Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Catch you later,” he said. “Good luck.”

She said, “That’s right.” Then, louder, she said, “Dickie boy. Early day.”

Early day, Hank thought. As soon as he woke, he would telephone Leslie. Lorna’s brother slid from the stool, wobbled an instant, braced himself against her with his undamaged arm, and they left. Maybe he would make the call tonight. The glass door closed behind them. Hank looked through it, waiting, but not with hope.

You’re right , he told himself. But he heard the words in Leslie’s voice, as if his wife were not in Manhattan, as if she were here in Oneida County, bearing all of the rest of his life in her strong hands, in her powerful voice. You’re right , Leslie said in him: If you don’t have a story, there isn’t an end. You don’t get punctuation .

Lorna must have agreed. She did not turn to look at him. She did not wave.

ONCE UPON A TIME, I was dissatisfied with how I used my brains and with how Sam used his. He was what they call — and still, in upstate New York, with respect — a banker. I was the banker’s wife. And I had grown bored with my candor, weary of my brittleness, bruised by my own dissatisfactions. So, driving from a canal town that since the late nineteenth century had been thrashing about to survive, I went to bed with a man named Max who practiced medicine and who had no heart.

I met him at a party and I met him at the hospital — need I say that I worked for the Auxiliary? — and I met him at a motel outside of Syracuse. He was stocky, and his soft skin gleamed over bunchy muscles. He was the sort of man who exercised not for his health but so that women would admire him. He wasn’t, so I’d heard, a good doctor; he wasn’t a happy one, and he was close to leaving the area when we met. Perhaps his imminent departure gave us a feeling of license. We made love three times on a Saturday in November, the second time while the Florida — Notre Dame game was showing on the television set. He wasn’t so cruel as selfish. He used me hard. I was stimulated by his lack of generosity, I’m sorry to say. And as men must, I’ve learned, he told his colleagues at the hospital. It seems that doctors, especially, need to talk like boys about sex. Maybe I knew he would. Maybe that foreknowledge was also a stimulant. Maybe I knew when it began that Sam must finally learn of it too.

As is Sam’s way, he didn’t tell me directly. I knew that something of it was in the wind when he told a story at dinner, after Joanna had gone upstairs to her homework, ending it with these words: “And he said it was the best blow job he ever had.”

I knew what Max was saying. I knew that Sam was hearing rumors or reports. I blushed over my chicken with rosemary, and if Max had been at the table instead of Sam, I could not tell — nor can I now — whether I’d have gone around to burrow into his lap or slug him with an herbed paillard.

I said, “Nice language.”

Sam looked lean and fit, tired, uninterested in food, and a little dangerous. As he’d aged, as he’d lost hair, his bony forehead and prominent nose made him look like something with keen vision and cruel abilities and the habit of hunting.

He said, “Sharon, a blow job is a blow job. You want to call it, you know—”

“Fellatio?”

“That’s right. You want to call it that? It’s still what she did with her mouth.”

I said, “You know, I think you’re right.” I cut a square of chicken with considerable care.

“We agree ,” he said to the ceiling. “But I didn’t mean”—his smile looked nasty—“to be dis taste ful. If you know what I mean.” He looked at me with his eyebrows raised, his eyes unblinking. I looked into them. I wanted to find something of our fifteen years together. We watched each other like that, and his eyes filled with tears that ran onto his face. His mouth collapsed, and he said, “Pardon me, please.” I remember that I nodded as he left the table. I remember thinking that I should have wept too.

We didn’t talk that way again. We meshed our social calendars, as we customarily did, and we attended dinners and cocktail parties at which doctors looked meaningfully over my body and sometimes met my eyes. I suppose they were waiting to be selected for the best-ever sex of their lives. In a provincial big town or small city, sex and thievery and numbers of dollars constitute the curriculum, and apparently reasonable adults grow hypertensive about them. So I was their hot topic. I find it of interest even now that I didn’t care.

I knew that Sam and I had foundered. I knew that Joanna could be drowned along with us. I knew, I insisted to myself, that she might survive. I worried only about how, I told myself. Everything else, I decided, would take care of itself. I gave up my local newspaper column, slid from the Auxiliary, and signed up for all the substitute teaching of French and Spanish I could, preparing myself for full-time employment as a single parent.

Gene McClatchey telephoned on an April afternoon to say, “This is Gene.”

“Gene?”

“At the bank, Sharon? I work for your fucking husband?”

I said, “Not that happily, I guess.”

“We need to meet.”

And of course I thought he was a tardy quester after the world’s best etc. I said, “Why ever, Gene?”

“On account of your husband is dicking my wife? Would that be a good enough why-ever?”

“My husband? Your wife? Valerie?”

He said, “Name someplace, will you? That’s private?”

“That’s secret, you mean.”

He said, “Please?”

We ended up a dozen miles to the north, at a conservation training center run by the state, a little park of nature trails and wooden blinds from which to peer at waterfowl. I don’t know why I felt compelled to bring a loaf of bread to feed to the ducks. I tore the pulpy slices into bits and hurled them at mallards while Gene McClatchey, a red-faced man with curly brown hair and a hard, black double-breasted suit, studied the tearing of the bread and its arc toward the water and the wheeling of the ducks as they fed.

He said, impatiently, “You don’t seem upset, Sharon.”

“I’m not surprised that something happened, Gene. I didn’t think of your wife, to tell you the truth. She’s so glamorous and Sam’s — well, I don’t know, I guess. You want me upset? How upset do you want me?”

“What I am,” he barked.

“You’re jealous,” I said. “Or angry. Because the beautiful woman who’s supposed to be yours—”

“No! I don’t want to hear any of that feminist horseshit about freedom and owning people and whatever. She’s my wife .”

“And hurt,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, Gene. Wounded.”

“Bitch,” he said. He flinched, stepped back from the fence at the duck pond, and scrubbed with his wide hands at his face. He said, “Sorry. I apologize. I’m so disgusted . Look at what I found that she left around by accident on purpose. Disgusted’ll do it.”

He held a small notebook with thick covers. The paper was heavy and the binding looked like the inside covers of a fancy antique book. She had written in aqua ink, of course. She wore mostly pinks and limes and aquas in soft cloth that emphasized her breasts and hips. She was the best-built woman over twenty-five in town. Gene struck her, so they said at our parties. Looking at his big hands and red face, I believed that he might. I recalled her long, solitary walks through a town in which you drove everywhere, in part to show off your car. I remembered marveling at the erectness of her carriage. I remembered watching men who marveled at what she carried with such pride. She might well have enjoyed provoking him, I thought.