Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  “Yeah. She isn’t anymore. Your girlfriend. Yeah, I thought about it.” I sat back down across the table from him, circled the beer bottle with my fingers. He was watching me, sipping the tea, waiting. There was some look on his face. Certainty, confidence.

  “I couldn’t figure it.” I looked at him. “I don’t know,” I said. He was smirking. But maybe he wasn’t. “Anymore. Anything. I don’t know.” It was as if he wasn’t even interested in our conversation anymore. His face was the big, quiet face of a child, of Allen as a child, of a time when it seemed that everyone knew what was going on but me. He had always been this way. And I thought, It never ends.

  I stood up from his table, tried to say goodbye but couldn’t, waved and then walked out and down the hall to the elevator, still there from when I’d come up in it. I remembered being in the hospital room with my father two weeks before he died, and I said something to him about coughing, only the way I said it it sounded like coffin, and my father looked at me, startled, with a look of terror on his face. And I thought about my own dying, and suddenly it was obvious that Teresa didn’t, couldn’t and wouldn’t ever care for me. I hadn’t the confidence for it. The elevator doors drew open, and I got on.

  Pretend She Don’t Scare You a Bit

  My giant yellow stepladder shifted, then rose up on one foot, and a minute later I was there, on the concrete, like that, sweetly, aimlessly recalling the history of my escape. Now I’m in the hospital. Can I move my arms and legs? Yes, I can, now I can. It was yesterday I was sort of paralyzed.

  I’m working in school supplies, next to pet supplies. Charlene brushes past me, lets her hand drag across my butt, laughs. “So close, but yet …” I say. Her smock is untied and her blue silk blouse is unbuttoned halfway down. “Dream on, college,” she says. She takes a box of pencils and slips it into her blouse, then draws the smock tight and ties it. Charlene steals things, for fun mostly. I do, too. There isn’t a lot of fun working in a place like this.

  I go back to work, watching the white metal ceiling for the bird that sails around in the steelwork and surveillance cameras up there. A starling. It got in months ago, but it hasn’t been around for at least a week, so maybe they were right, and it died of thirst like they said it would.

  Charlene’s boyfriend, Patricio, dumped her last week for a black girl on dayshift named Lakeshia. Patricio is my best friend here. He’s big. Charlene is small, short, sexy, in a Spanish sort of way. The stuff that dreams are made of.

  In the pet shop there’s a kid looking into a fish tank, hands around his face, forehead on the glass, staring into the aquarium. Guy’s about twelve. The store is Wannabe Wal-Mart, it’s near midnight on a Friday, we never close. I’m sale-ing stuff, putting on Manager’s Special stickers, $1.99, a hundred and twenty boxes of pencils. It’s a trick. The computers’ll pick the new price up anyway, and there’s a sign on the shelf, but they think the customers like to see these stickers.

  I wish I could be there staring in at the neon tetras, watching them zoom around. At least they enjoy their little pointless lives. We used to have a baby boa constrictor, but it died. It was really murder, the dumbass store management murdered it. They wanted $99.00 for it. Duh. Like they’ve never seen who shops here.

  “When you going to take me out to dinner?” Charlene says, bumps me a little with her hip. “I am off at two.”

  “I can’t afford you. I eat peanut butter and jelly.”

  “Oh, I love peanut butter and jelly,” she says, and licks her lips. “White bread.”

  “Well, okay, good. I’ll pick you up, ten after two. Hey, Charlene, what do you do with all the stuff you swipe?”

  “I don’t know what you talking about, college boy,” she says. “You need a rain gauge? A Beretta? Some car wax? You go to law school, you can defen’ me, okay? I pay you in merchandise.” She flips her shining, shoulder-length hair, and from nowhere produces the box of pencils and tosses it back on my shelf. “I got pencils,” she says. “Two o’clock.”

  I watch her walk away, swaying. She’s a certain kind of sexy, buys expensive clothes, wears them a little loose, walks good, the voice, knows how to look at you, smiles. A woman who knows everything. You look at her and think, Nothing I could ever do would make this woman nervous. And then she’s out of sight. I look up into the white steel rafters.

