The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

“I think I might’ve gleaned that,” she said.

  “Well, then,” he told her, “Good for you.” The pain had come back, this time with a powerful jolt to his chest and abdomen: it felt like a sudden fright, and he turned his head on the pillow, looking at the room. There was another bed, empty, and with the sheets gone. Someone had put a pitcher of water and a glass on the night table. He closed his eyes again, going down in the pain. Somewhere in the middle of it, he was sure, was his death, and knowing this made him want to say something, as if there were matters that must be cleared up before he let go. But when he searched his mind there was nothing.

  “Where is everybody,” he said.

  “I’ve been ringing for the nurse. Do you want me to go get one?”

  “No. Stay.”

  “I think that’s the first friendly thing you’ve said.”

  “Pay no attention to it,” he said.

  “It was a slip of the tongue?” she asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ll disregard it, then.”

  “Do.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think you’re as mean as you think you are.”

  “I’m dying,” he said.

  “You have a broken leg, some cuts and bruises.”

  “I’ll probably never get out of this bed.”

  “You’re mind’s made up,” she said.

  “Don’t be cute. I hate that—do me a favor and don’t be the life-affirming visitor with me, okay?”

  “Your mind is made up, isn’t it?”

  They were quiet. A doctor came in and looked into his eyes with a bright light, and touched his knee where the metal pin went in. The doctor was very young and blond and his hair was blow-dried, his nails perfectly manicured. He introduced himself as Doctor German or Garman or something; Theodore wasn’t listening. The doctor was a kid, no more than thirty. He smelled like rubbing alcohol and he sounded like somebody doing a television quiz show when he talked, his voice lilting like that, full of empty good cheer and smiles. When he was gone, Alice Karnes said “You can see how alarmed the young man is at your condition.”

  “What does he care?”

  “He’s obviously certain you’ll never get up.”

  “I don’t need sarcasm now either, thank you.”

  “Poor man,” she said.

  He said nothing for a moment, and then the aching in his bones brought a moan up out of him.

  “I am sorry,” she said.

  “Sorry for what.”

  “For being sarcastic.”

  “I can’t figure out what you’re doing here at all.”

  “I asked if you wanted me to leave.”

  “Yes, you did—and I said no. I remember that clearly. But I still don’t know what you’re doing here in the first place.”

  “Well it certainly isn’t for romance, is it.”

  “Why not?” he said. “Let’s have a whirlwind courtship.”

  “I don’t drink whiskey,” she told him.

  He looked at her.

  “I don’t—I’ve never even tasted whiskey,” she said. “I asked for whiskey, remember? You went in to get it and this happened—and I don’t even drink it. I was just trying to be—friendly, I guess.”

  He stared at her.

  “We—we were always very strict Baptists. We never did anything like drinking alcohol—especially whiskey.”

  “You—” he began.

  “I feel responsible,” she said.

  A nurse came into the room—a woman not much younger than they were. She took his temperature and his pulse and blood pressure, and then she, too, touched his knee where the pin was.

  “Nurse,” he said, “give me something for the pain.”

  She put some cold solution on the skin around the opening in the knee, using a Q-tip.

  “Nurse.”

  She looked at her watch. “I’m afraid you’re not due for another hour.” Her voice was grandmotherly and sweet, and she put her hand on his forehead and smoothed the thin hair back; her fingers were cool and dry.

  When Theodore moaned, Alice Karnes said, “Can’t you do something for him?”

  “We’re doing everything we can, Mrs. Weathers.” The nurse studied Theodore and then nodded. “Just hold on for another fifteen minutes or so and we’ll cheat a little—how’s that?”

  “What’s fifteen minutes, for God’s sake,” Theodore said, “I’m dying here.”

  “Just fifteen minutes,” the nurse said, turning. She walked out of the room without a word or gesture of leave-taking, as if she had been in the room alone.

  “Did you hear what she called me?” Alice Karnes said.

  He couldn’t think. He said, “Tell me.”

  “She called me Mrs. Weathers.”

