drops the club.
“Put your hands up.”
“I’m sure—”
“I am going to count to three.” The caution is delivered with a precision that makes Noel smile as he raises his hands. The parking lot is lit like a stage. Snow falls gently through rose-white lights beaming atop the cruiser. The policeman steps over the wall, shining a baton of light directly into Noel’s face.
“Officer, I can explain.”
“Turn around.”
Noel obeys.
“I’m going to frisk you. Keep your arms raised.” The officer pats him down, removes the remaining golf balls from his pocket as well as his car keys. He runs his hands down each trouser leg, then steps back and says, “Okay, you can put your hands down.”
A brief interrogation ensues. The cop is clearly a rookie. Noel can’t help feeling both amused and irritated. He recognizes the textbook earnestness, the training sequences, the mock urgency—all misplaced and misapplied in this real-world situation. The Department of Defense ID sets the officer at ease. He allows Noel to fetch his golf club. As he picks it out of the snow and wipes it off, he wishes there were some way of telling the young cop about infrared white grubs, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and the dead schoolchildren on the other side of the world. Perhaps it would help both of them to see a little more clearly. Instead, he assumes the role of obedient citizen, thankful for being let off with a warning.
On the parkway, the Navigator’s wiper blades beat time across the windscreen. The road is slushy, overly salted and sanded. It is cozy inside the enormous vehicle, protected against the elements. Noel’s exact geographic location is mapped and displayed on the dash in degrees, minutes, and seconds. He loves the four-wheel-drive security, the three- hundred-sixty-degree visibility, and the pleasing sense of riding higher, heavier, and beyond all need. He’d joked about it—about heaviness, need, and middle age—in the doctor’s office that morning. A bout of light-headedness yesterday and what felt like stabbing pains in his chest had gotten him an emergency appointment. “Could be gas,” the doctor told him after the EKG. “Gas? That high up?” The doctor assured him it was possible. “Could also be stress.” He ordered the full battery of tests, the outcome of which Noel foresaw exactly. Diet, exercise. He wasn’t a hypochondriac. The pains had been real. But like all the men in his family, he’s always been stoic about aches and pains. You tough out the things you can’t control. Pat, his wife, calls it dumb machismo, but it’s really something homelier, a modesty that resists calling attention to private suffering, not to hide from but simply to acknowledge the fragility and finitude of the flesh.
An old Fleetwood Mac song is on the radio. Thunder only happens when it’s raining. He switches it off. Fifteen minutes later he enters his Arlington house, a three-bedroom postwar brick colonial set among mature trees. They’ve been here since Hannah was three, when houses inside the Beltway cost a fraction of what they sell for now. A second mortgage is paying her tuition and fees at the University of Virginia. Regardless of what has happened at work, the peace of the neighborhood always makes him feel that he is returning to a parallel day here, a day he has missed.
“Pat?” He removes his wet shoes, hangs up his coat, finds her dozing on the sofa in front of the television. “Steve Kritsick called to see if he could ride with you on Saturday,” she says, pulling the blue fleece over her feet.
“What did you tell him?”
“I said yes.” She glances over when he doesn’t respond. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.”
“How about no?”
“I told him you’d call to confirm.”
He goes into the kitchen as Pat wonders aloud why Hannah isn’t answering her e-mail or returning her calls.
“I’m sure she has a lot on her plate.” He takes a beer from the fridge. The Pottery Barn vase that appeared yesterday has already blended into the kitchen decor and now contains a bouquet of dried flowers. Pat is expert at introducing things into the house that seem always to have been there. It’s in the kitchen that he feels they are truly cohabiting life partners. In bed, there are too many uncertain signposts en route to a good or bad night’s sleep. The bedroom is too singular a place, whereas in the kitchen, preparing and eating a meal, he is always conscious of familiar settings and can sit down like anyone else to enjoy what is being served. Plus, there’s no embarrassment about asking “So, how’d you like it?” afterward.
He puts the covered plate with his dinner into the microwave, punches the start button, and returns to the den.
“Did he say anything about tools?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m bringing my own. The stuff they had for us last year was totally fucking useless.”
Pat glances at him the way she often does when a remark strikes her as gratuitously cranky. He hadn’t meant to sound that way. The microwave beeps. He goes to fetch his dinner. When he returns, Pat is surfing through the stations, remote control in one hand, holding the fleece at her neck with the other.
“Went in for a physical today,” he says, sitting down.
Pat glances at him, contains her surprise by asking, “What prompted that?” equally casually.
“Just finally taking your advice.” He smiles, imagines slipping an arm around her waist but knows how she would stiffen ever so slightly and turn away. He has always found her attractive. A little thicker in the waist, heavier in bust and jowl, but she’s aging well. The same is said of him, in spite of the paunch.
They watch The Charlie Rose Show. There have been less even-tempered times, but they seem distant now. The big shift occurred three years ago, when Hannah left for college. It wasn’t that he and Pat were drifting apart but rather as if a little patch of gray had opened up. She’d be embarrassed to know how much he loves and has always admired her. “Sometimes I wish I could trade places with you,” he’d said to her recently in a slightly drunken, postcoital rush of emotion. They’d gone out to a bar in Clarendon for a Saint Patrick’s Day drink, something they hadn’t done in years. An early-spring breeze was blowing through the bedroom windows. What he meant was that he envied her direct, uncomplicated, open nature. She lifted the sheet up over her breasts. “Have you had these feelings for a long time?” The confusion that flashed in his eyes set her roaring with laughter. As he chuckled at her little joke, he added bawdy humor to the list of her admirable qualities. They lay for a quiet moment looking up at the ceiling. She was comfortable in her life and in her skin, someone who’d always understood that happiness is completely free. He turned his head on the pillow, looked at her, and felt the urge to embrace her again, but he waited instead to see if she came to him. The moment passed, and he realized it was not going to happen. When she got up and padded off to the bathroom, he felt a twinge of disappointment.
“I wish you hadn’t told Kritsick I’d drive,” he says, setting his empty plate on the table.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.”
Every March for the past three years, Noel and his neighbor have driven to a spit of land near the mouth of the Potomac where the church owns and operates a children’s summer camp. It has become an annual all-men’s parish outing, with Father Neale playing the role of host and foreman. The priest hustles about amiably, inspiring esprit de corps and providing continuity. It’s impossible not to notice how conscious all are of their contribution. At the end of the day, a case of cold beer always appears.
“Why not just say you need to leave early?”
He doesn’t respond.
The Charlie Rose Show has been the backdrop to dinner since the red-cell assignment started. It’s been months since he was home before eleven o’clock. He takes his plate into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator to get another beer, and freezes up. He stands there for a moment, staring blankly at the haphazard topography