The Trinity (27 page)

“What happened, if I can ask, to your husband?”

She doesn’t answer. The car pulls in front of Lutherkirk Castle, a well-kept ruin, the courtyard adorned with manicured hedges, the face of the castle lit with floodlights as the twilight approaches.

“I don’t know much about this castle. It’s always been a little too close to home to be interesting to me, maybe not glamorous because no real drive is required and no decisive moment in this country’s history took place here, at least not that I’ve read about.” 

She doesn’t get out of the car. They sit facing the castle as the Austin idles loudly. “The best time to come here is in the summer,” she continues, “not now, when all the flowers are dead and the grass isn’t really green. The garden here is fantastic, very colorful for a country that always seems so dreary.” Chris nods, feeling awkward that his question remains unanswered. He won’t ask anything about her past again. He notices that she no longer looks at him while speaking during her brief monologue about Lutherkirk Castle. She stares blankly out the window and he realizes how good it made him feel to have her looking at him while she talked, even while driving, casually glancing at him with a smile on her face, looking him in the eye.

He misses that, even though it’s only been gone for moments.

No woman, not even his mother, has ever looked him in the eye in a friendly way, as if there were interest in his attentiveness. He has never seen feminine eyes twinkle in response to his gaze, to his questions.

He feels something in his stomach that he has never known upon recalling that sensation. A fluttering in the base of his stomach that is more intoxicating than any beer he has ever drunk. Butterflies. His lack of experience doesn’t know what to call this feeling.

He does know that he is maybe in love. Maybe. Infatuated, definitely. And this emotion surprises him. Karen has always been a figure of authority, not unlike a teacher, and though she is not nearly old enough to be his parent, she is maybe twelve years older than he is. The space in years seems vast, as if a lifetime separates them.

Still, he realizes he has developed a sort of crush, but different from the ones he had in school. In school, the girls were unapproachable and probably didn’t even know his name. He stared at them across cafeteria and library tables and from lonely desks in classroom corners. Never has a girl talked to him so candidly and intimately.

Maybe this is the start of finding peace, Chris thinks as Karen reverses the car and heads towards the base.

She drives Chris all the way to the barracks as the Ministry of Defence Police at the gate wave her onto the base.

“We’ll have to do this again,” she says while extending her hand.

Chris takes her hand to shake it. “Yes,” he says. “Thanks. Thanks a lot.” And he leaves his hand in hers until she takes it away.

Chris is miserable in the first hours of his separation from Karen. The day has been exhilarating and he feels somewhat clean for having done something leisurely without resorting to drinking, and he actually learned something in the process. His vision of the world has increased by a little more.

He returns to the barracks just after the galley has closed for the evening. He finds Hinckley moping about in the room, wondering where Chris has been. He knows Chris’s schedule and expected him to be back when he got off work so they could eat supper together.

“Where ya been?” Brad asks Chris, who enters the room with a silly grin on his face. His tone is confrontational.

Chris senses Brad may be jealous if he realizes Chris has befriended anyone else.

He lies.   

“I was at the site, studying some of my job qualification requirements. I want to be ready, you know, to get promoted.”    Hinckley is satisfied with this explanation. “Ya eat yet?”

“No, have you?”

“Yep, but if you want to go to the club, I’ll go with ya.”

Chris isn’t really hungry. He ate a late lunch in St. Andrews and he is too gleeful to eat, but he agrees anyway and they wander off into the early evening darkness.

At the club, Chris absentmindedly eats a burger and fries and Hinckley slurps a milkshake loudly, sucking the straw obnoxiously as the cup quickly empties.

Brad prattles on about his usual subjects: football, the poor quality of life on the base and in Scotland, and his hatred of the Navy.

“Any damn fool can make it in the service,” he says. “Black, white, yellow or brown, you can make it. Shit, even me.”

Chris ignores him. His thoughts are on the past day and Karen. The next day watch is still two full days away. He glances at the clock above the bar and calculates the hours.

He asks Hinckley a question, an abrupt one, and it takes him by surprise.

“You ever have a girlfriend?”

Hinckley doesn’t answer. He swirls his straw in the empty milkshake cup.

“Well, yeah, sure, of course.” And Chris knows he’s lying. There is a certain air and lack of confidence that tells Chris that like himself, his roommate has never had a girlfriend.

“Really, who?”

“Well, hell, lots of them.” He forgoes the empty cup for one of Chris’s cigarettes. He lights it somewhat nervously between two of his chubby fingers. He stares at the table.

“A couple, ya know, in school. Nothing serious, just had some fun.”  

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“What about since you’ve been here?”

“Naw,” Hinckley says. “I can’t stand them damn Navy women. They all act like they’re good looking when you know damn well that where they ain’t surrounded by like eighty guys for every girl they’d be nothin’ special. But here, even a fat ugly chick can get a date; they do all the time. And them bloke women…” He gives a dramatic shiver. “Well, they’re just plain ignorant.”

