WAR IN A BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
A Novel By
PATRICIA RYAN
War in a Beautiful Country
C. Copyright, 2014, Patricia Ryan, New York City
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To Vera and Bill;
In their own way: courageous, graceful, and true.
Because death is unknown, life becomes the puzzle.
Contents
War in a Beautiful Country
Dear Reader
PROLOGUE
It was easy enough to pull off and difficult enough to be exciting.
Surfing the data felt like cruising the bars. All those women! In his mind: young, single, sexy , with cars, and credit cards, and gynecological medical records and special interest magazines----Romance. Brides. Good Housekeeping; weren’t they the cozy ones! And addresses and birthdays.
He played cursor roulette, looking for a name with the required first letter for his
SCARED (S.C.A.R.E.D) project. Looking for a name he could control; a name he had power over; a name that would give him a new rush, the thrill again of becoming the most important man in this woman’s life; the name of someone who would let him overtake her days and nights, so that she thought of nothing but him, did nothing but worry about him, changed her life because of him; the name of someone he could lie in his prison bunk and happily know: “She’s locking her door because of me. She’s looking behind her in hallways because of me. She’s afraid to go to the store, the movies, open her mail because of me.”
It wasn’t quite like the women he used to hit but it was a close second.
In the end, his choice for the lucky lady with whom he would correspond was a random guess, simply like pulling a name from a hat.
In any case, by now he had found “R.” Regina. And when he got tired of her, he would still have two more to go. E. D. Besides, after enough time had passed, he felt the women probably started to ignore the threats since they never materialized. Or they had nervous breakdowns and no one forwarded the letters to the loony bin.
But for now, it was Regina.
CHAPTER ONE
i.
The note said:
Dear Regina,
Soon I will blow you up.
Love, God.
CHAPTER TWO
“Well, Ms.” Detective Walker said, folding the note back into its small envelope and putting it on his crowded desk, “obviously this is someone with ‘Delusions of Grandeur’.”
He smiled at his own eloquent language.
“But,” he continued, “more likely it’s just some guy--assuming it is a guy--with a strange sense of humor. Or maybe that trucking company,” he chuckled.
“What?” Regina asked.
“You haven’t you seen the GOD trucking company? 1-800-CALL GOD?”
“No.”
“Guaranteed Overnight Delivery.” Detective Walker felt the need to smile again.
“Well, in any case,” he continued, “I wouldn’t be afraid if I were you, because chances are this so-called threat is merely a random....”
“Chances?!... Random?! But..it has my name and address on it!”
“So does your junk mail.”
Regina was not entirely satisfied with Det. Walker. The way he let the small envelope with its ominous message just float around in the morass on his desk, working its way under all the other papers, losing its place of importance and urgency. Finally she said, “Listen, I’m just an ordinary citizen leading an ordinary life. Why would.. he...or anyone….do such a thing?!...”
Detective Walker stretched his jacketless arms back over his head, tilting his chair away from her.
“Because he can...” was his reply.
ii
As Regina walked through the sad, day-old snow that had turned to gray slush, back to the nearby parking lot where her silvery Saab—a guilt gift of the divorce-- was tightly squeezed an inch away from the car next to it, she asked herself why some indifferent detective would behave as if a threat to blow her up was merely frivolous.
Yet Regina, too, wanted to resist being afraid. She resented the emotional strain that fear would bring now.
Lately, a satisfying melancholy had settled over her upturned life and calmed her down: a letting go, an acceptance of her newly realized failures. She did not want to exchange this empty peace for fear, which would require her active participation again, just as she no longer wanted her heart to be excited by love.
It was already enough that understanding something new about herself everyday felt like rocks being thrown at her head.
CHAPTER THREE
i.
Drew would be the first person, after Detective Walker, that Regina would tell about the note.
When Regina saw Drew a year ago at the Gallery, she looked at him with a sudden interest that made him feel he had been given a surprise present.
He didn’t know her look was for someone else. For some other young man he reminded her of. Realizing her mistake, Regina quickly turned her attention back to the exhibit, but it was too late.
Drew slowly moved next to her, pretending to study the three pieces of red, white, and blue string that lie on the floor parallel to each other, titled Un-tied States.
“Would you say this is good art?” he asked, unaware that the road to Regina had been smoothly paved for him by her superficial, but pleasant, memories of someone else.
“There is no good or bad art. Only good or bad galleries,” she replied cynically.
“Is this one good or bad?”
“If it ever shows my work, then it’s good .”
“How do you feel about good restaurants?” Drew asked.
“Great,” she responded.
ii
Since pulling out of the parking lot near the police station, Regina had not made much progress driving uptown towards Drew’s small apartment. Not that she was surprised by this.
People kept asking her: “Why would you possibly want to drive in New York City?”
“It has a life all its own,” she tried to explain.
