Perfume River (4 page)

And now that she is sitting before him in a Baton Rouge coffee shop with only a small tabletop of a French sidewalk café separating the two of them, and now that she is gazing directly into those eyes of his, they remind her of the emerald green of a Monet forest. She thinks to remark on this. Even in those first few moments with him. She also thinks, however, to mask her desire by immediately noting that it was the pigment that drove Monet mad. But instead, she says, “Did you march?”

He blinks those green eyes slowly, as if trying to understand.

Given her hunch about what he is or recently was, she hears herself as he might: the question could be a way of asking if he is a soldier. They are being routinely spit upon these days.

She clarifies. “To the capitol. Over the war.”

“Ah,” he says in a tone that suggests he was unaware of the event. “No.”

“Surely you knew,” she says. “We went right past that window. A thousand of us.”

“I figured it was a Greek Row picnic,” he says.

For a clock tick or two she believes him. The green eyes show nothing.

Then they come alive. Widen and spark, and Darla and Robert laugh together.

His eyes.

She looks toward him in the dark in the bed.

She realizes she has not been noticing those eyes for some time. She makes a note in her head to look him carefully in the eyes today.

And it occurs to her now, for the first time, after all these years:
My god. I’d actually expected an observation about the pigment of his eyes driving Monet mad to hide my desire. It would, in fact, have cried out my desire. His eyes were driving me mad.

Did she ever go on to openly make that observation about their color?

She tries to remember.

She cannot.

She thinks not.

I never did tell him
, she thinks.

And then:
Thank god. He got me into his bed quick enough as it was.

But she did tell him. It was on their fifth wedding anniversary, spent in bed in their apartment in Baton Rouge, making love in the morning but then spending the rest of the day—wisely, necessarily, they thought—reading for their PhD oral exams. They did so, however, naked together in bed, the heat turned up high, as it was a chilly February day. In the late afternoon, as the light from the window was fading, just after Robert switched on a nightstand lamp, she told him about his eyes, thinking perhaps he and she might touch again for a time on this special day. She told him about their color. Told him that she’d planned to cut him down at once, however, with her line about Monet. Perhaps at the moment of her confession Robert’s head was too full of the academic rhetoric of history. Her head was too, after all. For he simply smiled a little and offered a bland
How sweet
and he resumed his reading and she
resumed her reading and they did not touch again for a few days, and when they did, the incident was forgotten.

Darla is counting bricks in an imaginary wall, pausing at each hundred to take a brisk, long breath and then letting it out as slowly as she can, trying to ignore the unconscious, restless body in bed beside her, trying simply to sleep.

Shortly after her third hundred, Robert turns heavily onto his back and sighs. Darla hesitates briefly—just long enough to realize how there is no good reason to hesitate, even briefly, to follow this impulse—and so she seeks his hand at rest between them and lays hers gently upon it. She thought he was probably asleep, and he is, but she keeps her hand on his until, just past her fourth hundred, she falls asleep.

When Robert wakes, there is a thin etching of gray dawn along the vertical edges of the blackout blinds. Darla’s hand is long gone from his and he has missed the gesture. He is lying on his back and she is to his right, on her side, facing away. He is capable of a gesture similar to hers. He could lay a hand gently on the point of her hip now, as she sleeps, and then take it away again after a time without having to raise any issues or expectations between them. He has done so, with her sleeping, within the past week. But this morning he has woken to find Jimmy in his head and he needs to deal with that first.
Gently, very gently, so as not to wake her—for she can be a light sleeper sometimes, an aggrievedly light sleeper—he turns onto his side with his back to her.

For some years now it has taken Robert a little bit by surprise whenever he thinks of his brother. But the prompts this time are instantly clear: Robert’s venture to the veranda without the purgative focus of a cigarette, particularly on a night of Beethoven’s Seventh; the consequent memory of his flight from the North Vietnamese soldiers in Hue, of his refuge in the banyan tree; his taking refuge, as well, from the army, for an occasional night, in the arms of a Vietnamese woman.

Robert long ago recognized the irony of all this. In some sense he actually ran and hid before Jimmy did.

