Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

She had brown-green eyes that looked faded, as bleached as her son’s thick hair. They smiled when her thin, chapped lips did. “I imagine that I am,” she said.

“I meant—” I gestured toward the empty chair.

“No,” her son said.

The sound came up as the kitchen opened. My chef was probably getting on the kid. And I needed to get to the desk.

“What a wonderful idea,” she said.

Linda, who was tan and not red, and whose blond-brown hair was in those thick, wavy strands, said, “You must have a wonderful imagination, Peter.”

That’s right. That’s right.

“Bourbon?” she asked her son.

“Maker’s Mark,” he told me, “rocks, water back.”

I said, “Thank you. And a happy birthday to — to—” I smiled to finish. I had looked. Now I couldn’t stop looking at the daughter-in-law’s dark eyes. She was the ghost of the ghost I had seen. It was a terrible night.

By the time I left their drinks order at the service bar and seated people who’d been waiting, the noise level in both rooms was high enough to drown out the shouting in the kitchen. I was on my way there when a yachtsman decided that he and his companion would not wait any longer. He didn’t wear socks, and I could see that even his ankles were sunburned. His shirt was open to show the sunburned flesh beneath the coarse gray hair of his chest, though all three of his blazer buttons were fastened. He wanted none of us to miss the golden Bill Blass emblems.

I said, “Let me bring you another round of drinks. I know you and your daughter have been waiting for a while.”

“Daughter?” he said.

“Oh,” I said, but with a little too much relish in my voice. “Sorry. My mistake.”

“You’re damned right,” he said, taking her hand and aiming them at the door. “ Damned right.”

I smiled at the guests who entered across their bow and told them with the correct hint of regret about their ten-minute wait. I took their order for drinks to the service bar and noted that a tray of cocktails was ready to be delivered. It was the water chaser, in the squat Italian tumbler we used for those purposes, that told me whose order it was. I took the tray to them and apologized for the delay.

The daughter-in-law said nothing, the son thanked me, his mother shrugged as if to signal that, among us working folk, such matters are understood. Definitely a Jew from New York, I thought. We all seemed to fancy ourselves, once in a while, Marxists once removed. When I leaned to set down the bourbon and then the chaser, I saw they’d placed two photographs on the appetizer plate of the fourth place setting.

I looked, I moved a step away, and then, as if to arrange the drinks better, I stepped back. Linda said, “Help yourself.” Her voice was as dark as her eyes. Ghost bitch, I thought. I stepped alongside her into the musky cinnamon of her perfume, and I looked down at the pictures. One was of the son, Kent, in happy, animated conversation with a bald, broad-shouldered man an inch or so taller than he. The man, apparently the father who had died, was facing Kent and therefore not the camera. And, in the other, on some path near a lake or pond, carrying a rucksack over one shoulder, this same man was striding from whatever held the camera. When I looked up, his widow was frowning in real distress.

I saw Lucien floating up behind her. Oh, he was on something, I thought. He had a goofy smile on his thin, handsome face, and his lids were flapping as if to keep his eyeballs in his head.

“Luc will take your order. The wine list you see. We have a Domaine du Pesquier Gigondas I like, and it’s a good price. The Cahors is inky and full of fruit, unusually good body. The Puligny-Montrachet is not a good price, but it’s a gorgeous wine. So’s the Arneis. If you select the duck special, which Lucien will discuss with you, the Diamond Creek, a fairly dark cabby, would be a happy marriage.”

“What a lovely and unusual expression,” Linda said. “You really enjoy your work.” She said it the way you might tell a child what a big, strong boy he is. Thank you, bitch of a ghost, I didn’t say.

“Ladies,” I said. And then I couldn’t resist it: “Gentlemen. Enjoy.” To Luc, bearing down on their table like a fireman on call, I whispered, “A special celebration. A — kind of birthday. You will be alert, please, to their requirements?”

In the kitchen, one of the exhaust fans was faltering. I apologized to Abbie, my chef. She was the tallest person in the room, and that included the kid doing salads, who was over six feet tall. She was also, except for the daughter-in-law in the party of three or, counting dead people, four, the handsomest woman in the restaurant that night. Her long oval face was unhappy now, but not because of the heat. She was orchestrating dinners, and she danced, concentrating. It gave her a displeased expression. Fires flared as she or the sous-chef, Caroline, poured wine into pans. I asked if we had enough duck. Abbie strode like an athlete, spun like a chorus girl, scattered shallots, dipped out gold-green oil and ignored me. Caroline, her deputy, nodded that we did.

To the college boy composing endive, radicchio, scallions, and red-leaf lettuce, I said, “You’re doing fine. Don’t let the greens get soupy with the vinaigrette. Better to give them too little than too much. In the case of dressing, anyway. Ça va? ”

He looked up.

“Okay?”

He said, “Sure.”

“When it’s your place, it’s sure. In my place, when I ask, you make sure and then you tell me, so I feel sure. Correct?”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“That’s what ça va means. Good man.”

I went out the kitchen back door, and I stood behind the place, between the stuttering exhaust fan and the one that worked, and I looked down the dark slope of the hill. I lit up and leaned against the wall. At eight in the morning, in the kitchen of my house, four miles away, while mist blew in from the sea and it was chilly enough to make me consider using the fireplace, I’d made the café filtré and opened The New York Times . It was a stab at discipline, and of course it was a sham, but I never lit the first cigarette until I had read the sports and was ready to look at the business pages. To get there, I turned past the wedding announcements while I lit up, sighing it in, and I saw the face of Tamara Wynn, the girl I had loved in college, and when I was unloading corpses at Dover Air Force Base during the war, and when I was in the first and second graduate schools I’d tried. By the time I was at the Cornell management program, I was past talking about her with the women with whom I tried hard to fall in love, one of whom I’d married.

We’d been the usual story. I was unreconciled to her departure for other men and then marriage to a surgeon. I didn’t die of it, but she had died of something about which I hadn’t heard. I read in the Times how her daughter, Courtney — wasn’t there a year when every female born east of the Mississippi received that name? — had been given in marriage by the widowed father, who had been a premed in the class ahead of mine. There was the picture of Courtney, except it looked like her mother. Tamara, with her high brow and wide mouth and reserved, quizzical smile, looked out of the Times and up over thirty years.

All I could think to say that morning — I heard my voice; it sounded like a kind of wounded groan — was “Oh. Hello.”

Dottie, on her way into the kitchen, said, “Hello to you . That was pretty enthusiastic for first thing in the morning.”

It wasn’t you, Dot. It was the one I loved. It was the daughter of the one I loved. It was dead people. That’s my job: meet ’em and greet ’em. Hello.