Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  “I can see the rain from here,” said his wife. “See it? I’ve been watching it come. It’s kind of scary watching it build like that.”

  “Don’t watch it, then.”

  “A simple solution,” she said. “Like not talking to your wife about anything but weather and vultures.”

  “What did you want to talk about?” he said.

  “Oh, anything you want to talk about.” Her voice shook.

  “For Christ’s sake,” he said, “I’ve been driving for an hour. Give me a break.”

  She touched his cheek. “I know I’ve said this, but it—this thing happened to me, too, you know.”

  He slowed and pulled into the driveway, past still another SOLD sign. From here they could see the circling birds more clearly.

  “Those are vultures,” he said.

  There were five or six of them, sailing and drifting with the motions of the wind above the creek bottom, perhaps two hundred yards away, where the property line was demarcated with barbed wire that ran along the overgrown creek bed.

  “They took like crows to me.”

  “They’re too big to be crows.”

  “Vultures are endangered, aren’t they?”

  “Why don’t you stop being so goddam ameliorative,” he said.

  She sat back. “I don’t even think I know what that means.”

  “I can stand the evidence of my own eyes, Helena. You might’ve noticed that I’m not shrinking from any of the realities.”

  “I’m lost. Would you like to catch me up on what this is you’re telling me?”

  “Those are vultures, all right? Not crows. Big, getting-ready-to-feast-on-dead-flesh vultures.”

  “Okay,” she said crisply.

  “Calling them crows won’t change any of the facts.”

  “I thought they were crows,” she said. “Jesus.”

  Next to the house there was a car he didn’t recognize, parked beside his father’s Ford and his brother-in-law’s Trooper. “Somebody come here with Maizie and Leo? Who’s this?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Now you’re mad,” he said. “We can’t go in there mad at each other.”

  She said, “You mean we have to be ameliorative?”

  “Okay,” he said. “You want to be cute.”

  He turned the engine off and sat with his hands on the wheel, watching the shapes circle above the creek bed. She got out and started toward the house. The wind caught her blouse and made it flap at her middle like a flag. He waited a moment, then got out himself. “Hey,” he said.

  She stopped, turned into the wind to look at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what gets into me, Helena.”

  “We should go in,” she said.

  He walked up and peered in the window of the strange car. There were paperback books and fashion magazines on the back seat. It looked like a student’s car. He left it and went on a little ways into the field. When he glanced back, he saw her standing at the edge of the asphalt.

  “What’re you going to do?” she said. “James, please.”

  His breath caught. The wind swirled at his back. Everything was vivid and, abruptly, quite terrible. Above him the birds wheeled and turned, dipped and seemed to ride suspended on invisible wires. One swooped low, no more than twenty yards from where he stood, the big wings beating the air heavily. He saw the ugly red wattle on the side of the head, and then it rose, heavy, veering off toward the creek bed.

  “Come on, James. I’m getting chilly standing here.”

  “Be patient, can’t you?”

  “James, do you want to be alone a while? Is that it?”

  He turned. The sun had come through an opening in the clouds, and there were two wide sections of the field now, one in shade, one in sun. She stood in sun. A young woman trying to understand and to do what was needed. She held her handbag with both nervous hands, and the sun made her squint so that her distress was exaggerated. But she looked very pretty standing there. His mind hurt, gazing at her. For no discernible reason, he remembered that people had told him she would be one of those women who got better-looking with the years, like his mother. At the funeral, people had talked of Andrea Brewer’s vivaciousness and humor, her youthful appearance. Like Loretta Young, they’d said. The same definite features, the same lasting beauty. The same elegance, energy, and grace. A beautiful, vivacious, interested woman. And I can’t imagine, they said. The phrase kept coming up. I can’t imagine. Can’t imagine. Nobody could imagine. It was all unthinkable, out of the pale of questions and answers.

  He started toward his wife. “Vultures.”

  “Even if they were crows,” she said, “it amounts to the same thing.”

  He had reached her, and he turned again to look at the black shapes circling. “Jesus, God. Look at them.”

  “You’re turning everything under the same light,” she told him. “Stop it.”

  He said, “Any other comments you want to make?”

  She took his arm. “All right. But please.”

  “They’re vultures,” he said. “I could see their horrible little red wattles. I can’t help what’s true.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry I said anything. I swear, I can’t say anything. What did I do, James? Will you please tell me what I did? I’d really like to know what it is that I did. I would like to know why I’m the one who takes your anger and sarcasm. Why is that? You never cut Maizie or Leo or your father or anyone else about it. Why is it me all the time?” She brought a handkerchief out of her handbag and dabbed at her eyes. “It hurts me, too, doesn’t it? I loved your mother. Don’t I have a right to feel it? I’m in this, too.”

  “Oh, look, don’t cry,” he said. “I’m sorry. Please—please stop.”

  “I’m trying,” she sobbed.

  “Honey,” he said. “Here.” He put his arms around her. “Come on. I’m sorry.”

  “It gets so I don’t know which way to turn, which way you want me to turn. I didn’t do anything. I see Maizie saying the same kind of things to you, and you don’t snap at her. I don’t understand.”

