Silent Retreats (20 page)

Presently, I went straight to Marguerite, who was standing ornamentally next to the tall, thin artist. "I hate to say this, but haven't we . . . I mean, at some time in the past, a long time ago, I think, haven't we . . ."

"Met before?" Marguerite said.

"I was wondering the same thing, exactly," I said.

"I don't believe so." She looked away. Marguerite and Jerome were so urbane and worldly that they almost collapsed from boredom. Slater came from a world where this kind of approach is not used even for the sake of humor, and he wheeled abruptly and disappeared into the kitchen.

"No, I think we have. Really."

"I've never been to Texas."

I looked down at my own name tag,
Bob Price, Market Dev., Dallas
. "Oh, that! I'm not from Texas. I'm from Illinois."

"I love Chicago. Don't I, Jerome?" Then she noticed he was gone. "I was there in 1974. I was there with Jerome in 1979—Jerome is who just left." She grinned. "He tried acting, at the Goodman. Do you know the Goodman? That was fun. I love Chicago."

"Chicago isn't it, my dear, if you'd shut up a minute."

She laughed abruptly, stonily. "Oh, this is real cute—where's Jerome." She looked back toward the kitchen.

"I'm serious," I said. "We accidentally bumped asses once in the college bookstore, University of Virginia." Her jaw may have dropped as I said this. I was losing her fast now.

"Think now. Charlottesville, '68. Jeffersonian democracy? The blessing of the hounds, the old engineering building, Mincer's, the pool at Mem Gym." I waited for her to soften. Nothing. "I can't be wrong. I'm never wrong about a face. I spotted my first-grade teacher on the ferry from Patras to Brindizi."

"I've never been from Patras to Brindizi, and I've never been to Charlotte. Don't you think I remember what school I went to? I do the Northeast mostly."

"Charlottes-ville. You
what
the Northeast?"

"Never been there. Never have."

"How can you say this to me?"

"Please," she said. "It's a mistake."

"Oh, bull."

She looked straight at me. I had decided on an impolite course of action, hoping maybe a fight would break out and I could skulk away unnoticed.

"Really," I said straight into her face. "Be serious. You used to like to swim, maybe still do. You wore your hair long. Striped swimsuit." If this was the right girl, she was going to be amazed by my attention to detail.

I looked across the room and saw that Sarah was totally absorbed in conversation. Foster was very smooth, his hair razor-cut, his tie carefully loosened, his eyebrows combed. I checked several times and Sarah never looked up.

I was beginning, it is true, to allow that this woman was not my UVa fantasy girl, only a reasonable facsimile. She was sipping an old-fashioned. We were all sipping old-fashioneds by then. Her mouth was harder than the mouth of the girl I remembered, or maybe it was her mood, or maybe the rigors of passing time. Maybe we were all harder and softer than we used to be.

"Look," I said, and I took her arm, walked along beside her. "Try to see it my way. I never make this kind of total error about a face. I have to go with my instincts."

"Would you not," she said laughing. She looked at me and I let go of her arm. Luckily she didn't dart away.

At this time, I noticed a quick, attentive glimpse from Sarah, just in the act of turning as Marguerite whispered to me, "The coffee's in the kitchen."

How do you know in the afternoon when you are drinking too much beer that you are going to need all your faculties in order to be articulate that evening? I was in a bind, being in a strange town, in the company of Sarah Beecher who, at that time, had progressed beyond relevance to feminism and didn't take shit from anybody.

Marguerite must have had a lot of parties. She knew to roll up the rug and let us spill and wet on the heavily waxed hard wood if it came to that. She was using these very hefty glasses, with a thick glass base and her initials, MMH, etched on the side.

"I can't help but notice that your name begins with MMH, and I think I even might exactly recall that the girl I'm thinking of, back in Virginia, pretty pretty girl—this whole thing is quite complimentary if you think of it—I'm sure her name was MMH, something like that almost exactly." I was laughing sheepishly. "At worst, we have a
major
coincidence on our hands."

"Look, Bob, go talk to your companion. She's lonesome for you."

"She would appreciate that—I'm serious." I turned the both of us so that my lips could not be read from across the room. "But it's you I want."

