A Dangerous Age (20 page)

The reason I’m writing you is this: Are we right to be in this war? Did we have to start this war? Can we ever stop being there? What are those people thinking when they are being blown up every day if they leave their homes? What should we do? How can anyone know what to do? I’m reading Tom Friedman. He’s the only person who makes sense to me. I’ve lost all ambition to do my own work. I have no idea what I want to say. I’m reading Rilke. It’s soothing to me to read the
Duino Elegies
. I know, you told me once he was dependent on the worst sort of Eurotrash, but what poet wasn’t dependent on rich people? We’re rich people, or we used to
be. That doesn’t make us bad. Our ancestors were in the Revolutionary War.

I’m usually in a better mood than this.

Love,

Louise

Dear Louise,

How would I know what to do?

I am married to a war hero. He’s been there and he got blown up and he says we have to be there because we had to draw a line in the sand and the only thing that matters is that
the United States has not been attacked on our soil
since we went on the offensive in Afghanistan.

He does say he thinks there should be a draft because it isn’t fair for poor people to fight the wars, but it’s always been that way and it isn’t going to change. There is only one member of Congress who has a child in the war. I may be dumb, but I know pragmatism when I see it.

Brian has to go back in for more surgery. There’s an infection around his remaining molars. He lost some teeth on that side, but they had saved others. Now he’ll probably lose those too. He says he refuses to fixate on a couple of teeth when doctors can make perfectly good ones out of plastic. He’s been on antibiotics for a month. I try not to think about all the drugs he’s taken or what it’s doing to his liver.

You are married to the prospective donor, so it’s your
problema también, no es verdad
?

So now I don’t care about the right or wrong of a war against people who beat and torture and mass-murder their fellow citizens, and blow up everything every day and kill children and women, and train children to wear time bombs and believe they’ll go to a heaven where they can rape virgins all day, to name a few of the reasons I’m glad Brian is still a marine and I’m a marine’s wife.

I feel like I’m leaving the rest of the United States to their stupid television programs. When did the whole country ever fight to save itself except the Second World War, and the media are still trying to blame us for things like putting the Japanese into camps until we ascertained they weren’t going to be a fifth column.

I’m searching the dictionary every day for new words to talk about the things I can’t stop thinking.

Your flag-waver cousin,

Winifred

P.S. Olivia is in bed for three weeks. She was bleeding. Is that unusual? You should call her or send her a card.

Dear Winnie,

I already knew about Olivia. Tallulah called me and so did Jessie.

I think about the war every day. I’ve started to be a news addict, although Carl says the news is only about 40 percent accurate and all of it is biased.

He says more people get killed every day in automobile accidents in the United States than get killed in Iraq, but I say the injuries aren’t as devastating.

Besides, I still believe the war is mainly about oil. And even though it’s also to protect the United States, how do we know we’re doing the right thing?

Daddy says we should build nuclear power plants. He says if we built smaller ones and more different kinds and really trained people to run them, it would be better than depending on oil. He is reading some physicist named Freeman Dyson, but the books he likes best are all out of print. He says the big oil companies keep us from having safe nuclear power plants, but I can’t believe that. I can not believe people could be that selfish.

Things are soooo complicated. I wish I could go back to a simpler time when all I worried about was making documentaries.

Love,

Louise

T
ALLULAH
H
AND WAS HAVING A CRISIS
. Her boyfriend had just left her for a younger woman who ran triathlons. Her Vanderbilt Lady Commodores tennis team had just lost an embarrassing series to the University of Tennessee, with a series against Texas coming up, which would be doubly embarrassing to Tallulah, since that is where she had been an All-American in her college years.

Plus, she had gained ten pounds, and for the first time in her five-foot-eleven-inch life she was trying to stay on a diet.

Plus, she hated living in Nashville, which had become a huge, sprawling mess of a city, where rivers of automobiles crawled at all times of day except for a few hours right before dawn.

Tallulah got up from her desk at the Currey Tennis Center, having decided to walk to a sports store three miles away to buy a ten-speed bicycle.

