Sparta (20 page)

“Go-Go?” said Conrad, laughing.

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

“Not possible,” said Conrad.

“Possible,” said Claire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hemorrhoids?” Conrad asked.

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

Conrad laughed. “Sounds fun to me.”

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

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

“Yeah, what's up with Denny?”

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

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

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

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

 

10

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

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

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

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

He got it, but he didn't get it.

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

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

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

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

“Where you going?” he asked.

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

“See you later,” he answered, nodding.

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi there,” she said.

“You look fantastic,” he said.

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

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

*   *   *

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

The gathering dusk made it hard to see. Crowds flowed steadily along the sidewalk, bodies coming too close in the gloom, faces appearing too suddenly. Conrad's chest tightened, and he took Claire's elbow, steering her through the surge. A huge, grimy truck, thundering along the avenue, slowed suddenly beside them. The brakes gasped explosively, like gunshot.

Conrad felt the sound as if it were an electric shock. Dread rocketed through him, and he ducked, twisting away from the truck and opening his arms to protect Claire, putting himself between her and the blast.

By the time she looked at him, puzzled, it was over. He'd already straightened up; he shook his head, embarrassed. People's glances flicked at him, then away. He felt ashamed doing this so blatantly, in public—being scalded by fear. Fear and shame were mixed together.

The restaurant was a long, low room filled with packed tables. As they stepped inside, the noise rose up, deafening: the clamor of voices, the clatter of cutlery.

“Sorry,” said Claire. She looked at him. “I didn't remember it being so loud. Do you want to go somewhere else?”

“No, it's fine.” He didn't want her to think he couldn't handle it. But the noise bore down on him like a weight, and a ticking started up in his temple.

They stood by the front door and a young man came up to them carrying menus. He wore a blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He was clean and preppy, though his cheeks were dark with a two-day stubble.

“Good evening.” He was ostentatiously friendly. “Do you have a reservation?”

“Farrell.” Conrad found the dirty-looking stubble distasteful. In the Marines you were required to be clean-shaven at all times. Stubble made you look like a slacker or a terrorist. “We asked for a table by the wall.”

“Right. Follow me.” Friendly turned with a flourish and began threading his way through the tables. They were set very close together. It was impossible not to brush against the chairs as they passed through, though Conrad tried.

They stopped at a table near the wall. Friendly pulled out a chair and stood beside it.

“I actually asked for a table
by
the wall,” Conrad said.

“Right,” said Friendly, his face bright. “This is the closest we have right now.” He bared his teeth in a professional smile, his pink lips framed by stubble.

“I did call a couple of hours ago,” Conrad said.

“As I say, this is the closest we have right now.” His voice took on a syrupy politeness.

“So, when I asked for a table by the wall and was told I'd have one, what was that?”

“As I said, sir, this is all we have right now. If you'd like to wait at the bar, we'd be glad to let you know when one of these others opens up.”