Frederick Busch - Girls

As I looked at her, as she rocked back and forth and looked at me, I thought I should have started by thanking her for stripping the rest of the wallpaper.

What I said was, “You want me to find the same pattern of paper and put it back on the walls?”

I put my head down as soon as I’d said it. I couldn’t any longer find satisfaction in a fight with her. We were both too beat up for this. I started to say it but found when I looked up that she had left the room. I followed her. That was how our fights had always gone, Fanny walking off and me following. We had done it in cities on the West Coast and in the Middle West and even in Manhattan, where I’d finished up my stateside rotation and mustered out. She’d stood at a cement wall in Battery Park, looking down into the dirty water. She’d been wearing an ugly bronze raincoat I’d always hated because it made her skin look gray. She’d move, and I’d move with her. We went that way along the embankment. Finally, at the navy monument, she said, “If you’d tell me how to get home, I could stalk away and you could follow me there and get this damned thing over with.” I’d shown her the right subway entrance, but by then she wanted me with her, and we went home together. Now we were home together, and no one knew where else to go.

I went down the hall to the bathroom and listened at the door. I heard the shower. I banged on the door.

She said, “What?”

“I’m sorry.”

I banged again after I’d waited half a minute.

“What?”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I heard you.”

“Fanny, are you sorry?”

She said, “What do you think?”

“Don’t cry,” I said.

“So what should I do?”

“Come out.”

“In a while.”

“Fanny, I’m lonely for you.”

“What?”

“I miss you. It’s like I’m in Tokyo or someplace and talking on the phone. I keep missing you.”

Then she said, “I miss you, too.”

I was sitting on the floor outside the bathroom, my back against the linen closet door, and I’d been sleeping. She had put a blanket over me. The dog was on the floor beside me, with his back wedged hard against my leg. We were littermates. When I moved again, I woke him, and he looked over his shoulder with a kind of stupid glare, and then he thumped his tail.

“We missed again,” I said.

He rolled to his feet and shook himself head to foot as if to throw off water, and he planted himself. He was ready. Good dog.

The college was digging out after days of storm. Pickup trucks with plows in front and salt distributors in the bed worked the narrow lanes and paths while big trucks with highway plows cleared the larger roads. Grounds crew on ladders and a cherry picker crane worked to lever ice off the roofs before it melted enough to come down in avalanches. We’d had students buried under slides like that. The sky was bright and the sun, though it hadn’t any weight on your skin, was good to see, especially if you believed in winter ending, which I did not. From high up on the campus roads, you could look into neighboring counties. I was patrolling near the graveyard where they used to sell lots to the faculty. It was my suggestion, since my English professor’s girlfriend had hiked up here to try killing herself, that we include the cemetery and the quarry in our rounds. I wasn’t really patrolling. I sat in the idling car and looked over the campus, over the bright hills, and I stared without focusing.

I was counting my credit hours. Since I wasn’t taking a course this semester, I was a little behind schedule. According to my calculations, the sun would get very, very old and explode, incinerating all the planets in the solar system, a year and a half before my degree was in hand. This was not a viable self-improvement program, and I was going to have to step up the pace. On the other hand, I couldn’t imagine taking another course as long as I lived. I kept seeing myself as I used a yellow crayon to draw a picture of Ralph for Introduction to Art. I heard myself making up songs about Ralph for Music 101. I was too disgusted to think for long about my having written a paper and handing it in and letting myself be graded for what I had to say about a story I had told a baby girl about a duck.

I was grateful when they called me on the radio and asked me to come in. My vice president for administrative services made me head of security. I was given a raise of a thousand dollars. I asked if I got any more courses free, and he regretfully reported that I got what everyone else got: one per term. I asked if I could work plainclothes and he said we could try that. I had come in early because I didn’t think Fanny ought to have to deal with me. I knew what was bad for her. I was sad because I knew, and probably that was what my vice president felt. He was a pleasant man with a taste for bold tweeds and what he had assured me were English neckties. He wore tinted glasses in dark plastic frames and looked like he ought to be a teacher.

“Does this please you, Jack? You seem a little subdued.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I’m pleased. I’m grateful. I’m a little worried about the responsibility, but no, there’s nothing wrong. Thank you very much. And we can use the money.”

He looked at the papers before him. “How’s Mrs. — how’s Fanny?” he asked.

“Hanging in there,” I said.

“All right, though,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Fine.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said. “Congratulations, and, you know, fine. Stay in touch.”

The dispatcher kissed me on the cheek, and the other three on patrol shook my hand. They were former policemen from villages in upstate New York, and they were envious of the money but had no desire to make out shift schedules and answer to angry students about their slack attitude toward date rape.

The call came from the library, early, around half past eight, and I drove over.

I’d never liked going there. It was built into the side of a hill, and you climbed a lot of stone steps with short risers and somehow you were always out of breath, going in the heavy glass doors past the electronic apparatus that wailed if you didn’t check a book out properly. It was full of angles and corners. You didn’t get a good look at a long vista you could inspect and become familiar with until you hit the reference room. Standing near the circulation desk in the entrance hall, breathing a little too hard, I always felt I had come into someone else’s house. I tried to make my breathing normal. I saw walls and angles and shelves of new books on display, and I heard the clattery, hollow, plastic sound of computer keys. The catalog was on computer, and almost every long table I saw had computers on it. I didn’t like to use them unless I was forced to. No matter how I made my way through the computers or in the stacks among the students, I knew I didn’t belong there.

Through a glass wall with a door in it, near long tables with computers, I saw Rosalie Piri, who had bald tires, and a tall man and a taller woman. Professor Piri looked little between them. She saw me and lifted her chin and smiled. The others looked over, waved me in and then on. I followed them to an office on the far side of the reference room, where I was introduced to the circulation librarian, Donald Gombricz, and Irene Horstmuller, the head librarian. We sat around a conference table in Horstmuller’s office. There were pads, pencils, and a small book in a navy blue binding closer to where I’d been placed.

The head librarian said, “Professor Piri borrowed a book. It contains some possibly distressing information. We’re calling the authorities. but Professor Piri suggested that strict procedure would involve your input first.”