“I meant people like me don’t do that.”
“You want anything for pain?”
“No.”
“Don’t be stubborn, Your Honor. A petulant patient is still a patient in pain. Can be. Call the nurse if you hurt. I’ll leave orders in case you do. I’ll see you before they sedate you. It might be soon, but I think they’ll wait until tomorrow, or late this afternoon. We’re crowded. Sick people, you know.”
“Unlike me.”
The doctor let his face say that he was ignoring Richard’s childishness. And Richard felt an overwhelming need to cry.
“So if you’re so crowded, how come you put me in a private room. Why don’t you keep a suicide watch on me? Who says it’s suicide?”
“First of all, we didn’t. Second of all: Two kids in a car, one pedestrian walking her dogs, the cop who was chasing you for DWI and reckless endangerment and all the other violations you probably pronounce on people at your place of work. I’m going. We aren’t having much of a doctor-patient relationship right now.”
And when he left, Richard lay back, breathless with rage. He panted with hatred for his wife and his doctor, the nurse, the orderly, the hospital, the cops behind him during the chase, and the fact that he had not slowed down when they came into his mirror, no siren on but a band of white and red light that made him blink before—he suddenly could see himself—he crouched over the wheel and then leaned back, pushing his arms straight, locked at the elbows, jamming the accelerator down until the bellow of the engine and wind and, then, the siren of the following police, were almost as loud as the howl that he howled and that he kept on howling until the impact shut him, and everything else, up.
He heard his breath shudder now, in the salmon-colored room, mostly shadows and walnut veneers. Then he heard a man say, “You wanna nurse?”
“Who?”
“It’s me. You can’t turn, huh? Listen, Your Honor, it’s such a pain in the ass as well as the armpit, the crutches, I’m gonna stay flat for a while. I’ll visit you later on, you can look at me and remember. I’m the guy said hello the other time.”
“You’re in here with me?”
“Yeah. Ain’t it an insult? You a judge and everything. Like the doctor said, it’s real crowded.”
“This is too crowded.”
“Well, listen, don’t go extending any special treatment to me, Your Honor. Just pretend I’m a piece of dog shit. You’ll feel better if you don’t strain for the little courtesies and all. Your wife’s a very attractive woman, if I may say so. Hell of a temper, though.”
Richard rang for the nurse.
His roommate said, “All that pain. Dear, dear. Listen, remember this when you wake up. My name’s Manwarren. Emanuel Manwarren. Manny Manwarren. It’s an honor to be with a Your Honor kind of deal.” Then, to the entering nurse: “His Honor is in discomfort.”
Richard lay with his eyes closed until the nurse returned with water and a large capsule. He looked at her. She was young and intelligent-looking, and very tired. He said, “How shall I take this medicine without drowning? I can’t sit up.”
She said, “He ordered it by spansule.” Her voice was flat. She was expecting a fight.
“He would,” Richard said. “What if I die taking medicine?” He heard himself: he sounded worried about dying.
“Don’t fret,” she said. “I’ll telephone for an order change, and I’ll bring you a shot.”
“You’re a charmer, Your Honor,” Manwarren said.
“Are we going to engage in class warfare, or whatever this is, for all the time we’re in here? Mr. Manwarren?”
“Call me Manny. Nah. I’m a prickly personality. I hate the cops, authority figures like that, judges—you know what I mean?”
“Manny, why don’t you think of me as a miscreant and not a judge.”
“Can I call you Dick?”
Richard closed his eyes and listened to his breathing and the rustle of Manwarren’s sheets. The pain was in Richard’s bones and in his breath. He said, “There was someone with me, wasn’t there?”
“Dick, in cases like this, there usually is.”
II
THEY LIVED IN a renovated carriage house at the edge of a small country road outside Utica. Simple country living at a condominium price, Hilary liked to say. They couldn’t quite afford the mortgage, college tuitions, cars, the McIntosh stereo rig—Snuyder felt like a pilot when he turned the power on—or the carpets from Iran or Iraq or India, he forgot which, that Hilary had lately come to buy as investments. He thought of them as insulation.
