Sparta (23 page)

Lydia nodded, looking steadily at him. “That sounds good.”

He didn't want her to look at him that way, focused and searching. All this was embarrassing: That his girlfriend wouldn't take him back and it was probably his fault, since he seemed unable to talk to her without starting a fight, and that his stupidity might be driving her away for good. That he couldn't seem to have a normal conversation with his mother, couldn't even act polite to her. The fact was that he was ashamed, and what was the matter with him?

Lydia picked up the empty paper bag and folded it neatly against her chest. “Con, if there's anything you want to talk about,” she said carefully, “you know you can tell me.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I know that.”

*   *   *

Conrad went upstairs and checked his cell: twelve calls from Claire. She'd still be at work and wouldn't answer. He could leave an apology without having to talk to her. He punched in the number. She picked up on the first ring.

He closed his eyes. “Hey.”

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Katonah.”

There was a pause.

“I've been calling you,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “I've been out. Sorry.”

There was another pause; then they both spoke at once.

“Are you coming back?” she asked.

“I was a dick,” he said.

There was a silence.

“I was a dick,” Conrad said again. “I'm sorry.” His chest felt full of barbed wire.

“Thanks,” said Claire. “Yes, you were. But it's okay.”

He didn't like her saying he was. She could have said,
No, no, you weren't.

“I don't know how to make this work, Con,” she said. “But it's not going to if you just walk out on me. Don't cut me off.”

“You cut me off,” he said.

“No,” she said, “I didn't.”

Conrad said nothing.

“Conrad?”

“I'm here.”

“I don't know what you want,” she said. “I hope you don't think everything can be the way it used to be. I don't think it can.”

He said nothing. He thought of the night with her, of waking up over and over, the terror of the darkness, the strangeness of finding her there with him. The way fear filled a lightless room.

“Do you think we can? Just be together again as if nothing happened?” she asked.

“Maybe not,” Conrad said.

“So what is it that you want, Con?” Her voice was gentle.

He said nothing. He looked up at the windows and the willows outside.

“Everything's changed,” she said. “We've changed.”

“And so then what?” he asked.

“I don't know. I think we should go slowly. Maybe it's good that you're out there instead of here,” Claire said. “This way we can talk every day. Start to get to know each other again.”

He wanted to see her and he didn't. When he was with her, he felt clumsy and powerless. And it seemed like a kind of betrayal that she'd carried on so smoothly without him. She'd been living that other life, the life everyone else had, taking showers, going to the office, having dinner with people, seeing movies, sleeping late on weekends. He wanted to demand that it hadn't happened, all of it. He wanted just to rewind and delete. Everyone over here, living their lives, made him feel invisible. Everything had gone on without him, and his absence made no difference.

But not seeing her was intolerable. He wanted to be back in her life, though he wasn't yet back in his own life. He didn't know what his own life was. He didn't know if he could make the connection between his old life and the one here.

He let out a breath. “So what do we do?”

“Let's talk,” Claire said. “We can talk.”

She sounded level, as though she were in charge. Part of him wanted to bull his way back into the center of Claire's life and move in with her, and part of him wanted a huge explosion to separate them forever.

“We'll start with today,” she said. “What did you do?”

“This sounds like kindergarten,” Conrad said, but he was laughing. “Circle.”

“You got it,” Claire said. “Next we're going to play duck, duck, goose.”

He was laughing, but the jangling current was still running through his chest.

*   *   *

The next morning, his alarm went off at five. He was trying to make himself stay on a schedule, getting up early no matter how late he'd gotten to sleep.

He was awake at once, eyes open, looking up at the ceiling. This was the best moment of the day, silent and untouched. Outside his window it was barely light, a pale half-light. The willows were still. He dressed and went quietly down the back stairs and out the back door.

The sun was just coming up, silhouetting the row of trees along the crest of the hill. The grass in the meadow was lush and heavy, silvered with dew. The willow trees hung over the driveway like still green waterfalls, their loose fronds trailing. The air was sweet and damp.

