Thanksgiving Night

by Richard Bausch

  “Maybe next time,” she said. “We’ll see.” And she gave him that softly conspiratorial smile.

  Oh, God.

  Late at night, while Elizabeth sleeps, he sits at the window in the dining room, staring out at the next-door house, the lights there. Some lights are always on. Yet Shostakovich and his wife never seem to appear, going in or going out. It’s just a house with lamps burning in the window all night, all the predawn hours, all morning.

  Once Butterfield catches a glimpse of Ariana taking garbage out to the curb. She’s in a yellow bathrobe, and her hair’s in a knot at the base of her neck. She walks out and then back in, without looking at the street, without even seeming to watch where she’s going. On the way out, she dropped a piece of paper—a wrapper of some kind—and she steps past it and back indoors without seeming to notice it.

  Two weeks before Thanksgiving, Elizabeth runs into Ariana at the grocery store and ends up inviting her to dinner for that Friday night.

  “I didn’t know what to say to her,” she tells Butterfield, “and she kept hinting about it. They’ve been there for weeks and we haven’t made any kind of gesture. I felt wrong about it. We did tell them we’d get together—or you told them.”

  “It’s what you say under the circumstances,” Butterfield says. “Jesus.”

  “Well, and that applies here, too. Right?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “What’s the big deal?” Elizabeth asks him. “It’s just dinner. I told you. I felt bad.”

  Friday afternoon, they both arrive home in a mood. It’s cloudy and cold, gray, with a stiff wind, leaves blowing across the road, looking like 220

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  live things fleeing something, stampeding in the direction of the houses across the street; there’s the smell of burning coal in the air. All around them is the natural manifestation of their inner weather. Elizabeth has the beginning of a headache. She hurries into the house to take some aspirin. Of course, the unspoken tension between them stems from the fact that, for very different reasons, neither feels like entertaining Geoffrey Shostakovich and Ariana Bromberg.

  Butterfield can’t concentrate on anything. There’s a chilly, dead hand at the back of his head. Getting through this evening will be nearly impossible.

  Earlier today, Mark called him to ask what Elizabeth might like for Christmas, and he was at a loss, felt his culpability all the more in-tensely. The question seemed vaguely like a pretext. Mark has never asked before. Why would he call just now—was there a kind of emotional bad weather that even his children had seen coming?

  He keeps going over all the aspects in his mind, and, still, in spite of himself, replaying the scenes of venery with Ariana. It’s terrible how much delectation there is in the mental images of her body: over and over, he finds himself dreamily gazing upon it, feeling his blood quicken all over again.

  How strange that a man can long for more of the very thing upon which his soul is turning in regret.

  He finds it tremendously difficult now to imagine that every aspect of his failure won’t show in the coming hours, like a pornographic projection on the walls. The long fretting and worrying, and the increasing weight of shame mixed with lust, have made him hazily irritable with Elizabeth. So strange, to have this incrementally expanding sense of failure be the core of his aggravation with the innocent party; he feels as if he has already let slip the fact of his indiscretion.

  “Do you believe it?” Elizabeth says. “No Fiona. No Holly. They’re so busy with poor Oliver Ward. I think it’s terrible to be happy somebody had a stroke.”

  “Don’t say that,” he says. “Jesus.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way—not really.”

  A moment later, wanting to soften things, he says, “I can’t get over t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  how Fiona is with those kids. Holly, too. I never saw anything like it.”

  She doesn’t answer. The headache is coming on. She goes into the kitchen and stands at the sink, looking out the window there. He pours water and sets it on the counter, then goes upstairs to the bedroom.

  When she comes in, a little later, she says, “I wonder if they’ll really be any happier living in separate rooms.”

  “When I was fifteen,” he says, glad of something far from his present life to talk about, “Fiona moved to the local YWCA, like a street person, and it was all to get under Holly’s skin. All a snit of hers. She had money in the bank, and all that—and she looked like a bag lady for weeks. The goddamnedest thing. She stayed three weeks. Until the lady that ran the place found out that she had fifty thousand dollars in the bank every year from a trust fund.”

