And West Is West

by Ron Childress

  “You okay?” Bob asks.

  She lights a cigarette and exhales the smoke away from his face. “Let’s get out of here before you catch cancer,” she says.

  What is it about overconfident jerks that makes them attractive? Dunbar should not be on her sexual radar. But damn the Force’s fraternization policies, he is. Jessica doesn’t look toward the bar again but heads for the front door, passing the airman at the nickel slot. A dead cigarette sits between his knuckles where a burn blister has emerged.

  “Are you all right, Airman?” Jessica asks. As a new NCO this is her first official act over a subordinate.

  The airman drops a nickel into the machine. He cranks the lever and Jessica waits until the reels stop: two cherries and a bell. Coins rattle down the machine’s throat, but this doesn’t stop the airman from playing.

  “Why don’t we drive you back to base?” Jessica suggests. At his lack of response she puts a hand in front of the airman’s eyes. But he knows how to play the machine by feel and he does so again.

  “There a problem here, Sergeant?” Unseen, Dunbar has come upon them.

  “No problem, sir,” Jessica responds, protective of her fellow enlistee. She does not want whatever is up with him to go on his record. Despite manpower shortages, and perhaps the cause of them, it is easy for an ordinary airman to get bounced from drone duty if his psychological profile slips. The Air Force has the lowest accidental civilian kill ratio of all the services and wants to keep it that way.

  “How much have you been drinking, Airman?” Dunbar asks the man, but there’s not a bottle around and the airman’s breath smells dry.

  His eyes are blank from screen fatigue not alcohol, Jessica wants to say. What is more, off-duty bingeing is not what pilots and navigators, even stationary ones, do. The steadying vice is nicotine, taken via gum when indoors on base or through the standard cancer sticks while enjoying a break under the desert sky. One might imagine there is no battlefield stress an ocean away from the front, but this is the problem: lack of physical danger in operations that take lives—even enemy lives—never feels quite right. Jessica knows how the silent guilt builds. You learn to deal with it or crack. In other words, you smoke. Maybe, she thinks, risking their lungs is some atonement for being beyond the line of fire. God bless Philip Morris. She and Bob leave Pancho’s without the airman.

  A week later the airman is booted from the drone program. His next stop will be guard duty at a Kyrgyzstan airbase. Though this is Dunbar’s doing, Jessica feels rotten for not adequately watching the man’s tail, like any good wingman would. But she cannot discuss her unhappiness, not even with Bob. She would be putting her own psych profile out there to be picked over. The only person safe enough to talk to, to write to, about this is two thousand miles away. Is it common DNA that makes a father understand his daughter so well? What else could it be; Jessica has not seen Don in fourteen years. Yet from his letters she feels that he understands what she is going through like no one else could. Maybe because he’s a prisoner.

  CHAPTER 5

  Florida

  Dear Jessica,

  What a surprise. I was not expecting your monthly letter for two weeks. And I was not expecting you to send more cigarette cash. Since you keep calling it that I am guessing you have the habit. When I was young I could burn up three packs a day easy. Hope you are going lighter. I am. Last year the state banned us from smoking. Too many fires and sick prisoners. But the warden here is okay. He has allowed us music players to make up for the smokes. So on music is how I will spend your dough.

  Anyway I have a little good news. That library job I mentioned in my last letter. I got it. There was a shakeup over some smuggled DVDs and now I am a book stacker. No more hands blistered from laundry lye. I bet I feel as good as you did when you got your stripes. But I am sorry you are a little down about your promotion now. Remember you are new at the job so dont kick yourself too much over your lost airman. You probably could have done nothing more to help him than what you did. Probably you assumed his worries were like yours and he could handle them. But maybe the lieutenant you mention had him pegged right as a crackup. Who knows? Anyway you should keep for yourself a little of the forgiveness and understanding that you give to others. That includes me.

  When I think back on how I wronged you and your mother. Leaving you cold. Not sending you anything to live on. Then all this time later to have gotten that first letter from you. Did you know your last one adds up to twelve? Nearly a full year of letters. Your kindness brings tears to my eyes. Which are not something I can afford in a place like this. Like you I am forced to show the world a face that dont crack. When I cry I do it after lights out. Or just before like I am now.

