Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She soon enough stopped calling home. She soon enough, when I was able to catch her on the phone, spoke with no inflection. Soon, she mostly wept. And of course I should have gone at once, at the first hint of a sign of damage, to the city to rescue her. I should have stolen her. I should have fetched my baby home. But I waited, because I was leading my life, after all. I was teaching high school students how to distinguish between Babylon and Byzantium, Arafat and Attaturk, and I was failing, as were they, but that was how we were required to consume our days, and life was a storm of consequences with which one had to deal, and Alec in New York was only tense about her studies.

“It’s the work, Mommy,” she said. “I have too much of it.”

“Maybe it’s the wrong work.”

“You sound so Jewish , Mommy.”

“I think of you in New York, and I remember myself in New York, and I sound city ,” I said.

“City’s Jewish.”

“You’re in the foothills of Harlem and you can say that?”

“I’m in the foothills of fuck up.”

“Alec.”

“Gotta go. Gotta go. I’m doing permutations of collateral estoppel, and I can’t stop.”

“Al, I think maybe you ought to stop.”

“‘Bill till you drop. Don’t stop.’ Bye, Mommy.”

“Feel good and be careful? Please? Oh, say hello to Coriander,” I said, but she’d hung up.

BARRY AND I had lived together in New York for the first few years of our marriage. He was a student at Cooper Union, and I was a dancer, and it’s like watching a balloon that leaks while it zips in circles over your head, but in very slow motion, to see how those ambitions were mostly wishes and breath. But we were there when we were young, and on the afternoon of our first married day, in the room-plus-bathroom that we described as almost on University Place, I woke up next to my tall, hairy husband with his elegant, long, slender feet, and I didn’t know which hunger banged from inside at my ribs — need for food, or need for Barry. Food won, but we hadn’t very much. There were crackers and a wad of multipurpose processed cheese on the table seven feet from our bed. But there was a cake, prepared on upper Broadway to the specifications of Barry’s mother, and I was assailed by a need for sweets, and the cake was, for reasons we couldn’t ever remember, on the little square table from the Workbench that Barry’s best man had given us. So I reached out and plucked the three-or-four-inch-high couple, made of sugar in black and white, the bride in her broad white gown, the groom in his morning coat and striped trousers, each with a genderless face of white with periods under black carats for eyes, a dash for a mouth, and I bit — without planning to, and never knowing what I’d meant to signify — at the head of the little groom.

That was how we came to spend our first married afternoon in the office of a dentist named Echaissy on Eighth Street, because the darling couple were made of plaster, and I had cracked a tooth. The groom suffered only a chip to his glossy pompadour. We carried them with us to our next apartment, on Seventeenth Street, and then to Mamaroneck, and then upstate, where Barry took over a factory and I took over a classroom, and where Barry’s lungs filled with fibers of cloth, and his body devoured itself. We were married in City Hall, our witness had no camera, and the imperfect painted plaster couple are the embodiment and souvenir of what Barry and I and two witnesses had seen. We kept the bride and groom on a bookshelf in our living room, and there they remain, less the same of course, but standing watch over what you might call history.

Coriander was the name we’d given a stuffed tan cat with which Alec had slept since her second or third year. Barry told her stories about Coriander, and the saga had become the subject of Alec’s first and only novel, three sheets of paper stapled together, all six sides bearing crayon drawings of adventures about which she had written in thick, tall capitals. I remember one “Aha!” in messy blue letters, and I remember Barry crooning it to Alec months earlier, one weekend night at bedtime. “Aha!” he’d called, “Aha!” she’d echoed, on a Sunday night when, to keep the next morning’s class from arriving unmediated, and to demonstrate what I could not adequately say about that father and his child connected by the victorious shout of a make-believe cat, I had seduced him on a little armless rocking chair, outside on our porch, hidden from our neighbors by the porch’s waist-high wall. Coriander had been washed, mended, tossed and mauled and embraced in every house we’d lived in, in each of Alec’s dormitory rooms, and she had continued to be resident childhood fetish in Alec’s place on Broadway and 113th. That was where I went after Alec called to wish me happy birthday.

“Darling, “I said. “Al.”

“What, Mommy?”

“Al, it isn’t my birthday.”

“Sure it is. Today’s the eleventh, dingbat.”

I didn’t know what else to say: “But that’s Daddy’s birthday, remember? It isn’t mine for a month, I’m afraid.”

“It isn’t?”

“No.”

“It’s Daddy’s birthday? Today? But it can’t be his birthday. He’s dead.”

“Yes,” I said. “Where are you honey? Are you home?”

“What difference could that make? When am I is more like it. God. Daddy’s dead and you don’t even have a birthday now. When’s mine?”

“Your birthday? Alec, are you in your apartment?”

“Yes. I’m here in the kitchen thing. Ette. Kitchenette. I was looking at the ingredients and everything in the cupboard to see if I could make you a cake, you know, or something, but of course that would be so stupid. I can’t bake at all, as we both know perfectly well. And the cake I’d have to can’t bake would have to be for Daddy, not you, and he’s dead. You aren’t, right? No. I really meant to ask: Am I?”

“Dead, Al?”

She said, very breezily, “What’s your best bet?” Then all I heard was the sound of stoppered crying, someone’s mouth and nose cupped shut while they tried not to weep and they failed.

I said, “Al.”

“Oh,” she said, “I don’t think I’m strong enough anymore, Mommy. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

“No,” I said, “I’m leaving now. I’m coming. Promise me to stay in your apartment. Can you call someone?”

“Sure. What should I call them?” She laughed while she cried.

“Get some friends over, Al. Anyone you trust.”

“Well, he’s in jail for raping me, actually.”

“Someone else .”

“He’s the one who won’t see me anymore.”

“I don’t think I know who you mean.”

“Obviously, a man I saw and I don’t see him because he refuses to see me .”

“Is he a — friend?”

“Lover.”

“Ah.”

“Don’t ‘ah’ me, Mommy, all right? I’m old enough to have a lover.”

“Of course. Yes. I don’t remember—”

“No,” she said. “I never talked about him. We didn’t last long enough for me to find a short enough word that could describe how lousy it got so fast. A woman is allowed to want a man at the just about end of the twentieth century, may I point out. I keep waiting for a kind of sign or something, but he will not stand up for me. He isn’t what you’d call a stand-up guy. I tried telling him that. Because someone will punish him. Someone, of course, is going to demonstrate how you’re either a stand-up guy — a man, you know? — the geniune article, or you’re hollow. If you’re a dummy, I said, don’t come around here . But I didn’t know he’d do what I said to do or not to do. It’s pretty clear-cut, though, you know? You’d know. You got around a little when you were dancing, right? Man lets you down, you stick a pin in his balloon, right? His name is Victor Petrekis. He’s Greek. He’s what you would call a classical piece of ass, but hollow. Like those statues they make of the real statues, not in the museum. He can’t be there when I need him to be. You know, when it’s tough. It’s very tough, Mommy.”