A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (23 page)

Colin Powell brought to the United Nations satellite pictures of weapons sites and intercepted transmissions between Iraqi officers intending to conceal banned weapons from UN inspectors. Britain issued a report warning that the Iraqi army could launch biological and chemical warheads within forty-five minutes of Saddam’s order. Tony Blair said, “What I believe the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt is that Saddam has continued to produce chemical and biological weapons, that he continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that he has been able to extend the range of his ballistic missile program.” Hillary Clinton agreed that Saddam had “given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including
al-Qaeda members.” David Letterman complained, “Even after Colin Powell’s talk, France says it wants more evidence. The last time France wanted more evidence, it rolled through Paris with a German flag.”

Smart people she had never heard of but knew were respectable, including outspoken liberals and Clinton administration alumni, argued for a war that would break the stranglehold dictatorship, ignorance, and poverty maintained on the people of the Middle East. The spread of democracy was the only way to halt the conflict between Islam and the West before it spawned terrorism far more catastrophic than anything that had happened on September 11. Writing in
The New Republic
—it was the first time Joyce had read the magazine; she never read political magazines, but now she found herself shopping for an opinion—Leon Wieseltier asked, “How can any liberal, any individual who associates himself with the party of humanity, not count himself in the coalition of the willing?”

You could poke holes in the pro-war arguments—why would a secularist regime make common cause with unpredictable religious zealots? do we have enough troops to occupy a country of 25 million people in a region of the world virulently opposed to us on historical, religious, and cultural grounds? won’t regimes more reflective of popular opinion be even more anti-American?—but the arguments remained standing, their dread scenarios looming over everything you believed in and hoped for. Chemical weapons, nuclear bombs hidden in suitcases, smallpox, Ebola, something they didn’t have a name for yet…
What if Bush was right?

THAT FRIDAY EVENING
Marshall needed a drink, specifically a vodka martini, but as soon as he walked into the anonymous bar on Atlantic Avenue he saw that it was the wrong
place to ask for a vodka martini. The door slammed behind him, leaving him engulfed by cigarette smoke and head-banging rock. He shuffled to the bar anyway and ordered a Wild Turkey.

Most of the guys were in jeans and open-collar shirts or T-shirts. The women wore jeans too, their jeans below their hips, their shirts terminating well above their navels. The navels were pierced. Marshall was too old to drink in a place like this but he was exhausted by a difficult week at work—he had been hired recently by the Corporate Entity Formerly Known as LuQre to iron out its intricate dealings with the remnants of his previous company—and it was cold outside. He looked around, his eyes narrowed, taking note of the attractive, convivial women in the place, most of them in their twenties.

It had been more than a year since he had gone to a bar. That last time had been with Roger and Linda, before Roger and Linda had mysteriously gone underground, incommunicado. They had stopped returning his phone calls. He had heard they had broken up. Everyone was breaking up. It was like a virus, another sexually transmitted disease.

He gazed at the TV above the distant end of the bar. The screen was carved into pieces by flickering images he could barely resolve and text and logos he could not read. He sipped his whiskey under the flickering, abstract glow. Occasionally Marshall thought he saw something familiar, jet fighters taking off, Arab youths mobbing in a dusty street, soldiers stepping from a Humvee, a glamorous woman at an anchor console, an American flag unfurling in slo mo, but these apparitions escaped meaning. He found comfort in the emptiness of his vision. Let the light pour in.

This reverie lasted about two minutes.

“Go fuck yourself, you fucking fuckers!”

The imperative was shouted by a man two stools from Mar
shall, a big man with long graying hair falling flat over his ears. He was fairly shit-faced. Marshall hadn’t noticed the man when he had come in or wondered why the stools on either side of him were unoccupied. It was unclear what had provoked him. The shout had lowered some voices in the room for a moment and smirks and giggles sprouted around the bar. The man cried at the television again, “What do you know, you stupid miserable fucks!”

Marshall stealthily inched his stool away, but apparently not stealthily enough.

The guy wheeled, showing two tiny bloodshot eyes. He leaned over the vacant stool and growled, “What’s your problem?”

Marshall smiled as disarmingly as he could. He raised his open, empty hands. “Hey, no problem at all.”

The man demanded, “Do you support our troops?”

