Silent Retreats (22 page)

"Dad was the detail man, finding out what nurse was on duty, what doctor, holding the priest's oils, always away from her, back behind the candles, keeping busy. He was down the hall when she died.

"At the last, she was horror-struck—and what kills me is, I could tell she wasn't afraid out of pain or delirium or any of that but because she was seeing things
clearly
. She'd never be loved. She'd never have a love story. She was one little woman with this whole life behind her, nothing panning out, dying in a hospital where pulling the sheet over somebody was nothing—they did that
a few times
every day.

"Anyway, he was down the hall. I'd never seen anyone die. Have you? I guess I always thought that in hospitals they went in one of these slow, drugged-out swoons."

Rosie sighed, and I thought she might stop. But she went on.

"She kept saying in this loud, desperate whisper, 'If only he cared. If only he cared.'"

Rosie drank her beer down and clanked the bottle on the wrought-iron table. Then she folded her hands in her lap, staring down.

"I think about that. When Dad comes up on the train to visit so he can what he calls 'relate to' the kids."

When she looked down, her hair would fall forward. I had an impulse to put my arm around her, stayed where I was.

"We're probably the only ones not in bed," she said, wiping her nose, looking at her watch.

Her blouse fit loosely and casually around her. Her hands were large and expressive, not dainty. Her eyes could be hard just before these tears, and there was a scar intruding itself in the arrangement of her hair and the available light. Even in this discussion, I could pick out the aspects of Rosie that made it possible for her to deal in a business world, tough corners of herself she'd developed into tools of her trade.

"Well," I said after a while, "at least your mom had you.
You
were with her."

Rosie passed this off. In fact, her gesture seemed to deny it. "It wasn't even that simple," she said, dabbing at her eyes with this pink hanky she found in her handbag. "Sorry;" she said as an aside. "I don't cry like this when I'm at home.

"Mom and I hadn't been friends for a long time. When I was sixteen, she caught me in bed with a boy. Walked in on me. My dad was out in New Mexico buying a ranch or something, and Mom and I had this great admiration-and-trust thing going. She thought it was admiration and trust. I thought it was admiration and tacit permission—well, anyway, an opportunity—to be free. One afternoon she came home from shopping and caught me. I was in
her
bed with Michael Hannah. Truly, I don't think there's anything, at that angle, that she did not see in that short moment. She slammed the bedroom door and stomped down the hall.
Her
bed, isn't that a beaut?"

"Yikes," I said. It was the best I could do.

Rosie chuckled. "Michael Hannah's a lawyer in Florida now. I'll bet that scene replays with him from time to time." She brought her legs down and sat forward, pulling on a sandal. It was close to two-thirty. "I just want to say I didn't mean to be impolite when I said I wasn't listening."

"Not at all. I really got going. Sorry. I understand."

"And," she said. "I really enjoyed supper."

She was standing up. When she picked up her purse, I heard the clink of at least two more green bottles. 'I'm certain you enjoyed hearing about my dead mother and the great primal saga of Michael Hannah, right?"

She was taking my arm, whether out of affection or weariness I couldn't tell, and as we walked the sides of our legs would brush and bump and I could actually feel the curve of her thigh. She was talking in a low voice, but I wasn't listening. I was wondering about the next five minutes.

We had to walk across a dark patio that led through double doors into the bar, which was closed. In the dim of high-ceiling light, workers bent over the tables and stacked chairs, ran large barrel vacuums over the thick, royal-blue carpet. They were dressed in brown clothes, and the men wore hats stained through at the sweatband. They seemed to stoop so naturally, from the waist, like picking cotton; and their voices were low and sleepy. The room was still rank with the smell of stale barroom smoke. The door from the lounge led into the hotel lobby, where the lights were bright. Standing next to the column in the center of the room were two of my people, out of Dallas, and my first impulse was to duck. But they were just separating from a conversation, no doubt concerning prices at the pump, what's stored, and what we've still got in the ground.

"Here we go," I groaned to Rosie as Crazy Bob Price noticed us. He was coming.