  “Why do they keep moving in with each other?” His wife seems to be peering into him.

  “Did you take the aspirin?” he asks.

  “Migraine medicine. Why?”

  “Your eyes are scrunched up. You look like you’re in pain.”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t know why they do anything they do,” he tells her, deciding that he can’t really talk just now. “They were raised together. They can’t take a step without each other. And they’ve always fought. I don’t know whether it’s gotten worse, or if my tolerance—and theirs—is just running out.” His knees are tingling, his palms sweating. He goes into the bathroom, runs water, and washes his face. Anyone witnessing him in this instant would say that he’s trying very hard to remove a deep stain. He pauses once and stares into his own eyes with precisely the expression of someone attempting to puzzle out an opaqueness, a mystery. There is only the watery blue stare. Then he’s laving the soap and water over himself again, soaking his hair, emphatic and committed, the living cliché of a man far more interested in cleanliness than the average—and innocent—person. Elizabeth walks in behind him and fetches a small hand towel from the rack, and then goes back out, not quite noticing him.

  They prepare, together, without saying much, for the evening. She 222

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  cuts vegetables and he trims the fat off four thick pork chops. “I hope they’re not vegetarians,” she says. She puts music on—Van Morrison—

  and hums to it. It’s clear that her headache is easing off. Elizabeth has perfect pitch, and her voice is lovely. Its loveliness pierces him.

  Shostakovich and wife arrive promptly at six, carrying a bottle of cabernet that Ariana picked out of the admittedly limited cellar at Macbeth’s. Butterfield takes the wine and uses it as a pretext to avoid eye contact. Ariana’s wearing a black dress under her black coat. The dress looks more like a slip. It clings to her body and makes her dark hair seem a shade lighter. Around her slender neck is a small, tight strand of pearls. Shostakovich has donned a suede sport coat, pleated slacks, and a white shirt open at the collar. He and his wife look like a pair of social-ites out on the town.

  Elizabeth, in her jeans and tank top, explains that she and Butterfield have always been too casual. Shostakovich takes off his sport coat, talking about how Ariana likes to dress up in the evenings. Butterfield has moved to the kitchen area to open the wine. Ariana strolls in, arms folded, head tilted slightly. Elizabeth is talking to Shostakovich about Van Morrison.

  “I picked this one because it’s full-bodied,” Ariana says, her voice completely without nuance. “I like wine to be jammy and fruity.”

  “I don’t drink much of it,” Butterfield gets out.

  “I know. You’re a whiskey drinker.”

  In the dining room, Elizabeth and Shostakovich are chatting politely.

  The music has stopped, but Butterfield can only hear the voices, not the words. The sense of this moment is so strange that he loses briefly the thread of what Ariana is saying.

  “Pardon?” he says.

  “You look guilty,” she whispers. “Stop it. There’s nothing for you to worry about.”

  His hands shake, putting the corkscrew to the wine. He works to get it open, while she watches him, stan
ding there with all her weight on one leg, one hand on the outward-jutting hip. Elizabeth brings in the glasses, and he’s finally got the bottle open. He pours a little in each glass. Shostakovich raises his and makes a great show of swirling it. He t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  puts the lip of the glass under his nose and sniffs loudly, then drinks and makes a sound like someone using mouthwash. “A little too jammy, I’d say.”

  “Geoffrey,” says his wife. “You wouldn’t know the difference if it was jam.”

  No one says anything for a moment. “Just offering an opinion,”

  Geoffrey says.

  Ariana lifts her own glass and turns it up, drinking most of the wine with a single gulp. “Ah,” she says. “Very well structured. Nice finish.

  Oaky. See? All you have to do is talk about furniture.”

  It’s evident to Butterfield that she’s completely relaxed. He marvels at this.

  “Whatever you’re making smells wonderful,” she says to Elizabeth.

  “Pork chops,” Elizabeth says. “Nothing fancy.”

  Ariana looks around, as if Elizabeth has indicated the whereabouts of the pork chops. But she’s just taking in the décor. She says, “I’m terrible at cooking. Mending. Cleaning house. Baking. All of that.”

