“My people?”
“Now, you know what I mean. Your characters. You couldn’t have meant—you didn’t think that I meant anything about race.”
“No, El, of course not.”
“It doesn’t sound like us,” she said, “talking that way. I mean, making that kind of mistake about each other.”
“No.”
“We don’t do that.”
He shifted. He sighed. “We surely didn’t used to,” he said. He teetered on his side, and then rolled onto his back again. “We didn’t. We mustn’t.” He turned toward her and kissed her upper arm, letting his teeth gently close on her flesh.
“You’re trying to turn me on,” she said.
“I am.”
“So that—so that what, Sid?”
“So that you know.”
“It’s part of the argument, then?”
“We aren’t having one.”
“What are we having?”
“I don’t know.”
“A power struggle,” she said.
“El, come on.”
“Well, I’m not hard to get,” she said.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t know quite what you meant,” she said. “But I do think we’re a little old to be wasting our time on so much talk about what we aren’t doing when what we could be doing is making each other happy.”
He lay beside her, he didn’t move, and the orange sun hung in the early nighttime sky.
“Except we aren’t,” she said. “Am I guessing it right? Happy, I mean. I mean, we’re not happy.” Here they were, she thought, two adults who functioned in terms of language carefully chosen, and it was as if neither spoke the other’s native tongue. But the attitude of his body, his distance though he lay so close, his silence, now cut through the words they didn’t or couldn’t select. It’s as simple as that, she thought. We are not. “What we’ve been doing, maybe,” she said, “has been hoping. Maybe what we did was mostly hope.”
“Mostly hope,” he said. “Nothing ignoble in that.”
“We tried.”
He said, “We did our best.”
“Oh, Sid,” she said.
After a while, he said, “That’s right. Oh.”
And finally, she had returned his kiss, on the hard curve of the top of his shoulder, letting her lips come away slowly from his bronze-tan skin that always smelled to her like spices—and she thought of their names, although she never cooked with them and really didn’t know one from the other: mace and cloves and nutmeg—because it seemed likely, she thought, before she turned over to face away from Sid and from the enormous, ragged sun, that they had just kissed goodbye.
Bertha and Eugene cooked, and they did their best to entertain her. They made drinks of Campari and soda over ice, and Eugene warbled bad renditions of tragic French arias while Bertha complained about the mysteries of the stove mechanisms.
“I am using dried cèpes,” she told Eleanor, “along with chopped shallots and milk and no more than one-half a cup of heavy cream to make a kind of gateau of mushrooms. They’re really called timbales. You know the term? After we combine over heat, we’ll bake. You’ll find it echoed in the heavy cream, the port, and the shallots of the woodland sauce that my husband, the fascist chef, is coercing together for what will, after all, be simply sautéed duck breasts. Are you hungry, dear?”
Eugene was gliding from the sink to the table to the stove, wiping at his sweaty forehead with a dish towel hung about his neck. The evening breezes came in over the grapes while the air of the kitchen took on the aroma of the reducing canned chicken stock he apologized for using. “We bought it at the hypermarché outside Langon,” he said. “It’s a travesty, of course, but there hasn’t been time to make real stock. And we had better hope, by the way, that the co-fascist to my left”—and here Bertha actually performed a half a bow, her huge breasts falling against her dress—“knows that I require some of those cèpes for my sauce. And, darling,” he said to her, “can you scoop me five tablespoons of butter?”
She said, “Eleanor, would you mind awfully grating some nutmeg?”
Eleanor said, “Why?”
Eugene stopped washing parsley at the sink. Bertha, panting as she sautéed mushroom strips and chopped cèpes, with a knife in one hand and a tub of butter in the other, paused, then turned to Eleanor, looked at her face, and said, “An unpleasant association?”
She almost spoke, but only shook her head.
“It’s hardly necessary, dear,” Bertha said.
Eugene danced, immense over his relatively narrow, small feet, toward the table where she sat. “I must make you another Campari-soda,” he said.
