White Man's Problems Part 11

They pushed and panted through the s.e.x act for the next fifteen minutes. He grabbed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s one at a time from various positions, as though he were reaching down to grab more fruit from a tree. She took on a rubbery resolve, issuing a simple high-pitched grunt each time he thrust. The cold air blowing through the Marriott vents made it impossible to sweat. He buried his head in each available opening of her abundant body, trying to disappear between her legs from the front, between her t.i.ts, into her neck, even into her crevices from the side. He put her on her back, on her stomach, put one leg at a time over her head. She complied with each position. He increased the velocity and the force, trying to get her to make more than her basic sound. But nothing worked. He rose onto his forearms and felt his body pound into her until his loud slapping was the only sound he could hear.

He did not know how long he held, but his back started to weaken and he went to his side. He grabbed for her clammy arm and guided her to his crotch. He put a pillow beneath his head and moved her hand faster. She began talking in his ear, and when she saw that he was responding, she spoke more rapidly. She got dirty, then dirtier, then filthy. He put the pillow around his other ear, so that her voice vibrating in his ear louder and louder still was the only thing he could feel. Then he was done. He stared again at the ceiling. Then he turned on his side away from Meredith and looked, once more, at the drapes.

Dark green drifts over him, the color of cold ocean water splas.h.i.+ng against a beach, but much grayer, even black. He is in one of those World War II battles from the movies, wearing a green army helmet with netting around it. His unit is mid-invasion, trying to get a foothold amid the shrapnel and flying limbs and smoke and noise. So this is war. It is louder than his imagination allows, and he is in a terror so deep he cannot swallow. He sprints to cover where soil overhangs the beginnings of the sh.o.r.e, with the roots of a long-gone tree fortifying just enough s.p.a.ce for a few GIs to find safety. He slams his back into the mound, panting next to two other soldiers. The sound of the bullets is: pfft. They are cutting through clothing, piercing into flesh of the men around him.

He is so scared. He sobs. He vows he isn't moving. He looks out to the water where hundreds of other men are swimming back to the boats. The soldier to the right of him clutches his gun and makes signs that he is ready to head back into the fire. He screams in Hansall's ear but his voice is inaudible. Hansall keeps whimpering and looking to the ocean. The solider continues yelling; saliva is pouring out of his mouth. Still Hansall does not budge. The soldier hits Hansall on the helmet, with the b.u.t.t end of his rifle, screaming all the while, as bullets rattle by. Pap. C'mon. Pap. Get up. Pap. Get the f.u.c.k up. Pap pap. Get up you f.u.c.king coward we gotta go. I will leave you here to die in two seconds. Pap, pap, pap.

Hansall's eyes opened. The noise continued: pap, pap, pap. He raised his head. It was someone knocking on the door. Daylight was on the room, a gauzy substance through the sheers. He disentangled from Meredith and groped for his boxer shorts. He stumbled to the door and opened it a crack, pulling the little chain lock taut.

Linda's eyes looked back at him.

"Hey, wanted to make sure you were up..." she said. Before he could react, Linda saw into the secrets of his room. Meredith wrapped herself in a sheet and leisurely went toward the bathroom. Linda's face fell like a stone.

"Ok, wow, I didn't hear the alarm," he said.

Linda backed off the door. "Oh, I'm sorry." She instantaneously recovered. "You overslept. The bus is leaving in five minutes." She held up her wrist to indicate the time. He squinted at her watch as though she must be wrong. Then he glanced back into the room. "This is not what it looks like. She is an old friend from college-we got drunk and..."

Linda made a none-of-my-business face. "Ok, well, hurry up," and she headed to the elevator. Immediately, a familiar feeling came over him. Let it all come, he said to himself. That's right. I'm a f.u.c.kup. I'm an a.s.shole. The elevator bell rang. He heard Meredith peeing. He closed the door and started packing his day bag.

When he took his seat next to Will, no one was talking. Linda would not meet his eyes, focusing instead on shus.h.i.+ng her daughter and then looking out the window.

