Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  He stood gazing at her.

  “You’re making me edgy, Harry.”

  “You know, you’re still pretty,” he said.

  “Thank you. I like you, too.”

  “Like?”

  She smiled at him.

  “You never cease to amaze me.”

  She held the magazine up. “You know I could never stand compliments.”

  “Well,” he said. “It’s exactly true.”

  HE WAS IN THE utility room when the time came for her to leave. She called to him from the living room door. “Good-bye, Harry.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Okay. Bye.”

  She went through the house and in to him. He had started work repairing a purple martin birdhouse that had been damaged in a storm last month. She put her arms around his neck and held tight.

  “Hey,” he said. “Sure you don’t want to stay?”

  “No,” she said to him. “Gotta go.”

  In the car, she turned the radio up loud. The news was about the fighting in Bosnia. She let this play for a time, not really hearing much of it, then looked for music and found something baroque-sounding. The sun shone brightly; it would be a humid day. The sky over the mountains was milky with haze, and the mountains themselves looked almost bleached. Pauline Brill had already arrived at the Cider Press Café on Mission Street, where they had agreed to meet. They would eat lunch and then browse in the antiques stores along the block.

  “Anyone else coming?” Andrea asked, getting out of the car.

  “Just Missy. And she can’t stay long.” Pauline’s voice had been made raspy with years of cigarette smoke, though she had recently quit. “I swear, all it needs is for me to plan something and it falls apart under my hands.”

  They stood and watched the road for a few minutes. “I can’t really stay very long myself,” Andrea said.

  “I’ve got all afternoon,” said Pauline. “My summer classes are done. I was supposed to meet with these people about their dreadful child, but they canceled. Kid almost flunked summer school and I have him again this fall. Dreadful. Although I should talk about a dreadful child.”

  “I don’t have all afternoon.”

  “Have you started packing yet?”

  “No.”

  “Some companies will pack for you, you know.”

  “I haven’t given it much thought.”

  Pauline lived in a mansion off Highway 15 North. Though her husband had left her with an enormous amount of money, she continued teaching school out of what she described as a need to be earning something on her own. The truth was that she had been through hard times before her marriage to wealth, and now that her husband was gone, she felt that living off investment income and a trust fund was tempting fate. Something bad would happen to a person living off the fat of the land. Work was a relief from the daily trouble of trying to keep a stepdaughter in line, and in fact she liked to teach; it had been something at which she was skillful enough. It provided a contrast, she would say, to the failures of life at home—the war in the palace, as she called it. The stepdaughter was now nineteen and seemingly determined to find some way to destroy her reputation, if not herself; the two of them stalking through the rooms of that huge house in an ongoing battle, speaking, if they spoke at all, merely to taunt or chide or challenge each other. The girl, whose name was Pamela, had the looks of a movie star and was inclined to the sort of recklessness that caused talk. Pauline felt guilty and confused about her all the time, and often sought Andrea’s advice when she wasn’t trying to see what Andrea might know, since Andrea’s daughter Maizie had worked with the girl and had become friendly with her. “Does Maizie know if Pamela is on drugs, do you think?” Pauline asked one afternoon.

  Andrea said she never talked to Maizie about things like that.

  “But Maizie would know. They do still see each other socially.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Does Maizie take drugs?”

  “Pauline, I honestly never asked her. I assume she doesn’t.”

  “I’d ask Pamela,” Pauline said, “but I’m terrified what the answer would be. She wouldn’t tell me the truth. And anyway, there’s nothing I can do about it. She’s of age.”

  “I’m not sure Maizie would tell me the truth, either.”

  “Sure Maizie would. You and Maizie are so sweet together. Maizie would tell you.”

  “Maybe,” Andrea told her.

  “I think it’s all to spite me,” said Pauline. “Absolutely everything that girl does. As if I did anything to her at all except try to be there for her.”

  “Don’t cry,” Andrea said. “Please.”

