Something Is Out There

by Richard Bausch

  His intellectual gifts are in fact matched by her own. And nobody thinks in these terms anymore—it’s only something she’s aware of in his company. She has felt her own powers when with him, and this is sustaining in its way, when it isn’t intoxicating. It has helped her with her music, helped her see into it more confidently.

  But he can be difficult when the mood is on him.

  He knows where all her tender places are, and hasn’t shied away from using the knowledge on certain occasions. He knows, for instance, that her first fifteen years were spent traveling from city to city in the deep South with her mother, who was an exotic dancer. She never knew her father, never even knew who he was. There were sojourns here in Memphis, and in places like Tupelo, Jackson, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Biloxi, Mobile, and New Orleans. Hotel rooms, trailers, flophouses, motels, late-night buses from one town to another, night rooms with discarded clothes on the bed and the blinking of a neon sign out the window; meals in diners, fast-food joints, cafeterias (once in a cafeteria when she was eight, she saw an old man die while trying to finish a bowl of chicken soup as if gulping it from a mug; the soup ran down either side of his mouth and his eyes did something funny and in the next instant he put the bowl down with a clatter, in a tremendous hurry, clearly trying not to let it fall and make a mess, and then sat forcefully back in his chair and was dead)—there were hired tutors, mostly people who put her to work doing something rote and left her to her own devices; and there were babysitters who taught her to smoke and to cuss, and one had showed her the guitar, and helped her learn “Tom Dooley.” Two chords, C and G7. The start of everything else. She took to plaguing her mother about the instrument, and finally her mother got her a used Gibson concert guitar. She spent hour upon hour, blistering her fingers, learning to play it, and she discovered that she could hear things others couldn’t. She haunted the music stores, and offered to work for lessons. She found that she possessed this ability to hear her way inside the notes of songs, and to pick up the instruments that fell into her hands, and play them. This began her journey away from her mother. By the time she was sixteen she was elsewhere, far from the dancer, living with a jazz drummer, on the road, trying all the drugs and all the other things, too, including the sexual explorations of the kind she had come to understand were her mother’s own province.

  In Stanislowski’s mind, now, she’s still journeying. The Bradford Smith business has confirmed his perception of himself as one of the stops along her way. He used to joke about this in the first months they were together.

  It used to be a joke.

  And apart from their respective ages, they do have very different backgrounds. He grew up with doting parents who recognized his gifts and who sheltered and supported him accordingly, sending him to private schools in Philadelphia and Boston. He was one of the youngest people who ever attended Harvard, and then he went on to Juilliard. He spent two years in France studying with a man who had been a late protégé and friend of Copland, and, earlier, of Satie. It’s the kind of lofty education that makes him ill-equipped to deal with life at the level of dirty dishes piling up in the kitchen sink or trouble with the heat pump in the middle of winter. She understands this. His whole existence has been the studio or the concert hall with one orchestra or another, several of which performed music he composed; but aside from a year with the Berlin Philharmonic, he has spent the bulk of his career hidden away in this old Southern town, at this college, as a teacher. He’s had three previous marriages, all to women with no musical gifts and no musical ambitions either, and all ending in divorce. The wives are prospering in other lives far away, with other husbands, and children.

  Now, clouds shift over the houses and moving treetops. But wide clear blue spaces show, too. The clouds themselves are lined with that ashen color of rain squalls. Josephine rattles a little on the mandolin and tries to think of a pretense to delay Ruthie’s husband, something other than the box of clothes for the attic.

  The thought of the clothes brings her playing to a halt.

  She puts the mandolin down. The box of clothes won’t take ten minutes. She thinks of bringing up her trouble, asking Andrew’s advice as a man, but Andrew is decidedly not someone you ask for advice and indeed he won’t believe she’s the sort who might seriously ask for it. With Andrew, you are always trying to think up something amusing to report. He likes stories and thrives on them: whenever he’s present the talk becomes narrative; he tells stories and he elicits them—he makes Ruthie tell them, even through her natural reluctance to be the center of attention—and the stories are always funny; it’s always about the laughs with Andrew.

  And here he is, strolling a little unsteadily along the sidewalk with his paper bag–wrapped bottle of beer and his black-leather briefcase, looking completely carefree. He wears loose denims, and a gray button-down shirt with one side missing the button, so the collar sticks out a little. She steps out onto her front stoop and crosses the small space of grass to the edge of the sidewalk.

  “You look like a street person with a portfolio,” she says.

  He sips from the bottle and smiles. “Want a taste?”

  “I never drink before dark.” She’s managing it, showing him nothing.

  “Well, it’s dark up under the house.” His smile widens. “I had a couple glasses of champagne at the school. My boss, because I’m a graduated guy now.” He stands there. A stranger might consider him a bit of a simpleton. He has one of those faces—the little boy that he was has never quite left the features of the grown man. There are the round cheeks, and the wide grin, the eyes that turn to little dark half-moons when he’s amused.

  “Come on,” he says, offering it. “It’s so cold.”

