The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  S makes me feel worshipped. Says all women before me were girls. Kneels and kisses his way up my legs. Chews at me. I am my lover’s food and he is mine. We were starving, but now we nourish each other.

  Sam was still away two days later. We spoke coldly on the telephone. I said I’d be out of the house one morning so he could come for clothes. He agreed to a transfer of money from the joint account to my household account. I suggested that we get in touch with lawyers. He was silent for an instant, and then he hung up.

  As I walked from the phone, it rang, and I formulated something chilly and not too intimate with which to greet him. But it wasn’t Sam. It was the aqua-colored voice.

  She said, “Mrs. Edel?”

  “This is Sharon, Valerie. I recognize your voice. How are you?”

  “Mrs. Edel—”

  “Honey,” I said, “you’re screwing a man who’s been married to me for fifteen years, so you can get your nutritious ass down off of your high horse and talk straight a little. You don’t want to go around sounding like the district manager for Amway, do you?”

  “I want your little snot bitch of a daughter to stop it. Now. And I mean it. That straight enough for you? Honey?”

  “If my daughter—you better watch your mouth about her, Valerie. If there is a problem concerning my daughter, please feel as free as possibly only you can feel to tell me all about it.”

  “You’re a possessive, dried-up prude, Sharon. So if he wanders to the warmer climates—”

  “I’d call you a tropical rain forest in that case, Valerie. What about my daughter?”

  “Tell her to stop stuffing every mailbox she can reach with her letter about me. That’s what about her.”

  She hung up. I wondered if she and Sam had decided jointly to hang up on me that day. I went to our empty mailbox and looked across the street, then down our side of the block, and I saw the little white protrusions. As if I were entitled to, I went to my neighbors’ house, withdrew the single white page from the box on their porch, and carried it home in clear view, not like a thief but as a citizen bearing the news.

  Dear Occupant,

  As you may have heard, my father, Mr. Samuel Edel and my mother, Ms. Sharon Hilsinger Edel have separated. Whether that is temporary or permanent, is not yet known. I’m sure the ever reliable town grapevine will let you know as soon as we do.

  This is to set the record straight and do away with the rumors and innuendos. My father, Samuel Edel has been having an “affair” with a brainless slut named Ms. Valerie McClatchey. Otherwise known as “The Town Bag.” I hear that men of Mr. Edel’s age often do things like this e.i. getting oversexed and horny if their wives are getting somewhat mature. That is no excuse. However, I’ve been hearing vicious gossip that my mother, Ms. Edel pushed him into this type of “activity” by something she did. That is a lie. Mr. Edel went “sex mad” as many men do and broke his sacred marriage vows. He did it on his own e.i. leaving our bed and board. Ms. Edel is a right on woman. She did nothing wrong in this. I gladly put my reputation on the line to say this.

  Mr. Edel will have to answer to heaven along with Ms. McClatchey.

  Thank you for your time and attention.

  Sincerely,

  Joanna B. Edel

  When I came home, I had Joanna’s letter from the Lewis house, from Feimster and Murray and the crazy people on the corner with all the cats. I didn’t have it from the Lutheran Home or the Noels’. Mrs. Montemora had beaten me to her mailbox. I had it from Hilsenrath and Boynton and Hendricks. I had turned the corner onto Canal Street, which is also the old north-south highway, and the street had suddenly seemed unnaturally bright, the cars too terribly loud, the people outside the gas-and-electric and the drugstore like a surging mob in a movie—say, King Kong. There were too many mail slots in too many doors, too many postboxes, too many streets off Canal, and too many houses on each of the streets. I knew Joanna. Now I knew why I had heard the printer next to our word processor—it had sounded like a little electrical saw during the night. She had printed enough letters for a lot of the boxes in town. And she would have tried to reach them, stalking on her stiff, long legs, her chin up to signify her dignity, her story—Joanna’s story about the story—in her backpack and in each of her small hands.

  She was late from school. Or maybe her deliveries had taken the entire day. It was almost six, and I was sitting in the perfumed squalor of her room. There were more of the letters in a pile on her desk. Dear Occupant.

