Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “And could you bring me a shot of Mount Gay, too? Neat.”

  He nodded and went off. Both women watched him go.

  Natasha said, “I’m going upstairs.”

  “Our last night, sweetie. You—you don’t want to sit and talk on our last night?”

  “I want to sleep, Constance. That’s all I want to do right now. And I’m having trouble doing it.”

  “You’re depressed.”

  She gave no answer.

  “Well, me too.”

  “Can we not talk about it?”

  “I think you’re depressed because things have changed for you, and you don’t know what to do about it.”

  Natasha looked at her.

  “You’ve hardly been out of bed the last two days.”

  She drew in a breath and then managed to speak, with only the slightest tremor in her voice. “I want to be home, that’s all.”

  “I really don’t mean anything, you know.”

  They sat there without speaking for perhaps a full minute. Anyone walking through would have thought they were simply enjoying the evening light, looking at the other people in the big high-ceilinged room and at the scenes out the window—the several little tableaux of people eating and drinking and being together. Finally, Constance said, “Why don’t you have another vermouth. We could go out on the patio.”

  “I don’t want anything else.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m grateful to you for the time here.”

  “Well, for some of the time here.”

  The waiter brought the drinks on a small tray. Constance took the Mount Gay with one swallow, then wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “I swear I’ve never drunk this much.”

  “I promise I won’t tell anyone about your drinking,” Natasha said.

  Sipping her beer, the other woman looked over the lip of the glass at her, then set the glass down, smiling.

  “Good night,” said Natasha.

  “You probably won’t see me tomorrow.” Constance picked up her glass of beer again, drank from it, and set it down. “My flight’s at seven o’clock in the morning.” She stood as Natasha stood. They embraced. “I’ll miss you, you know.”

  “I’ll miss you, too,” Natasha told her, feeling empty and wanting to be shut of her.

  “When you make the wedding plans, let me know?”

  “Early next month. I know that.”

  “Maybe I’ll come? If asked.”

  “We both want it small.”

  “Let me know? I’d love to be there. I want to be there.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Constance looked at her.

  “I will.”

  She sighed. “I’ll be in Maine over the Christmas holidays. You and Michael are welcome.”

  “I think we’re leaving for France pretty soon after that. Lots of planning to do. But thank you.” Natasha went on up to her room and closed the door and saw that there was a message on the phone. She punched the button and then lay down and let it play, and cried softly, hearing him say, “I can’t wait, babe.”

  She replayed it twice, then called the front desk and asked the female voice to put in the return call. There was no answer, and she left her own message. “I’m coming home. Soon, my love.” She heard the frail sound of her own voice.

  7

  Faulk spent the morning looking at houses and apartments in Midtown. He played the radio, driving from property to property—air conditioner turned up full blast—following a kindly, quiet, elderly gentleman named Rainey, whose thick shoulders, long face, and protruding lengthy ears put him in mind of his father. Rainey stood by while the younger man went through rooms that were being lived in and contained intimations of the lives their occupants led, or toured houses that were vacant, standing in musty, old-wood-smelling parlors, looking down hallways and into closets and walking out onto back lawns in the scorching brightness, moving through the peculiarly depressing silence of abandoned dwellings. All the forenoon they were at it, getting into their respective cars and heading on to the next property. The air had already grown sultry by nine o’clock, laden with dampness and the smell of exhaust—late summer in the city. The ends of tree branches drooped, and the scattered wide shady patches on the lawns made Faulk think of something spilled. He listened to the different voices on the radio talking about the cataclysm, the developing crisis, the new face of war, and all the victims who were missing. Finally he turned it off, unable to bear it anymore.

  He felt empty. Rainey caught his mood. “Not liking much of what you see,” he said.

  Faulk shook his head and sighed.

  “This is not a good time, is it,” the older man went on. “A bad time for all of us.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And of course you have to go with your gut when it comes to picking a place to live.”

  “You remind me of my father,” Faulk told him. He hadn’t known he would say it.

  “Hope that’s a good thing. Is he still with us?”

  “Yes. Very healthy. A little touch of gout now and then and some trouble with peripheral vision. He lives in Little Rock.”

  “My mother’s got trouble with that. The peripheral vision thing. Still going strong, though. Ninety-two and sharp as a tack. She said something to me this week—stopped me. We’d been talking about it all, you know, and she said—I mean she was smiling, but I think she was half serious—said things get so bad and ugly all around you, everything changing for the worse as you age, that you don’t hate so much the idea of going.”

  They were standing in the center of a large square living room with freshly polished hardwood flooring. An arched entrance opened into a freshly remodeled kitchen.

  “Good light here with these windows,” said Rainey.

  “I should probably have waited until my fiancée could be with me,” Faulk told him. “I’m sorry.”

  “Well, but it’ll be good to have an idea, anyway.”

  “This is very nice.”

  “I had a place just like this once. Raised three girls in it. Theresa, Coleen, and Marilyn.”

  “My mother’s name was Marilyn.”

  “Good name. I picked that one.”

  Faulk imagined him as a young man. “Do they live close?”

