Silent Retreats (21 page)

On the outskirts of Denver we came to a moment that, I guess, had been inevitable all along. The moment designed to resist loss. We were on a city street by this time, and finally she signaled to pull into a big, empty parking lot. Which she did. After seven hours of this strange game, there was the desire to meet, to say hello. As I went by, I saw her watching me in the mirror. I saw the realization hit her that I was not turning in, that we wouldn't meet. She looked down. I drove on, washed away in traffic. Five minutes later I changed my mind and went back, but she was gone, of course.

Anyway, I'm in a restaurant alone, on the road. I'm watching waitresses. Several of them are clustered in a back booth (all the booths are vinyl, cracked at the wear points). And here comes another one, evidently off-duty. Mary Proletary, I call her in my mind. Bless her—see how she scans the place when she comes through the door. Either she knows herself in some solid, truckstop way, or she doesn't but doesn't know she doesn't.

Anyway, you can tell she pulls no punches. Her cheeks are rosy; she's still young. She isn't a quasi-professional like me, carrying flip charts and slide-tape programs around in her trunk—a labor guy, trying to live the executive illusion. Mary doesn't have to consult, tell people what they already know so they'll pay her. She never has to use the term "application oriented" in anything she does. She never says "bottom line."

She comes into the place in her off-hours—I wonder why. I watch her. She's showing the other waitresses pictures of her baby. They peer down through cigarette smoke and black eye liner. They smile and laugh together, rubbing shoulders as they huddle over the picture. It's interesting to watch them look at her. I'll bet they wonder about Mary, and Mary's boyfriend, whom I estimate to be a trucker from Memphis.

Mary is wearing a sundress, and I can see the straps from her bathing suit Xeroxed into her skin. Her hair is frizzed and peroxide reddish blond. Her walk is steady and solid, straight ahead. Her lower legs are full of the genes of work, her back narrow so the bones show. She's been granted seven years to flower and bear young before she plunges into the dim middle world I'm peering at her from, anonymous, scarred, guilty futile life, totally unrelated to anything a person ever dreamed of or wanted. Lonely, burning, storms. I dread returning to the car and the four-lane highway, using the credit card to call the office and tell them the Dallas estimates drawn from Boston data.

I watch those waitresses. They wonder about old Mary, and Mary's boyfriend whom they've never seen except in the shadow of a baby's snapshot. They wonder, watching her, about how happy she seems, and how she manages to hang on the way the customer in this place tips.

Here I was, or part of me, trying to explain to someone, Rosie T., why there's no God, and I was drinking. Almost always on the road I'm drinking—usually Johnny Walker black from a silver hip-flask McClure gave me before he died of the good life—all of this on top of black beans and beer.

"I think about the blood," I was saying. Over the years, I'd become accustomed to the mean anger I could now feel getting loose from me. "Here's God's son, sent to the world to save us. He's going to do this by, what they say, 'dying for our sins'—but first he says 'Do this in remembrance of me' and he starts eating his own body and drinking his own blood. This I'm supposed to explain to my children. Rosie—are you with me? I swear, what in hell was that guy doing? We're talking about the New Testament here."

There sat Rosie, drinking imported beer, gold earrings glinting in the partial light when a breeze lifted her hair. Her eyes were focused down, and her feet were bare.

"I don't know," I said. "When I was in college, I'd get in these arguments with the priests. They drove me whacko with their opposition to abortion, a belief they held up right next to their patriotic tolerance for napalming the citizenry of small . . . never mind, you remember all that. Abortion was bad, but arming ourselves so that we were second to none in our ability to fry the whole planet—that was okay. I said, 'Guys, try to look at it like this: maybe you don't care so much for the already born but instead are genuinely concerned about the unborn. But look here,' I said, 'if we fry the whole planet, think how many unborn babies we might kill.' Of course, this was a wise-ass oversimplification if there ever was one."

Rosie was peeling the label off her bottle. Sometimes her expression would change. I'd see an edge of a smile, an edge of a nod. Faint as these responses were, I chose to accept them as rapt appreciation for the wit of my argument. We were out by the tennis courts, under stars visible through the city haze. Off some distance behind her, the vaguely lit and looming old style hotel waited like a mother ship anchored offshore.

