Sparta

by Roxana Robinson

  “Come in,” Claire said, stepping back.

  She led him inside and shut the door. She turned to face him. Her eyes were steady under the straight dark brows. Her hair was still thick and glossy, shorter now; it brushed her shoulders. She was barefoot. Her dress was short and loose, pink, with some kind of wide peasant embroidery around the neck. Beneath it was her narrow body, the long torso, the tiny swelling of her belly. The dress was sleeveless, showing the shallow indentations on her upper arms. He wanted to take her arm in his hand.

  She didn’t seem to be wearing a bra. The dress was low-necked, the skirt wide and full: she was unbelievably available. He thought of putting his hand on her thigh and sliding it up her leg. He felt his breath shorten. He hadn’t been this close to a girl in months. Years?

  “Conrad,” she said.

  She gave him that serious, gentle look, head tilted on her long neck, her collarbones fanning beautifully out from her throat. She opened her arms, and he stepped into her body, folding himself around it. He felt her against him, her ribs arching outward, hard and neat, like a little curving ladder; the thrumming beat of her heart, fast and steady like a bird’s; the small, high breasts, which he knew, knew how they felt beneath his hand and under his fingers. She pressed against him, and this gave him a sudden massive hard-on, how could it not, and also he felt, inexplicably, the threat of tears filling his eyes, and that was crippling, and he gripped her too hard and she pulled away.

  He’d gone too fast, fuck, but he didn’t exactly have any control over himself. He tried to hold on to her, keep her in his arms, partly because he wanted so badly to hold her and partly because he didn’t want her to see the shameful aspect of his eyes, tears, or the eagerness of his cock. But she put her hand on his chest, pushing him off.

  “Con,” she said, stepping away. “Please.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He stood back, blinking. “Sorry.” He didn’t say, I can’t help it. He brushed at his eyes.

  A door opened and another girl appeared, thin and blond, in black yoga pants and a purple tank top. Claire and Conrad both turned to look at her.

  “Hi,” the girl said to Conrad. “Sarah Gibson, Claire’s roommate.”

  “Hi,” Conrad said. “I’m Conrad Farrell.”

  “I know you are.” She came over and put out her hand and smiled. She was one of those perfect New York girls, long, straight, thick blond hair, full pink cheeks and narrow eyes; confident and energetic.

  Claire had told him about her: Sarah was a smart southern girl who worked for a local TV channel. She drove around the city in a van with a dish receiver on top and stood with a microphone in front of disaster scenes, speaking crisply and looking serious. Apparently the cameraman spent a lot of driving time smoking pot, so the shots were not always steady. But Sarah was headed for bigger things.

  “I’m glad to meet you,” she said. “I’m glad you’re back.” She smiled. “I know Claire is.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t mind me,” she said, turning away and waving her hand. “I’m just getting something to drink. I’m going to leave you alone.” She slid past them toward the kitchen. “I know you have a lot to talk about.”

  When she’d gotten her drink and gone back to her room, Conrad leaned close to Claire and said, “What did you tell her about me?” and Claire said, “You don’t want to know,” and they both laughed, as though they were back at college again, lovers and friends, conspirators.

  Claire had written to him about both her roommates. The apartment had two bedrooms. The larger one was shared by Sarah and the third roommate, Gretchen, who worked either at the Museum of the American Indian or the Morgan, Conrad couldn’t remember which. A small, distinguished museum. Gretchen had a boyfriend in Brooklyn, where she spent most of her time. Sarah was out a lot, too. Claire liked them, and she didn’t mind having the smallest room, since she had it to herself.

  Claire and Conrad took beers from the fridge and went to sit in the living room. Big plate-glass windows looked out on another white-brick apartment building. Beyond the buildings, on the left, was a choppy brown rectangle, a glimpse of the river. The long curtains had wide black-and-white stripes. A boxy white sectional sofa stood with its back to the window, flanked by dark armchairs. The room was cluttered, but in a quiet, girl-messy way: kicked-off shoes on the rug, magazines open on the big square coffee table. An empty glass or two, flattened pillows on the chairs.

  Conrad and Claire sat at opposite ends of the sofa, facing each other.

