He’s using the bread to wipe up the olive oil from the plate. It’s as though he hasn’t even heard her.
“You said it was a celebration, for God’s sake.”
“That’s enough,” he tells her. “Will you please let it alone.”
She waits. Nothing in his face changes. “It was just that I was young,” she says. “Wasn’t it. That was really the only thing.”
He’s silent again.
“That’s all you saw in me.”
“Oh, please,” he says.
Abruptly she stands. “Excuse me. I’ll wait out in the car.”
“Marlee—” he says. But she walks away from him, forges past the waiter, and heads down the long hallway with the pictures of dead presidents of the United States. The brandy she’s drunk causes her to stumble into a chair, and her gait is very unsteady, but she keeps on, feeling the need to hurry. When she reaches the end of the hallway she turns and sees that the waiter is standing in the door, from where she has just come, wiping his pale hands on a white towel. He stares coldly at her, then faces the other way, as if consciously giving her his back. As he moves out of view, it’s as though he’s dismissing her forever from this very specific world, where people drink two-hundred-year-old brandy, and men with money marry younger women.
She makes her way outside, across the quiet parking lot to the car. It’s cooler, and there’s a chilly breeze blowing out of the north. The moon is bright on the still bare branches of the trees. She leans against the car hood and tries to breathe, still fighting back tears. The door on her side is locked. She works her way around to his side, and that door is open.
There’s nothing moving anywhere in the sprawl of shadows and shrubs at the entrance to the restaurant.
She gets in behind the wheel of the car and pulls the door shut. All the sounds around her are her own: she puts both hands on the wheel and holds it tight, shivering, sniffling, watching the entrance. Nothing stirs. She thinks of Tillie, out in the world, somewhere under this very moon, living her interesting and glamorous life with all its happy choices and all the long friendships and associations, and then she wonders what Ted will say or do when he comes from the restaurant. Briefly, it’s as if she’s anticipating what punishment he might dole out. Realizing this, she slides over to her own side of the car, the passenger side, which is in a well of moonlight.
Certainly he’ll be able to see her shape in the car as soon as he steps out from the shadow of the building.
Hurriedly, almost frantically, she wipes her eyes with the palms of her hands, then takes a handkerchief out of her purse and begins trying to get the mascara off her cheeks. Her heart races; there’s a sharp stitch in her side. She takes a deep breath, and then another, and then she touches the handkerchief to her lips, puts it away, arranging herself, smoothing the folds of her dress over her knees, running her hands through her hair, trying to achieve a perfectly dignified demeanor—which, for the moment, is all she can do, sitting here alone, frightened, at the start of a change she hadn’t seen coming—assuming the look, she hopes, of someone who has been slighted, whose sensibilities have been wounded, and to whom an apology is due.
VALOR
After it was all over, Aldenburg heard himself say that he had never considered himself the sort of man who was good in an emergency, or was particularly endowed with courage. If anything, he had always believed quite the opposite. The truth of this hurt, but there it was. Problems in his private life made him low, and he’d had no gumption for doing anything to change, and he knew it, way down, where you couldn’t mask things with rationalization, or diversion, or bravado—or booze, either. In fact, he would not have been in a position to perform any heroics if he had not spent the night sitting in the bar at whose very door the accident happened.
The bar was called Sam’s. At night, the neon Budweiser sign in the window was the only light at that end of the street. Aldenburg had simply stayed on past closing, and sobered up playing blackjack for pennies with Mo Smith, the owner, a nice gentleman who had lost a son in the Gulf War and was lonely and had insomnia, and didn’t mind company.
It had been such a miserable winter—gray bone-cold days, black starless nights, ice storms one after another, and a wind blowing across the face of the world like desolation itself. They talked about this a little, and about the monstrosities all around. Monstrosity was Smitty’s word; he used it in almost every context to mean vaguely that thing he couldn’t quickly name or understand. “Bring me that—monstrosity over there, will you?” he’d say, meaning a pitcher of water. Or he would say, “Reagan’s presidency was a monstrosity,” and sometimes it was as though he meant it all in the same way. Smitty especially liked to talk about the end of the world. He was perpetually finding indications of the decline of everything, everywhere he looked. It was all a monstrosity.