  So goodnight Daughter. I blow a fatherly kiss to you across the miles and over the waters and deserts and through the walls that separate us. Even if I am never to hear from you again it will be the mystery and miracle of my life that for a while you came back to me. You are more than I deserve and I expect every letter that comes from you to be the last. But never feel badly if you must stop writing. I will understand. And I will cherish till my last breath what I have received.

  Your loving father,

  Don

  PART TWO

  SEPARATION

  September – November 2012

  CHAPTER 6

  New York City

  It is the day before Labor Day but nevertheless it is a school night for Ethan, as was last night. A holiday weekend at work is why he has arrived late at (Le) Poisson Rouge on Bleecker, where Alex is eating nachos at a side table below the musicians. Alex’s latest is the avant-garde cellist onstage above them.

  “It’s serious this time,” Alex says and stuffs his mouth as if the waitress, who serves in mime, is about to snatch his plate. Silently Ethan admires his friend—how he devours meals, alcohol, women, and life. Ethan’s approach to living is less exuberant—he catches himself, constantly if metaphorically, patting his lips with a napkin after each bite, sip, or kiss.

  As he looks up at the instrument between the cellist’s legs and at her strong, bare calves, Alex spits something wet into his ear. “I don’t get what she’s doing with the bow, but she plays hell with me in bed. A real Paganini of the sheets.”

  “Paganini was a violinist,” Ethan says. “And a man.”

  “Whatever,” Alex replies.

  They watch Eva saw. Her cello screeches like a yowling cat. Ethan assumes this is deliberate.

  “Listen to that. Pure sex,” says Alex, chewing. He swallows hard and for an instant he appears to choke. Then the bump descends through his esophagus and he is breathing again. Ethan thumps him between the shoulder blades anyway. “So. What do you think?” Alex asks in a particular tone with which Ethan is very familiar.

  After Zoe left, Ethan told Alex to lay off trying get him laid. But Alex is an inveterate matchmaker. A goyim Yente Ethan often calls him, priding himself on the cultural reference since he has focused his life on mathematics. But Ethan does know Fiddler on the Roof because in high school he lost his virginity to the pretty girl who played Grandma Tzeitel. He thinks of her sometimes but not as much as he continues to think about Zoe. And so for the past month, through the dog days of August, Ethan has said No, No, and No to Alex’s various requests that they double date, or that Ethan take a friend’s number, or that he meet him at a SoHo bar where he has just run into a pair of beautiful sisters. “You and your wallet are hot property, amigo. Take advantage of it,” Alex says. “Look what I have to do to get by. Be a genius.”

  Being intelligent but a non-genius and somewhat human, Ethan relented at last. His blind date is not one of the musicians tonight but the cellist’s page-turner, and he sits on tenterhooks watching her. The performance is agitato and muscular and his date must slap the read sheets out of the way. He keeps expecting the music stand to fly across the room and the music to crash to an embarrassing halt as if a wrench has been shoved into the gears of a screaming engine. He worries tha
t his date’s long dark hair, which swings whenever she dives forward to flip, will snag Eva’s cello. Whenever the page-turner catches his eye and winks, his stomach pitches because she might miss her next cue and the audience, voracious in their love of extreme performance, will hiss her shamefully off the stage.

  Through all this tumult Ethan considers Alex’s What do you think? What Alex really wants to know is whether he likes the page-turner enough to try to take her to bed.

  The music, now at an earsplitting pitch, prevents him from responding to Alex with his own question—Why would Yahvi want to sleep with me so soon anyway? What Yahvi and he are on, if it is a date, is a first date. Ethan is aware that his restraint may be old fashioned, but Yahvi, or her family, is from India, where a public kiss can earn an admonishment. This gives him some relief, expecting that she will not behave like some of the other blind dates. Yet India is also the birthplace of the Kama Sutra.

