The Stories of Richard Bausch

by Richard Bausch

  This was a disconcerting surprise to Dornberg. “You mean you try to imagine them?”

  “I just mean it rhetorically,” she said. “In the abstract. I don’t see Cecily.”

  “Why think of it at all?”

  “I didn’t say I dwelled on it.”

  He let it alone, not wanting to press.

  “Come here,” she said. “Let’s dwell on each other a little.”

  The hardest thing during the months of what he now thought of as his trouble was receiving her cheerful, trustful affection, her comfortable use of their habitual endearments, their pet names for each other, their customary tenderness and gestures of attachment. He wondered how others bore such guilt: each caressive phrase pierced him, each casual assumption of his fidelity and his interest made him miserable, and the effort of hiding his misery exhausted him.

  The other woman was the kind no one would suppose him to be moved by. Even her name, Edith, seemed far from him. Brassy and loud in a nearly obnoxious way, she wore too much makeup and her brisk, sweeping gestures seemed always to be accompanied by the chatter of the many bracelets on her bony wrists. She had fiery red hair and dark blue, slightly crossed eyes—the tiny increment of difference made her somehow more attractive—and she had begun things by stating bluntly that she wanted to have an affair with him. The whole thing had been like a sort of banter, except that she had indicated, with a touch to his hip, that she was serious enough. It thrilled him. He couldn’t catch his breath for a few moments, and before he spoke again, she said, “Think it over.”

  This was months before the first time they made love. They saw each other often in the hallways of the courthouse, where he worked as an officer on custody cases (he had seen every permutation of marital failure, all the catastrophes of divorce) and she was a secretary in the law library. They started looking for each other in the downstairs cafeteria during coffee breaks and lunch hours, and they became part of a regular group of people who congregated in the smoking lounge in the afternoons. Everyone teased and flirted, everyone seemed younger than he, more at ease, and when she was with him, he felt the gap between him and these others grow narrower. Her voice and manner, her easy affection, enveloped him, and he felt as though he moved eloquently under the glow of her approval.

  Of course, he had an awareness of the aspects of vulgarity surrounding the whole affair, its essential banality, having come as it did out of the fact that over the past couple of years he had been suffering from a general malaise, and perhaps he was bearing middle age rather badly: there had been episodes of anxiety and sleeplessness, several bouts of hypochondria and depression, and a steady increase in his old propensity toward gloom. This was something she had actually teased him about, and he had marveled at how much she knew about him, how exactly right she was to chide him. Yet even in the unseemly, forsaken-feeling last days and hours of his involvement with her, there remained the simple reprehensible truth that for a time his life had seemed somehow brighter—charged and brilliant under the dark blue gaze she bestowed on him, the look of appreciation. Even, he thought, of a kind of solace, for she was sympathetic, and she accepted things about his recent moods that only irritated Mae.

  Perhaps he had seen everything coming.

  Once, they Stood talking for more than an hour in the parking lot outside the courthouse, she leaning on her folded arms in the open door of her small blue sports car, he with the backs of his thighs against the shining fender of someone’s Cadillac. He had gone home to explain his lateness to Mae, feeling as he lied about being detained in his office the first real pangs of guilt, along with a certain delicious sense of being on the brink of a new, thrilling experience.

  The affair commenced less than a week later. They went in her car to a motel outside the city. The motel was off the main road, an old establishment with a line of rooms like a stopped train—a row of sleeper cars. She paid for the room (she was single and had no accounts to explain to anyone), and for a while they sat on opposing beds and looked at each other.

  “You sure you want to do this?” she said.

  “No.” He could barely breathe. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said.

  “I haven’t,” he told her. “I’ve been a good husband for twenty-five years. I love my wife.”

  “Why are you here, then?”

  “Sex,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking of you.”

  She smiled. “That’s what I like about you. You’re so straight with me.”

  “I’m scared,” he said.

  “Everybody is,” she told him, removing her blouse. “Except the stupid and the insane.”

  There was a moment, just as they moved together, when he thought of Mae. He looked at the shadow of his own head on the sheet, through the silky, wrong-colored strands of her hair, and the room spun, seemed about to lift out of itself. Perhaps he was dying. But then she was uttering his name, and her sheer difference from Mae, her quick, bumptious energy and the strange, unrhythmical otherness of her there in the bed with him—wide hips and ruddiness, bone and breath and tongue and smell—obliterated thinking.

  Later, lying on her side gazing at him, she traced the line of his jaw. “No guilt,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I love to look at you, you know it?”

  “Me?”

  “I like it that the pupils of your eyes don’t touch the bottom lids. And you have long eyelashes.”

  He felt handsome. He was aware of his own face as being supple and strong and good to look at in her eyes.

  Not an hour after this, seeing his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, he was astonished to find only himself, the same plain, middle-aged face.

