Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

“Can we have two glasses of Hine VSOP?” Faulk said.

“Coming right up, sir.” The waiter walked away.

“We’ll have a real honeymoon in France, for the whole spring. If that’s what you want.”

“Yes.” She was disinclined to think about it now but wanted to please him. And then the full import of what he had said came to her. “Isn’t it what you want?”

He watched the old couple sip their cognac.

“Michael. Isn’t it what we want?”

“Sure.”

The waiter brought the two snifters of cognac. Faulk picked his up and swirled the liquid and breathed the sting of it into his nostrils.

“Why did you say it that way? If that’s what I want?”

“I don’t know. I just want you happy. If you’re happy, then I’ll be happy.”

“I am happy.”

He sipped the cognac, and she took a little of hers, watching him. He seemed to be pondering something, looking at the other people, and then out at the river, tapping his fingers lightly on the table, not even quite aware of it.

“So, then — you’re happy?” She waited.

“The world doesn’t feel all that safe a place to travel right now.” He signaled the waiter.

“You’re going to have another?”

“Just one more. I’m nervous.”

“So am I.”

The waiter came over, and Faulk held up two fingers. “The same.”

She finished hers and handed the empty glass to the waiter.

“I’m happy, too,” Faulk said. “Let’s keep to that.”

“Are you getting drunk? Are we getting drunk? On our wedding night?”

He smiled. “It’s been a great night. I’m drunk on that.”

The waiter came with two more cognacs and set them down.

They watched him move off.

“Because we’re nervous?” she said.

“I’m getting calm.” And in fact, he felt suddenly quite calm. Bizarrely, gratifyingly superior to her. The realization of this obliterated the calm. He couldn’t believe the turns of his own mind.

“I’m shaking,” she said. “I think it’s getting too chilly to be up here.”

“You look so beautiful, sitting there.” There was only the surge of anxiety now.

“After this, can we go down to the room?” she asked.

“Should I carry you across the threshold?”

“That won’t be necessary.”

“At the house, then.”

“Michael, really.”

He watched her for a moment, sipping the cognac. She had been loving and charming tonight and had even seemed calm, as he was now far from it. He touched her glass with his and drank the cognac and held the complex taste of it on his palate. It occurred to him that he was drunk, and that this explained his sudden panicky mood. He had been needling her about the threshold in order to break out of the cloud of fright.

“I’m worried about my drinking,” she said. “I had a vermouth and now the brandy. And I had a beer at the café. And wine with the dinner.”

He gave her his gentlest smile. “If you’re worried about it, I think that’s a sign that you’re healthy about it, too.”

She shook her head. “I’m gonna finish this brandy and then stop.”

They were quiet for a few moments. They had both become watchful inside, aware of the silence as being somehow like a pause in some struggle they were engaged in together. He drank the rest of his cognac, and then the rest of hers, and felt the easing inside as it warmed him.

Others came to the roof, though the night was indeed growing chilly. A waiter lit the gas lanterns above the tables. Faulk ordered one more cognac because she seemed to enjoy the heat coming from the gas lanterns. They listened to the chatter that went on around them. A man kept looking over at them, and she noticed it.

“Probably one of my old parishioners,” Faulk said. “Though he doesn’t look vaguely familiar.”

“Can we go to our room now?” she said. “The lamp feels good, but I’m getting cold.”

“Oh,” he said. “Darling. We’re going to be so happy.” He drank the rest of the cognac and, after signaling the waiter, reached into his jacket pocket.

Tomorrow they would spend the first part of the day here, downtown. They would have coffee at the hotel and then take a walk in the old part of the city. They would eat breakfast in the penthouse restaurant at the Peabody.

“I’ve never been so glad,” he told her. “I can’t explain it, but that’s the feeling.” A nagging little mote in his soul rebuked him with the fact that much of what he felt now had been produced by the brandy. “I am,” he said, against that knowledge. “I’m very glad.”

She wanted so to believe him. And to believe it was true for her, as well. She told herself that she had done nothing wrong, and she was not going to give in to the idea that she must spend any amount of time atoning for something she did not do. As they went into the light of the hallway to the elevator, she kept her hand in his. There was nothing to fear anymore. She was safe. Back in America. Back in Memphis. Home. Nothing wrong anymore.

As they got onto the elevator, she took a deep breath and tried to settle her own nerves, feeling this happy moment and the unease of the past days like warring parts of her soul.

For him, it was exactly the same.

9

In the room, he undressed her, and she stood and let him. It was unlike the lovemaking they had done before. There was an element of the staged about it — a compensation for something on both sides, as if without being fully aware of it as such, they were performing some ritual to exorcise ghosts. She lay in his arms looking into the dark beyond his shoulder and murmured his name, but she could not quite feel it as pleasure; it was work. She moved to help him finish, feeling ashamed and wanting more but finding herself unable to shake free of the thoughts and images that troubled her.

When it was over they lay side by side in the quiet, hearing only each other’s breathing and the low hum of the heater vent.

“Well, Wife?” he said.

“So lovely,” she told him.

“Did you come?”

“Too much brandy.”

“Cognac.”

“I thought they were the same.”

“Technically. There’s something about how they do it in Cognac, though. Double pot stilled.”

“Explain.”

“Next time.” He smiled.

“You don’t know, do you.”

They laughed together. And nothing about what they had just done in the bed mattered beyond the fact that they were together, and close.

“Shall we have a little ‘next time’ tonight?” he said.

“If you want to, of course. It’s honeymoon night.”

“But we know each other so well already.”

“What a thing to say.”

“Well. A little truth can’t hurt. Truth’s good, don’t you think?”

She was conscious of another specific way he could have meant this. She got out of the bed and went into the bathroom, where she washed herself and brushed her hair. The silence in the room behind her was not calming. When she returned to the bed he was lying there with his hands clasped over his chest, regarding her.

She touched his wrist. “Kind sir.”

“Better clean up myself.” He rose, yawned, and stretched.

“If you want to make love again …” she began.

He coughed and cleared his throat, going into the bathroom. He had heard her, of course, but he felt obscurely that somehow his dignity was involved. He looked at himself in the mirror and uttered the word “Please,” like a whispered prayer. He cleaned his teeth and urinated into the bowl, and then went back to stand over the bed. She lay there, eyes closed, on one side, hands together under the side of her face.

“You awake?”

She opened her eyes and looked at him. “I thought I was. But I was talking to Iris so I must’ve drifted.”