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quigonejinnA few notes:
When you are thirty-three, you begin to have these dreams: strange, vivid dreams. You are not taking Zoloft or Xanax or anything like that, but there is nevertheless wind. Sea. An immense creaking of lumber, the feel of slightly damp wool. The sound of the ocean, the feel of a wooden deck under your feet, and nothing in sight besides the ship, the gray sea, the blue sky. A British flag above. You are far enough away from land that there are no birds, not even clouds.
Barbara, in a white dress and a white hat trimmed with pink roses. Bush, in blue wool, no red trim, two rows of gold buttons down his chest.
You try to forget the dreams as soon as you wake, but they stay with you for hours, sometimes days.
...
Here is, in fact, how your day begins: you wake in darkness. Barbara is asleep next to you, a book settled on her chest, glasses on the edge of her nose. She has fallen asleep working again, and you think about taking the book off her chest and putting her glasses on the nightstand, but you do not want to wake her. All you do, instead, is look at her for a moment. Study the fine shape of her mouth, her profile. You can see that much by light of the alarm clock.
Then, you slide out of bed and find a shirt, trousers, in the darkness.
You dress in the hallway, put on socks and walk down the hall, down the stars. In the nursery, Richard Arthur turns over in his sleep and says a few syllables -- he is too young to say anything worth making sense yet. The door is open a little, so you can hear him, but you do not go in and look at him. You hold still long enough only to make sure that he has gone back on his sleep, and then you go on your way.
Six months in this house, and it still does not feel like yours.
In the stairway, there are snapshots of Barbara on assignment in Myanmar, El Salvador, Serbia. She is always the least frightened person in the photograph; at the landing, there is a picture of her, looking very young and very beautiful, holding a microphone in her hand and reporting from Berlin on the day that the wall fell. She uses awards that she has won in the kitchen as paperweights for mail. There is a bookshelf next to the refrigerator, and it holds books about politics, dense books about history and economics. A few recipe books. A travel dictionary for conversational Russian. A framed photo of her with the President of France.
When you see pictures of yourself all this, in fact, it is as though you are looking at a stranger. Thus, instead of looking at all of this evidence of your life with her, while making coffee and drinking that first cup, you stare out the big south-facing kitchen windows and the sun light up the trees. You go into the three car garage, get into your car. Start the car, and think about how much you love Barbara, how she is the most beautiful, most wonderful woman in the world. Settle that travelling mug of coffee in the cupholder.
Drive to see Bush.
Eagle, anchor, and globe. Semper fidelis. Seven months and sixty-eight miles south of Rutbah, you came across a munitions depot for one element of the insurgency.
...
Of all the branches of the military, the Marines may be the one for which you are, by nature, least suited. The Navy has Annapolis; the Army has West Point. Even the Air Force has its Academy in Colorado. You would have done well at one of the officer schools; you would have been buoyed by the tradition and the splendor, the sense of belonging. You would have enjoyed, despite yourself, the football games and car loans and rings the size of a baby's fist. It is entirely possible that you would, today, be a happier, saner man if you had gone Navy or Army or Air Force.
Instead, you were seventeen, an orphan with nothing but three semesters worth of accelerated community college credits, another semester of real college. Your father had been a large animal veterinarian, the closest thing that the rural town possessed to a real doctor within an hour's drive, and when your father died when you were two months short of being seventeen. Two months after you were seventeen, a kind lieutenant colonel for whom your father had once saved a brood mare told you that if you enlisted, got through Basic and did well, he would get you to Officer Candidate School when it was time.
You enlisted, got through Basic, made your way to being a corporal, at which point you served under Bush, and then you put yourself through the last two years of school. When it was time, you did not need the lieutenant colonel your father had helped; your own commander got you into OCS, and fifteen years later, you are a captain, and Bush is out of the Corps for good. He is a former Marine now, wearing a t-shirt and neatly pressed khakis, sitting on his front porch and waiting for you.
Somehow, because of those vivid dreams, you expect him to be wearing blue and gold with a sea at his back, but there is only sunlight. Blue sky. Nothern Virginia in the spring. Birds. Two crutches stacked neatly by him on the steps.
There is a small tree in his front yard, room for one car in the driveway. After Bush is settled into the passenger's seat, each time, you have to hand him the travel mug of coffee. He doesn't take it until you tell him to, and when he does, even though it's only half warm at best, he drinks, carefully, appreciatively.
You put the car in reverse, take the car into the street, and try not to watch him.
...
It is not easy learning how you should act with Bush. He is out of the Corps now. You are, nominally, still within it. Even while you were both Marines, though, interacting was occaisionally difficult because you could not understood why Bush respected you so much. You were commissioned, and he was not, but that failed to explain any of it -- he was such an eminently capable soldier, a splendid disciplinarian and fearless fighter. The best part of the Corps were written in the marrow of his bones. He has so many of the good qualities that you lack.
You remember meeting him. You remember having him as your sargeant when you were a corporal; you remember having him as your sargeant and XO when you were a second lieutenant. You remember hearing of the prodigious things that he did as part of United Shield in Somalia; you saw yourself what he did for you in Rutbah. It ought to be impossible for two men to be serve together so many times given the size of the Corps, the scope of global engagement, but currents of fortune and influence brought the two of you together, again and again.
Each time, it became clear to you: Bush was a Marine to the bottom of his soul. He planned to be in the Corps until he died.
And yet. He still smiles when he sees you these days. He tells you about his sisters, talks to you about his desire to rebuild a '66 Thunderbird that he saw advertised in the newspaper. Compliments and asks flattering questions about your new car. Asks after Barbara, too, in the most solicitous, kind way. Drinks more of the coffee and shows every proof of a healthy appetite, of happiness to be sitting next to you on a weekday morning in a car in the suburbs of Washington going to the hospital so that he can learn to walk, to go up stairs, to cope with phantom pain.
There is, in fact, a picture of Bush and Barbara in the hallway by your study.
Barbara is in a utility uniform with the sleeves rolled up and is smiling like an angel. A desert-issue hat is hanging from a string under her chin, and Bush is standing next to her in full pack, holding an M16. He is not smiling, and there is desert behind both of them.
...
You have never been an easy sleeper, but you have never had dreams this vivid: they are filled with texture and sound and feeling. Sometimes, you have dreams about other things, normal things, like riding a bicycle down a street that you recognize from childhood or the cold sweat of the first time you saw action, but they do not stay with you like the dreams of the sea. Men die. Ships burn. There is nothing about desert or mountains or infantry in them, only water. They are like memories, not dreams.
In particular, there is this one particular battle to which you keep returning. It is your ship against four others -- French, you suspect -- in a bay.
....
After his physical therapy session, Bush is tired and white-faced. He has much less to say, and he wobbles a little as the orderly helps him into the car. Sometimes, if it has been especially bad, he cannot manage the crutches and must be wheeled out. You always hold the car door with two hands, and Bush feels doubly embarrassed thouse days.
He is always exhausted, though, and sometimes, when you have the windows down and are stuck in traffic, Bush will drift off into sleep. It is not just learning to walk without the foot, after all. He spent months in bed; he did not get proper medical care until a good two days after the wound, and there were multiple bad bouts of fever. Originally, they thought that they might save part of his foot; later, they had to abandon that. At one point, you were prepared to exert whatever remaining influence you had to make sure that he got to at least hold his Purple Heart before he died. There were times, too, during the last desperate moments at the seige, you thought that about words you might use to plead with your captors for Bush's live and the lives of any other surviving men you might have.
Instead, the two of you are safe again. You are going to be married, and he is tired because he is getting the best rehabilitative care in the world. It is an article of faith among Marines in Iraq that if you survived until you were airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany, you would live. Bush lived until Landstuhl; Bush is alive, and he falls asleep sometimes.
His chin touches the seatbelt, and the grip he has on the arms of his bucket seat eases a little even though it is, generally, an uneasy sleep. He moves a bit every once in a while. Shifts in the seat, and his face is still so pale. He is so tired. Sometimes, his hand twitches a little, as if reaching for you, and you want, more than anything in the world, to take his hand in yours. You can remember, vividly, what his fingers felt like over yours on the chopper ride out of that munitions dump, just before the air strike came. During the plane ride through the night to Germany.
You keep your eyes on the road, though, and you keep both of your hands on the wheel. You concentrate on the traffic, and while Bush sleeps in the seat next to you, tired and pale, you tell yourself over and over that, in your dreams, the two of you go to sea again.
...
You were married when you went to Iraq.
There was no family for you, as your father had died when you were seventeen, but the marriage to Maria had, nevertheless, not taken place you were particularly young.
In fact, Maria had first been a friend to you during those long, lonely days when you were back from Somalia. She worked for the management of the off-base apartment complex that you did, lived there as part of her pay, and you met her in the laundry room, by the Coke machine. It was a confusing time in your life, lonely. The two of you talked for a few months. She baked you things, cooked you casseroles to eat, and helped you with your laundry once she realized that you were alone.
Once it happened, in fact, it went quickly. She was charmed by the fact that you did not want to have sex with her before you were married. Neither of you had much in the way of family, and the way it happened was that you received word that you might be shipped out to Somalia, and one night, on the spur of the moment, while she was on her way out the door after bringing you some chicken that she'd made, you asked her to marry you.
She was short, somewhat round, and she had started to cry because you told her that you might go to Somalia soon. In fact, she turned her head away from you so that you would not see her crying, but you knew that she was, and the question came out of your mouth.
You asked her to marry you without showing her a ring. She said yes without ever seeing or asking for one, either.
...
Barbara is, in fact, the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund. There was a period of a week or so when it was not clear whether you were alive or dead, and it was during that period that Maria went into labor, gave birth, and died from complications. Barbara took up donations, used her contacts, convinced a few influential people she knew, and stepped in herself to make sure that the details were arranged so that Maria was buried well and that the baby was provided for.
In fact, when you got back to the States, the baby was with her at the New York office. You had gone there to do an interview that the Commandant's office had set up for you, and only after you had stepped into the building with the First Lieutenant who was the guide assigned to you did you realize that this was Barbara's channel. This was the building where she worked when she was in New York, and the Lieutenant had grinned at you.
