“Six miles in forty-one minutes tonight,” he said. His running shorts were stuck to his thighs.
Susan said nothing, her eyes sad and dry. He still found them beautiful, like chocolate syrup, the way he told his buddies after their first hook-up, but now, after twelve years, her brown eyes demanded an emotional admission he was afraid to stop paying because his buddies were all gone.
“Forty-one minutes,” he said again. “I’ll sleep through the police academy. Remember at Rico’s when we’d watch the fat trainee cops run down Racine?”
Susan was silent. Mike wanted to put his finger in her face, but he didn’t. She looked at the cat while she stroked its cheekbone. He knew he couldn’t touch his wife even if he put his hand on her mouth.
One day, he’d remind her they were from different towns, but the same Illinois with brown rivers and cornfields running to the sky. He needed to get that straight again, remind Susan of her limitations.
“I know Harvard accepted you senior year of high school,” he’d tell her. “You wrote an essay on Freud and dreams for a contest, then presented it to the Rotary Club in a long dress. You had slides of diagrams and spoke into a microphone. The bored, gray men sat in folding chairs with their legs crossed.”
Susan would shake her head. Her eyes might blear while her finger pointed at his nose.
“You have no idea,” she’d tell him. “There is no way you could know a thing.”
“The day the envelope came,” he’d say, “you saw the rain dance on pickup hoods parked among the clapboard houses. The gutters were high with muddy water from the flooded fields. You held the letter and watched the weather coming over the interstate, the paper flecking wet, knowing your mother would worry all night about the creek rising behind the house. You cried with closed eyes, alone beneath the willow tree, happy you could blame your wet face on the rain.”
“I didn’t see any of it. Not the way you say.”
Mike told his wife nothing. He only watched her look away and rub the cat’s ear between her thumb and forefinger. He knew they liked fighting more than understanding, and because of it, they’d forced each other away. She was there for the cat, not him, and he could feel good about that if he let himself. Either way, he’d jog different alleys tomorrow night, dreaming he could run until the dawn broke over the two-flat roofs, the morning light coming fast, chalky, then the palest blue.
2
Donald Goetzler stood by the long window while the rain sliced their reflected faces in the glass. Shapeless men and women lined out the conference-room door and took paper plates when they neared the food table. It was Goetzler’s retirement lunch, the regulation catered buffet on Weber Industrial Supply, the long trays brought in by Mexicans in red windbreakers with their names sewn on front. The secretaries got him a white cake from a supermarket bakery. He looked at his watch, a gold Rolex date timer, then back out the window.
Weber retired Goetzler with a phone call to set up the short meeting where he’d sign for his package: one year’s salary, a two-year consulting retainer, and the right to pay for group health insurance. What’s your timetable, they said. He held the phone to his ear. He pressed it close, then closer, until the voice sounded like no voice at all. A fax came in. The printer spat paper. He wished he’d been tougher.
Yesterday, when he cleaned out his cubicle, he threw away three million dollars’ worth of research, two years of sixty-hour weeks, inquiries into how they might get Ford and General Motors to buy their safety equipment and lightbulbs.
Shred it, they told him. We’re changing our focus.
They wanted to sell hammers and light motors to prisons, federal agencies, city water departments.
The secretaries in their floral dresses looked up from the buffet where they poured ranch dressing on carrot sticks. Ari Feldman was moving through them like a cocky house cat, his paper plate sagging from the pizza slices and the stuffed shells. He was fat, his loafer heels worn into an inside slant, his XXL oxford coming untucked from his khakis with the elastic waistband. They stared squint-eyed through their glasses, looking at Feldman and the emptied pizza boxes, while he stacked garlic bread upon two oatmeal cookies. They mouthed jerk and shook their heads. He worked in quantitative market research, and e-mailed classmates from the University of Chicago about his folk rock band, The Bagel Chips. He went back and got another paper plate because the grease was leaking and wiped his hand on a chair back. He then walked right up to Goetzler, half the pizza on his plate.
“Ed Marx got a better retirement package than you did,” he said.
