Living in the Weather of the World

by Richard Bausch

  “I’m fine, really.”

  “You’re my brother,” she said, and raised her glass. “Here’s to my one brother. And I didn’t know this about you until a couple of years ago.” She smiled, but there were tears lining the lower lids of her eyes.

  “You all right?”

  “Isn’t it strange to have better treatment from people—just people—than you ever got from your own family?”

  “You mean the parents,” he said.

  She did not answer. She was pouring more of the wine.

  “I think I know what you mean,” he said. “You mean all of us.”

  “We should get another bottle.”

  “You mean me.”

  “I wish I’d known about you, and if you’d called now and then, just to be in touch, if we’d been in touch, I think I might’ve. Because what if you were there when I figured it out? I mean things might not’ve been so hard for me.”

  He nodded helplessly. “Right. That’s absolutely right. I’m sorry.”

  “I went through a lot of hell, as a kid. An awful lot of—just—you know, hell.” She had turned to the waiter, one hand up. The hand shook slightly, the smallest tremor, while she made a little waving motion. It went all the way to the bottom of his heart.

  “God, Katie,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  But the music had started up again, and it was clear that she hadn’t heard him. She was watching Lanelle move through the room, languid and sultry, mic in hand, singing “Angel Eyes.”

  THE LINEAMENTS OF GRATIFIED DESIRE

  What is it men in women do require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  What is it women do in men require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  —WILLIAM BLAKE

  I

  The woman David Shumaker had thought of as his own, his darling Sonya, was in Los Angeles for a period of weeks, helping her mother through knee replacement surgery and physical therapy. Almost two thousand miles away. At the beginning, he had thought he might go crazy without her. In the tossing nights, he suffered the fear that she would meet and fall in love with another man. He told himself it was just the distance, and his own long-standing insecurity about himself and women.

  Now here he was, the one who had met someone else.

  He told his father, because his father had introduced him to Sonya. The old man stared, frowning. “I thought you—” He stopped. “This is a joke, right?”

  She had been the professor’s undergraduate assistant in the math department at Memphis.

  “It’s no joke, Dad.”

  His father was quiet for a time. Then: “What’s the deal here, Son?”

  “I guess I should call and tell her.”

  “You’re really serious.”

  “I’ll get her on the phone and just—spill it, I guess.” He had not quite voiced to himself the hope that the other would offer to make the call, given the old student-teacher friendship.

  “This new someone else—what’s her name?”

  “Alexa. Alexa Jamison.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  His first impulse was to lie. But there was no use. “A week,” he said.

  “A week?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One week? Seven days?”

  “Well, almost a week. Six days, actually, counting today.”

  “Jesus Christ, David.”

  “I know.”

  The old man tilted his head slightly to one side, as if he had just noticed something about his son’s face. But he said nothing. They were in his study, sun and leaf shade in the window. It looked like the light of an ordinary day.

  The young man’s mother came through the house calling for her husband. “Wilfred? Are you still here? You were going to get milk—” She had come to the door and, seeing her son, walked over to give him a hug. “What a nice surprise.”

  “Surprise is right,” said Professor Shumaker.

  “Okay.” She folded her arms. “I’m waiting. You sold the painting.”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think he’s ready to talk about it.”

  “Really.” Her tone was light, nearly playful.

  “This is serious, Lena.”

  Shumaker said, “I can’t marry Sonya. I’m in love with someone else.”

  For what seemed a long time, no one spoke.

  His mother said, “I’ve got some work to do. You two talk about it and let me know.” She turned and went out, closing the door quietly.

  “That’s my lady,” said the professor. “Through thick and thin she’s out the door.”

  The young man said nothing.

  “Little joke.”

  “Dad, if you saw this woman—”

  “If I saw her.”

  “She’s the model for my painting. It’s a nude.”

  “A nude.”

  “You knew I was painting her.”

  “I think I’d’ve remembered if you said it was a nude.”

  “It’s a commission.”

  “Nude.”

  “It happens all the time, Dad.”

  “No kidding,” said the professor with a look.

  “It doesn’t really have to do with the fact that it’s a nude. This—this whole thing just—took hold of me. I’m completely gone on her, and if you saw her, you’d see why.”

  “What the hell’re you talking about, boy? If I saw her. You mean if I saw her nude?”

  “No. Jesus. I know it sounds worse than I mean it.”

  “It can’t sound worse than it is.”

  After a pause, the young man said, “I’ll call Sonya and tell her.”

  “Just like that.”

  “I won’t lie to her.”

  “Don’t lie to yourself. That’s ego talking, you won’t lie to her—that means you want to tell her over the phone. There’s been marriage plans, for Christ’s sake.”

  “You’re saying I should tell her face-to-face, then.”

  “What do you think?”

  “God, I feel awful.”

  “This thing with—you’re sure it’s serious? I mean the first time you see her in your life, she takes her clothes off.”

  “That isn’t how it happened. There was—I talked with her. We had coffee.”

