The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  “Madison,” Ted says. “Adams. Monroe. They’re presidents of the United States.”

  “Where’s Lincoln?” she wonders.

  “Come on,” Ted says, taking her by the wrist.

  The long-faced waiter stands watching them from the entrance to the dining room. “This way, sir,” he says.

  Everything is dim. The room is low-ceilinged; there are dark wooden beams and heavy oak tables and chairs, a thick carpet. On the tables, the little candles in their holders give off almost no light at all. Violin music seems to be leaking in from outside somewhere, it’s so faint. The waiter seats them, then takes Marlee’s folded napkin, snaps it open, and carefully places it across her knees. He does the same with Ted’s napkin. Then he moves off, and in a moment another waiter walks in and approaches them. He’s also tall, but more imposing, leaning forward slightly, as if his center of gravity were at the top of his head. He has widely separated, small dark eyes. There’s something triangular about his face. In a voice that to Marlee seems a trifle ridiculous—it’s very high-pitched and thin, like that of a boy—he asks if they’d care to see the wine list. Ted nods. Marlee covers her mouth with her hand and pretends to cough. “I feel like a Coke or something,” she says.

  The waiter is stone quiet. Ted turns to him and says, “Bring the wine list.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Marlee watches him stride back through the entrance. “Has he been breathing helium?” she says.

  “Shhh. He’ll hear you.”

  “I don’t think I ever had anybody put the napkin in my lap until I married you. Isn’t that strange? A whole aspect of eating out, and I’d completely missed it. Can’t get service like that at the Red Lobster.”

  He looks around the room. She can see that he’s not interested in talking about the Red Lobster.

  “Did Tillie say what we should order here?”

  “She said everything’s good.”

  “Well, and Tillie certainly knows what’s good. If there’s one thing about Tillie it’s her vast knowledge of all the good things there are to do and eat in the world. And she eats so wonderfully. I don’t remember when I’ve seen such an elegant eater.”

  “There’s no need to take that tone, Marlee. I’ve known the woman since nineteen forty-nine. We’re friends. For God’s sake, she’s had four other husbands since me.”

  “Well, I think I’d still rather eat at the Red Lobster.”

  “Please,” Ted says. “Don’t embarrass me.” He says this good-naturedly, like a joke.

  “Do I embarrass you?” she says.

  He touches her wrist. “Kidding,” he says. “Come on.”

  “I do though, sometimes. Huh.”

  He’s quiet, frowning, thinking. There’s a way he has of seeming to appreciate her youth and beauty while being the tolerant older man, with knowledge of the world that’s beyond her. “No,” he murmurs finally. “Though I do get a little puzzled now and then about what you’re thinking.”

  “It’s no mystery,” she tells him. “It’s our anniversary. I didn’t really want your first wife involved.” She pretends to take an interest in the room. A big flagstone fireplace occupies most of the far wall, and to the left of the fireplace, French doors lead out onto an open patio, groups of white-painted tables and chairs, potted plants and statuary. No one else is around. “You’d think if a place was so good, it would be more crowded,” she says.

  “It’s early.”

  The printed scroll at the bottom of the left-hand page of the menu contains the information that there is a cover charge of eighty-five dollars per person. “Do you see what I see?” she says. She reaches across and points to it on his menu. “Did Tillie tell you about that?”

  He stares at it for just the split second that answers her question.

  Although by any standard of her experience he’s quite well off, and has never really had to live without money, there is in his makeup a visceral inclination toward parsimony, a trait that he intellectually despises. She has often watched him pause, just so, fighting the small interior battle with himself; the fact is, it costs him emotionally to spend money, though he tries never to show it. During the past year she has become more conscious of the prices of things and more careful about expenses than she ever was when she was on her own and living off what she could scrape up waiting tables. It has been one of the surprises about being married to him, this continuing worry over money: when she was destitute, moving from place to place, she’d rarely given it a thought—never even had a checking account.

  “Do you want to leave?” she says.

  “Absolutely not,” he says.

  “Eighty-five dollars just to come in the door and sit down, Ted. You don’t have to put on a show for me.”

  “Marlee, please.”

  Their waiter comes into the room and walks over to them with the wine list. “Would you like to order your appetizers, sir?” he says in that high-pitched voice.

  “I’m afraid we still need a couple of minutes.”

  When the waiter has gone, Marlee says, “He actually squeaks.”

  “He can’t help it. Stop being so critical.”

  “I wasn’t. I was observing the phenomena. I didn’t say anything to him about it. If I was being critical, I’d say something to him about it. I’d say, ‘Hey, what’s the deal on the funny voice?’ Or no, I’d say, ‘Your voice is almost as high as everything else in this place.’ There’s a joke about that, isn’t there? I can’t remember how it goes.”

  Apparently, he’s decided to try another tack. “I love what the light here does to your eyes. They sparkle so.”

  “Like diamonds.” She smiles at him. This is something he said to her when they first met, and she had teased him for it then.

  “Okay,” he says out of the side of his mouth, nodding.

  “Maybe we can sell them to pay for the water.”

  “Marlee, are you just going to keep on?”

