Wives & Lovers

by Richard Bausch

  “No,” I said, “I’m fine.”

  “I have a cook named Clara, but she’s sick.”

  She had told me this on the day I registered—she’d repeated it three or four times since. I had begun to wonder what this Clara must be like to be missed so much.

  “I’m fine,” I told her.

  She shook her head. “Do you believe it? A little girl.” Then she turned and pointed at the motel office. “The paper’s right inside the door there. It’s on the front page if you want to read about it. My husband a rapist, for God’s sake.”

  “It’s a terrible thing,” I said as she marched toward the office. I think she meant to get the newspaper and bring it out to me, but then the phone rang in my room, and she said over her shoulder that I could come see it when I had the time. I went back into the room, certain that the call was from Elaine. I said “Howdy” into the telephone, and was greeted with a silence. “Hello?” I said.

  “Uh, yes. This is William Brooker. Listen, I wanted to ask you…” There was another silence, during which he sighed, like someone backing down from something. “Look, this is a little embarrassing. I mean I suppose it could wait until tonight. But I’d had a few drinks before I—before the party, you see.”

  “Yes?” I said, trying to sound only politely interested.

  “Well—I said something last night—you know. We were all standing there and that extremely choice young lady was talking to Dr. Keller, and—you remember I said something a little off-color to you…”

  “I didn’t quite hear what it was,” I lied.

  “Oh. Well, I was wondering if you thought the young lady might’ve heard me. Or Dr. Keller.”

  “I wouldn’t be able to say for sure.”

  “Yes, well. I shouldn’t bother you with it. You say you didn’t hear it at all?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I don’t like to offend,” he said.

  And I was suddenly seized with a perverse desire to make him repeat the phrase that had so unnerved me the night before. “What was it, anyway?” I asked him.

  “Oh, nothing. Just something a little—a silly little comment, you know. A joke. An impolite little aside. What I’d like to do to her—that sort of thing.”

  “Well,” I said, wanting just as suddenly to let him off the hook, “I’m sure no one heard you.”

  “But—you said you couldn’t be sure.” Precision was Brooker’s talent, someone had said.

  “I’m reasonably sure, Professor Brooker. I mean if I couldn’t hear you I don’t think anyone else could.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Good.” I had the feeling that I had just heard the tone he took in his classroom, leading a group of neophytes through the thicket of Twentieth-Century Politics.

  “So,” I said.

  He said, “Well, I guess I’ll see you tonight.” Then, exactly as though it were an afterthought, he told me I ought to wear a suit and tie for the occasion.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “There’ll be one or two other people here, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” I said. And I didn’t really hear him as he talked about who his other guests would be, because I was thinking about the fact that I didn’t have a suit or a tie, and so would have to go out and buy them. I had exactly twenty-two dollars in my pocket, and there was perhaps another forty in the checking account I’d opened only that week. The next installment of my advance wouldn’t arrive for days.

  Brooker had hung up before I could muster the courage to apprise him of this, and then I decided I wouldn’t want him to know under any circumstances. I would simply go without if I had to.

  Of course I knew I would do no such thing. I would probably have been willing to steal what I needed; but as it turned out this wasn’t necessary. Mrs. Sweeney’s son was about my height and build, and he had left four suits behind—this was apparently his whole stock of them—along with about five hundred ties, all given to him by his former stepfather, the rapist and child molester, who according to Mrs. Sweeney had had a thing about ties, had collected them like somebody hoarding a thing that would soon be rare and hard to get. I chose a plain blue one, and a gray suit. I tried the suit on, standing in Mrs. Sweeney’s spare room, and it fit well enough. Mrs. Sweeney made me wait while she ironed my shirt, and then that evening, after I’d got myself dressed and ready to go, she fussed with me, straightened the tie and brushed my arms and shoulders, her boy, going off to his first party in town. It seemed the appropriate thing to kiss her on the cheek before I left, and I’m afraid I embarrassed her.

