Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

  “So we’re gonna be at war with Afghanistan?”

  “Looks like it.”

  They were silent for a few moments.

  “I’d like to see us rebuild both towers even taller than before,” Jack said. “And with both buildings culminating in the shape of a fist with the middle finger raised, facing east.”

  “Jack,” Clara said. But she smiled.

  “Tom’s afraid they might use this as an excuse to go after Iraq.”

  “That’s alarmist,” said Clara. “Isn’t it?”

  “Well, there’s a lot of worry about the nuclear thing, and the chemicals. Biological weapons. That pig is importing uranium, they say. And we know he’s used chemicals and gas on his own people.”

  “Have to see about the train to Memphis,” said Faulk. “Sorry.”

  “Stay with us,” Clara urged.

  “Gotta set out finding us a house. Natasha’s furniture’s due to arrive—well, the first day it might arrive is tomorrow, I think. They get a window of ten days. But God I hope it’s sooner.” He sighed, briefly contemplating the new life. “We should’ve settled on something before she left Washington, but it just wasn’t possible.”

  “She’ll want to look with you, don’t you think?”

  “You’ll stay with Iris,” Jack said. “Wasn’t that the plan?”

  “I guess.” Faulk looked into the water and ice in his glass, and rattled it a little. He drank. The water tasted faintly metallic. He held the glass toward his aunt, remembering that he had awakened in the morning of this terrible long day with a hangover. “Do you think I could have a little whiskey in this?”

  2

  “Oh, Jesus God.” The words coming from her own mouth awakened her, and she lay crying silently for many minutes. Here, in her mind’s eye, was Duego standing over her. She had the realization that this had played and replayed in her fitful dozing the whole night.

  A moment later, the idea of Michael Faulk inside the squat cloud in New York, among the dead and dying, flickered across her consciousness with the picture of herself lying in the sand, drunk and stoned, kissing Duego on the beach in Jamaica, before Duego showed himself to be what he was. Putting her hands over her eyes, she attempted to erase all the images, sobbing.

  In the night, after the long time in the bathroom, she had come out and wrapped herself in a robe and simply collapsed across the bed.

  Now, trying to be quiet, not wanting Constance to hear her, she reached for the room phone and rang the front desk. No answer. She pulled the robe tight around herself and went into the bathroom. There was pain where he had pushed into her, and she took the little mirror attached to the sink and tried to examine herself. Her inner thighs were red, and it felt as though there might be a little tear just inside the opening. Moving her finger gently there, she felt only the slight sting of it but no abrasion.

  There was no more blood, either. Her foot hurt, where she had kicked him, and her middle toe was bruised.

  She took another long warm bath, trembling and washing herself gingerly with the soft rag. The muscles of her hips ached and were also tender to the touch. Probably there would be bruises there, too. She would need time for that to fade. She wanted desperately to find a way to make it so nothing had happened. Nothing. It would be something not done, not lived through. It would be something that had not ever been.

  She heard herself breathing and then realized, slow, that the breathing was a low scream. She stood there in the steam of the bath, dripping wet, turning in a small circle in the light.

  Finally she applied a towel to her body and willed herself to clean her teeth, nearly retching when she spit the water.

  After managing with her trembling hands to put her hair back in a ponytail, she dressed and went out into the hall and to the elevators. This took all the courage she could muster. She saw no one.

  Down in the lobby, there were people on the phones. She went to the front desk, where Mrs. Ratzibungen stood writing in a notepad. “I want to call my fiancé,” Natasha said to her in a shaky voice—oddly, painfully aware of the frightful ordinariness of the words. She pressed on: “They usually put a call through to my room from him about this time.”

  “I vill make zuh call for you. Vill you vrite zuh number here?”

  She wrote the number. Mrs. Ratzibungen stared at the shakiness of her fingers with the pen. Twice she dropped it and had to pick it up.

  “I vill put it through to you upstairs,” she said, softly.

