Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

And she did smile, then, so they sat down on the hill below the house, their faces in the sun, and they shared the last bottle of beer while Nell complained, as usual, about the bookstore she ran in Spruce Plains — that she wasn’t bankrupt yet was the best she could report — and Jay described a child in the emergency room, body covered from waist to neck with a deep gouging rash that itched and hurt simultaneously, and that his family physician couldn’t cure. He had remembered the article on gypsy moth larvae as the child’s mother was describing how calamine didn’t stop the discomfort. He’d swabbed the crusted lotion away and rubbed on a topical cortisone cream, explaining that the larvae of gypsy moths produce histamines, and they had set up an allergic reaction in the child, who had run shirtless through chest-high grass where the moths had laid their eggs.

“Pretty nice, huh?”

“You’re a good detective,” she said. “I like the way you look for clues. I like the way you enjoy it when you find them.”

“Me too. It’s the best thing I do. It’s the only fun, really, except when little kids hug me and get better.”

“You should have children,” she said.

“And you have one I could use. You want to do a deal with me? Nell, are you listening?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Okay. I have no idea what else I should say.”

She stood and she jumped on him and bore him down. She lay on top of him and kissed him crookedly, half on the mouth and half beneath his nose. Then she pushed off him and left him slanted on his hillside, and she backed her Jeep and drove down the road. He lay there a while and looked up into the light, then he rolled over onto his hands and knees, got up, and walked back up to his porch, where he dipped his brush into the wrong kind of paint and continued to apply it to the unprepared surfaces. He turned the radio on, and the Fountains of Rome played. He smacked the radio hard, and it slid into wet paint. “Baby music,” he said. He took a deep breath and then he apologized to Respighi. I don’t need a baby, he told himself. I have one. He paints my porch. He paints my radio. What I have to find, really, he said to himself, putting the brush into a jar of turpentine that he needed, he realized, for enamel paint, but not for the latex he’d been using, and then pressing down the paint can’s cover to save the wrong paint for the rest of the job, what I have to locate around here is somebody who could pass for an adult.

He tried his brother, Jonas, who was inside Jay’s house, sitting in the livingroom and reading at old copies of Science and Esquire , sitting in an armless rocker that Jay had stripped but never refinished. Jonas sat as if he were in a waiting room in a country doctor’s house. Jonas wore the trousers to the suit he’d arrived in — it was a blue-and-white Brooks crisp seersucker — and the same black polished penny loafers he had worn last night, and the same wrinkled blue oxford cloth shirt that he now wore rolled to just above the elbows. He was smoking a small cigar with a filter on it, and the air around him was the color of steel. He seemed to derive no pleasure from smoking, but he worked away at it, squinting against the smoke, blowing out as if it all were distasteful to him, but necessary. Maybe it was, Jay thought. Jonas had come in a long, wide Lincoln that matched the light blue of his suit. He had come before Jay was back from his evening with Nell, and he’d been sitting, although the door was unlocked, on the unscraped and as yet unpainted front porch. Buckets and brushes were waiting to be used there, and so was the radio, and Jonas had been sitting against one of the pillars, legs crossed before him, smoke around his face like bugs, listening to jazz on some disc jockey’s dawn patrol. They had said hello while Peggy Lee sang her instructions that some poor sucker had better go out and get her some money like the other men do.

Inside, though Jay had wanted to sleep, or at least not talk, they had sat up late together. They had drunk beer and had sat in the old shabby kitchen, with its damp sticky surfaces, and ants behind the long rusted sink, and mildew on the wallpaper, gashes in the linoleum — Jay liked to say that he was taking his time in bringing the house up to snuff: he had lived there for seven years — and they’d discussed how Jonas had just run away from home.

Jay asked, “Did you leave them a note or something? So they’d know you weren’t dead?”

Jonas shook his head.

Jay said, “No? You didn’t?”

Jonas said, “No. I didn’t. Okay?”

“Did you want to talk to me or what? Because I could go upstairs and we could sit around and not say anything tomorrow, if you’re busy tonight.”

Jonas waved his hand at Jay’s temper, then he looked at him. This was something Jay thought lawyers did with juries — the red, wounded little-boy’s eyes, peering into you. Jonas rarely pleaded trials, however, and Jay knew that. Jonas did good research and wrote fine contracts and argued before law referees, but he didn’t go to trial a lot. And, anyway, his eyes this time looked enormous and brown and liquid.

Jay said, “Is it really busted, you think? The marriage?”

Jonas shrugged. “Yeah, I think, probably.”

“And the kids?”

“They get hurt. You have a war, people get hurt.”

“Your kids, I mean.”

“Who do you think I was talking about, Jay? You think I’m doing some kind of routine here?”

“Ladies and gentlemen: take my wife. Please.”

“Fuck you, Jay. Okay? Hey. I left one of my kids crying and the other one’s not talking to any one no more. Any more. Joanne thinks every person who’s a grownup, he’s a, like a traitor. I’m talking like the neighborhood again, you hear me? I’m falling apart here, Jay. I’m already treating my kids like casualties. You do that and they’re your kids once removed. The thing is, you end up, you have to do that. Otherwise, the pain kills you. Your heart stops from it. So you do — you turn your heart down, like a radio. Then it don’t hurt so much. Doesn’t. Will you listen to me? I do some divorces, you know, just for favors. Everybody’s splitting up, and some of them are friends of mine. So I handle it. Every fuckin’ time, you see some kid get broken, like little rocks that a truck rolls over. It’s all the same parts of the kids, but it’s powder. Go put that together again, right? It don’t work. That’s Joanne. Whatever happens, I’m afraid she’s finished. She won’t trust people. And—”

The big eyes ran. Jay knew that Jonas was about to speak of Joe, his son. Jay looked down at the palimpsest of white rings on his old oak dining table. He made a big brother’s decision and stood to walk to the wall phone and call Manhattan to say that Jonas was here and all right.

“No,” Jonas said.

“You can’t just drop out of sight, you know. You have one or two responsibilities, right?”

“Oh. Excuse me. I didn’t think of that, Jay. I didn’t know that, about my responsibilities. I was thinking, this marriage didn’t work, you could take me down to some fuckin’ farm around here or something and pick me out a new one. I could marry a cow or a fuckin’ pig next time. Thank you for the memo.”

“Pick out a room with a bed,” Jay had said on Sunday night, leaving his beer bottle half-empty on the table and going up. “Don’t cut your wrists except in the bathroom, okay? I’ve got rounds and then I’ll come home and we can talk or something. Or yell. Whatever you want. Also, fuck you too. I don’t think your suffering ennobles you.”

“Well, that’s not why I’m doin’ it, schmuck.”

“Putz.”

“Fuckin’ asshole.”

“Prick. Goodnight.”