Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

  “But I’m really feeling stronger every day,” she went on. There was a quaver in her voice. “I’m worried about you. You don’t sound right.”

  “I’m so tired of being here,” Natasha got out.

  She did not leave the room on this day, either. The hours passed. She bathed and cared for herself but did not eat. She could not read anything in the books she had brought, because her powers of concentration were broken. And when she could concentrate, she worried about being ambushed by something in the words. She felt this as a kind of fracturing of her deepest self.

  Late that night she went on another walk, this time far along the beach, believing herself to be facing down the fear, heading straight at it, toward the lights that shone there. She wondered if it was Kingston, and then thought of Duego somewhere in that low sparkle far off. She went into the brush and picked up a heavy stone the size of a baseball. The walk back was hurried and aching, the muscles of her legs cramping, and there was a raggedness to every breath, a rasping that caught and seemed about to choke her. Near the resort, a man stepped out from the path leading there. She stopped and held the stone as if setting herself to throw it. “Keep away from me,” she said.

  He was gaunt, wasted looking, all bone, and his eyes looked too big for his head. He stared at her, standing very still. “Not moving, as you see.”

  “Stay back.”

  His movement was shaky, and she saw that he was very drunk. He staggered slowly by, as if meaning to circle her, but then went on to the water and in, where he simply waited as if expecting to be knocked over by the waves. Mrs. Ratzibungen came down the path and went past her. “Harmless,” she said. “Poor creatuh. It is Lawton. My former friend. You remember. Please. He is drunk. He vill not hurt you.”

  Natasha dropped the stone in the sand and started toward the resort. Nothing would change, and this was now the way life would be. Full of unreasonable fear all the time. She went on, pushing through the sand, stumbling in it. The night was as hot as the day had been.

  Constance was sitting in one of the chairs on the porch. She had a large flower in her lap. “Ratzi just went in to get us a rum collins. We saw Mrs. Ratzibungen’s old boyfriend. The one who’s been drinking himself to death the last twenty-five years. When we saw you coming, Ratzi had the idea of the rum collinses.”

  Natasha looked toward the entrance to the lobby.

  “Sit,” Constance said. “Come on.”

  Ratzi approached, carrying the drinks. “On the house,” he said.

  His mother came back up from the beach, looking tired and beset, strands of hair loose on her forehead. “He vent home. I vill check on him later.”

  “Does he know what’s happened?” Constance asked.

  Mrs. Ratzibungen said, “I vill be ruined. Kaput. But I feel zo bad for you Americans.”

  “Sit,” Constance repeated to Natasha.

  Natasha, feeling the obligation, sat down.

  “Here’s your drink.” Ratzi said. “On the house.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Vee are ruined. Lawton just here drunk, sick. Und you buy drinks.”

  “My mother is an alarmist.”

  “Look at zuh books, you think I am alarmist. You don’t look at zuh books. Zuh Gleister people vill close me down.”

  Ratzi said something harsh sounding to her in German, sipping the drink Natasha had refused. Then he looked over at Constance. “The Gleister Corporation owns the buildings and the grounds. We own the franchise. And we also have another place, a restaurant in Kingston. Doing very well. Quite well. Even now. I do look at those books.” He turned and said something else in the other language.

  “Maybe I can loan you some money for the short term,” said Constance.

  Natasha stood. “I have to go to bed. Good night.”

  “Sit down. I want to ask you something. Sit.”

  She did so.

  “Are we still friends?” Constance had tears starting in her eyes.

  “We’re still friends.”

  “Where have you been?” She wiped them with the table napkin and folded it tightly in her fist. “I haven’t seen you since yesterday morning.”

  “I haven’t felt well.” Natasha sniffled.

  “Zummer colds are zuh bad vons.”

  “This thing happened to all of us,” Constance said. “And people behave differently in this kind of extremity.”

  Natasha nodded but said nothing.

  “My daughter isn’t answering her phone. We’ve talked once. That’s it.”

  “Maybe she’s out with people. You wanted to go be with people, remember?”

  Ratzi said, “Maybe there’s still—you know, the volume of calls.”

  “Volume of calls at two in the morning,” said Constance. “Her time.”

  Natasha simply waited to be released.

  “Zometimes I unplug my phone ven I go to bed at night.”

  “Natasha, how many times have you talked to Iris?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I heard you talking to somebody.”

  “Ruined,” Mrs. Ratzibungen said.

  Two young women came from the other end of the beach, laughing and talking. One, Natasha realized, was the girl she had seen crying in the lobby two days ago. The girl seemed wildly happy now and, seeing Natasha, walked over to her. “Guess what?” she said. “My father’s friend, they found him. He was in Washington having breakfast with some people. He wasn’t even there.”

  “Oh, how happy,” Mrs. Ratzibungen said.

  Natasha smiled at the girl and nodded, watching her go off with her friend, and she thought of all the people for whom this had not ended happily. When she came down for her walk, she had seen on television an image of people putting pictures of the missing on a wall near the rubble of what was left.

  “Natasha’s fiancé was in New York.”

  “But he is safe,” Mrs. Ratzibungen said. “Ja?”

