“Casual? You think William and I are casual?”
“Please forget I said that, Melanie. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
“We’re not casual at all, Daddy. There’s been nothing casual about us, ever.”
“Please,” Ballinger told her, “I just meant that—this—this separation has cost us. Your mother and me. Well, me, all right? It’s cost me. Nothing’s the same. And you sit there and tell me she seems so happy.”
“I was talking about seeing the baby. Jesus, Daddy. Do you want me to say she’s miserable without you? I don’t—”
“No, no,” he interrupted. Then: “Wasting away, would be nice.”
She straightened. “For God’s sake. I said she was happy with the baby. I don’t know how she is about the other thing. I just got here from Chicago. She doesn’t talk to me about you. She doesn’t talk to me about herself. As far as I can tell she never talks to anyone about herself. I wish you’d quit making jokes.”
“Well, baby,” he said, “that happens to be how I express pain.”
“Bullshit.”
“You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he told her. “That’s my trouble, all right.”
“You know what absolutely drives me up the wall?” She glared at him. “How much like you I really am.”
“Must be awful,” he said. “You do your laundry in the tub, too?”
She seemed about to shout, but then she laughed. “I think you’re both crazy.”
“I guess it’s no good expecting life not to change.” He sat back down.
She said, “Things are exactly the way I expected them to be. I get irritable with William because he’s absent-minded, and there’s times when I’d like to do more than we do—go out more, maybe. See more people. But I do have a baby to think about, and we’d be staying home with her—or I would anyway—even if William were twenty-four. And he’s home with us. He’s so taken with her. He wakes her up in the middle of the night just to stare at her.”
“I used to do that with you,” Ballinger said.
“Well,” she said. “See?”
He did not see, quite. But he said nothing.
“I’m happy,” Melanie said. “Really.”
“That’s all we wanted,” Ballinger told her. “Your mother and me.”
“Oh, Daddy, do you think you can ever manage to stop sounding like you’re trying to rationalize your conviction that I’m lost or gone?”
“Happiness is all we wanted for you. I don’t know how else to put it. We wanted unmitigated gloom for you?”
She sighed. “Never mind.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“And don’t apologize. Lord, that makes me crazy.”
He said nothing.
“Things are fine,” she said. “Okay?”
“That’s wonderful,” he said. “Really.”
“Why do you have to say really like that. Like I’m not going to believe you or something.”
“That isn’t how I said it. I didn’t hear myself say it. Listen, you think you could stop editing me for a minute? Because I really find it annoying.”
“Maybe you should listen to yourself more carefully, sometimes.”
“It’s a real fight just hearing everybody else.”
“Oh, you poor, poor man.”
“Jesus, Melanie. How about giving me the benefit of the doubt, just a little?”
She paused, then shook her head. “I’m sorry.”
“No need to apologize.” But he had spoken too quickly. He added, “Just give me a little slack, okay?”
They were quiet.
“I am happy,” she said.
He said, “Good. It’s a God-given right. It’s in the Constitution of the United States.”
“Oh, shut up.” She smiled. It was an offering.
But the silence lasted just long enough for Ballinger to begin feeling the need to say something. He couldn’t think of one thing. She went into the other room and started pulling clothes out of boxes.
William arrived, trying to open the door while holding two paper bags stuffed with drinks and snacks. He had bought potato chips and dip and soft pretzels, along with three half-gallon bottles of cold mineral water. Ballinger helped him with the bags, and Melanie pulled another chair down from the table. William settled into it, tearing open a bag of barbecue-flavored potato chips. “These things kill my stomach,” he said, “but I’ve never been able to resist them.”
Melanie opened one of the containers of French onion dip and the bag of plain potato chips. “Sorry about the onions,” she said to her husband. “Now you won’t want to kiss me.”
Ballinger didn’t feel hungry anymore. He had a bad few minutes of being aware of all the little endearments and words of affection between couples, as though they were all being repeated now—all the terms of intimacy. He tried to empty his mind.
William said, “I’ve heard of the humidity in this part of the country, and I was expecting to feel it. But this is ridiculous. It’s not even noon. What’ll it be like at three o’clock?”
“It’s an average summer day in Virginia,” Melanie said. “Isn’t it, Daddy?”
“Average,” Ballinger got out. Another moment passed, during which he sought for something else to say.
“We sure appreciate your help,” William said, nodding at Ballinger. He put his hands on his knees. “This arthritis—I’ll tell you, old age isn’t for sissies.”
“Stop talking about old age,” Melanie said. “There are lots of people a generation older than you are. And there are people younger than you who have bad knees.”
“So you keep reminding me, dear.” William appeared chagrined.
Ballinger said, “I was just—just telling Melanie how happy her mother and I are that she’s come home—”
“Well, she wanted Carla to know her grandparents.”
“Yes,” Ballinger said, finding himself unable to look at either of them. “That’ll be a nice thing.”
“It’s hard to believe,” William said in what seemed an oddly reverent tone. “Isn’t it.”
