Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“You’re making the list, dear.”

“Yes, I am,” he said. He told Eleanor, “The preparation of food, you will not be surprised to learn, excites me. I get forgetful.”

“He can also be dictatorial and quite like a master chef — decidedly cruel,” Bertha said, smiling. “It gets quite dangerous when we cook.”

“The danger,” Eugene chanted, as if from memory, “lies in running short of reliable duck confit, not in any slightly bruised feelings among the sous-chefs.”

“Who said that?” Bertha asked.

“I did, of course.”

“You can see,” she told Eleanor, “he grows brutal.”

There was a rustling of linen clothing, a seizing of lists, and a counting of currency, and then they were off in their black convertible, down the stony drive to turn left onto the little connector road, then right onto the paved secondary, and then to wander the turns past vineyards and the sheds that sheltered stainless steel storage tanks and the descent into St. Macaire with its ramparts and its small, plain cathedral, and its narrow streets. She thought for a moment of the cousins as they loomed over the small, taut French while they inspected the wares of the seller of Basque sausages and cheeses, or the local man so proud of his harsh Armagnac, and the butcher who always seemed to sneer over his duck legs, his unplucked chickens, his thick loins of pork. She could hear their murmurs to each other and their charmed, polite replies.

In the master bedroom, which like the dining area opened into the vineyard, she moved folded clothing about and tried to pack. There were two large bags and two small ones for carrying books and bottles of water onto the plane; they hadn’t brought more than thin summer clothing and a cotton sweater apiece for a cool night, but there seemed to her to be too little room in their luggage. It felt important that she leave nothing of his behind, although she suspected that, eventually, she would give it all away in New York. For now, though, she wanted to bring him home with everything he’d carried abroad.

Did that include her? She wondered if they would have returned together, assuming the small matter of his not having died of an explosion of blood in the brain.

“Probably,” she said to the chugging of insects outside, the slow droning of fat bees in the waist-high pots of rosemary next to the house.

“Of course,” she said.

Looking at the herbs and thinking of the cousins at their list-making, she thought of the preparation of food. She remembered the first formal date with Sid, who had taken her for dinner to Jarnac, the restaurant in the West Village. He had insisted that they order the cassoulet, which was better, he said, than the cassoulet, with white beans and duck and pork sausage, that he had eaten in the Fifth Arrondissement of Paris the previous year. A stocky, jolly, but tough-looking woman came out of the kitchen while they ate, and she circulated through the small room. She and Sid embraced, she patted Eleanor on the shoulder, and she moved on.

“The chef,” Sid said.

“I can’t help it,” she told him. “I’m impressed.”

“That was the idea.”

“It was?”

“Oh, yes. You’re who I’m determined to impress.”

His thin face, which she thought had as many muscles in it as an athlete’s arm, was a little darker, with a little more putty color, she thought now, than Eugene’s. Sid kept his coarse hair short, and she had enjoyed inspecting the beautiful shape of his head. She could imagine a mother holding her hand around the back of that head. She could imagine her own hand there. He saw her speculating, and he suddenly grinned, a big and boyish, happy smile.

“What?” he said.

“Never mind. Although I suspect you can figure it out.”

“I hope so,” he said.

“I’m considering matters,” she said. “So tell me something.”

“About what?”

“About anything besides me. Tell me something about your work.”

“You said you know my work. Now I’m disappointed.”

“What you are is like a boy about it.”

“I’m like a boy about everything else, too,” he said.

“Never mind. Tell me about what you do. I read the one about the women who robbed banks. Very cool, as my daughter might say. A bunch of right-on women, she’d say, except for the part about shooting people. Your detective cries. People seem to like that.”

“Margo. Your daughter.”

“Yes, Margo. So what are you working on now?”

“Why, you.”

He had never mentioned any relative except his mother. He had certainly never referred to his cousins, the vast Caucasian Bertha and Eugene, the giant brown purveyor of rare books who would return chirping to the house to prepare something involving magret de canard in order to nourish the widow. And here was the widow, trying to fit too many clothes into too few cubic inches of luggage that, a couple of weeks ago, had accommodated everything.

Eleanor slept among the stacks of neatly folded undershorts and T-shirts and olive-green cargo pants and the socks she had bought him at Brooks Brothers. She had been frightened while she slept. She had awakened herself by calling out, had looked about the room and closed her eyes and gone to sleep again. Now her mouth was gummy and foul, her face felt greasy, her left hand hurt from clenching it. She showered but put on the same clothing she’d worn — khaki shorts, a wrinkled white camp shirt. She brushed her teeth and worked her hair into a ragged bun. She went barefoot into the kitchen, where she drank iced spring water while watching the sun hang huge and orange over the hills at the far edge of the grape vines cultivated by Monsieur and Madame Panifiette. The sun appeared not to move, though the insects chirred louder, she thought, and the bees worked harder now, and the hills began to go dark, almost as if they were a silhouette, even though the brilliant orange sun appeared to be directly over them. You would think it would light them up, she thought.

“Stand by, Eleanor,” Eugene called. She heard the throbbing of the engine of their Saab, and then she heard the slamming of doors, the rustling of plastic sacks, and the panting of very fat people moving across the hot slate walk at the back of the house.

She and Sid had not slept together during the week before he died. They had agreed, though they’d said nothing aloud, to continue to sleep in the same bed, to kiss each other good morning and goodnight, to walk naked from the shower to their bedroom, to use the toilet without hesitation or shame, and to in every other way manifest their intimacy. The making love had stopped as though a mechanism had broken without any other symptoms. They had malfunctioned without a fight, only slightly acknowledging the increment of tension between them. Sid was making some progress with the book, his fourth, about a black detective of the upper middle class who solved crimes out of his affection for the victims, but never quite learned how to love the woman who, by the end of each book, loved him.

On the night of her learning about the breaking down, they lay in the dark in bed, he in pajama bottoms and she in sleeping shorts and a sleeveless, scoop-necked top, not touching, at the start of their sleeping this way every night.

“I keep wondering,” she said. “I mean, about how, where you are — at the start of it — you could go off to France for a couple of months and work on a book that depends on being in New York, where your people are—”

“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.”