  To her own surprise, she takes it, and holds it to her mouth. It is, as he said, quite wonderfully cold. It’s also dry and tastes very good.

  “Hey, save me some of it,” he says.

  She decides that they can stand here and talk for a time; it’s something she can do for Ruthie. Handing back the bottle in its tight brown wrap, she watches him take another long pull of it. Across the street, a couple walks with a baby in a stroller. They’re talking quietly—a big, heavyset, balding blond man and a slender, dark-haired woman taller than he. She’s pushing the stroller. They cross at the end of the block and walk on under the shade of the big sycamore there. Mottled shade from the tree moves over them.

  “Imagine a street just like this in 1896,” Andrew says. “This kind of light. And a couple with a baby in a stroller, walking along. It would’ve looked about like this. The stroller would be a pram or whatever you call it, and the clothes wouldn’t be spandex, but essentially it would look the same. It was the same, of course. A young family out walking the baby.”

  “Yes,” she says, a little impatiently, remembering that she always liked his odd way of seeing things.

  “But, then, think of this—those people walking the baby in 1896, and the baby they were walking in the pretty sunlight—all of them are dead now.”

  “Yes?” she says. “What’s your point?”

  “I don’t know—graduation’s got me thinking about things.” He takes another pull from the bottle and offers it to her. “Well, it’s Truth. Right?”

  She waves the beer away. “It’s meaningless because it’s not worth saying. Everybody knows about it, without the indulgence of reminding themselves.”

  “Indulgence.” He smiles. “I guess you told me.”

  “Well, right?”

  He shrugs. “Ruthie says I’m morbid, anyway. But I bet your husband would agree.”

  She wants something else to talk about. He drinks more of the beer, and they both watch a car go by—two elderly people in a long tan Lincoln, the woman wearing a white baseball cap and staring straight ahead, her lips an unimaginably dark red, and the man looking at the house numbers, craning his deeply lined neck. Josephine stares after them. The sight sinks into her, and she experiences a sensation like ice water pouring down the inside of
her spine. She doesn’t want to be alone; it terrifies her to think of it. She puts one hand to the side of her face, and then lets it drop to her side.

  Andrew says, “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  She says, “Can’t you think of something pleasant to say?”

  “Well, I’m just fumbling through life, you know.” He takes the last pull of the beer. “You all right?” he asks abruptly.

  “Did Ruthie tell you about Stan going to stay in his studio?”

  He folds the top of the paper bag over the lip of the bottle. “Yeah.”

  “It’s—it’s only temporary. So he can concentrate.”

  “I can’t believe the fool’d move out.” He stares at her. She wants to repeat that it’s just a temporary thing. So Stan can work. The lie exhausts her; she doesn’t, just now, have the breath to say it. The light and scattered shade seem to be moving, seem to be coming at her. She sees butterflies lifting from the dark green bushes in front of the house across the street, and the old woman who lives there, who never speaks to anyone, is standing on the front stoop with her black knobby cane, trying to get up the courage to take the first step down. The sight races at Josephine as if from a terrible distance.

  Andrew touches her arm. “Hey.”

  “I’m okay. Just got a little light-headed there, probably from the beer.” She notices that his eyes are a little glassy. “How much champagne did you have?”

  He says, “Stan’s an idiot, if you ask me.”

  She can’t help the look that comes to her face, the silent nodding admission that things are as bad as they can be. “Listen,” she says, “can you come in for a second? I’ve got a big box of clothes I need to get up in the attic.”

  “Lead the way,” he tells her, handing her the bottle.

  They go up to her door and in, and she puts the bottle into the recycling bin under the kitchen sink. There she takes one deep slow breath. “If you’ve got another one, I’d sure be grateful for it,” he says from the living room. She gets a bottle of Moretti Italian—Stan’s favorite—from the refrigerator and walks in there, where he’s settled on the sofa with one of the guitars in his lap. He can play, too, but amateurishly. To his credit, he isn’t the type of part-time musician who imposes, or has illusions about, his ability. She puts the beer down on the coffee table and sits across from him, glad of the opportunity of extending things for Ruthie’s sake. She says, “Play me something.”

  “Naw.” He holds the guitar out to her. “You.”

  She takes it. There isn’t anything else to do. She tunes both E strings to D, plays a few soft riffs, something she has been working on, a song for Stanislowski. He drinks the beer, and then leans back, watching her. Finally she returns the instrument to its normal tuning.

  “Wish I could do that,” he says. “I have to use an electronic tuner. How can you do that?”

  “Don’t know.” She smiles. “It’s something you’re born with. Perfect pitch.”

  “I wasn’t born with it.”

  “I didn’t know I had it until Stan.”

  “You don’t have yet another beer around, do you?”

  She puts the guitar down and goes into the kitchen to get him the beer. “You want a glass this time?”

  “Sure.”

  She hears the guitar, a few slow bluesy notes. It stops. When she comes back into the room he’s standing at the picture window, looking out at the street. The old lady across the way has gotten to the second to last step. “I tried to help her once. She wants no help. She cussed at me, no kidding. You’d’ve thought I was making a pass at her.”

