Sparta (17 page)

“Too late,” he said. “It's done.”

*   *   *

They both hoped it would last in spite of the distance and separation. Why would it not? They loved each other. They wrote and emailed, and they saw each other when Conrad came home on leave, and they made it work until Claire graduated in 2003 and moved to New York. After that, Conrad saw that things were changing. While Claire was at college, she had still been within the world that had held him, where the two of them had been together. But in New York everything was new for her. She was living in a new community in which Conrad had no place.

That fall she sent him a long email. He was in training then, in the Pacific.
Here's the thing,
she wrote.

I can't go on living as though you're still here. It's making me kind of crazy. I still love you, Con, but I can't go on thinking that you and I are together, because we aren't. You're off somewhere, doing things I don't know about. And I'm here, doing things you don't know about. I feel disloyal, all the time, because I'm making new friends and entering into a world I never knew with you.

While I was still at Williams it was different, it still felt like our world, but now everything I do is something you and I never did together. Everyone I meet is someone you don't know, and at first I felt like I was sharing everything with you. Every day I couldn't wait to go home and write you all about it. But I can't keep up, I can't tell you everything, there's too much. And I feel guilty and disloyal if I have fun, and if I like people you don't even know, and I'm not sharing any of it with you. But I can't share it with you. You're on a ship somewhere in the Pacific. I can't go on like this for three more years.

When he read that, Conrad looked at the date. She'd written it at 5:38 a.m., October 17. It was a Friday for her, though he was on the other side of the international date line. He looked at the time and date as though they were important. He pictured her sitting cross-legged in bed, typing on her computer. None of that changed the fact of what she'd written.

Conrad wrote back and told her he understood.

You've always been free to let go, anytime,
he wrote.
We always said that.
Then he thought that this sounded patronizing, because saying that she was free to do something made it sound as though it were in his power not to make her free. But he couldn't think of another way to say it, because it was what they'd told each other. All of it made him feel heavy and leaden, sickened. He didn't know how to say it any better, and he wanted to get through with it, and he pushed “Send.”

They kept on writing to each other. They stopped saying they loved each other, though they wrote
love
at the end of their messages. He often wrote group emails to his family, and after that he usually included Claire in them instead of writing to her alone. But she was still the main person in his life.

At first, when he came back on leave, he saw her and it was all right. It seemed as though they were the way they'd always been. But then he'd gone to see her after he came home from Ramadi, in September 2004, and that was not all right.

He went first to Katonah. There, almost all he'd done was sleep, but somehow he hadn't ever actually relaxed. Every moment included the knowledge that he was going back, and probably back to redeployment. That sense was physically present. Each morning when he woke up, he knew exactly how close he was to leaving again. His departure was like a huge ticking clock hanging over every moment. By the end of his leave he was dying to get on with it.

*   *   *

Claire was in New York then, working at Findlay's and living with friends in a white-brick building on First Avenue. Conrad went in to see her. They went out to dinner, and he ended up spending the night. They didn't talk about it, they just got drunk and went to bed, which was something they knew how to do. They were very good at sex, only this time it had gone wrong. Somehow rage had gotten mixed up in it, and Conrad found himself lying on top of Claire's long body and looking down into her terrified face. She was crying. Afterward, he knew it was bad. He knew he'd made a mistake. He held her, stroking her hair. He whispered that he was sorry.

In the morning Claire lay turned away from him as though she were asleep. He knew she wasn't, because of her breathing. Conrad put his hand on her side, down low, and began to stroke the smooth curve over her ribs.

She took his hand and moved it away. Then she rolled over to face him.

“Con,” she said. “I can't do this. I love you, but I can't do this again.” She spoke very quietly.

He looked at her face, the broad, smooth forehead, the straight eyebrows. The fine-edged line of her mouth. He smoothed her hair away carefully from her face.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn't mean to be like that.” What had he done? He couldn't exactly remember.

“It's not what you did,” she said. “I just can't be in two places at once.”

“I'm sorry,” he said again. “I fucked up.”

