Feel sorry for
her
."

"I do. But I didn't know Michelle," I say. "For me, she's death
generally
, the physical aspect. She's pushing up general daisies. It's the general effect."

"Poor Dan." She tries to bring her arm up to my neck, but I'm heading for the other room.

"Poor Daniel what?" I say, sitting down on the bed to pull on my pants. "I'm going to call Dubie—remember him?" Roberta is right there, pushes me back—I'm tangled up in my jeans.

"Those people that dropped in for breakfast when I first knew you?"

"Right. Dubie and I go way back," I say.

"Why don't you just call home? I've got a great idea. Fly your little girl in and we'll take her for a glider ride in the Valley."

My boots are on the floor under my feet. I'm looking up, the frizzy cascade of Roberta's hair in my face. She's smiling down. "You're a good boy, Dan,” she says to me. "I want you to be happy. In the meantime,” she says, a smile at once shy and mischievous, "here's the physical aspect,” she says, flirting with the movement of her hips against me. "Here's your general effect,” she says. She kisses me next to the eyes, holds me still.

"Hello." It's a couple of nights later. I'm in the apartment alone. I decide to call.

"Hi, Dubie. It's Dan."

"Daniel! You okay?"

"I'm doing great."

"It's the middle of the night."

"You notice everything."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Yeah." I hear him struggling to sit up in bed. Dubie's a pilot for United Airlines, still lives in Chicago.

"Hey," I say. "Let's catch the Giants one of these days."

"Okay." This sounds uncertain, like he at least suspects this is not the reason for a call in the middle of the night.

"I miss your brand of BS. It's been too long. Plus, the Giants are having a good year."

"Seriously, I'm up for it. I've been wondering about you. Haven't been to the ball park since the last time we went, you and me. I stopped watching them after they traded Clark to St. Louis."

For a few moments I can't think of anything to say.

"I've been wondering how you're doing,” he says.

"So how's work?" I ask him.

"Great. I'm in deep shit with some old friends because I crossed the picket line this spring."

"You did?"

"When push came to shove, thirty years with the company just outweighed the union dispute. It wasn't even a hard decision, Dan."

"Sounds okay by me," I say. "But, speaking of deep shit, you're in a little with me."

"I know—don't say it."

"You're a shitty correspondent."

"Ah, I know it. I sure am sorry, Dan . . . I swear, I . . ." He stops himself. He knows there's no excuse. Dubie flies to the coast a lot, and calls while he's here, and used to, after the divorce, at least drop me a card from time to time. He says, "Not everybody can hammer out four-page letters triweekly. Takes me longer to read your letters than it takes you to write 'em. I couldn't keep up."

I hear something in the background, a woman's voice. "You got somebody with you?"

"My wife, you madman."

"Of course. Sorry."

"Everybody gets divorced, thinks everybody else is." He tells her it's me on the phone. "You dating, Dan? Elaine wants to know."

"Same, same."

"Roberta? Was that her name?"

"You remember her?"

"Do I remember? Eggs benedict? She's a doll, kiddo." I hear Dubie take an elbow to the ribs. He laughs.

"Right," I say. "That's her. Breakfast is her forte."

"He says breakfast is her forte," Dubie says to his wife, and she says something back I can't hear. "So what do you hear from Sharon?" he asks me. Sharon's my ex-wife. "Sharon," he says. "What do you hear from her?"

"I hear nothing."

"What about Adrienne? Don't you see her on weekends anymore?" Adrienne's my daughter.

"Nothing. Everything's broken down."

"Jesus, Dan, I don't know how you handle that . . ."

"One day at a time," I tell him.

"We saw 'em a few months ago. They had a hard time there for a while. Sharon was working for three-sixty at Olan Mills or some damn place and losing the house. Adrienne's the cutest little thing on earth. Which one would fully expect from you and Sharon. I don't know, pal."

"I'm up on my payments," I say. "I'm sending them everything I get. Virtually."

"Oh, I know. I don't mean that. It's hard anyway, you know. It's hard for them. And I know it's hard for you, too. It's hard. I'm not saying this to get you down," he says after a moment.

"I know."

I hear Elaine talking again in the background. "Roberta makes you happy?" he asks, evidently relaying a question.

"Yeah," I say. "I don't really think true happiness is in the cards. She's a very good girl. She's one of these thirty-year-old English majors, back to school to become a nurse and make a living. Bright, like an English major; down to earth, like nurses. I think she likes me okay. I'd do anything for her. You know," I say, realizing maybe I'm being too effusive, but I can't stop, I feel the release of pressure, "you know, she's twenty-nine, almost thirty—that's a different generation from us. Really. That crowd doesn't imagine anything that isn't there."

At the end of this, the point lost, I hear him talking in a low voice away from the phone. Then he comes back. "Elaine wants to know if you went through with your post-divorce daydream of buying something phallic like a Corvette or a big motorcycle."

