Last Night Part 13

- Quit it, for G.o.d's sake. Leave it alone. Let me like you a little bit.

- I don't want you to like me. In a half-whisper she said, I want you to curse me.

- Keep it up.

- It's so sweet, she said. The little family, the lovely books. All right, then. You missed your chance. Bye-bye. Go back and give her a bath, your little girl. While you still can, anyway.

She looked at him a last time from the doorway. He could hear the sound of her heels as she went through the front room. He could hear them go past the display cases and toward the door where they seemed to hesitate, then the door closing.

The room was swimming, he could not hold on to his thoughts. The past, like a sudden tide, had swept back over him, not as it had been but as he could not help remembering it. The best thing was to resume work. He knew what her skin felt like, it was silky. He should not have listened.

On the soft, silent keys he began to write: Jack Kerouac, typed letter signed ("Jack"), 1 page, to his girlfriend, the poet Lois Sorrells, single-s.p.a.ced, signed in pencil, slight crease from folding. It was not a pretend life.

Arlington.

NEWELL HAD MARRIED a Czech girl and they were having trouble, they were drinking and fighting. This was in Kaiserslautern and families in the building had complained. Westerveldt, who was acting adjutant, was sent to straighten things out-he and Newell had been cla.s.smates, though Newell was not someone in the cla.s.s you remembered. He was quiet and kept to himself. He had an odd appearance, with a high, domed forehead and pale eyes. Jana, the wife, had a downturned mouth and nice b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Westerveldt didn't really know her. He knew her by sight.

Newell was in the living room when Westerveldt came by. He seemed unsurprised by the visit.

- I thought I might talk to you a little, Westerveldt said.

There was a slight nod.

- Is your wife here?

- I think she's in the kitchen.

- It's not really my business, but are the two of you having problems?

Newell seemed to be considering.

- Nothing serious, he finally said.

In the kitchen the Czech wife had her shoes off and was painting her toenails. She looked up briefly when Westerveldt came in. He saw the exotic, European mouth.

- I wonder if we could talk for a minute.

- About what? she said. There was uneaten food on the counter and unwashed dishes.

- Why don't you come into the living room?

She said nothing.

- Just for a couple of minutes.

She looked closely at her feet, ignoring him. Westerveldt had grown up with three sisters and was at ease around women. He touched her elbow to coax her but she jerked it away.

- Who are you? she said.

Westerveldt went back into the living room and talked to Newell like a brother. If this went on with him and his wife, it was jeopardizing his career.

Newell wanted to confide in Westerveldt. He sat silent, however, unable to begin. He was helplessly in love with this woman. When she dressed up she was simply beautiful. If you saw them together in the Wienerstube, his round white brow gleaming in the light and her across from him, smoking, you would wonder, how did he ever get her? She was insolent but there were times when she was not. To put your hand on the small of her naked back was to have all you ever hoped to possess.

- What is it that's bothering her? Westerveldt wanted to know.

- She's had a terrible life, Newell said. Everything will be all right.

Whatever else was said, Westerveldt didn't remember. What happened afterward erased it.

Newell was away on temporary duty somewhere and his wife, who had no friends, was bored. She went to the movies and wandered around in town. She went to the officers' club and sat at the bar, drinking. On Sat.u.r.day she was there, bare shouldered, still drinking when the bar closed. The club officer, Captain Dardy, noticed it and asked if she needed someone to drive her home. He told her to wait a few minutes until he was finished closing up.

Early in the morning, in the gray light, Dardy's car was still parked outside the quarters. Jana could see it and so could everyone else. She leaned over and shook him and told him he had to leave.

- What time is it?

- I don't care. You have to go, she said.

Afterward she went to the military police and reported she had been raped.

IN HIS LONG, ADMIRED CAREER, Westerveldt had been like a figure in a novel. In the elephant gra.s.s near Pleiku he'd gotten a wide scar through one eyebrow where a mortar fragment, half an inch lower and a little closer, would have blinded or killed him. If anything, it enhanced his appearance. He'd had a long love affair with a woman in Naples when he'd been stationed there, a marquesa, in fact. If he resigned his commission and married her, she would buy him whatever he wanted. He could even have a mistress. That was just one episode. Women always liked him. In the end he married a woman from San Antonio, a divorcee with a child, and they had two more together. He was fifty-eight when he died from some kind of leukemia that began as a strange rash on his neck.