“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”
“Some of the dinner wine? If you know me, then you know I brought enough. I have Chateau St.-Georges-Côte-Pavie, which is a St. Émilion from nearly up the road. It’s supposed to be very fleshy and full of blackberries. It’s breathing on the counter, let me pour you a glass.”
“I can grate the nutmeg,” she told him. “That’s all right.”
“And I can pour you a glass of wine,” he said. “And that’s all right.”
She held her palm out and Bertha deposited the little tin grater with its small compartment that held the nuts. Eleanor leaned to sniff at the compartment. That was the smell of nutmeg. She said, “I wonder if you could excuse me?”
“Dear girl,” Eugene said, “it’s all too, somehow, celebratory, isn’t it? We were afraid it might feel that way. Although one could celebrate Sidney. Perhaps one ought to, even. My brother’s boy. And aren’t genes so treacherous? Arthur, my brother, also died too young. And he was healthy. Anyway, he was slim. Broad at the chest, but slender all the same. He was a dancer for a couple of years, a professional chorus-boy hoofer in Philadelphia and New York. You’d have thought that one of us was adopted, my mother used to say, because we were made so differently. Of course, I happened to them twelve, nearly thirteen years after my poor mother thought she was done with bearing babies. Arthur believed I was this pick-me-up-off-the-street creature, but I wasn’t. I was born to them, and we were brothers, the poor soul. We both of us adored Sidney. He was more like a brother to me than Arthur, now that you mention it, who was, if you’ll forgive the psychology, a little bit more of a father, if you can believe it, as we got older. So maybe the meal’s for him. But it’s also for you, Eleanor, because Sidney loved you and you loved him. God bless you both.”
Bertha said, “She’s all done in, Eugene. She’s exhausted. She should sleep. Eleanor,” she said, “you must have a nap. At once. We can worry later about food. Do you hear?”
Bertha insisted on shepherding her from the kitchen table and past Eugene, who leaned to kiss the air beside her face, around the corner, and down the short corridor that separated her bedroom and Sid’s from the room in which the cousins slept. She smelled the nutmeg, she believed. And she smelled Bertha’s heated skin, and a floral talc, and the astringency of a deodorant. Bertha held a vast, round, heavy arm about Eleanor’s shoulder and she murmured to her, making noises but not whole words, little cooing sounds of encouragement, as she saw her through the bedroom door. Inside the bedroom, as she lay on the bed beside the open French doors, Eleanor heard them moving across the tiled floor of the kitchen, heard the sputtering of sautéed food, the clatter of implements against crockery and pots, the thump of the oven door, the gurgle of liquids measured out. It all calmed her, and she let herself listen to the sounds of their cooking as, when she was a child, she heard, from her room, the noises made by her parents as they cleaned up in the kitchen at the end of a dinner party, her father’s voice tired and grainy and deep, her mother’s voice rich with satisfaction as she gossiped about her guests.
Eleanor woke to the sweet smell of grapes outside the bedroom, and the creamy, thick odor of the chalky soil in which they grew. Over those smells lay the dark richness of roasted vegetables and seared, sauced duck. She was lying on Sid’s s
ide of the bed, among his scattered clothes, closer to the open doors onto the fields, in the darkness of a cloudy sky lit coldly now by the pale, small moon. It would rain in the morning, she thought, and the day would be humid. Eugene and Bertha would be uncomfortable in high humidity, and they would soak through their traveling clothes. They would suffer, and so might she, she thought, but none of them would look up, like Sid, and then, like a lamp extinguished, go out.
She put on clogs and went into the kitchen, passing the closed door to the silent extra bedroom. A bottle half filled with the St.-Georges-Côte-Pavie glowed in the low light the cousins had left on. She tugged at the cork and poured some into a kitchen tumbler. In the refrigerator she found sliced duck wrapped in plastic, and she sat at the table and ate. The wine was fruity and rich, and the taste of the duck made her hungry for more. But when she thought of the smell of nutmeg, although she couldn’t make out its taste in the duck, she removed the partly chewed meat from her mouth and threw it into the garbage pail under the sink. She took a swig of St. Émilion and spat it down into the drain.
