“You’re a pig.”
“I’m a realist. I see the reality even when you can’t. You call it the idea of someone else. I call it a whore.”
Penny slapped him. He had crossed a line. They hadn’t fought like this in years. Never had he called her anything but his love, his treasure, his Penny, his unicorn. Was this not the fighting she so assuredly accused him of not doing?
He deeply regretted his attack. The slap to his face made him subservient. Perhaps this is what she was driving at. If she could get him to lose his cool then she would have every reason to walk out the door. Eastman felt ashamed, and he was scared of himself now. This was the start of the depression that would set in for four nights. She had two suitcases packed upstairs, hidden in her closet, and like the good husband so eager to assume his role as ex, he carried the bags outside and loaded the car. The rest of the night played out as if he were watching himself go through a series of mistakes. He no longer saw her through his loving, deeply engaged eyes, but through the eyes of the omniscient.
The drive to New Jersey they made in silence.
Now alone, Eastman ate in bed a dinner of stale crackers and peanut butter. The jam, after opening it to find crumbs and butter coagulating at the top from the boys’ breakfast, he dropped to the floor in frustration. He did not want anything so sweet. He drank a glass of water and took two painkillers, which alleviated the returning ache in his back. And then he took an additional half to alleviate all the other pain, and very soon he fell off into a deep sleep.
He awoke midway through the night, talking to himself. What he was dreaming of he could not remember. But he woke with a powerless feeling, as if in the dream he had been harassed, beaten, perhaps even sodomized. The dream was truncated by an overwhelming urge to pee. All that water. All those pills. If he had let go in bed, he truly would have felt at his lowest. Eastman got up. His back was not as bad as before, the Dusseldorfer’s magic was working. Rest had been good for him. He made his way through the dark hallway to the bathroom, finding the light switch. The toilet seat was still down from Penny’s last use. He had been using the downstairs bathroom for the past four nights. Too tired to lift the seat, Eastman carefully urinated between it but his aim was not what it used to be and he quickly soiled the porcelain U. Then once he sprayed his urine on the seat he decided, who the hell cares, and painted the seat and bowl in urine.
It occurred to him that if he couldn’t have her, if he was indeed losing her to another man, then he would resort to getting her back into the house. The boys needed their home. They couldn’t be taken out of school because she selfishly wanted to be with her idea of someone else. How ridiculous! He would get her back into the house, tell her he was moving out, that she should be here, in her home, the boys near their friends, in school.
Over the years the four Eastmans had developed into quite the traditional family. They had dinner every night at seven. Penny did most of the cooking, but he handled the shopping before she returned from work. The boys set the table each night and helped their mother dry dishes after the meal, while Eastman went to the den to fire up the television. The clacking of the dishes and the laughter and voices coming from the kitchen were comforting.
Both he and Penny had respectable careers that gave each of them some recognition on a national scale. Penny, in her field of psychology, had been publishing papers consistently in Psychological Science and Social Perspectives, and she taught three classes a semester at NYU, where she was building a fast case for tenure. Her work sometimes called her away to give lectures at academic conferences. All of which was okay by Eastman, because he worked out of his study at home and was there when the boys got home from school.
Toby and Lee went to a Quaker school in Brooklyn, where many of the teachers were young men and women of the counterculture scene. Both Eastman and Penny were happy with the progressive approach to education, though he was not altogether satisfied with their lax ideas on grading, for the school stressed creativity over grades and this irked him somewhat. Eastman had excelled in school because he was motivated by grades. Grades created competition. How else could a poor Jewish boy have measured himself against the more physically gifted boys? He certainly couldn’t measure up physically—he was a short stack, like his children.
