Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  “You sure it’s not puppy love?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. I told you it’s silly. We’ll talk.”

  “But there’s somebody quivering on the horizon.”

  She laughed. “Will you stop?”

  “Jesus,” he said. “Do I feel like an idiot.”

  “Good night, Dom.” She sang the words.

  He went off with a sidling gate, looking like Chaplin in all the films.

  6

  TYLER WAS NOWHERE. And Dominic was full of questions about him. When she told him the name, he said, “I know the guy, I think. Yeah. I thought he was—”

  Lily said, “You thought he was what, Dom?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  “Well, I thought he was sort of attached to somebody else.”

  Days, weeks passed. The ice melted, and it snowed again, and partly melted again, and there was a slushy dark mess along the street, black boulders she had to walk around when she crossed to the other side. Her classes kept her busy. She saw Dominic, and other friends in the bars across from the Rotunda, but she kept lonely hours, mostly, the routine of trying to study through difficulty concentrating. The books she was reading for her one literature course were filled with romance, the adventures of the world’s lovers. Her history texts cataloged the long record of human slaughter and migration. She had once felt herself to be separated from it all by her own capacity to remain detached, to analyze. She had not allowed herself a pause to reflect on much of anything but the next task before her. And the truth was that if she kept working through her own distractedness, she forgot Tyler, and even managed the occasional recurring spells of panic. She slept better, or at least she went to sleep. Her dreams were hectic, full of strands of speech she couldn’t fathom. The lovers in the stories she read either broke their own hearts with romantic expectations, or had their expectations answered beyond their wildest dreams. The antique poets sang of love. She dreamed of Mary Kingsley arguing with a boat captain about the draw of water on a craft, in the middle of some African river. She woke with a sense of having been close to her, and during that day she felt rather pleasantly watched over. It was a happy surprise, one afternoon, to discover that she hadn’t thought of Tyler at all that day.

  Her mother called to ask after her, and to ask why she hadn’t called her father. Lily said she would make the call, but she kept putting it off, knowing that each passing day meant another increment of awkwardness she would feel whenever she finally did make it.

  Hello, Dad? How are you?

  Fine. Great to hear from you, kid. I’m sleeping with somebody only a couple of years older than you are, and I’ve added immeasurably to your sense of the untrustworthiness of the world, but try not to pay any attention to it, okay? Let’s just be like we always were when you believed I was going to keep all those promises I made to you and your mother.

  One afternoon, she gazed out her window at the couples making their way along the snow-driven street, and had the barren thought that all love ended in estrangement, that it does alter when it alteration finds. There was a sour and empty solace in the thought, as if she could let go now that the worst apprehension had been realized.

  She had the room to herself, at least for the time being, and she had spread out, her books and papers lying across the other bed, her clothes strewn everywhere. She developed an agreeably heavy feeling in her mind from all the reading; it felt weighty, full. No distractions quite touched her anymore, and friends teased her about her weird, distant look.

  7

  Were you so terrified of intimacy? Did you have this same expectation, all the time, that things were not going to work out? That something bad was just on the other side of every minute? Why is it that when I look out a window and see lovely green mountains, I immediately think of the killing frost, or the insect hives and the animals hunting each other? That scene out this window in my first months here—the hawk raiding the starlings’ nest, and there was utterly nothing they could do. I watched it with a terrible fascination and sick-heartedness, as if it were offered to me by some force as an illustration of the world. I will have love. I will love, and it will be more than romance. It will be stronger, and truer. Yet I’m always fighting the thing in me that wants to deny it all, all the time. That shoulders aside every lighthearted feeling and insists that something will ruin it, bring it down to earth, shake it out of its lovely nest. It’s like a form of spiritual arthritis, and I’m always trying to beat it back, having to act to beat it back. I know that this is a product of my history; and even knowing it, I’m discouraged by how often I’m unable entirely to escape its effects. People say I can act. But my whole life is acting, it seems. My impulse, when these doubts and negations plague me, is to fly in the face of them, stare them down, pretend my way beyond the fright they cause, deny them a single increment of my allegiance. They’re patient; they wait.

  It helps me sometimes, imagining you at my age, living in that time: in a society with such a fixed idea of women and what was expected, and you with your own fixed, steely determination anyway to do what you would. It helps to keep this little journal by addressing you, like this. A secret friend, behind the diary, the spirit of the burning lamp in my mind: you.

  8

  “YOU NEED TO GET OUT,” Dominic said. “And I’m clearly not the man to do it.” He had followed her out of the literature class, and they were standing in the archway near the entrance to the colonnade. “I guess I could be drafted to take you out, if it came to that,” he continued, not quite looking at her. “I’m no draft dodger. I mean, if I had to, I could make the sacrifice. Oh, I know. You’re afraid of hurting my feelings by rejecting me later on.”

  “I’ve got studying, Dom. I’m not even doing the spring play. If I do one other thing, it means something else drops off the screen. Why aren’t you studying, anyway?”

  He was. He had also tried out for and gotten the part of Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “If you really loved me, you’d give up studying and come be in Willy’s fanciful love fable with me.”