“No,” she said. “I have to be clear. Whatever is going to happen between us will have to wait until you're back for good. I can't do this.”

He had no idea what she meant. Did she want to end things? Did she have someone else? Or did she just want to be available in case someone else came along? Some guy from Wall Street, was that what she wanted? Was that what she already had? He had no idea what she meant. He couldn't bring himself to ask.

“Okay,” he said, nodding. “Fine. I understand.”

Fuck.

*   *   *

Now it was nearly three o'clock in the morning, and it seemed like the right time to call. He was dreading a really bad conversation, a fire wall between them. Stilted questions,
Hi, how are you?
As if they had known each other years ago, not well.

He was dreading the call, but once he talked to her, he'd know more. It might be something he didn't want to know, but he had to do it. If she didn't want to see him anymore, at least he would know that. If she did want to see him, he still had to figure it out. He needed to know, one way or the other. A throbbing started up in his temple. On the right, the bad side. Maybe he could go into New York and stay with her for a while. This house was beginning to feel like a cage.

He got up, in his T-shirt and boxers. The back stairs creaked, all of them, and there was no way to get down them quietly. In the kitchen he switched on the light, and the white glare caught the room by surprise. The blue-and-white tiles on the wall beside the stove, the scarred butcher-block counters, the hanging green lamps—everything was frozen, caught by the illumination. Murphy was curled up on top of the island, lying half on a pile of catalogs. She yawned pinkly.

Conrad sat down and took the phone in his lap. He dialed Claire's number, listening to the electronic sound, the faint busy plinking of connections being made. Just before her phone started to ring, he hung up.

What exactly was he going to say? Was he supposed to beg? Explain that she did know him, that he was the same fucking person he'd been at Williams? Which he was not. Though part of him wanted to be that person—at least he wanted to be part of that person, the part that had been her boyfriend.

What he would say was
Claire
.

She'd hear in his voice why he was calling.

He didn't know what he was meant to say. He was saying,
Let me back in
. He was saying,
Fuck you
. Rage was involved again somehow, though in a way he didn't understand.

He dialed her number. It rang five times before she answered, her voice clotted with sleep.

“Hello?”

“It's me.” There was a pause. “Conrad.” It irritated him to have to say his name.

“Conrad.” She'd been deeply asleep; he could hear her struggling up to the surface. “Con. Where are you?”

“Katonah,” he said. “My parents'.”

“Mmm.”

“I'm sorry to call so late,” he said. “I thought you might be up.”

The middle of the night was familiar terrain for them. They'd stayed up all night many times, fucking, watching movies, driving around. At college they'd stayed up studying for exams, writing papers. As the hours wore on, he'd watched her face go pale and plain, half-moons darkening under her eyes, her lips turning gray. When she was tired, she got cold: she stretched her legs out and covered them with her parka. That gave him a hard-on, too.

“No,” Claire said now. “I wasn't awake. I have to get up in a few hours.”

Stupid of him. She had a job. “Sorry.”

There was a pause. Finally she spoke.

“Are you coming into the city?”

“Do you want me to?”

She sighed. “Don't be like this. It's the middle of the night.”

“I need to know what's going on,” Conrad said.

He studied the bulletin board, collaged with notes and reminders. The chimney cleaner's card,
CLEAN SWEEP
, with a top hat on the logo. An old list of family birthdays, the paper pierced by a million thumbtacks. A photograph of Lydia's mother as a child, wearing a snowsuit, beaming, her own mother's angular old-fashioned writing above it,
A Happy New Year!
His arrival date marked on the calendar:
CON!

“Come in,” Claire said.

“Okay,” Conrad said.

“I want to see you,” said Claire.

“Me, too,” said Conrad.

He felt a kind of elation. He wanted to see her, enter into the world he had with her; he also wanted to wrench himself free from something, pull away from the people around him who didn't know what the real world was like. He wanted both to enter into this world and to cut himself off from it forever.

