The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “You said that you understand Nora’s ah ...”

  “Plight?”

  “Yes. Plight. Did you mean you’re a single parent?”

  “Whose husband left. I raised the boys myself. Tim’s in the navy and Barry goes to Hobart. He—my husband—said that he felt like all the air in the house was gone. After that, he told me about his girlfriend in Syracuse. She was salesperson of the year that year for the Stickley furniture showroom. Yeah. So I know how Nora feels, more or less. How is she about it?”

  He closed his eyes and spoke slowly, but still his voice was unsteady when he talked about his child. “Not confident.”

  “Getting left will create that effect,” she said in a dry monotone. “And not just on Mommy. Behold: Jeremy’s cape.”

  He looked at the chairs against the near wall and at the clothes closet, open to display its low, bare hooks. “Oh,” he said. “You meant—”

  “Voilà, I meant. They both need a cape.”

  “And his is gone.”

  “And so is hers,” she said. “Does Mrs. Bing Royce visit our perhaps claustrophobic municipality? Jeremy never mentions her.”

  He thought again of striking and of cradling the sweet, insincere face. He shook his head: acting could still be sincere, he thought. And he thought that he was hoping so. He said, “No. Not for some years. She died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yes. Thank you. Well, it sounds like we’re all pretty damned sorry, Muriel.”

  “It sounds like we all need a measure of comfort,” she said. She looked directly into his face. She seemed sad, not bold, but her voice was even and determined when she asked, “Should I tell you the way to my house?”

  He knew the village well and didn’t want to. He thought of Nora as trapped here. He thought, often, of insisting that she come to live with him in New York, and he knew that he was afraid she might give in. He believed—it might, he thought, be all he believed—that he could not share his bereavement yet. His sadness seemed all that was left of Anna, his wife. So here he was, fugitive comfort to his child, driving through the village large enough to contain several churches, one of them fundamentalist Protestant, one Roman Catholic, one the traditional Baptist that housed the nursery school, a small Presbyterian church of elegant white clapboard, and no synagogue, of course, or mosque. The Methodists had established themselves in the next village to the north, five miles up on the commuting road to Syracuse. People here drove to Syracuse or Utica, or they repaired computers locally, or staffed the insurance company or hospital, cut cordwood, ran a snowplow, and a few on the outskirts still farmed.

  He thought a lot about churches these days. He wished he could believe in leaving his sorriest thoughts in the dim, comforting coolness of one. But he couldn’t. All he left, in the basement of a church, was his worried grandson, and all that Jeremy had left behind was his cape. His daughter’s husband was an architect in Syracuse. He lived, now, with an interior designer who had worked on one of his homes. They went to church every week, Nora had told him with scorn.

  “But maybe it’s not supposed to be like taking out the pails for the weekly trash pickup,” he snarled as he drove. “You’re supposed to be a pilgrim in church. You’re supposed to love something. Or somebody. Acknowledge the damned cosmic whatever-it-is.” He didn’t know whether he was disgusted with himself, or Nora, or her nearly former husband, or this theatrical woman whose limbs he thought of, whose jumper and sweater he described to himself as he drove the village, taking far longer than he needed to reach her house. He thought about her brave little scarf and was confused by the cruelty of his thoughts about her since, obviously, he was also drawn—through these well-tended streets—to Muriel Preston. He went past one after another Greek Revival, Cape Cod, and Queen Anne house, most very well kept and all of them brightened, now, by the orange maples and copper oaks and yellow poplars that flared as the year swung around October and dropped toward another upstate winter in which Nora would worry about Jeremy’s health and Jeremy would worry about everything. And Bing, he knew, would think not only of them, as the snows sealed the village in again, but also of Muriel Preston, no matter what happened.

  It was about to happen now, he thought, parking in front of the narrow gray shake-shingled house with its small porch littered with wind-blown, bright leaves. It was going to happen now.

