Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

That night, after dinner, in the broad low living room where they read, Louise pumped in coffee. She doctored it with milk and sugar, and she drank so much of it that by ten-fifteen, she felt sick. Gerry fell asleep on the sofa, and he snored at the newspaper over his face. She woke him to send him to bed, and he groggily obeyed. At ten-thirty, gagging as she poured the rest of the coffee into the sink, Louise turned the light out and she got into bed. The sheets were cold, the comforter warm, the pillows soft, but nothing felt good; her flannel nightgown rasped at her nipples, and the back of her neck was stiff, sore. Gerry was softly burring as he lay on his back, but the snores had not fully begun. She lay with her back to him, reading by the low yellow light of her bedside lamp: Rolling Stone to keep her in step with her student-clients, and then Vogue for real pornography. She realized, after a while, that her shoulders ached from the tension with which she held them up, behind her, like a shield against his bad dreams. She realized, too, that she was looking away from him because the realest privacy lay behind his eyelids as he slept, and she was reluctant to betray him. Of course, behind closed lids in sleep, she thought, is where you get so much betrayal done . Where was Gerry now? With whom?

She smelled the heat of the bulb against its frail shade, and also the printer’s ink on her magazine, the morning’s perfume in the air around her bureau across the room, the day’s labor ripening on his body and on hers, the coldness of the air from the river-bottom land around them, and the warm rich breath he breathed at her back as he shifted positions. The bed squeaked, the pages rattled and, as they did, reflections went bouncing from the photos in Vogue —women who had to work to look like Denise; boys who were trained to shape a mouth like the boy or man or creature in between whom she insisted on forgetting and often did — and as reflected light shimmered on the brass pole near her head, she thought, I am a woman inside of a life. This room is dark water, and the lights are submarine, and I am floating in my whole, entire life. She thought, No, but before she could marshal her argument, or mourn it, Gerry began to snore as if a motor in his chest were pumping. He’s the aerator in the tank, she thought; she waited to hear herself giggle; she didn’t.

She dropped her magazine from the side of the bed and then, as slowly as she could, she hauled herself up against the brass headboard until she sat. In the yellow-brown light of the weak bulb, she peered down at Gerry, whose snarling snores were louder now. She looked away from his pulsing closed eyes. It was rage, she realized; his shoulders jumped, his upper arms moved; his hands, she saw, were fists. She wouldn’t raise her eyes above his chest. It was time to look at him, and Louise didn’t want to. When she did, the sneaky, caffeine-buzzing frightened curiosity would be reason.

She watched his fists jump, and she listened to him snore; it was, she realized, the sound that someone might make who was drowning, or being choked. And then, with a final sorrow made part of the motion itself, remembering her sad, reluctant motions with the dark, cruel man who had worked her body so brilliantly, Louise gave in, and shifted in the bed to lay her full attention on Gerry’s face, as one might lay a palm along a lover’s cheek, connecting, caressing, taking hold.

His eyelids fluttered. His jaw worked as he ground his teeth. In light the color of yarrow, his face seemed made of shadows. Its many emptinesses reminded her of giant boulders dragged into fields by glaciers; they were scoured, full of shallow pits, and what had sculpted them was gone. He worked his jaws, or whatever worked him made his jaws chew against each other. He had stopped snoring, now, and he was breathing enormously, taking breaths so profoundly deep that, watching the eyelids flutter, watching the bones of his face compress, she waited with her own breath held to be certain that he would finish one and start again.

That’s love, isn’t it? That kind of worrying?

When she heard herself think the question, she felt herself start to cry. The tears came slowly and they ran down her face. She pushed at them with the backs of her hands as she watched him in his tortured sleep. Then his eyes rolled faster under his lids, and he clacked his mouth open and shut a few times. “Blaw” was the sound his gravelly voice said. “Blaw.” She recognized the noise from memories of her own scared dreams. It was what you said to ward off whatever impended in your nightmare. “Blaw.” But then, and with no warning, he backhanded with his left arm and slammed his fist backward into her pillow. His voice going higher even as he shouted it, he warned, “Don’t assault me .” He threw his right, and he screamed, “Blaw!”

The wide, clumsy punch caught her left shoulder and pushed her back on the bed. She caught his hand. She held it. She knew its weight, and the temperature of it’s skin, the dark fur on its forearm. She didn’t know whether to kiss it, or continue to hold it, or whisper to him that he only dreamed, then kiss him on the cheek and lie beside him until he slept without fear. Only?

She astonished herself by throwing his arm back against him. “Don’t you abuse me , you son of a bitch!” she shouted, and as she did she heard the echo in her words of his own dreamy voice. She punched at him clumsily, like a girl , she thought, swinging wildly until he woke, frightened, of course, and confused, saying, “What? What?” But he traveled all the way from the borders of dreaming, through her weeping, her shouts and her blows, to find her, to fight through her punches, to clutch her against him. She knew, as he seized her, that he did so in ignorance of what had happened inside him or inside her, or in the room between them. Gerry hugged her to himself and gave what dumb and uninvited comfort he could. She knew he did. And she, now, reached to comfort in return. She felt his drenched T-shirt and thick blunt ribs, and she held herself against them, thinking Caught .

THAT NIGHT I did what I had always done. It was how I’d been managing. Every morning I did what I always did, and every afternoon and night. Pooh lurched out with me while Bear slammed him into my legs and led us off the back porch. Bear was ten months old, a Labrador retriever long of muzzle and leg with vast paws. The old one, Pooh — my wife had named him — was lamed by arthritis, half blinded by cataracts, crippled by dysplasia, and still too strong to die. I placated the secrets of his physiology with Butazolidin tablets and dog biscuits. At that time, I was especially grateful when a patient or dog did not die.

It was unusually cold for early November, and the pumpkins I’d set out, because it had been the custom of the house, were settling into themselves as successive frosts softened them. No one came up our road for Halloween, but I had placed pumpkins on the front and back porches and had even fastened onto the storm doors the bunches of maize we’d always hung there. No one came to our house at Halloween because it was so remote, and because the pickings were better in town, five miles below. I had walked about, from kitchen to pantry through kitchen back to living room, waiting to give some little kids some lollipops and candy bars, but no one had come to claim them. I had thought to console myself with Tootsie Pops, but I learned from their high, artificial sweetness that I didn’t believe in consolation.

Pooh staggered around the bushes in the side yard, and I heard Bear rustling in the tall, withered grass below us. He was in the field that went down a hundred yards or so to the old apple trees on which gnarled, sour apples would gleam in the morning through winter. Pooh came back and lay down beside me with a grunt. I didn’t hear the puppy and I whistled him back. He didn’t come. I clapped my hands and called him. I heard slow winds and the natural sway of weeds against each other, but nothing caused by the intrepid unintelligence of a young dog rushing home. I called again, and listened, and then put Pooh inside, stuck a long-handled flashlight in the pocket of my barn coat, and, leaving the porch light on, went looking.