Before, During, After

by Richard Bausch

“This is Liam Adams,” Iris said. “An old friend.”

  Natasha shook hands, staring at him. He did not look the slightest bit familiar.

  “Hello,” Liam Adams said.

  “Mr. Adams and I go way back.”

  Natasha stood silent, with a half smile of greeting.

  “I’m visiting from New York,” he said.

  “We knew each other in the mayor’s office,” said Iris. “When you were small.”

  “I remember you when you were this big.” Mr. Adams held his hand out below the level of the tabletop.

  “He’s moving back to Memphis.”

  “Because of the attacks,” Natasha guessed.

  “Actually, I’d been planning to for a couple of years.” His smile was wide, and he had small yellow in-turning teeth. His blue eyes seemed too young for the elderly features. “But the Twin Towers got me focused on it, I guess. I grew up here, you know. And—and New York requires so much energy.”

  Soon they were all three seated at the table. “Did you know my mother?” Natasha asked.

  “No.”

  “It was just you and me, honey, when I took the job in the mayor’s office.”

  “And I came in a year later, right?” Mr. Adams said.

  “That’s right.”

  He shook his head, smiling wistfully. “I got married in New York. Twenty years we were together. Never thought I would get married. I’d been single so long.”

  The other two were silent.

  “She passed away in ’96.”

  “I’m sorry,” Iris said.

  “March.” He sipped the coffee, staring out the window.

  She stood and moved to pour more coffee. He watched her and, thanking her, lifted the cup and drank again. Iris sat down, moved the flat of her hands across the surface of the table. “Well,” she said. “This is certainly strange.” Then she laughed. “I can’t believe it. All these years—”

  “You were going to say?” Natasha asked her.

  “Well, it’s just been so long.”

  There was a pause.

  “I couldn’t come to Memphis and not call you,” Mr. Adams said.

  “That would’ve upset me.”

  Natasha thought of the news she had and stared at them both. Iris asked him where he was when the towers were hit.

  “I was walking my dog. Eighth Avenue, up on Ninety-First. I didn’t see it until I went in and made some toast for myself and sat down in front of the TV.”

  “Such a terrible thing,” said Iris. “Natasha’s husband was there, too. In New York. But like you, a few blocks north.”

  “I lost a neighbor. Didn’t know him that well. But I saw him that morning, and he talked about not going to work that day. But he went. There are so many ironies like that in it—people going along at the beginning of a working day like any other and something so bad coming.”

  “Would you like to stay for lunch?”

  “No, I should go. Some other time.”

  Iris saw him out, then sat at the kitchen table and looked at the coffee in her cup. “Imagine,” she said.

  Natasha watched her, and when she put one hand to her forehead and seemed about to cry, Natasha pulled her chair around and sat close.

  Iris looked at her. “What?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Little headache. Had it before he got here.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  Her grandmother turned to her and stared, eyes wide, mouth open as if she might shout or cry. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Is it true? Is it really true?”

  5

  ARTICLE 3. Whether it can be said that a person may still be in love with someone other than her spouse and decide against acting on it out of fear of hurting him, who is dear to her?

  We proceed thus to the Third Article: It seems that it can be said that a person may still be in love with someone other than her spouse and decide against acting on it out of fear of hurting him, who is dear to her.

  Objection 1.

  The crux of this case is against the grain of genuine straightforward honesty in my wife, who has in all other instances taken pains to be direct and truthful with me while denying that there is something more giving her these panics and night spells than the memory of having been trapped and believing she had lost me.

  Objection 2.

  Further, she has shown herself to be quite strong in asserting herself and her version of things when confronted or questioned, even with the lately subtle and guarded form reservations and questions have mostly taken (she will not speak of it directly), and there is clearly the same puzzlement as mine about all this in the one person she would confide in other than her husband if indeed there were such a circumstance, her grandmother, who I have come to believe continues in the same dark as I am about the cause of these confusions of feeling.

  On the contrary, It is well known that in many circumstances involving a dishonesty in order to protect the feelings of someone whose well-being is in question, there exists an extreme scrutiny about matters of no bearing on the essential question, in order to preserve the deception.

  I answer that, The idea itself is so contrary to the experience of being with my wife in every single other instance, and that when I watch her with her grandmother, or her friend Marsha, or our friend Andrew Clenon, it is impossible to put together this bright, intelligent, warm, expressive, and clever person with the one who seems inwardly, in spite of all her effort, to cower at the prospect of intimacy with me. That is, any intimacy beyond simply lying next to each other to read or talk. And she shows the quickest tendency to a kind of interior cringing at any suggestion that something is not the same, that something is missing. Ease is missing. She denies it and asks for time, and there seem to be moments when she comes toward me, but it all feels produced.

  Reply Obj. 1.

  The essential circumstance which is such cause of dismay is something emanating from those more than two weeks we were apart, and all the hurts and doubts stem from uncertainty about a singular event I am not privy to but about which there is undeniable evidence.

  Reply Obj. 2.

  What really amounts to only a few hours of fearing she had lost me does not seem at all sufficient as a cause of such a long period of lingering aftershock.

