Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  6.

  Elizabeth drops her husband off at the bookstore, and drives on to school. There are heavy clouds gathering in the lower quadrant of the sky to the west. It’ll be another day of intermittent rain squalls. She pulls into the school parking lot, and then sits for a while in the car, crying a little, watching the buses arrive and the parents’ cars, dropping off students. Everybody busy with the business of the day, the familiar routines. It all looks like the bustle and hurry, the busy activity, of a hive.

  She gazes at the old Briarly Building with its oak tree and its leaded windows and its little vanquished village of a graveyard, and thinks about sleep. On the ride to the bookstore, Will seemed distracted, nervous, drained. She didn’t feel like talking, and, apparently, neither did he. She wonders now what his dreams might have been. Watching him limp around the room getting dressed, she felt bad again about kneeing him, and asked if he was all right.

  “I must’ve slept wrong,” he said. “My tailbone’s sore as hell.”

  “Maybe I kicked you in my sleep.”

  “It does feel bruised.”

  Her own knee is, in fact, sore. She presses her hand to it, sitting 264

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  here in the car and staring at the school, wanting to turn around and go home and get to the bottom of whatever this trouble is that has begun for them.

  But there’s the day’s work. She wipes her eyes, does her mascara again, then gets out of the car and limps—her knee is indeed very sore—across the parking lot. And here’s James Christ with his sour, unhappy, victimized expression and his way of sidling up to her. “I saw you sitting there in your car. You looked like you were crying. You crying?”

  “No,” Elizabeth tells him. “I was trying to decide whether or not to move to another town and change my name.”

  He’s evidently at a loss. Moreover, he’s depressed and, as always before, he wants company. He walks with her, talking about it all—his worries, his heavy woes, the problem of his low self-esteem. His difficult childhood and the fact that he has bad digestion; nothing he eats agrees with him. Every meal is a trial. And, on top of that, he can’t find a stable relationship. He’s a man capable of spilling everything in the space of a stroll across a parking lot—Elizabeth thinks this, and then momentarily feels sorry for him. She stops and says, “James, what can I do about any of this?”

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to find another job. I’m tired of being unhappy. I’m always unhappy.”

  “Don’t worry,” she tells him.

  “You’re not feeling well and here I am complaining. What’d you do to your leg?”

  “I have a trick knee.”

  In the faculty lounge, they drink coffee and talk a little about the day to come. He’s low and sorrowful, and she senses that her own new situation makes her more readily accepting of his predicament—misery does indeed love company. She almost tells him about her night. But, instead, she just sips her coffee and pretends to listen. What if a man who has been unfaithful, upon discovery, never does it again? What if the wife, who knows about it, never brings it up? What if the wife can bring herself never to imagine what it was, what was said, how it felt, how far from her the man of her house has gone? If the wife confronts the husband with what she knows, does that end the marriage? Did the first Elizabeth know something that caused her t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  to go? But there were the two children. She left them, too. Can the wife find another life far away from the place where her once happy life was harmed? Can a woman pretend for the rest of her life that nothing happened?

  She makes her way to her classroom, trying to stop thinking of anything. And here’s Calvin Reed, waiting by the door.

  “What, Calvin?”

  “Nothing,” he says.

  “Are you going in?”

  “No.”

  She waits for him to explain. And, abruptly, he takes her by the shoulders. “Calvin,” she says, “let go of me.”

  He moves his hands down to her wrists and grips them, bending toward her as if to listen to her whisper something.

  “One more second,” she says to him, “and you’ll be in a lot of pain.”

  He lets go but remains where he is, hulking over her.

  “Step back,” she says through her teeth. “Or I promise you, you’ll fall back.”

  He does so.

  She enters her classroom and shuts the door on him. The disorder around her is no louder than usual, but this morning it’s like an assault to her senses. She reaches to the first desk, which is empty, and tips it over so that its front edge hits the floor with an enormous crash. Several girls scream, and one boy says, “Oh, my God.” Then they’re all still. The television is already halfway through the morning school-news report.

  “Sit yourselves down,” Elizabeth says. “And be quiet.”

  They all obey. The morning is here, now, to be endured. She moves to her desk and sits, and puts her hands to her face. She can feel them all looking at her. Finally, she opens her lesson plans and begins. There are assignments to hand back, assignments to give. She writes on the black-board and moves around the room during a written exercise, concentrating on each of them, keeping everything inside, not thinking.

  At the first class bell, James Christ comes in looking like a portrait done by a Dutch master of disconsolation. The sharp light in the room contributes to this effect. He comes to her desk and leans down, to murmur, “I saw Calvin sitting in Mr. Petit’s office.” She nods. The students 266

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  for this hour are already in their seats, talking and gesticulating and slapping at each other, the universal body language of teenage boys and girls in groups.

  “Settle down,” Elizabeth says, remembering all the times she interpreted a weary tone in a teacher as some discontent with herself or the class. How strange to have come this far in life and not to have reached an understanding of the truth that the personal life supersedes everything else.

