The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  The big eyes ran. Jay knew that Jonas was about to speak of Joe, his son. Jay looked down at the palimpsest of white rings on his old oak dining table. He made a big brother’s decision and stood to walk to the wall phone and call Manhattan to say that Jonas was here and all right.

  “No,” Jonas said.

  “You can’t just drop out of sight, you know. You have one or two responsibilities, right?”

  “Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t think of that, Jay. I didn’t know that, about my responsibilities. I was thinking, this marriage didn’t work, you could take me down to some fuckin’ farm around here or something and pick me out a new one. I could marry a cow or a fuckin’ pig next time. Thank you for the memo.”

  “Pick out a room with a bed,” Jay had said on Sunday night, leaving his beer bottle half-empty on the table and going up. “Don’t cut your wrists except in the bathroom, okay? I’ve got rounds and then I’ll come home and we can talk or something. Or yell. Whatever you want. Also, fuck you too. I don’t think your suffering ennobles you.”

  “Well, that’s not why I’m doin’ it, schmuck.”

  “Putz.”

  “Fuckin’ asshole.”

  “Prick. Goodnight.”

  “Thank you for the bed.”

  Smiling, and feeling fifteen, Jay went up to bed, and he was worried that he couldn’t feel more completely unhappy. Before he fell asleep, to the sounds of Jonas bumping into things in an unfamiliar house, he wondered if Jonas’s dilemma pleased him. He wondered if anyone ever recovered from being a brother, especially a younger one. He was certain that being the older was far from beneficial to the soul: no matter where in the world you lived, your younger brother, on entering some place or any time, was a stranger on terrain you might already have hoisted your flag above. You could not feel such confidence about your relationship to any other person’s life and still be decent, he thought. Feeling indecent, therefore, yet not so unhappy about all of it as he should, Jay fell into sleep. The whimpering woke him up almost at once. He listened hard, to be certain that Jonas was actually crying. He wasn’t. It had been Jay’s own noises calling him up and to the rescue. On and off, he kept himself company for long hours, or so it felt, because the sleep he fell to was so frightening, and its nature unnameable. Blinking against the dark, and rolling, rolling, he wondered whether he had taken some of Jonas’s troubles onto himself. That question was the answer. Hearing the word decent repeated by the secret self, he finally stayed asleep.

  Next day, he spent fifteen minutes in the emergency room, instead of walking his ward, in explaining to two very well-read but misinformed parents that their little girl’s herpes simplex—the child had a lipful of cold sores—did not necessarily mean that she would come down with genital herpes and infected children and a sex life demanding a terrible precision and tact. He administered synthetic penicillin to one patient and took another off intravenous feeding. He dictated records and signed orders. He got hugged by children in pajamas and he hugged them back. He got hugged by a nurse who weighed fifty pounds more than he, and who smelled of soap, and they traded shocking stories while he helped her find the key to the drug cabinet. He fed the goldfish in the corridor of the ward and then, after checking his mail and gossiping with doctors who also drove European cars, he went toward home.

  He kept going, though, and drove into Spruce Plains, which once had been a sleepy town inhabited by merchants and a few teachers from the local school and some antique dealers from New York who wanted privacy for their domestic arrangements. They all were still there, and the one or two artists who kept vacation homes. But there were also people who sold health foods, and tall bearded men who wore faded jeans and who made pots and rugs and furniture, and there was a bookstore. It had no cute name because it was Nell’s. The sign outside said BOOKS. That was what she sold—no art postcards, and not even witty place-markers, and no small anthologies of religious doggerel from greeting-card companies. She sold paperback books and clothbound books and she made enough money, along with a modicum of assistance from her former husband who taught history at Williams, to feed herself and her daughter, whose name was Rachel, and who was sitting behind the cash register when Jay came in.

  “Hi, Jay.”

  “Hi, Rachel. Where’s your mom?”

  The child smiled all of her teeth. “Nellie!” she called. “Nellie! A man’s here for you.”

