Authors: Tobias Wolff
Why had she written me, anyway? It didn’t matter where he was, if she’d addressed the letter to Hugh it would have been forwarded. Maybe she didn’t know his last name. Did he not want her to know?
I put the letter away. I would consider it, then come to a decision. But I never could decide. The standard by which Hugh and I tried to live was loyalty, and I’d always thought it was a good one. In the face of the Other we closed ranks. That worked fine when the
Other was a bullying sergeant or a bunch of mouthy drunks, but it didn’t shed much light here, where she was a girl in trouble. I could sense the insufficiency of the code but had no stomach for breaking it, at the risk of betraying Hugh. In the end I did nothing. I let other matters claim my attention.
M
Y ORDERS
came. Instead of sending me to the infantry school at Fort Benning, they assigned me to artillery Officer Candidate School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I felt both guilty and relieved. Since the Special Forces had no howitzers they could not reasonably send me back there. My logic was impeccable, but six months later, with twenty years of life under my belt and new gold bars on my shoulders, I opened my orders and saw that I was going right back where I started, to Fort Bragg and the Special Forces.
My position was absurd. While laboring to become an artilleryman I had acquired a body of skills now utterly useless to me—trigonometry! calculus!—and lost or grown clumsy in those I needed. It was going to be hard for the troops at Fort Bragg to take me seriously as an officer when some of them had known me not long before as an enlisted man, and as something of a fuck-up. I couldn’t even take myself seriously. In my OCS class I’d finished forty-ninth out of forty-nine, the class goat—like Custer, as no one lost a chance to tell me.
It wasn’t as disgraceful as it looked. There’d been one hundred twenty of us to start with. But it was still pretty bad. I barely passed the gunnery course, and then only by pulling all-nighters in the latrine. I was
chronically late and unkempt. My jocose manner amused only a few of my classmates and none of my training officers, who in their reports labeled me “extraneous” and “magic”—not a compliment in those circles—and never failed to include me in the weekly Jark, an hours-long punishment run in full field equipment, which was so effective in producing misery that people used to line the streets to watch us stumble past, as they would have gathered to watch a hanging. Some bystanders were actually moved to pity by the sight of us, and slipped us candy bars and words of encouragement. The true Christians among them threw water on our heads.
In the end I finished OCS only because, mainly to amuse myself, I had written a number of satirical songs and sketches for our battery to perform on graduation night. These revues, in the style of Hasty Pudding or the Princeton Triangle, were a tradition at Fort Sill and a big headache to our training officers, whose talents did not lie in this direction. Along with hundreds of other visitors, the post commandant and his staff would be in attendance. There’d be hell to pay if the show was a flop. When the time came for the final cuts to be made in our class it was discovered that I was the only one who could put the whole thing together.
They kept me on to produce a farce. That was how I became an officer in the United States Army.
O
NE BY ONE
Hugh and my other buddies disappeared into the war. I kept waiting for my own orders. At last I did get orders, but instead of Vietnam they sent me to the Defense Language Institute in Washington,
D.C., to study Vietnamese for a year. Most of the students were young Foreign Service officers. So I wouldn’t stick out too much, I was detached from the army and put on civilian status. I could live where I wanted to live. I reported to no one, and no one checked up on me. My only duty was to learn Vietnamese. On top of my regular salary I got per diem for food, housing, and civilian clothes. Before leaving Fort Bragg I was issued a pamphlet showing in detail the kind of mufti an officer should wear on different occasions, from clambakes to weddings. Each “Correct” picture was paired with an “Incorrect” picture—goateed beatniks in shades and sandals, hipsters in zoot suits, doughy proles in bermudas and black socks. The correct guys always wore dark blue suits except when they were doing their morning run.
It wasn’t a hardship post. My mother still lived in Washington and so did my brother, Geoffrey, and his wife, Priscilla. I had some good friends in town as well, guys I’d known from school days and kept in touch with during my leaves home. Laudie Greenway, in town for a last fling before joining the army himself. George Crile, studying at Georgetown and working as a stringer for Drew Pearson. Bill Treanor, about to open the first home in Washington for runaway kids. We threw in together and rented a house not far from Dupont Circle. Our landlady was Jeane Dixon, the newspaper sibyl who’d become famous by predicting the deaths of President Kennedy and Dag Hammarskjöld. She collected the rent in person, but not from me. As soon as her car pulled up I went running out the back door before she had a chance to see me and start prophesying. In all
the time I lived there I never once let her lay eyes on me.