It had all been arranged. The baby was there, in her office. He had been named Richard Arthur after her eldest and second eldest brother respectively. He was small, enormously solen, and after you had studied him, you stared at her. The top of your mouth was dry; a nanny held the baby, as Richard Arthur happened to be visiting, and Barbara looked even more beautiful than you had remembered her as being during all those long months without her. She was even more comforting, even more perfect. Her voice made your head swim, and the sweetness of her smile, the love in her eyes, took your breath away.
There was a backdrop of the skyscrapers of New York behind her, running from ceiling to floor, and you kissed her in full view of the nanny, the baby, the secretary who had come in to ask if Barbara would sign something.
Later, you came realized that it had been arranged like this. They had counted on you to become flustered in the middle of the interview, for you to have to say that you had just seen your son a few moments before, so that was why you had to have a moment. Happiness turned to Dead Sea fruit in your mouth when you realized.
Barbara is still the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund, though. You are still going to marry her.
...
Halfway back to Bush's, it starts to rain -- the rain comes out of nowhere, and since Bush hasn't quite bought that 1966 Thunderbird to restore yet, when you do get to the house, you jump out, open the garage door, and then drive the car in. Bush is embarrassed enough by that, but then you come around the back of the car, as there isn't room in the front, and you help him out of the car.
It shames him, but he needs it. He is still a little foggy from sleeping it seems, and he falls against you while standing up. Leans into you, and you lean him back against the car. Steady him. The two of you are standing very close; the rain is starting to come down on the driveway, and if he were a woman, at this moment, you would have kissed him. Instead, the two of you look at each other for a moment. Your hand is on his hip, and when you look down to see where, exactly, your hand is, you realize that he's actually hard in his pants.
He says something about having that brunette therapist again, but you don't look up to see his face when he says it. You look at your hand on his hip, at the shape of his cock inside his pants, and you open your mouth to say something. Take a breath.
In retrospect, he was just putting a hand on the roof of the car to get better leverage so that he could be sure that he wasn't going to fall out. At the time, though, you took it to mean that he was settling into place, and out of some kind of instinct, you went down on your knees.
You get his dick out of his pants, and you are crouching in front of him on the garage floor. It's fast, quick, almost instinctual, and he is holding onto the roof of the car while you take his dick in your mouth. He lets out a noise between a moan and a gasp, and it's only then that you realize that you have no idea how to do this. You cannot figure out how to breathe; your posture is completely uncomfortable. You bless the fact that there are no cars in this garage normally because otherwise, you would have motor oil and dirt all over your knees. You are frozen, absolutely unsure what to do, so after a moment, you back off.
And then you look up and you realize that Bush is looking down at you.
He's watching you. He's holding himself still aside from his chest, which heaving as though he's just run a dozen miles in the rain, but he doesn't say anything. You bring your mouth a little closer to his dick, and his eyes are still on you. Your lips are less than an inch from him, and he puts one hand on the side of your face, on your cheek. Moves it into your hair, hesitates for a moment, and he's still looking at you with this strange, unreadable expression.
There is rain coming down on the driveway. The car is so large that it blocks out any view from the street -- you'll have trouble getting it out of the garage, in fact, and were lucky to get it in without losing one of the side mirrors.
It's a moment of a hesitation. Bush looks at you. Again, you stare at his hip. Again, you're on the verge of pulling away. In fact, you think you're going to be ill.
And then the hand he has in your hair tightens.
"Like this," he says and puts your mouth back on him.
...
Midway through, he shifts over a little so that he is leaning against one of the closed back doors. You reach up, catch up his newly freed hand, and keep hold of it.
You were surprised, in a way, at how tightly he had held it.
...
Here is another part of the puzzle.
One morning, you were out into the streets of the town that you and your men were holding. It was a show of American strength It was a demonstration that the United States owned the streets. You were using your limited Arabic to converse with one of the marketplace vendors -- it was market day, and the farmers had brought in their wretched, thin produce to the market to sell. You were bargaining with an old woman, sweating into the heat, and cursing yourself for being an idiot. The woman was reluctant to sell to you. You noticed, from the corner of your eye, Bush with his M16 slung over his shoulder, full gear, pretending not to notice the vegetable-seller's good-looking granddaughter, who was at least thirty years younger than he was and scowled at him whenever he glanced at her.
There was shooting. The vegetable stand disintegrated; you felt Bush's hand on your shoulder, heard him shout to the detail that he had insisted you bring along as protection. Your instinct was to remain standing, to determine the precise nature of the shooting and the disturbance, but it was over in seconds.
Your walkie-talkie squaked and informed you that a patrol in the adjoining street had foiled an attempt on your life. Men on a roof with projectile incinediary devices and guns. Your men had captured one of them alive, though wounded. Two were dead, and sixteen feet away, there were also two dead.
A boy, six years old. In the dust next to him, his sister. His hand was stretched out towards him; her face had been so badly trampled in the stampede that it was impossible to make out her face. What she had looked like. They had both been shot, the girl through the chest and the boy in the head, in the torso. Multiple times, and since the market was not on even ground, their blood was still running down the slope towards you.
The same dust that covered their faces covered you, in fact. You. Bush. Everything.
That was what had struck you at the moment: the dust. You could not make yourself breathe for a long, terrible moment because you felt as though you would choke on it. And then, you had turned to say something to Bush. You wanted to tell him to find out who the two children had been, and you found that he had indeed, been looking at the two children.
And then he turned to look at you, and that was what struck you: there was no change in his expression. He had unshouldered his gun. He could very well have been the man who shot them both, and there was only the faintest hint of grief in him. Was a dollar unlucky when it was spent? Was it a terrible thing when a man's hair turned gray? It was war, and there would be civilian dead. Bush was ready for his next orders.
...
At the same time, this.
At the house in Georgetown, there are studies for both you and Barbara. In the attic, she has cleared away room for your books; in the basement, she has a tape library. A number of them are actually DVDs, but Barbara has been in journalism for many years. There are even framed articles from when she was the chief editor of the Choate newspaper. Another article that she wrote for the Lampoon when she was at Harvard. There are clipping files in the cabinets.
The two of you refer to it, nevertheless, as the tape room. One evening, while Barbara is in Russia covering the G8 summit, you go down to the basement, and you select, at random, a tape from the walls. You miss her, after all. Without looking at the label, you put the tape into the machine.
There is a flicker, a moment of darkness, then grainy, dim images. It is night footage from Iraq. You recognize the walls, the tree. It scraped against the side of the building; there were nights when you passed the hours by counting how many times it scraped against thet window, and Bush was sitting at one of the tables in front of the barracks. Most of the light in the video comes from inside the barracks.
"The men worship him, ma'm. They would do anything for him. Look what he has done this bunch -- half of them fresh from Parris Island, the other half from the bottom of their platoons. They love him, not for anything that he does or says, but for what he is."
Barbara said something that the camera does not pick up very clearly -- something involving the world handsome -- and Bush is very solemn.
"I suppose he is, ma'am, now you come to mention it. But it wouldn't matter if he were as ugly as sin as far as we're concerned. We'd die for him."
...
So it is, indeed, a puzzle. Bush is the man in the world to whom you are the closest. He was your senior NCO in Iraq, but you had been with him long before that. He was your best man when you married Maria; he was the only person on your side of the church. During the slow years between Somalia and Afghanistan, when money was tight and if geography permitted, you shared an efficiency and a grocery bill with him.
Nevertheless, you are a little frightened of him. You are little mystified as to why this man who is so much a perfect Marine should respect you so and let you do this to him: he is a tough man. A soldier, a Marine of the original, classic school. He is shorter than you are, but more broadly built and in possession of classic opinions.
The United States is right. The liberals and communists, when he sees a difference between them at all, are wrong. The United Nations is acceptable only insofar as its goals tail with those of the United States, and you remember, very clearly, all the criticism that you have of him. He is unimaginative. He is stupid, incapable of thinking outside the parameters of the Corps, and you have never bothered to ask him what he thinks of homosexuals in society, in general, much less their place in the Corps.
After the garage, both of you go into his house. While he moves about in the living room, you rinse your mouth over the kitchen sink. You do not use one of his cups; you try not to put your hands too much on his faucet. You try to make your exit as quietly, as unobstrusively as possible, but he catches you at the door. Thanks you again, effusively, for driving him to his physical therapy and tells you, as he always does, that if you are busy tomorrow, you do not have to trouble yourself for him.
You get out to the car. You start the car; you drive away from the development with its two bedroom bungalows and flat floor plans. Two minutes onto the highway, that cold feeling still in your stomach, you pick up the phone and call Barbara just so that you can hear her voice.
...
Barbara is, of course, the best thing about your new life. The house is nice; the respite from being at war is good. There are three hot meals a day if you want them, fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance. Meals that do not include either chicken or syrup, a Sub-Zero freezer and refrigerator filled twice a week by the housekeeper in accordance with whatever you or Barbara write on the notepad by the microwave.
Nevertheless, there are nights when you find yourself dreaming about seeing the world in night-vision goggles again, where you feel like the heat of Harada is the only thing that can make you feel warm even though it is Washington DC in summer. Even though you threw it away before boarding the transport to Germany, you can almost feel the hand-drawn map of the town. Other men startle and hit the ground when they hear a car backfire; you, on the other hand, look toward the sound of the noise.
As bad as it ever gets, though, all Barbara has to do is look at you, and the petty frustrations drop away. You are happy to be with her in the house in Georgetown. You do not mind waiting at the Reagan Airport for hours, waiting for her shuttle to arrive. You will even stand next to her at a black tie charity, at a Democratic fundraiser, at an award banquet where she will be receiving something else to use around the house as a paperweight, and it has always been different for her.
Her older brother is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee; another older brother was a three star general in the Army. She arrived by helicopter, and you had direct, explicit, rubbed in your face orders to be there to welcome her to Harada and make sure that she and her network had a satisfactory experience before going home.