  It was Andrea’s natural reserve that had always calmed the other woman down. Pauline had said as much on more than one occasion. Now Pauline toed the gravel at their feet and asked if Maizie had visited on the weekend. Lately, Maizie hadn’t had much time to spend with Pamela, and so the question was asked without any ulterior motive. Andrea said, “We talked on the phone.”

  “I think Pamela’s been meaning to call her,” Pauline Brill said.

  Andrea looked at her and thought of the many strands of hurt pride, anger, and worry behind that ordinary statement. “I’m sure Maizie’ll be glad to hear from her,” she said.

  “Of course,” Pauline said with a small, pained laugh, “I’m just guessing.”

  Missy Johnson pulled into the gravel lot, turned her engine off, and stared at them through the windshield. “Why didn’t you go on in and order something to drink?” she said, getting out.

  “We just got here,” Pauline said.

  Missy wore a white blouse and slacks, showing off her slender shape and her long, lovely legs. Younger than the other two women by almost twenty-five years, she was nevertheless the one among them who was most anxious about her health and her appearance, as though all her good looks and happiness were about to be taken away from her. She was always imagining the disasters that might befall her, and Pauline had taken to calling her Ms. Little, after Chicken Little.

  “I have to eat and run,” Missy said. “My damn babysitter has an orthodontist’s appointment.”

  They went into the café and were seated in a booth by the window. The waitress was a young woman with luminous blond hair. “If she didn’t get that hair out of a bottle,” Pauline said, “I’m buying lunch for us all.”

  “How will you find out?” Missy said.

  “I’ll just ask her.”

  When the waitress brought menus to them, Pauline said, “Honey, is that your natural color?”

  The young woman stepped back and seemed embarrassed. Her hand went up to the small shimmering curl at her shoulder. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “It’s very pretty,” Andrea said.

  “And this lady’s buying lunch.” Missy indicated Pauline with a nod. “Give the check to her.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  After the waitress put glasses of water down, Pauline said, “I swear it’s the same color Maizie’s was when she dyed it in February.”

  “I think Maizie looks good blond,” said Missy. “Don’t you like it, Andrea?”

  “Maizie likes it,” Andrea said. “I guess I do, too. Sometimes I don’t quite recognize her. It’s like she’s this—this woman I ought to know and can’t quite place.”

  “That’s the thing,” Pauline said. “It’s so much harder when it’s your daughter. I mean, I have an idea of it. I never wanted my stepchildren to change anything, even hair color. Of course, I’ve got Pamela threatening to get a sex change operation.”

  “You’re kidding,” Missy said.

  “She just does it to upset me, and I’m used to it now. I play along. But I know several young men who’d go into mourning.”

  “She is a knockout, isn’t she,” said Missy.

  “She’s dangerous, if you ask me. I don’t know what she’s into anymore.”

  “I didn’t mind when Maizie dyed her hair,” Andrea said. “She has a different life. It’s not connected to me a
nymore.”

  The other two looked at her. “What’re you thinking about, sitting there?” Missy wanted to know. “You’ve got a faraway look.”

  “She’s thinking about the antiques she’s going to buy,” said Pauline.

  “I don’t know,” Andrea said. “This morning Harry said he didn’t know where we’d put anything if I did buy it. Pauline, I wonder—what do you think of Harry?”

  Pauline waited an instant. “I think Harry’s a sweetheart.”

  “No, that isn’t really what I meant.”

  “I do, though.”

  “I don’t think he’s accepted what’s happened,” Andrea said. “I don’t think he grasps it yet—that he’s going to be living in that little apartment, and that strangers are moving into the house.”

  “Well, you both really ought to have started packing by now,” said Pauline Brill.

  Andrea sipped her water and looked out the window. The haze had disappeared from the sky. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, just the endless blue skies of August. A moment later, the blond waitress came to take their orders. Andrea said, “I’ll just have the water.”

  “That’s it?” Pauline said.

  “I had a big breakfast with Harry.”

  The other two ordered sandwiches and then began a conversation about Pauline’s student, the one who was causing problems. “He’s a sweet boy, really. Only he just can’t listen when he’s told to do something. It’s a stepfather situation and so I have a special—you know, but I think there’s some trouble in the home. You should hear the way this woman’s voice changes when she talks about her husband. She’s carrying some grievance. Something he did, I’d bet—and that she’s chosen to forgive him for. I’d give anything to know what it is.”

