Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  Lucas slid out from under the MG, wiped his hands on a red rag, walked into the house and stopped in the kitchen. He looked through the doorway into the rest of the house. “Liz?” he yelled, and waited. No answer. She wasn’t back from the school.

  He picked four white window envelopes off the green kitchen table, shuffled through them, and set them back down, leaving shadowy fingerprints. Bills. He liked the way they felt, fat with extras, sharp with creases. The MG would be worth five or six hundred, after the parts and the machine shop. And the VW brake job was worth another hundred. Two damn Fiats supposed to come in, a clutch job and a tune-up. And Liz would get eight or so from the college, at the end of the month.

  And it’s only the sixteenth, he thought. So we’re flush. “Flush.” Jesus, Daddy’s word. You want to live without money? Go to Tahiti. He meant it, too, all that time he was hoping I would really go; would have been almost like going himself. Figuring that out only took me ten years. The genius.

  He checked the clock on the microwave on the counter. 5:04. She should’ve been here an hour ago, he thought. His hand hurt. He looked at it, flexed the fingers, rubbed it with his other hand. Then he went back out to the garage and the MG.

  An hour later, when Liz pulled up and got out of her little station wagon, he stopped to watch her walk the driveway. She was beautiful, in a white blouse with wide sleeves, skirt above the knee, black hose. Her sparkling hair pulled back—the only compromise with college etiquette. Lucas had been, as always, asleep when she left in the morning.

  “Jesus,” he said, and smiled. “University lets teachers dress like that nowadays? You’re trying to break some poor kid’s heart or something?”

  She stopped in front of him, beside the little white car, kicked her knee up a little, drew her shoulders back. “Oh, I already did.” She reached up to loosen her hair.

  “The genius? He’s made for getting his heart broke. Little snot.”

  “How do you know he’s a little snot?” she said. “You’ve never even met him.”

  Lucas shrugged. “Professor, what you describe is a little snot. I know it through the acuity of …” He turned to see what she was looking at, but it was only the car. “Maybe it’s some faculty heart you’re trying to break.”

  She laughed, gave him a look.

  “Right,” he said. “Those parties. The chin-less hordes.”

  “Join me in a little leftover whatever?” She pointed to the kitchen door. “Spaghetti? It was good spaghetti, wasn’t it? You about finished here?”

  “It’s all back together,” he said. “I was just setting the valves. Manifolds, carbs, and tune it, and I get—”

  “Get paid.” She ran her finger along the top of the white fender, leaned back to look at the MG. “I always liked these little cars. Do you think the woman’ll sell it?”

  Lucas looked at her, blinked. “I know he’s a little snot because I used to be a genius. And I was a little snot.”

  “What’s it worth?” she said, still looking at the car.

  He shook his head. “Now? With the new engine? About two grand. Twenty-five hundred, if she’s lucky.”

  “Oh,” she said, and smiled, and walked into the house.

  They ate dinner and made love, and watched television and drank beer, and made love again, and she fell asleep after, nude in the big bed she always complained about, because it was like a rock, a thin mattress on a sheet of oversized plywood, really, not a bed, something else on the list of things to buy. Like insurance. He stood at the window, listening to the cool air push through the air conditioner register in the ceiling.

  At the bare window, smoking, he looked out at the street and his neighbors’ houses, most of which had gone dark by now, until a couple cars turned the corner, washing him with their headlights, from the waist up. There was light from the streetlight, too, so he took her dark brown silk robe from a peg by the bathroom door and slipped it on. Kimono. It was delicate, soft, smelled like her hair. He felt like some forties movie star or something.

  But he didn’t want to stand at the window anymore. What he really wanted was to make love again, the way they used to, so that it lasted forty-five minutes, and in the midst of it you didn’t know where you were. Need a new one for that, he thought. New ones are so much trouble. He sat in the director’s chair next to the bed in the dim light and watched her sleep, remembering ten years earlier, the not thinking.

