Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

  “Well, no—but I don’t mind at all. If you want to.”

  “Sorry I’m so forward.”

  “No,” Natasha hurried to say. “Really.”

  Aunt Clara’s husband, Jack, was Italian, and he kept a wine cellar and was proud of it, happy to show it off. At dinner, he told about being a young man ignorant of anything but the taste of beer and pouring down the sink a gift bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild 1956 because it wasn’t sweet. “Well, I was only twenty-four. Grand cru, worth about two hundred seventy-five dollars back then. I lied to the nice guy who gave it to me in gratitude for helping him get his car out of a ditch. Said it was excellent, and of course he was stunned that I’d opened it.”

  Aunt Clara said, “The deepest regret of the man’s life.”

  “That makes him very lucky,” said Natasha.

  After dinner, they all sat out on the porch, and Jack smoked a pipe. They remarked about the hot weather that would arrive soon, the town’s unbearable humidity. Clara said her daughter had recently decided to take up yoga in order to help her relax.

  “She always seems so relaxed,” Natasha said.

  Clara smiled. “She’s as nervous as the very idea of nervousness. And I think I did it to her, too. I was such an anxious mom. Saw threats everywhere. The poor thing was bearing up under a catastrophic imagination way before she became the senator’s wife, no kidding.”

  “I think a person’s character is probably there at birth,” said Jack, blowing smoke.

  Clara turned to Faulk and said, “Have you spoken with your father lately?”

  “Not too long ago. Couple weeks.”

  “I wonder how he’s doing.”

  “He said something about stopping to see me on their way to visiting Trixie’s family in Tuscaloosa next month. I’m pretty sure it’s Trixie’s idea.”

  “Don’t be so hard on him.”

  “Well.”

  They sat breathing the spring air, the fragrance of Jack’s tobacco. A bird sang in the nearest tree, and Clara whistled at it, making almost the same sound.

  “That’s good,” Jack said, smiling without removing the pipe stem.

  It was a pleasant, calm evening, and Natasha watched them, wondering at their ease together. Faulk had said nothing of his plan about the clergy.

  As they were taking their leave, Clara said to Natasha, “I hope I’ll be seeing you,” and embraced her. Then she kissed Faulk on the cheek. “We’ll keep the light on, as usual. But you know we always do that anyway.”

  “Thanks, darling,” Faulk said. “Thank you very much.” He put his arm around Natasha, and they walked down the sidewalk toward Thirty-Sixth Street, where he’d parked the car. The streetlights made shadows of the laden tree branches across the sidewalk. She felt pleasantly sleepy. “That was such fun,” she said. “What cool people.”

  “I stay with them every time I come to Washington. Since my divorce, Aunt Clara’s been worried about my well-being. I think she’s convinced you’ll be good for me.”

  Natasha hooked her arm in his. “She’s wonderful. I want to be like her when I grow up.”

  “I know that feeling.”

  “It’s funny. Politics didn’t come up at all.”

  “Cousin Greta came up. That’s politics in a way. Her nervousness. It’s all about what she has to do with her days.”

  “But you know Greta always does seem so comfortable and at ease. Like she was born to it. She was glowing at that Human Relations dinner.”

  “Yeah, well, she claims Clara’s house is the only place in the city where she doesn’t have to be the senator’s wife. You should see her and Clara together. Clara talks to her so tenderly, like she’s eleven years old and still living under her roof. And of course no mention is ever made of the, um, business. It’s like furniture: always there, but you never talk about it.”

  “I thought you might say something about your plans.”

  It took a moment for him to respond. “I’m not sure why I didn’t. I’ll tell her sometime before I go back to Memphis.”

  They went along the walk to the corner. The concrete was uneven, a tree root having forced it to buckle. He tightened his grip on her arm as they negotiated this and then let go when they crossed the street. Opening the car door, he said, “So where’ll we go tomorrow? It’s your call, I believe.”

  “I want to make love,” she said. “Tonight. Now.”

  He stood shuffling with the car keys.

  “Did I say something wrong?”

  “I’m thinking where we can go.”

  “My apartment,” she said.

  So their first time was in her bed in the small room with one window overlooking East Capitol Street. Before they went in there, though, they sat for an hour on the sofa in her combination living room and kitchen, sharing a snifter of brandy. She liked that he was not in a hurry. At one point she lay her head against his shoulder. She told him about wanting to grow up to be an artist.

  He looked at the little square frames with the watercolor faces in them on the wall. “Are those yours?”

  “Yes.”

  He got up and went to them and stood gazing. He took his time in front of each one. Finally he said, “They’re amazing. Truly. You must know how good they are. Who’re the models?”

  “I don’t know. Except, you know, I do feel like I know all of them. I buy old photographs from antiques stores and try to paint the faces, and you do get a feeling for a person, painting a face. I haven’t done it for a while.”

  He came back and sat down. “You have to start again. These really are quite amazingly good.”

  She felt the need to change the subject. “What will you do when you leave the priesthood?”

  “Haven’t thought about it much,” he said. “Some kind of social work? I’ve had to write a homily every week, and not having to do that is going to be good. I can get to some of the reading I’ve been too busy to do. I’ve been rereading Thomas Aquinas. And I’m not trying to impress you with my erudition. Really, it’s calming.”