Recently over dinner, Toby and Lee showed their parents their report cards and Eastman always looked forward to this time in the year. For every A, he paid them. If the school wasn’t going to stress the importance of grades, then he would. “Stop spoiling them,” Penny said. “They shouldn’t be driven by money in order to do well. They should be driven by knowledge. The desire to learn is enough.” “What’s a little incentive?” he told her. She rolled her eyes as he gave each of them two dollars. It made them happy. Before they went to their rooms to put the cash in a sock drawer, Penny gave them each a big kiss on the cheek. “From me, you get a kiss,” she said. Then Toby and Lee ran upstairs. “Penny,” he said, “it’s my own way of showing I appreciate them. I did the same thing with Helen, and look how she turned out. She’s at Vassar with a partial scholarship.” “Okay,” Penny said. “We’ll keep them on the payroll if we must.”
Eastman flushed the toilet and ran his hands under the faucet in the dark. He shuffled down the hallway and stopped in the doorway of the boys’ shared bedroom. The orange streetlight came through their window and he could see the two made beds, empty. Their kids would pay in the end for her lack of judgment.
Were Penny to move back in the house, they could both work together on a proper separation. They hadn’t yet talked about divorce. The ink wasn’t dry on the papers yet. “The ink, the ink, the ink,” he said, walking back to his room. He needed to talk to her about moving back. Call her. It was five-thirty in the morning. Penny would just be waking up for her morning yoga. Call her. Do it. Get her back in the house. You’ll move out. You’ll get a hotel. You’ll make something up. But if you can get her back in here, then there will be a discussion.
Call her.
Eastman got his address book then went to the phone on her nightstand. He hated having a phone in their room. To be reached at all hours was an unnecessary luxury and an incessant pest. But now he saw why she had insisted they have it in the boudoir. “For emergencies, Alan. For whenever we are apart.” He looked up the number for Cathy Domowitz, his mother-in-law, and dialed the rotary.
“Oh, hello?” It was Cathy, barely awake. Now that it was 1973, did everyone have a phone beside the bed?
“Cathy, it’s Alan. I need to speak to Penny. Is she awake?”
“Alan, what time is it?”
“It’s still early. I’m sorry for waking you.”
“Can’t this wait till morning, Alan? I’m sure she’s still asleep.”
“I’m sorry, it can’t, Cathy. It’s a matter of life and death.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m sorry for the disturbance, but you have a phone by your bedside, yes?”
“Of course.”
“And it is for times of emergency, I assume? Or is it to ask people to call back later? This, Cathy, is one of those times.”
“Hold on, Alan. I’ll wake her.”
Was she not already awake? It occurred to Eastman maybe for the first time that Penny was just as depressed and desperate as he was. He should have called earlier, days earlier, but he had been too stubborn. He wanted to punish her, to allow her to see what life was like without the man she’d spoken to every day for the past decade.
Penny took the phone. “Yes, Alan.” Her voice was tired, asleep. Intimations of her in bed next to him. The plan, the one he conjured in the bathroom as he urinated on their floor, was escaping him. Her voice was paralyzing. It had this effect on him, turned him into a little puppy, dying to please.
“Penny.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Everything.”
&nbs
p; “Can this wait a few hours? You’ve woken me up.”
“No.”
She paused and told her mother to go back to bed, that she would be taking the call.
“I want to apologize, Penny. For my behavior the other night when we fought. I said some things I regret, and that wasn’t right.”
“I understand, Alan. I understand what I’m doing to you.”
“So you feel it, too.”
“Yes, of course. I feel terrible.”
“Then you must come home. This is your house as much as it is mine. You’ve overreacted. And I have come to the conclusion that I must respect what you want, as you want it. The boys need to be home, they can’t be moved. And so you will live in our home, not me. I will leave. For the sake of the boys, Penny. You can’t just pull them out of school.”
“It’s summer, Alan. They don’t have school.”
“You can’t take them away from their friends, then.”
“You don’t know what’s going on with them, and you certainly don’t know what’s going on with me.”
“Because you haven’t told me, Penny. You must talk to me.”
She was silent. It was a silence that could have lasted into the morning hours. It was the start of the fifth day; more had been accomplished in less time. Peace treaties, wars fought and won. But she was silent. She wasn’t going to explain anything to him. She hadn’t the energy at this time of the morning. And so Eastman, faced with a desperate silence, a black silence that could determine the rest of his life, decided to act, to fight, to push against darkness.