He jogged lightly down the short slope of the driveway, out through the stone pillars, then turned onto the hard-packed dirt road. There were old sugar maples along the road at the bottom of the lawn; after that, the woods drew close on either side. The trees formed a soft green canopy overhead. He ran south, down the long slant of North Salem Road, past the tangle of wild grapevines scribbled around a stand of hickory trees, past a white-fenced horse pasture. He turned onto Mount Holly, heading down toward the reservoir. He had to wait to cross Route 35, jogging in place; it was already humming with fast commuter traffic. Once across, he was back on a narrow dirt road again.

Rounding that corner was his favorite moment of the run: the sudden widening view of the reservoir, the great green space, glowing, breathing, full of light and movement, calm and silent. It always came as a surprise, the shock of spaciousness. At that moment he was aware of himself, his own strength, the way he could run steadily and easily for miles. And he was aware of the beauty before him, the miraculous presence of the water shimmering in the light.

The road became paved across the top of the dam. Along the road on the reservoir side were two small Italianate pumping stations, like fortified medieval towers. The reservoir system had been created for New York City in the early twentieth century, and the dams were built by stoneworkers brought from Italy. Conrad wondered if the engineers' plans had actually called for miniature Renaissance towers with architectural detail—blind arches, rusticated stone foundations, tiled roofs—or whether the stoneworkers had simply made the towers look the way they knew towers should look. The diminutive structures altered the perspective: against their tiny battlements, the reservoir looked hundreds of miles long.

On the other side of the road was a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. It was that high to prevent suicides, he thought. He measured himself against it mentally—where to put his hands, the toeholds, how to swing himself up and over. Below it was the sheer stone wall of the dam, dizzying rows of cut stone, perfectly aligned and set, a two-hundred-foot curving drop to the woods and bottomland. Far below was the narrow creek, meandering quietly through the reeds as though it had no connection to the massive masonry wall above it, the billions of gallons of water retained.

The reservoir lay quiet and glassy, a light-struck reach, glittering, flat, and cool in the early-morning sun, a kind of miracle. A small pock on the water's elastic fabric, small rocking circles measuring outward: a fish, rising. Beneath the green surface was a dim world of secret flashing creatures.

He ran across the dam and then on, keeping to the edge of the reservoir, the road curving along the little bays and inlets, fringed by leafy woods. Then it turned away from the water, past a farm with Black Angus cattle grazing quietly in a sloping meadow, and out to the hard road again. He ran east for a couple of miles on a narrow paved road cut between steep banks, commuters hurtling past on their way to the train station. The houses were old and set back from the road, surrounded by lawns and trees. Between them were woods. The smells of the summer earth came to him as his feet hammered out their message on the road. Dogs barked as he went past. Even here, along the paved road, the tall trees reached together in a cool green clasp overhead. He turned north, then back west along Route 35. He hated that. It was the worst part of the run, heading into traffic, the cars roaring toward him, each one like an attack vehicle. His heart was pounding by the time he could turn off the main road and onto North Salem.

Now he was on a dirt road again, hard-packed under his feet, the smooth humped curve of it sloping into ditches on either side, the woods beyond. Squirrels clattering through the branches, a deer following him with her eyes, motionless but for the nervous flick of her white tail. A possum waddling furtively over a stone wall. The woods were thin here, the understory eaten by deer. Tumbledown stone walls meandered through the trees, marking the old fields and pastures. The last half mile was a slow rise back past the wild grapevines, past the barn and lawn, leading to the short, steep stretch of the driveway. He sprinted the last twenty yards up to the house, everything inside him full and thrumming, heart and lungs, every part working. He came to a stop under the willows and walked around in slow circles. The gravel crunched under his feet. The air was still cool and fresh.

Lydia went into the city after breakfast; Conrad drove her to the station so he could use her car. He came home by the back way, taking the road across the reservoir. It was different, crossing the dam in a car. It was nothing. The water was flat and affectless, the light indifferent. You could barely see over the parapet.