  “Sometimes,” Andrea said, “being forgiven is worse than being thrown out.”

  Missy wondered if the boy was on drugs. “It’s so easy to get them these days. But it’s worse than drugs. When kids in the high schools can get guns, where are we? And what are we coming to?”

  “It could be drugs with this boy,” said Pauline. “You can never rule that out. I worry about that with Pamela. She has all that money to throw around. Sometimes I feel like she’s doing it to me—to get at me—and then I wonder if maybe I’m imagining everything and it has nothing to do with me at all. Hell, there’s times when she doesn’t even seem to know I exist anymore.”

  Missy said, “I read somewhere that ninety percent of the population is walking around with drugs on them of one kind or another, including the over-the-counter stuff. Sleeping pills and tranquilizers and stomach pills and cold capsules, and every one of them does something to you that nature didn’t intend.”

  “Excuse me,” Andrea said, and went out to stand in the sunlight at the entrance of the café. The other two hurried to finish their sandwiches, and didn’t take long to join her. “You’re eager,” Missy said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I wish I could shop with you.”

  “Oh, come on,” Pauline said. “One store.”

  Andrea said, “One store is all I can do, too.”

  “Well, this is certainly a bust.”

  “I’ve got fifteen minutes,” Missy said. “Then I’ve got to scoot.”

  There were five stores, each in its own old house, ranged along this part of Mission Street, and they went into the first one. There, Andrea almost bought a soup tureen. Missy looked at a Tiffany lamp, and left a deposit on it. Pauline bought some turn-of-the-century postcards and photographs. One was of a large family ranged across the wide veranda of a big Victorian house. At the center of the photograph was an ancient woman, supporting herself on a cane and looking out at the world with a fierceness.

  “I envisioned this for myself once,” Pauline said.

  Andrea looked at the picture. “Oh,” she said. “Yes.”

  They went out to the parking lot, where Missy was waiting. “I don’t know how you can be so interested in that sort of thing,” she said. “Old scattered families. It’s depressing.”

  “My family’s all over the map,” Pauline said. “The pictures console me somehow.”

  “I hope my kids never grow up,” Missy said. “You and Andrea are lucky, really. You still have Pamela, no matter how much you fight with her, and Andrea has Maizie, and James is only an hour away. I’d love to be able to think my kids’ll stay around.”

  Andrea was staring off at the line of mountains and sky. It had come to her that her friend Missy still had the unimaginable future to think about: her children growing up, her life achieving its shape, whatever that might be—its one history.

  “Well,” Pauline said, “I’ve got more stores to hit.”

  “All right,” said Missy. “One more. For two minutes.”

  “Andrea, you coming?”

  “I’d better get going,” she told them.

  “I just might get you that soup tureen, you know,” Pauline said. “You might find yourself opening it for your birthday.”

  “That wouldn’t be a surprise, then.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “We have to go now, Pauline, or I can’t do it,” Missy said.

  “Come on, then.” They started off.

  “Take care,” Andrea told them.

  SHE GOT INTO HER car and drove east, past the old courthouse and the match factory, to the base of Hospital Hill and the Mountain Lodge Motel. There were cars parked outside two of the rooms, and the VACANCY sign was blinking. She went into the office and stood at the desk, waiting for the young man there to notice her.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “I’d like a room, please.”

  “Single or double?”

  “Single,” she said.

  He gave her a little card, and she wrote Andrea Brewer. Witlow Creek Farm. Point Royal, Virginia. She looked at what she had written.

  The boy took it and looked at it, too, without really reading it. He put it in a card file and fished a key out of a drawer. “That’s twenty dollars, ma’am.”

  She opened her purse and got out a pair of tens.

  “Room seven,” he told her. “You need help with luggage or anything?”

  “No, thank you.”

