Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  Lily kept thinking, Here is a happy man, and she felt fearful for his happiness. She remembered when her parents had seemed that way, and then she was visited by a wave of despair about the thing itself: happiness. She had spent so many nights as a little girl lying awake wondering about it; she had always known when she felt happy, but people used the word happiness as if it were a place, and she would wonder if she might never find it (all of this, the mix and flow of the memory of her childhood, was commingled with the image of Mr. Stapleton, standing at the door of Ronda’s house with the back pocket of his pants sticking out). And now, here, this soft-hearted, graying man, Buddy Galatierre, was talking about the same hope and wish, his own longing, as a boy, for happiness. It so endeared him to her that she felt an impulse to go to him and sit down at his side and kiss his cheek. Now he said that he used to lie in bed in the dark and wonder about it, when he was a boy: would he be happy? Lily did not follow up on the impulse to move to his side, but she nodded, experiencing the feeling of having her thoughts read back to her.

  He went on: “People think happiness is a country, a province, you know? And it isn’t any such thing. It’s good weather. Pretty weather. Climate. Inside, in the heart. It doesn’t come from outside so much. And of course it’s more complicated than that.” He paused. “When you get people in love, and passions—all that. Kin and lovers. And requirements. It can get pretty confused.”

  “My parents seemed so happy,” she said to him.

  He smiled. “They probably were. For a long time they probably were.”

  For a moment, neither of them spoke. She was pulling at a thread on the tail of her blouse.

  “I wish Millicent and I could’ve met in other circumstances,” Buddy Galatierre said. “Because you know I was never the type of man who believed in wrecking marriages. I never would’ve believed I’d do a thing like that. But finally you don’t question it. Happiness is what you feel when you don’t have to ask yourself if you’re happy. I know that’s a bit shopworn, but it’s also true.”

  She realized that she had been unraveling the thread of her blouse, and she stopped. Everything was connected; she saw the cloth of her blouse, absurdly, as a metaphor for her own falling-apart life. “God,” she said, almost to herself.

  “Well. That’s all a long time ago now, of course. And you don’t need me lecturing you. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, don’t apologize,” she found the strength to say. “I feel better, thank you. You’re a kindly, sweet, true gentleman. I’m so glad to be in your house.”

  “I’m happy to have you here. You and Tyler—and now this wonderful development about the baby.”

  Briefly, she had the eerie sense that he was referring to what she had discovered only this afternoon. For a lengthy moment, neither of them spoke. He gazed at the wall opposite him. She wondered, now, what he saw, what was going through his mind.

  “I’ve got to call the insurance people on Monday. I’d rather they hear about this episode of the citation from me.”

  “I’m so sorry about it.”

  “It’s funny,” he said. “When Millicent and I fight, and she’s driving? She speeds. I have to give in a lot to keep her from it.”

  “I hope Tyler’s learned his lesson.”

  He gave her a long, gentle, evaluative look. “You sure you’re all right now?”

  “Oh, I’m—” She reached across and touched the back of his hand. “Yes.”

  He stood. “Let’s go out and get something else cold to drink. Will you let me pour you an iced tea?”

  She thanked him, and then let him lead her out to the pool area. Everyone had gone around to the front porch. They were seated in the wicker chairs there, sipping drinks and talking quietly.

  “Here,” Millicent said, rising. “I’ll go get more chairs.”

  “I think I’m going to go to bed,” Lily said. “I’m really very tired.”

  “We haven’t had much of a chance to catch up with each other,” Dominic said to her.

  She smiled at him in the dark. “In the morning.”

  “Here’s to all pregnant ladies,” Tyler said.

  Nick stirred, mumbling something of his approval, and then lifted Manny’s hand, as if to offer Manny’s salute as well. But Manny had gone to sleep, or passed out, in his chair. He stirred a little and laughed, then was still again. Nick got to his feet and said, “Is anyone familiar with th’ custom droit du seigneur in ol’ feudal Europe? Anybody?” He took a breath. “Th’ custom was th’ right of th’ feudal lord to have sex-ee-al innercourse with th’ vassal’s bride on th’ wedding night. See? Everybody get me? An’ I wanted to say that on this peticular night, I do wush that’s still a custom in these parts and I was feudal lord, and ol’ Tyler there wuzza vassal. And it was wedding night for our sweet Ms. Lily, who looks like a renaissance darling with her lil’ belly all rounded like a watermelon jus’ ripe for harvest.”

  “Nick,” Sheri said. “If you only knew what you were talking about.”

  “S’dirty,” Nick said. “A very dirty thought about that pregnant lady standing there.” He took a step toward her, then stopped and seemed about to try saluting her, but this cost him his balance, and he fell back into Buddy’s arms. “I had an erotic dream about you, Ms. Lily,” he said. “Having it right now.”

  “And you’re going to be in so much trouble in the morning,” Buddy said to him, straining to hold him up, and laughing.

  “He’s in trouble now,” Sheri said. “Somebody drag him out of here.”

  “To you, beloved wife,” Nick said, raising his hand as if he had a drink in it. “Sad-eyed lady of the—what is it anyway? Netherlands?”