  Later, after I’m off, in the back Patricio comes up to me carrying a pool cue in each hand. “Man, you poaching my woman?” he says, and stares hard, until he starts laughing and I breathe out. “First thing she did was come to tell me, cholo,” he says. “Here, you’re gonna need some of these. Rocket fuel.” He puts a couple pills in my shirt pocket.

  “She wasn’t serious,” I say.

  “Serious?” Patricio says. “She is desperate. Just pretend she don’t scare you a bit.” He holds one of the cue sticks out to me. “Take this. We gonna get that bird. He been back here all night. Been shitting all over the stock.”

  Outside the breakroom is the warehouse area, the stock piled on pallets in rows, like a lumberyard or a library. Patricio’s got big yellow fourteen foot ladders at opposite ends of the long, narrow space.

  “There he is,” Patricio says, pointing up to the starling sitting on the bottom of one of the exposed steel joists. “Bird-ball,” he says, grinning, and swings his pool cue like a bat. “I be Sammy Sosa, you be that red guy.” He means Mark McGwire.

  We climb the ladders and run the pool cues along the corrugated steel of the roof for the racket it makes, to start the bird flying. Air must be twenty degrees warmer up here. As soon as the starling lights somewhere we shout and bash at the ceiling again, and he’s off again. The ladders rock and shudder as we slash at him and he flutters out of range until one time Patricio swings and almost falls, and the starling jumps frantically straight up and thumps against the ceiling, then drops four feet and swoops back toward me on the far side of the ladder, in perfect position, rising, floating, right in the center of the strike zone. It feels like I’m shaking my head but I’m not moving. I’m leaning.

  My arms jerk the pool cue out horizontal, for a bunt. He doesn’t hit it. He stops on it, instantly, bobs over head first and rights himself, then spins around, weird, dance-y footwork, to face the other way. He’s black, green, feathers iridescent as his wings disappear, gasping for breath, watching me with one coral-colored eye. He is perfection. “You got him!” Patricio yells. I have got him, I think. And of course right there the ladder starts to move.

  Good Parts

  I

  Bill was staring at his eyes in the bathroom mirror. Blue eyes. Some gray in them. “It’s your sense of inadequacy,” Bill said.

  “What’s my sense of inadequacy?” Maureen said. Dark hair. Green eyes.

  “Why you always fail. Why you can’t do anything right. Me too.”

  “You too what?”

  “I have the same problem. We share this problem.”

  Maureen stood up, walked out. She looked like a model. Took her robe, cigarettes, beer.

  “Bitch,” Bill said, staring into the mirror. “Stupid bitch.”

  Maureen fell asleep in the living room, on the couch. Again, Bill thought. I was a jerk again. I must have been born a jerk. He rearranged the robe, to cover her.

  II

  Bill and Maureen stopped at the laundromat and left their clothes, went to the grocery store, stopped off at the library, went to the drugstore, picked up their laundry.

  Maureen made stroganoff from a package that advertised itself as taking eight minutes. Bill sliced up the steak. Checked her progress. “Those sure are funny looking noodles,” Bill said. “They’re crooked.”

  “These fine noodles …” Maureen said. “You’re gonna love these noodles.”

  Bill read Newsweek until dinner was ready. Twenty minutes. They had candlelight and wine.

  “I love these noodles,” Bill said.

  III

  Maureen left the house crying. Slammed the car door. She drove to h
er friend Jane’s house. Jane’s house smelled like soup. There was a cloth tea strainer on the counter, very brown.

  “He wants to sleep around and you can’t,” Jane said. “What does he think, you don’t want to? The Neanderthal. Want some tea?” Jane got up. “Here, read this magazine. And this one. And this one.”

  “Stay out of it,” Maureen said.

  IV

  Bill took the mop from Maureen. “Not like that,” he said. “Like this.” He was showing her how to use a sponge-mop. He held the mop in his hands, a yellow handle, a yellow sponge.

  “Like that?”

  “You have to drag it so it’s flat on the floor, then you get the whole surface, not just the front edge. The bottom surface.” He pulled the mop expertly across the linoleum, holding the handle at an awkward forward angle of 80 degrees.