"Doesn't she like phalluses?" I say.

Laughing, Dubie relays the question. "She says she likes phalluses okay, but not on the highway."

I hear Elaine say something else, then Dubie passes it along. "Elaine says she still thinks you and Sharon could have survived if you had just sought counseling. She says she thinks Sharon misses you."

The second he says this, I think of lonely Albert, staring off, nobody to tell his story to. I try to imagine going to him for marriage counseling, fifty bucks a pop.

"Tell Elaine survival wasn't the question."

"Well, what was it?" Dubie asks point-blank. "We're your friends. We've always wondered."

"She wasn't happy, and I wasn't happy. How's that for starters?"

Elaine's talking in the background. "How old's Adrienne?" Dubie's asking me. "When was she born? Elaine wants to know."

"1975," I tell him.

"Lord, I remember that!" He laughs. "You rented that house next to a K Mart dumpster and had that old orange Vega."

"That's pretty much how I'm living now," I say, a joke sort of.

I hear Elaine recalling something, and Dubie listens, then relays it: "Elaine remembers how she and Sharon took off, when we were all up in Vancouver, and we couldn't find them. And then we finally caught up to them in this French-type place, remember? Where they were playing Leonard Cohen."

I remember that very well. We were young then, and I recall courting guiltily the possibility that some night on that trip Dubie and I might swap, one of those quiet sexual fantasies that pass by, mercifully not acted upon. Now I'm not sure I can even picture Elaine.

"Hey, Dubie," I say. "Tell her to stop with the flashbacks, for Christ's sake. I . . ."

I stop. Both of them are quiet.

"I see," Dubie says after a while.

I feel a sudden swell of emotion in my chest, not immediately recognizable to me. It's anger or sadness, one. "Sharon cared less about me or men in general, Dubie. Tell Elaine that. She spent endless hours over coffee with the witches—no offense to Elaine—in the neighborhood. It took five hours of foreplay every two-and-a-half months just to roll her over. I don't really think I turned her on anymore. It was like, she had her baby so thank you very much. She misses the routine and the income and the security, and she probably will have to get out of that house—the mortgage is a killer. She didn't love me anymore."

In the background Elaine is buzzing, her voice sounding disgusted. "Tell him he ought to check the statistics on how many households there are where it's the woman who's starved sexually."

Just at the end of this, Dubie covers the receiver and says something to her. It seems to be an attempt to get her to back off, because it's very quiet on the other end for a moment after that. Then I think I hear her mumble that I wasn't such a great catch myself. Dubie doesn't relay it, whispers something to her.

"And don't say 'Poor Daniel,' " I say to him.

"How'd you know I was thinking that?" Dubie says quietly, an audible smile. "No, really. I understand."

The word "understand" feels very good coming into my head. I think he does. I think a little communication might have taken place despite Elaine. I tell him how, living alone, suddenly I feel close to death, and far from the time when I was young. I tell him it's strange making love to a woman who didn't know me when I was twenty-six. I don't know why but suddenly I'm telling him about Michelle's visitation. I tell him I didn't even know the girl, or her child or her husband. I tell him about the creepy get-well card, and how it seemed like Michelle's casket actually rocked when it was bumped, even though Roberta didn't think so, and how the flowers fell.

There was a low, flat flow to the road, sundown. Skidmore, who'd been hiking fast since his last ride dropped him in the middle of the sandhills, was sitting now on his old suitcase, the kind with the pouches on the sides, deep in scrufty grass on the road's shoulder, dreaming of law school. Whole minutes passed, he didn't move. Cars flew by, station wagons, sixteen-wheelers blew by and honked loud as they passed and Skidmore didn't move, thinking about a blond he'd known in law school, back in Louisville, back before Fiona and he met—Fiona the wild-eyed impressionable Valdosta girl who carried a Buck hunting knife in her boot and thought she was a writer. Skidmore was thinking of the blond way back before her.

He took a swig off his Jack Daniel's. He'd told that poor fabulous blond girl so many lies and crossed his lying-ass trail so many times with her that the pupils in her eyes actually came to be shaped like question marks. Her mouth held a perpetual pout, and that only made her more beautiful to him. She didn't look half as tough as she turned out to be. Skidmore left her after they had a spat and she fired two shots from her .357 into her own refrigerator as he was walking past it. She finally did become a lawyer, he heard. Skidmore thinking of it he chuckled almost proudly out there on the road—Skidmore was a razzle-dazzle guy. He could unanswer more questions in a week than most men in a lifetime. It had become a pattern in his life. Give him a relationship and a couple of months on his own resources, and Skidmore could bring ruination on everything—he could bring more ruination than whole defoliation programs, whole societal collapses, whole holy wars. He actually heard one of those bullets whiz past his belt buckle.