  Like insurance. He could have mentioned insurance, Lucas thought, while he was going on and on about Pacific islands and money. But he probably did. Insurance, boy, that’s how you know you’re old, you find yourself craving insurance. That, and that first time when you get down to look under a car, or a couch, play with the baby, pick up something you dropped, whatever … and you think: Jesus, that hurts. That didn’t used to hurt. If we had a kid, then thirty-six years later he could stand at some window somewhere and think about all the things I told him wrong, or didn’t tell him. He stood up.

  She moved, sighed in her sleep, stretched and turned in the bed, and came to rest on her back, with one knee pulled up. Her face looked like a child’s face, very serious. He sat down on the bed and reached across to touch her, drew his hand down along her side to her hard hip bone standing high just below her waist, and leaned over to kiss her. She smiled in her sleep. I could do this every night, he thought. But we don’t. He pulled his legs up on the hard mattress and settled his head back. The silk hissed as he straightened the robe. Turn the thermostat up, he thought. Tomorrow, she’ll be home all day; she can sit out in the shop with me while I do the carburetors. Go out to dinner. He reached out with his hand, let it rest on her thigh, and fell asleep.

  • • •

  In the morning she slept late, and he laughed when he discovered the brown robe tight on his arms and wound around his legs. He dressed, drank some coffee and left to pick up rebuild kits for the MG’s old carburetors.

  The parts place was a big tin shed, glassed across the front, but it took direct afternoon sun and the glass had been tinted. Inside, it smelled like grease. Callie, the boy at the counter, said, “Put some SUs on there, Luke. Get that sad old bus up on its hind legs.”

  Lucas just looked at him. “It’s an MG,” he said. “Doesn’t matter what kind of carbs you put on it.”

  “Yeah, guess not,” Callie said, flipping through one of the big specifications books on top of the counter. He drew his finger across one of the pages, mumbled numbers to himself. “You could bore it out. With a couple sticks of dynamite.”

  Lucas laughed. “I could weld a Testarossa to the rear bumper,” he said, “but I ain’t gonna. How about just giving me the Stromberg kits.”

  The kid twirled around and disappeared back into the tall gray metal shelving overstuffed with one-color printed boxes and plastic packages and cardboard with crude Marks-a-Lot notations and numbers.

  Callie always wanted everything to go faster than it possibly could, wanted to blow the transmission out of every car he got his hands on, and, often, he succeeded. Lucas remembered being like that once. And country roads. Now he just liked the hardware, the bolts and brackets and washers and sleeves, the way the case hardened steel looked new, the perfect black rubber O-rings, the way it all spoke to you when it worked, quietly, the way years later, and in another country, you sat around sometimes figuring backwards what some engineer in England, or Germany, or Italy, or Japan, had figured frontwards years before. Like talking to somebody you never could know, Lucas thought, really talking to him, about something you both loved. But it started with the hardware. He picked up one of the little boxes from the counter where Callie had set them.

  “You want new needles? Jets? Floats?”

  Lucas shook his head. “The old ones are okay.” He emptied the box out into his hand, looking at the O-rings, gaskets, a shining aluminum washer. “Nice stuff, isn’t it?” he said, holding his open hand out.

  Callie drummed his fingers on the counter. “Duh,” he said, and smirke
d.

  Lucas looked up.

  “You want the brake stuff, too?” Callie said. “What year’s the VW?”

  • • •

  When he got home, Liz’s car was still there. She’s probably still asleep, he thought, until the kitchen door lock clicked as he got into the garage. He put the carburetor kits on the shelf running along the outside kitchen wall.

  “Have you eaten anything?” he heard her say. He smelled bacon, before he drew the screen open and stepped inside. “People are supposed to eat,” she said. “I mean, before they get to where they’re about to pass out. You can do the eggs. I always break them.”

  He put his arm around her lightly, kissed the side of her face, through her hair.

  “You go to Eurasian? You were gone a long time.”

  He nodded, walked to the hall doorway, stood watching her turn the bacon in the old heavy black frying pan.