  “Good Lord,” she said, but then she squeezed my elbow. I almost asked what time she wanted me home.

  3

  BROOKER’S DIRECTIONS were characteristically precise. I had given myself a few minutes to allow for any trouble finding the place, and so I was early. I walked up the sidewalk in front of the building, already feeling stiff and uncomfortable in my suit and my rapist’s tie, and Brooker came out on the landing and called to me. He was in shirt sleeves, the sleeves rolled up past his wrists.

  “So glad you could make it,” he said.

  By the time I got up to him he had rolled the sleeves down and was buttoning them.

  “I guess I’m a little early.”

  He ushered me inside and offered me a drink. Anything I wanted. I told him I’d wait awhile, and he excused himself and went upstairs. I sat in the living room, in the middle of his white sofa, my hands on my thighs, my back ramrod-stiff. It wasn’t the sort of room you could relax in. There was a fireplace, and a baby grand piano, and on every available surface there were figurines and cut-glass shapes and statuary. The chairs and the love seat and the ottoman were not in the sort of proximity that would make conversation very easy, and the wallpaper was of a dark red hue that was really rather gloomy. I remembered that I had come to look at the place, and in an odd shift of mind I had an image of me sitting there with the whole apartment to myself. Whatever else this room was, it was luxuriously appointed, and I knew I was going to enjoy the luxury of entering and leaving it as I pleased.

  Now I sat back a little and breathed a satisfied sigh, while upstairs I heard Brooker and his wife moving around. Twice I heard her heels as she crossed from one room to another, and then she came down the stairs. She was a striking woman in her mid-forties, with wonderful square shoulders and deep, clear blue eyes, and she was wearing a white evening gown that made her skin look marvelously tan and smooth. She offered me her hand (I nearly brought it to my lips), and asked, in a voice that was warm and rich and full of humor, if I would come keep her company in the kitchen while she got things ready for the evening. Apart from being a little breathless at the sight of her, I was now beginning to wonder if I hadn’t come more than a little early.

  I said, “I must’ve got the time wrong, Mrs. Brooker.”

  “Call me Helen,” she said, leading me into the kitchen. “And you shouldn’t worry about being early—we’re just running a little late.”

  The kitchen was a light-filled, high-ceilinged room that looked as though it might’ve been transported, brick by brick, board by board, from one of the family farms in Brooker’s native Minnesota. She indicated that I was to sit at the table in the center of the room, and then began opening cabinets and hutches, bringing out dishes, glasses, boxes of crackers, knives, and forks.

  “Can I help?” I said.

  “Absolutely not. I could never stand servants in the house because I wanted to do it all myself, and as you can see I can’t even let a guest be polite without launching into an explanation of this—quirk of mine.” She paused. “Do you like the kitchen?”

  “It’s a very nice room,” I said.

  “Well, and you’re going to be calling it home, aren’t you.”

  “For a month. I guess so.”

  She went about her work, slicing cheese, arranging crackers on the plates, and making dip, and I sat watching her.

  “William says your wife isn’t
with you.”

  “No.”

  “Too bad,” she said. “Do you miss her?”

  “Very much.”

  “William travels so much. It’s just odd that we’re both going this time.”

  “I’ll take good care of things,” I said.

  She waved this away as if there could be no doubt about it, and then without asking what I wanted she fixed me a glass of bourbon on ice. “If this isn’t to your taste I’ll drink it myself.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, and she gave me an odd look, as though my answer had surprised her. I sipped the whiskey, and she went back to setting things in order for the evening’s guests, who were apparently arriving now—we could hear Brooker greeting someone out in the hall.

  “William will think I stole you from him,” she said. “Do you mind if I have a sip of your drink? I don’t really want to have a whole one.”