The chapel, an ordinary room with red wallpaper and benches, in the funeral home was crowded. Someone was delivering a eulogy, but in the corridor where many people stood it was hard to make out.

- Can you hear what he's saying?

- n.o.body can, the man in front of Newell said. It was Bressi, he realized, Bressi with his hair now white.

- Are you going to the cemetery? Newell asked when the service was over.

- I'll give you a ride, Bressi told him.

They drove through Alexandria, the car full.

- There's the church that George Washington attended when he was president, Bressi said. A little later, he said, There's Robert E. Lee's boyhood home.

Bressi and his wife lived in Alexandria in a white clapboard house with a narrow front porch and black shutters.

- Who said, "Let us cross the river and rest in the shade of the trees"? he asked them.

No one answered. Newell felt their disdain for him. They were looking away, out the car windows.

- Anybody know? Bressi said. Lee's greatest tactical commander.

- Shot by his own men, Newell said, almost inaudibly.

- Mistakenly.

- At Chancellorsville, in the dusk.

- It's not far from here, about thirty miles, Bressi said. He had been first in military history. He glanced in the rearview mirror. How did you happen to know that? Where did you stand in military history?

Newell didn't answer.

No one spoke.

There was a long line of cars moving slowly, going into the cemetery. People who had already parked walked alongside them. There were more gravestones than one could believe.

Bressi extended an arm and, waving lightly toward an area, said something Newell could not hear. Thill is in that section somewhere, Bressi had said, referring to a Medal of Honor winner.

They walked with many others, toward the end drawn by faint music as if coming from the ancient river itself, the last river, the boatman waiting. The band, in dark blue uniforms, had formed in a small valley. It was playing "Wagon Wheels," Carry me home . . . The grave was nearby, the fresh earth under a green tarpaulin.

Newell walked as if in a dream. He knew the men around him, but not really. He stopped at a gravestone for Westerveldt's father and mother, died thirty years apart, buried side by side.

There were faces he thought he recognized during the proceedings, which were long. A thick, folded flag was given to what must have been the widow and her children. Carrying yellow flowers with long stems they filed past the coffin, the family and also others. On an impulse, Newell followed them.

Volleys were being fired. A lone bugle, silvery and pure, began to play taps, the sound drifting over the hills. The retired generals and colonels stood, each with a hand held over his heart. They had served everywhere, though none of them had served time in prison as Newell had. The rape charge against Dardy had been dropped after an investigation, and with Westerveldt's help Newell had been transferred so he could make another start. Then Jana's parents in Czechoslovakia needed help and Newell, still a first lieutenant, finally managed to get the money to send to them. Her grat.i.tude was heartfelt.

- Oh, G.o.d. I love you! she said.

Naked she sat astride him and, caressing her own b.u.t.tocks as he lay nearly fainting, began to ride. A night he would never forget. Later there was the charge of having sold radios taken from supply. He was silent at the court-martial. Above all he wished he hadn't had to be there in uniform, it was like a crown of thorns. He had traded it and the silver bars and cla.s.s ring to possess her. Of the three letters to the court appealing for leniency and attesting to his character, one was from Westerveldt.

Though the sentence was only a year, Jana did not wait for him. She went off with a man named Rodriguez who owned some beauty parlors. She was still young, she said.

The woman Newell later married knew nothing of all that or almost nothing. She was older than he was with two grown children and bad feet, she could walk only short distances, from the car to the supermarket. She knew he had been in the army-there were some photographs of him in uniform, taken years before, - This is you, she said. So, what were you?