  “And then she took her clothes off.”

  “Dad. Cut it out. No. Look—it’s a sitting. A sitting. The model just sits there—”

  “I know what a sitting is, Son.”

  The young man waited.

  “You were so serious about Sonya. She’s been like one of the family. She is one of the family.”

  He looked down. “I swear I never felt anything as strong as this.”

  The professor seemed to be waiting for him to explain further. Then: “Why’re you telling me—us—about it anyway?”

  “I guess I wanted your advice. I wouldn’t have accepted the commission if I thought—I—I wish I hadn’t accepted it. But I did, and Alexa’s walked into my life, and I’m completely gone.”

  “And she feels the same way about you.”

  “It’s crazy, I know.”

  “Well, there’s not much to say, then.”

  Another silence.

  “Is there.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Guess not.”

  “You guess not.”

  “Dad.”

  “That poor girl’s been like part of the family.”

  “I feel terrible.”

  “Well, just don’t break it off over the damn telephone. That’d be cowardly.”

  “It’s like I’m cheating on a wife.”

  “No,” Wilfred Shumaker said, simply. “You cheated on your fiancée. And your mother was on the phone with her mother just this morning.”

  II

  When he thought about it, he could see that this thing with Alexa Jamison was a betrayal of the idea of what Sonya and he had been. The romance of that. Such a sweet beginning and a following inertia. The t
wo families, everybody coming together as part of the story.

  It happened this way:

  Near the end of the spring semester, he and his father went to a Memphis in May party on the roof of the Madison Hotel. Wilfred introduced Sonya to him as his star pupil. Sonya extended a soft hand, and the young man shook it, and they walked to the table where the wine and the drinks were and waited in line, talking. They liked each other instantly. She had decided that she wanted to teach, and he joked about being in graduate school and still having to be driven around by his father. The ratty old, rusted car he’d been driving since high school was on its last legs, he told her, and so each afternoon after his one graduate class ended he had to hang out in the upstairs terrace of the student center waiting for a ride home with the professor, whose senior seminar in calculus went until five-thirty.

  “Of course you know how few guys would admit this sort of thing,” she said with a perfectly uncomplicated smile. Her straightforwardness was surprising and charming.

  “Well,” he managed to say, “no sense lying about it.”

  “Oh, but there is. I’ve lost all respect for your manliness. You don’t have a cool car.”

  “I have a cool bicycle. But it’s in my father’s garage and I haven’t been on it for years.”

  She bit the edge of her thumbnail and smiled. “I’d get that tattooed on your chest,” she said, smiling again.

  Later, with his father, being driven to his small efficiency apartment in the Cooper-Young district, he asked about her.

  “Well, I don’t know all that much. She’s got a real talent for mathematical thought and theory, and her parents live out in LA. That’s about it.”

  “I like her,” Shumaker said.

  The next night, as he stood in the terrace window of the student center and watched people move through the thin mist sweeping across the plaza below, she materialized out of the dimness, smiling up at him, quite lovely, a warm memory in the making. He rushed out to meet her.

  “I came here on an impulse,” she said. “Hoping I’d see you.” Her straightforwardness again.

  “I swear you were on my mind,” he told her. “And then you stepped out of the mist.”

  It was true. He had actually been hoping she would appear.

  “How poetic.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek. “So here we are.”

  He texted his father to go on home without him.

  They went down to the river in her little cluttered car, his knees against the dash because the passenger seat would not slide back. She found a parking space on Riverside Drive, and they walked along the trolley tracks for a block or so. Then he paid for a coach and horses to take them up to the Madison. The whole way up the long hill he kept looking at the side of her face while she talked. She went on in a stream of funny self-deprecation about growing up in Southern California, off Wilshire Boulevard in the City of Angels: the cool nights after blistering afternoons, the smog, the happy hours on the beach, her often troubled high-school days, and how silly that had all been for meaning so much to her at the time. Then there was her piano-playing father, an attorney for Hollywood types, and her actress mother, who had left the business to raise her. And there was Los Angeles itself. Sirens every night. A whole other class of people living up in the hills, in the big houses and the wildly extravagant villas.

  Before the coach got up to Main Street, he took her into his arms and kissed her. Magic. They went over to Beale Street and danced at the Rum Boogie Café, and then strolled up to B.B. King’s Blues Club for barbecue and beer. It was a lovely long night of easy conversation about their respective circumstances, like old friends catching up with each other. Both were twenty-two and had finished with their undergraduate degrees, his in art and hers in mathematics. They were both unemployed in their respective fields and were making do, as she put it. Along with taking the one art class he was a greeter and server at his uncle Terry’s restaurant, and she worked the ticket booth at the Malco Paradiso. He was living in the small efficiency apartment, a converted garage, really, with one window in the closet-sized bathroom and another in the only door, and she lived in a two-bedroom backyard rental house in Chickasaw Gardens, which she had shared with a gay clarinetist named Forest, who left after the first month for India, he said, to avoid the drag of nine-to-five. She’d decided to see if she could make the rent alone and was proudly surprised that she could. And no nine-to-five, either. Six to eleven at night. She laughed softly, saying this, and he said he liked the sound of the laugh. He spoke of the peculiar fact that the way you laughed could absolutely determine how well you did in company, and he faked a goofy mule-sounding bray, just to hear her laugh again. Later, when even the crowd on Beale Street had thinned out, they strolled back down to the river. The light on the water shone, and he had an idea that this would be something about which they would reminisce, telling how they came together. The night shimmered.

