The Stories of Frederick Busch

by Frederick Busch

  “Hank.”

  “Hank. I heard you talking about—a crooked President? But which one? A general—was it Grant?”

  “Restoring the tomb, yes. It was one of the morning—”

  “Sure,” she said. “Isn’t that something. And we meet up here in the faux Las Vegas of upstate New York. Isn’t that something.”

  She bent to the coffee. The boy poured a shot for Dickie. Lorna took a deep breath, and Hank heard her work to do it. He thought she was going to shout, and he turned to her. She said, looking at her cup, “Oh God, I hate decaffeinated coffee.” Her voice shook as she straightened to speak. She slowly blew air out between her lips, and it sounded to Hank like his father’s cigarette smoke. He sniffed, expecting to smell it.

  Then she said, making an effort, letting her anger sink again, “The most powerful stimulant I’m allowed these days is the Prince Valiant cartoon on Sunday. Sometimes, on TV, that fat fascist, what’s his name, with the wardrobe. And the occasional cup of decaf.” She sipped. “God. So what’re you doing in Not Las Vegas?”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “A lecture? Something exciting? Though, if you don’t mind my pointing it out, you look—what’s the word? You look like you feel a little shady. What’s your story, Hank?”

  He paid for the drink and her coffee. The boy emphatically snapped switches that shut off outside lights. “You can finish whenever you finish,” the boy said, “I don’t mind waiting. But I can’t sell you no more, ’cause we’re closed.”

  “Closed is closed,” Lorna said. “It’s apparently twelve-thirty in here when it’s not quite midnight in the world.”

  “This is Oneida County,” Hank said. Then he said, “I’m sorry, Lorna. I guess I don’t really have a story.”

  “Well, that’s all right with me,” she said.

  He saw his father, who had turned to instruct him about the trail of cairns or the weather, get struck by the wind, which slammed noisily into the mountainside. His father spread his arms for balance and opened his mouth. No sound came out, or the wind suppressed it. In the thick dirty white mist about them, his father, poncho taut with wind, was lifted into the air and taken from sight.

  The wind died and the cloud eddied. Rain had made the stones slick and shiny black. A dozen or so feet from the ledge over which his father had flown, Hank had stood in place, his back against rock face. He remembered standing with his legs together, the heels of his boots touching, leaning forward under the weight of his rucksack, his arms folded across his chest for balance or warmth. The wind came up again, and he stood still in it, leaning into the icy rain and waiting.

  He didn’t know—and he hadn’t known then, he was sure—what he might have waited for. But he stood in place and looked at the ledge. Now he wished that this woman, Lorna Wolf, knew about his waiting there. He’d have enjoyed asking her whether she thought he was waiting for instructions.

  He suspected she might agree with him—that he was waiting with utterly no hope for his father to reappear and tell him what to do about his father’s disappearance. Hank would have stressed, if he’d told her, that he had no confidence at all his father might return. Now it sounded to him like some kind of allegory, and he was almost—almost—grateful that she didn’t know.

  Slowly, his grinning father, bleeding along one temple and holding his body stiffly, climbed to his feet from the far side of the ledge. He had not been blown off the mountain, only over an apparently undangerous shelf of stone. Holding on to the rock now for balance, his father nodded. Hank wondered whether he had winked. And, walking alongside his son instead of before him, Hank’s father told him over and again, until Hank took his turn in telling him, how the winds had rolled him over rocks until he’d fetched up hard against some that had broken what would have turned into a fall.

  “Only the fall got broken,” his father said. “Who’d believe it? Only the fall got broken.”

  His father held Hank’s shoulder, though he didn’t lean his weight on him. At one point, they held each other’s hands, reaching automatically to balance themselves on a slippery, rounded face.

  “I was afraid we’d have to bivouac here,” his father said, heaving soon for breath but talking, talking. “You can get benighted and end up frozen dead on this mountain. And this is the gradual part. But don’t you let anyone tell you it’s easy. We’ll come back here—I’ll get hold of ropes and axes and pitons and whatever else they use, and we’ll practice, and we’ll come up here another time and climb straight up a different trail. Route, they call it. But this is how you start. You start this way, and then you take the more dangerous route.”