"I'm telling you," I told her, "there's nothing more unsatisfying than trying to nail a bunch of priests for inconsistency."

It's lucky I was drinking, because God is a big topic—bigger than sex, bigger than fossil fuels, I tried to tell myself, bigger than ennui, consternation, thwartment, and other characteristics of my professional life. To address the nonexistence of God, or to presume to address it, required drinking, which in turn provided me with a good excuse for the quality of my argument.

"Now, the idea was that he was going to save us by letting us hang him on the cross and bleed to death, or, I guess, God was going to save us by letting us do that to his son. We hang him up there between a couple of thugs and the whole business comes to pass just like the prophets had predicted. Naturally, since they had predicted it, we had to go ahead and do it."

Rosie's crisp gray skirt and white blouse glowed, her gold necklace, long and graceful, glittered in the light and shadow.

"Then—let me know when I'm being offensive—he rises again on the third day, opening the question of 'Is it really such a sacrifice to send your only begotten son to die on the cross if you have the power to bring him back in glory three days later at the drop of a hat?' You with me?"

Rosie was in the company, out of Boston. I was from Dallas. She took a sip from her green bottle and smiled. On other trips, before this evening, I'd seen her at meetings. She had one of those faces I'd keep seeing, and sometimes we'd even exchange glances. I'd been surprised this evening when, after the last afternoon panel discussion had ended, suddenly it was just the two of us drifting down Connecticut toward a Mexican restaurant she knew about, beyond the embassies, the arches, the long bridge.

"Don't misunderstand me," I said. "I oppose abortion too."

I watched her peel the label, and took another hit from the flask.

"God," I said. "Is that me? Is that my breath I smell?"

Rosie laughed abruptly, her eyes flashing up to mine, bright, clear, very pretty. "You could have said you don't like Mexican food," she muttered, razzing me. Finally, a verbal response.

"I love Mexican food. I was just checking to see if you're listening. I love Mexican food." I relaxed a moment. I could smell her perfume when the cool breeze came around just right. "Jesus," I said, "I'm starting to depress myself."

Rosie brushed at her dark hair. She was a beautiful girl. When in the past I had seen her, she would be sitting in corners of hotel bars, in intense conversations with someone, or striding down hallways among her friends, laughing and gesturing big. There was something captivating about her movement—bold, confident, but still very soft.

"I don't drink like this at home," I told her. Her eyes were down again now. "The blitherings of a drunk. By the way, I don't mean to run roughshod over whatever it is you believe—I'm not doing that, am I? You have to look at these as the blitherings of a corporate drunk or whatever—quick, change the subject. Extricate me."

She was looking down, no signals. Her hands folded now, motionless in her lap. Her beer on the table almost gone.

"I told those priests, I said, 'Look guys, if there's a God, why isn't war a sin? What do you want?' I said. 'War contains rape and lying, insanity—sometimes people even get killed. There's inebriation and profanity, stealing, promiscuity—what do you want?'"

I heard myself resort to old letters-to-the-editor, old complaining missives to the draft board, old 1960's runnings-off-of-the-mouth.

"'So where's the mainstream American church which follows the footsteps of the Prince of Peace and says absolutely no to war?' I said to them, 'Some churches say no to dancing. A lot of them take very brave stands on gambling and birth control. On the topic of frying the planet, however, there's some question. Right? You get high-level debate on that one. You get damned near to the Amish before you find religions extreme enough to oppose war.'" Rosie just sat there. I was wearing out.

Now she looked up and muttered, "So you say there's no God because of what churches do?"

"Hell,” I said, "I don't know. There probably
is
a God. He probably planned all this as a test."

I was now beginning to feel like I'd been drinking the scotch through my eyes. Rosie remained at rest, her legs up on the wrought-iron table (skirt perfectly tucked and folded for modesty), her face rosy-cheeked from imported beer and the night air.