Walking past the great pot of rosemary, and among lavender bushes, she slowly carried her wine down a row of grapevines. Something flew close to her head, but when she looked up she saw only the rows of cloud, like the serried layers of flesh on a fish, lit from above by the dim moon. She squatted, suddenly, and coughed, waiting to be sick. Nothing happened, though. It was as if they had eaten the corpse, she told herself, and she gagged again. But nothing more happened except a strangled cough, and she turned from what she thought of as her theatrics, sipped at the tumbler, and then walked the short distance back to the French doors of the bedroom, where she sat cross-legged on their bed and emptied her glass and thought of the sorry sweetness of their confession to each other that, at barely their beginning, they were failed.
A night bird at the far edge of the grapevines called, another answered, and then she heard Bertha’s rich voice. It had made a kind of whinny in the bedroom across the corridor. She moved from the bed without thinking, and she crouched at her closed door. Breathing raggedly, shallowly, she pressed the empty glass to the door and her ear to the bottom of the glass. She heard the whining of what she knew were bedsprings in the extra room. She heard the shuffle and brush of bedclothes, and she heard their skin. They were probably running with sweat, she thought. They were naked and their bodies were wet and they were making love. She had never thought of them this way. She had considered them delicate of feeling, gentle of motive, bound inside themselves by their fat and the difficulty with which such large creatures moved, no matter how graceful they might appear. But now she heard them whisper with pleasure, she heard the smack of lolloping, floppy skin, the suction of their flesh as they moved together and apart and then together again.
Eugene said, low, “Oh, for God’s sake, my dearest girl.”
Bertha made a sound of pleasure at her wickedness.
“God,” he said.
She thought of the hundreds of pounds of flesh that shifted and slid, of the way a mounded stomach was stuck by fluid and friction to the loose, damp canyon of a crotch. She was excited by what she heard, but she was also suddenly aware that what she ached with now was not the grief of this morning or of the days and nights before. It was envy, she thought. She didn’t breathe out, and didn’t breathe out. She knelt at her door, one hand closed on the knob and the other holding her eavesdropper’s glass as she listened to the long silence in the room across the hall. Then one of the sweat-slicked, gargantuan lovers held by death at bay whispered words she couldn’t distinguish. Then one of them shifted great weight, the guest bed groaned, and Eleanor began to breathe.
METAL FATIGUE
WHAT YOU MIGHT notice first is how dirty they are. It probably isn’t from not bathing, though you have to wonder how they could have the energy to shower or wash their hair. I think that’s what it was, with my daughter and the others. They all had the look, all over their skin, that you see on somebody’s hair who doesn’t shampoo. There was a dullness to them. They couldn’t catch the light.
But coming there to see someone, you still can hope. There are doctors and nurses. There are dirty pink walls and almost-wheat-colored linoleum floors and ash furniture with yellow plastic cushions. There are closed-circuit television cameras in the corners of rooms where pink wall meets bright white ceiling. There is someone in a security office dressed in jeans and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt who oversees the little screens of the monitors and supervises as many of the patients as he can. There are bedrooms without interior door locks that can be sealed from the outside and there are several sets of steel doors on each floor that open only with a staff member’s card. There is a gray-carpeted room with dark gray chairs and sofas on the street level, inside the locked glass doors, where family members sit until the ward doctor or nurse or psychiatric social worker sends word that they should ride the elevator up. So you can wait there or go up or sit in the ward cafeteria or the television room with its chained cigarette lighter and ceramic red ashtray and the laugh track of the rerun that seems always to be on and, if you want to, you can hope.
Linda and I sat at one of the cafeteria tables and watched a small young woman with matte-finish dark blonde hair writing with a fountain pen in a leatherbound journal. She bent close to the pages and wrote very slowly, pausing to look up, sometimes at us and sometimes at the other patients with their visitors, then leaning to the journal again.