  I reread one, the line about Ms. Edel, who was a right on woman. Joanna, from her doorway, said, “Why are you in my room? Why are you reading my stuff?”

  I said, “I’m an occupant. And how private is a letter you’ve delivered to every address in the ZIP code? Is that your hair, darling?”

  It was short, ear-level on one side, a little shorter on the other. It was the color of yellow cough drops, and it looked as though it would glow in the dark. Her lips looked rigid, and her eyes were very wide. She pulled the wiry bunched hair that heaped the top of her head and she flushed as, pulling more hair, she exposed what was a quarter of a shaved scalp. “This is my hair,” she said.

  I thought for an instant that if I dyed my hair the color of hers, she would somehow be less alone in the midst of our lives. But I knew promptly that I wasn’t cut out for a cough drop. I said her name a few times.

  “It just looked cool when I did it,” she said. “Nothing else. It’s not the biggest deal in the world. I like it like this, Mommy, so don’t start, all right?”

  I said her name again. And then we were both wailing, and assuring each other that it was only hair for Godsakes and, after all, it was going to grow back.

  That’s the story. It straggles off into Gene McClatchey’s swollen, masked, and splinted nose—broken, according to the usual sources, by his wife, who stayed awhile and then left. Sam left, too, to run a bank branch in Sidney, New York, where he lives alone and dates young secretaries and is said to look seedy. Joanna and I came to Cleveland, where her hair grew in as black and thick and springy as before. Everyone in the story thought they were going to die of it, but of course they didn’t. Once you’re in a story, you must live forever. You must choose again and again. You always do it the same.

  ARE WE PLEASING YOU TONIGHT?

  WE WERE VERY BUSY, and the rooms were loud. Even the kitchen was loud, though our chef never stood for noise that wasn’t necessary. I kept thinking I could hear the barman whistle through his teeth—Comin round the mountain when she comes—which he often did when he made mixed drinks. We had two seven-fifteens, a party of three, and a party of two, and the three came early. The old lady led them, then came the son, and then his wife. I looked away from the wife because she was the same bad news I’d been receiving all day.

  The old lady was very small, maybe under five feet tall, and her skin was that pale, tender white you only see on the extremely old. Her wraparound skirt and rayon blouse were too large, and I expected her to walk out of her scuffed, low-heeled pumps, like a kid playing Mommy in her parents’ bedroom. She didn’t shuffle, though. She had a kind of stride, although she wobbled as if the bottoms of her feet were tender. Or maybe it was balance, I remember thinking. The world was spinning a little too fast, or gravity wasn’t working right on her, and something kept pulling her slightly sideways. The son walked with his head down, as if she embarrassed him, or as if he embarrassed himself. That’s a choice, right there, isn’t it? How you call it is who you are.

  “How are you?” she asked me before I could say it to her. And she asked as if she knew me. Of course, a lot of people out there thought I was someone to know. It wasn’t quite Rick’s Place, but it was a good restaurant. I ran it tight, the food was Provençal, we cooked it well and served good wines. I cultivated my tall, tough manner, and my clientele worked to make me smile. People who spend a lot when they dine out consider their money better spent when the people who sell it to them make believe they’re friends. As for my famous ser
vice, I had learned to run a squad while attached to Graves Registration, and my career had taken me from dishing out the dead to daube Aixoise.

  “Ah, and you!” I said, as if with sudden pleasure.

  “Peter,” she said, “this is my son, Kent, and his wife, Linda. This is Peter,” she said to them. “He owns this lovely place.”

  It was the way she said Peter. She rounded off the r just a little, and I heard New York or New Jersey—she’d say ah instead of are—and not Southport, Connecticut. I thought I recalled that she’d come, once or twice, with a handsome old man. He was burly the first time, then waxy and thin several months later. I’d forgotten them. Her son was broad and sunburned, his brown hair was bright with highlights of red and light brown from saltwater sailing.

  As I seated them, his mother said, “Peter, I wonder if you would instruct our waiter to leave the fourth place setting. It’s my husband’s birthday. He died.”

  “I was very sorry to hear about it.”

  “You heard?”