Looking at his lighted house at 1:25 in the morning, observing a close, clear disk of moon, a sky bluer than black, and veined with cloud—it was a dark marble mural more than sky—Richard said, “We get by.”
Hilary was in the living room, at the piano. She was playing little clear crystal sounds with occasional speeded-up patterns of dissonance. He watched the tall, pale woman at the piano, her body rigid, neck tense, all pleasure residing below her moving wrists.
“Hello,” Snuyder said softly, removing his jacket and then his tie, dumping them on the sofa. “I was working with the clerks on a case. It’s a terrible case. Then we went out for some drinks.”
The repetitions in the music came in miniature parts and were very simple. There was a name for that. He was unbuttoning his shirt and he had it off by the time she sensed him and stopped and turned on the piano bench to see him wiping the sweat on his chest with the wadded shirt.
“Ugh,” she said, covering her eyes with her big hands.
“How.”
“Richard, stop. It’s ugly.”
“It’s a sweaty night,” he said. He went for his welcoming kiss. She hugged his waist and kissed his belly.
“Yummy,” he said.
“Salty,” she said. “Phoo.” But she held him, and he stayed there. “Vhere vas you so late?”
“I told you—clerks? Case? Just now?”
Richard carried his guilt and his dirty shirt toward the shower and Hilary followed. She stood in the doorway as he slid the cloudy shower door closed and made a screen of water that sealed him away. He groaned and blubbered and shook his head and shoulders and, loosening at last, dopey with comfort, shed of the sweat and oils and inner fluids of somebody else, he heard only part of what Hilary had said.
He called, “What?”
He turned the water off, and her words came over the stall. “I said you sounded especially like a whale tonight.”
“Thank you. You did not. The Satie was beautiful,”
“Thank you. It was Villa-Lobos, a Chôros. I don’t think it’s possible to confuse the two unless you’ve got me at the piano, the Snuyder Variations, eh?”
“Hilary.”
“Sorry. Sorry.”
“A number of other performers also dislike playing to a live audience. Glenn Gould, I remind you, for the one-millionth time, stopped playing concerts altogether. He was not, I think you’ll agree, a shabby tickler of the ivories.”
“Can you see how little I’m cheered by that? I’m sorry Gould is dead. I wish he’d been comfortable at concerts. But he made recordings, Richard. He made wonderful recordings.”
“And you will too. It’ll happen.” He made his voice sound matter-of-fact, sincerely casual, casually sincere. But he knew how impatient he must sound to her.
He had intended to leap from the shower, dangle his body before her, and roll her into bed—and pray for performance this third time tonight. But when he came out, tail wagging and his smile between his teeth like a fetched stick, she was gone, his stomach was fluttering with premonitions, and he was very, very tired. He decided to settle for a glass of beer and some sleep. Hilary was in the kitchen when, wearing his towel, he walked in. She was peeling plastic wrap from a sandwich, and she had already poured him a beer. “You always want beer after a day like this. At least I can make the meals.”
Richard drank some beer and said, “Thank you. You’re very kind, though su
llen and self-pitying.”
“But I make a fine Genoa salami sandwich. And I look nice in shorts.”
She was crying at the sink, turning the instant boiling-water tap on and off, on and off. The mascara ran black down her face. She looked like a clown. He realized that she’d made herself up for him—when? midnight? afterward?—and had worn the face she had made for him to see. He visualized himself, proud as a strapping big boy, stepping from the shower to greet her.
He finished chewing salami and dark bread. He said, “I hate to see you so damned unhappy.”
She turned the boiling water on and off, and steam fogged the kitchen window. “So you make me cry to express your dismay with my sorrow?”
“Actually, I wasn’t aware that I was making you cry.”
“You’re such a slob, Richard.”
“But well-spoken, and attractive in a towel.”
“You aren’t unattractive,” she said. “But you’re so tired, you could never make love. Could you?”
Richard sighed with fear and satisfaction as he drank his beer. “We can do some middle-class perversions if you like. Many were developed for the tired husband after work, I understand. We can—” He had by now stood and moved to her, was moving against her as they leaned at the sink. “We can do a number of exotic tricks they practice in the movies that the D.A. confiscates.”