"Dad, where were you?" said Will. "Jesus."

"Don't talk like that," said Hansall. "Jesus, Will, I got a stomach thing. I was up all night puking."

Mrs. Coyle made the group walk from the Arlington National Cemetery's parking lot to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, some two miles uphill. Hansall, head throbbing, trailed closely behind Jobie, who trailed closely behind Will, Declan, and Harry. It had turned cold overnight, and Hansall was suddenly underdressed, cutting the wind in a hooded sweats.h.i.+rt. He looked at the boys to see if they were wearing enough clothes. The main troika seemed ok, but when he looked at Jobie, something was wrong. Hansall caught up to the boy and felt his shoulder. It was sopping wet.

"Jobie, what happened? You're soaked."

Jobie pushed ahead. "Got splashed on. Ms. Barlow let us swim after dinner and I left my stuff too close to the edge."

"You can't go around like that," said Hansall.

"I'm ok."

Hansall pulled off his own sweats.h.i.+rt.

"No. Here, take that off and put this on."

Jobie was startled and removed his wet coat. As he took Hansall's sweats.h.i.+rt, the little boy broke into a wide grin. "This is going to be really big on me," he said. Eventually his bangs poked through the neck and he smiled at Hansall. The sweats.h.i.+rt was like a gigantic caftan. Hansall helped Jobie push up the sleeves and tucked the back into his jeans as best he could. Jobie looked down at the letters printed across the chest. He looked up at Hansall again. "Brown," he said.

Hansall was not sure what Jobie meant. "Yeah? That's where I went to college. It's called Brown."

"The color brown?"

"Yeah."

Jobie c.o.c.ked his head in confusion.

"Well, no. It's named after some guy named Brown."

Jobie nodded as though he were a magistrate, or a policeman, or a teacher who had just been presented with a reasonable idea. "Brown," he repeated. Then he ran to catch up with the other boys.

Will drifted next to Hansall a few minutes later, as they pa.s.sed the picket-fence white headstones, and they walked without speaking. He looked at the boy's straight hair. Will's skin was pale, a bit washed out, especially considering he was a Californian. Hansall wondered, as he often did, what his son's true feelings were toward him. He concluded that it was disappointed love.

Hansall thought of how this contrasted with his own feelings about his parents. He went to memories of his mother rather than his father, probably because she was gone now. Even as a very young boy, he looked forward to being with her. He carried with him images of riding in the Pontiac, the two of them, singing songs on the way to the supermarket. He couldn't wait to get home from school to see her, to hear what she planned to do for the rest of the day. When asked in later life for his earliest memory, he always had the same reply: a Sat.u.r.day morning play cla.s.s-a prehistoric Mommy and Me-in which a long, thin foam mat was placed in the middle of the tile floor in the Methodist Church bas.e.m.e.nt, and he and the other kids would practice tumblesaults. He could still see and feel the burnt-red foam, the topside covered with a s.h.i.+ny skin, the bottom spongy and more p.r.o.ne to erosion, little silver-dollar-sized divots probably bitten out by toddlers. He remembered tasting that foam. He remembered his mother's wide-open arms as she motioned for him to tuck his head down and roll toward her.

"Dad," Will said, pointing at a tombstone near the path, "why does that one have just numbers?"

Two rows in, a marble slab did not have a name and life and death details. It read, "11342345."

"It must be a temporary," said Hansall. "Like a placeholder until they get the rest of the info on the soldier." The other boys stopped and looked at it, too.

"No," said Linda, who walked by as they slowed. "That's a serial number. That's what they do when they can't identify the remains."

The long walk uphill ended a few minutes later at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. At a whispered command from Mrs. Coyle, they hurried to catch the Changing of the Guard. Right on the hour, the children stretched on their tiptoes to see the clicking and clacking soldiers march back and forth along the marble, until the retiring sentry was replaced by the new man, who took his place in the guard box, face chiseled into a glare. As Hansall took in the new marine's final position, sideways, he wondered if the guards were really guarding anything.

