The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “They aren’t buck. They’re crooked. They’re sexy. Your face isn’t round the way you say it’s round. It’s oval. You’re a—you’re a dish, Rosie.”

  She shook her head. Her eyes were closed, and she kept them that way as, rolling the towel, squeezing it, she said, “I looked in the bathroom mirror and I grabbed my throat. Like this”—she put one hand around her neck; he saw the thumb slide into its bruised print above her larynx—“and I said, ‘Why can’t you learn?’”

  “Rosie,” he asked her, “learn what?”

  “That you’re going to have to keep asking that all the time we’re married. That I’m going to choke myself to death or drown the cat. Or you. Choke you, drown you. Because you see a way of living. Fine. You’re entitled to. But it’s yours. Its teeth are bigger than mine are, even. It could eat me. It could swallow me.” She opened her eyes at last. She put the towel around her neck. As she tucked it in, she said, “That’s all. It’s a goddamned cliché. I know it. Didn’t I say that before?”

  “I think I might have called it that last night. It isn’t, Rosie. I really believe that: it isn’t.”

  “No, you were right. All of it’s clichés.”

  “Rosie, but we love each other.”

  She shrugged.

  Stephen slid down with his back against the doorframe. He stuck his legs out so they straddled the wall on which the wide-open door was hinged.

  “Are you doing that to keep me in?” Rosalie asked.

  “I didn’t think of it that way. I’m thinking, just, I don’t want you feeling so bad.”

  “Because I can step over you.”

  “Rosalie, you could step through me.”

  She sat down on the bed, next to the suitcases. She nodded. “I know.”

  Stephen was thinking that if they made love now he would want to set the suitcases down, not sweep them aside from the bed. He didn’t want her to think he was sweeping aside what she’d said. He saw Rosalie watching him, and he knew that she was thinking how aroused he always was when she fought him and told him that she didn’t care about love. He didn’t smile to her, and when he saw how sad her magnified eyes behind her glasses were, and her mouth, and the brutal bruises on her fragile neck, his eyes filled up.

  She said, “What, Stephen?”

  “I remembered when I heard that singing before. It wasn’t in church.”

  She lay back on the bed. She pulled her glasses off and held them, folded, in one hand. She drew her legs up and curled herself down toward them so that she wasn’t quite a ball, but was lying on her side in a crescent.

  “You look like a half-moon,” he said

  “You stay there. I don’t want this thing ending up in some wild screw and we forget all about it.”

  “I’ll sit right here.”

  “I mean it, Stephen.”

  “I was little. I don’t know—eight? So my mother was young.”

  “Your mother was never young, Stephen. She was born old and mean.”

  “No, she was pretty, and she was young, and my father was gone by then. She was living with Carl Boden.”

  “The philosopher king.”

  “He was an interesting guy.”

  “Smart enough, I’ll give him that, to take off on her.”

  “I think she was one of those people who people leave. I don’t know.”

  “I do. She’s mean. She’s skinny and mean and she has those thin lips.”

  “But he was there, then, and for the next ten years or so, huh? And they had a good time together. I remember all those little pats on the ass, and smooching in the kitchen. Nice stuff.”

  “You would.”

  Her eyes were closed, and Stephen then closed his. He said, “I remember Carl was wearing this seersucker shirt. And he was sitting in the kitchen, watching her do something. I think she was cooking. I was playing, I guess. Drawing at the table. The radio was on. That was before we moved out to Harrison, so it was up on Eightieth Street, and she was listening to the radio. All of a sudden, Carl says to her, ‘You don’t sing anymore.’ She says What, and everybody says What a few times, and Carl says, ‘I used to love the way you sang when you cooked. It was always so happy.’ Something like that—how she sounded happy, and she made him feel happy, and now he’s disappointed, something is missing. Do I have to tell you she started to cry?”

  He opened his eyes to watch her lift her shoulders. She said, “And?”