Aldenburg liked listening to him, sometimes, and if on occasion he grew a little tired of the dire predictions, he simply tuned him out. This night he let him talk without attending to it much. He had been struggling to make ends meet and to solve complications in his marriage, feeling depressed a lot of the time because the marriage had once been happy, and trying to work through it all, though here he was, acting bad, evidently past working to solve anything much—staying out late, giving his wife something to think about.
The present trouble had mostly to do with his brother-in-law, Cal, who had come back from the great victory in the Gulf needing a cane to walk. Cal was living with them now, and the victory didn’t mean much. He was as bitter as it was possible to be. He had been wounded in an explosion in Riyadh—the two men with him were killed instantly—less than a week before the end of hostilities, and he’d suffered through three different surgical procedures and eleven months of therapy in a military hospital in Washington. Much of his left knee was gone, and part of his left foot and ankle, and the therapy hadn’t helped him much. He would need the cane for the rest of his life. He wasn’t even twenty-five and he walked like a man in his eighties, bent over the cane, dragging the bad leg.
Aldenburg’s wife, Eva, couldn’t stand it, the sound of it—the fact of it. And while Aldenburg thought Cal should be going out and looking for some kind of job, Eva seemed to think nothing should be asked of him at all. Aldenburg felt almost superfluous in his own house. He was past forty and looked it. He had a bad back and flat feet, and the money he made selling shoes wasn’t enough to support three adults, not to mention Cal’s friends who kept coming around: mostly pals from high school, where he had been the star quarter-back. Cal’s fiancée, Diane, ran a small beauty parlor in town and had just bought a house that she was having refinished, so she was over a lot, too. There seemed never anywhere to go in the house and be alone. And lately Eva had started making innuendos to these people about her difficult marriage—fourteen childless years with Aldenburg. As if the fact that there were no children was anyone’s fault.
God only knew what she found to say when he wasn’t around to hear it.
Toward the end of the long night, Smitty said, “Of course, a man doesn’t spend this much time in a saloon if there’s a happy home to return to.”
Aldenburg caught just enough of the sentence to know he was the subject. He said, “Smitty, sometimes I look around myself and I swear I don’t know how I got here.”
“I thought you walked over,” Smitty said.
They laughed.
Sometime after three in the morning he had made coffee, and they had switched to that. Black and strong, to counter the effects of the night’s indulgence, as Smitty called it. He had broken an old rule and consumed a lot of the whiskey himself. It was getting harder and harder to be alone, he said.
Aldenburg understood it.
“Damn monstrosity didn’t last long enough to make any heroes below the level of general,” Smitty said. “My son was a hero.”
“That’s true,” said Aldenburg. “But take somebody like my brother-in-law. Here’s a guy standing on a corner looking
at the sights, and this oil burner goes off. You know? Guy standing in the street with a couple of other boys from the motor pool, talking football, and whoosh. Just a dumb accident.”
“I don’t guess it matters much how you get it,” Smitty said, shaking his head. His son had been shot through the heart.
“I’m sorry, man,” Aldenburg told him.
“Hell,” said Smitty, rubbing the back of his neck, and then looking away.
Light had come to the windows. On the polished table between them was a metal ashtray stuffed to overflowing with the cigarettes they had smoked.
“What day is this, anyway?” Smitty asked.
“Friday. I’ve got to be at work at eleven. Sales meeting. I won’t sleep at all.”
“Ought to go on in back and try for a little, anyway.”
Aldenburg looked at him. “When do you ever sleep?”
“Noddings-off in the evenings,” Smitty said. “Never much more than that.”
“I feel like all hell,” Aldenburg told him. “My liver hurts. I think it’s my liver.”
“Go on back and take a little nap.”
