Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I didn’t, because I hadn’t. She’d gone too, and I had heard she lived with the manager of a big sporting goods store. He drove a car that was famous among the younger chemists and junior executives at the firm because it was as tastelessly painted as any car they’d seen. Cheryl was almost stocky, but not fat, and she loved clothes too tight for her powerful thighs and thick waist. Her hair was bright blond, and she’d look you in the eye and talk to you hard, but rarely mean. She had made me feel optimistic. She had left because the feeling was a lie. “I just hate sitting around being pale,” she said, “you know?”

I said to Duane in the car as the first flakes fell on the windshield, “No. You stay. You fight it.”

“Fight what?”

“Whatever’s getting at you. Was practice bad?”

“The two minutes I scrimmaged weren’t bad.”

“Are you convincing him you lost it, or did he think so in the first place?”

“I didn’t lose it.”

“You can play basketball?”

He nodded his head.

“So go play basketball. You don’t quit.”

“How can I play basketball on the bench?”

“Sit up extra straight.”

I insisted that we eat together that night, and I forced him to help me cook. He carefully planted his elbows on the table and let his mouth grow slack. I heard his food grow pulpy in his teeth. I refused to react. In Brooklyn, we had called it a game face: the stony eyes and unexpressive mouth with which you showed your opponent on the court that you knew no fear, could run forever without panting, and hadn’t worried about anything for over a year. Duane wore his, and I wore mine. We choked down our overcooked hamburgers in silence, and I washed the same six dishes over slowly, until he went up to his homework.

It was, for an instant that night, as if Jackie were away but in reach. I wanted to call her and ask what she would do if she lived with a troubled son as so many mothers do. I wanted to ask her what we, as parents, really thought. I’d often not known until she’d told me. Cheryl always had an opinion, and Duane had always known it, resented it, fought it, but had always been impressed. When I’d admitted to him, one weekend, that Cheryl and I were apart, he’d said, “Now you’ll have to figure out my curfew on your own.”

I went upstairs now to his room and I knocked. He mumbled something, and I opened his door into the hot, heavy air of caged adolescent. U-2 sang songs of social concern he played loudly, and a lifetime of underwear and long-legged jeans lay on the rug. I thought of photographs of airplane crash sites. He was on his bed, looking at a textbook page covered with diagrams. Then, as if he were timing himself, he slowly turned his head and raised his brows.

I didn’t throw his jeans at him or shriek about attitudes or the impossibility of studying with such music on. I spoke softly, and he turned the tape player down and asked me to repeat myself. I did. “I said I wanted to apologize for that crack about sitting up straight. You can’t play ball while you’re on the bench and it feels lousy. I’m sorry you’re not playing a lot. I think you’re tensing up, psyching yourself out. I think it’s your mother, maybe me. You can play yourself out of that, I think. You can get your form back. You want me to talk to your coach?”

“No.”

“Because I will, Duane. I’ll do—”

“No, thanks.”

“—anything I can.”

“No thanks.”

I stood there and I nodded my head a lot. I said, “Well,” and nodded again. He had gone back to looking at the page. His hand reached out for the volume control and I did not speak of it. I backed up, and the door swung shut, as if his thoughts had gently closed it with a slow motion, a single click.

Downstairs, I did what I always do when I have a problem to solve: I forced it into words. On a legal pad I took from my briefcase, I wrote his name at the top in capitals: DUANE. Then, beneath it, along the left-hand margin ruled in two red vertical lines, I wrote, in my finest, firmest hand:

DRUGS?

ILLNESS?

JACKIE?

CHERYL?

ME?

TEAMMATES?

BEING 15?

SEX?

COACHING?

CLASSMATES?

LIFE.

I balled the list and I fed it to the wood stove. And so much for words.

Cheryl had said, “You’re my first boyfriend who always wears a suit to work. Some guys wear sports jackets, you know, some kind of tweed or corduroy. But they can decide to wear a crewneck, or a sleeveless pullover. But you wear a whole suit, every day. I’m gonna be measuring people’s wardrobes against you from now on.”

A year before, we’d been lying in bed, wearing my pajamas. Jackie had given them to me — navy blue with red piping, shipped upstate by Brooks Brothers. Duane had gone for the weekend to a friend’s house, probably to watch R-rated movies on the VCR. And Cheryl and I were drinking the wine she had brought and were talking about her favorite topic: Cheryl’s future. “I’m just gathering myself,” she loved to say. On the little TV screen in the bedroom, a late Friday night basketball game from L.A. was showing, and the slow motion replay of James Worthy exploding into a killer jam for two points plus the foul shot prompted Cheryl to point a stubby white finger at the black man panthering the ball. “I’m like him,” she’d said. “I’m gathering myself for something like that. One of these days, brother, wham !” I all but tore my pajama coat off her after that. And we were together for a strong, friendly several months.

“I can’t be anybody’s medicine,” Cheryl had finally said.

“Maybe you’re mine, though,” I’d told her.

“Then maybe I don’t want to be. I don’t like sickness.”

So I couldn’t call Jackie, and I couldn’t call Cheryl, and what I’d called to Duane hadn’t worked. It left me with myself, one-on-one.

I quit work at midday, canceling a lunch date and a conference about the new German contraceptive foam we were marketing. I asked my assistant to deliver the Christmas issue of our magazine to the printer, and I went shopping. Past ski costumes and NFL shirts, in the back, near cardiac fitness machines and free-weight rigs, I found the backboard, basket, and pole I was looking for.

Cheryl was there. I had known she would be. I told her, “I didn’t come in here to pester you, Cheryl.”

She shook her head and her long hair swung. “I know that. You see? You’re putting yourself down. Still.”

“I don’t mean to.”

“I guess you don’t. But you do it. You’re so fuckin sad , dammit. Now you, suppose you tell me what you want and I’ll see if I can sell it to you and let’s us not have this discussion ever again in our lives. All right?”

“A backboard and hoop to go on a metal pole,” I said.

She pointed. “This one you were looking at already. You losing weight?”

“Nope.”

“My sweet ass you’re not. Are you sick? Are you in love?”

She was wearing a black turtleneck, black shorts over black tights, low, soft white boots. I didn’t want to look like a man looking over a woman. So I studied the metal frame of the outdoor backboard, and I said, “No. No more love these days, Cheryl.”

“You old bore. This one’s got fiberglass on one side, metal on the other. It goes on this two-piece pole, which is the full ten feet, Duane’ll love it for Christmas, and he deserves it, so you buy it for him. Is your life all right?”

“I hear that yours is.”

“Oh, Dave? We’re doing some kind of collision trip. He thinks we’re heading for marriage, and I know we aren’t, and he’s gonna bang smack into what’s what, and what’s not, and then we’ll be through.”