But it wasn’t the same.

Even now, almost forty-seven years later, he feels compelled to repeat the litany of differences: More than a few Americans at MACV, officers and enlisted men alike, had local women to go to now and then; the communist offensive on five other provincial capitals the previous night had convinced everyone in Hue that the city’s traditional exemption from serious attack, tacitly accepted by both sides, still pertained; Robert’s break from the army was not even AWOL, much less desertion. And Robert had not run from the war. He did not even run from that night’s battle; he sought cover and would later emerge.

He would later emerge.

And a price would be paid for not running.

Robert shuts down this line of thinking.

He does not want to emerge from the banyan. Not this morning. Not ever again. There is no need. He has long since reconciled himself to those few days in 1968.

So much time has passed. Generations. For Christ’s sake, he’s had his own children and grandchildren since.

And the irony about his act being akin to Jimmy’s is superficial. A conceit. Jimmy did run. From the war. From far more.

Not that Robert blames Jimmy.

Not for his politics, certainly.

Not for decades.

Robert eases onto his back once again, expecting that thought to send Jimmy on his way, but instead he and Jimmy are sitting in overstuffed chairs angled toward the settee where their father is in a familiar stage of dozing off. Sitting upright, head sinking, he will soon—barely lifting his face and without opening his eyes—pivot slowly into fetal repose on the velour.

It is Labor Day, 1967. Robert is on home leave with orders to Vietnam. He graduated in June of
‘66
from Tulane and struggled through that summer with what to do. He went off to LSU on a graduate school deferment, but he dropped out as soon as the fall semester was finished and he enlisted.

Robert is wearing his dress greens. Glad for his father to see him in them. His father was a nineteen-year-old hard-stripe corporal in the infantry under Patton in Germany, about to become a platoon sergeant when the war ended.

But the conversation has been odd. Minimal. Tangential. Almost sullen, for his father’s part. Pops is a quiet drunk. But sober, he can talk. He has the gift of gab. Even smart gab at
times. He isn’t well educated but he’s well read. Their home has always been filled with books, and he even hounded any traces of Third Ward Yat out of his sons’ speech. Still and all, Robert understands: About real feelings his father also is a quiet man. He gets drunk on his feelings and clams up.

And Robert figures there are other things going on to shut Pops down, figures the old man and Jimmy were probably fighting before Robert arrived and the fight simply has overridden everything. His little brother, fractiously self-assertive and needy as usual, has simply jumped in between him and their father.

Robert, in his bed, closes his eyes to the oak beam running above him in the ceiling as if it were about to fall and split the bed in two. He is tempted to slide forward a couple of hours, to the abrupt ending of the family’s Labor Day afternoon in New Orleans.

But he does not.

He remains in the moment when he and Jimmy are themselves quiet, almost placid-seeming, with each other, as they sit watching their father fade into sleep in the front room of the family’s double shotgun in the Irish Channel. When Pops bought the house—after he was promoted to stevedore foreman at the Seventh Street Wharf—he opened the common wall of the semidetached, here in the living room and in the back, at the kitchen, making a unified home of it. Robert was ten, Jimmy was eight.

As their father begins to snore, the brothers look at each other. It’s been more than a year since they’ve been together.
Robert made his decision about the war on his own. The previous summer Jimmy was hitchhiking out west, and he spent Thanksgiving and Christmas somewhere in the Northeast with a girl he’d met on his travels.

Without a word or a nod, the brothers rise and go out the front door and down the porch steps. Clay Square lies before them, the de facto front yard playground of their shared childhood. Two years apart, they were playmates and then enemies and then friends and then largely indifferent to each other, as they sought their own independent selves, and now neither of them is sure about the other. They are ready to be what they will become on this little walk together, as Robert goes to war and Jimmy enters his senior year at Loyola after months of faux vagabondage during the Summer of Love.

They pause at the sidewalk and scan the broad, oak-edged sward of the park. The boys have too much history between them there, too much contending and screaming and too many tears and bloodied noses, long passed but with the affect still clinging to the place, and they turn south on Third Street, heading toward the river.