  6

  The two women worked on the bending exercises for Iris’s knee, and some lifting with two-pound weights, and then Natasha drove her to the bank and to the store. Iris talked excitedly and happily about the new baby. “It’s just what this world—just what we need now,” she said. “Have you thought about a name? I bet not. Well, it’s new. I wonder what you’ll settle on. Have you-all talked about it? I can come over and babysit every day. It’s going to be so wonderful living so close. My God, I’ll—I’m about to be a great-grandmother.” She was using the cane, but was clearly less dependent on it, touching it to the ground with each step. “Imagine that. A great-grandmother.”

  “Yes, you will be that,” Natasha told her. “You already are that.” Sometimes the bad possibilities did not play themselves out in life, and people were lucky and knew it and appreciated it. Two months. Two months. This was Faulk’s child.

  “I actually like the sound of it,” Iris said. “Great-grandmother.”

  The day was cool and sunny, and they stopped for lunch at the Otherlands Coffee Bar and sat out on the wooden deck in the shade of an umbrella and were happy. With Iris’s happiness, Natasha could believe that this was a happy thing. Suddenly she thought of sitting here with Constance the day before the wedding, and it made a little cloud of unrest in her soul. She looked at Iris’s lined face and loved her for the calm that always seemed to reside there. “Come have dinner with us tonight, okay? That’s when I’ll tell him.”

  “Oh, tell him when he gets home from work.”

  “No, I want you there. Please?”

  Iris smiled and nodded, thinking it over.

  “Come help us celebrate. I want to have a party.”


  “Well, it’s up to you, sweetie.”

  There was a brief pause.

  “It was good seeing Liam after all these years,” Iris said, and then bit into her sandwich. “He didn’t remember that I met his wife. They visited a couple of times at the beginning.”

  “Were you in love?”

  Chewing, she seemed to be trying to decide for herself what the situation had been. “We were very good friends, I guess you’d say now. Nothing happened. We had fun, though. I was grieving, raising a child alone.”

  The cool air and the heat of the sun was on them. Natasha realized that she did not want to know more. All of it was past, and she wanted the past to be past. Gone.

  “I have pictures from those days,” her grandmother said. “You should see your face in them—this little kid with deep shadows under her eyes and a look like grief itself. The irises of your eyes didn’t touch the bottom lids. It made you look sadder than you were.”

  She heard this without quite taking it in. She was thinking about the fact that this was Faulk’s baby and not Duego’s—and then she was beset with the idea of Duego, wherever he was in Florida … or Memphis; that was also possible. Two people knew what had happened on that beach in Jamaica. The thought had not quite registered with her before she imagined him witnessing her silence and deciding to leave her alone. Perhaps this moment he was with some other unfortunate young woman, still being who he was and what he was. It seemed wrong of her not to have thought of it earlier in this way.

  Iris was talking about Natasha’s mother. “When she was pregnant with you she was the bloom of health. She had no morning sickness at all. No discomforts. It was like she was made to be pregnant. And that was when she got the idea of getting away from Memphis. The grime of Memphis. That was the way she talked about it. Grime. She got big as a house, and she was happy that way, and all she could talk about was finding a way out of this town. Grime. I’ve always loved this town and felt at home in it. It’s the best of both worlds—a big city that feels very much like a small town. But she wanted out of it in the worst way. I thought it was odd.”

  “Well, we’re all odd, aren’t we? If you scratch the surface.”

  “I had a beau,” Iris said, and gave the small nodding gesture that admitted it was Liam Adams. “For a little while when I was left alone. And I needed it, then.”

  Natasha reached over and touched her wrist. “You never told me this.”

  The old woman stared at her with brimming eyes. “ ‘The dark backward and abysm of time.’ ”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “It’s all right if you did.”

  “I have one memory that’s pretty clear,” Natasha said. “The two of them sitting in the front seat of a car and snow outside the windows. I was in the backseat. They were talking low, and we were waiting for someone. But that’s all. I don’t know who we were waiting for. And I remember crying once because I couldn’t tie my shoes, and Daddy trying to show me—and she said, ‘You’ve hurt her feelings.’ And I cried harder, milking it, but I can’t see their faces, and I don’t know where we were. A sunny living room somewhere and summer outside the window.”

  “You were the prettiest little baby, you know.”

  “Even with my old soul?”

  “Yep.”

  Presently, Iris said, “I’ve wondered what might’ve happened if we had been in love, that man and me. He looks so old now. Well, he is old, isn’t he.”

  “I think he looks nice,” Natasha said.

  After another pause, Iris said, “Regret hurts pretty awfully, doesn’t it.”

  “Yes—more than anybody ever tells you.”

  She tilted her head, as if trying to see into what she had just heard, but also, now, gazing stonily at the younger woman. “Go on.”

  “No. It’s—I was just saying.”

  “Are we talking about the same thing?”

  Natasha said nothing.

  “Will you please tell me what’s going on with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m pregnant.” Too much time had passed. No one would believe her after so much time. Or, no, they would believe her, and what would they do then?

  “You have been so inward and not yourself,” Iris said. “It’s very plain. Poor Michael is painfully and obviously aware of it.”

  “Has he said something?”

