‘I know what he’s been through.’
‘No, Sheldon. You don’t.’
‘What do you know about what I know about?’
‘Vietnam isn’t Korea.’
‘What’s not Korean about it?’
‘All I’m saying is that you can’t presume to know what he’s been through just because he walks through the door looking the same.’
‘That’s what you did to me.’
‘You were a clerk.’
‘You don’t know what I was.’
Mabel tossed the magazine into the middle of the living room floor and raised her voice.
‘Well, what the hell were you, then? First it’s one thing, and then it’s another. You want my respect? You want my sympathy? You want me to understand why you shout “Mario” in your sleep? Then tell me.’
‘I did what I was told to do. That’s all you need to know.’
‘Because that’s how men act?’
‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘I’m going to bed.’
‘I’m staying up until he gets home.’
‘Why? So he can come home from a war and you can tell him, first thing out of your mouth, that he’s late?’
‘Go to bed, Mabel.’
‘Aren’t you looking forward to seeing him?’
‘I don’t know.’
Mabel was angry, and walked to the bedroom door.
‘I don’t even know what that means, Sheldon. I really don’t.’
‘I don’t either.’
Saul was on the last number 5 train from Union Square out to Beverly Avenue in Flatbush, Brooklyn, while his parents were arguing. He stared at his own hands during the whole trip.
The woman who would eventually become Rhea’s mother lived on the second floor of her parent’s house on a tiny plot of land, so small that residents in the bathrooms of the adjacent homes could have handed each other rolls of toilet paper without getting up.
Saul’s clothes were a little too big for him. He’d lost twenty pounds on the river. He stood in front of the dark house looking up at the window, like he did when he was a teenager hoping to get laid. They’d met on a bus four years ago. In the fumbling way of adolescents, they neither chose nor rejected each other. As the relationship continued, they were unable to pull the other close or let go because it all seemed so
Saul picked up a small pebble and tossed it at the window. It could just as well have been a grenade. There’d be an explosion in the window and then he’d return to the boat. But it wasn’t a grenade. It was a pebble.
She opened the window almost immediately and looked down.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she said.
‘Probably,’ Saul said.
She was wearing a ripped T-shirt from a band he’d never heard of that hung loosely off her body. Her face looked especially pale. From the light of the street lamp he could make out the contours of her breasts.
‘So you’re back.’
‘Whatever the hell that means.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to see you.’
‘You mean you want to fuck me. Big soldier back from the war with a hard-on. Right?’
‘Baby, I don’t know what I want until after it’s over.’
For some reason this made her smile.
‘Come in the back.’
And so he did.
When he was on top of her, and inside her, and his hands were gripping her thighs and his eyes were closed, he heard her say, ‘If I get pregnant, it’s yours, you understand?’
In that moment, he thought she meant that the baby would be his and not someone else’s. That she hadn’t been with another man recently. That there was still something between them. That the past was secure.
In a few months’ time, as the baby grew, Saul would be dead. He would never understand that she had not been talking about the past. She had been explaining the future.
The old watchmaker was asleep in his living-room chair when Saul came in the next morning at seven-thirty. He’d been kicked out of her bedroom early, so her parents wouldn’t know he’d spent the night there. She insisted that, since she paid rent, she could do whatever she wanted in her upstairs apartment, but her father used vocabulary from a different age. He talked about what happened ‘under his roof’ and how ‘no daughter of mine’ would bring ‘shame to the family’.
There was no engaging this language with the vernacular of 1973. So they played the game and talked past each other, and hoped that the consequences would be manageable. With the pregnancy, all that would change. Nothing was manageable anymore. Some of this dynamic with her parents — had Rhea known it — might have explained what she would eventually hope to learn but never would. This enigmatic woman had been a stranger to Saul, and would remain one to Rhea.
Saul stepped quietly into the apartment so not to wake anyone. He carried his green canvas army duffle bag on his left shoulder as he struggled — as he used to — to free the key from the deadbolt. The trick was to turn it just slightly off-centre clockwise and give it a jiggle.
As he worked the lock, the smell of the house worked its way into him and made him suddenly nauseous. A thought he hadn’t articulated until now came to him as powerfully as the scents of his childhood.
Just then, just as his mind was able to put some words to the sensation, his father spoke.
‘Welcome home.’
The key was freed, and Saul closed the front door. He stepped to his right and looked into the living room that was entirely unchanged from the last time he had stepped into it. His father wore shapeless, colorless clothes, and his face was drawn and tired.
Saul put down the duffle bag by the umbrella stand and stretched his shoulders. He took a deep breath, pulling the past into his lungs, where it didn’t belong.
‘Thanks.’
His father did not get up.
‘You look OK,’ he said.
‘Yeah,’ said Saul. ‘I do.’
‘You hungry? Want some coffee?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t think so or no?’
‘I don’t know the difference.’
‘Sit down.’ Sheldon gestured to the sofa, where Mabel had been curled up with the Sunday magazine.
His father’s calm was reassuring, as though he understood what might have happened over there. But he never entirely understood what his father had done in Korea. He’d asked before, and all his father had said was, ‘I did what I was told to do’, which wasn’t much help. It was more important now to learn what they might have in common. What his father understood. What was understandable at all.
‘How are you doing?’ Sheldon asked.
