Wives & Lovers
Page 23
I put my drink on the end table and began to gather up the photographs.
“Did you find anything of interest?” she said.
I said, “No.”
“How unfortunate.”
“One of the perfectly seedy little risks of the job,” I said.
She took another drink. “Do you suppose I ought to look for a way to get you?”
“I guess you’ll do what you want to do.”
“You’re not even sorry, are you.”
“Yes,” I said, “in fact I am. I’m quite sorry.”
“To think I believed you were charming. It turns out you’re just a writer.”
I had got everything in a stack, and had put it carefully, as if it were fragile, aside. “I wish I could tell you how sorry I really am,” I said. When I remember this now, it seems clear that I didn’t have much respect for her anymore, and it all had to do with what I thought she did not know about her husband.
“Are you referring,” she said, “to Miss Alvarez?”
I looked at her. There was nothing at all in her eyes.
“Of course you are.”
“You know,” I said.
“William has always been like a little child in a candy store when it comes to women.” She finished her drink, and then, precisely as though I were no longer there, put away the papers and letters and photographs. I went upstairs and packed my things, and she followed me, stood in the doorway of the room, her room, watching me.
“This is where you slept?”
“Yes.”
“That’s fascinating.”
“I had to sleep somewhere,” I said.
“You don’t think much of us, do you? Or of me.”
I didn’t say anything to this.
“I suppose I should go jump off a building, the way that poor girl did.”
“Mrs. Brooker,” I said, “you wondered if I was sorry about—about prying the way I did. What about you? What about your husband? There’s a young woman dead, Mrs. Brooker. What about that?”
“Your indignation is touching,” she said.
We didn’t say much else to each other before I left. She stood by with the air of someone who has dealt the telling blow, sipping another drink now and again, tapping the toe of one shoe on the hardwood floor. As I went down the stairs she said, “They all deserve whatever they get.” It was as if she were hurling it at me as I scurried away; as if she wanted to chase me with it. There was no anger or pain in her voice—only scorn. And my answer was exactly the kind of stupid, reflexive thing one regrets later, thinking of the smart things one could have said if only one had been able to summon the presence of mind, or the courage, or the calm. I said, “I’m sorry I ever saw you.” And of course the fact is that if I’d had an hour to think of something I would no doubt have found nothing better: I was to begin a teaching job in less than two weeks, and I couldn’t imagine anything I might have to say to anyone.
I drove around the city for awhile that evening. I don’t know what I thought I might see in those quiet streets, the fine old houses and shaded lawns. I suppose I needed simply to get a feeling for the town as something continuous, something—well, ongoing and unabstract, too: children playing in the splashed blue shade of a sycamore; a dog barking from behind a white picket fence.
When it grew too dark to see, I stopped at a package store and bought myself a bottle of whiskey. I intended to get drunk, of course, but I didn’t. I went to the rental house and worked all night painting the bedroom and the guest room. Oh, I had some of the whiskey, all right. I had enough to make me sleep in spite of a feeling so desperate and hopeless that, in the morning when I woke and remembered it, I thought of drinking more of the whiskey to keep it at bay. But it was immediately upon me again, and I made myself go about the business of cleaning up the rooms, even as my conviction grew that I would not be living in that house. I had no sense of it—even with all my work on it—as a place where I might be with Elaine, one of a pair of tenants, at home.
A little later, when I headed over to the Western Union office to wire Elaine for the money to fly back to the Midwest, I had my mind half made up to tell her I was coming back for good, that I would not be taking the job after all. In fact, it was Elaine who, that week, insisted that we go through with everything as planned, that we travel east to take up residence in the rental house.
7
THAT FALL, I saw Brooker now and again, from a distance, as I’m sure most people on the campus ever saw him. He left the college that spring, and the faculty bulletin said he was starting his retirement, along with his lovely wife, Helen, in Key West. The Sweeney motel was torn down before the year was out, and I never saw Mrs. Sweeney again. The last thing I heard about her infamous husband was that he was an object of study: the doctors were hoping to find some clue to him.
Elaine and I remained in the rental house for almost two years, and then bought a place, a little bigger, and a lot older, on the other side of the campus. I would never have believed that I might stay at a small college like that, but we did stay more than seven years. All four of our children, two boys and two girls, were born there. Sometimes at night I wake up from a dream that I’m holed up in a place like Brooker’s apartment, and then our room feels like a little cave in the dark. If I can’t go back to sleep I get myself up and go look at the children. I tuck their blankets over their shoulders, remove their books or toys from their beds; I perform the tasks of a father in the night. Elaine sleeps so soundly that my kiss never wakes her. Our life together is full and perhaps often enough a little too busy; there are times when I think we just miss each other. But that is probably true of any couple.
