The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “Could do,” he said, nodding. “Could do.”

  She laughed. “Could do,” she said. Over her shoulder she let “Bye, Daddy” drift with her smoke.

  “A little theatrical,” I told him, betraying her.

  “Time of great strain,” he said. “Lot of stress. Pretty girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “Little like her mother. Little like you.”

  “Then that worked out for us.” I took the cassette from him and slid it into the VCR. When the set was on, I punched PLAY.

  Apparently the camera was mounted on a tripod. It remained still throughout. People walked on- and off-camera, but Belinda stayed where she was: seated in a wooden chair with a copy of the International Herald Tribune on her lap. She held the paper up, and I could see the date. Then she put the paper on her lap, and sat, with her arms hanging down. I thought of Lissa’s arms as she’d entered the kitchen. Belinda wore running shoes and gray, baggy, rumpled cotton pants, a dark and dirty-looking T-shirt. Her hair was chopped short, and it looked grayer. She’d lost weight, she looked exhausted. The cords in her neck were prominent when she moved or talked. Horizontal ridges on her throat were new to me. Her arms were a little puffy, and very tan. She didn’t seem drugged, but she was subdued.

  A small, dark man in a kind of faded khaki uniform, wearing very large and very dark sunglasses, came to stand beside her. He put his little hand on the back of her neck and squeezed. But he didn’t seem to be hurting her. She straightened.

  “My name is Belinda Hosford Dugan,” she said. “I am an American citizen who has been interrupting—” She peered at something near the camera, and I realized that she was reading. She wore contact lenses, and I should have known from her squint that she was reading signs.

  “Cue cards,” I said.

  “Just like Johnny Carson,” Pontrier said.

  “Interfering in the orderly process of the life of the people. As a lesson to such as myself, I have been seized and am a prisoner. I am safe and well. I am not being mistreated. It’s true,” she said and I knew she’d deviated from the lines they’d written. No one stopped her, though. “I’m all right. Please tell my girls—tell Lissa and Linda—” She began to cry. She stopped herself. “Hello. Darlings, hello. I’m all right. I can’t come home yet. And this thing, really—” Then there was static, then silence, then the small man in dark glasses said, “Enough. For now, enough.”

  She hadn’t spoken of me. She hadn’t sent a message to me. For several months we’d hardly spoken, except when we traded information about the house or children. Even then, our exchanges could have been by postcard. “For now, enough.” I thought of Lissa and Linda, seeing her, hearing her say, “It’s true,” and then the little man.

  “I’m too young to be as old as you make me,” she’d said one morning. She was leaving for work, and I was going to drive the girls to school. She had come up behind me to put her hand on my shoulder. She’d hissed it, so the girls wouldn’t hear: “You make me so tired.”

  And I had leaned my head back to reply, “We know it’s not from sexual exertion.”

  And she, almost laughing, had whispered back, “We know it’s not from sex with you.”

  That was the morning of the night she chopped her hair short. It was still short, and she looked pretty on the tape—hollow-eyed, exhausted, but still pretty Belinda, my childhood bride. We had taken sixteen years to fail. In the television tape, she showed those years. I wondered if anyone else could see them.

  Pontrier turned the VCR off. The TV set roared the hush of static, and I turned it down but not off. I don’t know why. It was like sheltering under something to hear the neutral noise about me. He took the tape from the machine and handed it to me. He gave me a business card, which I didn’t read. I said, “That’s all?”

  “You don’t need medical assistance, on account of you give it. And you got that tall doctor there. You understand the situation pretty good, and you can call me. You will. They always do. Eight, ten times a week, some of them. A day, even. Doesn’t help. Doesn’t hurt anything. Built the time right into my schedule. Families, I call it. Write it on my calendar for the week. Liaison. You can’t liaise without talking to ’em. Call if you want to. Any news, you’ll hear. From us. Me. Right away. Promise. Do think they’re gonna turn her loose. Woman. You know.” He sounded like a machine winding down.

  “You have a long drive back.” I said.

  “Traveling’s part of it. See the country. Rather see some other part of it, no insult intended.”

  “It’s an acquired taste.”