Driving in New York City was Regina’s private, stubborn, idiosyncrasy. No doubt others would think her crazy if she told them she loved driving best during the worst traffic, when maneuvering a two-ton killing machine required the agility of the amusement park game of Go Carts, when her whole mind and body were a perfectly mixed combination of knowledge, skill, and courage; when motion and sound from every direction played on her brain like strobe lights, a great flashing, screaming ,confusing, and rhythmic cha cha cha of chaos, seeing first this, then that, with it all changing each time other stimuli hit her eyeballs, as cars, trucks, and vans would weave, stop, slam on brakes, pull out, and cut across her without warning; with pedestrians on cell phones, walking in front of her as if they were strolling onto their patios; bicyclists blindsiding her; skateboarders rolling out from between parked cars; and even pigeons which strut until nearly under her oncoming wheels, giving off a full dose of New York attitude—”Hey, I’m walking here!”—and only managing to get out of harm’s way by an inch…. that inch that saves every New Yorker, that inch which is all you need between cars, tables in restaurants, and the thirteen million people a day packed into a mere 23 square miles.
There was something exhilarating about how hard it was to drive in New York. It was like living here.
iii
Regina w
as often aware that having New York City as your hometown, the place you would return to if you needed to get back to your roots and be comforted, was strange. In all the old movies, wasn’t a hometown where you got off a Greyhound bus on a dirt road, carrying a duffle bag, and everyone ran out of the house to hug you?
Instead, whenever Regina returned from out of town, she knew she was getting close to home when she began to see big foam dice dancing from the rear-view mirrors of other cars passing her on the road to the city. She realized she couldn’t get much primal comfort here.
She often wondered what it would be like to have that special thrill of seeing New York for the first time. Being born in New York City was like coming into the world already having had your first orgasm. There would never be the shuddering recognition that your life had been rearranged for all time.
Even though-- like most New Yorkers--Regina often hated living here, it always took her by surprise how violently she loved this city—how New York was not only her city, but her country, her race, her sex, her religion.
Still, many times she felt like leaving. Moving to some orderly, clean, rational, sensible, well-organized, friendly place where all the construction was finished. Where the number of people in the average parade was not larger than some countries.
But she was afraid that when the relief and pleasure wore off, the very ease of it would bore her and she would secretly scream, “What have I done??!”
She would yearn to see straggly plants breaking through concrete, or growing on rooftops in what seemed nothing but air and dust, the hearty fearless birds, and the sudden glimpses of fiercely blue sky, so prized for its impossibility.
Yes, she often thought of leaving.
But every time she saw photos of the city, even while she was in it, she would miss it, get homesick for it. As if she were already gone, she would desperately want to get back.
Although she was still here.
CHAPTER FOUR
Regina kissed Drew hello.
“I got a note in the mail today. It said:
‘Dear Regina, Soon I will blow you up. Love, God.’”
Drew laughed. “No, you didn’t,” he said. “It’s a joke, right? ‘Love, God’, that’s funny. Actually, it’s corny.”
Regina laughed too. “Yes, it is corny. And it may be a joke. We don’t know.”
“We....?”
“I went to the police.”
“You’re serious! You really did get....”
“Yes.”
How did you get it?” Drew asked.
“In my letterbox. Downstairs.”
“Was it to you?”
“Yes. It had my name and address on the envelope.”
“Did it have a postmark?”
“That’s the strange thing. It was from Texas.”
“Well, see...maybe it’s just a junk mail promotion for something.”
“Like what?”
“Like...say, a movie…or a life insurance policy....I don’t know! What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know what to think. So far, something like this is out of my realm of experience.”
Drew was making dinner for them. He turned back to the stove and didn’t say anything more. Regina never helped him cook. The kitchen was so small that working together would have brought them both to a standstill. Besides, she needed something like an Indian guide to get through his refrigerator, even after at least half of its contents fell to the floor whenever the door opened.
Instead, she sat on the couch, studied him, and thought appreciatively of how he was so full of sweet virility.
In Drew’s apartment everything was in the same room, which meant they were always together. It was a strange, narrow, little place on the ground floor, carved out of an old brownstone. Once each room had been part of a whole house, but now was a tiny, separate, studio apartment. It was an interesting place to have a crowded party.With everyone in the same small, long room, people lined up, like in a railroad car. To get another drink or go to the bathroom, you would have to push from the middle, as the crowd automatically swayed slightly to allow a crooked path. You could spend the whole night walking sideways and meeting new people.
At one party--after the close of a small play in which Drew had a rather good part --the cast and crew converged at Drew’s apartment. By midnight everyone was in an altered state from emotion, beer, and no food. The play’s lighting designer believed no one liked him because he was Japanese and threatened to commit suicide. He opened the window with a dramatic flourish.
“I am going to jump!” he cried loudly. No one paid any attention.