I bought a Volkswagen and took girls to Wolf Trap and the Cellar Door. I smoked dope. I began a novel, which, somewhat to my surprise, I managed to work on in a fairly disciplined way. I fell in love.
Her name was Vera. She was related by marriage to a Russian prince, and had grown up among expatriate Russians and come to think of herself as one of them. She had their wounded gaiety, their air of romantic, genteel displacement, their manners and terms of address. Her grandfather she called Opa; her brother Gregory, Grisha. She hated to cook, but when she had no choice she made great borscht. She favored high boots and bright skirts and scarves such as a Russian princess might wear while at leisure among her beloved serfs, picking mushrooms or hunting bears or dancing to the balalaika. She drank like a man and ate like a wolf. I fell in love with her the first night I saw her and pursued her for weeks afterward. I loved her name, her odd swinging stride, her dark wit and mad laugh, her clothes, her pale skin and antique, heart-shaped face. She had a steady boyfriend but I kept after her anyway until finally she surprised us both by falling in love with me. Her best friend, the girl who’d introduced us, took me aside and told me I was in way over my head. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but I began to learn.
She could be very funny, my Vera, but her humor was desperate and biting. She was obsessed by a single terrible truth, that everything and everyone you love will someday be taken from you. For Vera all other truths were frivolous; this was the one that mattered.
Her father had been her closest friend. He had told her his secrets. They had conducted ESP experiments together—successfully, according to Vera. She had lost him suddenly, without any warning, when she was in her first year of boarding school, and the pain that came upon her then had never left her. She saw everything through it.
And as if it weren’t enough by itself, this unhealing wound was endlessly abraded by anger, anger at the world for being a place where such a thing could happen. She wouldn’t have said so herself, but her father’s death left her feeling deserted. And because she was convinced that everyone else would desert her in the end, she was always looking for the first signs. Just about everything was a sign. A quizzical look, failure to agree, reference to experience not shared with her, private sorrow, old loyalties. Anything could qualify. And her rage at such betrayals was uncontainable.
We were driving across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge late one night. It was hot in the car, and I asked Vera to crack the window. She looked at me curiously. I asked her again.
What?
she said.
Crack the window?
Please, I said. She screamed
Here!
and struck the windshield with the heel of her hand. She did it again, and again, as hard as she could.
Here! Here!
I grabbed her wrist so she wouldn’t hurt herself and asked what I’d done wrong.
You know
, she said. She stared ahead, hugging herself. Finally she declared she’d never in her life heard the expression “crack the window,” and said further that I
knew
she’d never heard it. Why, she asked, did I like to mock her? Exactly what pleasure did it give me?
I thought it best not to answer, but my silence
goaded her to fury, and the injured sound of her own voice served as proof that I had wronged her, that I was vicious, disloyal, unworthy, hateful. Vera was still going strong when we got to my place. She hadn’t moved in with me yet; that opera had yet to open. My friends and I lived in a black neighborhood where people didn’t observe the white protocol of seeming not to hear what was going on around them. I tried to hush Vera but she was in full cry, and before long our neighbors joined in, yelling at us from up and down the street. They were inspirational to Vera but not to me. I told her she had to go home, and when she refused I simply got out of my car and went inside.
It was well after midnight. My friends were in their rooms, gallantly pretending to be asleep. I opened a beer and carried it to the living room.
The first crash wasn’t that loud. It sounded like someone had kicked over a garbage can. The second was louder. I went to the window and parted the blinds. Vera was backing down the street in her mother’s old Mercedes. This was a blocky gray diesel made, no doubt, from melted-down panzers. Vera went about fifty feet, stopped, ground the gears, started up the street again and rammed my car head-on, caving in the hood. Her undercarriage got caught on my bumper as she pulled away. She couldn’t move but kept trying anyhow, racing the engine, rending metal. Then she popped the clutch and the engine died.
“I’m going to kill you,” I told her when I reached the street.
