Sparta (43 page)

Conrad nodded, to show he got that Go-Go got it.

He didn't like being asked, though he didn't like not being asked. He didn't like scrutiny, though he also didn't like invisibility.

Okay, he was a dick. He was working on it.

*   *   *

The following week, Conrad asked Jenny to come out to Katonah with him for the weekend. He would be under less scrutiny with her there, he thought, and it worked. On Friday night they all watched a World War II thriller, and on Saturday he and Jenny ran the reservoir together in the morning, thudding along in companionable silence, passing the shimmering water, blinking through clouds of gnats hovering in the still air. In the afternoon he and Jenny played Scrabble. On Saturday night they all had dinner together. They finished eating and sat on, talking, the green lamp throwing its intimate glow over the honey-colored table.

“So, how's Claire?” Lydia asked.

“She's good,” Conrad said.

“How are things between you?” she asked.

“Mom, just because you're a therapist it doesn't mean Conrad's your patient,” Jenny said. She crossed her two index fingers at her mother to ward her off. “Intrusive question.”

“I'm his mother!” Lydia said. “I'm allowed to ask him how he's doing.”

Jenny rolled her eyes and shook her head.

“It's okay,” Conrad said. “I don't know how we're doing, Mom. I think it's good. It's hard to say. We see each other a lot, but not all the time.”

“It must be hard to keep things going through everything,” Lydia said. “Deployment, then coming back.”

“It's hard to keep things going no matter what,” Jenny said.

“So how are you and Jock doing?” Lydia asked, turning to look at her.

“Okay, sorry I mentioned it.” Jenny flapped her hand in front of her face. “I'm not answering. I just mean, of course it's hard. Getting together with anyone is hard.”

“Give me a break, Jen, okay?” Lydia said. “Let's just suppose I'm trying to let Conrad feel comfortable if he wants to talk about it.”

Jenny looked at the ceiling.

“Yeah,” Conrad said. “A lot of couples break up when the guys come home. Marriages, too.”

“Did you have guys in your platoon who were married?”

“Some,” Conrad said.

“Wow. So young,” Lydia said.

“Some of them were sergeants, so they were older and had been in for a while. But some of them were really young. It was a tough way to start a marriage. The guy is living a whole different life, and he can't say anything about it to his wife.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” said Jenny.

Conrad shrugged. “What's the point? ‘Our convoy was blown up yesterday, and a guy lost both his legs?' I didn't tell you guys much. You just scare everyone at home, and it doesn't do any good. So the guy writes about some joke someone played, or how he remembers going swimming with his wife, or whatever. Nothing about his real life there. Sometimes the wife hangs in, sometimes she doesn't. She doesn't know what the guy's going through. Sometimes they hardly even knew each other before he left. She doesn't know what's coming home to her. One guy came back and found his house empty. His wife, kids, furniture, all gone. Bank account cleaned out.”

“Holy moly,” said Jenny.

“What happened to him?” asked Lydia.

“The guys in his team took turns, kind of kept him on a suicide watch until they figured he was okay.”

“Suicide watch,” Marshall said. “Jesus.”

Conrad shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

“Doesn't the VA do something?” Lydia asked. “Offer counseling or anything?”

“When you come home, you fill out a mental health form that asks if you've thought about killing yourself,” Conrad said. “Everyone says no.”

“What if they say they're fine then, but later realize they're not?” Marshall asked.

Conrad shrugged. “The whole Marine ethic is that you're tough. You can take anything. You don't ask for emotional help. That's the one place you're on your own.”

Marshall nodded. “So there's no way out. You can't ask for help.”

“Not really,” Conrad said. “Marines can't say they're in trouble. Not if they still think of themselves as Marines.”

Lydia leaned back and crossed her arms on her chest. “I really don't like hearing this.”

Conrad shook his head. “Not much you can do, Mom.”

“But if you were in trouble, Con, could you go to the VA?”

“Sure, anyone can,” Conrad said. “But I've heard they have months-long waiting lists, and then what they do if you see someone is give you drugs.”