  “Thank you.” Natasha hurried back around to the elevators and up to her room. The hall was empty and quiet, no one stirring. Certainly there would be open phone lines now. Certainly she could know for sure, for good and all, that Michael was safe. Alive. Himself, as she could learn all over again to be herself.

  Sitting on the bed waiting, she kept shivering and trying not to let her mind run. But it was running. Not about Faulk, now, but about possible pregnancy, the varieties of venereal disease, the ways people were deformed or scarred by such calamities, or died from them. And each thought was woven over the image of Nicholas Duego towering above her.

  Could one report a rape the next day? Whom would she report it to, here? No, she had decided definitely not to do that.

  She had never consistently taken the pill. There had been the others, and after Mackenzie there were those strangers, and of course there was Mackenzie, too. And Faulk. And nothing had happened, and her last period had ended more than a week before she left for Jamaica. “Oh, God. Please. Help.”

  The call would not come. She felt certain now. She believed that the news, whenever it should reach her, would be bad. A punishment. More of this hell that had enveloped her. A voice from her life in the world came to her, accusing, judging: You deserve it. It’s you. She shook her head and closed her fists in her lap.

  “No,” she said aloud. “It is not. It is not.”

  She heard Constance moving around next door.

  At last, startlingly, the phone rang, and she dropped the receiver trying to bring it to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Baby.” His voice went over her like air for someone suffocating.

  “Oh, Michael—oh. Oh, my God. Michael. Michael.”

  “I’m all right. I didn’t even know it was happening. Clara called me with it. I was up on Fifty-Fourth Street in the hotel room. A long way away.”

  “I’ve been lost, Michael. I’m lost.” She sobbed.

  “I’m so sorry, honey.” He went on to tell her about how he woke up and it had already happened and how clean the sky looked out his hotel window. As she listened, she experienced again the sense of him as being innocent, less worldly than she.

  “Have you been able to get through to Iris?” he asked.

  She could not stop crying. A part of her wanted to tell him what had happened, blurt it out—but then the breath for speech itself was gone. Wouldn’t it mean that he would come to know more than he would understand? He would have to know everything.

  “Natasha,” he said. “I’m all right, honey. We’re fine. You’ll be back here in no time, and we’ll be together.”

  “Oh, yes,” she got out, sniffling. It occurred to her that the anxiety regarding what he would come to know of her past must stem from something existing between them as a couple. The disorienting sense that she was the one who was older came rushing back, and the lightness of his voice—that boyish unaware brutal confidence—frightened and depressed her. She felt this in a second, and it was obscurely some failure on her part.

  “Enjoy the water,” he said. “And the sun and fresh air and try to put it out of your mind. It’s over. I’m safe. We’re safe. If we let it make us less than we are, then they win. Nothing good can come from dwelling on it, right? We’re okay. Call Iris.”

  “It’s hell,” she said to him. “I want to come home. Can’t you or Senator Norland do something to bring people who got stuck overseas home? I was important to him. He tried to discourage me from leaving. I was important to him. Can�
�t he do something?”

  “I’m sure if he could, he would.”

  “I want to come home, Michael.”

  He said, “I know. But, honey—stop that. Stop talking like that.”

  “I can’t help it.”

  Perhaps thirty seconds went by with only the small sound of static through the line.

  “You there?” he said.

  “Do you—do you want me to call you back after I talk to Iris?” she asked.

  “I’ve gotta go to the train station in an hour or so.”

  “Okay.”

  He murmured, “We’re okay, darling.”

  “I miss you,” she said, and felt it, a physical pang, like something molten being poured into her bones. It stopped her breath. She would never love anyone so much. “Michael!” she burst forth in a moment’s terror that he would hang up before she could tell him that. But she had said the words. There were no other words. “I love you,” she told him. The tears kept coming.

  “It’ll be all right, sweetheart. I’m out of there. And soon we’ll be together in Memphis.”