People were watching them, to see what the drunk would do. Marshall looked for a place to take his glass. No tables were free. Marshall tried to catch the bartender’s eye, but he was busy at the other end of the bar, intensely smoking, apparently the only person in the room unaware of the confrontation. Marshall said, “Of course I do. I’m not so sure about going to war, but—”

“That’s bullshit, the same old crap from the same old United Crap of America. If you say you support the troops, you have to support the mission. Otherwise it’s an empty promise, an implication that their sacrifices mean nothing. Our troops serve our nation and we go to war as a nation. Those who oppose the war inevitably oppose the men who fight it.” He shook his head bitterly. “It happens every time. We give up our lives, our limbs, and the best friends we’ll ever have. When we come back you spit in our faces.” The man drained his glass and challenged him. “You’re not a vet, are you?”

“No,” Marshall said apologetically. “I guess you are.”

“Yeah.” He spat on the floor. “A United States Army Ranger. Seventy-fifth Regiment, First Battalion.”

Marshall tried to sound like a Democratic politician. “I honor your service, with pride. What, you were in Vietnam?”

“Grenada.”

Marshall pushed a tiny parcel of air from one of his nostrils, an infinitesimal fraction of a chuckle. The guy saw it and took a swing at him.

The punch never connected, but Marshall jerked away from it, slipped off his stool, and sprawled onto the floor’s wet sawdust—
ooof!
he heard himself say—and then the stool fell on top of him. The other patrons scattered out of the way. It was very dramatic and totally ridiculous. He should have stayed in the Heights. From the floor he witnessed the guy being hustled off the premises.

Arms he didn’t see elevated him to his feet and unknown hands brushed him off and somebody slapped him on his back once it was clear that he wasn’t hurt. The stool was righted. People were laughing. The bar had come together over the incident—apparently the drunk was locally famous for picking fights. Another glass of Wild Turkey materialized at Marshall’s side. For a moment he was the center of attention. Some men good-naturedly congratulated him on his fall. He smiled and downed the whiskey. Women had arrived at his side too, two slender girls in jeans and snug pastel shirts, concerned that he might have been hurt. He rushed to introduce himself.

In a few moments the bar’s patrons went back to where they had been but the two women lingered. Having survived his encounter with the vet, Marshall was inspired to act on impulse. He ordered a round for the women and a friend who had turned her back to say something to one of the guys at the bar. When the drinks came the third woman
took her drink and smiled and a little bomb went off in Marshall’s gut.

The woman cried, “Victor’s daddy!”

He wished he could hide. He had been caught fighting in a dive bar on Atlantic Avenue and buying drinks there for women he didn’t know.

“Miss Naomi. Hello.”

She was hardly recognizable from this morning, when he had dropped off Vic. Since then she had applied eyeliner and orange-brown lipstick, put on a pleated skirt, and exchanged her track shoes for knee-high boots. The only part of her ensemble that he recognized was her pink leotard top. She told her friends Dora and Alicia that he was one of her preschool parents, the father of Victor and Viola—and a 9/11 survivor. Alicia abruptly brought her hand to her face in a gesture of concern. “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “I’m fine. I got out.”

“Still,” Alicia said. “It must have been the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

“I suppose,” he replied, not wanting to disagree, not with such gorgeous sympathy drawn across her face. He paused to soak in the loveliness of the three young women. Alicia’s face was lustrously rouged and her lips were moist and full. Dora’s dense, matte-black hair corkscrewed down to her shoulders. All three women wore body-hugging tops. He took his time counting the six breasts between them. He raised his glass and they toasted his presence at the bar. He said, “Who knows. Tonight may be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

Dora asked, “How’d you find this place anyway?”

“I was passing by,” he said. “I needed a drink.”

The women looked at him for further explanation. Their eyes were open wide as if to take in the whole of him.

“There was noise and light inside and I just wanted to be part of it. It’s a cold night and I have nothing to do,” he confessed. For a moment he thought he would confess further to
just how wretchedly, shamefacedly lonely he was. Would they have pity on him? Would they embrace him? Should he tell them his 9/11 story?

“Unfortunately, we’re just about to leave,” Miss Naomi said.

Marshall’s smile was brave. The girls had barely sipped the drinks he had ordered.