“If one of your guys was in trouble, what would you do?” asked Lydia.

Conrad shook his head. He rubbed his palms on his thighs. “I'd talk to him, try to get him some help. But I'm not sure how much the VA really does.” His neck felt hot, and he twisted his head from side to side as though to loosen the joint.

“Okay,” Lydia said. “What about dessert?” She stood and began to stack the plates.

“Who won that Scrabble game, by the way?” Marshall asked.

“Con did,” Jenny said. “Three out of five. But only by using some very iffy words.”

“Iffy?” Conrad said, raising his eyebrows. “Oh, and how would you describe ‘oxer'?”

“A totally real word,” Jenny said. “Totally normal and legitimate.”

“Though not in the dictionary.”

“Everyone who rides horses knows what it means,” said Jenny. “It's a jump. It's a famous and very well-known jump.”

“Oxer.” Conrad shook his head.

The weekend went pretty well. Conrad made himself talk to his parents, made himself pretend there was no gap between them. If he acted as though it didn't exist, eventually it would disappear.

Things went well, except for the nights.

There was still the problem of sleeping. Each night he woke up sweating and frightened. He turned on the light and found himself in that room, with the low beds and the uneven lampshade, the crammed bookshelves and tattered posters. It was like a cave: he hated the long, narrow space, hated the low, uneven ceiling, the slanting eaves, the small windows. But he told himself to focus. He breathed slowly, counting, and the minutes kept ticking past, each one bringing him closer to dawn.

 

21

One Saturday in mid-October, Conrad met Claire at the Metropolitan Museum on Eighty-first Street. The air was chilly and damp, the sky gray and overcast, with a pale scumbling of clouds. Conrad arrived early.

The museum stretched alongside Fifth Avenue for three blocks, a long, low, massive building on a heroic scale. A series of wide, shallow flights of steps led up to the entrance of three triumphally arched doorways. The Italianate architecture declared its connection to Rome, the Renaissance, and an imperial culture. The handsome façade, elevated and removed from the street, suggested power, discretion, and entitlement. This sort of museum, which owned vast quantities of art and objects from elsewhere, was rooted in the period of cultural colonialism, when anyone from a rich country could buy anything they liked from a poor country and carry the booty home and call it a collection. Now things were different: poorer countries were not so poor, and they had changed their minds about who owned what. They declared ownership of their cultural heritage, and they wanted everything back. But had it become part of the cultural heritage of the country that had housed it for so long? Who was to say how ownership is defined? Who is the real owner of the great horses of St. Mark's Square in Venice? How far back does ownership reach? The tides of booty surge back and forth across the globe, rising and falling in the wake of warfare and conquest. In Iraq, museums were looted immediately after the invasion, and who knows where the collections went, and under what conditions? Protection was never certain. Hadn't Bill Gates bought the Bettmann Archive and then buried it under Iron Mountain in western Pennsylvania to protect the photographs? What if there was an earthquake or some underground leak? Lord Elgin had taken those marble carvings from Athens and put them in a safe place in London.

In any case, the museum now housed one of the great collections of the world, stretched out between Fifth Avenue and Central Park like a great bulwark of culture. Conrad was on his way to see an exhibition of Scythian gold, on loan from the Hermitage. It was Claire's idea.

He jogged up the steps and stood outside the closed doors. Below him, knots of people gathered on the steps and on the sidewalk—faintly festive, anticipatory, all waiting for the museum to open. A school group clustered in a corner, teenagers, all eyeing one another and pretending not to. The girls were wearing skintight jeans and those sheepskin boots that everyone wore, their heads anxiously lowered, everything fixed and rigid, hands jammed into their pockets, jackets zipped up to their chins. The guys were loose and shambly, in hooded sweatshirts, unzipped or half zipped. Their too-long jeans dragged on the sidewalk.

