The Longest Night (23 page)

“Don't be snooty,” he sniffed. “Obviously you don't know cows.”

“I don't,” Jeannie confessed. “Oh, Eddie. Don't get sore. You tell a good story.”

He smiled. “Do I?”

She was close enough now to smooth the collar of his shirt. “The best.” She brushed her fingertips over his shoulder. “Do you miss Belvoir?”

“Not the work. But…other parts of it.”

“Me, too.”

He drained his drink again.

“You're kind of an old man now, aren't you, Eddie?” she asked fondly. “I'd thought of you as this young kid, just a kid who smiled shyly at me when I'd bring in brownies.”

“I'm twenty-four,” he said, a little startled.

“You were so young when we were together. I thought you were fresh out of high school! All the wives giggled over you. They thought you were so handsome.”

“I know,” Eddie said.

Jeannie stood and refilled their tumblers, then sat back down. She had slid off her pumps and they sat to the side, pale blue and satiny, like overgrown Barbie shoes.

“Of course, I won't pretend that I didn't get a lot of attention from the fellows,” Jeannie said.

“There was some talk,” said Eddie.

“All of it respectful, I presume.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Everyone was a little bad back then. Was it something in the air?”

“No one was as bad as we were,” Eddie said, and this goofy cliché was exactly what Jeannie had hoped to hear. She knew, instantly, that victory was hers, and her confidence soared.

Eddie set his drink on the coffee table, and Jeannie used all of her willpower not to slide it onto the coaster. Outside, far across the street, two mothers walked past with prams. Jeannie's face felt very hot. Eddie put his hand on her knee and she giggled. He seemed to find this encouraging because the hand moved up her thigh, under her skirt, and found the edge of her garter, which he unclipped while he kissed her.

“You seem familiar with those,” Jeannie remarked when she came up for air. Her head was swimming.

“You could say.” He leaned in to kiss her again, but she heard a noise just outside the door and pulled back.

“Geez! The mailman! Come here.” Awkwardly she slid over the back of the couch. Eddie vaulted after her with a surprised, “Oh, shit!”

They crouched for a few minutes, listening to the light crunch of the mailman's shoes on the top step, and then the flutter of mail to the floor.

Jeannie laughed in relief, leaning into the back of the couch. “Oh my word,” she said. “This is bad.” And predictable Eddie, who nearly salivated like a Pavlov's dog each time he heard “bad,” was on her in an instant, his body covering hers. It felt divine, to lie there beneath him while he unbuttoned her dress and unhooked her bra and slid away her nylons and panties, though Jeannie found herself suddenly obsessed with whether or not his large feet stuck out on the other side of the couch. “Your feet, your feet,” she kept whispering, but Eddie did not seem to think this was reason enough for caution, or maybe he assumed she had some kind of absurd fetish, or maybe he just didn't understand what she was saying.

B
Y THE TIME
M
ARTHA
and Angela returned, Eddie was gone, the empty tumblers had been washed and dried, and Jeannie felt a bit like she had made love to a truck. “Mama!” Angela cried as soon as she burst through the door, but Jeannie patted her head and steered her back toward the nanny. “I'm sorry,” she said, “I'm terribly sorry, but I've come down with a migraine again.”

“Oh, no,” said Martha, wringing her hands.

“Can you please stay for the day? I don't think I can keep my eyes open with this jackhammer in my head.”

“Oh, my. Yes. Certainly, ma'am.”

“Thank you, Martha. There are baked beans in the pantry.” This was one of Angela's favorite meals, baked beans and a slice of white bread.

Jeannie drifted back toward the bedroom, where she had already lowered the shades. The room became remarkably, blissfully dark, even during the day. She sank into her bed, still feeling the heavenly weight of Eddie's body, the slight rawness of her rarely kissed lips, the numb, happy seasickness of alcohol. She heard Martha turn on a television program in the living room. It was almost like a lullaby, the perfect muffled and constant noise, and Jeannie finally didn't have a troublesome thought in her head as she drifted off to sleep.

T
wo letters had come from Paul since he'd left. One he'd written on the cargo plane to Greenland. He said that he missed Nat, that he could see the ocean from a tiny window on the plane, that he hoped she was eating well and getting lots of rest. “Remember, pay attention to what's going on and always be careful,” he added, which he probably intended in a loving way but which seemed paranoid to her. She wished he'd told her more about the airplane; she'd never ridden one and couldn't imagine any time in the future when she would.