“She’s playing tic-tac-toe,” Linda said. “Over and over. X and then O, X and then O.”
“No,” I said.
“Oh, yes. What—you think we’re in here because we very sanely write in our journal all day? ‘Dear Journal: Today, I took my meds on time. I didn’t spit out the mood enhancer or the antipsychotic. Not once did I try to gnaw through the vein in my wrist with my unbrushed teeth.’ Dad, we’re nuts. Remember?”
“You’re tired. You aren’t nuts. God, Linda. If you’re nuts, we’re all nuts.”
“And is that a consolation? No, I mean it was nice of you to tell me. What I’m saying is I can’t remember whether I feel good because of it or not.”
I got hold of both her hands, which were clasped in front of her, and covered them with mine. The backs of her hands were cold and a little damp. The skin of her face was very dry, and it looked as if she’d been standing in strong winds for days. She was wearing fleece-lined moccasins from which the staff had unlaced the rawhide cords so she couldn’t use them to hang herself. They flopped when she walked, but at least she couldn’t commit suicide with her shoes.
“What’s so funny, Dad? What’s the joke?” She pulled her hands away.
I shook my head. “I think I’m getting a little strange, myself,” I said.
“They did wonder if it was genetic, the depression.”
“Do you think it is?”
“Mom never tried to kill herself and neither did you, right?”
“Well,” I said, “no.”
She smiled a great, toothy, unfunny smile and said, “Well, there’s time, you know? There’s still time for both of you. Be patient.” She furrowed at the skin under her thumbnail. “Mom couldn’t handle coming today?”
“She’s with Max and Allison, sweetheart.”
The wit that made her look lively went out. Her skin looked only wind-scoured again, and sore. Her eyes were as dull as her hair. “The kids are fine,” she said. “Yes? The children are fine? They’re fine.”
“They are. They like it that we’re staying with them. They aren’t frightened.”
“What do they believe?”
“I’m not sure. We told them you were in the hospital and you’d be home in a while.”
“Not soon?” she asked. “Not ‘imminently’? Well, you wouldn’t say ‘imminently’ to a kid, would you? You would say ‘soon,’ I think. I would. I’d say ‘soon.’ Could you have told them ‘soon,’ but remember it as ‘in a while’?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
�
��So you did say ‘soon.’ ‘Mommy will be home soon,’ you said.”
“Yes.”
“Even though you told me ‘in a while,’ you told my children I’d be coming home ‘soon.’”
“Yes. Yes, I did.”
“And what’d they say back?”
“When I told them ‘soon’?”
“Yes. ‘Mommy’s coming home soon.’”
“Max nodded, you know, like a judge granting a motion. Allison looked at me, squinched her eyes together, and then she smiled.”
“Yes,” Linda said. “Good. Good.” She got hold of soft flesh under her thumbnail and worked it up and out. She put her thumb in her mouth as if it stung, then said something around it.
“I couldn’t hear you, Lin.”
“I said I was glad to be getting out of here soon. These people are all nuts. Whereas I,” she said, “am only tired. Ask my dad. And what should I know about Matthew?”
“He calls and talks to the kids.”
“Do they cry afterwards?”
“No. It’s always a very short call, and I think he keeps it light. They seem fine with it.”
“Do they ask when he’s coming home?”
“Not so far.”
“You’re lying, Dad. Lie, lie, lie. You’re telling me what you think I should hear. You know, I didn’t get terminally stupid to get myself locked away in here. I got crazy is all. I’m still smart enough to tell when you lie to me about the children, et cetera.”
“You’re not locked away, Lin. You admitted yourself—you know: you asked them to let you in. You wanted to be safe. You wanted to feel better. Nobody’s locking you in here.”
“Every door you go inside of, they can lock. It’s up to them.”
“That’s the paradox of psychiatric hospitals, I guess. People volunteer so they can feel safe. I imagine—”
“What is it that you imagine about me and my overdose and my children and my husband who left me and them and us and everybody else except some guy—”
The Stories of Frederick Busch Page 46
