Silent Retreats (9 page)

There was no telling when we'd get the time, because work mercilessly absorbed us both, and of course I was a family man and a Chief, and Martha had a child and husband. In fact, Martha was married to one of the real, all-time ranking ass holes, a guy named Bill, who thought for a long time—he was then about thirty-five—that if he just never came home from work, if he went on every trip he could, if he drank every martini ever offered him by any executive in the next echelon up of Buckley-Formitron Digital (BFD), well, someday he'd be president of the whole damn company.

And naturally the people at BFD loved that kind of old-fashioned ambition. They knew Bill was one of the all-time ranking assholes, but, in their case, this was a very big career plus. If he could harness and sustain the energy and determination which made him the asshole he was, and could get some experience in the world of hard knocks, they knew that there was virtually no limit to the asshole Bill could become.

His one real drawback, however, was major by any standard and caused BFD executives to shake their heads, rub their chins, and pace. BFD was a forward-looking outfit and very much into personnel development (PD, they called it), and there was a lot that the BFD PD consultants and specialists could handle in the way of drawbacks and deficiencies if they had
the right raw material
, so to speak. And ordinarily they would not hesitate to invest in a comer like Bill. But in Bill's particular case, because he was such a broad-based and wide ranging asshole, the company was frankly hesitant to invest in his executive development. With an asshole of this proportion, they were into an area of numerous unknowns. They knew, for instance, there was an odds-on chance someone would kill Bill and, with that, negate a very significant PD investment. They hadn't become great by taking crazy chances.

There had already been an attempt on this gentleman's young life. As a practical joke, when he was breaking in with the company down in Dallas, he peed in the Listerine bottle of the guy he was on the road with, a redneck salesman from South Texas with flat ears, walleyes, and no discernible sense of humor. For Bill—Martha calls him William—for William, this joke was enormously funny; for the redneck who gargled the pee—well, two days later he caught Bill on the freeway en route to the airport and opened fire on him with a thirty-aught-six. Although he missed Bill himself, he put a three inch hole in the door of the company car and blew the steering wheel off its mounting, causing a fantastic wreck to occur. Bill was in the hospital ten weeks with broken ribs, broken toes, and a broken face. Of course, the company had to pick up the tab. There was a rumor, unconfirmed, that someone in BFD's personnel development section turned in the redneck for spite, maybe because he missed. Anyway, he's still locked up down at Richmond.

When Martha got back from Houston and hung over my desk, talking about women's liberation and sexual harassment on the job, her small, pale breasts visible in the shadows beneath the crisp drapings of her blouse, I determined that I would have to quite soon make every attempt to explain some things to that girl.

So one evening (it was my wife's racquetball night and Scott went with a friend to
Star Wars
for the second time in two weeks) I slipped over to Martha's apartment to have a chat (her husband, I knew, was in St. Louis having the last of his plastic surgery—the face thing had gone on for years). Just my luck, though, she wasn't there and consequently, with some misgivings, I left her a note:

Dear Martha:
I came by to explain some things to you, strictly business of course, and just my luck you aren't home so I have to leave you a note.
I've been wondering, are you really serious about this women's liberation thing or are you just trying to make it clear that you have thin hips, went to Vassar, and are currently underemployed? I'm wondering because I just read
Newsweek
about the Houston convention and it sounds like a bunch of bull to me, no offense. Sounds like a bunch of women going around trying to act like a bunch of men.
Anyway, I had always thought you were one of the smart ones and now it seems that you, like everyone else, are going crazy, lured to insanity by Walter Cronkite and Gloria Steinem.
Sincerely,
H. Brodey

For days things were the same. Into my office Martha would stride, smiling, asking questions, and I remember that, for me, it was a very strange period. I would watch her eyes for some new recognition, some acknowledgment of my communication. None came. At work and at home I was doing a lot of daydreaming and was probably acting oddly-forgetting things, losing things, not noticing things.

Gradually my wife came to the conclusion that I was unhappy with my work, because, she observed, I
always
seemed distracted when I was unhappy with my work, and in fact there is no doubt about it, I wasn't particularly happy with my work. It wasn't "my" work anyway, and anyway it wasn't particularly "work," but whatever I was doing day in and day out in the plain, sterile box of glass offices on Dupont Circle, I sure wasn't particularly happy with it and my wife was right about that.

