Perfume River (14 page)

And so they fall silent one last time.

Both men turn from the windows they are facing.

Then Jimmy says, “You understand?”

“That you won’t come to see him.”

“Yes.”

“Of course.”

“Tell her to let go of this.”

“I’ll try.”

Both houses tick with morning silence. The brothers feel the vague impulse to say a little something more before they end the conversation, but neither can possibly imagine what it might be.

“Good-bye then,” Jimmy says.

“Good-bye,” Robert says.

They disconnect.

Each takes the cordless phone away from his ear and looks at it for a moment as if it were a faded Polaroid found in a shoe box.

Jimmy’s four women workers have gone off together for their monthly lunch at Mavis’s house and he is glad now to be able to sit at his worktable and have the barn to himself. Linda has not yet checked in with him. It must be going badly at their friends’ house.

He has taken up his deer tine and his softest square of camel hide and has hunched into the furious burnishing of the edges of half a dozen messenger bags, filling himself with the smell of warming beeswax and edge paint, emptying himself of Robert’s voice and the family he has left behind.

But shortly he hears the middle bay door creak open and closed. He looks across the floor.

It’s Linda, and he thinks:
Good. The antidote.
Whatever of Robert and Peggy and William he has not been able to burnish away will vanish in five minutes with Linda.

She is flushed from the sun and the cold and sheds her quilted coat as she approaches. Beneath, she is turtlenecked to her chin and is long-legged and slim-hipped in black dress-up jeans.

She stops before him.

She strips off her knit hat and shakes her hair down. “Your women are gone,” she says.

“This is their day for Mavis’s wife to make them venison stew.”

She obviously hasn’t noticed the phenomenon.

“A start-ups tradition,” he says.

“Ah,” she says.

She grows still, her coat over her arm, her hat in her hand. She is staring at him but he has no sense that she’s seeing him. She’s considering something, he senses.

Becca no doubt has confided in her. Linda wants to speak of it but has probably made a vow not to. Linda takes that sort of pact seriously.

“You’ve got a tale to tell,” he says.

She makes a small sound, deep in her throat. Not quite a sound of assent. More meditative.

Jimmy waits for Linda to figure out what she’s free to reveal.

Then she says, “When will they be back?”

He’s thinking of their friends splitting up and hears this wrong. His puzzlement must be showing. Linda clarifies. “Your women.”

“My women …” he says, drawing out the phrase to add an unspoken
as you oddly insist on calling them
, “… usually take an hour and a half or a little longer on stew day. They make it up at the end of the afternoon.”

“And they left recently?”

“Twenty minutes perhaps.”

Linda nods and lays her coat and hat on the near edge of Jimmy’s worktable, and she says, “Then let’s go sit on the couch together for a few minutes.”

“All right,” Jimmy says.

He follows her to the south end of the barn and into the break room next to their office.

“The coffee’s fresh,” he says.

“I’m good,” she says, and she heads for the flannel chesterfield. He follows her.

She arranges herself sideways at one end, her legs drawn up beneath her. A long story to come.

Jimmy sits in the middle of the couch, within reaching distance, holding distance if need be. He turns toward her and waits.

She is still working something out in her mind. Then she says, “They’re finished, Becca and Paul. Forever and for the best.”

“I’m sorry,” Jimmy says.

“No,” Linda says. “It
is
for the best. For everyone concerned.”

A recent image of the couple flickers into Jimmy’s head: a restaurant in Toronto, the two of them side by side on the bench seats, Paul’s pugilist jaw and horn-rimmed reader’s eyes, Becca’s ballerina bun and Bardot pout. They are nearly two decades younger than Jimmy and Linda but the four of them are joined together by New Democratic Party politics, halibut fishing on Hudson Bay, and a couples’ chemistry that synthesizes compassion and snark.

Before Jimmy can consider this image, it flickers out again with Linda reaching into his lap and lifting his hand toward her. She leans to it and kisses him on the very spot where a wedding ring would be if they were to wear them.

“My darling,” she says as she replaces the hand in his lap.

But he instantly senses what is happening.

“I need to go away for a week or two,” she says.

If he objectively considers this, there is the possibility that she will, as Becca’s best friend, simply stay with her or go away with her to help her through the first wave of trauma over the dissolution of her marriage. Paul is once divorced; Becca has never been.

