Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Without going into details, let me say that I was pretty punk about it. Just as we were about to leave, I told Belle that I was too tired for the drive and that I’d go back to my apartment. She was furious, but she wasn’t surprised.” He looked at me so intensely that I looked away. “I want you to understand some of the complexities of our assumptions, Belle’s and mine. At any rate, I did go back, and they went on to Long Island.

“My understanding is that Belle became worried about me”—he signaled for more drinks, brandy Alexander for me, white wine for him—“and woke up the poor host and made him drive her all the way back to New York at two in the morning, in a nasty rain. She has a key, of course, and let herself into my apartment.”

“You weren’t there,” I said.

“No.”

“Because you moved in with Anya after I went uptown to Columbia.”

“That’s not inaccurate.”

“You keep the other place—”

“As a cover. In an Eric Ambler novel, it would be called that, yes.” Leonard tried to smile, sipped his wine, frowned at it.

“And you sort of live part-time with Anya?”

He shrugged, raised his eyebrows, said, “It’s a simple clarity for a complex situation — but, yes. Yes.”

“Can I be your law clerk, Leonard?”

He grinned, with all his teeth this time, saying, “You mean you’re my student? You flatter me that much?”

“Meaning I admire you very much.”

He said, “You’ll be Law Review and start someplace so prestigious—”

“Can I? Can I ask you again at the end of the year?”

He blushed, like a young man having drinks with a girl at one of the city’s romantic saloons, and he said, “Yes. Please.”

“Thank you, Leonard.”

“But listen,” he said. “She came into an empty apartment and looked around — it’s tiny, a sofa bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom and closet. But she looked. And not only wasn’t I there, there were barely signs that I’d been there. I don’t know precisely what she began to know, but she began to know it. It was four in the morning by then. She sat there, by herself, not reading, not looking at television. She simply sat. Probably in the dark. And then, around six, she called the police and asked what to do. They told her she could file a missing persons report. What would that achieve? she asked. Nothing, they told her, except list me as missing and cause my name to be checked in emergency rooms and at the medical examiner’s office. She thought there was no point in that, she said. She said she knew that if I were sick or dead she’d find out fairly soon. Then she went down to Grand Central and rode home. She reached me at the office later that morning. I assured her that I had been all right. I told her not to worry herself.”

“And she accepted that?”

“She said she supposed foreign clients had arrived on a late plane and that I had to meet them.”

“You let her believe that?”

“I didn’t really answer. I told her I’d be home that weekend and told her to take care of herself, and we hung up.”

“Leonard, she believed you?”

“We believe what we need to, I suppose.”

“Is that true?”

He clasped his hands before him, in the air. The tips of his fingers were white and substanceless beneath the skin; they held the imprint of whatever they pressed upon. Shrugging his shoulders, he said, “It sounds true.”

“Leonard, everything sounds true if you say it right.”

“Dealing with other people’s truth can be a self-indulgent process,” he said. And then, as if to assure me that his remark was not meant merely to discipline me, he added, “We have been self-indulgent, I suppose, in a sense. Though we’ve been waiting for this. We’re waiting now.” And I didn’t know which we —my mother and he, or someone else’s mother and he — he meant.

I finished my drink, and he ordered another round, and then he finished his. We sat in silence through the arrival of the drinks, and through our consumption of them, and through the waiter’s arrival with more. I smoked a lot and tried to think hard. Leonard waited patiently for me to have a reaction, or to discern what it was. I lit another cigarette — he cupped his hands for me again — and I blew smoke out, feeling that my tongue was raw, my throat sore, my head filled with childish exclamations and masterful formulations and the tune of a Robert Hall radio jingle. It was dark over the river now, but bright on the terrace, and ships were glimmering like fish as their superstructures caught the light the river absorbed. I said, “Life is confusing, Leonard,” and he was decent enough to try to keep his lips from curving. But he couldn’t, and then I couldn’t, and we laughed — whooped, really — until he walked around to my chair, leaned from behind to kiss my cheek, and then gripped my arm to help me up and get me to a cab.

A year after his death — he died in his sleep, and in Westchester — I was spending the weekend helping my mother clean and cook for a party she’d decided it was necessary to give. As I vacuumed and put things away, grinding my teeth because I should have been uptown at my desk, I looked, thinking of my books, at the bedside bookcase. I saw Judgment on Deltchev by Eric Ambler. I thought of the Beekman Towers and Leonard’s lesson; I had been trying to understand it since he’d offered it to me, and particularly since his death — since the funeral we felt we couldn’t attend. I think our absence would have provoked his hesitant smile, but also grave pity for Anya and, I think, actual understanding of her relief at not having to watch him buried. Anya knew of his death when she read it in the Times .

With the vacuum cleaner bellowing, I opened the book, saw Balkan names and descriptions of fear and subterfuge, and then a shade of baby blue — a piece of note-paper. I laughed, because only in stories and in the most arcane probate cases will a letter from the dead fall from among the pages of a book. But I was sure that I had found such a letter, and I did not laugh anymore. In the roar of Anya’s Electrolux, air pouring from an unstoppered vent, the old motor getting louder as it got hotter, I sat on my mother’s bed and opened the folded single sheet. It was six-by-nine — perhaps half an inch longer each way — and where it had been folded, yellow-brown had supplanted the blue. A lion was engraved in the upper left-hand corner, and in the right it said Hôtel Lotti, 7 et 9, Rue de Castiglione, Paris . And below, nothing. No message I could read, no reminder, no clue. It was simply a bookmark, a convenience — it had nothing to say.

I smelled the motor grinding and meat cooking in the kitchen and the harsh intimate scent of Anya’s Russia Leather. I was made physically sick by the blankness of the paper, its neat precise folds in which the brown discolorations pooled. I folded it and put it back in the book, and I thought of Leonard in a hotel room that smelled of paint. He lay on the long wide wooden bed in the Hôtel Lotti. Over a chair hung his trousers, wrinkled from the airplane, and on the bathroom doorknob hung his jacket, heavy with passport case and pens. He was in undershorts and undershirt, and his long black hose were held to his thin white calves by garters, black and tight. His feet nearly touched, and one arm lay on his chest while the other held Judgment on Deltchev . He was reading of failures and fealties, the corruptions of the sub-rosa world, and Anya was on 50th Street, and I was studying torts, and the man who had fathered me was living in Edgware, and I knew who my father was. I heard the shallow breathing and saw his thin white skull on the wide pillow, the dwindling body enclosed by the patterned wallpaper of the Hôtel Lotti.