Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

Looking at him in the restaurant as he moved strips of salty meat among the lettuce chunks, she’d been able to say only, “How did you live, Gerry? How did you stay alive?”

“By not loving her anymore. I took myself away from her.”

“But how? ”

“I don’t want you ever to know,” he’d told her, letting his fork fall and rubbing at his eyes. She had wanted to reach across the little black shiny table to stroke him. He’d looked to her like a huge boy, like a wounded creature, Gerry, her child. That night, at home, instead of suggesting drinks or mentioning dinner, she had pulled him by the same strong arm she’d held at lunch, and they had gone to bed. But what she had thought would be a consolation turned to desperate, clever sex. It was she who had wept as they turned and plunged like drowners in the sea. Her tears, she later thought, could have seemed to be her comforting.

Gerry drove off to counsel deputies who beat their wives. He gave advice to department families about child abuse, alcohol abuse, and drug abuse. And Louise talked to girls who would not eat, and to parents who refused to give their children money for meals in school, and to boys who drove long cars and came to high school only when the courts compelled them. They watched cheerful black and white films with Jean Arthur or Myrna Loy. They read fat novels about prehistoric cave women or spies who could fight with their hands without breaking them. They paid bills with checks drawn on a joint account, and they sometimes went to Montreal or New York by plane, where they stayed in good hotels and ate too much, walked through exhibitions in museums, met with professional colleagues with whom the predication was that diseases were cured, conditions improved, and frailties strengthened.

During recent nights, in their antique brass bed that squeaked and wailed with age and corrosion, Gerry began to thrash. He’d always snored. He had, from the start, sometimes muttered in his sleep. But the deep snores that echoed in his big chest, which he never dressed in pajamas, but always in a dark blue T-shirt, now became the rumbled warnings of explosions to come. He rasped and boomed, and then went on to cry aloud, in a high, tight voice she at first didn’t recognize as his when it wakened her. They were always warnings—“Do that again!” or “Go try and get in here, you son of a bitch!” And he would swing big looping roundhouse punches while he lay on his back or his side, sometimes hitting the thick brass posts of the bed and waking himself enough to say, “Oh,” or “Sorry,” and sleep again at once, and sometimes sleeping through it all, but always waking Louise. So that she lay in a quickly subsiding panic while he muttered and swore, worked up his dreamy rage, then threw his punch, then woke or didn’t, then slept at once — leaving her to feel his face, to listen to his breathing and then, again, his snores, and to grow furious at him for doing this, whatever it was, to her.

In the morning, feeling sick because sleepless, or at best, even if she’d fallen back asleep, as weary as if she’d been up half the night, she might ask, “Do you remember what you dreamed last night?”

“Did I do it again?”

“Sure did. You were hummin’ and fussin’ and feudin’—you’re a dangerous sleeper.”

“I’m so sorry, Lou. You want to sleep in another room?”

“No.”

And then his quick and unembarrassed smile: “Good.”

They collaborated again when a deputy was reported, anonymously, for being in the back seat of a patrol car on a country road with a high school girl of sixteen. The deputy was charged with statutory rape. The Sheriff’s Department brought seven internal charges against him. Once the rape was dealt with, there would be other charges, and the man was done in New York State law enforcement, although, as his union adviser made clear, he could most likely uphold the law in any of two dozen distant states. The deputy was Joe Penders, the only African-American man in the department. He was short, thin, the brown-red color of cherrywood, with high, sharp checkbones, a small slender nose, and hair going prematurely gray above his ears. In short, Louise told Gerry, Penders was a dish. So, she hastened to add, was Denise Bastone. “If they lynch him,” she joked, not joking, “it’ll be because most of the boys in school, and more than half of their fathers, were making plans to be more or less where Joe Penders apparently was, several times a week for three weeks. She has this very short, glossy black hair, and a kind of an expression — imagine a gorgeous nun without makeup, an Italian natural beauty, all right? Put too much makeup on her, so it’s just short of cheap: the I’m-in-trouble signal, you know? And then have that sweet, sweet face almost ready to drop into a pout that tells you to go to hell. Okay. That’s Denise, and she’s wearing a skintight, crotch-high acid-washed denim skirt, rose-colored tights, and a sweater that’s illegal in Utah. I asked her if she loved him.”

“He said he thought so,” Gerry said. “It’s pretty clear he’s desperate to marry her in the next fifteen minutes.”

“Naturally,” Louise said. “Of course. Which is why Denise’s answer to the question consisted of lighting a cigarette, tossing the lit match behind her onto the floor, and telling me, ‘He’s a really sweet guy, don’t get me wrong. What he mostly is, though,’ she says, ‘is a real wild piece of ass.’ She looks me straight in the eye, and she smiles this angel’s smile. Cue the celestial music. She says, ‘You know what I mean.’ She says, ‘I can’t figure out, like, why I can’t go get some if I want to. You know what I mean,’ she says.”

“And you do,” Gerry said.

“She’s a baby! You’re not supposed to make love to anybody when you’re sixteen. Much less a sheriff’s deputy in the back of a public law enforcement vehicle.”

“Except most of the girls today who’re sixteen do just that. The only aberration here is the kind of car, Lou.”

“Gerry,” she said. It sounded to her like whining. She watched him rub his eyes.

“But I’m right,” he said. “And what about what she said? Isn’t that a kind of feminist thing, too? Guys shouldn’t be the only ones who can go after good stuff when they see it? Women have the right to it, too? Our bodies, ourselves, and so on?”

“And so on,” Louise said, suddenly more depressed than angry, and curious now, puzzled, feeling as though she’d heard a song that she’d known but had forgotten.

They were making a salad at the kitchen window in the back of their house that night. It was near the riverbank, and they were looking outside more than at the scallions and carrots and green pepper and radishes, and more than at one another.

“I’ll make a vinaigrette,” Gerry said.

“Does she turn you on, Gerry?”

“The kid? Denise? I never met her, Lou.”

“You know. The idea of all that hot teenager panting all over you.”

“Well, she was panting all over Deputy Penders, not me.”

“Imagining that she might be. Could be. What if she were?”

“Right on, Denise,” he said, raising a fist betokening power to the people. “Right on. It is a revolution, Louise.”

“You want to go out, in the garage, and get into the back seat?”

His face was so eager, so unguardedly excited in a new way when he turned to her, that she fell to studying the tender white scallops of the seed-choked green pepper she’d cut open. “Well, you’re kidding, of course,” he told her. “We’re adults.”

She said, “Of course.”

As boys outside her office aimed their bodies toward accidental collisions with girls, as the noise in the corridors rose to the pitch of mass panic, Louise sat in her small room and turned her overheated metal desk lamp toward the old Modern Library edition of The Interpretation of Dreams that she had purchased at a garage sale in Rochester. She was comforted by the worn cloth of its red-brown binding: it was like an old dog’s back, or a father’s sport coat, a teacher’s car — worn, even shabby, but an emblem of what was veteran, reliable, sage. Inside, on its bright white pages — she had to squint as she read — even the chapter headings reassured her: “The Dream as Wish-Fulfillment,” “The Dream-Work,” “The Material and Sources of Dreams.” But when she read the familiar sections ( “Dr. M is pale; his chin is shaven, and he limps” ), she grew frustrated with the need to break the code — as if the dreamer and his mind were distant fellow spies, fearful of capture, unwilling to risk their location, needing nevertheless to broadcast their fears. But there was nothing on these pages about the lashing out, the violent reach, the heavy blow. There were only the undercover agents, incapable of silence, signaling in cipher.