Ballinger was at a loss, nearly startled. He looked at the other man, wanting to say, Yes, this is the god damn most unbelievable thing to me.
William went on: “I remember when my first grandchild came along. A little girl, too. I kept thinking about the child her father was—still was—in my mind. This bungling kid who couldn’t get out of his own way. That little boy was a father. It just didn’t seem possible.”
“Well,” Melanie said, rising, “there’s a lot to do.”
They worked together, unpacking what they could, leaving the dishes since they had no water. They confined their talk to practical matters, with William directing Ballinger as to where certain pieces of furniture should be moved. A little after noon, two young blond men came to hook up the phone lines. They wore overalls and leather belts with tools in them. They could’ve been brothers, though one was blockier, a boy who had done serious weight lifting. William Coombs engaged them in conversation, talking about the heat.
“Yes, sir,” the muscle-bound one said. “Hotter than a firecracker in hell out there. You gonna be living here, sir?”
“My wife and I, yes. And our little baby girl.”
“Little baby girl,” said the smaller one and glanced in the direction of the hallway, where Melanie had gone with a box of framed photographs. Ballinger saw the look he gave his friend. William hadn’t seen it.
Melanie came back through for another box. The muscle-bound phone man watched her, barely pausing in his work—his large hands quickly manipulating the wires in the wall. He followed her with his gaze as she carried another box down the hallway.
William had put his head back, drinking the last of a bottle of water, and again he didn’t see the look the two younger men exchanged.
Ballinger said, “How about concentrating on what you came to do, boys?”
“Sir?” the smaller one said.
William had
swallowed the last of the drink and simply stared.
“What’s your problem?” said the big one. “Sir.”
“Just do what you came to do and get out,” Ballinger told him. “That way, you get to keep your jobs.”
The two phone men accomplished their task and made a sullen exit, and for a time Ballinger and his daughter and son-in-law worked in silence. Finally William cleared his throat and said, “You know, Jack—I wasn’t unaware of their attitude.”
Ballinger gave no answer to this.
“I’m sort of used to how people respond to the situation.”
“They were ogling my daughter.”
“She’s my wife,” William said. “We’re quite used to it—believe me.”
“Okay,” Ballinger said. “Forgive me.”
“Please don’t be angry about it, Jack.”
Ballinger apologized once more. He had the unbidden urge to tell the other man not to call him Jack.
“Well,” William said, “I don’t want you to think it’s not appreciated, either. Your allegiance.”
“William,” Melanie said, “you make it sound like a treaty’s been signed.”
“Melanie’s got a great future as an editor,” Ballinger said. And when there was no response he added, “Little joke.”
The three of them sat drinking more of the cold mineral water. The quiet had become oppressive. William crossed his legs and began talking about the study he wanted to make of the poems of the Christian mystics. His pale, skinny calves showed above the black line of his socks.
Melanie broke in on him. “Daddy, Mom did tell me I should ask you to stay.”
“Well,” Ballinger said, marking with a pang of sympathy William’s embarrassment at the interruption, “I’ve got a lot to do, honey.”
In the past several months, he had only spoken with his wife on the telephone. She told him in a breathless excited voice that she had uncovered in herself a love for doing volunteer work of all kinds. On weekends she spent time in a nursing home, helping with the more seriously impaired residents. She had become friends with a marvelous hundred-year-old woman named Alma, who was confined to a wheelchair. Mary walked her around the grounds on breezy sunny days. “We talk about everything,” she told Ballinger over the phone. “She’s one of the most fascinatingly unegoistic people, if that’s how you can put it, that I’ve ever known. You know what she said to me, Jack? She said she was continually surprised by life’s abundance. A hundred years old, abandoned in a home, and saying that.”
“She sounds positively hortatory.”
Silence.
“Mary?”
“I was telling you something important, Jack. You don’t know the woman. Why do you have to belittle everything.”
“It was a joke, okay? I’d like to meet her sometime.”
“I have to go now,” she said.
“It’s nice to hear your voice,” he told her. “It’s nice to hear any voice.”
“You’re not seeing anyone?”
“Are you?”
“No, Jack. I’m not.”
“I’m getting angular, I think.”
“Poor thing.”
A man came to turn the water on in the middle of the afternoon. It took only a moment. Melanie began washing the shelves of the cabinets in the kitchen, singing softly to herself. William kept working in the extra room, filling the bookcases. Ballinger went out to a delicatessen in the town square and bought sandwiches. The humidity soaked him. In the delicatessen it was crowded and noisy. Two slow fans turned in the ceiling; the place smelled of garlic and oil. At one end of the room, in one of the small booths, a couple sat close together, slung over each other it seemed, even in this heat. Another pair stood holding hands.
Ballinger could not have supposed he would miss Mary so much, since in the last days they had spent in one house together they had suffered tension over the slightest things. It had been Mary who said, “I won’t live this way. I won’t have us turn into one of those couples always sniping at each other.” He hadn’t wanted that either. Mary believed that they had lost the sense of how to be with each other over the years of raising Melanie. He supposed this was true. But he had been alone all these months. He would not have said that he had taught himself, particularly, to live without her.