  “My wife is most definitely not what you’d call domesticated,”

  Shostakovich says, sipping his wine with another show of taking in its bouquet. “Useless for anything wifely except—well, heh, heh—you know.”

  Butterfield keeps his eyes trained on the wine in his glass. The pause following this remark is terrible.

  “Geoffrey likes to talk about his fantasy sex life,” says Ariana.

  Shostakovich raises his glass. “Score one for the wife.”

  Butterfield moves to the living room to put more music on and to gather himself, feeling as though he’s seeking momentary refuge. And again, Ariana is there. But Shostakovich has followed as well, leaving Elizabeth in the kitchen to finish preparing the meal.

  “What do you guys like?” Butterfield asks and remembers, just in time, to add, “For music.” He’s got his back to them, picking among the confused mass of CDs in and out of cases. He can’t clear his own mind.

  “Not Shostakovich,” Ariana says, laughing. She sits next to her husband on the couch.

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  Butterfield puts a Bonnie Raitt CD in and turns it down so that it comes from the speakers in a soft murmur of notes. Seeing Ariana’s empty glass, he says, “More wine?”

  “Sure.” She holds the glass toward him with the slightest bending of her wrist, smiling that smile, her dark eyes taking him in—and in.

  He walks into the kitchen on weak legs, and Elizabeth glances at him, tending to the cutting up of a brick of gouda cheese. She licks a finger and says, “Pour me some more, too, okay?”

  He does so, and pours more for himself. It’s not quite numbing enough. He’s thinking how implausible it is to be entertaining the idea of telling Elizabeth they have to sell the house and move—buy another dwelling elsewhere. Find a quiet little cottage by the ocean, on the other side of the continent, or across the Atlantic, the sunny hills of anywhere else. What he has become involved in is beginning to be nearly too much for him, as if some irrational element of his being has been let loose and is gathering strength. He feels he might begin raving any minute.

  He opens one of his own bottles of wine—a cabernet from another winery—and refills his glass yet again. There’s the whole evening to get through, the rest of his life in the neighborhood to get through. He gulps the wine, receiving the unbidden thought that while some men seem well suited to cheating on their wives, he’s most certainly—and painfully—not one of them.

  So, then how, he wishes to ask someone in authority, did this happen?

  How does a man whose life, as far as he can see, is quite smooth and even happy, come to such a pass? What unanswered hungers are in him?

  What excesses of behavior, what enormities await a man whose passions are not available to his consciousness until they explode from him?

  He tries to recall other temptations—and there are one or two—but nothing ever went past the line he always drew across experience: that line the whole society accepts, past which one moves at peril, the stuff of novels and movies. Trouble of the most serious kind. He can’t believe any of it, swallowing the wine too fast and feeling himself crouching, all too creaturely, under his own façade of polite interest.

  The dinner is long, and finally a bad blur to him. For a long while, t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  they all watch Shostakovich pick through the salad Elizabeth prepared, removing onions, mushrooms, cucumbers, green peppers, and cilantro leaves; he puts them all on the side of his dinner plate in a neat pile, and there’s a deeply concentrating look on his face, a seriousness of intent and a single-mindedness that, in the dim light of the table, takes on an almost fiendish appearance, as if he were performing this little panto-mime with a kind of mad glee, eyes frowning over a strange, wide smile of premeditation. Finally, he becomes aware of the silence and looks up.

  “Geoff, for Christ’s sake,” Ariana says. Then she turns to Elizabeth.

  “Ignore him, really. He’s got the manners of a range bull and all the obsessiveness of a raccoon when it comes to food.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” he says, putting a large forkful of lettuce in his mouth. “I have allergies to these things. I like my salad greens and tomatoes and that’s it.”

  “I’d’ve made it that way for you,” Elizabeth says. “Really. If you’d said something.”

  “Wouldn’t want you to trouble yourself.” He stops chewing and takes something off his tongue. Part of a mushroom.

  “For Christ’s sweet sake Geoffrey,” says Ariana.