  The door opens now, and Jonathan Lawrence enters, moves quickly to a chair, and takes it, not looking at anyone. Elizabeth assigns a writing exercise and makes it a point to stop by his desk. The assignment is to write a series of sentences about fog on a mountain, to see how many different ways it can be said. Jonathan has written: “A veil of fog obscures the immensely pleasing mountain crags in the distance.” And

  “The mountain is like a lady covering her stony countenance with white linen.”

  “How is your grandfather?” she asks him.

  “Better,” he says. “Thank you for inquiring.”

  “Can you try to write a bit less floridly?”

  He appears horror-struck by the suggestion—and then she realizes he doesn’t understand the word and is embarrassed by the prospect of being caught out in his nonunderstanding.

  She says, “Fancy is nice. But simple is good, too. You know, ‘You couldn’t see the top of the mountain for the thickness of the mist.’”

  “Oh, yes. I see. Oh, indubit—of course.”

  “Glad to hear about your grandfather’s progress,” she says. And finds that she has to fight back tears. She leaves him and returns to the front of the room, to her desk, where she sits and brings a tissue paper out of the top drawer, holding it to her nose, and surreptitiously dabbing at her eyes. She thinks about Will, about what he might be doing at this very minute. There’s almost a half hour to go in the period. She makes herself concentrate on her lesson plans—the section on The Great Gatsby.

  The roil of possession and passion in the novel moves through her like a memory of her own recently lived life. She will have to explain Tom Buchanan’s unfaithfulness to Daisy, and Daisy’s unfaithfulness to Tom.

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  How could they? How could Fitzgerald write of it all so effortlessly?

  How can she talk about any of it, now? Her stomach does a little joltin
g turn, and she has to swallow several times fast. The hour is a slow progression of increasing anxiety.

  7.

  Butterfield endures an awful morning, fierce with guilt and with a frighteningly strong pull at his middle when he thinks about Ariana.

  He tries to look at everything reasonably. That is, he seeks detachment, the solace of the blameworthy: intellectual nicety, rationalization, what is happening is a small thing in the larger scheme of existence. The yearning he feels is both normal and unacceptable. He must put it aside and go on with his life. It will be possible to behave as if nothing has happened. It will be possible to forget it. Ariana lives next door and is talking about secret visits.

  Oh, God.

  The morning passes with almost no business—a man and his son, three elderly ladies. Butterfield’s alone with his mind and the images there. When the elderly ladies come in, they remind him of his mother and great-aunt and the soon-to-be-divided house on Temporary Road.

  He’s going to have to work through all that. He’s growing shakier by the minute in the contemplation of everything. Sitting behind the counter, he imagines himself months past this day, with its lowering sky and its threat of rain, a threat which feels for all the world like the threat of devastation.

  When the rain starts, he stands in the doorway and watches it—a slow, steady, windless fall. The eaves run. The street fills, and it still comes, agitating the surfaces of the puddles. As the water is displaced by car tires, it makes that soft swishing, that familiar sound, the cars going slowly by. Every common noise comes to him now as a kind of goad, as if the world means to tantalize him with its plainness, its imponderable separateness from his troubles. It’s raining, dark, the sky looking poison-268

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  ous, and none of this has anything to do with the darkness in his soul.

  A little past ten o’clock, Mark calls. “What’s wrong, Dad? You got a cold?”

  “I’m okay,” Butterfield tells him.

  “You sound messed up.”

  “It’s the phone, and thanks for the report.”

  “I’m calling to tell you Gail and I’ll drive down from her place for Thanksgiving. I’m flying down the night before.”

  “Okay.”

  “Dad, something’s wrong. I can hear it. Is Elizabeth—would it be better if we came on the Friday after?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mark. Come as soon as you can. As soon as you-all want to.”

  “Well, there’s something we have to ask you.”

  “Both of you?”

  “Well, Gail.”

  Butterfield waits for him to go on. He sees Ariana pull up outside and stop. The rain is coming harder now. He’s filled with the same measure of excitement as fear, an improbable balance of thralldom and dread. He can barely talk. “You—you want to t-tell me what it is, Son?”

  There’s a seizing near his diaphragm.

  “Well, I don’t think she should surprise you with it.”

  “Okay.” He hasn’t even quite heard Mark. The muscles of his chest and abdomen seem to have tightened to the point of a cramp. His son says something he can’t quite distinguish, so he asks him to repeat it.

  “I said it’s kind of heavy.”

  “Heavy.”

  “It’s very heavy.”

  “Jesus, Son. Will you just tell me?”

  “Gail’s with a woman.”

  Butterfield waits for more. Outside, Ariana gets out of her car, tak -

  ing her time.

  “Dad?” Mark’s voice seems to come from some far distance.

  Butterfield watches Ariana Bromberg rush to the shelter of the entrance to the store, holding an open newspaper over her head. She pushes t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  inside, and lets the newspaper down, running one dark, slender hand through her hair. He catches himself conjuring up a picture of the Mon-gol invasion of Europe.

