Garden of Lies (59 page)

him.

Her whole body shook, heaving with sobs, dry hurting ones that seemed hacked from her

middle somehow, and then it hit her.
I
can’t. I can’t ... how can I tell him? If I tell him about

tonight, then I
[356]
have to tell him everything. The abortion, everything, how all these years

I’ve been lying to him.

She felt herself grow cold all over.

She thought of poor, beaten-up Lila Rodriguez.
So this is why she doesn’t fight back. Not fear.

Shame. The way I feel now. Dirty. Guilty. As if I deserved what he did to me.

But then she remembered.

There could be a way out of this. There was a chance. She might be pregnant. And then Brian

would be so happy. He wouldn’t care about the past. She shut her eyes, and imagined him in

Central Park proudly pushing one of those big, shiny English carriages, and then gently, ever so

gently, him nudging aside the soft blankets inside for those who paused to peek.

But as hard as she tried to picture it, Rachel could not summon a picture of that imaginary

baby’s face.

Then she sensed a dampness between her legs. A small, insistent cramp in her lower abdomen.

She thought,
Oh God,
no ...
please
...
no.

But there could be no mistaking it. Her period.

Music from the radio drifted into the back seat. Bobbie Gentry singing in a smoky voice about

the night Billy Joe McAllister jumped off the Tallahatchi Bridge.

Staring out at the blur of headlights, flashing traffic signals, the lighted store windows along

Madison Avenue with their haughty, stiffly posed mannequins, Rachel wished she, too, could

jump off a bridge.

Chapter 23

Brian looked out at his audience. A hundred or so, he judged offhand. Mostly veterans, a few

wives, seated in gray metal folding chairs. Hard faces. Frustrated, angry, weary faces. Faces

whose stony expressions said:
There ain’t nothing bad that I ain’t already seen.

He straightened, shuffled his index cards. What could they expect from him? Hope? Hope that

he somehow might have a key, a cure to whatever was messing up their lives?

Brian felt himself sweating under his denim jacket.
How can I help them?
he asked himself.
I

don’t even know what’s messing up my own life, Rachel and me.

So many people wanted to hear what he had to say. Nam vets mostly. Men who couldn’t find

the right words, who needed a voice. A grunt like them who would speak out, tell it like it was.

Someone to remind them that what they’d gone through wasn’t the end of everything, that there

was still good to be had in this world.

All this flap about Watergate now,
he thought,
the hearings, everyone speculating. Will Nixon

confess? It’s like the whole country has amnesia. They’ve forgotten Vietnam ever happened. Dirt

swept under the rug. And these men who’d served in combat, just a bunch of unwelcome

reminders.

“When I was growing up,” he began, stepping out from behind the podium, leaning up against

it on one elbow, “the kids in my neighborhood knew every four-letter word in the English

language. Spanish, Italian, and Yiddish ones, too. And when we weren’t shouting them at each

other, we were marking them on the sides of buildings. But there was one dirty word we didn’t

know. It hadn’t been invented back then.” He paused, waiting for the last rustle to die down. Then

into the stillness he said: “Vietnam.”

“Damn straight!” someone yelled from the audience.

Brian smiled. “You guys know what I’m talking about,” he went on. “It’s a word no one wants

to hear, right? You mention [358] Nam, and they look away. Or they get mad, accuse you of

murdering women and babies over there. They say we had no business being there in the first

place.” He paused, saw several men nodding. “So you learn to keep your mouth shut, bottle it up.

Maybe they even got you feeling like you’re a bad guy. And then you say to yourselves, ‘Hey,

man, that ain’t fair. I fought for my country. I’m supposed to be a hero!’ He waited a beat, then

brought his fist down with a hollow thud on the podium.
“
Well,
forget
about being a hero. I’m

here to tell you we aren’t heroes. We aren’t bad guys either. Just men. Men who did what they

thought they were supposed to do, and got kicked in the ass for it. ...”