The trees along Fifth Avenue were losing leaves, the striated trunks and twisted limbs standing out a vivid black against the dull grays of the cobblestone sidewalk. Across the street was a line of elegant town houses, all detailed and ornamented: molded cornices, curving stone steps, glossy painted trim. On the avenue, buses droned past heavily, lurching to a stop in front of the museum. People clambered awkwardly down the steps onto the sidewalk; others stood waiting to board. The buses panted, pulled themselves together, and thundered southward. On the sidewalk, passersby moved briskly. A dog walker passed, at the center of a loose constellation of dogs, all of different breeds and sizes, all trotting peacefully, silky tails up, silky ears down.

Claire was early, too. Conrad saw her as she stood on the far side of the avenue, waiting for the light. She wore a long down jacket, dark red, and jeans. Her hair was loose on her shoulders, and around her neck was a bright red scarf.
Look at me,
he thought, willing her to feel his thought.
Look at me.
She turned and looked downtown, then up again at the light. When it changed, she started across. Behind her was a Latino couple, teenagers, holding hands.
Look at me.
Claire crossed the street, peacefully unaware of his scrutiny. Reaching the near sidewalk, she skirted the high school students and started easily up the stairs. Her hands were in her pockets. As she started up the last flight, she looked up suddenly, as though his thought had finally reached her. She looked directly into his eyes and broke into a smile.

“There you are,” she said, and held him in her gaze as she walked on up the steps.

She came close, and they kissed briefly. Her cheek was silky and cool. He thought of how her long hair used to hang down over her parka, shimmering. He wasn't sure how he was going to begin this conversation. He wished she had looked at him when he'd first sent her the thought. A guard pushed open the heavy bronze outer doors and locked them into place with a reserved and imperial manner. He didn't speak or look at anyone, but the crowd outside understood that they were now permitted to enter the museum.

The entrance hall was huge, with stone floors and walls and a lofty, echoing ceiling. The scale was vast and godlike; human voices were lost in the great space. It was both overwhelming—individuals had no power here—and exhilarating. The institution, which felt very much like a temple, seemed powerful and distinguished. If you were someone who trusted museums, you were in the right place.

They paid the entrance fee and were rewarded with small metal buttons that they fixed to their collars. They set off up the triumphal marble steps under the vaulted ceilings. The scale and the great spaces were silencing. No one spoke; Conrad wondered if this was the right place for their conversation. Reaching the second floor, they followed signs through hallways and galleries, past huge historical paintings, panoramas of wars and rapes, coronations and weddings and peace treaties; past cases of glowing china, greens and pinks and blues, platters and bowls; past walls of photographs, someone's project on Appalachia, ruined hillsides and lively faces—finally arriving, through a narrow off-center doorway, at the exhibition of Scythian gold. At the entrance was a stand of catalogs and books, posters, bright commercial clutter. Headsets for rent. Conrad asked Claire if she wanted the headset.

She shook her head. “I just like to look at the objects.”

A relief: What if she'd said yes? How could he have the conversation?

They moved into the first gallery. Rows of transparent cases stood along the walls, glitter within them. Near the doorway stood a dignified black guard, tall and heavyset. He wore a brown uniform, and at his belt was a walkie-talkie. Conrad wondered who he had for backup: What if a SWAT team showed up for all this loot? Russian gangsters? Who did the Met have on call?

The gallery was not full. Maybe a dozen people moved about, leaning quietly over the cases, reading the wall placards. He wondered when to have the conversation. He didn't want anyone to overhear. He'd thought the museum would be the best place: he didn't want to do it in a restaurant or anyplace where he was sitting alone, across from her. He didn't want to look directly into Claire's face.

Claire leaned over the first display case. Pieces of jewelery were laid out against a white background, dangling earrings, small pendants, heavy bangles. It was a surprise, how bright gold actually was. They moved slowly from case to case: amulets, rings. A bridle ornament. The Scythians drew heavily on animal imagery. There were stylized lions, panthers, bears, bulls. Near them stood another couple, leaning over the case. A woman with angular black-framed glasses and very short hair was next to a man with a small pursed mouth and a European leather jacket. They were speaking quietly in a foreign language—Dutch? Conrad couldn't quite hear.