Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

6.1 Penn Sinclair

Penn sat across the table from the beautiful Louise Grayson, who had waited for him, who had believed his promises that he would somehow put his trust fund and philosophy degree to work building an empire and that he would marry her as soon as he got home. He had been home for three weeks, and so far neither of them had brought up the subject of marriage. If he wanted to talk, she listened. If he wanted to be alone, she went out for dinner with a friend. Night after night he lay in bed, sweating next to the cool Louise, and night after night she brought him a glass of orange juice and a scented cloth for his forehead.

But now Louise had arranged a lunch so they could talk about his future. When her cell phone kept clamoring for attention, she held up a finger and rolled her eyes. “Did I say ivory?” she said into the phone, tapping a polished nail on the tablecloth for emphasis. “I absolutely meant ecru.”

Penn found it hard to follow the conversation — what was the difference between sautéed and braised? Would the vegetarian stuffing work for the gluten intolerant? Did they need one bartender or two? Three servers or four?

As Louise talked, Penn watched the waiters hurry back and forth from the kitchen carrying aromatic dishes and tried to imagine what their lives were like. Across the room, a thin glass window looked onto a SoHo street, with its scaffolding and construction workers and honking taxis and harried pedestrians, all living lives that were opaque to him. It was as if he had crossed into a parallel universe and was searching for a way back. He had assumed the disconnection must have happened in Iraq, but now he realized he had been looking out the window all his life and only rarely making contact: the night he had first slipped the straps of Louise’s camisole over her ivory shoulder blades, the philosophy and Latin classes at Princeton, the small brick caretaker’s cottage he pictured when he thought of home, even though the tiny building occupied only a forgotten corner of the sprawling Greenwich estate that had been in the Sinclair family for more than ninety years.

“Brides,” said Louise, finally hanging up, and it occurred to Penn that the real point of the lunch was to demonstrate how busy she was, how opposite of needy and grasping, how far from ready to be a bride herself.

“I’ll take your word for it,” said Penn, who had a sense that if one of the passersby pulled out a gun and shot through the glass into the restaurant, the bullet would pass right through him, as if he wasn’t really there.

“Someday you’ll find out for yourself,” said Louise with a laugh to show that she wasn’t being serious even though she was.

Louise’s happily-ever-after included two cherubic figments of her imagination named Joseph and Jules. Their pink and blue nurseries were oft-visited rooms in her consciousness. She could describe the darling gingham furniture and soft cotton clothing and daily routines with the precision of an event-planning professional, which was what she was, and because she could imagine those things, Penn could imagine them too: the orderly closets and brightly colored educational toys and the children themselves, beautiful and well-dressed, of course, miniature versions of Louise. The event that held the least reality for her was the explosion of a short string of IEDs that had blown five of Penn’s men to kingdom come and left two others wandering in a wilderness of misfiring neurons and brain chemicals run amok. While they waited for the main course to arrive, he spoke the sentences he had committed to memory as he was lying awake in Louise’s big four-poster bed the night before.

“But that doesn’t really change anything,” sniffled Louise, who started to cry before he came to the second clause of the second careful sentence, before he got to the reassurances that he still loved her but that the thing he was had changed so profoundly that the only way to express his love was to leave her.

“Someday you’ll see I set you free.”

That had been sentence number four. It had sounded convincing in Penn’s imagination, but now it seemed hollow and contrived. He hurried on. “In an ideal world…” he started, but before he could spit out the rest of sentence number five, the red-faced Louise mumbled, “But I don’t want to be free!”

Penn wanted to shake her. Freedom! Wasn’t that the casus belli that had remained like a golden nugget in the sieve of official excuses once all the silt of lies had washed away? If people like Louise didn’t want freedom, what had everything been for?

“I have to do what I think is right,” said Penn, the carefully planned speech forgotten. He was crying now too. He was picturing the life he might have had with Louise. And he was picturing the men he had sent on the mission — proud and insubordinate and radiating energy and health. And then he was seeing the men who had come back from it — shaken men, men who were bloody and frightened and changed. “I made a mistake,” he told her. “I have to try to make up for it.”

“It’s not as if you can undo it,” said Louise. Across the street, a man slipped on the scaffolding and caught himself.

“Of course I can’t make up for it, but I have to do something. I can’t pretend nothing happened.”

A taxi discharged a woman who carried a small dog in her purse. A businessman strode past, talking angrily into his phone. A girl in a yellow dress thought better of crossing against the light.

“It was a war, Penn. Everybody makes mistakes in war — frankly, it’s kind of a cliché. And what about the mistake you’re making now?”

“It isn’t an easy decision — I think you know that.”

“At least you get to make it,” said Louise slowly, testing the implications of casting herself in the victim role. “I just have to live with the results.”

“Id est quod est,” said Penn. “It is what it is.” He was going over the insubordination incident in his mind. What had made him so sure it wouldn’t burn itself out? What had made him think getting the men off the base was critical to preventing trouble? But the supplies had to go eventually — the colonel was right that no time would have been safe. And since the men had been eager to finish the school — at least he thought they were — he had decided he could kill three birds with one stone. If only all he had killed were birds.

“We don’t have to decide now,” Louise declared. “Anyway, you’re better off staying with me than with your parents. At least until you get settled. At least until you find a job and a place of your own. Then we can talk about this again.”

Settled, thought Penn. How would he ever be settled? He felt like a stranger washed up on a foreign shore, and Louise was either a towrope back to the world he had come from or an anchor preventing him from fully escaping. One day he felt one way about it and the next another. And then it seemed to him that the colonel was right that worrying about such things was misguided. Why did it matter what a thing was like? Why wasn’t it good enough just to name it in the usual way without thinking you’d find something else if you peeled away the layers? Sometimes he wished the colonel were there to tell him what to do. Then he would just do it, no questions asked.

6.2 Danny Joiner

Danny came home from the war with angry conversations taking place in his head. Whenever he closed his eyes, he saw Pig Eye’s body disintegrating in a volcano of blood and guts, and whenever he opened them, he heard a voice say, Why didn’t you see him? What are you, a fucking moron? Sometimes the dominant voice was his own, but other times the voices belonged to strangers who were criticizing him for things he did or didn’t do. He thought one of the voices might belong to an old drill sergeant, a gruff man no one really liked but they all respected. All of the voices made good points, but the things they were upset about were all things Danny couldn’t control.