OCTOBER 10, 2011
There’s a man drinking at the inn’s bar who has recently returned from Iraq. Neko, dark-eyed, a few years older than Vale. She remembers him vaguely from years ago—slender, a mother from Mexico, wheelies in front of the post office.
He and Vale are the only ones there. It’s 10 P.M. and Vale has just finished cleaning the kitchen, setting the tables for breakfast. The owners have gone to sleep, left Vale in charge of locking up. She’s come to love the late walks home—back roads, her phone’s light illuminating the way.
Tonight the old house creaks around them. The inn’s strange night music: toilets flushing upstairs, the hum of the dishwasher.
Vale hasn’t thought about Neko in years, but here they are: Scotch and wine on the counter before them, Gypsy jazz playing quietly on the radio.
He tells Vale he’s a photographer, that he’s spent the last two years photographing the war in Iraq for Reuters, that he flew back from Baghdad a month ago for a break and to spend time with his mother.
He takes a sip. Tells Vale that his mother, Carmen, came here from Mexico when she was eighteen, married Neko’s dad, and has sat huddled next to the wood stove, eyes on the TV, all winter long for thirty years. He spins the glass on the bar’s counter. “A unique version of happiness, eh?”
Vale nods. “The winters can be long.”
Neko takes a slow drink. “Yes. Long.” He looks at Vale. “And you?”
Vale eyes his wrists, the blue veins that quiver there. Crooked teeth. One chipped one. Beautiful face. Beautiful cheekbones.
“Me,” she says, turning from him and sipping her wine. “No story. Back home for spell.”
He nods, eyeing her.
“Isn’t that,” he says quietly, nodding toward the poster with Bonnie’s face on it pinned to the wall near the door, “your mother?”
Vale doesn’t look at the poster. Of course he knows. Everyone knows. She closes her eyes for a minute, imagines slamming her glass against the bar counter, having it shatter into one thousand pieces. Little shards in the carpet—impossible to clean up. “Yes. That’s Bonnie.”
Neko nods. Takes another sip of his drink. “She’s beautiful,” he says, quietly.
“She is,” Vale says, a sudden ache in her gut and thighs.
Neko takes another sip of his Scotch and tells her that he came back to be with his mother, yes, but that he also needed to be somewhere quiet for a while. “Away from the madness. And then Irene happened.” He laughs into his drink. “The fire will find you anywhere, won’t it?” he says.
“Yes, it will,” Vale says, turning her wineglass in slow circles, making a mosaic of concentric rings on the bar’s countertop.
THIS IS HOW THEY BEGIN SLEEPING TOGETHER. THEY leave the bar and walk to his parents’ house—a fifties mint-green cape a quarter mile down the road. They climb an external staircase to a room above the garage: a string of Christmas lights, a mattress on the floor, a wood stove in the corner. He puts a log on the fire, opens the damper, and the log bursts into flame, its birch bark crackling. Vale sits down on the futon. Neko pours Scotch into two cups. “Mademoiselle,” he says, handing one to her. A smile she can’t say no to.
Vale takes a sip. That glorious burn through her upper body. She leans her head back against the wall.
“What’s war like?” she asks quietly.
Neko sits down on the floor across from her. He takes a sip from his cup. Closes his eyes. “It’s unlike anything else, war,” he says. “Humankind’s dark underbelly.”
Vale nods.
“But enough about that,” Neko says, loosening his shoulders, opening his eyes again. Adept, she can tell, at partitioning his brain. “What is it you do, when you’re not here, Vale?”
HOW WILL SHE RESPOND TO THAT QUESTION? VALE PICTURES herself undressing under golden and red lights, surrounded by the ogling bodies of sick and sad and lonely men and women, in order to pay her bills.
She thinks of the line from No Word for Time: To do damage to the earth does spiritual damage as well. “I tend bar. I make delicious drinks,” Vale says.
“I believe it,” Neko says, smiling. “I’d like to try those drinks someday.”
Vale nods. “That can happen.”
He is beautiful, Neko—dark skin, thin bones, long fingers. Vale goes to him. Puts her lips against his lips. Slips his T-shirt up and over his shoulders. She knows nothing of war. Her pain has come from different wounds, but isn’t all pain shaded the same color? Soft blue, plum. Running up and down our veins. Recognizable across the room.