“Fuck Carter Angell and fuck his anorexic Italian girlfriend. Let them triathlon themselves into the sunset,” she said. “I’m making some moves and I’m making them fast.”

Tallulah stuck her cell phone into the side pocket of her dark green carpenter pants, added a Visa card, a driver’s license, and some cash, and walked out of the building without locking the door to her office.

She had made it to the edge of the campus when the cell phone rang. She pulled it out and answered it.

“Hello, hello,” Olivia said. “What’s going on? I’m in bed trying to keep my baby inside my womb. I’m bored to death. Tell me news. I saw the scores of the Tennessee matches. Was it as bad as it sounds on paper?”

“They don’t play,” Tallulah said. “There’s not a single woman on the team who really goes after it. I can’t inspire them. All they want is the scholarships and the uniforms.”

“Well, that’s a waste of your talent. Where are you?”

“I’m on the front of the campus near the old administration building, manicured lawns, flower beds, and trees so old they were big when the Fugitive poets walked here. I love this part of the campus. I think about John Crowe Ransom when I’m under these trees. All those guys were committing adultery with one another’s wives. Most of the great poems came from that. Carter dumped me, by the way. He moved in with a triathlete from Colorado. They were training together.”

“What’s the good news?”

“That he wasn’t living in my house. That I hated his fucking dog, and that I’d be relieved if I hadn’t been dumped.”

“What’s the weather like today in Nashville, Tennessee?”

“Gorgeous, spring, new leaves on old trees, flowers, daisies,
tulips. It’s the end of exam week. The campus is getting emptied. My girls are mad because they have to go to Austin Monday. They should be. They’re going to be annihilated. My old coaches there will get to watch me watch that.”

“So are you going to stay depressed or not?”

“I’m walking to a sports store to buy an all-terrain bicycle and then I’m going to ride it home and eat my diet lunch. I got fat, Olivia. I had no idea how unpleasant it is to have your clothes be too tight. I’m doing Sugar Busters. I started yesterday.”

“Why don’t you go down to a black high school and volunteer to teach a couple of days a week during their summer school? You might find a Venus Williams.”

“That’s an idea. How’d you come up with that?”

“I have to stay in bed; staying still is cranking up parts of my brain that I haven’t used in a while. I’ve been mindfucking about our young people never lending a hand in the world. Service, the thing our old Presbyterian ministers used to preach every Sunday. It’s something the Cherokees assume all people know, and the ones who don’t drink always practice it, and not just the women—the men do too.”

“Einstein said he tried to constantly remember that his life was based on the work and hands of thousands of men and women over hundreds of years, and that he must strive to pay that back in whatever measure he could.”

“Hiroshima? Nagasaki? Well, that wasn’t his fault. He was afraid Hitler would get there first.”

“Now North Korea, India, Pakistan, Israel, France, Germany,
England, the United States, China—who else? I used to try to keep track of nuclear problems.”

“Don’t you get to take free classes at Vanderbilt?”

“Yes.”

“Have you taken any?”

“No.”

“Well, there you are. Get out of the box. You don’t have to be a losing tennis coach twenty-four seven, do you?”

“I’m on West End Avenue, passing hundreds of automobiles going ten miles an hour, ruining the air, burning up the fossil fuels your husband is fighting to secure. I have to go ten more blocks past this sixth level of Hades and then I can cut through some rich neighborhoods where there’s more oxygen. I’m glad you called. You couldn’t have called me at a single moment when I wanted to talk to you more than I do today.”

“Come visit. Come sit by my bedside.”

“I might. Don’t be surprised if I do. I might just leave from Austin if they lose as badly as I think they are going to. I won’t fly home with them. That’s a message.”

“Come on, then. I’m not going anywhere for at least another week.”

“I might. Actually, I probably will. Don’t be surprised if I show up.”

S
UNDAY MORNING HEADLINES
. Twenty-eight Iraqis killed, forty-eight wounded, in insurgent attacks in Baghdad
and Tikrit. The tally for the week, eight American dead, including three contractors.