"Oh no, this I don't believe!" Price shouted. "Harold!" he yelled back at his friend and mine, Harold Atwood. "Harold! Do you see this? Check this out, this company's only liberal meets Rose Targus, the Boston flash!" Harold disappeared on the elevator before Price finished getting this out. Bob and I worked closely and had had many talks. For him it was axiomatic that anyone who opposes human slaughter is liberal.

"I'm serious," Bob said, grinning, joining us for the short stroll down the corridor to the elevator for the west wing. "There should be media coverage of this. Movietone highlights, something. This is either a match made in heaven or the most unlikely combination I could summon myself to imagine in the whole company, coast to coast! I'm not kidding." Bob was one of those people who has known for twenty years that he can get by with this kind of talk because of the grin he has.

"Why aren't you in bed?" I asked him. I could see that he and Rosie knew each other, but, actually, everyone knew Bob Price. He seemed to have done all the groundwork for getting himself well promoted several years before, and even though the promotion never came, the groundwork remained. The promotion never came because of Bob's love of the night. The question was rhetorical.

He grinned. "I made a cardinal error, is why I'm not in bed. I called someone I knew from the old days, who lives out in Arlington. I received an invitation for supper—what could I say? How was tonight's session?"

We paused one count too long. "Never mind, never mind, wrong question, forget I asked." He was winking at us, loosening his tie.

"Hey," he said, a different tone now. "Was I as loud as I think down there when I shouted to you just now?"

"We understood," Rosie said, scoring back, and the elevator was opening for Bob's floor. I was relieved that he would be gone and I could say good-night to her in private, even though I had no idea how.

Bob was getting out. "Listen, Flash," he said, "good to see you, no kidding. You too, big guy," he said to me, "but I see you all the time anyway. Sorry if I was loud down there. I'm working on that stuff. Even I get tired of being a buffoon."

"No problem," I was saying, reassuring him, but then I noticed something strange happening in the corner of my eye. Rosie was getting off the elevator on the same floor.

"This is my floor, too." She grinned at Bob. Then she half turned to me, about to speak. Bob was holding the elevator doors, just letting them go.

"Amazing," he was saying. He was a little drunk, but there was something warm and engaging about him, a kind of unabashedness-about-everything. It made him seem innocent of business, even though he'd once done six months at Danforth for a specialized piece of market research—he'd been caught in the middle of the night microfilming abstracts of Sun's aerial propane surveys.

"Martin, is this amazing? Flash's room is on the same floor as mine." The doors were almost closed.

"For a hung-up old Catholic like myself, and a Texan, you make good company," Rosie said to me through the narrowing gap, and she was gone.

"I'm not a Texan," I said.

"He's not a Texan," I heard Bob tell her as their voices dropped away below me. The elevator was taking me up to seventeen.

"I don't even sound like a Texan," I said, staring at the menu for the restaurant on the roof, posted on the wall of the elevator behind plexiglass. The bell dinged and I stepped off into a long hallway whose length and repetition of carpet pattern combined to upset my stomach.

"I don't like Texas very much, in fact," I said, trying to find my room key. "There's too much stress in Dallas. Too much rain in Houston."

The world is full of people, many of them at cross-purposes. When you encounter someone like Rosie and talk half the night, and you're on the open road, so to speak, and so is she, this business of saying good-night is such a problem, the whole business so futile, that veterans of the road hesitate to go through it at all.

I know many guys who have been on the road for years, and most of them eventually learn it's best to have one glass of wine, go to your room, turn on the Carson show, and lapse into sleep. For others, the puzzling game of instant intimacy goes on, futile and sad. Everybody's married and everybody knows the problem, and yet the game occurs just enough beneath the surface of the things that are happening so that it keeps happening.

