The Cradle (8 page)

She looked over her shoulder at Bill, still seated across the way, waiting patiently, watching her, legs crossed.

She smiled at him, then found herself waving. No reason. He gave a funny smile back, shook his head, and waved as well. His
wave plus his funny smile said: why are we waving across the concourse at the airport?

She turned to the water and took two more pills. She thought of the sun, and of Hawaii, of being somewhere else. The baggie
was still in her hand. She reached into it and pulled out one more with the tip of her finger. It stuck there, and she held
it up, then placed it on her tongue. Just to be sure.

Renee had been in love two times in her life and had slept with only two men. The loves were very different—one winter, one
summer. Had Jonathan not been killed, it would have been only one love and one man, and her heart would be impressed with
only one imprint. Her landscape would be something easy and traversable—she would be something like a flat prairie, like the
farmland in Wisconsin.

She sometimes wondered: would I be simple, then, if he lived? She thought of her heart as a fractured and complex thing, some
cratered mass of treacherous slopes and sinkholes, not at all something simple and easy. On the far side there was the flat
prairie, the original open place, that was Jonathan. On the other side, past the enormous divide, there was the luxury hotel
that was Bill, safe and stable, even though on that end it was always winter. The in-between landscape was the shattered land.

She thought of the burning factory she’d seen on television with Bill that night. It was the perfect kind of structure for
this in-between: it was just what you’d come to as you were making the journey from one to the next. That first love was so
long ago, thousands and thousands of years, and yet he was still there in her mind, she still knew him, she still felt him.
One night she’d been drifting off to sleep and she heard him yell her name from downstairs; her head shot up, and Bill looked
at her, and she said, Oh, it’s nothing, and then went into the bathroom and cried. She saw him all the time. There he was,
for example, at the Foster Avenue Beach in 1968, dripping as he came up out of the water in his blue trunks, coming to lie
down beside her in the sun, his dark hair flattened down on his head, his lean muscles tan. He was so young. Adam’s age. Was
that possible? The two long blue veins running up each of his forearms, meeting together at the underside of his elbows. And
they reappeared along the biceps and ran up along the fronts of his shoulders and disappeared as they snaked beneath the skin
and flesh of his chest. That image, the image of him walking toward her, was both false and true. It had happened over and
over again for one entire summer, so who could say whether her mind made it by piecing all the perfect parts together? It
didn’t matter. Besides, it was only the entryway into her thinking. That picture was the first page of Jonathan. On the last
page he was lying alone in a jungle, half gone.

They met at a party. She was a freshman at Northwestern, he was someone’s cousin. He had not been bothered about knowing no
one, about not being a student. She remembered closing her eyes and leaning against a table and swaying back and forth to
the strange music filling the house. It was foreign and had scales she didn’t know and a drumbeat with no changes, just pounding,
da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da daa. When she opened her eyes, she saw him across the room. He was holding a
joint and talking to someone, speaking emphatically, moving his right hand up and down to illustrate his points even as he
moved the joint slowly to his lips. Stoned, and high on some pill she’d taken with a girl in the bathroom, she found herself
staring at him for what felt like five minutes. Whatever part of her brain that kept telling her not to look at someone forever
had either stopped working or made a special exception for this person.

Finally he saw her looking. How could he not? When he crossed the room and approached her, she stood up straight.

She felt as if her eyes were barely open.

He said, “Hi. You look like you’re about to die.”

The music was loud, and he had to lean close to her. Even then, it was a yell.

“I just can’t understand what this
music
is,” she yelled. “It’s so funny.”

“What’s your name?”

“I’m Renee,” she yelled. “That is my friend Steven over there,” she yelled, nodding in one direction, “and that is my friend
Sheila over there,” she yelled, nodding in another. “What are you?”

“What am I?”

“I mean, who are we?” she yelled.

“Who are we?” he asked. “I guess you’re Renee and I’m Jonathan. Hi.”

She introduced herself to him again.

