Because the Rain (3 page)

“Yessir,” Goetzler said.

“Lieutenant colonel in twenty. It’s possible. You know how to read, Goetzler.”

The army would go crazy with dope, but the war came first, twelve months of it. Goetzler commanded an MP platoon in Saigon and patrolled in a jeep with Sergeant First Class Stanley Olszewski. The apartments over the storefronts all had long windows with broken shutters needing paint. Olszewski wore a crew cut, carried a Remington 870 loaded with double-aught buckshot. There’s too many gooks too fast here for an M-16, he said. He took greenbacks from the madams of Cholon to insure the off-limits orders on their brothels were unenforced. The first thing Olszewski did was look at Goetzler’s small hands and thin wrists.

“For Christ’s sake, sir, get a Rolex,” he said. “No gook will listen to a second lieutenant with a PX Timex.”

They busted AWOL draftees from the First Infantry Division, bony rednecks who wouldn’t pay the pimps, slow-eyed blacks who killed their buddies over whores. There were explosions, bombs in restaurants, cafés, and go-go bars, the jagged pieces of brick and glass killing the squatting peddlers in from the country-side to sell mangoes and orchids from rice baskets. Sometimes, they trapped the VC bombers in the sewers, and Goetzler and Olszewski watched from the jeep while their men threw grenades into the open manholes like pitchers on the mound.

They pulled the pins, these young MPs in starched jungle fatigues, then did a fast wind-up, laughing and wagging their tongues. Fire in the hole, they yelled. Nobody took cover. After the explosion, the water sprayed up brown and foamy and soaked their legs.

Olszewski held the wheel and kept his foot on the clutch and chewed a Swisher Sweet. Goddammit, Cianci, he said.

The sergeant would stop the jeep suddenly and the tires would lock and they’d slide on the wet streets. Goetzler’s neck always jerked and his glasses went spinning into the sunlight. He grabbed after them and got handfuls of humid air. The grayed sergeant just slapped his back. The fucking job, he said. The second week, Goetzler bought an idiot strap at the PX, but the lenses still fogged and he saw Saigon as if through a wet window. He spent his whole tour trying to see correctly, discern the true distances, though it didn’t matter because Goetzler and the war became instant friends.

Camille Pajak couldn’t get inside his head over here. He loved Vietnam for that alone. There would be no more walks along Belmont Harbor after lectures at DePaul, the lake waves white from the sun, himself tortured by her silence. He didn’t care about her great admiration for Emily Dickinson. He was done thinking about her eyes, gray like pond ice, her slender hips, her 36Cs tight inside a sweater, the way her brown hair unraveled in the lake wind when she told him they were the very best of friends. He burned the letters she’d written him in Officer Candidate School about the sparrows in Lincoln Park on the first day of autumn. He’d read them after a day’s training, hiding in the dark latrine while the fifty men snored from metal bunks. She sprayed the stationery with Chanel and sent two a week. The cadre sergeants thought it was his cousin being nice.
What could you do with a woman, Goetzler?
But he sat upon the toilet stool and held the paper to his face, knowing her hand touched them. He imagined Paris wet and long nights of lovemaking above rue Cardinal Lemoine where they joined like erotic sculptures while the rain smeared streetlight across the apartment windows. The letters were signed “Always, C,” instead of Camille, and he pretended it was a gesture when he knew it was only an opportunity for her to be literary because after graduation she took a job as a legal secretary for Brady, Lunt, and O’Connor.

He was an MP officer now. They said nothing about his small fingers, thick glasses, or how his body would look better on a woman. It was illegal. He bought a nickel-plated Colt .45 with a tricked trigger, the pull lighter than flicking a Zippo. He wore a green cravat under his starched fatigues and smoked a Dunhill pipe filled with Burnham tobacco from Hong Kong. He sported a gold Rolex date timer. For five dollars a week, a lispy Vietnamese kid spit-shined his boots, buffed his MP helmet liner with paste wax, and bleached his white gloves in a bucket. Colonels slapped his back and told him he was the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Stay squared away, they said, and you own the glory road.

