Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  “That’s it,” she said. “I mean when we aren’t snorting, shooting, smoking, dropping, popping, or tearing the wings off angels. Or stealing stuff or—”

  “Hush,” he said. “Hush hush.”

  She looked at him.

  “It’s a song. Was a song. When were you born, what year?” He shook his head. “Nevermind. In olden times this blues guy, Jimmy Reed, I think he lived in Dallas—He played harmonica and guitar and he had this trashy blues voice, we played him on the radio. A song called ‘Hush Hush.’ It was about noise. How there was too much noise. Sort of wonderful.”

  “I don’t know whether I’m in love with him or not. Too soon to tell. He wants me to move in.”

  “A girl’s got to find out, I guess.” Tilden lay back in the bed, watching her.

  “It was nice, last night, I mean throwing things and the rest of it, mostly the rest of it. I mean, I loved it. I mean, you. But look—” She was drawing circles in the sheet with her finger. “Look. When I was about six Mama gave me a picture, this glossy picture, of you, of my father.” She smiled, shook her head. “That picture was my favorite thing for about six years. You signed it. When I was about twelve, a girl told me it was Jim Morrison. The singer.” She shrugged. “So I need another picture, see? Girl needs a picture.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Tilden said. “Somehow you knew my—”

  “Mama gave it to me. Your name? I got it from Mama.”

  “Okay. Anyway—”

  “And Boston is right, and Baltimore, you living in Baltimore. There is a scar on the back of your neck, I’ve seen it. You want blood tests and shit? Paternity?”

  “I want you not to be my kid. I like looking at you. Only not like you look at a daughter.”

  “There’re lots of people to look at.” She stood up, reached her hand up and split her hair between her fingers. “I’ve gotta go to work. You know Tilden, you’re really fucked up,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  He looked toward the empty doorway. “Now!” he shouted. “I am now!”

  But she didn’t answer. He thought of getting up, of following her into the room and talking some sense into her, but when he imagined her shoulder in his hand, his face red and words spewing out in the southern accent which he fell into when he got angry, cared too much, the image reminded him of the bruises all over her arms, made him recall that he really didn’t know what to say, that two women he had married and loved and looked at ended up, after a while, looking at him, just as he ended up looking at them, sometimes fondly, each to the other a special piece of furniture. He let himself settle back into the bed, feeling comfortable and familiar, and he thought, Nestling, I’m nestling down here—just like everybody else, just before he fell asleep.

  • • •

  Sometime after noon he went into work. Kelli said Loeffler had called him three times. He was supposed to be working on an incentive plan, but he spent most of the afternoon staring down out his office window at a bench and a pathetic tree set in the sidewalk, wine bottles around the tree reflecting the dirty sunlight. The bench, like all the other damn benches, had “William Donald Schaefer and the Citizens of Baltimore” painted on in script. Blue and white. He thought about calling Paulie at work, but didn’t, it became a test of his character, one he passed. When you make love to a woman, he thought, if you accidentally make something, you’re supposed to make a son. If you accidentally make a daughter, that’s all right, but you’re not supposed … It thins out the blood or something. They make this stuff up. He put his feet up on the desk and looked around. Dull, he thought, but not loud, ugly, pathetic, cruel. Decorating an office was like decorating a Buick. He closed his eyes, looking for her, and waited for five o’clock.

  When he got to the apartment, she hadn’t come home. Tilden fell asleep.

  An hour and a half later he woke up on the couch in the living room, in the dark, and reached up where the lamp had been, but then he remembered. So he sat in the dark. He had been having a particularly gaudy dream, he was sweating, but he couldn’t remember anything except that it had something to do with work. He never remembered dreams. When he tried, all he could ever bring to mind was the dance dream, which he had had fifteen or more years earlier, a dream about his first wife. Floating around the kitchen of his parents’ house in Richmond, she was dancing in the air, in a short, flimsy dress, a 60’s dress from Paraphernalia, green with big yellow flowers, and he finally caught her and tied her up with white rope.