  Saturday was the day for household maintenance and upkeep. The day for errands. While he ran the mower, hauling and pushing it back and forth in the rows of blowing grass, he felt pacified somehow. He had forgotten the shoe, or he wasn’t thinking about it. He knew Mae was inside, and he could predict with some accuracy what room she would be working in. Between loads of laundry, she would run the vacuum, mop the floors, and dust the furniture and knickknacks—every room in the house. Toward the middle of the morning, she would begin to prepare something for lunch. This had been the routine for all the years since the children left, and as he worked in the shaded earth which lined the front porch, digging the stalks of dead weeds out and tossing them into the field beyond the driveway, he entertained the idea that his vulnerability to the affair might be attributed in some way to the exodus of the children; he had felt so bereft in those first weeks and months of their absence.

  But then, so had Mae.

  He carried a bag of weeds and overturned sod down to the edge of the pond and dumped it, then spread the pile with his foot. Somewhere nearby was the tunk tunk of a frog in the dry knifegrass. The world kept insisting on itself.

  She called him in to lunch. He crossed the field, and she waited for him on the back deck, wearing faded jeans and a light pullover, looking, in the brightness, quite flawlessly young—someone who had done nothing wrong.

  “Find another shoe?” she asked him.

  He shook his head. “Got rid of some weeds. It’s such a pretty day.”

  “Why did you save the other one?”

  He walked up on the deck, kicking the edge of the steps to get dried mud from his boots. “I guess I did save it.”

  “It was the first thing I saw when I went through the garage to put the garbage out.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  The breeze had taken her hair and swept it across her face. She brushed at it, then opened the door for him. “You seem so unhappy. Is there something going on at work?”

  “What would be going on at work? I’m not unhappy.”

  “Okay,” she said, and her tone was decisive. She would say no more about it.

  He said, “It just seemed strange to throw the thing away.”

  “One of the workmen probably l
eft it,” she said. “Or one of their girlfriends.”

  The kitchen smelled of dough. She had decided to make bread, had spent the morning doing that. In the living room, which he could see from the back door, were the magazines and newspapers of yesterday afternoon. The shirt he had taken off last night was still draped over the chair in the hallway leading into the bedroom. He suddenly felt very lighthearted and confident. He turned to her, reached over and touched her cheek. “Hey,” he said.

  She said, “What.”

  “Let’s make love.”

  “Darling,” she said.

  They lay quiet in the stripe of shadow which fell across the bed. During their lovemaking he had felt a chill at his back, and as he’d often romantically strived to do when he was younger, he tried to empty his mind of anything but her physical being—the texture of her skin, the contours of her body, the faint lavender-soaped smell of her; her familiar lovely breathing presence. But his mind presented him with an image of the other woman, and finally he was lost, sinking, hearing his wife’s murmuring voice, holding her in the shivering premonition of disaster, looking blindly at the room beyond the curve of the bed, as though it were the prospect one saw from high bluffs, the sheer edge of a cliff.

  “Sweet,” she said.

  He couldn’t speak. He lay back and sighed, hoping she took the sound as an indication of his pleasure in her. Part of him understood that this was all the result of having put the affair behind him; it was what he must weather to survive.

  “Cecily called while you were weeding,” she said.

  He waited.

  “I wanted to call you in, but she said not to.”

  “Is anything wrong?”

  “Well,” his wife said, “a little, yes.”

  He waited again.

  She sighed. “She didn’t want me to say anything to you.”

  “Then,” he said, “maybe you shouldn’t.”

  This made her turn to him, propping herself on one elbow. “We always tell each other everything.”

  He could not see through the cloudy, lighter green of her eyes in this light. Her questioning face revealed nothing.

  “Don’t we?” she said.

  “We do.”

  She put one hand in his hair, combed the fingers through. “Cecily’s afraid Will has a girlfriend at school. Well, he has a friend at school that Cecily’s worried about. You know, they have more in common, all that.”

  “Do you think it’s serious?” he managed.

  “It’s serious enough for her to worry about it, I guess. I told her not to.” He stared at the ceiling, with its constellations of varying light and shadow.

  “Will’s too single-minded to do any carrying on,” she said. “He probably doesn’t even know the other girl notices him.”

  “Is that what you told Cecily?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Did you tell her to talk to Will about it?”

  “Lord, no.”

  “I would’ve told her to talk to him.”

  “And put ideas in his head?”

  “You don’t mean that, Mae.”

  “I guess not. But there’s no sense calling attention to it.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “It’s not as if he’s saving old shoes or anything.”

  “What?”

  She patted his chest. “Just kidding you.”

  “Is it such an odd thing, putting that shoe in the garage?” he said.

  They were in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the day’s newspaper open before them. She had been working the crossword puzzle. The light of early afternoon shone in her newly brushed and pinned-back hair.

  “Well?” he said.

  She only glanced at him. “I was teasing you.”

  He got up and went out to the garage, took the shoe down from its place on the sill, and carried it to the garbage cans at the side of the house. The air was cooler here, out of the sun, like a pocket of the long winter. He put the shoe in the can and closed it, then returned to the kitchen. She hadn’t moved from where she sat, still looking at the puzzle.

  “I threw it away,” he said.