Two hundred and sixteen bodies found in a mass grave, making the genocide count in Iraq somewhere in the range of sixty thousand. How are there any people left there? Olivia wondered.

“I’m turning off all news media for twenty-four hours,” Olivia told Mary Lily when she brought in her breakfast tray. “And I’m getting out of this bedroom and staying out of it. I called the Merry Maids. They’ll be here at ten o’clock to clean the house. My cousin might be coming from Nashville.”

“I could clean the house. I know how.”

“Yeah, but you don’t like to do it.”

“I might go home for a few days, since your cousin’s coming,” Mary Lily said. “If you can do without me.”

“Go on. I know you’re tired of being here.”

“Well, if you’ll be all right. Philip would come to get me. He said just to call.”

“Call him. The Merry Maids will be here at noon. I’ll have people here all day.” Olivia sat up in the bed, put her feet on the floor, and walked across the room and back three times before she sat down to eat the delicious breakfast Mary Lily had prepared for her. It was a small waffle with scrambled eggs and bacon. There was a pot of herb tea with cream and sugar. There was a yellow tulip in a white vase. “Riches,” Olivia said, looking toward her aunt. “I live like a princess.”

B
OBBY
T
REE HAD BEEN
at work since six that morning, which was still night in Tikrit, Iraq. The unmanned helicopter he was piloting from a console at Nellis Air Force Base was hovering over an office building in Tikrit, watching the back entrances while a team of Marine Special Operations soldiers were coming in the front. They were searching for the insurgents who had carried out four car bombings the day before. A tip from a sixteen-year-old Iraqi boy had led them to the office building. A marine in an armored vehicle in front of the building was directing Bobby as he worked the helicopter nearer to the building, spotted the men escaping through the rear doors carrying weapons, shot three of them, and wounded two more.

Then it was over. The marines had taken the building, and dogs were searching for explosives or bombs. Ten more insurgents were in custody. The bodies of the dead were in the courtyard where the helicopter’s guns had left them.

Bobby sat back in his chair, spread his hands out to stretch his fingers, and then put his hands back on the controls and moved the helicopter higher and to the side of the building, where it would be out of the range of handheld missile launchers.

M
AY
23, 2005. Tallulah Hand boarded the Northwest Airlines regional jet to Austin, Texas, and settled into her seat to finish reading
Tennis
magazine. “I should go to the Italian Open,” she said under her breath. “I played it twice and lost in the first round both times. But I was there.”

P
HILIP
W
HITEHORSE PARKED
his truck in the driveway, threw the stuff that was piled in the front passenger seat into the back of the vehicle, brushed the seat off with his black denim jacket, and then heaved a sigh and took the cigarettes out of his shirt pocket and stuck them in the glove compartment.

He combed his short hair with an old comb he kept on the floor of the front seat, then got out and went up Olivia’s front steps to collect Mary Lily and take her back to Tahlequah. He’d missed her, and that worried him more than he wanted to admit. When she was in Tahlequah he only saw her a couple of nights a week, but since she had been in Tulsa taking care of Olivia, he had been thinking about her every night. He’d even thought about her while he was watching the Kentucky Derby. That was the last straw.

“H
ERE COMES
P
HILIP
Whitehorse,” Olivia yelled down to her aunt. “He’s coming up the front walk.” Olivia was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking out the window. She was only staying in bed half the day now. Her doctor said she could get up for good the following week. She was pushing that by sitting on the side of the bed half the time when she was in it. She had had it with staying in bed and acting like an invalid, although it had the effect of making her sympathetic to injured and bedridden people, and she was planning on writing a column about the courage of ordinary people in the face of serious illnesses and injuries.

Mary Lily walked down the stairs and opened the front
door and stood waiting while Philip removed his hat and came through the door. “I’m mighty glad you’re coming home,” Philip said. “I had to watch the derby alone. Kayo was watching it with your granddad and Spotted Horse Woman.”

“They didn’t ask you to watch it with them?”

“Not that I noticed,” he said.