Here I achieved Marguerite's full attention. I set my sights on living through the next three minutes. The chances were fair provided she didn't shout for Jerome. The stage was set for a soap opera. Sarah's glass was already in the air, ice sailing away from it in slow motion, the drink splashing on people and causing them to contort their faces and fall away in stop-action, hurky-jerky style like when the film comes off the sprocket.

Bob, Maggie, Sarah—you think about all the soap-opera triangles you've seen. Maggie doesn't agree it's a triangle, says it's a square. Sarah's a nurse at the hospital, has many emergencies. Bob is a doctor, lawyer, and successful architect, runs a women's magazine on the side. The two women are wonderful, but different; Bob is different, but wonderful. Everyone is attracted to everyone. Suddenly Sarah inexplicably murders Sylvia, Bob's second wife's first husband's fiancée; Sylvia comes back in dreams, gives Sarah a case of the nerves. Sarah confesses, goes to jail, is found insane in a court of soap-opera law. She studies anthropology while in jail, and Maggie assists Bob at the magazine, starts her own talk show for women.

When Sarah gets out of jail, she and Maggie often meet for coffee, discuss Bob. Oblivious to this, Bob goes on business trips where he has many adventures and close calls with girls on the demographic bubble who look alike and want to be stars in the soap operas. Finally, Bob learns that he's adopted, which makes him sad. Sarah reveals she once knew someone who was adopted. Maggie has a baby, puts it up for adoption. Sarah gets a job at the courthouse.

Amazingly, one day the adopted child comes back and wants to talk to Maggie. The child is now seventeen although everyone else on the soap opera has only aged two weeks. Naturally, Bob, Sarah, and Maggie are astonished. They meet for coffee. Someone steps up and asks Bob to sing, so he does, to the astonishment of the regulars in the nightclub, bar, and/or lunch counter. It turns out Bob is not really Bob—he is David. The bad news is he isn't really a doctor; the good news is he isn't really adopted. David goes to jail for not being Bob. Sarah asks, "But where is Bob!"

"He's getting carried away," Maggie Howe says. The ambulance was very well lighted, large gray whales swimming. I have no clear recollection of the following week.

Later Marguerite tried to cheer me up by telling me how this event had really been the turning point of the whole evening. The group loved it evidently, having a body among them. Late arrivals, she said, assumed it was a gangland hit which missed and some poor bastard from Texas got nailed by accident. She did satires on the artists—the artists wanted to believe, man, that there had been an affair, man, and this babe had kept a secret from this dude too long, man, you know, and he had doggedly sought to learn the truth. She had resisted, and he took her arm, man, sex you know, and he started using this big-guy weight on her, man, and she says enough of this shit and she pulls this little silver piece out of her purse and pop, Jack, she blows him away. Went down like a goddamned tree. Dumb oil company guy anyway. Forget it.

According to Marguerite, it took forty minutes for the ambulance to arrive. On Tuesday, when I woke up, the doctors were on the golf course and a nurse—Bunny, I called her—with a small but crucial chip out of her nose and pointy glasses bent over me and said, "Well hello." Through her white dress I could read the designer's name on the elastic band of her bikini panties.

"What happened to me?" I asked her. No answer.

"Sarah's gone back to Chicago," Marguerite told me when she came to visit.

"What happened?" I asked her.

"Sarah said she was real sorry," Marguerite told me. "She said she didn't know why she did it. She said when she threw it she never thought she'd actually hit you. She said she saw red when she realized you were doing your thing again. She said you really bled and you never seemed like the kind of person to bleed."

I sat up, realizing I was in a hospital. My bed was surrounded by airy yellow curtains. "What happened to me?" I asked her again.

"We covered for you at home—bad fall at a party, nothing serious, you were lucky, home by Friday. Your wife bought it, we think."

"Am I okay?" I asked her. I couldn't see straight. I wasn't sure I could move my toes. She started to talk past my question again. I took hold of her arm. "I need to know what happened to me."

Pretty eyes, she looked down at me. "You got your head bashed, Bob."