 

9

The train station at Katonah was no longer housed in its original whimsical nineteenth-century building, with a shallow-sloping roof and deep eaves, dark red clapboards and small-paned windows. That building was still there, flush with the tracks and right in the middle of the village. But it had been sold by the railway and was now a downscale Italian restaurant, noisy and crowded, with a neon sign outside and lines for takeout spilling into the parking lot.

When the station was first sold off, it had become an upscale restaurant with a spare, minimalist look, bare wooden walls, Bauhaus chairs, and a pricey menu. The handsome owner came over to each table to describe the specials—fresh crab flown in from Maryland, shrimp from the Gulf. It was amazing that such a restaurant could flourish in such a tiny village in the outlying suburbs, where practically no one went out to eat during the week. And it was amazing that the food was brought in from such exotic locales. It was amazing that the owner used his own plane to bring it in. Then it turned out that the owner was using his plane to bring in other things besides Gulf shrimp, things that were not on the menu. It turned out that the restaurant was a front and the owner a dealer, and he ended up in court on narcotics charges and the restaurant changed hands.

The old station had been sold off when the trains became electrified. A third rail was installed alongside the old ones. This one was solid and angular, a dirty brown, unlike the smooth, curved, shining rails that carried the trains. This one carried a lethal charge of electricity and made it life-threatening to walk across the tracks at ground level. The old station, with its wide sheltering eaves and roomy waiting room, was still a restaurant, and Katonah had no station building at all. North of the old building was an overpass that led over the tracks. In the middle of it, concrete stairs descended to the platform, between the north and south tracks. At the end of Conrad's homecoming weekend, Lydia drove Jenny and Conrad to the train. She parked and got out to say goodbye. When she kissed Conrad, she said, “Give my love to Claire.”

“I will,” he said.

She spoke into his ear. “You can always come back, Con. You can stay here as long as you want.” She looked at him. “You know that, right?”

“Right, Mom,” he said. “Thanks.”

People were already down on the platform. A teenage girl in tight jeans and blunt-toed sheepskin boots, a middle-aged man in khakis and a windbreaker, two women with small suitcases, standing side by side and not talking.

Conrad and Jenny made their way up the outside staircase, then down to the platform. Everyone stood waiting, occasionally glancing up the track with the air of public travelers, a combination of patience and passivity. The afternoon was warm and balmy. Along both sides of the tracks was a narrow stretch of untended woods, ash and sugar maple, spindly saplings thrusting up under the bigger trees, the ground thick with unraked leaves. The trees had made their annual unfolding, offering their brave, innocent leaves to the air. The concrete platform—flanked by the iron tracks, the wooden ties, the dull stone roadbed—was like an industrial island in a natural sea. Along it foamed the deep green of summer.

When the train pulled in, they walked down the platform and got on the last car. The train had come from more rural stations, and the car was nearly empty. High-backed gray seats stood in rows beside the big plate-glass windows beneath the open racks for luggage. They walked to the end of the car and took the last seats. Jenny slid in next to the window; Conrad tossed their bags onto the overhead rack and sat beside her.

Jenny was wearing kid clothes again, brown cargo pants and a black T-shirt. More big earrings: today they were black—big, dangling question marks. She leaned back in her seat and propped her feet up. Someone outside gave a call and the train began to glide forward, slowly at first, then, clicking and shuddering, faster.

The view outside was a leafy tangle, the trees too close and going by too fast to focus on, the images quick and broken, like strobe-lit flashes. Then they were out in the open, where the highways ran briefly side by side—the big, wide modern one, with its careful engineering, next to the narrow, curving old Saw Mill River Parkway, designed for aesthetics, with its graceful hanging trees and its riverbank that flooded within minutes of a rainstorm. The wide lanes ran parallel, the cars sliding along in a smooth wave, all at the same speed, as though they were controlled by a distant electronic panel. The highways vanished suddenly, blotted out again by trees crowding against the windows. Near the next village were glimpses of low brick buildings scattered around the old station. It was now a watch-repair shop or a picture framer, Conrad couldn't remember, couldn't quite see the sign.