  “So,” Claire said. “How is it, being back?”

  She had tucked her legs up beneath her and was leaning an elbow against the arm of the sofa. It was strange to be with her, and to know that she was so distant. He had no right to touch her. He knew that, but it was strange. He’d never been with her like this before, without the right to touch her. Not since he’d first met her.

  “Okay, I guess,” he said.

  “You look kind of … uneasy. Or something.”

  He shrugged.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked.

  He shook his head.

  “Okay.” She smiled. “Then I’ll tell you some classmate news.” She stretched her legs out in front of her, settling in. Her back was against the arm of the sofa, her bare feet stretching out onto the cushions. She now seemed more comfortable, and something inside Conrad began to loosen, seeing her like that, relaxed and easy. “I heard from Lizzie. She’s in Sedona, working as a hiking guide for a big resort hotel.”

  “Cool,” Conrad said.

  “Well, yeah, but Lizzie?” Claire wrinkled her nose. “She never even wanted to go for a walk, let alone a hike. Remember? She wanted to drive down the hall to the shower. Now she’s ready for the Himalayas.”

  “Maybe she takes the guests on virtual hikes,” Conrad said. “Maybe she just drives them around in a van.”

  Claire shook her head. “No. She’s seriously different now. She sends these photographs, like Sunrise over the Mesa or The Soul of the Saguaro.” She shrugged. “Who knew, right? She’s suddenly Eco-Queen. I think there’s a guy involved. I think she’s living with a woodsman.”

  “Maybe there’s an alien involved.”

  “She might have been body-snatched,” said Claire, nodding. “She might be an alien.”

  “What about Baynor?” Conrad asked. “You heard from him?”

  “He’s working for his dad, making boats in Maine.”

  “Not possible,” Conrad said, grinning. “Didn’t he say that’s the one thing he would never, ever do?”

  “We have it on tape,” Claire said, laughing. “Remember that time? We all said what we were going to do?”

  Junior year, late one night, they had passed around a microphone and declared plans for the future. Conrad had said he was either going to be a wilderness guide or teach public policy law, like his father. He hadn’t yet said the word “Marine” out loud. Claire had wanted to be an archaeologist.

  “How’s archaeology?” he asked.

  “There’s still time,” she said, grinning. “I may do it. And you’re a wilderness guide already, aren’t you?”

  Conrad laughed. “So, does he like it, Baynor?”

  “I guess.” Claire shrugged. “He’s there.”

  “What about Gordon?”

  “Go-Go’s on Wall Street. Lehman Brothers or somewhere. I see him sometimes. Pinstripe suits. He wears those shirts with white collars and the rest of them striped?”

  “Go-Go?” said Conrad, laughing.

  Gordon Russell had been a political science major and something of a political radical. He played bass guitar in a very bad grunge band, wore fingerless gloves and torn jeans. His hair was longish, and to promote the black sandpaper stubble terrorist look, he didn’t shave every day. He’d cultivated a kind of badass unkemptness. On the door to his dormitory room was a hand-lettered sign that read IF IT HAS RULES, FUCK IT. OR IF IT MOVES.

  “Not possible,” sai
d Conrad.

  “Possible,” said Claire.

  “Didn’t he have an earring? Several of them?”

  “He did,” Claire said. “Many of them. Once.”

  “It’s good to see you, Clairey,” he said. He lifted his beer, saluting her.

  He liked sitting here on this comfortable sofa, listening to her talk about their friends.

  “So what else is going on?” he asked. “How about you?”

  “Well, I’ve told you about my job at the auction house,” she said. She folded her legs neatly at the ankle. “You know about Yvette.”

  Yvette was Claire’s strange Belgian boss, unmarried and unfriendly and incredibly knowledgeable. She was plain, with pale skin and lips and cold blue eyes, but always immaculately dressed: earrings, heels, her hair drawn back in a chignon.

  “Yes. Yvette, the scourge of the Porcelain Department,” Conrad said.

  “I’ve decided I like her,” Claire said, “even though she’s so strange and unfriendly. I’ve decided she has some secret pain.”