  Her living room was small and shadowed. She still wore the jumper, but had removed her white cotton turtleneck sweater, and her chest above the bib of her dress was red with warmth. The scarf was knotted loosely about her neck. It was a grown-up woman’s neck, with some less-than-taut flesh beneath the smoothness of the scarf. He thought he could smell her bare shoulders and arm when she brought him his wine.

  “I like red wine,” she said. “Is that all right? It’s a big, rich Pommard that I can’t afford. Except I love it. I’ve saved it for a special occasion. So here we are inside of it. In the occasion, that is, not the wine. You understood that.”

  “I understood that.” He would have sipped laundry bleach or buttermilk. He’d felt a little drunk while parking the car. Make that unsteady, he amended.

  She was barefoot now. Her toes were stubby on small feet. She sat on the sofa, two white linen cushions to his left. There were muddy-looking canvases in gilt frames, and photographs of boys and the young men they’d become. Lemon peel, he thought, and the almond soap they give you in the bathroom of the Georges V in Paris, that was what the skin of her shoulders smelled like.

  She sipped her wine and smiled. “It’ll open out plenty more,” she said. “Give it a while.”

  He looked at his watch but didn’t note the time.

  “Bing,” she said, “give it a while.”

  He nodded. He smiled. He drank the wine. As if he were about to sign a document that was the engine of great consequence, he wondered what was going to become of Nora and Jeremy. What was in store for him?

  She poured more wine for them, reaching to the coffee table and scenting the air of her living room. Her eyes moved sideways at him as he breathed her. He couldn’t tell whether he was intended to see her observing him or whether she had merely looked. She smiled as if to herself when she sat back. She was careful, in the adjustment of her hem, to cover her knees.

  “Does Jeremy talk to you?” she asked.

  “About—you mean about his feelings?”

  “He says you’re wise. That’s his word for you: ‘wise.’”

  “We talk a lot. When he asks about his father, it destroys me. It’s like watching a sick puppy, or a wounded bird. Words don’t work when they’re devastated like that.”

  “No,” she said, “you’re wrong. You do give him comfort.”

  “The goddamned cape gave him comfort. I beg your pardon.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I’ve heard that locution before.” She sipped wine. “I survived it.”

  They sat, they drank, and then she stood to pour a little wine they didn’t need yet.

  He said, “You think of yourself as strong, then.”

  “Bold, I think you mean. Licentious, even. Do you feel ... rushed?”

  “No,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

  “It’s all right if you did, because it’s possible I am a little forward with you. Anyway, I do feel competent, I’d say.”

  “Yes,” he said. “That’s what I’d say, too.”

  “At what, would you say?”

  “Living your life, I guess.” He moved his arm, and it touched her jumper, for she still stood, holding the wine bottle. “Making your way.”

  “Try me,” she said. “See for yourself.” She set the bottle on the table’s dusty wood beside their glasses, and later he remembered his concern that the bottle might have made a permanent ring. He put his arm about her thighs and pulled her against him, pressing his face into her jumper. Her hands, on his shoulders, drew him in, but then she said, “Upstairs, all right? Come up.”

  In her room, on the maple bed that g
roaned as they shifted and slid and bucked, she actually said—he would repeat the words in his thoughts of the afternoon—“Oh, my darling.” He thought it as arch, as premeditated, as stickily poetic as anything he’d heard. He wanted romance, he thought with pity for himself. He wanted this to be as fresh and just invented as her words turned it scripted and somehow untrue.

  He thrust very hard to stop her from saying it again. And he felt, at the time and later, that his motive betrayed her even as she made their passion seem a little ludicrous. Neither her words, nor his response, nor her tears, nor his wondering whether she truly wept, prevented them from marching on together, with strength and with what struck him as a comradely regard for what felt best for each of them. He realized that he wanted her to say those saccharine words again. He wanted her to mean them. He asked, with his body, whether she did. He demanded that she did. He held her down on top of him as he slammed up. He closed his eyes and heard her grunt and maybe, then, whisper a protest once, though she moved and moved and moved with him. He demanded, with his body, to know what she had meant. But it was Bing who gave in first, surrendering to his angry pleasure, knowing only a little of what he had intended and knowing nothing more about her own intentions, to lie beneath her like a victim, emptied of himself.

