The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  And now, thank God, a prisoner.

  “And you’re the one who got it done,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am.”

  “How did you find my address?”

  “The clerk of the court is a friend of mine. Angie.”

  “You were always over there on the other side of the aisle,” he told her.

  “Well, I couldn’t get up the courage to show my true feelings. Bruce might’ve killed me.”

  “Really?” Dallworth was standing in his doorway, with the door partly shut.

  “Well, he’s gone for the time being,” she said. She turned slightly and looked off. The wind lifted a few shining strands of her reddish hair and let it fall again. “He hit me sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry he did that to you,” Dallworth said, wanting to close the door. He didn’t know quite how he was expected to proceed now.

  She stood there, obviously waiting for him to do something.

  “So,” he said.

  She said, “I spent ten years like that,” and smiled. “I was just so grateful to you.”

  He ended up taking her to dinner. They went to a small Italian restaurant in a mall, a little south of the town of Winchester. It was a sunny early evening in July. Dallworth knew the restaurant and hoped she would admire, as he did, the European feel of the place once you got inside. The waiters were all Italian; the food was Northern Italian, served with an easy, familiar dexterity and in marvelously decorative profusion. He watched her eat. and finally decided simply to be honest with her. “I feel so odd,” he said. “Do you feel odd?”

  She pondered this. “Not in the least.”

  They hadn’t got far with dinner before he began to hope that they were going to be more than friends. The waiter brought the wine he had ordered. They drank it slowly while she talked about her plans: getting on with life, a new job in a bank, away from the Walgreen’s where she had spent the last five years working. It would be good to have someone to go places with; Bruce had been such a couch potato. Dallworth asked her if she would like to go to a movie with him tomorrow evening. He felt the need to establish this while they seemed to be getting along so well.

  “I’d love to,” she said.

  “You ever play golf?” he asked. His enthusiasm was running away with him.

  “I should, given where I live.” There was a faintly sardonic note in her voice. “Of course, when they built the country club they took extra care to plant those little fat pines on the border of my yard. They don’t like the fact that I’m there. My little rambler doesn’t exactly fit the profile. I’ve been tempted to poison the trees. But I’d never do a thing like that, of course.”

  Very gently, he said, “Would you like to learn how to play golf?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He would not push the golf if she showed no interest. He felt oddly precarious. He was almost forty. His one marriage had ended more than twelve years ago, a childless waste. He wanted a family, and this feeling had only grown stronger as the decade of his thirties ran out. He had feared that it was already too late. Regina’s eyes looked so frankly straight at him, and he sensed that she enjoyed something in him over which he had no conscious control. He felt stupidly as if this one evening were some sort of last chance, and inwardly he berated himself for it, looking at the other people in the restaurant in their relaxed poses, their settled, pleasurable sociability.

  He had spent too much time alone in the last year.

  Now she spoke about seeing the golfers outside her bedroom window all day in the warm weather, and she speculated aloud about what they could be thinking as they shambled by, together but separate, too; sometimes it looked as if they were playing field hockey, hacking at the ball, which just rolled along the ground a few yards at a time. It must be especially rewarding to be good at it.

  “Yes,” he said. But he was uncomfortably certain that he had been one of those people she had watched go by her window. He had to work to dismiss the thought. In five years, his lowest score was sixty-six, but that had been for nine holes. “It’s got a beauty,” he told her, managing to sound authoritative. “It’s hard to explain to someone who doesn’t know the game, or play it.”

  Sensing that she had made him uneasy, she sought other things to say. Nothing suggested itself. A disconcerting silence drew down on them. She gave him her best smile, worried that he would feel the quiet as displeasure. She had wasted the last decade with a man like Bruce, who was exciting and harrowing and interesting when he was sober, and terrifying when he was drunk. She had stayed with him, she knew, out of a kind of recklessness that was also cowardly. She had a clear understanding of her own deepest troubles, and for some years now she had grown ever more profoundly, even unreasonably frightened of growing old alone. That, too, was a reason for staying with Bruce. She was not pretty in the normal sense; her face was too narrow, and her features gave her a look of a sort of continual renouncement, as though she had just declared against some abstract offense. She had tried to soften this by heightening her eyebrows and making her lips a little fuller with the lip gloss. Nothing worked. When she looked in a mirror, she saw the face of an irritable school teacher. She, too, wanted a family, and time was running out.

  But she could not say any of this to him.

  Dishonesty in love is not less common than in any other facet of life, and the person who swears that truth will be the centerpiece of his relations with others is a fool. She would be thirty-six in two months. Gazing into his almost feminine blue eyes, she realized that the sound of his voice calmed her. It actually pleased her. He had begun talking about his day out on the links.

  “Someday,” she said, “I’ll stay home from work and wait for you in my backyard. I’ll have a drink all ready for you. All you have to do is walk up the fourth fairway and step through the row of trees and there I’ll be. How would you like that?”

  He smiled, and hoped she’d forget the idea.

  The talk—or the wine, he couldn’t tell which, though he supposed it was the latter—had an apparently aphrodisiac effect upon her. He was describing the difficulty of hitting a ball on a downhill lie and getting any loft on it—talking now just to keep things going, feeling increasingly uneasy about the silences—when she ran her stockinged foot up one side of his leg, under the table.

