The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Are you okay to drive?” she asks.

  “What?” he says, putting the wipers on.

  “I just wondered. You had a few beers.”

  “I had three beers.”

  “You had a few.”

  “Three,” he says. “And I didn’t finish the last one. What’re you doing, counting them now?”

  “Somebody better count them.”

  “I had three goddamn beers,” he says.

  In fact, he hadn’t finished the third beer because he’d begun to experience heartburn shortly after his father started telling the stories. He’s sober all right, full of club soda and coffee, and he feels strangely lucid, as if the chilly night with its rain-smelling breezes has brought him wider awake. He puts both hands on the wheel and hunches forward slightly, meaning to ignore her shape, so quiet beside him. He keeps right at the speed limit, heading into the increasing rain, thinking almost abstractly about her.

  “What’re you brooding about?” she says.

  The question surprises him. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m driving.”

  “You’re mad at me.”

  “No.”

  “Sure?” she asks.

  “I’m sure.”

  What he is sure of is that the day has been mostly ruined for him: the entire afternoon and evening spent in a state of vague tension, worrying about his wife’s mood, wondering about what she might say or do or refuse to do in light of that mood. And the vexing thing is that toward the end, as he watched her watch his father tell the stories, the sense of something guilty began to stir in his soul, as if this were all something he had betrayed her into having to endure and there was something lurid or corrupt about it—an immoral waste of energy, like a sort of spiritual gluttony. He’s trying hard not to brood about it, but he keeps seeing her in the various little scenes played out during the course of the day—her watchfulness during his own clowning with his brothers and her quiet through the daylong chatter of simple observation and remarking that had gone on with her father and sisters, with Kenneth’s parents. In each scene she seemed barely able to contain her weariness and boredom.

  At one point while his father was basking in the laughter following a story about wine and a small boy in Rome who knew where the Germans had stored untold gallons of it, Kenneth stared at Shannon until she saw him, and when for his benefit she seemed discreetly to raise one eyebrow (it was just between them), her face, as she looked back at his father, took on a glow of tolerance along with the weariness it had worn—and something like affectionate exasperation, too.

  Clearly she meant it as a gift to him, for when she looked at him again she smiled.

  He might’ve smiled back. He had been laughing at something his father said. Again, though, he thought he saw the faintest elevation of one of her eyebrows.

  This expression, and the slight nod of her head, reminded him with a discomforting nostalgic stab (had they come so far from there?) of the look she had given him from the other side of noisy, smoky rooms in rented campus houses, when they were in graduate school and had first become lovers and moved with a crowd of radical believers and artists, people who were most happy when they were wakeful and ruffled in the drugged hours before dawn—after the endless far-flung hazy discussions, the passionate sophomoric talk of philosophy and truth and everything that was wrong with the world and the beautiful changes everyone expected.

  Someone would be talking, and Shannon would confide in him with a glance from the other side of the room. There had been a thrill in receiving this look from her, since it put the two of them in cahoots; it made them secret allies in a kind of dismissal, a superiority reserved for the gorgeous and the wise. And this time he thought for a moment that she was intending the look, intending for him to think about those other days, before the job market had forced them to this city and part-time work for his father; before the worry over rent and the pregnancy had made everything of their early love seem quite dreamy and childish. He almost walked over to take her hand. But then a moment later she yawned deeply, making no effort to conceal her sleepiness, and he caught himself wishing that for the whole of the evening he could have managed not to look her way at all. With this thought in his mind, he did walk over to her. “I guess you want to go.”

  “For two hours,” she said.

  “You should’ve told me.”

  “I think I did.”

  “No,” he said.

  “I’m too tired to think,” she told him.

  Now, driving through the rainy night, he glances over at her and sees that she’s simply staring out the passenger window, her hands open in her lap. He wants to be fair. He reminds himself that she’s never been the sort of person who feels comfortable—or with whom one feels comfortable—at a party: something takes hold of her; she becomes objective and heavily intellectual, sees everyone as species, everything as behavior. A room full of people laughing and having a good innocent time is nevertheless a manifestation of some kind of pecking order to her: such a gathering means nothing more than a series of meaningful body languages and gestures, nothing more than the forms of competition, and, as she has told him on more than one occasion, she refuses to allow herself to be drawn in; she will not play social games. He remembers now that in their college days he considered this attitude of hers to be an element of her sharp intelligence, her wit. He had once considered that the two of them were above the winds of fashion, intellectual and otherwise; he had once been proud of this quirk of hers.

