Perfume River (28 page)

It’s been a week.

Bob has appeared each night but one in a dream. His eyes are oddly warm and wide upon Robert even as the back of his head explodes. And each night Robert has awakened in a thrash of regret:
I stopped to take a bullet when I should have lunged onward to take your gun.
Last night, for the first time, Bob did not come to him.

Robert has not dreamt at all of his father. Or he has utterly forgotten him before waking. After all, he and his brother, side by side, watched the box that held the old man vanish into the earth.

But he is keenly aware:
One dead man still lives.

In the bathroom Darla has cleaned her face and she stares at its nakedness and thinks,
I am old.
She closes her eyes. She saw nothing of the event itself, arriving in the doorway after
the gunshot, Robert rushing to her while all around him the crowd surged backward, breaking apart, wailing. Robert took her in his arms, spun her into the buffet room, shielded her from the sight, as witnesses said he shielded his brother and his mother from the gun.

She can still feel his arms upon her.

She will ask Robert to turn out his light before she enters the bedroom. They have held each other every night since, but silently and inertly and only for a few minutes. She opens her eyes. She cannot bear to see herself. She looks away. Her lipstick sits on the cosmetics shelf beside the sink. She reaches out, puts her hand on it, hesitates, picks it up.

After she is ready; after she is all right again in the mirror, looking pretty good for sixty-seven; after she feels his arms around her, turning her away from harm, lifting her with the sound of a gunshot ringing in her head; after she feels his mind working beyond this door, his fine mind that she sometimes senses in his study when she is in hers; after she can picture him sitting alone at the bistro table in the corner of the coffee shop in Baton Rouge; after she is ready, she turns to the door and puts her hand on the knob and she pauses. She has felt this present desire for him often in these past few years, when her hand wished to rise to him, when her body wished to press against him; but then she has paused to consider the moment and her body and his body, to consider the day just passed and the day to come and the lateness of the hour, to consider the words that may have lately been spoken between them over some trivial thing. And she has not acted.

But in this pause now, she thinks of something to do. She grasps her nightgown at the shoulders and lifts it from her body and over her head and she tosses it to the floor.

She opens the door only wide enough for her voice and says to her husband, “Turn out the light.”

He does.

She does the same with the bathroom light and steps into the darkness.

And she crosses the room feeling like a fool, her body naked but her face made up. But no. It’s not foolish. She wants her face as beautiful as possible for him in this present moment even if he can’t see it, and she wants him to remember her body from the past, when he first loved her. This present nakedness is for herself: She can’t reason herself out of it. She must stay in her body. She must act.

Darla slips into the bed.

She keeps a small separation between their bodies, letting the dark continue to mask her intention. This is sweet to her, to let that be for a few moments. This imminence.

As for Robert, he is lifting his face from his coffee while protesters are streaming by in the street outside, but one of them, this woman with blue eyes, is standing over him, bantering at him from the start, and he hears himself speak the first words he ever said to her:
I’ve been away.
And he thinks now of her, of them:
I’ve always been away.
He turns his face, seeing only a vague shaping of the dark beside him, and he says, “If I tell you something I did in Vietnam, a thing I deeply regret, will you stop loving me?”

She answers by rising up and moving over him and descending into an embrace.

And as they make love, Darla is very glad to be connected to her husband. She is comfortable, though the parts of her that ache each day are aching now and the parts that once were vivace are now andante. But she is old. She knows him so well. And she senses her Confederate women nearby, perhaps sitting out in the yard, in the dark, perhaps under the live oak tree near the veranda, waiting for her, understanding.

Robert, too, is glad for this connection, glad to be inside his wife once again. And when they are finished making love, he will tell her his secret from Vietnam, about the man he killed in the night, and he knows, from this answer of her nakedness, that she will continue to love him. The only secret he will keep from her forever is what fills him now, unexpectedly, as he moves within her: his first days in the city of Hue, in the autumn, in the midst of a war, the air full of the perfume of fruit blossoms floating downriver, heading for the South China Sea, and the woman he met and loved and lost, and the fear he has carried ever since that the smell of the air and the love of a woman would never again be as good.

It took me sixteen years to sufficiently compost Tallahassee and Florida State University and Jefferson County into my imagination to remake them into this novel. It took me seventy years for all the rest. I offer my abiding gratitude and affection to my friends and warm acquaintances, to my colleagues and students here in Northern Florida. You have all nurtured me. And this book, as with several of my recent books, owes a serious debt of thanks to my friend and physician, Wesley Scoles, for his medical expertise as my characters dealt with life in their bodies.