  “Like okra,” he said. Whinny, gum and tooth. He took his glasses off.

  He went into the kitchen and soon he was back with his case and his coat, and soon he was gone from the house. At the narrow window beside the door, I watched the journalists surround him. There were two more trucks now, large white ones with lights and antennas on top. As he stopped to speak, the air and lawn in front of the house leaped into bright intensity as television lights came on. It was like a lightning strike.

  In the living room, again, I put the tape on and I bent before the set. There was Belinda, her hair, her eyes, her breasts. A prurient boy, I looked behind me, then reversed the tape and looked again—she wore no brassiere. I could see her nipples at the soft fabric of her shirt. Belinda on TV, without a bra, I told myself. I rewound and looked again: my wife on reruns, available as starkly as this, and to strangers.

  I looked again, and then once more. I was her audience, now. I turned off the set and the VCR and went toward the stairs to fetch Kate and Melissa and Linda. They were descending as I reached the staircase. Linda walked past me, heading for the living room. Kate, holding Melissa’s hand, stood where she was.

  Then a roar came from the living room, the static of the VCR. The tape began to play, and the hush gave way to Belinda, speaking. The stranger on TV was talking to us, and her daughter Linda sat on the sofa before her, smoking, clicking the switch to REVIEW and then PLAY. She sought the instant when her mother stopped reading her script. We stood at the stairs and we watched her watch her mother, over and over, lost and found, the hush and then Belinda’s voice, Belinda’s breasts, Belinda’s hair, and Linda sighing out smoke and making her mother say to her, “It’s true,” “It’s true,” “It’s true.”

  NAME THE NAME

  MY WIFE isn’t local. She finds it alarming that so much of where we live is named for someplace else: Pompey, Fabius, Marathon, Mycenae, Euclid, Cicero, Tripoli. Here—Syracuse and Lebanon, Rome—in the center of the state of New York, where it often snows in May and always in April, three hundred miles from Manhattan, the children are entitled. Whether they are kissed for their beauty or scalded in punishment, whipped with a belt or beaten by fists or sung to at dawn, and in a mobile home or a three-floor Colonial with central chimney and hand-adzed joists, they are the young and we allow for them in the hamlets and the trailer parks, in the yellow-brick Victorian synagogue, in the farmhouse turned by candles and chrome-plated cross into a church.

  I am the man in the unwashed dark blue truck who comes up the snow-sealed rural road or into the street behind the boarded-over tannery. If your child can’t come to school, the law demands that someone bring the school to him, and I am the carrier of entitlements, with my briefcase scuffed like cheap shoes, and my long thick overcoat and clumsy gloves, with a white metal toolbox in the back of the truck that I fill each day with textbooks and ruled coarse paper, and the forms I turn in to the board every night. I am the education they must send. In Smyrna and Coventry, Lower Cincinnatus and New Berlin, I’m the chance.

  At eleven in the morning, while thick wet snow fell without sticking onto crocuses and daffodils, I drank reheated coffee sweetened with condensed milk and light brown sugar by a woman too embarrassed to look at my face. She wore polyester pants with a black and white check, a man’s gray sweatshirt over a heavy flannel shirt, and big slippers lined with synthetic fur; on top of each slipper was the
face of a dog with a long pink tongue. She wore no socks, and the chapped rough redness of her ankles was an intimacy between us. She was feeding soft wood—scraps of lumber, chunks of pine—to a big, hot wood stove. I could smell the almost-kerosene of the creosote in her stovepipe.

  Her face was wedge-shaped, and soft. Inside her fat, and under her thinning light hair, within the smell of smoke and cheap deodorant, a shy, myopic thirty-five-year-old woman was waiting for my verdict on her twelve-year-old girl. I said, “Thank you for the coffee,” and while she looked at her painted-over Hoosier cabinet, I said, “Myrna’s a bright girl. I’m not sure about her social studies, but I think that’s only because she didn’t finish the chapter. She could do it.”

  “I’ll mind her.”

  “I spoke to her about it.”

  “I was the same age as her when I—” She pointed at her soft belly. Her fair skin was red. I saw tears behind her thick glasses.

  “Not with Myrna.”