Unlike Maria or Bush, you had not wanted her to be there. You were expecting a hard woman, but Barbara was kind. You were expecting her to be old, but she was a decade younger than you. Bush, who was acting as your XO, had put her on an infantry rotation squad rotation plan designed to keep her from seeing anything more exciting than munitions sorting, but after a two weeks, he came to you with a proposal to keep her with a single squad and let her see time in the western end of town. Sometimes, you would come out of the comm office, and you would see Gerard walking her up and down in the one strip of greenery in camp, trying his charm on her. She had a spectacular sense of humor.
There had been a long memo issued to you on the fact that the reporter was not a friend, that she was a member of the media, but it was always scrupulously fair.
Barbara ate with the men. She argued with you about Whitman and Ginsberg; she sang the USC fight song with Galbraith. Bush talked to her for hours when he barely managed a letter a month to his sisters; she was the only American woman in a dozen miles, and one night, you overheard one Pfc tell another that he had asked her for an autograph so that he could send it to his little sister, who wanted to be a journalist and was a big fan of hers. She told him that she didn't have time to sign anything then, and the corporal thought that she had forgotten the request entirely until he got an ecstastic e-mail from his sister, telling him that Barbara had taped a three minute long personal message, beamed it to the network, and had gotten the network to courier a copy, in an official FSNBC pouch, to the house in Montauk, New York.
There were times when you were sure that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. It did not seem possible that any single, real human being could be as perfect as she was, and after she left, you heard how she had gotten engaged to a junior senator from Connecticut.
She married him. He died after being struck by a drunk driver two months later; three weeks later, you heard that the wives and girlfriends of your squad had put together a scrapbook of letters and photographs to console Barbara for her loss and to thank her for how she had helped them keep in touch with their men. Maria sent you the letter she wrote for that compilation first, through e-mail, so that you could look it over and make any suggestions and revisions.
It has been six months since you came back from abroad.
You and Barbara are waiting for a decent period to pass before marrying.
...
Some of the dreams you have are terrible -- death and battle, the bay with the four French ships, a black river that sweeps you along from shore to shore. The two dead Iraqi children appear as your children; you stand in your house and watch them die of smallpox. Maria cradles the boy in her arms long after he's dead; she cannot stop holding the corpse, and yet, she will not let herself cry because you have not started crying. She knows that you disapprove of emotional displays, and she does not want to disgrace you in front of your dead child.
Inevitably, you wake after those particular dreams. You lie in bed next to Barbara, and you strain your ears for the sound of Richard's breathing through the baby monitor that is placed on the nightstand. The area around the Georgetown house is very quiet at night, and usually, if you hold yourself still, you can hear your son's slow, steady breathing, as real and seemingly close as Barbara's.
Already, Barbara loves him as few stepmothers ever love the children of another woman. When you arrive home after that first time with Bush, after you have finished talking to Barbara and completed the rest of your drive, it is somewhat past noon. You are thinking about what you would like to have for lunch as you bring the car into the driveway, come up through the walkway to the house, let yourself in, and find, in the foyer, the nanny with Richard. He does not want to be put to bed, and there is a strange moment while you are standing there with the keys in the keys in your hand, watching your son as he is held by a woman known, to you, only by her first name.
Richard is scrubbing at his eyes with his hands, twisting about and trying to wriggle away from her. When he sees you, he holds out his arms -- it is immensely gratifying to see that he wants to be held by you, and you settle him into your arms as best you know how. He smells like fresh diapers and baby powder, as well as something else that you decide, after a bit of examination, must be unique to babies. It is not unpleasant. Sweet, almost like the hay you remember smelling when you were a child following your father on rounds, but without dust at the end. He is soft, surprisingly light in your arms, and you hold very still.
Neither you nor the nanny make any noise, and eventually, Richard yawns and leans against your chest. You still don't dare to move; you have forgotten all about being hungry. You can't even breathe deeply for fear of waking him, but this is the third time that you have been happy all day. It is the first where you have not also felt guilt.
...
Maria had a mother. Before she was married, she lived with her mother close by. After she married, when you were not at home, she went back to living with her mother, so they were close. You have been to Maria's grave several times since you have come back, but you have not spoken to Mrs. Mason or contacted her in any way.
She was there, presumably, for Maria's death and her funeral. Barbara, presumably, knows about all this.
Still, it has been six months, and you have not contacted Mrs. Mason in any way. Barbara calls you one afternoon to tell you that she's decided to begin a course of fertility treatment.
...
Here is a dream of yours: you have been ill for a long time, in a foreign land, and after you return home, Barbara watches over you all summer to make sure the last traces of the illness are gone. She is diligent and loving. Under her care, you grow slowly, steadily, healthier. One afternoon, you and Richard lie side by side on your bellies beside the fish-pond, trying to catch carp with your hands.
You return to the house with the sunset all around you, muddy and wet and gloriously happy. Barbara is standing on the steps, smiling, her hands stretched out, one for each of you.
That is the dream: you and your son and your wife, as close as three human beings can be, living in a beautiful house.
...
It is five days later before anything else happens with Bush -- two of the days are because of the weekend, and Bush does not get therapy on the weekends. Three of the days, you drive him to his therapy, drive him back. During that period, once, you even take him to get groceries and walk with him through the aisles of the stores, him on his crutches, you pushing the cart. The checkout girl smiles at Bush; he drops his head and blushes like a teenager instead of looking her in the eye.
You say nothing, but feel as though you are coloring yourself.
On the sixth day, you drive him back from his therapy, and you go with him to the door. He hands you his keys, stands there while you open the door for him, then makes the awkward step up from the porch into the hallway of his house. You have one foot on that step, as if to follow him. You stop because you are suddenly unsure, and then, while you are standing in the door like that, the door actually lying against your shoulderbones because it is mostly closed, Bush kisses you.
You are fairly sure that Bush has never kissed someone taller than him, but he does it right. He turns his head to do it; he must go up on the toes of the one foot that he still has and raise himself up, off his crutches, by upper body strength. Nevertheless, it is a kiss and a good one. Sparks go down your back when his tongue touches yours. While he's kissing you, working at you with only his mouth because he must keep both hands on his crutches, you can feel his breath across your cheek.
The keys drop out of your hand and land on the floor. You put your hand in the small of his back and press him against you -- in a few moments, both you and him are on the floor. It started with his hand down your pants and him trying to give you a handjob, but it ends with him rubbing his clothed crotch against the bare inside of your thigh, you coming against his shirt, and him coming from watching you gasp and writhe and almost beg for him to put his hand around you again.
...
There is one dream that you know to be based on reality very closely:
In the dream, you are on a ship, in a foreign port, about to take her around the Cape. You have not told anyone aboard the ship that is what you intend to do, but Bush has guessed, and so have many of the men. It is dangerous enough to take a ship around the Cape at this time of year, but the Lydia has taken on so much in the way of stores that it will take a miracle of seamanship. Consequently, you have told Bush and the other lieutenants to be a little more lax about bumboats and women coming alongside. The crew is hardened enough, experienced enough, that an afternoon of liberty will not be too damaging.
You are in your cabin. Some of the midshipmen have gone ashore. Sunlight plays on the beams over your head, and there is a knock -- Bush, with a woman behind him. She comes in; Bush closes the door behind him, and the woman begins to undress. Her shoes, her shawl, her dress, her shift. It's all wordless, as the details seem to have been taken care of already. When she is naked, she kneels in front of you, works your trousers off. She would take your shirt off, too, but you put your hand into her hair. You are hard already, and soon after, you've got your fingers wrapped in her hair and are moving her mouth hard and fast to make her whimper a little and put her hands on your thighs and press so that you will slow and she can breathe.
Bush watches from the across, hat held over his chest, and his face unreadable.
When you are done, he puts the girl on her back on your map table, and it is your turn to watch.
It happened in your actual life. The occaision was that you were in Germany after finishing Officer Candidate School; you certainly weren't a stranger to the grand Corps tradition of paying for sex, but this was a present from Bush for giving you a present for finishing OCS and receiving a commission.
The only real difference was that it happened in your hotel room, not your office.
Also, that you and Bush had drunkness available as an excuse. You put your hand around yourself, after all, while Bush went at her. You held his hand, again, in the moning before you filed your full, formal report to Gambier in Kaiserslautern.
....
One afternoon, Barbara takes the afternoon off work, and she and you and the baby have a picnic in the park. The sky is overcast, but you and Barbara take turns holding Richard while the other eats. He smells like powder and clean laundry. Barbara's eyes, blue in most lights, are beautifully gray.
...
In Iraq, you had command of an undersized company; together, with Bolton, you were to maintain peace and security in the seventy five miles around the crossing of the Ammon-Baghdad road and the north-south oil pipeline. Bolton had more combat experience than you did, was technically the one in command at Rutbah while the new lieutenant colonel took his sweet time arriving, You had been a second lieutenant in Bolton's battalion while he was a first, though. He knew the quality of your work, and he was scrupulously fair -- his platoons alternated checkpoint and patrol duty with yours. When news came in of the munitions dump and abandoned base, it was clear that one of you would have to go out and at least look at it.
"You'd give three fingers to go," Bolton said, looking hard at you. The two of you were in what passed for his office; the air conditioning was humming at full strength, but both of you were sweating hard. "I know it, and you know it. You're the same restless fucker that you were the first time in Mogadishu."
He studied you for another moment, and then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. You called tails; he called heads. After a moment where you had to grip your hands into fists to keep yourself from doing anything rash, the quarter came up with the silver eagle, a little scratched from having being in a desert, but its wings nevertheless stretched over the arrows of war and the laurels of glory.
...
The laurels, as they actually played out: to come home. To have a staff job in Arlington. Gentle treatment for having lost half of Sutherland company in the single bloodiest day in any United States face-to-face engagement in almost twenty years. A house in Georgetown, Barbara, the first new car you have ever owned, and a Navy Cross, the highest award available to a man in your branch of service without Congressional approval. Ostensibly, it was for personally throwing back a grenade that had gotten over the ramparts, but you know the political motivations behind it.
