Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

  “Want to watch television?”

  Her smile was sardonic.

  He turned the bathroom light off, got back into bed, and put his arms around her.

  “You sleepy?”

  “Yes, I guess so. Sorry. All that double-pot-stilled stuff.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  “We could do it again.”

  “You’re tired.”

  “I said I was sleepy.”

  “But you are tired.”

  “Oh, baby—maybe I am, a little. Aren’t you? It’s been a long day.”

  He sighed and lay over on his back. “It has been that.”

  “Want to talk?”

  “Sure.”

  They were quiet. Perhaps a full minute went by. It felt to them both like a long time.

  At last, he said, “I wonder when I’m going to find out more about Jamaica.”

  This struck through her. “Oh, God.”

  “It’s all right, whatever it was. You’re my wife now.”

  “Michael.”

  “Well?”

  “What do you think might have happened? Tell me that.”

  He leaned up on one elbow and was a darker shadow in that dim space, looming over her. “I don’t have any idea. And I’m sorry. But when I asked that—when I asked your friend Constance about it, why you’re still so much—she looked for all the world like she was hiding something.”

  “Constance looks that way no matter what the subject is.”

  “But you are different.”

  “Tell me what you think it is. Do that. What is it that you think happened in Jamaica.”

  He took in a breath to say the words and then held them back. A part of him quailed at the thought of having it spoken, told out, whatever it was. This was their honeymoon night. He saw himself as being unreasonable and like an adolescent boy. Then, in an instant, he felt sober and awake, and very, very old. “I guess I’m jealous,” he said. “It’s stupid.”

  “Jealous.”

  “I said—it’s stupid. I think—maybe it’s—you’re so much younger. It’s natural for you to desire life. I know there’s something about me that makes—there was something about my—way of being that made Joan want to leave me.”

  “Do you hear yourself?”

  “I know,” he told her. “Forget it.”

  “I’ve left a job and moved back here,” she said. “And I’m in the stages of recovering from the fright of my life, the fear that something”—she began to cry and tried very hard not to, wanting to speak definitely and clearly and to control her voice—“that something happened to you and we—we wouldn’t have this. Look, it’s all new to me and I’m sorry but I can’t help being nervous—and—and anyone would be and why can’t everybody stop reading into everything I do or say.”

  “By everyone, do you mean Constance?”

  “No,” she said, too loud. “Iris. You. I don’t know how to do this, Michael. I don’t know how to recover from thinking my life is over and my love is dead in a collapsing building in New York. I don’t know how to go on from all this we’ve been through.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said into her sobs. “I’m sorry. Baby, please forget it. Forget I said anything.”

  It was a while before she could speak. And when she could, the force of her own will surprised her. “Can we just go on with our lives together now? I don’t ever want to talk about Jamaica anymore. Please? Not ever. It was awful and it’s over and you’re safe and we’re here.”

  While she spoke, crying, he put his arms around her and murmured through it, “Of course, my darling. Of course. We’ll never mention it.”

  They lay there for a long time, both awake and both silent, while the city made its clamor out in the night—the heater had cut off, and they could hear everything—sirens and car horns and trucks going by and steadily, like a reminder of where they were, the far-off strains of music from Beale Street.

  Mr. and Mrs. Faulk

  1

  ARTICLE 1. Whether, putting aside her simple kindness, any evidence exists of my wife’s former passion for me?

  We proceed thus to the First Article: It seems that, putting aside her simple kindness, we have no evidence of my wife’s former passion for me.

  Objection 1.

  It is true that there have been stresses beyond the norm, therefore something external to her is affecting her behavior and her moods. The whole country is in panic now about the anthrax attacks. And of course the war is under way in Afghanistan.

  Objection 2.

  It is true that people in courtship are different than they are in marriage, and this is Marriage. My wife is loving and considerate and seems happy, and she spends most mornings doing physical therapy with her grandmother, and they laugh together and tell each other stories and my wife looks like any other young woman glad of her circumstances, and glad to see me. But there are panic attacks in the night and when we are intimate I can feel her unhappiness in it and have tried talking to her gently about it and striven to be more what she needs, being as circumspect as possible and then by turns seeking to be more passionate, as passionate as we were. Yet something is in the way, something is displacing us, something is on her mind. She is not here, and it is hard not to fear that someone else may be in her deepest thoughts.

  On the contrary, she has always shown in her relations with everyone a direct and honest bearing and a truthful nature. Her every gesture shows forth a strong-minded and gentle spirit, and she seems as troubled about our secret problem as I am. She still seems as loving to me as she always was and in other things pays generously careful attention to me. But there is an undeniable sense that something happened that she is hiding from me, and it seems that this which she feels she must hide can only have to do with the something in Jamaica, with the someone in Jamaica, that her friends evidently know about as women sometimes are supposed to know about these matters among themselves.

  I answer that, there seems no evidence of involvement with anyone else, and I further admit that I have been watching her, and attending very carefully to her movements and her communications with others. Though there have been several calls from her friend Constance, and she has been going on afternoon walks with her friend Marsha. She seems vaguely unhappy to hear from Constance. Several times the calls have further upset her, though from what I can hear they are only talking about Constance’s decision to sell the house she spent so much of herself on and move permanently to New York; but there has seemed more distance between us after these conversations.

