Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

What do the leaves mean?

Autumn comes to fire

on hillside flesh ,

but you ask :

What do the leaves mean?

The oak, the maple, and the grass .

Winter comes and leaves

and each night you touch me

to test the season .

Here, I say, and you ask :

What do the leaves mean?

A year later we sold the motel for a handsome profit. We toured Europe, and the Orient, then returned to build a house in the Sweetheart Mountains. It was a large, expensive house, with decks and fine woods, not a neighbor for miles. To be safe, though, I bought up the surrounding land and spent a summer fencing it in. I installed a burglar alarm and dead-bolt locks on all doors. It was a lovely sort of life, Bobbi said, horses and hiking, our daughter, but even so I could sometimes feel an ominous density in the world. The stars seemed too tightly packed. The mornings were too short; the nights collided. Beirut was a madhouse. The graveyards were full. In Amarillo, they were manufacturing MIRVs, and in the Urals there were Soviet answerings in kind, a multiplication.

And me—I stewed. At night I would often wake up and squeeze Bobbi for all she was worth, which was everything. The flashes were killing me.

Density, I thought. Implosion, not explosion, would surely end the world.

It wasn’t mental illness. By and large I was happy. The world spun on one axis, we spun on our own. Bobbi worked on a translation of Erlkönig , I putzed around the house, Melinda grew smart and beautiful.

We were homebodies.

On November 8, 1988, Chuck Adamson was elected mayor of Helena. When the polls closed, I remember, there was a gathering at his house, which by midnight became a victory party, and we were all there, his wife and kids and cocker spaniel, and Bobbi, and my mother, and many people I didn’t know. I remember dancing with my mother—hard stuff, no waltzes—her hair bluish now, the way she snapped her fingers and rocked without modesty. I remember delivering an oration. It had to do with the governorship, how Chuck was a shoo-in if he kept his nose clean and his eyes on the shining dome. It was stirring rhetoric. We were all very drunk and very happy. Later, I found Adamson off by himself, sitting in a stairwell with a drink and a glum expression in his eyes. The dog was curled up in his lap. “Mr. Mayor,” I said, “what’s the sadness for?” and Adamson fixed a stare on me, a long one. He wasn’t acting when he said, “The usual.” I knew what he meant. Nothing more was said. I sat beside him, and we listened to the party, and after a while we went back in.

My mother died on January 10, 1993.

And that summer Bobbi disappeared. She was gone two weeks; her diaphragm went with her.

That was the worst time. I loved her, she loved me. I was almost sure of it. So why? I’d go to the medicine cabinet and open it and just stand there. It was like watching a hole. The diaphragm, I came to realize, was one of those objects whose absence reveals so much more than its presence.

In mid-June, Bobbi returned as abruptly as she left.

She put her bag down and kissed Melinda. She gave me a look that meant: Don’t ask.

But I did. I wanted specifics. Where exactly, and who, and what was said and done. I wanted to know these things, but I didn’t want to know, but I did, I wanted to know and not know, and what I most wanted to know and not know was why. Bobbi was forthcoming in her own way. She did love me, she said. But then why? Why couldn’t it be absolute and perfect and final and lasting? Her smile was uncontrite. When I asked about the diaphragm, she said it was only a precaution—I believed in precaution, didn’t I?—and when I asked where, she said it didn’t matter—she was here, with me, now—and when I asked who, the navigator or Scholheimer or the adjutant or Johnson or someone new, Bobbi shrugged and went off to wash her hair.

I followed her into the bathroom. I kept asking why. It was more than asking, because I opened the medicine cabinet and showed her the hole and yelled, “ Why? ”

Bobbi worked up a lather with her fingertips. The shampoo, I remember, was lime-smelling. She looked at me in the mirror. She was back, she said. Couldn’t we let it go at that? I remember sitting on the edge of the tub, smelling limes and picturing the diaphragm. It was round and rubbery and discolored to a white-brown. Two weeks, I was thinking. Why? I pictured the tube of spermicide. Bobbi in bed: blond and long-legged, those narrow hips, how she made love with her eyes open, not moving much until near the end, when she would reach behind her head with both hands and grasp the vertical grillwork on our brass bed and make a sound like a bassoon. But the diaphragm was there between us. It was there even when it wasn’t, or especially when it wasn’t, and it was there now when I asked, “ Why? ”

She dried her hair with a red towel.

She closed the bathroom door and sat beside me on the tub. She did not smile. Because, she said quietly, she was a breathing human being. Because she was not a dream. Real, she said, and it was time to accept it.

Then she quoted Yeats.

Brutal, she said.

For several months afterward, through the summer and fall, I expected to find a last poem nailed to my heart. I couldn’t sleep. In bed, I watched her eyelids. I plotted tactics. Ropes and locks and dynamite. I felt sane and brutal. Dig , a voice whispered, but that came later.

There were stresses and uncertainties, an in-between time, and then one day near Christmas Sarah and Ned Rafferty drove up in a jeep. They needed a hideout.

“Just for a month or so,” Sarah said, kissing me, then Bobbi. “Till things quiet down.”

She was wearing mink. Piled high in the back of the jeep were Christmas presents, boxes of Swiss chocolate, a frozen turkey, and an armed nuclear warhead.

“So far,” Sarah said, “the Air Force doesn’t even know it’s gone. Ignorance breeds calm.”

Rafferty hugged me.

That evening Bobbi cooked the turkey and I put a record on and Sarah chatted about the terrorist life. She was not a terrorist, of course, or not exactly, but she enjoyed the wordplay. “You wouldn’t believe how tough it is,” she said. “Not all glamour and fun. I mean, shit, nobody gets terrified anymore.” She looked at Melinda. “Excuse the shit.”

After midnight, when Bobbi and Melinda and Ned had gone to bed, Sarah curled beside me on the couch.

“Home, sweet home,” she said softly. “Your daughter, an absolute honeybun. How old? Nine? Ten?”

“Ten.”

Sarah sighed. “Ten biggies. The magic number.” She put her head in my lap. “Naïve Sarah. All that time I kept thinking, Hang in there, baby—he’ll be back. Wanted to be wanted. Not a peep.” She tapped my wedding ring. “Anyway, it’s still politics as usual. Key West, the old Committee. Not quite the same, I’m afraid—mostly just dreams. Super Bowl, remember? Never made it. Cowgirls won’t have me. Look at this skin, William, like cowhide, that’s what the tropics do. I’ll be tan till I die.”

“It’s perfect skin,” I said.

“Old.”

“And perfect.”

She laughed and kissed my nose.

“So here’s the program,” she said brightly. “We kill Bobbi-cakes. Sell your daughter. Blow this house up then hightail it for Rio. Two days, we’re home free.”

“Not funny,” I said.

“Add your own wrinkles.”

“There’s Ned, too. You’re lucky.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “that I am. Magnificent guy. Loves me dearly, you know. Not a string, just loves me and loves me.”

“Well, he should.”