  Nell came through the curtains at the back of the shop, glared at Jay, then harder at Rachel, and she marched the length of the store. Standing in front of the register, as if she were about to pay for something, she said, “Apologize. Apologize to Jay and then to me. Now. Now.”

  Rachel got down from her wooden stool and stood on the other side of the counter. “How do you think I feel, being humiliated like this? I’m thirteen.” Her face frightened Jay because the eyes were like marbles in something shot and stuffed; only the lips and forehead moved.

  “You’re grounded. You’re starving for a meal. Your goose is cooked, and I’m eating it. I mean it. Look at me: Do I mean it? Apologize.”

  Rachel said, “Jay, I’m humiliated right now, but I’m also sorry. I didn’t mean to act like some adolescent creep. It just—Jay, when you come after her like that, you don’t know how crappy it makes me feel.”

  “Didn’t mean to make you feel crappy, Rachel. But it isn’t entirely your problem. And you made me feel very peculiar when you said that. When you treated me that way.”

  “I’m sorry, Jay. I didn’t mean to imply you were sniffing around Nellie’s legs.”

  Nell squealed, swung at Rachel’s face, missed most of it, but caught enough to make a plopping sound of skin and to send Rachel into a fast pallor. “Ma!”

  “That’s right,” Nell said, panting. “Try calling me Nellie again real soon, won’t you? And be a smart little shit in front of grownups again real soon. You think you will?”

  “I apologize,” Rachel said, not crying, “all right?”

  Nell said, “I mean, do you have problems, or what?”

  “I think either I’m jealous of Jay’s affections for you or I’m unsettled by their implications for our family.”

  “Will you stop sounding so gifted?” Nell wailed. “Talk like the other kids. Talk like me.”

  “I do apologize,” Rachel said. “I’ll go into the house and chew gum and watch bowling now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “No,” Nell said. “You’ll go wash your face and fix your hair and do chores.”

  “Ma.”

  “Now.” Rachel’s face changed, some of the stillness and sullenness leaked out, and she left, waving casually to both of them. Nell said, “Can you tell, I made the mistake of giving her some Salinger stories? They took her hostage, I think.”

  “Is she going to stay a chowderhead like that?” Jay asked.

  “Not if she wants to keep breathing. Hello.”

  “You want me to take care of your kid? I’ll stay here and nurse her.”

  “She isn’t sick. She’s just an adolescent.”

  “Okay. You want me to stay here and take care of you?”

  “What’d you have in mind?”

  “I thought maybe one of us might want to sweep the other of us off of his or her feet.”

  The door opened and two women in identical straw hats came in. One of them wore a patch over her eye, and its delicate yellow tone precisely matched her gloves, bunched in her hand and waved at Nell in greeting. “So much for the leisure to sweep,” Nell said, waving back.

  “My brother showed up. He’s running away from home. I meant to tell you, but I was thinking about getting you to run away from home. Anyway, he’s here.”

  “He’s younger than you?”

  “He’s thirty-seven, and he’s running away from home.”

  “To live with you and be a kid brother?”

  “To tell me some of his troubles, maybe. Maybe today. I don’t know. Let’s not count on tonight, though, all right?”

  “I didn
’t know I was counting on tonight.”

  “If I can put up with your kid, can we live together?”

  “No.”

  “Then we can get married?”

  “No.”

  “Can I nibble your toes in the village square?”

  Nell giggled, then stopped herself. She said, loudly, “I don’t think there is a village square in Spruce Plains, Dr. Reese. Perhaps you had some other place in mind.”

  He said, also louder, “Where I can nibble?” Nell colored, the woman whose eyepatch echoed her gloves looked over, and Jay left the store, making the sounds of chomping.

