Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

I found Terry swimming in the deep water out past where the Uruguayans were splashing. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of weeks. Kay had been back in Florida, and without her around to animate the barbecues and cocktail hours and trips to the beach, the only time I saw Terry was on the road from Mission HQ around dusk, when he’d wave at me from the window of his SUV.

Even now, we almost didn’t speak. He was swimming much farther out than I had ever gone. I had arrived to find him swimming, had swum myself for at least an hour, and had been sitting, watching him, for still longer when he finally came out of the water, his broad chest and shoulders swollen from the sport. He was panting from the exertion. When he saw me, he came and sat beside me.

He was silent for a long time, watching the tide creep higher. Then he started talking to me, the way a man can sometimes talk more openly to an acquaintance than to a friend, about the burden of pain and love he was carrying.

“What you got to understand — what you got to understand, her pussy, it’s sweet . Almost like — cinnamon, you know?”

Terry pulled a cigarette from a pack he had left in his shoe. He took a drag so deep that half the cigarette was reduced to ash. The smirk fell off his face. His bluster faded, and I realized that his vulgarity was only a mask intended to conceal a tenderness I hadn’t thought him capable of. You only had to look at his eyes to see it: the lower eyelid distended by sleeplessness, streaks of red emerging from the mud-colored pupils.

“Listen, brother. We got something — it’s serious, brother. That’s all I’m saying. She won’t talk to me, and you gotta go see her for me. I’m dying here. I don’t know who else I can get to go. She likes you, she’ll listen to you.”

“She doesn’t like me,” I said, surprised that she even knew my name. We had only exchanged words once, at Kay’s birthday party.

“No, she does, bro. Trust me, she does.”

“Why won’t she talk to you?”

“You were there, man. You saw her. She’s not like you can talk to her, she gets in the mood, you know.”

“It’s the election?”

“That and other things.”

“Other things?” I said.

A roar came up from the Uruguayans: someone had scored a goal. The winning Uruguayans lifted their hero on their shoulders and paraded down the beach with him. The defeated goalie sagged to his knees. He looked about ready to bash his own brains out with the nearest rock.

“She wants me to get her out of here,” Terry said.

“Where are you supposed to take her?”

He stubbed out his cigarette in the sand, flipped the pack over onto its back, slipped out another one, and lit it. He was on four-day stubble.

“That’s what I say. I say, ‘What am I supposed to do?’ But she won’t listen. I say, ‘Even if I marry you, even if you weren’t already married, even if I weren’t married, I can’t get you a visa.’”

“And you told her that?”

He said, “You can’t talk to her. She just says, ‘You don’t love me.’ I say—”

Terry didn’t finish.

“Does Kay know?”

“She doesn’t need to know. I love that woman. But this thing isn’t like that. What you have to understand is that I don’t have a choice.”

* * *

Back after that first thing, Kay had dragged Terry into counseling. No, no, I won’t go — and then there he was, slouched in a chair like he was at the principal’s office. Principal was a middle-aged lady with horn-rimmed glasses, chewing nicotine gum, one piece after another. Louise Whatshername. Christ, what was her name? Three times a week, ninety minutes a session, for about six months, this Louise Something sat there listening, crossing her legs when Kay crossed hers, then talking to Terry, the look in her eyes telling him that she understood, she really did. “I bet that was very difficult to resist,” she said. Sometimes Kay would jump on Terry’s ass, and Louise would say, “Kay, this is Terry’s time to talk. Let Terry tell his story. Your time is coming up next.”

And Terry knew just what she was doing: this was his game. She was taking a bad situation and making it into a story, something both of them could live with. “Love is a story,” this Louise Lady said. “A marriage is a story. But you can’t have two stories in a marriage. That’s my golden rule. If a stranger comes up to you and asks what happened, you both tell the same story. Bad story, good story, but maximum one story per marriage.” She was taking two stories and making them one again.

“I can’t forgive him,” Kay said.

“You don’t need to,” said Louise. “You two just need to have the same story. And you don’t even know it, but you two have been living different stories for a long time. When you two have the same story, you don’t need to forgive him, because you were the one who was unfaithful, just like he was unfaithful, and he’s the one who suffered, just like you’re suffering now.”

“I wasn’t unfaithful,” Kay said. “I was a good, decent, devoted wife.”

“The couple was unfaithful,” said Louise.

“Bullshit,” said Terry.

That got a smile out of Kay, first in a long time.

After he got the first confession out of his system, Terry loved confessing. Two decades he’d spent coaxing men to confess their sins, and this was the first time he’d ever seen it from this side of the table. He knew this from the interrogation room, the way getting someone to talk the first time was hard, getting them to stop talking was harder. Sometimes he’d want to tell them, Shut up, you’re digging yourself a deeper hole. Same dynamic at work with Louise Something: the urge to talk and talk and talk. Every time you tell the story, you tell it different, you tell it deeper. First story: wasn’t me. Second story: was me. Third story: was me and I’m good. Fourth story: was me and I’m bad. Nth story: used to be me. How much it had bothered him that Kay stopped seeing him the way she used to, like he was her hero. How there’d been a place in his heart that was Kay’s, and he’d given it to this other lady. How they’d made love twice a week, most times at her place. How they’d watched TV together afterward.

“What did you watch?” Kay asked.

“You know, whatever was on.”

Kay wincing, the TV hurting her more than the sex.

“Did you love her?” she asked.

Terry didn’t know how to answer that. He’d always known where home was. That should mean something too. He’d never lost his head for her. There was just this thing that was Kay’s and he’d given it to her . But it was Kay’s and if you knew that thing was Kay’s — doesn’t that mean something too?

So that was how the other thing went. Whole time it was happening, the thing inside him that told him what was right and what was wrong was pointed firmly in the direction of wrong. Terry White was the kind of guy — he liked to be able to look everyone in the eye. If you can’t look your own wife in the eye, something’s wrong. He knew that. And when Kay knew, really knew, that he understood that, that’s when she let him come home. Separate Kay and Terry and interrogate them about his thing with Miss Whitman, and they’d have ended up telling pretty much the same story, word for word. That’s all you can really hope for: one marriage, one story.

So what you got to understand, what you really have to understand, is that this thing with Nadia was all different. What you got to understand is that the thing inside him was pointing the other way round.

* * *

What you got to understand, Terry was saying — what you got to understand is—

He lit a cigarette.

He had never wanted a woman more in his life, from the first time he saw her, which was on the very night he had heard gunfire and, motivated by blind, stupid instinct, headed in the direction of danger. The siren of his vehicle had interrupted the assault. By the time he was at the house, the judge was already half out the door, standing on his front stoop with a shotgun in his hand. Didn’t even know how to rack it properly. Terry was worried that the judge would shoot his own balls off. Then they’d gone inside, patrolled the house, rooftop to kitchen, back terrace to bedroom, where Terry had seen Nadia sitting in bed in white underwear and a gray camisole. The judge had slipped into the bedroom, closed the door — the last thing Terry saw was her green eyes staring into his, a straight-out soul connection if there ever was one.