But Jimmy understands. Linda is invoking the agreement that allowed the two of them to officially wed. A quarter of a century ago it was what they both wanted, equally, philosophically. It was how they’d sorted out the world together—before marriage and after—with regard to equality and rights and interpersonal power and the nature of love. All these things freely given and received and shared.

Jimmy has always been content with this.

He has wanted it.

But now in the center of his head he feels a hot dilation, like the frame of a Saturday movie serial sticking in the projector and its image splitting and searing and burning through.

“I’ll be back soon, my sweet Jimmy,” she says.

He does not say anything.

This declaration is clearer than is their custom.

She keeps her eyes on his. Nothing intense in her gaze. This is how it has always been for them. They have always treated each other’s lacunae with loving tact. It is what they want.

The conversation is meant to stop here.

They will hold hands. They might kiss. They might even make love now, here on the chesterfield, to assert their abiding connection.

But the burning is done in Jimmy’s head and there is only a blank screen. A tabula rasa. And from it he asks, “Were you the reason for the breakup?”

Minutely—but minutely is significant for Linda, Jimmy knows—minutely she flinches. Then she composes herself once more.

She takes his hand again. “They’ve never meant as much to you as to me,” she says. “You’re not worried about the breakup.”

She’s right about that. Nor is it the issue. But he does not say so.

“Nothing has changed between you and me,” she says, squeezing his hand gently.

Then he hears himself ask another question. “Which of them is it?” He realizes only in the asking that he does not know, could not guess.

She lets go of his hand, but her voice remains gentle: “I think the way we’ve always handled these things is best, don’t you?”

Now he asks, “Does the other one know?” But obviously not. Otherwise none of this would now be a surprise to him. He would surely have heard from the excluded one.

Linda straightens before him, taking a deep breath. Her eyes do not narrow or harden or flare, as they can do when he and she argue. If anything, they soften for him. He feels a twist of admiration over this. Then a tighter twist, of tenderness. And then a sudden chest-clamping regret.

She says, “Are we wrong, my darling? Surely not. We have always been so smart about this. Love on this earth is not a singularity. It is a profusion. As simple as a kind word at a checkout counter. As complex as you and I. But love always has boundaries. By the parts of us—mind, body, heart—that are involved, or not involved. And to what degree. And for how long. I feel certain this is a partial thing now before me and a brief thing. Our love for each other—yours and mine—is the bedrock for any other experience in this fleeting gift of my life. It’s the same for you, isn’t it? We’ve said so to each other. Often. Aren’t we grateful for that?”

And at this she lifts her hand and touches his cheek and says, “Whichever of us dies first, I want our lips to touch in that moment.”

She pauses, and she says, “I love you, Jimmy.”

She waits, her fingertips lingering on him.

He can think of nothing to say.

He is not moving.

He can’t imagine what’s showing on his face.

She withdraws her hand.

She shifts her legs, squares her shoulders to him a bit more.

She says, “Why don’t you spend a couple of weeks with that girl Heather. She would like nothing better, I’m sure.”

He still can find no words.

She says, “Maybe she’ll help you stop worrying about what’s next.”

Just before noon Robert answers the foyer phone. As he expects, it’s his mother. “Darling, he’s off the morphine drip and starting to wake up.”

“I’ll be there within the hour.”

Peggy rightly takes these as his last words and jumps in. “Before you hang up. I’m out in the hallway. I need to ask. Did you try?”

“Jimmy?”

“Of course Jimmy.”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He’s not coming.”

Robert hopes that will be it.

He waits for her.

She waits for him.

Not for long. “Why are you doing this to me?” she says. “What did he say?”

“Do you really want details?”

“Yes.”

“There aren’t many. We didn’t instantly turn into chums.” Robert hesitates only very slightly before the lie: “I don’t recall the exact words.” He recalls them quite clearly. “But it amounts to this: Nothing has changed. We all need to let him go.”

Robert waits for a dramatic sound on the other end of the phone. A stricken word. A sob even. But there’s only silence.

This troubles Robert more than her usual emoting. Better for her to be angry. She needs to be fighting. He says, “We’re still toxic to him.”

“Did he say that?” This comes out sharply. Her dukes are up. Good.

“No,” Robert says. “Not those words.”

“What words?”