  “And nothing. She stopped crying. He apologized a lot, she apologized a lot. I shut up and ate my food. Something under sauce, I’m sure. Anyway, the next day’s Sunday. We’re going to go to Central Park, we’re going to hit the streets on Sunday in New York, and the radio’s playing. A very dumb, bouncy song. I absolutely cannot remember its name, but I think I still remember what it sounded like. She’s making those amazingly thick, brutal flapjacks of hers, and Carl’s sitting there reading a book, growling at it the way he always did. And all of a sudden my mother’s humming along with the song on the radio. ‘Dee duh duh,’ she sings, all noise, no words, and heavy, slamming down on the syllables, as heavy as her pancakes, ‘Dee duh duh!’ She’s hitting those off-key notes, she was a terrible singer—and now, because I really don’t remember seeing it, but now I imagine how she’s looking out of the corner of her eye, right? To see if Carl notices? I didn’t figure this out for years, of course.”

  “You didn’t figure it out until this morning.”

  “Yes And then Carl leaves the room.” He stopped. They were silent.

  Rosalie turned onto her side and opened her eyes. “That’s the story?”

  “That’s the story. He throws his book down on the kitchen table, whammo!, and he walks out of the room.”

  “What’d your mother do?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “That’s the story. What she did, then.”

  Now Stephen lay on his stomach, his feet out in the hall and his torso in the bedroom, and he propped his chin on his forearms. “That’s their story. My part of it is what I said. How sad she was, trying to show him all of that awful joy I suppose she wasn’t feeling. She tried to give him that. I think it was remarkably generous, what she offered.”

  Rosalie said, “I didn’t offer you anything when I was singing. You understand that?”

  “I was thinking about how sad it was, somebody who couldn’t sing, and who really didn’t feel like singing, trying to sing for someone.”

  “Do not start crying for that woman.”

  He said, “If I cried, Rosie, it wouldn’t be for her.”

  “Don’t you dare and cry for me.”

  “No,” he said. He put his head all the way down on his hands.

  Rosalie said, “This is impossible. We’re impossible.”

  They lay in silence, he on the floor and she on the bed.

  She wakened him by saying, “See? You were sleeping.”

  “No,” he said. He didn’t know why. “I wasn’t.”

  He watched her swing her feet over the side of the bed. Her robe was hiked, and he saw her calves and knees, her lower thighs. She pressed them together and pulled the hem of her bathrobe down. She sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Now I’m going to sleep. You go someplace else, please.”

  “Where?”

  “I just want to sleep!”

  He manufactured a dignity with which to climb to his feet and leave. When he was in the kitchen, he heard their bedroom door close. He shooed the cat from the stove, then collected all the dishes and rinsed them, stowed them in the dishwasher. He couldn’t remember if you were allowed to wash the iron frying pan in the machine. He scratched at it with a steel pad just in case you weren’t. And when the machine was humming and hushing, when the surfaces were wiped down and the wiping rag rinsed in water nearly too hot to touch, he took off his necktie, hung it on the dish towel rack, and telephoned the office.

  As he gave instructions and answered questions, he thought of the musical tones he’d punched to reach his secret
ary. He thought of the clients who pressed those numbers and listened to those tones, waiting for advice. He heard his voice, over so many calls, dispensing wisdoms and assurances, citing statutes, offering precedents. And he knew how he’d concluded so many times that the marital tragedies to which he’d been asked to respond were, finally to him, all alike. It struck him with a kind of disgust how banal he and Rosalie were, how quotidian their sadness would seem to some other lawyer at some other phone number who might hear Stephen complain how his mind was shaken and his heart was sore. He wondered if, when his clients telephoned, his deepest inner parts went to sleep, like an arm pressed into the same position too long, while clients wept descriptions to him of one’s suffocation and the other’s need for self-expression, and everyone’s rage to flee. His secretary waited, and he finally heard the lengthening pause, so he finished and rang off.