  “She did, did she?”

  “The assumptions people make.”

  “Maybe we could kill her for it,” Theodore said.

  She smiled at this, and then she reached over and put her hand on his arm. For a long moment she left it there, without saying anything, and then she took it away, sat back, still smiling.

  “Well,” he said.

  She said, “Try to sleep now.”

  “You got me all excited,” he said.

  Her smile changed slightly, and she looked away out the window.

  He was in the hospital for almost a month. They put his leg in a cast, and they showed him how to use crutches, and they all talked about how strong he was, a man who ought to live to be a hundred and twenty; they congratulated him for his quick adjustment to the new situation. They showed him why he would always have to use a cane. They laughed at his ill temper and his gruff ways and his jokes, and when they sent him home a group of the nurses and therapists chipped in and bought him a large basket of fruit and a card with a picture of the Phantom of the Opera on the front of it and an inscription that read, “Why did she turn away when I tried to kiss her?” The card was signed by everyone, including the young blond doctor, Doctor Garman—who called him Dad, just as Judy did, with the same proprietary irony. He didn’t mind, particularly. He was just glad to be going home. Judy had come to see him almost every day, and he made jokes about having nothing to put between himself and her except feigned sleep. She brought Alice Karnes along with her now and then, but rarely left them alone. In Judy’s presence, the older woman was often too mortified to speak: Judy kept talking at and through her, obviously trying to get Theodore to see her many fine qualities—how resourceful she was, and self-reliant; how good her stories were and how well she told them: her wit and her generosity and what good friends they had become. The whole thing was like a talk show, except the unfortunate guest never got to really speak for herself.

  “You should hear Alice do Keats,” Judy said. “She’s got you beat, Dad. She knows all of Keats.”

  “Well,” Alice said, “one poem.”

  “Yes, but every word of it, and it’s a long poem.”

  “I took a speech class,” Alice said. “It’s nothing. Everybody had to do it.”

  “Go ahead, give it to us,” Judy said.

  “Oh—now, you don’t want to hear that.”

  “We do—don’t we, Dad.”

  Alice looked at Theodore. “Your daughter-in-law just mentioned that you liked to recite Keats aloud, and I told her I knew the one poem.”

  “Did she tell you just when and how I recite Keats?”

  Judy said, “We want to hear you recite your poem, Alice.”

  “Sure, why not?” Theodore said. He lay there and listened to Alice try to remember the “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” her face crimson with embarrassment. It was interesting to watch her thin lips frame the words, and in fact she had a very pleasant voice. He caught himself wondering if Alice Karnes, for all her apparent unease, hadn’t planned everything out with Judy. Once, in the first week of his stay in the hospital, he had awakened to find the two of them whispering to each other on the other side of the room; it was clear that something was in contention between them, until
Judy saw that he was awake, and immediately changed her demeanor as though to warn the other woman that they were being watched.

  Before he got out of the hospital he decided that they were in fact conspiring together about something—they had, after all, become friends, as Judy put it. They were more like sisters, in fact. It was evident enough that Judy wanted to see a romance develop, and Theodore found that he rather liked the idea that the two women were in cahoots about it; it flattered him, of course. But there was something else, too—some element of pleasure in simply divining what they were up to. He felt oddly as if in his recent suffering there had been a sharpening of his senses somehow, as though a new kind of apprehension were possible that hadn’t been possible before. He might have expressed it in this way if he’d wanted anyone to know about it. The good thing was that no one did: to Judy he was, of course, the same. He gave the same cantankerous or sarcastic answers to her questions, made the same faces at her, the same mugged expressions; he even continued to recite Keats over her talk when he was tired of listening to her, and he still insisted on his whiskey and his bad habits, though of course, under the circumstances, he had to insist on these things in theory.

