Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“That’s bad for you, baby,” I said.

She nodded.

“I could give you statistics about strokes. We could talk about cancer. I hope to God she didn’t put you on the pill.”

She stood. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Linda Dugan. I don’t think my father will be doing a Pap smear right now. If there is any personal information you don’t know about me yet, he’ll be happy to fill you in.”

Pontrier whinnied. So did I. So did I . “How are you?” I asked her.

“Linda’s fifteen,” I said to Pontrier, as if something were explained. I seized her before she could flee. She let me hold her into me, and she hugged back. With her hot cigarette behind my neck, I thought of Joan Crawford. Linda had always reminded me of her; she had my broken-looking nose and the wide mouth that on Belinda was often cruel, but that on Linda was mean and sexy at once. She was smart, tough, and damaged by life with me and Belinda. And because she was fifteen, she lived secretly. I always missed her. It was as though she too had fled to another country. She smelled a little sour, like the sweat you sweat in nightmare-heated sleep. Into her cheek and stale hair I whispered, “Baby.”

She gave in and leaned on me for an instant. Her arms tightened and then let go. She stepped back and put the cigarette in her lips. “I’ll go sit with Kate and Lissa.” She said to Pontrier, “Are you going to leave a copy of that videotape with us?”

“Could do,” he said, nodding. “Could do.”

She laughed. “Could do,” she said. Over her shoulder she let “Bye, Daddy” drift with her smoke.

“A little theatrical,” I told him, betraying her.

“Time of great strain,” he said. “Lot of stress. Pretty girl.”

“Yes.”

“Little like her mother. Little like you.”

“Then that worked out for us.” I took the cassette from him and slid it into the VCR. When the set was on, I punched PLAY.

Apparently the camera was mounted on a tripod. It remained still throughout. People walked on- and off-camera, but Belinda stayed where she was: seated in a wooden chair with a copy of the International Herald Tribune on her lap. She held the paper up, and I could see the date. Then she put the paper on her lap, and sat, with her arms hanging down. I thought of Lissa’s arms as she’d entered the kitchen. Belinda wore running shoes and gray, baggy, rumpled cotton pants, a dark and dirty-looking T-shirt. Her hair was chopped short, and it looked grayer. She’d lost weight, she looked exhausted. The cords in her neck were prominent when she moved or talked. Horizontal ridges on her throat were new to me. Her arms were a little puffy, and very tan. She didn’t seem drugged, but she was subdued.

A small, dark man in a kind of faded khaki uniform, wearing very large and very dark sunglasses, came to stand beside her. He put his little hand on the back of her neck and squeezed. But he didn’t seem to be hurting her. She straightened.

“My name is Belinda Hosford Dugan,” she said. “I am an American citizen who has been interrupting—” She peered at something near the camera, and I realized that she was reading. She wore contact lenses, and I should have known from her squint that she was reading signs.

“Cue cards,” I said.

“Just like Johnny Carson,” Pontrier said.

“Interfering in the orderly process of the life of the people. As a lesson to such as myself, I have been seized and am a prisoner. I am safe and well. I am not being mistreated. It’s true,” she said and I knew she’d deviated from the lines they’d written. No one stopped her, though. “I’m all right. Please tell my girls — tell Lissa and Linda—” She began to cry. She stopped herself. “Hello. Darlings, hello. I’m all right. I can’t come home yet. And this thing, really—” Then there was static, then silence, then the small man in dark glasses said, “Enough. For now, enough.”

She hadn’t spoken of me. She hadn’t sent a message to me. For several months we’d hardly spoken, except when we traded information about the house or children. Even then, our exchanges could have been by postcard. “For now, enough.” I thought of Lissa and Linda, seeing her, hearing her say, “It’s true,” and then the little man.

“I’m too young to be as old as you make me,” she’d said one morning. She was leaving for work, and I was going to drive the girls to school. She had come up behind me to put her hand on my shoulder. She’d hissed it, so the girls wouldn’t hear: “You make me so tired.”

And I had leaned my head back to reply, “We know it’s not from sexual exertion.”

And she, almost laughing, had whispered back, “We know it’s not from sex with you .”

That was the morning of the night she chopped her hair short. It was still short, and she looked pretty on the tape — hollow-eyed, exhausted, but still pretty Belinda, my childhood bride. We had taken sixteen years to fail. In the television tape, she showed those years. I wondered if anyone else could see them.

Pontrier turned the VCR off. The TV set roared the hush of static, and I turned it down but not off. I don’t know why. It was like sheltering under something to hear the neutral noise about me. He took the tape from the machine and handed it to me. He gave me a business card, which I didn’t read. I said, “That’s all?”

“You don’t need medical assistance, on account of you give it. And you got that tall doctor there. You understand the situation pretty good, and you can call me. You will. They always do. Eight, ten times a week, some of them. A day , even. Doesn’t help. Doesn’t hurt anything. Built the time right into my schedule. Families , I call it. Write it on my calendar for the week. Liaison. You can’t liaise without talking to ’em. Call if you want to. Any news, you’ll hear. From us. Me. Right away. Promise. Do think they’re gonna turn her loose. Woman. You know.” He sounded like a machine winding down.

“You have a long drive back.” I said.

“Traveling’s part of it. See the country. Rather see some other part of it, no insult intended.”

“It’s an acquired taste.”

“Like okra,” he said. Whinny, gum and tooth. He took his glasses off.

He went into the kitchen and soon he was back with his case and his coat, and soon he was gone from the house. At the narrow window beside the door, I watched the journalists surround him. There were two more trucks now, large white ones with lights and antennas on top. As he stopped to speak, the air and lawn in front of the house leaped into bright intensity as television lights came on. It was like a lightning strike.

In the living room, again, I put the tape on and I bent before the set. There was Belinda, her hair, her eyes, her breasts. A prurient boy, I looked behind me, then reversed the tape and looked again — she wore no brassiere. I could see her nipples at the soft fabric of her shirt. Belinda on TV, without a bra, I told myself. I rewound and looked again: my wife on reruns, available as starkly as this, and to strangers.

I looked again, and then once more. I was her audience, now. I turned off the set and the VCR and went toward the stairs to fetch Kate and Melissa and Linda. They were descending as I reached the staircase. Linda walked past me, heading for the living room. Kate, holding Melissa’s hand, stood where she was.

Then a roar came from the living room, the static of the VCR. The tape began to play, and the hush gave way to Belinda, speaking. The stranger on TV was talking to us, and her daughter Linda sat on the sofa before her, smoking, clicking the switch to REVIEW and then PLAY. She sought the instant when her mother stopped reading her script. We stood at the stairs and we watched her watch her mother, over and over, lost and found, the hush and then Belinda’s voice, Belinda’s breasts, Belinda’s hair, and Linda sighing out smoke and making her mother say to her, “It’s true,” “It’s true,” “It’s true.”