  “Well really. Eighty-five dollars apiece, and we haven’t even ordered a Coke. Did you see his face when I said I thought I’d like a Coke? Don’t they have Coke here? Can you imagine what the rooms cost? If it’s a hundred seventy dollars for us to sit down in the restaurant, imagine taking up a whole room for a whole night.”

  “Will you please change the subject,” Ted says.

  The waiter comes back, leading another couple. A big gray-haired man and a very skinny older woman. The waiter seats them on the other side of the room. The big man clears his throat with a precisely pronounced “?-ha.” He does it two or three times, then loosens his tie and sits back, addressing the waiter familiarly.

  “You’re staring at them,” Ted says.

  “I’m wondering what they do for a living, and are they going to take a room.”

  “Tillie reserved a room for us.”

  She looks at him. “No.”

  “She did—it’s part of the surprise.”

  After a pause of a few seconds, he says, “Don’t you want to stay?”

  “I think I’d rather go to Italy. It’d be about the same, don’t you think?”

  “Come on,” he says. “It’s our anniversary. We ought to splurge a little.”

  She hesitates. Then shakes her head. “No.”

  “It’s the money, isn’t it,” he says. “You still can’t seem to get it through your head that I have the means for us to do something like this.”

  It strikes her that he’s almost cheerful, having won his struggle with himself. “You’re sweet,” she says. “You don’t want to spend that kind of money.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he says. “I want to. Don’t you believe me?”

  “I believe you. I don’t want to stay here.”

  “You don’t want to spend the money. I can see it in your eyes.”

  “There’s nothing of the kind in my eyes. There’s diamonds in my eyes, remember?”

  “Come on,” he says. “You’re worried about the money—you’ve been talking of nothing else s
ince we came in here.”

  “I don’t care about the money. You can put the money it would cost on this table and light a fire with it. I don’t care about it, okay?”

  “Be quiet,” he says. “Remember where you are.”

  They are both silent for a moment. On the other side of the room, the big man clears his throat again. “A-ha.”

  “I can’t explain it,” she says, low. “But if we took a room here I’d feel—cheap.”

  “What the hell would make you feel anything of the sort?”

  “I just told you I can’t explain it,” she says.

  He takes her hands. They look at the room. The waiter walks in and sets a match to the wood in the big fireplace. The blue, cool shades of dusk are stealing into the outlines and shapes out the window.

  “Hungry?” he says, letting go of her.

  She nods, shifts in the chair.

  “Nothing to worry about,” he says.

  A moment later, she says, “Where was Tillie when you talked to her?”

  “She called from Las Vegas, but she was leaving there. Said she’d lost several thousand dollars, and the people she was with were doing even worse. But they were leaving. She was going with them to LA and then maybe up to San Francisco.”

  Marlee searches her mind for something neutral to say.

  “I don’t understand why you have such a problem with Tillie.”

  “Who has a problem with Tillie? I wanted what we did on our anniversary to be your idea, that’s all.”

  “This was my idea—Tillie only suggested the place.”

  They look at their menus.

  “This is going to be very good,” he says. “You’ll see.”

  “Why didn’t you ever remarry, Ted? All those years before you and I met.”

  He frowns, studying her. “Look, what’s bothering you?” “Nothing’s bothering me,” she says, loud enough for the couple at the other table to hear. This causes them both to pause.

  “Have you decided what you want?” Ted asks.

  “I’m not that hungry,” she says. “Actually.”

  “Marlee, stop pouting.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she says.

  “I think you do.”

  Picking up the linen on her lap, she throws it down on the table, and comes to her feet. “Stop telling me what I know.”

  “I’m not—” he grips the table edge as though to steady it. The others are openly staring at them now. Again the big man clears his throat with that odd, emphatic sound. “A-ha.” The waiter stands at the entrance to the room.

  “Sit down,” Ted murmurs.

  She bends toward him across the table. “I will not be ordered around.”

  “Marlee, it’s our anniversary, please. Please sit down. Sit down and we’ll talk about whatever’s bothering you.”

  “I have to use the facilities,” she says, and it’s almost as if she has addressed the room. But she’s in command of herself. She touches the hair at the back of her neck and smiles, first at Ted, and then at the waiter.

  “Through here,” the waiter says to her, indicating a small entrance onto a corridor to the right of the fireplace.

  “Thank you.” She almost curtsies. She feels the impulse run along her spine. Turning to her husband, she whispers, “Pay toilets. Want to bet?”

  He shakes his head, looking down at his hands.

  “Wonder how much it costs to sit down in there,” she says, stepping over to kiss the crown of his head, withdrawing before he can take hold of her arm. She makes her way across the room. The waiter is watching her, standing by the big man’s table, pad in hand. As she reaches the entrance to the corridor, she indicates her own table. “I think my husband may be ready to apply for his mortgage now,” she says, low.

  “Pardon?”

  “May we have some ice water?”

  “Certainly.”

  “A few dollars worth,” she mutters under her breath.

