Silent Retreats (19 page)

"I think we should settle the bill for one night right now, Mr. McFarland. Would that be okay? It comes to fourteen-fifty."

"I understand," Skidmore said, and paid the man. He noticed that he was involuntarily talking like McFarland, lending credence to a notion he was developing about the power and creativity of the human mind.

"I couldn't help but notice the helmeted gentleman who left here a few minutes ago."

The clerk laughed, shaking his head. "We get some crazies. That's why we have to have rules. Visitors call from down here. No women on the fire escape—we'll throw both of ya out. And so on. Used to have a printed sheet with the rules—can't find 'em." He handed Skidmore a room key. "Mr. McFarland, you'll be in room 209. It's on the second floor. Take the elevator, go to your left on two and follow the numbers. It's after 207, I forget which side of the hall."

Skidmore went to his new room.

"Dear Blondy," he wrote, nervously idling away the evening with a letter after finding his room and cleaning up. While cleaning up, he discovered he'd ripped his pants and underwear sliding down the drainpipe. Carefully, he tore the elastic band off, knotted it to size seven-and-a-quarter, and put it on his head to keep his hair back while he bent into the letter. Once in a while, when he'd look up from writing, he'd see himself in the mirror above the desk.

Dear Blondy,
I really do remember your name, but I like to call you Blondy because of your hair, which, you recall, was blond, etc. Well, I believe you are probably wondering what I have done with my life since law school. Well, I have been to Norway twice and have, other than that, whiled away my middle years on Indian reservations and in small towns near Indian reservations, doing legal work for and against Indians and white boys, etc. I was going to be a litigator at one time, you will recall, but this is more like social work. How have you been? Yesterday, I was out hitchhiking, just for fun. I had been in Ft. Robinson, Nebraska, and, on the spur of the moment, divined that I might only change towns, a matter of 214.8 miles, and reach ultimate happiness. I arrived here last night. On the way in from the highway, I accidently fell in a ditch and almost broke my ear. But I think it'll be a nice town to raise a family in.
I know you're wondering how about the women, aren't there any women in your life, etc., and the answer is really no. I used to chase a lot of girls, and I admit that even when I was chasing you I was chasing a girl. That last sentence was a joke. I don't write many letters. Anyway, I have this friend, McFarland, and I did ask him some of this stuff, about girls, and he said the one way to find ultimate happiness was to stop thinking so much about it. Have you met McFarland? I keep forgetting. He's great with the advice but he's the best friend I have. So, how have you been or have I already asked?
One thing I've learned in middle age is not to trust any woman who is not yet a memory. Such as Fiona, whom I only just left. She was not very dependable when it came to taking down photographs of old lovers, small things like that, plus she stood me up when we were having an actual date. I know this is boring. I think I mention it to let you know if I was ever a shit to you that I am now getting my just deserves.
I'll tell you something. I remember you. Do you remember me, if you know what I mean? It would be a valuable thing to me to know that you remember me. I remember you. You're the best I ever had. I like how you laughed, and I like how you really did want me sometimes if I hadn't been completely obnoxious recently. When I had you I didn't know what I had. And I didn't know then how lonely I'd be later. Etc. I don't know what to do now.
With love,
Skidmore.

In the drawer of the desk there was stationery, and he took out an envelope and addressed it:
Blondy, Box 2439, University of Louisville School of Law, Belnap Campus, Louisville, KY Please forward if necessary
. Carefully, Skidmore folded the paper and put it in the envelope. For a while he shadowboxed and made fast wisecracks into the mirror. His hangover had completely subsided, he noticed, but the letter had made him feel blue. He thought maybe he would just go up on the roof of the hotel and contemplate leaping for a while, get some fresh air. About then the telephone rang. For a moment he stared at it. He didn't even own a ball glove.

"Hello."

"Hello, this is the front desk." Skidmore recognized the voice of the old man again. "Is this Mr. McFarland?"

"Yes," Skidmore said. He prepared himself. "What is it?"

"Well, sir, could you come down here, please?"

"I don't believe so, no. What is it? Why are you calling me?"

"Sir, this lady is down here and she's crying."

Skidmore's head swam. "What's her name? Why are you calling me?"

"She wants to talk to you. I'll put her on."

"No, hell no, you just ask her—what's her name?"