  I handed her my glass. She took a long, slow sip, then breathed. I have loved the taste of whiskey since I was very young and my father would take me out on the porch at home and let me sip it out of sight of my mother, and I have never seen anyone—nor, I believe, have I myself ever enjoyed a sip of whiskey as much as this stately and beautiful woman did that night in Brooker’s kitchen.

  “Very good,” she said, and smiled, handing the glass back to me. There was something a little hurried about the way she did it, and then I realized that Brooker was coming down the hall. I put the drink down on the table in front of me and tried to look calm as he entered the room, leading Dr. Keller, who did not remember having met me, and who, again, asked if I was tenure-track. We had got past all that and in the next moment Brooker asked his wife if she wanted a glass of bourbon.

  “Not on your life,” she said.

  “I always ask and she always refuses,” Brooker said. “I don’t know if I like disciplined people.”

  “Why don’t you have some?” she said to him.

  “No,” he said, “I’m off it, too.”

  Dr. Keller also declined, and so now I was the only person in the group who was drinking. I found this a little irritating, and I made up my mind that I was going to sip the drink very slowly; I might even ask for another. I sat watching Mrs. Brooker put the finishing touches on a plateful of cheeses and cold cuts, while the two men stood talking about diets and diet drinks. Their conversation seemed so banal that I wondered if they weren’t trading sides of a sort of running joke, but they were serious: Brooker’s full attention was on the college president as he listed his various reasons for preferring iced tea without sugar over the sugarless colas. And then I noticed something else. Helen Brooker was staring at me. She had finished with everything and was simply standing there with her legs crossed at the ankles, gazing at me with all the frankness of a child. When I turned a little and met her gaze, she smiled and offered to refresh my glass.

  IT WAS AN ODD EVENING. The other guests arrived, two couples. They were people of Brooker’s age and class, and Dr. Keller introduced the men as members of the Board of Visitors of the college.

  “This is our writer,” he said, presenting me to them. “Professor Brooker was so kind as to invite him here tonight.”

  The two men shook my hand, and their wives nodded at me from the snowy expanse of the couch. I sat in one of the wing chairs near the fireplace and was promptly forgotten. Brooker had begun to hold forth about the Kennedy years, and I noticed that his wife sat staring at her nails while he talked. She had heard it all before, of course, and she was doing a bad job of disguising her boredom. Finally she got up and carried a couple of empty plates into the kitchen, and when she came back out she had a glass of whiskey. She sat down next to the wives, and when she crossed her legs and let her high-heeled shoe slip to the toe of the dangling foot, my blood jumped. I went into the kitchen to pour my own whiskey, and I think I entertained for a moment the rather puerile fancy that she would make her way to me there, and that she might confess something to me, something I could console her for. But no one came, and in a little while I carried my fresh drink back to the chair by the fireplace.

  The others were all drinking iced tea from a tray on the coffee table. I sipped my drink, and watched Helen Brooker sip hers. The talk was general now, and very stilted and hesitant; there seemed no common history for any of them to talk about—or there was a common history that all of them were avoiding as a subject for talk. In any case, I grew very tired and so deeply bored that I may even have nodded off once or twice. When Mrs. Brooker stood to go fix herself another drink, I got up, too. I meant to leave, but before I could make my apologies she took me by the arm and walked with me into the kitchen.

  “You haven’t really seen the place,” she said.

  “It’s fine,” I said.

  “We keep our bourbon in here to discourage our guests.” She was pouring it into her glass. “Billy doesn’t like trying to talk to drunks.”

  “Billy.”

  “Brooker.” She tipped her head slightly to the side. “Doesn’t it sound like a little innocent boy: Billy Brooker? That’s what they called him, you know.”

  “Who?” I said.

  “The Kennedys.”

  “Did you know him then—when he was with the Kennedys?”

  “I worked for him. I was his secretary.”

  “You must’ve been very young.”