  “What are you looking at?”

  He slid his hands into his pockets. “Let’s go out to dinner. Tonight, I mean.”

  She stopped, fork above frying pan, and turned halfway around. “We have a guest for dinner.” She set the fork on the stove beside the pan, reached up to open a cabinet. “Tonight.”

  “Who?” he said. “Why didn’t you …”

  “I asked Gordon Greer if he’d like to come to dinner.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Liz.” He was shaking his head. “You’re kidding? What are you, his mother all of a sudden? We’re adopting him? Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “He’s a very special kid. And he’s a thousand miles from home.” She took two plates out of the cabinet, shut it, and set the plates side by side on the counter.

  “You aren’t paid to be a nanny. You have to feed the kids too? C’mon. We’ll have to buy a silver spoon for the twit.”

  “Luke—”

  “They treat you like garbage over there. They’ve got guys who spend whole days looking for their chins and they pay them eight times what they pay you. Adjunct. Emphasis on ‘junct.’ ”

  “That has nothing to—”

  “They teach a course the first semester and spend the second semester deciding how many sheets each professor gets from the Xerox machine. Duh. You don’t get any.”

  She reached out and flipped the gas off, picked up the fork. The flame under the frying pan flared yellow and went out. “That has nothing to do with Gordon Greer. He needs attention.”

  “Jesus. I need attention. I mean, okay, he’s special, he’s a genius. Great. Maybe he’ll do right and get his MBA and screw his teacher in his spare time.”

  She threw the fork and it bounced up out of the pan and over the edge of the stove and fell to the floor. “You could’ve finished. You could still finish. But you like to screw with cars. Like, like—”

  “Yeah?” he said. “Like?”

  “Well, like your old man. And his goddamn farm. Maybe if somebody had taken an interest, you wouldn’t have flunked out.”

  He watched her walk across the kitchen, sit at the table. “I didn’t flunk out,” he said, following her. “I quit. And I wasn’t eighteen, I was in graduate school. And, for that matter, lots of them took an interest, whatever that means. I was a freak, they always ‘take an interest’ in freaks.”

  “Well …” she said. She stared up at him. “I told him about you. That you were happy. That school was just school. I told him he didn’t have to be a genius. Only I didn’t say ‘genius.’ I told him he could go to Tahiti, live on the beach. Or work on cars if he wanted to.” She looked away.

  “So I’m sort of an exhibit or something?”

  “Everything I told him was stuff you told me.” She wouldn’t look at him. She was crying.

  “Okay, okay, we’ll have a nice dinner. I’ll wear overalls. No, I’ll wear a tux, and we can smear gear oil on it. The happy prole. Elizabeth? Jesus, if you’ll stop crying I’ll go to work for GT&E. Procter and Gamble. Anybody, I don’t care …”

  “I don’t want you to go to work for anybody.”

  “Yeah, I know. Look, I just wanted to go to dinner. Just you and me. Alone.” He sat on the edge of the table, stood back up, stepped toward the door. “Fine, okay, we’ll have dinner. Stop crying. Jesus. I’m going to work.”

  He walked out, stood listening until he heard the pan clanking on the stove again, and sat down at the bench, picked up a carburetor, and thought about his breakfast. She’d bring it out, she wouldn’t break the eggs, but she’d overcook them, they’d be solid, but when you’re hungry, who cares? He thought of his mother, standing out on the porch, what the farm did to her, always tired, and angry, and it was because they didn’t have any money, and that was why his father never talked about anything else, wanted him to run off to a desert island, and make a million there.

  • • •

  The kid arrived at seven. He was big and, except for his light, klutzy hair, rugged looking, not at all what Lucas had guessed. Liz led the way through the living room, and they settled at the kitchen table.

  “I hate my name,” the kid said, after Liz had introduced them. “I sound like some movie star everybody forgot about.”

  “Gloria Graham.”

  “Lucas,” Liz said, but the kid laughed and nodded at him across the table.

