Frederick Busch - Girls

“You’re being daring, huh? What I mean is, you’re wonderful. But you worry about doing it.”

She covered us both and lay very close to me, with her face on my arm.

She said, “It shows?”

“I don’t know.”

“Yes, you do. It isn’t that I haven’t had some men. Ack! ‘Had some men.’ But I did. I had boyfriends in college and graduate school. I’ve been around.” I felt her lips move. I felt the warmth of her breathing on my arm. Her head shifted as she spoke. “And I can get feeling crazy and sexy. I can let myself get there. With you, for example. But something always gets me embarrassed. I don’t know what. Maybe I think I have to act embarrassed. I don’t know. When your father’s a cop, you grow up with a major superego thing. No matter what you do.”

“I get embarrassed, too.”

“Maybe you’re your own superego,” she said.

I recognized the word, but I didn’t know it. I was so far over my head in so many ways. I said, “I have not had a lot of women friends in my life. I’ve lived with the same woman since the seventies. When you were born, right?”

“No,” she said. “I was born in ’68. Your wife’s pretty. She’s sad. So are you. Aren’t you?”

“That seems to be the effect she and I have on each other.”

“Did I make you sad? Do I?”

“Why would I be here if you did? I came banging into your house like an accident happening.”

“No,” she said. “No accident. How are your ribs? Did we hurt you?”

“It was like a feather on top of me. When you say ‘no accident,’ you mean you were expecting me?” I thought of Mrs. Tanner and her certainty that everything was planned. “Because I didn’t know I was coming here tonight. Of course, I didn’t know I was coming here the other day. I thought this time I was driving home. It was like — Jesus, I haven’t got your kind of words, Rosalie. It was like I was in the water and I just reached out and caught hold. I hope that isn’t insulting. I don’t want you to think I have some kind of tool — no, some kind of anything practical in mind. Jesus. The more I talk, the less I say. Rosalie,” I said. My eyes were shut. “I didn’t know it was possible for me to still … do, you know, it. And feel good.”

“No?” she said. “Well, let me make it clear: You did do it. I felt you pump and pump.” She reached for me again. Then she moved her head again and said, “I wasn’t expecting you, either. I was hoping. I didn’t think for sure it would happen, though. Even after the other day. I almost raped you standing up. I knew you felt embarrassed about me being on the faculty here. I knew you were the kind of man who stood back a long time and considered things.”

“There has to be a lot of social pressure on you, from inside of you, about this happening to us. To be perfectly honest, I feel some of it, too.”

“But, hey,” she said, “tough shit, right? If it’s you and me, then that’s what it is.”

When I shifted, I closed my eyes against what I felt.

She said, “Do you want to ask me why I was hoping for you?”

“Why were you — you know.”

She put her teeth onto my upper arm and then slowly worked them up and down, like she was tasting my flesh. It felt warm and moist and in the darkness, like a baby feeding, but also there was the feel of her breast and side and groin and thigh against me. I felt myself grow and I forgot what we’d been saying.

In a whisper, she said, “Because I knew you would taste like this. I knew you’d be tough and maybe even mean but you’d try and not show it. And you would taste this good.”

She moved under the covers. I almost didn’t hear the muffled whisper when she said, “I’m not embarrassed when I can hide like this.” Then she said, “I knew you’d taste this good.”

When I woke up again, she was sleeping, too, and it was one in the morning.

I said, “Jesus!”

“Are we all right?” she said.

“The dog. I have to feed the dog. He’s used to eating around five, five-thirty. He’ll think he’s dead of starvation.”

“You’re leaving me for a dog? Not your wife and not your children — you didn’t talk about children.” Her voice was soft and sullen. She sounded like a teenage girl.

I didn’t think I could put my socks on because my side was too stiff. I stuck my legs through my trousers, my bare feet into my boots, and I balled my socks and underpants and stuffed them in pockets. I got my shirt on and then Rosalie stood in front of me, wearing my sweater pulled down over her arms and hips. I wanted to stay awhile and peel it up very slowly. I also wanted to make her promise to give it back. I thought of Fanny recognizing it someplace, and in the darkness of her bedroom, I closed my eyes. I remembered how on an earlier afternoon she had covered her eyes like a child, and now I was doing it, too. When I opened my eyes, she was closer to me, and on her toes, leaning against me, kissing the bottom of my chin.

“Bend down and kiss me for real,” she said.

Her arms were on me, and my head was coming down. She chewed on the side of my jaw, that little wet nibbling pressure of her teeth.

I drove through town at fifty, and I didn’t care if I was stopped. I got up to sixty-five on the snowy two-lane highway, and back down to forty-five on the ice-packed road that went to our house. The roads and snowbanks and fields looked blue under the moon, as blue as the room in my imagination where Rosalie and I had made love. In fact, though, her bedroom was mostly creams and tans and ambers, with a little deep red in some of the stuff on the wall. I tried to see her stretched out, as I’d imagined her, but instead I saw myself stretched out, and Rosalie nibbling with little teeth on me. She looked like a child, but she acted like a veteran in bed. I got as excited as I was scared, and something was wrong with that. Something, of course, was wrong with me leaving like a kid past his curfew, and something was wrong when a man left a small, exciting woman in her bed. Something was also wrong with the way I thought of her, the tiny breasts and narrow hips, the little belly. There was something not right about her looking in my mind like a child.

I pulled in too quickly and skidded. It didn’t matter. Fanny’s car wasn’t there to slam against. I’d been speeding home like when she lived with me in the old days, before she put herself on the late shift and before she moved to the room she let from Virginia. Fanny wasn’t home, and it didn’t matter, I realized, if I came home half-dressed from someone’s house. She thought I did that anyway.

The dog danced designs on the floor, and I let him out, then had to come out with him and pee into the snow to persuade him to finish relieving himself before he charged past me at the door. I let him in and put down food and fresh water. I ran some water for myself and took my tablets for the pain.

I thought of Rosalie Piri telling me her father was a cop.

He probably kept a service revolver in his bedroom, I thought, but with the shells locked away someplace else because there were children in the house. I heard her say, “You didn’t talk about children.” I let the dog out for a run, and I went upstairs. I was moving slowly because I had done a little damage to the ribs. I couldn’t begin to think what else I had done some damage to.

I kept the pistol wrapped in a greasy fatigue T-shirt in our closet. The shirt stank of gun oil. It was in a cardboard box, in which a pair of women’s white soft walking shoes, size nine, had come to our house in a United Parcel Service truck. I carried it downstairs. I let the dog in, gave him a biscuit, and then I poured myself a drink. I’d been careful about using whiskey for a while because I thought I might be able to dive into a bottle one night and not come up. I put some sour mash over ice cubes in a tall glass, and I put the bottle away. I spread newspaper on the kitchen table, and then I put the revolver on top of it.