  “Hemorrhoids?” Conrad asked.

  Claire waved her hand. “I don’t know. I just feel sorry for her. I don’t know if she has any friends. And my god, she’s so snooty and so fussy, how much fun can she have? When she talks, it’s like she’s been wound up with a big key on the back of her head.”

  Conrad laughed. “Sounds fun to me.”

  “But I don’t mind her. She knows everything about porcelain. I mean, everything. And the other woman in my department, Louise, is very nice. She’s just gotten pregnant, so the big discussion we have all the time is how much time she takes off, does she take off any time, does she quit altogether. And also morning sickness, and the development of the placenta. I know so much about pregnancy now! I’ve told you about her. And then you know about my friend Denny, in Oceanic Art.”

  Oceanic Art was next door to the Porcelain Department. Denny was the head of it, an older gay man, a good friend of Claire’s. She had written to Conrad about all these people.

  “Yeah, what’s up with Denny?”

  “Denny’s great. He may be the funniest man I know.”

  Conrad lay facing her on the sofa, sipping his beer, listening to her stories. Some of them he was hearing for the first time, some she’d already told him, but he let her tell them again, for the pleasure of lying there, watching her face and hearing her laugh. This is how it is to be back, he thought.

  Conrad told Claire his own stories, the ones he could tell. He told her about Johannson and Boccatto. He told her about the market at Haditha, the baskets of golden dates. He told her what the desert looked like beyond Haditha, those long, arid undulations beneath the flat blue sky. The way the powdery sand drifted when the wind came up, lifting and twisting through the air in soft pale skeins.

  But even that, even talking about the landscape there, in-country, was oddly painful. There was some kind of pull from it: he didn’t tell Claire that. She assumed he was glad to be back, everyone assumed that. And he was glad to be back. He didn’t tell her there was something he missed. He missed his men, and he missed something more. It was like a dark crack, a crevasse, a sliver, reaching down inside him, deep and narrow. There was something he needed from there, something he didn’t have here.

  10

  Conrad sat sprawled on the sofa in the living room while Claire took a shower. He had asked where he could take her out to dinner. He hadn’t asked if he could spend the night, though she must have seen his duffel bag, which he’d slid onto the floor close to the sofa, and she must have known what it meant. Or what he hoped it meant. He was back now, for good: didn’t that mean that they were back together? He wasn’t sure how the evening would go.

  He picked up a gossip magazine from the coffee table and began leafing through it, glancing at the photographs: here was a defiant middle-aged woman wearing harlequin glasses; she was suing her parents because she was ugly. Conrad peered at the picture. It was hard to tell if the woman was ugly or not: she was middle-aged. Maybe when she was younger she’d been ugly, but now she was merely middle-aged, so what was the point? Beside the picture of her was a smaller one of her parents, looking sullen and overweight. Not so good-looking themselves: maybe they should sue their parents. There was a story about a hiker who’d been lost on a mountainside for six days and given up for dead. He’d been rescued by someone’s dog, not a trained search-and-rescue dog, just a terrier out on a walk with his owner. The hiker was photographed, safe and well, at home, for some reason wearing a clown suit. Next to him was a small headshot of the terrier: a Jack Russell, ears pricked, nose raised, avid. Then a picture of an old woman with greasy hair, sitting at her kitchen table and grinning, holding up a small object. She’d found a packet of old gold coins in her grandfather’s trunk in her attic, and now she was unthinkably rich, which was especially heartwarming, since the bank was about to foreclose on her mortgage and throw her out on the street.

  There were pictures of movie stars: Getting married, having adorable children, being jealous, splitting up. Behaving badly, nailed for shoplifting, joining cults, getting busted for drugs. Not paying their housekeepers, having the safe cleaned out upstairs by burglars while their security men were having coffee in the kitchen. Delivering racist rants on video. Leaving vicious messages on ex-wives’ voice mail, which the ex-wives then sent to the newspapers and the Internet. Story after story, a smorgasbord of bad behavior.

