I heard the breath expelled, the woodcrack, the intake of his breath, and then the words. He said, low, “You can’t go down there! Who ever said you could go down there? It isn’t allowed, and you know it very well. Yards of bother in that, silly boy. You stay up here with me, won’t you?” Then he swung, and the wood split, and he stood another piece on the block. “Of course,” he said, and in a different, deeper, voice, “this isn’t the kind of report we like to get. We don’t blame you, understand. No one’s blaming you. All we care about is if you’re happy and well. Would you call yourself happy and well? Can you think of anything Mommy and I can do to make you happy and well? By God, we would do it, Kev. We’d do anything. You know that.” He swung, but the head was canted a little and the ax skipped. He was positioned right, and he was safe. “Look the head right into the wood,” he instructed himself. The voice was familiar. Of course. It was mine. He split the piece, took a breath, set up another and, looking at it and saying, “All I love is you,” as if Deborah were speaking to her son in our yard, he swung the ax. All he had to do now, I thought, was imitate Jillie divorcing me, and he’d have invoked us all.
Before he could tense for another swing, I said, “Kevin. Hot dogs for lunch.”
He turned to watch me walk over from the car. “How come I didn’t hear you come here, Uncle Bob?”
“I guess I drove very quietly.”
He laughed a little too loudly, watching me with his baby’s brown eyes. He was very alert. I wondered what had made him that wary. “I was chopping wood,” he said. “In case we need it for the fireplace.”
“You did a good job, Kevin. Do you remember how to leave the ax?”
He turned and swung, very hard, and buried the blade in the block.
“Good man,” I said with gratitude.
Jillie had been watching us from the kitchen, I thought, because she was at the door before I touched the knob. “Home for lunch, how nice,” she said, as if I hadn’t driven too quickly. “Kevin’s been splitting kindling, and I’ve been trying to think of something special to eat.” I handed her the paper sack, and she said, “My favorite! Hot dogs! My white knight of the sausage casing.”
Kevin said, “Yay!”
“Boiled, I think. I have a package of sauerkraut and some yellow mustard and—yes, we’ll grill the rolls. It’ll be an all Brooklyn hot dog day. Like eating at Nathan’s. Kevin—did you ever get to Nathan’s at Coney Island?”
He was studying her bottom in her jeans. “No, Aunt Gillian,” he told her buttocks.
She said, “We’ll go there one day. With Mommy. Kevin? Your mom’s coming here.”
“Here? How?”
“The same way you did.”
“Airplane,” he said. “It was a terrible trip. It took forever. They gave me an extra dinner, did I tell you that? When?”
“Jillie,” I said, after a while, “Kevin wants to know when she’s coming.”
“Deborah is coming,” Jillie said while looking at me, her brows up and her cheeks pale, “tomorrow. She’s going to rent a car and drive up from New York.”
“That’s an ugly drive if you’re jet-lagged.”
“No,” Jillie said, “she’ll take a couple of Valium when she gets on and she’ll sleep through. She always does. She’ll be fresh for the trip. Will you be glad to see her, Kevin?”
“Yup.”
“Will you be glad to see her, Bob?”
“It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Is Arthur coming?”
Jillie shrugged.
“You called her?”
Jillie, at the stove, nodded.
“How was it? The conversation?”
“Pas devant l’enfant.” She added, “Merde,” probably because she was pleased with her rediscovered French.
I decided not to be warned off. I really needed to know. “I mean, after what? A real while, huh? You guys just clicked right into place and it was like no time lost? Nothing uneasy?”
Jillie said, with conviction, “Cochon.” You can be cute when you call a man a swine, or you can mean it—the snout, the hairy tail, the four hard hooves.
