Robert Butler - Perfume River

She tries to clarify. “I thought perhaps he took a turn for the worse.”

“He’s bad enough.”

“I understand,” she says, feeling clumsy, caught in the implication that Robert’s sadness could be caused only by his father having died. She assumed that mere suffering would simply bring out the abrasive worst in William Quinlan, a worst that would primarily irritate Robert. “He must be in a lot of pain,” she says.

Robert simply shrugs.

Something has happened , she decides. Just not death. Now she assumes it’s something William has said. But other than expressions of quotidian grumpiness or reflex jingoism — none of which, surely, would affect Robert like this — she cannot imagine what.

Robert turns away, wishing to sit down. Only once, many years ago, did he voice his delusion to Darla. He submitted to her his father’s pride in his Vietnam service to help explain how he ended up a soldier in the war that this beautiful and righteously impassioned woman despised. And he submitted it along with a manifestly mature clearheadedness about his need for his father’s approval, which allowed the delusion to be unquestioningly shared by them both.

His first impulse is to sit in his reading chair. It’s angled away from everything in the room except the French doors. It faces the oak, which is on his mind. He has never said a word to Darla about killing the man in the dark. He has never said a word to anyone. He is weary and he wants his chair for the privacy of his present thoughts. But he does not want to snub his wife. So he moves to the sofa, which also faces the veranda, and he sits there at one end.

Darla has watched him make this choice. She senses he’s made it to acknowledge her presence. But he does so without looking her way, without saying a word, and he has placed his back to her. So she circles the sofa but stops at the far end. “Would you prefer some privacy?” she asks.

He looks at her. “No,” he says. “Sorry. I just needed to rest.”

She sits too. Not next to him but not quite apart.

They say nothing.

Darla will not press him for words.

Robert’s mind is full of them: It would be better if I’d fully earned his scorn in the way he pictured me. If I’d stayed behind the walls of MACV that night and never killed. Or simply killed from there in an indeterminate way, as I may have done sometime during the next few days, spraying rifle fire with others into trees and building facades and down the street, aiming at muzzle flash. It would even be better if I’d not gotten lucky that first night: not found my way to the gates of MACV; not arrived in the middle of a battle lull with the right cries and somebody to hear them so I could make a dash to the gate; not dodged, at the last moments, some surprised enemy fire. Better if I’d simply died that first night trying to get back. Would my father, to his surprise, have perceived some sort of courage in a dead body in the street with a pistol in its hand? Would he? Of course he wouldn’t. Of course not. He would have known my actions for what they were: headlong flight into cover, more proof of my instinctive cowardice. But at least I never would have heard about it. Fuck you, Pops. Fuck you.

And in the lull from a heartfelt fuck-you, Robert becomes aware of his wife next to him. He turns his face to her.

Gazing beyond the veranda as a pair of mated cardinals spanks across the yard, Darla senses Robert at once and looks at him.

And the lull in him ceases. He looks away from her, but she has replaced his father in his head. It wasn’t until we’d had sex, until we were quiet at last and slick with sweat, that I explained my work in Vietnam, my work so like research, my work so unlike that of a man who was ready to kill for his country. But when she’d finally asked how it was for me there, my carefully arranged job was all I spoke of. All she wished to know. She was relieved. I was no killer but I was no coward. I was perfect for her. She was glad I was alive. What would she have thought if I’d gone on to tell her about my man in the dark? If I’d told her how I killed a man when he might have been anyone? How he frightened me, so I shot the man down. Decades later she would bitterly criticize two high-profile Florida cases of men acquitted of murder for standing their ground. Back then, at the beginning for us, in her antiwar passion, would she have gotten up at once and gone to the bathroom and closed the door and washed me off her body forever? Or because she was already falling in love with me would she have been glad I hadn’t taken the risk?

Something in Robert fillips a perverse little impulse into his mind: Tell her. Tell her now. Tell her you killed this man. But tell her as if this were your old man sitting here next to you. Give it to her with the spin he might actually respect, a spin I fervently wish were true: I was alone on what constituted a battlefield in Vietnam. So I did what men do on a battlefield. I may have gone to Vietnam to minimize my risks, but when the real war came to me, I stood in the dark alone and raised a steady hand and I killed and I’m content with that.

The impulse lingers in Robert for a few beats. If in response she flares at him, if she throws aside her supportive concern for him, even as his father is dying, and vociferates the politics of pragmatic pacifism, if she declares her deep disappointment in him and vanishes into her office for the night, then Robert would know: By the same tale his father might soften; his father might approve; his father might reconsider.

And all of this suddenly sounds crazy to him. Crazy that he still gives a goddamn about his father’s regard. Crazy that he’d even fantasize about saying something that risks his wife’s love. Crazy that his obsession over the first man he killed — with such mitigating circumstances — should have renewed itself all these decades later. Crazy to think that the twenty-three-year-old in 1968 has anything whatsoever to do with the man he is in 2015. And this last thought instantly seems crazy to him the other way round as well, that the twenty-three-year-old should have anything but a deep connection to the seventy-year-old. He is a historian, after all.

This facile chaos of thoughts beclouds a simpler truth he has ignored for decades: He could never have won the respect — never have won the love — of both his wife and his father. He always had to choose.

He lifts his arm, presses his wrist hard against his forehead.

Darla watches. She edges closer to Robert and arrives at the wrong conclusion about the gesture: He is moved by his father’s suffering.

Robert is wrong about her, as well. If he were to say what he thought to say a few moments ago, even spun for his father’s approval, he would not have risked her love. Would not even have done so in 1968. She did not ask for the details of his military service — though she knew she must eventually — until she could sleep with him at least once.

She wanted him strong-handed and even rough and she wanted to feel in the midst of it that this man might have been a killer. Wanted him that way but it was okay because it was by her desire, by her initiation, by her permission that he was fucking her. She was in control of the pounding of him inside her. It was she clutching him tight and it was she crying out for more and for harder and so it was okay, she was the boss. And she could assume he’d been a killer, but that was in another country, and here and now, in this bed in America, she had the power to reform him. She had the power to forgive him, a man who killed and maybe killed some more and killed and killed. Dangerous as he was, he needed her. He needed her to bring him back even from that.

Not that all this was conscious in her. It resided in her breathlessness, it was in her hands that took his and closed the bedroom door and drew him to the bed and stripped his clothes from him and allowed him to strip the clothes from her, and it was in her hands that ran over the stubble of his whitewalled hair, that grabbed him down there, grabbed the part of him that may even have known Vietnamese women like this, that hurt these women and left them, women she could forgive him for, women she could forgive.