The Cross is bronze on a blue and white ribbon. At the center is a small ship, called a caravel, moving across rough water. It has occurred to you that this medal is the source of these dreams you have been having, but those thoughts are creditable only when you are not being honest with yourself.
...
Barbara takes that afternoon off, in part, because there is something that must be done: there is a benefit of some sort that both of you must attend. The nanny stays late to watch Richard Arthur to bed, and you put on one of the two tuxedos that you own. You are still technically active duty, as you are formally listed on the staff of a major general in Arlington and write the occaisional memorandum for him or talk to him about Iraq, but it is a marginal call as to whether you ought to wear dress uniform B to most of these things. Most of them are charities; the majority of the remainder are professional, journalism association celebrations or functions.
You have made a judgment call, though -- there are speeches, and sometimes, there are opinions, expressed in the speeches. It is better not to wear blue-and-red to some of these functions. Barbara likes you better in true black tie, too.
During the pre-banquet cocktails, while Barbara is talking to some of her publishing friends, you meet a woman named Marie. She wears a gold dress and beautiful shoulders. No jewelry, just the fine, perfect color of her skin. When you meet her, you are struck wordless for a few moments because she has the warmest eyes you have ever seen. She is shy, young and profoundly uncomfortable in the fancy surroundings, but her smile makes you feel as if you have just sat down by a blazing fireplace on a cold, damp night -- at first, it makes you feel hot, almost uncomfortably so, and then it turns into a pleasant warmth down to the bones.
She is French; she has thickly accented English, and you have high school French. You have managed to get her name, that she is new to Washington DC and has never been to America before. You are about to ask her if she has seen all the monuments, and then her husband calls for her. She is the wife of the son of the French ambassador, you realize, after glancing up at the little group that waves to her. Why did you assume, when looking at her, that her husband was dead, that she was living with her father-in-law? Why does looking at her make you feel so happy, and why are you so sure that she is a good woman who could love you?
She apologizes, looks at you once more, kindly, though without a smile, and hurries to be with her husband.
Barbara is still holding court underneath the potted palms. There is a glass of champagne in her hand the same color as Marie's dress.
...
After the first speech, you slip away, tell Barbara to catch a taxi, step away before she can say anything to you quietly, and then you drive to Bush's. It is quick, trafficless, at this hour. It is fairly late, and Bush is a little surprised to see you in the black tie.
Nevertheless, he is pleased. He offers to heat up another frozen dinner; you tell him that you have already eaten, and then, he makes small talk and maneuvers around the place easily enough now that he is only on one crutch. You think a little bit about Marie while watching him get a beer from the fridge, but mostly, you watch him. Most of the lights in his house are turned off, but he turns them on after you arrive. Eventually, you convince him to go back to watching television, and you watch him.
Eventually, he falls asleep, and you think about taking the remote control out of his hand and putting it back on top of the cable box, but you do not want to wake him. It is so peaceful, in fact, in the room: he has the screen door open. The sounds of the summer night mix with the television. You can hear the trees, the wind, the insects, and you look at Bush. You study the shape of his mouth, the strength of his jaw. The steadiness of his breathing. You remember the time that you dug him out of a firefight in an abandoned warehouse in Mogadishu; you remember the time he offered to give you his pay while the issue of your commission was clarified.
His heartbeat lies at the base of his throat, and his sleep is peaceful. You can see that much by light of the television.
Bush is close to being happy.
...
There were nights in Iraq, too. Bad nights, terrible nights. Nights after Barbara, night where you couldn't sleep, and nights, too, when you fought against the fact that everything was as slow and heavy as a dream.
There were nights that were almost good, though: the streets were always quiet after dark because out of fear, but sometimes, the silence was not that menacing. You could hear the trees on the side of the compound rustling; you could hear Barrack D talking, the occaisional sound of the perimeter watching passing and going by their way. Bush would be outside with the other officers until they began to play poker, and at that point, he would wander inside on a pretext of paperwork, as he was playing both the role of a mastery gunner and a first. It was not fraternization, after all, if there was work to be done.
You would have an exchange of formalties. He had paperwork. You had more paperwork. He had come in to make his report. Casualties. Supplies. Minor disciplinary issues. You listened, then watched while he pretended to do paperwork. You would sit in your chair, the only chair in the whole town that had four working wheels, and put your feet up on your desk. The window was open; the trees were rustling, and Bush's face was half in shadow because there was only one lamp in the quarters that were also your office. Your laptop had a half-written letter to Maria; together with the lamp and the air conditioner, that was all of the generator's output that you could justify taking for your personal use.
The computer was also playing one of your Arabic language lessons. Bush shifted in his metal chair every once in a while.
It was impossible to think of Barbara in a context like this, impossible to worry about anything more than vague professional concerns, and you and Bush might go through the rest of the evening that way, barely saying seven words. Sometimes, he would reach over and hand you something across the desk; you would glance at it, then sign. Drink some water. Watch Bush. Wonder what it would be like to be a father. Listen to his breathing.
Those nights felt like dreams, too. Slow dreams, wonderful dreams. Dreams full of peace.
...
In August, Bush is given a government job in San Diego. There is a good sized military population there, and you are not entirely clear what his duties would be with the title that he would have, but the job is real enough. You call around to make sure, and it is through the Department of Defense. Bush tells you about it when you see him, shows you the letter. Mentions that he had gotten a phone call about it a few weeks before, talked to them about it, but that he hadn't even been aware that he was under serious consideration. It has something to do with the Marine training base at Twentynine Palms, but it is a Department job, and it is situated in the city by the ocean, not the desert.
Bush thanks you over and over for it. He says that he never would have gotten the job if it had not been for you; he thinks, in fact, that it has something to do with you. He assumes, crudely, that you had something to do with it, and the gratitude in his eyes is pathetic to see.
It is a desk job, and you honestly had nothing to do with it. He will never be a Marine again; his hair is still short in the Marine way because he had it cut short in his last trip to the physical therapy in the VA, but it will grow out soon enough, and he has his head turned in that way and is smiling up at you in his kitchen.
...
Guilt about Maria, guilt about Barbara, guilt for what you did in Iraq, guilt for what you failed to do. Guilt for what you could not do for Bush, for taking him to a fate that you distinctly considered worse than death. Guilt, too, for loving him so much that the only way it can find expression now that you are back home is to play the woman for him or have him play the woman for you. You are tired and afraid; this was intended to be the greatest, best time of your life. You had the woman you loved; you had the friend who loved you. You had a son, a family.
Gulit, fear, worry. The inability to enjoy what you have, an overwhelming yearning for escape from what you experience -- these are the things that control your dreams. They are the origin fo the alternate life that you live at night.
Little by little, you are starting realize that these things control your waking life, too. Love, you are learning, is not enough for happiness.
...
One night, you are dressing next to Barbara for another event, and asks you to come over and zip the back of her gown. You are mostly done yourself, so you go, and you put one hand on her hip, another in the small of her back. Strangely enough, she takes the hand that you have at her hip, and she moves it over so that it is lying low on her belly. Between the hips now, and you stop moving. You stop breathing. If you were breathing, you could smell her perfume.
She turns her face up to look at you.
"The doctor thinks that -- "
When you manage to smile back at her, she looks so happy that she might start weeping.
...
At some point during that night when you went to see Bush, it rained. In the darkness, Bush got up to close the screen door, and you must have lain down on the floor for some reason. You woke the next morning, still on the floor, an ache in your neck, but suddenly and absurdly happy because Bush's arm was over your chest and his snoring was so close by.
Outside the door, it was still raining.
...
You see Bush to the airport. You stand with him in the ticket line, and you go with him as far as the security line. There was time before that for a stop at a news stand, where he buys himself a soda, and you buy a bottle of water and a newspaper He salutes you one last time for old time's sake; you know that you have a standing invitation to visit him, and he has shown you pictures of the shore. He is looking for a condo near the sea, and then he goes to a special line because of his prosthetic leg. The nanny is with you. She brought Richard Arthur and holds him.
Barbara is in New York; the nanny gives Richard a bottle, and even after Bush is gone out of the airport, even after his plane is left and gone, you stand there, and you wait.
You stand, and you wait. People pass on either side of you; you barely see them. The intercom system mentions flights that are boarding, flights that have left, but you are not sure what you are waiting for. You wait, and you wait.
It is not Bush you are waiting for, or Barbara, or even Marie, the woman in gold that you cannot forget. You waited for a commission; you waited to fall in love. You waited for a friend and for family, and then, you waited for your wife to die. You waited to come home; you waited for the good life, and now that you have everything you ever imagined, you are not sure what you are still waiting for: it has been so long since you have been happy, completely happy, that you can have forgotten what it feels like to the point where you cannot even wish for it anymore.
You are waiting now. You wait, and you wait, and you are waiting for happiness.
...
Written while listening to Grant Lee Phillips's "Like A Lover." And uh. Cher's "Believe." And lots of other songs.
Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
iansmomesq for the original idea and for generous enough to let me play with it. Thanks, too, to black_hound and babel for hand holding. I SWEAR MY NEXT FIC WILL NOT SUCK LIKE THIS.
1. This is really goddamn long.
2. It's still not quite long enough. I'm not satisfied with this at all, and I think that to really get things laid out properly, have a nice narrative arch that, you know, keeps things from being retarded, I'd have to write a 100,000 word novel. I lack either the time or the talent for that. Plus, there be some growin' up I need to do if I want to really write this story the way that it should be written.
3. I don't think that male/male sex necessarily requires one guy to act like a chick. I have no guarantees that Horatio Hornblower being, in many respects, your average American dude unversed in gender and sex theory, does not.
4. While I did a decent amount of research for this -- a lot of time on Google, four books, reading every @(#)*@ article on Wiki -- it's not going to ring true for people who actually, um, know about stuff. You'll just have to suspend your disbelief, OK? Or better yet, just not read this.