  He and Liz had found the table at a Goodwill store—an old green-marble formica dinette table with an aluminum band around the edge. He had gotten the bumper shop to re-chrome the legs. It looked brand new, resurrected, but the kid treated it like it was just some dumb table.

  “You even know who Gloria Graham was?”

  “Lucas!” she said again.

  “Well,” Gordon said, “I saw her in a movie, with Robert Mitchum. He’s a doctor. She owns these horses, a stallion and a mare. When she finally goes to bed with Robert Mitchum, the horses go berserk.” He giggled. “It was funny. It was a real fifties movie.”

  “Well, shut my mouth,” Lucas said.

  Liz laughed.

  The kid was leaning forward, broad-shouldered and big arms, looking like he played on the line. A tackle or something. What must it be like to be a tackle, Lucas thought. Go around saying, I’m a tackle. I’m a mechanic. I’m a genius. The names they give us to call ourselves.

  “Gordon watches a lot of movies,” Liz said.

  “I hear you’re a genius, Gordon.”

  The kid looked at Liz, back at Lucas.

  “I’ve got to get the vegetables cut up.” Liz pushed her chair back from the table. “You all will excuse me? Gordon’s thinking about quitting school, Luke. Maybe you can help him with that.” She pointed toward the hall door. “In the living room.”

  The kid started to say something, but Lucas said, looking at Liz, “We can help you.”

  She pointed again. “Help most by staying out of the way.” She stared at him, held the look an extra second, then went for the refrigerator. “It’s Thai chicken. Sometimes this comes out, sometimes it doesn’t. When it comes out, it’s terrific.”

  “You watch TV, Gordon?” Lucas said, taking his glass from the green table. “You want to watch TV?” He walked into the hall, turned into the living room.

  The kid followed, close behind. “I—I usually watch movies. Do you have Showtime? There’re some great movies on Showtime. And HBO and Cinemax,” he said. “They’re pay channels.”

  Lucas looked at him, pointed to the couch, sat in his chair. “Yeah, I know. But my trust fund was late this month.”

  The kid shrugged, smiled with his eyes, a six-year-old. He sat forward on the couch, stiff, like a museum exhibit.

  Genius, Lucas thought. Should have a brass plaque. “You know the first time I heard someone say, ‘I only watch movies’?” he said, rubbing his hand, looking at it. He glanced at Gordon. “It was a while back. It’s okay to do it, just don’t say it.”

  The kid put his hands on the couch, lifted himself, settled in the identical position at the front edge. “You—You’re a car mechanic? But you used to be a psychologist,” he
said. “I thought about trying to be a psychologist. Must be strange. I mean, being both. I mean, you must have been smart.”

  “I was in school,” Lucas said. “Seems like forever. I was never a psychologist.”

  “Did she really say that, about me?” the kid said. When he said ‘she,’ he held the word in the air as long as he could.

  Lucas laughed. “Yeah, I’m afraid so.” He picked up the remote control and punched the TV on, no sound. The picture flashed and then came in. A living room, unbearably sterile. Some pale black people talking. Lucas looked around his own living room, at the secondhand furniture, and the tables and couch he’d built and she’d sewn. Number 2 yellow pine modern, her snotty colleague had called it. But he wasn’t being snotty. Liked it better than I do, Lucas thought. Wished he had built it himself.

  “It’s a great view,” the kid said. He was looking out the big front window, at the streetlights and the streets sloping down away from the house. “I like to just watch cars drive up and down. Wonder what they’re thinking, the drivers. I imagine them going to meet somebody.” He laughed, a short little laugh. “There’s this cop in the McDonald’s every Friday night. His cop car is always outside. He’s always sitting with this nervous looking woman. She’s beautiful, but she’s nervous. They’re in love, I think. It’s great. She has her hair up, like …” He put his hand to the back of his head. “Her hair is beautiful, too, just pulled up tight. They’re always in the corner, at a corner table. Hiding. It’s great.” As he looked at Lucas, the wild smile began to fade from his face. “You and Miss—”