Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She put on clogs and went into the kitchen, passing the closed door to the silent extra bedroom. A bottle half filled with the St.-Georges-Côte-Pavie glowed in the low light the cousins had left on. She tugged at the cork and poured some into a kitchen tumbler. In the refrigerator she found sliced duck wrapped in plastic, and she sat at the table and ate. The wine was fruity and rich, and the taste of the duck made her hungry for more. But when she thought of the smell of nutmeg, although she couldn’t make out its taste in the duck, she removed the partly chewed meat from her mouth and threw it into the garbage pail under the sink. She took a swig of St. Émilion and spat it down into the drain.

Walking past the great pot of rosemary, and among lavender bushes, she slowly carried her wine down a row of grapevines. Something flew close to her head, but when she looked up she saw only the rows of cloud, like the serried layers of flesh on a fish, lit from above by the dim moon. She squatted, suddenly, and coughed, waiting to be sick. Nothing happened, though. It was as if they had eaten the corpse, she told herself, and she gagged again. But nothing more happened except a strangled cough, and she turned from what she thought of as her theatrics, sipped at the tumbler, and then walked the short distance back to the French doors of the bedroom, where she sat cross-legged on their bed and emptied her glass and thought of the sorry sweetness of their confession to each other that, at barely their beginning, they were failed.

A night bird at the far edge of the grapevines called, another answered, and then she heard Bertha’s rich voice. It had made a kind of whinny in the bedroom across the corridor. She moved from the bed without thinking, and she crouched at her closed door. Breathing raggedly, shallowly, she pressed the empty glass to the door and her ear to the bottom of the glass. She heard the whining of what she knew were bedsprings in the extra room. She heard the shuffle and brush of bedclothes, and she heard their skin. They were probably running with sweat, she thought. They were naked and their bodies were wet and they were making love. She had never thought of them this way. She had considered them delicate of feeling, gentle of motive, bound inside themselves by their fat and the difficulty with which such large creatures moved, no matter how graceful they might appear. But now she heard them whisper with pleasure, she heard the smack of lolloping, floppy skin, the suction of their flesh as they moved together and apart and then together again.

Eugene said, low, “Oh, for God’s sake, my dearest girl.”

Bertha made a sound of pleasure at her wickedness.

“God,” he said.

She thought of the hundreds of pounds of flesh that shifted and slid, of the way a mounded stomach was stuck by fluid and friction to the loose, damp canyon of a crotch. She was excited by what she heard, but she was also suddenly aware that what she ached with now was not the grief of this morning or of the days and nights before. It was envy, she thought. She didn’t breathe out, and didn’t breathe out. She knelt at her door, one hand closed on the knob and the other holding her eavesdropper’s glass as she listened to the long silence in the room across the hall. Then one of the sweat-slicked, gargantuan lovers held by death at bay whispered words she couldn’t distinguish. Then one of them shifted great weight, the guest bed groaned, and Eleanor began to breathe.

WHAT YOU MIGHT notice first is how dirty they are. It probably isn’t from not bathing, though you have to wonder how they could have the energy to shower or wash their hair. I think that’s what it was, with my daughter and the others. They all had the look, all over their skin, that you see on somebody’s hair who doesn’t shampoo. There was a dullness to them. They couldn’t catch the light.

But coming there to see someone, you still can hope. There are doctors and nurses. There are dirty pink walls and almost-wheat-colored linoleum floors and ash furniture with yellow plastic cushions. There are closed-circuit television cameras in the corners of rooms where pink wall meets bright white ceiling. There is someone in a security office dressed in jeans and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt who oversees the little screens of the monitors and supervises as many of the patients as he can. There are bedrooms without interior door locks that can be sealed from the outside and there are several sets of steel doors on each floor that open only with a staff member’s card. There is a gray-carpeted room with dark gray chairs and sofas on the street level, inside the locked glass doors, where family members sit until the ward doctor or nurse or psychiatric social worker sends word that they should ride the elevator up. So you can wait there or go up or sit in the ward cafeteria or the television room with its chained cigarette lighter and ceramic red ashtray and the laugh track of the rerun that seems always to be on and, if you want to, you can hope.

Linda and I sat at one of the cafeteria tables and watched a small young woman with matte-finish dark blonde hair writing with a fountain pen in a leatherbound journal. She bent close to the pages and wrote very slowly, pausing to look up, sometimes at us and sometimes at the other patients with their visitors, then leaning to the journal again.

“She’s playing tic-tac-toe,” Linda said. “Over and over. X and then O, X and then O.”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, yes. What — you think we’re in here because we very sanely write in our journal all day? ‘Dear Journal: Today, I took my meds on time. I didn’t spit out the mood enhancer or the antipsychotic. Not once did I try to gnaw through the vein in my wrist with my unbrushed teeth.’ Dad, we’re nuts. Remember?”

“You’re tired. You aren’t nuts. God, Linda. If you’re nuts, we’re all nuts.”

“And is that a consolation? No, I mean it was nice of you to tell me. What I’m saying is I can’t remember whether I feel good because of it or not.”

I got hold of both her hands, which were clasped in front of her, and covered them with mine. The backs of her hands were cold and a little damp. The skin of her face was very dry, and it looked as if she’d been standing in strong winds for days. She was wearing fleece-lined moccasins from which the staff had unlaced the rawhide cords so she couldn’t use them to hang herself. They flopped when she walked, but at least she couldn’t commit suicide with her shoes.

“What’s so funny, Dad? What’s the joke?” She pulled her hands away.

I shook my head. “I think I’m getting a little strange, myself,” I said.

“They did wonder if it was genetic, the depression.”

“Do you think it is?”

“Mom never tried to kill herself and neither did you, right?”

“Well,” I said, “no.”

She smiled a great, toothy, unfunny smile and said, “Well, there’s time , you know? There’s still time for both of you. Be patient.” She furrowed at the skin under her thumbnail. “Mom couldn’t handle coming today?”

“She’s with Max and Allison, sweetheart.”

The wit that made her look lively went out. Her skin looked only wind-scoured again, and sore. Her eyes were as dull as her hair. “The kids are fine,” she said. “Yes? The children are fine? They’re fine.”

“They are. They like it that we’re staying with them. They aren’t frightened.”

“What do they believe?”

“I’m not sure. We told them you were in the hospital and you’d be home in a while.”

“Not soon?” she asked. “Not ‘imminently’? Well, you wouldn’t say ‘imminently’ to a kid, would you? You would say ‘soon,’ I think. I would. I’d say ‘soon.’ Could you have told them ‘soon,’ but remember it as ‘in a while’?”