  Buddy pulled him to the other end of the porch.

  “Gotta kill some deer in th’morn’n. Id’n that right?”

  “For God’s sake, put him to bed,” said Sheri. She stood, unsteadily, and wrapped her arms around herself. “I’m cold. Is it me or has winter started?”

  When the others had gone inside, Dominic and Tyler helped Manny to his feet. Manny sang softly to himself, nothing remotely like a melody. Tyler had him on one side and Dominic on the other.

  “Thanks very good,” Manny said, in an English that sounded less halting and uncertain. “I see lights, so nice—I—” He stopped, and then went limp.

  Tyler looked across the drooping form and said to Dominic, “Your friend’s not much of a drinker. I don’t think he had but about two.”

  “The cheapest drunk there is,” Dominic said. “He’ll never go broke drinking.”

  The two men worked to get Manny through the doorway and along the hall to his room. They went in there and stayed for a few minutes. Lily stood in the light of the entrance to the kitchen. Rosa was there, making coffee.

  “Somebody cleaned up in here,” Rosa said.

  Lily didn’t answer her.

  “And I’m drunk.”

  Tyler and Dominic came back from the bedroom, talking and laughing about Manny’s drunken attempt to rise after they had put him on his bed. Rosa asked them if they wanted coffee.

  “How about some eggs, Rosa?” Tyler said.

  “The coffee’s on, honey. And I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “Alone?”

  Rosa put one hand on her hip and gave him a withering look. “How would you like to spend time in a hospital?”

  “Just teasing there, Rosa.”

  She looked at Lily and shook her head as if to elicit moral support, then turned and was gone from the room. Dominic poured coffee and held the pot toward Lily.

  “No, thank you, Dom,” she said. “I have to go to bed.”

  “She’s sleeping for two,” said Tyler with a quick, glancing smile. He nodded at Lily. “You go on ahead, sweetie. I’ll be right along.”

  She went down the stairs, into their room, and sat on the bed, waiting for him. When he didn’t come, she undressed, got into a nightgown, and curled under the sheets. Perhaps she slept. She didn’t know. The dark seemed to be changing, but
nothing really changed. Somewhere far off in the Mississippi night a train sent up its wail, a long moan that repeated itself, then faded.

  Finally Tyler entered, and made himself ready for bed. He did not speak to her, and she pretended to be asleep.

  3

  TOWARD DAWN, he stirred and got up, put on a pair of jeans, and stepped outside, by the pool. She lay half awake, waiting for him to come back. She’d awakened several times in the dark with heartburn and a nameless terror. Now she tried to go to sleep, and couldn’t, and in a little while he came back, walked through the room and out, and upstairs, where others were now stirring. She heard Nick’s laugh, and remembered that they were planning a trip north, to hunt deer. Tyler returned, closed the door quietly, apparently trying not to wake her. “I’m not asleep,” she told him.

  He went into the bathroom without answering. He was in there a long time. His coming back out brought her up from the sleep she had drifted down into in the quiet. He put on his jacket, standing by the bed, sighing. Then he sat down.

  She said, “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.” He lay down, slowly.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “I don’t know what else there is to say. I said I’m sorry I reacted the way I did. And I am sorry. But now it’s—now we’ve—” He sighed again. “I didn’t know how much the anger was building up, Lily. I thought I was handling it.”

  “Did you say anything to him last night after I came down here?” she asked.

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “What’d you talk about?”

  “New Orleans, a little.”

  He sat up and turned on the light, then rubbed his eyes, shifting around so that his feet touched the floor. His shadow on the wall was enormous; it made her feel crowded, outnumbered. “It’s pretty serious, not telling a man a thing like that,” he said.

  “I didn’t keep anything from you,” she said. “I thought this baby was ours. Yours and mine.”

  “I meant us not telling him.”

  She felt suddenly as if she were being too hard on him. She moved in the bed, and touched his back.

  He turned slightly to look at her. “How many times were you with him, Lily.”

  “I wasn’t with him the way you think.”

  “What’d you do—use an applicator or something?”

  She held her anger in. His tone had been simply, painfully bewildered. “It happened once. A couple of days before you came to me, at the dorm. It didn’t work and he was miserable. It was sad and a little desperate and lonely and—I don’t know, like a kind of clinging together. There wasn’t anything romantic about it, and it didn’t seem as sordid as it sounds, telling it. And I didn’t think I would ever see you again.”

  “But you did it when you saw him the next time?”

  “No!” she said, too loud. “I was never physically intimate with him after that first time. I said it happened once. That once. And I got pregnant from—from drippings, for God’s sake. I mean we didn’t even finish. He was figuring out that he’s—what his sexuality is.”

  “Say it—he was figuring out he’s gay.”

  “Gay, yes,” she said. “All right. As far as I knew, you were not in my life when it happened.”

  “But you just jumped into bed with him. Out of friendship?”

  “It wasn’t like that, Tyler, and anyway I don’t have to justify that to you. I told you, this was before you. Before us.”

  “How many other men have you been with, anyway?”

  “How many women have you been with?”

  “I asked you first.” He actually smiled.