But also, confession time, I was gradually becoming quite taken with Martha. In the atmosphere of that office, with its blind, empty toil, if a man weren't distracted by a woman like Martha, he was either a victim of the illusion that he was rising in the company or else he was dazed to a gray blur.

When all is said and done, love is all there is, to coin a phrase. Tell you what. I decided to shack up with Martha at the very first opportunity, blessed soul, because love is all there is; and also to quit my job, just for spite. Wrote a letter to my old friend Wes Hammatt confessing part of my intention (I figured if I wrote it as though it had already happened, it would further incline me to go through with it):

Dear Wesley,
Thought I'd drop you a short note and tell you that things are fine around here and that, just for spite, I quit my job today and am about to embark on a new adventure. You know what I decided? I decided I'm going to be a hell-bent hippie-dad to my boy and a hippie husband to my wife and a middle-aged flake to the rest of the world.
I told the boys down at work that they could take it and fly it straight up Hemingford's chimney for all I cared—laughed in their faces. I walked straight into Maynard L. Hemingford's leopard-skin penthouse office and told him that none of it mattered one way or the other, so I was quitting and that was that. He was pretty startled all right.
Drop me a line and welcome me to the leisure class. And remember this always: love is all there is.
Your old buddy,
Harold

In fact, though, in the days right after my note to Martha, when I was beginning to feel disoriented, I was amazed that she offered no sign of ever having received it. I began to think either she hadn't in fact received it, couldn't read my handwriting, or had decided to ignore the fact of my existence outside the controlled and confined dynamics of the office. My worst worry was that somehow my note had been intercepted.

I remember how that concern nagged at me all the way home the Friday before the Chiefs' camping trip. It would have been so comforting if Martha had only given me some sign and not forced me to wonder. When I got home that night, even though I was way too tired and preoccupied to do it, I sewed our vests, out of burlap and corduroy. I thought I had a pretty good design, primitive but vestlike. I had to work most of the night. I kept a bottle of Johnny Walker with me to help me through the hard parts. The project was absorbing, I'll say that, and for a while I forgot Martha existed.

About eleven, I was on the street looking for somewhere to buy buttons, brown leathery ones that would blend with the style of the vest. I had in mind a sort of Davy Crockett effect, rough and ready, but wash and wear of course. Mine came out a little crooked, especially on the seam under the left arm, and there were a couple of other ragged and uneven places that I went after with scissors to make them look intentional. I learned a few things that kept me from making the same mistakes on Scott's. I was doing all of this in the dead of night, he and my wife sound asleep in another part of the house. For a surprise, I took the liberty of attempting a small monogram on the left side in the front of his. At the time it seemed like the perfect touch.

That morning a van with the words
Tribe II
painted on the side in Indian writing came by and picked us up for the camping trip to the Blue Ridge. We had our vests in a backpack, to be unveiled whenever everybody else's were, and Scotty was real enthusiastic about the camping part although he was mortified that he'd be the only one with his initials in red script on his Chief vest.

On the ride up, we had a good seat, isolated in back. I had some time to think and sort of relax, doze a little to catch up on the night's sleep. One Chief dad, named Ted, was at the front of our van (seven vans in all were making the trip), taking care of the details and tallying checklists on a clipboard. We were in good hands, so I sat back and allowed my mind to go find Martha. I thought about her lack of communication just when I was needing her to be responsive, and what kind of family obligations such as this she must have been engaged in, exactly the kinds of things that might have prevented her from getting right back to me. I forgave her for a few minutes. I didn't know much about her family, actually, except the stories about her husband. At the office, family realities were usually obscured. I don't know why.

When we got to the campground, high above a bluff Stonewall Jackson once used to reconnoiter the Shenandoah Valley, I was enchanted. This outing was just what I needed. Scott and I pitched our tent on a handsome spot with a fabulous overlook, and at sundown we looked down on the backs of circling hawks far below us yet high above the valley floor. I was still nervous about putting on our underachieved vests (he had already said he'd wear his inside out to hide the monogram). So far no one had vests on, and so I was beginning to assume there would be some kind of ceremony of collective unveiling, some terrible moment when Scott would be embarrassed by his daddy because of the slapdash sewing job I'd done.