  “I’d end up in the hospital with exhaustion. As it is, I’m going on two hours’ sleep.”

  “I’ve almost charmed you into it. I can tell by the green, nauseated cast of your lovely face.”

  She kissed his cheek, and walked away from him.

  She felt no sense, really, that she was missing anything. Dominic was there, uncomplicatedly, as her friend. She told him that she was in her senior year of college, and was, at last, serious. She had begun to consider the possibility that upon graduation she might find a way to get to London, where she could write her play.

  “You’re sick with love, and you can’t even see it,” Dominic said.

  “Go away,” she told him. “I’m sick with work.”

  Her mother called on Sunday evenings, usually. For several weeks they hadn’t talked about her father. But then the questions started again: had Lily heard from him? No. Had Lily called him? No.

  “Don’t you think it would be nice if you called him?”

  Lily said, “Why doesn’t he give me a call?”

  “He tells me he has—he says there’s never any answer in your room during the days and he’s afraid of waking you or disturbing you at night.”

  “Well,” Lily said. “That’s how I feel.”

  “If he were a friend, you’d take the trouble to get through to him.”

  “You’d be surprised. Ask my friends. Besides, he’s not a friend.”

  “No, he’s your father.”

  “Okay,” Lily said, her voice shaking. “I’ll call him.”

  “And so now you’re mad at me.”

  “No.” She sat forward and put one hand on her head, closing her eyes.

  “Lily, do you want to hurt him, is that it?”

  She couldn’t answer this. She sighed into the phone, and realized that under the circumstances, this was an answer of its own.

  “Stop being
so angry about it. If I’m not angry, why should you be? He was my husband.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this anymore, Doris.”

  Conversations like this upset her, and made it difficult to concentrate, and for hours afterward she watched television, or went out and walked the streets of the campus, alone.

  THREE

  1

  She went home for a visit during spring break. When her mother requested that she go on into town to see her father and Peggy, she declined.

  “Oh, come on,” Doris said. “What’re you going to do, disown him? He’s your father. I’ve never known you to be so conventional.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Lily said. “I need a little time. Do you think you could leave me alone about it? Do you think you could stop seeming so cosmopolitan about it all, as if it’s just so all right with you?”

  Her mother said nothing, then. She got up after a few minutes and went on into her bedroom. Lily watched her go, looked at the roundness of her, the way her small feet seemed to mince along the carpet in the hallway. A former dancer. It was hard to believe. There was something of the crank about her, now, a subtle zaniness that worked on Lily’s nerves. She went down the hall, and knocked on the bedroom door. No answer. “Mom?”

  Silence.

  “Mom, I’m sorry. Please?”

  “Nothing to be sorry for,” said Doris. “Good night, dear.”

  “Good night.” Lily waited, listening, but the quiet went on, and then she could discern the sounds of the other woman readying herself for bed. Doris coughed, cleared her throat. Lily heard her running water in the bathroom. When the water stopped, she said, “Doris? Want some coffee?”

  “I’m going to bed, honey.”

  Lily didn’t move.

  “Go on to bed,” said her mother from the other side of the door.

  They had a tense two days, during which they both avoided the subject of marriage or divorce, or men in general. They worked crosswords together, and went out to browse in the thrift shops and flea markets in the valley, and they spent one afternoon painting a set of antique chairs, working in the family room, in the middle of an island of spread-out newspapers. Toward the end of this project, the tension relaxed slightly, and Doris talked about the little plays Lily would put on for her parents when she was small. “Do you remember?” Doris said. “Of course you spent so much time over at that theater—I worried about it a little. Thought it had warped you. You got so quiet.”

  A moment later, she said, “Are you seeing anyone, honey?”

  “Are you?”

  “Don’t be aggressive.”

  “There’s my friend Dom.”

  “Is he more than a friend?”

  “He’s a friend. He makes me laugh. We tell each other things. I’m not interested in him that way.”

  “And there’s no one you’re interested in that way?”

  “This is ridiculous, Doris. What exactly are you seeking to know?”

  “All right,” Doris said. “I can’t answer for where we ended, your father and I. And, honey, I can’t answer for it. But it was love. Just because it didn’t end there doesn’t mean it wasn’t real. And I want you to have that.”

  “Do you think I’m—” Lily began. Then stopped. “What’re you worrying about?”

  “The world isn’t all symmetry and order, you know. People have fallen in love over a lot less than friendship.”

  Neither of them spoke for a time.

  “You think you can run your life solely on the basis of intellect?” Doris said.

  “I’d like not to be governed wholly by heartthrobs and hormones. I suppose you could say that, yes.”

  “Is that how you see me? Your father?”

  “I wouldn’t presume like that, Doris. But I have my own thoughts on this for me.”

  “It’s how you see your father.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” Lily said. “It just leads in circles.”

  Perhaps a full minute went by. There was just the sound of their paintbrushes and the crinkling of the newspapers they were sitting on as they shifted their weight, working.

  “It’s more than friendship on Dom’s side, isn’t it?”