“You already introduced yourself,” he yelled. “I’m Jonathan. Hi. Honestly, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, Jonathan,” she said, tilting her head. “I was just looking at you. Did you see me looking at you?”

“That’s why I came over here.”

“Do you want to know what I was thinking while I was looking at you?”

“What?” he yelled back.

“I SAID, DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT I WAS THINKING WHILE I WAS LOOKING AT YOU?” she yelled.

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “I do.”

“I WAS THINKING,” she yelled, “THAT YOU LOOK LIKE A PRINCE.”

“A prince?” he yelled. “That’s nice. I actually think my family comes from peasants.”

“No, no, no, no, no,” she said, shaking her head, smiling at him. She slapped him on the shoulder. “You glow,” she said. She
looked up at the ceiling then, thinking. When she looked back at him, she said, “I know exactly who you are.”

“Who am I?” he said.

“Why?” she said.

“Uhhh,” he said. “I don’t know?”

“Who are you?”

“I don’t go to your school. I’m just here, living with my uncle and my cousin—”

“You are Charles Martel.”

Jonathan stopped talking, leaned back, and stood up straight. “Thank you very much, Renee.” Someone was dancing right behind
him, she saw, a blond-haired girl. She was shaking her head. Another student was nearby, a boy she knew from class, and she
looked at him and looked at his mouth moving and could see by the way his mouth moved that he said the words
Tet Offensive.
It was sometime near the beginning of 1968, cold outside but unbearably hot in this apartment. The music was loud. She turned
away from the student and looked again at this Jonathan.

“I don’t feel tired, Bill,” Renee said.

“They probably just haven’t kicked in yet.”

“It’s been forty-five minutes,” she said. “And I feel awake.” It didn’t feel like the fuzzy God hand had reached down and
turned her brain off. Actually, it felt like she’d been struck by lightning.

“Very awake,” she said.

“Where are the pills?”

“What?”

“Where are your sleeping pills?”

“In my bag,” she said. She reached down for her purse and began digging for the baggie. “I just brought a few.”

“Let me see them.”

She found the baggie, looked at it, and handed it over to him. He adjusted the overhead light and squinted at the midsize
yellow capsules. He held them close to his nose.

“Problem,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“These aren’t sleeping pills,” he said.

“What are they?”

“These are Adam’s,” he said, twisting his wrist to show her. “These are the ADHD pills.” He glanced at her. “You just took
amphetamines, dear.”

“That’s not possible,” she said, snatching the bag. “I just—he stopped taking those two years ago.” She stared at the capsules.
There it was, in tiny white writing.

adderall

“We still had a bottle in the cabinet,” Bill said. “The refill? It was still there. He quit and we kept them because we didn’t
know if he’d want to start again.”

“Oh dear.”

“You must have picked up the wrong one this morning.”

Renee stared straight ahead at the back of the seat in front of her. Bill was smiling. “Look, you’ll be fine. You’ll just
be a little focused for a while. You took two, right? It’ll wear off in a couple of hours. Read your book.”

She turned to him. “I took four.”

“
Four?”
he asked loudly. He looked around and then said, more quietly, “Why in God’s name would you take four?”

“Because I wanted to sleep well.”

“Are you trying to overdose?”

“If I wanted to overdose, I’d take thirty.”

“I’m thrilled you have a plan for that.”

“It’s not a plan,” she said, stuffing the baggie back into her purse. “It’s logic. I’m telling you, this was an accident anyway.”

“Okay, okay,” Bill said, hands up. “Let’s get you some water.” He pressed the overhead button for the stewardess and said,
“I’m wondering if this is the kind of problem that makes them turn the plane around.”

“I’ll be fine. So it’s some speed. I existed in the seventies.”

“You were maybe not so on edge in the seventies.”

“Just stop,” she said. “Stop, Bill. Okay? I’m fine. I’ll write.”

She had a notebook. She’d stuffed it into her purse this morning. She’d thought that maybe, given the right feeling—the right
evening on the beach, the right wind coming from the water—her mind would turn back to the last white note card on the board
and show her some way to write it.