I decided not to say, in French, Why, what a clever notion you had, making things safe by suggesting he play with the ax. I imagine the idea was to get him outside, away from you. But think how handy it would have been if he’d decided to get back in in a hurry. I did say, “I think maybe you want to let us wash your clothes for you, Kevin. I’ll give you something of mine, and you let us—”
“That means Aunt Gillian,” Jillie said. “Uncle Bob, with his jurisprudence degree and the summa cum laude from Cornell never quite got hold of the mystery of the washing machine dial.”
“Quel canard,” I said. “Jillie, what was Deborah’s news? What’s up?” What’s up?”
I went to the stoveside counter and took the platter of hot dogs and the basket of rolls. Jillie brought mustard and sauerkraut and glasses of pop on a tray. Kevin seemed to have shrunk in his chair.
Jillie studied him. She said, “Mommy isn’t coming because she’s angry, Kevin. She’s coming because she misses you.”
He shook his head, and there seemed to be less play to his expression, less life in the muscles of his forehead and jaw. I said, “Hey, Kevin. You take your medicine every day, right?”
“Every day,” he said.
“Did you take it this day?”
He looked at me and looked at me, and his eyes showed energy for an instant, and he shook his head. “I forgot,” he said.
“Let’s do it now, Kevin. You go find your medicine, your pills.”
“Once in the morning and once with my tea.”
“First, you can eat some hot dogs and then you can wash. And I will set the left-hand dial at medium, and the right at warm water wash and cold rinse. We’ll have you clean as a whistle.”
Kevin stuck a finger in each side of his mouth and, from stretched, unnatural-looking lips, he whistled so loudly you’d have thought someone was screaming.
We ate in a silence that wasn’t peaceful. I smiled at Jillie and tried to help Kevin tend the sauerkraut that radiated from his plate in a ragged circle on his place mat and the dark wood of the table. I thought of Tasha, and I thought of Deborah. I watched Jillie’s shoulders bow down, as she sat, beneath whatever she felt I had known her for so many years, and I could not have named her feelings. But I felt them gathering. I watched the lines at the sides of her eyes, the shifting muscles of her forearms, the skin of her cheeks, and the flesh at her hairline. Everything moved subtly, in ways I might have claimed once to know, but which now seemed new to me. Birds cackled near the kitchen window, and our mouths made soft noises around our food. It was gathering.
Kevin used the downstairs tub—we could hear him splash like a kid—and I loaded his clothing in the washing machine in the pantry off the kitchen while Jillie cleaned our lunch dishes. It didn’t come with violence—an ax, say, wielded by the damaged son, Deborah’s hope gone imperfect. It didn’t come by surprise. It was the message from my life, and that should always be expected. Later in the day, later that night, alone, I told myself I’d been waiting for it for years.
Jillie came to the pantry with an obvious reluctance. But she couldn’t, I saw, have stayed away. She came close to me. I could smell the bright scent of the dishwashing soap and the rich darkness of her perfume on her skin. She reached for my arm, which was poised with detergent above the machine, and she touched the back of my hand. She put her fingers gently around my wrist. She couldn’t make her fingers meet although I felt the pressure of her effort. Then she let me go. She took a deep breath. It reminded me of Kevin’s breathing outside at the woodpile. I thought of myself in Marlow, years before, panting like a runner.
She said, “What was it, when you were with her, and I was taking Tasha to the British Museum—we were wearing our matching goddamned tan tourist raincoats, Bob, for heaven’s sakes! And you and Deborah were laughing and doing everything together that you did. What did you think was comin
g to you that you deserved so much?”
Kevin stepped into the doorway behind us, a muscular man who wore a towel over grown-up cock and balls, and also a damp, happy child just out of his bath.
Jillie looked from me to Kevin and then again at me. She stood between men gone wrong, or boys who hadn’t turned out right. You looked at us, I thought, and we seemed okay. You looked again and we were ruined just a little. We were your dreams come true.
