Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  Buddy had begun passing out the drinks, standing over the cart. Nick emerged from the house, wearing a Hawaiian shirt open at the front, and a pair of white trunks and sandals. He was carrying a can of beer. “Anybody else want a beer?” he asked.

  “I’ve got some on ice under the tray, here,” said Buddy. “I’m like a flight attendant for the airlines, moving down the aisles offering libations. Who ordered what?”

  “Iced tea,” said Sheri. She had folded the back of her chair down and turned so that she was lying on her stomach.

  “Iced tea it is,” Buddy said.

  Tyler edged off the side of the pool, and let himself down into the water, then propped himself on his folded arms on the edge, facing Lily, squinting into the sunlight.

  “You should come in,” he said. “It’d relax you.”

  She shook her head, looking at her own hands folding and unfolding over her belly.

  Dominic appeared from the side of house, wearing green trunks that looked too big for him, and seeming even skinnier and sallower than Lily had remembered him. She caught herself trying not to stare. He walked down the pool steps and into the water up to his waist, then dipped and went under, coming up with his hair in his face. He stood and pushed it back, and then settled in again, arms out to balance himself. Lily had seen him look for her as soon as he stepped from the shadow of the house. Now he seemed content to move through the water.

  Tyler took a scotch from Buddy and held it up as if to offer a toast to everyone. He drank from it, swallowed with satisfaction. “Aren’t you going to have anything, honey?” he said. “Join the party?”

  “I can’t,” she said. “You know that.”

  “Iced tea?” he said. “Lemonade? Grapefruit juice?”

  There was something brittle and terrible about the whole exchange.

  She watched the others, and tried to imagine how, or when, she would tell Dominic that he was the father of this baby she was carrying. Dominic flopped around in the water, talking to Rosa, and now Manny came out, wearing white trunks with silver-and-gray swordfish rising from fantastic blue-and-pearl waves printed on the legs. He accepted a glass of bourbon from Buddy, and then came over and sat in one of the canvas chairs next to Lily, who smiled hello.

  Buddy had gotten into the water now, too, along with Sheri and Millicent.

  “Very happy,” Manny said.

  She wanted to reassure him. “You are from Chile?”

  He stared for an instant or two. Then, smiling quickly, with that nervous look: “Oh, yes. Chile.”

  She waited a moment. “And—do you like it in America?”

  The smile was still urgent. “Yes.”

  “And how long have you lived here?”

  The smile did not change. “Yes,” Manny said.

  “Manny has to be spoken to very slowly,” Dominic said from the pool. “I thought I mentioned that in my letter. I know it’s the old cliché of speaking loud and slow, but you know, actually it turns out to be necessary, at least in Manny’s case.”

  “Very close,” Manny said, nodding.

  “Yes,” said Lily. “Very.”

  “Yes.”

  “I am very much older.”

  She let her facial expression ask for her.

  “Seventeen years.” He pointed to his chest. “Thirty-nine.”

  “You don’t look thirty-nine.”

  He understood this. “Thank you.”

  The others were all talking and moving around in the pool. Nick wanted to go out to hunt in the morning. “What about it, Buddy?” he said, pushing backward in the water.

  “We’ve got company,” Buddy said.

  “Let’s bring ’em along. I think the, er, nearly parturient Ms. Lily’ll even let her hubby go again.”

  “Tyler does what he wants,” Lily said with as little inflection as possible.

  “What the hell is he talking about, anyway?” Sheri said. “What-urient?”

  “It means Miss Lily’s about to bring forth young,” Nick said. “But I’m talking about the manly art of killing soft, furry creatures from a distance with a scope rifle.”

  “Shut up, Nick.”

  Buddy hoisted himself out on the aluminum ladder at the deep end, and poured himself another drink. Tyler kept floating along on his back, not speaking to anyone, really. Rosa and Dominic had begun to discuss movies. They clung to the side of the pool and sipped their drinks and argued—Dominic going on about how he hated Siskel and Ebert. “Wouldn’t you love to see them stop for a minute and say, ‘Of course, folks, you realize that most of this stuff we’re talking about so portentously here is pure unadulterated class A shit.’”