“I’ll feel worse if I do.”
They heard voices, car doors slamming. Smitty said, “Uh, listen, I invited some of the boys from the factory to stop by for eggs and coffee.” He went to open the door, moving slow, as if his bones ached. The curve of his spine was visible through the back of his shirt. He was only fifty-three.
Aldenburg stayed in the booth, with the playing cards lying there before him, and the full ashtray. He lighted a cigarette, blew the smoke at the ceiling, wishing that he’d gone on home now. Brad and Billy Pardee came in, with Ed Crewly. They all wore their hunting jackets, and were carrying gear, looking ruddy and healthy from the cold. Brad was four years older than Billy, but they might have been twins, with their blue-black hair and identical flat noses, their white, white teeth. Ed Crewly was once the end who received Cal’s long passes in the high school games, a tall skinny type with long lean arms and legs—gangly looking but graceful when he got moving. He was among the ones who kept coming to the house now that Cal was back from the war. Aldenburg, returning in the late evenings from the store, would find them all in his living room watching a basketball game or one of the sitcoms—every chair occupied, beer and potato chips and a plate of cheeses laid out for them, as though this were all still the party celebrating the hero’s homecoming.
He never had the nerve to say anything about it. An occasional hint to his wife, who wasn’t hearing any hints.
Brad was bragging now about how he and Billy and Ed had called in sick for the day. They were planning a drive up into the mountains to shoot at birds. Billy turned and saw Aldenburg sitting in the booth.
“Hey, Gabriel,” he said. “You’re early, ain’t you?”
“Yep,” Aldenburg told him, glancing at Smitty, whose face showed no reaction.
“Have a seat at the bar,” Smitty told them. “I’ll put the bacon on. Help yourself to the coffee.”
“I was over at your place last night,” said Crewly. “Didn’t see you.”
“Didn’t get in till late there, Ed.”
“I think I’d like to start the day with a beer,” said Brad.
“Me, too,” his brother put in. The weekend was ahead of them, and they were feeling expansive.
Smitty put the beers down on the bar.
“I didn’t leave your place till pretty late,” Ed Crewly said to Aldenburg. “Eva figured you were down here.”
“I was here last night, Ed. That’s true.”
“Stayed late, huh.” Crewly had a dour, downturning kind of face, and a long nose. His skin was dark red, the color of baked clay.
Aldenburg shook his head, smoking the cigarette.
“I bet Gabriel’s been here all night,” Billy Pardee said.
“The whole night,” Aldenburg said, not looking at them.
“Damn, Gabriel,” Brad Pardee said. “What’re you paying rent for, anyway?”
Aldenburg looked at him. “I’m paying it for my wife, my brother-in-law, and all their friends.”
Billy put his beer down and shook one hand, as if he had touched something hot. “Whoo-ee,” he said. “I’d say somebody’s been told the harsh truth. I’d say I smell smoke.”
Aldenburg watched them, wishing he had gone before they arrived. It had been plain inertia that kept him there.
“Wife trouble,” Smitty said. He was leaning against the door frame, so he could attend to the bacon, and he held a cigarette between his thumb and index finger, like a cigar. The smoke curled up past his face, and one eye was closed against it. The odd thing about Smitty was that whenever these other men were around, nothing of the kindness of the real man came through; something about their casual hardness affected him, and he seemed to preside over it all, like an observer, a scientist—interested without being involved. The others performed for him; they tried to outdo each other in front of him.
“Hey, Gabriel,” Brad Pardee said, “come on. You really spent the night here?”
Billy said, “You going to work today, Gabriel? I need some boots.”
Aldenburg held his empty coffee mug up, as if to toast them. “We sell boots, all right.”
“What’re you drinking there, Gabriel?”
“It’s all gone,” said Aldenburg. “Whatever it was.”
“You look bad, man. You look bleary-eyed and real bad.” Billy turned to the others. “Don’t he look bad?”
