The Committee. Sterling Watson

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СКАЧАТЬ not even when the weather would change. His only regret about his war was literary, or perhaps more accurately, historical. He loved the quotation attributed to Alexander the Great when, after years of conquest, his army mutinied before a battle in India. The men were worn out and demanded to go home. The young king called them to assembly, stepped forth, and stripped naked. “Does any man among you honestly feel that he has suffered more for me than I have suffered for him? Come now—if you are wounded, strip and show your wounds, and I will show mine. There is no part of my body but my back which has not a scar; not a weapon a man may grasp or fling the mark of which I do not carry upon me. Show this man to me and I will yield to your weariness and go home.” No one came forward. Instead, the army burst into wild cheering. In tears, the men begged Alexander to forgive their lack of spirit and pleaded with him only to lead them forward.

      Stall’s wound was in the back of his leg. His war had been brief, and all he knew of life so far, it had taught him. Keep your head down when you can. Be good to others, ask for the same in return, drink the wines of the countryside and eat the good food, and don’t overcomplicate simple things. Occasionally people asked Stall about his war, and when they did, he gently tried to change the subject, and if they pressed him, and if he’d had a little bit to drink, sometimes he said, “I was only there for a few months. I was shot in the ass, but I was not running away.”

      Stall drank some of his unusual third martini and said, “Jack fought all the way from Normandy to the Rhine with the 101st Airborne. He was wounded three times, and he won a medal. One of the big ones. He had a good war, or a bad one, depending on how you look at it.” Stall set down the drink and examined it, begging it for the truth he knew it held. In vino veritas. Was survival itself enough to justify three wounds and a year of brutal fighting? He’d never asked Jack Leaf that question.

      “How did he look at it?” Maureen waited. She was very close to the line Stall did not want her to cross.

      “He didn’t say. At least not to me. I saw his medals mounted in a glass case in his study. I just stuck my head in there one night at a party. You know, curious to see a colleague’s lair. His was close to perfect—like an English gentleman’s study. Leather chairs, a big rosewood desk, rows of books, a mahogany humidor, and a rack of pipes. Everything neat as a pin. Jack was all about order in life and work.” Until the end, Stall thought.

      “Where was he wounded?”

      Stall wanted to say, All over Europe, but knew that would be the gin talking. He said, “I don’t know. I never saw him in anything but his professor outfit.”

      “You never saw him naked?”

      Maureen knew, of course, that Stall had showered with many of his colleagues. Handball was the English professor’s game of choice. Played well, it was serious exercise. Several of the younger men played the game at noon, showered, and returned to their offices for sandwiches at their desks. So, yes, Stall had seen a lot of professorial nakedness, some of it ugly, some of it beautiful, none of it Jack Leaf. Stall shook his head.

      “Where was he from?”

      “Oklahoma, I think. His PhD is from Vanderbilt. I don’t know where he got his BA.” Of course, Maureen knew about Jack Leaf’s Vanderbilt connection. Of such things were pecking orders made, and the English Department hierarchy mattered to Maureen as it did to all of the wives. Possibly even more than it mattered to Stall.

      She sipped and set down her glass with great concentration. “Did you know his middle name was Red?”

      “Red? You mean a nickname?”

      “No. I mean his full name was Jack Red Leaf.”

      “You’re kidding.”

      Maureen shook her head in a way meant to be decisive. Some of her gin slipped over the rim of her glass.

      “Where’d you get that?” Stall slid his chair closer to his wife’s at the kitchen table. His knee touched hers.

      “From Sarah. She told me.”

      “When? Why? She just told you, Oh, by the way, my husband’s middle name is Red?”

      “Of course not. Don’t be an ass.”

      There it was. The anger that lived in the heart of Maureen from Across the Border. Where did it come from? Stall wondered. The gin only let it out, called it from its hiding place. What was the source of the anger in Maureen Stall?

      From the land beyond earnestly inebriated, Maureen looked at him and then at her martini as though she were having a hard time deciding which she liked best. Or least.

      “Sarah told me one night at a party—maybe it was the same party where you snuck into Jack’s study and pronounced it neat as a pin. Anyway, we were talking about marriage, you know, couples and how they meet, what attracts them, makes them want to be together.”

      Obscurely, Stall saw that he might not like where this was going. With women, it was tit for tat, and just as surely as Jack Leaf’s wife had told Maureen about her and Jack, so had Maureen given Sarah Leaf her tit. No, Stall didn’t mean that. It was the gin talking and not well, but the idea was clear. Stall feared what Maureen might have told Sarah about the attraction between the Stalls. Not because he knew what she might have revealed, but because he had no idea.

      Maureen said, “She said it was his skin.”

      “His skin?”

      “Yes, his skin. Come on, Tom. Think about it. The skin of Jack Red Leaf?”

      It came to Stall. “No!”

      “Yes, what else could it be?”

      “You’re saying he was an Indian? You’re saying Sarah told you that?”

      “Not in so many words. Her exact words were, From the first time I saw him, I loved his skin. His dark skin. It was so smooth. The man had no wrinkles. It covered him like caramel poured over a cake. You know what I mean, Maureen, and here she stopped and she sort of winked at me. We were both drinking, of course, and it was late at night in their house and most people were already gone, and you were off snooping in Jack’s study, and she winked and said, You know, Maureen, my husband’s full name is Jack Red Leaf.”

      “And you knew . . .”

      “Not until later. Not until I thought about it. And I started to wonder why she told me and what that wink meant. It was sort of a dirty wink, if you know what I mean.”

      Stall thought about it. She could only mean one thing. “You mean, uh, sexy dirty. That kind of dirty.”

      “Yeah, that kind. I think I know Sarah well enough to know when she goes sexy dirty late at night in her cups.”

      “What was she drinking? We, uh, ought to get—”

      “Oh, don’t be an ass. She was drinking firewater. I don’t know, probably bourbon. She likes bourbon. The question is, why did she want me to know what, apparently, nobody else knows or has even cared to think about? Why Jack Leaf’s skin was so dark.”

      “I don’t know . . .” Stall ignored the fact that his wife had called him an ass twice, and considered the question. “I just thought—I mean if I thought about it—I thought his skin was Mediterranean. СКАЧАТЬ