Strangers at the Feast (12 page)

He looked around, and through the blur of wet shame he saw the bartender, two stewardesses sharing a martini, a family with small children: they were all staring. Gavin fumbled for his wallet, laid a wad of bills on the bar, and left.

Slowly, dizzily, he made his way to the men’s room, where he locked himself in a stall until it was time to board the plane.

In Boston, Eleanor met him at the airport. Gavin said nothing of what had happened. Eleanor had had a difficult couple of years caring for her mother, who had been diagnosed with cancer. They sent letters during his time away, in which she described her literature classes, her professors, and Gavin complained about the food, the weather, or the broken fan in his office. Neither said what was really on their minds, because as soon as Gavin shipped seven thousand miles away, it seemed to have dawned on them both that they didn’t know each other that well.

As Yvette was slowly dying, Eleanor was becoming more and more like her mother. She was nervous about where they would live, what job he would find, how they would afford furniture. She was nervous about his mood, which was not, as a matter of course in those days, very good.

His father was dead, the Kent State Massacre had just happened, and war memorials were being doused with tar and urine. In Winthrop, where for years he’d been treated like a prince, people said, “It’s such a shame you signed on for that mess.”

After Eleanor’s mother died, they moved to New York City. Gavin thought it might be easier living in a place where everyone didn’t think that for two years he’d been burning villages.

Focused on making good money for a few years to alleviate Eleanor’s fears, Gavin interviewed for jobs at Morgan Stanley, Fidelity, Goldman Sachs. But there was no way to hide his war record. The three-year gap on his résumé and his slight limp said it all. After all the gruesome news reports, his interviewers, who had probably once been as enthusiastic about the war as he had been, seemed uneasy with the idea of a veteran down the corridor. Morgan Stanley and Fidelity claimed they didn’t have openings. The hiring manager at Goldman Sachs wanted to know if he was undergoing psychiatric treatment.

“I graduated from Yale. With straight A’s in economics. I have a
recommendation from Franklin Sommerworth. What more do you want?”

“Mr. Olson, try not to let yourself get worked up.”

He offered Gavin water, a sugar cookie. No job.

Gavin interviewed for two months before he got an offer.

“I think you’ll take to the calm environment here,” the man at Reynolds Insurance said.

Gavin was given a small, windowless office on the twenty-ninth floor of the Empire State Building. The walls were blue and hung with framed photographs of roses and irises, powder room decor. Classical music was pumped through a small speaker mounted in the corner. He sold life, fire, car, medical, flood, and umbrella policies. Over the phone he convinced people they could lose everything in the blink of an eye, which he was beginning to believe.

There were ten other office doors, with other nameplates, and occasionally he heard the soft click of doors opening and closing. But they all kept different hours, and submitted their weekly sales sheets to a large oak box marked:
PROGRESS
. Notes would appear on his desk afterward:
Good work, J. Reynolds
. It wasn’t until their first quarterly strategy meeting that Gavin looked around the elliptical glass conference table at a dozen men his age, one with a stump of an arm, another in a wheelchair. Jeremiah Reynolds’s only son had been killed flying a Huey over Tay Ninh.

Eleanor was trying to make a life in New York, but Gavin hated the building mixers she arranged. He couldn’t bear standing around with law students and hippies, self-righteous draft dodgers who wouldn’t have lasted a day in any army.

“You mustn’t be so judgmental,” Eleanor would complain.

“They judge
me
. Insurance salesman equals idiot. And they’re right. It’s a dead-end job. If I told them I was a vet, then maybe they’d see what I was up against. But that’s a conversation stopper.”

“Sweetheart, please don’t go about
advertising
it. It makes people uncomfortable.”

And this was the beginning of Gavin’s realization that for the rest of his life most people, no matter what he said about his Saigon desk job, would still imagine he’d gone on a killing spree in the jungle. Two million men served in the war, only a fraction in ground combat.

The truth was, Gavin had killed two men before his injury. He shot them close enough to see their faces, which he thought of from time to time, and which disturbed him. He wished he’d known their names. It seemed a shameful act to kill a man and not know his name. But none of his feelings resembled those of the disturbed veteran-characters who eventually appeared in the movies.