Goetzler looked out the window.
“He got three years full pay and a five-year consulting deal,” Feldman said.
“They never call them back,” Goetzler said.
“They’ll call Marx. He was something around here.”
Goetzler looked at the sterno heating the stuffed shells. He’d stood next to some of the men at the urinals, but the women were floral dresses to him. In the window Goetzler saw that Feldman was still talking, his face blurred by the rain.
“Ed Marx got an IT degree at night before people even had the Internet. He knows trends.”
Feldman was taking pizza bites before swallowing his mouthful.
“That guy is far from done. Ed Marx will be the consultant of this industry.”
“You hear anybody talk about him since he left?”
“No.”
“You’ll get the call one day,” he said.
Ari Feldman started chewing very quickly. Goetzler could see his red wet teeth.
“You stayed in the army after Vietnam,” Feldman said. “I started ten years before you. I’ll be a director like Ed Marx.”
Goetzler pointed to the plate of pizza.
“But your ass won’t fit his seat,” he said.
Feldman looked away before Goetzler turned. They both watched the rain and the wind melt their reflections in the window. Feldman was burrowing his eyes into the glass while Goetzler smiled and looked at his gold Rolex date timer. He liked the way it slid from his shirt cuff. If he looked at the watch and nothing else, he could be very happy with himself and believe he got exactly what he wanted.
* * *
One morning in late June 1967, while the Officer Candidate School platoon crossed the monkey bars outside the chow hall, Donald Goetzler fell off for the last time. His hands were too small and he never got a good enough hold around the bars for his arms to take him across. He’d hold up the line. The cadets behind him, sweaty with momentum, kneed his backside. His blisters burst like opening eyes and he went down midway across. He knelt on all fours and the men’s boots kicked his head, knocking off his horn-rim glasses. He looked for them, patting the red sand, the grit impacting his bloody blisters. When the platoon filed into chow hall, Goetzler went to the aid station, where he had his palms cleaned, and two hours later stood before Major McCally with gauze on his hands.
McCally lit a cigarette and reclined in his oak swivel chair. He put his jump boots upon the desk and Goetzler saw himself reflected in the shiny leather, his hands wrapped like amputated stumps. The major held the cigarette between his fingers, his hand ready to karate chop. He was with the Twenty-fifth Division in the Pacific, and had an autographed picture of James Jones on his desk. I knew him in Hawaii before Pearl, he’d say of Jones. I even knew the little dark-eyed queer he turned into Pruitt. But Jimmy Jones. That book shoved it up their asses and he married a looker who only jumped writers and then he makes a million. Good on him. McCally won a battlefield commission in Korea, six years after winning the Distinguished Service Cross on Iwo Jima, but his glory road had stopped at an Officer Candidate School training command.
The major’s hair was cut close, flecks of gray upon the black. He looked at Goetzler with stiff blue eyes.
“They’re drafting some real no-hopers into the line divisions,” he said. “An infantry officer better be part lion tamer if he wants to make his mission in Vietnam.”
Goetzler looked down at the bloody gauze.
“Flat out,” the major said. “Your glasses are too thick. They’d steam up bad in-country. You’d get shot in the head. I’m transferring you to the MPs.”
“Yessir.”
“After this war, Goetzler,” the major said, “the army is going to be full of dope. I mean it. You get yourself a plainclothes assignment. You find some of that dope and put the shitbirds away. Get you a pension.”
“Yessir,” Goetzler said.
“Lieutenant colonel in twenty. It’s possible. You know how to read, Goetzler.”
The army would go crazy with dope, but the war came first, twelve months of it. Goetzler commanded an MP platoon in Saigon and patrolled in a jeep with Sergeant First Class Stanley Olszewski. The apartments over the storefronts all had long windows with broken shutters needing paint. Olszewski wore a crew cut, carried a Remington 870 loaded with double-aught buckshot. There’s too many gooks too fast here for an M-16, he said. He took greenbacks from the madams of Cholon to insure the off-limits orders on their brothels were unenforced. The first thing Olszewski did was look at Goetzler’s small hands and thin wrists.
