In the Lake of the Woods by Tim O’Brien

grabbed a sweater and a pair of jeans, hurried back to the kitchen, laced up her sneakers, and headed down the dirt road toward the Rasmussen place. Then any number of possibilities. A wrong turn. A sprain or a broken leg.
    Maybe she lost her way.
    Maybe she's still out there.

10. The Nature of Love
    They were at a fancy party one evening, a political affair, and after a couple of drinks John Wade took Kathy's arm and said, "Follow me." He led her out to the car and drove her home and carried her into the kitchen and made love to her there against the refrigerator. Afterward, they drove back to the party. John delivered a funny little speech. He ended with a couple of magic tricks, and people laughed and clapped hard, and when he walked off the platform, Kathy took his arm and said, "Follow me."
    "Where?" John said.
    "Outside. There's a garden."
    "It's December. It's Minnesota."
    Kathy shrugged. They had been married six years, almost seven. The passion was still there.
    Â 
    It was in the nature of love that John Wade went to the war. Not to hurt or be hurt, not to be a good citizen or a hero or a moral man. Only for love. Only to be loved. He imagined his father, who was dead, saying to him, "Well, you did it, you hung in there, and I'm so proud, just so incredibly goddamn proud." He imagined his mother ironing his uniform,
putting it under clear plastic and hanging it in a closet, maybe to look at now and then, maybe to touch. At times, too, John imagined loving himself. And never risking the loss of love. And winning forever the love of some secret invisible audience—the people he might meet someday, the people he had already met. Sometimes he did bad things just to be loved, and sometimes he hated himself for needing love so badly.
    Â 
    In college John and Kathy used to go dancing at The Bottle Top over on Hennepin Avenue. They'd hold each other tight, even to the fast songs, and they'd dance until they couldn't dance anymore, and then they'd sit in one of the dark booths and play a game called Dare You. The rules were haphazard. "I dare you," Kathy might say, "to take off my panty hose," and John would contemplate the mechanics, the angles and resistances, and then he'd nod and slide a hand under the table. It was a way of learning about each other, a way of exploring the possibilities between them.
    One night he dared her to steal a bottle of Scotch from behind the bar. "No sweat at all," Kathy said, "it's way
too
easy," and she straightened her skirt and got up and said a few words to the bartender, who went into a back room, then she strolled behind the bar and stood studying the selections for what seemed a very long while. Finally she made a so-what motion with her shoulders. She tucked a bottle under her jacket and returned to the booth and smiled at John and dared
him
to order two glasses.
    He was crazy with love. He pulled off one of her white tennis shoes. With a ballpoint pen he wrote on the instep: JOHN + KATH. He drew a heart around these words, tied the shoe to her foot.
    Kathy laughed at his corniness.
    "Let's get married," he said.
    Â 
    First, though, there was Vietnam, where John Wade killed people, and where he composed long letters full of observations about the nature of their love. He did not tell her about the killing. He told her how lonely he was and how he wanted more than anything to sleep with his hand on the bone of her hip. He said he was lost without her. He said she was his compass. He said she was his sun and stars. He compared their love to a pair of snakes he'd seen along a trail near Pinkville, each snake eating the other's tail, a bizarre circle of appetites that brought the heads closer and closer until one of the men in Charlie Company used a machete to end it. "That's how our love feels," John wrote, "like we're swallowing each other up, except in a
good
way, a perfect Number One Yum-Yum way, and I can't wait to get home and see what would've happened if those two dumbass