“Why not?”
During dinner Helen played hostess, passing salad and dinner rolls, smiling at his jokes. Tom pleased her mother beyond words; she glowed, hopeful that this was a first step for her daughter. Helen snuck scraps under the table to Duke.
When Tom asked Helen about her photographs in Vietnam, she spoke of the beauty of the countryside. “It’s too bad you never saw it in person, Mom. It’s so beautiful. Maybe we’ll go after the war is over.”
Charlotte frowned. “Why would I ever set foot in such a place? A place where they killed my son?”
Helen rose and took her plate to the sink. After dinner, Charlotte suggested Tom and Helen take a walk along the beach. Driving down the coast highway, Helen insisted on stopping first at the liquor store for a bottle of scotch. She drank out of the bottle and turned Tom’s radio on loud. At the top of a hill, with the town spread out below, she moved her leg over the gearbox and around the shaft. Tom ran his hand along her knee as she jammed her foot down on the accelerator, bracing herself against the back of the seat so he couldn’t dislodge her, and the car raced down the curving road. Tom held the wheel and slammed on the brakes. “Are you crazy?”
“Just having fun.”
“Some fun. Getting us killed.”
“Didn’t it feel good, just a little? Kept you dying from boredom?”
They parked along the beach and walked in the sand barefoot, passing the bottle back and forth between them.
“You’re a little wild, huh?” he said.
“That’s me.”
“How long did you say you’d been back?”
“I didn’t.” She stopped and dug her feet into the cold and gritty sand. Waves in the moonlight sharp and hard as the blades of knives. “Six weeks, four days.”
Far up the beach, teenagers crowded around a large bonfire that threw light up on the cliffs, but where Tom and Helen stood it was dark and deserted.
“So what are you doing with your days?” he asked. He took a long pull from the bottle and let his fingers brush along hers when he handed it back.
“Baking for Gwen.” She laughed. “Cakes and cookies, buns and rolls.”
“No, long-term. When are you going to start doing photography again?”
“I’m done with that.”
“I told all my friends about you, all your covers. They’d seen your stuff and were impressed as hell. That’s why I came when you called, even though you were a jerk that day.”
“Wow.” His bluntness made her like him better.
“So why aren’t you working at a newspaper? Or covering another war? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”
“I just went as a lark. It turned into something else. What do you do if you have a hazardous talent, like riding over waterfalls in a barrel? A talent dangerous to your health?” After the question came out of her mouth, she felt embarrassed.
He stopped and took a sip. “I don’t know. If I was that good at something, I know it’d be hard to stop. Baking… shit.”
Helen moved back into the cave of shadows at the base of the hillside, tumbled onto her back in the sand. Was that the simple answer, that Darrow couldn’t leave his work because he was good at it? That she loved the work more than this life that felt like a living death? No matter how she tried, the gears of her old life kept slipping; she could gain no traction. Her mind was always far away, whirring. She had not known how alive she was in Vietnam. How despite the fear and the anger, she had been awake in the deepest way, in a way that ordinary life could not compete with. She motioned Tom down and pulled him on top of her.
“All those guys over there made you a little crazy, huh? We can go to my place. I have a bed.”
“Baking’s not so bad. You have flour, butter, sugar. The smell of baking bread.” She shook her head, squirmed from under him, reached for the bottle nested in the sand, and took a long drink.
He grabbed the bottle away. “That’s enough. I don’t want you passing out on me.” He kissed her on the lips, the neck, fumbled with the buttons of her blouse.
She closed her eyes, but that made her head spin faster, so she opened them again. “There was this place on Tu Do that made the most wonderful croissants.” Despite the pulsing of the waves, the times in high school and college, despite the smoky taste of the scotch on her tongue, this wasn’t even a moment’s forgetfulness.
“Come on…”
“No.” She couldn’t remember why she thought this would work, why she sought him out. He had unbuttoned her blouse. For a brief moment the pulse of warmth began, a deep pull, but instead of distracting, the arousal opened a deep grief inside her.
Helen jerked open his belt buckle, but the scotch suddenly created a wave of nausea welling up in her, and she pushed at his chest to get him off, unable to bear another minute, which he at first mistook for passion, pressing down harder, her slaps growing more frantic, powerful, convulsed, until he moved off, and she rolled away, crouched on all fours, and heaved.
He sat on the sand next to her. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Nice.”
She sat with her knees up, her head on her arms, sucking down gulps of air.
He stood and took off his shirt, then his T-shirt. He walked to the waves, then came back. “Here,” he said, kneeling down, handing her his wet T-shirt to wipe her face. He sighed. “I don’t know what just happened.”
“I shouldn’t have called.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I wanted to be the kind of girl you think of when you go off to war.”
“You’re the one who goes to war, remember?”
“We better go home.”
“I like you. But you’re not that kind of girl.”
The next day she took the box of Darrow’s belongings and boarded a flight for New York.
She did not think about what she would find, did not know what she was looking for. Not until later did she realize that the addition of facts would simply dilute her own store of memories without bringing him closer, that as she became the biographer of his life, Darrow himself would move further and further from her grasp. Although she knew him deeply, now she could discover only the surface of his life.
She drove out of the city, onto long, winding roads shaded by the dying yellow and red of fall. Although it was only late September, already there was a chill in the air, and the low sun cast a somber light on the lawns and houses. Circling streets aimlessly, unable to place Darrow in this suburban environment, she came upon his street name and turned. She planned to drive by the house a few times, to reconnoiter the area, but when she saw a long, rising lawn that led to a white Cape Cod, she stopped. How to reconcile this house with the crooked apartment in Cholon? Could the same man belong to both places?
Helen parked on the side of the road and watched as a coiffed brunette in a floral dress unloaded groceries from a car trunk. Her own jeans and army T-shirt with a khaki shirt on top suddenly seemed shabby. This place, this woman, were impossible to put together with the Darrow she knew. Was the excuse of war a way to go live another, a second life? Were there closets filled with his clothes inside? If she brought them to her nose, would she smell him? She got out of the car and struggled to lift the box, balancing it on her hip as she closed the car door.
The driveway dipped before it rose to the house. A small puddle filled with fallen leaves had formed from an earlier rain. Helen walked around it, stepping on the wet lawn, almost slipping in a hidden dip. The driveway was long, the woman too far away for Helen to see her face. Once she saw her close-up, she would know if Darrow had loved her.