“So you’ve done this,” Jimmy says.

“This?”

“The US Army in Vietnam.”

Robert looks at Jimmy.

He is visibly Robert’s brother, with the same jaw, their father’s jaw, but Jimmy is paler in hair and skin, missing their mother’s touches of darkness, which she got from her own mother, who was Italian. In spite of the confrontational
quickness of his remark, Jimmy isn’t looking at Robert. He’s keeping his eyes ahead, down the street.

Robert says, “I did the
army.
It was up to them where they sent me.”

“That’s a cop-out,” Jimmy says, though he still doesn’t look Robert’s way and his manner is matter-of-fact. “Did he put you up to it?”

Robert knows who Jimmy means. Pops. As of this Labor Day weekend in 1967, they have both always called him that. But Jimmy invokes him now as an impersonal pronoun.

“No,” Robert says at once, taking the words literally to make the answer simple. No, there was no overt conversation, no request or exhortation or plea.

Jimmy says, “This isn’t his war, you know. Even if he wants to make it that. Ho Chi Minh is not Adolf Hitler. Far from it.”

“I told you this isn’t about Pops.”

“It’s an evil war,” Jimmy says.

Robert says, “Did your girl of the summer put you up to this?”

Jimmy stops walking abruptly.

Robert stops too, turns to him. He expects a fight now.

But even though Robert is a step in front of him, Jimmy keeps his eyes down the street.

They stand like that for a long moment.

Robert senses his brother grinding toward a choice. A fight is one option, clearly.

Now Jimmy looks him in the eyes.

From years of experience, Robert knows how to read his brother’s face. It surprises him now. Nothing is there that fits the way Jimmy began this conversation. No furrow, no flare, no twitch. Nothing that fits his temper.

“My feelings are my own,” Jimmy says, and his voice is actually soft. Robert cannot remember the last time he heard this tone in his brother.

“I believe you,” Robert says. Though he’s not sure he does. But he makes his own voice go soft as well.

“I bet he’s proud of you,” Jimmy says. He is still managing his tone.

“I don’t hear any sarcasm in that,” Robert says.

“There isn’t any.”

“Is she a flower child?” Robert says. “Teaching you gentleness?” He regrets it at once. No matter that he’s starting to hear Jimmy’s tone as an affectation, a lie. It’s still a better way for them to talk, surely.

Jimmy doesn’t answer. His cheeks twitch slightly and release, twitch and release. He’s grinding his teeth.

If a woman is indeed gentling his brother down, the attitude deserves nurturing. So he makes himself a little vulnerable to his brother, offers an admission. “He isn’t showing it.”

Jimmy stops working his jaw. “I don’t follow,” he says.

“Pops,” Robert says. “His approval. He was never going to actually show it. We both know that.”

Jimmy furrows again, briefly, and grunts a nod of sympathetic recognition.

“My decision was my own,” Robert says.

Jimmy nods again, in assent, looks away, beyond Robert to the square. They are silent for a few moments. Then Jimmy says, still looking into the distance, “She’s bringing it out in me.”

Now Robert doesn’t follow.

Jimmy turns his face to him, sees his puzzlement.

“Gentleness,” Jimmy says. “She’s only bringing something out in me that’s already there.” He pauses, then adds, “And she’s not a flower child.” This last, however, comes out devoid of gentleness. Not quite angry, but sharply firm. Still, in an earlier time, Jimmy would be in full-flighted umbrage now.

Robert says, “I didn’t mean to insult her.”

“It wouldn’t be an insult anyway, if she were,” Jimmy says.

Robert thinks:
If you didn’t take it as an insult, you wouldn’t have hardened up in the denial.
But he doesn’t let it out quite that way. He says, “I was just asking. Trying to assess what degree of criminal you both think I am by putting on this uniform.”

“I thought you were asking to source my gentleness.”

“Those two things often go together these days. The gentleness and the judgment.”

“We’re judging a government.”

“By embracing another,” Robert says. “North Vietnam’s oppressions are even institutionalized. Read a little history. No government, no country in this world has spotless hands.”