Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“No, tell me straight. Never mind, don’t bother. I know it’s stupid and suicidal and obnoxious. But I mean, aside from the usual arguments.”

“Strikes me as a terrific plan.”

“I’ll stop again. You aren’t, I don’t know, allergic to it or something?”

“Just to the cancer part.”

She said, “Well, I’ll stop again. Before you leave, I’ll stop smoking.”

“Is it time for me to go?”

“Is this a tolerable process for you? Doing the work like this?”

He nodded.

“It is not time for you to go. We almost have the shape. Structure is the concern for us, because you know how to tell stories. It’s — it’s like your dead Iranian. He’s all over the book. It’s like the book’s his body. He’s all blown up, so how would you put him back together? Same for us with the book. We’re reassembling a body of experience. It’s going to be different from what happened outside you, in the desert and while they were driving all over, but we have to find the shape it took inside . What your memories made it, what your emotions — well, you understand. You know what we’re doing. And you know we aren’t done.”

“You paid me a pretty good penny,” he said.

“One hell of a lot more than a penny.”

“It doesn’t seem entirely fair that I get the more-than-a-penny, and you still have to do all this work.”

“That’s what I do,” she said. “I buy broken, and I fix.”

“But meanwhile,” he said, “I can’t help noticing you’ve got stuff going on….”

“Stuff.”

“Stuff in your life. Private stuff.” She left the table to open and close drawers in the pantry. Then she was back, sitting opposite him, looking unhappily at him over the cigarette she lit, sighing. He waited, as if he were the one who drew in the smoke. “It makes you sad,” he said. “It makes you smoke.”

“Thank you,” she said, “but don’t worry. The private stuff is just one more — what did your Marine Corps rifleman call it? ‘One more shit storm in paradise’?”

Murphy took the half of buttered English muffin she handed down to him, and he fastened his thick black muzzle carefully around it, as if the muffin were alive, and then he carried it off to the doorway of the breakfast room with his head up. He lay and licked it, watching them, then closed his mouth around it, raised his head, and worked at the bread while butter and crumbs leaked down from his leathery lips.

“So I should mind my own business,” Mason said.

“I appreciate the attentiveness,” she said. “You’re a man who has feelings. That’s a nice part of the book — your honesty about being afraid, your sweetness about the younger men in combat, and the children you observed in the villages. And — listen. Listen, this is just the killing each other part you’re overhearing when I’m on the phone. It’s natural, it’s part of the cycle, and when you go looking to be happy, if that’s what this is about, then you have to do it. There’s the smiling part — first shy, then plain damned glad, then the way people smile right after they finish sexing each other tired. There’s the happy habit part — you know, how you get to understand each other’s arriving early or arriving late, ordering drinks for each other because you know what the other one likes, all of that. Then there’s the no longer working smoothly part, and that runs into the let’s just shoot each other part. I more or less happen to be in that particular aspect of the human misery sometimes called a relationship. I’ve been there before. As a matter of fact, it’s one of my specialties. Look,” she said, “I’m already chain-smoking. See how fast it all comes back? So could you tell me what that was about the Spanish Gate?”

The dog banged his tail against the floorboards and made a sound that was half growl and half yap. Mason knew by now that it signaled his desire to go outside. Ada went to the back porch door and held it for him. She stood at the door, her cigarette in her mouth, while she bent, blinking her eyes against the smoke, and loosened her barrette to gather her hair and fasten it again. Then she held the cigarette and looked out through the screen.

“Do you remember?” she asked.

“Where did that come from?”

“One of your notebooks. Some day in September, October. Just before you went over to Kuwait to join up with the Marines. I could find it. You wrote something about mussels in white wine with brown bread.”

“Oh,” he said. “I did? I don’t remember doing that. But it has to be about Galway, and this little restaurant near the Spanish Gate. We were — I was — there was somebody with me, and we were drinking a lot of white wine and eating mussels, and these thick slices of coarse brown bread. We got pretty drunk, as a matter of fact, and very fast.”

“So it wasn’t just the wine that did it,” Ada said, sitting again now that Murphy had returned.

“It wasn’t, no. I was with a friend, as I said.”

“A man or a woman? Can I ask? Has to be a woman.”

“Woman, yes,” he said. “Her name is Marianne Neal. We were in the smiling part of it, according to your breakdown.”

“Excellent word,” she said, “breakdown.”

“I was thinking that something terrific might possibly happen. And of course, a few days later it did. Just, it was terrifically unhappy. We were drinking and eating, we’d just come from some antiquarian fair in a great hall someplace in the city. Terrific city, Galway. Being there made me happy. I’d bought a brass jam pot for her that she thought was beautiful. Marianne’s a poet,” he said.

“Oh, now, never even approach the outskirts of a poet,” Ada said. “Didn’t you know that by then in your life? They love pain. For you if it can’t be helped, but for them if they have any say in it. They specialize in the five stages of misery. First, get some love going. Second, find a way to want to kill yourself because of it. Third, polish it and polish it. Fourth, insert it in a vital organ. Anyone else gets snuffed, it’s a shame. If the poet, however — this is Number Five — if the poet manages to sustain a dreadful, agonizing, not quite totally fatal wound, then there you have it: a long cycle of poems at the least, and quite possibly a book of them. Never go near a poet. Of course, you know that now, don’t you?”

They went to work. Each of them took notes, and Ada managed the papers, arranging pages and renumbering them. She indicated with glued memorandum slips where he would have to provide new material or insert old. She asked him, over and over, to tell her the meaning of what he had thought were clear, simple sentences. It was a history of unworthiness, he believed, the story of a man without courage who traveled with young men and their officers who went only toward trouble, whereas he constantly wanted to run away.

“I was always making believe,” he told Ada during their lunch break. They ate chicken salad sandwiches and drank rosé under the steady stare of Murphy, whose panting, Mason found, established the rhythm to which he chewed. “I was scared. I was ashamed of being so scared. I made noises like somebody who hadn’t ever heard of being scared. I kept wishing they would just, goddamn it, turn around , go back.”

“You suggest it plenty,” she said, “but maybe you want to talk about it directly. Give examples — what they did automatically, compared to what you wanted to do or would have done if nobody else was watching. Fear’s a great topic. Everybody wants to hear about it. You know: how to fail.”

“I’m waiting for you to give me the eleven stages of fearfulness. You have this wonderful habit—”