  “Where do you work?” she asked.

  “I own this little company, you know. As they said in court.”

  “I didn’t hear a lot of what went on in court,” she said, moving her foot.

  He couldn’t breathe out for a second. “And—and there’s—there’s a small trust, from my mother’s estate. My mother owned a peanut company and sold it to a corporation. My company’s a guh-guh-glass company.” Her foot had reached above his knee and was starting back down.

  “Glass.”

  “Yuh-you know. For windows.”

  “So you don’t have a profession?”

  “Well, I have the company. It took a lot to get it off the ground. There was an awful lot to do. It’s—you see, it’s stabilized. But it doesn’t really make any money. It pays for itself. My older brother, Mack—Mack runs it. He’s the type who manages things. And he’s the older brother, you know.”

  Her foot stopped moving. She sat straight. “I don’t want you to think I’m fast,” she said.

  “Everything’s okay,” he told her.

  “Well,” she said. “So what else?”

  He shrugged. “There’s not much to tell. In the last five years I’ve been involved in eleven civil cases—and this is the first time it resulted in a jail sentence for somebody.”

  “Couldn’t have happened to a better person.”

  “Does Bruce—hold grudges?” Dallworth asked her.

  She nodded thoughtlessly. “Tell me more about yourself.”

  “Five years seems like a long time, hut it goes by awful quick.”

  “Come on,” she said. “Tell me.”

  His ex-wife had recentl
y taken up domicile with a pair of gay men on Long Island somewhere. She was a photographer. Sex had troubled her. None of this seemed worth mentioning. The marriage had come apart without rancor or care, really. In other words, it had been a terrible catastrophe. He didn’t even know where he had gone wrong. He told Regina how long it had been since the divorce. “It was amicable,” he said.

  She watched the small tremor of his hands, and his nervousness endeared him to her. She folded her own hands on the table and smiled. “It’s been anything but amicable with Bruce.”

  Regina had no understanding of sports, and the charms of golf had always eluded her. She had spoken about this often, too. And she mentioned it to her mother when Dallworth went off for a weekend in Canada, to play a new course. The fact was, he had played almost every day for most of his thirties, spending more money than he should, even traveling to southerly climes for an occasional weekend during the coldest months of the winter. He had probably been one of those people out on the grass behind her house, she told her mother, though she had never seen him play and, in fact, had no desire to. She liked him. She liked him. Her mother wanted to know if she hankered for him. She used the word.

  “I don’t know,” Regina said. “I felt that way about Bruce, and look what kind of life I had. This is friendly.”

  He was beginning to be in love.

  When he returned from his trip, he called to tell her he had missed her, and stumbled through a few clumsy remarks about the weather in Canada, how cool the mornings were and how long the dew stayed on the grass. He came to take her to lunch, in the middle of her Monday, and he had already played another eighteen holes, had teed off at six-thirty in a low ground fog, the misty dawn. She was fascinated, oddly enough. Having been married young and widowed young—a thing she didn’t want to talk about—and having lived with a man like Bruce, who lacked the temperament or the ability to appreciate the subtleties of anything, she had been, she now realized, fairly starved for talk, any kind of discourse, something other than the books she escaped into, the silence of all that, or the empty racket of television. She craved simple human communication. She was on the rebound, as people say. To her it felt like being able, at last, to breathe again.

  Because he was in love, he saw the circumstances of their meeting in an increasingly romantic light, as if they were characters in a film. When he talked to Mack, it was always about Regina. Mack, who watched a lot of television, found this tiresome. Dallworth would describe what she wore, and report her conversational flourishes verbatim. Her forwardness was an aspect of her charm. She was bold; she seemed to be moving under a pressure. She had wide interests and a sophisticated way of discerning the heart of things. He liked to theorize about her.

  “There’s a lot I don’t know about her life,” he said.

  “What about the business, John? What’re you gonna do?”

  “It’s supporting itself, Mack. You don’t let me do anything but sit there and answer the phone.”

  Mack’s part of the inheritance from their mother was a small recording studio—or Mack had bought and outfitted the studio with his part of the money. This had turned out to be lucrative, and Mack was paying a young woman to run it for him. It was amazing how many people wanted to record themselves playing one instrument or another, or singing their songs. Bad songs, Mack said. He kept a little book with lines from the really bad ones. In his opinion, John’s obsession with golf was a little like these would-be songwriters, all of them so anxious to protect the copyrights, as though anyone in the world would want to steal such awful stuff. Recently he had taken to saying lines from the songs when his younger brother started talking about Regina.

  “She’s mysterious, Mack. Truly mysterious. There’s things she won’t talk about.”

  “How Can I Say I’m Sorry When My Foot Is In My Mouth?”

  “What?”

  “I Love Your Smell.”

  “Mack, do you want me to stop calling you?”

  “I don’t want to talk about Regina, bro. Okay?”