“They’re sending me to Vietnam, Penny.”
“Who? What are you saying?”
“The Herald. Baxter Broadwater and the boys upstairs. They’re sending me to Vietnam. I’ll be embedding with the few marines left. It’s a mission that could very well reverse the course of the war. A very dangerous mission. Men will die. But if they are successful, and if the story is told properly, in my way, it could have a true impact on the way the country sees this awful pig fuck of a war.”
“But Alan, you’ve been against the war from the start. You’ve demonstrated. You’ve given speeches. You’ve been arrested. They probably have a file on you.”
“I’m not fighting in it, Penny. I’m going as a correspondent. Although I’ll probably have to carry a firearm for protection. It’ll be a hairy mission. That’s for sure. Saigon. The field. Then to the north. Hanoi. Possibly covering a subsequent surrender. But if I make it through alive then I’ll be home free.”
“Alan, you’re not thinking this through.”
“There’s nothing to think about, Penny.” He wanted to say to her, You’ve left me! You’ve left me no choice! It’s you who haven’t thought this through! But in order for a story to have true effect and merit, one must allow the reader to discover the implications on her own. And at all costs hide personal ambition. It is a story. It has no ownership. And so he allowed the words to resonate. He would be fighting for her. Just not in the way she thought.
“When are you leaving?”
“A matter of weeks. Sooner possibly. Days. I’m waiting for my visas. A fixer. A translator. But I’d like to see you before I go. I’d like to spend time with you and the boys.”
“Alan,” she said, as if she wouldn’t give in. And so he pressed.
“Just in case,” he said.
“Just in case of what?”
“You know.”
“What are you saying?”
“It’s a war, Penny, anything can happen in a war.”
“Oh my God, Alan.” She began to cry. It was an opening to deeply affect her, to change her mind once and for all.
“So will you come, Penny? Will you move back so I can spend these last few days with my family?”
“Alan, you’re making this impossible. I can’t do this right now. I just can’t.”
“I know this is a lot to take in at the hour. But sleep on it and call me in a day or two. I’ll keep you abreast of the situation as it happens. I don’t have a lot of time, but I have some. Will you be at your mother’s? Is that where I’ll be able to reach you?”
“What? Yes.”
“Is there another number? If I need to get in touch with you.”
“This is the number you will call.”
“I would need to move quickly for the sake of the mission. Things could be expedited in my situation. I need to be able to reach you if that happens.”
“Jesus Christ, Alan.”
There. He was putting the brakes on Penny’s affair in the making. Let it be just a simple idea for the time being. Let her get her stubborn head around the situation before she could move on. She was not only leaving him but breaking up a family, it was a disaster already, so why not wield the disaster.
“I will be here, at my mother’s,” she said. They ended the conversation and she didn’t say I love you and neither did he.
After the call, Eastman went into Penny’s bedside drawer, looking for answers. The drawer smelled of old teak and jasmine. There were her night creams, hairpins, massage oils, perfume, a dildo wrapped in a velvet cloth. And then a summer scarf, paisley and purple, that he had given to her on her birthday a few years ago. He remembered picking it out, searching all the top department stores in New York until he found the perfect item that reminded him of her.
He picked up the scarf, determined to smell it, to recall all the times she wore it with him. And just as he did, a matchbook fell out of its center onto his lap. It had been carefully folded into the scarf. It was a matchbook from the Waverly Inn, a restaurant they’d never been to together. He was a little hurt that she’d left the scarf, something he gave her, but he was more curious as to why she had hidden a matchbook in it. He opened the matchbook and discovered a phone number scribbled on the inside flap in someone else’s hand. Drawn next to the number was a little heart. Her new lover, perhaps? He convinced himself it was. So an affair had already started. His suspicions were confirmed.
Eastman gritted his teeth and tried to remain calm. There was a rage in the pit of his belly, he could tear out somebody’s throat, kill a man with his bare hands. His thoughts turned bloody, primal.
