Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  “Liz. You can call her Liz.”

  “You and … Liz … are like that,” the kid said. “She talks about you.” He looked away. As the energy slipped out of him, his wide soft face looked empty, dead. A big, dead kid, a shape.

  Lucas closed his eyes, hearing his breathing. Kitchen, he thought, and got up from the chair, then picked up his glass, pointed at Gordon’s. “Hey. You want something? A beer?” He was staring at the quiet boy. “Anything?”

  The kid shook his head.

  • • •

  In the kitchen, Liz was standing at the sink. “I’m a jerk,” Lucas said, “a proletarian ex-genius jerk. I thought I was over it. But I’ve—” She was holding one hand wrapped around the other. She was white. The counter stretched off under a mess of paper towels, plastic bags, cut up tomatoes and peppers and onions. Ginger root cut like pale gold poker chips. The big knife, with blood on it.

  “I’m all right,” she said. Tears in her eyes. “Only I only don’t feel very well.”

  “Let me see it.”

  The sink was full of blood. Her index finger was dark, with a crescent-shaped cut curving in a black line at the side of the tip. He put his arm around her shoulders. “Emergency clinic,” he said. “Okay?”

  “No,” she said. “No. I’m not spending forty-six dollars on a stupid little cut.”

  “Is it throbbing?” He drew his arm away, put it back.

  “You cut yourself worse than this all the time. I feel so stupid. I want to sit down.”

  He led her to the table, lowered her onto one of the chairs. “Did you wash it? Put some—Some—”

  She nodded. “It was like a big fat flap on the end of my finger. But I put some pressure on it and it went right back.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Lucas said. “It’ll be okay.”

  “I wasn’t looking what I was doing.”

  “It’ll be okay. You just sit there.” He walked back to the refrigerator, reached in for a beer, and set it beside the cut vegetables on the counter. He looked back at her, opened a cabinet, took out a glass, and took the glass and the beer over to the table and poured for her. “You drink. We’ll cook,” he said. “Gordon!” he shouted. “Need you in here.” She looked sheepish, drying her eyes before the kid got into the kitchen.

  He arrived all smiles, lumbering through the hall doorway and over between them, his light hair soft and babyish, his bulk not quite under control, until he saw her at the table.

  “She cut herself,” Lucas said. “She’s okay. Just a little shook. We’re going to do dinner, though. You and me. Okay?” Lucas put his hand on Gordon’s shirt, pushed him up to the counter.

  He stood at the counter, confused, half-grinning and half-frowning, a big kid a thousand miles from home standing in a strange kitchen, looking at the bloody knife the woman that he loved had just used to cut herself, and at the food, red, white, green, gold, that she had cut with such care into wedges and slices and shapes revealing an unbearable sort of perfection, scattered over the kitchen counter. The kid was staring at them.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” Lucas said, and he saw the kid’s eyes soften. “Let’s get to work here.” He picked up the knife and dropped it into the sink. “And I’ll tell you stuff. Like, what happens to a genius.” He turned the tap on.

  Lucas saw twenty years into the future, saw the kid standing, with a puzzled look, just as he was now, but smoking, at some window somewhere, thinking about this particular lie, the one he was telling him.

  “You know what happens to a genius?” Lucas put his hand on the faucet handle, looked at Gordon, smiled. “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. He turned the water off. He shook his head again. “Absolutely nothing. So, the first thing all us geniuses do … is relax.”

  Gordon was nodding. Without being told to, he had begun herding the cut vegetables into groups, delicately guiding them through the debris on the counter with a fork, whispering.

  Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines in which these stories first appeared:

  Atlantic Monthly: “Heaven” (© 2002 Steven Barthelme, as first published in The Atlantic Monthly)

  Boulevard: “Hush Hush” and “Tahiti”

  Burnt Bridge: “Down the Garden Path”

  Columbia: “Coachwhip”

  Denver Quarterly: “Vexed”

  Epoch: “Acquaintance”

  Esquire online: “Jealous You, Jealous Me”

  Fiction Southeast: “Pretend She Don’t Scare You a Bit”

  Gulf Coast: “Good Parts”

  McSweeney’s: “The New South”

  North American Review: “Telephone” and “Siberia”

  Oxford Magazine: “Sale”

  Southwest Review: “Bye Bye Brewster”

  Swink: “In the Rain,” written in 1998, was not published in its original form but later appeared, in a substantially different version, in Swink (Issue 2, 2005), as a collaboration, with added material from Pam Houston. The story in this volume is the original, previously unpublished version.

  Yale Review: “Interview” and “Claire”

  Thanks also to Bill Henderson, Pushcart Press for reprinting “Hush Hush” (Pushcart Prize, XVII) and “Claire” (Pushcart Prize, XXIX)

  STEVEN BARTHELME was born in Houston, the son of the celebrated architect Donald Barthelme Sr. He is the author of the story collection, And He Tells the Little Horse the Whole Story, the essay collection, The Early Posthumous Work, and the co-author, with his brother Frederick, of Double Down: Reflections on Gambling and Loss. He is the director of the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi, where he is also a Professor of English. His writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and McSweeney’s. Barthelme won Pushcart Prizes in 1993 and 2005, and in 2004 he won the Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Award for work published in Yale Review.