Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  GOOD-BYES

  MAIZIE, MY DARLING, I’m sitting here trying to find something to say to you, and all I can think about is how it was when I was a kid and ran through the rooms of an empty house, the echoes bouncing around. I’m feeling pretty blue tonight. And the echoes are bouncing around here, of course. Every move I make gets repeated in the walls. It’s so strange to have this house empty again, and maybe it’s a good thing that your mother isn’t here to see it like this. I remember you and James running through these rooms when we were first here, before the furniture got moved in, both of you yelling so loud I had to get after you. Tonight I feel like a little kid, and the way my voice echoes in the walls is at least partly what’s doing it to me. It makes me more certain than ever that I shouldn’t move in with you and Leo, and I’m sorry for all his hard work on the room. But you’ll find some use for it, I’m sure.

  You were so anxious to buttonhole me when we moved your mother’s things out of here, and I guess I wasn’t very helpful. I know I wasn’t. I’m not the best man for getting things said that need saying, and there’s a lot I miss, I know. James told me he was joking when he said that about how I miss so many close calls I ought to be an umpire, but I know he was serious enough, too. You both think I’m pretty dense, no doubt. And even so, you think I’m keeping something back, that I’m lying when I say I really don’t have a very definite idea why your mother did what she did. You think there’s something hidden, some secret we kept from you, and there just isn’t. For instance, you both knew about it when she had her trouble about Buddy Wells. You both knew how close we were to separating.

  I just don’t have any clear ideas about it, and I wish that weren’t so. I wish I could say I knew for certain what she was thinking about, or that I’d seen anything in her behavior or heard something in her voice.

  To be exactly truthful, I thought she was happy.

  I thought she was handling the move far better than I was. After all, she was the one who took charge, who went through all the papers with the real estate people, and showed the house and grounds. It was your mother who took us through each stage of the sale of the property and all the settlements. She wouldn’t let me have anything to do with it. I had been having my usual trouble sleeping, and of course my stomach was giving me fits. The whole thing had me rattled pretty bad. But she seemed to have warmed to the idea and got comfortable with it—I remember, I even questioned her about it on that last day—at no time did she seem unfocused or despondent or indifferent.

  Anyway, I refuse to believe that she could’ve done it just because we were leaving the house. That’s a hardship, maybe, but nothing to kill yourself over.

  There were, after all, things to look forward to. Being a grandparent, for instance. And having some time and money to travel a little. She always wanted to go to Rome and look at the Sistine Chapel in person. And there were all those Donatelli statues. The tombs Michelangelo did. You know me, Maizie. I don’t know much about Art, but we were saving up for the trip. I’d love to have been able to give it to her. I would’ve let her teach me like she always said she wanted to. We’d go on one of those posh two-week deals, maybe. Or a combination cruise. Something really elegant. We actually planned it. I put extra dollars away for years, and I don’t have any idea how much she saved on her own. But somehow school and work and the farm—things got in the way. She held the purse strings, of course, and she started dipping into the Italy money so she could get for you kids the things she wanted you to have. She didn’t mind, either. Neither of us had any regrets on that score.

  But I want to try and give you everything you want to know, Maizie. And so I’ve decided to tell you a story about your mother and me, and it starts with the night she told me about Buddy Wells. I knew Wells a little, enough to see that whatever else he was, he wasn’t the sort of man who could’ve been much use to your mother. I think I also sensed that he was a little enamored of her. Wells was the sort of man who couldn’t keep his own emotions out of his face, there wasn’t a single subtlety anywhere in him. They began with a friendship, like a lot of people—he was bringing his daughter to your mother’s dance classes, and they’d got to talking. The daughter charmed her especially. She invited him and the daughter to a party or two that we had, back when we were entertaining a lot. One day, out of the blue, Buddy made a declaration of love to her. It shocked her, apparently, though I can’t imagine why. She didn’t know what to do with it at first. For a few weeks she kept the whole thing to herself. She even sought ways to keep from ever being alone with him. But then she found that she was thinking about him in the nights, and wondering what he might be doing during the days. She decided she felt something for him, and on an evening toward the beginning of summer, she decided to tell me this.

  “Buddy Wells has fallen in love with me,” she said.

  It was a Thursday evening after her spring recitals, and I had made my own dinner and settled into my chair with the crossword puzzle. I said, “Anyone could’ve told you that.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said.

  I said, “Sure I do.”

  There was such a look of alarm on her face, Maizie.

  I said, “What is it?”

  “I feel the same way,” she said.

  I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. It hadn’t quite sunk in yet.

  “I’ve fallen in love with him,” she said.

  I said, “You’ve—” but nothing would come.

  “He wants me to move in with him.”