  “Art form of the century,” Rosa said. “Isn’t that right?”

  “I know a guy thinks commercials are the art form of the century. Imagine the inside of his head.”

  “What will you do after New Orleans?” Lily asked Manny, speaking very slowly.

  He seemed puzzled. But she could see that it was not over the language: he had understood the words. “We stay there. My aunt—my lady friend—”

  “I’d like to come visit,” Lily told him.

  “Visit—yes.”

  Tyler had come to the edge of the pool nearest them. He folded his arms on the side and rested his chin on them. “You’d like to visit where?” he said.

  She returned his cold, falsely cheerful gaze. “New Orleans.”

  “You’ve been to New Orleans.”

  “I’d like to go again.”

  “Well, then of course we’ll do that,” Tyler said.

  Manny cleared his throat and sipped his drink, looking at each of them in turn. “New Orleans,” he said. “Lots of place. Big, nice house. Sì. Yes. Burgundy and St. Philip. Wonderful with a garden. Flowers.”

  “I’ll bet we walked by it that time,” Tyler said. “What do you think, Lily?”

  Manny said, “Yes.”

  Lily felt as if everything around her were closing in. Just now, in the too-bright light, it was easy enough to imagine that Dominic would be unhappy to be told that this child was his. She ran her hand lightly over her abdomen, and was momentarily light-headed.

  “Why don’t you change into your little maternity bathing suit and come on in,” Tyler said from the pool. “The water’s really nice.”

  “Nice,” Manny said. He stood. Lily watched him move around to the steps and then walk into the water. Dominic swam to meet him, followed by Rosa. Sheri held on to Nick, and Millicent and Buddy walked in a small circle in the shallow end; Millicent lifted her head and kissed him. They murmured to each other, shutting out everything around them. Lily pulled her eyes away, trying not to think of it all as a lie.

  Tyler was still resting his head on his arms, gazing at her. “Come on in,” he said. He was trying to make up.

  “Maybe later,” she told him.

  She got up, walked to the sliding doors, and entered the house. There was a terror gripping her now that she could feel this alienation and bitterness, and she went into the downstairs bathroom and washed her face, cupping the water in her hands and splashing it at herself, trying, in the pure sense shock of the cold water, to gain some control over her own mind. It seemed to her now that she would bear the baby and be alone, without help or love or solace from anyone. It was impossible to imagine Dominic being happy about the fact that in the single most humiliating experience of his young life he had engendered a child. But then, she worked to remind herself, he had kept the relationship with her, had remained her friend.

  When she came out into the room again, Tyler was standing in front of the doorway, wrapped in a towel.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Fine,” she managed.

  “Look, I’m sorry about all of it. I—I lost it and I’m sorry.”

  She waited for him to go on. He stood there gazing at her. “Sorry’s a word,” she said. “I’m sorry, too. But, Tyler, we’ve got trouble, now. Bad, bad trouble.”

  “You’re gonna tell
him.”

  “I don’t know,” she burst out. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  “I don’t think we should ever tell anybody.”

  She sat down on the bed and folded her hands in her lap, feeling that her presence, her body, her solidness, were heavy, blocky, all bulk and weight, while he was almost air, almost spirit, standing there in his bathing suit with the towel draped over his lean shoulders.

  “You’re gonna tell,” he said. “Aren’t you.”

  2

  LATER, Buddy and Nick drove out and bought a lot of barbecue and side dishes, and lugged it all back in plastic bags, which they opened on the picnic table by the pool. Their repast went on into the night. There was more swimming, more drinking. Manny and Dominic got very drunk, and Dominic made everyone laugh by doing imitations of public figures; he was particularly adept at the new president. “Better than the Saturday Night Live guy,” Buddy said.

  At some point during the long evening, Dominic told Lily that Manny had once been a priest, had worked as a missionary in a quiet country parish in the mountains of Peru, and had left the order in 1984, though he still practiced his faith. “He can read English perfectly and he’s not such a bad writer of it, either, though he misses some idioms. But the spoken word still gives him a lot of trouble. He keeps trying to get me to go with him to Mass.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  There was a sadness in his features—some grief had crossed his mind. “You know, for the life of me, I can’t seem to figure out a reason. But I don’t want to go, and that’s a fact.”

