Someone to Watch Over Me
Page 20
I never answered. I went about my business and tried not to get mad. She was as big as a Buick. She weighed more than my whole family put together, including Doke. I never mentioned that the bed sagged on her side, and that I was having to replace the mattress every six months. I’d watch her settle into her seat in a steak joint, order a porterhouse the size of an infant, and I wouldn’t say a word. I said nothing about her jeans, which were big enough to throw over a rhinoceros and keep it dry in the rain.
The night she kicked me out, she came home with a new friend. A new lover, she told me. She made her lover wait out on the front lawn while she broke the news. “Do you understand me, Ignatius? I want you out. I’ve decided I don’t need a man to tell me who I am. You can stay until you find a place. Sleep on the sofa. But Grace is moving in with us.”
Grace had walked into the hospital cafeteria several weeks before, after having been bandaged up in the emergency room. She’d been in a traffic accident, and her nose and upper lip were cut. Hildie and she got to talking, and pretty soon they were meeting for drinks after Hildie’s shifts. It was just like Hildie and me, in a way, except that now she was deciding that she wanted a woman and not a man. I never thought much of myself, but this hurt me. “She’s the most interesting person I’ve ever been around,” Hildie said, “and you and I haven’t been anything to each other for a long time.” This was true. Grace walked up to the door, and Hildie opened it and stepped back for her to come in, acting like this was the grand entrance of her happiness. Grace had a big white bandage over her nose, but we weren’t in the same room more than fifteen minutes before I recognized Samantha. Blond this time. A few pounds heavier, a little fuller in the face. But unmistakably her.
“Hello, Grace.”
She looked at me with those little black eyes, and then sat on the couch next to Hildie. I went into the bedroom and started packing, throwing shirts in a suitcase, and some slacks and socks and under-wear. I wasn’t sure what I should take with me. I could hear Samantha/Grace in the next room. She had built her own house, she was saying, and had learned how to play several musical instruments but then forgot how. She had spent the night with Sting during a thunderstorm and power outage in Atlanta. By the time I got back to the living room, she was talking about Mount Saint Helens. She was there when it blew. She almost died.
“Ever been on the reservation?” I asked. I was putting a few of my books into my suitcase.
They both looked at me as though I had trees growing out of my head.
“Reservation?” Samantha/Grace asked.
I couldn’t tell if she recognized me. She stared, and then she smiled. So I smiled back, then resumed packing.
She said, “I’ve done so much wandering around. I’ve been in almost every state of the union, and made love in each one of them, too.”
“I always wanted to go to Hawaii,” Hildie said, laughing.
“Oh, absolutely. I’ve been there. I was married and lived there, but I got divorced.”
“Must’ve been a tough week,” I put in. It was a nasty thing to say. And it was the wrong time to say it. It made me look bad. I said, “Little joke, girls.”
“Oh,” Samantha/Grace said. “Haw.”
Hildie shook her head. “Men.”
“Haw, haw,” Samantha/Grace said.
“Ever been to Montana?” I asked her.
“I worked in the emergency ward at the hospital in Dutton,” Hildie said. “A terrible lonely job. That’s where I had the misfortune of meeting Ignatius.”
And Samantha/Grace smiled and leaned back in her chair. My name is not one that a person forgets easily. And you remember somebody as small as I am, too. She stared at me with those little wolverine’s eyes, and kept smiling.
Clasping her hands behind her blond head, Samantha/Grace said, “Well, you know, I guess to be truthful I’d have to say I never was actually in Montana. That’s one of the few places I’ve never been.”
I couldn’t help it.
A laugh came up out of me like a sneeze. I laughed and laughed and went on laughing—so hard that Hildie got mad, and the madder she got the more I laughed. Before I had stopped laughing, she’d thrown all my things out on the lawn. This was the last night of my marriage, I knew that, and that was all right with me. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was complaining.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several of these stories appeared first in the following magazines or anthologies: “Nobody in Hollywood” in The New Yorker; “Someone to Watch Over Me” in Esquire; “Par” in the Atlantic Monthly; “Fatality” in Playboy; “Valor” in Story; “Two Altercations” in Ploughshares; “Self Knowledge,” “1951,” and “Riches” in Five Points. “The Voices from the Other Room” in the Idaho Review. “Glass Meadow” in Off the Beaten Path: Stories of Place. “Nobody in Hollywood” also appeared in Best American Short Stories, 1997. “Valor” also appeared in Pushcart Prize Stories, 1998. “1951” appeared, under the title “Missy” in New Stories from the South, the Best of 1999.
About the Author
RICHARD BAUSCH is the author of eight novels, including In the Night Season, Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America & All the Ships at Sea, and Rebel Powers, and four volumes of short stories, including Selected Stories in the Modern Library. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Harper's, The New Yorker, playboy, and Story. His fiction has been widely anthologized in Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, The Best American Short Stories, and Pushcart Prize Stories. He lives in rural Virginia.
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More Praise for
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME
“Rich and satisfying…. His stories illuminate the charged stillness in which emotional changes happen…. Bausch hovers over his characters like the guardian angel they all seek, like the perfect parent or spouse: respectful, patient, engaged, but never pushy, never obtrusive.”
—Bette Pesetsky, New York Times Book Review
“In one story after another of this very well-done collection, Bausch highlights the fragility of our realities, the worlds we tell ourselves we understand and for whatever reason believe we have some mastery over. Here, Bausch demonstrates again and again how foolish and illusory that belief is.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“The essential mystery at the heart of every relationship is the subject of these twelve stories. What drives people together? What drives them apart? Revenge, boredom, sex—they’re all here…. The landscape of the heart depicted here is less bleak than it sounds; what drives these stories is the belief that love is reachable just around the bend. A-”
—Entertainment Weekly
“A master of nuance…. In the 12 stories collected here, Richard Bausch once again proves himself our foremost chronicler of domestic discord.”
—Richmond Times Dispatch
“With the subtle and dazzling Someone to Watch Over Me Richard Bausch has raised the bar for short story writers in this millennial year.”
—Washington Times
“In his fifth story collection, Bausch delightfully proves himself the chronicler of faults—not wrongs, but the shy, ambiguous, and sometimes disastrous ways we don’t quite get each other.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred)
“Confused relations and the panic of loss suffuse the tales in Richard Bausch’s stunning fifth collection of short fiction…. Bausch’s chilling and believable dramas are haunting; the stories advance with the gravity of stop-motion photography. And the characters, driven to desperate acts, incapable of hearing one another, will linger long in readers’ minds.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
By Richard Bausch
Novels
Real Presence
Take Me Back
The Last Good Time
Mr. Field’s Daughter
Violence
Rebel Powers
Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America
& All the Ships at Sea
In the Night Season
Short Fiction
Spirits
The Fireman’s Wife
Rare and Endangered Species
The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch (Modern Library)
Copyright
SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER ME. Copyright © 1999 by Richard Bausch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © APRIL 2008 ISBN: 9780061881978
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