JOY OF COOKING
AS THEY CHEWED AT Cheerios in milk and drank unnaturally orange orange juice in the breakfast room off the kitchen of their house, Stephen’s daughters studied him through eyes distorted by corrective lenses. Sasha seemed patiently curious, Brigitte apprehensive; neither spoke, and neither looked away. When Rosalie in their bedroom started to sing, not in words, just heavy syllables pounded atop a tune about joy—
Dee duh duh doe
Dee da-da!
Dee duh deed da
Dum da-da!
—Stephen saw his daughters watch him hurry to the kitchen, cocking his head to listen hard. Inside his face, on top of his tongue that rose as if he sang, and underneath a brain he thought of as boiling in his blood like an egg in water in a pot on a stove, Stephen supplied the words as Rosalie sang while she packed before leaving him:
Jesus loves me
This I know!
For the Bible
Tells me so!
And we’re not even Christians, he thought. We aren’t anything.
He had stayed home from work this morning after making sandwiches for the children’s lunches. Sasha liked hard-cooked eggs in slices on mayonnaise smeared over soft white bread. Brigitte ate only smooth peanut butter with grape jelly on the same pulpy bread that Sasha liked. Both girls, nine and eleven, stared at him through dark-framed glasses that reminded him of Rosalie’s (as did their eyes), and Stephen bellowed bad jokes, all but screamed “Sure!” when Brigitte reminded him about money for milk and an after-school snack. Rosalie, meanwhile, prowled their bedroom, blowing her nose and slamming things.
When the bus came, the children, he knew, were happy to be released. Brigitte had called from the front door, “Bye, Daddy. Bye, Mommy.” But Sasha had said nothing. He’d called to them, as if deputized, “We love you!” As they fled the tension that ached in the house like flu in muscles, Stephen felt that he, too, had been set free. The feeling didn’t last. He heard their bedroom door open as Rosalie marched in her fuzzy, dragging slippers to the bathroom and back. She must have left the door ajar: he heard the brass pulls on their bureau jangle, then the thrap, four times, of suitcase clasps, and he was certain that Rosalie was packing to leave.
He fetched a mug of coffee from the kitchen to the breakfast room and sat with it as Rosalie hummed, and as the words she didn’t say echoed in his inner ear, though not in her voice but in his. She sounded, now, reassured by the song. She sounded young.
When he looked at the tile-topped breakfast table, he understood why his coffee had tasted awful. He had poured not milk but orange juice into his acid third cup. He still held the juice tumbler, which rattled on the tabletop to something like the rhythm—dee da-da—of Rosalie’s song. Stephen kept time.
The tumbler was Sasha’s. She had worn too much dark red lipstick, as usual, to counteract what she saw as the scarring effect of her braces. Of course the frame of crimson broadcast her braces, and she looked like the grille of a ’49 Buick. Today she’d worn even more than he was used to, and Stephen wondered if, hearing their fight, she had laid the impasto of lipstick on as a rebuke to them. He had locked her out, though, with his porcelain grin, his morning commotion, his all-but-yodeled good cheer. He lifted her juice tumbler, and he kissed the one-lipped print that Sasha’s mouth had left on the rim of the glass. It tasted like Crayola.
He left the breakfast room and walked through the kitchen, where the cat was on the counter next to the stove, eating hard-boiled eggs. He went down the small parquet corridor that connected the back of the house to the front, and he stood outside their bedroom door. It had two thin cracks that looked as though someone had tried to draw: they were stick-people, hand-in-hand, made by his kicking at the door when Rosalie had locked him out, years before. He watched her now, and he listened. She was wearing her heavy green plaid bathrobe, with a dark gray bathroom towel around her neck, tucked into the robe, like a scarf. She hummed about Jesus’ love.
She looked up from her underwear drawer and her face was sullen, swollen, sliced by her glasses’ dark frames. But when she took his stare and countered it with her own, she nearly smiled. He felt his eyebrows rise. “You’ve got lipstick on your mouth,” she said.
He nodded. Leaning against the doorframe, he wiped at his lips, then licked them, then wiped once more. “Sash,” he said. “I drank from her glass. She wore lipstick for two today.”
