Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

He turned to me, smiled his smile, shrugged, then turned away and leaned back in against Jillie. He shrugged again. Jillie shrugged, as if in response, but she was signaling me. It meant: Who knows what we’ve got here? Wait awhile and see.

I went back to our office and dialed the call again. Thinking as Arthur, I insisted to myself, I wondered what I hadn’t for years and years: Where are you now? Whom are you with? What do you feel? And, like Kevin, I was gripped in the stomach, seized that is in the ganglion there, thinking with my belly and probably my balls. Feeling, finally, like no one but me, like a lover gone into the past, I was wounded as I hadn’t been for years by the thousands and thousands of miles between upstate New York and the Chelsea Embankment. The telephone chimed the distance. I could feel the hugeness of the surface of the sea between Block Island and Margate. And then the ancient but familiar furtiveness returned, so I hung up.

Kevin, in the kitchen, said, “Bob! Where’d you go?”

“Back there.” I pointed with my thumb.

“What’d you do?”

“Nothing much.”

“Boring, huh?”

“Kevin, you’re not boring. Aunt Gillian isn’t boring.”

“So you must be!”

I said, “Exactly.”

In his English voice, he told Jillie, “Bang on right, isn’t he?”

She said, “Kevin, in all the years I’ve spent with this man, and some of them have been lollapaloozas, he has never been boring.”

“Lol—”

“Lollapaloozas.”

“What’s that, Aunt Gillian?”

“It means he is a heavy-duty, full-time, nonstop job.”

Kevin looked as though he might glow. “She really likes you, Uncle Bob.”

I said, “I hope so.”

Kevin gestured at the kitchen or at us. “I’m never going home,” he said.

Years before, not long after London, our daughter, Tasha, had told me, “Whenever you lie, Daddy, I know it from your face. You catch yourself. You hear your own lies. I think you hate them or something, because you always look disgusted with yourself.”

I’d told her, “No, I can always hedge on the facts, a little, when I’m arguing in court. It’s a professional necessity. And I was even a pretty good cardplayer in the Army.”

“Well, sure,” she’d said, looking like Gillian’s younger sister, broad-shouldered and slim-hipped, a fine swimmer, a ferret of fathers. “That’s easy, lying to judges and juries and clients and shady lawyers.”

“You left out hit men and child molesters.”

“But with us ,” she said, “ha! You’re hopeless with us.”

Jillie, all those years later, said to Kevin in our kitchen, “You stay as long as you like.” She sounded like she meant it.

She was coaching me, and I caught the hint. “As long as you like,” I said. It sounded to me like a lie.

“I LOOKED IT UP in the big dictionary, and it means you were court-martialed,” I said. “Given a dishonorable discharge.”

“It means safe ,” Jillie whispered directly into my ear in bed that night. We were acting like children, I thought, or like a man and woman sneaking some time together in bed. “Bob means safe, it’s an old-time English expression. I read it somewhere. I don’t remember. Dickens? Thomas Hardy? Arnold Bennett?”

“The turncoat? You’d take his word? It means turncoat, maybe.”

“No, that’s Benedict Arnold.” The effect of all this whispering was reminiscent of high school, the wet tongues of girls, the hard, waxy ears of their boyfriends. Her voice, hushing and warm in my ear, was making itself felt on the soles of my feet. They actually tingled. As if a wave of sensation bounced, then, back up through my body, my penis went heavy and hard, and I laid it against her thigh. “Good grief,” she said, “I’ll keep naming them, if I can remember any more. Oliver Goldsmith. George Gissing. Thackeray, oh, yum.”

“So the kid’s saying to me, Safe as Uncles?”

“He’s saying everything’s okay. All’s well. He’s using a piece of old-fashioned slang he heard from his nanny or housekeeper or whatever this Martha person is because she’s the only one who hangs around with him now and because he’s scared. He’s like a child, Bob. He’s like that dear little boy he was when they used to bring him here.”

“When Deborah used to bring him here. Arthur dropped her off and picked her up because he was too busy in the gadget trade and because we were boring.”

“I never cared. She was my friend,” Jillie said. “I loved her.”

“I used to think you, you know—”

“What?”

“I used to think the two of you — you know.”

“Friends?”

“Lesbian?”

“Bob. You sound jealous.”

“You know me. I probably was. And there’s nothing wrong with — loving each other. However you did it.”

“Really?”

I was halfway on top of her now, and my hand was in her pajamas. “I hope I believe it. Would you tell me?”

“What, exactly?”

“If you and she—”

“Deborah.”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

I said, “Yes?”

“I mean, yes, I would tell you. But no. We loved each other. We were real friends. Real friends. I think that’s why I’m all over Kevin. I miss her really a lot. I hurt with missing her when I let myself get into it. Sink down into thinking about it.”

My hand was on her stomach, edging down, and she reached in the dark and took hold of my wrist, pushing. The curtains belly in the waking room. I said, “Belly,” working down with her, our hands moving together from her belly and together on her groin and then our fingers, pressed together, inside her, moving. We were breathing in unison, and the tone of our breathing deepened, but it was still a kind of whisper, a conversation.

Deborah had pointed out the poem for me not only because there had been a heavy white curtain that bellied in the window of the hotel in Marlow. She was also, as the four of us sat together and as Kevin played with a metal reproduction tractor I had bought him, reminding me that I had kneeled before her in the room, beside the bed, and had reached beneath her skirt to take down her pantyhose and underpants and then had climbed up inside the tent of her skirt head-first, kissing her thighs that felt cool to my lips, and working around her groin, biting on her stomach, growling, “Belly,” which had made her shriek laughter, as if she were terribly ticklish.

“Idiot,” she’d told me, her hand on my head through the skirt. “You’re doing Cookie Monster from Sesame Street . God. Coo-kie. Idiot Bob.”

“Belly,” I snarled into her, forcing my face where little force was required as she spread her legs to my mouth and fell back on the bed. “Belly,” I said, below it.

Jillie was bucking up at our hands, at our fingers, saying, “Bobby, come on,” pulling me onto her, replacing our hands with me, filling herself with me as I loved her and cheated again with her friend.

JILLIE CALLED IN, telling them she was away for the day. She was a partner in a letterpress printing company that sold old-fashioned-looking letterhead to the publishers and antiques dealers and artists who lived in our section of Dutchess Country, a hundred miles north of New York. I was going to spend the day in the office working on a suit involving an Ethiopian national whose French-owned airplane had fallen into the Mediterranean. I was suing on behalf of the dead man’s sister, who had become an American citizen. Jurisdiction wasn’t undecipherable, but it was complicated, and I was going to be phoning and faxing all day. But I was also, I told Jillie, going to be worried about her at home with Kevin.