You think about women. You know women aren't everything, but once in a while you think they might be. The Sarahs and the Maggie Howes, their pretty smiles and their knitted brows of concern, their hair flying in your eyes. Most of the action is mental, make no mistake. While you may bump into them at the bookstore, they may never know you exist and that you love them. Perhaps no one knows how happy it makes you just to see them walk by. You stare at waitresses. You crane your neck in heavy traffic. You become what they call a womanizer.

While I was in the hospital, Marguerite and I had several nice chats, and later she helped me get my things at the hotel and took me to the plane in her little green Rabbit. By that time I knew the whole thing had been a drunken mistake and that she wasn't my UVa fantasy girl, but she was nice, no doubt about it. She lectured me about my chauvinism.

"What's a woman to you?" she asked. She smiled at me, mercifully. "For you a woman is someone to make you feel like a boy. It isn't good for you, Bob, all these lies and deceptions. Think how it makes the women feel, your wife and everybody. Settle down. Get some character."

This is how intimate we got. Marguerite Howe has my blood in the cracks of her hardwood floor. And she told me to get some character.

I went home and cultivated a lull in my life. I imagined my brain was healing. I operated at a basic level. I decided to stop loathing my job and wanting to rush through the office vomiting into the typewriters. I tried to be faithful and truthful. My wife and I went out to eat a lot. I made it a point to eat basic foods, drink to a basic excess, stay away from the girls at the office and on the road, stop watching the waitresses, concentrate on business, and, also, I took up running. I was a little depressed, and I think now that running was a last-ditch attempt to die a heroic and dynamic premature death rather than the shameful, guilty, regressive, gluttonous, wearisome, promiscuous, and despicable premature death I was headed for. I was feeling guilty about my life, and I was thinking a lot about dying.

A shrink once told me at a party that I should give up drinking and align myself with the stars. I guess that's how those guys work. They say something like that to you and it stays in your head because they're a shrink, and later it occurs to you that you might know what they mean. I decided the reasons I was fading so fast were work, drinking, lying, late nights and pretty girls on the road, and, finally, bad organization.

I decided to address head-on, with a high heart and an eye to the future, the problem of bad organization.

I sorted everything. It was a long-range project. Sorting and labeling. I didn't just label things; I labeled the shelves I put them on. I bought staplers and note cards and a couple of two drawer filing cabinets for the home. I had a different stack of note cards for each category of my life. Every paper clip had its place. This went on for several months. There was no doubt about it. It was a large glass, and Sarah had hit me right on the button.

In the meantime, back at work, I was doing even more driving than I used to. After Carl Palmer died on the Blue Ridge in that 727, I wasn't interested in airliners. I leased a Buick and spent my thirty-second year on "cruise."

One day in the spring of the year following the Marguerite Howe disaster, somewhere between Junction City, Kansas, and Denver, I looked into the rearview mirror and there, driving a dark blue BMW, was a beautiful woman, her hair flying in the wind, chic sunglasses, peering coyly around me. When she passed, I watched for her to look my way and I think she might have, just for a second.

I tried to imagine what she must be like, and where she must be going. I tried to imagine the silk threads in her voice, the warm breath. We were on a big four-lane, and I commenced to play a game. For no reason I would signal to change lanes, and move over into the left lane. I was about a quarter of a mile behind her. When we would come to little rise in the road, in which for only a moment we would be obscured from one another, I'd take that moment and switch real quick into the other lane again. For half an hour I did this, supposing that she was watching my every move in her mirror.

Finally, as I was cruising along in the right-hand lane, I repeated the process again, signaling so she could see, shifting lanes, then waiting for the rise. When it came, I shifted real quick into the right lane again. When I topped the rise so I could see her, I saw to my absolute glee that she had switched to the left lane. And all the way to Denver we were never in the same lane again. I would switch, she would switch to the other. It was a coded conversation of some kind, a dance. Sometimes I would pass her and speed up ahead, and at the first rise I'd switch lanes. In the flat again I'd look back and see that she had switched, too.

Once, and this was the real surprise, I had to get off the four-lane to get gas. I knew the game was over, but I had no more gas. When I came down the entrance ramp back onto the highway—I couldn't believe my eyes—she was parked on the shoulder waiting and rushed off again ahead of me to play some more.