  She hands him the beer and the glass, and goes over to the guitar. They sit across from each other and he drinks the beer, watching her play. She does the opening of the adagio to Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez.

  “There’s something so sexy about a woman playing a guitar.”

  She plays on for a space, concentrating. One of her weaknesses when she plays, according to Stanislowski, is that she watches her own left hand on the fret board.

  She glances up from playing and sees that Andrew’s staring at her. He has drunk the beer, and he holds the empty glass with its traces of foam on the rounded sides. Some of the foam is still on his lips. He wipes it away with the back of one hand. She stops playing the adagio, and begins finger-picking the pattern to “Landslide.”

  “I love that song,” he says. “Can I have another beer?”

  “If you do,” she tells him, “you won’t be able to stand.”

  “Tell me about what happened with Stan.”

  “He—needs space to work.” She sighs, and puts down the guitar.

  Her dream last night was that she was lying at the edge of an ocean, looking out at the emerald-turning-to-brilliant-blue of the water with its bands of whiteness up close, a perfectly innocent sweet afternoon, bright sun and pale sky—and suddenly turtles came out of the surf. They were small, yet in the province of the dream she knew them to be giant sea turtles, slithering up the beach toward her. The trail of their approach was precisely toward her, inscribing a wide fan of which she was the focal point. Realizing this, she was aghast, but she couldn’t move, and then she was aware that she was dreaming, and so she began trying to wake up, and she did wake up; she was in the bedroom, and Stanislowski was there, but the turtles were there, too, very small now, like the pets in the little aquariums, and yet her dream-mind continued to categorize them as the gigantic slow sea turtles that made their heavy trail across the beach sand and laid the millions of eggs. Stanislowski got up and went out of the room and didn’t see the turtles and she was begging him to do something about them. He didn’t hear her.

  And didn’t hear her.

  And she woke up again, alone in the house with the cats and all the musical instruments. She remembered a story about a woman who died and her many cats devoured part of her face. She got up, trembling, and spent an hour in the other room, playing the harp for the celestial feeling of the notes in the stillness, and for the difficulty, which teased her out of thought.

  But it all comes back to her now like a missed heartbeat. She tries to collect herself.

  “You just got that look again,” Andrew says. “I’m making you nervous.”

  She wants Ruthie to call now. She walks back in the kitchen and opens another Moretti, and brings it back to him. “This is the last one I’ve got.”

  He takes it. “You don’t want any of it?” He pours it.

  “I’m fine.”

  He drinks, looking at her over the lip of the glass. Then he smacks his lips. “So, what’ll we do now?”

  “Well, I’ve got this box of clothes.”

  He stands. “Okay.” She wonders if he knows about the surprise party.

  “Here,” she says, going into the hall, where the box is, and when she reaches up to pull the attic door down, he stands close, so that his arm comes against her shoulder.

  “Let me,” he says, and pushes in front of her. She thinks of the alcohol he’s had. He goes up to take a look. She sees his black shoes on the steps; he isn’t wearing socks. When he backs down he has that simpleton’s smile on his face. The box of clothes is against the wall, on the floor. He claps his hands together and then bends down to lift it. It’s bulky and heavy, and he nearly falls back on the first step, but then steadies himself, inching upward, one-foot-up-and-standing, one-foot-up-and-standing, using the metal braces at the sides of the stairs, and the box as something to lean into, going up. He makes it with a lot of loud breathing, and when it’s done, he comes back down and closes everything.

  “There,” he says. “Now what?”

  “I don’t have any beer left,” she tells him. It comes to her that she has always felt that there was something missing in Andrew, something vaguely not right.

  He moves toward her, and she steps back. “Andrew?”

  And his arms are around her. “I feel so sad for you guys,” he says, leaning in. “I wish I could make it better.” She presses he
r hands against his upper chest, turning her head. His mouth brushes her cheek, her nose, her neck, and he keeps leaning with her. The two of them struggle briefly, he’s trying to find her mouth, and then he says something, only she can’t hear what he’s saying because her own voice is sounding, a string of words she comes to understand are at the level of a scream, ending in “Jesus Christ!”

  He steps back from her, tries to take hold of the frame of the bedroom door, and misses, falling so that his shoulder hits the frame, and he lets out a cry and straightens himself, clutching the hurt shoulder and staggering toward the living room, where he sits heavily on the sofa and bends forward over the pain, head down. “God,” he murmurs. “I’m drunk. Sorry. Forget it. God almighty—”

  She’s standing over him. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she says. “Oh, Jesus Christ. Oh, Jesus Christ.”

  He sits up, still holding the hurt shoulder. He looks like he might cry. But then his expression changes, becomes that of someone who has been grievously and unjustly treated. “What the hell—I just wanted to hug a friend who’s hurting.”

  She says nothing.

  “A friend can kiss a friend.”

  They’re both unable, for the moment, to speak. There’s just the sound of their breathing. Instances flash through her consciousness, like a kind of mental static, of her and Stanislowski in the company of this man and his wife.