  Stephen walked from the kitchen to the breakfast room and back. He stood in the kitchen, frightened because he’d no idea what to do. At last, he fetched his briefcase from the hall and set it on the table in the breakfast room. He took from it a yellow ruled pad and the fountain pen that Rosalie had given him when he’d been made a partner. Then he did what he did in the office: he made notes. At the top of the page, he printed PROBLEMS. Halfway down the page he drew a horizontal line and printed SOLUTIONS. It was a letter-size pad, so he had four inches or so for problems—not enough, he thought. He tore the page from the pad and made his dividing line vertical. He headed the left side PROBLEMS. He thought he heard their door slam, and he paused. No one came, he breathed more evenly, and he headed the right-hand side SOLVE. He tore the page away.

  On the next clean page, he wrote Dear Rosalie. He tore the page out. Rosie, he wrote. Looking from the breakfast room to the narrow bookshelves on which stood her cookbooks and his Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits, he saw a very old, blue spine—the Joy of Cooking her parents, both dead now, had given them when they married. He set down his pen and went to the kitchen and, singing a song—singing Dee duh duh!—and not thinking of its name, he took the book, and he began. The song, he would remember later, was called “If I’d Known You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake,” and his mother, he would then remember, had offered its syllables to her lover, Carl Boden.

  But for now, he followed directions. He sifted flour. He found baking powder. He used nine eggs in achieving four separated yolks and whites. He set butter aside to reach room temperature. He found almonds and ground them. He slowly melted chocolate. He whipped up milk and vanilla and egg white without spattering them. And he baked the cake so that a toothpick slid unstained from its core. While it cooled, he mixed the icing, then applied it, maybe a moment too soon. But it was a chocolate fudge cake, made from scratch, and he slugged out the syllables, Dee duh duh!, as in the credenza in the living room he found the shoe box labeled BIRTHDAYS and took from it a single pink birthday candle. While he washed the dishes and straightened the kitchen, he thought of Sasha and Brigitte blowing candles out. He was standing near the counter, reading prefatory words on nutrition in the cookbook while the icing hardened, when Rosalie came in. She wore jeans and a soft white cotton shirt that fastened with metal snaps near its floppy collar. In her clean white running shoes she looked springy and competent as she inspected the kitchen, then him. She seemed to him frighteningly older than she’d been. He slid the pink candle into the pocket of his shirt.

  She filled the kettle with water and put out instant coffee and one mug.

  He heard himself offer, “I was going to do a laundry.”

  Before the water could be hot enough, she poured it over the coffee and walked past him to the breakfast room. He found a cup and shook some crystals into it and, without stirring the coffee, followed her. He sat and said, “Rosie.”

  She looked up. Her eyes behind the lenses were red and puffy. Her elbows were on the legal pad and his awful fragment of letter. She had set her cup on his salutation. Her face wasn’t angry, it was solemn. She looked to him as she must have looked as a girl in church: sure of what she must do, owlish with her certainty.

  He left the table again. He stuck the candle into the cake, and he brought it to her. Setting it on the table, he said, “Here.”

  “Very nice,” she said. “Very well done.”

  He was going to say, “I made it for you,” but then the girls came in. He heard their bus huff away, and he called to them, “Come and get it, ladies! Look at what I made for you!”

  Rosalie walked past them, pausing to kiss each daughter on the top of the head. She waved and went toward the other side of the house while Sasha followed her and Brigitte waited. Stephen went to her and stooped, one knee on the floor. “How was school, baby?”

  Her face was pale, her eyes narrow. She asked, “Did you make the cake so we wouldn’t go away, Daddy?”

  He looked down at her pink sneakers. “Yes,” he said.

  When Rosalie and Sasha returned, he looked up, then stood. Sasha carried two small canvas traveling bags. Rosalie carried two large bags and an over-the-shoulder carryall.

  Stephen thought of the advice he gave to shattered men who called. He said something like “Wait,” he thought. They came to him with this, and he said, “Wait.”

  “Daddy,” Sasha said. He saw that she’d put lots of fresh lipstick on.

  Brigitte said, “Can we have some of the cake?”

  That was when Rosalie’s face crumpled, but not in tears. She looked as though she fought not to laugh, and Stephen—as the counselor, now, addressing the husband—told himself not to hold that against her.