  “Safe,” Natasha said. “Yes.” She excused herself. This time Constance did not try to stop her. In the room, she lay down and closed her eyes, and a humming sounded in her ears. She got up and took some aspirin, swallowing it with a little water she got bending over the spigot, then went to the bed and lay down and pulled the blanket over herself as if to hide. I will not let it do this to me. I will not let it do this to me.

  The humming in her ears went on.

  5

  He took a cab from the station to his apartment in Chickasaw Gardens. The cabbie and he traded remarks about the surprisingly cool, dry air for mid-September in Memphis, and it felt refreshing to be talking about something other than the attacks and the coming war in Afghanistan. Except that he knew the cabbie was carefully avoiding all of it, and so the overall feeling was of complicity in a kind of ruse. At his apartment, he dropped off his bags, then called the hotel in Jamaica. “You choose,” she had said about a place for them to live, and he heard the note of apathy in her voice, wondering at it, almost as though he were admiring a quality of hers. He thought of her there, alone, marooned, and felt all the more powerfully the will to protect her. Finally he got in his car and drove straight to Iris’s house. She opened the door as he came up onto the stoop. “I’m so glad to see you safe,” she said.

  He followed her into the kitchen. She moved well with the cane.

  “I’ve been sleepless this whole awful time,” she told him. “I close my eyes and dream I’m sleeping and then I wake up.”

  “I guess nobody’s sleeping very well.”

  “You too?”

  “Me too.”

  Sun shown through the white-curtained windows of the patio door. She had made coffee, and she poured him a cup without asking if he wanted it, supporting herself with one hand on the countertop. Her knee was in a brace, and he thought it must be difficult to maneuver with it. But it didn’t seem to bother her at all. She came over to sit across from him with her own cup of coffee.

  “I know I’ve fallen asleep for little spells, but
it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

  He looked at her thick fingers with their chewed nails and the slight arthritic curvature of them.

  “How did you fall?”

  “Which time?”

  “The most recent one.” Faulk knew of the original injury.

  “I’d thrown my bedspread off in my sleep, and it was bunched on the floor. I caught my foot in it getting up. If it had happened ten years ago and if I wasn’t already hurting from this other one, it wouldn’t even have been noticeable.”

  They drank the coffee in silence for a few moments. It struck him that, apart from the fact that in the normal outward way she had been his parishioner, there wasn’t really very much they knew about each other.

  “I’ve got several houses to look at,” he said. “I’ve been researching it. But there’s not much I can do really until Natasha gets back.”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure you don’t need us to stay here. Because we will, you know. I’m perfectly all right with that.”

  She smiled. “It’s the word perfectly in that sentence that gives you away.”

  “No,” he said, and he repeated it while she laughed quietly. Her laugh was that of a much-younger woman.

  “I am perfectly all right with it.”

  “I don’t need you to stay here.”

  He sipped the coffee. She looked out the window at her small flower-bordered lawn and sighed. “I don’t like the way our girl sounds on the phone.”

  “She just wants to be out of there. And home.”

  “Something’s different.”

  He had felt it, too. But he did not show this to Iris. He desired to reassure her, and he took some of the reassurance for himself as he spoke: “Coming back home will help her get back to herself. Must’ve been awful being that far away and not knowing, not being able to get through.”

  “Best medicine,” Iris said. “People you love around you.”

  “Everybody safe.”

  “Nothing feels that way, though, now, does it?”

  “No.”

  “I haven’t felt this apprehensive in a long time.”

  “It’s all of us.”

  When he left Iris’s he drove to Chickasaw Gardens, intending to arrange his move from the apartment. He had taken the apartment less than six months ago, and there was the problem of the lease. Also, his landlord knew about him and had let it be known that he considered him some sort of renegade. The landlord, Mr. Donald Baines, was by his own conception of himself a devout Christian. The lease was for one year.

  “One year,” Mr. Baines said. “Not five and a half months.” He was fifty-something, balding, with an outsized, eerily corrugated beer belly. He wore knit shirts that made the heavy, dimpled, drooping shape of the belly all the more noticeable. There were thick pouches under his small eyes, like emblems of his general flabbiness. Everything about him suggested immobility. He did not drink much, he had told Faulk, but he liked food. He was, he said, addicted to food. It didn’t really matter what it was. He had continually to resist the urge to satisfy not his hunger but his taste buds. It was that simple. Many things, to Mr. Baines, were “that simple,” and anything that wasn’t, he let alone. He had a habit of talking about himself in the third person.

  “Of course, I’ll be looking for someone to sublet,” Faulk told him. “But we don’t have much time.”

  “You can bring your lovely bride to the apartment and live with her there until the lease is up. Then you’d have time to find a nice place for yourselves. Donald Baines isn’t that much of a stickler about the fine points of the lease.”

  “Well,” Faulk said. “I’ll work something out.”

  “A person has to keep his agreements. But as long as Mr. Baines gets his rent payments—you know.”

  “Yes, I do know.”