  “Did he leave the priesthood because…” Lily stopped.

  “Not really,” Dom said. “No.” He touched her wrist. “You needn’t feel uneasy talking about it, Lily.”

  “No,” she told him. “It’s—there’s—it’s not that.”

  “You’re Catholic, too, right?”

  “I think my father was. I mean, he was raised Catholic. I know he was. I don’t know what I’m saying here.”

  “Am I making you nervous?”

  “Not quite,” she said, feigning irony.

  They were quiet for a space, watching the others.

  She saw Tyler, off by himself, near the entrance to the porch, pacing slow, and smoking a small cigar. The baby kicked inside her—the other life. She moved slightly to accommodate the discomfort. “Oh,” she said.

  Dominic said, “May I?” and without waiting for permission, he put his hand very gently and tentatively on her abdomen. The baby moved there, and he looked at Lily. “Oh, my. I felt that. That was amazing.”

  “Yes.” Lily could not imagine how she had gotten the word out.

  He kept his hand there, waiting for another movement. Tyler walked over and stood staring at them both. Lily breathed in the cigar smoke.

  “I just felt your baby move,” Dominic said, without removing his hand.

  “It’s something,” Tyler said, “isn’t it.” His voice was warm, but Lily saw in his eyes a sour, horrid, nearly malignant light.

  She took Dominic’s hand and sat forward. “I’ll be back in a little bit.” She patted the back of his wrist, and stood, and Tyler followed her to the entrance to the kitchen. At the door, he said, low, “Forgive me. I’m trying. Christ, that was bad.”

  She kept her eyes on him, opening the door, then stepped in and closed it on him. The kitchen was littered with paper plates and cups, napkins and plastic knives and forks on the counters, and piles of the leftover food that had been brought from the take-out place. It all looked congealed and stale now. She began to put things in trash bags, cleaning up, and in a moment the door opened. Nick, and Buddy. They were arm in arm, and Nick was telling the older man a joke, faltering and getting things wrong and trying to correct himself. At last Buddy stopped him and said, “Why don’t you wait until you’ve really got it, okay?”

  “Damn,” said Nick, swaying with what he had drunk. “S’good one, too.” He went out, and Buddy closed the door. Grinning conspiratorially at Lily, he shook his head.

  “Nick’s lit. He’s not alone, of course.”

  She gave him a tolerant smile, though it took him in, too, or she meant it to. She hoped he understood.

  “Must be tough to be the only one not drinking.”

  She was filling the dishwasher. She said, “I’m all right.”

  “Something’s hurting you, kid, isn’t it.”

  She looked at him—at the wrinkles around the eyes, which were only slightly glazed with what he’d had to drink. She felt a wave of hoping that Millicent was not cheating on him. He put his glass down and picked up a paper plate of food scraps and dropped it into one of the plastic bags she had been using for refuse.

  “It’s none of my business, of course.”

  “I’m all right,” she said. “Really.”

  “Scared, maybe?”

  She said nothing.

  He finished putting the food in the bag, then set it down and looked at her. “When Millicent was pregnant with Sheri, she was as scared as I’ve ever seen anybody.”

  Lily stopped what she was doing.

  “It’s a natural thing. There’d be something the matter with you if you weren’t scared.”

  She faced him, and her throat constricted. No words would come.

  “Let’s go in the living room and talk,” he said. “Want to?” He moved toward her, and gently touched her elbow. “Come on,” he said. “Just for a minute.”

  They went through the little hallway and into the wide space with the bear rug and the big window overlooking the prospect of the valley, the far river, and the overpass. It was all dark out there. The faint moving illuminations on the sky were the lights of cars heading to and from Oxford. Electric lights, which looked like the last burning vestiges of sunlight in haze. He sat on the sofa and extended an arm, evidently wanting her to sit within the circumference of it. She had taken the seat across from him before she realized this. It was too late to change positions now. He put his hands together, then wiped them over his forehead and hair. “Sometimes it’s just good to get off by yourself,” he said. “So if you want me to leave you here, I understand.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t.”