It seemed to him that the people who had stayed home
wanted
veterans to be tortured. Wanted soldiers to be paying penance for the whole misguided endeavor. Because as long as the men who fought were still dealing with it, everyone else could sweep the war under the rug.

Gavin didn’t want veterans neglected—a few Reynolds men kept flasks in their desks, and all day he heard the glide of drawer casters, the loud sigh after a sip of gin—but when the world so firmly expected a person to unravel, it felt like someone tugging the thread.

After six months at Reynolds, Gavin wanted to escape his windowless office. If no one would hire him, he’d go back to school, he’d get so many degrees no firm could pass him over. He decided to apply to law school, studying for the LSATs while he was supposed to be making sales calls. His Reynolds colleagues advised against it: campuses were the hotbeds of antiwar sentiment; hippies were shouting veterans out of classrooms. Gavin also knew that money would be tricky, and he and Eleanor would have to move, but he didn’t want to get stuck in sales his whole life, and told Eleanor as much.

“Sweetheart, you can’t go back to school. You’re going to be a father.”

Gavin was stunned. In all the scenarios of his future, parenthood had not entered his mind. And it was the one that changed everything.

In the years after the children were born and they moved to Westport, as Gavin rode the long commuter train home at night with a folder of actuarial reports in his lap, he thought back to high school in Winthrop, where he’d been voted most likely to succeed, to his years at Yale, where he’d once dined with the university president, where, after he took the 800-meter title from Princeton, his teammates carried him over their heads through campus chanting “Ol-son, Ol-son.” Sometimes when this memory seized him, Gavin would nearly leap from his train seat and press his palms to the black windows of the doors. He lowered his body in a lunge, one leg thrown back so that his calf muscle tingled in an almost exquisite pain, the seams of his wool suit pulled tight. Through the dark windows lay the towns where all the men seated around him would soon carry their briefcases down silent streets, wipe the bottoms of their polished shoes on a
WELCOME
mat, greet their aproned wives, kiss their children, and have a conversation about the weather, the grocery bill, new kitchen cabinets.

Sometimes Gavin pushed so hard against the windows that the men around him glanced up from their newspapers.
See? I’m not like you
! But they looked down again quickly, bored and unconvinced, and Gavin eventually lifted his own briefcase in defeat and stood dutifully awaiting his release into the night.

This sense of entrapment produced in Gavin a child’s rebellion. In the early years, amid his long days at Reynolds Insurance, he indulged in juvenile deceptions, halfhearted dalliances. But only what he believed fell within the scope of masculine autonomy. Eleanor, who never shed the anxiety she’d inherited from her mother, raised the children, and one day the small giggly creatures who had waved around macaroni artwork, who had stampeded through the house dressed as unicorns and dragons, were, he realized, kind-hearted human beings. Miraculously, his house was filled with what he recalled from his own childhood as love. Clumsy, unspoken,
harried—nonetheless love. And toward his wife he noticed a growing affection, the familiarity that came with decades of shared breakfasts, whispered postparty astonishment at the misbehavior of other people’s children, amusement at drunken neighbors wielding garden hoses at midnight. But this affection was compromised, he believed, by Eleanor having borne witness to what had become of his life, by her memory of who he had been. And he recalled the woman he had imagined his wife would be. From time to time these ghosts, these younger, other selves, tiptoed down from the attic, rattled the windows while he slept. He felt deceived. He woke in the night and looked at Eleanor. Did she feel it as well?

He did not know how to express tenderness to the person who had become the mirror of his disappointments, who had seen his every failure. Eleanor accepted their life, and him, with a cheer that rendered him silent. She suggested after-dinner strolls, picnics at the beach; with a stoniness he did not quite understand, Gavin refused her. The idea that he was punishing her made him sick. It was himself he loathed. And yet in his obligations as a husband, he decided he was fulfilling his duty. He worked hard, paid the bills. He rarely drank, never raised his voice. He was an insurance man now, that was all. She should not expect more. If he had to accept life’s disappointments, so would she.

ELEANOR

One day, several years after they had moved to Westport, Eleanor stood on the back porch cleaning Gavin’s telescope; she wiped it down carefully, from the tripod to the lens, with long, slow strokes of a dust rag.