  “Not too far away.” Rainey sighed. “One’s in Chicago, and two’re in Nashville. I get to see them pretty often. Them and the grandkids. I’ve got nine grandkids. Each of my girls has three boys.” He smiled. “I tell them it’s a baseball team.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “I’m afraid they’ll all end up as part of a platoon, now.”

  Faulk nodded. “Bad,” he said.

  “Should we take a look at the upstairs?”

  “I’ll keep it in mind. Might be a little big for just two. Can we look at the ones in High Point?”

  They walked out and got into their separate cars. Faulk looked back at the house, with its porch and the forsythia lining the left side of the front yard. Mr. Rainey pulled away slowly, and they went on down to the end of the street, toward Poplar Avenue.

  Following the real-estate agent, Faulk thought of his father. He did not put the radio on. It was hard to feel himself in his own age, almost fifty. The road ahead was blue, baking in the sunlight, an end-of-summer day in Memphis, Tennessee, in the United States, and a war had begun. He had seen in the news that religious fanaticism was the one motive being advanced most by observers (there were already acts of violence against mosques and shrines), and it came to him that just now he felt detached from it all. He was driving around Memphis looking for a house and a neighborhood, anticipating life with a new, young wife, and when he thought of her he felt excitement, even gladness. Yet there was something faintly reflexive about that, too.

  At High Point Terrace, Mr. Rainey showed him a couple of houses, and then they came to one on Swan Ridge, where the key in the lockbox was the wrong one. Faulk liked the look of t
he house and the yard, and Mr. Rainey tried calling his office. But he had to leave for another appointment. The two men arranged to meet later in the morning.

  Faulk drove back to his apartment, opened a can of ravioli, heated it, and ate, and then called his father.

  “Glad you’re home,” the old man said. “I talked to Clara and she said you were on your way.”

  “I’d have called when I got here, but it’s been crazy.”

  “Your girlfriend get home okay?” This was simply his way of speaking.

  “I pick her up late this afternoon.”

  “You find a place yet?”

  “I think maybe I have.”

  “You figured out what you’re gonna do, now that the church thing is over?”

  “Dad.”

  “Just curious. I don’t mean anything by it.”

  “You make it sound like some phase I was going through.”

  “Well,” the old man grumbled. “No sense giving all your money to the phone company.”

  “Right,” Faulk answered with an old sense of being held at an emotional remove.

  “Make a trip out here, why don’t you, now that you’re not a priest anymore.”

  “That sounds like now you’ll be able to tolerate me, since I’m a layman.”

  The old man sighed. “I meant now that you’re more free to travel. Come on, boy. Quit interpreting everything I say. I’d like you to drive over to see us.”

  “We’ll do that. You coming to our wedding?”

  “If we can. When is it?”

  “Early next month.”

  “Give me some notice.”

  “This is it.”

  “You want to give me a definite date, Son?”

  “I will. Of course. Promise.”

  Faulk sat with the phone at his ear, picturing the old man in his television room leaning back in the easy chair amid all the law books he never looked in anymore, with a movie paused on the VCR, anxious to get off the line.

  “Not everything I say is intended as a criticism,” Leander said.

  Faulk apologized, meaning it.

  “Just sometimes,” said the old man with a cheerless little snickering sound.

  “Right,” Faulk said. “Well, I’m home.”

  “Good.”

  “I’ll call you when it’s set.”

  As long as he could remember, a barrier had existed between them. Periodic conflict about religion kept flaring up in the house, and according to the old man, Faulk was more his mother’s child. Marilyn Dealey Faulk was quite austere in observance, while Leander had, as she said of him, no covenant with anything but the hours of the day. From Faulk’s earliest memories they quarreled about the discrepancy. The old man would say that Marilyn’s pietistic attitudes and habits never kept her from feeling murderous resentment over some real or imagined slight. According to him, she was only interested in those superficial elements of Christian living that permitted the slaughters and terrors of the world to continue, all in the name of God. Onward, Christian soldiers. He would whistle the old hymn, just to needle her.

  Marilyn never flagged in espousing the age-old, Bible-haunted tenets that had traveled down the generations from culture to culture; she was very strong in her belief.

  They were, then, in fundamental disagreement about the whole human journey.

  Even so, they generally went for periods looking like a settled couple in the calming waters of habit. If you paid attention, you might observe that there wasn’t much affection between them—not much of that kind of warmth emanating from intimacy when intimacy is easy and relaxed—but only a form of detached consideration. To others, they seemed normal. But Faulk always had the feeling that something was brooding under the surface kindness and the usual staid rituals of family life. He had no way to express this at the time, but it was a feeling strong enough and steady enough to last until he did have language for it. The boy, precocious, unsure and uneasy and watchful of every little fault line between them, was full of anxiety all the time that they might fly apart, like shards from a shattered window. This was when he learned to fear the insubstantial stirrings that lurked in the dark of what people refused to look at: the ways in which thought could injure you. He watched his parents go through their days, rarely affected and seemingly oblivious to the damages resulting from the passions that arose when they did fight. And any fight, invariably, was about religion. Always, the religion. In one of those conflicts, the old man said forcefully, at the top of his thin voice, that he wanted something from his son to shore up what he called the puny remnants of sanity in the house. His house. Faulk sided with his mother, because he feared his father, and he had nowhere else to go.

