Lainie replays, almost hourly, the sight of Richard first walking through the door of the Baltimore house. The crisp, buttoned dress shirt he wore bagged about him like a druidic cloak. He’d lost weight and was pure, knotty muscle. His posture was wary and vulpine. He was shaven to a rubbery gleam, his cheeks milky white from being hidden by a jungle beard while the rest of his face had cooked bronze. For a long moment, they’d stared at each other. He squinted as if he didn’t recognize her; her fingertips flew to her beehive, her lipstick, her fingernails. Was it too much? Too dazzling after he’d seen nothing but raw, filthy men for so long?
Then Richard had gently lowered his bag to the ground and a single quake had rolled through his shoulders. Two small tears, one from each eye, rolled down his smooth cheeks. Lainie had never seen her husband cry, had even suspected he didn’t have the capacity, and to her surprise, it frightened her. She knew, though, that it was proof that she meant something, that they meant something, and she ran to him, bound her arms about him, pressed her own crying eyes into the stiff folds of his shirt. Several seconds later, she felt his hands on her back, but cautiously, as if his instinct had become to hurl off creatures that attached themselves to him.
“I’m … sorry,” he’d said.
Lainie still wonders about this. Sorry for being gone? Sorry for crying? Sorry for his inability to embrace her like a normal man?
“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “You’re here. You’re here. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“You look … you feel…”
She wonders about this, too. Did she look as strange to him now as South American fauna did seventeen months ago? Was her softness the softness of sucking mud, of boar carcasses, of other sorts of jungle rot she couldn’t begin to imagine? So she’d shushed him, told him not to speak, just to hold her. It’s something she regrets. Whatever lost well of emotion his two tears had indicated was crusted shut by the following day, impervious to her gentle prods. It was Richard’s protective instinct, perhaps, against the disorienting assaults of the city.
It was only when Timmy and Tammy rollicked down the stairs to greet their father did Lainie break from Richard, turn around, and consider the empty, unfurnished house behind her. Her knees wobbled with a terrible suspicion. What if she’d had nothing to do with Richard’s tears? What if it had been the perfectly clean, virtually silent rooms behind her that had moved him?
She wrangles the same dress shirt Richard had worn home around the ironing board’s nose. It’s best not to think such thoughts. It’s best to concentrate on what she can do now to be a better wife. Maybe it’s not Today-worthy, but Richard’s Occam job is important. Imagine what would happen if she left a burn mark on his shirt. It would hint at problems at home. And there aren’t any. Her job is to help Richard by taking the mess of warfare, however it hits him, and to scrub away the dirt, the grease, the oil, the gunpowder, the sweat, the lipstick if it comes to that, and to iron it tidy again, for her husband and family, of course, but also for her country.
6
THE NAME ON his tag reads BRAD, but Giles has seen him wear JOHN on occasion, and once even LORETTA. Giles presumes the second was by mistake and the third a joke, but the misnomers have introduced enough uncertainty that Giles is reticent to use any of them. He definitely looks like a Brad: six-foot-one, six-foot-two if he’d quit slouching, a face of forthright symmetry, straight teeth bordering on horsey, and a whipped-cream dollop of blond hair. His eyes, as melted-brown as the chocolate from the burned-down chocolate factory, brighten when they see him. Giles swears they do.
“Hey, there, partner! Where you been?”
Brad’s voice is broadly, unspecifically southern, and Giles becomes mired in its syrup. Hair worries engulf him: the gradient of his toupee, the crop of his mustache, the hazards of ear and eyebrow stragglers. Giles puffs his chest and snaps off a nod.
“Well, good afternoon to you.” Too professorial; he unscrews it. “Hey yourself, partner.” Who does he think he is, a schoolboy? “Very nice to see you, indeed.” Three redundant greetings. Just perfect.
Brad stilts a hand to the counter and leans onto it.
“Now what might be your pleasure?”
“It’s so difficult to say,” Giles gushes. “What, if I may ask, would be your personal recommendation?”
Brad drums his fingers. His knuckles are scuffed. Giles pictures him pitching firewood in a forested backyard, wood flakes alighting upon moist, minor abrasions like golden butterflies.
“How you feel about key lime? We’ve got a key lime that’ll knock you back to Newark. It’s that one there, top floor of the tower.”
“My, that is a vivid green.”
“Ain’t it? I’ll fix you up with a nice, hefty slice, what do you say?”
“How can I spurn such a tantalizing hue?”
Brad scribbles the order and chuckles. “You always got the best words.”
Giles feels a blush rise up his neck. He battles it back with the first thing that pops into his brain.
“Tantalizing comes from the Greek. Tantalus, one of Zeus’s sons. A troubled boy, to be sure. Rather famously, he sacrificed his son and served him up to the other gods. Not unlike carving up a pie. But it’s his punishment we commemorate. He was cursed to stand in a pool, hungry for fruit that was pulled away each time he reached up, and thirsty for water that ran away each time he kneeled.”
“He chopped up his kid, you said?”
“Yes, though the point, I think, is that Tantalus was not permitted the escape of death. His fate was to suffer knowing that everything he wanted was right there in reach, but he could partake in none of it.”
Brad chews over this, and Giles feels his blush resume its northerly creep. He’s often marveled at how a single painting can say so much to so many people, and yet the more words one uses, the more likely it is for them to turn on their tellers and expose them. Brad, he is relieved to see, chooses to abandon classical analysis. He spikes the order on a spindle.
“I see you got your paint bag there,” he says. “Working on anything good?”
Giles knows it’s an old man’s poppycock to make-believe that this or that cordial question throbs with furtive significance. He’s sixty-four. Brad can’t be older than thirty-five. Well, what of it? Does that mean Giles can’t enjoy the spar of good conversation? That he can’t feel good about himself as he has so rarely in life? He lifts his portfolio as if only now noticing it.
“Oh, this! It’s not much. The launch of a new food product is all. It seems I have been entrusted with captaining an ad campaign. I’m en route to a meeting at the agency, as it happens.”
“No kidding! What kind of food product?”
Giles opens his mouth, but the word gelatin feels flaccid.
“I probably shouldn’t say. Confidentiality agreements, you know.”
“Is that right? Lord, that sounds exciting. Drawing art, secret projects. Lot more exciting than slinging pies, I tell you.”
“But food is the original art! I’ve always meant to ask. Are you Dixie Doug himself?”
Brad’s guffaw is explosive; it tussles the bangs of Giles’s toupee.