  Maureen ran into the closet and began screaming with laughter.

  Bill opened the closet door and looked at the tears in her wet eyes, the shirt wadded in her fist. “Foolish?” he said.

  V

  Bill and Maureen sat on the carpet in the living room playing Black Tower until 6 a.m.

  VI

  At the office a handsome young millionaire talked to Maureen. A client. He looked out the window as he talked, at parking lots fifteen stories below. Maureen typed, printed forms. Her boss was “in conference.” She missed lunch.

  The young millionaire described in lavish detail his vacation which had been spent in Mexico, Puerto Vallarta and Cozumel. He talked about “little bars.” He intimated that he had had sex with beautiful women.

  Maureen told Bill about the young millionaire when she got home. “He’s a jerk,” Maureen said.

  Bill laughed.

  “But he’s a millionaire.”

  Maureen swirled an imaginary Tequila Sunrise and did her young millionaire imitation, lifted her eyebrows and spoke through her nose:

  “Oh yes, I own several tall buildings. I have eaten turtle eggs inside the turtle. Ahem. The inside of the turtle is hot and pink. My love life? Ha! It’s understandable you would be curious. I am a man of the world who has made love to an eye-guana, pretty thing. Of course you wouldn’t know … It wasn’t just any iguana—it was a bisexual iguana. After, we shared a cigarette. He said I was the best he’d ever had.”

  VII

  Bill went to the bookstore. Once a week. He had his eye on a girl there, a slow thin girl who worked in the bookstore.

  “Can I help you,” the girl said.

  “Yes, please take me home,” Bill said.

  “Sure,” the girl said.

  “What?”

  “I get off in an hour.”

  I have been following women around bookstores for twelve years, Bill thought, in the car. The girl came out and got into the car, and they drove to her apartment which was full of hateful, expensive furniture and liquor bottles facing front. Bill had four drinks and made love to her.

  “Stay the night,” the girl said.

  Bill thought about it for an hour and then said, “I can’t. I want to, but I can’t.” Everything about the apartment was wrong; the toothpaste was on the wrong side of the bathroom sink.

  VIII

  Bill bought a gun, .38 caliber. It smelled good. Maureen returned it and got his money back. $199.95.

  IX

  The dentist told Maureen she needed some work. An assistant took it all down. At the reception counter Maureen wrote out a check and asked for a chart of the proposed work and charges.

  The woman behind the counter looked up at her. “May I ask what you want it for?” she said.

  “What?”

  “May I ask why you need it?”

  Maureen dropped her cigarette onto the carpet, grinding at it with her shoe. “Sure, honey, it’s because it’s my teeth and my money.”

  In the lobby of the building she called Bill from a pay phone. He was at work. She was crying.

  “They want nineteen hundred dollars. They want to butcher my teeth. They want to fix—my teeth don’t hurt. Why do—I’ve got three month’s worth of appointments,” Maureen said.

  “I’ll pick you up,” Bill said.

  “I’ve got my car.”

  “I’ll pick you up anyway. Call them back and cancel the appointments. We’ll try another dentist. Second opinion, like that. Fifteen minutes.”

  X

  Maureen made a meatloaf and a salad.

  “Thanks for dinner,” Bill said, after they had finished.

  “Is she pretty? How old is she? Did you tell her about us? Is she good at it? Screwing? Better than me? Is she blonde? What’s her name? Don’t tell me. Is she more beautiful than me? I don’t want to know anything about it,” Maureen said.

  Bill felt sick to his stomach.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  XI

  Maureen went to a bar with one of the law clerks from the office. He was short. Maureen was older and taller. When he began telling her about his “mistress” she excused herself and went home.

  “This is not working,” she said, at the kitchen table. “We’re going to have to try something else.”

  “One little slip?” Bill said.

  “That’s not it,” Maureen said. “It’s more than that. I’m moving.”

  “I think you’re right,” Bill said. “I think we should get two apartments, like we talked about.”

  “I mean moving out of town. I’m leaving town. I’m going back to school.”