  A few minutes later, his father said, “And my glasses didn’t even break.”

  Hank said, “Only the fall.”

  His father pounded on his shoulder in response.

  They went to the top. His father stopped to light a cigarette where sun broke through the cloud cover. Big athletic hut boys and boyish New England blondes like those he would pursue in college—like Leslie, in fact—worked outside the low wooden building he and his father would enter, making shy, effortful, casual conversation, like people used to adventure.

  His mother would not be there to greet them, of course. They would eat and they would listen to a hut boy play the piano, and they would sleep in a dormitory for men. Then they would go home. His mother would have returned. He would become nine and ten and forty-four. And where, in the logs of a thousand centuries’ navigation through oceans of blood, would the tiny moment of a father’s lifting into the air be entered?

  “No story, Lorna,” he said. “I wish there was.”

  She patted his arm.

  He thought how, when Leslie slept and he came late to bed, he patted her arm as he lay down. She said she knew in her sleep that he was there, so he did that. She slept with a leg protruding from the comforter, often in the coldest weather. Usually bare, her leg lay on top of the cover, its slender calf and extended foot an elegance he admired.

  Lorna leaned over as if she were going to kiss him good night, and he held steady, hoping she would.

  “Catch you later,” she said, in her hoarse, dark voice.

  “Catch you later,” he said. “Good luck.”

  She said, “That’s right.” Then, louder, she said, “Dickie boy. Early day.”

  Early day, Hank thought. As soon as he woke, he would telephone Leslie. Lorna’s brother slid from the stool, wobbled an instant, braced himself against her with his undamaged arm, and they left. Maybe he would make the call tonight. The glass door closed behind them. Hank looked through it, waiting, but not with hope.

  You’re right, he told himself. But he heard the words in Leslie’s voice, as if his wife were not in Manhattan, as if she were here in Oneida County, bearing all of the rest of his life in her strong hands, in her powerful voice. You’re right, Leslie said in him: If you don’t have a story, there isn’t an end. You don’t get punctuation.

  Lorna must have agreed. She did not turn to look at him. She did not wave.

  STILL THE SAME OLD STORY

  ONCE UPON A TIME, I was dissatisfied with how I used my brains and with how Sam used his. He was what they call—and still, in upstate New York, with respect—a banker. I was the banker’s wife. And I had grown bored with my candor, weary of my brittleness, bruised by my own dissatisfactions. So, driving from a canal town that since the late nineteenth century had been thrashing about to survive, I went to bed with a man named Max who practiced medicine and who had no heart.

  I met him at a party and I met him at the hospital—need I say that I worked for the Auxiliary?—and I met him at a motel outside of Syracuse. He was stocky, and his soft skin gleamed over bunchy muscles. He was the sort of man who exercised not for his health but so that women would admire him. He wasn’t, so I’d heard, a good doctor; he wasn’t a happy one, and he was close to leaving the area when we met. Perhaps his imminent departure gave us a feeling of license. We made love three times on a Saturday
in November, the second time while the Florida–Notre Dame game was showing on the television set. He wasn’t so cruel as selfish. He used me hard. I was stimulated by his lack of generosity, I’m sorry to say. And as men must, I’ve learned, he told his colleagues at the hospital. It seems that doctors, especially, need to talk like boys about sex. Maybe I knew he would. Maybe that foreknowledge was also a stimulant. Maybe I knew when it began that Sam must finally learn of it too.

  As is Sam’s way, he didn’t tell me directly. I knew that something of it was in the wind when he told a story at dinner, after Joanna had gone upstairs to her homework, ending it with these words: “And he said it was the best blow job he ever had.”

  I knew what Max was saying. I knew that Sam was hearing rumors or reports. I blushed over my chicken with rosemary, and if Max had been at the table instead of Sam, I could not tell—nor can I now—whether I’d have gone around to burrow into his lap or slug him with an herbed paillard.