"Oh well." I was trying to back myself down. "Talk, talk—how did I get on this godforsaken subject?" I put the bottom of the flask against the sky. Out came the last of the Johnny Walker, down my throat sore from raving.

"My goodness, but you sure told those priests, didn't you, at your college, back in the good old sixties." Rosie was looking down, as always, at the bottle, at her hands.

"Okay, sorry—I'm wound up." I smiled, trying to slide off the hook with a flanking maneuver. "If I offended you, I'm sorry."

"Not at all," she said. "Actually, I don't know what in hell you've been talking about."

My face froze in a waxy half-grin. I tried to push a chuckle out through the wax, but it wouldn't go. I was leaning forward, a posture left over from my last glorious moments as a religion bullshitter. I had the need to swallow, but I was afraid I would gulp audibly so I resisted, but this made me almost choke. She was right, of course. When I'd started the conversation, it had been ordinary and banal subliminal seduction fare, getting to know one another and so on. But I'd caught an old ideological thermal, and the thermal and the scotch conspired to ruin me. Now Rosie's face wore a polite, perhaps even a shy, smile. She knew she got me.

What a strange test. Two people otherwise married, out by the courts in the middle of the night. Was it my imagination, or had the growth in the number of business meetings held in hotels exactly paralleled the growth in the number of professional women in business?

What a life. Waiting or hurrying in the airports, waving big at the taxi stands, hopping in and out of friends' cars at the various bars after meetings, that's the way things were, and in the hotels thousands of faces passed by me, thousands, motivated at cross-purposes, full of plans and secrets and wondering. Their briefcases and careful choice of clothes, the unspoken whole life behind their eyes—home, where the reality was, where the real, not plastic, loves were—home, behind them somewhere, or half thought of in the half-finished letter in the breast pocket or worthless little toy picked up in the airport gift shop.

I leaned back in my chair and sweated out my penance. The air was getting damp, and there was a chill. The morning fog, it appeared, would not be confined inside my head but would spread to the streets, bridges, alleys between tall buildings, would hover on the Potomac.

After a while she said, "You seem so angry at something." She looked at me. "Are you like that? Seriously. Your whole face changes."

"Doesn't sound like me to me," I said, trying to laugh it off.

"I don't know," she said.

It seemed like that was about it. Time to pack it in. Count it as a miss—attribute it to anger in the eye of the beholder.

After a while Rosie took a long sigh, and her chin came up, her eyes, and she was saying something, almost too quietly. "My mother died three months ago."

She quickly waved off a gesture of mine that I was so sorry, and she was going on.

"She was fifty-five and no great friend of my father. I have memories of loud fights. But, anyway, she had cancer, which had been in whatever they call it—remission—for a couple of years, then came back.

"She knew she was dying, but the doctors tell you not to think that way, so every time she did she had to do it with guilt, as if the
fact
wasn't bad enough. We sort of thought she'd come to terms with dying—I guess people can. But right at the end she was real disturbed, wild in her eyes—she was grabbing out at things next to her bed, shouting, crying. God, that's with me forever.

"The doctor said she was really unconscious, couldn't feel a thing, bullshit, bullshit—she was supremely lucid.

"My father was in and out—he couldn't stay still. He had this kind of automatic chant, 'Everything's going to be okay, okay, okay. Everything's going to be all right.' He'd say it not to tell her the truth—I had the feeling it was to keep her quiet. I'll never forget when the priest was giving her extreme unction—now they call it 'anointing of the sick.' The whole room got cool and smelled like candles and feminine hygiene deodorant.

"'Am I going to die, Al?' she'd ask him, and he'd say, 'Why no, honey. Of course not. C'mon.'

"The priest who gave her the last rites, he came and talked to her—many times. They talked alone. He held her hand. Sometimes they prayed, and from the hall you could hear this low monotone duet. His visits would always give her some peace, they really would. If you could have seen that, you'd have thought, 'I don't
care
whether or not there's a God, get that guy back in there!'

"But my father—I could tell he wanted to be warm toward her, but something stopped him, the same thing that had stopped him since day one. She'd look right at him sometimes, all eyes, you know the way they get? She weighed about seventy-five pounds.