  It’s all more complicated than that now, of course. Now he knows she’s unable to help the fear of being with people in congregation, that it’s all a function of her having been refused affection when she was a child, of having been encouraged to compete with her many brothers and sisters for the attentions of her mother, who over the years has been in and out of mental institutions, and two of whose children, Shannon’s older sisters, grew sexually confused in their teens and later underwent sex-change operations. They are now two older brothers. Shannon and Kenneth have made jokes about this, but the truth is, she comes from a tremendously unhappy family. The fact that she’s managed to put a marriage together is no small accomplishment. She’s fought to overcome the confusion and troubles of her life at home, and she’s mostly succeeded. When her father finally divorced her mother, Shannon was the one he came to for support; it was Shannon who helped get him situated with the two younger sisters; and it was Shannon who forgave him all the excesses he had been driven to by the mad excesses of her mother. Shannon doesn’t like to talk about what she remembers of growing up, but Kenneth often thinks of her as a little girl in a house where nothing is what it ought to be. He would say she has a right to her temperament, her occasional paranoia in groups of people—and yet for some time now, in spite of all efforts not to, he’s felt only exasperation and annoyance with her about it.

  As he has felt annoyance about several other matters: her late unwillingness to entertain; her lack of energy; and her reluctance to have sex. She has only begun to show slightly, yet she claims she feels heavy and unsexy. He understands this, of course, but it worries him that when they’re sitting together quietly in front of the television set and she reaches over and takes his hand—a simple gesture of affection from a woman expecting a child—he finds himself feeling itchy and irritable, aware of the caress as a kind of abbreviation, an abridgement: she doesn’t mean it as a prelude to anything. He wants to be loving and gentle through it all, and yet he can’t get rid of the feeling that this state of affairs is what she secretly prefers.

  When she moves on the front seat next to him, her proximity actually startles him.

  “What?” she says.

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You jumped a little.”

  “No,” he says.

  “All right.” She settles down in the seat again.

  A moment later he looks over at her. He wants to have the sense of recognition and comfort he has so often had when gazing up
on her. But her face looks faintly deranged in the bad light, and he sees that she’s frowning, pulling something down into herself. Before he can suppress it, anger rises like a kind of heat in the bones of his face. “Okay, what is it?” he says.

  “I wish I was in bed.”

  “You didn’t say anything to me about going,” he says. “Would you have listened?”

  “I would’ve listened, sure,” he says. “What kind of thing to say is that?”

  She’s silent, staring out her window.

  “Look,” he says, “just exactly what is it that’s bothering you?”

  She doesn’t answer right away. “I’m tired,” she tells him without quite turning to look at him.

  “No, really,” he says. “I want to hear it. Come on, let it out.”

  Now she does turn. “I told you this morning. I just don’t like hearing the same stories all the time.”

  “They aren’t all the same,” he says, feeling unreasonably angry.

  “Oh, of course they are. God—you were asking for them. Your mother deserves a medal.”

  “I like them. Mom likes them. Everybody likes them. Your father and your sisters like them.”

  “Over and over,” she mutters, looking away again. “I just want to go to sleep.”

  “You know what your problem is?” he says. “You’re a critic. That’s what your problem is. Everything is something for you to evaluate and decide on. Even me.

  Especially me.”

  “You,” she says.

  “Yes,” he says. “Me. Because this isn’t about my father at all. It’s about us.”

  She sits staring at him. She’s waiting for him to go on. On an impulse, wanting to surprise and upset her, he pulls the car into a 7-Eleven parking lot and stops.

  “What’re you doing?” she says.

  He doesn’t answer. He turns the engine off and gets out, walks through what he is surprised to find is a blowing storm across to the entrance of the store and in. It’s noisy here—five teenagers are standing around a video game while another is rattling buttons and cursing. Behind the counter an old man sits reading a magazine and sipping from a steaming cup. He smiles as Kenneth approaches, and for some reason Kenneth thinks of Shannon’s father, with his meaty red hands and unshaven face, his high-combed double crown of hair and missing front teeth. Shannon’s father looks like the Ukrainian peasant farmer he’s descended from on the un-Irish side of that family. He’s a stout, dull man who simply watches and listens. He has none of the sharp expressiveness of his daughter, yet it seems to Kenneth that he is more friendly—even more tolerant. Thinking of his wife’s boredom as a kind of aggression, he buys a pack of cigarettes, though he and Shannon quit smoking more than a year ago. He returns to the car, gets in without looking at her, dries his hands on his shirt, and tears at the cigarette pack.

  “Oh,” she says. “Okay-great.”

  He pulls out a cigarette and lights it with the dashboard lighter. She’s sitting with her arms folded, still hunched down in the seat. He blows smoke. He wants to tell her, wants to set her straight; but he can’t organize the words in his mind yet. He’s too angry. He wants to smoke the cigarette and then measure everything out for her, the truth as it seems to be arriving in his heart this night: that she’s manipulative and mean when she wants to be, that she’s devious and self-absorbed and cruel of spirit when she doesn’t get her way—looking at his father like that, as if there were something sad about being able to hold a room in thrall at the age of seventy-five. Her own father howling with laughter the whole time …

  “When you’re through with your little game, I’d like to go home,” she says.

  “Want a cigarette?” he asks. “This is so childish, Kenneth.”

  “Oh?” he says. “How childish is it to sit and sulk through an entire party because people don’t conform to your wishes and—well, Jesus, I’m sorry, I don’t think I quite know what the hell you wanted from everybody today. Maybe you could fill me in on it a little.”

  “I want some understanding from you,” she says, beginning to cry.

