Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Wait a minute.”

“Stephen, don’t talk like a lawyer now. Don’t you dare be smart and logical with me and tell me about facts. That’s what got us here.”

“No, it isn’t, Rosie. What got us here was my wanting you to be my handmaiden. Dedicating your life to the Great Attorney. The thing about you as decoration in my career.”

“ On your career. You’re really trying. You’re trying so hard, you sound stupid. Like a kid who studied for a test and he doesn’t know what all the memorized answers mean. You’ve been up half the night—”

“All of it.”

“No. I was. I heard you snoring on the sofa.”

“Wrong.”

“See?”

“See what?”

“Never mind,” she said, holding a knot of pantyhose away from her body, as if it were stirring and might strike. She carried it to the bed. “Just, let’s say I’m acknowledging that you’re really thinking about what we talked about. Except it has so little to do with the damned country club, the damned office dinner, the damned goddamned dance. Those are symptoms. It’s all just a cliché. As you pointed out.”

“Symptom,” he said. “As in disease?”

“As in disease.”

“So what’s the disease? That you love me?”

She stared at him.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what it is. You love me — lawyer, no lawyer, whatever. That’s what bothers the hell out of you: that you love me. Is that the disease? How do we treat a thing like that, Rosie?”

“I’m doing it,” she said.

“No, you’re not. You’re taking twice as long to pack as I’ve ever seen you take to do anything. You could have changed all four tires on your car by now.”

She turned to face him. She slowly pulled the towel out of her robe by one end, tugging on it hand over hand until the bath towel was hanging from her hand, and he could see the mottling of blue and red at her throat.

“Jesus! Rosie! I didn’t do that!”

She said, “I did.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t make you understand, and I can’t make me understand.” Her teeth were clenched as she spoke. “I stood in the bathroom last night, while you slept, damn it. You slept . And I looked at my stupid round face and my buck teeth—”

“They aren’t buck. They’re crooked. They’re sexy. Your face isn’t round the way you say it’s round. It’s oval. You’re a — you’re a dish, Rosie.”

She shook her head. Her eyes were closed, and she kept them that way as, rolling the towel, squeezing it, she said, “I looked in the bathroom mirror and I grabbed my throat. Like this”—she put one hand around her neck; he saw the thumb slide into its bruised print above her larynx—“and I said, ‘Why can’t you learn? ’ ”

“Rosie,” he asked her, “learn what?”

“That you’re going to have to keep asking that all the time we’re married. That I’m going to choke myself to death or drown the cat. Or you. Choke you , drown you . Because you see a way of living. Fine. You’re entitled to. But it’s yours . Its teeth are bigger than mine are, even. It could eat me. It could swallow me.” She opened her eyes at last. She put the towel around her neck. As she tucked it in, she said, “That’s all. It’s a goddamned cliché. I know it. Didn’t I say that before?”

“I think I might have called it that last night. It isn’t, Rosie. I really believe that: it isn’t.”

“No, you were right. All of it’s clichés.”

“Rosie, but we love each other.”

She shrugged.

Stephen slid down with his back against the doorframe. He stuck his legs out so they straddled the wall on which the wide-open door was hinged.

“Are you doing that to keep me in?” Rosalie asked.

“I didn’t think of it that way. I’m thinking, just, I don’t want you feeling so bad.”

“Because I can step over you.”

“Rosalie, you could step through me.”

She sat down on the bed, next to the suitcases. She nodded. “I know.”

Stephen was thinking that if they made love now he would want to set the suitcases down, not sweep them aside from the bed. He didn’t want her to think he was sweeping aside what she’d said. He saw Rosalie watching him, and he knew that she was thinking how aroused he always was when she fought him and told him that she didn’t care about love. He didn’t smile to her, and when he saw how sad her magnified eyes behind her glasses were, and her mouth, and the brutal bruises on her fragile neck, his eyes filled up.

She said, “What, Stephen?”

“I remembered when I heard that singing before. It wasn’t in church.”

She lay back on the bed. She pulled her glasses off and held them, folded, in one hand. She drew her legs up and curled herself down toward them so that she wasn’t quite a ball, but was lying on her side in a crescent.

“You look like a half-moon,” he said

“You stay there. I don’t want this thing ending up in some wild screw and we forget all about it.”

“I’ll sit right here.”

“I mean it, Stephen.”

“I was little. I don’t know — eight? So my mother was young.”

“Your mother was never young, Stephen. She was born old and mean.”

“No, she was pretty, and she was young, and my father was gone by then. She was living with Carl Boden.”

“The philosopher king.”

“He was an interesting guy.”

“Smart enough, I’ll give him that, to take off on her.”

“I think she was one of those people who people leave. I don’t know.”

“I do. She’s mean. She’s skinny and mean and she has those thin lips.”

“But he was there, then, and for the next ten years or so, huh? And they had a good time together. I remember all those little pats on the ass, and smooching in the kitchen. Nice stuff.”

“You would.”

Her eyes were closed, and Stephen then closed his. He said, “I remember Carl was wearing this seersucker shirt. And he was sitting in the kitchen, watching her do something. I think she was cooking. I was playing, I guess. Drawing at the table. The radio was on. That was before we moved out to Harrison, so it was up on Eightieth Street, and she was listening to the radio. All of a sudden, Carl says to her, ‘You don’t sing anymore.’ She says What, and everybody says What a few times, and Carl says, ‘I used to love the way you sang when you cooked. It was always so happy.’ Something like that — how she sounded happy, and she made him feel happy, and now he’s disappointed, something is missing. Do I have to tell you she started to cry?”

He opened his eyes to watch her lift her shoulders. She said, “And?”

“And nothing. She stopped crying. He apologized a lot, she apologized a lot. I shut up and ate my food. Something under sauce, I’m sure. Anyway, the next day’s Sunday. We’re going to go to Central Park, we’re going to hit the streets on Sunday in New York, and the radio’s playing. A very dumb, bouncy song. I absolutely cannot remember its name, but I think I still remember what it sounded like. She’s making those amazingly thick, brutal flapjacks of hers, and Carl’s sitting there reading a book, growling at it the way he always did. And all of a sudden my mother’s humming along with the song on the radio. ‘Dee duh duh,’ she sings, all noise, no words, and heavy, slamming down on the syllables, as heavy as her pancakes, ‘Dee duh duh!’ She’s hitting those off-key notes, she was a terrible singer — and now, because I really don’t remember seeing it, but now I imagine how she’s looking out of the corner of her eye, right? To see if Carl notices? I didn’t figure this out for years, of course.”