Outside, the brightness gave him a headache. When he got back to the apartment, the air-conditioning felt wonderful. He set the bag of sandwiches on the coffee table. “Lunch,” he said.
Melanie didn’t stop. “I want to get this done first.”
William came in with his arms full of books. “Be right there.”
Ballinger sat down and took a bite from his sandwich. He could see his daughter through the opening into the kitchen. She stood on a chair, one shapely leg lifted slightly off the seat, reaching to get a corner of the shelf. He averted his eyes. A sense of how William would look at her had come to him; there had been something strangely guilty and sexual in the moment. He stared out the window at the sunny street, chewing the sandwich. His head throbbed. William came haltingly back into the room and, pulling a chair up, sat across from him, reaching into the bag.
“These damn knees of mine,” he said. “Although I have very good cholesterol, you know. One-fifty-six. And my blood pressure’s one-ten over seventy-six.”
“William,” Melanie called from the kitchen, “talk about something else.”
He had taken a bite of his sandwich, and his answer was slightly garbled. “You-wite, hon. Stupid—course …” He smiled a little sheepishly at Ballinger.
“It’s okay,” Ballinger said. A concession. He nodded at the other’s grateful look.
When Mary arrived, unexpectedly early, gleaming with the heat, carrying the baby in a small bassinet, Melanie became agitated, almost childlike, talking rapidly and happily about the apartment and the rooms and how she planned to fix them up. As they stood in the small room that would serve as Melanie’s study, Ballinger made a joke about moving into it temporarily.
“Temporarily?” Mary said to him, with a look. It wasn’t ungenerous, or sarcastic, but rather candidly questioning.
“It’ll be a little break from living in Ernest Borgnine’s basement,” he told her. He had only meant it in the spirit of the moment.
“Poor baby.”
Melanie said, “Speaking of babies …”
They all went into the living room, where the child had awakened in her bassinet. They took turns holding her. They ate the sandwiches and drank the cold water, and then Melanie fed the baby while the rest of them worked.
Ballinger wandered into the room where the bookshelves were. They had been built into the wall by a previous tenant, floor to ceiling on three walls, with a large desk built into the fourth wall, below a window which sun now poured through. William had got the first few shelves filled, in what was clearly no particular order. Books lay in tall stacks in front of each section around the room. Ballinger browsed among the titles. “You’re gonna need some curtains to keep out that sun,” he said to William, who bent down and picked up an armful of books, groaning softly.
“Melanie’s already picked out the ones she wants.”
“You have more books than I do,” Ballinger told him.
There was a hopeful something in the older man’s expression. “I’m like a pack rat. I can’t even get rid of the bad ones.”
“Is there any order you want?”
“No, sir.” He flinched slightly, having said this, as if he expected Ballinger to seize on the use of the word sir.
Ballinger stepped over to the next section and began filling it. The two of them remained quiet for the hour it took to get everything put away. One of the last boxes contained a pair of bookends made of wood, two carved elephants that William had brought back from England, forty years ago. “I was studying Shakespeare,” he remembered. “At the beginning of it all. I was on fire with it. That feeling—all the wonderful books you’re going to read for the first time. I’ve always believed
in the good fortune of books, you know?”
“The first time I read Faulkner,” Ballinger said, “I was in Mississippi. Nineteen seventy. Twenty-one years old. In the air force.” He put the bookend in its place on the shelf. “I bought a copy of As I Lay Dying. I remember thinking that tide seemed about right for somebody with my morbid imagination.”
“I met Faulkner once.”
Ballinger looked at him.
“We shook hands and talked a little about horses.”
“I think I would’ve asked him about writing,” Ballinger said.
“That would have been a strategic error, I think.”
Perhaps it was not so odd, now, to discover in himself something like affection for the older man. Nevertheless, the feeling surprised him.
“I guess,” William Coombs said, almost tentatively, “there are some advantages to being an old guy.” His smile was faintly chiding.
By the end of the afternoon, they had the apartment in livable shape, had even hung some of the pictures, though Melanie wasn’t certain yet how she would finally want them arranged. She wanted to think about it, she said. But they had got all the furniture in place and put most of the clothes and books and dishes away. The empty boxes were stacked out on the front stoop. Melanie said they had worked long enough. She was going to take a shower.
“I’ll work on putting the crib together,” William said.
“You’ve done enough for one day,” said Melanie’s mother. “You won’t need the crib for another month, at least, William.”
“I’ll just give it a couple turns.”
Ballinger gazed at the heated gleam of his estranged wife’s skin, still such lovely skin. Oddly, he saw her as a person separate from him, someone new. He lost time for a moment and was outside memory, a delirious, pleasurable elsewhere. But in the next instant it changed in him, like a sort of mental turning of gears, and he was back in himself, aware of her as herself. How awful it had been, living through the long bad last days in the house, feeling nothing—an appalling and frightening apathy. It depressed him now to remember it.
The Stories of Richard Bausch Page 49