Already, he’d collared a major for beating up a bar girl on Le Loi Street, a square-jawed colonel on Westmoreland’s staff who welted her small cheeks with his West Point ring. He pinched a fat lieutenant colonel for selling Johnnie Walker Red from the officers clubs to the bar manager at the Rex Hotel. He escorted the men to Long Binh Jail, cuffed and wide-eyed, their rank meaning nothing.

Mostly, he wanted Camille Pajak to see the girls flock him. Knock him down where he stood. The wispy daughters of South Vietnamese army majors, even the mouthy hookers who claimed their man was a master sergeant in supply, the biggest shot in I Corps, and he was returning next week to take them back to Topeka. New shoes every month and a PX card of their very own. They got naked for a mess hall apple and never pretended to cry about the fate of Virginia Woolf. She put stones in her pockets to drown herself, Camille once said. Stones in her pockets.

*   *   *

That night, after the retirement buffet, Goetzler watched Annie do her lipstick without a mirror. She sat in his chair, her small knees joined and tilted, looking out the high-rise window across Lincoln Park and the gray lake. The money envelope stuck from her Coach bag, six hundred dollars for two hours. He drank his scotch, Laphroaig twelve-year-old, and the whiskey bit over the ice. He could afford this once a week until he was seventy.

Goetzler first saw her on the Web site www.chicagoasian.com. Annie’s scanned photo was fuzzy, taken by a hotel room door. She stood with her back to the camera and wore a black thong. He knew she was Vietnamese by her skinny legs. The Thais and Filipinos got more meat as children. Their bones were bigger.

Annie put her phone on the glass table. He asked her last week to come in a yellow
ao dai.
He wanted to reach up through the panels and feel her stomach. He would splay his fingers before drawing them into a slow fist. But she came into his condo wearing a suit and walked across the oak floor in thick boots. The girls always wear what you want, Nick said. You tell me if there’s a problem. Goetzler had even turned the heat up because he knew she’d be cold in the yellow silk. Maybe, he thought, it was folded in her bag.

“You need to get changed?” he said.

“I can’t wear an
ao dai
for you,” she said. “You are not my husband.”

Goetzler nodded at her reflection in the glass. Geese flew over the rooftops along Clark Street, a tight V formation.

“The war’s old,” she said.

Annie lifted her head up and blew like she exhaled smoke. Her arms were long and thin and the American weight never formed right above her elbows. She’d been looking at his books.

“You have a nice place,” she said. “A lot of women would like to sit and look out.”

Goetzler put down his drink. The wind lifted the rain up the window. He saw himself reflected in the window, the drops shadowed in his glasses.

“I caught my wife with a supply sergeant over in Germany,” he said. “I was a captain.”

Annie laughed. Her smooth lipstick cracked when she opened her mouth.

“I bet he was handsome,” she said.

“She wanted to drive around Europe in an Alfa Romeo convertible and wear nice sweaters. We did that—right after I got assigned to Berlin. We rented a red one and drove down to Mont Blanc.”

The rain held Annie’s eyes and he watched them in the window. She pointed at him, her nail long and red.

“Your first anniversary.”

“It rained outside Annecy and a tire blew out. We couldn’t get the top back up.”

“Perfect.”

Annie stood and stepped from her boots as if deep in water. She took off her jacket and laid it over the sofa arm. Her shoulders were small, like sticks. She walked over to him and lay down upon the couch with her head against his thigh. He picked up her foot and waited for her to look away from the window. Her heels were white and hard, blanched by hot sand.

“You learned to walk over there,” he said.

She was silent.

“You get out on a boat?” he said.

“No. I flew with my wings.”

Goetzler watched her stare at the rain before looking out the window, never knowing where the sky and the lake separated.

3

The window blinds muted the streetlight when Mike Spence sat on the bed after his tenth night of Loop traffic control. Susan lay with two cats over one leg, eyeing the bulge where he kept a .38 on his ankle. The snub-nose was backup against the H&K Nine on his hip ever failing. She’d been looking at the concealed pistol for a long time, and he hadn’t taken off his uniform. Since Mike went on the job, they spent nights paused in silence rather than fighting about the life he’d just quit.

Susan thought the hidden .38 was ridiculous because Mike waved Sonomas and GMC Jimmys onto the Congress Parkway from State Street.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he’d told her. “I’ll need it one day.”

