The Other by David Guterson
He wound up the Bel Air’s 280 horses and drove by the Northgate Shopping Center. Its vast plain of parking was empty at this hour, except near the theater, which had on offer Forbidden Planet, with Anne Francis. Rand had seen her the year before in Battle Cry, looking good smoking a cigarette and wearing a chipper beret. Battle Cry had left Ginnie cold, though; it was sappy, she said, on the rainy drive home from it, and full of “war clichés.” What she liked was a movie he found interminable—James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause—and also Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which to Rand seemed just another black-and-white B-movie. “Group-think,” said Ginnie. “Conformity.” But what he saw was Dana Wynter, leading with her breasts, fleeing in sham terror. Ginnie said that was a metaphor. They’d argued about it, though in the spirit of exhaustion. “It isn’t worth the effort,” Ginnie said. “You’re not going to get it anyway.” But two days later, she hadn’t forgotten and still needed to be right about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Conciliatory as always, Rand “admitted” he was still thinking about it.
Rand turned south. It was unbelievable how blighted Aurora Way was north of 85th, the city limit. What might have been a parkway of trees and lawns, like the section of Aurora passing near Green Lake, was here a corridor of callous disregard for the standards of Rand’s city. A strip of commerce fashioned out of plywood and vinyl, gaudy signage and aluminum window sashes, with the sort of hot tar roofs that smelled noxious on a sunny day, then cracked in winter. In a twenty-block section there were eight real-estate agents with oversized readerboards announcing lots for sale in “Shoreline” and “Lake Forest Park,” and four “motor courts” with neon lights and vacancies. Rand passed Chubby and Tubby’s, Hamburger Heaven, Rudy’s Value-Save, Zisko’s Insurance, Colby’s Lawnmower and Small Appliance Repair, and Petterson’s Paints—did he know these Pettersons? There weren’t a lot of Pettersons, he supposed. The ones he knew had married into Byrd money, made selling cheaply bought railroad right-of-ways to timber companies in the twenties. Byrd’s heir, a girl named Elvira, had married a Petterson, and then the money moved over, and pretty soon Byrd’s railroad fortune was dispersed among too many lackluster or wayward Pettersons. Now—it made sense—one of them was selling gallon cans of latex to the do-it-yourself-ers mortgaged for life in “Mountlake Terrace” and “Firdale.” Rand recalled that his own eaves needed painting. But it was hard to find painters you could trust.
Rand parked his Bel Air by the Green Lake Bathhouse and opened the glove compartment. Inside lay a flask of Bond & Lillard, which he put in the pocket of his summer-weight chinos. (B&L was straight Kentucky bourbon, bottled-in-bond and 100-proof, which Rand’s Boeing colleague Brad Sisk extolled with the zeal of a sales rep, taking names at the office for fifths and ordering a case every other month.) The flask was something Rand had picked up at a Maritime Society Silent Auction; it had gone to sea for a dozen years with the captain of the two-masted schooner Equator, Robert Louis Stevenson’s ship to Samoa in 1889. Rand tipped and nipped with reservations—he had a 9 a.m. meeting with Defense Department planners—recalling Stevenson’s stirring epitaph: “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.” Exactly, he thought, and dosed himself more fully. Those phrases made death more appealing than life. The adventurer in his eternal easy chair. Not to mention Polynesian bathing beauties—unsurpassed, in Rand’s estimation.
Warmed, he got out, raised the convertible roof, locked the car door, and walked the lakefront promenade. The lake reminded him of an illustration of Loch Ness in a children’s book he’d once cherished, the sort of Victorian watercolor drawing that implied the lonely presence of a monster. Yes, Green Lake tonight was both silvery and ominous, but everything was ominous right now to Rand, whose mental refrain and litany through the evening had been, and was, Am I ready for tomorrow? He had on board Ted McCallum from the Industrial Products Division and a team of preliminary-design engineers to outline a new guidance system for BOMARC, but they hadn’t met to coordinate and were just going to wing it in the presence of the air force. Unknowns. Plus, Ted was touch-and-go in the clinch. Two of the engineers were pointyheads from the Michigan Aeronautical Research Center—BOMARC was a joint venture—and Rand hadn’t met either of them. Worse, so far BOMARC, meant to shortstop Russian bombers, couldn’t hit sluggish drones that should be sitting ducks. One problem was accuracy of calculation, another was complicated circuitry. The main problem was that BOMARC, a hulking hybrid, was both a rocket and a pilotless airplane. Could it be both? That was the question haunting Rand. Plus, there were guys on the accounting side calling BOMARC “SLOWMARC,” because the project was now two years behind schedule. The previous BOMARC had crashed at Cape Canaveral in ’54, and Dick Nelson, the lead engineer, had to go to D.C. to explain it to the secretary of defense. A million bucks up in smoke, a plume above the Everglades, and Nelson was transferred to manufacturing, where he could do less harm (though word was he’d improved things down there). Now it was Rand’s turn to walk point on BOMARC, which, he’d been told, had better become GOMARC. With a chuckle, okay, but he understood.