  I bowed my neck and shut my eyes an instant. I didn’t want to have to lie again.

  She frowned, and her skin, I thought, might crack. Her teeth were dingy with a kind of heavy film. Her dark hair was thinning. And still, she was a pretty thing. She must have been one of those small Austrian cuties with her narrow nose and prominent cheekbones. “Tonight is my husband’s birthday,” she said. “Kent and Linda and I are having dinner with him.” She said it as though the husband had forced his way to dinner with them. He was dead, and she was sorrowful, and he’d been hers, and she was dining in his honor, but he still, according to some definition I hadn’t yet heard, was uninvited.

  I turned toward the empty chair and nodded deeply. I said, “Happy birthday.” I’d fed stranger tables. I had supervised the emptying of cargo planes filled with the horribly dead, the routinely dead, the accidentally dead, and the dead who’d been murdered by people under their command. Service is service.

  “Isn’t he lovely?” she asked her son and daughter-in-law about me. I tried to avoid the daughter-in-law’s eyes. Linda’s eyes. She wasn’t the twin of the kid in the papers, but she looked enough like her. I had trouble with that. I was having a bad night, and I’d had a bad day.

  “He’s wonderful,” Linda said. Her voice was edgy and entertained at once. It didn’t make my night any easier. I refused to meet her eyes.

  “I’ll take drink orders, and your waiter, Luc, will be over shortly,” I said. There was a line at the reservations desk, Luc for Lucien was tripping on something he was managing well enough, but I thought he might be ready to fly, there was a new kid making salads, and it had been a very bad day. In light of which, after taking their orders for Johnnie Walker Black straight up, Beefeater martini rocks, and the house white, a Chalone from Monterey, I turned to the old lady—I thought I could see through the skin of her jaw—and asked her, “Are you going all the way?”

  She had brown-green eyes that looked faded, as bleached as her son’s thick hair. They smiled when her thin, chapped lips did. “I imagine that I am,” she said.

  “I meant—” I gestured toward the empty chair.

  “No,” her son said.

  The sound came up as the kitchen opened. My chef was probably getting on the kid. And I needed to get to the desk.

  “What a wonderful idea,” she said.

  Linda, who was tan and not red, and whose blond-brown hair was in those thick, wavy strands, said, “You must have a wonderful imagination, Peter.”

  That’s right. That’s right.

  “Bourbon?” she asked her son.

  “Maker’s Mark,” he told me, “rocks, water back.”

  I said, “Thank you. And a happy birthday to—to—” I smiled to finish. I had looked. Now I couldn’t stop looking at the daughter-in-law’s dark eyes. She was the ghost of the ghost I had seen. It was a terrible night.

  By the time I left their drinks order at the service bar and seated people who’d been waiting, the noise level in both rooms was high enough to drown out the shouting in the kitchen. I was on my way there when a yachtsman decided that he and his companion would not wait any longer. He didn’t wear socks, and I could see that even his ankles were sunburned. His shirt was open to show the sunburned flesh beneath the coarse gray hair of his chest, though all three of his blazer buttons were fastened. He wanted none of us to miss the golden Bill Blass emblems.

  I said, “Let me bring you another round of drinks. I know you and your daughter have been waiting for a while.”

  “Daughter?” he said.

  “Oh,” I said, but with a little too much relish in my voice. “Sorry. My mistake.”

  “You’re damned right,” he said, taking her hand and aiming them at the door. “Damned right.”

  I smiled at the guests who entered across their bow and told them with the correct hint of regret about their ten-minute wait. I took their order for drinks to the service bar and noted that a tray of cocktails was ready to be delivered. It was the water chaser, in the squat Italian tumbler we used for those purposes, that told me whose order it was. I took the tray to them and apologized for the delay.

  The daughter-in-law said nothing, the son thanked me, his mother shrugged as if to signal that, among us working folk, such matters are understood. Definitely a Jew from New York, I thought. We all seemed to fancy ourselves, once in a while, Marxists once removed. When I leaned to set down the bourbon and then the chaser, I saw they’d placed two photographs on the appetizer plate of the fourth place setting.