  She took a sip of her drink. “Billy’s thirteen years older than I am. He was forty-two and I was twenty-nine. I was just out of a very unhappy marriage, and of course he was—well, he was the famous Mr. Brooker, though I must say I was really in love with Jack Kennedy more than anything else. We were all in love with him—the whole staff. And of course I voted for him because I thought he was so handsome. A lot of women and men did that, you know.”

  “I wasn’t old enough to vote, but I guess I would have,” I said.

  “You were fascinated with him.” It was as though she were leading me toward something.

  “I liked his speeches.”

  “He was an awful womanizer, you know.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Are you a womanizer?” She smiled, swallowed some of her drink, turning to face her husband, who came into the room from the back door and stood for a moment, looking at her and then at me.

  “Hogging the booze,” he said.

  “Here,” said his wife, lazily handing him hers. “If I have any more I’ll wind up with a headache.”

  “Cheers,” Brooker said, and drank.

  “Have our guests departed, Billy?”

  “They’ve departed.”

  “I’ve got to go,” I said.

  “Why don’t you have another drink?” Brooker said. “You haven’t really seen the place yet.”

  So I stayed for another glass of bourbon, which was enough to make me a little bleary-eyed and giddy for the drive back to the motel. Brooker walked me through the upstairs rooms of the apartment, including his wife’s reading room, as he called it (it looked like a bedroom), and his study. She excused herself and went off to another room to bed, leaving the smell of her perfume everywhere.

  “Your wife is very beautiful,” I said to him when she had gone.

  “Yes,” he said, as if we had agreed on something quite unimportant.

  The upstairs rooms were spacious and comfortable-looking, and there was a television room I knew I would spend a lot of time in. I wasn’t planning to try to do much writing. In fact, I have always been the sort of writer who works best out of a predictable routine, and with plenty of order and harmony around him. Brooker showed me his study last. It was a small book-lined room with a desk and two straight-backed chairs, and with exactly the harried, busy-paper look you’d expect it to have. “I’ve been working on something,” he said to me, and took one of the pages from his desk. On the wall above the desk were photographs of Brooker among the powerful; and of his wife, wearing something flowing and diaphanous and white, in various balletic attitudes obviously meant to appear candid, and just as
obviously posed for. Brooker apparently caught my interest in these photographs, for he put the page back down and touched the corner of the nearest photograph—of Helen standing in a bath of white light, her slender arms almost hidden in the liquid folds of the gown. He moved the frame just so, and then stared at the picture.

  “Helen wanted to be an actress for a while,” he said. “She wasn’t bad.”

  “She’s beautiful,” I said, and realized that I was sounding more and more like a love-struck high school boy.

  Rather dryly, Brooker said, “Yes, we agreed about that before.” And then, giving me a fatherly smile: “I can bear any number of repetitions concerning the beauty of my wife, lad.”

  We went downstairs, and I declined what was—I was certain—a decidedly halfhearted offer of another drink; in any case, I thought it was time to leave. He stood in the light of the landing and asked if I was okay to drive, and I assured him I was, though I had my doubts. As much as I love the taste of bourbon, I have never been able to drink more than a glass or two without getting very unsteady on my feet. When I pulled out onto the highway there was an immediate blurring of the lines of the road ahead, and I held tight to the wheel, going very slow, feeling more sloshed every second.

  Mrs. Sweeney was sitting under her yellow porch light, with her flyswatter and her book. She stood and walked over to me.

  “My goodness,” she said when I staggered.

  I took her husband’s tie off and held it out to her.

  “I don’t want it,” she said.

  I put it into the suit-coat pocket. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve had a little too much to drink.”

  “Your wife called,” she said. “I waited up to tell you.”

  “You’re very kind,” I said.

  “They showed pictures,” Mrs. Sweeney said. “On the news. They showed him being taken into court. He was covering his face.”

  There wasn’t anything I could think of to say to this.

  “It was on the news. They think he killed a lot of little kids and buried them somewhere. I was married to him all that time.”