After that, Susan stopped seeing him, and looked with unblinking eyes upon the things he now wore. Mike just went to work.

He touched his wife’s ankle, but she didn’t move. He left his hand until it made him feel uncomfortable.

“You’ll still write?” she said.

“I know what we did for me,” he said, “but I don’t want to write anymore.”

“I didn’t choose a cop, Mike.”

“It’s like the army but I get to come home at night,” he said.

“You haven’t been a soldier for a long time,” she said. “This is just another idea you have of yourself.”

“No,” he said. “The idea was being a writer.”

Susan looked at his light blue Kevlar vest, the same color as his police shirt, then the .38 again. She became a wraith when they talked about this, terrified and near levitating, but he’d stopped feeling bad about it. Susan already knew the answers to her questions, and he believed she didn’t have to ask them.

“I can only write about veterans,” he said. “And people don’t think about veterans the way I know them to end up.”

“You can put veterans and their wives in different places,” she said. “We’ve been to Mexico and France. Barcelona. Women will read that.”

“I’ll never sit alone in a room again,” he said. “Todd didn’t care about my buddy Dilger and how the lifers ruined him. Todd also has the money to buy books.”

“I don’t know you,” she said.

“I won’t keep letting some dream humiliate me,” he said.

“We’ve killed for your dreams,” she said.

Mike smiled into his wife’s eyes while he undid the Velcro on his Kevlar vest. He was done trying to explain.

“Just like soldiers have for ours,” he said.

Susan’s eyes wilted, then glassed. She looked from his ankle as if her turning had changed his police blues back into Levi 501s. She then closed her eyes and held them shut. Mike sat for five minutes, stitched inside his wall shadow, and watched her feign sleep. Her eyes never reopened so he stood to raise the blinds.

That night they made love in the hard streetlight, but not to each other. It was what they were doing to forget the problems. They imagined couples from supermarket lines, waitresses in Polish restaurants, women who ran with their dogs. Susan told him things and he told her things, too. They always kept their eyes closed and sometimes he felt her smile while he kissed her. But tonight, among the wind sounds, her lips were straight and coldly wet, and he felt her imagining nothing while he dreamed another man kissing her breasts. Mike tried parting his wife’s lips with his tongue, but they wouldn’t come open, and the man was licking Susan’s stomach when Mike finished. He never let the guy get far.

She touched his arm after he rolled away and looked at him. Her brown eyes once made him angry they were not one person. Now, he did not know when her eyes became only eyes. The wind lifted the curtains and they fell and covered her face before lifting again. He could smell the cold in the wind.

“You’re not into it anymore,” he said.

“I love you,” she said.

She cried and her eyes shook. She lay upon her stomach hugging a pillow.

“It was not a baby,” he said.

“They taught me that,” she said.

He looked at his dirty uniform on the floor and knew that Susan’s eyes were closed without having to see her.

In time, they included visuals into their lovemaking. They used the computer after his traffic shifts, the amateur sites with group sex pictures, the free downloads of home swinger video shot in a Naperville, Illinois, basement, and joined adultfriendfinder.com. They browsed profiles and found many couples like themselves, naked men and women with neither hope nor despair. After they clicked the stranger’s thumbnails, they looked a while before smiling and going to bed.

But they didn’t own a digital camera and felt uncomfortable with posting pictures, so their ad received no hits. She wanted to keep pretending they swung and Mike felt better. He knew this was a game and that they’d return to normal again. After a few days, they stopped using the computer because the different sites used the same pictures and seeing the people again made them sad. They spent the morning dark quietly while Charlie Rose did a whole week interviewing Wharton School of Business professors about the American economy and neo-conservatism.

One night, Mike and Susan saw an Asian woman in the second-flat window across the street. They’d been watching a
Good Times
marathon on TV Nation when she stood in the lit glass, shirtless with black panties, her body like a half grown cat’s. When JJ tried selling an offended Florida on the possibility of a black Jesus, the Asian woman stood so close to the window her breasts pushed flat, and Susan clicked off the television.

“Sit up,” she told Mike.

He leaned against the headboard while the Asian woman backed away from the glass. She was drying herself with a towel. Susan sat inside his thighs. Things had gone that fast.