Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

In her peripheral sight she saw a stirring nearby, a startling sudden movement that turned out to be a shape stumbling in the uneven pockets of sand toward the water.

Nicholas Duego.

And he had just seen her, veering in her direction. He stopped and fumbled with something in his shirt pocket. A cigarette. She watched him light it and then come on. “Hello,” he said. “I wondered where you went.”

“If you don’t mind I’d rather be alone.”

He seemed not to have heard. He sat down about three feet from her, elbows resting on knees, saying nothing, and not looking at her but at the moonlight on the water. After drawing on the cigarette, he offered it.

“I don’t smoke.”

“It is not tobacco.”

She stared at him a moment, then took it, drew deeply on it, and handed it back.

“It is the only thing that relaxes me,” he said. “When I want to relax. Sometimes I would rather not relax. For that I have other things.”

She blew the smoke out and briefly had to fight the need to cough. Sitting back and looking at him, she said, “Really.”

He smiled. “You are not used to the smoke.”

She had the feeling that he was trying to impress her. She almost laughed. “I guess you’re a bad character.”

He offered the joint.

“Right,” she said.

“I am not bad, no. I am a good man.”

“That’s nice to know.”

They smoked for a few minutes in silence, passing the roach back and forth. She wasn’t thinking about anything but relief from the whiskey-dimmed funk she was in, and it came to her that in its way this was similar to those passes in the bars and clubs of Washington when there was just the blankness of herself in the instant, just the time and place, no history or thought of a future, either, but only the counterfeit brightness of the exact present. The sky shifted before them, the clouds moving, and she could not think of the clouds as anything but emptily pretty things that did not apply to her. There was only this very minute itself: a squall out at sea, water lifting and settling, night with its terrors beyond the line of the horizon, far away.

“I have more,” Duego said, holding out a little plastic bag. “Should I roll us another one?”

She watched him do it, saying nothing, and kept the one he’d given her, taking another hit from it, holding it between her thumb and forefinger, the coal burning very close to her flesh now. It was almost gone.

1

He offered her more, and she took it, gazing at the slowly vanishing lunar radiance on the water. You could still see small glimmering traces of it on the shifting surface, thousands of white wings. Marijuana after alcohol made her woozy, as if she had just awakened from a long sleep. But her vision seemed sharper, and her senses, her nerve endings, were tingling. She thought idly of the phrase having a buzz on .

He was talking, going on about something.

Food, she realized.

“I like things cooked dark. Crisp and brown.”

She looked at the side of his face, a handsome Latin face, with a sharp nose and high cheekbones, and coal-black hair. She felt nothing. Yet when she handed him back the joint, and he rested his other hand on her shoulder, she did not remove herself. The moonlight was dying, shrouded in folds of cloud. She put her knees up and rested her head on them.

The other took a hit and said, “I did not speak English until I was ten years old.”

She sniffled. “You told us that. Please leave me alone.”

“I think if you talk to me you will feel better.”

She did not speak.

He went on smoking, holding it in, then letting go, blowing the smoke. He held the joint out to her. “I am a dancer.”

“You told us.”

“I never liked it as a child.”

“Dancing.” She took another toke and handed it back.

“I did not like America. In my country there was a very strong official hatred of it. But my father felt differently. He worked for Americans before the revolution. My mother was Canadian. He wanted to go be an American or a Canadian. But I was a boy and I had friends. I did not want to leave my friends. In the house, when I was small, as long as I can remember, he talked about going to North America, and I have memories of them fighting about it. And then my mother died. I did not know when we went to Canada to visit her family that it was to go to America to live. A friend in America helped him.”

She could think of nothing in response. And then she simply dismissed the worry about it. Mentally, she dismissed him . “Do you still hate America?” Her voice was flatly automatic.

He appeared momentarily affronted. “I am a citizen.”

“Ever heard the phrase America, love it or leave it ?”

He laughed. “I could have made that up. It could have been me. Because I love America. It gave me the chance to be a dancer.”

“What kind of dance? Ballet?”

He shook his head. “Modern dance.”

“Yes, well, I had ballet in school.”

“Did you like it?”

“Not especially, I’m sorry to say. I wasn’t any good at it.”

They were quiet.

Presently, he said, “It’s hard to be good at something you do not like.”

“Well, I wasn’t very good.”

“I was not good in school. My wife helped me study and do better and now she is gone. The woman she is with — I thought this woman was my friend.”

“I’m sorry.” The dope was not making her feel anything. She had no sense of well-being or of the jollity it usually occasioned and, looking out at the seascape before her, she wished for solitude while lacking the will to do anything to achieve it. She sat quite still, her distress having shaded into this drowsy gloom, this sour observing.

“Where are you from?” he asked. “Your voice is different.”

She told him.

“That is in Shelby County.”

“How did you know that?”

“I had a friend I visited in Memphis. The second day terrible thunderstorms came and they kept saying the counties and we listened because it was a tornado and the storm hit Bartlett in Shelby County. I remember that. Because I thought of pears. We watched it on the television. It knocked down trees. I went to Graceland.”

“Almost everyone who visits Memphis goes there. A lot go there because of Graceland.”

He wrote in the sand. “That is my address in Orlando, Florida.”

“Please. I’m really not up for talking.”

“It feels good to carve it in the sand, after today. My place on earth. And I mark it here. Like a sign for everyone to see.”

“People will walk on it.” The idea struck her as funny. She laughed softly.

“Here.” He offered her another hit.

“Okay.”

They smoked. Somewhere behind them was the sound of a steel drum. It went on awhile and then died away. A girl laughed, and a man laughed, too. They spoke in German, and after a few moments you couldn’t hear them anymore.

“Write yours,” he said.

“At present, I have no address.”

He stared.

“All right. Here’s where my grandmother lives.” And as she scrawled the number and the name of the street, she did feel strangely as if she were claiming something in defiance. The idea made her pause. Then she swept her hand across all of it. “This is what happens, isn’t it.”

“Why did you do that?”

“Because I’m not superstitious.”

He wrote his name and wiped it away. “Neither am I.”

A moment later, he said, “Why do you have no home?”

She told him about leaving the job in Washington and was surprised to find that she felt friendly toward him; something in her nerves, below the level of thinking, was actually responding to the cool night breezes and the quiet talk.