  “I’m beginning to think I don’t know you at all, not in the slightest,” she said.

  “Well,” he said, “I know this is the eighties and we’re all supposed to be so sexually liberated, even though there’s a plague killing people by the thousands—but I do think I have a right to know how many people you had sex with before me. Were you promiscuous, for instance? Should I be worried about anything?”

  “I had sex with the whole city of Charlottesville,” she said. “I just went through the phone book and started with the As and moved on through the Zs. I had sex with entire families, and in fact, while you slept on the train coming down here, I fucked the whole engineering crew, and all the passengers. You were asleep, so I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “Ha,” he said. His mouth barely moved.

  “Now, tell me your adventures,” she said. “This is fun.”

  All the color went out of the flesh around his lips, and his eyes narrowed. “Oh, Christ. We’re not going to get over this, are we?”

  “Gee,” she said. “Well, um, that’s up to you, I think. Maybe the important thing to remember is that you don’t have anything to say about this. This isn’t Victorian England, for Christ’s sake! This is my situation, and it happened before you came to me that day and I was so happy to see you. That’s right, I remember it now. I was so happy to see you—and—and, oh, yes, I asked you how many lovers you’d had before I met you but, you know, I really don’t care. And I expect the same from you.”

  “I was a virgin,” he said.

  She stared at him. Something about the overdignified cast of his facial expression, the way his chin jutted forward as he spoke, convinced her that what he had said was true. She was seized by the sour conviction that he felt cheated by the fact, and that he might want to exact some punishment for it from the world. His lips were so tightly drawn, and his eyes glittered with moral indignation and disapproval. “Well, I was, too, in effect,” she told him.

  “You were pregnant, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I told you how it happened,” she said.

  After another pause, he said, “Jesus—what’re we going to do.”

  “I’m going to have a baby, and then I’m going to raise it and love it.” She was on the verge of tears again.

  “Do you love me?” he said.

  “I don’t like you much right now, I can tell you that. But what do you think, Tyler? What would you say I feel about you given the last few months?”

  He looked down at his hands. “Oh, God. I’m scared, Lily.”

  “I’ve never done anything like this,” she said, beginning to cry. “I’m only twenty-two for Christ’s sake. We’ve never—Tyler, I thought we were having our first child, starting our family—I thought you were nervous about being a father—”

  He said nothing, nor did he move.

  “Do you see? I wasn’t ready for this—any of this. You’ve had longer to get used to it than me. You’ve known about it longer. I thought we were telling each other everything—”

  He paced to the other side of the room again, then came back and sat down, and to her surprise, took her hands in his own. “Look. I’ll be a good father. I will.”

  “Yes,” she said, sobbing. “I know.”

  “Dominic’s more your friend than mine. You know him better than I do. But I don’t think this would make him happy—knowing it’s—knowing this. And besides—oh, Christ. If he knows, everybody else will know.” He squeezed her hands. “Everybody.”

  She kept her eyes down.

  “You’re sure you didn’t have sex with anyone else.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she said through her teeth.

  “Well,” he said. “I know—but it’d be easier if you had. You couldn’t be sure it was his, then.”

  “Oh,” she said, through her tears, and with a bitter, sobbing breath. “That would be just perfect, I can see that.”

  For a long time they sat there, without speaking and without moving. From time to time she sniffled. She noticed, after a few moments, that he had begun wringing his hands again.

  At last, he took a deep breath, and shook his head. “We’re going hunting. Imagine it. Buddy, Nick, and me. Nick tried to get Dominic and Manny interested but Manny’s too hungover. Manny’s been sick.”

  “Dominic isn’t going either?”

  “Listen, don�
�t tell him,” Tyler said.

  “Tyler, please.”

  “I mean it. Say nothing. They’ll go to New Orleans and that’ll be that.”

  “I don’t know if I can keep it from him for life. He’s my friend. He’s got a right to know, doesn’t he?”

  Tyler stood again, and moved with a tight, furious stride, arms showing veins and muscles, to the bookcase and back, his jaw working.

  She had stopped crying, though her chest kept heaving with the sobs that had shaken her.

  “Goddamn,” he said. “Goddamnit all to hell.”

  In a dispirited faltering of her voice, she spoke: the words that came were exactly those she had uttered to her father’s young wife, all those months ago, when she had felt so sure of her own sense of right and wrong. “Cheer up,” she said, staring off at the dark of the window. “Maybe something will happen.”

  4

  LATER, she went upstairs and poured herself a bowl of cereal. None of the others seemed to have left their rooms yet. She went back downstairs, showered, and dressed, feeling an unexpected aversion now to seeing her reflection in the mirror. When she went back upstairs, she found Millicent and Rosa preparing to go into town. They asked if she wanted to go with them to Square Books, but she demurred. She waved good-bye to them, then went out and sat by the pool in the sun. There was a crispness in the air, but it had not turned cold, as Millicent had said it was supposed to. A thin cloud of steam rose from the water in the pool, which was glass smooth. There wasn’t any wind. The sun was warm, and when you stepped into the shade you felt the difference. She pulled a footstool close, so she could prop up her legs.