Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“You didn’t figure it out until this morning.”

“Yes And then Carl leaves the room.” He stopped. They were silent.

Rosalie turned onto her side and opened her eyes. “That’s the story?”

“That’s the story. He throws his book down on the kitchen table, whammo! , and he walks out of the room.”

“What’d your mother do?”

“I don’t remember.”

“ That’s the story. What she did, then.”

Now Stephen lay on his stomach, his feet out in the hall and his torso in the bedroom, and he propped his chin on his forearms. “That’s their story. My part of it is what I said. How sad she was, trying to show him all of that awful joy I suppose she wasn’t feeling. She tried to give him that. I think it was remarkably generous, what she offered.”

Rosalie said, “I didn’t offer you anything when I was singing. You understand that?”

“I was thinking about how sad it was, somebody who couldn’t sing, and who really didn’t feel like singing, trying to sing for someone.”

“Do not start crying for that woman.”

He said, “If I cried, Rosie, it wouldn’t be for her.”

“Don’t you dare and cry for me .”

“No,” he said. He put his head all the way down on his hands.

Rosalie said, “This is impossible. We’re impossible.”

They lay in silence, he on the floor and she on the bed.

She wakened him by saying, “See? You were sleeping.”

“No,” he said. He didn’t know why. “I wasn’t.”

He watched her swing her feet over the side of the bed. Her robe was hiked, and he saw her calves and knees, her lower thighs. She pressed them together and pulled the hem of her bathrobe down. She sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Now I’m going to sleep. You go someplace else, please.”

“Where?”

“I just want to sleep! ”

He manufactured a dignity with which to climb to his feet and leave. When he was in the kitchen, he heard their bedroom door close. He shooed the cat from the stove, then collected all the dishes and rinsed them, stowed them in the dishwasher. He couldn’t remember if you were allowed to wash the iron frying pan in the machine. He scratched at it with a steel pad just in case you weren’t. And when the machine was humming and hushing, when the surfaces were wiped down and the wiping rag rinsed in water nearly too hot to touch, he took off his necktie, hung it on the dish towel rack, and telephoned the office.

As he gave instructions and answered questions, he thought of the musical tones he’d punched to reach his secretary. He thought of the clients who pressed those numbers and listened to those tones, waiting for advice. He heard his voice, over so many calls, dispensing wisdoms and assurances, citing statutes, offering precedents. And he knew how he’d concluded so many times that the marital tragedies to which he’d been asked to respond were, finally to him, all alike. It struck him with a kind of disgust how banal he and Rosalie were, how quotidian their sadness would seem to some other lawyer at some other phone number who might hear Stephen complain how his mind was shaken and his heart was sore. He wondered if, when his clients telephoned, his deepest inner parts went to sleep, like an arm pressed into the same position too long, while clients wept descriptions to him of one’s suffocation and the other’s need for self-expression, and everyone’s rage to flee. His secretary waited, and he finally heard the lengthening pause, so he finished and rang off.

Stephen walked from the kitchen to the breakfast room and back. He stood in the kitchen, frightened because he’d no idea what to do. At last, he fetched his briefcase from the hall and set it on the table in the breakfast room. He took from it a yellow ruled pad and the fountain pen that Rosalie had given him when he’d been made a partner. Then he did what he did in the office: he made notes. At the top of the page, he printed PROBLEMS. Halfway down the page he drew a horizontal line and printed SOLUTIONS. It was a letter-size pad, so he had four inches or so for problems — not enough, he thought. He tore the page from the pad and made his dividing line vertical. He headed the left side PROBLEMS. He thought he heard their door slam, and he paused. No one came, he breathed more evenly, and he headed the right-hand side SOLVE. He tore the page away.

On the next clean page, he wrote Dear Rosalie . He tore the page out. Rosie , he wrote. Looking from the breakfast room to the narrow bookshelves on which stood her cookbooks and his Encyclopedia of Wines and Spirits, he saw a very old, blue spine — the Joy of Cooking her parents, both dead now, had given them when they married. He set down his pen and went to the kitchen and, singing a song — singing Dee duh duh! — and not thinking of its name, he took the book, and he began. The song, he would remember later, was called “If I’d Known You Were Coming, I’d Have Baked a Cake,” and his mother, he would then remember, had offered its syllables to her lover, Carl Boden.

But for now, he followed directions. He sifted flour. He found baking powder. He used nine eggs in achieving four separated yolks and whites. He set butter aside to reach room temperature. He found almonds and ground them. He slowly melted chocolate. He whipped up milk and vanilla and egg white without spattering them. And he baked the cake so that a toothpick slid unstained from its core. While it cooled, he mixed the icing, then applied it, maybe a moment too soon. But it was a chocolate fudge cake, made from scratch, and he slugged out the syllables, Dee duh duh! , as in the credenza in the living room he found the shoe box labeled BIRTHDAYS and took from it a single pink birthday candle. While he washed the dishes and straightened the kitchen, he thought of Sasha and Brigitte blowing candles out. He was standing near the counter, reading prefatory words on nutrition in the cookbook while the icing hardened, when Rosalie came in. She wore jeans and a soft white cotton shirt that fastened with metal snaps near its floppy collar. In her clean white running shoes she looked springy and competent as she inspected the kitchen, then him. She seemed to him frighteningly older than she’d been. He slid the pink candle into the pocket of his shirt.

She filled the kettle with water and put out instant coffee and one mug.

He heard himself offer, “I was going to do a laundry.”

Before the water could be hot enough, she poured it over the coffee and walked past him to the breakfast room. He found a cup and shook some crystals into it and, without stirring the coffee, followed her. He sat and said, “Rosie.”

She looked up. Her eyes behind the lenses were red and puffy. Her elbows were on the legal pad and his awful fragment of letter. She had set her cup on his salutation. Her face wasn’t angry, it was solemn. She looked to him as she must have looked as a girl in church: sure of what she must do, owlish with her certainty.

He left the table again. He stuck the candle into the cake, and he brought it to her. Setting it on the table, he said, “Here.”

“Very nice,” she said. “Very well done.”

He was going to say, “I made it for you,” but then the girls came in. He heard their bus huff away, and he called to them, “Come and get it, ladies! Look at what I made for you!”

Rosalie walked past them, pausing to kiss each daughter on the top of the head. She waved and went toward the other side of the house while Sasha followed her and Brigitte waited. Stephen went to her and stooped, one knee on the floor. “How was school, baby?”

Her face was pale, her eyes narrow. She asked, “Did you make the cake so we wouldn’t go away, Daddy?”