Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  “I think if it’s a boy,” Maizie told him, “we’ll call him Leo, after his very strange father.”

  “Not Leo,” he told her. “And not Carl, either. I knew a kid in school named Carl and he was a total jerk. How about Judas I. Kelleher?”

  “Stop it,” she said, laughing. “Please.” A moment later, she said, “Benedict A. Kelleher,” and they laughed together.

  “Sirhan S. Kelleher,” Leo said.

  “John Wilkes Kelleher.”

  They laughed. “Genghis K. Kelleher,” he managed.

  For a moment, neither of them could speak, and it was all as lighthearted as it used to be between them.

  He said, “Suppose it’s a girl.”

  She was wiping her eyes. She frowned, took a breath. “Let’s talk about it later.”

  “I can’t think of any notorious bad women,” he said.

  “Lizzie B. Kelleher,” said Maizie, “for Lizzie Borden.”

  “How about some multicultural names? Retributia Kelleher. Or no, Corona. Corona Cigar Kelleher. Or there’s all the nouns, right? The hippie names. How about Peace? No, too obvious. Disharmony. There you go. Disharmony Kelleher. What do you think? No? War Kelleher. Psycho Kelleher. Communist Kelleher. Thoroughgoing Kelleher. Hungry Kelleher.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Maizie said.

  “How about Maizie?” he said to her, kissing her cheek. “A little Maizie for me to spoil.”

  “No,” his wife said. “I mean it now, Leo. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “There’s a fifty-fifty chance it’ll be a girl,” he said, wanting to save the mood somehow. But she had sunk into herself, and was thinking again about her mother. Gently, he said, “Honey, we could name her Andrea, if you wanted.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Leo,” she said, rising, moving away from him. “Sometimes I don’t believe you.”

  He said, “I can’t very well be expected to gauge your feelings if you never tell me what you feel.”

  She said, “I feel right now that I want to be alone.”

  TODAY, MAIZIE WALKED in from the back, kicking the doorjamb to knock the snow off her boots. The snow powdered her shoulders and glittered in her hair. She glanced at her husband, breathed “Hello,” then smiled, looking away, her eyes wide with the exertion of having climbed the porch stairs. There was something almost childlike about her face in this light, her cheeks rouged with the chill. She glanced at him and looked away again. Lately, whenever she caught him gazing at her like this, she seemed flustered, as if he had intruded on her in a private moment.

  “Is it slippery?” he asked.

  “What? Oh, not really—not in the grass. I walked in the grass.”

  “How far’d you go?”

  “Down to the end of the block.” She removed her coat, shook the snow from it, and hung it on the peg next to the door. “I guess we’ll see whether the old family lore has any truth to it. If things go according to the story, we’ll be parents by morning.” Her mother used to tell about how walking during a snowstorm had brought about the labor that produced Maizie, two weeks after she was due, twenty-nine years ago. “This doesn’t look like much of a storm, though.”

  “It’s not bad on the road?” Leo said.

  “It’s not sticking to anything but the grass. We’ll have clear roads for the ride to the hospital. If this has worked.”

  “I was thinking about James and Helena, actually. Whether they’ll have trouble getting here tonight.”

  She smiled. “You don’t believe this baby will ever be born, do you?”

  “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he said, smiling back.

  She had braced herself in the doorway to the kitchen, pushing one boot off with the toe of the other. Then she stopped and leaned her back against the frame, resting her hands on the amazing roundness of her belly. Earlier, she’d joked about not being able to button her coat, and he’d caught himself thinking about a day, sometime in the future, when she would be completely herself again; she was getting some of her natural humor back. It was true, as he had wanted to say so many times, that life insists on itself. Now she massaged the place where her navel was, with a gingerly, tentative motion of her fingertips. “I’m sore,” she said. “Right here. It feels stretched to the breaking point.”

  “Need help with the boots?”

  “I’m fine.” She pulled at the remaining boot. When it came off, she made a harrumphing sound, then dropped it and leaned against the frame again, breathing hard.

  “Your father called.”

  She said nothing.

  “About two minutes after you left.”

  She moved to the sink and put the tap on, filled a glass of water and drank.

  “He said he just wanted to know how you are.”

  “Did you tell him I’m fat?” she said, pouring the rest of the water out.

  “When you stand there like that with your back to me, it’s impossible to see that you’re pregnant.”

  “I’m shaped like a big pear.” She wet a paper towel and dabbed her cheeks with it. “I feel feverish.” She walked over to him. “Do I have a fever?”

  He touched her forehead. “Cool as a cucumber.”

  “I feel like I have a fever.”

  “You’ve been out in the cold.”

  Straightening her back, she put one hand at the base of her spine. “I’m going to go see if I can take a nap. Do I have time?”

  “James and Helena said they’d be here about eight,” he said.

  She sighed, looking at the clock above the stove. “I have a little while, then. Oh, will this baby ever come.”

  He watched her go on back into the bedroom, and then he took a package of turbot fillets out of the refrigerator and cut them into smaller pieces for frying. From the window over the kitchen sink, he could see that it was still snowing. Gusts of it swirled under the streetlamp, but the road surface was still visible.

