Sparta (22 page)

“You scare me,” said Claire.

She looked distressed, and he put his hand on her wrist. He meant to reassure her, but he felt a faint reflexive flinch, a withdrawal. This gave him a sinking feeling; also a dark undercurrent of triumph.

“I'm sorry,” he said, and he was. “Didn't mean to get so mad.”

“What happens?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

“I don't know what you want,” she said. “I don't know whether you want to talk about it or not. Everything seems to make you angry.”

“Right.” He nodded. “Sorry.”

She leaned toward him. “I love you.”

He had no idea what she meant. Did it mean they were back, that they didn't have to take things slowly after all? Or just that they were best friends? Was it platonic love that she meant?

He didn't know which one he hoped for.

“I love you,” she said again, “but we're not exactly back where we were four years ago. And yes, I've seen other people since I wrote you that letter. But I'm not going to talk about them the way you talk about them. You don't have the right to talk that way. Maybe I'll tell you about them, when I'm ready to. But I don't think of them the way you do. I don't know if I'll ever tell you about them.”

None of this mattered. He wanted to be able to press himself against the length of her and pound himself into oblivion; he also wanted to be able to turn and walk away at any moment, recover his own sense of his world, return to a place where she was not. A wildness was inside him, like a sandstorm, raging, senseless, amorphous.

“I love you, too,” he said, because you had to answer that statement, you couldn't let it hang in the air.

Of course she had slept with other people. Four years: she hadn't been sealed in plastic. What was he thinking? “I'm sorry,” he said, because you had to respond to the rest of it, and everything she'd said was true. All he could do was hope that there was no one she was seeing right then, that the timing had miraculously worked out and that right now she was available; ready, maybe, to have him back.

But he couldn't focus on her, couldn't keep his gaze on her face. Beyond her was the noisy jangle of the restaurant, the couples leaning toward each other across their tables, shouting over the din. Waiters were carrying laden trays, the headwaiter was winding in and out with his sheaf of menus. The noise was enormous.

What made him so wild, what made his throat swell with rage, was the fact that no one here knew anything, no one here understood about the real world. No one understood what you looked for on the street (risk assessment), how you cleared a room (always moving as a team, though you had to slip through the fatal funnel one by one), how many shots you fired to kill someone (three), how you identified yourself on the radio (company, platoon, individual), how to establish a perimeter, or what the risks were in a room like this, filled with moving people and noise. They knew fuck-all here, everyone.

He wondered if this was what it had been like after World War II, soldiers arriving home from the battlefield to all those beaming civilians. But back then the soldiers had had critical mass, and the war had been a national effort. Not like this, where no one could even find Iraq on the map. No one knew why we were there, no one could remember if we'd found WMDs or not.

He looked down at his plate.

What he wanted was for Claire to understand all this without his saying it, because he didn't know how to say it. He couldn't describe, even to himself, what it was that was hanging low and threatening over his head.

He took a deep breath and started at ten, heading for one. Sometimes it was better to vary it; sometimes it worked better if you shifted things around. Because he didn't have a lot of choice. He could feel the world closing in around him, a kind of invisible tunnel, the air turning more and more solid, impossible to breathe.

*   *   *

At the apartment, the door shut solidly behind them, and Claire turned to look at him. He stepped forward and put his arms around her because this was what he had been waiting for, the deep solace of her embrace. He felt all of her against him, her cushiony softness, firm and elastic.

She stiffened, but he pushed closer, tightening his arms around her, because he wanted this right now more than anything. He felt her resistance, but also something else. Wasn't there some yielding? All those nights in college, spent in his narrow bed in the freezing cold, when they had made their own heat. All those nights of joyful sex, all that shared exhaustion and delirium, the delight they'd given each other, all that trying to get inside each other: once you had that together, wasn't it always there? You could summon it up forever, couldn't you?

Because he wanted now to be with her, he would give anything to press himself against her long, soft coolness, wanted to wrap his hands in her hair, run his lips over the hard ridge of her collarbone, wanted to fuck her senseless, wanted to be part of her. This now was desperation, he wanted the division between them to be over.

He said her name. He ran his fingers slowly across her face, the powdery softness of her skin, the miraculous secret hardness of the bones beneath.

“Clairey, I will never hurt you,” he said into her hair.
Save me.

 

11

During the night Conrad jerked awake several times, disoriented, his heart thudding against his chest. He had left the bedroom door open a crack, and the shaft of light from the hall fell across the bed. When he came jolting into consciousness, opening his eyes, he saw the dim contours of the room, the black rectangle of the half-open closet door, the dim shimmer of the mirror over the bureau. Dark rectangles, pictures on the wall, clothes draped over a chair. A girl's room: he was next to Claire.

Each time he woke, she woke and put her arms around him. Each time, she drew him close and moved herself against him. She was smooth and bare and warm. He put his face into her hair, her neck. He knew her smell; he drew long, deep draughts of it; it didn't soothe him. The nightmares had unfastened him. Something inside him was running loose.

He was awake as the sky outside the window began to brighten; he watched the room turn gray. He was facing Claire, waiting for her to wake. She lay with her head on the pillow, facing him. He watched until she opened her eyes. When she focused on him, he spoke.

“I want to know more,” he said. “What happened after you wrote that letter.”

“Conrad,” she said, blinking. He could see consciousness coming into her eyes. She was just waking up.

“I want to know.”

There was a long pause. Claire looked at him, drawing herself up from sleep. She rolled onto her back and rubbed her eyes. “What do you mean, ‘what happened'?”

“I mean, after you decided we were asymmetrical. Did you just start going out with other guys, just like that?” He didn't like saying the words, he didn't like the feel of them in his mouth.