  “Did you hear me, Dad?”

  “I heard you.” He signals for Ariana to wait, and then tries very hard to draw in one single breath of air. She smiles; it is entirely, fatally inviting.

  Mark’s voice continues on the phone. “She was helping Gail search for Mom. They’re in love, according to Gail. She wants to bring her to Thanksgiving.”

  “Christ,” Butterfield says, meaning it in all the ways it can be meant.

  “I don’t think she’ll come without her.”

  “Well,” Butterfield says. “I’m—” He can’t push air through his vocal chords.

  “Dad?”

  “—fucked if I can think of a thing to say, Mark.”

  “I think it’s a bit rude and insensitive, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “All right,” his son says. “Sorry. This is Gail’s thing—not mine.”

  Ariana shifts her weight, jutting one hip and resting her wrist on it, watching him.

  “I’ve got to go, Son.”

  “She’s worried about how you’ll react, Dad. She asked me to—she wanted me to prepare the way.”

  “Look, I can’t talk about this now, Mark. I’ve got a customer.” This comes forth with unnatural speed, as if he’s rushing through something he learned to recite.

  “I know you’ll have to clear this with Elizabeth. I know it’s a big thing to have to tell you over the telephone.”

  “I’ll talk to you later, Son.”

  Ariana stands there, arms now folded. She wears a tan dress with a low sweep at the neck, showing collarbones and the soft swell of the top of her breasts. There’s a commiserating smile on her face, though now she raises one eyebrow, one dark, soft line, and he would never have believed there could be so much concupiscence in that simple gesture—so 270

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  much of a conspiratorial invitation to venery. When he hangs the phone up, she crosses to the door and looks out, then turns. “Nobody on the street just now. Isn’t it about lunchtime?”

  “Early,” he manages. It comes out of him at the level of a chirp.

  “I still make you so nervous.”

  He can’t utter a sound. Outside, the rain ceases, almost as if turned off, like a faucet. A car goes by, and she watches it, then turns to look at him again, still smiling that smile.

  “I had fun the other night until Geoffrey got to be—well, Geoffrey.”

  “We can’t do anything,” Butterfield tells her. “Please.”

  “You’re going on the old double standard,” she says. “Right?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you are. It’s something I control. Isn’t that how you see it?”

  He can’t help himself. He nods.

  “And if I want to, you won’t be able not to.”

  “No,” he says.

  “You’re denying that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Want to?” she asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “No. I’m sorry. Please.”

  “Well, do you or don’t you?”

  “Want to?” he asks.

  She smiles. “Oh, yes. I do. I certainly do. That’s why I’m here.”

  “I was asking if you were asking did I want to.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “Forget it.”

  “But you want to.”

  “Yes,” Butterfield says. “Christ. Yes. Goddamn it, yes.”

  She closes the door, turning the CLOSED sign around, then faces him and begins disrobing. He watches her and is filled with a sense, almost innocent-feeling, of purest wonder. It’s weirdly as if he’s a child observing a mystery of science unfolding in a beautiful presentation by experienced parental hands. Again he tries to call up the depredations t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  of history. She walks over to him and unbuckles his belt. Her body is stunning. He looks at her breasts, her long belly, the tan line at the top of her thighs and across her lower hips. In a second, he’s on his
knees, the position for worship, arms wrapped around her hips. She thrusts her pelvic bone at him, holding him by his ears. The event is pornographic, and she wants to look upon it, gets him to move to the end of the counter where the mirror is, so she can observe them. He says, “Did you lock the door?”

  “No.”

  And he stops, looks up into her face. There’s a mad gleam in her eyes.

  She grins at him; it’s almost a leer.

  “You think I want to get caught?” she murmurs. “Geoffrey would kill me.”

  As with the other times, he feels astonishment exactly as strong as that of a man stumbling into a new and previously unseen world; and yet it’s also as if he’s standing apart from it all, watching his own actions. The quiet is unspeakable and thrilling. He’s loose in it, like someone tumbling through space, and so when the telephone rings, loud as a fire alarm, he jumps back and scrabbles violently to his feet, hearing himself say, “Jesus Christ. This is a place of business.”

  “It’s a telephone,” she says, so matter-of-factly that it merely adds to the unreality of everything. He’s up, facing her. She stands there, arms at her sides, quite at ease in her nakedness. The phone rings again.

  Absurdly, he lurches to the door and separates the blinds with a metallic crashing, looking out the window as if the sound has come from there. The phone rattles a third time, pulling a sound of distress up out of his throat.

  “Don’t answer it,” she says, as if this is a solution to his upset.

  He topples toward the counter and picks up the receiver. “Hello!”

  “Dad?” It’s Gail. “What’s wrong?”

  He looks at Ariana. “It’s Gail,” he says.

  “Is Elizabeth there?” Gail asks. “Are you all right? You shouted at me when you answered.”

  “Nobody here,” he says.