Finally the kids drifted off to play and the dads were sitting on some logs around the fire. I seemed to always be standing or sitting near Ted the Organizer. He had built the fire, take-charge guy, with the sticks and logs all standing on end and tipping inwards like a teepee, very precious.

"You're new?" he said to me finally.

"Right," I said.

"Brodey is it? "

"Right." He made a note on his clipboard.

"Pretty up here, don't you think?"

"Fabulous. You always forget a place like this exists so close to D.C."

"It's true."

He seemed pleasant enough to me. His hair was brown and perfectly groomed, and he wore a beard so carefully cropped that it seemed to defeat all rationales for having one. I decided to broach a dreaded subject.

"I've been wanting to ask someone. About the vests, you know?"

"The vests?"

"Right." I was conscious of the other Chief dads around the fire.

"Hey, Ozzie," he said across the fire to one of the dads. "When do we do the vest thing?"

The guy who was apparently Ozzie shrugged that he didn't know, but there was a strange grin also. I sensed a conspiracy. I felt very much on the outside of this group.

"Don't worry about the vests," Ted said. He seemed ready to accept me even if I was not yet a pure Chief dad like the rest.

"I'm not worried. I was just wondering when we put them on. Do we need them on this trip?"

He smiled. Some of the others had heard this exchange and were mumbling among themselves.

"And also I was wondering, does anybody have a copy of the rules and regulations? I wanted to review them. I've never seen them written down."

Ted was shaking his head. "I don't want to sound judgmental," he said, and I braced myself—I was always the guy asking the procedural questions, details, details. "But it's hard to believe, isn't it, that they really expect a bunch of men to sit around sewing vests?"

"I don't think my wife's started ours yet," Ozzie offered from across the fire, and some of the dads laughed. Ted reached into a bag next to the log he was sitting on. He handed me a very cold beer.

"Here's to the rules, Brodey," he said.

It was a great evening. I hadn't felt that relaxed in weeks. That night, peaceful in the tent, Scott asleep next to me, raccoons rummaging in the brush outside, I had a lot of time to think. Martha, a sweet dream, was on my mind. And all her women's lib stuff, what an obsession. I don't mean to suggest that in spirit I was not somewhat in sympathy with some of the things women were saying they stood for in the days of the ERA crusade, to the extent I was able to discern them. It's just that their techniques weren't really very liberated. It's absurd, for instance, to depend so heavily on the government and governmental processes in order to revolt against structures and traditions which have long been culturally dictated, reinforced, perpetuated by government and governmental processes. What fun the boys had watching the girls chain themselves to the statehouse door with their sloganized T-shirts and their falsetto chanting.

But all this had certainly given Martha and me something to talk about, and I was thankful for that. I thought of her, her dark hair, her eyes, imagined those arms around me and mine around her.

Above the tent somewhere in the dark was an owl on the limb of a pine. He hooted the whole night, softly but persistent. At first he was driving me crazy, but I gradually came to terms with the soft cooing. The tone was friendly somehow. I imagined that he was trying to tell me about himself. In the morning there was half a squirrel lying in a heap in front of our tent, a gift. Later I realized it was an omen.

Because. As I said. Martha. Had eyes deeper than the deep blue sea. I had listened raptly to all her high hopes for the ERA and for improving the lot of women, and I'd found myself involved. She'd gone into detail describing the arguments in the feminist literature she read, and all I could do was look at her and love her. When she came across the part in
The Women's Room
where the author says she hates men, one and all, each and every, and that's that, well, Martha talked about that in the office for a week, everyone nodding or making neutral coffee-break-type comments like "Uh-huh," "Yup," or "Sure, Martha, anything you say," and then for them it was back to work as usual, but for me here she came, striding into the office, staring into me with those eyes, leaning way down to point things out, asking whole bunches of questions. I'm damned if I can recall what she was asking. I found myself envying old William. Love is all there is.