The group made their way from the monument.

"So no one knows who he is?" said Will.

"Nope," Hansall said.

"Not even his family?" said Declan.

"Not even the army people?" said Harry.

"Someone must have known when they buried him," said Will.

"They told them to forget," said Jobie. "They told anybody that knew about him to forget him. His mother, his brother, sister."

"That's crazy," said Harry.

"War is h.e.l.l," said Jobie with a shrug.

When they reached the Visitor's Center on their way to the bus, the kids swarmed into yet another gift shop. Hansall marveled at the consistency of the color scheme. It, too, was beige, with new carpet and brown shelves. The workers again wore vague uniforms, and the kids scattered among the souvenirs. He stood at the entranceway, near the checkout counter, near but not talking to a cl.u.s.ter of teachers and moms.

Jobie approached him. "Can I have my money?"

"What is it this time?"

He held up a glossy coffee-table book. "I need fifty-five." Hansall noticed Mrs. Coyle heading over, and, figuring he had backup, looked sternly at the kid.

"C'mon, Jobie," he said, loud enough for the teacher to hear. "Not again. You can't spend that kind of money."

"What's he saying?" Mrs. Coyle said.

"We're at it again," Hansall explained, rolling his eyes. "He wants fifty-five bucks to buy a book."

Jobie held up the book. The Ill.u.s.trated History of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He glared at Hansall, then turned to Mrs. Coyle. "It's my money."

Hansall took the book out of his hand. "Jobie, we said n-"

"Well," Mrs. Coyle interrupted. "I don't think that's so bad. Is this what you really want?"

Jobie nodded. She looked at Hansall and turned her palms and said, "Let him get it. It's a nice book."

Jobie s.n.a.t.c.hed the book back from Hansall and got in the checkout line. Hansall shuffled to the line and stood without speaking to Jobie, watching the checkers slide items into the clear plastic gift bags. Hansall thought, This is a cemetery, for crissakes.

Then a bolt of panic hit him as reached in his pocket. He didn't have Jobie's money. Hansall knew he could not pull out a credit card, because the kid would freak out if he didn't see the money come from his envelope. Hansall scoured the inside of the shop for an ATM but couldn't find a machine. The checker said, "Next."

"Hi," Hansall said in his nicest voice. The checker was yet another retiree, a rail-thin man with a gray beard. "Hey, can I give you a check?"

The man shook his head. "No checks." Hansall glanced down and saw Jobie leaning in. Hansall snuck a look at what money he had left in his pants pocket. Sixteen dollars. Behind him, the line of tourists waiting to throw down for Arlington National Cemetery swag was backing up. The old man behind the register stared at him. Then he s.h.i.+fted his gaze to Hansall's right.

Linda was at his side. "How much is it?" she said. She ignored Hansall and handed the checker three twenties. She retrieved her change and the book, now encased in a large clear gift bag, and handed it to Jobie. She put her hand on the small of the boy's back and guided him out of the store.

They shuttled their way through the rest of the day. A blindingly fast trip to the Air and s.p.a.ce Museum at the Smithsonian left the boys unsatisfied, and Hansall toyed with the idea of inciting a gender fight on behalf of his guys. Where they wanted to linger with astronaut uniforms and retrorockets, the women running the show hurried them back onto the bus. But the group dynamic reclaimed even Hansall when they pa.s.sed the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument, and by now the kids did not have to wait for Mrs. Coyle to start the chant. Jobie, in fact, seemed on perpetual lookout, and he jumped up and shouted, "Standing at five hundred fifty-five feet and three-quarter inches..."

The rest of the bus joined in, "The world's largest freestanding masonry structure..." Hansall found himself catching on to the cadence, chiming in with the others, swept up by the natural force of ringing in on something. He looked down at Will, who was beaming as he gave full-throated voice with the other kids, proud as they were of accomplishment in memorizing the words, in memorializing the Memorial. He smiled at his dad.