Half an hour later, Brian could see that those hard faces in the audience had cracked. Here and

there men were weeping silently, tears running down their scarred faces. The applause gathered

slowly, breaking in an angry, almost violent wave of acknowledgment.

I’m lucky. I wrote about it, got it out of my system. Didn’t even care at the time if anyone

would ever read it.

If he could compare the writing of
Double Eagle
to any other experience, Brian thought, it

would be like having malaria. The words burning in him like a fever, leaving him at the end of

the day exhausted, limp, drenched with sweat. That it had a proper ending, emerged in a form

resembling a novel, was thanks to Rachel. She’d read each page as it rolled off the typewriter,

offered suggestions, solace, helped shape the hot, angry explosion of words into a real story.

He remembered those days and nights of her residency, when she would arrive home,

exhausted, yet somehow still have the energy to go over the pages he’d written that day. He could

see her in his mind, a picture precise as a snapshot, Rachel in the plaid seat-sprung sofa in his

den, typewritten pages spread over her lap, a pencil clenched in her teeth. Like a kid in school,

she absently chewed her pencils, wearing them down to the lead. Yeah, and she didn’t look much

older than that, with her hair braided, in the big old shirts—his castoffs—she wore over jeans.

Seeing her like that, his heart would catch suddenly, squeezing the breath out of him.

Brian remembered other times, too—the three weeks on Fire Island every August, before she

became too busy with the clinic. The two of them, racing along the tide line until they tumbled,

[359] breathless, onto the warm sand. Sweet slow kisses late at night by a driftwood fire. Making

love on sandy sheets, their bodies stinging from too much sun.

Rachel. God, we were good for each other, weren’t we?

Brian felt a pang. He’d been thinking of their happiness in the past tense.

No, that wasn’t true. He loved her now as much as ever. It just wasn’t the same. Back then, it

was as if they had both inhabited one space, breathed in the same air ... and now they were living

in two separate spheres. He thought of the His and Hers towel set one of his cousins had sent as a

wedding present. How they’d laughed at the time. Now it didn’t seem so funny.
His and Hers.

Yeah, that just about said it all, didn’t it?

Now the auditorium was emptying out, a handful lingering, reluctant to let go, men wanting to

be freed of Vietnam, and at the same time wanting to recapture the kick-ass camaraderie they’d

had over there, the kind of closeness they didn’t get from their wives or with the guys down at the

plant.

Snatches of conversation floated toward him as he descended from the speaker’s platform.

“One hundred first? No kidding? Me too. Delta Company. You guys fragged our asses at Phu

Bai, after Tet. ...”

“... dicking around on the ground. Shit, man, we were up in the air taking all the flak. Ever

been up in a Slick and had your fucking tail shot out from under you? ...”

Brian suddenly wished they would all leave. He could feel a headache beginning to bore in at

his temples. A dull throbbing in his sinuses. What he wanted most right now was to go home ...

and find Rachel waiting for him there. Fixing supper. Or just hanging out. Waiting for him to

walk through the door and take her in his arms ...

Get off it, man. She won’t be there. She’s at the clinic or the hospital. Saving a life probably.

And one thing you can be sure of, it ain’t yours. You had your turn.

Brian looked up, and saw a woman moving out from the shadow of the far right aisle. For a

crazy split second, he thought it was Rachel. He felt a surge of happiness. She had gone out of her

way to meet him. Wonderful. Fantastic.

Then he saw with a stab of disappointment it wasn’t Rachel. [360] Too tall. Too dark. And she

was wearing a hat that partially shaded her face. Rachel never wore hats. She always said that

hats were for tall women; short women looked like mushrooms in them.

This one was no mushroom. A willow, tall, graceful. He watched her as she wound her way

around the knots of men, her white cotton skirt fluttering at her golden-skinned calves. Something

familiar tugged at him. ...