  “Oh, no,” says Kenneth. “You might as well cut that out. I’m not buying that. Not the way you sat yawning at my father tonight as if he was senile or something and you couldn’t even be bothered to humor him.”

  “Humor him. Is that what everyone’s doing?”

  “You know better than that, Shannon. Either that or you’re blind.”

  “All right,” she says. “That was unkind. Now I don’t feel like talking anymore, so let’s just drop it.”

  He’s quiet a moment, but the anger is still working in him. “You know the trouble with you?” he says. “You don’t see anything with love. You only see it with your brain.”

  “Whatever you say,” she tells him.

  “Everything’s locked up in your head,” he says, taking a long drag of the cigarette and then putting it out in the ashtray. He’s surprised by how good he feels—how much in charge, armed with being right about her: he feels he’s made a discovery, and he wants to hold it up into the light and let her look at it.

  “God, Kenneth. I felt sick all day. I’m pregnant.”

  He starts the car. “You know those people that live behind us?” he says. The moment has become almost philosophical to him.

  She stares at him with her wet eyes, and just now he feels quite powerful and happy.

  “Do you?” he demands.

  “Of course I do.”

  “Well, I was watching them the other day. The way he is with the yard—right? We’ve been making such fun of him all summer. We’ve been so smart about his obsession with weeds and trimming and the almighty grass.”

  “I guess it’s really important that we talk about these people now,” she says. “Jesus.”

  “I’m telling you something you need to hear,” Kenneth says. “Goddammit.”

  “I don’t want to hear it now,” she says. “I’ve been listening to talk all day. I’m tired of talk.”

  And Kenneth is shouting at her. “I’ll just say this and then I’ll shut up for the rest of the goddamn year if that’s what you want!”

  She says nothing.

  “I’m telling you about these people. The man was walking around with a little plastic baggie on one hand, picking up the dog’s droppings. Okay? And his wife was trimming one of the shrubs. She was trimming one of the shrubs and I thought for a second I could feel what she was thinking. There wasn’t anything in her face, but I was so smart, like we are, you know, Shannon. I was so smart about it that I knew what she was thinking. I was so perceptive about these people we don’t even know. These people we’re too snobbish to speak to.”

  “You’re the one who makes fun of them,” Shannon says.

  “Let me finish,” he says. “I saw the guy’s wife look at him from the other side of the yard, and it was like I could hear the words in her mind: ‘My God, he’s picking up the dog droppings again. I can’t stand it another minute.’ You know? But that wasn’t what she was thinking. Because she walked over in a little while and helped him—actually pointed out a couple of places he’d missed, for God’s sake. And then the two of them walked into their house arm in arm with their dog droppings. You see what I’m saying, Shannon? That woman was looking at him with love. She didn’t see what I saw—there wasn’t any criticism in it.”

  “I’m not criticizing anyone,” his wife tells him. “I’m tired. I need to go home and get some sleep.”

  “But you were criticizing,” he says, pulling back out into traffic. “Everything you did was a criticism. Don’t you think it shows? You didn’t even try to stifle any of it.”

  “Who’s doing the criticizing now?” she says. “Are you the only one who gets to be a critic?”

  He turns down the city street that leads home. He’s looking at the lights going off in the shining, rainy distances. Beside him, his pregnant wife sits crying. There’s not much traffic, but he seems to be traveling at just the speed to arrive at each
intersection when the light turns red. At one light they sit for what seems an unusually long time, and she sniffles. And quite abruptly he feels wrong; he thinks of her in the bad days of her growing up and feels sorry for her. “Okay,” he says. “Look, I’m sorry.”

  “Just let’s be quiet,” she says. “Can we just be quiet? God, if I could just not have the sound of talk for a while.”

  The car idles roughly, and the light doesn’t change. He looks at the green one two blocks away and discovers in himself the feeling that some momentous outcome hinges on that light staying green long enough for him to get through it. With a weird pressure behind his eyes, everything shifts toward some inner region of rage and chance and fright: it’s as if his whole life, his happiness, depends on getting through that signal before it, too, turns red. He taps his palm on the steering wheel, guns the engine a little like a man at the starting line of a race.

  “Honey,” she says. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

  He doesn’t answer. His own light turns green, and in the next instant he’s got the pedal all the way to the floor. They go roaring through the intersection, the tires squealing, the back of the car fishtailing slightly in the wetness. She’s at his side, quiet, bracing in the seat, her hands out on the dash, and in the moment of knowing how badly afraid she is he feels strangely reconciled to her, at a kind of peace, speeding through the rain. He almost wishes something would happen, something final, watching the light ahead change to yellow, then to red. It’s close, but he makes it through. He makes it through and then realizes she’s crying, staring out, the tears streaming down her face. He slows the car, wondering at himself, holding on to the wheel with both hands, and at the next red light he comes to a slow stop. When he sees that her hands are now resting on her abdomen, he thinks of her pregnancy as if for the first time; it goes through him like a bad shock to his nerves. “Christ,” he says, feeling sick. “I’m sorry.”