  He held her. The windows of the house reflected the folds of ashen cumulus in the moving sky. “We’d better go in,” he said finally. The storm was rolling toward them, and the sun had dipped behind the biggest part of the cloudbank.

  “I’ve streaked my mascara.”

  “No,” he said. Then: “Here.” He took the handkerchief and touched it to the corners of her eyes. “That’s better,” he said.

  “I don’t look like a raccoon?”

  “You look beautiful,” he said. And it was true.

  Through the window of the front door, they could see his father sitting in the kitchen, beyond the far end of the hallway. On the table before him was a coffeepot and some cups.

  Brewer opened the door and called, “Hey, Harry. You feel like company?” It was what he said every week.

  His father nodded without speaking. Then Brewer saw that he was listening to someone else, and in that instant a dark-haired woman peered around the frame of the kitchen door. “Hello,” she said. Brewer recognized her as one of the women his mother had been with the day she died. The woman’s name was Pauline Brill.

  “Hi,” Helena said to her. The false cheer in her voice made Brewer ache, deep.

  They entered the house and went along the shadowed hall. Brewer’s father had put black cloth over the three large pictures here—they were all of Brewer’s mother, in her days as a dancer and teacher of dance—and it was as though the cloth somehow took a degree of light out of the air. In the kitchen, the old man stood but remained where he was at the table, and in the brightness coming from the window, his face had a pallid look. Brewer walked in and took his hand.

  “You’re early,” the old man said. Then he turned to Mrs. Brill. “You remember my son, his wife Helena.”

  Mrs. Brill offered her hand. Helena touched her fingers to the other woman’s palm and then excused herself to go freshe
n up. Brewer thought of his mother working in her garden, the rough texture of the inside of her hands. This morning, getting ready to come here, Helena had sat on their bed painting her toenails, her hair bunched up in a towel, bath powder showing on her back and shoulders. For some reason, he had found it necessary to avert his eyes from her in this homey tableau, and now the image raked through his soul with the power of something taunting him.

  “How was your week?” he managed to ask his father.

  “It was okay. Maizie and Leo came by a few times. And Pauline here. Friday was bad.”

  “What happened Friday?”

  “Nobody came by. It was murder. Murder.”

  Brewer glanced at Pauline Brill again. He couldn’t help the feeling that she was here out of morbid curiosity, to look at the ones Andrea Brewer had decided to leave. “I go by here on my way to school.” She smiled. “Today I was on my way back from church, and thought I’d stop in and see how he was doing. He wasn’t in church.”

  “No,” Harry said. “I didn’t give it a thought on this particular morning.”

  “We’re fine,” Brewer said to Mrs. Brill.

  “Yeah, well, you look sleepless,” his father said to him.

  Helena came back into the room, patting the sides of her head lightly. “This weather does it to my hair,” she said.

  “You look gorgeous,” said the old man.

  She kissed him on the cheek, patted his shoulder, and her eyes swam. Brewer thought of the mascara, without wanting to.

  “I haven’t done much around here, but I did box up some of your mother’s things,” Harry said. “You can look through them if you want, see if there’s anything…” Then he seemed to drift, staring off. They watched him. “Forty-two years,” he murmured with a disbelieving shake of his head.

  Brewer said, “When did Maizie and Leo get here?”

  The old man shrugged. “A few minutes ago. Sit down—you give me a crick in my neck.”

  Brewer and his wife sat down at the table. Pauline Brill remained standing. Outside, the storm clouds had blocked out much of the light. Everything was suffused in a silvery gray glow, like dusk.

  “Anyway,” the old man said, “I’ve been deciding maybe I won’t mind leaving this place after all. It was your mother’s, really.” He shook his head.

  James Brewer leaned toward him slightly, but could think of nothing to tell him.

  “Are you sleeping any better?” Helena asked.

  The old man looked at her. “I’ve been taking the pills they gave me—they knock me out. I sleep all right but it’s not restful sleep. I feel like someone hit me over the head when I wake up.”

  There was a silence. Helena gave her husband a sorrowful look, which he could not bring himself to acknowledge. “Where’s Maizie and Leo?” he asked.

  “They’re around somewhere. They went for a walk. Said they’d be back in a while.”

  “They’re going to get caught in the rain,” said Helena in a small voice.

  Pauline Brill said, “I should be leaving. Just wanted to check on you, Harry.”

  “Pauline teaches school, too,” Harry said to his son. He looked at Mrs. Brill. “James is a principal.”

  “Yes, I knew that.”

  They were all quiet a moment. Harry lifted his cup and drank from it. He swallowed loud, then cleared his throat. “My brain’s like Swiss cheese. Can’t remember from one damn day to the next. It’s the drugs, I know. They eat away at your memory. I didn’t even know it was Sunday today till Maizie and Leo showed up.”

  Brewer said, “Have you made any other preparations to leave? You said you’d call the moving companies and get estimates. And Maizie said over the phone that Leo’s got the guest room in their place all ready for you.”