“Have you known any?”

“Don’t have to. I can tell by lookin’ at ’em.”

Chris lights a cigarette and stares numbly at two young sailors playing pool at a table in the corner of the club. They chalk their sticks incessantly and Chris wonders how hard of a game it is to play. There are two girls watching them play, two girls Chris has seen on the base. He wouldn’t call them ugly. He is jealous of the four; they are smiling, enjoying life, and seem quite at ease.

Chris inhales his cigarette. “Don’t you ever wish you had a girlfriend, you know, instead of hanging around me?”

Brad is taken aback by the candor of Chris’s question; he has never had anyone ask him about how he should feel.

“Shit, I don’t know. I guess, hell… I never thought about it.”

There is silence almost a minute.

“Well, I want a girlfriend,” Chris says. “I think this sucks, watching other people with girls. No offense against you, but I’d rather hang out with a girl.”

Hinckley can only nod. He has never talked about girls with anyone before.

Chris finishes his cigarette and they wordlessly rise to leave. Brad suggests a beer and Chris declines. He doesn’t want to blemish that pure feeling he has enjoyed all day. He wants it to remain clean. He wants his mind to remain clear as he falls asleep and thinks about Karen.

They go back to the barracks and silently get ready for bed. Hinckley simply pulls off his jeans and socks and grabs a t-shirt and climbs into his rack. Chris brushes his teeth and puts on his Navy-issue sweatpants and t-shirt.

His body is somewhat tired, but his mind is wide awake as he stares open-eyed at the barely visible ceiling. There are two days before his day watch, and he wonders how he can pass them. Hanging out and reading in the barracks won’t quite do; he knows that he won’t be able to concentrate on words.

He enters the nocturnal world through daydreams. He envisions himself as Karen’s boyfriend and feels silly for feeling so in awe after just one day of friendship. But something inside him stirred, some emotion that he never thought he could feel.

It must be love, he decides.

He sees himself living with her in her tiny apartment in Brechin, spending quiet evenings at home together, both reading silently and then eating together.

Sex, the thought of sex, doesn’t enter his mind just yet. He is a virgin, and this is something that causes him anxiety. He knows she was married, so she must have a measure of experience. But how much? And why isn’t she married anymore? And is she truly not married in her heart?

An hour, maybe more, passes in this sometimes blissful, sometimes agitated daydream.

Then Hinckley interrupts the silence. Chris assumes that he’s been asleep all along, but he, too, has been thinking.

“I hear you’re going to Father Crowley’s next weekend.”

Chris is shaken upon hearing his roommate’s voice in what is otherwise an extremely quiet night. There is no sound of traffic or any civilization, quite unlike the nighttime noise of his suburban childhood, the constant roar of expressways and electric lights and industry and civilization.

“Yes,” he replies, after a moment’s hesitation. “How did you know?”

“Just do,” Hinckley says. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, just didn’t know when. I’ll be there too, when you go.”

“I’ve never seen you in church.”

“Don’t go to church. I met him over in Lutherkirk. We got to talking.”

“Oh… Really?”

“Yep. I’ll talk to you about it more tomorrow.”

Chris hears Brad roll over on his side, and Chris continues to stare at the ceiling. He feels somewhat betrayed or maybe jealous. He thought he was the only young man to have bonded with the priest. He is curious about what the priest and Brad could have talked about. He doesn’t see Brad engaging in any sort of theological discussion.

Several more moments of confused thoughts occur, and finally Chris falls into a troubled sleep. He dreams about the priest. Instead of Karen driving him around the countryside, it is the priest, and this too makes him happy. He has a friend, an older friend who takes an interest in his state of mind, unlike his mother or father.

In the dream, Brad drifts in and out of the back seat of the priest’s car, but he is silent, not his normal obnoxious self.

Chris wakes up. Hazy sunlight comes from behind the drawn shade over the picture window. He peers behind the shade and looks through the damp and foggy window. The buildings of the base are now a darker shade of their true color against a grayish sky as they have been painted by a soft and cold steady rain.

Brad has gone to work. Chris gets his bearings. His first waking thoughts are of the priest and his dream.

Then he recalls the previous day with Karen. His thoughts of the priest vanish in an instant.

The time is 10 a.m., according to the clock radio that he bought at the exchange. He turns it on to Radio Tayside and hears the voice of who he now knows to be Margaret Thatcher, a name from the news at home that he couldn’t connect to anyone or anything.

She is talking about unemployment, how there are record highs in Great Britain, and what her government will do to alleviate the situation.

Industry, she says, has to grow.

Chris showers, the plans of the day unsure. He dresses slowly, the AM radio playing statically in the background. He hears a Thompson Twins song that was played incessantly on Detroit radio his last year in high school. Despite not being fond of the song, he finds his feet tapping rhythmically to the music and his lips silently mouthing the lyrics. He feels light, despite the dreariness outside, the specter of loneliness that shrouds his life, and the fact that his family has all but abandoned him.