When you are thirty-three, you begin to have these dreams: strange, vivid dreams. You are not taking Zoloft or Xanax or anything like that, but there is nevertheless wind. Sea. An immense creaking of lumber, the feel of slightly damp wool. The sound of the ocean, the feel of a wooden deck under your feet, and nothing in sight besides the ship, the gray sea, the blue sky. A British flag above. You are far enough away from land that there are no birds, not even clouds.
Barbara, in a white dress and a white hat trimmed with pink roses. Bush, in blue wool, no red trim, two rows of gold buttons down his chest.
You try to forget the dreams as soon as you wake, but they stay with you for hours, sometimes days.
...
Here is, in fact, how your day begins: you wake in darkness. Barbara is asleep next to you, a book settled on her chest, glasses on the edge of her nose. She has fallen asleep working again, and you think about taking the book off her chest and putting her glasses on the nightstand, but you do not want to wake her. All you do, instead, is look at her for a moment. Study the fine shape of her mouth, her profile. You can see that much by light of the alarm clock.
Then, you slide out of bed and find a shirt, trousers, in the darkness.
You dress in the hallway, put on socks and walk down the hall, down the stars. In the nursery, Richard Arthur turns over in his sleep and says a few syllables -- he is too young to say anything worth making sense yet. The door is open a little, so you can hear him, but you do not go in and look at him. You hold still long enough only to make sure that he has gone back on his sleep, and then you go on your way.
Six months in this house, and it still does not feel like yours.
In the stairway, there are snapshots of Barbara on assignment in Myanmar, El Salvador, Serbia. She is always the least frightened person in the photograph; at the landing, there is a picture of her, looking very young and very beautiful, holding a microphone in her hand and reporting from Berlin on the day that the wall fell. She uses awards that she has won in the kitchen as paperweights for mail. There is a bookshelf next to the refrigerator, and it holds books about politics, dense books about history and economics. A few recipe books. A travel dictionary for conversational Russian. A framed photo of her with the President of France.
When you see pictures of yourself all this, in fact, it is as though you are looking at a stranger. Thus, instead of looking at all of this evidence of your life with her, while making coffee and drinking that first cup, you stare out the big south-facing kitchen windows and the sun light up the trees. You go into the three car garage, get into your car. Start the car, and think about how much you love Barbara, how she is the most beautiful, most wonderful woman in the world. Settle that travelling mug of coffee in the cupholder.
Drive to see Bush.
Eagle, anchor, and globe. Semper fidelis. Seven months and sixty-eight miles south of Rutbah, you came across a munitions depot for one element of the insurgency.
...
Of all the branches of the military, the Marines may be the one for which you are, by nature, least suited. The Navy has Annapolis; the Army has West Point. Even the Air Force has its Academy in Colorado. You would have done well at one of the officer schools; you would have been buoyed by the tradition and the splendor, the sense of belonging. You would have enjoyed, despite yourself, the football games and car loans and rings the size of a baby's fist. It is entirely possible that you would, today, be a happier, saner man if you had gone Navy or Army or Air Force.
Instead, you were seventeen, an orphan with nothing but three semesters worth of accelerated community college credits, another semester of real college. Your father had been a large animal veterinarian, the closest thing that the rural town possessed to a real doctor within an hour's drive, and when your father died when you were two months short of being seventeen. Two months after you were seventeen, a kind lieutenant colonel for whom your father had once saved a brood mare told you that if you enlisted, got through Basic and did well, he would get you to Officer Candidate School when it was time.
You enlisted, got through Basic, made your way to being a corporal, at which point you served under Bush, and then you put yourself through the last two years of school. When it was time, you did not need the lieutenant colonel your father had helped; your own commander got you into OCS, and fifteen years later, you are a captain, and Bush is out of the Corps for good. He is a former Marine now, wearing a t-shirt and neatly pressed khakis, sitting on his front porch and waiting for you.
Somehow, because of those vivid dreams, you expect him to be wearing blue and gold with a sea at his back, but there is only sunlight. Blue sky. Nothern Virginia in the spring. Birds. Two crutches stacked neatly by him on the steps.
There is a small tree in his front yard, room for one car in the driveway. After Bush is settled into the passenger's seat, each time, you have to hand him the travel mug of coffee. He doesn't take it until you tell him to, and when he does, even though it's only half warm at best, he drinks, carefully, appreciatively.
You put the car in reverse, take the car into the street, and try not to watch him.
...
It is not easy learning how you should act with Bush. He is out of the Corps now. You are, nominally, still within it. Even while you were both Marines, though, interacting was occaisionally difficult because you could not understood why Bush respected you so much. You were commissioned, and he was not, but that failed to explain any of it -- he was such an eminently capable soldier, a splendid disciplinarian and fearless fighter. The best part of the Corps were written in the marrow of his bones. He has so many of the good qualities that you lack.
You remember meeting him. You remember having him as your sargeant when you were a corporal; you remember having him as your sargeant and XO when you were a second lieutenant. You remember hearing of the prodigious things that he did as part of United Shield in Somalia; you saw yourself what he did for you in Rutbah. It ought to be impossible for two men to be serve together so many times given the size of the Corps, the scope of global engagement, but currents of fortune and influence brought the two of you together, again and again.
Each time, it became clear to you: Bush was a Marine to the bottom of his soul. He planned to be in the Corps until he died.
And yet. He still smiles when he sees you these days. He tells you about his sisters, talks to you about his desire to rebuild a '66 Thunderbird that he saw advertised in the newspaper. Compliments and asks flattering questions about your new car. Asks after Barbara, too, in the most solicitous, kind way. Drinks more of the coffee and shows every proof of a healthy appetite, of happiness to be sitting next to you on a weekday morning in a car in the suburbs of Washington going to the hospital so that he can learn to walk, to go up stairs, to cope with phantom pain.
There is, in fact, a picture of Bush and Barbara in the hallway by your study.
Barbara is in a utility uniform with the sleeves rolled up and is smiling like an angel. A desert-issue hat is hanging from a string under her chin, and Bush is standing next to her in full pack, holding an M16. He is not smiling, and there is desert behind both of them.
...
You have never been an easy sleeper, but you have never had dreams this vivid: they are filled with texture and sound and feeling. Sometimes, you have dreams about other things, normal things, like riding a bicycle down a street that you recognize from childhood or the cold sweat of the first time you saw action, but they do not stay with you like the dreams of the sea. Men die. Ships burn. There is nothing about desert or mountains or infantry in them, only water. They are like memories, not dreams.
In particular, there is this one particular battle to which you keep returning. It is your ship against four others -- French, you suspect -- in a bay.
....
After his physical therapy session, Bush is tired and white-faced. He has much less to say, and he wobbles a little as the orderly helps him into the car. Sometimes, if it has been especially bad, he cannot manage the crutches and must be wheeled out. You always hold the car door with two hands, and Bush feels doubly embarrassed thouse days.
He is always exhausted, though, and sometimes, when you have the windows down and are stuck in traffic, Bush will drift off into sleep. It is not just learning to walk without the foot, after all. He spent months in bed; he did not get proper medical care until a good two days after the wound, and there were multiple bad bouts of fever. Originally, they thought that they might save part of his foot; later, they had to abandon that. At one point, you were prepared to exert whatever remaining influence you had to make sure that he got to at least hold his Purple Heart before he died. There were times, too, during the last desperate moments at the seige, you thought that about words you might use to plead with your captors for Bush's live and the lives of any other surviving men you might have.
Instead, the two of you are safe again. You are going to be married, and he is tired because he is getting the best rehabilitative care in the world. It is an article of faith among Marines in Iraq that if you survived until you were airlifted to Landstuhl, Germany, you would live. Bush lived until Landstuhl; Bush is alive, and he falls asleep sometimes.
His chin touches the seatbelt, and the grip he has on the arms of his bucket seat eases a little even though it is, generally, an uneasy sleep. He moves a bit every once in a while. Shifts in the seat, and his face is still so pale. He is so tired. Sometimes, his hand twitches a little, as if reaching for you, and you want, more than anything in the world, to take his hand in yours. You can remember, vividly, what his fingers felt like over yours on the chopper ride out of that munitions dump, just before the air strike came. During the plane ride through the night to Germany.
You keep your eyes on the road, though, and you keep both of your hands on the wheel. You concentrate on the traffic, and while Bush sleeps in the seat next to you, tired and pale, you tell yourself over and over that, in your dreams, the two of you go to sea again.
...
You were married when you went to Iraq.
There was no family for you, as your father had died when you were seventeen, but the marriage to Maria had, nevertheless, not taken place you were particularly young.
In fact, Maria had first been a friend to you during those long, lonely days when you were back from Somalia. She worked for the management of the off-base apartment complex that you did, lived there as part of her pay, and you met her in the laundry room, by the Coke machine. It was a confusing time in your life, lonely. The two of you talked for a few months. She baked you things, cooked you casseroles to eat, and helped you with your laundry once she realized that you were alone.
Once it happened, in fact, it went quickly. She was charmed by the fact that you did not want to have sex with her before you were married. Neither of you had much in the way of family, and the way it happened was that you received word that you might be shipped out to Somalia, and one night, on the spur of the moment, while she was on her way out the door after bringing you some chicken that she'd made, you asked her to marry you.
She was short, somewhat round, and she had started to cry because you told her that you might go to Somalia soon. In fact, she turned her head away from you so that you would not see her crying, but you knew that she was, and the question came out of your mouth.
You asked her to marry you without showing her a ring. She said yes without ever seeing or asking for one, either.
...
Barbara is, in fact, the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund. There was a period of a week or so when it was not clear whether you were alive or dead, and it was during that period that Maria went into labor, gave birth, and died from complications. Barbara took up donations, used her contacts, convinced a few influential people she knew, and stepped in herself to make sure that the details were arranged so that Maria was buried well and that the baby was provided for.
In fact, when you got back to the States, the baby was with her at the New York office. You had gone there to do an interview that the Commandant's office had set up for you, and only after you had stepped into the building with the First Lieutenant who was the guide assigned to you did you realize that this was Barbara's channel. This was the building where she worked when she was in New York, and the Lieutenant had grinned at you.
