Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  Brian simply stares at the wall. “I’ve been talking to Mom on the phone. I don’t think she’s going to come back here.”

  “We talked,” Henry says.

  “Are you mad at her about it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “I think Tommy’s going to work on her. Tommy’d like to come back now.”

  Henry says. “Let’s drop it.”

  “The whole world,” Brian says, then seems to hesitate. “I was thinking about the fact that I’m almost forty and I haven’t understood one goddam thing.”

  It seems to Henry that this statement comes from some aspect of his son’s recent troubles with Tillie. How badly he wants the other man to leave, how hard it is to be here with him, this soft-looking middle-aged man who is his son. His own reaction horrifies him, and he tries to compensate by moderating the tone of his voice. “There really isn’t anything for you to do here.”

  “I’ll stay.”

  It’s evident that staying will cost the younger man.

  “Natalie’ll be home soon,” Henry says. “Really, we’re—we’re fine here.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  He can’t say it out. The tentative, half-hurt expression on his son’s face catches him up. “I don’t want you to trouble yourself,” he says.

  “That’s all I do,” says Brian. “That’s what I’m best at.”

  Henry thinks of him as a child, searches for an image of him. Nothing will come clearly enough. “Brian,” he says. He wants to say something definite to him, wants to clear the air somehow. But he can’t find the words. He doesn’t even know where to begin.

  “What,” Brian says.

  “Nothing. I can’t—I feel like there’s something I ought to say to you.”

  “About Elena?”

  “About me,” Henry says, turning away.

  A little later, Brian says, “I think I should probably go.”

  Henry leaves him there, walks into the living room and looks at his mother. Nothing has changed. She lies still, breathing in those little separate gasps. He sits in the chair, lays his head back. His son walks in from the kitchen, stands for a moment, sighing. Finally he sits in the chair across from Henry.

  “I guess I’ll go on home,” he says.

  “That’d probably be best.”

  “Oh,” Brian says. And then, a second later: “God.”

  Henry’s filled with wonder at the force of the antipathy he feels, looking upon his son’s doughy, still-innocent, dark features and the paunchy shape of his body. Again, he wants to say something to conceal the anger that’s working in him, but he can think of nothing at all.

  “I wish I had her bravery—” Brian begins.

  “Right, son, I know.”

  Brian’s quiet. Henry closes his eyes, thinks of feigning sleep, and for a while he’s simply waiting for his son to decide to leave. He has his hands folded across his chest. Brian sighs; the chair he sits in squeaks with his weight.

  “Elena?” he says.

  Henry opens his eyes. His mother’s sitting up. She looks at Henry and then at his son. She sighs. “Boys. Scared as puppies. Look at you.”

  “Elena, it’s me,” says Brian.

  She lies down again and closes her eyes.

  “Elena?”

  The breathing is slower, more shallow.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Brian says.

  Henry says, “Shut up, will you?”

  They say nothing for a long time, then. Henry closes his eyes and pretends to sleep.

  “Dad?”

  He doesn’t answer. A moment later, he hears Brian get up and leave the room. Part of him wants to say something to stop him, but then he drifts off, and after a while he becomes aware that something has changed.

  He sits forward. There’s no sensation that much time has passed, but the lights are all off, and Brian is back, a vague shape, all round-nesses, snoring in the chair.

  Henry’s surprised by the wave of relief that washes over him with the knowledge that his son has chosen to stay. He thinks of Natalie lifting into the dawn over the curve of the earth, on her way home, and for a moment he feels something like gladness; it’s the faintest stirring in his spirit over the fact that he will look upon his sister’s face today. But there’s something else, too, now—some random, unbidden, creaturely sense of belonging where he is.

  He sits up. On the makeshift bed, his mother lies very still. Moving tentatively to her side, he looks into the pale shape of her face, and realizes with a resigned sinking at his heart that this silence, this deep stillness, is what has awakened him. Taking her hand, he holds it, kisses the veined, cold back of it, shuddering inwardly for a moment. But then something lifts inside him—a sensation so strong it makes him draw in a breath, like a sob. He puts her hand down, and very carefully, very tenderly, touches her closed eyes. Then he lets his palm rest on her cheek. Time ends. In some wordless part of his soul, this moment—the moment of realizing where he is and what he is doing—alters the flow of things: this little instant, at which it seems to him he has arrived out of all the turmoil and blur of his adult life, expands, widens, fixes him in its cold, calm center, and his long, complicated history leaches out, is gone. Everything seems strangely, almost terrifyingly, immaculate. He kneels at his mother’s side and smoothes a strand of her hair. He says her name. He weeps. And when he turns, when he sees in the half-light that his son is awake now, too, he has a sensation of being ruthlessly pulled from a dream.

  “Oh, God—” Brian says. “Dad?” His voice is thin with dread.

  And, quite gently, as though speaking to a child, Henry tells him.