  The old man shook his head. “They’ve got a baby coming. I’m still not sure I shouldn’t’ve gone ahead with the apartment idea.”

  “Do you want us to call the movers for you?”

  He glowered. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a kid, James. I’m not some kid in that school you run. I forget things, but I’m not completely incompetent.”

  “We’re just worried about you,” Helena said, glancing at Mrs. Brill.

  Harry cradled his cup of coffee with his two big hands. “You don’t need to be worrying about me. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Well, of course not,” Helena said.

  “Helena, please,” Brewer said, then touched her wrist to reassure her. He turned to his father. “Maizie and Leo went out?”

  “Went for a walk, I told you.”

  “Did they go down toward the creek?”

  “They didn’t say where they were going, and I didn’t watch them.”

  “Stay here,” Brewer said to his wife.

  “Who’re you ordering around,” the old man said. “If I ordered your mother around like that, she’d have knocked my block off.”

  “What about the storm, James?” Helena said. “It’s a lightning storm.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “You can never tell them anything,” said the old man. “That’s what their mother used to say, too. The both of them. I told Maizie the same thing. You think she’d listen? They don’t listen, and they never have, either one of them.”

  Brewer walked away from this, back down the hall and out into the leaf-, rain-, and ozone-smelling wind. Some of the vultures must have settled to the ground for their meal, because there were fewer of them in the sky. He started across the field, and as he neared the creek he heard his brother-in-law’s voice: “Get away from here, you goddam dreadful, ugly sons of bitches. You foul, coprophagous, carrion-eating grotesqueries!”

  He saw Maizie first. She was standing, with her hands in the pockets of her slacks, on the near side of the creek. The gray light made her hair look darker. The roots were growing out of the blond dye she had used. “Hey,” she said as he approached. Across the narrow creek and up toward the opposite field, Leo stood poised with a handful of stones. The big dark birds had risen at his shout, and had settled on the lowest branch of a bare tree perhaps fifty feet away.

  “Bastards,” Leo said. “Heartless unredeemable bags of death!”

  “Leo,” Maizie called, laughing with desperation. “They’re just birds.” She turned to Brewer. “Listen to him. Where does he get that stuff?”

  “Scat!” Leo yelled.

  Lying on the ground near him, its back hoofs badly twisted in the barbed wire, was a calf, eyes bulging, tongue protruding and swollen. The eyes were frantic; there was a sort of staid terror in them, and no animation at all.

  It had been James Brewer who went to the motel room and, with the proprietor, opened the door upon the lifeless shape of his mother in the bed.

  “I keep telling him,” Maizie said. “It can’t live. Its leg is broken. We worked like crazy trying to get it loose, but most of its strength is gone. It was past help when we got here, really. Even if we could cut the wire.”

  “Oh, Jesus Christ,” said Brewer. “Let’s go back to the house.”

  “Leo,” Brewer’s sister called to her husband, “there’s nothing you can do.”

  “You go on,” Leo said, without looking back. He was climbing the fence. “I’m going to chase them away. The least they can do is wait till it dies, for Jesus’ sake.”

  “This is a lightning storm, Leo. Please.”

  “I can’t just leave it here. Maybe the storm’ll drive them away.”

  “You’re supposed to be helping me with Dad.”

  “I’ll be up in a minute, Maizie. I’ll just take a minute.”

  Brewer walked with her up to the crest of the field. The wind was now coming at them in heavy gusts, and from here they could see Leo running across the neighboring field, waving his arms and shouting, his voice almost failing to reach them because of the wind.

  “Mr. Quixote,” Maizie said. “It’s getting embarrassing.”

  “Was Pauline Brill around when you guys got here?” Br
ewer asked his sister.

  She had been thinking of something, and for a moment she didn’t answer. Then she turned to him and said, “What? Oh, she came in a little after we did.”

  They watched as Leo roused the birds from their branch. The vultures beat the air with their big wings and settled in another tree, and he was starting toward them. Beyond this, they could see the darkest part of the cloudbank moving across the open space surrounding the neighboring farmhouse.

  “I found out something,” Maizie said. “Pauline Brill let it slip.”

  Brewer waited.

  “The day Mother—the day it—she—she haggled with a man over a damn soup tureen. The day it happened, James. They went back and forth about a soup tureen. She wanted to buy it and the guy wanted more than she was willing to pay, and she tried to talk him down. You know how she could be about those things. She tried to talk him down.”

  Brewer saw again the image of his mother lying in the motel bed. It was always waiting under the stream of his thoughts. In the movies, people walked into rooms and spoke to the dead, and minutes went by; they had to touch the bodies to make sure. It always took them a stupid amount of time to figure it out.

  “Do you believe it?” Maizie said.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I can’t think about it anymore. It’s killing me trying to think about it. I’m sick of everything.”

  She made a sound almost like a laugh. “I just wish I could make any sense of it. What in the name of God she was thinking of. How could she do it to us? How could she be so cold about it? Didn’t we mean anything to her at all? Didn’t this baby I’m carrying mean anything to her? How could she just lock herself away from us forever, without even a hint or a word to us about it? She must’ve known what it would do to us.”