ballroom, he delivered a witty concession speech. Afterward, they held hands and waved at people and pretended not to know the things they knew.
All that pretending, she thought.
The teakettle made a sharp whistling sound. She watched John push to his feet, lift the teakettle off the stove, and move down the hallway toward the bedroom. After a second she nudged the screen door open and stepped inside. A foamy nausea had risen up inside her. She glanced over at the kitchen counter, where the telephone should have been. For a while she stood motionless, considering the possibilities.
The gas burner was still on. She turned it off and went into the living room. At that point a wire snapped inside her. The smell, perhaps. The dead plants, the puddle of water spreading out across the floorboards.
Right then, maybe, she walked away into the night.
Or maybe not.
Maybe instead, partly curious, partly something else, she moved down the hallway to the bedroom. At the doorway she paused briefly, not sure about the formations before her—the steam, the dark, John crouched at the side of the bed as if tending a small garden. He didn’t turn or look up. He seemed to be touring other worlds. Quietly, almost as a question, Kathy said his name and then watched as he leaned across the bed and raised up the teakettle. There was the scent of wet wool. A hissing sound. He was chuckling to himself, saying, “Well, well,” and in that instant she must have realized that remedies were beyond her and always had been.
The rest had to follow.
She would’ve turned away fast. Not afraid now, thinking only of disease, she would’ve grabbed a sweater and a pair of jeans, hurried back to the kitchen, laced up her sneakers, and headed down the dirt road toward the Rasmussen place. Then any number of possibilities. A wrong turn. A sprain or a broken leg.
Maybe she lost her way.
Maybe she’s still out there.
They were at a fancy party one evening, a political affair, and after a couple of drinks John Wade took Kathy’s arm and said, “Follow me.” He led her out to the car and drove her home and carried her into the kitchen and made love to her there against the refrigerator. Afterward, they drove back to the party. John delivered a funny little speech. He ended with a couple of magic tricks, and people laughed and clapped hard, and when he walked off the platform, Kathy took his arm and said, “Follow me.”
“Where?” John said.
“Outside. There’s a garden.”
“It’s December. It’s Minnesota.”
Kathy shrugged. They had been married six years, almost seven. The passion was still there.
It was in the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved. He imagined his father, who was dead, saying to him, “Well, you did it, you hung in there, and I’m so proud, just so incredibly goddamn proud.” He imagined his mother ironing his uniform, putting it under clear plastic and hanging it in a closet, maybe to look at now and then, maybe to touch. At times, too, John imagined loving himself. And never risking the loss of love. And winning forever the love of some secret invisible audience—the people he might meet someday, the people he had already met. Sometimes he did bad things just to be loved, and sometimes he hated himself for needing love so badly.
In college John and Kathy used to go dancing at The Bottle Top over on Hennepin Avenue. They’d hold each other tight, even to the fast songs, and they’d dance until they couldn’t dance anymore, and then they’d sit in one of the dark booths and play a game called Dare You. The rules were haphazard. “I dare you,” Kathy might say, “to take off my panty hose,” and John would contemplate the mechanics, the angles and resistances, and then he’d nod and slide a hand under the table. It was a way of learning about each other, a way of exploring the possibilities between them.
One night he dared her to steal a bottle of Scotch from behind the bar. “No sweat at all,” Kathy said, “it’s way too easy,” and she straightened her skirt and got up and said a few words to the bartender, who went into a back room, then she strolled behind the bar and stood studying the selections for what seemed a very long while. Finally she made a so-what motion with her shoulders. She tucked a bottle under her jacket and returned to the booth and smiled at John and dared him to order two glasses.
He was crazy with love. He pulled off one of her white tennis shoes. With a ballpoint pen he wrote on the instep: JOHN + KATH. He drew a heart around these words, tied the shoe to her foot.
Kathy laughed at his corniness.
“Let’s get married,” he said.
First, though, there was Vietnam, where John Wade killed people, and where he composed long letters full of observations about the nature of their love. He did not tell her about the killing. He told her how lonely he was and how he wanted more than anything to sleep with his hand on the bone of her hip. He said he was lost without her. He said she was his compass. He said she was his sun and stars. He compared their love to a pair of snakes he’d seen along a trail near Pinkville, each snake eating the other’s tail, a bizarre circle of appetites that brought the heads closer and closer until one of the men in Charlie Company used a machete to end it. “That’s how our love feels,” John wrote, “like we’re swallowing each other up, except in a good way, a perfect Number One Yum-Yum way, and I can’t wait to get home and see what would’ve happened if those two dumbass snakes finally ate each other’s heads. Think about it. The mathematics get weird.” In other letters he wrote about the great beauty of the country, the paddies and mountains and jungles. He told her about villages that vanished right before his eyes. He told her about his new nickname. “The guys call me Sorcerer,” he wrote, “and I sort of like it. Gives me this zingy charged-up feeling, this special power or something, like I’m really in control of things. Anyhow, it’s not so bad over here, at least for now. And I love you, Kath. Just like those weirdo snakes—one plus one equals zero!”
When he was young, nine or ten, John Wade would lie in bed with his magic catalogs, drawing up lists of the tricks he wanted—floating glass balls, colorful fekes and tubes, exploding balloons with flowers inside. He’d write down the prices in a little notebook, crossing out items he couldn’t afford, and then on Saturday mornings he’d get up early and take the bus across town to Karra’s Studio of Magic in St. Paul, all alone, a forty-minute ride.
Outside the store, on the sidewalk, he’d spend some time working up his nerve.
It wasn’t easy. The place scared him. Casually, or trying to be casual, he’d gaze into the windows and stroll away a few times and then finally suck in a deep breath and think to himself: Go—Now, he’d think—Go!—and then he’d step inside, fast, scampering past the glass display cases, letting his head fill up with all the glittering equipment he knew by heart from his catalogs: Miser’s Dream and Horn of Plenty and Chinese Rings and Spirit of the Dark. There were professional pulls and sponge balls and servantes—a