  “It’s Catholic.”

  “Well, we’re English Catholics, right?”

  “I went to that church down in Charlottesville. A big metal statue of him out in front of the place. A very podgy, disgruntled-looking aluminum monk. And a building that looks like a spaceship.”

  “I spent some time reading in his big book when I was a kid. Something reassuring about having everything laid out in that orderly way. I liked that. Still do. It might’ve been what led me to life in the church. Not his, of course.”

  “Let’s not talk about church,” she said. Then: “Will you wait until I can put things away?”

  “Of course.”

  He sat on the sofa in the light of the one lamp, legs crossed, a magazine open in his lap, looking like someone in a dentist’s office. It was endearing, and sweet. She went into the other room and worked behind the closed door, putting dirty clothes into the bottom of the closet, stacking books neatly on the nightstand, and changing the bed. She worked hurriedly, and when she came back out to the living room she found him standing at the bookcase, hands clasped behind his back, gazing at the titles.

  “We’ve got some of the same books,” he said.

  She took him by the hand and led him into the little room. He moved as if worried about waking someone, padding to the window and pulling the curtain aside to look out. “Nice view of the Capitol.”

  “Yes.”

  He came back and put his arms around her, kissing her neck, the side of her face. His mouth tasted of the brandy. They were standing beside the bed. They sat down and looked at each other.

  “I’m nervous,” he told her.

  “Me, too.”

  They made love, saying little, and she came very quickly, holding tightly to him. He kept going, and she spread her legs wider to take him deeper, murmuring his name.

  “I’m going to come in you,” he said suddenly, loud.

  “Do. Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes.”
>
  Afterward, they lay in the tangle of sheets, saying nothing for a time. Finally he leaned up on one elbow and gazed at her. “That was glorious.”

  “Can you stay?” she asked.

  His expression was faintly bemused. “I’m not going anywhere, if it’s all right.”

  This gave her a distressing sense that he might suppose she had done this often enough to wonder. She said, “I don’t know what the protocol is. I’ve never done this.”

  “Here?” he said.

  She answered simply. “Here, yes.”

  “I’m glad I’m the first. Here.” He smiled.

  She reached up and brought him to her, then rolled over on top of him and began softly to move down. When she took him, still a little flaccid, into her mouth, he moaned, “Oh, lover.” She felt him harden, and she tightened her lips and pulled, and then ran her tongue slow along the shaft, and then straightened and straddled him, guiding him into her, sinking and rising on him, head back, hands gripping his shoulders. It went on. It was very good. She paused, bending to his face, kissing him, tightening the muscles of herself around him, then straightened, moving her hips back and forth, rising and sinking. “I’m going to come,” she said, and did, and held him tight inside her, hands still gripping his shoulders, her head drooping so that her hair was in his face.

  Later, they went into her small bathroom and took a shower together, moving gingerly in concert because of the small space and the clutter of the bottles of shampoo and conditioner. He held her in the rush of warm water while she let it cascade over her hair. They stayed until it began to get cold. Then they toweled off—he dried her and she him—and returned to the bed. She lay back and opened her legs, and he kneeled before her, paused, moaned, lowering his head. He began kissing her inner thighs until, with tantalizing slowness, he licked her. And when she was about to come, raising himself, he pushed deliciously inside. She felt the easing, the falling through, without quite going over, and he went on, apologizing for taking so long, until at last he, too, was finished.

  “So lovely,” she murmured.

  “It’s been a long time,” he breathed. “Too long.” He was still out of breath.

  “Let’s sleep now. Or do you want something else to drink? I have some wine in the refrigerator.”

  “I don’t want to move.”

  “Can I get it for you?”

  “I don’t want you to move.”

  She snuggled closer, put one leg over his middle, and felt him running warm out of her—how good to have this sensation without the attendant stab of guilt or aversion; how wonderful to feel so clean and clear.

  “Where do we go tomorrow?” he said.

  2

  She chose the Corcoran Gallery. Though he had driven or walked by the building many times during visits to the city, he had never been in. They spent a pleasant couple of hours looking at an exhibit of Impressionist paintings on loan from the Louvre—and then they went across the river to Mount Vernon and Arlington Cemetery, those somber, gentle slopes, row upon row of white crosses and six-sided stars. At the Kennedy grave site, they stood quietly among other visitors and read the words of the speeches.

  She said, “Doesn’t seem fair.”

  “What.”

  “Lincoln wrote the words on his memorial.”

  He stared for a moment, unable to decide how serious she was. “You’ve been working in politics too long, I think.”

  “It’s the truth. Right?”

  “I think JFK wrote his inaugural himself.”

  She shrugged. “He had help.”

  “You don’t like him.”

  “I don’t remember him,” she said.

  “Well, I was ten when he died. I remember him. And I remember that. Everybody remembers where they were that day.”

  She said, “For me it’s the Challenger disaster.”