  Outside, she looked at the highway, the cars going along next to the railroad bed. The smell of coal and tar drifted by on the air. At the gas station across the street, two black men were shouting good-naturedly at each other from a distance, and two others were laughing. A woman came out of one of the bathrooms and walked briskly around to give the key back to the attendant. The woman’s car was open, and a man sat waiting for her. Beyond this, the hills rolled on toward the dark blue eastern sky. She drove the short distance to room seven, got out, and locked the car. Up the other way, in one of the yards behind a house on the other side of the fence there, dogs barked and complained. A breeze shook the leaves on the trees and lifted the flag in front of the hospital at the top of the hill, those low brick buildings where her children were born—only yesterday, it seemed.

  She went to the door of the room and opened it. A small place with brown walls and dark brown furniture, smelling faintly of cigarette smoke and cleanser. The bed sagged in the middle. A Bible was on the nightstand. She closed and locked the door, but left the chain off. Then she went into the bathroom and got out of her clothes, standing before the mirror over the sink. She was sixty-five years old, but she looked younger. It was an objective thing one could look at in a mirror. She did not look sixty-five. Fifteen years ago, she had almost left her husband for a man ten years her junior. She had not done so, and Buddy Wells was dead now, eight years or nine years—nine years. And so it would only have been six years; that would have been all. And perhaps it would have been enough. But she had chosen to stay in the house with its view of the mountains, where she had raised her children.

  How strange, that she should feel so far away from them now.

  She took a shower, then dried off, wrapped the towel around herself, and pou
red a glass of water from the tap. She brought this to the nightstand, where she’d left her purse. Dropping the towel, she got into the bed and pulled the blankets to her middle, propping herself up on the pillows. The sheets were cool and clean-feeling. She breathed deeply, closed her eyes a moment, then reached in her purse and brought out the bottle of pills. She did not think anymore, nor did she hesitate. She swallowed the pills quickly, one after another, until the little bottle was empty. There was the noise of traffic, and it lulled her. When the pills were gone, she put the phone on the floor, then lay on her side with the blanket pulled high over her shoulder. The light over the bed was on, and she thought to turn it off. It was too bright. She could feel the heat of it on her face. She saw herself rise and reach for it, and was unhappy to find that it couldn’t be reached. A while later, she was disturbed to see that it was still burning. I’ll have to get up to do it, she thought. I’ll just have to do that one more thing. It’s keeping me awake. And oh, my children, I wanted to tell you what I mean. I wanted to say why. I meant to tell you somehow, only I couldn’t get around to it, couldn’t get to any of it, couldn’t find the way, and there wasn’t time. There was never enough time, and you would never have believed me anyway, that it could be so important. A simple view from a window, my children. That it could mean so much, that it could give me back all the time you were small. That it could come to mean more than anything else. Not even love, oh my darlings. Not even that. But listen. I can tell you now, I think. At last. Oh, finally. Listen, she heard herself say from somewhere far off. And we can stop.

  PATIENTLY

  WHEN THEY PULLED onto Route 4, at the far end of the property, with its bright new SOLD sign and its straw-strewn field, James Brewer saw several dark shapes pinwheeling in the gray sky at what looked like the base of the driveway in front of the house. It made a disturbing sight. His mother’s suicide was a little less than a month ago.

  “Are those vultures, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Crows,” his wife said. “I think they’re crows.”

  Before them, to the left, a wide field of grass went on to the line of trees which bordered the neighboring farm. Small white stakes with flags on them were placed intermittently across the length of the field. Beyond the trees there were more fields, more stands of trees, and the soft, worn-down crests of the Shenandoahs, with dark, threatening clouds trailing along the top edges. A blue sheet fanned out beneath the clouds and blurred the treetops, the deep green swells of the hills. It all looked wild, uninhabited. The owners of the houses that were going to be built here would have a good view of the mountains. It was lovely country, as Brewer’s mother had so often said. Brewer had a moment of realizing how astonishingly, painfully beautiful the world was when you thought of never seeing any of it again. As he thought this, lightning forked out of the center of the huge escarpment of cloud, and a thunderclap followed. He counted the seconds. “That’s only three miles away.”