Rosalie waited, then looked back into her drawer.
“You shouldn’t do this,” he said.
“Nope.”
“Then don’t.”
“I shouldn’t want to do this,” Rosalie said. “I shouldn’t feel so bad. Nobody should.”
“Then don’t feel bad.”
“Stephen, we don’t need to be as old as we are to talk like this. We could hire a couple of kids. We could get the girls to do it. God knows they hear it enough.” After studying her underthings, she plunged both hands into the bureau drawer and drew out what looked like random handsful, then wheeled and went to the suitcases, and tossed some into each. She stood at the suitcases which lay on their bed and, with her back still toward him, she asked, “Why aren’t you at work?”
“You really want to know?”
She went back to the bureau and began to examine pantyhose. She didn’t answer him.
He said, “Because I’m scared to be. At first I stayed here to fight. But then I heard you singing that goddamned hymn. I thought: she’s leaving.”
“You’re right.”
“And I was too frightened.”
He watched her shoulders slump. She pulled at the towel, settling it into the robe, around her neck.
“I’d have expected ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers,’” he said.
“What was I singing?”
“You didn’t know?”
She shook her head, she held up hosiery and shook her head again.
He said, “‘Jesus Loves Me.’”
“I was? Really. I haven’t sung that since I was a little girl. It’s the song that good little girls like. They’re so good, Jesus has to love them.”
“Is this for real, Rosie? With taking the kids, everything? The girls go away, and you go away, and I’m supposed to live here alone?”
“No,” she said. “After a while, the girls and I come back, and you’ve moved out. You’re living in an apartment someplace. The girls and I live here. I don’t know. Life goes on.”
“This is really for real, then.”
She slowly nodded.
“No,” he said. “Rosie, we love each other. That’s why we get so mad.”
“So? You think love makes you feel better? Who said love makes you feel better? With you and me—and this is thirteen years into the mission, now, long enough for us to be out on the edge of the solar system if we’re a rocket ship—”
“Wait a minute.”
“Stephen, don’t talk like a lawyer now. Don’t you dare be smart and logical with me and tell me about facts. That’s what got us here.”
“No, it isn’t, Rosie. What got us here was my wanting you to be my handmaiden. Dedicating your life to the Great Attorney. The thing about you as decoration in my career.”
“On your career. You’re really trying. You’re trying so hard, you sound stupid. Like a kid who studied for a test and he doesn’t know what all the memorized answers mean. You’ve been up half the night—”
“All of it.”
“No. I was. I heard you snoring on the sofa.”
“Wrong.”
“See?”
�
�See what?”
“Never mind,” she said, holding a knot of pantyhose away from her body, as if it were stirring and might strike. She carried it to the bed. “Just, let’s say I’m acknowledging that you’re really thinking about what we talked about. Except it has so little to do with the damned country club, the damned office dinner, the damned goddamned dance. Those are symptoms. It’s all just a cliché. As you pointed out.”
“Symptom,” he said. “As in disease?”
“As in disease.”
“So what’s the disease? That you love me?”
She stared at him.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is. You love me—lawyer, no lawyer, whatever. That’s what bothers the hell out of you: that you love me. Is that the disease? How do we treat a thing like that, Rosie?”
“I’m doing it,” she said.
“No, you’re not. You’re taking twice as long to pack as I’ve ever seen you take to do anything. You could have changed all four tires on your car by now.”
She turned to face him. She slowly pulled the towel out of her robe by one end, tugging on it hand over hand until the bath towel was hanging from her hand, and he could see the mottling of blue and red at her throat.
“Jesus! Rosie! I didn’t do that!”
She said, “I did.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t make you understand, and I can’t make me understand.” Her teeth were clenched as she spoke. “I stood in the bathroom last night, while you slept, damn it. You slept. And I looked at my stupid round face and my buck teeth—”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 29