It had persisted in the back of her mind these last months. She’d done nothing. She’d been thinking of Adam, and the poems
had, in the last months, begun to feel embarrassing. Never mind whether or not they were good—embarrassing because she’d written
them at all, because she had become a middle-aged woman writing poems in her study. It was something she should have been
proud of. A younger version of herself would have been proud. Now it looked capricious and escapist, glibly bourgeoisie, some
silly grab at self-therapy, not art, not anything that mattered.

And yet the board had stayed up. The blank note card was still there. She had begun to believe that finishing it would finish
everything. Write the poem, and the feeling will be out of you, there will be something complete. Everyone can move on. You
will never have to think of it again. If that formula was true, then it was so close, only ten lines away, and she would have
her freedom. They got the water and Bill rubbed her neck a bit and asked her how she felt. The answer was, she felt her heart
beating in her chest and was aware of every artery, vein, and capillary that snaked through the skin of her face, her neck,
and along the sides of her head. The round muscles at the bottom of her jaw were twitching. Already she had a headache. She
said she felt fine, like she’d had too much coffee. Bill seemed skeptical, but he turned back to his newspaper. She closed
her eyes, pen in hand, not knowing what she would write. She listened to the sound of the engine and she found herself there
with Jonathan on some airplane as well, crossing the ocean, and then there with him as he landed.

What was it? Hot. Humid. His letters—there were only four letters—had said that the humidity was what he couldn’t get over,
and that he walked off the plane and it was like walking into water. And so she imagined him in all the places she could think
to imagine him—sitting near a stream, gun resting across his legs. Sleeping in a barracks. Pacing through the jungle, crouched
low, forming one arm of a triangle of other men doing the same. It was everything she’d gotten from movies.

She wrote this. First she just listed the images that came into her mind, but she found herself, after filling a page with
the images, connecting them to one another, trying to make a story out of it. She made Jonathan thinking of her at night but
doing his best to not think of her at other times because thinking of her would distract him, and being distracted would get
him killed. Then he was in Saigon, sitting at an outdoor café, writing a letter to her. Around him the city was alive and
moving. She didn’t know what details to fill it with, so she just tried to think of people. An old man walking slowly. A prostitute
yelling at another table of soldiers. Children. Palm trees? She didn’t know. She took these images and did her best to weave
them in with what she had written about him in the jungle. She found herself writing whole paragraphs about things she didn’t
know about, things like what Jonathan thought of his aunt and uncle in Chicago; what Jonathan thought, truly, about the war;
what Jonathan planned to do when he returned. She found herself writing one of his thoughts: he didn’t know whether he would
marry her. It hurt to write it. She wondered whether it was true. He had promised her he would and she had believed him, absolutely.
“I understand the right thing to do,” he’d said. But. What if she had spent the better part of her life thinking of what could
have been between them and he had died there, unsure whether he loved her? Whether he was trapped? Was such a thing possible?
She never wrote to him about herself, back home in Chicago. She never mentioned the classes, sitting at desks, taking notes,
explaining to her parents that they had not
given him enough of a chance, and that when he came home, they’d know him, really know him, and she and he would be married
and they would appreciate him.

It broke down before she could bring herself to write the scene of his death. She had thought about it, of course. She had
wondered. In the first days she knew only “killed in combat.” Then she became obsessed, she wanted to know the exact details.
She had made phone call after phone call to any military office she could find, but those calls had been only frustrating
and had gone nowhere. Later she waited for a letter to arrive from somebody Jonathan knew, somebody who’d been with him. Others
had to have been there. She convinced herself that one day she’d walk to the mailbox and find a spare, simple note telling
her what had happened, what they’d tried to do to help him, why it hadn’t worked, and what Jonathan had been saying. Some
soldier friend of his would have taken it upon himself to seek her out and write the note and let her know. Instead his body
arrived and they were not allowed to open the casket because he’d been incinerated.