  Guilt, Tilden thought. People are always talking about guilt, and this is what they mean. I’m feeling guilty, like everybody else. He got up, made his way to the wall switch and stood, thinking about turning it on, decided not to.

  On the steps outside the front door, he looked up and his car seemed far away, reflecting a dozen colors from the lights up and down the street. He made himself walk the fifteen feet, took a businesslike look at the traffic on the gray street, circled the brown Toyota, got in. I remember this, Tilden thought, pulling into the traffic. This is high school. He laughed.

  When he got to the hotel, he left the car on the street, and was inside before he realized he still didn’t know the kid’s last name; Tilden stood looking. In the center of the huge, dim lobby, under a high ceiling decorated with lost chandeliers, was a flat fountain where people were pitching pennies into the water. Others sat on gray couches scattered to one side. Tourists were taking photographs of each other around the fountain, using flashes. On the far side of the fountain a recessed bar faced fat green couches set beside stingy glass tables on a gaudy carpet in a slightly darker green. The bar was railed off in brass, and packed. Another recess farther down, and corridors leading off at each corner. The elevator doors, opposite the fountain, were the same smoky marbled mirror glass as the wall. Tilden retreated to the gray couches, sat down, glanced around for short looking men. Boys. Paulie.

  Christ, he thought, it’s some kind of designer whorehouse. Haven’t been in a hotel for ten years. On the other couches, overdressed women, with children standing beside them like miniatures, in crooked coats and ties. He looked around for telephones, but remembered he had no one to call. Hi, thought I’d call to say … well, I’m in love with my daughter … well, I didn’t know either … well, she’s sort of … tall … no, I’m at her boyfriend’s hotel … well, I’m sort of spying on them … only I’m not spying very well … well …

  He was cold, and thought of his coat, back at the apartment. He let his head sink into his hands, felt his elbows pressing into his knees, listening to high heels slap across the marble floor. His hair felt greasy. He thought of calling his wife, the second one. Beth. Her name was Beth, and she said she was going to look for somebody who’d let her have a dog. When he tried to picture her, what she looked like, he started to shake. He couldn’t hear anything. Then he saw her all in white walking toward him across the lobby, from around the elevators, and, a little behind, a short guy with shaggy hair, black suit, purple shirt, cowboy boots. Paulie, he thought. Paulie, I want to talk to you.

  “You don’t look well, Tilden,” she said, waiting for the boy to arrive beside her. “Ryan, this is my father. Tilden, Ryan.”

  The boy held out his hand, but then, seeing Tilden’s face, withdrew it. “Hello,” he said. “Paulinda has told me a great deal about you.”

  Tilden looked at her. She was shaking her head. This is strange, Tilden thought, he’s got to think it’s strange. Some quaint American custom, maybe. Perhaps. They say “perhaps.”

  “I hope you’re not angry,” Ryan said. “I told Paulie she should call.” He looked at her, for an acknowledgement, then at Tilden, and getting nothing, no smile, shook his head. “You are angry. I’m sorry. But this is a little much, you know.”

  Tilden nodded. “A little much,” he said. “Maybe.”

  Paulie was smiling, carefully. She had the boy’s arm, slowly pressing him backward, but he was still talking.

  “I am sorry,” he said. “And I am please
d to finally meet you.” He turned, drew his sleeve from her. “Paulie, I’ll see you up—”

  Tilden grabbed Ryan’s coat, pulled him up onto the balls of his feet; “Little scumbag …” he said. But that was all he could think of. He stared at the kid’s face.

  He was looking at Tilden as if the older man were a child, a particularly wearisome child, who only had to be outwaited, who couldn’t win, but had nonetheless to be allowed some time before the weight of decorum hit him. Tilden let go. “Get rid of him,” he said. “He says your name again, I’ll kill him.”

  “You actually do this over here,” Ryan said. He was straightening his coat. “I thought it was only in films.”

  Paulie had stopped smiling. “Tilden, Jesus.” She and Ryan exchanged looks, she taking him by the arm and leading him the first few steps back toward the elevators.