When she spied the second letter a week later it made her heart jump, but this note was brief as well. He was not at Camp Century yet, he said, but waiting for the weather to clear up north so they could head there. He reported that there was not much to do other than play cards and eat; that it was very cold; that he could see the polar ice cap on the edge of miles of brown dirt; and that there was an Arctic fox that skirted the edges of camp looking for handouts. The fox must have been the most compelling observation he had because he wrote three full sentences about it (it was not pure white but slightly brown; it had small ears like a cat; and so forth) and he asked her twice not to forget to mention it to the girls. So she didn't forget. She mentioned it several times, in fact, until Sam finally blurted, “Mama! You
told
us about the fox!”

When a third letter from Paul arrived weeks later, it was six sentences long and written in a stymied, bewildering manner.

“Dear Nat,” it said. “I hope you are well. I miss you and the girls. Sometimes I feel almost like you are a dream that I won't be allowed to come back to. Nat, you are my angel. Always be careful. I love you. Paul.”

Nat read the letter over and over at the small, round kitchen table. She hated this letter. It was like a telegram from some incomprehensible place. She had it memorized within minutes. Each flat, pithy sentence turned a different key in her, as if her heart were a series of separate but connected gears.

She was warmed by the thought that he missed her and the girls, but the line about being a dream made her feel sad and almost indignant. Of course he would come back to her. She was doing nothing but waiting right there, and she could not fathom nor tolerate any doubt about his return. Besides, it was melodramatic. She was not a dream; she was flesh and blood.

She was both flattered and embarrassed when he called her his angel. She knew she was
supposed
to be his angel, because men were inherently unstable and needed a woman's love the way a pilot needed a compass. Men were the providers and the doers and the protectors of everything—finances, morals, property—and yet there was something off about them, everybody knew it, something that needed to be sheltered from certain realities, such as childbirth or the sight of a woman without support garments. It had always puzzled Nat, this way she was supposed to treat men, because it didn't seem to fit Paul and it felt foreign to her. And yet they were becoming it, as if it were inevitable. Distance was making them proper, and making her his angel.

She had lost track of time when she finally looked up from the letter. It was dusk; kids called and ran around at the end of the street. She hadn't written to Paul since he left. If she wrote, she'd have to tell him about the car, but then she'd feel like a ditzy little girl. She'd begged for that thing, fought with him over it even, and to admit that she'd gone out and wrecked the tire so soon after he left would undermine whatever argument she'd built up in the first place
.
He'd think she was the worst kind of fool. “I'm a good driver,” she'd said, that morning in the car. “I'll be careful.” And he hadn't responded, because he'd known better.

She picked up a pen and a thin sheet of lined paper and wrote a note that felt neither satisfying nor honest. “How are you? The girls and I are doing well. We walk to the neighborhood playground a lot.” That was true. “The girls loved hearing about the fox.” True, also.

When she'd sealed the envelope she set down her pen and stared at her dull, dodgy letter. It seemed meager. What was happening to her and Paul? What was he thinking, what was he doing, a million miles away? Who was he with, what did he eat; did he dream about Nat, wake up antsy for her the way she did for him? She should be with Paul. She should be with him. The idea was obsessive and impossible. She leaned her forehead into her hands and stayed that way until the room around her grew dark. She let herself inhabit that muffled grief: for her own useless self-pity and for the inscrutable man in an ice tunnel, writing letters she did not understand to his faraway angel.

T
HERE WAS A LONG
quiet spell when she did not receive anything from him at all. These weeks were the worst of the deployment. She occasionally saw her new friend Patrice when they took their girls to the neighborhood park, but other than that she was alone nearly all the time. She missed Esrom more than she liked to admit; it horrified her to think how she'd humiliated him in front of Jeannie Richards, how he might never drop by again. She kicked herself for it. His visits had punctuated her days, and now each sunrise to sunset stretched on twice as long as before.

W
HEN A DARK GREEN CAR
pulled up along the curb outside her house one morning, Nat assumed it was someone who had the wrong address and would soon discover their mistake, turn around, and drive away. She watched the car from the kitchen where she sat with her coffee, waiting to see what it would do. The driver's profile looked familiar, and she realized that it was Esrom.

She couldn't help it; his reappearance thrilled and flustered her. She wished she had washed her hair.

Esrom waved and started up the slope of grass. “Hello,” he said when he reached her.

“You came back!” she said. “I thought you might never—well, I'm glad to see you.”

“Don't be silly,” he said, reddening. He was one of those people who flushed instantly, a distinct visual
whoosh
like a semaphore of emotion.

She laughed from relief and happiness. “Where's your truck?” she asked.

“Well,” he said, smiling, “I thought you could use this.”

She looked around. “Use what?”

“The car.” When Nat stared at him wide-eyed, he explained, “It was my buddy Jacob's. It's a Dodge Wayfarer, 1949. The thing had been rode hard and put away wet, as they say, but we fixed it up. It'll last you ages now. The landlord said our carport was starting to look like a used car lot, and some of 'em had to go.”

