Silent Retreats (10 page)

In the meantime, time passing, Martha continued on as always, businesslike and business only, never stepping out of role to communicate with me, never confronting me on my letter, left brazenly on her doorstep, never mentioning a thing. I began to wonder what it would take to get a rise out of her. Then there was the sweet winter morning I'll never forget, when frost had formed on the office windows and the crystal sun had risen to burn it off, and Martha hurried into the office and stood at my desk. She was carrying an envelope and, carefully checking to be certain nobody was close by, said to me, "I thought so."

"You thought what specifically, Martha?" I said. I was trying to work.

"I thought you'd reach out for me sometime."

"How's that?"

"C'mon. You know." She was staring straight at me, her eyes watering. I anticipated the charge of sexual harassment.

"Chrissake, girl," I told her. "Don't talk sign language—I'm a practical man." I was looking past her through my office door and out into the secretarial pool. People were rushing to the Xerox, filing copies, stuffing envelopes, stapling things, making displays, dialing on their phones. "Perhaps you're speaking of my note?"

Quickly checking the door, she leaned forward and kissed me right in front of my left ear, and then whispered, "Yes. You love me."

Then she handed me the envelope and walked out of the office. I sat there, trying to hold myself together. I could hear my heart hammering. I could hear my ears turning red. I felt a solitary drip of sweat slip from under my arm down my side almost to my waist before it was absorbed by a chance fold in my shirt. It was a pretty strange situation. The envelope contained a proposition, no uncertain terms, time and place.

I sat waiting for the sun to rise in the patched asphalt parking lot of the Cedar Hills Motorlodge, a family operation out on the two-lane highway. Not a bird chirped. Not a leaf stirred. The animals in the stand of trees just west of the motel restaurant were motionless. I stared deep into the shadows, followed the vertical lines of the trees from the ground, thousands of lean young hardwoods, up into the tangled confusion of the damp, early spring foliage. Nothing moved.

Then, for a while, I stared at the motel itself, thought about motels in general. The motel office had a curved glass window, 1950's architecture, and, motionless behind the registration desk, in dim light, the night lady sat. I stared at her. She stared back. She seemed not to move. Not even the smoke from her cigarette in an ashtray on the counter seemed to move. It was like she'd been painted there by Edward Hopper. She stared right at me. She kept staring, as I sat there in my car. It was clear to me that she wouldn't suspect a thing.

I was hoping that somewhere out on the highway right then was Martha, speeding along in her Mercedes (imagine this if you can) toward me. Behind the Cedar Hills Motorlodge—Martha had suggested the place because they had waterbeds—behind it was a greenhouse, also a family operation. I found it right at daybreak while I was stretching my legs.

Inside were pots, and tables for pots, and among them all the rocks that kids had thrown, smashing out the windows of the greenhouse, leaving a hulk, faded and broken, causing strange shadows and flashes from the broken crystal in the frosty morning sun. Among the shadows suddenly, among the broken pots on the greenhouse floor, this is no lie, this is how things happen when your conscience is working overtime, I saw the corpse of a dead squirrel and I was stunned with an irrational terror.

I hurried back to the car and disappeared down a country road.

When I skulked into the office about eleven that morning, feeling like my brain had been embalmed, I found this note in a plain envelope on my desk:

Dear Mr. Brodey,
I want to apologize for not making it out west this morning. My little one sliced a toe and had to have stitches last night. William returned from Tucson very late, and I was a little upset. Plus, I backed into Dr. Summer's car over at the emergency room. The timing was all wrong, and I couldn't even contact you to cancel. It must have been an impossible wait, and I'm very sorry. I feel particularly bad because, after all, I asked you.
Martha

Why did I shack up with Martha? Because she asked me that's one reason. And because, as I have said, I had quite a number of things to explain to her.

Still, this note showed a side of her totally apart from the person of the office game which had begun in light chatter at coffee breaks and which we were trying to consummate at the Cedar Hills Motorlodge. She had a little boy and couldn't even drive right when he was hurt. I could well imagine the battle that was going on inside her, rushing that boy over to the hospital. Maybe her husband had been waiting out at the airport, sitting on his briefcase, needing a ride and wondering what was going on. And then there was this other, this shadowy other person, waiting for her in a motel parking lot out west of town. Suddenly she must have felt like she was bad, like her plan to be unfaithful was making bad things happen to her loved ones. I forgave her for standing me up, even if she really hadn't.

