Shadowfires

that was the year we pulled our troops out, which I'll
never forgive or forget, because it
wasn't just an abandonment of the Vietnamese, it was an abandonment of me. I understood the terms, and still I'd
been willing to make the sacrifice. Then my country, in which
I'd believed so deeply, forced me to walk away, to just let the greater evil win, as if I was supposed to find it easy to deny the complexity of the moral issues after I'd
finally grasped the tangled nature of them, as if it had all been a
fuckin' game or something!”
    She had never before heard anger like this in his voice, anger as
hard as steel and ice-cold, never imagined he had the capacity for
it. It was a fully controlled, quiet rage-but profound and a little
frightening.
    He said, “It was a bad shock for a twenty-one-year-old kid to
learn that life
wasn't going to give him a chance to be a real pure hero, but it was even worse to learn that his own country could force him to do the wrong thing. After we left, the Cong and Khmer Rouge slaughtered three or four million in Cambodia and Vietnam, and another half million died trying to escape to the sea in pathetic, flimsy little boats. And… and in a way I can't
quite convey, I feel those deaths are on my hands, on all our hands,
and I feel the weight of them, sometimes so heavy I don't think I can hold up under it.”
    “You're being too hard on yourself.”
    “No. Never too hard.”
    “One man can't carry the world on his shoulders,” she said.
    But Benny would not allow that weight to be lifted from him, not
even a fraction of it. “That's why I'm past-focused, I guess.
I've learned that the worlds I have to live in-the present world and the world to come-aren't
clean, never will be, and give us no choices between black and white.
But there's always at least the illusion that things were a lot different in the past.”
    Rachael had always admired his sense of responsibility and his
unwavering honesty, but now she saw that those qualities ran far
deeper in him than she had realized-perhaps too deep. Even virtues
like responsibility and honesty could become obsessions. But, oh,
what lovely obsessions compared with those of other men she had
known.
    At last he looked at her, met her gaze, and his eyes were full of
a sorrow-almost a melancholy-that she had never seen in them before.
But other emotions were evident in his eyes as well, a special warmth
and tenderness, great affection, love.
    He said, “Last night and this morning… after we made love… Well,
for the first time since before the war, I saw an important choice
that was strictly black and white, no grays whatsoever, and in that
choice there's a sort of… a sort of salvation that I thought I'd
never find.”
    “What choice?” she asked.
    “Whether to spend my life with you-or not,” he said. “To spend it
with you is the right choice, entirely right, no ambiguities. And to
let you slip away is wrong, all wrong; I've no doubt about that.”
    For weeks, maybe months, Rachael had known she was in love with
Benny. But she had reined in her emotions, had not spoken of the
depth of her feelings for him, and had not permitted herself to think
of a long-term commitment. Her childhood and adolescence had been
colored by loneliness and shaped by the terrible perception that she
was unloved, and those bleak years had engendered in her a craving
for affection. That craving, that need to be wanted and loved,
was what had made her such easy prey for Eric Leben and had led her
into a bad marriage. Eric's obsession with youth in general and with her youth in particular had seemed like love to Rachael, for she had desperately wanted it to be love. She had spent the next seven years learning and accepting the grim and hurtful truth-that love had nothing to do with it. Now she was cautious, wary of being hurt again.
    “I love you, Rachael.”
    Heart pounding, wanting to believe that she could be loved by a
man as good and sweet as Benny, but afraid to believe it, she tried
to look away from his eyes because the longer she stared into them
the closer she came to losing the control and cool detachment with
which she armored herself. But she could not look away. She tried not
to say anything that would make her vulnerable, but with a curious
mixture of dismay, delight, and wild exhilaration, she said, “Is this
what I think it is?”
    “What do you think it is?”
    “A proposal.”
    “Hardly the time or place for a proposal, is