Claire drew a breath. She spoke without looking at him. “I told you. I went out with people. Different guys.”

“Are you seeing one of them now?”

She turned to him. “I don't like this. I feel like I'm being interrogated.”

“I need to know what happened,” said Conrad. “If we're going to go on.”

After a pause Claire said, “I've been seeing one guy more than others.”

“Do you fuck him?”

She stared at him. “I'm not using that word,” she said. “You use it like a weapon. Stop it.”

“Okay,” Conrad said. “Are you sleeping with him?”

The room was silent. He could hear her breathing, he could hear the rustle of the sheets as she shifted her legs.

“I don't know that you have the right to ask me that,” she said. “This is our first night together. I'm not sure you get to ask me to roll out everything in my life for you.”

“This is not our first night together,” he said.

She put her hand on his shoulder.

“Conrad,” she said.

“Okay,” he said. Her hand was soft and cool.

“Don't do this,” she said. “Don't blow this up.”

He breathed evenly, watching her. She raised her hand to his forehead, smoothing his hair.

“Don't pretend this is our first night together,” he said.

“Don't pretend that we've been together all along,” Claire said. “You know it's different now.” She withdrew her hand, turning on her side toward him, laying her hands beneath her cheek.

He lay on his back, raising himself up on his elbows, his head turned toward her.

“So you won't tell me.” Frustration was mounting in his chest. “You just decide we can't talk about this. But what if I do want to talk about it?”

“It's not that I won't talk about it—” Claire started to answer.

“But you won't talk about it,” Conrad interrupted. “What if I think it's important to talk about it?”

He ripped the sheet off himself and sat up, throwing his legs over the edge of the bed. “Fuck this.”

“Con.” She put her hand on his shoulder.

He jerked away from her touch. “Fuck that.”

Claire sat up and knelt on the bed, naked, her legs pressed closely together, her hands on her thighs.

“Okay.” Her voice was not steady. “So, I don't know what to do. I don't know what you want, and I don't know what I should do. You're so angry about everything, and what do you want? You want to just show up and be back at the center of everything, like that?”

Conrad didn't answer. He stared at the wall.

On it was a framed photograph of Claire's parents when they were in their twenties. They were standing in the cavernous reaches of a European train station. They both had long hair, and they were wearing bell-bottom jeans and carrying backpacks. They were smiling, beaming, really, their faces hopeful and innocent. They were making the V sign with their fingers: peace, brotherhood, we're cooler than you, whatever. What struck him—what enraged him, actually—was their complete unfetteredness, the lack of purpose and responsibility. They were just drifting, doing whatever they felt like, going wherever they wanted. They were his fucking age.

“It's been
four years
, Con,” Claire said. “You can't just arrive home and move back in. My life is different. Things aren't the way they were before. This is too abrupt.”

“It's too abrupt for
you
?” said Conrad. “How do you think it is for me?”

“Okay,” said Claire nervously. “I know.”

Conrad swiveled to face her. “How do you know? How do you have any idea what it's like for me? To be over there and see my friends die? And then to come home and be told to go slow? That this is
too abrupt
.” He paused. “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to arrive less abruptly? You want me to just come home from Iraq for weekends? Arrive in stages?”

“Okay,” said Claire. She fanned out her hands. “Okay.” She sounded frightened.

“No, really,” said Conrad. “How do you think I should do this?”

“I don't know how you should do it,” Claire said. “But we're both part of it. I can't help how it is for you. You have to do this with me. If you want to be back in my life.”

“That's what I'm doing.”

“Not like this,” Claire said. “I want you to learn what it's like. I want you to meet my friends, I want to get to know you again. You can't just walk in and start giving orders.”

Conrad said nothing. Anger was still solid in his chest. And giving orders was how you got things done. You didn't encounter something and then wait around to see what happened. You took command, made a plan, and carried it out. What was inside him was ready to explode, it always was.

He stood and faced her.

“I'm not going to hang around for this,” he said. “If you don't want us to start up again, fine. Your call. But I'm not on trial. I'm not being interviewed for this position. I'm not going to wait around while you decide whether or not you want me. Either we're on or we're not.”

Claire pressed her hands together, sliding them between her knees. “I can't talk to you if you're like this.”

“Like what?”

“This is not a conversation,” she said. “It's just you saying what you want.”

She had no idea, he thought. How you had to work to make everything happen, push it into the channel you intended. You had to plan everything, you had to take control. Part of what he felt was rage, part of it something he couldn't name, which twisted at him, like pain.

“Okay,” he said. “I'm out of here.”

*   *   *

At Grand Central, Conrad waited for the next train to Katonah, though it wasn't for an hour. He turned off his cell phone, though he kept checking it, and by the time he reached Katonah, Claire had called seven times. At the station he took a cab, an old blue Chevy that sounded like a motorboat. The driver was a Hispanic woman with dark skin and long black hair. She drove slowly up their dirt road, the car gurgling heavily up the driveway. He paid her and got out, and the car wallowed down the drive.

Lydia was in the kitchen, she had been grocery shopping, and stood by the counter in front of a row of bags. She turned, surprised. “Con! You're back sooner than I expected. I thought you were staying for a while in the city.”

Conrad stayed on the far side of the room. He didn't want her to touch him.

“Yeah,” he said, “I came back out.” He was being graceless.

“How's Claire?” She was putting away the groceries, briskly taking things out of the bags, setting them on the shelves.

“Fine,” Conrad said.

Lydia turned to look at him. “Really?”

He shrugged.

“Are you two okay?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don't want to stay in the city with her, though. She's working. She gets up in the morning and goes to the office. I don't really have anything to do there. I thought I'd come back out. I'm going to start studying for the GMAT. It'll be better here. I can go running, do some training.”