And as he draws near, Bob understands. You see what we’ve learned? What I gave my life to learn? At every moment, no matter who we are, we are all of us on the brink of being fucked. Nothing to save you from that. Nothing you can do. There it is. I am hugging you close now, my son.
And Robert sees Bob. Half a dozen strides away.
Their eyes lock.
Bob stops.
They look at each other.
Bob lifts his right hand, moves it up to his chest, and then reaches inside his coat. He pauses. For a moment Robert thinks Bob is feeling his heart. Is he in pain? But Bob’s hand is moving again, emerging.
A pistol, in profile against his chest, moving now, turning, the barrel coming round, and Robert is moving too, pushing forward in chest and shoulders sensing in them the placement of mother and brother and brother’s lover and of Bob and the vector between and Robert steps and the muzzle appears now and Robert steps again veering right, lunging between Bob and the others, the muzzle stopping, steadying, and Robert stops and squares and centers his chest on the killing black hole at the tip of the pistol.
“Bob,” he says.
They wait for a single breath.
And Bob understands.
He lifts the pistol and puts the barrel in his mouth and he holds his father close and he pulls the trigger.
Robert slips into the bed and pulls the covers to his chest. Only his table lamp is lit. Darla is in the bathroom. The door is closed and a thin fluorescent line shows at its base. The water is running. And then it stops. Not a sound from where he knows his wife to be. Not in this moment, not in the next. His limbs quicken. They would have him jump from the bed, rush to her. But now he hears some small sound. Unidentifiable. Perhaps a bottle-click on porcelain. Something. It is enough. The electric clock whines softly from her nightstand. He did not lose her. He did not lose any of them. Except for Bob.
It’s been a week.
Bob has appeared each night but one in a dream. His eyes are oddly warm and wide upon Robert even as the back of his head explodes. And each night Robert has awakened in a thrash of regret: I stopped to take a bullet when I should have lunged onward to take your gun. Last night, for the first time, Bob did not come to him.
Robert has not dreamt at all of his father. Or he has utterly forgotten him before waking. After all, he and his brother, side by side, watched the box that held the old man vanish into the earth.
But he is keenly aware: One dead man still lives.
In the bathroom Darla has cleaned her face and she stares at its nakedness and thinks, I am old. She closes her eyes. She saw nothing of the event itself, arriving in the doorway after the gunshot, Robert rushing to her while all around him the crowd surged backward, breaking apart, wailing. Robert took her in his arms, spun her into the buffet room, shielded her from the sight, as witnesses said he shielded his brother and his mother from the gun.
She can still feel his arms upon her.
She will ask Robert to turn out his light before she enters the bedroom. They have held each other every night since, but silently and inertly and only for a few minutes. She opens her eyes. She cannot bear to see herself. She looks away. Her lipstick sits on the cosmetics shelf beside the sink. She reaches out, puts her hand on it, hesitates, picks it up.
After she is ready; after she is all right again in the mirror, looking pretty good for sixty-seven; after she feels his arms around her, turning her away from harm, lifting her with the sound of a gunshot ringing in her head; after she feels his mind working beyond this door, his fine mind that she sometimes senses in his study when she is in hers; after she can picture him sitting alone at the bistro table in the corner of the coffee shop in Baton Rouge; after she is ready, she turns to the door and puts her hand on the knob and she pauses. She has felt this present desire for him often in these past few years, when her hand wished to rise to him, when her body wished to press against him; but then she has paused to consider the moment and her body and his body, to consider the day just passed and the day to come and the lateness of the hour, to consider the words that may have lately been spoken between them over some trivial thing. And she has not acted.
But in this pause now, she thinks of something to do. She grasps her nightgown at the shoulders and lifts it from her body and over her head and she tosses it to the floor.
She opens the door only wide enough for her voice and says to her husband, “Turn out the light.”
He does.
She does the same with the bathroom light and steps into the darkness.
And she crosses the room feeling like a fool, her body naked but her face made up. But no. It’s not foolish. She wants her face as beautiful as possible for him in this present moment even if he can’t see it, and she wants him to remember her body from the past, when he first loved her. This present nakedness is for herself: She can’t reason herself out of it. She must stay in her body. She must act.
Darla slips into the bed.
She keeps a small separation between their bodies, letting the dark continue to mask her intention. This is sweet to her, to let that be for a few moments. This imminence.
As for Robert, he is lifting his face from his coffee while protesters are streaming by in the street outside, but one of them, this woman with blue eyes, is standing over him, bantering at him from the start, and he hears himself speak the first words he ever said to her: I’ve been away. And he thinks now of her, of them: I’ve always been away. He turns his face, seeing only a vague shaping of the dark beside him, and he says, “If I tell you something I did in Vietnam, a thing I deeply regret, will you stop loving me?”
She answers by rising up and moving over him and descending into an embrace.
And as they make love, Darla is very glad to be connected to her husband. She is comfortable, though the parts of her that ache each day are aching now and the parts that once were vivace are now andante. But she is old. She knows him so well. And she senses her Confederate women nearby, perhaps sitting out in the yard, in the dark, perhaps under the live oak tree near the veranda, waiting for her, understanding.
Robert, too, is glad for this connection, glad to be inside his wife once again. And when they are finished making love, he will tell her his secret from Vietnam, about the man he killed in the night, and he knows, from this answer of her nakedness, that she will continue to love him. The only secret he will keep from her forever is what fills him now, unexpectedly, as he moves within her: his first days in the city of Hue, in the autumn, in the midst of a war, the air full of the perfume of fruit blossoms floating downriver, heading for the South China Sea, and the woman he met and loved and lost, and the fear he has carried ever since that the smell of the air and the love of a woman would never again be as good.
Acknowledgments
It took me sixteen years to sufficiently compost Tallahassee and Florida State University and Jefferson County into my imagination to remake them into this novel. It took me seventy years for all the rest. I offer my abiding gratitude and affection to my friends and warm acquaintances, to my colleagues and students here in Northern Florida. You have all nurtured me. And this book, as with several of my recent books, owes a serious debt of thanks to my friend and physician, Wesley Scoles, for his medical expertise as my characters dealt with life in their bodies.