The woman lifted her chin, and the brim of the hat tilted up. Brian caught sight of her face, and

felt his breath suddenly leave him, as if he’d been given a hard whack across the chest with a

baseball bat.

Rose. Good Lord. What’s she doing here?

He watched her purposefully cut ahead of three men headed toward him, then she was

stretching her hand out, long slim fingers wrapping about his, warm and surprisingly soft. She

tipped her head back slightly, a shy smile peeking out from under the brim of her hat. Brian’s

discomfort was immediately lost in a rush of tenderness.

In his mind he saw a little girl standing alone in a schoolyard, scabby knees sticking out from

under a dress that was too small, her face pinched with misery. He remembered taking her by the

hand, and the smile she had given him then, a look of such radiance it had somehow turned that

shy, ugly duckling of a kid into someone so beautiful his breath had gotten all choked up in his

throat.

Brian felt that way now, as if he couldn’t get enough air in his lungs. “Rose. What on earth are

you doing here?”

“That’s a fine way to greet an old friend.” She laughed, and he was relieved to hear the easy

ring to it. No, this was not going to be a replay of London. “I came to see you, of course. Well, to

hear
you, anyway. I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the front with all these people. But I’m glad I did. I

want to tell you, you were wonderful up there. I always knew you could write, but that ... well,

you really knocked me out.” She sounded sincere.

Suddenly he was very glad she was here. “Listen, can you wait a few minutes? There are some

guys here I still have to talk to. Then what do you say we grab a cup of coffee somewhere?

There’s a diner up at the corner.”

She hesitated, and for an instant her smile wavered and the light flickered out in her eyes. Then

she answered, “I could use some [361] coffee, actually. I’m working on a brief. I’ll probably be at

it all night. In fact, I shouldn’t even be here. I just couldn’t resist when I read the notice in the

paper. My place is only a few blocks from here.”

“Great. Give me five minutes.”

Brian turned back toward the group waiting for him by the podium, but a commotion at the far

end of the auditorium, near the exit, caught his attention. Two men fighting. He caught the flash

of a knife. Holy shit.

Brian felt his own anger rise. Damn. Didn’t they
get
it? The war was
over.

He lunged down the center aisle, half-aware of the milling crowd falling back, metal chairs

skittering and clanging into one another. A knot of onlookers had formed around the scufflers,

and he plowed into their midst, elbowing them aside. Inside the circle, Brian caught the blur of

fists, contorted faces, a checked cowboy shirt torn at the sleeve. A skinny white man, he saw, was

pummeling the shit out of a heavyset black.

“Fuck you, man!” cowboy shirt spat. “I was there in sixty-eight, I saw action in Hue. I ain’t no

rear echelon motherfucker!”

“Hey, REMF,” the black man snarled, “I lost a
leg
in the Tet offensive, so don’t you be talkin’

to
me
’bout action.”

Brian noticed he was standing at an odd angle, one hip hitched higher than the other—a

prosthesis. But, hell, he was game, no,
spoiling
for this.

Cowboy lunged forward, knife in hand, and Brian felt something in his brain click, his combat

instincts snapping home like a chambered round. It was all there, just like Nam, the hot surge of

adrenaline, the humming in his ears, the sudden loss of gravity.

Brian sprang at Cowboy, catching him by the wrist, locking his other arm behind his back. He

heard a grunt of rage, and felt muscles and tendons strain and buck in his grasp ... then abruptly

go slack. The knife clattered to the floor.

Cowboy sagged, then crumpled. Brian caught him in a hard embrace, and felt his chest heave

in a wrenched sob.

“It’s okay, man,” Brian murmured. “You don’t have to prove anything. It’s over. The war’s

over.”

Brian held him while he sobbed, and saw the others looking on, some with disdain, some in

pity, most faces a mixture of both. [362]
We aren’t supposed to cry,
Brian thought,
but that’s the

trouble, isn’t it? That’s why we fight.

But, damn it, what do you do when you don’t know who or what your enemy is? he wondered,