Paul Theroux - Mr. Bones - Twenty Stories

“It’s dangerous.”

“So is your travel.”

“And it stinks.”

“You won’t smell it. You’ll be away.”

He was so shocked by her casual I took it up, he was too embarrassed to tell anyone. He felt he had to hide her smoking from people they knew, and Bree objected to that. Smoking relaxed her, she said. It aided her digestion. It passed the time. Your own smoke smelled different from other people’s smoke. “Who knew?”

And it seemed to give her confidence. She began to whistle — tunelessly, which made her whistling louder, more intrusive. Her whistling said, I am on my own. It also said, I don’t care. And: I am going to go on doing this until I improve. And it seemed to him, irrationally, as though she expected someone, a stranger, to answer her, whistling back. He had never heard her whistle before, and the whistle was like another voice, but someone else’s voice.

“I never travel with Harry Dick — I’d just be in the way,” she said the next time they were at the Willevers’.

Willever said, “He’s an outsider. Two outsiders is one too many.”

Bree said, “As an outsider, Harry Dick has a hatred of insiders. But if you spend that much time writing about yourself, how can you call yourself an outsider? You’re too big.”

“But what do you really think?” Willever said, as he often did, as another tease, not expecting a reply.

But Bree said, “Travel can warp your outlook.”

Afterward, in the silence of the car — Furlong was driving — Bree said, “I honestly don’t know why I said that.”

Furlong examined her face. She did not look sorry. She was smiling softly, but with unshakable defiance, her lips everted, as though she held a cigarette between them, a smoker’s confident pout.

Feeling whipped, Furlong said, “What is wrong?”

“I don’t know what I was talking about.” Bree spoke in an insincere, silly-me tone — or did she mean it?

He said, “I think Ed knows you smoke.”

She laughed — the laugh was new too, a cartoon cackle that went with the whistle.

He said, “How will you explain it?”

“I’ll say how much fun it is. I never knew that.”

They did not have children, a conscious decision, because a child would have hampered his travel. To “Any kids?” Furlong said, “We’ve got a really energetic Lab. It’s like having a five-year-old who never grows up.” But it was Bree who looked after Lester when Furlong was away.

It seemed to him that Bree was content. She did not discuss her plans with Furlong. But this apparent reticence marked the onset of a new habit, like the smoking, like the whistling. Instead of talking about her plans, she made announcements when they were in the presence of other people, usually the Willevers, sometimes the Jimmersons, now and then the Woottens — his friends, not hers. When they asked about a book he was writing, Furlong said, “I’m in Addis Ababa.” Or “Just leaving Rangoon.”

This happened one night at the Willevers’, soon after her whistling improved. “I’m still in Kunming,” Furlong said, and when (to be fair) Willever asked Bree what she was doing, she said, “I’m going to Las Vegas.”

“Good for you,” Ed said.

Furlong laughed. “That’s Bree. Great at improvisation.” But in the car on the way home he said, “You’re not serious.”

She said, “I don’t know. It just came out. After I heard myself say it, it seemed like a great idea. I might go this weekend.”

Furlong felt carved up, as with the revelation of her smoking. He said, “You don’t gamble. You hate shows.”

“But you can smoke there. And I’ve heard there are a lot of restaurants.”

“And you hate to go to restaurants alone. You’ve said so.”

“I’ve gotten used to it. From you being away.”

Furlong uttered a skeptical sound through his nose that was meant to convey disbelief. But on the day he drove her to the airport, she said, “You’ll be able to work better with me away. You can do whatever you want. You’ll be brilliant.”

It was what he had said to her once on one of his departures. And he had also written how, in Italy, if a person praised a baby’s health and didn’t say “Bless him,” the praise was like a curse. He felt that way now, that in praising him she was blighting his luck.

It was just a weekend, she said. He sat at his desk, imagining Bree in Las Vegas doing — what? She didn’t call. He dialed her cell phone. No answer. But that had been their agreement. “I don’t want to disturb your writing.”

Her silence, her absence, did disturb him — terribly. He wrote nothing — or rather, he wrote pages that, after he reread them, seemed to him forced and unreliable and lifeless, and he tossed them. He walked Lester, and found the dog demanding and indecisive. He fretted. What did people do in Las Vegas if they didn’t throw money away gambling? Did they gamble in other ways? He imagined himself in Las Vegas, and Bree at home, and he became anxious.

On her return, Furlong said, “What were you doing all that time?”

She said, “What do you usually do?”

She seemed rested and chatty, not about Las Vegas but about her next trip, a longer one, to Disneyland. “I’ve always wanted to go.”

Disneyland! The word suggested a world of frivolity and wasted money and bad health, a relic from the age of smoking. But she went. And in the five days she was away Furlong could not work. Worse, in the middle of that week Joan Willever stopped in.

“I just wanted to see how you were making out with Bree away.” A girlishness in her tone, something coquettish, disturbed him deeply.

“Where’s Ed?”

“Home. I didn’t tell him I was coming over. I thought he’d be funny about it.”

Furlong could only think that when he was away Ed Willever dropped in on Bree, and that a pattern was being revealed to him. He wanted to say Bree smokes, but he was ashamed to, and she might blame him for her doing it.

“You don’t need me?” Joan said.

What did this mean? He stared at her and said, “I’ve got work to do.”

“The traveler at home,” Joan said. “Strange concept.”

After she left, he sat with his fists pressed against his cheeks as though trying to force a sentence from his head. Nothing came, or only falsehoods came, as he awaited Bree’s return; and he hated the thoughts that were crowding his imagination.

The last sentence he’d written was “The Nepali in the shop sat under a long sticky screw of flypaper, its curls black with bodies.” He could not continue, or extend it. He kept seeing it, more and more bodies accumulating on the hanging paper.

Bree said nothing to him on her return, but the next time at the Willevers’ she spoke up, mentioning the rides, the restaurants, the features of the hotel. Furlong sat, dumb, confused, with growing anger.

Ed Willever said, “You’ve got competition, Harry Dick.”

Bree said, “Of course not. I’d never write about it.”

And that confused Furlong further. He could not help but think that in her absences she’d taken over his life, that her travels were his own trips, but with a difference — she didn’t write about them, she hardly spoke of them, but in a fragmentary way he believed her to be editing, in a spirit of concealment.

When she said she wanted to drive to Seattle, Furlong said, “Take a plane.”

“You can’t smoke on a plane.”

“I want to come with you.”

“No,” she said. “I want to smoke in the car and you won’t like it.” Then, “You have to write your book.”

He did not have the heart to tell her that he couldn’t write.

Bree drove to Seattle, whistling as she left the house. She was out of touch for ten days. She vanished in the way he had always done; and when she was away a part of him vanished — the confident part of him, the risk taker, the wizard, the storyteller; and he was left idle, feeling undermined, staring at his unfinished sentence, following her progress in his head, knowing what he would be doing on that road.