  Rare & Endangered Species

  SINGLE

  THAT MORNING, she was awake first. She lay in the pre-dawn and listened to him breathing, and after a time, being careful not to disturb him, she got her robe on and made her way downstairs. The kitchen was all deep shadows and gray light, the surfaces looking as though they’d been lined with silver. She put bacon in the skillet over a low flame, then made coffee. The room began to take on a definiteness, the shadows receding. For a while she sat in the window seat, sipping the coffee, breathing the warmth of it and feeling the chill of being awake early. The view out this window was of fog and dripping trees. You couldn’t see much of the wide field which surrounded the house, and the mountains beyond were completely obscured. She remembered that when James and Maizie were small and required her to be up so often at first light, she had liked watching the fog burn off the soft green slopes, like an enormous ice floe melting away. The fog was thick this morning, and the light was a watery color.

  It had rained most of the night.

  The smell of the frying bacon filled the small kitchen. She knew it was traveling through the house. And now she heard him stirring upstairs.

  Though for years he had struggled with insomnia, rising several times each night, restless and angry with himself, often unable to fall asleep until the small hours of the morning, he was usually up with the sun. Force of habit, he would say. Creature of habit. He padded into the kitchen wearing his robe and slippers. “Hey,” he said, “you’re up early.” He cleared his throat, scratched the back of his head and yawned, then tied the robe tighter. “That bacon smells awfully good.”

  “Turn it, will you?”

  He stepped to the stove. “What got you up at this hour?”

  “Dreams,” she said.

  “Nightmares?”

  “Busy dreams. Things piling up, and me trying to organize them.”

  “I wish I could sleep deep enough to dream.”

  “I heard you snoring once.”

  “Not me,” he said.

  “I’m going to go look at some antiques today with Pauline Brill and Missy Johnson and maybe some others, if they can make it.”

  “I wouldn’t be thrilled about having more stuff to move,” he said.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.” She sipped her coffee, then opened a book which lay in the win
dow seat, one of his big coffee table books about aircraft, the history of flight.

  “You want me to finish this?” he said.

  “If you want to.”

  “I hadn’t planned on it.”

  She closed the book and moved to where he stood. They had been married forty-two years, and there were certain codes of speech and gesture they had developed for the sake of peace. These polite exchanges masked acts of will and contention: he wanted his breakfast cooked for him, for instance. Or he wanted her to stay home. He was not in the mood to be by himself.

  “Sit,” she said to him.

  “I’ll help.”

  “You’ll get in the way.”

  He shuffled over to the table and sat down, then rose again. “Think I’ll have some coffee.”

  “Coffee?” she said. “You? You’re having trouble sleeping.”

  “Want me not to have the coffee?” he said. “I won’t have the coffee.”

  “You never drink it.”

  He sat down again. But he was waiting for her to speak.

  “I’ll pour you some if you want it,” she said.

  He didn’t answer.

  She poured the coffee and set it before him, and for a little space there was only the sound of bacon frying.

  “How do you want your eggs?” she said.

  “Think I’ll just have the bacon with a couple slices of toast.”

  At the stove, she turned the bacon again, put four finished strips of it on a paper towel to drain. The rain increased at the window briefly, then sighed away in the wind.

  “What do you have in mind to buy?” he said.

  “Probably nothing much.”

  “I don’t know where we’re going to put everything,” he said, looking around the room.

  “Maizie said she and Leo could keep some of it for us. And the same goes for James and Helena.”

  “Yeah, but why? For what? We’ll never have a place for it again.”

  “Well then, they’ll have to keep it all. We’ll look at it when we visit them.”

  “Including whatever you decide to buy this afternoon?” He said this with a crooked smile, which she acknowledged with a shrug.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “If you see something nice,” he said.

  “If I do, yes.” She put two more strips of bacon on the paper towel.

  “Maybe I’ll have eggs after all.”

  “Will you or won’t you?”

  “You going to have some?”

  “I might,” she said.

  He cleared his throat. “We should’ve had more children.”

  She ignored this. The bacon was done. She turned the gas lower and went to the refrigerator for the eggs. “Scrambled?” she said.

  “Is that how you want them?”

  “I don’t care how I have them.”

  “That’s not like you.”

  She shrugged. “Make up your mind, Harry.”

  “Scrambled.”

  She poured the bacon grease into an empty coffee can, then washed the skillet and set to work on the eggs. He watched her.

  “You’re not taking Maizie with you on this antiques run?”

  “Maizie has a doctor’s appointment.”

  “Seems like Maizie’s always running to the doctor.”

  “It’s a regular appointment, Harry.”

  “I remember how Buddy Wells was always running to the doctor.”

  She was silent.

  “Didn’t do him any good.”

  “Would you put a couple of slices of toast in?” she said.

  “I hadn’t thought I would.” He stood, moved to the cabinet where they kept the bread. “It’s strange to think of a person like Buddy Wells now. Being this much older than he got to be. I can’t even imagine him in his fifties, you know? Any more than I can really imagine myself being sixty-seven.”

  “What made you think of Buddy Wells?” she said.

  He shrugged. “Walking around sleepless, you think of a lot.”