Rand recalled that, at this very minute, he was missing the Seattle Yacht Club Summer Sail he and Ginnie had made annually before the birth of John William. Members went north in a well-organized flotilla, moored at Roche Harbor, ate, drank, and were persistently convivial. They moved from deck to deck to flirt, borrow ice, or just stay in motion while the boats rocked under them, hopping over gunwales with a box of crackers under an arm or a bottle of vodka hoisted like pirate’s booty, sunburned and salty, windblown and randy. Babies had been absent from those maritime revels, but not prepubescents, and especially not teen-agers, kids who inhabited the same boat space but in a different dimension, in their own closed universe, only rarely making eye contact with the likes of Rand while they giggled, ate, and just plain looked good. But a baby? Out of the question. What would you do with an infant, after all, when it was time, around midnight, to row ashore in a courtesy boat and descend on the swamped bar in the Hotel de Haro, ostensibly for a round of festive libations but in point of fact to ogle winsome strangers? Unknown. Out of focus. Anyway, Rand would be home tonight instead, a landlubber in Laurelhurst, awake in bed with cotton balls in his ears.
Rand sat on a bench when his left ankle started throbbing, as he knew it would, within a half-mile’s walk—this from long bouts of tennis in his twenties—and enjoyed a last round of tippling. This was good. Summer leaves in their fullness, and the smell of loam and lily pads. A furtive, woody haven, an arboreal respite. Here his B&L, at long last, dulled him. Summer nights in Seattle are not often warm, but this one was, with the breath of lindens. Rand melted into it, finally done with restiveness. A leaf-edged, gentle, shrouded vista, a view of the serene urban lake of his childhood, where he’d waded, swum, hunted frogs, rowed, and felt his wet worm turn watching girls in damp bathing suits. “Home is the sailor, home from the sea, / And the hunter home from the hill.”
After a half-hour, Rand got up and, pitching a little as he negotiated the promenade, made his way back to the Bel Air. He put the flask in the glove compartment and lowered the top. Traffic had dissipated. The streets were lonely. Weaving toward Laurelhurst on Ravenna Boulevard, he caught “Irish Pat” McMurtry on the radio, pounding Ezzard Charles in round ten at the Lincoln Bowl, and in his state of more-than-mild inebriation, he felt roused by the manic description of blows and by the violent enthusiasm apparent in the crowd’s roar, a partisan crowd with a weakness for McMurtry and a racial disdain for Charles.
Rand drove pointedly. He felt a burgher’s loyalty to Laurelhurst and wished to avoid the impropriety of sideswiping a parked car. In the strictly spaced pools of streetlamp light, though, the world appeared ghastly, and an accident seemed probable. The streets were narrow, and the hedges emphasized a diminishing perspective. Rand spied a ’56 Jaguar in a driveway. Someone had parked a boat trailer at curbside. The Bel Air convertible passed through a zone of rose-garden sce
Ginnie? But it couldn’t be. She would be reading her Ferlinghetti in bed right now, ears stopped and wearing a linty nightgown, the planes of her cheeks rubbed pink with expensive cold cream. She would be thumbing through Collier’s and perusing the ads with her head propped against three pillows. She would be peering down through her beatnik glasses and nursing untold grievances while maintaining a freighted and female silence against the advent of his return. Rand idled. To be paralyzed by an unusual turn of events—that was him, and he knew it, much to his chagrin, but the way he liked to think of this was native caution and due deliberation. So he denied what he’d seen and mistrusted his blurred perception, yet the fact remained that Ginnie had passed by—recklessly—at this odd, late hour. It could only mean one thing: emergency. And, if he was further deductive, infant emergency. Rand thought again of his diaper-pin hypothesis. Maybe John William had impaled himself and then, in his writhing, driven the point into his colon, or punctured a major artery. If so, then he, Rand, would be right, right in a way that meant purchase on Ginnie, leverage, and a marital upper hand, and though he wouldn’t choose an emergency involving John William as the trigger for such an advantageous posture, he also saw this potential outcome—this skirmish victory in the war of his marriage—as a silver lining to what might be a black cloud, and as a long-term, sunny side-effect.
Convenient to Laurelhurst was the Children’s Orthopedic Hospital—a complex of buildings mammothly institutional and notably out of scale with the neighborhood—and Ginnie careened toward it, down 42nd, with the breathlessly intoxicated Rand in her exhaust stream. He caught up under the emergency-bay klieg lights in time to see her in the door of her Buick. Ginnie emerged with the tempestuous John William, and though foremost in Rand’s thoughts was the well-being of his son, immediately beneath that was loathing for his own existence—for his bilious wife, for his earsplitting baby, for BOMARC and his meeting in the morning, not to mention the fat against his belt and the ceaselessly returning weeds in his flower beds. John William! thought Rand, running at a speed he hadn’t ventured since giving up tennis, and aware of how clumsy his gait had become, how undependable his legs, how pincered his lungs were by lack of exercise. He was thirty-six.
