Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  Maizie said nothing.

  “I’m sorry,” Leo told her. “I’m sure I don’t make any sense.”

  “I’ve been so mad at her for it,” Maizie said.

  The others in the room seemed not to be there, and then they were. They spoke quietly about levels, and procedure, and already the business of the hospital was moving on, a woman moaning down the hall, the doctor talking to a nurse about what dosage of some drug to give still another patient elsewhere. Several others were working on the baby.

  “Is everything okay?” Maizie said to no one in particular.

  “Everything’s fine,” Leo reassured her, although he wasn’t certain of this himself.

  Maizie said, “I want us to start over—go back to the way we were. I don’t want to feel this anger anymore.”

  The doctor moved to the foot of the bed. “She’s pinking up real nicely,” he said. “You did fine. Both of you.” Then he nodded at Leo. “All three of you.”

  They brought the baby over, wrapped in a hospital blanket—dark pink, ancient-looking, with a head of black hair and small dark tufts on the lobes of her ears. The eyes opened, and they were a deep, deep shade of blue. The fingers of one tiny hand were jutting from the folds of the blanket, and they moved, closed over the edge of the cloth, and then opened again.

  “Hello,” Maizie said. “Oh, welcome, my little baby.”

  “She’s beautiful,” Leo said. “Isn’t she?”

  Maizie looked at him, soft eyes, all his, giving him everything of herself; it was in the look. “Beautiful,” she murmured. Then she opened her gown and put the baby to her breast. “Oh, see, honey? She’s taking right to it.”

  “I see,” he said, and felt time open outward. It was the strangest sensation, as though he were already decades older. He reached down and touched his daughter’s leathery hand, the amazing fingers, perfectly formed, almost frightening for their softness.

  The doctor was still standing there. Leo felt an abrupt surge of affection for him, as if they would go on from this moment to become the greatest of friends.

  “Tell me,” the doctor said, “this little girl’s name.”

  Spirits

  1

  I MET BROOKER at one of those parties for new faculty. I was just out of graduate school, after a stint in the Army, and I had just arrived, that July, to get myself ready for the fall semester. Brooker was the most distinguished member of the faculty, and I think I must’ve been surprised to see him. When I had come through on my campus interview in the spring, the people who squired me from place to place gave me the impression that he was notoriously aloof; there were bets among them as to who would next catch a glimpse of the creature.

  But then, I was a fiction writer, the first ever hired to teach at this small, rather conservative teachers’ college, and he wanted to get a look at me. He told me this in the first minute of our acquaintance, as if he wanted me to know he wasn’t a regular at such gatherings: he really had come specifically to meet me. He had seen my stories in the magazines; he knew I had a book coming out, and he liked everything of mine that he’d seen. I was, of course, immediately and wholeheartedly in thrall. Remember that I was only twenty-six, and I suppose I offer this as an explanation, if not as an excuse; it could never have occurred to me then that he was merely flattering me.

  The party took place on the lawn of the president’s house, which was a two-hundred-year-old Colonial mansion with walls two feet thick and new, polished tile floors that shone unnaturally and made me think of carcinogens, for some reason. The president was a small, frail-looking old man with a single tuft of cottony white hair at the crown of his head, and twin tufts above his ears. His name was Keller, and he was a retired military officer with a Ph.D. in modern political history, Brooker told me. Dr. Keller was clearly delighted that Brooker had decided to attend his party. He stood in the open door to his house, the hallway shining behind him in a long perspective toward other open doors, and offered me his hand. “Come right through and get something else to drink, young man,” he said. We had all been filing toward him from the lawn, which was dry and burned where there was no shade, and lush green under the willows and oaks and sycamores that surrounded the house.

  “This is our writer,” Brooker said to him.

  “Well, and what do you write?”

  “He writes stories, Dr. Keller.”

  “Oh. What kind of stories?”

  Brooker left me to answer this, and I stammered something about seriousness that I’m sure Dr. Keller took as evidence of the folly of the English department in having hired me in the first place. His next question was a clear indication of this.

  “Are you tenure-track?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  He nodded, and then he had turned to Brooker. They stood there exchanging comments about the turnout, the weather, the long spell without rain that had killed the grass, and I took this opportunity to study Brooker. For a man of nearly sixty, he was remarkably youthful-looking. His hair was gray, but thick, and his face still had the firm look of the face in the photographs of Brooker with Jack Kennedy before he ran for the presidency, or with Robert Kennedy near the end, or, later, with Lyndon Johnson. I remembered reading that Brooker had become disaffected with public service after the riots in Chicago, and had joined the faculty of a small private college in Virginia, and I was a little pie-eyed about the fact that I too was joining the faculty of that college. Life was roomy and full of possibility and promise; and I was for the moment quite simple and happy.

  “So,” Brooker said to me, entering the hall where I stood, “you have met our fine old president in his fine old house.”

  “Very nice,” I said, gazing at the walls, the paintings there, which were of Virginia country scenes of a century ago.

  “Have you found a place to live yet?”