“For Christ’s sake, sir, get a Rolex,” he said. “No gook will listen to a second lieutenant with a PX Timex.”
They busted AWOL draftees from the First Infantry Division, bony rednecks who wouldn’t pay the pimps, slow-eyed blacks who killed their buddies over whores. There were explosions, bombs in restaurants, cafés, and go-go bars, the jagged pieces of brick and glass killing the squatting peddlers in from the country-side to sell mangoes and orchids from rice baskets. Sometimes, they trapped the VC bombers in the sewers, and Goetzler and Olszewski watched from the jeep while their men threw grenades into the open manholes like pitchers on the mound.
They pulled the pins, these young MPs in starched jungle fatigues, then did a fast wind-up, laughing and wagging their tongues. Fire in the hole, they yelled. Nobody took cover. After the explosion, the water sprayed up brown and foamy and soaked their legs.
Olszewski held the wheel and kept his foot on the clutch and chewed a Swisher Sweet. Goddammit, Cianci, he said.
The sergeant would stop the jeep suddenly and the tires would lock and they’d slide on the wet streets. Goetzler’s neck always jerked and his glasses went spinning into the sunlight. He grabbed after them and got handfuls of humid air. The grayed sergeant just slapped his back. The fucking job, he said. The second week, Goetzler bought an idiot strap at the PX, but the lenses still fogged and he saw Saigon as if through a wet window. He spent his whole tour trying to see correctly, discern the true distances, though it didn’t matter because Goetzler and the war became instant friends.
Camille Pajak couldn’t get inside his head over here. He loved Vietnam for that alone. There would be no more walks along Belmont Harbor after lectures at DePaul, the lake waves white from the sun, himself tortured by her silence. He didn’t care about her great admiration for Emily Dickinson. He was done thinking about her eyes, gray like pond ice, her slender hips, her 36Cs tight inside a sweater, the way her brown hair unraveled in the lake wind when she told him they were the very best of friends. He burned the letters she’d written him in Officer Candidate School about the sparrows in Lincoln Park on the first day of autumn. He’d read them after a day’s training, hiding in the dark latrine while the fifty men snored from metal bunks. She sprayed the stationery with Chanel and sent two a week. The cadre sergeants thought it was his cousin being nice. What could you do with a woman, Goetzler? But he sat upon the toilet stool and held the paper to his face, knowing her hand touched them. He imagined Paris wet and long nights of lovemaking above rue Cardinal Lemoine where they joined like erotic sculptures while the rain smeared streetlight across the apartment windows. The letters were signed “Always, C,” instead of Camille, and he pretended it was a gesture when he knew it was only an opportunity for her to be literary because after graduation she took a job as a legal secretary for Brady, Lunt, and O’Connor.
He was an MP officer now. They said nothing about his small fingers, thick glasses, or how his body would look better on a woman. It was illegal. He bought a nickel-plated Colt .45 with a tricked trigger, the pull lighter than flicking a Zippo. He wore a green cravat under his starched fatigues and smoked a Dunhill pipe filled with Burnham tobacco from Hong Kong. He sported a gold Rolex date timer. For five dollars a week, a lispy Vietnamese kid spit-shined his boots, buffed his MP helmet liner with paste wax, and bleached his white gloves in a bucket. Colonels slapped his back and told him he was the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
Stay squared away, they said, and you own the glory road.
Already, he’d collared a major for beating up a bar girl on Le Loi Street, a square-jawed colonel on Westmoreland’s staff who welted her small cheeks with his West Point ring. He pinched a fat lieutenant colonel for selling Johnnie Walker Red from the officers clubs to the bar manager at the Rex Hotel. He escorted the men to Long Binh Jail, cuffed and wide-eyed, their rank meaning nothing.
Mostly, he wanted Camille Pajak to see the girls flock him. Knock him down where he stood. The wispy daughters of South Vietnamese army majors, even the mouthy hookers who claimed their man was a master sergeant in supply, the biggest shot in I Corps, and he was returning next week to take them back to Topeka. New shoes every month and a PX card of their very own. They got naked for a mess hall apple and never pretended to cry about the fate of Virginia Woolf. She put stones in her pockets to drown herself, Camille once said. Stones in her pockets.
