Outerbridge Reach by Robert Stone Page A

smile button and a red rose. The face of the card showed a cartoon drawing of two cute anthropomorphic little animals driving a jalopy toward the sunset. “Friends to the End” said the motto inside. Maggie had signed it, “With love and apologies to Dad.”
    A shade impersonal, he thought, but it was as far as she could go. He went to her room and knocked on the door. A Megadeth tape was in the machine and he heard her turn it off.
    â€œHardly anybody sends me flowers anymore,” he told Maggie when she opened the door.
    She came out to him blushing, avoiding his eye, a wise guy no more.
    â€œSo we’re friends again, are we?” he asked.
    â€œYes,” she said. Teasing a little, he pursued eye contact. She kept looking away, at the point of tears. When he hugged her, she tensed into a statue of iron. King Midas’s daughter, he thought, ungilded.
    â€œWhen you’re back next month,” he told her, “we’ll have a trip. Would that be good?”
    She nodded, all confusion.
    â€œAnyway,” he said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”
    In the master bedroom he watched television for a while, a documentary on public television about Cuba. In the film, Cuba’s idea of itself seemed very appealing. The ideal Cuba was a place in which the ape of ego was not worshiped. People could live their lives on behalf of something more than just themselves. The ideal Cuba seemed to honor poverty and obedience with all the fervor of a Catholic boarding school.
    He was still watching it when Anne came upstairs.
    â€œAren’t things bad enough?” she asked him. “Do I have to look at Castro on top of it?”
    â€œI’m considering life in Cuba, Annie. If our losses are too severe. Of course you wouldn’t be able to play the market.”
    â€œIt’s not funny,” she told him. “I was trying to help out. So I fucked it up. Please don’t make fun of me.”
    â€œSorry,” Browne said. “I’ve been dealing with customers all day. I’m in a disorderly state.”
    He pressed the remote button and turned off the set. She sat down on the side of the bed, looking at herself in the mirror.
    â€œWhat do they say? The customers.”
    He smiled without good humor.
    â€œMy customers are luxury consumers. They could use a little grace under pressure.”
    â€œBoy, me too,” Anne said.
    â€œDid I tell you that Buzz Ward was retiring?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œHe is. He’s going to become a preacher in his old age.”
    â€œHe’ll be good at it,” she said. “He’ll look wonderful.”
    Again, Browne was unable to sleep and passed the early morning hours sitting up beside his sleeping wife. He thought it might have been the wine.
To the Source of the Oxus
lay open on his lap but his thoughts, for some reason, stayed on the Cuban documentary. A car went slowly by outside, cruising. With it came the sound of a rap tape played at full volume as though one of its windows were open.
    The documentary had been no different from a hundred other programs that had offended Browne with their liberal humility and left-wing bias. But the vision of its imagined country, a homeland that could function as both community and cause, was one that remained with him. Browne felt his own country had failed him in that regard. It was agreeable to think such a place might exist, even as home to the enemy. But no such place existed.
    The war would never be fought because the enemy had proved false. All his fierce alternatives were lies. Surely, Browne thought sleepily, this was a good thing. Yet something was lost. For his own part, he was tired of living for himself and those who were him by extension. It was impossible, he thought. Empty and impossible. He wanted more.
    Ward had said, “I need some love in my life.”
    Ward, Browne thought, would make a good minister. A decorous man who knew the