  He didn’t know if he had slept and dreamed in the chilly, dark room when she moved on him and then climbed out of the bed. “I would like to wear your shirt,” she said.

  “Please do. But it’s a little big for you.”

  She stood beside the bed to pull it on. Its tails hung to her knees. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to wear it. Stay there, please.”

  She returned with their glasses and the bottle of Pommard. “I think you’ll find it’s opened more than generously,” she said, smiling what he thought she might think of as a wicked grin. She sat on the bed, touching him, still wearing his shirt, as they drank.

  “I flushed it down the toilet,” he finally said.

  “Yes. And you’re noting, when you say that, how I kept a condom in the drawer of my bedside table.”

  “No,” he said. “Yes.”

  “Is this the first time since—”

  “No,” he said. “There was another time. An earlier time. Well, of course it was earlier. I was awful at it.”

  “How did you think you did here? Just now?”

  “Could we talk about the World Series?” he asked her. “Or how you like the Knicks for the upcoming year?”

  “You are the rare man I would talk with about the World Series if he asked me to,” she said. “So that should tell you how we did here together. If you’d like to know. How would you say we’re doing?”

  “Muriel,” he said, “I got lost in you. I didn’t mean to say anything like that—about the apparatus.”

  “Apparatus! That’s wonderful. I wish I could be indiscreet about it and tell someone.” Her voice sounded sad when she said, “I don’t trust anyone that much. Maybe one day I’ll tell it to you. Do you think?” She drank and settled back against him. She said, “I believe these things are meant to happen as they insist on happening, and it isn’t given to us to necessarily understand why. Do you agree?”

  Her hand moved over his belly and groin, and he moved to be available to her. What she said seemed absurd to him, like the flabby talk that disappointed him in churches. But he said, “Yes.”

  “Yes,” she said, leaning to kiss his mouth. She sat back and said, “I wasn’t just left with my boys. I was left when I didn’t have a job, when there wasn’t money in the bank for us, when it was a brutal winter and I ended up selling shoes in Utica. The store went out of business. The strip mall it was in went bust. One of my kids, Timmy, was caught for shoplifting, but I begged and begged for him, and they let him go. That’s why he had a clean record when it was time to try for Annapolis. Do I think of myself as strong? Yes. Do you?”

  “Yes. You raised your sons,” he said, “and they’re all right.”

  “Oh, yes. They are.”

  “And you’re young.”

  “Young enough, I suppose.” And then she said, “For what?”

  “A life? I don’t know.”

  “Well, I always had one, Bing. That’s the being-strong part.”

  “Of course.”

  “No. Please don’t of course me. It’s a little complicated for that.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Muriel, for what? I’m confused.”

  “Yes, you are, I’m sorry to say.” She set her glass on the floor and stood, removing his shirt. He wondered if she indicated by shrugging it off that his obtuseness was ending the day for them. But she stood before him an instant and then climbed into the bed, pulling the comforter over them and climbing onto him again. Then she raised herself up, with her hands on either side of his face. “I want to look at you,” she said. He closed his eyes in embarrassment. “No,” she said. “Bing.” He forced his eyes open, and she gave him a rueful smile which, he thought, was precisely how she had intended, hours ago, to complete their afternoon.

  Then he saw her eyes flicker and close halfway. She made a surrendering sound, and she kissed him deeply—as, he speculated, she might possibly not have planned.

  Downstairs, in jeans and a baggy T-shirt, she held the cream-colored scarf as if she meant to knot it on her neck. She raised her face to be kissed goodbye.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “You know—with Jeremy.”

  She said, “Darling.” She held the scarf against her cheek as if he had just presented it to her.