  Again, her eyes only grazed him. “Threw what away?”

  “The shoe.”

  She stared. “What?”

  “I threw the shoe away.”

  “I was just teasing you,” she said, and a shadow seemed to cross her face.

  He took his part of the paper into the living room. But he couldn’t concentrate. The clock ticked on the mantel, the house creaked in the stirring breezes. Feeling unreasonably ill-tempered, he went back into the kitchen, where he brought the feather duster out of the pantry.

  “What’re you doing?” she said.

  “I’m restless.”

  “Is it what I told you about Cecily?”

  “Of course not.” He felt the need to be forceful.

  She shrugged and went back to her puzzle.

  “Is something bothering you?” he asked.

  She didn’t even look up. “What would be bothering me?”

  “Cecily.”

  “I told her it was nothing.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Sure. I wouldn’t lie to her.”

  In the living room, he dusted the surfaces, feathered across the polished wood of the mantel and along the gilt or black edges of photographs in their frames: his children in some uncannily recent-feeling summer of their growing up, posing arm in arm and facing into the sunlight; his own parents staring out from the shade of a porch in the country fifty years ago; Mae waving from the stern of a rented boat. When he was finished, he set the duster on the coffee table and lay back on the sofa. Could he have imagined that she was hinting at him? He heard her moving around in the other room, opening the refrigerator, pouring something.

  “Want some milk?” she called.

  “No, thanks,” he called back.

  “Sure?”

  “Mae. I said no thanks.”

  She stood in the arched entrance to the room and regarded him. “I don’t suppose your restlessness would take you to the dining room and family room as well.”

  “No,” he said.

  “Too bad.”

  When she started out, he said, “Where’re you going?”

  “I’m going to lie down and read awhile. Unless you have other ideas.”

  “Like what?” he said.

  “I don’t know. A movie?”

  “I don’t feel like it,” he told her.

  “Well, you said you were restless.”

  He could think of nothing to say. And it seemed to him that he’d caught something like a challenge in her gaze.

  But then she yawned. “I’ll probably fall asleep.”

  “I might go ahead and get the other rooms,” he offered.

  “Let it wait,” she said, her voice perfectly friendly, perfectly without nuance. “Let’s be lazy today.”

  He had ended the affair with little more than a hint; that was all it had taken. The always nervy and apparently blithe Edith had nevertheless more than once voiced a horror of being anyone’s regret or burden, was highly conscious of what others thought about her, and while she obviously didn’t mind being involved with a married man, didn’t mind having others know this fact, she would go to lengths not to be seen in the light of a changed circumstance: the woman whose passion has begun to make her an object of embarrassment.

  The hint he had dropped was only a plain expression of the complications he was living with. It happened without premeditation one afternoon following a quick, chaste tussle in the partly enclosed entrance of an out-of-business clothing store in the city. They’d had lunch with five other people, and had stayed behind to eat the restaurant’s touted coffee cake. They were casually strolling in the direction of the courthouse when the opportunity of the store entrance presented itself, and they ducked out of sight of the rest of the street, embracing and kissing and looking out at the row of buildings opposite,
feeling how impossible things were: they couldn’t get a room anywhere now, there wasn’t time. They stood apart, in the duress of knowing they would have to compose themselves. The roofs of the buildings were starkly defined by gray scudding clouds—the tattered beginning of a storm.

  “It’s getting so I feel like I can’t keep up,” he said.

  Her eyes fixed him in their blue depths. “You’re not talking about you and Mae, are you.”

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “Sure you do,” she said. Then she took his hands. “Listen, it was fun. It was a fling. It never meant more than that.”

  “I don’t understand,” he told her.

  Edith smiled. It was a harsh, knowing smile, the look of someone who knows she’s divined the truth. “I think we both understand,” she said. Then she let go of him and walked out into the increasing rain.

  Two days later she took another job, at one of the district courts far out in the suburbs; she told everyone they knew that she had wanted out of the city for a long time, and indeed it turned out that her application to the new job was an old one, predating the affair. The opportunity had arisen, and she’d been thinking about it for weeks. This came out at the office party to bid her farewell. He stood with her and all the others, and wished her the best of luck. They were adults, and could accept and respect each other; it was as if everything that had happened between them was erased forever. They shook hands as the celebrating died down, and she put her arms around his neck, joking, calling him sexy.

  The dark was coming later each night.

  He went out on the deck and watched the sky turn to shades of violet and crimson, and behind him Mae had begun to prepare dinner. There were lights on in the other house. Two cars had pulled up. Dornberg heard music. As he watched, a pair drove up on a motorcycle—all roaring, dust-blown, the riders looking grafted to the machine like some sort of future species, with an insectile sheen about them, and a facetlessness: the nylon tights and the polished black helmets through which no human features could be seen. When the motorcycle stopped, one rider got off, a woman— Dornberg could tell by the curve of the hips—who removed her helmet, shook her hair loose and cursed, then stalked off into the light of the half-finished porch, holding the helmet under her arm like a football. Her companion followed, still wearing his helmet.