“Hi,” a passing dog walker said as he put both legs over the outside ledge.
The startled designer hopped down to the sidewalk from the street level window and returned to the party through the front door. Everyone was grateful for the fresh air.
Regina didn’t know why she remembered this as she watched Drew test a spaghetti strand by folding it over a potholder he held in his other hand.
Then Drew said, “I think Texas is too far away from here. Even for God.”
“Not if God showed up in your mailbox, it wouldn’t be.”
Regina was not altogether surprised that Drew too, was not taking her situation seriously.
Unlike Detective Walker, a professional, she was sure Drew’s reason came from the more common reaction of his youthful age group. In her mind, they all seemed generally indifferent, with the exception of what was happening to themselves at the moment. Then they gave the same out-of-proportion importance to every one of their own crises, big and small, which, ironically, led to a misunderstanding of their own good, and sometimes great, lives.
Mostly Regina appreciated the charm of Drew’s being fifteen years younger, yet some part of her always felt superior. In small ways she could become just plain annoyed, and sometimes bored. Together they joked that the real differences between their ages was that Drew came from the stand-in-one-spot-and-just-wave-your-arms generation of hard rock, while Regina believed the only real concerts had violins and a cello.
“Why are you still with this child?” her Aunt Doris had once admonished. “You have to be careful. The young treat you the way they are feeling about themselves .They don’t know enough yet to treat you the way you’ve earned being treated. They’re still amateur people, you know.”
“Doris!” Regina had exclaimed.
But Doris was right.
Regina remembered herself when she was young; young enough not to realize she was liked because she was young; young enough to think that if others wanted to be of value, they had to be young too.
She recalled how she had behaved at one of her first jobs, as a too-young-almost-manager of a small art department in a large corporation. Once, on a day when she was particularly full of her own view of the world, a supplier who sold paper to her predecessor dropped in to see her.
She was furious: imagine his not making an appointment! Didn’t he know who she was!
After keeping him waiting longer than she had to, she went out to the reception area rather than invite him into her office.
He was old! It wouldn’t do.
The man had thin white hair and looked a bit frail, actually. He was lugging around a heavy, square, black case with samples of every kind of paper imaginable. Why did she have to see this? She knew what paper looked like. Annoyance and disdain covered her as though it were her outfit for the day. The man reeled from her rude introduction.
After a few cursory minutes looking at paper--during which time the old man nervously tried to establish contact with her by describing the good partnership he always had with the company--Regina thanked him coldly and said she was busy. He gathered up his samples and left.
Regina caught the accusatory look he shot her, but it was only decades later, that passing time allowed her to know what that look told her about who she was then. And now, knowing this taunted her, embarrassed her. Lately, under hard-earned wisdom’
s new spell, she could see things once lost in the past…. not just in this case, but in many others as well: the meaning of glances and looks locked in her head all these years, lying in wait to become clear.
Yes, she too had once been an amateur person .
It made her wonder to herself: if I was such a jerk then and didn’t know it, how do I know I’m not one now?
“There is no great way to be a human being,” Doris often told her.
ii
She was startled back from her reverie as Drew continued to press his point.
“You hate it when I’m right,” Drew accused her.
“That’s not true; I like it when you’re right.”
She did like it when he was right. Regina secretly felt Drew was not as sharply aware as she would prefer him to be. She saw him as the kind of person who couldn’t seem to talk and push an elevator button at the same time.
But Drew had his appeal. He was sometimes willing to lead her life. But more importantly, he did not require her to lead his.
Regina knew it was easy to fall in love with someone else’s life. She herself did it with men she wished she could have known who were no longer alive, if they had sensuously left behind the valuable core of themselves in a book, a painting, or an idea. Regina recognized she was a bit of an achievement groupie, a talent eater. As a would-be artist herself, plagued by a lack of confidence, sometimes she wanted to suck all the talent out of a man, dead or alive, for herself. She could turn a man’s resume into an aphrodisiac.
She saw some of this same tendency in Drew, struggling to be an actor and insecure in his own work, when, the first time he had come to her loft and saw the large number of paintings, both finished and in process, a place full of everything needed to paint and used seemingly without hesitation, a testament to commitment and accomplishment. He could not know at this time Regina’s inner grief at not getting out of herself what was inside, so he mistakenly said:
“It must be good to be you,”
Still.
For her, Drew provided only a temporary and unusual pleasure, like being at a lovely resort where she knew she could not remain. She saw no sense in turning the metaphorical great weekend into a lifetime of misery.
Sometimes after a long day with Drew, Regina would think: I miss brilliant people. I don’t mean sitting around discussing quantum physics. I mean being with people whose minds can give ordinary life an extra shine.
So when Drew was right, she felt encouraged. And if he were right in this case about the note being merely a gimmick, it would also be a great relief.
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