“I’m not going to be his proxy in an argument with you, Mom. I’ll see you in an hour.”

“Toxic,” she says.

“Listen. The only way this thing could have been made right was for Pops to reach out. Not Jimmy. Years ago. At the latest when Carter gave the amnesty. Pops should have told Jimmy to come home. Told him—God forbid—that he understood, that he didn’t condemn him.”

Robert has said all he intended to, and Peggy delays only long enough to draw a breath. She says, “I am so sick and tired of the men in this family.”

Robert lets her have her big curtain line unchallenged.

But she stays on the phone.

So does he, though she’s no longer on his mind. He wonders at Jimmy, at how firmly he grasped his own life and held it close all these years.

“Are you still there?” Peggy finally asks.

“Yes.”

“Why? Come up here to me.”

And a short time later he is passing the Blood of the Lamb Full Gospel Church. He turns his face to it, puzzles over what that was all about yesterday morning. A man in coveralls is carrying a ladder along the side of the church building.

And then the church vanishes with a run of pine along Apalachee Parkway.

Peggy is waiting for Robert in the hallway outside his father’s room. She steps toward him.

“Have you been waiting out here all this time?” he says.

“No,” Peggy says, keeping her voice hushed and flapping her hand at him to do the same. “It’s been an hour. You’ve always been punctual.”

“Is he still awake?” Robert accepts her tone, has kept his own voice low. A private conversation in the hall would cause an argument for her and Pops.

“
Fully
awake,” she says.

They’ve already been arguing.

Robert says, “So what do you need to say on the sly?”

Peggy’s head snaps ever so slightly. It always comes as a surprise, that he sees through her.

“Yes, well,” she says, “I just wanted to remind you he’s in a delicate state.”

“Of course.”

“Not just in his body. His mind. He’s lost his mind.”

“The drugs,” Robert says.

“He’s lucid,” Peggy says. “Just mad.”

“Let me guess. He doesn’t want a priest to come visit.”

“I won’t even tell you how he put it,” she says.

“It’s his choice,” Robert says.

“So please don’t let him get worked up about anything.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

Peggy clutches Robert’s hand. Somehow it feels real, this gesture. “I know you will.”

He takes both her hands in his.

She says, “I’m just so afraid I’m going to lose him now.”

“He’s a tough guy. He can beat the odds.”

“God knows I’ll miss him,” she says. “Even at his worst.”

Especially at his worst
, Robert thinks.
His worst has kept you happily energized.
But he gently compresses her hands and says, “The best thing is for you to go on downstairs and get some coffee and a Danish. Linger over them. I can handle Pops better if it’s just the two of us.”

Peggy searches her son’s face, seems to reassure herself about something, and then nods.

They let go of each other, and without another word Peggy is gone.

Robert approaches his father’s hospital door.

He steps in.

At first the only sound he recognizes in the room is his father’s heart, digitized into a soft monitor beep. And now the faint hiss of the air flowing from the wall into his father’s lungs. Pops lies in his bed, his torso angled upward, his arms laid out on top of the blanket, the left one wrapped thickly from hand to elbow. He is watching out the window: the bright afternoon sky and the distant tops of longleaf pines.

Robert hesitates. His father keeps his watch. Always clean-shaven, as if he were standing for inspection by Patton himself, his cheeks and chin are covered now in dark scruff.

Robert says, “Pops.”

William turns his face abruptly to his son. “Sorry,” he says. “I thought you were Mother.”

Robert approaches the bed, wondering briefly if his father’s mind has indeed gone wrong, if he was expecting his own mother, the long-dead Grandma Quinlan. But of course he meant Peggy.

“I sent her away for coffee and pastry,” Robert says.

“Good,” William says. And then his eyes wander off, as if the exchange has set him thinking.

Why does Robert have the immediate impression he knows what’s on Pops’s mind? Perhaps it’s the recent, vivid
reminder of the daily struggle between his father and mother. That and the coffee and pastry. These stir the past in him, not as recollections, but enough to give him his impression as he arrives at his father’s bedside.

What has worked covertly in Robert are two events. In one of them, a decade ago, on an otherwise routine phone call from New Orleans, his mother suddenly sounded real, sounded vulnerable in a way unalloyed with dramatic artifice. Robert had just casually mentioned that Darla was at school for the afternoon.