“Oh my, what would Dr. Freud say about this?” A slender, tanned woman stood with a pitcher of lemonade in one hand, a bottle of bourbon in the other.

“My husband is very serious about his telescope,” said Eleanor, continuing to dust. “Are you new to the neighborhood?”

“I’m Martha Bixby. We just moved into the Victorian on the corner of Summit and Pleasant.”

Which Eleanor already knew because she had spied the woman several times during the day through Gavin’s telescope. A habit she had taken up since both children entered school, especially exciting when she saw moving vans.

“Eleanor Olson.” She shook hands and resumed her dusting.

“Eleanor, stroke that telescope one more time and it’ll have an orgasm. Let’s have a cocktail.”

Martha was five years younger than Eleanor, and her husband worked as a lawyer for Pan Am. He frequently traveled on business and Martha, lonely, would wander over in the afternoons, light a cigarette, and complain: at 6:00 a.m. he left to take the commuter train, often not returning until 11:00 p.m., too tired to tell her about his
day. Pan Am kept a corporate apartment near Grand Central and he often stayed overnight. Martha wanted to know if Eleanor thought he was keeping some floozy.

“Does Gavin ever stay in the city like that? I mean, wouldn’t you wonder?”

“Oh, no. Gavin works late about half the week. It’s the new corporate culture,” she said, repeating a phrase Gavin often used. “Our husbands are just trying to give us a good life.”

“
Is
this a good life? This makes you happy?”

“Happiness encompasses many things.”

Martha fingered her long, black hair. She had olive-toned skin and always wore a pair of beaded turquoise earrings that fell practically to her shoulders. She said they had once belonged to her great-grandmother, a genuine Navajo.

“I miss when he was a student,” Martha said, “when he was in law school and he studied at home while I watched television. I’d throw a bra across the room and tell him to come give me a kiss.”

“Gavin used to play violin for me! Can you imagine my husband playing violin?”

“Do you think the war…”

“Heavens, no. He’s just so busy. You know how many phone calls he makes a day? Two hundred. That’s his quota. The company keeps a precise record of every number he dials. Less than two hundred, and it comes out of his paycheck.”

“I bet you’re a good wife.”

“Oh, I really couldn’t say,” Eleanor lied.

“I’m a lousy wife. I burn toast. I sweep the dirt under the sofa. If we ever move and someone lifts that sofa, I’m done for. I don’t know why he married me. All the other Pan Am wives look like they went to wife school. I don’t think he knows why he married me. No, wait, I do know. Because I’m a good lay.” Martha picked up the pruning shears and slowly snipped the air. “I suppose I could have an affair. But with who? Have you seen the mailman? Denture city.”

Such talk! Eleanor told herself not to be judgmental. But she also told herself she was very lucky she wasn’t like Martha.

“Martha, I’m sure your husband loves you.”

“Hey, let’s start a group. For women around here. Consciousness raising.”

“We’re too late for all that, Martha. You and me, we’re a group!”

But things with Martha went downhill. The next time Eleanor saw her, and she lit up a smoke, it wasn’t a cigarette.

“Want one, Ellie?”

“The cops could arrest you.”

“I wouldn’t mind a night in jail.” She distractedly fingered one of her turquoise earrings. “A change of scenery.”

Then, in early October, Eleanor looked up from weeding the garden and saw Martha with an empty pitcher hooked on her forefinger. She wore bell-bottoms and wedge sandals; her unbrushed hair fell loose at her back. She slumped into a lawn chair and let the pitcher thud onto the lawn.

“Martha, you look purple! What’s wrong? Did you have a fight with Richard?”

“I missed my period.”

“Martha! Oh, that’s wonderful! This could be just the thing to help your marriage!”

“No, Eleanor. I did something stupid. Really dumb, professionally dumb. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. The baby’s not his.”

“Oh.” Eleanor pulled her chair close, dismay and excitement seizing her at once. This was terrible news—adultery, an illegitimate child—yet Eleanor felt the thrill of secrecy, of her own sudden usefulness. “Look, Martha. You have to go to confession, get it all out, and be done with it. You’re not the first woman in history to do something dumb. We’ve all cut little corners here and there. Just keep this to yourself. You mustn’t tell anyone else.”