  When she walked back, she was angry. “Real shabby, daddy. What were you thinking?” She looked around, took Tilden’s arm, tightly, and led him toward the broad marble steps down to the street door. “What the hell are you doing here, anyway? You locate some paternal instinct?” She stopped on the steps, cocked her hip, released him, and stared. “Or do you just like making scenes in hotels? You’re acting like fifteen.”

  “I know.” Tilden stood three steps down, looking back at her. “But you don’t understand.”

  She laughed, shook her head.

  She was wearing some kind of white, long, T-shirt dress, stretched over her hip in a kind of perfection that only women seemed able to achieve, and it seemed to him that because she fit so perfectly in this hotel lobby, with the Givenchy whorehouse bar, and the orgy of glass and chrome and brass, green and gray and marble and the idiot chandeliers so high no one would call them to come back, and the other people with their impossibly brisk strides and Sunday clothes—what they used to call Sunday clothes—because she fit, so did he. That’s how it seemed, but he knew he didn’t.

  “Call me. Tomorrow,” he said. “Tell him I haven’t been well or something. Call me at work.”

  He smiled and turned his face away, didn’t look back until he was through the glass doors and out on the sidewalk. She was posed on the broad marble steps. He stood on the sidewalk, staring back over something written in gold on the glass, her clear eyes, the black hair, soft breasts with the big nipples, her hip high, and he felt his eyes smile and felt them blink once, twice, three, four times, and he thought, You can’t look at anyone this way unless you’ve slept with her, and she, smiling, stepped back up a step. He jerked forward, a fraction of an inch, looked down, then back up at her for another second’s worth of it, then raised his hand and waved. Someone was standing behind him, a copy of the Sun under her arm, looking at him like he was some sort of space creature. Tilden smiled. He wanted to look back through the glass doors. The woman circled around him and into the hotel.

  • • •

  The next day, a Tuesday, she never called, but around three thirty Tilden was looking out his window when they came up the street and stopped at the corner. A short boy and a tall girl, arguing. They worked their way toward the building and then worked their way away. She was coming; he was going. When the boy began winning the argument, they would fade toward the sad little tree and the bench for the bus. When she got the upper hand, toward the building they came. Her dress was light, nylon or polyester, and swung as the boy grabbed her arm and released it, grabbed again. She threw her hands up, threw her head back, sat down on the bench. Tilden’s telephone buzzed.

  “Yes,” he said, and then, “Okay,” and then, “Oh, Kelli, when Paulie … If Paulie comes, just send her in,” and then Tiny Loeffler came on the line.

  “Let me guess,” Loeffler said. “You’ve been busy—that teenager you had up here last month? You recall we talked about an incentive plan? We’re tired of hiring new tellers every week. So think of something. You know, nifty prizes.”

  “We could pay them a living wage,” Tilden said. He was straightening the telephone cord. “Microwaves again?”

  “That’s a breaththrough,” Loeffler said.

  Tilden snorted. “If they aren’t going to okay cash, the whole thing is a waste anyway. I can do you up a microwave plan by five this afternoon, no problem.” The telephone cord was stretched out flat. They were still on the bench. Her arms were down, one hand caressing the hem of the dress, her black hair sparkling in the sunlight.

  “Okay, but hurry the hell up.”

  His left hand, with the receiver, fell to his side; he could hear Loeffler talking, distantly. “Put your arms around her,” Tilden said, “you sleazy little creep.” He laughed and pulled the phone back up.

  “You there? Tilden? Hey, what’s that little girl’s name? She in the book?”

  Tilden was silent, turned away from the window. He felt blank, holding the telephone, waiting.

  “Okay,” Loeffler said, “but I think she needs a younger man. You’re a little long in the tooth here. Aren’t you? Has her daddy seen you yet? Hey?”

  Tilden began to smile. “I’m her daddy,” he said. “Her name is Paulinda. She’s my daughter. You ought to get married, Tiny.”