  But now he was going home. He could get around, however laboriously, on his own. He was almost eighty-four and he had suffered a bad fall, and he was strong enough, after three and a half weeks, to get around on crutches. Of this he was very proud. When Judy came to the hospital to take him home, she naturally brought Alice along, and as the three of them worked together to get him safely into the car, he had a bad moment of remembering the little chilly puff of air he had felt on the base of his neck when he’d first awakened in the hospital bed; he was convinced now that it had been death. He tried to put it out of his mind, but it left its cold residue, and he was abruptly quite irritable. When Alice Karnes reached into the car to put his shirt collar down—it had come up as he settled himself in the front seat—he took her wrist and said, as roughly as he could, “I’ll get it.”

  “Of course,” she said softly.

  He sat with his arms folded, hunched down in the seat. He didn’t want their talk now or their cheerfulness, their hopes for him. When Judy started the car up he turned to her and said, “I don’t want any company today.”

  “You’re going to have it today,” she said, as if she were proud of him, “you old goat.”

  They said nothing all the way to the house. Alice Karnes sat in the back seat and stared out the window. The few times that Theodore looked at her, he felt again the sense of a new nerve of perception, except that it all seemed to bend itself into the shape of this aggravation—as though he could read her thoughts, and each thought irritated him further.

  At home, they showed him how they’d fixed everything up for him; they’d waxed the floors and organized the books; they’d washed all the curtains and dusted and cleaned, and everything looked new or bleached or worn away with scrubbing.

  “Look here,” Judy said, and showed him a half-gallon of bourbon that they had set into the bookcase, like a bookend. “But you can’t have any of it now. Not while you’re on the antibiotics.”

  He went out onto the porch to sit in his wicker chair in what was left of the morning’s sun there. They helped him. Judy got him a hassock to rest his leg on. It took a long time getting him settled, and they bustled around him, nervous for his unsteadiness. But he was sure of himself. He sat in the chair and took a deep breath, and they stood on either side of him. “Don’t loom over me,” he said.

  Alice Karnes went back into the house.

  “There’s a new element to your bad temper, Dad. A meanness. And I don’t like it.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You’re in my sun.”

  “I know,” said his daughter-in-law, “you just want to be left alone.”

  Ben Hawkins came walking around the house and up onto the porch. “I saw the car come down the block,” he said. “I was watching for you.”

  “You found me,” Theodore said.

  “You look okay,” said Ben.

  “I’m fine.”

  “He’s been such a dear,” Judy said, and turned to go back into the house. Ben Hawkins offered a polite bow, which she didn’t see, then settled himself into the chair next to Theodore’s. He sat there quietly.

  “Well,” Theodore said.

  The other man stirred, almost as if startled. “Yes, sir,” he said, “I guess you made it through all right.”

  “I guess I did,” Theodore said.

  “I been getting some palpitations, but other than that, okay.”

  “Palpitations,” Theodore said.

  “Heart—you know.”

  “But nothing serious.”

  “Oh, no. Other than that, okay.”

  “You been to a doctor?”

  “They don’t know what they’re looking at. I looked it up, though—palpitations are almost always okay.”

  “There’s machines that measure the heartbeat and everything,” Theodore said.

  “Other than a little palpitation now and then I’m okay, though.”

  “You’ll probably die, don’t you think, Ben? It’s a distinct possibility, isn’t it?”

  “I’m feeling better,” Ben said.

  They were quiet. After a while they exchanged a few remarks about the brightness of the sun, the coolness of the air when the wind stirred. The women came back out, and Ben Hawkins stood up and bowed to them and, after shaking Theodore’s hand, took his leave. He went down the steps and walked back around the house, and once again the two women were with Theodore there on the porch. The sunlight had traversed that side of the house; they were in the shade now. It was cool, and quiet. Theodore had watched Ben Hawkins walk away, and the sun had caught a wisp of the man’s sparse hair, had shown Theodore somehow the defeat and bafflement in his stride—in the way his back was bent and in the bowed slant of his head. Theodore had seen it, and his newfound acuity had without warning presented him with a sense of having failed the other man. He tried to reject it, but it blew through him like a soul, and then it opened wide, fanning out in him, such an abysmal feeling of utter dereliction that he gripped the arms of the wicker chair as if to keep from being swept away. And now Judy was talking to him again, telling him about some prior arrangements.