  She shook her head. “That would have been too young to be her. No. It was a baby bore itself early and dead. A, you know, miscarriage. I remember my grandmother—I lived with them. My mother didn’t have the strength for any more kids, so she give me to them. My grandmother told me to thank Jesus it was dead. I didn’t think of nothing like that, though. I cried and cried. I wanted that baby. I was like her. Twelve.”

  “So she’ll have the baby?”

  “I believe she will,” she said. “Lord willing and her strength all right. She’s a strong girl.”

  “Well,” I said. “I thank you for the coffee. I’m very pleased with how Myrna’s doing with her studies. Will she go back to school?”

  “Oh, yes,” her mother said. “I’ll be helping with the baby. She has to go on and live out her life. We can afford another mouth.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Good. And the father?”

  “Myrna’s?”

  “Her baby’s.”

  “No, they’re too young,” she said. “He’ll have to live with his own mommy and daddy.”

  I remember how I looked at the crazy lenses of her thick glasses and then nodded. I remember being angry with myself for being surprised. I smiled my good-byes.

  In the truck, I scribbled my report. I saw Myrna at the window over the long front porch. She waved like a little girl. She was a little girl. So I waved back. For the principal and the board of education, for all whose rules—and weren’t they right?—required that a pregnant schoolgirl in her seventh month stay home, I waved. She would come to school with her baby anyway, and her friends would surround her, and certain teachers, even, would smile their applause. She would be heroic to them, and her trophy would be eleven years and eleven months away from a pregnancy leave and a visiting teacher like me. I wondered if one day I would teach Myrna’s child and sit in my truck and wave to her like this.

  When I arrived at the hospital, they were removing lunch dishes in the corridor. Outside Intensive Care, in the small lounge, people sat to wait, and they all looked as though they wanted to smoke. I hadn’t smoked in a dozen years, and the NO SMOKING sign always made me wish for a cigarette. I buzzed and they asked who I was. I told them, and that I was there for Leslie DuBois—say “Du-Boyce”—and they admitted me. I always found myself wishing they wouldn’t. In her room, one of eight in a large squared doughnut of such rooms surrounding the ICU nurses’ station, Leslie lay. I called, above the hiss and click of her ventilator, “How’s the spider?” I had told her that she looked arachnoid, nested in the IV feed lines and ventilator hose. Her tired eyes blinked several times, and the urgent O of her mouth, which was taped about the thick tube that went down her throat and breathed for her, twitched.

  She wrote to me. On the Invisible Pad, with its gray pudding of undersheet, and its clear plastic topsheet that lifted to erase what she wrote with a mute pen, a pointed red wooden stick, Leslie wrote, in crooked block lines, NOT SPIDER FLY. Leslie DuBois had taken most of the pills in her parents’ house. She had telephoned her doctor. So she’d lived. No one was certain when her brain would tell her lungs to breathe out carbon dioxide, or remind her legs to bear her weight, so Leslie, who had lived, lived here. And she was required to be entitled to me: they forced me at her, and she wrote to me on her Invisible Pad, and I called back above her ventilator, and then, for twenty minutes or so, we played school.

  I said, “The Jersey Devils are the Cinderella team in the playoffs this year!”

  She wrote, GRETZKY IS GOD.

  “Wrong team,” I called. She sweated long rivulets. She shuddered under the workings of the ventilator as if she were a ragged-running car. “Your metabolism needs tuning,” I yelled.

  Gray-blue pale, dank of hair, smelling sour and showing in her eyes how embarrassed she was when I bent close, she tore the cover up, then wrote HATE HOCKEY.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I do too.”

  She tore and printed. LOVE U.

  “I love you, Leslie,” I said. “But you didn’t do your homework, did you?”

  HATE POEMS.

  “Gotta read’em. Gotta graduate on time.”

  WHY?

  “Because when you get better you’ll want to go to college. Stay up all night doing homework about poems. That’s why.”

  BOLOGNA.

  “Nothing wrong with your spelling,” I called. I found on her crowded night table the Xeroxed sheet I had given her. We were doing Keats’s sonnet “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be,” which after that first line goes on to worry “Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain.” I said, “Leslie. You had fears that you might cease to be.”

