Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Try me,” she said. “See for yourself.” She set the bottle on the table’s dusty wood beside their glasses, and later he remembered his concern that the bottle might have made a permanent ring. He put his arm about her thighs and pulled her against him, pressing his face into her jumper. Her hands, on his shoulders, drew him in, but then she said, “Upstairs, all right? Come up.”

In her room, on the maple bed that groaned as they shifted and slid and bucked, she actually said — he would repeat the words in his thoughts of the afternoon—“Oh, my darling.” He thought it as arch, as premeditated, as stickily poetic as anything he’d heard. He wanted romance, he thought with pity for himself. He wanted this to be as fresh and just invented as her words turned it scripted and somehow untrue.

He thrust very hard to stop her from saying it again. And he felt, at the time and later, that his motive betrayed her even as she made their passion seem a little ludicrous. Neither her words, nor his response, nor her tears, nor his wondering whether she truly wept, prevented them from marching on together, with strength and with what struck him as a comradely regard for what felt best for each of them. He realized that he wanted her to say those saccharine words again. He wanted her to mean them. He asked, with his body, whether she did. He demanded that she did. He held her down on top of him as he slammed up. He closed his eyes and heard her grunt and maybe, then, whisper a protest once, though she moved and moved and moved with him. He demanded, with his body, to know what she had meant. But it was Bing who gave in first, surrendering to his angry pleasure, knowing only a little of what he had intended and knowing nothing more about her own intentions, to lie beneath her like a victim, emptied of himself.

He didn’t know if he had slept and dreamed in the chilly, dark room when she moved on him and then climbed out of the bed. “I would like to wear your shirt,” she said.

“Please do. But it’s a little big for you.”

She stood beside the bed to pull it on. Its tails hung to her knees. “I know,” she said. “That’s why I wanted to wear it. Stay there, please.”

She returned with their glasses and the bottle of Pommard. “I think you’ll find it’s opened more than generously,” she said, smiling what he thought she might think of as a wicked grin. She sat on the bed, touching him, still wearing his shirt, as they drank.

“I flushed it down the toilet,” he finally said.

“Yes. And you’re noting, when you say that, how I kept a condom in the drawer of my bedside table.”

“No,” he said. “Yes.”

“Is this the first time since—”

“No,” he said. “There was another time. An earlier time. Well, of course it was earlier. I was awful at it.”

“How did you think you did here? Just now?”

“Could we talk about the World Series?” he asked her. “Or how you like the Knicks for the upcoming year?”

“You are the rare man I would talk with about the World Series if he asked me to,” she said. “So that should tell you how we did here together. If you’d like to know. How would you say we’re doing?”

“Muriel,” he said, “I got lost in you. I didn’t mean to say anything like that — about the apparatus.”

“Apparatus! That’s wonderful. I wish I could be indiscreet about it and tell someone.” Her voice sounded sad when she said, “I don’t trust anyone that much. Maybe one day I’ll tell it to you. Do you think?” She drank and settled back against him. She said, “I believe these things are meant to happen as they insist on happening, and it isn’t given to us to necessarily understand why. Do you agree?”

Her hand moved over his belly and groin, and he moved to be available to her. What she said seemed absurd to him, like the flabby talk that disappointed him in churches. But he said, “Yes.”

“Yes,” she said, leaning to kiss his mouth. She sat back and said, “I wasn’t just left with my boys. I was left when I didn’t have a job, when there wasn’t money in the bank for us, when it was a brutal winter and I ended up selling shoes in Utica. The store went out of business. The strip mall it was in went bust. One of my kids, Timmy, was caught for shoplifting, but I begged and begged for him, and they let him go. That’s why he had a clean record when it was time to try for Annapolis. Do I think of myself as strong? Yes. Do you?”

“Yes. You raised your sons,” he said, “and they’re all right.”

“Oh, yes. They are.”

“And you’re young.”

“Young enough, I suppose.” And then she said, “For what?”

“A life? I don’t know.”

“Well, I always had one, Bing. That’s the being-strong part.”

“Of course.”

“No. Please don’t of course me. It’s a little complicated for that.”

“Yes,” he said. “Muriel, for what? I’m confused.”

“Yes, you are, I’m sorry to say.” She set her glass on the floor and stood, removing his shirt. He wondered if she indicated by shrugging it off that his obtuseness was ending the day for them. But she stood before him an instant and then climbed into the bed, pulling the comforter over them and climbing onto him again. Then she raised herself up, with her hands on either side of his face. “I want to look at you,” she said. He closed his eyes in embarrassment. “No,” she said. “Bing.” He forced his eyes open, and she gave him a rueful smile which, he thought, was precisely how she had intended, hours ago, to complete their afternoon.

Then he saw her eyes flicker and close halfway. She made a surrendering sound, and she kissed him deeply — as, he speculated, she might possibly not have planned.

Downstairs, in jeans and a baggy T-shirt, she held the cream-colored scarf as if she meant to knot it on her neck. She raised her face to be kissed goodbye.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. “You know — with Jeremy.”

She said, “Darling.” She held the scarf against her cheek as if he had just presented it to her.

As he parked in the driveway behind Nora’s old Volvo station wagon, his legs felt tired, as if he had walked great distances. His body hadn’t ached like this since before Anna died. He was only past the middle of fifty and she was in her forties, but he thought of her as young. He thought of her, too, as confusing. Yes, he thought, but remember the sounds she couldn’t help making. Those were not, he thought, the noises she planned for him to hear. He snorted. He shook his head. He tried to feel only experienced about the flesh, and not excited, but he couldn’t pretend. He still smelled her, and he felt her in his shoulders and thighs. He thought he still smelled the mixture of them. He paused at the back door, wondering whether Nora would smell them, too. He crackled his chewing gum to cover the excellent wine with artificial cinnamon scent, then spat the gum away and went inside.

It seemed a normal early evening. Jeremy assembled unbrilliant constructions of locking plastic bricks while not watching the television set that brayed bad news in the little breakfast room. Nora, he could see, was listening to the news and sorrowing for the fall of mutual funds, for dying rivers, for soldiers wounded, for migrant families pursued through a southwestern desert by federal officers armed as heavily as soldiers sent off to war. Her thick eyebrows sloped down, her lids were low, and her narrow lips frowned. She looked like Anna, he thought. And what help was that to anyone?

“So where were you?” she asked, not listening, he thought, for an answer. He waved to Jeremy and the boy waved back, his fingers together so that his hand looked like the paw of a cub. Jeremy’s smile was real but disappearing, and he looked as usual: worried, small, and slumped against the end of a harrowing day.