Richard Ford - Women with Men

“I'm not,” Barbara said. “Never mind. It doesn't matter. I just think things and then they go away.” More spoon banging.

“I love you,” Austin said. The rim of his ear had begun to ache from the receiver being pressed into it with his shoulder.

“Good,” Barbara said. “Go to sleep loving me.”

“I don't want to argue.”

“Then don't argue,” Barbara said. “Maybe I'm just in a bad mood. I'm sorry.”

“Why are you mad?” Austin said.

“Sometimes,” Barbara said. Then she stopped. “I don't know. Sometimes you just piss me off.”

“Well, shit,” Austin said.

“Shit is right. Shit,” Barbara said. “It's nothing. Go to sleep.”

“Fine. I will,” Austin said.

“I'll see you tomorrow, sweetheart.”

“Sure,” Austin said, wanting to sound casual. He started to say something else. To tell her he loved her, again in the casual voice. But Barbara had hung up the phone.

Austin sat in bed in his pajamas, staring at himself in the smoky mirror. It was a different picture from before. He looked grainy, displeased, the light beside his bed harsh, intrusive, his champagne glass empty, the night he'd just spent unsuccessful, unpromising, vaguely humiliating. He looked like he was on drugs. That was the true picture, he thought. Later, he knew, he would think differently, would see events in a kinder, more flattering light. His spirits would rise as they always did and he would feel very, very encouraged by something, anything. But now was the time to take a true reading, he thought, when the tide was out and everything exposed — including himself — as it really, truly was. There was the real life, and he wasn't deluded about it. It was this picture you had to act on.

He sat in bed and felt gloomy, drank the rest of his champagne and thought about Barbara in the house alone, probably doing something to prepare for his arrival the next afternoon — arranging some fresh flowers or preparing to cook something he especially liked. Maybe that's what she was doing when they were talking, in which case he was certainly wrong to have been annoyed. After thinking along these lines for a while, he reached over and began to dial Joséphine's number. It was two a.m. He would wake her up, but that was all right. She'd be glad he had. He would tell her the truth — that he couldn't keep from calling her, that she was on his mind, that he wished she was here with him, that he already missed her, that there was more to this than seemed. But when he'd dialed her number the line was busy. And it was busy in five minutes. And in fifteen. And in thirty. So that after a while he dispiritedly turned off the light beside the bed, put his head on the crisp pillow and passed quickly into sleep.

In the small suburban community of Oak Grove, Illinois, Austin meant to take straight aim on his regular existence — driving to and from the Lilienthal office in nearby Winnetka; helping coach a Little League team sponsored by a friend's Oak Grove linoleum company; spending evenings at home with Barbara, who was a broker for a big firm that sold commercial real estate and who was herself having an excellent selling season.

Austin, however, could sense that something was wrong, which bewildered him. Although Barbara had decided to continue everyday life as if that were not true, or as if whatever was bothering him was simply outside her control and because she loved him, eventually his problem would either be solved privately or be carried away by the flow of ordinary happy life. Barbara's was a systematically optimistic view: that with the right attitude, everything works out for the best. She possessed this view, she said, because her family had all been Scottish Presbyterians. And it was a view Austin admired, though it was not always the way he saw things. He thought ordinary life had the potential to grind you into dust — his parents’ life in Peoria, for instance, a life he couldn't have stood — and sometimes unusual measures were called for. Barbara said this point of view was typically shanty Irish.

On the day Austin returned — into a hot, springy airport sunshine, jet-lagged and forcibly good-spirited — Barbara had cooked venison haunch in a rich secret fig sauce, something she'd had to sleuth the ingredients for in a Hungarian neighborhood on West Diversey, plus Brabant potatoes and roasted garlics (Austin's favorite), plus a very good Merlot that Austin had drunk too much of while earnestly, painstakingly lying about all he'd done in Paris. Barbara had bought a new spring dress, had her hair restreaked and generally gone to a lot of trouble to orchestrate a happy homecoming and to forget about their unpleasant late-night phone conversation. Though Austin felt it should be his responsibility to erase that uncomfortable moment from memory and see to it his married life of long standing was once again the source of seamless, good-willed happiness.

Late that night, a Tuesday, he and Barbara made brief, boozy love in the dark of their thickly curtained bedroom, to the sound of a neighbor's springer spaniel barking unceasingly one street over. Theirs was practiced, undramatic lovemaking, a set of protocols and assumptions lovingly followed like a liturgy which points to but really has little connection with the mysteries and chaos that had once made it a breathless necessity. Austin noticed by the digital clock on the chest of drawers that it all took nine minutes, start to finish. He wondered bleakly if this was of normal or less than normal duration for Americans his and Barbara's age. Less, he supposed, though no doubt the fault was his.

Lying in the silent dark afterwards, side by side, facing the white plaster ceiling (the neighbor's dog had shut up as if on cue from an unseen observer of their act), he and Barbara sought to find something to say. Each knew the other's mind was seeking it; an upbeat, forward-sounding subject that conjured away the past couple or maybe it was three years, which hadn't been so wonderful between the two of them — a time of wandering for Austin and patience from Barbara. They wished for something unprovoking that would allow them to go to sleep thinking of themselves the way they assumed they were.

“Are you tired? You must be pretty exhausted,” Barbara said matter-of-factly into the darkness. “You poor old thing.” She reached and patted him on his chest. “Go to sleep. You'll feel better tomorrow.”

“I feel fine now. I'm not tired,” Austin said alertly. “Do I seem tired?”

“No. I guess not.”

They were silent again, and Austin felt himself relaxing to the sound of her words. He was, in fact, corrosively tired. Yet he wanted to put a good end to the night, which he felt had been a nice one, and to the homecoming itself, and to the time he'd been gone and ridiculously infatuated with Joséphine Belliard. That encounter — there was no encounter, of course — but in any case those pronouncements and preoccupations could be put to rest. They could be disciplined away. They were not real life — at least not the bedrock, real est life, the one everything depended on — no matter how he'd briefly felt and protested. He wasn't a fool. He wasn't stupid enough to lose his sense of proportion. He was a survivor, he thought, and survivors always knew which direction the ground was.

“I just want to see what's possible now,” Austin said unexpectedly. He was half asleep and had been having two conversations at once — one with Barbara, his wife, and one with himself about Joséphine Belliard — and the two were getting mixed up. Barbara hadn't asked him anything to which what he'd just mumbled was even a remotely logical answer. She hadn't, that he remembered, asked him anything at all. He was just babbling, talking in his near sleep. But a cold, stiffening fear gripped him, a fear that he'd said something, half asleep and half drunk, that he'd be sorry for, something that would incriminate him with the truth about Joséphine. Though in his current state of mind, he wasn't at all sure what that truth might be.