Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Hilary.”

“Sorry. Sorry.”

“A number of other performers also dislike playing to a live audience. Glenn Gould, I remind you, for the one-millionth time, stopped playing concerts altogether. He was not, I think you’ll agree, a shabby tickler of the ivories.”

“Can you see how little I’m cheered by that? I’m sorry Gould is dead. I wish he’d been comfortable at concerts. But he made recordings, Richard. He made wonderful recordings.”

“And you will too. It’ll happen.” He made his voice sound matter-of-fact, sincerely casual, casually sincere. But he knew how impatient he must sound to her.

He had intended to leap from the shower, dangle his body before her, and roll her into bed — and pray for performance this third time tonight. But when he came out, tail wagging and his smile between his teeth like a fetched stick, she was gone, his stomach was fluttering with premonitions, and he was very, very tired. He decided to settle for a glass of beer and some sleep. Hilary was in the kitchen when, wearing his towel, he walked in. She was peeling plastic wrap from a sandwich, and she had already poured him a beer. “You always want beer after a day like this. At least I can make the meals.”

Richard drank some beer and said, “Thank you. You’re very kind, though sullen and self-pitying.”

“But I make a fine Genoa salami sandwich. And I look nice in shorts.”

She was crying at the sink, turning the instant boiling-water tap on and off, on and off. The mascara ran black down her face. She looked like a clown. He realized that she’d made herself up for him — when? midnight? afterward? — and had worn the face she had made for him to see. He visualized himself, proud as a strapping big boy, stepping from the shower to greet her.

He finished chewing salami and dark bread. He said, “I hate to see you so damned unhappy.”

She turned the boiling water on and off, and steam fogged the kitchen window. “So you make me cry to express your dismay with my sorrow?”

“Actually, I wasn’t aware that I was making you cry.”

“You’re such a slob, Richard.”

“But well-spoken, and attractive in a towel.”

“You aren’t unattractive,” she said. “But you’re so tired, you could never make love. Could you?”

Richard sighed with fear and satisfaction as he drank his beer. “We can do some middle-class perversions if you like. Many were developed for the tired husband after work, I understand. We can—” He had by now stood and moved to her, was moving against her as they leaned at the sink. “We can do a number of exotic tricks they practice in the movies that the D.A. confiscates.”

Hilary’s eyes were closed. She was unfastening his towel. Her upper lip was clamped over the lower one; and he watched it when it moved. “Movie perversions?” she said. “Where would you pick up movie perversions?”

“You know those evidentiary sessions I sometimes hold? We all sit around and watch dirty flicks.”

“She said, “Pig.”

His skin had been cool and hers hot. His body, had it been a creature with a mouth, no more, would have sung. But it was very tired, and it was crowded with his mind. He thought, now, here, in his hospital room, not about— damn it — whoever he had been with in a motel room in Westmoreland, New York, before he wrecked his car. He could remember that — the room, the bedspread’s color, the light lavender cotton skirt on the floor, and not her face. He couldn’t see her face .

Richard, in their house, in his memory now, had taken off his wife’s clothing and had wooed her away from what was sorrowful and true. He’d loved her in their kitchen to the exclusion of everything, for a very little while. And now, in the hospital room, he couldn’t see or say the name of the woman he had loved more than Hilary and whom he had washed from his body to preserve her to himself. Naked of clothes and towel and her, they had lain in a nest of Hilary’s underwear and blouse and dark Bermuda shorts — skins so easily shed. And Hilary had been watching him. He’d seen her eyes rimmed with black and filling with darkness. She had figured him out, he knew. He had wondered when she would tell him. In his hospital room, he remembered hoping that she would find a way to make it hurt.

III

IT TOOK Lloyd and Pris nearly a month to arm themselves and gather their courage and rage. Then they came, through the main doors of the county office building, and past the glass information booth—“Can I help you?” the woman in beige had said to the profiles of their passing shotguns — and down one flight to the basement offices. They thought the dogs would be in the basement, Lloyd later said. “I couldn’t figure on anybody keeping animals upstairs where the fancy offices was bound to be.” They took eleven people hostage, including a woman who cried so long and loudly that Lloyd—“She sounded like one of the goddamned dogs ”—hit her with the pump-gun barrel. She breathed quietly and shallowly for the rest of their visit and was hospitalized for a week. The police at first remained outside and were content to bellow over battery-powered hailers. “ I couldn’t understand ’em,” Lloyd said. “It sounded like some goddamned cheerleaders on a Friday night over to the high school game. Except Pris and me wouldn’t play ball.”

They passed out a note that said, “26 PRIVAT STOCK CRETURS PLUS FREEDOME OF CHOICE PLUS $10,000.” The money was for Pris’s sex-change operation, Lloyd said in his deposition. They wanted to be legally married and live as man and wife. Pris was tired of costumes and wanted outfits . The police got bored and flushed them out with tear gas, then beat them badly before the arraignment. Lloyd later said, “I don’t think the operation would of made that much difference, to tell you the truth. Pris, he didn’t — she — whatever the hell he is. It. I don’t think he loved me the way you want somebody to love you.” Lloyd was starving himself in the county jail. Pris was defended from rape by a captured counterfeiter out of Fairfax, Virginia, and their affair was two weeks old and going strong.

And Hilary had not come back. Manwarren had paid for a television set while Snuyder had slept the sleep of the sedated, and Snuyder now lay looking at the dimpled ceiling panels, clenching his fists against the pain, and listening without wishing to. Game-show hosts with voices as sweet and insistent as the taste of grape soda cried out with delight and mortification as army sergeants and homemakers and stockbrokers selected numbers and boxes and squares marked off on walls and were awarded either bounty or a consolation prize consisting of a lifetime supply of scuff-resistant, polymer-bound linoleum clean-’n’-polisher for the busy woman who has more to do than wax, for sweet goodness’ sake, her floors. Manwarren also watched soap operas that had to do with misplaced babies and frantic adulterers, always on the verge of discovery as incestuous. There were snippets of old movie, fragments of cartoon, crashingly educational disquisitions on the use of C—“C, you see , is also in ka -ristmas ta ree! ”—and Gilligan, eternally trapped on his island with Tina Louise and constitutionally incapable of hurling himself upon her, continued to invent ways of extending his imprisonment.

Manwarren, a real critic, commented with alert smugness and an eye for the obvious. “You believe she couldn’t remember who invented noodles ?” he sang. He crowed, “Numbers are from the friggin’ Arabs, dummy! No wonder he’s a garbageman.” Snuyder kept waiting to hear the suck-and-pour of passing traffic on the arterial highway leading into downtown Utica, but all he heard was Manwarren and the objects of his derision. “Hey,” he said, “hey, Judge. You handle yourself like this ‘Family Court’ guy? He takes no crap offa nobody, you know? He’s got a courtroom fulla morons, by the way. No wonder they ended up in court. They wouldn’t know how to cross the street .” A “M*A*S*H” rerun drove Manwarren into silent sniffles, but he covered well by saying, in a gravelly voice, “I don’t think that’s a very realistic way to talk about the Korean conflict.” Of “Robin Hood,” he said, for the first time approving in tone, “I never knew Glynis Johns had knockers like that, Judge.”