I must have looked like I meant it, because she locked her door and sat there without saying a word. I walked back and forth around my car, a yellow Volkswegen
bug, the first car I’d ever owned. It was cherry when I bought it. An unusual word to use about a VW, but that’s what the ad said: “Cherry, needs tires, runs good.” Gospel, every word. It was a good car but a soft car, no match for the armor-plated
Überauto
now parked on its hood. Before landing there Vera had nailed the bug twice on the driver’s side, caving in the door and breaking the window.
I kept circling it. As I walked I began to tote up the damage, translating it into words that offered some hope of amendment.
Crumpled fender. Dents on door panel
. A phrase came to mind that I tried to dismiss and forget, because the instant I thought of it I knew it would undo me.
Cracked window
. I sat down on the curb. Vera got out of her car. She walked over, sat beside me, leaned against my shoulder.
“You cracked the window,” I said. “I’ll think twice before I ask you to do that again.” And we sat there laughing at my ruined car.
This sort of thing became routine, all in a day’s work. At first I was able to see Vera’s fits as aristocratic peculiarity, and even managed to believe that I could somehow deliver her from them and help her become as squared away as I was. After all, she looked as solid as a rock compared to her brother Grisha.
I never actually met Grisha. Just before I started going out with Vera he had quarreled with their mother over something so trivial she couldn’t remember it afterward, except that she had said something about not liking the look on his face, whereupon Grisha declared that he wouldn’t inflict his face on her or anyone else ever again, and locked himself in his room upstairs. He refused to come out except when there was no one
to see him. Vera’s mother left Grisha’s meals on a tray outside his door and carried the dirty dishes away when he was done. The same with his laundry. That was the situation when I first visited the house. Vera’s mother was a fond and patient woman who had long ago surrendered her authority in the family. She accepted this business with Grisha as she accepted everything her children did. Anyway, it couldn’t go on much longer. Summer was almost over. Grisha had another year of school left, and he would have to leave the room once classes began.
That’s what she thought, but Grisha thought otherwise. Just before Labor Day he left a note with his dirty dishes announcing that he planned to stay right where he was and get his diploma by correspondence. He trusted his mother to arrange the details.
She called a family council to discuss the question, and asked me to sit in. I was glad to do it. It was a sign of favor and I did my best to be worthy of it. When she asked for my view I gave sound military advice, which was to lay siege to Grisha. Starve the brat out, I told her. She had to show him he wasn’t the center of the universe.
When I finished I looked at Vera’s mother and saw that I’d been wrong: Grisha
was
the center of the universe. She seemed embarrassed and a little amazed that I didn’t know this. She thanked me and turned to Vera, then the talk turned serious. They reasoned together and after sober consideration reached their decision. Grisha could do anything he wanted to do.
Vera’s mother signed him up for correspondence school and continued to minister to him. But one night Grisha opened his door just as she was picking up his
dinner tray. For a breathless moment they were face-to-face. Then Grisha slammed the door and immediately took measures to ensure that no such accident ever happened again. He wrapped his head completely in gauze, leaving little holes for his mouth, eyes, ears, and nostrils. Once he was all covered up he became less reclusive. I could sometimes catch glimpses of him at the end of a hallway, or retreating up the stairs as I came in the front door. And once, after dropping Vera off in the early morning, I came across Grisha out for a walk. He flared up suddenly in my headlights, his bandage a white ball on his narrow shoulders. It wasn’t at all funny. It was as if I were seeing not Grisha but some terrible future, the future of my fears.
I made up my mind to live with Vera’s moods, as I wanted to think of them, even while they grew more outrageous. I tried to see them as evidence of a rich, passionate nature. What other girl had ever cared enough about me to destroy my car? She’d even threatened to shoot herself once, pulling a pistol out of a desk drawer as I was about to leave her house in the middle of a quarrel. It was pure theater, I understood that, but a small doubt remained, and a small doubt was too much for me, so I gave in and stayed. I nearly always gave in. This became part of the trouble between us. Once she got her way she despised me for letting her have it, and immediately started pushing again. She had to find that line I wouldn’t cross, where my cussedness was equal to hers. On this ground we fought like sworn enemies. We held nothing back, and once we were exhausted, after we’d given and taken every hurt, we came together with a tenderness that lasted for days, until the next round began. It was a
hard way to be in love, and not the way I’d hoped for, but it was our way.