Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“I’m sorry the weather’s so uncomfortable,” Eleanor said. “And I’m so glad you’re here, you and Bertha, that I feel treacherous about my relief — on account of your discomfort. But thank goodness.”

“You’re a cousin. A cousin-in-law. I do not know what you are, in legal definitions, Eleanor. You are our family. If you want to be. If you do, then you are. If you don’t, consider us a very, very large pain in the ass until we see you safely home.”

She took his beefy, moist hand, the one that rested on the table near his coffee cup, and she set it against the side of her head.

“Dear girl,” he said.

Bertha walked in, moving as gracefully in spite of her size as Eugene did, whether it was to lift a cup of coffee or cross a room. Eleanor could imagine them as they somehow, helping each other quite cordially, made their slow, breathless way up the stairs of the Très Grand Vitesse and stowed the bags at the end of the first-class carriage. She could imagine them murmuring to one another—“Are you all right, dear? If you’d give me your hand…”—and could envision them as they faced each other across the little table of their compartment, stomachs folded doughily over the table’s edge, great arms flattening on its top, arranging bottles of Evian and sandwiches, wedges of cheese, perhaps, and chunks of fruit that Eugene cut for them with a folding wooden-handled picnic knife while the train gathered speed. She saw his vast hands manage with delicacy the division of a Cavaillon melon or a crescent of Brie, saw hers distribute napkins and plastic cups.

“I have just been having another word with Madame Panifiette,” Bertha said. “She was most accommodating of my accent.” Her smile might have excused Madame or indicted her own French, but it was kind, somehow. “She expects to ‘achieve a resolution’ quite rapidly.”

“I’ll bet you money,” Eleanor said, “that it costs us extra money.”

“I will expect her to do better on our behalf,” Eugene said, with a little steel in his voice. “But some money might pleasantly change the equation. I could see that.”

Bertha asked, “Did Eugene tell you that we were cooking tonight?”

Eleanor shook her head.

“Well, we’re cooking,” Bertha said, “so you might prepare yourself.”

“Is that a stressful situation?”

“No, dear,” Eugene said. “It’s noisy, a little, and sometimes quite messy, but I wouldn’t call it stressful. You are in one of the superb culinary districts of the world, and not at all far from St. Émilion, such a great wine center, as I’m sure you know. We’re off to shop, and then, when we return with food and drink, you are invited to a meal prepared by relatives. Are we your in-laws?”

Eleanor shrugged. She tried to smile brightly.

“Outlaws, then,” Bertha said, and she laughed like a girl, though her eyes seemed sad as they slid toward Eleanor and then away.

“Outlaws it will be,” Eugene said.

Begging her pardon for seeming intrusive, they moved about the room, opening cupboards and inspecting the refrigerator, each naming items for a list while Eugene wrote down, on one of Sid’s green-lined white legal pads, what they would need to buy at the open-air stalls in the square of St. Macaire and at the supermarket in Langon.

Eleanor, who was tall and broad-shouldered and, according to Sid, “the slightly repressed all-American lifeguard at the country club pool,” was thinking of Margo, also tall, slender, and broad-shouldered, who suddenly, it seemed, was in graduate school for the study of some kind of cell physiology that her father, a medical doctor, seemed to understand while Eleanor could only decipher the meaning of “cell” and “physiology,” without formulating an intelligent sentence that used both words. She was remembering how, early that winter, Margo had come home from Madison, Wisconsin, to Eleanor’s place on West Ninth Street to stay the night and register her opinion about Sid and her mother before spending the weekend at their old apartment, now her father’s, uptown.

She said, “Mother, for Christ’s sake. Have an affair . It’s an itch, so scratch it. Get over the thrill of it. Then learn how to live alone like the rest of us, for Christ’s sake.”

“And have you considered that it could possibly be more than sex?”

“When a forty-five-year-old divorced white woman gets a jones for a slightly younger, fairly hot black man who writes books, one of which she happened to read before he picked her up at the Metropolitan Museum show of those Vienna Whoevers who did the highly sexualized paintings? Ma: duh-uh .”

“I don’t know where to begin,” Eleanor had said. She remembered stumping back and forth on the broad, painted planks of her little Village living room. “I don’t know whether to shout terrible things about your not knowing the Vienna Secession, or calling their paintings ‘sexualized,’ like you’re the Dean of Correctness at a second-rate college, or portraying me as this over-stimulated matron who just wants to get laid by the nearest black man, who, like all the rest of them, you know, you know , is a phallic engine who cannot stay away from dumb and oversexed white women. Margo: duh-uh . How could you? And why are you so lonely, handing out that living-alone stuff? And since whenever do you say I have a jones ? I don’t know where to begin.”

“Don’t say anything I can’t forgive, Mother.”

Margo had called her Mother since the divorce, which they had conducted like a small war while their civilian casualty was in the eleventh grade. Eleanor said, “Margo? Are you really that alone? Are you saying that I am? Are you accusing me of being in despair? How desperate do you think I am ?”

“How much do you weigh, Mother?”

“How much—”

“How much do you weigh?”

“One thirty-three.”

“I thought it was, like, a hundred and forty-five?”

“No comment.”

“Right. So I’d call you roughly a hundred and forty-five pounds of desperate. That’s how desperate I think you are.”

Margo sat in silence, then, and watched her wander in the living room, from the wall of bookshelves to the long sofa to one of the windows onto Ninth Street. Finally, Eleanor let a long sigh slide between her lips and she said, “I’ve been holding my breath. I’ve gotten so strung out by you, I forgot to breathe.”

“Then you know the principle of blowing dope. Hold it and hold it and then let it go. I could roll us a joint.”

“Of marijuana?”

“What did you think it involved, Mother?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“All right.”

“Do you smoke it a lot?”

Margo looked at her with the pity of the young. Eleanor had seen it on her students’ faces. That it was undisguised made it cruel, as if they had never considered the possibility of an elder understanding the gulf between them. You decayed before their eyes, it said, and you didn’t know how close to dead you were.

“I think you’re learning to value yourself is all,” Eleanor had said when they told each other goodnight. “It’s not easy. I know.”

“And do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Mother, do you value yourself?”

“Of course. And I know that Sid values me. Oh,” Eleanor had said, “not a great answer, is it?”

“You’re still learning, too.”

“Life is long,” Eleanor remembered telling her.

“It better be,” Margo had said, about to go inside the guest room, “because you are one slow learner.”

Which apparently was true, Eleanor thought as, in the French rental, Sid’s great cousins prepared to drive into St. Macaire to purchase butter and cream and duck breasts and two kinds of mushrooms. “We can bake in those little ramekins instead of metal molds,” he said. “Absolutely no harm done. And that’s a reminder,” he instructed Bertha, “about milk for the timbales. We cannot forget the milk.”