* * *
That night, after the retirement buffet, Goetzler watched Annie do her lipstick without a mirror. She sat in his chair, her small knees joined and tilted, looking out the high-rise window across Lincoln Park and the gray lake. The money envelope stuck from her Coach bag, six hundred dollars for two hours. He drank his scotch, Laphroaig twelve-year-old, and the whiskey bit over the ice. He could afford this once a week until he was seventy.
Goetzler first saw her on the Web site www.chicagoasian.com. Annie’s scanned photo was fuzzy, taken by a hotel room door. She stood with her back to the camera and wore a black thong. He knew she was Vietnamese by her skinny legs. The Thais and Filipinos got more meat as children. Their bones were bigger.
Annie put her phone on the glass table. He asked her last week to come in a yellow ao dai. He wanted to reach up through the panels and feel her stomach. He would splay his fingers before drawing them into a slow fist. But she came into his condo wearing a suit and walked across the oak floor in thick boots. The girls always wear what you want, Nick said. You tell me if there’s a problem. Goetzler had even turned the heat up because he knew she’d be cold in the yellow silk. Maybe, he thought, it was folded in her bag.
“You need to get changed?” he said.
“I can’t wear an ao dai for you,” she said. “You are not my husband.”
Goetzler nodded at her reflection in the glass. Geese flew over the rooftops along Clark Street, a tight V formation.
“The war’s old,” she said.
Annie lifted her head up and blew like she exhaled smoke. Her arms were long and thin and the American weight never formed right above her elbows. She’d been looking at his books.
“You have a nice place,” she said. “A lot of women would like to sit and look out.”
Goetzler put down his drink. The wind lifted the rain up the window. He saw himself reflected in the window, the drops shadowed in his glasses.
“I caught my wife with a supply sergeant over in Germany,” he said. “I was a captain.”
Annie laughed. Her smooth lipstick cracked when she opened her mouth.
“I bet he was handsome,” she said.
“She wanted to drive around Europe in an Alfa Romeo convertible and wear nice sweaters. We did that—right after I got assigned to Berlin. We rented a red one and drove down to Mont Blanc.”
The rain held Annie’s eyes and he watched them in the window. She pointed at him, h
er nail long and red.
“Your first anniversary.”
“It rained outside Annecy and a tire blew out. We couldn’t get the top back up.”
“Perfect.”
Annie stood and stepped from her boots as if deep in water. She took off her jacket and laid it over the sofa arm. Her shoulders were small, like sticks. She walked over to him and lay down upon the couch with her head against his thigh. He picked up her foot and waited for her to look away from the window. Her heels were white and hard, blanched by hot sand.
“You learned to walk over there,” he said.
She was silent.
“You get out on a boat?” he said.
“No. I flew with my wings.”
Goetzler watched her stare at the rain before looking out the window, never knowing where the sky and the lake separated.
3
The window blinds muted the streetlight when Mike Spence sat on the bed after his tenth night of Loop traffic control. Susan lay with two cats over one leg, eyeing the bulge where he kept a .38 on his ankle. The snub-nose was backup against the H&K Nine on his hip ever failing. She’d been looking at the concealed pistol for a long time, and he hadn’t taken off his uniform. Since Mike went on the job, they spent nights paused in silence rather than fighting about the life he’d just quit.
Susan thought the hidden .38 was ridiculous because Mike waved Sonomas and GMC Jimmys onto the Congress Parkway from State Street.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d told her. “I’ll need it one day.”
After that, Susan stopped seeing him, and looked with unblinking eyes upon the things he now wore. Mike just went to work.
He touched his wife’s ankle, but she didn’t move. He left his hand until it made him feel uncomfortable.
“You’ll still write?” she said.
“I know what we did for me,” he said, “but I don’t want to write anymore.”
Because the Rain Page 2