“We have to be someplace. A party,” Miss Naomi explained. She looked to her friends. Dora flashed a half smile. Miss Naomi shrugged. “If you want to come…”

“Sure!” Marshall didn’t try to hide his eagerness. “I mean, if it’s okay. I’m not really dressed for a party…”

“It’s in Nassau County, though. Do you mind? We have cars, you can ride with me.”

Within minutes, less than a half hour after someone tried to hit him, Marshall was encased within a low-slung beat-up sports car with Miss Naomi, just the two of them leaning back side by side in the bucket seats. “My boyfriend’s,” she told him, nearly singing it. “He’s going to meet us.” Marshall didn’t like hearing about the boyfriend, but the boyfriend was really only a momentary disappointment, a kind of abstraction. Miss Naomi was close by, her gin-rich exhalations mingling with his, her hand firmly on the stick shift. The city outside the car seemed as remote as another country.

She drove the car hard, grinding its gears as she weaved through traffic. She was high. He liked that. She slapped a cassette into the tape deck, early Courtney Love. Her eyes were still wide, her contact lenses visibly bobbing in the opposing cars’ headlights. He would have liked to speak, to say something friendly or funny, with perhaps a hint of a come-on, but the music, the engine, and the road were too much in his ears. Instead he smiled and she smiled back. He liked that too. This morning she had looked up pleasantly when he brought Vic into her classroom. She had been on her knees, putting some pillows into a cubbyhole, her face slightly pink.

Just past the Nassau frontier they reached a raggedly illuminated boulevard of strip malls and small shuttered shops. Young men huddled on street corners, their hoods pulled over their heads against the cold. Marshall avoided eye contact. Instead of fleeing this nether region of trash-can fires and cratered, glass-strewn lots, Miss Naomi turned into a small street of small unattached homes. She had been here before. The house at which they arrived was halfway down the block, a simple two-story single-family house, with no driveway and a short untended lawn and a few lamps lit inside. As they came up the walk he heard the music. He wondered what the neighbors thought. “Whose house is this?”

“No one’s. Dora has a friend in real estate. It’s one of her listings.”

The door opened to a blast of noise and cigarette smoke, and adjacent to the burning tobacco he detected the scent of marijuana. This was great; this was the kind of party he hadn’t been invited to since before he was married. A dozen people were in the house already and some grinned and nodded at Miss Naomi when they entered, ignoring Marshall. Marshall nodded hello anyway. “He’s coming later,” Miss Naomi said. One of the women pulled her away to tell her something hilariously scandalous. Marshall folded his coat and laid it in the hangerless hall closet and backed toward the drinks table, where he picked up a bottle of vodka and poured it to the rim of a plastic cup. In the center of the living room a woman danced alone with her head down. Her long brown hair whipped back and forth.

Marshall stood off to the side of the room, which was generically furnished, presumably for renters. A few other men were by themselves, hands in their pockets. They were mostly younger than he was, big fellows, some of them already well paunched, blue-collar guys who possibly worked for heating companies or construction firms. Marshall might have been the
only man present wearing dress slacks. One of the living room’s corners was occupied by two men and a girl sitting against the wall, squared off around a joint.

The party had not quite started yet, he intuited; they had come too early. Marshall stayed near the drinks table. None of the women were as fetching as Miss Naomi, he decided, after the vodka sufficiently detached him from his surroundings. Some wore capris and tank tops, despite the weather. Were they also preschool teachers? Several wore butterfly tattoos at the base of their spines; a snake crawled from the top of one girl’s blouse, its teeth bared. Marshall grinned at the girl. She didn’t appear to see him.

He idled toward Miss Naomi, who turned to speak, but then the front door opened again and her motion was arrested by the entrance of a tall rangy man with hollow cheeks. The man was greeted by shouts: “Nick! Nick-o!” They were happy shouts, as if the guests had been actively waiting for him. Nick removed neither his sunglasses nor his leather jacket and maintained his place in the foyer, surveying the scene warily. He also examined Miss Naomi, who stood before him patient under his inspection. He said something indistinct, his voice a faraway rumble. She leaned forward to listen. Marshall remained in place, unsure whether to step away from the intimate conversation. When Miss Naomi finally noticed Marshall’s presence she murmured, “This is Mr. Victor.” Nick nodded, a cigarette dangling from his lips.