  What will he do if she wants to come home with him? Considering her enthusiasm as a page-flipper, the prospect terrifies. Or is it scary because she would be the first person in his bed since Zoe? It has now been fifty-one days since Zoe slept next to him and forty-four since they communicated—which means that he has, to date, spent about one percent of his adult life in post-Zoe limbo. He does this calculation every day.

  Then the cacophony of music-like sound implodes. The abrupt cessation of noise creates an aural vacuum in the club, an emptiness so sudden that even the dim lighting seems darker. The audience stands to deliver its applause.

  All the women on stage are taking bows. It is a little strange, Ethan thinks, that Yahvi, the page-turner, should be among the applauded and not be one of the applauders. Is this what we have become in an era of universal reward—spoiled children who receive gold stars for mere participation?

  “She’s the composer, dimwit,” Alex says after Ethan makes his observation verbal. This information scares him even more. For what if this supremely competent woman, this woman capable of forging sound into a brain-piercing rapier, does come home with him?

  “You were amazing,” Alex says leaping to embrace Eva as she comes down to their table.

  “Hope it wasn’t too harsh,” Yahvi says as Ethan pulls back a chair for her to sit.

  “It was . . . beautiful,” he responds and wishes to swallow his hesitating tongue.

  “Yes. It was beautiful. If you have the right ears. Do you have such ears, Ethan?” Yahvi’s eyes, large and dark, laughing and forgiving, embrace him.

  THROUGH A SLIVER of morning sky Ethan sees a boom moving across his fragment of the Freedom Tower. He is saddened that his apartment will not have a clean view of the spire that will lift the structure to its symbolic height of 1,776 feet. Que sera. He should have bought an apartment on a higher floor. But how was he to know that the Goldman Sachs monolith on West Street would block most of his view of Ground Zero? This is the hazard of living in a mobile city, a sleepless city that also never lies still.

  A contradiction, the French for a building, immeuble, comes to him—in high school he was much better at programming languages. And then comes the word for furniture. Meubles. The immovable and movable to an old-world culture. But here, in this city, change is the status quo. A building is implicitly a process, a gerund, a building. And a piece of furniture is not necessarily a movable—to which the weekly sidewalk piles of discarded chairs, tables, mattresses, lamps, and bookcases attest.

  He prepares espresso over these thoughts, waits for Yahvi to smell the coffee and arise. It has been six weeks since their first date and she has spent the past three consecutive nights in his apartment. On this happy, crisis-free Wednesday he decides he will do something remarkable, unprecedented, amazing. He will call in late to the bank.

  He spies Yahvi tangled in the sheets, a dervish come to rest. Parts of her—an ear, a breast, a knee, a cascade of dark hair—spill from the Egyptian cotton. Watching her, recalling how his fingers stroked her skin and the way last night she pulled him into her, he wants this again. Should he go to her or clatter about in the kitchen scrambling eggs to awaken her? They are now more than hookups but not quite in a relationship. Or are they? If he slips into bed, will she think he’s a lech? If he makes her breakfast, will he come off as the mathematical nerd that he is?

  “I see you,” she says from inside the mouth of her sheet cave. Her hand, like a genie’s bejeweled with silver rings, spiders out and beckons. He puts his coffee cup on the dresser and gets a knee on the bed before a chittering stops him. He’s in an updated fable. His choice: the Lady or the BlackBerry.

  He retreats to the dresser where the device vibrates. Since no one ever calls this early it must be important. Perhaps disastrous. Has there been another financial meltdown? The caller ID is unknown. He does not even recognize the area code.

  “Hello?” he says.

  “Ethan Winter?”

  The voice, deep, harsh, hovers on the edge of recall. Instinct tells Ethan to ignore it, to shut the phone, to go to Yahvi. The bangles she has worn to bed rattle as she beckons—a petulant child demanding gratification, her full lips pout. Stupidly he turns his back to her. “This is Winter,” he says.

  IN A CHAIN cafe around the block from his building, Ethan locates at a window table Dr. Leston eating eggs with a plastic fork.

  “You and my daughter lived in an interesting neighborhood,” the doctor says.

  Ethan corrects him, “I still live here.”