  I was paying a weekly rate at the Sweeney Motel off the interstate. I had paid the first month’s deposit to rent a house that wouldn’t be ready until the first week in September, and I was using the advance money on my book to make it until then. My wife had remained behind at the large Midwestern school where I had taken my degree; she would make her way here as soon as things were settled. I told him all this, feeling a little silly as I went on but finding myself unable to stop; it was information he seemed glad to have, and yet I wondered what could possibly interest him in it. I wound up talking about Mrs. Sweeney, who, because I was the same age as her son, had given me the single-room rate for a double, and kept stopping by to see me in the evenings, as if to give to the general pool of the world’s kindness in the hope that somewhere someone else would offer something of it to her son.

  “I’m giving a series of lectures at Chautauqua Institution this August,” Brooker said. “I hate to suggest that you leave Mrs. Sweeney, but I wonder if you might not want to use my apartment for the month. You’d save money that way, and you could get some work done.”

  I just stood there.

  “It must be awful trying to work in a motel.”

  “Well,” I said, “I haven’t been working.”

  “I’m going to be gone right through the last week of the month, because I have to spend some time in New York City too.”

  The president joined us then, wanting to introduce some people to Brooker, who nodded at them and was gracious and witty while I watched. There were two women in the group, one of them not much older than I, and as the president began to talk about the lack of rain and his garden, Brooker leaned toward me and, breathing the wine he had drunk, murmured something that I wasn’t sure I could’ve heard correctly. I looked at him—he seemed to be awaiting a signal of agreement from me—and when I didn’t respond he leaned close again, and, with a nod of his head in the direction of the younger of the two women, repeated himself. It was a phrase so nakedly obscene that I took a step back from him. He winked at me, then turned his charm in her direction, asking her if she liked the president’s fine old house.

  “Built in 177
1,” Dr. Keller said, looking at the ceiling as though the date might have been inscribed there.

  “I love old houses,” the young woman said. “That’s what my field of study is. The American house.”

  Brooker offered her his hand and introduced himself, and then began an animated conversation with her about modern architecture. I stood there awhile, then moved off, through the hallway to the kitchen and out the door there. Some people were still on the lawn, but I went past them, to my car, feeling abruptly quite homesick and depressed. I drove around the college and through the town streets for a while, just trying to get the sense of where things were. The place my wife and I had rented was on the north end of town, in a group of old, run-down frame houses. Sitting in the idling car and gazing at it, I felt as though we had made a mistake. The place was really run-down. The porch steps sagged; it needed painting. I had agreed to fix the place up for a break in the amount of rent, and now the whole thing seemed like too much to have to do along with moving and starting a new job. I drove away feeling like someone leaving the scene of an accident.

  When I got back to the motel, Mrs. Sweeney was waiting for me, and talking to her made me feel even worse. I kept hearing what Brooker had murmured in my ear. Mrs. Sweeney sensed that something was bothering me, and she was mercifully anxious not to intrude, or impose. She stayed only a few minutes, and then quietly excused herself and went on her way.

  I had showered and was getting into bed before I remembered that Brooker had offered me his apartment. I was ready to doubt that he could’ve been sincere, and even so, when I called my wife, I found myself mentioning that I might be spending August as a house-sitter for none other than William Brooker.

  “Who’s William Brooker,” she said.

  I said, “You know who he is, Elaine.”

  “I’m not impressed,” she said.

  We didn’t speak for a few seconds. Then I said, “So, do you miss me?”

  “I miss you.”

  “What’re you doing right now?” I asked.

  “Talking to you.”

  With a feeling of suppressed irritation, I said, “What’ve you been doing all day?”

  “Studying.”

  “The faculty orientation party was no fun,” I said, and I went on to tell her about Brooker’s murmured obscenity. Part of me simply wanted to express what I had felt about it all evening—that while I might have uttered exactly the same thing at one time or another, in Brooker’s mouth and under those circumstances it was somehow more brutal than I could ever have meant it in my life. But there was also, I’m sure, the sense that my shock and disbelief would appeal to her.

  “That doesn’t seem like such an unusual thing for one man to say to another,” she said. “Was she attractive?”

  “You didn’t hear the way he said it, Elaine.”

  “Did he slobber or something?”

  Now I felt foolish. “Elaine, do you want to talk tonight?”

  “Don’t be mad,” she said. “It really just doesn’t sound like such an awful thing to me.”

  “Well,” I said, “you weren’t there.”

  “Are you going to stay in his apartment?” she asked.

  “I don’t know—I guess it’ll save us money,” I said, feeling wrong now, convinced that the whole question was pointless; that Brooker hadn’t been serious, or that I had misinterpreted a gesture of hospitality anyone else would have known how to give the polite—and expected—refusal to.

  “Why don’t you hang up and go to sleep?” Elaine said. “You sound so tired.”

  “What if I get this apartment,” I said. “Will you come out sooner?” And in the silence that followed, I added, “You could come out August first.”

  She said, “I’m in summer school, remember?”

  “All right,” I said, “the second week of August, then.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “What’s to keep you from coming then, Elaine?”

  “We didn’t plan it that way,” she said.

