Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

  “You heard the lady in the car.”

  “I just want to talk to him and know he wasn’t anywhere near it.”

  “I’ll get you a drink,” Constance said. “This is Campari and soda. You want one?”

  “How can you drink?”

  “Are you kidding? Look at this place.”

  It was true. Everyone was drinking. The room was crowded, and everyone had something in hand.

  “It’s sort of what we have instead of Valium,” Constance said with a soft bitter laugh.

  They watched the people out on the sidewalk. Many of them—doubtless Americans—hurrying aimlessly one way and then another, some clearly panic-stricken, unable to decide where to turn. An elderly couple in ridiculously unfitted clothes—bright white long-sleeve shirts and silly-looking bell-bottom red slacks, stopped on one corner, crossed the street, then turned and waited and crossed back, and went on. Natasha felt suddenly so tremendously sorry for them that she found herself weeping again. It was as if she had just awakened from a dream of crying to discover that she was indeed crying.

  “Here, baby,” Constance said, reaching to touch her cheek with a handkerchief. “It’s gonna be fine. You’ll see.”

  Many people dressed for holidays in the sun were gathering in front of the hotels and restaurants on that side. They all appeared confused and harried.

  “The airlines are grounded,” Constance said. “No flights. We’re stuck here. Stuck here. You know that? Jesus Christ. We’re stuck.”

  The news on the hotel televisions kept replaying the pictures: the planes slamming in, smoke towering skyward, clear sky beyond the city, devastation, the immense squat black toadstool of a cloud over its southern end—and the buildings collapsing in that terrifying straight-downward, floor-upon-floor, pancaking way, like thick gray powder.

  The ride back from Kingston was completely silent. The three ladies had disappeared into the streets, so it was just Natasha and Constance and the three men. They filed out of the van and back into the lobby of the resort’s central building, where others still watched the television with its inexhaustible voices and images, the pundits all weighing in, the discussions of the short presidential speech, and the fact that the president at first seemed to be running—or flying—away, Air Force One heading west for a thousand miles before turning around.

  Natasha went up to her room and lay down. A fit of low, breathless crying came over her. The window was bright with sun, and the wind blew through. She turned, pulled the blanket over her shoulder, and lay there trembling. The chill persisted, and though she might have allowed herself to fall asleep, nothing like drowsiness came to her—she was as wide awake as she had ever been in her life. She wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands and finally pulled the blanket high over the side of her face and breathed into her palms.

  A while later Constance came and knocked on the door and called to her. She got up and opened it and then walked back to the bed. Constance followed her into the room. “I’m sure he’s fine. He’s probably trying to call you.”

  The younger woman sat up and put her feet on the floor. “I can’t stay here.”

  “Well, there’s nowhere to go.”

  “I mean this room.” She stood and looked at the open French doors leading to the balcony, showing the sea and the sunny sky and the broad pure beach, where, now, there was no one.

  “Imagine,” Constance said. “We’ll always feel a kind of hatred for this place now. This is where it happened to us.”

  “I can’t stand it here.” Natasha moved toward the other window that looked out on the mountains to the east.

  “You want to go down to the water? It’s almost lunchtime.”

  “I can’t eat.”

  “Then let’s have more to drink. I’d like to get drunk if it’s all right with you.”

  Natasha saw something broken and frightened in the other woman’s round, double-chinned face, and she put her arms around her. They stood there embracing, hearing the sounds of others moving down the hallway and still others on the patio below. Someone laughed, a young boy—you could hear the edge of adolescence in the scratchy notes, that lean, pointless exuberance. It seemed excruciatingly out of place, incongruous, even ill spirited, an assault. In the next instant, a voice spoke harshly in Spanish, and the laughing stopped.

  Downstairs, the lobby was still crowded, the television blaring. They went past it to the outside patio, where meals were served, a wide veranda in sunlight overlooking the beach. Several other people were already seated at the tables near the stone balustrade. At the farthest table sat the two men who had been with them in the van. They were not talking or looking at each other, but they were together, with the air of strangers clinging to the familiar, or near familiar. The younger one, Nicholas Duego, stood and waved at them.

