Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Yeah. I know. I break everything down into sequences. I could number the stages of bleeding to death while I was bleeding to death. I’m a comedienne, of course, right?” She drank off her rosé and licked her lips. “Pure amateur.”

He said, around the chicken salad, “I find it a little exciting, to tell you the truth.”

She moved her head slowly while elongating her neck, and it was as if she were peering down at him from a significant height. “Why would that be?”

“I’ve always wished I could be chipper and bitter and tough like that, maybe. I don’t know. It attracts me.”

“I attract you?”

“Yes. It does, and you do.”

She nibbled at a piece of chicken protruding from the edge of her sandwich. She poured them more wine. She shook her head. “Well,” she said. “And I’m sitting here, telling you how compelling I find your being so scared. Aren’t we just a meant-to-be couple? As in, who needs sex when you can have failure?”

He thought that if he said something about sex and failure, they might end up in bed. But he was afraid to talk about failure and sex, because then — he was certain — the sex would fail. He wished he could tell her, because it would be a fine joke about his fear, which she seemed to find so valuable.

“Well, well,” she said, feeding a piece of sandwich to the dog. She learned back, removed the barrette, leaned forward to gather her hair, then fastened the clip again. Mason pretended not to watch. “I’m running errands, in town,” she said, “mail, and dental floss at the IGA. You take a nap so we can do a session of work before low tide. All right?”

“Why low tide?”

“Because of your pleasure in mussels,” she told him. Then she and Murphy left.

Obediently, he took off his shoes and socks, he opened his bedroom window, and he lay under the powerful light off the sea and the winds that waxed and waned as if they were a tide. He sensed a giant shadow passing, but opened his eyes to see nothing except fir trees and the ocean off the rocks below the house. He wondered if a condor or an eagle had flown over. After a while, when he’d closed his eyes again, he saw different structures of rock and in different colors. He knew at once: the strand off the bay in County Sligo. He and Marianne Neal were walking on the coarse tan sand after their time in Galway, where they’d seemed to him so easy with each other. Outside of Sligo town, in Marianne’s little stucco house that was several miles northeast of the crowded road to Donegal, he’d felt her grow watchful, as if she had begun to worry about his fragility. And her care made him know that he ought to expect misfortune.

She had driven them in her small, apple-green, misfiring secondhand Ford to a little sandy track that went down to the beach. She pulled up the hand brake and sat, looking out the windshield at other parked cars and the gleam of water farther down. Her lips looked tattered, and he had seen her biting them. When she worried, she nibbled at herself — edges of her lips, her cuticles, a wisp of her frizzy, light hair. His stomach bucked, and he was certain now of unhappiness ahead. There were few people about, perhaps because cool winds had come up. He and Marianne had walked, saying little, along the curve of the bay. A small, white-hulled boat with an orange sail was turning into the wind.

“Can you see her?” Marianne asked.

He shook his head.

“She’s got ahold of a rope, she’s standing at the mast there.”

“Is it a nun?”

“It is, Martin. A nun in her blue robe on a sailboat. She’s grand, I think. Martin, there’s a man I’m going to see again that I wanted you to know about?”

“Ah.”

“Ah. Poor man. What else could you say, then? I’m so sorry. He’s the father of my dead child. The infant boy born dead. He’s asked to return again to my life. I don’t know. I don’t. But I don’t think I can sustain the two sets of emotions at once. And here you are, off to the deserts over there, and I’m giving you something like the shove.”

“This is the shove?”

“I wouldn’t feel it inappropriate if you gave expression to some anger , Martin.”

He knew her powerful poems about the baby. He wanted to say that he would rather cry, just then.

He remembered that he gave her no reply. He looked away from her, at the nun standing against the background of the orange sail on Sligo Bay, and he put his arm around her. She tensed. Then she very slowly relaxed against him for the space of a breath or two. All this time, he thought, and what you carry out of it for certain is how she fought an embrace and then gave in. She would probably write something about that instant of fighting, he thought. Marianne was a revelation about inventing ways to use words, unlike him with his timid notations on how others behaved. He remembered the citrus scent that she wore, and the smell, like crushed ferns, of the Sligo sand that the afternoon’s sunlight had warmed before the winds came up — the smell so different from the animal rankness of the tawny sand patrolled by Alpha in its reconnaissance vehicles — and he remembered that her skin was cool to the touch, at the strand at Sligo and in their bed at the Galway Great Southern, or anyplace else. His skin cooked while hers grew cold, and she produced sorrowful poems, and he grew sentimental over mussels steamed with shallots in white wine.

When Ada woke him, she seemed to be wearing sneakers and a long denim shirt and nothing else.

“You slept all afternoon,” she said.

“I was running away from work. It’s a great tradition of the trade.”

“We can work tonight,” she said, “or tomorrow. We’re doing all right. Listen. Wear some shorts, or a bathing suit if you brought it. I can’t lend you one, I’m afraid, unless you’re comfortable in a red maillot. And you’d best wear something on your feet.”

Ada left, but Murphy stayed, to pant and fart and wink as Mason put on a pair of shorts he wore when he played basketball with his friends, and then tennis shoes and a T-shirt. Murphy went to stand before the back door, his blunt, spade-shaped head leaning on the jamb. Mason let him out and then walked down the narrow path of dark, mossy soil along which Murphy had already run out of sight, past wind-stunted evergreens, then driftwood crushed against the huge rocks lying on top of the great stone sheets that radiated black and pink-gray layers into the sea. Ada was there, halfway down to the turning of the cove. She carried two plastic buckets, one of which she handed him.

“Your hands will probably get sore,” she said. “The more you try and hang on to the rocks, the more you’ll get those very pale knees and shins chopped up on the barnacles and all. But it’s worth it, because they’re so sweet here. It’s pretty much a secret place, so far.”

“What’s the secret about? Did you say?”

“Mussels, for goodness’ sakes. That’s what I’ve been telling you. This place, when the tide is low, is a gorgeous mussel bed.”

She and Murphy went farther out, climbing over or around immense glacial rocks that lay on top of the pink and gray stone sheets. At low tide, which was now, he imagined, you must be able to reach ten feet or more below the level of the high tide of six hours before. She had disappeared over the edge, and so had Murphy, and he went to find her. She was in ocean to her waist and thighs, and Murphy was swimming away from her, threading his slow, powerful way through the bright plastic buoys of the lobster traps, his head low on the water, breathing in groans that were carried back on the wind.

The rocks seemed steep to Mason, and slippery, and he sensed that, trying to climb down, he would slide along them into the sea, striking his head and shoulders and spine against the sharp white barnacles and — he watched her pry one loose — the hundreds of long black mussels that she faced. The water had painted her shirt against her stomach and groin, and he could see the shadow of a bathing suit beneath the shirt and the movement of her stomach muscles under the suit as she pulled and twisted until a mussel she was harvesting came loose, to be dropped into the white plastic bucket that she held in her other hand.