Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

And there was Sarah, too.

As we went into the second week of the search, she began moping. She slept in a closet. She drove the bellhops crazy with elaborate late-night orders and penny-pinching tips. At lunch one day she gave me a memento of our times together, a lavender envelope containing the scented shavings of pubic hair. “It isn’t grass,” she told me, “but it’ll grow on you.”

She was relieved, then depressed, with each new dead end.

“A proposition,” she said one evening. “What we’ll do is, we’ll set up a basic-training business for all the up-and-coming provocateurs. Like at Sagua la Grande, only franchise it, spread the risks around, establish branches in all the major capitals. Terror’s the fashionable thing. A wide-open field—Beirut, Jerusalem—the market’s there. Say the word.”

“I’ll sleep on it,” I told her.

She smiled. “You do that. Dream the good dreams. The closet’s all yours.”

Next morning we turned up our first hard lead. The Dean of Faculty at Bonn University remembered Scholheimer and Bobbi. “Lovebirds,” the man said, and shook his head. “They go kaputt .” He was a portly old gentleman with red cheeks and an ivory cane. Leaning forward, wheezing, he pulled out a soiled old photograph and carefully presented it to me. It was Bobbi in pigtails. “ Liebchen ,” he said. “Make many men cry. Auf Wiedersehen , Scholheimer.”

“In other words,” said Sarah, “a bad-ass bimbo.”

The old man nodded.

“Bobbi, she squeeze the juice out of rock, freilich . Break the husband heart.”

“Right,” Sarah said. “Yours, too, I’ll bet.”

“ Bitte? ”

“Keep talking.”

The language barrier was formidable but Sarah managed it. Apparently the marriage had not been a long one—Bobbi had walked out after two months; Scholheimer had returned to the States with a chastened perspective and a pocketful of poems. “Bimbo,” the old man said sadly. He fingered the hem on Sarah’s skirt and went on to explain that Bobbi had taken a job teaching sixth-graders at the American Air Force base in Wiesbaden, 130 kilometers southwest of Bonn.

The man’s eyes dampened. He patted Sarah’s knee.

“All many years ago,” he said. “ Herzen und Schmerzen . You find my Bobbi, you say I still love. Alles vergessen .”

Sarah put the snapshot in her purse.

“Count on it,” she said grimly, “I’ll deliver the message.”

That afternoon we rented a car and drove for almost an hour along the Rhine, through Königswinter and Remagen, then a straight shot to Wiesbaden.

An adjutant recognized Bobbi’s photograph.

“Angel,” he said. “Sweetest thing on earth. She your sister?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Some sister.”

“I know that. The whole family knows.”

“An angel,” he said flatly. “Wings. All of it. How’d she hook up with that bastard hubby of hers? Schlum, Schultz?”

“Scholheimer.”

The adjutant bit down on a pipe. He was a trim, polite man of forty-five or so, whiskey lines along the nose and cheekbones, but still healthy-looking, the ruddy tightness of a long-distance runner. “Scholheimer,” he muttered. “Shit on a shingle. Bobbi deserved better.”

“Angels do,” said Sarah. She crossed her legs and looked at him with understanding. “You knew her pretty well?”

“Ma’am?”

“I mean, you knew her. That way. I can tell.”

The man wanted to smile. He filled his pipe from a leather pouch, tamped it down, and struck a match against his desk. There was a hesitation before he shrugged. “Yes, ma’am, I guess you could say that. She was my daughter’s teacher—damn fine teacher, too. Kids loved her. So the marriage goes bad, hubby’s out of the picture. I took up some slack.” He turned toward me. “But, sir, I’ll tell you something, it was real romance. Your sister, she was no troop groupie. I hope that’s understood.”

I nodded.

“Romance,” he said, “the genuine article. She used to slip poems under my pillow.”

“God,” said Sarah, “she must’ve been a darling.”

“Roger that. Even my daughter said so.”

The adjutant pulled a piece of ruled paper from his desk drawer. He smoothed the edges and passed it across to me.

“ Martian Travel ,” he said. “Go ahead, read it.”

“I already have.”

“Your sister’s got talent. One day I woke up, she was gone, and maybe a week later I found that poem in my Class A’s. Made me feel like a million bucks. She had this way with words.”

“Sure,” Sarah said. “Like a Xerox machine.”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. She writes like Shakespeare.”

“Affirmative,” said the adjutant. “Maybe better.”

It was easy after that. At last report, he said, Bobbi had returned to grad school, this time the University of Minnesota. She was a Golden Gopher. Early the next morning we boarded a Lufthansa flight for New York.

“The thing that gets me,” Sarah said at forty thousand feet, “is the way you’ve written off our whole relationship. You don’t talk about it, you don’t think about it. All Bobbi. No Sarah. What the hell happened? ”

Her eyes showed fatigue. She was quiet for a moment, then searched for my hand.

“William, I’m quitting.”

“No.”

“I am. I’ve had it. The end. Give it up, otherwise I’m bailing out.”

“One more week?”

“Impossible.”

“Sarah, I need time.”

Eyes closed, she glided over the clouds. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m done.”

“All right, then.”

“Sure. All right.”

But over New York she said she loved me; at Kennedy International she said she’d give it a while longer.

We took a nonstop to Minneapolis, spent the night in separate beds, then walked across town to the U of M. It was bright September. Freshman season, kickoff, the rush, and the campus was clean with Swedes and maroon and gold and Big Ten fever. We’d won the peace for them. Hair was out, health food was in. And it was our labor of a decade ago that made all this possible—straight-legged jeans, Jantzen shirts, ears wired for sound, the serenity of higher education. “Memories moribundus,” Sarah murmured. In the administration building, she hummed a tune that had been fashionable during occupations of such places, or in jail, or in torchlit parades for amity on earth. Her voice was husky. Boys in letter jackets stopped to ogle. She wore high heels that went snap-click in the waxed hallways. Her nylons gleamed. She had the posture of a model, a moneyed alumna, classy and chic, stunning; she could still stop traffic. She hummed and ignored the jocks while I bribed the assistant registrar. “Inflation,” the man said crisply, “is the evil of our era,” for his price was high; then he slipped me the records.

Bobbi had enrolled in 1978—a master’s candidate in fine arts. She’d completed the program in ten months, record time, and the transcript was monotonous with A’s and B’s. A professor named Rudolph was responsible for the A’s. We found him in the faculty lounge, a tall and very bitter man. “She deserved A’s,” he snapped. “Johnson gave her B’s—Johnson’s the one she ran off with. Should’ve flunked her ass!” Then the anger came. Last he’d heard, she was working as a tour guide at the United Nations. “The princess of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza,” he said. “What a waste. All those goddamn A’s.”

“This Johnson?” I said.

“B’s! Claimed she needed incentive.”

“And now?”

Rudolph cackled. “The scrap heap. B’s didn’t cut it. Hope he’s peddling candied apples, that’s what I hope . Hope she dumped him hard.”