  I said, “Nice language.”

  Sam looked lean and fit, tired, uninterested in food, and a little dangerous. As he’d aged, as he’d lost hair, his bony forehead and prominent nose made him look like something with keen vision and cruel abilities and the habit of hunting.

  He said, “Sharon, a blow job is a blow job. You want to call it, you know—”

  “Fellatio?”

  “That’s right. You want to call it that? It’s still what she did with her mouth.”

  I said, “You know, I think you’re right.” I cut a square of chicken with considerable care.

  “We agree,” he said to the ceiling. “But I didn’t mean”—his smile looked nasty—“to be distasteful. If you know what I mean.” He looked at me with his eyebrows raised, his eyes unblinking. I looked into them. I wanted to find something of our fifteen years together. We watched each other like that, and his eyes filled with tears that ran onto his face. His mouth collapsed, and he said, “Pardon me, please.” I remember that I nodded as he left the table. I remember thinking that I should have wept too.

  We didn’t talk that way again. We meshed our social calendars, as we customarily did, and we attended dinners and cocktail parties at which doctors looked meaningfully over my body and sometimes met my eyes. I suppose they were waiting to be selected for the best-ever sex of their lives. In a provincial big town or small city, sex and thievery and numbers of dollars constitute the curriculum, and apparently reasonable adults grow hypertensive about them. So I was their hot topic. I find it of interest even now that I didn’t care.

  I knew that Sam and I had foundered. I knew that Joanna could be drowned along with us. I knew, I insisted to myself, that she might survive. I worried only about how, I told myself. Everything else, I decided, would take care of itself. I gave up my local newspaper column, slid from the Auxiliary, and signed up for all the substitute teaching of French and Spanish I could, preparing myself for full-time employment as a single parent.

  Gene McClatchey telephoned on an April afternoon to say, “This is Gene.”

  “Gene?”

  “At the bank, Sharon? I work for your fucking husband?”

  I said, “Not that happily, I guess.”

  “We need to meet.”

  And of course I thought he was a tardy quester after the world’s best etc. I said, “Why ever, Gene?”

  “On account of your husband is dicking my wife? Would that be a good enough why-ever?”

  “My husband? Your wife? Valerie?”

  He said, “Name someplace, will you? That’s private?”

  “That’s secret, you mean.”

  He said, “Please?”

  We ended up a dozen miles to the north, at a conservation training center run by the state, a little park of nature trails and wooden blinds from which to peer at waterfowl. I don’t know why I felt compelled to bring a loaf of bread to feed to the ducks. I tore the pulpy slices into bits and hurled them at mallards while Gene McClatchey, a red-faced man with curly brown hair and a hard, black double-breasted suit, studied the tearing of the bread and its arc toward the water and the wheeling of the ducks as they fed.

  He said, impatiently, “You don’t seem upset, Sharon.”

  “I’m not surprised that something happened, Gene. I didn’t think of your wife, to tell you the truth. She’s so glamorous and Sam’s—well, I don’t know, I guess. You want me upset? How upset do you want me?”

  “What I am,” he barked.

  “You’re jealous,” I said. “Or angry. Because the beautiful woman who’s supposed to be yours—”

  “No! I don’t want to hear any of that feminist horseshit about freedom and owning people and whatever. She’s my wife.”

  “And hurt,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, Gene. Wounded.”

  “Bitch,” he said. He flinched, stepped back from the fence at the duck pond, and scrubbed with his wide hands at his face. He said, “Sorry. I apologize. I’m so disgusted. Look at what I found that she left around by accident on purpose. Disgusted’ll do it.”

  He held a small notebook with thick covers. The paper was heavy and the binding looked like the inside covers of a fancy antique book. She had written in aqua ink, of course. She wore mostly pinks and limes and aquas in soft cloth that emphasized her breasts and hips. She was the best-built woman over twenty-five in town. Gene struck her, so they said at our parties. Looking at his big hands and red face, I believed that he might. I recalled her long, solitary walks through a town in which you drove everywhere, in part to show off your car. I remembered marveling at the erectness of her carriage. I remembered watching men who marveled at what she carried with such pride. She might well have enjoyed provoking him, I thought.