  Jay drove back to the clinic he shared, in Millerton, with two other doctors, and he saw private patients until four, when he remembered that he had been expected at home for lunch. It was an uncrowded day, and his partners took his patients when he left and drove too quickly home. His brother was wearing the wrinkled seersucker pants and the wrinkled oxford shirt. He sat outside with Jay’s bottle of vodka and two glasses and a plate of rubbery egg-with-ketchup sandwiches. Without speaking, they ate and drank across the picnic table from one another, under the willow at the side of the house. Then Jay talked a little about his practice, and about the day, and, apologizing for his lateness, and gesturing with his full glass that Jonas should take his too, he led him from the table up the sloping small lawn toward the field that ran west from his house. They walked slowly, for their drinks’ sakes, climbed the wooden fence and then descended, walking through cowflop and high grass, through swampy ground and dense thistle and very uneven dry field, away from the house and finally uphill, toward nothing but long meadow and bright yellow flowers that Jay couldn’t name.

  Then they stood, sweating slightly, but cooled by the evening wind that came up, sipping small to make the drinks last, and looking at the orange sunset that told of tomorrow’s humidity. A blue jay landed very close to them and bounced twice, then flew away, nagging. “This is pretty,” Jonas said.

  Jay nodded.

  “You still like it? Out here?”

  Jay nodded again.

  “You got girlfriends or something? Shit. It’s probably nice, being a bachelor. I don’t want it, though. That part scares me, having to date girls. Date. What a terrible word. You stamp them November twenty-ninth or something. But I’m the one who wants to be free. You understand the contradictions here, Jay?”

  Jay said, “I have a friend, a woman, and when she puts a disciplinary move on me, really rags me and tells me exactly what I should do, I tell her she’s conducting orthopedic conversations—like a brace, or a cast, say. Orthopedic. I don’t intend to be doing that to you, Jonas. So you tell me when I start, all right? If I do, I don’t want to. And not that I ever doubted that you would tell me. But I wanted to ask you something, all right? I wanted to ask you: Do you love Norma? How’s that for a question?”

  “It’s always the first one I ask people if they come and ask me to handle a divorce for them. Same question. And what I learned, Jay, is—this’s a good one for you to know. Though you’re not getting any younger, and maybe it’s time for you to make a move, you know? I learned, anyway, that loving the wife or husband is very often about the last problem they have when they’re splitting up. Well, hell, Jay, you did this whole thing. It was so long ago, I almost forgot. You know what I’m talking about. Sure, they say, right? Sure, yeah, I love McSchmuck. Big deal, though. See: I can’t live with him, they say. Right? Or: She eats my soul like a carrot stick, this one guy told me. So how is loving her supposed to help, he asks, and then of course he cries all over my desk. I wanted to tell him it sounded like a very spiritual kind of a blowjob, but I’m a tasteful guy. But it’s amazing how little it counts for, love, when you got a marriage that’s dying, dead, diseased, whatever you want to call it. You remember that from your—”

  “Yes. I’m so dumb about that,” Jay said. They strolled now, breathing unevenly because of the terrain, but still, Jay thought, like a couple of old Jewish guys in the neighborhood, walking and discussing issues of international importance and great local impact. They walked at the same pace and they discussed. “I always think that love is the thing,” Jay said. “This is in spite of Elizabeth, who you may remember from my days as cuckold-to-a-culture in Philly, and in spite of other people I’ve known since then, including this friend of mine now, who’s also divorced. You know someone who isn’t? But I keep thinking love, anyway. Everybody is talking strain and need and alienation and the timelessly popular self, and this one, which is Nell’s current favorite: erosion. She says you can get eroded, and down to bedrock, and then you have to move on or you’re washed away.”

  “That’s it,” Jonas said. “She knows.”

  “Does Norma love you?”

  Jonas nodded. He was wet-eyed again. A swallow was near them, raging in clicks behind and in front of them. Bugs flew up, and mosquitoes clung to their arms and faces and necks. Jonas kept trying to light one of his cigars, but the matches blew out. He threw the unsmoked cigar into high grass.

  Jay asked, “And is everybody—faithful to everybody?”

  Jonas smiled, as if this time Jay were the younger one. “Yeah. So far as I know, neither party has entered into adulterous relationships.”

  “You sound like Pop.”