The infant in the hospital parking lot was crying, but that wasn’t new; in tenor and intensity it wasn’t any different from crying Rand had heard many times before. The klieg lights revealed the same strictured face, yowling and choleric, that greeted him each time he peered, from a furtive angle, surreptitiously, into John William’s crib. Or maybe it was redder, but it was hard to tell with certainty. Rand didn’t trust his take on things. There was something kaleidoscopic about the way he was experiencing the world right now. Between the adrenaline and the B&L, he only knew it in fragments—there was no continuity. But he did note that, for once, Ginnie seemed off her game. She was palpably panicked—the moment had gotten her. Shadowy armpit perspiration showed on her tunic, and her face was blanched by anxious effort. She didn’t even have the wherewithal to castigate him for being suddenly present. It was as if she didn’t have time to register his existence, much less engage in vitriol. With the baby in her arms, she hurled herself at the hospital’s automatic door, which opened with a pneumatic exhalation, as if separating pressure fronts, and he followed. It was a quiet night in the emergency ward; the foyer had the feel of silent anticipation, of a stage set before Act One. Rand was struck by this. That there was no drama. The only drama was theirs, and they’d brought it with them as if in search of an audience. Ginnie advanced like the star of the show, and with the determination he’d seen in her when she confronted their neighbor’s dog by blending stampede with lecture. Which animal is more alpha? was the only question.
The emergency-ward desk nurse lacked a sense of urgency, and to Rand her flippant manner seemed outrageous—gum-snapping, slow with a stapler, averse to eye contact, inappropriately dreamy; she was in her mid-twenties, and her lower lip looked wet and lazy. Rand stopped to explain, but Ginnie didn’t hesitate; she disappeared with the baby behind a pair of swinging doors—the kind with small windows that reminded Rand of portholes—and left him behind with the paperwork, which seemed to him a secretarial task and further undermined his sense of command. Yet, filling in blanks, he felt himself relax a little—the business-as-usual atmosphere in the anteroom subdued his desperation. He had time to think now. He was aware of his inebriation. He was aware of how menial and subservient he must seem to this sultry receptionist, whose bouffant was dark and lax. At best, he realized, he was an afterthought to her. He didn’t register; he didn’t give off scent. Rand acknowledged his feeling of being unmanned by time and marriage, a sensation he worked hard to keep in the background. It occurred to him by way of consolation that he did rise in stature on board the Cornucopia, as master of the tiller, where Ginnie, disturbed by the sea, was diminished. (It was a big part of what he liked about sailing.) This reversal—Rand waxing while Ginnie waned—was rare, but also occurred around jumper cables—because Ginnie was irrationally afraid of electricity—and in moments demanding celebratory elocution: for all her education and classes in rhetoric, Ginnie was tongue-tied at wedding receptions, whereas he, dumb Rand, offered toasts to happiness with ease. He’d always believed that this shortcoming of hers arose from a lack of feeling. Why was it that after weddings she invariably detailed for Rand the reasons to expect failure? He’s a cretin, she’s a bimbo, he lacks drive, she’s ineffectual, he’s devil-may-care, she’s “repressed…” Rand had his wallet out. He was fumbling through the plastic dividers, and this awkwardness deflated him further. He wasn’t skipper of his ship, he didn’t exist.
In Room 2, he found Ginnie and a Dr. McAfee, who looked startled, Scottish, and, despite his youth, old-school—tufts in his nostrils, dark hairs on his fingers—while rotating on his stool with his hands in his lap and the earpieces of his stethoscope at the back of his neck. As Rand entered, McAfee was using the phrase “further cardiac and vascular evaluation.” He stopped to introduce himself; Rand was certain McAfee smelled liquor, and that made him self-conscious and ashamed. Ginnie’s strong throat was conspicuous in the light of this room, and there was a heavy female smell of exertion, an exudate of hormone—frankly, thought Rand, the smell of Ginnie’s sex, which was always on hand when she exercised. Rand perched on the examination table. In McAfee’s manner, he thought he read the thrust of things—naturally, he and Ginnie had overreacted, in the way of most parents. There was no real emergency here. The doctor had seen this hysteria before; the atmosphere was of a misunderstanding. Yet Ginnie looked subdued and circumspect. If he was giving her the benefit of the doubt, he would say that the night’s events had exhausted her and rule out any other explanation. But—tellingly, he thought later—she wouldn’t look at him, and there was a hint of guilt in that.