It was invigorating, a feeling Eastman had not felt in days, months, years. Hatred, beastly violence. It made him feel alive. And with matchbook in hand, Eastman stood from the bed with no pain in his back to speak of.
Broadwater was right. It had been psychosomatic.
4.
Eastman set off that morning with good intentions, focused on becoming someone he once was. He felt Penny was giving him a chance. Despite what he had said to her over the phone, Eastman still had no intention of going to Vietnam for the Herald. It was a lie. Penny would be relieved to know that Eastman was, in fact, not going to Vietnam, and this is what he wanted to avoid at all costs. A lie, a good one, was duplicitous. Once Penny began negotiations to get him to stay he could barter for his marriage.
It was certainly not the worst lie told over the course of the war.
Upon leaving the house, Eastman had placed in his breast pocket the matchbook from the Waverly Inn, the thief’s number, so he presumed, written on the inside flap. He patted his breast every few blocks to make sure it was there.
He took the subway into Manhattan and got off at Union Square. A protest was in progress at the foot of the park. Young men and women with guitars, beads, bandannas. Hippies, dopers, vets, students, and dropouts. They sat around cross-legged. Some of them, it seemed, had been camping out in the park. The nights had been warm enough. But this sudden encounter with youth gave him an intimation of tiredness. He could smell their fatigue through the musk and body odor and marijuana smoke. This generation was tired. They had been spit out, abused, drafted for a decade. Still, they were determined to keep their lives.
A sign hung over the southwest park entrance.
Among the soldiers who died:
12 were seventeen
3,092 were eighteen
14,057 were twenty
9,662 were twenty-one
He took his notepad out of his hip pocket and wrote the figures down. He would check them later against the records he kept of the war, the news clippings stored in a file in his desk.
As he walked deeper into the park, he found men sleeping on benches. They were veterans in their twenties, looking much closer to death than he did. Some homecoming. He had a point of comparison. Back in the winter of 1945, he had returned from war to his wife, Barbara, his college sweetheart. She was devastated to hear that he would only be home for a month’s time before he was to return to the Philippines to begin a job with the Associated Press.
His first few days back, they stayed with his parents in Brooklyn Heights. The apartment was too loud and too small. His mother, Frances, scolded his father, Bert, until his father became irate, fleeing the apartment for the track. He remembered being home with his wife and feeling like he was thirteen. Fran would be washing dishes in the kitchen, the clinking sound of the china, the pots against pans. He couldn’t think there, he felt he had more room in the belly of an aircraft carrier among a fleet of marines. He fled with Barbara to the Catskill Mountains, rented a cottage, where they caught up on much of the lovemaking he had missed while deployed. It was a celebratory time, postwar. After a few weeks of country living, which relaxed his mood, they returned to Brooklyn. He left her with his parents and flew back to Manila. She was willing to let him go for the purpose of starting a career as a correspondent and to begin the book he spoke about constantly.
Half of Eastman’s time as a correspondent was spent in Manila, reporting on the rebuilding of a Japanese-occupied city. Because of his service he gained access the other correspondents didn’t have. He frequented the Officers’ Club at the Manila Hotel, had drinks with lieutenants and generals. They trusted him not to write anything too tell-all. Eastman was fine with it. He was not after a story for the AP, he was interested in talking to people for his book—the men who were still stationed in the Philippines and their stories of patrols and ambushes in a jungle thicket of death. He got them talking, under the guise of being a reporter writing about reconstruction. He had a tremendous memory then and would retain whole conversations until he returned to his hotel room to expel them onto paper. He wrote Barbara five times a week, and after thirteen months with the AP he quit and returned home. Eastman had made enough cash, including his military severance, to support his wife. They lived cheaply in Brooklyn in a small one-room apartment, spent summers on the Cape, and after two years of writing and living off his savings and Barbara’s salary, he had completed the manuscript that would become The American War.
Eastman Was Here Page 4