  “I’m aware of that.” Leston beckons him to a chair.

  Ethan wants to speed up this encounter, whatever its purpose, so he can return to Yahvi. But he sits. Dr. Leston appears less solid under daylight than he had in the fireplace glow of his study. He is eating hunched over and a bit of egg has caught on his angular chin. Ethan notices that the doctor has shaved poorly and that his coat seems big. In the three months since their introduction the doctor must have lost weight.

  “Can I help you with something?” Ethan says.

  Leston presents a leathery smile and puts down his fork. With a finger he wipes a bit of egg from his lip. His eyes, deep in their sockets, drill Ethan’s. “I don’t doubt you’re the one person I know who can help me with this problem.”

  Ethan almost cuts him off. “If you need a broker, I’m not one. And any work I do for UIB is confidential. I couldn’t tell you what to invest in.”

  The doctor erases Ethan’s words with a contemptuous wave. “You think I would trust your bank again? What I am talking about now is Zoe.”

  Ethan feels a stab under the ribs. He’d thought he was over Zoe, or close to it. “We haven’t talked since she left for Washington.”

  Leston’s unruly eyebrows rise. “She’s doing well,” he says.

  “Well good for her,” Ethan answers but fails to feel sarcastic. Though Yahvi is waiting twelve stories above, his post-Zoe reality begins to slip.

  “She works for an organization that assists rural women in developing countries. Microloans. Legal aid. That type of thing.”

  Ethan nods. He sees Zoe bustling through an office run by bureaucrats who measure personal success by their proximity to power. He imagines the politics, both office and international, slowly corroding her shiny enthusiasm. “I’m happy for her,” he lies.

  “Yes, everything is good for her. For the moment.”

  “Mind if I get coffee?” Ethan says.

  When he’s at the register he watches Leston pour out and swallow pills. The doctor’s hands shake. He is ill, Ethan determines, quite ill. Or else why this meeting? Ethan deduces that this could be just the beginning of the bad news.

  “How’s your wife?” Ethan asks, returning with his coffee.

  Leston smiles as if at an unspoken joke. “Elizabeth, as I imagine you could guess, is worse than when you met her. She has grown to be too much for me to handle at this point.”

  Despite his dislike of the doctor, Ethan allows that Leston is not as hard a man as he tries to appear. “Well, I guess you of all people w
ould know of the best places to take care of her.”

  “Facilities where she can sit around in diapers with no memories and stare at wallpaper?”

  Ethan holds Leston’s gaze. “How sick are you?”

  “Pancreatic cancer,” Leston says. “And when I am deceased I’ll need a favor from you. Not for me. For Zoe.”

  “But you know we’re not even friends anymore. As I’ve said, I haven’t spoken with her in months.”

  “Yet Zoe has mentioned you to me more than once.”

  Ethan feels his spine straighten. “What?”

  “The strongest relationships are based on respect. I see that Zoe may have this for you and that my judgment of your character may have been hasty. It’s your line of work, you see. But listen to me now. Today Zoe wants her own life. Give her time. Be patient. Keep an open heart.”

  Open heart. Ethan would expect the doctor to use the phrase medically, not metaphorically. From the briefcase by his chair, Leston lifts out a bulging manila folder bound with rubber bands. He grimaces with the effort of handing it to Ethan. “This will explain all,” he says. Shakily he leans hard on the table to stand. “Zoe knows very little of her true background. I’m counting on you to look after her when she discovers the whole truth. I cannot tell it to her. I’ve kept her in the dark for too long and now I’ve run out of time.” Leston starts shuffling toward the door. He would be running if he were not infirm.

  Ethan tucks the manila folder under an arm and picks up the doctor’s abandoned briefcase. Leston is supporting himself on each table that he passes and Ethan hurries to offer him his free arm. Leston accepts the aid without comment. This sudden capitulation seems caused by the doctor’s illness or a debilitating medical treatment. But perhaps it has to do with what the doctor, in all practical terms, has just bequeathed—his daughter and her “background.” Ethan guides Leston out into the sunny fall day, normally a most perfect kind of day.