Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

Living with two women (three, if you include the neutral housemate, Rosemary) isn’t easy. And in this case it was absurd. I had assumed an obligation to take care of Mary, and figured Patience ought to understand and go along with that. Patience became unreasonable: “You have nothing to do around the house except take out the garbage, and look at it!” she yelled one night. “Maggots are crawling out of the garbage can! You never do anything around here!”

I sulked (I hated it when she got this way). “That’s what you say. Mary says she thinks I do plenty around the house. That’s an objective opinion—”

Patience’s eyes open wide. “Bob, Mary is your old girlfriend—”

“I don’t want to argue about it if you have to bring up the past,” I said.

Patience walked off.

A few nights later, while Mary was confiding her troubles to me in the family room—we held hands, platonically—I saw Patience come into the kitchen. She stopped, frozen. She was trying not to go nuts and die from pain, but I saw it as spying on an innocent meeting of friends. I said, “We can see you there.” Patience’s face became ashen. She turned and went back to our bedroom.

It was as plain as day that Mary was trying to move in, but I didn’t see it. After Mary gave Patience a private triumphal look one night while I had my head on her shoulder, Patience told me Mary had to go. What a nag! But I called a friend and took Mary to stay with him and his wife.

Two weeks later my friend said his wife was getting upset and Mary had to go. Damn, Mary sure needed a lot of help. I brought Mary back. Patience, finally losing her grip, left when we arrived. The next day Patience came back, but only to get her things and to see Jack. Jack was at my sister’s, but I wouldn’t tell Patience where he was. She started screaming and ran out of the house, hysterical. I couldn’t figure out why. She must be crazy.

I went to the sleep study at the hospital. For ten nights, I slept in a small room with wires stuck all over my skull and one attached to my dick. The dick sensor would tell the doctors when I had an erection, something they were interested in knowing. I used to fiddle with the sensor while I waited to fall asleep, imagining them in the morning saying, “Jeez-oh-Pete! This guy had a hundred and twenty-eight erections last night!” At the end of the test, my shrink called me in and said that the trouble was that I did not sleep. He said this without a smile. I stared at the shrink. “I know. That’s why I come here all the time.”

“Well, now we know you really don’t sleep, like you say. You stay in REM all night.”

“REM?”

“Rapid eye movement: dream state. You never get into deep sleep.”

“That might be why I feel so goddamn tired all the time.”

“Yeah,” the shrink said. “Not sleeping would account for that.”

I think I was supposed to feel better that science had confirmed the obvious. I got mad and said some critical things about the psychological profession as practiced by the VA. When I got home, I figured they’d be coming to scoop me up in a big net, so I sat on the front step slugging down bourbon with a gun stuck in my pants, waiting. They didn’t come. Instead they adjusted my medications, giving me different kinds of tranquilizers, but I still didn’t sleep.

After the sleep studies, I began to cheat on Mary by sneaking out to see Patience. Patience lived near the university with a girlfriend, and I’d go see her and complain how bad I felt and how I wasn’t getting along very well with Mary, and so on. Maybe she’d come back? Are you kidding? She was dating normal people, having fun.

A month later, I intercepted Patience as she walked to a morning class. I took her aside and begged her to come home. We both cried. Patience said, “Not with that girl in the house.”

I went home and told Mary she had to go. She left.

Two days later, Mary called. She would not give up so easily. She felt I had cheated her and wanted me back. I went to see her, telling Patience I was visiting Bill Willis, my technician friend in Melbourne. I was going to be firm with Mary, end this thing. The result of that confrontation was that she got pregnant.

I told Patience I was going to New York City to photograph the Village with some friends of mine from the photography class. I arranged a $500 student loan at the bank. On a Friday I drove Mary straight to New York in her car to an abortion clinic in the Village. Sunday, Patience picked me up in Gainesville, where my “friends” had supposedly dropped me off. My affair with Mary was over as far as I was concerned.