Frederick Busch - The Stories of Frederick Busch

“Your mother won’t shell out for the lumber. She won’t ever fix this place. She hates me. She thinks I’m a wastrel and the last of the hippies and the seducer of her kid,” I said.

“Don’t be insulting,” she said. “You never seduced me. Yes, you did. But I knew you didn’t mean to. You were respectful. You pay your respects, and you stand there being shaggy and a little shy, and people sometimes, anyway, no matter their intentions or any of that, they fall in — whatchamacallit.”

“Did you ever think of that as scary?”

“It’s the word you’re scared of,” she said. “You’re saving it for Miss Plexiglas Maidenhead of the Short Attention Span. But that’s fine. Really. Let’s say fall into… flesh. That’s what happens when people get to be postgraduates.”

“You always talk about how old you are,” I said.

“Postgraduate, I said. Who said anything about old?”

“No, you’re afraid that you’re the scary older woman.”

“I’d just as soon you do not predict my intentions or supply me with meanings. What happens,” she said against the back of my neck, “is that people fall into flesh.”

I turned off the stove. She was pulling on me and my leg went back for support, and she pushed her groin against it as she dragged me by the waist, and I started to fall. She straightened and caught me, big as I was, because she was a strong woman and she liked to prove her strength. I pushed off, turned, and we were standing straight again. I put my hands inside her jacket.

She hissed because I had touched bare skin. I said, “No wonder you’re cold.” She pulled me toward the built-in bed a few feet from the stove.

“You aren’t resisting,” she asked. “We could cancel the rest of the badinage and just enjoy ourselves. Do you think?”

“I’m not resisting,” I said.

“I’m not resisting either,” she said.

I tried to say how grateful I was, and how worried about my gratitude, and how she turned my temperature up like an oven. But the idea of saying it and of knowing she had heard it would make me sad. What happened a lot, that year, was that I worried about making myself sad and then about permitting myself too much pleasure. It was like taking care of a sick roommate, or a patient, except that he was me. The lights were on, but we closed our eyes. You always want a little darkness when you go to bed with someone who’s a stranger you will probably never know much better but who you like a lot. You end up watching yourself and each other, which is what you need, together, to get past. And I knew her well enough to know that the end of anything at all could make her sad — of her marriage some years ago, of her father’s life last year, of her twenties this year, of her mother’s money, of whatever she and I were caught in, and probably, I thought, of what she would describe as the end of her happiness or sanity or something immense and dreadful to conclude.

“You don’t need to call Julia those Miss Whatever names,” I said, “do you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Very much. Absolutely very much. She’s got training-bra spring in her tits, and she’s got you forlorn. Yes, I do.”

“You don’t even need a bra, Rebecca. Look at you.”

When she looked down at herself, as I looked up her chest, beneath me, where we lay, her eyes nearly crossed. She put her hands on herself and said, “They’re hard as ice.”

“It’s the cold.”

“So, David,” she said, “let’s be practical. Get me warm here, will you?”

It was Rebecca in the darkness I wanted, so I pulled the covers up over us, and I also closed my eyes. I lay inside her, and she lay beneath me inside her dead father’s hunting coat. Later on, I thought that we hadn’t solved very much between us, and then, still later, after she had gone to the house, as I stood at the stove in the smell of natural gas and of her whiskey and vermouth and cigarettes and soap while the soup slowly cooked, I thought that we hadn’t done so badly at what it is you do when the weather is bad, and prospects are slim, and it is best to not be wholly on your own.

The next morning, there was some kind of dazzle in the sky. The clouds were milky and low in a blanket, and little flecks of sun broke through. They made me think of the flecks of ice in Rebecca’s hair as she shook them off in the dull light of the trailer. They also made me think of the gray-white plastic walls of the trailer, which were flecked with a gold-colored paint. I noticed the sky, and then the low gray car that was parked behind the kid’s cabin at the motel. It looked as though it had been in a fire, or as though whitewash had been dumped all over it and badly cleaned off. I wondered if the stains on his jacket had something to do with the charred look of the car, an old Pontiac with busted springing in the back which suggested that someone had used it for hauling heavy freight over long distances.

I lugged and wrestled a long, flat rock that would serve as a kind of keystone for the wall, at what was once, years before, the beginning of their driveway, when they kept it paved and when anyone drove on it to visit them. The wall would be about three feet high and would separate their land from the road for a hundred feet, ending at the other end of their former driveway, near the stone house where Rebecca and Mrs. Josephine Peete managed a very small estate, mostly by selling off parcels of their property. They were in a corner of what had been hundreds of acres. They were the only year-round residents, and in winter, without the protection of foliage and brush, they could see the A-frames and faux-Victorian cottages of their neighbors.

The kid backed from the door of his cabin as I loaded a wheelbarrow with rocks to set out in a bottom layer leading from the keystone. He didn’t come down the steps to wait for the bus, and he didn’t wear his backpack. That was how I knew it was Saturday morning.

“Hey,” I called across the road.

He looked at me, but his face showed no expression and he didn’t reply.

“I live over here,” I said. “In the little trailer in there.” I pointed in the general direction of the pine trees. “How’s it going?” I asked, trying to sound like an all-right person.

He studied me, and then he took his hands out of his coat pockets and lifted them a little way into the air before him and, with no expression, shrugged. He looked like a miniature man who indicated that fate would have its say.

“I’m David,” I said. “I work at this place.”

His hands were back in his pockets and his pointed, pale face gave me nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “It’s time to work.”

I fitted the stones together right. I knew how to do that because all I ever did right as a kid was build. I’d constructed a fortress near my parents’ place in South Jersey, narrow but tall, maybe fourteen feet high, made of wood on a stone foundation — not drypoint, like this one, but made solid with mortar — and it still was there. My mother reported on it when she and my father came to see me, after I had finally graduated. She’d been kneeling at the little refrigerator in my trailer, putting packets of food inside, and she had just told me how my fort still stood, when she began to cry. I thought she was crying about the size of the trailer, the smell of it, the pretty powerful sense it radiated that, living in it, you had given up on acquiring a future. I didn’t ask her, though. I sat back at the little fold-up table and let her pretend not to cry while she, down at the refrigerator, pretended not to know that I observed her weeping. Giving that kind of privacy to each other can be almost as good as a set of walls, or a door you can close behind you. My father had never learned about it, and pretty soon he was standing behind her, almost shouting down onto her head. “Lily! What? What’s wrong?” He turned to look at me, and something about my face — maybe the nothing I tried to compose on it — made him think about shooting me, or slugging me, or shouting. “Lil,” he said, “ tell me.”