Pearl Buck - The Goddess Abides

He rose abruptly from his chair and, walking to the closed window he stood, his back to her as though he were gazing at the garden, now dimly appearing in the moonlight, and he went on talking.

“It wasn’t just the one child. Thousands! Even the Vietcong didn’t use napalm. We did. But we weren’t deliberately personally cruel as some of our own Vietnamese allies were. I saw a Vietnamese officer — there was a woman in a village just frozen in terror with two children clinging to her and another in her arms — shoot the children one after the other and then shoot her in the belly. Why? He was our ally — one of them. But it wasn’t a matter of one or a thousand. The children could never run fast enough. Bombs, bullets, mines, poisoned bamboo spikes, artillery shells, napalm — the whole works. Not just children, either, but everything seemed to center in that little boy whose brain I saw as that wretched instrument — exposed it. I was about to be discharged. I’d served my time. A week later I was on my way home. But I’ve never forgotten.”

She listened in silence as he revealed himself. He revealed himself and yet the revelation removed him infinitely far from her. She had lived her life in such safety, such peace, such remoteness from the world he had known that Edwin’s death, and even Arnold’s, dwindled now to mere incidents, inevitable and scarcely sorrowful. How could she comfort this young and stricken man? She felt a surge of helplessness, weakening in its power. She did not know what to say and so said nothing and felt the more helpless. Then suddenly he seemed to need no comfort. He turned resolutely and squared his shoulders.

“Why have I told you all that? I’ve never mentioned it before. I came home, I went to work. Who is to say that it was all meaningless? Pour me another cup of coffee, will you?”

He held out his cup and she filled it and he sat down again.

“So,” she said, putting the silver coffee pot on its tray, “what are you working on now, specifically?”

He smiled at her gratefully over the edge of his cup and, setting it down empty, he began with his usual enthusiasm. “I’m not ready yet for specifics. Basically I’m a physicist. That’s my training. I’d have proceeded in that field, remote from human lives, I suppose, and wandering further and further into nuclear physics, if I had not been thrown into Vietnam — from which I shall never extricate myself now, emotionally, at least, I have lost my interest in space. I’m earthbound. But if I’m to apply my physics, I need engineering, biomedical engineering.”

He frowned absently as he paused. He had forgotten her, she perceived, half jealously, and she pondered in some secret recess of her mind whether she should recall him by a feminine trick, an exclamation, softly uttered, that he was getting beyond her comprehension. So might she have done had she not been the daughter of Raymond Mansfield, that eminent scientist, who had lived so entirely as a scientist that she, alone with him in this house after the too-early death of her mother, had absorbed not only understanding of his scientific jargon, but an actual comprehension of his work with cosmic rays, at least to the degree of being able to help him with measuring and testing instrumentation. The exactitude demanded by such scientific pursuits had bred exactitude in her being, expressed in honesty carried sometimes to an extreme.

This honesty prevented her now from a feminine trick, and she merely said, rather quietly, “I understand. Of course, I haven’t followed the developments in engineering, but I remember my father’s impatience with his own imperfect instruments when he was measuring cosmic rays on mountaintops and in caves. He used to mutter to himself that goddamit why hadn’t he taken a course in ordinary engineering!”

Jared laughed. “Exactly! Well, universities today are planning courses in biomedical engineering and I shall simply have to—”

He broke off.

She waited, and then asked in the quiet almost indifferent voice with which she had been speaking, “And how, exactly, do you define biomedical engineering?”

He looked at her surprised and then considering. “Well, it’s an interdisciplinary sort of thing, as I think I’ve told you — multidisciplinary, if one is to be exact. For example, if I develop nuclear instrumentation — which I may decide upon — I must have electronic engineering for making my tools. But since I want to work in the medical field I must proceed further with biology.”

“That makes you a physico-biological engineer?”

“Exactly.”

He looked at her with suddenly quizzical eyes. “Strange talk, this, isn’t it? Between a young man and a beautiful woman?”

“It brings back my talks with my father, when I was a girl,” she said.

“You still don’t look more than a girl,” he said.

She felt his eyes upon her then and, looking up, met as surprised a gaze as though he saw her for the first time. Accustomed as she was to abrupt appreciation in a man’s look, she was instantly absurdly shy. She had often been told that she was a beautiful woman, although she did not think herself beautiful, being too tall, she thought, and inclined to be too thin and perhaps too fair, not at all voluptuous looking or anything of that sort. So she had thought somewhat apologetically when she was Arnold’s wife, yet here was the “look” again, as she called it to herself, a look unwelcome until now, when to her own surprise, it was not at all unpleasant. She met his dark eyes, not boldly in the least, but with a sort of pleading.

“I suppose it’s because I’m too thin,” she said, her voice so low as to sound breathless.

“You’re exactly right,” he replied firmly. “I’m glad you’re tall and leggy. I like it.”

She laughed, to evade this declaration. “What am I supposed to say now?”

“Whatever you feel,” he directed promptly.

“Well, then, I’m pleased, though surprised.”

“Come now — I don’t believe you’re surprised,”

He gazed at her, daring her, and she felt her cheeks flush. She was about to protest her age in self-protection and then did not, discovering in herself a reluctance even to think of the difference in their ages. What did it matter if really it did not? They were two human beings who by accident had been born a generation apart. So it had been with herself and Edwin, only that was different, was it not, since he was the man?

“What are you thinking of?” Jared asked suddenly.

She laughed in embarrassment “Has one person the right to ask that of another?”

“Meaning you won’t tell me?”

“Meaning I won’t tell you!”

They exchanged half-smiling, half-challenging looks and then she rose.

“Thank you for telling me about the child. I shan’t forget. It explains so much. Do you mind if I say good night? I’m a little tired tonight.”

…Safely in her own room and alone, she sat down before her dressing table and stared at herself in the oval, gilt-framed mirror that hung above it. What she saw was different, or so she imagined, from the woman she had looked at, without exactly seeing her, this morning when she was brushing her hair after her shower. This woman, reflecting herself now, looked, she decided, glowing — a ridiculous word. As though she were naïve enough to glow, if one must use the word, merely because a young man seemed inclined toward falling in love with an older woman who happened to be herself! Older she was, and she had all the sophistication, she believed, that a woman should have at her age.

Her acquaintance, if not her friendship, was wide, and she was quite accustomed to the attachments between men and women these days, old and young, young and old. For that matter, what about herself and Edwin? But could she ever have explained that relationship to Arnold? Perhaps life was merely a series of experiences that could not be explained even to one’s self. And it was true that she now looked years younger than she was, which she had not before Arnold died, or indeed, even before Edwin died. Alone, she had in fact reverted to her own natural youthfulness, the effect, perhaps, of complete freedom, in which it was not necessary to share anything of herself, her time, her thoughts, with anyone else.