Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

“Pretty much.”

“Maybe we should take separate compartments.”

“If you say so.”

“But maybe not,” she said. “In a case like this, proximity’s important.”

“Fine,” I said.

We made Bonn late the next morning. Sarah wanted to get right down to business—no last-minute waffling, she said—but I needed a day for reconnaissance and planning. No mistakes. Ten years and more I’d been dreaming about this, how one day I’d pack my bags and take off after her, chase her to the ends of the earth, do it right this time, show her what a brave and sane and exciting man I am, make her beg for me, buy her furs and jewels, the things of the world-as-it-is, real things, show her how life is meant to be lived, show her what she’d missed. I was done with half-assed fantasies. I was a pragmatist. Let the world stew in its own bloody juices, it didn’t mean a damn next to Bobbi.

“You want it too bad,” Sarah said. “You can’t win.”

I told her to wait and see.

We found a room near the government district, unpacked, then went out for lunch and a walk. It was the burning end of August. There were giant shade trees along the Rhine, and bridges and boulevards; there was a sidewalk café where we ate sausages on brown bread and drank beer. We were beginning to feel rich. We rode the riverboats, bought cameras, bought clothes, dined elegantly at a high rooftop restaurant. Sarah looked great. She looked tan and aristocratic, silver earrings and a Cyd Charisse dress that was made to dance in, so we danced slow to jazzy music, then we rented a hansom that took us clomping through the wee-hour streets.

“A question,” I said. “Put yourself in Bobbi’s shoes. A night like this—will it win her over?”

Sarah snuggled close. She had a shawl around her shoulders. Her shoes were off.

“Depends on the vibes,” she said.

“How are they?”

“Ho-hum, sort of. This is Europe, man, you have to wear your wealth more freely. Take it more for granted.”

“What about the basics?”

“Passion,” she said. She showed me a brown leg. “Otherwise it gets soupy and she starts thinking of you as something sweet. Like Fermi and Einstein. Take some chances. Get violent.”

“Like so?”

“Harder. We’re talking violence .”

The hansom circled through a park. I practiced violence for a time, then got sleepy, and Sarah ended up paying the driver and seeing me to the room.

In bed, she cried.

“This lip of mine,” she said. “I’m not hideous, am I? I mean, I’m still kissable?”

“Absolutely.”

We kissed cautiously. Afterward, with the lights out, Sarah slipped a pillowcase over her head and came in close for warmth.

“Idiot,” she said, “I love you.”

In the morning I began making calls. There wasn’t much to go on—a few vague possibilities. All I remembered, really, was that her husband had taken a position as a visiting lecturer in prosody at Bonn University; Bobbi had planned to teach English to the children of embassy officials.

But all that was nearly a decade in the past.

“A cold trail,” Sarah told me.

She lay in bed as I made the calls; after each strikeout she kissed me and said it wasn’t meant to be. I tried the university, the American Embassy, and the central APO mailroom in Bad Godesberg. No one knew anything. In part, it was a problem in detection, teasing out clues, but there were also the complications of language and uncertainty and Sarah.

“It’s an omen,” she said. She was at the foot of the bed, legs wrapped around a phone book. “Tell you what. Let’s get married.”

“Not that simple.”

“It is simple. Get hitched in Istanbul. Honeymoon in Venice and then settle down in some nifty castle on the river Rhone.”

“Nice thought,” I said, and frowned at her. “Maybe I should try American Express.”

Sarah put her head in my lap while I dialed.

“Man and wife,” she said lightly, not quite teasing. “We’ll do it right. Have portraits done. Those rich, dark oil jobbies that age so nicely. Hang them in your hunting den. You’ll call me Lady, I’ll call you Sir William. Dine each evening at eight sharp. Very proper, you know. I’ll run charity balls and you can chase foxes with your friends. Late at night we’ll talk pornography. We can do it.”

American Express had never heard of Bobbi Scholheimer.

“William, for God’s sake, don’t you love me?”

We had breakfast in bed, then I tried several hotels and pensions, then the German-American Club, then each of the banks. I was getting desperate. Somehow, for all the wasted years, I’d always thought that when the time came it would be easy. Ring her up and plead my case and start making children. I’d run through the image a million times.

“Hey, look here,” Sarah said. She went up into a handstand at the foot of the bed. “Command performance. How does Bobbi match up?”

“Stop it.”

“I’ll bet she can barely stand on her feet .”

“Sarah—”

“Balance, man.”

She curled her toes toward the ceiling, the muscles at her hips correcting for the wobble in the bedsprings.

“Is she cuter? Perkier? No shit, I can be perky, too.” Sarah came down to the kneeling position. “Coy and shy and mysterious. Demure as all get-out. Sublime. You want sublime?” She crossed her arms on her chest, bowed her head, and smiled. “Gee golly, sir, I don’t commit Congress on the first date. Am I blushing?”

I looked away.

“Listen,” I said gently, “we can’t accomplish anything this way.”

“Accomplish me , William.”

“Let’s just—”

“I’m sublime! I am, I’m brilliant. You can wear my Phi Beta Kappa key around your neck, we’ll go steady. My doctor says I’ve got this gorgeous womb—ovaries like hand grenades—I’m built for motherhood—I can cook and rob banks and manage money. I can sew. I know how to make pickles. Just name it.”

“Get dressed.”

Sarah sighed. “I hope she’s dead.”

“Then there’ll be ghosts.”

“Who cares? Hope she got hit by a tank —nothing left but tread marks and maggots. We’ll build a memorial to her somewhere in southern Illinois.”

We spent two days making the rounds of every school in the city. Sarah complained that it was too much like FBI work, like tracking down Most Wanteds, but still she insisted on tagging along. It was rough on both of us. We interrogated teachers and headmasters, paged through old yearbooks, wasted hours at the embassy, placed ads in the three daily newspapers. Nothing. At night, while Sarah slept, I’d sit up and study Martian Travel . It was all I really had of her. And a few threadbare images: the way she moved, the blondness and blue eyes, the voice that never seemed to alight on nouns or verbs. I remembered the phone call—her light laugh when I declared myself. Flattered, she’d said. She understood. Dreams were wonderful, but we had to be practical, we had to be adults, and then she’d gotten around to the business about being married.

Well fine, I thought. If it was practicality she wanted, acceptance of the world-as-it-was, I was ready now to take her on a uranium ride to the ends of the earth. I’d be dead-hard practical; I’d toe the line; I’d take her as my wife and build a house and lay in supplies to last a lifetime—whatever she wanted, whatever practicality could buy—and then, when the lights went out, when the established planet went hot like a cinder, then we’d uncork that last bottle of Beaujolais and turn to the civil defense channels and congratulate each other on how splendidly adult we were. It didn’t bother me a bit. All I wanted was to end the world with Bobbi close by.