Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

I was leaning over my coffee cup, whispering again, and resenting my need to be secret at home. Although, I reminded myself, I had surely been secret enough before and for a long time. “What if he gets violent?” I roared in a hush. “Didn’t he used to get that way when he was a boy? A little boy?”

Jillie said, in less of a whisper than would have made me comfortable, “He got frightened. He got apprehensive. And he’s my dear friend’s child.”

“Your dear friend who hasn’t written or called in how long?”

“Well, she’s going through some things.”

“What?”

“Never mind .” Jillie rarely sounded stern. I think she learned impatience and cruelty from me. And when she spoke like an angry me to me, I found myself, always, quailed.

“Quelled and quailed,” I told her.

“What?”

“The way your eyes get big and your brows go up and your voice gets brittle and mean and your cheeks get pale. You look like a killer.”

She nodded, sipped at her coffee, said, “Don’t you forget it,” and sipped again.

“But call me,” I said. “If there’s anything . You call me.”

“And you will ride upstate in a couple of hours, once you get free of the office and out of midtown traffic and off the Henry Hudson Parkway and through the Hawthorne Circle and up the Taconic, and you will rescue me.”

I said, “Damned right.”

“You’re a dope, Bob.”

“Damned right,” I said

“A middle-aged dope with delusions of heroism.”

“Wrong,” I said. “A middle-aged dope with a wife at home alone with a — with a troubled boy.”

“Man, nearly.”

“Jesus, Jillie. You never called Tasha a woman until she was a junior in college.”

“It never upset you whether I did or not.”

“And this does, so you’re doing it?”

She nodded.

“You are really pissed off.”

She nodded again.

“I could have sworn we were crazy and all over each other last night.”

She nodded.

“And that makes you mad?”

She said, “In a way.” Then: “No.” She shook her head. She took an enormous breath. She said, “This is something to forget. To never mind. I am not pissed off. We did have a good time. You know that. I’m thinking, though, we’re rolling around in the rack and Debbie’s crazy in England and it doesn’t seem fair.” She took another long breath.

“You’ll hyperventilate,” I said. “It doesn’t seem fair for you to — could I say enjoy? For you to enjoy your marriage? And I suspect she is rolling around. In somebody’s rack.”

“If I hyperventilated and fell out of my chair and cracked my head on the floor and died, well-fucked, then that would seem to be a reasonable exchange and fair to Debbie. As for her sex life, don’t make the mistake of thinking a random screw, or a whole matched set of them, is any substitute for, I don’t know — for being happy a little.” She watched me. She nodded her head very hard. “Really,” she said. “Anything else, and you’re dreaming.”

At the office, I punched numbers on the phone. I called Deborah and hung up. I called Jillie and disconnected before it could ring. I called Tasha, who was teaching medieval history at the University of Texas in Austin. Her answering machine had no message, only a long pause and then a suddenly burped tone to prompt the speaker, but the caller needed to hear his kid’s voice more than tell her anything, so he hung up. I telephoned the retired appellate court judge who was of counsel to the firm handling Air France matters in the States and soon enough was doing the equivalent of starting to try to untie a very tight knot made of soft, wet wool.

The judge and I hung up, issuing the phony quacks of business bonhomie. The telephone rang at once and my secretary, Ms. Seidman, who detested me and all lawyers — everyone, in fact, except the performance artist who pierced his body as part of his art with whom she lived in apparently something of a state of excitation — announced that my wife was on the line.

This time, she was the whisperer. I said, “I can’t hear you, Jillie. Is it Kevin?”

She said, very low and muffled, as if her hand was over her lips and the telephone, “He’s talking to himself.”

“In a menacing way?”

“No, no. It’s — it’s upsetting. He’s so worried .”

“ He’s worried. He’s in trouble. That’s who talks to themselves, people in trouble. Is there any reason to think he’s going to act out?”

“Bob, you don’t know what in hell act out means .”

“No, but I hear it a lot. Do you notice how you’re always correcting my words, these days? Jillie: you think — I’m asking this, I guess — do you think he’s going to do anything physical to express what’s on his mind?”

“That is what it means.”

“Jillie, for Christ’s sake, you’re home alone with a kid the size of a goddamned fullback who is at least immature and somewhat retarded and worried and frightened and more than likely he’s a hell of a lot more screwed up than either of us thought, and you’re teaching me. Are you — never mind. I’m coming home.”

“You can’t come home. You have to get rich people out of their responsibilities and obligations, don’t you?”

“You’re hunting for my head , Jillie.”

“For your belly.”

“My belly?”

In Cookie Monster’s voice, she said, “Belly.”

“Stay near the door or something,” I said. “Go out to Millerton and hang around in crowds.”

“Where do they keep them, again, in Millerton?”

I said, “Shit. Goddamn it. Jillie. Take care. I’m coming home.”

“Oh, boy,” she said.

In the elevator I thought it, and in the car I said it to myself: “ She telephoned you. She picked up the phone and she called you .” Going uptown and west, I said, “And now you’re talking to yourself like Kevin, aren’t you?” I was doing sixty-five on the Henry Hudson, ignoring the rearview mirror and, frankly, anything to either side. I wasn’t driving the car, I was aiming it. I remembered telling clients in ticklish cases to keep their silence. People, you see them and observe their behavior, and you think: nobody talks to any one. But you’re wrong. They do. Whenever you think they can’t, or they won’t, then they do. I thought about Jillie and Deborah. Oh, they do, I thought. I said, in a singsong, “She called Kevin’s mom-my.” Then I said, “Cookie Monster’s gonna eat up all of your ass .”

I stopped at one of the little places on Route 82 and bought hot dogs and rolls and sodas and a box of chocolate chip cookies. I went seventy miles an hour until I got to our driveway, up which I let the car waddle casually, uncle fellow, daddy guy, coming home with snacks and not a tad concerned about the safety of his wife or the menace of her recently discovered rage.

Kevin was outside, splitting kindling. He wore his olive slacks and basket-weave loafers and his cream-and-olive shirt. I watched his back and arms as he swung the ax, and I remembered seeing them, but smaller, and bare, brown in the summer sun, when Deborah and he had come to stay for a week. I had taken him out to our shed and showed him how to split wood. Maybe he was six or seven, broad-backed and strong, and his coordination had been excellent. Once he saw how to stand the chunks upright on the chopping block and swing without fear, letting the momentum of the head of the ax do the work, he became good at it. He was good at it now. As I got out of the car, I heard him grunt as he swung, just as he had a dozen years before. In a way, he was the same boy.