Robert Butler - Perfume River

He holds the French pistol in his right hand, flat against his chest. He expects to die here.

Robert steps from his veranda.

He is panting heavily.

He has not let this happen for several years.

He moves across his lawn now, approaches his tree. He places both hands hard upon its trunk to stop their trembling.

He leans heavily there, waiting for this to pass.

But still he thinks: I was not meant to be here. I was not meant to live this life I’ve led. I was meant to die long ago. Long long ago.

Darla wakes, opens her eyes. Her lids are heavy, a precious, fragile state for her in the deep middle of the night. She is on her back, and above her is only indecipherable dark. She lets her eyes close. The bed has stirred and it continues to stir. Her eyes open again and their heaviness has vanished. She turns her face and watches her husband’s form adjusting, arms and now legs and now arms again. She realizes he is doing this as unobtrusively as he can. He was once much worse, returning from whatever it is that he does. He is trying. She would speak, but she does not want a conversation that would wake her up once and for all. If there is something on his mind and he is choosing not to volunteer it, it can wait till morning. She turns on her side, putting her back to him.

And she sees him for the first time. It is May 8, 1970, four days after the Ohio National Guard killings at Kent State. He sits alone at a bistro table in a corner of a coffee shop in downtown Baton Rouge. She figures she has him pegged: the stretchy slacks and the button-down, short-sleeved sport shirt could simply be the sartorial momentum of the LSU student dress code, only recently rescinded, but something else about him — perhaps the longer hair on top of his head and the new growth on the sides; perhaps his quiet, two-handed focus on his coffee; perhaps just that surge of intuition about a guy your pheromones tell you you’ll fall for — something — makes her figure they are PX clothes and a military whitewall haircut abandoned at last and a cup of better coffee than he’s had for the past two or three years. He is an ex-soldier.

Behind her, on Fourth Street, some of the thousand people who just marched on the state capitol are drifting by, stoked and chatty with righteousness. Enough of them are also crowded into the shop to justify Darla receiving her cup of coffee and then approaching this man with green eyes and disparately dark hair and a jaw as smooth and hard as monument marble.

He looks up at her, though slowly, as she draws near, as if he were reluctant to shift his attention from the coffee.

She plays her hunch. “It looks like you’ve wanted that cup of Community for a long time.” She learned quickly, as a New York girl first-year grad student, about the local coffee, ground and roasted on the north side of town.

“I’ve been away,” he says.

Darla looks around the crowded room as if checking the available seating. She knows it makes no difference; she’d be doing this anyway. Still, even though she has for several years been quite comfortable with her female empowerment in this new age, she chooses to portray, with the search, a practical reason for the question she is about to ask. She nods at the empty chair across from him. “May I?” she asks.

“Of course,” he says.

She puts her coffee cup on the tabletop and sits.

He stirs now in the bed next to her.

She stops this memory.

She is no longer sleepy. She needs to count bricks in an imaginary wall. She needs to take deep breaths and let them out slowly.

She thinks: What prompted this bit of recherche du temps perdu ? Not a small French sponge cake. Not even Community Coffee. Perhaps my Thai quinoa salad, though for its overspiciness rather than its latent nostalgia.

She can’t even muster an irony-arched half smile for herself. She would like to dismiss the past with this sort of smarty-pants joking. But that is a lifelong impulse she has lately come to see as cowardly. The fact is she clearly remembers falling in love with him. Loving him. Loving him and loving him.

And now that she is sitting before him in a Baton Rouge coffee shop with only a small tabletop of a French sidewalk café separating the two of them, and now that she is gazing directly into those eyes of his, they remind her of the emerald green of a Monet forest. She thinks to remark on this. Even in those first few moments with him. She also thinks, however, to mask her desire by immediately noting that it was the pigment that drove Monet mad. But instead, she says, “Did you march?”

He blinks those green eyes slowly, as if trying to understand.

Given her hunch about what he is or recently was, she hears herself as he might: the question could be a way of asking if he is a soldier. They are being routinely spit upon these days.

She clarifies. “To the capitol. Over the war.”

“Ah,” he says in a tone that suggests he was unaware of the event. “No.”

“Surely you knew,” she says. “We went right past that window. A thousand of us.”

“I figured it was a Greek Row picnic,” he says.

For a clock tick or two she believes him. The green eyes show nothing.

Then they come alive. Widen and spark, and Darla and Robert laugh together.

His eyes.

She looks toward him in the dark in the bed.

She realizes she has not been noticing those eyes for some time. She makes a note in her head to look him carefully in the eyes today.

And it occurs to her now, for the first time, after all these years: My god. I’d actually expected an observation about the pigment of his eyes driving Monet mad to hide my desire. It would, in fact, have cried out my desire. His eyes were driving me mad.

Did she ever go on to openly make that observation about their color?

She tries to remember.

She cannot.

She thinks not.

I never did tell him , she thinks.

And then: Thank god. He got me into his bed quick enough as it was.

But she did tell him. It was on their fifth wedding anniversary, spent in bed in their apartment in Baton Rouge, making love in the morning but then spending the rest of the day — wisely, necessarily, they thought — reading for their PhD oral exams. They did so, however, naked together in bed, the heat turned up high, as it was a chilly February day. In the late afternoon, as the light from the window was fading, just after Robert switched on a nightstand lamp, she told him about his eyes, thinking perhaps he and she might touch again for a time on this special day. She told him about their color. Told him that she’d planned to cut him down at once, however, with her line about Monet. Perhaps at the moment of her confession Robert’s head was too full of the academic rhetoric of history. Her head was too, after all. For he simply smiled a little and offered a bland How sweet and he resumed his reading and she resumed her reading and they did not touch again for a few days, and when they did, the incident was forgotten.

Darla is counting bricks in an imaginary wall, pausing at each hundred to take a brisk, long breath and then letting it out as slowly as she can, trying to ignore the unconscious, restless body in bed beside her, trying simply to sleep.

Shortly after her third hundred, Robert turns heavily onto his back and sighs. Darla hesitates briefly — just long enough to realize how there is no good reason to hesitate, even briefly, to follow this impulse — and so she seeks his hand at rest between them and lays hers gently upon it. She thought he was probably asleep, and he is, but she keeps her hand on his until, just past her fourth hundred, she falls asleep.

When Robert wakes, there is a thin etching of gray dawn along the vertical edges of the blackout blinds. Darla’s hand is long gone from his and he has missed the gesture. He is lying on his back and she is to his right, on her side, facing away. He is capable of a gesture similar to hers. He could lay a hand gently on the point of her hip now, as she sleeps, and then take it away again after a time without having to raise any issues or expectations between them. He has done so, with her sleeping, within the past week. But this morning he has woken to find Jimmy in his head and he needs to deal with that first. Gently, very gently, so as not to wake her — for she can be a light sleeper sometimes, an aggrievedly light sleeper — he turns onto his side with his back to her.