  “What?” he said into her talk. “What?”

  Alice Karnes had again gone back into the house.

  Judy was talking. “I said I got Alice to agree to stay here with you while I go to work, although God knows we ought to just let you fend for yourself—but she still feels bad about your fall. So you are going to let her stay here until I come back from work.”

  He nodded.

  “She’s been very kind to you,” Judy said, “So please. Remember your manners.”

  “Yes,” Theodore said, not really hearing himself. “Yes.”

  He watched her walk off the porch and out to her car. She waved, before she drove off, and he held his hand up; but she was waving at Alice, who stood in the doorway behind him, and now cleared her throat as if to announce her presence.

  Theodore said, “Well, you going to stand there all day?”

  “I thought you might want to be alone,” she said.

  He heard himself say, “No.” Then, “Do you need an invitation?”

  He breathed, and breathed again. Judy had driven herself away, and now he felt her absence with something like grief. He couldn’t believe it. Alice Karnes stepped out and took the rocking chair across from him. She rested one arm on the porch rail and looked out at the yard.

  “I’m only staying as long as Judy continues to feel she needs me,” she said.

  “You want something to drink?” Theodore managed.

  She leaned back and closed her eyes, and breathed a sigh. The sunlight was on her hair, and she looked younger. “I’ll fix you something cold,” she said.

  “Anything,” said Theodore.

  But they sat there in the shade
of the porch. They looked like a couple long married, still in the habit of love.

  WEDLOCK

  Honeymoon night, Howard locked the motel room door, flopped down on the bed and, clasping his hands behind his head, regarded her for a moment. He was drunk. They were both drunk. They had come from the Starlight Room, where they had danced and had too much champagne. They had charmed the desk clerk, earlier, with their teasing and their radiant, happy faces. The desk clerk was a woman in her mid-fifties, who claimed a happy, romantic marriage herself.

  “Thirty-five years and two months,” she’d said, beaming.

  “Not even thirty-five hours,” Howard had said. His face when he was excited looked just like a little boy’s. “But it’s not Lisa’s first one.”

  “No,” Lisa said, embarrassed. “I was married before.”

  “Well, it’s this one that counts,” the desk clerk had said.

  Lisa, twenty-five years old, three years older than her new husband, had felt vaguely sorry to have the woman know this rather intimate detail about her past. She was nervous about it: it felt like something that wasn’t cleared up, quite, though she hadn’t seen Dorsey in at least two years—hadn’t seen him in person, that is. He had called that once, and she’d told Howard about it. She’d complained to Howard about it, and even so had felt weirdly as if she were telling lies to him. Many times over the weeks of her going with Howard she’d wished the first marriage had never happened, for all her talk with her friends at work about what an experience it was, being married to a rock-’n’-roll singer and traveling around the country in that miserable van, with no air-conditioning and no windows.

  Somehow she’d kept her sense of humor about the whole bad three years.

  And tonight she’d made Howard laugh, talking about being on the road, traipsing from one motel to another and riding all those miles in a bus with people she wouldn’t cross the sidewalk to see; it was astonishing how quickly dislikes and tensions came out in those circumstances. You just went from place to place and smiled and performed and shook hands and hung around and you hated everybody you were with most of the time, and they hated you back. It was worse, and somehow more intimate, than hatred between family members because for one thing you didn’t hold back the stuff that scraped the raw places; you didn’t feel compelled to keep from hitting someone in the sweet spot, as she liked to call it. You just went ahead and hit somebody’s weakest point, and you kept hitting it until you drew blood. She’d kept on about it because he was staring at her with his boy’s eyes, dreamy and half drunk, and finally they were both laughing, both potted, feeling goofy and special and romantic, like the couple in the happy end of a movie, walking arm in arm down the long corridor of the motel to their room. They had come stumbling in, still holding on to each other, and finally Howard had lurched toward the bed and dropped there.