Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Then they stood, sweating slightly, but cooled by the evening wind that came up, sipping small to make the drinks last, and looking at the orange sunset that told of tomorrow’s humidity. A blue jay landed very close to them and bounced twice, then flew away, nagging. “This is pretty,” Jonas said.

Jay nodded.

“You still like it? Out here?”

Jay nodded again.

“You got girlfriends or something? Shit. It’s probably nice, being a bachelor. I don’t want it, though. That part scares me, having to date girls. Date. What a terrible word. You stamp them November twenty-ninth or something. But I’m the one who wants to be free. You understand the contradictions here, Jay?”

Jay said, “I have a friend, a woman, and when she puts a disciplinary move on me, really rags me and tells me exactly what I should do, I tell her she’s conducting orthopedic conversations — like a brace, or a cast, say. Orthopedic. I don’t intend to be doing that to you, Jonas. So you tell me when I start, all right? If I do, I don’t want to. And not that I ever doubted that you would tell me. But I wanted to ask you something, all right? I wanted to ask you: Do you love Norma? How’s that for a question?”

“It’s always the first one I ask people if they come and ask me to handle a divorce for them. Same question. And what I learned, Jay, is — this’s a good one for you to know. Though you’re not getting any younger, and maybe it’s time for you to make a move, you know? I learned, anyway, that loving the wife or husband is very often about the last problem they have when they’re splitting up. Well, hell, Jay, you did this whole thing. It was so long ago, I almost forgot. You know what I’m talking about. Sure, they say, right? Sure, yeah, I love McSchmuck. Big deal, though. See: I can’t live with him, they say. Right? Or: She eats my soul like a carrot stick, this one guy told me. So how is loving her supposed to help, he asks, and then of course he cries all over my desk. I wanted to tell him it sounded like a very spiritual kind of a blowjob, but I’m a tasteful guy. But it’s amazing how little it counts for, love, when you got a marriage that’s dying, dead, diseased, whatever you want to call it. You remember that from your—”

“Yes. I’m so dumb about that,” Jay said. They strolled now, breathing unevenly because of the terrain, but still, Jay thought, like a couple of old Jewish guys in the neighborhood, walking and discussing issues of international importance and great local impact. They walked at the same pace and they discussed. “I always think that love is the thing,” Jay said. “This is in spite of Elizabeth, who you may remember from my days as cuckold-to-a-culture in Philly, and in spite of other people I’ve known since then, including this friend of mine now, who’s also divorced. You know someone who isn’t? But I keep thinking love , anyway. Everybody is talking strain and need and alienation and the timelessly popular self , and this one, which is Nell’s current favorite: erosion . She says you can get eroded, and down to bedrock, and then you have to move on or you’re washed away.”

“That’s it,” Jonas said. “She knows.”

“Does Norma love you?”

Jonas nodded. He was wet-eyed again. A swallow was near them, raging in clicks behind and in front of them. Bugs flew up, and mosquitoes clung to their arms and faces and necks. Jonas kept trying to light one of his cigars, but the matches blew out. He threw the unsmoked cigar into high grass.

Jay asked, “And is everybody — faithful to everybody?”

Jonas smiled, as if this time Jay were the younger one. “Yeah. So far as I know, neither party has entered into adulterous relationships.”

“You sound like Pop.”

“Who, me?”

“The time they had all the trouble.”

“What trouble?”

“When I was in college, away at school? You don’t remember? They almost split up, Jonas. You remember.”

“Never happened. That has to be your imagination. Never happened, Jay.”

“Jonas, it happened.”

“No way. Not them. That’s a couple . Bullshit, Jay.”

“Bullshit back, Jonas. It’s true.”

They had stopped again, no longer old men outside the synagogue, though, but boys in an argument. Jonas’s voice went higher. “Jay,” he shouted, “you don’t think I woulda known if the old man and Mom nearly got a divorce?”

“Well, you did know once. You cried at night. I heard you when I came for the weekend, to study for exams, I think. I came in and I asked you what was wrong, and after you told me to drop dead, you said it was on account of them.”

“Never.”

“Okay. Never.”

“Jay. Really?”

“No, never, I was lying.”

“Jay, come on. Tell me. Really?”

“No.”

“ Jay .”

“You’re a baby, Jonas, you wiped it off your mind because you didn’t want it there. What the hell. You were young. That’s true, you know? You were young. I was seventeen, maybe eighteen. But I think it happened in my first year of school. I was seventeen. So you were twelve? Almost thirteen? It’s a disgusting age. I realized that earlier today. You were thirteen. And you wiped it out. Amazing. Domestic amnesia, you could call it.”

“Hey, doc tor. You want me to make an appointment so you could tell me about it? All it is, it’s only my parents. If it gets important, you could send me a registered letter, huh?”

“It’s simple. It’s so simple. You know them. They wouldn’t let us hear it or see it. Which is why you probably don’t remember it.”

“ Def initely don’t remember it,” Jonas said. “Am I a liar? Plus amnesia? Look at this, around here. You’re practicing medicine in an office, you carpet it with cowshit. You know why?”

“All it was,” Jay said, “was that Mom flew out to Aunt Anna’s and Pop freaked out when she was late coming home. I mean by a day . He went out to the airport and she never showed up. That night — can you see her making him eat it like that all day? That night, it was in some hot month this happened, I think. That night, she telephones, and I don’t know what she said, but it slams him down into his chair and keeps him there until she’s done talking. I remember we were eating dinner. Horrible gray hamburgers and that peas-and-carrots mix from a can? He turned around to me. He was wearing those thin glasses with gold rims at that time. He turned while you were shoving the food in, and he said, ‘Mother will probably be home tomorrow,’ he said. I remember that. His eyes looked like yours do. Excuse me. They were all wet and they looked like yours. He knew something about her, or about them both, and he didn’t want to. I think that was a lot of whatever he was feeling. He didn’t want to have to deal with the information. Whatever the information was, he hated having to know it. And he must have hated what it meant. So out we go the next day. Kennedy was called Idlewild in those days. He took us there. He made you wear the school assembly clothes, blue pants and white shirt and red tie. He combed your hair so hard, you cried before we left. He was scared. He was white . We’re standing there someplace at the field, and there’s her plane, and people keep getting off it. For him, Pop’s a mess. He’s turning his Palm Beach hat around and around, he’s fingering the summer silk tie from Brooks. He was wearing the brown seersucker with the stripes. Do you remember that?” Jonas shook his head. “It was a suit he wore a lot. Anyway, all of a sudden, there she is. She must have waited until the plane was empty. It was quite an appearance. She stands up there in the door of the airplane like a conquering warrior. Oh, they knew some stuff we didn’t, boy. At that minute, that second, when they looked at each other, I could feel it. They knew stuff. After a while, she comes down the steps like a queen. Pop just stands there, and then he says — I swear this: I never forgot — he says, ‘Neither party has so far precipitated an unmarried state.’ I said ‘What?’ or something. Hell. I still don’t know what that means. But he just shook his head and then he just waited for her. But his voice, and that poor hat rolling and rolling in his hands. Oh, was he scared. Listen, if I didn’t enjoy the show so much, I think I’d have peed in my pants.”