“But you know different,” she said.
“Don’t I, boy,” he said, sighing into his hands as, cupped along his face, they rubbed at the lids that always looked sore.
“And then you come home, and I make you forget your worries.”
He stopped rubbing. He turned on one arm, blinking, and looked at her. She ducked to sip her coffee. “Yes, Louise,” he said. “That’s what I do. And that’s what you do.”
She did not say anything. But she knew that she smiled gratefully. She knew that she had just poured too much scalding coffee into her smiling mouth because her gratitude for his assurance was as powerful as her need had been to hear it. He was the counselor for the Sheriff’s Department, and she was the counselor for the senior high. And every time he called it the final difference, Louise refused to cry.
One of Gerry’s patients, a man near retirement who drove a red and white sheriff’s car and who’d been said to talk to himself in public as much as he probably did inside the car out of sight, had arrested a high school junior for hanging from a pedestrian bridge near Sidney, New York while mooning. The deputy, enraged not by the boy’s risk to himself, or the thought of what his body, falling from eighteen feet, might do to windshields or the amazed people behind them, had hauled the boy up and beaten him, while he was still half naked, for his nudity. “Showing your ass like that,” the deputy had said, again and again, according to the boy. Louise had worked with the boy and his parents, while Gerry had worked with the deputy. During their only conference, she had heard Gerry whistling “Moon over Miami,” and she’d started to giggle.
“What?” he’d said.
In the bright room, with its smell of tobacco and something like turpentine, in the steel-colored light of the Chenango Valley in winter, she had told this man who looked as much like a deputy as his clients did—tall, thick, broad of neck, slightly stooped, as though he drove all day; handsome in the way that minor actors who end up playing clever villains must once, maybe in high school, have been called handsome—“You were whistling about a moon. It made me think of that bare bottom suspended in the air over the highway.”
Gerry had looked at her—had seemed to study her—as if he aimed his high forehead and big nose and little dark eyes. He moved his head as if his neck were sore, his shoulders stiff. He’d rubbed his eyes and then, the only male she’d seen do this since her second year at Oberlin, he blushed. His prominent nose and forehead made a beacon in the grim, small steel-colored room. He closed his eyes and rubbed at the lids, and she knew he was hiding.
“It’s such a wonderful expression,” he blurted, “mooning.” He laughed uncontrollably, she thought, letting his teeth show, then putting his hand to his lips as if he wished to cover them. The laughter came from his belly and his big chest so that his torso shook. He was probably a man of coarse appetites, she’d thought. She had understood, even as she’d risen to wrap her long winter coat around her and look at her watch and say excuses, that she was thinking less of this competent-looking vulnerable man than someone she had left in Rochester, a lover, dark and demanding and finally cruel, whose memory filled her with sadness about herself and what she strongly suspected, and maybe feared, was lust.
He had telephoned her that night, and she’d felt an obligation toward him, as forceful as if she’d betrayed him with the man in her memory. He had been apologetic, as if he’d gone too far. A kind of pleasant romantic duty, then, started them out, and now they had lived together, without a dog or cat or child, for almost two years, in a locked-log house on a river flat outside of Plymouth, New York. They went to work early, driving separately the twelve miles to the county seat to ply their trade; they came home late, cooked together, brought in food, and then they watched films on the VCR, or read and slept early. Louise had told him about her former lovers—a few she’d called boyfriends, and the other she had tried not to dwell on. He was the one about whom Gerry had asked the most gentle, pointed questions. She had put an end to them by telling him, “You use your mind like a penis, sometimes, you know that?”
“Sex is in the head,” he’d answered at once, his tone growing hard as he looked over at her from the sofa on which he lay with the Science supplement of the Times. “Isn’t that a tenet of the feminists?”
“I’m not a feminist,” she’d answered.
“Sure you are,” he’d said at once, in the new, grim voice.
“I’m me. I’m only me.”
“All right,” he’d said, looking at the papers, “that’s plenty good enough. Be you.”