Skidmore heard the desk clerk ask the person her name. It sounded like a scuffle broke out, and then she was on the phone.

"There's a goddamned law about signing into a hotel under the wrong name," Fiona said. She was crying. "What did I do wrong, for chrissake? Why did you leave? I just went to the drugstore to get you some after-shave. It was going to be a gift since we were going on a goddamned real date. I wait for you all the damned time, you can't wait for me five minutes while I buy you some after-shave?"

Skidmore was staring down at his letter to Blondy. "How did you find me?" he said.

"How did I find you?" she said. "How did I find you?" Skidmore could imagine the tears streaming out through her wild-woman eye makeup, her wild-woman hair across her face, caught in the muck.

"I knew you'd come to Long Pine. You were so fascinated when I told you about the place. Jesus." He could hear her wiping her nose. Skidmore couldn't believe she was down in the lobby. "I'm a wreck because of this, damn you. I knew you'd come here, plain as day," she said, "you all do." She wiped her nose again. "Maybe you could just tell me what the hell is going on. Do you love me or what?" she said.

Poor Skidmore, cornered by Fiona. He eyed the sheets on the hotel room bed and tried to think what floor he was on.

I think back on all the waitresses I've watched—roadhouses, coffee shops, airport restaurants. I watch them because it occupies me while eating lunch, and admittedly maybe because I'm lonely in a way women never understand, and probably because I'm tired of watching soap operas in these canned decor motel rooms with their high traffic bedspreads, tired of stripping down and taking futile, half-sleep, beer-induced naps, lulled by the sound of cars out on the highway where I should be.

And I watch because waitresses are fascinating, the way they cope with routine, their eyes down, their thank-you's flat and self-protective. Sometimes I might say something to them or write a note to them on a napkin as I leave, or I might leave saying nothing but taking a little of them with me in what I've seen and wondered. Sometimes coming out of the restaurant is disorienting, like coming out of a movie. I scan the terrain for clues as to where I am, what year it is. Waitresses deal with you as a customer, and in that way are a lot like the rest of the world. But by observing and wondering, I do at least manage to keep myself from thinking about all the other things I think about when I'm on the road.

Like all the times I bashed my head. Like the dizzy hour in the washroom back at South Ward, sixth grade, sitting on an old porcelain sink, staring down at the gray, matrix-marble floor, smelling the powdered soap and wadded paper towels, the whole room gray from the gray of frosted-glass windows serving as shelter from a gray day. Then a cloud like a gray whale, in from the corner of vision, and slam. When I wake up there's blood, a wide lake on the marble floor. I think to myself that there's been a disaster, and in a way there has, one of those little private ones that come back much later on. The teacher who found me shrieked and woke me up—she thought I'd killed myself. Mild kidney infection, the doctor says. That's what makes you blind. You broke your nose.

Then another time, the great family car wreck. Passing a truck on an old two-lane, we fly off the road going sixty, hit a culvert. Here's a 1958 Oldsmobile doing cartwheels down a fencerow, barbed wire, wooded underbrush, knee-high corn, flying suitcases and disintegrating windows. It lands upside down. Again I wake up bleeding. Elsewhere, someone squealing like pigs. Concussion, the nurse says—you'll be okay. Still have dreams about that one. Miss my brother Ben.

I do know about getting the old head bashed. In college I had a fight with a guy from town. The Fonz I call him in my memory. I'd gone out with his girl once. A long time after that I was going for a Coke at the bowling alley, and as I was crossing the parking lot he tore out from behind the building in an old Ford and tried to run me down. I shot him the bird; then I saw the brake lights and heard the wheels lock. He backed up. I bent down to look across the front seat at him, just as he was climbing out on the other side.

As he came around the rear of his car, I noticed that the Fonz was a little guy and I recall thinking I would win. Next thing I knew I had a bicycle chain around my head. I recall trying to go with it instead of pulling my face off, and somewhere in there my head hit the curb and the car and Lord knows what else. I finally got a hold of the little shit and decided to kill him, but some bowler pulled me off. Nasty, the doctor says—between the two of you I'll be here all night.