  She called to him from the bedroom. “Did Daddy want me to call him back?”

  “Didn’t say so.”

  “Did anyone else call?”

  “A Mrs. Gehringer. Asking for you.”

  For a while there was no sound from the bedroom, and he supposed she had drifted off to sleep. But then she spoke to him from the end of the hallway. “Did Mrs. Gehringer say anything else?”

  “Just asked for you. I told her you were out, and I didn’t know when you’d be back, and she thanked me and hung up.”

  Maizie started back toward the bedroom.

  He followed her. “Who’s Mrs. Gehringer?”

  “No one,” Maizie said. “Marty’s wife. Remember Marty from work?”

  “The older guy, sure.”

  “If she calls again, I’m asleep. I’ll call her back.”

  “When do you want me to wake you?”

  “I probably won’t sleep.”

  He hesitated a moment, thinking she might say more. Then: “I’ll come in half an hour before they get here.”

  She lay down on her side, facing away from him.

  “Okay?”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “I’m just really tired.”

  “Do you want me to call and see if I can catch them?”

  She sighed. “No.”

  “It’s no trouble, Maizie, if you don’t feel like company.”

  “Please,” she said. “Just let me be quiet a while.”

  HE WAS AWARE OF most of his shortcomings, and he feared that there were others. He had never been the sort of man who dealt in subtle shadings—whether they had to do with the ebb and flow of emotions during the course of an evening, or with, say, the source of light emanating from the painted sky of a Monet—and no matter how hard he tried, no matter how many books he read to improve himself, there was no getting around his clumsiness, his nervousness in groups, his old tendency to bungle things during conversation, to put his foot in his mouth, or fail to get the joke, or lose the train of thought in mid-sentence. He was not slow
, nor at any disadvantage in terms of intelligence, though he often felt that way; the problem was that his nerves often made him go blank. There had been times when she teased him about these failures, but lately they only made her restless and impatient. And yet when she had snapped at him, or been abrupt with him, she seemed almost too contrite, as though there were something coming that she was sorry for. He had found it increasingly difficult to speak to her beyond the practical exchanges of a given day, such as whether or not she wanted him to call her brother and ask him not to come.

  She had kept so much of the pain about her mother to herself. Nothing he had been able to say could draw it out of her. “I don’t want to talk about my mother,” she told him. “Please. I don’t even want to think about her.”

  “I just wanted to say, you know, I’m—I’m here if you do want to talk.”

  “Please, Leo.”

  There was the pregnancy to worry about, and for a while there was the fact that her father was coming to live with them. He’d kept himself busy enough putting the spare room together for the old man, doing what he knew how to do best, and he took special pains with everything—even put chair railing in, and crown molding. It was a lovely room when he was finished, with its own private entrance from the outside and its own little kitchen and bathroom. All that work, and then the old man decided he didn’t want it after all.

  When it was first completed, Leo brought her in to look it over.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “I hate it.”

  He felt something drop in his heart. “I’m pretty proud of it,” he told her. “What do you hate?”

  “I hate that it’s here. That the farm is gone and that my mother—it’s the place for my father to come spend the end of his days because of all that. Do you see?”

  “It’s a place for your father, yes. I worked like crazy on it, Maizie.”

  “I know you did. Can’t you understand?” she said. “It’s all part of this whole awful thing. The farm getting sold off and my mother checking into a motel room and taking a bottle of pills and every time I heard the hammer down here, every sound it made, it just—it’s part of the same bad thing and I hate it and I’m sorry.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?” he asked her. He was almost glad that she had said this much to him about it.

  “I don’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said. “Please.”

  “No,” he said. “Listen. It’s the first thing you’ve told me about what happened, how you feel. I would’ve gladly stopped—”

  “It’s a room for Dad,” she said. “It’s just that it’s necessary at all.”

  She put her arms around him. They had been married almost six years, and her touch still thrilled him. He turned and bent down to kiss her.

  “Baby,” she said, “sweetheart,” patting his chest with the ends of her fingers. But there was something perplexed and distant in her voice.

  AT SEVEN-THIRTY, HE WALKED back to where she lay sprawled on the bed, her arms over her face. Standing in the doorway, he whispered, “You awake?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’ll be here in a little while.”

  “I had a contraction just now.” She moved her arms and looked at him, seemed to study his face. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You keep watching me.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to. I’m trying to be here for you in this.”

  “There’ll be plenty of time when it starts,” she said. “Babies don’t usually come all that suddenly. You keep hovering over me like you think I might crack open or something, like an egg.”

  He’d meant her grief over her mother. He decided not to pursue it. When she sat up, slowly, accommodating the heaviness of her belly, he reached down and took hold of her elbow, to help her stand.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  He stood back.

  “I’m sore all over.”

  “Are you having another contraction?”

  “Yes.” She sat down again, lightly massaging her abdomen, breathing deep. “It’s passing.”

  He watched her.

  “Easing off now.”

  A moment later, she began to cry.