  “Wait. Now wait—”

  “No waiting. I thought today maybe six years from now I could meet you on a street in Mexico, you know, outside a ‘little bar’ or something, and then we’d have a lot to talk about, we could go to the beach and screw and talk all night long.”

  “It’s movies,” Bill said. “It won’t happen.”

  “It could happen,” she said. “That’s the point.”

  Bill shook his head.

  “It won’t happen this way, that’s for sure,” she said.

  “It’s crap,” he said.

  “There’ll be iguanas. And those funny birds, yakking.”

  “Maureen—”

  “You won’t even bitch about the sand,” she said. “The waves will make those wave noises. There’ll be wind. There’ll be colored lights. You’ll be crazy and happy again. There’ll be cliffs. Cliffs behind us. Cliffs.” Dark hair. Green eyes.

  In the Rain

  She was a nice wife, even liked me for a time. I enjoyed her company, and in the early days, when sleeping together had this scorched-earth sort of magic, we mistook that for love. But the magazine articles she sometimes gave me didn’t make sense to me. I could never find a description of what it’s like. One summer a twenty-two year old girl came to work at the bank as a teller—I was training them then—and she was pretty and young and below her wide, flat forehead her gaudy green eyes had a hint of confusion or even hurt in them. I was seduced; she was interested. I waited for her to arrive at work in the morning and maneuvered to be by the elevator or in the corridor, for two minutes of her. We went to lunch a few times, talked at some dreary bank parties. Unable to touch her, I stood against a white wall in some excessively carpeted middle management home, talking to her, staring, trembling. I want. That is what it is like. Insufficiently tidy. It’s unkind to ask a man to have feelings. This is what I was thinking, standing in the rain, the day the cat came back. But that was later.

  At work people say I’m “distant,” my family was sort of cool and rational—I mean they weren’t always playing kissy face with one another—and last winter when my wife left, she said living with me was like living in dry ice. “You’ve no feelings,” she said, and I told her that that wasn’t logical, that it was only reasonable to assume that, in regard to feelings, everyone had an exactly equal amount. She said, “See what I mean.” One of those things women say when they’re angry.

  When she left me the cat, asked me to keep it for her, she said, “Maybe old Rilkey will teach you something.”
I thought maybe she had a boyfriend, one who didn’t like cats, not that I blame him. Talk about cold. They really do look for someone who can’t stand them, and then just jump up on his lap. This cat wasn’t so bad. I’d always hated its name, though, so I started calling him “Slick.” It took him three or four months to learn it, not because he was stupid, just because he was obstinate. Last week in the floods, his obstinacy almost got him killed.

  It rained for six days. Lawns were like sponges, the air in the house was thick and wet, streets were impassable and everywhere there was mud. By the time the cat dragged himself in on the fifth day, I’d given him up for drowned. He was soaked, black fur lying flat in little gobs all over his body so that it didn’t look like fur anymore. I loved him. That’s a feeling, isn’t it?

  It was a Monday, June 9, when it started raining. I let Slick out in the morning when I left for work. My wife used to put him out at night but I never do unless he makes himself such a pain I can’t stand it. Anyway I let him out and left for the bank. I’m a loan officer. You get callous after years of listening to people’s troubles, especially when you can’t always do what they want. They lie to you, anyway. Hell, if it was my money, I’d just give it to them, like I did when I was a teller. It’s only paper. That’s how everybody who works in a bank thinks, and why sometimes you just take some of it home. Sometimes you give it to other people.

  About three that afternoon, Becky, my assistant, told me there was a storm coming in and a few minutes later, as if on cue, the world got dark. Out my windows, low black clouds. I left early.

  When I got back to the house, Slick wasn’t around, but I didn’t notice until around eleven-thirty that night when I went into the kitchen and mixed my nightcap—a tall Scotch and water. I carried the glass over and opened the back door and whistled. By then it’d been raining seven hours straight, so I figured he’d be in the garage, contrite for staying out so late. I whistled again, stood by the door. Took a sip of the drink. Suit yourself, I thought. I stood a minute and listened to the thunderstorm.