  He looked around the room as if he had forgotten whatever he had planned to tell her, and was searching for something to say.

  “I’m—I am nervous about it,” Lily said.

  He appeared almost relieved. “When I met Millicent, Tyler was something like four years old, as I guess you know.” He tilted his head a little to one side, looking amused; she knew the look. Something that was a pleasure for him to think about had passed through the stream of his thoughts. “I’m not going to tell you that story. That’s just a garden-variety love affair, you know. She was working for me, and married, and a mother. And she had this marriage that was smothering her. Well, it seems that now I am telling you about it.”

  “It’s all right,” Lily said. “Really, Buddy. It is.”

  “Anyway. Tyler’s father had a bit of the tyrant in him. Used to give her grief over things you wouldn’t waste five minutes on.”

  Lily felt abruptly as if the blood in the veins around her throat had thickened.

  “He never let Tyler see it—I doubt Tyler ever saw anything like it. And the old man was really pretty good with Tyler. Well, he doted on him. You might even say he spoiled him a little.”

  Lily caught herself shaking her head. “No, he—he was rough on Tyler.”

  “You’re thinking about the hunting story—the buckshot and the rabbit.”

  “That and other things.”

  Buddy shook his head and pondered this for a moment. “It’s true, he didn’t have a great deal of tolerance. And remember I’m talking about before I arrived on the scene.

  “Anyway—yeah—well, it looked earlier this afternoon like Tyler’s not used to being yelled at.” Buddy smiled a forbearing smile, and shook his head. “He’s a little old to be racing around Oxford in one of my demos.”r />
  “You yelled at him about it?”

  “In a manner of speaking. I get too many of those kinds of tickets and I could lose my insurance. As it is, the rate’s gonna go up now. I told him I would take it out of his pay next time it happened.”

  “We were arguing,” Lily said. “Something happened at Lamaze.” She recalled with an unpleasant little jolt to her nerves that the woman had been recommended by Millicent and Sheri. “It was probably my fault.”

  “He was driving, sweetie.”

  She was quiet.

  “Anyway,” he went on, “when we—when things developed as they did and Millicent was pregnant with Sheri, we sort of—both of us decided it was best to leave the boy with his father. Fact is, Tyler was his father’s, really. From the beginning. All boy, as Millicent used to put it.”

  Lily merely echoed the phrase. “‘All boy.’”

  “At the beginning,” Buddy went on, “we kept it all platonic and we were friends, you know, and we denied it for months, what was really happening to us. Months. And then when we went over the top—well, it was like a dam overflowing. There was no stopping us. It swept us completely along on the tide of itself.”

  Lily saw her father and Peggy, holding hands across the table in a restaurant.

  “We never wanted to hurt a soul,” Buddy went on. “You know? I mean—well, you’re in love. You know how it is. Love makes you want to be kind. You want to believe so badly in the essential goodness and kindness of everyone. So you talk yourself into believing you can find a gentle way of getting everything into some kind of livable arrangement, and of course you don’t stand a chance of accomplishing that without causing a terrific amount of pain, and you see the damage you’re causing, and even then you don’t feel much of the pain, really. You’re too close to getting this matter accomplished that you know is going to make you so—so happy. That’s the word, all right. Happy.” The expression on his face was faintly nostalgic. He went on to talk about growing up in Tennessee, and about his parents, who still lived there and worked the same jobs—she was the reference librarian and he was the events manager at the Nashville Public Library. He’d grown up around books, he said, and in his family, among his uncles, aunts, and cousins, there had always been a big love of them. He had started out in the car business right out of college, working as a salesman, the same job Tyler was now doing, and he had been fortunate enough to make his way to general manager of a big dealership in Point Royal, Virginia. That was where he’d met Millicent. And the year they were married, with the help of four cousins, he’d borrowed enough money to open the present dealership. The move here had been a gamble that had aged him; he still felt old when he thought about those first couple of years. He went on to talk about Sheri as a little girl, the fright of his first days as a father. He was enjoying himself now, and the little wrinkles around his eyes deepened.