  I looked, I moved a step away, and then, as if to arrange the drinks better, I stepped back. Linda said, “Help yourself.” Her voice was as dark as her eyes. Ghost bitch, I thought. I stepped alongside her into the musky cinnamon of her perfume, and I looked down at the pictures. One was of the son, Kent, in happy, animated conversation with a bald, broad-shouldered man an inch or so taller than he. The man, apparently the father who had died, was facing Kent and therefore not the camera. And, in the other, on some path near a lake or pond, carrying a rucksack over one shoulder, this same man was striding from whatever held the camera. When I looked up, his widow was frowning in real distress.

  I saw Lucien floating up behind her. Oh, he was on something, I thought. He had a goofy smile on his thin, handsome face, and his lids were flapping as if to keep his eyeballs in his head.

  “Luc will take your order. The wine list you see. We have a Domaine du Pesquier Gigondas I like, and it’s a good price. The Cahors is inky and full of fruit, unusually good body. The Puligny-Montrachet is not a good price, but it’s a gorgeous wine. So’s the Arneis. If you select the duck special, which Lucien will discuss with you, the Diamond Creek, a fairly dark cabby, would be a happy marriage.”

  “What a lovely and unusual expression,” Linda said. “You really enjoy your work.” She said it the way you might tell a child what a big, strong boy he is. Thank you, bitch of a ghost, I didn’t say.

  “Ladies,” I said. And then I couldn’t resist it: “Gentlemen. Enjoy.” To Luc, bearing down on their table like a fireman on call, I whispered, “A special celebration. A—kind of birthday. You will be alert, please, to their requirements?”

  In the kitchen, one of the exhaust fans was faltering. I apologized to Abbie, my chef. She was the tallest person in the room, and that included the kid doing salads, who was over six feet tall. She was also, except for the daughter-in-law in the party of three or, counting dead people, four, the handsomest woman in the restaurant that night. Her long oval face was unhappy now, but not because of the heat. She was orchestrating dinners, and she danced, concentrating. It gave her a displeased expression. Fires flared as she or the sous-chef, Caroline, poured wine into pans. I asked if we had enough duck. Abbie strode like an athlete, spun like a chorus girl, scattered shallots, dipped out gold-green oil and ignored me. Caroline, her deputy, nodded that we did.

  To the college boy composing endive, radicchio, scallions, and red-leaf lettuce, I said, “You’r
e doing fine. Don’t let the greens get soupy with the vinaigrette. Better to give them too little than too much. In the case of dressing, anyway. Ça va?”

  He looked up.

  “Okay?”

  He said, “Sure.”

  “When it’s your place, it’s sure. In my place, when I ask, you make sure and then you tell me, so I feel sure. Correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “That’s what ça va means. Good man.”

  I went out the kitchen back door, and I stood behind the place, between the stuttering exhaust fan and the one that worked, and I looked down the dark slope of the hill. I lit up and leaned against the wall. At eight in the morning, in the kitchen of my house, four miles away, while mist blew in from the sea and it was chilly enough to make me consider using the fireplace, I’d made the café filtré and opened The New York Times. It was a stab at discipline, and of course it was a sham, but I never lit the first cigarette until I had read the sports and was ready to look at the business pages. To get there, I turned past the wedding announcements while I lit up, sighing it in, and I saw the face of Tamara Wynn, the girl I had loved in college, and when I was unloading corpses at Dover Air Force Base during the war, and when I was in the first and second graduate schools I’d tried. By the time I was at the Cornell management program, I was past talking about her with the women with whom I tried hard to fall in love, one of whom I’d married.

  We’d been the usual story. I was unreconciled to her departure for other men and then marriage to a surgeon. I didn’t die of it, but she had died of something about which I hadn’t heard. I read in the Times how her daughter, Courtney—wasn’t there a year when every female born east of the Mississippi received that name?—had been given in marriage by the widowed father, who had been a premed in the class ahead of mine. There was the picture of Courtney, except it looked like her mother. Tamara, with her high brow and wide mouth and reserved, quizzical smile, looked out of the Times and up over thirty years.