  Stephen told them, “Just a minute, all right?” And he went to the drawer and found the cake server, then tore off several sheets of paper towel. He cut a wedge of chocolate cake with butter cream icing, and he handed it to Brigitte. She held it on her palm. Stephen stepped back to address them all, Sasha and Brigitte and Rosalie, their identical eyes. They paused with their baggage.

  Brigitte said, “Thank you, Daddy.”

  Sasha smiled and shrugged.

  Stephen said, “Rosie.”

  She said, “What?”

  He tore off more towels, cut more cake, and came to offer it. He said, “For on the way.”

  Rosalie shrugged as if echoing Sasha. She looked down at the luggage that occupied her hands. “No room,” she apologized.

  “Of course,” Stephen said. Like three good guests, then, they waited politely. And then, slowly, to show him how reluctantly they left, they left. When the front door closed, he bit a piece of cake and stood in the kitchen and chewed. He heard himself humming the tune he had baked to, and then he remembered its name.

  THE NINTH, IN E MINOR

  THE MORNING AFTER I drove to his newest town, I met my father for breakfast. He was wearing hunter’s camouflage clothing and looked as if he hadn’t slept for a couple of nights. He reminded me of one of those militia clowns you see on television news shows, very watchful and radiating a kind of high seriousness about imminent execution by minions of the state.

  I knew he had deeper worries than execution. And I was pleased for him that he wore trousers and T-shirt, a soft, wide-brimmed cap, and hip-length jacket that would help him disappear into the stony landscape of upstate New York. He needs the camouflage, I thought, although where we stood—in the lobby of the James Fenimore Cooper Inn—he seemed a little out of place among the college kids and commercial travelers. The inn advertised itself as The Last of the Great Upstate Taverns. My father looked like The Last of the Great Upstate Guerrilla Fighters. Still, I thought, he’s got the gear, and one of these days he will blend right in.

  “Hi, Baby,” he said. He tried to give me one of the old daddy-to-daughter penetrating stares, but his eyes bounced away from mine, and his glance slid down my nose to my chin, then down the front of my shirt to the oval silver belt buckle I had bought in Santa Fe.

  “How are you, Daddy?”

  He fired off another stare, but it ricocheted. “I have to tell you,” he
said, “half of the time I’m flat scared.”

  His shave was smooth, but he’d missed a couple of whiskers, which looked more gray than black. His face had gone all wrinkled and squinty. He looked like my father’s older brother, who was shaky and possibly ill and commuting from the farthest suburbs of central mental health. He took his cap off—doffed it, you would have to say. His hair looked soft. You could see how someone would want to reach over and touch it.

  “But I don’t like to complain,” he said.

  I got hold of his arm and pulled my way along his brown-and-sand-and-olive-green sleeve until I had his hand, which I held in both of mine. He used enough muscle to keep his arm in that position, but the hand was loose and cool, a kid’s.

  I asked him, “Do you know what you’re scared of?”

  He shrugged, and, when he did, I saw a familiar expression inside his tired, frightened face. He made one of those French frowns that suggested not giving a good goddamn, and it pleased me so much, even as it disappeared into his newer face, that I brought his hand up and kissed the backs of his fingers.

  “Aw,” he said. I thought he was going to cry. I think he thought so too.

  “Look,” I said, letting go of his hand, “I saw Mommy in New York. That’s where I drove up from. We had dinner two days ago. She asked me to remember her to you. She’s fine.”

  He studied my words as if they had formed a complex thought. And then, as if I hadn’t said what he was already considering, he asked, “How is she?”

  “She’s fine. I told you.”

  “And she asked to be remembered to me.”

  “Right.”

  “You’re lying, Baby.”

  “Correct.”

  “She didn’t mention me.”

  “Oh, she mentioned you.”

  “Not in a friendly way.”

  “No.”

  “She was hostile, then?”

  “Hurt, I’d say.”

  He nodded. “I hate that—I didn’t want to hurt anybody,” he said. “I just wanted to feel better.”