Whenever I think of that end of summer so long ago, when I took flight from an oppression that might have unhinged me, I remember the slow, lonely hours in the air—the sense that the world below me was little more than a savage place where the weak were fed upon by the strong—and the nervous feeling when I arrived, the fear that my marriage really was over for all my indulgence in those fantasies of betrayal, and our mutual neglect. And the way it felt to see Elaine standing in the white light of the airport terminal, waiting for me.
How good it was to see her.
As I walked up the ramp toward her, lugging my packed suitcase and my unhappy experience like the same great weight, I understood at least that I loved her, and I remember my sense of wonder about this. I remember also that I thought of Sweeney, and of Brooker; that Sweeney and Brooker occurred to me then as though they were, together, the opposing principle—a naked manifestation of the forces that would always be lurking in the darker corners of the spirit. I put this from my mind, and stepped forward to greet her. “Darling,” I said. I couldn’t believe how familiar and wonderful she looked.
She smiled as if to say we would be all right now.
There was a thing in us both that moved us in each other’s direction, that made us recognizable to each other. Whatever our complications, this obdurate fact remained.
“You look beat,” she said, and she reached across the little space that divided us.
About the Author
RICHARD BAUSCH is one of his generation’s most celebrated fiction writers. He is the author of nine novels and five volumes of short stories. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, and many other national magazines and has been featured/anthologized in numerous “best of” collections, including the O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and many other prizes and honors. He teaches at George Mason University and is the coeditor of the esteemed Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.
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Richard Bausch
“Richard Bausch…brings to life characters and situations as vivid and compelling as any in contempor
ary literature. Bausch’s literary voice is reminiscent of no one else’s; he is an original.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Bausch is quite simply one of our finest storytellers.”
—Detroit News
“Bausch’s writing is like a brilliant October sky—clean, clear, and lovely.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“To read the fiction of Richard Bausch is to be hugely moved, to be in touch with the depths of experience, to be present at the creation of a monument to human worth…. He shows us how, without ever denying life’s exasperating ambiguities and its terrifying twists of fate, we might come together in love’s sustaining embrace…. Bausch has the uncanny knack for making the simplest of stories resonate with deep emotion.”
—Newsday
PRAISE FOR
The Stories of Richard Bausch
“Grade: A. Read just a few of these staggeringly literate and well-observed short fictions and you’ll soon realize that it’s not only God who dwells in the details.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“The book for which Bausch will be remembered…. A fine, fat collection of forty-two tales…distinguished by characters whose complexity is simply and economically suggested.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“In the small firmament of American writers who’re both superb novelists and eloquent short-story practitioners Richard Bausch’s star shines more brightly now than ever.”
—Richard Ford
“Richard Bausch is, simply, one of our greatest short-story writers.”
—Andrea Barrett
PRAISE FOR
Hello to the Cannibals
“Ambitious not only in its historical and geographical sweep but also in the author’s choice to confine himself, with admirable conviction and credibility, to the consciousness of two women…. Bausch writes some of the most gripping dialogue [in American letters]…. Beautifully balanced between comedy and hopelessness.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Long one of America’s finest writers, Richard Bausch has surpassed even himself in this wise, brilliant, expansive novel about two very different women—explorers both—whose parallel lives intersect in beautiful and unexpected ways. Hello to the Cannibals is a fiercely original love story as big as the world.”
—Lee Smith, author of Saving Grace and Fair and Tender Ladies
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Someone to Watch Over Me
“Mr. Bausch’s stories have a restorative quality. They demonstrate the power of crisp, unsparing lucidity. They may not cheer you up, but they’ll make you glad you read them.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Some writers seem to have an instinctive sensitivity to human emotion. They seem to be able to reach inside human experience, responding to its variety instead of its limitations, and they have the rarest of abilities to record the nuances of this experience to create literature. Richard Bausch…is one of those rare master writers, and his power continues to grow.”
—Richmond Times-Dispatch
PRAISE FOR
In the Night Season
“Wry and exacting…. A brutal and relentless thriller.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Pulse-racing suspense…. Bausch has long been one of the most expert and substantial of our writers.”
—Boston Globe
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Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea
“Bausch spins this intricate and delicious story with a wondrously tender touch…. One of the best books of the year.”
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“Bausch is a wily and subtle writer…. Brilliant passages of conversations, hilarious comic moments, and characters’ poignant attempts to communicate with one another…. Flawless.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
ALSO BY RICHARD BAUSCH
Real Presence (1980)
Take Me Back (1981)
The Last Good Time (1984)
Spirits, and Other Stories (1987)
Mr. Field’s Daughter (1989)
The Fireman’s Wife, and Other Stories (1990)
Violence (1992)
Rebel Powers (1993)
Rare & Endangered Species: Stories and a Novella (1994)
Selected Stories of Richard Bausch (THE MODERN LIBRARY, 1996)
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea (1996)
In the Night Season (1998)
Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories (1999)
Hello to the Cannibals (2002)
The Stories of Richard Bausch (2003)
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
WIVES AND LOVERS. Copyright © 2004 by Richard Bausch. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition March 2008 ISBN 9780061758652
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