  I said, “You’re joking.”

  “I don’t know how to put this any other way,” she said. “I know it sounds silly.” That was what she said. Those were her words.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said.

  She stammered like a little girl in a school lesson, but couldn’t get anything out.

  I waited.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Harry, you know what I’m going to say.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t have the slightest idea.”

  “I’m moving in with him. He’s in love—we’re—we—”

  “You mean this?” I said to her. “This is serious.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “Well, is it or isn’t it?”

  “I’m not making it up, Harry.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m not making it up,” she said again.

  I said, “Let me get this straight—”

  She said, “Please, I told you. Don’t make me go through it again.”

  “All right, Andrea,” I said. “Suppose you tell me what you want me to say.”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You think you do, though,” I said.

  And she nodded. It was as if she were relenting somehow, as if I’d forced the answer out of her.

  “Why don’t you tell me instead of making me say it for you?” I said.

  She began to cry.

  “Have you slept with him?” I said.

  Maizie, it was as if I’d thrown something at her. But a husband has the right to ask certain things. She said, “Not—not yet.”

  “But you’re going to,” I said.

  “I don’t know.” This was said with a good deal of frustration, and again it was as if I’d been badgering her about it.

  “You came in here to tell me something. Is that all of it? I don’t see why I should be put into the position of a goddam inquisitor about it, since you are my wife.”

  “I don’t know,” she said again. “I know I love him.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake,” I said, “let me know when you know the rest of it.” She had her purse in her hands and was standing over by the door. I was sitting more or less right where I’m presently sitting. She’d come through from the bedroom, where she’d been most of the evening. It’d been a normal evening. There hadn’t been anything that would have led me to suspect a situation like this. I said, “Where are you going now?”

  She sai
d, “I don’t know.”

  I said, “This is an appalling case of ignorance on your part.”

  “Please, Harry,” she said.

  I said, “If only you knew how silly you look, mooning over that open-faced kid. You’re funny, you know it? A laughingstock. No, you’re ridiculous. I can’t believe that you, with your goddam reserve and your refinement and your book and garden clubs and study groups and Arts Leagues, could be willing to make such a public fool of yourself this way, being sluttish like this with a kid ten, twelve years younger than you are.”

  She started to cry.

  “Really, Andrea. I think you’ve gone off the deep end. Look at you. This kid’s in his thirties, for Christ’s sake. You were nursing James when Buddy Wells was in elementary school. It’s so silly. Silly and sordid. What do you think?”

  She stood there crying, not looking at me. And I felt suddenly almost sorry for her. Part of me sensed that she had blundered into the whole thing, and that she was perfectly and painfully aware of how ridiculous she had become.

  I sensed, too, as any husband would, that it all had to do with me. But there were other reasons for me to feel that way, as you’ll see soon enough. And it was what put me over the edge. When she started toward the bedroom, I followed her. I said worse things. I was getting carried away now, and even my sorrow for her couldn’t stop me. I told her just what I’d do if she left—how the talk would go among the people we knew, and what I’d make sure you and James and the rest of the family understood about it, how she had carried on with Wells behind my back and betrayed everything we stood for. And I said that if I had any say at all, she would spend the rest of her life in Buddy Wells’s circle, alone, without anyone to turn to when things went sour, as they certainly would, with somebody like Buddy Wells. I reminded her of her age, and of you and James—especially I reminded her of you, and what it would mean to you, starting into your womanhood. I was shouting, letting her have all of it, things I hadn’t ever said to her, and wanted to say to her. Because what I never said to you or James or to anyone was that all my married life I’d carried the feeling with me that the woman with whom I was spending my days lived her real life separate from me. Somehow, Maizie, in a way I couldn’t ever understand or appreciate, I wasn’t the husband she apparently needed.

  I stood there watching her cry, and I had said everything there was to say, and then I almost touched her shoulder. I knew I had gone under her pride and wounded her, and even as I was proud that I’d struck some of the wind out of her sails, I felt sorry.

  I felt sorry, Maizie, but as you know it didn’t stop me from calling you and James and getting both of you into the fight to keep her. I believed, and I still believe, it would have been a terrible thing for her to have gone with Buddy Wells. But then, given my disappointment and my anger, I thought for a time that maybe we should separate. I have always believed that loving involves an act of will—or, really, many acts of will. In my mind, she had decided against me, and as the days went by I found that I cared less and less about keeping her. I felt that I had been right about her. I had not imagined that she always withheld something. I watched you and James fight with her, and just couldn’t bring myself to do or say much of anything.

  One afternoon, as she was dressing to go to her studio, I said, “Have you talked about your little love affair with any of your friends?”