  As he parked in the driveway behind Nora’s old Volvo station wagon, his legs felt tired, as if he had walked great distances. His body hadn’t ached like this since before Anna died. He was only past the middle of fifty and she was in her forties, but he thought of her as young. He thought of her, too, as confusing. Yes, he thought, but remember the sounds she couldn’t help making. Those were not, he thought, the noises she planned for him to hear. He snorted. He shook his head. He tried to feel only experienced about the flesh, and not excited, but he couldn’t pretend. He still smelled her, and he felt her in his shoulders and thighs. He thought he still smelled the mixture of them. He paused at the back door, wondering whether Nora would smell them, too. He crackled his chewing gum to cover the excellent wine with artificial cinnamon scent, then spat the gum away and went inside.

  It seemed a normal early evening. Jeremy assembled unbrilliant constructions of locking plastic bricks while not watching the television set that brayed bad news in the little breakfast room. Nora, he could see, was listening to the news and sorrowing for the fall of mutual funds, for dying rivers, for soldiers wounded, for migrant families pursued through a southwestern desert by federal officers armed as heavily as soldiers sent off to war. Her thick eyebrows sloped down, her lids were low, and her narrow lips frowned. She looked like Anna, he thought. And what help was that to anyone?

  “So where were you?” she asked, not listening, he thought, for an answer. He waved to Jeremy and the boy waved back, his fingers together so that his hand looked like the paw of a cub. Jeremy’s smile was real but disappearing, and he looked as usual: worried, small, and slumped against the end of a harrowing day.

  Facing Nora in the kitchen and murmuring into the sizzle of the small chicken she’d just lifted up from the oven, he said, “I spoke to Jeremy’s teacher. The nursery school woman.”

  “Muriel Preston.”

  “Yes. She didn’t see the cape. I think she thinks maybe one of the children stole it.”

  She said, “They don’t need it.”

  “No.”

  “Jeremy does.”

  “Yes, he does.”

  “I mean he really needs it.”

  He nodded, then went to the counter on the far wall for the hardwood cutting board and the carving knife and fork that he and Anna had given to them when Nora’s husband, Jeremy’s father, was home. He dripped juice from the bird on his shirt and along the floor.

  “Sorr
y,” he said.

  Nora said, “That’s all right.” She tore off pieces of paper towel so that she could clean up the juice, but she held the paper, watching him, and she finally set the crumpled squares near the sink. Bing told himself to remember to wipe the floor after dinner.

  “I’ll let the chicken sit awhile,” he said.

  She said, “I should have bought some cloth someplace.”

  “For what? A new cape?”

  “Maybe I could have persuaded him. I asked, but he flew into a rage. He said it wouldn’t be—Hey, Jeremy, honey. Hi.”

  He held something like a white, yellow, and red pistol made of the locking plastic bricks. He solemnly offered it to his grandfather.

  “Look at that,” Nora shouted.

  “Good job,” Bing said, holding it as you’d hold a handgun.

  Jeremy said, “It’s a angle iron.”

  “Of course it is,” he said. “What do you do with it, honey?”

  Jeremy took it from him and held it against the side of the refrigerator. With the eraser end of a pencil, he made measuring motions. “You get it straight,” he said.

  Bing said, “Yes, you do.”

  “I love how you didn’t mark the fridge up,” Nora said too loudly. “Thank you.”

  “It was pretend. Arnie does it real.”

  “God, doesn’t he,” Nora said. Arnie Holland was the country man in his thirties who was as celebrated among the women of the village for the effects of his shirtlessness while he worked as he was for his achievements at rough carpentry.

  Bing, slicing a drumstick and going to work on the thigh, said, “Arnie was here, then?”

  “At Lindsay Delano’s.”

  Bing had dropped Jeremy there after school so that Nora could stay on at work in the hospital admitting office, where a flu had cut into the staffing. He had driven from Lindsay’s back to school, then from school to Muriel’s house, and from there to the Quik-Mart for his guilty cinnamon gum, and from there to his daughter’s. He was becoming a local, he thought. It was time to go home. It was time to get back to work. He hadn’t checked for messages, he hadn’t called the office, he hadn’t even opened his briefcase in nearly a week. He was moving with his usual long-legged, slow-motion lope—that had been Anna’s description of his progress through the world—but he was really on the run.