It had all been arranged. The baby was there, in her office. He had been named Richard Arthur after her eldest and second eldest brother respectively. He was small, enormously solen, and after you had studied him, you stared at her. The top of your mouth was dry; a nanny held the baby, as Richard Arthur happened to be visiting, and Barbara looked even more beautiful than you had remembered her as being during all those long months without her. She was even more comforting, even more perfect. Her voice made your head swim, and the sweetness of her smile, the love in her eyes, took your breath away.
There was a backdrop of the skyscrapers of New York behind her, running from ceiling to floor, and you kissed her in full view of the nanny, the baby, the secretary who had come in to ask if Barbara would sign something.
Later, you came realized that it had been arranged like this. They had counted on you to become flustered in the middle of the interview, for you to have to say that you had just seen your son a few moments before, so that was why you had to have a moment. Happiness turned to Dead Sea fruit in your mouth when you realized.
Barbara is still the administrator of the Maria Hornblower Memorial Fund, though. You are still going to marry her.
...
Halfway back to Bush's, it starts to rain -- the rain comes out of nowhere, and since Bush hasn't quite bought that 1966 Thunderbird to restore yet, when you do get to the house, you jump out, open the garage door, and then drive the car in. Bush is embarrassed enough by that, but then you come around the back of the car, as there isn't room in the front, and you help him out of the car.
It shames him, but he needs it. He is still a little foggy from sleeping it seems, and he falls against you while standing up. Leans into you, and you lean him back against the car. Steady him. The two of you are standing very close; the rain is starting to come down on the driveway, and if he were a woman, at this moment, you would have kissed him. Instead, the two of you look at each other for a moment. Your hand is on his hip, and when you look down to see where, exactly, your hand is, you realize that he's actually hard in his pants.
He says something about having that brunette therapist again, but you don't look up to see his face when he says it. You look at your hand on his hip, at the shape of his cock inside his pants, and you open your mouth to say something. Take a breath.
In retrospect, he was just putting a hand on the roof of the car to get better leverage so that he could be sure that he wasn't going to fall out. At the time, though, you took it to mean that he was settling into place, and out of some kind of instinct, you went down on your knees.
You get his dick out of his pants, and you are crouching in front of him on the garage floor. It's fast, quick, almost instinctual, and he is holding onto the roof of the car while you take his dick in your mouth. He lets out a noise between a moan and a gasp, and it's only then that you realize that you have no idea how to do this. You cannot figure out how to breathe; your posture is completely uncomfortable. You bless the fact that there are no cars in this garage normally because otherwise, you would have motor oil and dirt all over your knees. You are frozen, absolutely unsure what to do, so after a moment, you back off.
And then you look up and you realize that Bush is looking down at you.
He's watching you. He's holding himself still aside from his chest, which heaving as though he's just run a dozen miles in the rain, but he doesn't say anything. You bring your mouth a little closer to his dick, and his eyes are still on you. Your lips are less than an inch from him, and he puts one hand on the side of your face, on your cheek. Moves it into your hair, hesitates for a moment, and he's still looking at you with this strange, unreadable expression.
There is rain coming down on the driveway. The car is so large that it blocks out any view from the street -- you'll have trouble getting it out of the garage, in fact, and were lucky to get it in without losing one of the side mirrors.
It's a moment of a hesitation. Bush looks at you. Again, you stare at his hip. Again, you're on the verge of pulling away. In fact, you think you're going to be ill.
And then the hand he has in your hair tightens.
"Like this," he says and puts your mouth back on him.
...
Midway through, he shifts over a little so that he is leaning against one of the closed back doors. You reach up, catch up his newly freed hand, and keep hold of it.
You were surprised, in a way, at how tightly he had held it.
...
Here is another part of the puzzle.
One morning, you were out into the streets of the town that you and your men were holding. It was a show of American strength It was a demonstration that the United States owned the streets. You were using your limited Arabic to converse with one of the marketplace vendors -- it was market day, and the farmers had brought in their wretched, thin produce to the market to sell. You were bargaining with an old woman, sweating into the heat, and cursing yourself for being an idiot. The woman was reluctant to sell to you. You noticed, from the corner of your eye, Bush with his M16 slung over his shoulder, full gear, pretending not to notice the vegetable-seller's good-looking granddaughter, who was at least thirty years younger than he was and scowled at him whenever he glanced at her.
There was shooting. The vegetable stand disintegrated; you felt Bush's hand on your shoulder, heard him shout to the detail that he had insisted you bring along as protection. Your instinct was to remain standing, to determine the precise nature of the shooting and the disturbance, but it was over in seconds.
Your walkie-talkie squaked and informed you that a patrol in the adjoining street had foiled an attempt on your life. Men on a roof with projectile incinediary devices and guns. Your men had captured one of them alive, though wounded. Two were dead, and sixteen feet away, there were also two dead.
A boy, six years old. In the dust next to him, his sister. His hand was stretched out towards him; her face had been so badly trampled in the stampede that it was impossible to make out her face. What she had looked like. They had both been shot, the girl through the chest and the boy in the head, in the torso. Multiple times, and since the market was not on even ground, their blood was still running down the slope towards you.
The same dust that covered their faces covered you, in fact. You. Bush. Everything.
That was what had struck you at the moment: the dust. You could not make yourself breathe for a long, terrible moment because you felt as though you would choke on it. And then, you had turned to say something to Bush. You wanted to tell him to find out who the two children had been, and you found that he had indeed, been looking at the two children.
And then he turned to look at you, and that was what struck you: there was no change in his expression. He had unshouldered his gun. He could very well have been the man who shot them both, and there was only the faintest hint of grief in him. Was a dollar unlucky when it was spent? Was it a terrible thing when a man's hair turned gray? It was war, and there would be civilian dead. Bush was ready for his next orders.
...
At the same time, this.
At the house in Georgetown, there are studies for both you and Barbara. In the attic, she has cleared away room for your books; in the basement, she has a tape library. A number of them are actually DVDs, but Barbara has been in journalism for many years. There are even framed articles from when she was the chief editor of the Choate newspaper. Another article that she wrote for the Lampoon when she was at Harvard. There are clipping files in the cabinets.
The two of you refer to it, nevertheless, as the tape room. One evening, while Barbara is in Russia covering the G8 summit, you go down to the basement, and you select, at random, a tape from the walls. You miss her, after all. Without looking at the label, you put the tape into the machine.
There is a flicker, a moment of darkness, then grainy, dim images. It is night footage from Iraq. You recognize the walls, the tree. It scraped against the side of the building; there were nights when you passed the hours by counting how many times it scraped against thet window, and Bush was sitting at one of the tables in front of the barracks. Most of the light in the video comes from inside the barracks.
"The men worship him, ma'm. They would do anything for him. Look what he has done this bunch -- half of them fresh from Parris Island, the other half from the bottom of their platoons. They love him, not for anything that he does or says, but for what he is."
Barbara said something that the camera does not pick up very clearly -- something involving the world handsome -- and Bush is very solemn.
"I suppose he is, ma'am, now you come to mention it. But it wouldn't matter if he were as ugly as sin as far as we're concerned. We'd die for him."
...
So it is, indeed, a puzzle. Bush is the man in the world to whom you are the closest. He was your senior NCO in Iraq, but you had been with him long before that. He was your best man when you married Maria; he was the only person on your side of the church. During the slow years between Somalia and Afghanistan, when money was tight and if geography permitted, you shared an efficiency and a grocery bill with him.
Nevertheless, you are a little frightened of him. You are little mystified as to why this man who is so much a perfect Marine should respect you so and let you do this to him: he is a tough man. A soldier, a Marine of the original, classic school. He is shorter than you are, but more broadly built and in possession of classic opinions.
The United States is right. The liberals and communists, when he sees a difference between them at all, are wrong. The United Nations is acceptable only insofar as its goals tail with those of the United States, and you remember, very clearly, all the criticism that you have of him. He is unimaginative. He is stupid, incapable of thinking outside the parameters of the Corps, and you have never bothered to ask him what he thinks of homosexuals in society, in general, much less their place in the Corps.
After the garage, both of you go into his house. While he moves about in the living room, you rinse your mouth over the kitchen sink. You do not use one of his cups; you try not to put your hands too much on his faucet. You try to make your exit as quietly, as unobstrusively as possible, but he catches you at the door. Thanks you again, effusively, for driving him to his physical therapy and tells you, as he always does, that if you are busy tomorrow, you do not have to trouble yourself for him.
You get out to the car. You start the car; you drive away from the development with its two bedroom bungalows and flat floor plans. Two minutes onto the highway, that cold feeling still in your stomach, you pick up the phone and call Barbara just so that you can hear her voice.
...
Barbara is, of course, the best thing about your new life. The house is nice; the respite from being at war is good. There are three hot meals a day if you want them, fresh fruits and vegetables in abundance. Meals that do not include either chicken or syrup, a Sub-Zero freezer and refrigerator filled twice a week by the housekeeper in accordance with whatever you or Barbara write on the notepad by the microwave.
Nevertheless, there are nights when you find yourself dreaming about seeing the world in night-vision goggles again, where you feel like the heat of Harada is the only thing that can make you feel warm even though it is Washington DC in summer. Even though you threw it away before boarding the transport to Germany, you can almost feel the hand-drawn map of the town. Other men startle and hit the ground when they hear a car backfire; you, on the other hand, look toward the sound of the noise.
As bad as it ever gets, though, all Barbara has to do is look at you, and the petty frustrations drop away. You are happy to be with her in the house in Georgetown. You do not mind waiting at the Reagan Airport for hours, waiting for her shuttle to arrive. You will even stand next to her at a black tie charity, at a Democratic fundraiser, at an award banquet where she will be receiving something else to use around the house as a paperweight, and it has always been different for her.
Her older brother is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee; another older brother was a three star general in the Army. She arrived by helicopter, and you had direct, explicit, rubbed in your face orders to be there to welcome her to Harada and make sure that she and her network had a satisfactory experience before going home.