  The apartment was in a box-shaped brick row of them across the street from Donald Baines’s cottage-sized house. Faulk crossed and let himself in. He looked at the rooms—the barren place where he had lived through these months. How Natasha would hate living here. Cracks lined the ceiling, and a sheen had developed in places over the old paint, as if the humidity of the town had begun some process of melting in the walls. He cleaned the floors and the fixtures in the sinks and dusted the surfaces, then packed laundry in a bag and spent time on the telephone, calling in the ad about subletting. The inheritance from his mother paid nine thousand dollars a month. It was enough for them to live on. He could, if he had to, afford two rent payments for a while. Natasha would want to find something to do, to support her painting, until they could have their spring in France. This was a vague fancy at the edge of his consciousness. He was not thinking practically, since there would be a lot of matters to address if indeed they were to decide to live in France for a few months. He put details aside and told himself that things would be all right. And he felt a wave of excitement, thinking of her walking the beach in Jamaica and wanting to come home.

  In the morning he tried to call her, but the line was busy. He tried four times and then left a message on the room phone. “I bet you’re on the phone with Iris, or with the airlines. I can’t wait, babe.”

  6

  She was indeed on the phone with the airlines, getting her flights rescheduled. It took an hour. The woman who helped her was very kind but spoke with a slight indistinguishable accent that made certain words hard to understand. Natasha guessed, using context, but felt the frustration of it. Now, certainly, you had to bring forth all the generosity you could muster. But she couldn’t shake the annoyance. She could hear Constance talking on the phone in her room, the voice strangely antic, as though she were addressing a small child. This was the third day of slow time.

  Mrs. Ratzibungen had let everyone stay the extra days without charge, even as she was losing money steadily. People sat in the lobby and watched the news reports of the aftermath and the investigation. Natasha wanted none of it. She took another walk, this time on a path leading toward the mountains, the path rising steadily to a level nearly at the height of the palm trees, where she paused and looked at the country and the shoreline. In her travels in Europe she had never felt the slightest hint of the alienation and isolation that gripped her now. She wanted to be home. She wanted Memphis, the house where she had grown up—though that house was now occupied by others, and she had not been near it in almost ten years. But far more than anything now—oh, more than breathing—she wanted the affair with the photographer never to have been, those nights in Adams Morgan, and the beach, here. She wanted the whole of it obliterated, erased, rubbed out. Gone. The drinking and the unhappiness and the not caring what happened, the throwing away of hours, the sinking, all the weeks of deadening intoxication and self-loathing. These last three days.

  She felt it now, returning down the path. Wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands, and her nose with her forearms, she slowly made her way to the entrance of the resort, muttering low under her breath.

  Stop it. Stop it.

  Lunch was being served. She took a sandwich and went to her room hoping for sleep. But sleep was fitful and tormented, so she simply lay in the bed, staring. And later she ate dinner in the restaurant, alone. She saw Constance out on the patio with Ratzi, a bottle of rum and a pitcher of orange juice on the table between them. A little later, near the end of the meal, the older woman came in and sat across from her, one hand fisted under her chin. Natasha had ordered a vermouth on ice and now held it, looking into the facets of color reflecting in the ice cubes.

  “Mind if I join you?” Constance said.

  Remembering once more, with a pang of guilt, that the other had paid for her stay here, she said, “No, I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t seem to know anymore whether or not I’d be welcome.”

  “You’re welcome. And stop it.”

  Constance ordered a beer from the waiter, whom they hadn’t seen before. He was tall and olive hued, with small round black eyes. He brought her beer and walked away,
saying nothing, and she held it up. “Well, here’s to our trip. Neither of us will ever forget where we were when all hell broke loose.”

  Natasha raised her glass and drank.

  “So you’re still going back to Memphis.”

  “Still?”

  “You’re going back. You haven’t changed your mind.”

  “Why would I change my mind, Constance?”

  “A lot of people are changing plans because of this, dear. That’s all I’m saying.”

  “I’m still going to Memphis.”

  They said nothing for a few seconds.

  “It’s nobody’s business, anyway,” Constance said. “Where we’re going from here.”

  Natasha decided to leave it alone. She nodded and drank.

  “I think I’ve ruined our friendship.”

  She could think of nothing to tell her.

  “I know I got under your skin about that business—but I thought I’d apologized.”

  “Forget it,” she said.

  “But you’re different. Something’s changed.”

  “I said forget it. So forget it. Please.”

  “I’m going to California, though I’d rather go to Maine.”

  She did not respond.

  “I’m going to see my daughter. Who I’m pretty sure doesn’t want to see me.”

  “I bet she does, actually. Given what’s happened.”

  “She says she’s upset because I didn’t try harder to call her.”

  Natasha nearly spoke the words aloud: Sounds like something you’d say. Instead, she drank the last of her vermouth.

  “I don’t think anybody wants to go to New York,” Constance said. “And then, in a way, I think everybody does.”

  “I just want to go home.”

  “I don’t really know where home is.” This was the first time the older woman had ever made this kind of confession.

  “You’ve got the house.”

  Constance smirked. “Actually I’m not liking how it’s turning out. I feel selfish.” Swallowing the rest of the beer, she signaled the bartender. Before he reached the table, she called out, “Another one.”