Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Hil, I can’t remember a lot. I remember us , overall, you know. And a lot of times and things. But I can’t remember a lot.”

“And that includes the slut in the car? That’s what kills me. It’s so sad for you that you can’t. I feel sorry for you. You son of a bitch.”

“Hil, she’s literally a slut?”

“Oh. You boy. You infant. You expect me to keep track of your infidelities and log your bedroom transactions, don’t you. You’d ask me for help. You know, knowing me, I’d probably give it. You— boy .” She wept mascara lines down her face.

Snuyder said, “I’m promiscuous? I thought I remembered that I really loved her.” Their silence widened, and a woman on the television set said, “I wouldn’t dare tell them that!”

Hilary sighed. She said, “I think I’ll go home. I understand they’ll bring you back for therapy, and you’ll use a walker. You’ll be able to walk someday. I feel sorry it’s so bad. Also, Richard, I’m moving. During the latter part of the week. I’ll telephone you.”

“Where?” he said. “Did we decide to do this?”

Hilary shook her head. “It started when you told me you were moving out.”

“Yes,” he said. He remembered at once, and as if he looked through transparent overlays: long arguments, slower and longer conversations, Hilary on the phone, Hilary weeping black lines while holding a teacup to her mouth, himself standing before her and wishing aloud that he were dead. He remembered the words about remorse that he had tried to say, and the fear of how they’d tell their sons. Hilary had told him about Warren, calling from college, in tears, because he had sensed that it all had gone wrong. Snuyder said, “I’m sorry. I don’t remember women. A woman. The woman, I guess you’d call her.”

“Yes,” Hilary said.

“I apologize. If it’s because of her, I apologize. I don’t suppose it would make any difference now, seeing that I don’t know her anymore. Is she the—”

But Hilary was up and moving. She was at the door. He heard the squelch of her crepe soles on the linoleum floor.

He said, “I suppose not.”

She said, “See you, Judge.” Then, too brightly, she said, “Actually, I’ll see you in court.” She laughed too hard, and she left.

Manwarren called over at once. “You know what, Dick? I think you shoulda hit the pole a little harder, you don’t mind my saying so. You’re in a pickle, to say the least, big fella.”

“You think I’m in a pickle, Manwarren?”

“Call me Manny.”

“I’m going to make a call, Manny. While you sleep. I’m going to have a man who runs a chain of fish stores in Syracuse — I’m going to ask him to have an employee in the Manlius packing plant come over here while you’re sleeping and kill you. He’s going to open your chest with his bare hands, and he’s going to tear out every vital organ in your body one at a time. And he won’t wear gloves. His nails will be dirty. He picks his nose. Do you understand me, Manny?”

The sound increased in volume, and bright voices clung to the ceiling tiles. She had been in the car with him. She had screamed when they’d hit. Hilary was leaving because of her, and he didn’t know who the woman was. The set cried out and the voices rose. He was alleged to have attempted suicide. He would never walk normally, and his sons would not come to him. He knew that too. Hilary would take all their money and the men on the ethics committee might remove him from the bench. He thought they wouldn’t, since none of them was terribly honest either, and each was equally impeachable. They would probably reprimand him, and he would suffer a trial-by-headline. But he would return to the bench, he thought. He would live alone in an apartment such as the ones near the Sangertown Mall. Or perhaps he might move into Clinton, where the old large houses east of town were divided into Victorian cells for bachelors and men such as he. He would drive alone to work and sit in his courtroom. He would say who was right in the eyes of the law. He never would know who the woman had been, or what they had been together, or why.

It was an empty mourning, he thought — abstracted, like a statement about how dreadful the starving African babies are. He wondered if the woman he loved and didn’t know might have told him she was leaving. Perhaps he had aimed at killing her .

He heard himself whimpering, and made himself stop. He heard Manwarren’s television set, and then the dogs in the trailer who’d whimpered, he’d been told by the deputies, before they heard the foot on the door; once rescued, they’d begun to bark and wail. He thought of Lloyd and Pris, armed and marching, in their terrible fetor and loss, to recover their starved, sick dogs. They were separated now. Poor Lloyd: he had taken the hostages, and only when his prisoners lay on the floor in the deeds-recording office had he realized that he wanted to insist on one more prize, the operation that would change Pris’s sex. It was then, Snuyder remembered realizing, as he’d read Lloyd’s deposition, that Lloyd had understood how permanently separate he had always been from Pris and probably always would be. “He don’t love me,” Lloyd had said. “How could he?”

It was a case he had wanted to try. They were accused of a dozen public-health violations and twenty or more violations of the civil and criminal codes. And they were so innocent, Snuyder thought. No one should be allowed to be so innocent. Shots rang out on a TV show, and wheels screamed. Snuyder jumped, remembering the sound of locked brakes. She had been there with him, in the same small space. And he had leaned back, locked his elbows and knees, and had driven at the pole. He had. And he would not know her. And even that was not the worst part.

SHE MIGHT RETURN. He would have to decide about trying to heal, or waiting for her next door to death. He forced himself to breathe evenly, as if he slept. The TV set made sounds. The dogs stood on the bed and chairs, they cried their pain and hunger, their fear. Manwarren cackled. The police would come soon with questions. He was held together with pins. He was going to die, but of natural causes, and many years from today. He knew it. He smelled the dark air of the trailer, and he heard the gaunt dogs whine.

WHEN THE State Department officer telephoned to ask if I was the Dr. Leland Dugan whose wife, Belinda, was traveling as a journalist in Europe and the Middle East, I answered in a manner even I, at the time, found cagey and evasive. “Yes,” I said. “I’m Dugan. But she isn’t really a journalist. Of course, she does journalism. But she’s a sociologist. On her tax return she calls herself a teacher.”

One of our recent fights had been about income tax returns. Belinda had wanted to be a married woman filing separately. I’d tried to show her that such a category cost us money. She’d been resolute: “I will not sign on some line tagged spouse . Underneath your name. I won’t be underneath you anymore.”

“So I’ve noticed,” I’d told her.

“In the Lebanon,” the State Department officer said. His way of saying it— the Lebanon, as if this were the thirties and we were in Whitehall discussing Middle East chappies — made me pay attention. I am paid to pay attention to the stories people tell. I should have done better, but it had been a difficult morning, and one of my patients, seeking to test and protest at once, had sat before my desk for twenty minutes without speaking, daring me to intervene. I hadn’t, and for the thirty subsequent minutes, he’d bellowed and ranted, sweating and heaving and, finally, leaping from his chair. “I don’t feel better,” he’d said, like a huge, sore child. “I don’t feel better at all. So now what am I supposed to do?”