They were having fun with it, as he could have predicted they would. He put his cigarette out and lighted another. Because Ed Crewly was in Aldenburg’s house a lot, they all knew things, and perhaps they didn’t have much respect for him—though they meant him no harm, either. The whole thing was good-natured enough. When he got up, slow, crossed the room to the bar, and poured himself a whiskey, they reacted as though it were a stunt, whistling and clapping their hands. He saw that Smitty had gone into the kitchen, and was sorry for it, wanting the older man as an audience, for some reason.
They watched him drink the whiskey for a little time—it was almost respect—and then they had forgotten about him. Smitty brought their breakfasts, and they scarfed that up, and a few minutes later they were going out the door, all energy and laughs. Like boys out of school.
They weren’t gone five minutes when the accident happened.
He had walked back to the bar to pour himself another whiskey, having decided that whatever badness this would bring, including the loss of his job, was all right with him. He was crossing the space of the open door, holding the whiskey, and motion there drew his attention. He saw a school bus entering slowly from the left, bright morning sun on the orange-yellow metal of it, and in the instant he looked at the reflected brightness, it was struck broadside by a long white speeding car, a Cadillac. The Cadillac seemed to come from nowhere, a flying missile, and it caved in the side of the bus with a terrible crunching, glass-breaking sound. Aldenburg dropped the glass of whiskey, and bolted out into the cold, moving through it, with the whiskey swimming behind his eyes. In what seemed no space of time, he had come to the little water-trickling place between the Cadillac’s crushed front grill and the door of the bus, which must have flown open with the collision, where a young woman lay on her back, partway onto the street, her arms flung out as though she had taken a leap from her seat behind the wheel. There was something so wrong about a lovely woman lying in the road like that, and Aldenburg found himself lifting her, bending, not really thinking, bracing himself, supporting her across his legs, his arms under her shoulders. It was hard to keep from falling backward himself. Somehow he had gotten in there and lifted her up where she had been thrown, and on the metal step before his eyes, a little boy lay along her calves, one arm over her ankles, unconscious, blood in his dark hair, something quivering in the nerves of his neck and shoulders. There was a crying, a screeching. Aldenburg held the woman, tried to take a step, to gather himself. She looked at him, upside down, but
did not seem to see him.
“Take it easy,” he heard himself say.
The boy was still now. The screaming went on in another part of the bus. Was it screams? Something was giving off a terrible high whine. He looked at the woman and thought, absurdly, of the whiskey he had drunk, his breath.
She moaned, “Is everyone all right?” But she didn’t seem to be speaking to him.
He lifted slightly, and she said, “Don’t.”
“Hold on,” he told her. “Help’s coming.”
But she wasn’t breathing. He could feel the difference. Her weight was too much. He put one leg back, and then shifted slow, away from the bus, and the full weight of her came down on him. Her feet clattered on the crumpled step, slipping from under the boy’s arm, and dropped with a dead smack to the pavement. And then he was carrying her, dragging her. He took one lurching stride, and another, and finally he got her lying on her back in the road. The surface was cold and damp, and he took his coat off, folded it, and laid it under her head, then remembered about keeping the feet elevated for shock. Carefully he let her head down, and put the folded coat under her ankles. It was as though there were nothing else and no one else but this woman and himself, in slow time. And she was not breathing.
“She’s gone,” a voice said from somewhere.
It was Smitty. Smitty moved toward the bus, but then shrank back, limping. Something had gone out of him at the knees. “Fire,” he said. “Jesus, I think it’s gonna go.”
Aldenburg placed his hands gently on the woman’s chest. He was afraid the bones might be broken there. He put the slightest pressure on her, but then thought better of it, and leaned down to breathe into her mouth. Again he was aware of his breath, and felt as though this was wrong; he was invading her privacy somehow. He hesitated, but then he went on blowing into her mouth. It only took a few breaths to get her started on her own. She gasped, looked into his face, and seemed to want to scream. But she was breathing. “You’re hurt,” Aldenburg told her. “It’s gonna be OK.”
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