  “Yes,” she got out. “Yes, darling.”

  He was gone. She put the handset back in its cradle and lay over on her side, facing the window and the French doors leading out onto the balcony, still seeking to compose herself, working to beat back the images that kept repeating in her thoughts. Constance had come out on her own balcony next door. The older woman’s shadow was on the green tiles there. A silhouette that held a glass up and drank. “Is Michael all right?” Constance called.

  “Yes,” Natasha said loudly, and then she repeated the word in a near whisper. “Yes.” She sighed, feeling momentarily released, the first real sense of things working out all right moving through her with a surge of near elation, until she stirred on the bed and felt the discomfort in her hips and between her legs.

  After a few seconds, Constance’s voice: “I myself never thought otherwise. But we’re grounded, you know. Stuck here.”

  Natasha did not answer.

  “Want some orange juice?”

  She watched the shadow-shape drink; the head back, tilted to the sky. She got up from the bed and stepped out. You could tell it to a friend. You could say it to a friend. The other woman was in her Japanese robe, holding the glass at her hip and gazing off into the measureless distance. The sea was ablaze with morning, and in the brightness it was difficult to see her face.

  Constance looked at her. “How do we feel?”

  “Fine.” Now Natasha would say it.

  “You look awful. You been crying?”

  “Yes, hasn’t everyone?”

  “This has done something to you. Michael is safe, right?”

  “I just talked to him.”

  “Hey,” Constance said. “So it’s over. Everyone we know is safe.” She leaned on the rail with the nearly empty glass in her hand and stared. “I mean, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Right.” Constance gave forth a small derisive laugh.

  “Constance?”

  “I saw you on the beach,” she said evenly. “I came looking for you. And I saw you.”

  Natasha waited, a freezing at her heart. Then: “You—what?”

  The older woman nodded and with a furious motion tossed what remained of the orange juice over the railing. “That’s right. I saw you. I saw you and that Cuban guy, whatever the fuck his name is. Lying on the sand going at it.”

  Abruptly, Natasha felt the chill under her heart as a kind of strength. She looked directly back into the other’s eyes. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what you think you saw.”

  “Are we really going to do this?”

  “Yes, why don’t we go ahead and do this, as you put it. Let’s do it, Constance.”

  “Well, I saw you.”

  “You said that.”

  “He was on his back and you were leaning over him, kissing him. Deep.”

  “Nothing happened, Constance.”

  “It was serious tonguing. I’m not naïve.”

  “I—yes, I—I kissed him. I kissed him. I felt sorry for him. But that was the end of it.”

  “You expect me to believe that.”

  She turned to go back inside. “You can believe whatever the fuck you want to believe. Or whatever your ideas about me tell you to believe. This conversation is over.”

  In her room, she muffled her own sobs in the pillows of the bed, trying to stop. When she looked at the window, expecting to see Constance’s shadow, the shadow was gone.

  She took time to collect herself and then tried the front desk. No answer. She went out and along the hall to the elevators. The middle-aged couple she had seen the night before, who did not seem together, were waiting there. They had been murmuring animatedly in Spanish but stopped when she came up to them. The elevator opened, with a young Jamaican man and two little dark girls already on it. They all rode the four floors down in silence.

  The lobby was nearly empty. At the front desk it was Ratzi now, looking beset and worried. “My brother,” he said to her as she approached. “No one can find him.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” she said. And couldn’t ask him to put a call through to her grandmother. She walked to the entrance of the bar and asked a woman who stood there, a member of the restaurant staff. The woman went to the desk and spoke to Ratzi, who looked past her at Natasha.

  “I’m sorry,” Natasha mouthed.

  Back in her room, she sat on the bed and waited. There were voices outside, shouts, children playing. The call came through. Once more, the ring startled her. “Hello?”

  “Oh, my dear girl.”

  “I’m okay. I am.” But her voice was all tears.