I started wondering about Martha: such a nice person, and she had a whole life out in Arlington in fine circumstances. She had a nice yard and church on Sunday. She had thin hips and the admiration of every male who saw her zip by in her little silver sports car, tasteful golden earrings glinting up in the sun as the wind raised her hair away from her neck. Things had turned out just the way she might have been hoping when she came down the aisle with her pretty little Vassar B.A.

I kept wondering to myself: sure, Bill's a worthless guy, but Lord knows he provides, and, whatever he does for her, it seems to be doing her good, because she's a full blossom of handsome womanhood, and she seems to love her boy, and he's probably a good little kid. Thinking about it all made me wonder. Why me?—why old Harold, in a world full of viable males? Why was Martha wanting to sleep with old systems man Brodey, or Chip, as I was known on the baseball field when I was young? And really, wasn't there nothing but trouble in all this?

After I got Martha's note of apology, I wrote her a note which I passed to her beneath a table at the monthly board meeting:

Dear Martha:
Call me "Chip." It was a long wait and I was disappointed, but I sure do understand what happened and have no hard feelings.
I hope very much that we can rearrange something, unless you've changed your mind. Does your car still work? Is the place out west satisfactory? In all this Martha, I suppose you know there is one thing that puzzles me more than anything else, you being the beautiful woman you are, me seeming perhaps fairly ordinary because of my conscientious and business-like attitude at work. Could you tell I'm a rambling guy, or what? If we are reduced to forever exchanging notes such as this, there is one question I'll need answered more than any other. Martha—why me?
As ever,
Chip
P.S. Please burn all these notes.

She was amazing the way she could deceive. She came into the office and talked the same, laughed the same among the group and made them laugh—she'd be wearing these very pretty white slacks that made her seem tall, and shoes that actually made her tall, and a pretty yellow blouse, and here she'd come, asking questions, "Mr. Brodey, what do you think about this?", "Can you authorize that?", leaning way down, her tummy flat all the way to the cinched-tight waistband. She smelled like flowers to me, and she'd be asking, "Can this be changed?", "Could we call so-and-so for these results?", etc., etc. I'd sit there dreaming of kicking the door shut and kicking off the lights, doing it on the desk. Forget the Cedar Hills Motorlodge and the impossible logistics of comfort.

We were having a lot of trouble setting up our rain-check bout. I would find myself considering calling Martha in the evenings; I thought of driving over to Virginia just to idle by her building a couple of times and watch the amber glow radiate through the curtains and the shadows move. I was acting peculiar at home and at work, and I knew it, but I couldn't get back on track. I was experiencing new emotions, new heat. I was becoming more and more sure of the business of love being all there is.

I felt on the edge of distraction and imagined the whole office knew about us. I almost didn't care. Gradually I was getting to the point where I would have to press the matter, no matter what it meant to my regular life. I sensed my destiny was about to change, that I was about to take a plunge. I tried to calm down, talk myself through it, but I kept thinking about her. The rain check continued to elude us, days passing—time, hours ached by with a dullness absent of mercy.

One day I determined that it was time to do some serious drinking. I called the office and told them I was sick, which was quite true. I headed for this abandoned farmhouse I knew about, out on the Harper's Ferry Road, evidently a favorite setting for the frankest kind of teenage revelry, judging from the mattresses and the shreds of underwear. En route I visited a suburban liquor store to buy a bottle. I selected for this pathological little outing Jack Daniel's. Jack Daniel's stinks worse than any whiskey on the market in North America and is, according to a friend of mine at work, 2 percent cow piss. It goes down very rough, like swallowing sandpaper. But the worst part about Jack Daniel's is the hangover, which is recovered from the way you would recover from the removal of fishhooks in the cortex.