  She was breaking up pieces of American cheese and dropping them into the scrambled eggs. Then she moved to the refrigerator, brought out a carton of milk, and poured some into the mixture, stirring.

  “Speaking of not being able to imagine a thing, I can’t imagine living somewhere else,” he said. “Can you?”

  She said nothing.

  “I was standing here thinking about the bread. Silly? Where will we keep the bread?”

  “I suppose there’ll be a place,” she said.

  “Seems like too much to have to think about.” He dropped two slices into the toaster, then put the loaf back in the cabinet and shut it. “It wakes me up at night, but then I can’t think about it clear enough. Can’t imagine it. So I walk around and try to get sleepy.”

  “Are you going to want more coffee?” she said.

  He stared at her a moment. “I guess I better not.”

  “Why did you look at me that way?” she said.

  “What way?” He smiled, then touched her arm above the elbow. “Funny thing to be thinking about bread.”

  “I guess so.”

  “You ever think about Buddy Wells?”

  “Not for years,” she said.

  “No,” he said. “Me, too. But I thought of him last night. We’re twenty years older than he got to be. Think of that. It’s like we left him there and went flying into our old age. I was going over all that last night, you know, doing the arithmetic. Who was how old when. He never even got as old as you were at the time.”

  “Please, Harry.”

  “No, really. Think of it. You were fifty and he was almost forty, and he died at—what was it—forty-six? forty-seven? I know he didn’t get out of his forties.”

  “Yes?” she said, as though waiting for him to finish something.

  He shrugged. “Seems odd to think about it now.”

  “There are things I could mention, Harry.”

  His gaze settled on her hands, and she paused. “I didn’t mean it as a contest,” he said. “Forgive me. I got to thinking of Buddy Wells.”

  She took his wrist. “I’m sorry.”

  When the toast came up, he buttered it. She had put the plates out, the bowl of steaming eggs. The bacon. He poured orange juice and brought out a jar of strawberry jam for the toast, though it turned out that neither of them wanted any. They ate quietly, looking at the lawn and the field beyond it. The fog dissolved in the sun, which peeked through the clouds drifting over the mountains. It would be a bright, breezy day. Cool air came in the open window.

  “I didn’t think I could become accustomed to the idea of leaving this place,” he said.

  She said, “I guess you’ll have to.”

  “You’ve gone past it somehow, haven’t you?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I don’t mean that to be a challenge, either, Andrea. But I wasn’t speaking rhetorically.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  “Well?”

  She put her fork down and picked up her piece of toast, looked at it, then put it back on her plate. “I wouldn’t know how to gauge such a thing.”

  “It’s a simple concept. You were as desperate as I’ve ever seen you, and yet you seem to have made peace with it. You’re not even angry with me about it, like James and Maizie are.”

  She merely returned his look.

  “You seem almost settled about it now. I admire you for it.”

  She began eating again. “It’s a house. I’ve loved it here. And it’s over.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Harry, what do you want me to do?”

  “No, I admire it,” he said. “I’m still going through all the stages of grief. Walking around last night, I felt this pain in my chest. And it wasn’t even quite physical, I could tell.”

  She went on eating.

  “We don’t tell each other much these days,” he said.

  “Yes we do. You were telling me you didn’t know where we’d put th
e bread in the apartment. And you said you were brokenhearted about leaving.”

  “I am. If we could afford to stay, I’d stay. Besides, I think I was talking about something else, too.”

  “I understood that.”

  “You couldn’t’ve really wondered why I mentioned Buddy Wells.”

  “Buddy Wells has been dead nine years, Harry. I don’t understand you.”

  “You’d’ve been a widow all these years.”

  “I can’t believe we’re talking about this now.”

  “I sometimes wondered if you didn’t wish you’d gone with him.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Not even a little?”

  “It’s absurd talking about something that didn’t happen fifteen years ago. I didn’t go with him. I stayed here.”

  “You never once wondered if maybe you shouldn’t’ve left me? I could be such a son of a bitch in those days.”

  “Oh, Harry, I don’t feel like this now. Really I don’t. I know you’re only woolgathering, but please.”

  “It’s—well, I don’t know. Leaving the place. You think about everything.”

  They finished the meal and started washing the dishes together. He remarked about the beauty of the day, and she agreed. And she let the quiet go on.

  “What’re you thinking about?” he said.

  She smiled out of one side of her mouth. “Do you mean, a penny for my thoughts?”

  “It was a question.”

  Again, they were quiet.

  Presently he said, “James and Maizie still seem to think we’ll walk into some miracle and be able to stay. The place is sold and they’re still entertaining fantasies about it.”

  She was drying the dishes and putting them in the cabinet over the sink.

  “I get the feeling James thinks it’s our fault we’re clearing out,” he said. “I want to yell at him sometimes. It’s their doing, really. They could’ve had it if they really wanted it. They could’ve gone in together and bought the place.”

  “You want them to pay for us to live here?”

  “I thought we’d all live here.”

  “Well.” She dried her hands and went into the next room, and he followed her. The light through the front window was too bright. She picked up a magazine from the rack and lay down on the couch.