Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“No.”

“We don’t do that.”

He shifted. He sighed. “We surely didn’t used to,” he said. He teetered on his side, and then rolled onto his back again. “We didn’t. We mustn’t.” He turned toward her and kissed her upper arm, letting his teeth gently close on her flesh.

“You’re trying to turn me on,” she said.

“I am.”

“So that — so that what, Sid?”

“So that you know.”

“It’s part of the argument, then?”

“We aren’t having one.”

“What are we having?”

“I don’t know.”

“A power struggle,” she said.

“El, come on.”

“Well, I’m not hard to get,” she said.

“That’s not what I meant.”

“I don’t know quite what you meant,” she said. “But I do think we’re a little old to be wasting our time on so much talk about what we aren’t doing when what we could be doing is making each other happy.”

He lay beside her, he didn’t move, and the orange sun hung in the early nighttime sky.

“Except we aren’t,” she said. “Am I guessing it right? Happy, I mean. I mean, we’re not happy.” Here they were, she thought, two adults who functioned in terms of language carefully chosen, and it was as if neither spoke the other’s native tongue. But the attitude of his body, his distance though he lay so close, his silence, now cut through the words they didn’t or couldn’t select. It’s as simple as that, she thought. We are not. “What we’ve been doing, maybe,” she said, “has been hoping. Maybe what we did was mostly hope.”

“Mostly hope,” he said. “Nothing ignoble in that.”

“We tried.”

He said, “We did our best.”

“Oh, Sid,” she said.

After a while, he said, “That’s right. Oh.”

And finally, she had returned his kiss, on the hard curve of the top of his shoulder, letting her lips come away slowly from his bronze-tan skin that always smelled to her like spices — and she thought of their names, although she never cooked with them and really didn’t know one from the other: mace and cloves and nutmeg — because it seemed likely, she thought, before she turned over to face away from Sid and from the enormous, ragged sun, that they had just kissed goodbye.

Bertha and Eugene cooked, and they did their best to entertain her. They made drinks of Campari and soda over ice, and Eugene warbled bad renditions of tragic French arias while Bertha complained about the mysteries of the stove mechanisms.

“I am using dried cèpes,” she told Eleanor, “along with chopped shallots and milk and no more than one-half a cup of heavy cream to make a kind of gateau of mushrooms. They’re really called timbales. You know the term? After we combine over heat, we’ll bake. You’ll find it echoed in the heavy cream, the port, and the shallots of the woodland sauce that my husband, the fascist chef, is coercing together for what will, after all, be simply sautéed duck breasts. Are you hungry, dear?”

Eugene was gliding from the sink to the table to the stove, wiping at his sweaty forehead with a dish towel hung about his neck. The evening breezes came in over the grapes while the air of the kitchen took on the aroma of the reducing canned chicken stock he apologized for using. “We bought it at the hypermarché outside Langon,” he said. “It’s a travesty, of course, but there hasn’t been time to make real stock. And we had better hope, by the way, that the co-fascist to my left”—and here Bertha actually performed a half a bow, her huge breasts falling against her dress—“knows that I require some of those cèpes for my sauce. And, darling,” he said to her, “can you scoop me five tablespoons of butter?”

She said, “Eleanor, would you mind awfully grating some nutmeg?”

Eleanor said, “Why?”

Eugene stopped washing parsley at the sink. Bertha, panting as she sautéed mushroom strips and chopped cèpes, with a knife in one hand and a tub of butter in the other, paused, then turned to Eleanor, looked at her face, and said, “An unpleasant association?”

She almost spoke, but only shook her head.

“It’s hardly necessary, dear,” Bertha said.

Eugene danced, immense over his relatively narrow, small feet, toward the table where she sat. “I must make you another Campari-soda,” he said.

“No,” she said. “No, thank you.”

“Some of the dinner wine? If you know me, then you know I brought enough. I have Chateau St.-Georges-Côte-Pavie, which is a St. Émilion from nearly up the road. It’s supposed to be very fleshy and full of blackberries. It’s breathing on the counter, let me pour you a glass.”

“I can grate the nutmeg,” she told him. “That’s all right.”

“And I can pour you a glass of wine,” he said. “And that’s all right.”

She held her palm out and Bertha deposited the little tin grater with its small compartment that held the nuts. Eleanor leaned to sniff at the compartment. That was the smell of nutmeg. She said, “I wonder if you could excuse me?”

“Dear girl,” Eugene said, “it’s all too, somehow, celebratory, isn’t it? We were afraid it might feel that way. Although one could celebrate Sidney. Perhaps one ought to, even. My brother’s boy. And aren’t genes so treacherous? Arthur, my brother, also died too young. And he was healthy. Anyway, he was slim. Broad at the chest, but slender all the same. He was a dancer for a couple of years, a professional chorus-boy hoofer in Philadelphia and New York. You’d have thought that one of us was adopted, my mother used to say, because we were made so differently. Of course, I happened to them twelve, nearly thirteen years after my poor mother thought she was done with bearing babies. Arthur believed I was this pick-me-up-off-the-street creature, but I wasn’t. I was born to them, and we were brothers, the poor soul. We both of us adored Sidney. He was more like a brother to me than Arthur, now that you mention it, who was, if you’ll forgive the psychology, a little bit more of a father , if you can believe it, as we got older. So maybe the meal’s for him. But it’s also for you, Eleanor, because Sidney loved you and you loved him. God bless you both.”

Bertha said, “She’s all done in, Eugene. She’s exhausted. She should sleep. Eleanor,” she said, “you must have a nap. At once. We can worry later about food. Do you hear?”

Bertha insisted on shepherding her from the kitchen table and past Eugene, who leaned to kiss the air beside her face, around the corner, and down the short corridor that separated her bedroom and Sid’s from the room in which the cousins slept. She smelled the nutmeg, she believed. And she smelled Bertha’s heated skin, and a floral talc, and the astringency of a deodorant. Bertha held a vast, round, heavy arm about Eleanor’s shoulder and she murmured to her, making noises but not whole words, little cooing sounds of encouragement, as she saw her through the bedroom door. Inside the bedroom, as she lay on the bed beside the open French doors, Eleanor heard them moving across the tiled floor of the kitchen, heard the sputtering of sautéed food, the clatter of implements against crockery and pots, the thump of the oven door, the gurgle of liquids measured out. It all calmed her, and she let herself listen to the sounds of their cooking as, when she was a child, she heard, from her room, the noises made by her parents as they cleaned up in the kitchen at the end of a dinner party, her father’s voice tired and grainy and deep, her mother’s voice rich with satisfaction as she gossiped about her guests.

Eleanor woke to the sweet smell of grapes outside the bedroom, and the creamy, thick odor of the chalky soil in which they grew. Over those smells lay the dark richness of roasted vegetables and seared, sauced duck. She was lying on Sid’s side of the bed, among his scattered clothes, closer to the open doors onto the fields, in the darkness of a cloudy sky lit coldly now by the pale, small moon. It would rain in the morning, she thought, and the day would be humid. Eugene and Bertha would be uncomfortable in high humidity, and they would soak through their traveling clothes. They would suffer, and so might she, she thought, but none of them would look up, like Sid, and then, like a lamp extinguished, go out.