“You brought me a car?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Oh, no. Oh, that's wonderful of you, but I can't take a car.”

“Why not? It was just sitting unused at my place.”

“Because it's…I don't know.”

“You've been without a car for weeks now,” Esrom pointed out.

Nat nodded, fiddling with a loose thread in her pocket. “I haven't even told Paul about it yet.”

“Well then, take this one in the meantime.”

Nat looked anxiously at the green car.

“Listen,” said Esrom, “I hope you don't mind my asking, but what are you going to do when you have this baby? You can't take the bus to the hospital. Or if one of the girls gets sick?”

“I was planning to get a ride with a neighbor when I have the baby,” Nat said. “Other than that, we've been riding the bus and it's just fine. Nice, even. It's less than ten minutes to downtown.”

“It's good to be able to rely on yourself, though.”

Nat couldn't deny that, although whether she'd be relying on herself or on him she couldn't tell.

“And now if you need to, you know, get out on a little day trip or whatever you like,” he added, “you'll have the option.”

Nat felt her own smile tug at the corners of her mouth. She looked Esrom in the eye; he wasn't wearing his hat, and he looked younger without it, plain, sandy haired, blue eyed. He really wanted her to take the car. He was proud of his work, she could see. She felt nervous accepting such a gift, but could she refuse it on any sensible grounds? The thought of driving anywhere she needed to go was too tempting to pass up.

“Thank you,” she said. “This means a lot to me.” She didn't want to make too big a deal about it, though, so she asked, “Can I make you some food? Would you like to come inside?”

“I gotta get back. Got some training today.”

“Training?”

“The testing station fire department.”

“Congratulations!” Nat said.

He smiled shyly. “Thanks. Well, I'm not in yet. Just training.”

“That's wonderful,” she said. The car, his news about the fire department—this was the happiest day of Nat's summer yet. “Here, let me give you a ride home,” she said. “I'll test-drive the car.”

He raised his hand to protest—“I can take the bus”—but Nat trotted up the walk, opened the front door, and called, “Girls! Mr. Esrom is here. We need to give him a ride home.”

The girls came springing out of their room, elation written on their faces. “Mr. Esrom, Mr. Esrom!” they cried, scrambling to the entryway and dancing around him. They were dirtying their nice white socks.

“Hello,” he said, laughing.

Sam flung herself around his leg. “Are you coming in? Did you bring us anything? Can we make you cookies?” She sounded like a giddy, unfiltered version of Nat.

“We're just driving Mr. Esrom home. He's letting us borrow a car for a while,” Nat said.

“A car?!” the girls cried, and Sam sprinted down to inspect it, Liddie hurrying behind. In two seconds they were in the backseat of the car, sliding back and forth across the gray broadcloth and beaming out the window.

Nat opened the door to the passenger seat, but Esrom pointed at the driver's side. “I thought you wanted to drive.”

She paused. “Sure, if that's all right with you.” She slid into the driver's seat and burst out laughing, running her hands over the large steering wheel, opening and shutting the ashtray. It made a satisfying click. “I love it,” she said. “It'll break my heart to give this thing back to you.”

“I don't want it back. But you hang on and see. Heck, maybe you'll test-drive it and it won't even be up to snuff.” He raised his eyebrows, grinning, and now looked absolutely like a little kid. “Go on! Drive it.”

She eased out into the street and headed toward downtown, wanting to bounce in the seat like her girls.

“Mama,” Sam called, “there's that lady from the party, the party wiff the Cracker Jack and the toys.”

Nat saw the familiar swirl of red hair and refined, high-heeled walk: Jeannie Richards striding along on the sidewalk, pushing a large pram. She should have expected to see Jeannie: This was the hour of her daily walk, and she was like clockwork in the neighborhood, her fine legs pumping forward as she clicked along with a strangely placid look on her face, as if the movement sent her into some trance. But it was not trance enough: Jeannie's head swiveled, Esrom raised his hand politely, and Nat, against her better manners, accelerated through the neighborhood, her heart pounding. The girls whooped and Esrom said, “Whoa there, Nellie.”

“Sorry,” Nat said. For a moment her happiness was dampened. Jeannie's expression had been critical and all-seeing.

“You okay?”

“That was rude of me,” she fretted. “Why didn't I just slow down and say hi?”

“I thought you two were friends.”

“It's a long story.” Nat hesitated. “I'm sorry you had to go do work for her, that day. She's my husband's boss's wife. I let her push you around. Now I've offended
both
of you. Boy, I'm a piece of work, aren't I?” She shook her head. “How was it, when you went to her house? Was she nice to you? Please tell me she paid you.”