Anyway. The weightroom at old Memorial Gym, University of Virginia, was a white cell, shaped like a perfect cube, with ancient brick walls and tall windows like the interior of an old church. This weightroom, it was not the weightroom of the athletes. It was for ordinary students. We had the pre-Nautilus machines, universals with fraying cables, free weights with old bars that were rusty and sweat-pitted. The weightlifters here were not lifting in order to make the team. At the end of it, there was not a standing ovation from the crowd and a kiss from the cheerleaders. There weren't mirrors, there weren't radios like in the beach-blanket weightrooms of the stars. There were no immediate gratifications whatever. Except for this certain girl who would pass the door of the weightroom on the way to the pool and, in passing, glance in. Half an hour later she'd pass again returning to her locker.

It was a visual thing. She had dark oval eyes, olive-colored skin, straight silky black hair. I never knew her name—in my mind, I called her simply Ann. Day after day she passed the weightroom, always that moment of looking our way. I know we all watched for her, all of us who lifted at that particular time of the afternoon, although nothing was said. I'd see her other places, on Emmett Street at the crossover for instance, or in the periodical section at the library, or drinking beer at Poe's with her sorority sisters laughing around her. Once we bumped back to back coming through the turnstiles at the bookstore. She never particularly saw me, or at least there was never a moment of recognition or acknowledgment. I was not the recurring theme for Ann that she was for me.

Anyway, I met her years later, or so I thought. And this is when I got smacked in the head in New Haven. I imagined that I recognized her at a party. In fact, this person I thought was her was the hostess of the party. It was a reception at her house in connection with a symposium we and several other Texas oil companies were attending at Yale. She was living with the artist Jerome Slater, had lived with him for a while when he was at Oxford and all during the first African tour, and his friends were at this party too, half of them gay, I surmised, and the other half, I swear to Christ, speaking French. And then there were menopausal matrons and all the usual execs and functionaries, full of mutual and fleeting admiration for one another, oil and art, art and oil, money and money, it was a great party. I was with Sarah Beecher, from our Chicago office. But don't tell my wife.

Sometimes I think back on the people who are dead. Brother Ben, seven, upside down in a cornfield. My friend Carl T. Palmer, who died in the crash of a 727 on its approach to Dulles International. I wonder what Carl thought when he heard the pine trees tickling the belly of the plane. They found his ring finger, with ring. But if there is one death among the people who are dead that makes me know I can die, I can really, really die, it is the death of Sarah Beecher in deep, cold water, Lake Michigan. I'm told Sarah was swept off the deck of a prominent industrialist's sailboat while trying, during a squall, to explain what we meant in the sixties when we said something was irrelevant. I guess that's how it happens.

But anyway, she was alive and well in New Haven the night I thought I had finally found that long-lost UVa girl, lo after fifteen years of watching for her to step out of the crowd and be like she was back in the days at Memorial Gym, the image of perfection, the sweet inspiration, distant and silent and coy.

Imagine my surprise when Sarah and I arrived at this quaint little Trumbull Street apartment building, climbed the narrow stairs to the right flat, and tapped on the door—and there she was, taking me away in the breeze of her dress and perfume with the startling olive skin, the oval eyes lined with dark lashes, the piercing greenish brown eyes smiling at us both. At Sarah the way beautiful women look at one another in the company of men, at me without an ounce of recognition.

"Good evening," she said. "Come in—they're just getting started in the living room. I'm Marguerite Howe." Long arms, the lovely carriage of a swimmer even then.

I watched and waited. I was going to have to ask and make an idiot of myself. I was patient, watching close, trying to make sure. From certain angles, yes. From others—maybe. A guy (Foster Petty, I called him in my mind) struck up a conversation with us that was mostly for Sarah, and I disengaged, found the perimeter of the room and took to looking at the paintings on the wall, mostly Slater's.

They were evidently from his "bridge period," bridges and bridges only, those of the old stone and old steel, and he seemed most taken by the arching formation just over the river, and by the equal but opposite reflection of the arching formation in the surface of the water passing below, which would also give you ripples of sky and river-bank trees. He would depict the birch and the sycamore, and there would be stones flat and water-swept right at the water's surface, right at the water's edge. There was one picture of a bridge over an ice-packed river, and one of a bridge vaulting a dry riverbed. But for the most part, Marguerite's boyfriend had water in his rivers, flowing steady, one must suppose, all the way down to the sea.