  Iris considered for a moment.

  “Has he talked to you, Iris?”

  “I said it’s painfully obvious that he’s worried about it. No, he hasn’t talked to me. Not directly. I was trying to find the words to explain how it is. It’s—it’s in the way we speak to each other in your presence, like we’re both tiptoeing around an invalid.”

  “Oh, well, God! That’s good to know. That makes me feel so confident and strong. Thank you.”

  “I don’t mean it as a criticism, honey.”

  “You could’ve fooled me.”

  “Well, I didn’t. I’m worried about you, and so is Michael.”

  They said nothing for a few moments, Iris eating her sandwich and then wiping her fingers. Natasha watching her, but not eating.

  “I’ve ruined your lunch.”

  “I felt a little nauseous before we sat down,” Natasha said.

  “Maybe have a little milk.”

  “I’m all right.”

  A while later, she said, “God. I’m pregnant,” and she sniffled.

  “Well, that explains a lot.”

  “I don’t know what it explains. I’m having a baby, that’s all.”

  “Look, we all love you.”

  “Who is ‘we all’? Have you all been talking about me?”

  “I wasn’t saying it about anybody. Me, Michael. Marsha. Your friends. Everybody who ever really got to know you. That’s all I mean.”

  “I feel so watched,” Natasha told her.

  7

  ARTICLE 4 Whether it is justified to seek answers by confronting people outside the marriage who may be possible sources of enlightenment concerning the problem, if a trouble goes unanswered for so long.

  We proceed thus to the Fourth Article: It seems that it is justified to seek answers by confronting people outside the marriage who may be possible sources of enlightenment concerning a problem, if a trouble goes unanswered for so long.

  Objection 1.

  It is possible that the trouble itself is colorated with imagining, and therefore might smack of the hysterical, and introduce further trouble without the benefit of further understanding.

  Objection 2.

  The fact of confronting anyone is by its nature extreme, and may therefore be unfeasible on the face of it, given my own character, which is to keep things inside.

  On the contrary, It is impossible to suppose that one’s sense of the trouble is all the product of imagining, or even partially so, though the suspicion about the former lover is imbued with what I do imagine of my wife on the beach in Jamaica, with someone. But there is a definite change in her feeling toward me which is unacknowledged but demonstrated in ways that she answers for with her experience of 9/11. She herself acknowledges, at least tacitly, the unease; and the panics in the night, the anxiety and trembling, are all manifestations of the trouble. They are undeniable. Therefore, I have sufficient reason to seek an answer for myself beyond our unhappy silences and the sense, even as she seems all right, that something is haunting her. It is a reasonable thing to expect a man to seek some communication with the person she was with in Jamaica, Constance, and, if my suspicions are shown to be correct, with the someone else my wife saw there.

  I answer that, it makes no sense to look for something that could be purely in the realm of imagining, especially if one has to confront a person who showed such clear sign of being part of the conspiracy of silence. And it would be something bordering on psychotic to seek some sort of confrontation with the photographer, because he is only one possibility, and it should be simple enough to rule him out: one has only to find out where he was during that per
iod in the middle of September. Lacking him as the possible other the whole question of distrust deepens further. This is a sufficient answer to the Objections.

  8

  That evening, Iris came over to the house for dinner, as planned. She brought Liam Adams with her. She introduced him by saying, “This is my friend from the mayor’s office.” Faulk simply stared at them, as if waiting for some kind of punch line.

  Iris said, “I guess Natasha hasn’t talked to you since you got home.”

  For Faulk, it was another aspect of what he did not want to think about: his wife’s previous life. The fact that it was from her childhood meant nothing against the rush of feeling that it was a further complication, and it made him irritable. He offered wine to them both. Natasha, returning from the store with a bag of groceries, said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought I’d be back before you got here.” She looked at Mr. Adams and smiled.

  Apparently he had come calling shortly after Natasha dropped Iris off from their lunch. Natasha put the groceries away and started heating oil to fry chicken. Faulk had poured two glasses of Rioja. Liam Adams drank his rather quickly and then spoke about taking the liberty of having another glass. “If no one minds,” he said, pouring it full.

  Natasha saw this, and marked it, and then went about making the dinner while the three of them talked in the other room.

  They discussed the Afghan war for a while, and then Iris said, “Let’s change the subject. I’m so sick of the whole awful thing.”

  Adams had emptied the first bottle of wine, so Faulk opened another. The new wine was a Côtes-du-Rhone, and Adams talked about how this wine seemed lighter. Natasha made the dinner with help from Iris while the two men went on about Faulk’s having left the priesthood and about Adams’s deciding to move back to Memphis, where he was born and raised. He reminisced about Memphis in the old days, when he was a boy and it had been a segregated city. “Beale Street then was nothing like it is now, let me tell you.”

  The women set the dinner out, and they all sat down to eat. Adams kept pouring wine for himself and Faulk until the second bottle was empty, and Faulk took the last bottle of red that he had, a Brunello, and opened it, feeling a little drunk himself, and watching Adams fill his glass again. Adams drank most of the glass and then poured more, talking too loud about deciding to come home and then taking five years to do it.