  He heard part of a laugh, then silence, then a click, and the dial tone. Tilden, listening, stepped back to the window. She was straightening herself, patting her hair, setting seams, shifting her shoulders. Cotton. The dress was cotton. He set the telephone receiver down. I’m not a bad guy, Tilden thought, for wanting this woman to be wearing a nylon dress, for wanting to look at her, for wanting her to hush and put her hands on me, for any of it. She’ll be quiet now, and go away. She’s already gone. Maybe sometime she’ll need money, and she’ll call. He looked around the room. Place’s okay, he thought. Peaceful. You ought to have a kid.

  He stood at the tall blue windows which stretched to the floor—it made you sick when you stood close—and looked to his right then back to his left, but the street was empty. In his mind he saw them again, moving, talking, a mimed argument on the blue and white bench. Stand up, sit down. Stand up, sit down. I remember that, he thought. He reached out, his hand moving as if by itself, and touched the thick glass.

  Jealous You, Jealous Me

  Okay so it wasn’t really four women, but by the end of it the two of them felt like two women each. Busy over here, busy over there, back over here, and so on. You just let one look go wrong, or say something, or one smirking over finishing a goddamn crossword first, or even one of them too quick and loud shouting out an answer (“Ort!”) and Bam! there goes your ménage à trois. Go back to Catholic school.

  But in the beginning it was fun, and the porno part was just part of it, and not even the best part. Life got much bigger, for all three of us. They were surprised, I think, how interested they were in each other, that they liked each other. It was walking down streets in the snow, travelling in threes, kidding, cooking, staring, or showing up together at parties, stepping around in some over-hardwooded apartment, and watching everyone we knew wonder, their blasé eyes a little too open. Guessing. And then, on the way back to one of our own apartments, running and laughing, rolling around in the snowbank on the side of the hill that fell away down from the street. Kids.

  It was electric, watching them shopping at a secondhand shop together, or coming in the door back from the market on the other side of the park with leaves on their clothes, in their glorious hair. Or standing on the sidewalk by myself one early evening, big coat and cold, looking up toward the building, finding our window, watching shadows move in the apartment, wondering myself, crazy with sweet slow blood-pounding jealousy.

  In Catholic school the electricity of sin was everywhere possible, in a word, a wish, a thought, making the simplest action—a look—a cataclysm, a murder. What wasn’t itself a sin was an “occasion of sin.” What a way to live. I loved it. But later when you lost faith in sins, there was this catastrophic collateral cost. Now, with the two of them, things mattered again in that old way I had all but forgotten. I got it all back for a while
.

  Our park was mostly an overgrown field stretched between rocks high on one side and a creek in a ravine shrouded by trees on the other. Once, in the spring, in the middle of the field I turned over a two foot square piece of weathered plywood and found a small Storeria, Dekay’s Snake, about ten inches long, and picked it up. I knew from when I was a kid. She was on one side of me in jeans, and she was on the other side in jeans, and because wonders were welcome, this parlor skill I had picked up as a loner ten year old was thrilling, magical, like jumping motorcycles or something. Suddenly come running up two scrawny boys about ten, the lead one yelling, “That’s my snake, mister!” I looked at him. He was pointing at the muddy plywood. “It’s my snake … trap,” he said, still fierce, and took the Dekay’s when I offered it. It was his snake trap. That was what the spring was like, perfect things happened.

  So why, what happened later? We moved. We got jobs in another city and all moved there, and everything seemed to go out of balance. If you have ever been in a bed with two women made wholly and entirely of concrete, you can imagine the experience. Otherwise, no.

  No, the real reason was that I left it up to them. Maybe there was no alternative. Maybe one of them had been waiting all along to undo it, I don’t know. Diffidence was perfect for creating balance in the beginning and while things were going well. I never tried to control things, to say this and not that. I said only I want you and I want you, which in our electrified air, seemed to be enough.

  I might’ve saved it if I had tried. Might not.

  But now I wish just for a few minutes, or an hour, or days, or the rest of a life of that jealousy, the feeling outside on the sidewalk, in the instant lost and alone in the most acute way, looking up waiting to see through a window a shadow move against a wall, knowing but also imagining where the couch and chair and kitchen and bed were in the apartment, wondering if they were touching each other, with the key in my pocket.