  “You’re not okay, I’m not deaf.”

  “No. I am. I’m all right.” She would not. Not anyone. She waited.

  “Father Mi—,” Iris began but then stopped herself. “I mean, Michael is on his way home. He took the train, if you can believe it. He’ll get here tomorrow morning.”

  “The first day the truck can get there is the day after tomorrow.” Her voice began to leave her. She cleared her throat and made an unsuccessful attempt not to cough.

  “You sound awful,” her grandmother said.

  “It’s just a little—a little cough.”

  Iris sighed. “How long will the planes be grounded, I wonder. They’re not charging you for the extra days, are they?”

  “No.”

  The line crackled. Iris said something about the truck with Natasha’s belongings.

  “It’s mostly books,” Natasha said. “My bed. A table and some chairs and pictures.”

  Silence.

  “Iris?”

  Again, the old woman’s voice, faint in the static distance: “Don’t worry about me. But I did have another little fall getting out of bed. I’m fine. I called a cab and got myself to Dr. Rayford’s office for X-rays, and it’s fine. The original injury is healing fine. They gave me a cane.”

  How simple: you were injured and you went to see some people and they made sure you were all right and then they gave you something to help you keep going.

  “God’s sakes,” Iris said. “Here I am talking about my little trouble. I’m sorry. When do you think you’ll be able to come home?”

  “I’ll call you when I know more,” Natasha got out.

  “Okay, hon—”

  And the connection was lost. She went into the bathroom and tried to put on a little more makeup. Her hands were shaking too much, and anyway makeup was something you did to look sexy.

  Sexy.

  She washed the makeup off, pat-dried her face, gathered herself, and went downstairs. Several people she didn’t recognize were in the dining area. One couple had their bags around them. Jutting out of one bag was a small pennant advertising a cruise ship. The woman was writing furiously on a card, her face unnaturally pale.

  The sun was pouring through the windows along the right side of the room and through the silk curtains over the French
doors there. The patio outside was bathed in brightness and looked empty. The chairs were still upside down on the tables. All but one. At that table Constance sat reading a newspaper. Natasha crossed to another table, one that looked out onto the grassy hill leading to the mountain behind the resort.

  Grace, the tall waitress with the dreads, approached. “Hello, young miss.”

  “Hello, just coffee, please. Strong.”

  “I remember how you like it.” There was the faintest trace of a smile on her face and then heavy concentration as she moved away.

  Ratzi came in from the lobby and looked around. When he saw Natasha, he walked over and took the chair opposite her. Feeling his proximity as obscurely invasive, she made an attempt not to show her aversion, holding herself erect, hands clasped in her lap. For a moment he sat there, pushing the hair back from his forehead, adjusting his shirtfront. “My brother was with an old girlfriend,” he said. “All day and all night.”

  “I’m glad you found him.” It was autonomic speech. She did not even hear herself.

  “He didn’t know about the disaster. The whole time. Ficken.”

  She said nothing.

  “Sex crazy. Sorry for the vulgarity.”

  “I don’t care about it.”

  “My mother is lying down in a terrible state from worrying.”

  “Sorry to hear it.”

  “That man, Mr. Skinner, he almost died. His wife is with him.”

  “Sorry to hear that, too.” She felt the impulse to ask him what he wanted from her.

  “Mr. Duego checked out of his room this morning and went into Kingston.”

  She felt something give way in her chest.

  “He left a letter for you.”

  “Why would he write a letter to me,” she managed.

  Ratzi sat back and reached into the front pocket of his shorts and brought it out. It was in an envelope that was folded tightly in thirds. “I don’t ask questions. I have to say that he did seem upset, though. Worried about something. I don’t know—do you want it or not?”

  She took it and put it in her purse. “Did you read it?” she asked.

  “Of course not. And in case you don’t believe me, you’ll see that it’s sealed.” He stood. “Good day.”