  Later, after we’d hung up and I’d been unable to fall asleep, I put my pants and shirt on and went out for a walk. Mrs. Sweeney was sitting on her little concrete slab of a porch, with a paperback book in her lap and a flyswatter in one hand, her stockings rolled down to her ankles, her hair in a white bandanna. She glanced over at me and smiled, and then went back to her reading. I went on up the sidewalk in my bare feet, and stood near the exit from the interstate, thinking about the fact that I was married, and that tonight my marriage felt like an old one, though we had been together only a little more than a year.

  2

  ELAINE WAS TRYING to finish a master’s degree in library science. The first time I saw her, she was wearing a swimsuit. I had just finished my first year of graduate school and was living in a small room above a garage, trying to write, and spending most of my afternoons at a lake a few miles west of the campus. There was a beach house and restaurant on the lake, one of those places whose floors are covered with the sand that people track in from the beach, and whose atmosphere is suffused with the smell of suntan lotion. I was sitting alone at the counter, eating a hot dog, and two young women walked in, looking like health itself, tan and lithe and graceful in their bikinis. They ordered ice cream cones and then walked to the back of the room to see what songs were on the jukebox. I sat gazing at them, as did the boy behind the counter—a high school kid with a lot of baby fat still on him, and with the funny round eyes of a natural clown. There wasn’t anyone else in the place, and when the women strolled out finally, the boy put his hands down on the counter and let his head droop. “It’s a tough job,” he said, “but somebody’s got to do it.”

  I laughed. We were for the moment in that exact state of agreement which may in fact be possible only between strangers. I got up and went out to the shaded part of the beach, where the two of them had settled at a picnic table. I had never done anything of the kind, but I was so struck by their beauty that I simply began speaking to them. I asked if they were students at the college and if they were going to summer school, and I asked how they liked the lake. They were polite, and they gave each other a few smiling, knowing glances, but we spent the rest of the afternoon together, and when I left them I asked to see them both again; it was all quite friendly, and we agreed to meet at a pizza parlor just off campus. That night, when I went there to meet them, only one of them showed up. This was Elaine. We had something to eat, and we went for a walk, and the odd thing to recall now is that I was a little disappointed that she, and not her friend, had come to meet me. I remember feeling a little guilty about this as the evening wore on and it became evident that Elaine and I were going to be seeing each other. As it turned out, her friend was leaving school, and I never saw her again; but even so, there were nights in that first year of our marriage when I would wake up next to Elaine and wonder about the friend. It was never anything but my mind wandering through possibility, of course, and yet when I think of Brooker, of the events that followed upon our first encounter at the faculty orientation party, my own woolgathering makes me feel rooted to the ground through the soles of my feet.

  HE PHONED ME EARLY the next morning. I had been lying awake, thinking about calling Elaine, and when his call came through I thought it was Elaine. “I wondered what happened to you,” he said.

  I was vague. I think I was even a little standoffish. I said something about having things to do, errands to run.

  “Listen,” he said, “I wondered if you were still interested in house-sitting for me.”

  I hemmed and hawed a little, the thought having crossed my mind that I hadn’t actually said I was interested; for some reason, now, accuracy seemed important: it was as if I might lose something to him if I allowed him to blur any of the lines between us.

  He said, “I don’t want to impose on you.”

  “No,” I said, “really. I’m very glad you thought of me.”

  “You’d be doing me a favor,” he said.

  And so we ag
reed that I would come to the apartment for a drink that evening, at which time I could get a look at the place. His wife was arriving from New York in the afternoon, and if past experience meant anything at all she would not feel like entertaining a dinner guest; but a quiet, sociable drink was something else again.

  “I could come another night,” I said.

  “No,” he said after a pause, “tonight will be fine.”

  After we hung up, I went outside and found Mrs. Sweeney hanging wash on a line in the yard.

  “Have you looked at television this morning?” she said. “Did you see the news last night? You see that guy arrested for molesting that little girl?”

  She didn’t wait for me to answer.

  “That’s my ex-husband,” she said. Her eyes were wide and frightened and tearful. “You believe that? My ex-husband.” She turned to hang up a sheet, and I thought I heard her sniffle. “You think you know a person,” she went on; she was looking at me now. “You live with a person and you think you know him—know the way he is. His—all the way to his soul. You think you understand a man’s spirit when you look in his eyes and he’s your live-in partner for three years. Three years,” she said. “Do you believe it? And he was always the cleanest, nicest man you’d ever want to meet. Quiet and easy to get along with and sort of simple about things, and a good storyteller sometimes, when he felt like it. A little slow about work, sure—but…”

  “Maybe he’s innocent,” I said.

  She stopped what she was doing and gave me a look almost of pity, except that there was impatience and frustration in it, too. “He confessed,” she said. “He confessed to the whole thing. Can you imagine what this’ll do to my boy, a thousand miles away from home, on some boat in the ocean, hearing that his stepfather did a terrible thing like that and then confessed to it?”

  “Maybe the news won’t get to him,” I said.

  “Oh, it’ll get to him. I’ll write and tell him about it. It’ll get to him, all right.” She put her apron full of clothespins in the basket at her feet and walked over to me. “I should be getting something for you to eat.”