  With Regina, Dallworth talked about his travels to distant places to play golf. They became regulars at a Mexican restaurant at the entrance to the Skyline Drive. The restaurant was owned and run by a Bulgarian gentleman, and they sat in the window, sipping red wine. She wanted him to talk; she would ask about his day and then insist that he recount what he could remember of his round. She was learning about the game in this fashion, and for her it was so much better than watching it. So he would go through the day’s shots, being exact and honest. Eight strokes on the par four first hole; thirteen on the par five second; nine on the par four third; seven on the par three fourth. She had a way of lazily blinking as he talked, which at first made him nervous. “You can’t want me to go on.”

  She said, “I do, too.”

  “You’re not bored?”

  “I’m not bored. I’m calm. It calms me to listen to you. I like to picture everything.”

  So he tried to be more clear about the lay of the land—the look of things. He had discovered in himself a capacity for description. Whereas, once he had talked to release a tension, he was now indulging himself, and he began exaggerating a little. He scrupulously kept his own score, but when he spoke to Regina about his day, the shots began to straighten out, the pars came more often, with slowly increasing regularity, and birdies began to happen, too.

  One afternoon, he scored an eagle on the long par five fifteenth at Skeeterville Trace in Charlottesville (it was actually a twelve, but it would have taken too long to tell her each shot, the three that he hit in the water, the two that were lost in the brush at the dogleg, the four mulligans he’d taken—the first he had ever allowed himself—to keep the number at twelve). He described for her the long, looping drive off the tee—no feeling like it in the world, he said—and the chance he took on the approach, using a three wood, uphill, the ball rolling to the fringe of the green, and then the forty-five-foot putt, through tree shadows, downhill. It was all vivid in his mind, as if it had actually unfolded that way, and she sat there gazing at him, sweetly accepting.

  Perhaps he had begun to believe it himself.

  Regina, of course, was unimpressed. Not because she felt any superiority, but because she wasn’t really listening to the words. She basked in the sound of his voice, and she could listen to him without really attending to the details. He was so gentle. He was careful of her; and she liked the way his chin came to a little cleft, liked the blue sparkle in his eyes, which gave her an idea of the little boy he must have been. She thought about him when she was alone, felt glad looking forward to him, waiting for him to arrive after his day.

  He seldom talked about the business, except to mention casually that Mack was having new phones installed, and they were about to be audited again. Mack handled everything. Mack had been the one, all their lives, who was good at things: captain of the football team, co-captain of the basketball team, the star third baseman. Mack had been born sleek, fast, quick of foot, agile, and he had possessed a cruel streak, a killer instinct. John told her about him without mentioning what must have been apparent by contrast, that he himself had been too thin, too gangly and slow, almost dopey. He made self-deprecating jokes about his dreadful youth, but these things were dropped in conversation as if they didn’t matter very much—offhand as talk about the weather. Dallworth was happy. And perhaps she had never known a really happy man before.

  He spent a lot of time imagining them together, married. But it was painfully difficult to find the courage: He would plan exactly how he might ask her, would head for her house with resolve beating in his breast, and then when they were together, each time, he’d lose his nerve.

  He would end up lying about what he had done on the golf course again.

  This was beginning to bore him. It was also getting out of hand. They talked about other things, of course, and she had a way of observing people that made him a little apprehensive about what she must be able to discern in him. But they were m
ore often glad than they were uncomfortable, and she would eventually lead him back to talking about the game, his day’s game. And she sat there staring, blinking slowly, with such wonderful attention. He would have gone on forever, to keep that soft look on her face.

  The rainy afternoon of her birthday, they slept together for the first time. It was exactly as awkward as she had feared it might be. But it was considerate, too, and rather more tender than had ever been her experience. They lay quiet for a time, and then began again, and she found, to her surprise, that she could forget herself. Later, while he held her, she told him of her early marriage. How her husband—a man she had loved and who had come with her out of her adolescence—had been killed in Australia in a freakish accident. An accident which, nevertheless made a certain kind of terrible sense. His name, she said—she still believed it was purest coincidence—was also Bruce. This Bruce, her first love, had traveled to Sydney as a panel member for a conference, sponsored by an insurance group, concerning the different rates of occurrence of auto accidents under various traffic conditions and controls. Not fifteen minutes after he arrived at his hotel, he had gone out for a walk and, stopping at a curbside, had looked left, where right-lane traffic would be in the United States, and then stepped out in front of a bus, which was of course oncoming in the left lane, since this was Australia, where everything was backward.

  “Well,” she said, “not backward. You know what I mean.” It had been a long time since she had spoken of this, and it was her thirty-sixth birthday. Her own sadness surprised her; she felt the tears come.

  Dallworth hurried to say how sorry he was. Perhaps this was the opening, the chance he could take, to ask for her hand. He mustered all his nerve, took a breath, staring into her brimming eyes, opened his mouth, stopped, breathed again, and heard himself say, “I had another eagle this morning.”

  Somewhere in the synapses of his brain, there was what he’d meant to go on and say: that he wouldn’t consider an eagle—or a hole-in-one, for that matter—to be much of an accomplishment if he couldn’t have her for a wife. The absurdity of it made him stop at the word morning, and anyhow she hadn’t heard him. She was still thinking about her first love.