They left off their lovers’ archaeology until, meeting for lunch at the Howard Johnson’s near the County Office Building, when Louise told Gerry about a girl who had sought her help in finding a doctor to abort her pregnancy, Gerry’s face had gone smooth and expressionless, then had turned bright red.
“Only a baby,” Louise had been saying. “And having a baby. And needing to kill it.”
“Is she finding the decision difficult?”
“Oh, Gerry, she’s terrified. I have to talk to her some more. I’m worried about who the father is. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were her own—”
“The decision,” he’d said, his lips thin and pale against his flushed face. “Is it hard for her?”
“What?” Louise said. “What, Gerry?”
“You had your Mr. Wicked Desires. I—well, a woman, of course.” He gave an imitation of a smile. “I mean, there was somebody who I—whew.”
And she’d said, “Loved.”
Gerry was rubbing at his eyes. She had reached to hold his wrist and pull his hand away from his face, and he had held the arm rigid. He might be someone ferocious, she’d thought.
The waitress had come and left their iceberg lettuce, their processed turkey strips and cold French bread, and she had never seen her do it, Louise realized.
Gerry at last had let his arm fall down into her small hand, and he had looked at her to say, “The waitress thinks we’re fighting over the olives, I think. She had—not the waitress, you understand.” His face had lost some of its bright color, then, and his eyes had grown less reptilian. “The woman I’m referring to. Apparently I made her pregnant. I’m assuming that. I decided I’d stick with the assumption. Well, it hadn’t gone well, that’s all. Our being together. Our time together wasn’t going well. I think I’m not easy to live with. Do you?” He’d faked his helpless smile and laugh, and Louise had found herself rubbing at her own shut lids. “She aborted the baby, but she didn’t want to tell me. First she aborted, then she told me, then she put only a few of her clothes into a suitcase—two suitcases, actually, plus a carry-on bag. It was like she was escaping. Well, she was. She was very pale. She was sweating. I thought she’d gone infected, from the procedure. First she aborted, then she told me, then she packed, and then she left.”
Looking at him in the restaurant as he moved strips of salty meat among the lettuce chunks, she’d been able to say only, “How did you live, Gerry? How did you stay alive?”
“By not loving her anymore. I took myself away from her.”
“But how?”
“I don’t want you ever to know,” he’d told her, letting his fork fall and rubbing at his eyes. She had wanted to reach across the little black shiny table to stroke him. He’d looked to her like a huge boy, like a wounded creature, Gerry, her child. That night, at home, instead of suggesting drinks or mentioning dinner, she had pulled him by the same strong arm she’d held at lunch, and they had gone to bed. But what she had thought would be a consolation turned to desperate, clever sex. It was she who had wept as they turned and plunged like drowners in the sea. Her tears, she later thought, could have seemed to be her comforting.
Gerry drove off to counsel deputies who beat their wives. He gave advice to department families about child abuse, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse. And Louise talked to girls who would not eat, and to parents who refused to give their children money for meals in school, and to boys who drove long ca
rs and came to high school only when the courts compelled them. They watched cheerful black and white films with Jean Arthur or Myrna Loy. They read fat novels about prehistoric cave women or spies who could fight with their hands without breaking them. They paid bills with checks drawn on a joint account, and they sometimes went to Montreal or New York by plane, where they stayed in good hotels and ate too much, walked through exhibitions in museums, met with professional colleagues with whom the predication was that diseases were cured, conditions improved, and frailties strengthened.
During recent nights, in their antique brass bed that squeaked and wailed with age and corrosion, Gerry began to thrash. He’d always snored. He had, from the start, sometimes muttered in his sleep. But the deep snores that echoed in his big chest, which he never dressed in pajamas, but always in a dark blue T-shirt, now became the rumbled warnings of explosions to come. He rasped and boomed, and then went on to cry aloud, in a high, tight voice she at first didn’t recognize as his when it wakened her. They were always warnings—“Do that again!” or “Go try and get in here, you son of a bitch!” And he would swing big looping roundhouse punches while he lay on his back or his side, sometimes hitting the thick brass posts of the bed and waking himself enough to say, “Oh,” or “Sorry,” and sleep again at once, and sometimes sleeping through it all, but always waking Louise. So that she lay in a quickly subsiding panic while he muttered and swore, worked up his dreamy rage, then threw his punch, then woke or didn’t, then slept at once—leaving her to feel his face, to listen to his breathing and then, again, his snores, and to grow furious at him for doing this, whatever it was, to her.