"...The Was.h.i.+ngton Monument."

Hansall's brief bubble of belonging was burst at the National Archive, where the Websters stood in line outside of the building for forty-five minutes. As they waited, the women seemed to enclose around Linda. Rather than hanging back and bridging the gender gap as she had been doing throughout the trip, a shuttle diplomat of sorts, determined to keep the peace and find common ground with Hansall, she was returning to her female nation-state. The mothers and teachers surrounded her, their arms touched her, they practically hugged her. Their private laughter rang at him, a stuck-out tongue.

The boys were ensconced in a ridiculous conversation about bonus patches for Grand Theft Auto, so, as they moved into the somber old building, Hansall felt, once again, alone. The big news at the National Archive was not even national. The Magna Carta was on temporary loan from wherever it was housed, or, more accurately, wherever it was that housed the earliest copies of the Magna Carta, of which there were apparently only five, that being the number of Magna Cartas that were needed to proclaim the new normal across England in 1215. It was unclear to Hansall which Magna Carta was in front of them now, but it was plain that any one of the early copies was so special that it warranted first-stop special-guest-star status on the United States National Archive tour of Freedom's Greatest Hits. Hansall wondered if it shouldn't read "3/5" at the lower right-hand corner, like a very limited and very valuable Warhol lithograph.

The light around the gla.s.s-encased parchment made clear viewing impossible. He had a recollection of a World War II novel in which a bunch of German soldiers went through an elaborate plan to kill Winston Churchill, only to find out that the man they ultimately took out was not Winston Churchill but an impostor used by the British to fake everyone out. Instincts ignited, Hansall found it suspect that the English would let the U.S. have any of the real Magna Cartas. The kids peered in at the grand old doc.u.ment, their faces hopeful but vacant. They hadn't yet covered the Magna Carta in social studies, Ms. Barlow explained. Hansall wondered what the h.e.l.l the children could possibly be grasping from this. What was a kid growing up three thousand miles away going to get out of fifteen seconds in front of this abstract reduction? All anyone ever understood about the Magna Carta was that it was the granddaddy of them all, like the Rose Bowl.

Onward through the Archive they zoomed, taking in the Declaration of Independence, The Const.i.tution, and The Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, collectively, in less time than they spent waiting to use the urinals at lunchtime on the scalding day in Williamsburg. Hansall brought Will back for a second look at the Bill of Rights, dutifully trying to attach significance to the one thing on this journey he wanted his son to understand.

"All of our freedom-everything-comes from this paragraph, if you ask me," he said, pointing to the First Amendment. To their credit, the boys, including Jobie, went to their tiptoes.

Will pointed to a place lower on the piece of parchment. "Dad, what is the Seventh Amendment?"

Hansall felt the wave of panic he always felt when he should know something but did not. He was a fake. He had faked everything-high school, college, law school. He knew there were objective measures such as diplomas and the bar exam, but felt nonetheless that if he were the real deal, he would remember the Seventh Amendment.

"It's complicated," he said, in an authoritative voice. "It has to do with states' rights...the rights of the states."

"Really?" said Declan.

"Of course," said Jobie. "Mr. Hansall is a lawyer. That's what lawyers study, the Const.i.tution and the amendments."

Hansall's hangover did not improve during the long, hot day, and by the time they finished a hectic dinner in Chinatown, he was exhausted. Next the group took on the Korean Memorial, with its statues of soldiers moving through rice paddies. The GIs had green pit helmets, with the netting and packs of cigarettes fastened in the band. The memorial was made up of a wall of superimposed images, snapshots of young men at war, portraits taken by Polaroid during down times. Mrs. Coyle told the kids to look closely for a dog, and at the end of the wall collage, one of the girls jumped and squealed and pointed to a German shepherd in the arms of two infantrymen.

Will and Hansall stared at the picture. Hansall noticed the boy was upset.