  “You can borrow it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You can keep the diary awhile. I have xeroxes. I figured you’d want to see the real thing.”

  “Oh. Thank you, Gene. But why?”

  “They can’t get away with it,” he said.

  “For the sake of argument,” I said, “why not?”

  “Because it’s wrong. That’s why I wanted you to know. I want it stopped, Sharon.”

  “You’re asking me to stop Sam from—”

  He said, “Please?”

  I can’t believe S! Silly-billy lover! Put the tube of jelly in his hand and he just held it. Asked me what it was for. Looked at me the way he does. I think I got wetter. He said O Boy. My boy lover. O Boy.

  S says Sh frigid for months. How about those stories about her? Backseats and motels and quickies in cars? S says S wouldn’t know where to put a cock without the instruction book. Here’s what I told him—Lie down. He knew what I meant.

  S thinks his daughter smokes pot. Got to talking, asked if he ever tried it, S surprised. Said I heard a good high gives great orgasms. We’ll try it together if we can get some. Stay young. It’s the ticket. Keep your body good and your lover crazy.

  Gene growling like a dog these days. He smells it. Dogs can smell it on you.

  You can’t belong to other people. You have to belong to yourself. You have to love yourself. Then other people.

  When S comes, his balls jump. Mexican Jumping Balls. S phones up and says Cucaracha! Makes me think of his balls. My lover’s balls.

  When I showed him the page after page of round, uncertain handwriting, Sam slapped the book from my fingers. I thought of Gene beating on Valerie and wondered if it was my turn. I said, “If you hit me, I might end up killing you, Sam.”

  He said, “I’ll bear that contingency in mind.”

  “You understand, of course, that she’s using you—this thing—affair—relationship—”

  “Don’t smirk, Sharon. Or I will hit you. And then you’ll have to kill me, remember. And your mother will raise Joanna in Cleveland while you’re a gray-haired convict. And for Christ’s sake don’t tell me about any other woman using adultery against her husband!”

  “You think this is about ‘adultery,’ Sam? Your b
alls are jumping so high, they’re blocking your vision.”

  “My balls?”

  I retrieved the diary and painstakingly found the page for him.

  Which brings me to Joanna, whom I had to hold and talk to after Sam, that night, took a room at the Valley Rest Motel, which is on the southern end of town. She let me talk, but she had no mercy for my need to hold. She twitched away from me that night. She paced the living room, touched the lampshades, prodded at books, moved records and discs on their shelves. She plucked at her hair and bunched her lips in disgust.

  “You know what they’ll say about Daddy? Big banker-man Daddy? They’ll say, ‘Old Sam Edel’s been punching the town bag.’” She looked at me pointedly and then she looked away. “You know how humiliating this is?” She looked at me again and cried, “Oh, of course you do!” Her pale, imperious face went soft, and she ran to me like a fugitive from Giselle. We hugged. By the time I decided it was safe to close my eyes and enjoy what I could, her lean body had gone hard. “That bitch,” she whispered.

  She endured my rubbing at her hair, and even my kisses. When I explained that her father might really be gone, she simply nodded. “He’s angry,” I said. “He’s not a happy man. But he adores you, Joanna.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “A guy’ll tell you love all you want. They say it a lot. It’s like at a hockey match. They sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ they look like nice kids, and then they beat the shit out of each other. It’s a guy thing. I’m just not that terribly impressed. I love you. Right. Thanks ever so much.”

  “Oh, he means it, darling.”

  “Ma,” my fourteen-year-old daughter instructed me, “they all mean it.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll be all right,” she said, like an older aunt, embracing me again. It was later, after the buttered popcorn, that she asked me to confirm the requirement under law that her father, once divorced from me, had to help pay her way through college. On behalf of the lawyer I hadn’t consulted yet, I guaranteed. It was really then, as I promised Joanna her future, that I began to feel the fractures of our collapse.