Newell hadn't walked back with the others, He had no excuse to do that. This was Arlington and here they all lay, formed up for the last time. He could almost hear the distant notes of adjutant's call. He walked in the direction of the road they had come in on. With a sound at first faint but then clopping rhythmically he heard the hooves of horses, a team of six black horses with three erect riders and the now-empty caisson that had carried the coffin, the large spoked wheels rattling on the road. The riders, in their dark caps, did not look at him. The gravestones in dense, unbroken lines curved along the hillsides and down toward the river, as far as he could see, all the same height with here and there a larger, gray stone like an officer, mounted, amid the ranks. In the fading light they seemed to be waiting, fateful, ma.s.sed as if for some great a.s.sault. For a moment he felt exalted by it, by the thought of all these dead, the history of the nation, its people. It was hard to get into Arlington. He would never lie there; he had given that up long ago. He would never know the days with Jana again, either. He remembered her at that moment as she had been, when she was so slender and young. He was loyal to her. It was one-sided, but that was enough.

When at the end they had all stood with their hands over their hearts, Newell was to one side, alone, resolutely saluting, faithful, like the fool he had always been.

Last Night.

WALTER SUCH was a translator. He liked to write with a green fountain pen that he had a habit of raising in the air slightly after each sentence, almost as if his hand were a mechanical device. He could recite lines of Blok in Russian and then give Rilke's translation of them in German, pointing out their beauty. He was a sociable but also sometimes p.r.i.c.kly man, who stuttered a little at first and who lived with his wife in a manner they liked. But Marit, his wife, was ill.

He was sitting with Susanna, a family friend. Finally, they heard Marit on the stairs, and she came into the room. She was wearing a red silk dress in which she had always been seductive, with her loose b.r.e.a.s.t.s and sleek, dark hair. In the white wire baskets in her closet were stacks of folded clothes, underwear, sport things, nightgowns, the shoes jumbled beneath on the floor. Things she would never again need. Also jewelry, bracelets and necklaces, and a lacquer box with all her rings. She had looked through the lacquer box at length and picked several. She didn't want her fingers, bony now, to be naked.

- You look re-really nice, her husband said.

- I feel as if it's my first date or something. Are you having a drink?

- Yes.

- I think I'll have one. Lots of ice, she said.

She sat down.

- I have no energy, she said, that's the most terrible part. It's gone. It doesn't come back. I don't even like to get up and walk around.

- It must be very difficult, Susanna said.

- You have no idea.

Walter came back with the drink and handed it to his wife.

- Well, happy days, she said. Then, as if suddenly remembering, she smiled at them. A frightening smile. It seemed to mean just the opposite.

It was the night they had decided would be the one. On a saucer in the refrigerator, the syringe lay. Her doctor had supplied the contents. But a farewell dinner first, if she were able. It should not be just the two of them, Marit had said. Her instinct. They had asked Susanna rather than someone closer and grief-filled, Marit's sister, for example, with whom she was not on good terms, anyway, or older friends. Susanna was younger. She had a wide face and high, pure forehead. She looked like the daughter of a professor or banker, slightly errant. Dirty girl, one of their friends had commented about her, with a degree of admiration.

Susanna, sitting in a short skirt, was already a little nervous. It was hard to pretend it would be just an ordinary dinner. It would be hard to be offhanded and herself. She had come as dusk was falling. The house with its lighted windows-every room seemed to be lit-had stood out from all the others like a place in which something festive was happening.

Marit gazed at things in the room, the photographs with their silver frames, the lamps, the large books on Surrealism, landscape design, or country houses that she had always meant to sit down with and read, the chairs, even the rug with its beautiful faded color. She looked at it all as if she were somehow noting it, when in fact it all meant nothing. Susanna's long hair and freshness meant something, though she was not sure what.

Certain memories are what you long to take with you, she thought, memories from even before Walter, from when she was a girl. Home, not this one but the original one with her childhood bed, the window on the landing out of which she had watched the swirling storms of long-ago winters, her father bending over her to say good night, the lamplight in which her mother was holding out a wrist, trying to fasten a bracelet.

That home. The rest was less dense. The rest was a long novel so like your life; you were going through it without thinking and then one morning it ended: there were bloodstains.

- I've had a lot of these, Marit reflected.

- The drink? Susanna said.

- Yes.

- Over the years, you mean.

- Yes, over the years. What time is it getting to be?

- Quarter to eight, her husband said.

- Shall we go?

- Whenever you like, he said. No need to hurry.

- I don't want to hurry.

She had, in fact, little desire to go. It was one step closer.

- What time is the reservation? she asked.