Now, as midnight approached, he sat in the kitchen, drank another Coors, and told Einstein about his self-imposed emotional isolation. Einstein sat before him, unmoving, never yawning, as if intently interested in his tale.
“I was a loner as a kid, right from the start, though I wasn’t entirely without friends. It was just that I always preferred my own company. I guess it’s my nature. I mean, when I was a kid, I hadn’t yet decided that my being friends with someone was a danger to him.”
Travis’s mother had died giving birth to him, and he knew all about that from an early age. In time her death would seem like an omen of what was to come, and it would take on a terrible importance, but that was later. As a kid, he wasn’t yet burdened with guilt.
Not until he was ten. That was when his brother Harry died. Harry was twelve, two years older than Travis. One Monday morning in June, Harry talked Travis into walking three blocks to the beach, although their father had expressly forbidden them to go swimming without him. It was a private cove without a public lifeguard, and they were the only two swimmers in sight.
“Harry got caught in an undertow,” Travis told Einstein. “We were in the water together no more than ten feet apart, and the damn undertow got him, sucked him away, but it didn’t get me. I even went after him, tried to save him, so I should’ve swum straight into the same current, but I guess it changed course just after it snatched Harry away, ‘cause I came out of the water alive.” He stared at the top of the kitchen table for a long moment, seeing not the red Formica but the rolling, treacherous, blue-green sea. “I loved my big brother more than anyone in the world.”
Einstein whined softly, as in commiseration.
“Nobody blamed me for what happened to Harry. He was the older one. He was supposed to be the most responsible. But I felt… well, if the undertow took Harry, it should’ve taken me, too.”
A night wind blew in from the west, rattled a loose windowpane.
After taking a swallow of beer, Travis said, “The summer I was fourteen, I wanted very badly to go to tennis camp. Tennis was my big enthusiasm then. So my dad enrolled me in a place down near San Diego, a full month of intense instruction. He drove me there on a Sunday, but we never made it. Just north of Oceanside, a trucker fell asleep at the wheel, his rig jumped the median, and we were wiped. Dad was killed instantly. Broken neck, broken back, skull crushed, chest caved in. I was in the front seat beside him, and I came out of it with a few cuts, bruises, and two broken fingers.”
The dog was studying him intently.
“It was just like with Harry. Both of us should have died, my father and me, but I escaped. And we wouldn’t have been making the damn drive if I hadn’t agitated like hell about tennis camp. So this time, there was no getting around it. Maybe I couldn’t be blamed for my mother dying in childbirth, and maybe I couldn’t be pinned with Harry’s death, but this one… Anyway, although I wasn’t always at fault, it began to be clear that I was jinxed, that it wasn’t safe for people to get too close to me. When I loved somebody, really loved them, they were sure as shit going to die.”
Only a child could have been convinced that those tragic events meant he was a walking curse, but Travis was a child then, only fourteen, and no other explanation was so neat. He was too young to understand that the mindless violence of nature and fate often had no meaning that could be ascertained. At fourteen, he needed meaning in order to cope, so he told himself that he was cursed, that if he made any close friends he would be sentencing them to early death. Being somewhat of an introvert to begin with, he found it almost too easy to turn inward and make do with his own company.
By the time he graduated from college at the age of twenty-one, he was a confirmed loner, though maturity had given him a healthier perspective On the deaths of his mother, brother, and father. He no longer consciously thought of himself as jinxed, no longer blamed himself for what had happened to his family. He remained an introvert, without close friends, partly because he had lost the ability to form and nurture intimate relationships and partly because he figured he could not be shattered by grief if he had no friends to lose.
“Habit and self-defense kept me emotionally isolated,” he told Einstein.
The dog rose and crossed the few feet of kitchen floor that separated them. It insinuated itself between his legs and put its head in his lap.
Petting Einstein, Travis said, “Had no idea what I wanted to do after college, and there was a military draft then, so I joined up before they could call me. Chose the army. Special Forces. Liked it. Maybe because… well, there was a sense of camaraderie, and I was forced to make friends. See, I pretended not to want close ties with anyone, but I must have because I put myself in a situation where it was inevitable. Decided to make a career out of the service. When Delta Force-the antiterrorist group-was formed, that’s where I finally landed. The guys in Delta were tight, real buddies. They called me ‘The Mute’ and ‘Harpo’ because I wasn’t a talker, but in spite of myself I made friends. Then, on our eleventh operation, my squad was flown into Athens to take the U.S. embassy back from a group of Palestinian extremists who’d seized it. They’d killed eight staff members and were still killing one an hour, wouldn’t negotiate. We hit them quick and sneaky-and it was a fiasco. They’d booby-trapped the place. Nine men in my squad died. I was the only survivor. A bullet in my thigh. Shrapnel in my ass. But a survivor.”
Einstein raised his head from Travis’s lap.
Travis thought he saw sympathy in the dog’s eyes. Maybe because that was what he wanted to see.
“That’s eight years ago, when I was twenty-eight. Left the army. Came home to California. Got a real-estate license because my dad had sold real estate, and I didn’t know what else to do. Did real well, maybe ‘cause I didn’t care if they bought the houses I showed them, didn’t push, didn’t act like a salesman. Fact is, I did so well that I became a broker, opened my own office, hired salespeople.”
Which was how he had met Paula. She was a tall blond beauty, bright and amusing, and she could sell real estate so well that she joked about having lived an earlier life in which she had represented the Dutch colonists when they had bought Manhattan from the Indians for beads and trinkets. She was smitten with Travis. That’s what she’d told him: “Mr. Cornell, sir, I am smitten. I think it’s your strong, silent act. Best Clint Eastwood imitation I’ve ever seen.” Travis resisted her at first. He did not believe he would jinx Paula; at least, he didn’t consciously believe it; he had not openly reverted to childhood superstition. But he did not want to risk the pain of loss again. Undeterred by his hesitancy, she pursued him, and in time he had to admit he Was in love with her. So in love that he told her about his lifelong tag game With Death, something of which he spoke to no one else. “Listen,” Paula said, “you won’t have to mourn me. I’m going to outlive you because I’m not the type to bottle up my feelings. I take out my frustrations on those around me, so I’m bound to shave a decade off your life.”
They had been married in a simple courthouse ceremony four years ago, the summer after Travis’s thirty-second birthday. He had loved her. Oh God, how he had loved her.
To Einstein, he said, “We didn’t know it then, but she had cancer on our wedding day. Ten months later, she was dead.”