  “They don’t know anything.”

  “What about his friends?”

  “No,” she said.

  “You can trust that?” I said.

  “I can trust it.”

  “You have my permission to go with the son of a bitch,” I said. “I won’t fight you.”

  She looked at me. She had been pulling one shoe on. “What?”

  “You heard me,” I said. “I’m not going to try and stop you anymore. I’ll even help you put the best face on it. Just get it over with quick.”

  She waited a few seconds. “I don’t guess I deserve you being kind,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m being practical.”

  “Well, maybe so,” she said.

  “You’re free,” I told her. “And that’s that.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  And I thought that was that.

  When she told me she was staying, it was as simple as saying the time of day. I was in the kitchen late the next morning, and she came home from the studio and walked up the back steps.

  “Harry,” she said. “I’m home.”

  I had been eating a bowl of cereal. I barely looked up.

  “I’m not going to go away, either.” She said this peering at me through the screen in the door.

  I said, “Go or stay. It’s up to you.”

  We didn’t exchange another word that day, but in the morning we had coffee together and talked about the leaves changing on the side of the mountain, how they were always the first to change every year. She wondered about you, struggling with your classes. And about James. It was very ordinary and maybe a little hollow, but it was friendly, too. It was even conciliatory, I think. And we just went on from there. It wasn’t long before we’d got far enough past it that we could talk about it. And then we could forget it, too. I believe, Maizie, that we were a fairly happy couple. There are pictures. You can see it in her face. She kept herself far from me in a lot of ways over the years, but she was never devious or dishonest. It was not in her to be dishonest. And those pictures show her being happy. We did talk about Buddy Wells on that last day, but it was me who brought it up.

  We bantered about him, in fact. I said something about how much money she’d have if she were Buddy Wells’s widow. It seemed to me that she was amused. And later I told her that she was still beautiful, and that I loved her. Because I did. I did love her, Maizie. All the time.

  And I ask you to imagine how it can feel like starvation to be intimate with someone you can’t really reach—the sort of person whose love is somehow only partly there, who holds back something essential that another man was freely given, almost at the cost of a long marriage and a family.

  I don’t think I’m excusing myself. I wasn’t the best husband a woman could have—I don’t suppose James was so far wrong with his joke—but I’m not to blame, and after all, I am the one who’s still here. I admit that my first reaction to the news of what she’d done was wondering what I’d done to head her there. I blamed myself, more than you or James ever could, and I know that some part of both of you does blame me—for not seeing clearly enough, for not sensing that something was so wrong.

  But I refuse to accept any blame now, harsh as that sounds. If it were possible to speak to the dead and be heard, I’d tell her the same thing. I’d say, “Andrea, listen to me. No pity, Andrea. None. No excuses, no regret for anything, and no sympathy, either, for what you’ve done to us.” And I’d mean it.

  But as I won’t accept any blame, I won’t place it, Maizie. She did what she felt she had to do, and I can’t change it, no matter how much I wish I could, and I don’t blame her for it. I accept it as a fact, what she decided to do with her life. You and your brother will have to decide how you feel about it. When I close the door on this old house, I’ll walk away recalling how your young voices sounded in it, and it’ll hurt me exactly as it’s supposed to, and I guess it’ll even make me wish I hadn’t finally said no to the room in your house.

  But I won’t entertain one regret about anything. Not one.

  It’s midnight now, and I just said my name aloud, and listened to the echo. Like most people my age, it’s terribly hard for me to accept the idea that my boyhood memory of being fascinated with the way rooms sound when they’re empty means nothing, or that thinking of it now means nothing, and I’m afraid that’s what your poor mother tried to say to us—that none of it has any meaning. But that was how she saw things. I don’t know what else to say about her now, or how else to think about it. She finally said no to everything, like a kid throwing a tantrum in a public place.

>   And I still love her.

  I wish she was in the next room. I wish she’d chosen some other way to deny us herself. I’d like to think of her being alive and happy, even if it had to be somewhere else. Even if it had to be with a man like Buddy Wells, and even if I hated her for it.

  Love, Harry

  DIURNAL

  WHEN MAIZIE’S MOTHER wasn’t the subject behind their talk, they found time to be easy with each other, and to be like other expectant couples. They had taken the Lamaze classes, and done the exercises at home, and they had discussed names, and made plans. He had dreamed up whole lives for this child, made of triumphs and love, and sometimes he felt as though he had cut through the carapace of sorrowing distraction and worry that encased his wife. On one occasion, lying in bed sleepless in dawn light, they had even teased and laughed about the names, trying absurd ones on each other. “How about Attila H. Kelleher?” Leo said. “No, I have it, how about Adolf H. Kelleher?”