  Butterfield keeps his eyes trained on the pork loin he’s cutting up and tries, with all his might, to eat heartily, though each bite makes his gorge rise. The wine hasn’t helped his nerves at all, and he pours more, in pursuit of the calm that he hopes it might bring.

  “More wine?” he hears Ariana say.

  “Yes,” he answers and holds his glass out, not making eye contact.

  They all have too much of the wine. Elizabeth opens two more bottles of red and one of white. Shostakovich produces a little cellophane bag of dope, and they all partake of that. Ariana says with a smirk that they are all mellowing out now. They sit in the living room, listening to one of those heavy-necked jazz divas with a smoky, hard-experienced sound to her cigarette-gravelly voice; Butterfield can’t recall the name. And he’s too drunk to get up and look. Shostakovich talks about his time in the merchant marine. The women he knew. None of them were as beautiful 226

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  as Ariana, of course. Ariana makes snide comments about his escapades overseas, and the tattoo she says he has on the back of one thigh—a little sinking ship. “It’s ironic,” she tells them. “Isn’t it? Geoff’s little sinking ship on his thigh?” Though Butterfield can’t particularly see the irony, he laughs at her tone, as does Elizabeth. In fact, they all end up laughing a lot, in the kind of hilarity that comes of unfamiliarity breaking down in alcohol and cannabis. The evening begins to seem fairly pathological. Inwardly, Butterfield rides over caverns, terrible cliffs. He watches Ariana, who seems so impressively calm, at ease, talking now about some of the people she sees in Macbeth’s. The bagpipes player is the Scottish (“Really,” Ariana says) brother-in-law of the owner. The brother-in-law is a beer alcoholic. One beer is not enough, and twenty-four is also, um, not enough. They all laugh at this, Butterfield lying back on the couch, head in Elizabeth’s lap—a thing that used to be natural as breathing and now feels like a stratagem, a gesture intended to hide things and therefore dishonest. He feels this as a desolation, a range of destruction. The others are relaxed and happy now, and he remembers his mother and great-aunt, his son and daughter
. And then, once more, his mind presents him with an image of Ariana lying back on the floor of The Heart’s Ease bookstore.

  God. Help.

  Ariana sips more wine, talking about the bagpipe-playing brother-in-law of the owner of the bar. Each night, she watches him get progressively more drunk and less able to play the instrument he’s so proud of. There’s a swift, humorous way she talks now, animated even more by what she’s had to drink and smoke. She seldom looks at Butterfield, who isn’t saying much. Elizabeth remarks this.

  “I’m drunk,” he manages. “Sorry.”

  “We’re all drunk,” says Shostakovich. He goes on to say that Ariana hides her drunkenness better than most people. She’s very cagey and smart, and fast, and she knows it. Her wit is deadly, he says. But he has always, luckily, found that sexy.

  Butterfield can’t keep from glancing at the perfect shape of Ariana in that black dress as she crosses her legs and lets the high heel on one foot dangle almost off of it.

  “Geoffrey married me for my mind,” Ariana says. “He wants to fuck t h a n k s g i v i n g n i g h t

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  me for my deep thoughts. Isn’t that right, Geoffrey?”

  “Oh, baby,” he says. He talks of meeting her in college, when he was about to graduate. He’d planned to go to graduate school, but got side-tracked by Ariana, who was tired of the college life. Ariana’s an impatient sort of girl, Shostakovich tells them. She wants what she wants, and she just walks up and takes it. That was what she did with Shostakovich. He didn’t have a chance, he says. But then he has always been drawn to unstable personalities, and for all her definiteness about what she wants out of life, she can be a bit flaky. Or people decide that she is. In the last nine years, she’s held fifteen different jobs. He talks on in this vein as if Ariana’s not there, and she simply watches him, a little half-smile on her face, almost of bemusement, the expression of someone observing unwittingly comic behavior in a child.

  “Well,” Elizabeth says, finally. “I’ve got to put some food away. Sorry for the wifeliness.”

  “I’ll help,” says Ariana. “Don’t listen to Geoffrey.”