  Reply Obj. 1.

  Although there have been stresses in the daily round of news and in the country as a whole, people seem to be making their way along in their lives without noticeable effects on mood or bearing.

  Reply Obj. 2.

  Intimacy, of course, involves trust. And the trouble now is there seems an undeniable lessening of trust, on both sides. It would seem that, even if what happened in Jamaica was a momentary fling with an old flame—this person who by her own account she was willing to lie and cheat for and her affair with him was less than a year old when I first met her—even if this was the thing hidden, I cannot but conclude that whatever has existed between us is now made false, and it is the falseness of it that is causing all the quiet suffering.

  ARTICLE 2. Whether it is feasible to believe that love can exist in an atmosphere of suspicion and the sense of having been betrayed?

  We proceed thus to the Second Article: It seems that it is not feasible to believe that love can exist in an atmosphere of suspicion and betrayal. For every instance of such distrust and anxiety about faithfulness requires that the two people believe each other and believe in each other and believe that what they feel for each other is grounded in truth.

  Objection 1.

  Suspicion does not mean or imply that grounds for it are real. It is possible to imagine things in a state of anxiety especially if the person afflicted with the suspicion is already struggling to overcome the effects
of a general calamity.

  Objection 2.

  There can be no denial that love exists because there is such pain at the arrival of all suspicious thoughts, and there is a concerted effort to put suspicions down. There is also much effort on her part to be what she believes I need her to be and to put down all those things that trouble her about us.

  On the contrary, suspicion may arise without there being a tendency toward suspicion and that has not been my nature, and I would never have felt the suspicion if there were not these signs of an unforgettable event in Jamaica having to do with my wife’s feelings toward me. And I fear an erosion in my love for her out of these growing suspicions. I want to know what she and Marsha Trunan talk about, and why it is that Marsha seldom comes here when I am home, and I do not really feel included in this friendship. I want to know why she never talks to Constance on the telephone with me near, as if she is afraid something will be said, some reference to something will slip out.

  I answer that, love can only exist as itself in an atmosphere of mutual trust and acceptance, and that if one truly loved one’s partner, one would confide in him, not turn from him, trying to hide the fact by pretending nothing is wrong.

  Reply Obj. 1.

  Because I am not normally of a suspicious nature—and Joan was in fact thinking of leaving me long before I was aware of it—and am in fact rather slow to judge anyone’s actions, it cannot be said that my suspicions are produced by something other than the circumstances in which we find ourselves.

  Reply Obj. 2

  There must be some demarcation between love as possession and love as it is or was between us at the start. It was beautiful and we shone with it and people saw it and felt happy when they saw us because we were so happy. They were made happier or for a time they forgot their unhappiness or they turned away in envy because they saw how happy we were. I believe that. We glowed with it. We were so utterly glad of each other.

  2

  Nights while she slept, and he couldn’t, he sat up reading or writing in a spiral notebook that he kept locked in his desk drawer. It was for the mechanical scribbling of it and the absurdly mannered and rational sound of it that he kept on. His anxiety lessened slightly with the concentration it took to keep to the specific form of inquiry: that of Aquinas in The Summa Theologica. It was, then, a kind of ironic glaring at the anxiety itself, an attempt to reason it through. And the reading he did, always in Aquinas—those logical calm sentences coming from apparently calm faith—also helped to ground him, as it had when he was a boy, or he wanted to believe it did that. Yet, after putting it all away and going in to lie quietly at her side, keeping still, being considerate and thinking of himself as lovingly waiting for her to come to him, and finally drifting off to sleep at last, he would wake in the predawn hours to find that the anxiety was still there. Now he was thinking not only about the one other but about all the others: she had lived a life before he met her, and while he understood fully that it was no business of his to question any of it, something Marsha Trunan said one night over a dinner they were having with Iris—something about too many bad dates during her absence from the lives of friends that last winter in D.C.—upset him in a way he could not dismiss. It had started with talk about Senator Norland suffering a mild stroke and being hospitalized and how he worked too hard all the time and was so preoccupied that he hadn’t even noticed the descent of one of his chief employees into desolation and despair. Faulk marked the perturbed look on his wife’s face as her friend went on about it, and an image raked through him of her in the arms of other men. He was aware that this, too, was none of his business, was in fact stupidly possessive and selfish—even brutish. Yet he felt the strangeness, the otherness, of her, someone he did not really know at all, and the sensation followed him through the hours of the day and into the nights. Of course her past had been altered by present circumstance. It meant nothing except as it related to the mystery about Jamaica: if that was as he now suspected it was, then everything else took on significance, and the irrationality of the thing had the force of reason.

  He could not pray. He could not think of anything else at all. There were times when the shadow of something beyond all this, some nameless immensity, seemed to be gathering.