In the morning, feeling sick because sleepless, or at best, even if she’d fallen back asleep, as weary as if she’d been up half the night, she might ask, “Do you remember what you dreamed last night?”
“Did I do it again?”
“Sure did. You were hummin’ and fussin’ and feudin’—you’re a dangerous sleeper.”
“I’m so sorry, Lou. You want to sleep in another room?”
“No.”
And then his quick and unembarrassed smile: “Good.”
They collaborated again when a deputy was reported, anonymously, for being in the back seat of a patrol car on a country road with a high school girl of sixteen. The deputy was charged with statutory rape. The Sheriff’s Department brought seven internal charges against him. Once the rape was dealt with, there would be other charges, and the man was done in New York State law enforcement, although, as his union adviser made clear, he could most likely uphold the law in any of two dozen distant states. The deputy was Joe Penders, the only African-American man in the department. He was short, thin, the brown-red color of cherrywood, with high, sharp checkbones, a small slender nose, and hair going prematurely gray above his ears. In short, Louise told Gerry, Penders was a dish. So, she hastened to add, was Denise Bastone. “If they lynch him,” she joked, not joking, “it’ll be because most of the boys in school, and more than half of their fathers, were making plans to be more or less where Joe Penders apparently was, several times a week for three weeks. She has this very short, glossy black hair, and a kind of an expression—imagine a gorgeous nun without makeup, an Italian natural beauty, all right? Put too much makeup on her, so it’s just short of cheap: the I’m-in-trouble signal, you know? And then have that sweet, sweet face almost ready to drop into a pout that tells you to go to hell. Okay. That’s Denise, and she’s wearing a skintight, crotch-high acid-washed denim skirt, rose-colored tights, and a sweater that’s illegal in Utah. I asked her if she loved him.”
“He said he thought so,” Gerry said. “It’s pretty clear he’s desperate to marry her in the next fifteen minutes.”
“Naturally,” Louise said. “Of course. Which is why Denise’s answer to the question consisted of lighting a cigarette, tossing the lit match behind her onto the floor, and telling me, ‘He’s a really sweet guy, don’t get me wrong. What he mostly is, though,’ she says, ‘is a real wild piece of ass.’ She looks me straight in the eye, and she smiles this angel’s smile. Cue the celestial music. She says, ‘You know what I mean.’ She says, ‘I can’t figure out, like, why I can’t go get some if I want to. You know what I mean,’ she says.”
“And you do,” Gerry said.
“She’s a baby! You’re not supposed to make love to anybody when you’re sixteen. Much less a sheriff’s deputy in the back of a public law enforcement vehicle.”
“Except most of the girls today who’re sixteen do just that. The only aberration here is the kind of car, Lou.”
“Gerry,” she said. It sounded to her like whining. She watched him rub his eyes.
“But I’m right,” he said. “And what about what she said? Isn’t that a kind of feminist thing, too? Guys shouldn’t be the only ones who can go after good stuff when they see it? Women have the right to it, too? Our bodies, ourselves, and so on?”
“And so on,” Louise said, suddenly more depressed than angry, and curious now, puzzled, feeling as though she’d heard a song that she’d known but had forgotten.
They were making a salad at the kitchen window in the back of their house that night. It was near the riverbank, and they were looking outside more than at the scallions and carrots and green pepper and radishes, and more than at one another.
“I’ll make a vinaigrette,” Gerry said.
“Does she turn you on, Gerry?”
“The kid? Denise? I never met her, Lou.”
“You know. The idea of all that hot teenager panting all over you.”
“Well, she was panting all over Deputy Penders, not me.”
“Imagining that she might be. Could be. What if she were?”