Hilary’s eyes were closed. She was unfastening his towel. Her upper lip was clamped over the lower one; and he watched it when it moved. “Movie perversions?” she said. “Where would you pick up movie perversions?”
“You know those evidentiary sessions I sometimes hold? We all sit around and watch dirty flicks.”
“She said, “Pig.”
His skin had been cool and hers hot. His body, had it been a creature with a mouth, no more, would have sung. But it was very tired, and it was crowded with his mind. He thought, now, here, in his hospital room, not about—damn it—whoever he had been with in a motel room in Westmoreland, New York, before he wrecked his car. He could remember that—the room, the bedspread’s color, the light lavender cotton skirt on the floor, and not her face. He couldn’t see her face.
Richard, in their house, in his memory now, had taken off his wife’s clothing and had wooed her away from what was sorrowful and true. He’d loved her in their kitchen to the exclusion of everything, for a very little while. And now, in the hospital room, he couldn’t see or say the name of the woman he had loved more than Hilary and whom he had washed from his body to preserve her to himself. Naked of clothes and towel and her, they had lain in a nest of Hilary’s underwear and blouse and dark Bermuda shorts—skins so easily shed. And Hilary had been watching him. He’d seen her eyes rimmed with black and filling with darkness. She had figured him out, he knew. He had wondered when she would tell him. In his hospital room, he remembered hoping that she would find a way to make it hurt.
III
IT TOOK Lloyd and Pris nearly a month to arm themselves and gather their courage and rage. Then they came, through the main doors of the county office building, and past the glass information booth—“Can I help you?” the woman in beige had said to the profiles of their passing shotguns—and down one flight to the basement offices. They thought the dogs would be in the basement, Lloyd later said. “I couldn’t figure on anybody keeping animals upstairs where the fancy offices was bound to be.” They took eleven people hostage, including a woman who cried so long and loudly that Lloyd—“She sounded like one of the goddamned dogs”—hit her with the pump-gun barrel. She breathed quietly and shallowly for the rest of their visit and was hospitalized for a week. The police at first remained outside and were content to bellow over battery-powered hailers. “I couldn’t understand ’em,” Lloyd said. “It sounded like some goddamned cheerleaders on a Friday night over to the high school game. Except Pris and me wouldn’t play ball.”
They passed out a note that said, “26 PRIVAT STOCK CRETURS PLUS FREEDOME OF CHOICE PLUS $10,000.” The money was for Pris’s sex-change operation, Lloyd said in his deposition. They wanted to be legally married and live as man and wife. Pris was tired of costumes and wanted outfits. The police got bored and flushed them out with tear gas, then beat them badly before the arraignment. Lloyd later said, “I don’t think the operation would of made that much difference, to tell you the truth. Pris, he didn’t—she—whatever the hell he is. It. I don’t think he loved me the way you want somebody to love you.” Lloyd was starving himself in the county jail. Pris was defended from rape by a captured counterfeiter out of Fairfax, Virginia, and their affair was two weeks old and going strong.
And Hilary had not come back. Manwarren had paid for a television set while Snuyder had slept the sleep of the sedated, and Snuyder now lay looking at the dimpled ceiling panels, clenching his fists against the pain, and listening without wishing to. Game-show hosts with voices as sweet and insistent as the taste of grape soda cried out with delight and mortification as army sergeants and homemakers and stockbrokers selected numbers and boxes and squares marked off on walls and were awarded either bounty or a consolation prize consisting of a lifetime supply of scuff-resistant, polymer-bound linoleum clean-’n’-polisher for the busy woman who has more to do than wax, for sweet goodness’ sake, her floors. Manwarren also watched soap operas that had to do with misplaced babies and frantic adulterers, always on the verge of discovery as incestuous. There were snippets of old movie, fragments of cartoon, crashingly educational disquisitions on the use of C—“C, you see, is also in ka-ristmas taree!”—and Gilligan, eternally trapped on his island with Tina Louise and constitutionally incapable of hurling himself upon her, continued to invent ways of extending his imprisonment.
