Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

JONAS, HIS BROTHER, had soared. Like their father, he went to law school and then was a clerk, of sorts, in a shabby firm of men whose wages came from defending the malfeasances and tax shelters of businessmen with overseas interests. Jonas was in fact above that kind of law, at least as often as he could be. He moved on, a junior partner in a firm whose practice was exclusively international law. And then, on lower Broadway in Manhattan, across the street from Trinity Church and hard by Brooks Brothers, Jonas rented quarters for himself and a secretary and two other men, and he became Reese, Kupkind & Slatauer, and at meetings of the New York Bar Association, he served on the foreign law committee. He took taxis to work, from Yorkville, and when they spoke by telephone every few months — each might have sworn, Jay suspected, that they’d spoken within the past week — Jonas reported savagely to Jay on how, from families still in the old neighborhood, he had learned of sweeping ethnic shifts, brown skins edging out white, and rumors of voodoo practiced within three-quarters of a mile of the synagogue that Eleanor Roosevelt herself had opened with a garbled Hebrew phrase in 1953.

Jay had gone to Moravian and then to the medical college of the University of Pennsylvania. To their father, going to any out-of-town college was a step up from his own attendance at Brooklyn College. Moravian was a major school to him, therefore, and the move to Penn had been pure triumph. Jonas’s acceptance, with a scholarship, by Reed, had actually made their father weep. When they were together, and drinking too much, Jonas went wet at the eyes, remembering their father’s tears. Jonas had come home for law school, attending Columbia while living at International House, uptown, and then moving to an apartment at 112th and Riverside. Jay had gone from Penn to a residency in Syracuse, at Upstate Hospital, and then he had moved downstate into Duchess County, near Poughkeepsie, where he practiced pediatrics and lived in a large white house that had been started in the eighteenth century and, according to Jay, had rarely been lived in since. He claimed to Jonas that most of his money went toward making up for years of rot and structural decline. He never talked about the tall, coal-colored woman he had married in Philadelphia, and had lived with for two years, and who had left him for a man in Durham, North Carolina.

Jonas married too. His wife was named Norma, their daughter Joanne, their son Joseph. The grandparents were healthy and transplanted and long-lived in Miami. The boys were men now, Jonas thirty-seven and Jay forty-two, and progress seemed assured. If they were not what might be called a successful family, and there is always someone who wants to say that, then they surely were not a failure. They lived in America and were making their way.

IN THE PART OF Duchess County from which Jay commuted to Vassar Hospital in Poughkeepsie, there were still large areas of forest, and there were dirt roads that tore a car apart in winter and that in summer were half-grown-over with weeds and hanging brush. Jay lived nearly in the woods, except for the half-acre of lawn around the house, and the long scrubby hillside climbing away to the west. He almost never mowed the lawn, so he lived within a swollen circle of meadow that, from time to time, he engaged someone with a tractor to come and cut. It was a Sunday in June, and he had driven home from morning rounds in his old crimson Alfa-Romeo with the top down. He was wearing khakis with white porch-paint on them, and was even getting some of the paint onto the four fluted pillars at the front of his house. He worked with his back to the hillside forest and the road that went through it, listening to Elgar on the big radio he’d put at the edge of his drippy brush’s reach, beside the cooler in which four Beck’s beer bottles glistened. Paint spattered onto the green V-necked hospital shirt he’d swiped, and it flew onto his chin and, he was sure, up into his five o’clock shadow. One more white hair, he thought, and he smiled charitably at the notion of getting old because — he caught himself and warned himself and kept on smiling anyway — he wasn’t taking his whitening whiskers and aging body very seriously at all. I will pay for that, he thought. Janet Baker was singing the Elgar Sea Pictures, and, as her voice soared, he dropped his thought about age and he shouted, in a strong and utterly off-key praying, to accompany the song about horses running on a beach.

Nell drove up his hill in her very old Jeep, with the big front grille that looked like a sneer. He not only heard her above the music and his own noise, but he saw, in the corner of his vision, the plume of dusty roadbed that she trailed, like smoke, below her. He put the brush down and stood, paint-smeared fingers on his hips, to watch her arrive. He watched her all he could. She was wearing dirty jeans and boots with flat heels and a tank-top knitted shirt, and he thought again that she must have more muscles than he, and yet she looked so smooth at the shoulders. He could see the bones below the neck. Baker rose again; she sounded like a cello. Through her, Jay said, “You have the chest of a bird. I can see all of your bones.”

Nell grew red, as she often did, but looked down at her body and then shook her head, as if she disapproved. She shrugged and started walking again, and soon she was there. As usual, they didn’t know what to do. She pulled her hair back and refastened the clip that held it in a clump above her neck. Her hair was very close to black, and very fine, and it was always falling down. “You must be wooing me again, to talk like that.”

He reached to turn the radio off and pulled the cooler to him, across the patch he’d just painted. He handed her a bottle of beer. She nodded and unscrewed the cap and started to drink. He said, “What else? I invited you to marry me, and you declined. I take that very personally.”

“I would hope so,” she said.

“It’s a kind of combat,” he said. “Do you remember this from when you were teen-aged? You’d have a crush on someone and they’d be going with somebody else, or they’d just be too obtuse to notice you, and you’d spend most of your time being cruel to them and teasing them and vilifying them because you wanted them to just react? In almost any way at all? Do you remember that? I do. I think I must have done it a lot. Forgive me.”

She finished the beer too quickly and belched a little. “All right,” she said. “How’s the porch? Oh. Oh, that’s not really good, is it?”

“Paint’s paint.”

“Jay, you’re putting latex over enamel. And you haven’t even scraped the enamel. You got paint all over everything. You’re incompetent. No. It’s worse than that. You don’t care about this.”

He handed her another beer and opened one for himself. The sweat ran down his forehead, and sap beetles whirred slowly in the sun to land on the sticky paint and die there. He heard the tapping of a woodpecker, and a lot of other birds he never bothered to identify: they called, he listened, and that was all he required.

“And,” she said, frowning, looking too serious, “you got paint on your face, and you got it in your hair — Jay! You got paint all over your goddamned hair .”

“Do you love me?”

“No.”

“Really. Do you like me?”

“No.”

“So marry me, then. We’d be the Great American Marriage. Can you tolerate me in small doses?”

“I don’t think so. No.”

“Perfect. We can get the blood tests tomorrow. Or I can do them here, heh heh.”

“Pig. Painting pig. I will not be married to you.”

Then Jay said, “No. I meant it.”

She slowly nodded her head.

“Okay,” he said. “Now tell me what you really think about my paint job.”