  “Who, me?”

  “The time they had all the trouble.”

  “What trouble?”

  “When I was in college, away at school? You don’t remember? They almost split up, Jonas. You remember.”

  “Never happened. That has to be your imagination. Never happened, Jay.”

  “Jonas, it happened.”

  “No way. Not them. That’s a couple. Bullshit, Jay.”

  “Bullshit back, Jonas. It’s true.”

  They had stopped again, no longer old men outside the synagogue, though, but boys in an argument. Jonas’s voice went higher. “Jay,” he shouted, “you don’t think I woulda known if the old man and Mom nearly got a divorce?”

  “Well, you did know once. You cried at night. I heard you when I came for the weekend, to study for exams, I think. I came in and I asked you what was wrong, and after you told me to drop dead, you said it was on account of them.”

  “Never.”

  “Okay. Never.”

  “Jay. Really?”

  “No, never, I was lying.”

  “Jay, come on. Tell me. Really?”

  “No.”

  “Jay.”

  “You’re a baby, Jonas, you wiped it off your mind because you didn’t want it there. What the hell. You were young. That’s true, you know? You were young. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen. But I think it happened in my first year of school. I was seventeen. So you were twelve? Almost thirteen? It’s a disgusting age. I realized that earlier today. You were thirteen. And you wiped it out. Amazing. Domestic amnesia, you could call it.”

  “Hey, doctor. You want me to make an appointment so you could tell me about it? All it is, it’s only my parents. If it gets important, you could send me a registered letter, huh?”

  “It’s simple. It’s so simple. You know them. They wouldn’t let us hear it or see it. Which is why you probably don’t remember it.”

  “Definitely don’t remember it,” Jonas said. “Am I a liar? Plus amnesia? Look at this, around here. You’re practicing medicine in an office, you carpet it with cowshit. You know why?”

  “All it was,” Jay said, “was that Mom flew out to Aunt Anna’s and Pop freaked out when she was late coming home. I mean by a day. He went out to the airport and she never showed up. That night—can you see her making him eat it like that all day? That night, it was in some hot month this happened, I think. That night, she telephones, and I don’t know what she said, but it slams him down into his chair and keeps him there until she’s done talking. I remember we were eating dinner. Horrible gray hamburgers and that peas-and-carrots mix from a can? He turned around to me. He was wearing those thin glasses with gold rims at that time. He turned while you were shovin
g the food in, and he said, ‘Mother will probably be home tomorrow,’ he said. I remember that. His eyes looked like yours do. Excuse me. They were all wet and they looked like yours. He knew something about her, or about them both, and he didn’t want to. I think that was a lot of whatever he was feeling. He didn’t want to have to deal with the information. Whatever the information was, he hated having to know it. And he must have hated what it meant. So out we go the next day. Kennedy was called Idlewild in those days. He took us there. He made you wear the school assembly clothes, blue pants and white shirt and red tie. He combed your hair so hard, you cried before we left. He was scared. He was white. We’re standing there someplace at the field, and there’s her plane, and people keep getting off it. For him, Pop’s a mess. He’s turning his Palm Beach hat around and around, he’s fingering the summer silk tie from Brooks. He was wearing the brown seersucker with the stripes. Do you remember that?” Jonas shook his head. “It was a suit he wore a lot. Anyway, all of a sudden, there she is. She must have waited until the plane was empty. It was quite an appearance. She stands up there in the door of the airplane like a conquering warrior. Oh, they knew some stuff we didn’t, boy. At that minute, that second, when they looked at each other, I could feel it. They knew stuff. After a while, she comes down the steps like a queen. Pop just stands there, and then he says—I swear this: I never forgot—he says, ‘Neither party has so far precipitated an unmarried state.’ I said ‘What?’ or something. Hell. I still don’t know what that means. But he just shook his head and then he just waited for her. But his voice, and that poor hat rolling and rolling in his hands. Oh, was he scared. Listen, if I didn’t enjoy the show so much, I think I’d have peed in my pants.”