Manwarren, a real critic, commented with alert smugness and an eye for the obvious. “You believe she couldn’t remember who invented noodles?” he sang. He crowed, “Numbers are from the friggin’ Arabs, dummy! No wonder he’s a garbageman.” Snuyder kept waiting to hear the suck-and-pour of passing traffic on the arterial highway leading into downtown Utica, but all he heard was Manwarren and the objects of his derision. “Hey,” he said, “hey, Judge. You handle yourself like this ‘Family Court’ guy? He takes no crap offa nobody, you know? He’s got a courtroom fulla morons, by the way. No wonder they ended up in court. They wouldn’t know how to cross the street.” A “M*A*S*H” rerun drove Manwarren into silent sniffles, but he covered well by saying, in a gravelly voice, “I don’t think that’s a very realistic way to talk about the Korean conflict.” Of “Robin Hood,” he said, for the first time approving in tone, “I never knew Glynis Johns had knockers like that, Judge.”
Snuyder listened. The pain made him blink in disbelief. He looked at the ceiling panels and waited for Hilary to return. She didn’t. The balding nurse, this time in a long-sleeved dress, came in with a sedative shot. He was so grateful, he felt embarrassed. His orthopedic surgeon, a tall and slender man who not only didn’t smile, but who made clear both his disapproval of the patient and of having to explain to him, explained to him what he would do inside of Snuyder’s hip and leg. Pins. Something about pins that would staple him together again, he remembered, after the surgeon was gone and the ceiling had dropped a few feet, and then the orderlies came to roll him away to be pinned into shape.
There was something about dogs, and their terrible odor, and somebody riding one around a muddy country lot. He said No! And, knowing that he dreamed while he dreamed, he awaited the dream that would tell him who had sat in the front with him while the police car chased him and he drove—by accident, he insisted to the unseen audience his dream included—into the slow breaking up of his bones. The dogs whined and whined, as if steadily, increasingly, wounded by someone patient and cruel.
The intensive care unit was dark and silent and Snuyder was in very deep pain. His hip burned, and his stomach, and the groin he ached too much to reach for. He kept seeing the skin slide open as the angry surgeon sliced. He yelped for assistance and then shuddered to show the nurse
that it was he who needed her promptest sympathies. He was hooked to a drip and a monitor, she explained. Soon he would be taken back to his room. He was fine. The procedure had seemed to be effective, and now his job was to sleep. He slept, but the burning followed him, and he dreamed again of dogs whose fur was stiff with filth, whose eyes dripped mucus, and whose droppings were alive with long white worms. He heard the dogs’ howling and he hated Lloyd and Pris. The television set was low, and a curtain divided him from Manwarren, but he knew, waking later, that he was back in his room, and still burning, and all right, alive, not dreaming anymore. The world was in color on the other side of the curtain where a voice electric with triumph told someone named Cecelia that the car she’d won had bucket seats. She screamed.
The woman in the car with him had screamed.
TONY ARIZONA, his senior clerk, was there in the morning to discuss adjustments of his trial calendar. He brought a cheap glass vase filled with blue flowers that Snuyder couldn’t name, and a fifth of Powers’ Irish Whiskey. He showed Snuyder how his cases had been distributed among the other sitting judges and that certain others—very few of them—had been postponed. Snuyder said, “No. You gave the boys with the dogs to Levinson.”
“He wanted it. He hates queers.”
“He is queer. I want that one, Tony. Hold it over as long as you can before you give it up. And try not to give it to Levinson. He’ll be corn-holing them in chambers by the end of the first hour. Oh, boy.”
“They cut you up some, I understand.”
“Not to mention I cut me up.”
“Judge. Dick. I have to give the dog people to Levinson. State wants your calendar cleared. You understand? I’m sorry.”
“The suicide thing?”
“They think they might want to look into it.”
“Tony. You think I tried to kill myself?”
“I think you bent your car around a telephone pole. For what it’s worth, I don’t care—I mean, I care, but only about you. You did it, you didn’t do it, you’ll work it out and the accident’s over, that’s that. It’s not the suicide thing. It’s the woman.”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 17
