Robert Butler - Perfume River

As he waits for the water to pass through the filter of his Technivorm Moccamaster at exactly two hundred degrees, however, he marvels: All this stuff in my head is prompted by that man in New Leaf. Not even him. My first mistaken impression of him. He has nothing to do with Vietnam.

“You were restless last night,” Darla says.

He turns to her.

She stands in the doorway in black running tights — she still has fine legs, this Dr. Darla Quinlan — and red fleece jacket. She holds her watch cap, her hair pulled back and bunned up, the pull of her hair smoothing the wrinkles in her face enough for them to nearly vanish at this distance. If he were nearer, he would touch the bottom of her chin with his fingertip, lift her face just a little, and even her incipient jowls would vanish.

“No more than usual, I think,” he says.

“Perhaps not,” she says.

“Sorry I disturbed you.”

“It’s not about me. I wondered if you were all right.”

“I am.”

They look at each other in silence, each feeling the wish to have more to say but unable, for the moment, to think what.

“Tea first?” Robert finally asks.

“I like to run first,” she says. But she does so without a trace of a dumb-shit-you-should-know-that-after-all-these-years tone. Robert wonders if that means she’s considering putting the running preference aside.

“Just this morning,” Robert says. “It’s cold out.”

She hesitates, but says, “That makes it better to take the tea when I return.”

They fall silent a moment.

“You’ll be working by then?” she asks.

“How long will you be?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t sleep well.”

“Sorry,” Robert says.

“It wasn’t you. I knew you were restless because I was already awake.”

“Does it make you run longer or shorter, not sleeping well?”

“Longer, usually.”

“Tough girl,” he says.

“Tough girl,” she says.

“We’ll see,” he says.

She angles her head to indicate she doesn’t quite understand.

“Whether I’m working when you get back,” he says.

They are silent again, but not moving.

“I can stay,” she says.

“You should run,” he says.

“All right.”

She puts her cap on. She turns. She turns back. “You could have a second cup. You love the new beans.”

“The second cup goes to my desk,” he says, though without a trace of a tone — or even a trace of a feeling — that she should know that after all these years.

Darla goes.

How is the silence of this kitchen consequently different because she is out running somewhere on the dirt and macadam remnants of a WPA road instead of still sleeping upstairs? Somehow different. Felt several times lately by Robert, like a newly, faintly arthritic knuckle. He cannot say why.

He takes up the coffeepot, and now, in order to work, he has to try to put Darla out of his mind along with Bob and Jimmy and Lien and Dad and the others who hover around them.

Perhaps because his work often leads him to consider the smallest semantic details, he hears the shift in his mind from his earlier memory to this present moment: Pops stopped being Pops somewhere along the way. He is Dad now. And to his face, there was rarely an occasion to address him with a name at all. Dad to his mother, when they spoke of the man.

But this is exactly the hovering of others he needs to resist. Semantics — his mind —snagged him on his father just now, so he thinks it will be a simple matter of the will to return to this kitchen and his coffee and the scholarly day to come. But a woman slips into him. To his surprise, it is not Darla.

Lien. She came to him last night beneath the oak tree, across all these years, and he left her last night just as he left her when the Tet siege began. Now, she comes to him as she always did, silently, gently. Borne not on a thought but a river.

The sunlight flares from the water and he turns his face to her, pressed chastely against him in the narrow bow of her uncle’s sampan, the man out of their sight line behind them, beyond the bamboo thatch shelter in the middle of the three-plank boat. He is their chaperone, working the long sculling oar, bearing them on the river past the Citadel, past the coconut palms and the frangipani, toward Ngu Binh Mountain. Robert and Lien met only a few weeks ago in her cousin’s tailor shop, where she works. He came again and again as if to consider a tailor-made suit until finally she said, I am happy Robert never choose , and she invited him to float with her upon her river in this season that gives it its name. And indeed the water all around them fills him with a ravishing sweetness possible only on the cusp of rottenness. The blossoms of fruit orchards upriver — litchi and guava, breadfruit and pomegranate — have fallen into the water and decayed in their passage to the South China Sea. The sunlight flares from the water and he turns his face to her and she turns her face to his and they hold each other in this gaze, before they have ever kissed, ever embraced, weeks before they will make love, and the perfume of this river fills them both, and she says to him, Mr. Robert, your eyes are the color of water drop on lotus leaf , and he says, Miss Lien, your name means “lotus,” yes? and she turns away from him, glances over her shoulder toward her uncle, to make sure he cannot see. Then she looks at Robert again with her eyes the color of a black cat turned auburn in sunlight, and she leans to him, and they kiss.

He has not had this memory — has feared and resisted this memory — for years. He knows how to let go of it. He reinhabits this: Lien offers him the French.32-caliber pistol that belonged to her father, and he takes it and he turns and he heads out her door and down the stairs and into the war. This is a memory he can put aside without needing his willpower.

He closes his eyes.

He smells the coffee he has brewed.

He opens his eyes.

Once again he takes up the carafe. He pours his Ethiopian in small circles, listening intently to the purl of it, leaning in, flaring his nose to its smell, isolating the notes of peach and blueberry and cocoa. He thinks, reflexively, to carry the cup to the living room, as he often does, to sit in the reading chair that faces the French doors to the veranda. But the oak tree is framed in those doors.

He sits instead on a counter chair at the kitchen island. He puts his back to the casement window looking out to the veranda. This will be only about the coffee. He puts his hand to the mug handle.

The telephone rings.

He straightens sharply, inclined not to answer, short of its being Darla on her cellphone, in distress out in the woods. The answering machine is within earshot, in the hallway between kitchen and living room. At the second ring the machine’s synthesized woman’s voice says, “Peggy Quinlan.”

His mother, on her cellphone.

Robert looks at the clock over the kitchen sink.

Barely past seven.

She has insomnia. She has unreasonable worries about Dad. She has reasonable irritations with him. She gets lonely, even with him always around. She never thinks what time it is.

Another ring and the answering machine announces her name again.

The coffee is hot.

Robert will let the machine answer. He can call her in a quarter of an hour.

He puts both hands around the mug, warms them there. He will take his first sip when things are quiet again.

Shortly the machine answers and his mother’s voice, strained and short of breath, says from the hallway, “Robert, pick up if you’re there. Your father has fallen. We’re at the hospital. He’s broken his hip.”