  He took to retreating into himself whenever Leander was near. By the time he was in his teens, Christianity, with its rituals, and more important its literature, had become a sort of haven for him, and he spent hours reading through Hooker, Bonhoeffer, Duns Scotus, Tillich, Kierkegaard, the mystics, and, finally, especially, Aquinas—The Summa Theologica—that massive intellectual construction explaining all the knotty inconsistencies and the shadowy grottoes and crevices of faith in the world. All that, and of course he never thought of any of it as refuge, not back then; he never perceived it as any kind of withdrawal from the realities of the house where he lived. Yet he was perpetually a boy in hiding, buried, separated—even from himself.

  Later, during his journey away, through the years of study and absorption in college and then at seminary, there were days and sometimes weeks when he experienced the same emotional detachment that he believed came from his parents—a malaise, even a form of paralysis, doing things automatically: a pair of eyes, two hands, a creature sleeping and feeding, someone absorbed in reading and study, feeling nothing. And recalling Sartre’s comment about hell being other people, he thought he understood the feeling; hell was being aware of one’s separation from other people—who looked discouragingly like specimens, so far from him as to seem somehow not of his kind.

  How he had hated it.

  After his ordination, he took on the busy life of his first assigned parish, and that element of his being seemed to have gone the way of other youthful troubles. He grew out of it, probably by the simple pressure of what there was to do. When he met Joan, shortly after coming to Memphis, he was already far past that time; it was an old memory then.

  Except that of course it was what had led him to leaving the priesthood. And it was with him now, this disquiet: he could not bring himself to care about much of anything, not in the way that you normally associated feeling. Things happened to you and around you and what you felt stayed; it was almost a kind of sustenance. But when that failed, what you were left with was the waiting for the next thing. Even the terrors of the catastrophe, all that, even that, left him strangely anesthetized. Suddenly, it seemed, he was someone only reacting, an onlooker, attending to his own discomforts, and in a sort of suspension about all the rest, waiting to see an outcome that did not exist.

  Natasha was the answer to all that. The bright center of everything.

  And now he realized that the apartment smelled of the cleansers he had used, so he made another trip out to find some scented candles and to get some coffee. She liked the smell of coffee. Back in the apartment, he lit the candles, brewed coffee, and then sat by the window, drinking it.

  8

  She woke before first light after a static interval of half sleep, and for a little while she tried to go back. When the sound reached her of Constance struggling out into the hall with her luggage, she thought of getting up to go thank her and to say something else—perhaps even to apologize, complicated as that would be. A moment later, she rose and went to the door, opened it, and called out the name. Constance was gone. The sun had risen and the day was heating up. Some people were already out on the beach.

  She was packed. She had the clothes that she would wear—jeans and a white blouse—on the chair next to the bed. A wave of panic came over her as she put the
m on, and she sat back down on the bed, arms wrapped tightly around her middle, rocking back and forth and trying to breathe slowly. Finally she opened the minibar, took one of the bottles of whiskey out, and drained it in two stinging gulps. Then she was in the bathroom, coughing and spitting into the sink.

  When she had gathered herself and patted cold water on her cheeks, she stood out on the balcony and breathed the humid air with its fragrance of cooked sausage and bacon. She was not remotely hungry. At last she moved to the door and into the hall. There was a note taped just below the room number.

  I’ll miss you. Really sorry about everything. Please call when you get to Memphis?

  Love, Constance

  Downstairs, the lobby was nearly empty. A van waited to take people to the airport. In the van already, in the far back, was Skinner, with his wife. Skinner looked very pale and tired. He had a bandage on one heavy arm and another above his left eye. He nodded at Natasha but did not speak. Mrs. Skinner stared straight ahead, hands clenched tightly in her lap. Ratzi drove, and he, too, was silent, even sullen, watching the road with an air of overfamiliarity and boredom, and seemingly far away in his thoughts. Natasha looked out at the sea and sky through the placid stillness of the palms.

  At the airport in Montego Bay, Ratzi asked in a flat tone what airlines they were flying. Natasha got out first, and again Skinner nodded at her. She tried to smile but felt only a sense of having looked foolish. Ratzi hauled her bag out of the back of the van, set it down, and then shook hands—no grip, not even quite fully making contact. Then he got back in behind the wheel and pulled out and away with his cargo of unhappiness and recrimination: Mrs. Skinner glaring out the back side window.

  There was a very long line leading to the check-in counter. It took an hour to get to where you checked your bags. Natasha checked hers, then made her way through the muddle and noise of others. A garbled voice announced a gate change for another flight. She heard a loud beeping from somewhere. Reaching the gate with nearly an hour to spare, she sat down to wait. The whiskey she had drunk was making the beginnings of a headache, so she went and ordered a Bloody Mary at one of the little kiosk bars. This is what I’ll do, she thought bitterly, swallowing the drink. I’ll just stay crocked all the time.