  That was a year and four months ago.

  Once in those first days, they sat together in her car parked at the edge of the river, sipping Chianti and eating figs with walnuts and little wedges of cheese, making up stories about the people who walked by—giving them whole lives and histories and complications, putting sorrows and joys around them like invisible capes as they strolled past. He made sketches of them and showed them to her, and they talked about the series of river scenes he might paint and call the whole exhibit Mississippi. Yes, he would do that.

  Two weeks later, he bought a ring with a salary advance from Uncle Terry, who sometimes played guitar and sang at the farmers’ market on Saturday mornings. He took her to see him play, and then the two of them rode the trolley down to the river and around to Main Street. On the patio of the Blue Fin Café, he dropped the ring into her glass of white wine, as he had seen it done in the movies. She wept when she saw it and, standing to kiss him, knocked the glass over and wept some more.

  The following night, they went to his father’s house, and Uncle Terry was there, too, and they had a big dinner that Lena had prepared. Sonya’s parents spoke to everyone on the telephone. Everyone sang happy birthday to David Shumaker, who was turning twenty-three at the end of the month. The day he bought the ring, he had taken sketches to the dealers on Main Street, and three different galleries showed interest. They would be married as soon as he had his first show, and by that time they might both be teaching. If the exhibit did well, they could do it sooner. It was just a matter of producing enough work, and he was spending long hours each day drawing and doing preliminary sketches of the scenes.

  They spent every available moment together through the spring and summer. They confided about secret feelings concerning others, old and new fears, affections, hopes, disappointments. They made love on the ratty old divan in his apartment and spent whole afternoons playing in the sunlight through the one window in the door and planning how life would be after they were married.

  In the interim they would earn certification to teach. They might end up teaching in the same school. He would win prizes for his series of paintings called Mississippi. They would fly off together into the limitless blue distances. They fantasized that, just as her once-roommate had flown off to avoid the nine-to-five drag, they too would fly away, after Shumaker made big money on the paintings. She with her talent for math would handle the finances, would be his business manager in their travels through India, the far-off exotic ends of the earth. Talking about all this, he made her laugh by pronouncing the country’s name in what he called high British: IN-dyaa.

  —

  IN EARLY SEPTEMBER, after she flew to LA and there were only phone calls between them, it became difficult finding time to talk with her, and, seeking reassurance, he teased about taking a plane out there to surprise her.

  “Don’t talk like that,” she said. “I don’t like that.”

  “I was joking.”

  “Don’t joke. I don’t feel like jokes right now.”

  “Come on,” he said. “You? Wouldn’t y
ou like to see me?”

  “My mother’s driving me batty. I’m sorry. It’s awful to say, but I’d like to see anyone but her these days. And my father’s not far behind.”

  The parents and their troubles.

  Each call became a session of complaining about them. Both were in their fifties, and they wanted her to come home for good. They had never dreamed that sending her to the University of Memphis would mean that she would decide to live there. They hated Memphis. Each night at dinner, her father found subtle ways to disparage the place, while her mother grieved sullenly over some perceived slight or other coming from the other two. “Being an only child sucks,” she told Shumaker. “I’m between them, and they go back and forth—they can’t stand to be in the same room, and then they can stand it—you know? All of a sudden they won’t take a step without each other. They’re the heroes of their own movie about love. There’s no middle ground. I’m the middle ground.”

  In the evenings after the tensions of dinner, her father would sit at the piano in the parlor and pound away on a Chopin nocturne as if it were something requiring that kind of force. And her mother would sit with a TV tray of various snacks and candies at her elbow, her leg supported by a big leather hassock, watching old movies on TCM—those chatty films of the thirties and forties—apparently oblivious to the thundering of the piano. Their daughter was quite adept at describing all this at length. Shumaker listened, and tried to keep track. He thought it was the distance that was making her seem so sour.

  “Come home,” he said. “Now.”

  “I can’t now. God! Quit torturing me. Please.”

  He did not say, as he wanted to, Come on, babe. Where’s my funny darling?

  He enrolled in classes to earn certification and was looking to find work teaching. There was nothing but substitute jobs. But he went on taking the courses and working for his uncle. He lacked much opportunity to work on his sketches and paintings, and his heart wasn’t in it with Sonya so far away, in other weather and time.

  All this was before he began work on the portrait. Before he met Alexa Jamison.

  III