  “Well?” Constance said.

  Natasha went with her to the table. It was better to be in company. They sat down, and the waitress came over. The waitress was a beautiful island woman named Grace, and they knew her. “What will it be for you?” Grace said to them with a note of solicitousness. There had existed a sardonic, teasing banter between her and her customers until this day. She had played a version of herself, a performance—an island character with no need of these tourists and interlopers—and now all her normal rosy, affectionate disrespect was gone, replaced by gentle concern. The difference was disheartening.

  “Piña colada, Grace,” Constance said. Her voice carried, and Natasha realized how unnaturally quiet it was, turning to look at the other tables, where people were alone or with others, not saying much, staring, some of them, or concentrating on their meals. At one table the three elderly ladies sat, with untouched glasses of beer before them.

  “How did they get back?” Constance said, then turned to Grace. “Make it a double, will you?”

  “Yes, mum. And the young miss?” Grace was not more than five years older than Natasha. Her eyes were midnight dark and full of mournful kindliness. She wore a floor-length wraparound skirt, and her wild brown hair was tied in an impossibly big tangle atop her head, dark tan dreadlocks trailing out of the knot of it. “Well?” she said.

  Natasha pondered a moment. She had been drinking rum punch or white wine all week. “Whiskey,” she said. “I’ll have a whiskey.”

  “Bourbon?”

  “Yes. Neat.”

  Grace nodded and walked off.

  The heavy man held up his glass as if to offer a toast. “Whiskey sour,” he said. “I haven’t had one in ten years. This is the first one. Ten years. I’m an alcoholic.”

  Natasha remembered smelling alcohol through his heavy cologne in the morning. She almost said something; it seemed pointless now to keep any kind of pretense about things. But she saw the shadows under his eyes and the way his hands shook. He was just someone suffering this, like everyone else.

  Duego was drinking water. He took a long swallow of it, set the glass down shakily, then rubbed his eyes. The muscles of his jaw tightened.

  Natasha took the rolled napkin from its place on the table, removed the heavy silverware from it, and put it to her eyes, trying to gain control of herself. Duego offered her some of his water.

  “Where is Grace?” Constance said.

  As if summoned by the question, the tall woman appeared in the doorway and started toward them. Constance reached up and took her drink off the tray and gulped it down. “Bring me another one, please,” she said. “Make it two more. Doubles both. Please.”

  Grace nodded, setting Natasha’s glass down, and turning to move off.

  Natasha lifted her glass and sipped from it, but caught Grace’s eye as Grace started away and nodded at her questioning look. “Yes. Me, too.”

  The heavy man also ordered more, and Duego, as if wanting merely to keep up with the others—there was something grudgingly acceding in the gesture—touched Grace’s elbow and ordered a screwdriver. She moved off, seeming to glide away in the yellow wraparound skirt.

&
nbsp; “I haven’t had a drink in ten years,” the heavy man said. “My name’s Walt Skinner. I’m an alcoholic.” This time, the meaning of the words seemed to arrive in his mind as he spoke. His eyes welled up, and he took the last of his drink. “My wife’s here somewhere.”

  “I do not usually drink,” Duego said. “I do not like the taste of it.”

  “I do,” said Constance, “and I do. I do drink and I do like the taste. And I want to get very drunk today.”

  “Jesus,” said Skinner, wiping his eyes with his fat fingers. “I can’t find my wife. She’s here somewhere. I can’t feel a thing. This isn’t touching a thing.” He put the glass to his mouth and took what was left in the melting ice. His hands shook. He kept moving one leg, a nervous up-and-down motion, toe to the ground, heel raised, the movement of someone normally much thinner, so that the ticlike nature of it glared forth, the frenetic shaking of panic. “We’re from New Orleans. You think they’ll keep us from flying there?”