  “What,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “Nothing, honey. Really.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “You don’t need to worry about me,” she told him. “I don’t want you worrying about me.”

  He nodded. Then, because she wasn’t looking at him, he said, “I know.”

  “Going through all this, and being pregnant on top of it.”

  Again, he nodded. Now the situation was reversed: he had thought she was talking about the baby.

  “I have to brush my hair.”

  “Right,” he said. He walked slowly with her into the living room and helped her get settled on the couch. She wanted music, so he put the stereo on, then went back into the kitchen. He got out the rest of what he would need to cook the dinner. They’d been seeing James and Helena more often since the old man had left for Tampa, and on most of these occasions Leo did the cooking. He liked it that way. It eased him inside, and when Maizie appreciated what he had done, even when the appreciation was automatic—spoken in the middle of thinking about something else—he felt happy. It was a respite from the continual feeling that he ought to be doing more to make their lives change for the better, more to help the healing process, without knowing what that thing might be. Because of her mother, because of the pregnancy, he couldn’t seek an answer from her about himself—about her feelings for him—because he did not want to become only another element of her suffering.

  And maybe he was that, anyway.

  He hadn’t been working very long when she came into the room and crossed to the window over the sink, looking out at the snow. “Still not sticking to the road,” she said.

  “I saw.” He watched her. “Have there been any more contractions?”

  “No. It’s just Braxton-Hicks, I’m sure.”

  A moment later, she said, “They’re late.”

  “Probably took it slow,” he said. He thought she looked tired. “I’m sure James would understand if you wanted to cancel a thing like tonight.”

  “You know,” she said, “I never thought you’d be so comfortable with members of my family. You and James seem to get along so well now. And you used to be so afraid they’d disapprove of you.”

  “I guess that’s—been a fear of mine.” He felt his throat tighten, and this surprised him. Lately, the slightest things moved him. “I want to keep us all together,” he managed. “It’s a family, after all.”

  His own family was long gone—dead, or scattered to the winds. He had a cousin somewhere in Oregon, another in New Orleans, still another somewhere in Illinois, one or two in New York. His father’s brother lived in northern California, with a wife and three stepsons. He rarely heard from any of them. He had met Maizie at college, and when she brought him to these Virginia hills to meet her family, he found himself doing and saying absurd things in an effort to ingratiate himself. He loved them immediately. They were so intelligent and attractive, so fortunate, and they seemed to contain elements of the charm and elegance of the house they lived in, as though each of them had sprung naturally from its graceful arches and sun-lighted, tall-ceilinged rooms. He was admiringly jealous of their stories, their shared history, and their happy knowledge of one another, and he envied them even their irritations and chidings and petty quarrels—all those familiar little aggravations and gibes that seem to arise from nowhere and yet are a part of the daily assumption, the lived-in confidence, that the other person’s feeling for you will always be the same. It seemed to him that in order to find their way through the anguish of the thing that had happened to them, they must try to concentrate on what was good about them, as a family. To do this with all their hearts, and to take no one and nothing for granted.

  Maizie looked out the window over the sink again. “The road�
��s getting a little covering now.”

  “I hope they’re not stuck somewhere.”

  “An excuse for necking.” She gave him a small, sardonic smile. Another of her mother’s old stories was about driving back to Virginia from her family home in Michigan, in 1951—how the car had got stuck in the snow, and how she and their father had kept warm through most of the night by necking in the back seat under a pile of blankets.

  “Want to see if we can get to Michigan tonight?” Leo said.

  “Don’t,” Maizie said. “Why do you keep calling it up?”

  “Honey, you brought it up that time.”

  She had already begun to correct herself. “I’m sorry, you’re right. Let’s just leave it.”

  Lights pulled through the snow and into the driveway, then went out.

  “Is this them?” Leo asked.

  “It’s a pickup truck,” Maizie said. She went to the door and opened it, pushed the storm door out. Someone was coming along the walk, carefully, almost falling down in the slickness. Leo moved to stand behind Maizie, who now held the door open and said, “Yes?”

  It was Pauline Brill. She stepped up onto the porch and stamped her boots. “Hello,” she said. “Sorry to bother you. You’re not eating, are you?” She stamped the boots again.

  “Come in,” Maizie said. “Leo, you remember Mrs. Brill.”

  Leo said he did. They moved into the kitchen, and he offered her a cup of something hot. She demurred, with a grateful smile, and said there was no time. She had not come to stay. They spoke of the weather and of the fact that Maizie was overdue to have her baby, and though they joked and smiled and seemed relaxed, there was of course the one subject they couldn’t speak of, and its stubborn presence behind their talk made everything else seem produced, somehow. Mrs. Brill did not take off her coat. Maizie sat at the table and Leo leaned against the sink, and when all the pleasantries were done with, there seemed nothing left to say.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Brill. “I’m actually here to see if I might enlist you both in an effort to get the school bond issue put on the ballot in the fall.” She reached into the pocket of her coat and brought out some sheets of paper, folded and dog-eared, water-spotted. “This is not a good night for carrying a petition around, but it was the only night I could spare this week. You know Pamela is getting married.”