  “Doris, give it a rest—please.” A moment later, trying for a lighter tone, she said, “He jokes about it.”

  “They are never joking when they joke about it, sweetie.”

  2

  AT SCHOOL, NOW, the last of her undergraduate work and the complications of applying to various graduate schools were all the more stressful. She had begun to entertain the idea of taking a break from school. She went to see Dominic in the play, and afterward she went out with him and several members of the cast. He had been good, everyone had done well enough, yet the play had seemed long, and Dominic felt that it had been a disaster, especially where he was concerned. They all talked back and forth about what had gone right or wrong, and though Lily knew most of them, she felt out of place. Dominic was not himself, sitting back in his chair with his leg jumping in that nervous way he had, chewing the cuticles of his fingers and watching everyone. Something was worrying him.

  “I’d better leave,” Lily said to him. “I’ve got a mountain of work. I thought you were wonderful.”

  “I sucked.”

  “Shut up, Dominic,” one of the others said—the young man who had played Lysander. Lily didn’t know him.

  “You were fine,” she said to Dominic.

  “Oh, hey, I’ve slipped from wonderful to fine.” He shook his head. “We don’t lie to each other about a thing like that, do we?”

  “I thought you were wonderful. And fine. And we don’t lie to each other and that means we believe each other, okay?”

  “There’s no ‘fine’ with Shakespeare, Lily. Come on—either you strike the notes that are in the role or you miss them. It’s like hitting the wrong keys on the piano.”

  “Now you’re arguing over my choice of words.”

  “Who wants Bottom to shut up?” the one who had played Lysander said.

  “Well,” Dominic said to Lily, “thanks for coming, anyway.”

  She felt dismissed. But she hesitated about leaving, and ended up staying to the end of the evening. As they were all going out of the place, he hugged her, and asked if she would come to another performance. “I think I can do better,” he said.

  “You always outdo yourself,” she told him.

  He held up both hands. “Don’t say another word. I’ll take that as a yes.”

  She hugged him, and excused herself.

  3

  SHE SAW TYLER AGAIN on a warm March afternoon, from the other side of the colonnade. He was standing in the shade of a column, listening to some young woman talk, one hand clasping the other arm at the elbow. Lily felt that if she were to walk over there, she would have to explain who she was. She started off in the other direction, but then he called out to her, and when she turned he was running to catch up with her.

  “Hey,” he said. “I thought that was you.” He walked along beside her. The sidewalk was crowded with other students, and there was a lot of traffic in the street.

  “Have you eaten?” he asked. “Will you let me buy you lunch?”

  She stopped and looked at him. The sun was bright here, and he was holding one hand up to shade his eyes. “I don’t want to be inside,” she told him.

  He knew of a deli nearby, and they went there and he bought sandwiches, which they carried, with two bottles of iced tea, across to the quad in front of the Rotunda. They sat in the shade of a big oak, and ate the sandwiches, talking about the balmy weather, the pretty sky, the outlandish dress of some of the people strolling past them. He spoke of a professor he knew who made passes at his students, and was about to be fired for it. “He’s never had an attractive female student he didn’t make a pass at.”

  “How do you mean that?” she chided him. “‘Attractive.’”

  He took a large bite of his sandwich, and then held it up
, as if that would be a more fitting subject of conversation. “Just meant it’s—you know—the—the pretty ones he goes for.”

  “Do you know anyone who goes for the ugly ones?”

  He was chewing, and his expression was of a kind of cagey avoidance. He shook his head, and smiled. At last, he said, “Allow me to change the subject before I get into any more trouble than I already am.”

  “Hey,” she said. “Though it might not seem so to you now, I’m really not one of those people who’s always looking for something to be offended by. I was making a joke. I hate people who sit around waiting for the chance to catch somebody up. Really. That’s an ego game and I hate it.”

  He nodded, having taken another bite of the sandwich. There was a smear of mayonnaise on the side of his lip, and she reached over and took it off with her napkin. He grasped her wrist, and then let his hand glide into hers.

  “Oh, hell,” she said. “What’re we doing, anyway?”

  “You’re beautiful, you know.”

  “Don’t.”

  “You are.”

  She waited for him to let go, and when he did, she put the sandwich down in its crown of waxed paper, and kissed him. She kissed his neck, and his ear, and then his mouth. He tasted of the sandwich, and of something else—the faintest trace of tobacco. His chin was rough; he hadn’t shaved that morning. When she let go, and sat back on the grass, he leaned with her, and the kiss went on. Finally they were apart, attending to the mess they had made of lunch—the sandwiches were knocked off the paper, lying in the grass. She picked hers up and put it in its wraping, and closed it tight.

  “Tyler,” she said, “what do we do now?”

  He was sitting there, hugging his knees. “I can’t stop thinking about you. But I’m—it scares me, Lily.”

  After a moment, she said, “Oh.” And she gathered the refuse from lunch, including his, and stood. He got to his feet and seemed to shift from one leg to the other, looking at her and then looking away. He ran one hand through his rich brown hair, which shone in the mottled sunlight.

  “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded,” he said.