So I was thinking about the game and hating myself in my room, washing my face and brushing my teeth and avoiding the dresser mirror, trying to hang up my pants without dumping the change from the pockets. I confess that I felt some relief. In a way, I was glad she was gone. The good-bye in the elevator had been all wrong, yes, but I was going to make it to morning without the waftings of guilt. Lights out, I stretched out on the high double bed closest to the window and looked at the city. The amber lights on the expressways and bathing Capitol Hill gave an eerie cast to the night, with the low, thin haze seeming to dampen everything. I could see National Airport in the distance. I thought of my kids, how they reacted the first time we took a trip on a plane, something routine for me but seen through new eyes when I went with them. Thinking of them, as always, relaxed me. I closed my eyes and began my usual custom of stopping the room from its drunken spin by muttering the Lord's Prayer over and over unto sleep.

But the phone rang.

"Hello."

"Martin?"

"Hi."

"I wanted to tell you, it wasn't really my floor. It's just that goddamned Bob Price. Such a loudmouth. I know him from way back. I decided not to take any chances."

"Protecting your good name, as we say in Texas."

"Seems odd to you maybe."

"I'm not from Texas."

"That's what I hear. No, really, I never thought you were. I was just keeping the conversation rolling."

I didn't say anything.

"I acted like I was walking to my room, past his room, then doubled back. I'm too tired for intrigue, but I had to do it."

"Quick thinking," I said. You've come a long way since Michael Hannah, I was thinking, but luckily didn't say it.

"I guess, too, I wanted to thank you properly for the evening," she said. "Tolerating Mexican food and my crying." There was a long pause. "I just wanted to tell you that."

"That's real nice of you, Rosie. I enjoyed it, too. I am sorry about your mother. I got rolling with my old religion thing, and there you were, still in mourning for your mom."

"You didn't do anything wrong."

She was quiet then. I was elated she called, and could smell her perfume over the phone, but I couldn't get myself to start the whole process again. I flattened out on the bed and enjoyed simply listening to her breath over the phone line.

"Martin?" she said after a while. I was staring at the ceiling. It was stucco-looking, or was that stuff asbestos?

"Martin? Are you there?"

"Yes."

"You going to sleep?"

"Nope. Just resting."

"How's your view?"

"Well, I've got the Potomac. I've your Jefferson Monument, your Capitol dome. The two eerie red lights in windows on top of the Washington monument. How about you?"

"Foliage mostly. Treetops. Your deciduous and your native conifers. And there's a
very
tall tulip . . ." I could hear her moving, maybe stretching the phone cord. She was laughing. "Hold it, it's a flower box outside my window."

I laughed too.

"Martin?" she said to me then.

"Hmm?"

"Do you have pure blue ice in your veins, or what?"

She came to the door dressed in cut-off jeans, the same blouse, only not tucked in, and she carried a large plastic department store shopping bag which contained a robe and a few other things. We held each other by the window, her face against my chest.

I showed her all the sights through my window. I felt chatty. There was that feeling again that I always forget. The feeling that you've been out there alone all your life until now, and you want to explain to this woman how you've been feeling, go over all the stuff, the torment of work, the stress and the isolation. You want to thank her for being with you.

"Rosie . . ." I began.

"Don't start trying to talk about this," she said. "I'm only here to be held. I'll use the other bed. Say so if you can't handle it."

I could feel the warm breath on my arm when she spoke. There was a desperate kind of trust she had, very sad. Under ordinary circumstances I'd have contrived to get past this little last-minute hesitation. I could handle the terms because of the vulnerable expressions of trust, but it wasn't easy. I didn't sleep much, but stared across the gap between the beds.

And then here I was, the sun on me and my headache—I was wide awake; and there was Rosie T., deep in blankets and still asleep, across the great divide. I couldn't see her face at all for her brown hair. I reached way over and spread it away so I could see the pretty brows and dark, shy lashes, the long straight nose. Recalling that encounter now, I find that I remember vividly the heat in the room that morning. I was fascinated by the little-girl wisps of hair at the scalp line, near her face, which I lightly touched with my fingers as she slept. I could hear her breathing, wonderful girl. In that skin and how those lips were, in the distinctive character of her hands, somewhere in there invisible to me was Rosie's mom, gone to her maker.

I looked at my watch on the table next to the bed. Outside the window and far away, a 727 rocked off the airport runway, plowed up into the capital sky and disappeared beyond the Capitol dome, conveying people like me, and wonderful people like Rosie T., home.