This friend of mine at work almost died drinking Jack Daniel's once, and we know it was the Jack Daniel's that caused it because this friend of mine had ingested nothing but Jack Daniel's for a period of ten days. You would have to agree that in this particular case Jack Daniel's is highly implicated and doesn't come off looking very good. If this friend of mine at work nearly died, I can well imagine that there are cases in which, by ingesting Jack Daniel's, certain men have actually gone to the grave.

And so I selected Jack Daniel's and departed for the Harper's Ferry Road abandoned farmhouse in the early afternoon. I had to think. But that wasn't all. I had to think self-destructively. There was no glass at all in the windows of the farmhouse, and the ceiling in the kitchen was falling in. All the mattresses and such were on the second floor. I took off my tie and sat on the couch in the living room. There was still flowered wallpaper, and a few other basic amenities had survived, although there was no television. I sat the bottle of Jack on the table before me and stared into it. Then I opened it and took a drink.

An hour later, quite drunk, I was stretching my legs and snooping around, and I accidentally stepped on the business end of a garden rake—its wooden handle flew up and smacked me in the face. There was a lot of blood, and I took off my sportcoat to try to save it—the shirt and pants were hopeless. I recall crashing upstairs and falling out on a mattress which seemed to have been arranged by some darling high school girl so that she could watch the stars while lying on her back. On my back, staring up through the glassless window, I could see clouds in the dusky sky, and I was trying to discern shapes among the clouds when suddenly I saw, whirling among them, a round, black and silver and blue flying saucer.

I have spotty recollections after the initial sighting. I recall seeing something circling to land, and later heard something whirring out in the soybean field, and I could see flashing lights reflected on the ceiling. Presently, a monster was at the top of the stairs, shaped like a five-foot pipe wrench entwined in an ectoplastic tuba and wearing a space helmet. He was staring at me. I figured the tuba part was the digestive tract tried to make for the car, but my feet just waved in the air ineffectually. Amazingly, that exact movement seemed to be a threat to him. He started yelling in this alien voice, "Mayday! Mayday!" and banged and bumped down the steps and out across the yard. I scared him off waving my legs! He powered up the ship, hit the sky in a cloud of red smoke, turned left over the far fencerow and disappeared straight up. My lawyer believed every word of this until I told him what I'd been drinking.

The fact was, of course, someone had followed me out there and beat me up. I don't think it was William, but it was definitely motivated by William. I found one of my notes to Martha wadded up in my pants pocket while I was checking to see if I'd been robbed, this while the state patrol was bringing me home. My wife later told me the police had thought I was dead when they found me. Figured suicide at first, they said. She told them I was an ordinary systems analyst most of the time but that I'd been real unhappy in my job lately. I told them the rake bit, and the crime lab went out and made plaster casts and verified my story, completely amazing. I told them about the saucer, and they didn't even bother me anymore. Nobody even seemed mystified by the anonymous call the police had received that sent them to the farmhouse in the first place.

I told Wes Hammatt all this stuff. In fact, I wrote him maybe five letters, through the fall, the winter, the spring. I'd been writing to him for years before all this, and I hoped he would find a way to see it all as part of the maturing process of an old friend, that he would understand and maybe, although this was a long shot, commiserate. I really needed understanding. One day he wrote back:

Dear Harold,
Don't go around asking me for approval for your adulterous activities as I am a believer in the sanctity of marriage. A lot of people who know you less well than I do, if they were to read these letters of yours, they'd think you were somewhat of an unstable personality.
Listen here. You tell that Martha person to put on a bra, Harold. That's my advice. I know it isn't helpful to have an old friend tell you "I told you so" but I'm your age, old buddy, and I'm not going through these trials and mental disturbances such as you are from what I'm reading here, going around calling yourself "a rambling guy" like you were some goddamned character in a country music song.
If you still lived in Villa Grove, I'll tell you what, you'd be coaching Little League and girding your loins like everybody else. Why a conservative person like yourself would ever have taken a job in Washington, D.C., and started living the fast life is beyond me. I know a town like that has thousands of good therapists, Harold. Frankly, Joan and I think it might be time.
Keep me posted, and, for the sake of your lovely wife and boy, stay the hell away from the Jack Daniel's. I remain yours in stark and non-supportive candor,
Hammatt