  Her intensely dark eyes—the pupils looked all-black to me—swung up to lock with mine. LIFE NOT POEMS, she wrote.

  “Poems are life. They can be. They can be about life. Very respectably. Very persuasively.”

  MY LIFE NO POEM.

  She lay back as if she had declaimed. I was exhausting her. I said, “Let me. You’re telling me, he, he does things like that ‘glean’d’ and that kind of phony-sounding ‘do sink,’ and you’re probably saying to yourself, ‘He stuck that in for the rhythm of the line. Nobody says “do sink.”’ Right?” She flapped a wrist. “Right,” I said. “Well, I can’t argue. The ‘do sink’ isn’t his greatest work. It doesn’t sound natural. Of course, you could argue that while poetry comes from a natural impulse—to talk!—it either sounds natural, like us, or it doesn’t. He was writing in 1818. You have to be fair about that. Maybe they talked like that in 1818. I frankly don’t think so. I think he gimmicked it up to make the rhythm work for him. But how about ‘And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!/That I shall never look upon thee more’? Is he talking about his imagination? I mean, that’s what the poem’s about, right? A guy who doesn’t want to die because he wants to get his writing done? Or is this part, the thee part, about, well, love?”

  She was sleeping. While she slept, her chest shuddered and sweat poured up from her skin. And she wept. I swore—I swear—I could tell the difference between the perspiration and the tears. Psychoanalysis of suicides induced through poetry by Doctor Farce! Romantic poetry a specialty! I sat back, and in the low aqua-colored plastic chair beside her bed, in the rhythm of her ventilator’s vacuum-and-compression, in the high-pitched beep her IV monitors cried as the clear solution in the sacs ran down through her, I closed my eyes and in the heat of her room I slept.

  The tearing sound of her eraser sheet woke me. I leaned forward so quickly, my back hurt. “What?” I said. “What?”

  Leslie looked across at me—our heads were almost on a level—and her eyes looked pleased. I reached, automatically, for her Invisible Pad. It said WHAT COLLEGE?

  “Oh,” I said—surely shouted—“Wellesley! Vassar! Radcliffe! Let’s think big!”

  Her fingers moved, and I replaced her pad in them. It made the tearing sound, and then she wrote.

  SHAMPOO NEXT.

  “You want me to wash your hair? Sure. How?”

  She moved her han
d, I gave her the pad, and she added, without tearing, TIME.

  “I will. You have them get the stuff, and I will. I’ll talk to you about colleges. I’ll ask some questions, and I’ll tell you. And I’ll—you want me to bring in hair magazines? You know: magazines with pictures of hairdos? I’ll give you a perm.”

  She took the pad back and pulled up the sheet. KISS.

  So I leaned down into the clicking and hissing and tape and perspiration and her tears, and I kissed her on the cheek and on the eye. Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. I said, “You’re right about the poem. You’re wrong, but you’re also right. Look on the Xerox sheet, and read what I wrote for you about sonnets. About the form. The fourteen lines, the rhyme scheme, you remember. Read the poem again, and we’ll talk about it. All right?”

  She waved good-bye with just the fingers on her left hand. Her eyes were closed.

  “All right,” I said.

  In the corridor, a big clumsiness of briefcase and coat and gloves and forms and pens, I said to a couple of the ICU nurses, “When is she going to be okay?” They watched as I tried to put everything where it should go. I looked up from the floor where I kneeled, my back still aching, and stuffed my briefcase full.

  One of them, whose name was May, a slender woman with short legs, said, “Are we talking miracles or medicine here? And would you like the fact or the fiction?”

  I stood up slowly and fought my way into my coat.

  “How about you?” May said. “How’re you guys, you know, handling it?”

  “I’m on my way to the jail right now.”

  “You want some leftover lunch? You look lousy.”

  “You never said that when we were drinking in the Solsville Hotel,” I said.

  She pushed her rimless glasses back up onto her nose and stepped a step closer. She smelled like chewing gum and soap. She put her fingers over the top of my trousers and her thumb around my belt buckle. “Say hello to your wife,” she said, smiling, pulling once, then twice, at the top of my pants. “Take care.”