ACCIDENTAL BOMBING
REGRET NECESSARY EVIL
OF AIR WAR
U.S. authorities announced that two U.S. Air Force F-4 Phantom jets were responsible for the accidental bombing of a peaceful village in the Iron Triangle. The U.S. Command said the planes made three bombing and rocket passes, killing 83 civilians, wounding 175, and leaving 10 missing.
My chest stretched on its bones. I went to the window to breathe. A light going on in the hallway.
“Once I wake up during the night I can’t get back to sleep,” she whispered. “I thought I might take some pills — something — though I feel sleep-proof at this point.”
I said I was sorry I had waked her, reading the outline of her soap-bubble breasts under her bathrobe. She, seeing me look, smiling queerly. “Are you a good pill?”
“A bad pill.” I grabbed her, kissed her neck, pretending to be a vampire.
“You have to learn to be gentle,” she says, holding me away. “Didn’t anyone ever teach you how to be with a woman?” Her breath heavy.
I follow her, wife, into the bedroom, cold, hands sweating. Looking on as if watching myself. Parks’ student, so cold, and teacher’s wife. He following her (her fingers have his) to the big bed, the covers down. The room dark. Silhouettes of figures.
Her tongue invades his mouth, plays like a fish between his teeth. She gives instructions.
Lie down. Lie down next to me. Don’t be afraid.
The room is dark. He is not her husband, though she doesn’t know who he is. He is afraid of dying.
He bites his tongue, which is salty and raw, a slab of gristle. The blood fills his mouth. His eyes are closed. Watching the two of them in his mind, Parks and wife. Making time on a velvet red couch while he waits outside. He tastes himself.
“I’m waiting for you, Christopher,” she says in a murderous voice.
The good soldier stands at attention in crisis. Does what he’s asshole told. Good early training and you never have to worry about them again.
ENEMY ASSAULTS
14 POSTS IN DELTA
“Christopher, I’m waiting. What’s the matter, honey?”
Don’t let her pull you by the bloody nose, whatever you do, Parks says.
(I’m watching them, taking student notes in head.)
“Christopher, sweet Christopher, little Christopher.” Mocking whisper.
Sits up as he comes toward her. His fist against the side of her face. Testing. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Five times. Child’s play. Someone crying. “Christopher.”
(I’ll protect you, I tell her. That’s what I’m here for. I won’t let the motherfucker hurt you anymore.)
TWELVE
The Mysterious Disappearance of Curtis Parks
HIS FIRST STOP was at a residence hotel on Twenty-third Street, where he spent two sleepless, exhilarated nights, charting the course of his new life, hallucinating the best and worst of its possibilities. Then, a piece of luck, he was given the key to a place off Perry Street, an apartment of a friend of a friend, an actor who was on the road with a show and would be gone, if the trip was successful, for at least six months. He whistled to himself as he watched the scraggly beginnings of a beard in the full-length bedroom mirror, the reflection of a new man.
The war, going on without him, uninfluenced by his move. He divorced himself from it, no longer responsible.
Lonely living alone, his third day in the world, Curt phoned Rosemary. Since her midnight call, the night she was attacked in the park, he had been obsessed with winning her back — his sense of loss, the extent of it, the barometer of his affection. His sense of himself in the balance.
In his vision of the future, he saw Rosemary running toward him as in the fade-out of a movie, unable to contain her joy, as it had been in the early days with them. He phoned in exhilaration, his voice flying to her. He had separated from Carolyn, he announced, and wanted to see her. In a faint voice she said she didn’t think it was a good idea.
He pleaded. She said no, no, absolutely no, she couldn’t.
“The hell with you,” he said, and hung up, then called back and apologized, but it made no difference.
He suspected that she had given him up for the one who just recently had been a guest in his house, the student he had done so much for and gotten so little from in return. He didn’t want to think about it. Christopher was a thing of the past.
It was painful to take, though he took it well, better than he had planned. Necessity was justice, he told himself. He had earned her loss, needed it to go on. Their relationship had come of a bad time, had been determined by terms no longer in effect. The old no longer mattered — the past dead. Beyond what had already been, she had nothing to offer him, a strange sad girl with greater capacity for pain than for pleasure. If dead to the fact of her, the idea persisted. The Lady Rosemary of his loins. He missed what he didn’t have, a man surrounded by death.
He was a phoenix emerging from his own ashes. The new improved Curtis Parks. Trying to recall what he had wanted to do and not done — the possibilities of himself he had given up, given away — during the dead years of his marriage. Unable to remember.
After talking to Rosemary, he went to a movie on Forty-second Street — Some Came Running, with Frank Sinatra — and fell asleep, sitting down, somewhere in the middle. He woke during the coming attractions of a spy film (a body falling from a closet with a knife in its back), in love with everyone — moved by the pleasures of his dream. Wanted to embrace the sleeping hag next to him, but embarrassed to, went home to his new home to sleep.
His loneliness gnawing at him, he made a date with an Oriental-looking Jewess of about thirty, top-heavy, a high-school French teacher he had met in the peace movement, recently divorced. Their first night together, with a minimum of preliminaries, he took her to bed in her own apartment, which was just what he needed. It was the best sex he had had in a long time and, grateful, Curt stayed on, long after the time he arranged with himself beforehand to go. After a while — Curt was dozing off — Carol rolled on top of him and they made love again, his pleasure in the act even greater than it had been the first time. No doubt, he told himself, struggling to get a little sleep, he had struck gold here. What a marvelous girl this was — loving, skillful, taking her pleasure without the fraud of empty endearments. A little later they made love again. Carol slept pressed against him, her mouth at the hollow of his ear, her breath … Curt, exhausted, unable to sleep.
In the cold light of early morning, out of the shadows of a dream, he awoke, Carol blowing in his ear (Not again, he thought, feigning sleep). The fever of need reached him even in exhaustion. And so, dreaming of sleep, he occupied her again, assaulted the cave of her treasure, a celebrant of life, dying slowly to the music of her motion. She sang his name to him — Curtis, Curtis, Curtis, Curtis, Curt — a concert of recognition. So that’s who he was.
Before leaving, he asked her if she liked movies. Not knowing what was expected of her, she said yes, she liked some movies, good ones, foreign films. They made a date to go that night and he went home to sleep.
It’s not easy for a man with a puritan conscience to stay in bed during the day without some pang of anxiety. In his fitful wakings, an FM radio playing softly in the next room, the very qualities that had pleased Curt most about Carol began to trouble him. If she had gone to bed with him so easily, on the thinnest acquaintanceship, clearly — how inexorable logic can be — she did the same with other men. It made him jealous just to conceive of it. How vulnerable she was to the betrayals of the flesh. He went into the living room and turned up the radio, took a brief shower to cool off, and went back to bed. What was she doing at the moment? he wondered, and had to stop himself from calling to find out. Did she know who he was, what kind of man he was going to be?