  They made their way down to the parking lot and drove back across the river, to Georgetown. He noted that she appeared almost passive about the evening, but then he realized that this came from a form of relaxation: her smile was both playful and compliant, the expression on her face giving forth a lovely intimation of gratitude, perhaps not for him, particularly, but for the fineness of the day. He kept the talk light, and the way her dark eyes seemed to narrow very slightly when she concentrated on something delighted him.

  The next morning, they drove out to Middleburg for a long leisurely afternoon of thrift shopping. They stayed there that night. And the following morning they traveled down to the Old Town section of Fredericksburg to look at antiques. He watched her negotiate with a dealer about a set of old pewter cups for Iris, and together they rummaged through old postcards and photographs in a bin. She bought thirty of them in a packet. One family’s photos going back to 1913.

  It was gratifying to discover that they had the same fascination with the individual details and concerns of past lives.

  He wanted to look at Civil War battlefields in the area, and she agreed to this with an enthusiasm that warmed him; it was an interest of hers as well. They went to Marye’s Heights, and over to Chancellorsville, then on to Manassas and even out to little Ball’s Bluff, in Leesburg. This necessitated intervals of travel on the highways and the country roads, too, and they were quiet for long periods. When they spoke, it was mostly about the battles that had thundered back and forth in these peaceful hills and fields. He was impressed with her knowledge of all that, her comprehension of the politics of the time, and when they were standing at the little monument to the action at Ball’s Bluff, he told her so.

  She bowed her head. “Thank you, Mr. Professor, sir.”

  “Well, I am impressed.”

  “You just can’t believe someone my age could be at all knowledgeable.”

  “That’s not how I meant it.”

  “Just teasing you,” she told him. “I did a lot of reading growing up because I was alone so much. I even knew about Thomas Aquinas.”

  “Hey, I don’t feel there’s anything about you I have to compensate for.”

  “I was being silly. Okay?”

  “Okay.” He put his arm around her. “Let’s forget it.”

  But that night, in her bed, lying awake in the dark with the sound of traffic out the window, he couldn’t sleep, and while she moved and murmured, dreaming, he kept thinking about the numbers: when she was five years old, he was already old enough to vote; when she was ten, he had been married for two years. He quietly got out of the bed and went into her little living room. It was chilly, and he pulled the afghan that covered the sofa around himself. Looking through more of the books, he found a volume of Shakespeare. He took it to the kitchenette and had a glass of water, then poured himself some of the sauvignon blanc that was in the refrigerator. Most of the flavor was gone from it, but he thought it might help him sleep. Finally he sat on the sofa with the afghan over his shoulders, looking through the Shakespeare. The line she had told him that Iris embroidered on a pillow rose to his mind. The phrase was vaguely familiar. He had seen two Shakespeare plays in the last three or four years. He looked through Hamlet, and then The Tempest.

  And there it was, in the second scene. He closed the big book, satisfied, as if he had won some kind of contest, and abruptly felt foolish for it.

  He crawled back into her bed and was very still when she turned and put her arm over his chest. The feeling of intimacy, the slight sourness of her breath in sleep, the warmth of her body, so close, caused something to collapse in his heart. He told himself that he’d had the wine, and therefore could sleep. But sleep did not come, and he lay there doing the math, worrying all the more about it because he knew now that he was in love.

  3

  Friday morning at Harpers Ferry they hiked up beyond the old ruin of Saint John’s Church and the grass-overgrown, tumbledown two-hundred-year-old graves adjacent to it, to the big flat boulder where Thomas Jefferson reportedly stood and declared that this view of the conjoining rivers and opposing bluffs was worth the grueling
journey across the Atlantic. They stood together on that rock, a light breeze moving over them, and held hands, watching the waters course and mingle in currents and eddies far beneath them.

  “I’m beginning to feel like this touring is a pretext,” he said.

  “Explain.”

  “I don’t really care so much about it now. I just—I want to be around you. We could’ve stayed in bed today, at your apartment.”

  “The air-conditioning doesn’t work that well. We’d be miserable there in the heat all day.”

  They watched the white folds of the water below and saw two people—a man and a woman—high on the cliff across the way. The two people were wearing backpacks, and it looked like they had dry-tooling axes and ropes. Apparently they were serious. There seemed something ostentatious about all that equipment. Except that now the man dropped something shiny, and it bounced terribly off an outcropping of rock far below. Natasha gave a little cry of alarm.

  “A long fall,” her companion said.

  She covered her eyes. “I can’t watch them.” A second later, she peeked through her fingers.

  “I did a little climbing in Colorado when I was in my twenties,” he told her. “Well—once. I didn’t mean to make it sound like more. It was just once. Very supervised.”

  They watched the couple move across the face of the cliff.

  Suddenly he said, “It’s from Shakespeare. The line embroidered on the pillow.”

  She looked at him.

  He shrugged. “It sounded familiar when you told me about it. I was up last night, looking through your books. It’s from The Tempest. I saw it done last year in the park.”

  “ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”

  “It’s part of something Prospero asks Miranda. ‘What seest thou else in the dark backward and abysm of time?’ He’s asking her what she remembers.”

  “I should know the play, but I don’t.”

  “I’m in love with you,” he said evenly, straightly, as if answering a question.