Unlike Maria or Bush, you had not wanted her to be there. You were expecting a hard woman, but Barbara was kind. You were expecting her to be old, but she was a decade younger than you. Bush, who was acting as your XO, had put her on an infantry rotation squad rotation plan designed to keep her from seeing anything more exciting than munitions sorting, but after a two weeks, he came to you with a proposal to keep her with a single squad and let her see time in the western end of town. Sometimes, you would come out of the comm office, and you would see Gerard walking her up and down in the one strip of greenery in camp, trying his charm on her. She had a spectacular sense of humor.
There had been a long memo issued to you on the fact that the reporter was not a friend, that she was a member of the media, but it was always scrupulously fair.
Barbara ate with the men. She argued with you about Whitman and Ginsberg; she sang the USC fight song with Galbraith. Bush talked to her for hours when he barely managed a letter a month to his sisters; she was the only American woman in a dozen miles, and one night, you overheard one Pfc tell another that he had asked her for an autograph so that he could send it to his little sister, who wanted to be a journalist and was a big fan of hers. She told him that she didn't have time to sign anything then, and the corporal thought that she had forgotten the request entirely until he got an ecstastic e-mail from his sister, telling him that Barbara had taped a three minute long personal message, beamed it to the network, and had gotten the network to courier a copy, in an official FSNBC pouch, to the house in Montauk, New York.
There were times when you were sure that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. It did not seem possible that any single, real human being could be as perfect as she was, and after she left, you heard how she had gotten engaged to a junior senator from Connecticut.
She married him. He died after being struck by a drunk driver two months later; three weeks later, you heard that the wives and girlfriends of your squad had put together a scrapbook of letters and photographs to console Barbara for her loss and to thank her for how she had helped them keep in touch with their men. Maria sent you the letter she wrote for that compilation first, through e-mail, so that you could look it over and make any suggestions and revisions.
It has been six months since you came back from abroad.
You and Barbara are waiting for a decent period to pass before marrying.
...
Some of the dreams you have are terrible -- death and battle, the bay with the four French ships, a black river that sweeps you along from shore to shore. The two dead Iraqi children appear as your children; you stand in your house and watch them die of smallpox. Maria cradles the boy in her arms long after he's dead; she cannot stop holding the corpse, and yet, she will not let herself cry because you have not started crying. She knows that you disapprove of emotional displays, and she does not want to disgrace you in front of your dead child.
Inevitably, you wake after those particular dreams. You lie in bed next to Barbara, and you strain your ears for the sound of Richard's breathing through the baby monitor that is placed on the nightstand. The area around the Georgetown house is very quiet at night, and usually, if you hold yourself still, you can hear your son's slow, steady breathing, as real and seemingly close as Barbara's.
Already, Barbara loves him as few stepmothers ever love the children of another woman. When you arrive home after that first time with Bush, after you have finished talking to Barbara and completed the rest of your drive, it is somewhat past noon. You are thinking about what you would like to have for lunch as you bring the car into the driveway, come up through the walkway to the house, let yourself in, and find, in the foyer, the nanny with Richard. He does not want to be put to bed, and there is a strange moment while you are standing there with the keys in the keys in your hand, watching your son as he is held by a woman known, to you, only by her first name.
Richard is scrubbing at his eyes with his hands, twisting about and trying to wriggle away from her. When he sees you, he holds out his arms -- it is immensely gratifying to see that he wants to be held by you, and you settle him into your arms as best you know how. He smells like fresh diapers and baby powder, as well as something else that you decide, after a bit of examination, must be unique to babies. It is not unpleasant. Sweet, almost like the hay you remember smelling when you were a child following your father on rounds, but without dust at the end. He is soft, surprisingly light in your arms, and you hold very still.
Neither you nor the nanny make any noise, and eventually, Richard yawns and leans against your chest. You still don't dare to move; you have forgotten all about being hungry. You can't even breathe deeply for fear of waking him, but this is the third time that you have been happy all day. It is the first where you have not also felt guilt.
...
Maria had a mother. Before she was married, she lived with her mother close by. After she married, when you were not at home, she went back to living with her mother, so they were close. You have been to Maria's grave several times since you have come back, but you have not spoken to Mrs. Mason or contacted her in any way.
She was there, presumably, for Maria's death and her funeral. Barbara, presumably, knows about all this.
Still, it has been six months, and you have not contacted Mrs. Mason in any way. Barbara calls you one afternoon to tell you that she's decided to begin a course of fertility treatment.
...
Here is a dream of yours: you have been ill for a long time, in a foreign land, and after you return home, Barbara watches over you all summer to make sure the last traces of the illness are gone. She is diligent and loving. Under her care, you grow slowly, steadily, healthier. One afternoon, you and Richard lie side by side on your bellies beside the fish-pond, trying to catch carp with your hands.
You return to the house with the sunset all around you, muddy and wet and gloriously happy. Barbara is standing on the steps, smiling, her hands stretched out, one for each of you.
That is the dream: you and your son and your wife, as close as three human beings can be, living in a beautiful house.
...
It is five days later before anything else happens with Bush -- two of the days are because of the weekend, and Bush does not get therapy on the weekends. Three of the days, you drive him to his therapy, drive him back. During that period, once, you even take him to get groceries and walk with him through the aisles of the stores, him on his crutches, you pushing the cart. The checkout girl smiles at Bush; he drops his head and blushes like a teenager instead of looking her in the eye.
You say nothing, but feel as though you are coloring yourself.
On the sixth day, you drive him back from his therapy, and you go with him to the door. He hands you his keys, stands there while you open the door for him, then makes the awkward step up from the porch into the hallway of his house. You have one foot on that step, as if to follow him. You stop because you are suddenly unsure, and then, while you are standing in the door like that, the door actually lying against your shoulderbones because it is mostly closed, Bush kisses you.
You are fairly sure that Bush has never kissed someone taller than him, but he does it right. He turns his head to do it; he must go up on the toes of the one foot that he still has and raise himself up, off his crutches, by upper body strength. Nevertheless, it is a kiss and a good one. Sparks go down your back when his tongue touches yours. While he's kissing you, working at you with only his mouth because he must keep both hands on his crutches, you can feel his breath across your cheek.
The keys drop out of your hand and land on the floor. You put your hand in the small of his back and press him against you -- in a few moments, both you and him are on the floor. It started with his hand down your pants and him trying to give you a handjob, but it ends with him rubbing his clothed crotch against the bare inside of your thigh, you coming against his shirt, and him coming from watching you gasp and writhe and almost beg for him to put his hand around you again.
...
There is one dream that you know to be based on reality very closely:
In the dream, you are on a ship, in a foreign port, about to take her around the Cape. You have not told anyone aboard the ship that is what you intend to do, but Bush has guessed, and so have many of the men. It is dangerous enough to take a ship around the Cape at this time of year, but the Lydia has taken on so much in the way of stores that it will take a miracle of seamanship. Consequently, you have told Bush and the other lieutenants to be a little more lax about bumboats and women coming alongside. The crew is hardened enough, experienced enough, that an afternoon of liberty will not be too damaging.
You are in your cabin. Some of the midshipmen have gone ashore. Sunlight plays on the beams over your head, and there is a knock -- Bush, with a woman behind him. She comes in; Bush closes the door behind him, and the woman begins to undress. Her shoes, her shawl, her dress, her shift. It's all wordless, as the details seem to have been taken care of already. When she is naked, she kneels in front of you, works your trousers off. She would take your shirt off, too, but you put your hand into her hair. You are hard already, and soon after, you've got your fingers wrapped in her hair and are moving her mouth hard and fast to make her whimper a little and put her hands on your thighs and press so that you will slow and she can breathe.
Bush watches from the across, hat held over his chest, and his face unreadable.
When you are done, he puts the girl on her back on your map table, and it is your turn to watch.
It happened in your actual life. The occaision was that you were in Germany after finishing Officer Candidate School; you certainly weren't a stranger to the grand Corps tradition of paying for sex, but this was a present from Bush for giving you a present for finishing OCS and receiving a commission.
The only real difference was that it happened in your hotel room, not your office.
Also, that you and Bush had drunkness available as an excuse. You put your hand around yourself, after all, while Bush went at her. You held his hand, again, in the moning before you filed your full, formal report to Gambier in Kaiserslautern.
....
One afternoon, Barbara takes the afternoon off work, and she and you and the baby have a picnic in the park. The sky is overcast, but you and Barbara take turns holding Richard while the other eats. He smells like powder and clean laundry. Barbara's eyes, blue in most lights, are beautifully gray.
...
In Iraq, you had command of an undersized company; together, with Bolton, you were to maintain peace and security in the seventy five miles around the crossing of the Ammon-Baghdad road and the north-south oil pipeline. Bolton had more combat experience than you did, was technically the one in command at Rutbah while the new lieutenant colonel took his sweet time arriving, You had been a second lieutenant in Bolton's battalion while he was a first, though. He knew the quality of your work, and he was scrupulously fair -- his platoons alternated checkpoint and patrol duty with yours. When news came in of the munitions dump and abandoned base, it was clear that one of you would have to go out and at least look at it.
"You'd give three fingers to go," Bolton said, looking hard at you. The two of you were in what passed for his office; the air conditioning was humming at full strength, but both of you were sweating hard. "I know it, and you know it. You're the same restless fucker that you were the first time in Mogadishu."
He studied you for another moment, and then, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a quarter. You called tails; he called heads. After a moment where you had to grip your hands into fists to keep yourself from doing anything rash, the quarter came up with the silver eagle, a little scratched from having being in a desert, but its wings nevertheless stretched over the arrows of war and the laurels of glory.
...
The laurels, as they actually played out: to come home. To have a staff job in Arlington. Gentle treatment for having lost half of Sutherland company in the single bloodiest day in any United States face-to-face engagement in almost twenty years. A house in Georgetown, Barbara, the first new car you have ever owned, and a Navy Cross, the highest award available to a man in your branch of service without Congressional approval. Ostensibly, it was for personally throwing back a grenade that had gotten over the ramparts, but you know the political motivations behind it.