"It makes me think of Rusty," Will said.

Hansall and Johanna had purchased Rusty as a puppy in happier times, and he had become Will's dog. Rusty had to be put down several months earlier, on New Year's Eve. Hansall had not come to the house for the vet's visit, at the conclusion of which it was decided Rusty had suffered long enough. Johanna told Hansall the next day, while he was watching the Rose Bowl.

"Well, buddy, Rusty is in a better place now." Seeing that didn't work very well, Hansall nodded to the picture. "Just like that guy. He's long gone by now, too."

Will rushed ahead to find Declan. Per Mrs. Coyle's instruction, the children held hands as they moved through the ma.s.s of spring breakers splaying out over the conjunction of memorials surrounding the mall and made their way to the steps of the Lincoln. Swept up in goal gradient and overtired, they ran up the white granite stairs, and Hansall struggled to keep up. When he arrived at the top, the group had turned and was looking out. It was just becoming dark, and the Was.h.i.+ngton Monument stood at the end of the reflecting pool, with the Capitol Building on the horizon.

"You all remember Martin Luther King, whom we talked about," said Ms. Coyle. "Well, you are standing right where he stood when he gave the speech. Who can remember what the speech was called?"

Hands shot up and several of the kids strained to get her attention. "Let's see how much the parents know," she said. "Who can answer? Linda?"

"It was the I Have a Dream speech."

"That's right."

"It's also the spot where protesters about UFOs come to give speeches," said Hansall. He laughed and looked around to the other adults with a smile.

"Let's go in and look at Lincoln's statue," said Mrs. Coyle.

Hansall's ears burned. The chilly air of polite dislike seemed to be giving way to quiet whispers that maybe something needed to be done with him. Well, they were all too serious, he thought. He didn't care to buy into treating this all like the cla.s.sroom. The boys were looking for distraction, something to break up the monotony.

He had an idea based on a memory from his high school trip years ago. He steered his foursome to the side of the memorial, where excerpts of Lincoln's two inaugural addresses were written in huge block letters.

"Look up there" he said. "There is a mistake in one of those columns. Which one of you can find it first?"

Hansall gave them hints, directing them to the far left, then to the lower half, and finally, when it did not appear that they were going to get it, he directed them to the place in the sixth sentence of the second paragraph of the first inaugural address where the E in the word Earth was actually an F. It took another minute for the boys to see exactly where he was pointing, but eventually they all found the flaw and smiled. Each of them looked at him with br.i.m.m.i.n.g satisfaction, excited to have caught the memorial makers in a mistake.

Mrs. Coyle was commandeering the group to the other side of the building. A soft din was over the place, the congealed sound of hundreds of school kids milling, the echoes and guide voices bouncing off the grand stone and slate of the compound.

"Ok," she said. "I do this with every cla.s.s I bring here. Look on the wall. We are going to read it out loud together. Parents too. Ok, ready? Everyone scooch in close. Jobie, start us off."

Jobie gazed up at the letters.

"Four score..."

The rest of the kids' voices came in, "And seven years ago..."

Hansall smirked. He looked down to try the boys' eyes, to see if they were buying it. But when Linda shot him one of her sideways looks, like his mother, midprayer at church, and he saw that the boys all had their heads forward, he merged in. "Now we are engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure."

Well, he thought, it was a d.a.m.n good speech. He focused on the sound of the words. The kids' voices made a sort of chamber music. As they mouthed the lines, they closed in tighter: "As a final resting place for those who gave their lives here so that that nation might live."

The words, the curious diction, came back to him. He remembered staying up late one night in his room during high school, reading the speech from his history book and trying to memorize the lines. He had opened and closed the book for hours, repeating the phrases out loud until he had the whole thing. The mnemonic tools he used came back to him: three paragraphs, one sentence in the first paragraph, three sentences in the second. He gave into just reading along with the young voices. "The world will little note or long remember what we say here, but it will not forget what they did here."