  Of course Conrad got it. He knew everyone loved this spectacle, the rich and famous behaving badly and receiving public censure. He got it that it made people feel good. Schadenfreude was particularly active around the rich and famous. He got how it worked, how everyone loved to watch the turning of the wheel of fortune, the high brought low and the low, high. He got the fact that the wheel raised collective self-esteem, reminded everyone that famous people were no better than they—in fact, probably worse. He got it that this made everyone feel good because they all knew that they themselves would never be so foolish. They would never shoplift. Never join a cult. Never get caught doing drugs. Never leave Jennifer Aniston for another woman, never leave a stupid message for their daughter on their ex-wife’s voice mail. From these pages rose a big, steamy, invisible plume of self-righteousness, superiority.

  He got it, but he didn’t get it.

  What he was holding in his hands, these flimsy pages with the sensational text, the idiotic stories and voyeuristic photographs, was proof of how many people cared about all this and how much they cared. These magazines sold in the millions. People had been reading this stuff in doctors’ offices, in airports, on the subway, in bed, in the kitchen, waiting for water to boil. They’d all been reading this stuff, here, while his men were over there, in-country, getting up in the dark, clumsy and tired, covered in sand, loading themselves with sixty pounds of gear, fear clogging their chests. Checking the springs on the magazines, buckling on helmets, getting ready to mount up and head out, ready to be blown apart. Actually being blown apart. Everything over there had happened, real things, while people here were reading this stuff. Feeding on it.

  He couldn’t fit the two things together. It gave him a jagged, unfinished feeling, like the first pinprick of heartbreak, a tiny pointed lance of light beaming on something you can’t bear to see, can’t bring yourself to look at, can’t look away from.

  The door to the other bedroom opened and Sarah appeared. Now she was dressed to go out, in a glossy jacket and tight pants. Her blond hair was sleek, her eyes dark and glittering. She waved at him, holding her hand up and waggling her fingers.

  “’Bye. I’m heading out.” She gave him a wide white smile.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “Meeting some friends downtown,” she said. “See you later.”

  “See you later,” he answered, nodding.

  He liked hearing that she’d see him later. He took it to mean he’d been preapproved for an overnight. He sat up straighter.

  He wondered where Sarah mean
t by downtown. He used to come to New York during college, he’d known the places to go then, but things would have changed. He didn’t exactly know New York now. He’d heard everyplace was now gentrified, all art galleries and good restaurants.

  It was strange, thinking that you had to keep up with things like that. That the places you’d known might not be there, or they might be there but no longer were where anyone went. He’d gone away to Iraq thinking that this country, everything he knew about it, would all be waiting for him. He’d expected it to be just the same when he came back. He’d thought that there was some sort of compact—wasn’t there? He was offering his life for his country, and his country would be there when he came home.

  Now it felt as though he’d been left behind. Some steady onward movement had continued without him. It was like dropping out of line on a long march. He had to run to catch up, and even so, he couldn’t find his place.

  Claire’s door opened and she came out. Conrad put down the magazine. She looked summery and gorgeous. Her shoulders were bare, her blue dress gathered into a drawstring, taut across her collarbones. She wore a silver circlet around her throat. Her dark hair was smooth and glossy, and her eyes and mouth glinted. She looked charged, electric.

  “Hi there,” she said.

  “You look fantastic,” he said.

  She tilted her head, smiling, and the long shaft of her bare throat caught the light. He felt the sight of her all through his body.

  He thought that this was how it would work. He could feel her body with his body. They still felt the same way about each other; they were the same people as before. This would work because he would make it work. He was here. He would be what she wanted. He wanted to be the person he had been before. Resolution was the thing, determination. He would make it happen. You planned the mission, then carried it out. Continue the mission: Charlie Mike.

  * * *

  The air was warm, and they walked slowly up the avenue, people flowing around them on the sidewalk. The city skies were changing from afternoon to evening. The light was slanting lower, shifting from a harsh overhead glare to long horizontal shafts. Above them, the upper stories of the buildings were still brilliant. Illuminated by the setting sun, the white-brick towers blazed against the darkening sky. But a dark edge of shadow, the echo of the planet’s edge, was rising smoothly from below. The shadow flooded through the streets: down on the sidewalks the sun had set, the light was dimming.