  He had come to see that he was the one between them who was most changed, now, watching her and listening when she was on the phone and looking carefully at her e-mails and whatever was sent to her, and sifting also through the boxes that she had packed from her time in Washington. He found nothing but the photograph taken in Chicago. There were many other photographs, but they were all of her with Iris or with friends or people she had known in France and in Washington—people around the senator and the senator himself. In one little box were photographs of her when she was small, elementary school poses, class pictures, a little girl with a wide, lovely smile and a sadness in her eyes.

  He put all this away with the care of an archeologist handling ancient artifacts, and felt deceitful for all his suspicions. Even so, he could not shake them.

  Oh, God, help me.

  She did some reading. She found that more than seven out of ten victims of the crime never report it. She looked it up and then went to other sources and looked it up again. The lowest estimate was six out of ten.

  It filled her with resolve at the same time that it horrified her.

  In the nights, this was the thing that woke her, this knowledge. Others managed to go on, others made their way, and she would lie awake hearing him in the next room or breathing in the bed at her side and think that she could make it. She could live past it and be through with it at last.

  It was the work, the painting, that she could use to learn how to be herself again. Long ago she had written in her notebook something of Wyeth’s that she had admired without realizing its true force: I think one’s art goes as far and as deep as one’s love goes. I see no reason for painting but that. If I have anything to offer, it is my emotional contact with the place where I live and the people I do.

  But all the emotional contacts seemed so attenuated and frail now.

  The country was at war in Afghanistan, and the master terrorist had declared a jihad on the United States. The anthrax horror was playing out on TV and in the papers. There were claims that the killer powder—which one reporter said looked like Purina Dog Chow—was “weapons grade,” and a man in Florida said this was the same makeup of the biological agents the Iraqi dictator had used on his own people. Someone else said there was evidence that smallpox was mixed in with the powder.

  “The mortality rate of smallpox before the vaccine,” Faulk said to Iris one evening over dinner, “was something like fifty percent. You know what it was for the Spanish flu?”

  “Eighty?” Iris said.

  “Two.”

  “What?”

  “Two percent. And that translated into thirty million deaths worldwide.”

  “God,” Natasha said, low, “can’t we talk about something else?”

  “People will look back years from now,” said her husband, “and wonder how we went through the days.”

  There was a sense of being threatened that was always there, like the dark outside windows in a well-lit house. Even when you didn’t talk about it, the effects of it made themselves felt. The cleanup in New York and at the Pentagon continued, and each night there were more stories about all of it.

  They went together and bought a small used car for Natasha, and he rode with her as she drove over to Iris’s to show it off. Iris was irritable with them and said they shouldn’t have spent the money, they could have taken her car, since she seldom used it anymore, and it was a good car, with few miles on it, only five years old. Faulk watched his wife handle the old woman’s temper. She kissed Iris on the cheek and said, “You need your wheels, lady, and you know it. And we have the money.” She looked at Faulk. “Don’t we, honey?”

  “We do,” he said, delighted at the smile on her face.

  It was no surprise
to him that she was most comfortable around Iris. They spent a lot of time over at the old woman’s house, and Iris liked the company.

  At times, because they were mutually horror-struck at the history they were living through, he could believe they were coming out of their own personal trouble. Their little daily rituals were a hedge against the grief that was everywhere, and the two of them became adept at a sort of careful thoughtfulness with each other.

  Each morning when they arose—sometimes separately, sometimes without much sleep—the first few seconds they were together felt easy enough, coming from the fog of dreaming and drifting, and they prepared for the day as if nothing were wrong. He would make her breakfast, and they would eat, or try to, talking aimlessly about what was in the papers. He went to work like anyone else, leaving her in her little space off the dining room, laying out her own work for the day, tubes and brushes and the small squares of hot-pressed paper.

  Often, though, they were coming from hours of sleeplessness or, worse, nightmares. She kept having the nightmares. He worked at being patient and gentle. And when she would drift off, and sleep would not come for him, he would go into the little room off the master bedroom where his desk was, and the spiral notebooks, the two volumes of The Summa Theologica.

  Sometimes he was in that cluttered, narrow room when the sun came up.

  In the darkness, she would lie quiet, having awakened from the bad dreams, aware of him in the other room, and she felt small and spoiled and trifling, angry with herself for everything, even unimportant matters: her unspoken annoyance with him for minor habitual things she had never thought of before living with someone—the fact that he was squeamish about roasting a whole chicken because it made him too aware of the thing as a carcass; his tendency to leave his clothes hanging on doorknobs or draped over chairs; his late hours, sitting up reading or writing, and his refusal to allow her into that world with him (they did not talk anymore about what he was reading or what he was writing; if she broached it as a subject, he changed the subject). But these were negligible problems, requiring adjustments that would have been necessary anyway. Withal, there were the other matters, the mud on the floor, as Iris would put it: the undeniable and increasing unease in lovemaking; the instances of recurring panic—the latest when she remembered writing Iris’s address in the sand and felt it as a certainty that Constance had indeed seen Nicholas Duego at the airport. These nights, in the dark, alone in the bed, she experienced the worry about that, and then in the wooziness of half sleep actually hoped it had been Duego and that he was spying on her so he could see that she was not telling anyone, he would know that his secret was safe with her, and he did not have to do anything else.