At home, Conrad drove the Volvo into the garage and turned off the engine. He sat for a moment in the shadowy silence, listening to the engine tick. Against the cobwebby wall was an old sawhorse, a snow shovel, stacked cardboard cartons. A two-by-four leaned against the wall beside a rake. Unlike a barn, a garage was meaningless space, a narrow backwater for the slow tidal drift of junk.

He opened the car door. It was stiff, and the hinges creaked drily. He shouldn't be driving around in his mother's old car. He should have his own. He'd had a car in college but sold it when he went into the Marines. He could buy another; he had combat pay. Even Ollie had a secondhand Toyota.

Inside, he went upstairs to his room.

He checked his cell phone: Claire had called twice. He checked his email: a couple of messages from his men, who were now scattered. Some of them were back in Iraq. The platoon had a new commander and had been deployed to a base near Hit, in Anbar Province. Bradley was there, and Gomez and Molinos. They had minimal Internet access, but periodically Conrad sent everyone a blast, just to check in. Today he'd gotten mail from some of the guys who were still there and some who were home.

Bradley wrote him from Hit.

Morning LT. Thought you would like to know what's going on: you'll be pleased to hear that we have had no IEDs since yesterday, and also I just received a shitload of comics, a lot of good ones. Some school got hold of my name, I guess. Or who knows? Maybe they came from God. Where they have put us here, it makes Sparta look like the Bel-Air. Got to go, Semper Fi. CPL Bradley.

Bradley was from Iowa. He had sandy-colored hair, a wide, low brow, sleepy blue eyes, and some goddamn itch. Iraq made him itch everywhere, and it drove him nuts. He couldn't stop scratching, mostly his balls. His favorite pastime was reading comics, any kind. He knew every character and every story line. The other guys tried to come up with ones he didn't know, but no one had ever done it. The Super Heroes were his favorites, but he read
Archie
, too, anything, even the surreal modern ones.

Conrad wrote back:

Morning, Bradley. How you doing? Glad to hear about the comics, and sorry to hear the quarters are not so good. I'm up in Westchester now, trying to keep in shape. I'll get you some comics when I go into town.
Little Lulu
, right? Hang in there. Semper Fi. Farrell.

He couldn't tell the men he missed them—an officer didn't say that—but he did miss them.

Another message from Anderson, his sunburned seatmate on the plane. Anderson was through his EAS, end of active service, and back in Minnesota. Anderson was good-natured and generous, and everyone liked him.

Hello, LT, how's it going? Just checking in. Not much happening here. I've been swimming in the lake every day, and every time I go in I think of the wading pool we built at Sparta. I think, now I'm in a real lake! And no one's fucking shooting mortars at me! I can't believe it's for real. It all seems like that. I mean that it's for real. Know what I mean? Okay, over for now, LT. Paul Anderson. (Weird not to write CPL anymore.)

Anderson had once boosted—thrown, really—Molinos over a wall single-handed during a firefight in Ramadi. They were trying to get into a courtyard. All the houses had walls along the street, then a courtyard inside. The door to the street was metal. It could be kicked in or shot up, but if you were trying not to make so much noise or if a sniper was aiming at the door, you went over the wall, and they needed someone over the wall right then. Anderson was pumped, battle-high, and he threw Molinos over like a football.

Anderson was quiet. They called him the Swede, though he'd told them again and again that he was Norwegian. They called him the Swede, and because he was quiet he stopped correcting him. He was a good kid, always ready, willing. He never complained, though his hands had been badly burned by an IED in Haditha. He'd been sent to Germany for treatment, and when he came back, his hands were still wrapped in bandages. When those came off, his hands were red and boiled-looking, swollen and shiny with scar tissue. They were stiff and clumsy, like mitts. He could barely bend his fingers and hardly clean his rifle. The hands looked painful, as if they were about to burst, but Anderson never complained and never asked for help.