“Right on, Denise,” he said, raising a fist betokening power to the people. “Right on. It is a revolution, Louise.”
“You want to go out, in the garage, and get into the back seat?”
His face was so eager, so unguardedly excited in a new way when he turned to her, that she fell to studying the tender white scallops of the seed-choked green pepper she’d cut open. “Well, you’re kidding, of course,” he told her. “We’re adults.”
She said, “Of course.”
As boys outside her office aimed their bodies toward accidental collisions with girls, as the noise in the corridors rose to the pitch of mass panic, Louise sat in her small room and turned her overheated metal desk lamp toward the old Modern Library edition of The Interpretation of Dreams that she had purchased at a garage sale in Rochester. She was comforted by the worn cloth of its red-brown binding: it was like an old dog’s back, or a father’s sport coat, a teacher’s car—worn, even shabby, but an emblem of what was veteran, reliable, sage. Inside, on its bright white pages—she had to squint as she read—even the chapter headings reassured her: “The Dream as Wish-Fulfillment,” “The Dream-Work,” “The Material and Sources of Dreams.” But when she read the familiar sections (“Dr. M is pale; his chin is shaven, and he limps”), she grew frustrated with the need to break the code—as if the dreamer and his mind were distant fellow spies, fearful of capture, unwilling to risk their location, needing nevertheless to broadcast their fears. But there was nothing on these pages about the lashing out, the violent reach, the heavy blow. There were only the undercover agents, incapable of silence, signaling in cipher.
That night, after dinner, in the broad low living room where they read, Louise pumped in coffee. She doctored it with milk and sugar, and she drank so much of it that by ten-fifteen, she felt sick. Gerry fell asleep on the sofa, and he snored at the newspaper over his face. She woke him to send him to bed, and he groggily obeyed. At ten-thirty, gagging as she poured the rest of the coffee into the sink, Louise turned the light out and she got into bed. The sheets were cold, the comforter warm, the pillows soft, but nothing felt good; her flannel nightgown rasped at her nipples, and the back of her neck was stiff, sore. Gerry was softly burring as he lay on his back, but the snores had not fully begun. She lay with her back t
o him, reading by the low yellow light of her bedside lamp: Rolling Stone to keep her in step with her student-clients, and then Vogue for real pornography. She realized, after a while, that her shoulders ached from the tension with which she held them up, behind her, like a shield against his bad dreams. She realized, too, that she was looking away from him because the realest privacy lay behind his eyelids as he slept, and she was reluctant to betray him. Of course, behind closed lids in sleep, she thought, is where you get so much betrayal done. Where was Gerry now? With whom?
She smelled the heat of the bulb against its frail shade, and also the printer’s ink on her magazine, the morning’s perfume in the air around her bureau across the room, the day’s labor ripening on his body and on hers, the coldness of the air from the river-bottom land around them, and the warm rich breath he breathed at her back as he shifted positions. The bed squeaked, the pages rattled and, as they did, reflections went bouncing from the photos in Vogue—women who had to work to look like Denise; boys who were trained to shape a mouth like the boy or man or creature in between whom she insisted on forgetting and often did—and as reflected light shimmered on the brass pole near her head, she thought, I am a woman inside of a life. This room is dark water, and the lights are submarine, and I am floating in my whole, entire life. She thought, No, but before she could marshal her argument, or mourn it, Gerry began to snore as if a motor in his chest were pumping. He’s the aerator in the tank, she thought; she waited to hear herself giggle; she didn’t.
She dropped her magazine from the side of the bed and then, as slowly as she could, she hauled herself up against the brass headboard until she sat. In the yellow-brown light of the weak bulb, she peered down at Gerry, whose snarling snores were louder now. She looked away from his pulsing closed eyes. It was rage, she realized; his shoulders jumped, his upper arms moved; his hands, she saw, were fists. She wouldn’t raise her eyes above his chest. It was time to look at him, and Louise didn’t want to. When she did, the sneaky, caffeine-buzzing frightened curiosity would be reason.
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 23