  “Everything’s grounded,” Constance said.

  “I guess I ought to go looking for her. This feels so helpless. All those people and there’s nothing we can do. My wife went off with some lady friends this morning. She might not even know.” His face seemed to register this possibility. The mouth dropped slightly, the eyes widening, all the color leaving his round face.

  Duego said, “I am from Orlando. I have no relatives in New York.”

  Both men seemed now to be waiting for Constance and Natasha to speak, to say where they were from. It was a peculiar moment: social expectation spun over appalling actuality. Natasha nearly laughed, and an odd braying sob rose from the bottom of her throat. “She’s moving back to Tennessee,” Constance said. And in the next moment Natasha did laugh, turning away from them. The laughter turned to tears.

  Constance patted her shoulder. “It’s all right, honey. I know it is. It’s all right.”

  Natasha feared allowing herself to think so. Thinking so could bring on the thing through some terrible convergence of fate: Faulk deciding to go down there and stand on the street, looking up. And perhaps he was looking up when the plane hit. It was as if she could cause this to be true by accepting the probability that it was not true. And then something like premonition came to her that things were only beginning. There were other horrors to come.

  Tall, stately Grace came back with another tray of drinks.

  “That was fast,” Constance said. “Just the way I like it.”

  Grace set the drinks down. For a few moments, they all drank and were silent. Natasha began to feel as though she were violating some kind of morality, greedily taking this form of analgesic help in the face of the unbearable visions of the morning. She finished her drink and excused herself, wanting solitude now, moving away from Constance’s questioning expression across the wide lawn leading down to the beach.

  She walked there through the hot sand. And when she reached the edge she felt a deep pang, centered in her chest, just below her neckline. For a moment she thought her heart might be stopping. She put her hands there and looked for a place to sit down. It came to her that she might never get up if she let herself sink to the ground in this moment. Unsteadily, slowly, she walked into the water, feeling the cold pull of it and then the slap of it as it came back, wetting her to the knees. The pain in her chest wall lessened. She waited, crying soundlessly, while the water sucked back, pulling sand along the sides of her feet, foaming there, and then rushing at her. Iris would be worried and trying to call. Iris would know where Michael was. Michael would call her. And why hadn’t he called? The circuits, the overloaded circuits. She looked out at the horizon, that straight dark border under the moving sky, and it terrified her. The waves came in.

  Finally she turned, and here was Constance, being helped along by Walt Skinner. They both had their drinks.

  “I’ve switched to vodka,” Constance said, holding up her glass. “For my fourth double.” Then she stopped and seemed to consider. “Sounds like something from a tennis match. Fourth double.”

  Skinner held his drink up. “My second.”

  “That’s your fourth,” said Constance.

  “Okay. I stand corrected. I must’ve miscounted.”

  “How many did you have this morning?”

  “Nothing this morning. I’m goddamned certain of that.”

  “You’re lying through your teeth.”

  “Madam, I have no teeth. I wear dentures.” He laughed with a low snorting sound, enjoying his own humor, staggering, and she helped him stay on his feet. Together they splashed unsteadily into the water, holding on to each other. They were in almost to their knees when Skinner fell back into a sitting position, holding his drink up, spilling none of it. “Looka that,” he said. “Didn’t lose a drop.” He seemed to be grasping at the fact. There was something hysterical about it: a moment of mastery over the physical world. “We’re stuck in paradise. We’re the lucky ones.” He held the glass higher.

  “Shut up,” Constance said. “Don’t talk like that. Jesus.”

  “You gonna stand there?”

  “Cold.” She sat down carefully. “I am never ready for it to feel so cold.”

  “It’s warm as toast,” Skinner said. Then he seemed to recall himself. “Goddamn. What’re we doing, anyway? I don’t know where my wife is.” The water rushed away from them and then came back in foam.

  “I’m beginning to believe you made her up,” Constance said.