The Cross is bronze on a blue and white ribbon. At the center is a small ship, called a caravel, moving across rough water. It has occurred to you that this medal is the source of these dreams you have been having, but those thoughts are creditable only when you are not being honest with yourself.
...
Barbara takes that afternoon off, in part, because there is something that must be done: there is a benefit of some sort that both of you must attend. The nanny stays late to watch Richard Arthur to bed, and you put on one of the two tuxedos that you own. You are still technically active duty, as you are formally listed on the staff of a major general in Arlington and write the occaisional memorandum for him or talk to him about Iraq, but it is a marginal call as to whether you ought to wear dress uniform B to most of these things. Most of them are charities; the majority of the remainder are professional, journalism association celebrations or functions.
You have made a judgment call, though -- there are speeches, and sometimes, there are opinions, expressed in the speeches. It is better not to wear blue-and-red to some of these functions. Barbara likes you better in true black tie, too.
During the pre-banquet cocktails, while Barbara is talking to some of her publishing friends, you meet a woman named Marie. She wears a gold dress and beautiful shoulders. No jewelry, just the fine, perfect color of her skin. When you meet her, you are struck wordless for a few moments because she has the warmest eyes you have ever seen. She is shy, young and profoundly uncomfortable in the fancy surroundings, but her smile makes you feel as if you have just sat down by a blazing fireplace on a cold, damp night -- at first, it makes you feel hot, almost uncomfortably so, and then it turns into a pleasant warmth down to the bones.
She is French; she has thickly accented English, and you have high school French. You have managed to get her name, that she is new to Washington DC and has never been to America before. You are about to ask her if she has seen all the monuments, and then her husband calls for her. She is the wife of the son of the French ambassador, you realize, after glancing up at the little group that waves to her. Why did you assume, when looking at her, that her husband was dead, that she was living with her father-in-law? Why does looking at her make you feel so happy, and why are you so sure that she is a good woman who could love you?
She apologizes, looks at you once more, kindly, though without a smile, and hurries to be with her husband.
Barbara is still holding court underneath the potted palms. There is a glass of champagne in her hand the same color as Marie's dress.
...
After the first speech, you slip away, tell Barbara to catch a taxi, step away before she can say anything to you quietly, and then you drive to Bush's. It is quick, trafficless, at this hour. It is fairly late, and Bush is a little surprised to see you in the black tie.
Nevertheless, he is pleased. He offers to heat up another frozen dinner; you tell him that you have already eaten, and then, he makes small talk and maneuvers around the place easily enough now that he is only on one crutch. You think a little bit about Marie while watching him get a beer from the fridge, but mostly, you watch him. Most of the lights in his house are turned off, but he turns them on after you arrive. Eventually, you convince him to go back to watching television, and you watch him.
Eventually, he falls asleep, and you think about taking the remote control out of his hand and putting it back on top of the cable box, but you do not want to wake him. It is so peaceful, in fact, in the room: he has the screen door open. The sounds of the summer night mix with the television. You can hear the trees, the wind, the insects, and you look at Bush. You study the shape of his mouth, the strength of his jaw. The steadiness of his breathing. You remember the time that you dug him out of a firefight in an abandoned warehouse in Mogadishu; you remember the time he offered to give you his pay while the issue of your commission was clarified.
His heartbeat lies at the base of his throat, and his sleep is peaceful. You can see that much by light of the television.
Bush is close to being happy.
...
There were nights in Iraq, too. Bad nights, terrible nights. Nights after Barbara, night where you couldn't sleep, and nights, too, when you fought against the fact that everything was as slow and heavy as a dream.
There were nights that were almost good, though: the streets were always quiet after dark because out of fear, but sometimes, the silence was not that menacing. You could hear the trees on the side of the compound rustling; you could hear Barrack D talking, the occaisional sound of the perimeter watching passing and going by their way. Bush would be outside with the other officers until they began to play poker, and at that point, he would wander inside on a pretext of paperwork, as he was playing both the role of a mastery gunner and a first. It was not fraternization, after all, if there was work to be done.
You would have an exchange of formalties. He had paperwork. You had more paperwork. He had come in to make his report. Casualties. Supplies. Minor disciplinary issues. You listened, then watched while he pretended to do paperwork. You would sit in your chair, the only chair in the whole town that had four working wheels, and put your feet up on your desk. The window was open; the trees were rustling, and Bush's face was half in shadow because there was only one lamp in the quarters that were also your office. Your laptop had a half-written letter to Maria; together with the lamp and the air conditioner, that was all of the generator's output that you could justify taking for your personal use.
The computer was also playing one of your Arabic language lessons. Bush shifted in his metal chair every once in a while.
It was impossible to think of Barbara in a context like this, impossible to worry about anything more than vague professional concerns, and you and Bush might go through the rest of the evening that way, barely saying seven words. Sometimes, he would reach over and hand you something across the desk; you would glance at it, then sign. Drink some water. Watch Bush. Wonder what it would be like to be a father. Listen to his breathing.
Those nights felt like dreams, too. Slow dreams, wonderful dreams. Dreams full of peace.
...
In August, Bush is given a government job in San Diego. There is a good sized military population there, and you are not entirely clear what his duties would be with the title that he would have, but the job is real enough. You call around to make sure, and it is through the Department of Defense. Bush tells you about it when you see him, shows you the letter. Mentions that he had gotten a phone call about it a few weeks before, talked to them about it, but that he hadn't even been aware that he was under serious consideration. It has something to do with the Marine training base at Twentynine Palms, but it is a Department job, and it is situated in the city by the ocean, not the desert.
Bush thanks you over and over for it. He says that he never would have gotten the job if it had not been for you; he thinks, in fact, that it has something to do with you. He assumes, crudely, that you had something to do with it, and the gratitude in his eyes is pathetic to see.
It is a desk job, and you honestly had nothing to do with it. He will never be a Marine again; his hair is still short in the Marine way because he had it cut short in his last trip to the physical therapy in the VA, but it will grow out soon enough, and he has his head turned in that way and is smiling up at you in his kitchen.
...
Guilt about Maria, guilt about Barbara, guilt for what you did in Iraq, guilt for what you failed to do. Guilt for what you could not do for Bush, for taking him to a fate that you distinctly considered worse than death. Guilt, too, for loving him so much that the only way it can find expression now that you are back home is to play the woman for him or have him play the woman for you. You are tired and afraid; this was intended to be the greatest, best time of your life. You had the woman you loved; you had the friend who loved you. You had a son, a family.
Gulit, fear, worry. The inability to enjoy what you have, an overwhelming yearning for escape from what you experience -- these are the things that control your dreams. They are the origin fo the alternate life that you live at night.
Little by little, you are starting realize that these things control your waking life, too. Love, you are learning, is not enough for happiness.
...
One night, you are dressing next to Barbara for another event, and asks you to come over and zip the back of her gown. You are mostly done yourself, so you go, and you put one hand on her hip, another in the small of her back. Strangely enough, she takes the hand that you have at her hip, and she moves it over so that it is lying low on her belly. Between the hips now, and you stop moving. You stop breathing. If you were breathing, you could smell her perfume.
She turns her face up to look at you.
"The doctor thinks that -- "
When you manage to smile back at her, she looks so happy that she might start weeping.
...
At some point during that night when you went to see Bush, it rained. In the darkness, Bush got up to close the screen door, and you must have lain down on the floor for some reason. You woke the next morning, still on the floor, an ache in your neck, but suddenly and absurdly happy because Bush's arm was over your chest and his snoring was so close by.
Outside the door, it was still raining.
...
You see Bush to the airport. You stand with him in the ticket line, and you go with him as far as the security line. There was time before that for a stop at a news stand, where he buys himself a soda, and you buy a bottle of water and a newspaper He salutes you one last time for old time's sake; you know that you have a standing invitation to visit him, and he has shown you pictures of the shore. He is looking for a condo near the sea, and then he goes to a special line because of his prosthetic leg. The nanny is with you. She brought Richard Arthur and holds him.
Barbara is in New York; the nanny gives Richard a bottle, and even after Bush is gone out of the airport, even after his plane is left and gone, you stand there, and you wait.
You stand, and you wait. People pass on either side of you; you barely see them. The intercom system mentions flights that are boarding, flights that have left, but you are not sure what you are waiting for. You wait, and you wait.
It is not Bush you are waiting for, or Barbara, or even Marie, the woman in gold that you cannot forget. You waited for a commission; you waited to fall in love. You waited for a friend and for family, and then, you waited for your wife to die. You waited to come home; you waited for the good life, and now that you have everything you ever imagined, you are not sure what you are still waiting for: it has been so long since you have been happy, completely happy, that you can have forgotten what it feels like to the point where you cannot even wish for it anymore.
You are waiting now. You wait, and you wait, and you are waiting for happiness.
...
At last, the realization came upon him. Now he could shake off the astonishment, the bewilderment, that had held him helpless up to that moment. Nothing counted in the world except Barbara. Now he could move. Two steps forward and she was in his arms. Her tears wetted his lips; they were complete in a world of their own, and his heart beat faster.
"My love! My darling!" he said, for, unbelieving and blind, she had not responded.
And then she knew, in the darkness that surrounded her, and her arms went about him. There was no such joy in all the world. Indeed, there could not be, and for Hornblower, there never was.
Written while listening to Grant Lee Phillips's "Like A Lover." And uh. Cher's "Believe." And lots of other songs.
Thanks to
iansmomesq for the original idea and for generous enough to let me play with it. Thanks, too, to black_hound and babel for hand holding. I SWEAR MY NEXT FIC WILL NOT SUCK LIKE THIS.
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Date: 2006-08-25 03:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-08-26 04:21 am (UTC)And, erm, yes. With that out of the way, I'm glad you enjoyed this. The modern stuff is a little weird, and I feel guilty for writing so much crack, but I can't help it. And hurray for my obsessiveness doing somebody good. :D