  In the ladies room, she pauses to look at the high polish of the sink, the faucets with their brass handles. There are candle-flame shaped lights on either side of the sink, and they give her face a pale glow. She runs the water, puts her fingers under it, then flicks them at the mirror. The spatters make her skin look spotted, and she twists her mouth and wrinkles her nose, staring. Turning the water off, she lifts one of the folded linen towels from the shelf above the sink, and wipes the drops away from the glass. Then she looks at herself, turns her face to the side a little. It’s a face she has never really liked the look of, and now it seems too pale, the lips too dark.

  A month after she and Ted were married, at a gathering on a sunny lawn not five miles away from here, while he and Tillie stood under a tall maple tree sipping lemonade and chatting about people they knew, some woman in a frilly white blouse asked Marlee if she came to parties often with her father. “Oh, he’s not my father,” Marlee said. “It only seems that way.”

  “I beg your pardon?” the woman said.

  “My mother and father have been gone a long time,” Marlee told her, looking directly into her eyes. “Ted’s my husband.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  “No,” Marlee said, “actually we’re quite happy about it.”

  “I didn’t mean—” the woman began.

  And Marlee took her gently by the elbow. “It’s fine, really. I’m just teasing you. It’s a perfectly natural assumption for you to make. You mustn’t trouble yourself.”

  But the woman had spent the rest of the afternoon watching her, and when she told Ted about it, he said she was imagining things.

  “Every time I looked over at her, she was just looking away,” Marlee said. “I could see her out of the corner of my eye.”

  “Who was watching who, then?”

  “Look—it made me nervous, okay? And you spent the whole time talking to Tillie.”

  “I talked to Tillie for twenty minutes. And then we spoke for a little while toward the end. Anyway, you can’t tell me that bothers you.”

  “It bothered me today,” Marlee told him.

  “Well,” he said, “that’s just ridiculous.”

  This is often the way he extricates himself from talk with her when something is at issue between them. He simply decides that whatever is bothering her is ridiculous, and that’s supposed to be the end of it. “I don’t want to discuss it,” he tells her, and his tone is nearly parental. This infuriates her, and lately she has been brooding about it, feeling a little like a sulking child, unable to stop herself, wanting to be more understanding of him.

  He’s a man who’s accustomed to having his way, and he can’t seem to allow that she has had any true experiences, or learned anything worth imparting to him, for all his talk about seeing the world completely new through her eyes, and his protestations about her freshness, her energy, her headlong strength. The young don’t really know what Time is, he likes to say. And they have no true fear, since they all believe they’re immortal; that’s the thing that separates them from the old. He has said that Marlee saved him from a sleep, that she breathed life into him, and they have laughed and been bright and happy and in love when they’ve had any consistent amount of time alone. But then Tillie calls, or one of his far-flung acquaintances or friends, and everything seems to be going on in some other plane, at a remove: that crowded life over there, his, to which she, Marlee, is merely attached. His conversations are filled with references to other places and other times, and Marlee has seen the animation in him when he talks with these others, especially Tillie. Yet any attempt to speak of this with him falls short: in the first place, it’s one of the things he finds ridiculous as a subject, and in the second, she has trouble finding the words to say exactly what she means.

  Indeed, she has trouble saying much of anything that draws the same sort of animation and attention from him. And for all his wide associations compared to hers, she’s not exactly without experience. She’s been on her own from her twelfth year, when her mother d
ied (she never knew her father, who was lost in Vietnam). She spent her teens moving among the various members of her mother’s family. The last stop had been with the family of her great-uncle, a salesman who traveled a lot. On car trips he sometimes took Marlee with him. She saw much of the Pacific Northwest that way, riding along in an ancient black Ford—the salesman’s favorite possession, a classic, with a jumpseat and a running board and a horn that actually went ah-oo-gah. He was a devout Christian, but tended to drink more than he should, and on one occasion, in a fleabag motel north of Portland, he got fresh with her—that was how he put it when he tried apologizing the following morning, blaming the alcohol, and wishing himself dead. Marlee forgave him—it was just a kiss, after all—and yet she’d understood, almost as it was happening, that the time had come for her to move on. He was more than glad to pay for everything, including a year at the University of Illinois, where she had wanted to go since the afternoon she saw images of the campus in one of those promotional films during the halftime of a college football game.

  Sometimes she believes that in her husband’s mind her history only begins with the day he entered the café where she worked in Champaign, the summer before last—a distinguished visiting lecturer in history, who noticed that his waitress had been to his lecture. “You have a sparkle in your eyes,” he said. “Diamonds. You’re rich.”

  “I waitress for the sheer joy of it,” she told him, smiling. “Surely you can come up with a better line than that.”

  His own history includes Tillie. That woman whose extravagance and audacity he talks about as people remark on the escapades of a screen star: Tillie has traveled the world, speaks several languages. She was married to a sheik (the third husband). She was once rumored to be the reason a certain senator spent a night in jail for driving under the influence. She spent the weekend of her fiftieth birthday deep-sea diving off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. And her first husband had watched her through the years, a basically timid man for all his courtly charm and his good looks—keeping to his orderly life, remaining single, doing his teaching and giving his lectures, spending his years in the universities, and all the while attending to the adventures of an ex-wife like a man waiting for something to change….