  “I hope we bomb the living shit out of them all. Nuke the fuckers. Pardon my language.”

  Natasha started back up the beach.

  “Don’t leave,” Constance called to her. “We came to get you.”

  “I can’t find my wife,” said Skinner, coughing. “I’m scared. I need another drink.”

  “Natasha,” Constance yelled. “I can’t get up.”

  Natasha went on, hearing their commotion. They were no longer aware of her, the two of them helping each other get up and laughing crazily. Before she reached the central building, she encountered a man and woman, roughly Constance’s age, headed down to the water. The woman was distraught, and he was supporting her by the elbow. They were talking about how they had visited the World Trade Center only last week.

  “You’ve been there?” Natasha said to them.

  “Yes,” said the man after the slight hesitation of his surprise at being spoken to. “We were just there, visiting with our son. And he took us to the top.”

  “He’s safe?” Natasha said.

  “He lives in Brooklyn.”

  “Can people get in to go to the top at nine o’clock?”

  They looked at her.

  “When is it open to tourists?”

  “Oh, I don’t remember,” said the woman. She had a big brown mole on the side of her neck.

  “It’s nine-thirty,” the man said. “I’m certain of it. I looked at the sign.”

  People could be so perfectly kind. Natasha thanked them and wished them a fast return to their home.

  She went on into the lobby with its television still transmitting the foment of voices, repeating the images that now suddenly, somewhere beyond language—despite everything you knew and feared—were weirdly, distressingly thrilling, too. It was the awful majesty of the terrible. In the bar, she sat at one end and watched the crowd of people trying to find a way to occupy themselves. Duego walked over from somewhere beyond the patio and stood looking at her. He was holding a glass of what looked like orange juice.

  “I cannot concentrate on anything,” he said. He had been crying. She felt an urge to touch his wrist but held it back.

  The bartender walked over and stood staring. He was a small man with a gray ponytail. When he smiled, a gold tooth showed.

  “A whiskey,” she told him. “Bourbon.”

  He looked at Duego.

  “Another, yes,” Duego said. “Screwdriver.”

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” Natasha said.

  “I do not know what is in
this. I knew the name of it as a drink. I do other things. But I have heard the name of this drink, and I know that it is made with orange juice. Orange juice is healthy.”

  “Yes. Orange juice is healthy.”

  “I drink orange juice every day.”

  “So do I.”

  “I do not usually like alcohol. But this tastes very amazingly good.”

  “Vodka is tasteless. So it’s the orange juice. And we’ll drink to orange juice.” Looking past him into the lobby, she saw a group of people on their knees. A square-shouldered, balding man with angry red splotches from sunburn on his muscle-bound arms was leading them in prayer, thick hands folded under his chin, eyes closed.

  Natasha went and stood in the entrance, watching for a few moments. The man was saying the Lord’s Prayer. She could not see Faulk doing this if he were here. It seemed vaguely showy. She saw two of the women who had taken the journey to Kingston. In the flow of her thoughts, running through the bands of terror, was the fact that Michael Faulk was thousands of miles away.

  “Your whiskey,” Duego said. He had brought it over, with the little napkin at its base. “To orange juice.”

  She thanked him and repeated the phrase, and he clicked his glass against hers. They drank. She walked back to the bar and sat on the stool at the end. He followed and took the first stool, right angled from her. He put both elbows on the shiny surface, setting his drink down. “I have never liked orange juice. But this.”

  She didn’t respond, looking around the room for Constance or Skinner.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “Forgive me. I am unable to be alone just now.”

  She gazed at him. “You said you do other things. What other things?”

  “I can say nothing about that.” He grinned.

  There was that strange stiffness and overformality in the way he talked. “Did you come here alone?”

  He nodded, his chin quivered, and she looked away.

  “My wife left me,” he said. “A dancer. And she—she fell in love with another dancer. Another woman dancer. Another woman. I came here to get away from all that. My wife the lesbian. I hope you are not a lesbian.”