Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

“Want to watch television?”

Her smile was sardonic.

He turned the bathroom light off, got back into bed, and put his arms around her.

“You sleepy?”

“Yes, I guess so. Sorry. All that double-pot-stilled stuff.”

“I’m not sleepy.”

“We could do it again.”

“You’re tired.”

“I said I was sleepy.”

“But you are tired.”

“Oh, baby — maybe I am, a little. Aren’t you? It’s been a long day.”

He sighed and lay over on his back. “It has been that.”

“Want to talk?”

“Sure.”

They were quiet. Perhaps a full minute went by. It felt to them both like a long time.

At last, he said, “I wonder when I’m going to find out more about Jamaica.”

This struck through her. “Oh, God.”

“It’s all right, whatever it was. You’re my wife now.”

“Michael.”

“Well?”

“What do you think might have happened? Tell me that.”

He leaned up on one elbow and was a darker shadow in that dim space, looming over her. “I don’t have any idea. And I’m sorry. But when I asked that — when I asked your friend Constance about it, why you’re still so much — she looked for all the world like she was hiding something.”

“Constance looks that way no matter what the subject is.”

“But you are different.”

“Tell me what you think it is. Do that. What is it that you think happened in Jamaica.”

He took in a breath to say the words and then held them back. A part of him quailed at the thought of having it spoken, told out, whatever it was. This was their honeymoon night. He saw himself as being unreasonable and like an adolescent boy. Then, in an instant, he felt sober and awake, and very, very old. “I guess I’m jealous,” he said. “It’s stupid.”

“Jealous.”

“I said — it’s stupid. I think — maybe it’s — you’re so much younger. It’s natural for you to desire life. I know there’s something about me that makes — there was something about my — way of being that made Joan want to leave me.”

“Do you hear yourself?”

“I know,” he told her. “Forget it.”

“I’ve left a job and moved back here,” she said. “And I’m in the stages of recovering from the fright of my life, the fear that something”—she began to cry and tried very hard not to, wanting to speak definitely and clearly and to control her voice—“that something happened to you and we — we wouldn’t have this. Look, it’s all new to me and I’m sorry but I can’t help being nervous — and — and anyone would be and why can’t everybody stop reading into everything I do or say.”

“By everyone, do you mean Constance?”

“No,” she said, too loud. “Iris. You . I don’t know how to do this, Michael. I don’t know how to recover from thinking my life is over and my love is dead in a collapsing building in New York. I don’t know how to go on from all this we’ve been through.”

“I’m sorry,” he said into her sobs. “I’m sorry. Baby, please forget it. Forget I said anything.”

It was a while before she could speak. And when she could, the force of her own will surprised her. “Can we just go on with our lives together now? I don’t ever want to talk about Jamaica anymore. Please? Not ever. It was awful and it’s over and you’re safe and we’re here.”

While she spoke, crying, he put his arms around her and murmured through it, “Of course, my darling. Of course. We’ll never mention it.”

They lay there for a long time, both awake and both silent, while the city made its clamor out in the night — the heater had cut off, and they could hear everything — sirens and car horns and trucks going by and steadily, like a reminder of where they were, the far-off strains of music from Beale Street.

1

ARTICLE 1. Whether, putting aside her simple kindness, any evidence exists of my wife’s former passion for me?

We proceed thus to the First Article: It seems that, putting aside her simple kindness, we have no evidence of my wife’s former passion for me.

Objection 1 .

It is true that there have been stresses beyond the norm, therefore something external to her is affecting her behavior and her moods. The whole country is in panic now about the anthrax attacks. And of course the war is under way in Afghanistan.

Objection 2 .

It is true that people in courtship are different than they are in marriage, and this is Marriage. My wife is loving and considerate and seems happy, and she spends most mornings doing physical therapy with her grandmother, and they laugh together and tell each other stories and my wife looks like any other young woman glad of her circumstances, and glad to see me. But there are panic attacks in the night and when we are intimate I can feel her unhappiness in it and have tried talking to her gently about it and striven to be more what she needs, being as circumspect as possible and then by turns seeking to be more passionate, as passionate as we were. Yet something is in the way, something is displacing us, something is on her mind. She is not here, and it is hard not to fear that someone else may be in her deepest thoughts.

On the contrary , she has always shown in her relations with everyone a direct and honest bearing and a truthful nature. Her every gesture shows forth a strong-minded and gentle spirit, and she seems as troubled about our secret problem as I am. She still seems as loving to me as she always was and in other things pays generously careful attention to me. But there is an undeniable sense that something happened that she is hiding from me, and it seems that this which she feels she must hide can only have to do with the something in Jamaica, with the someone in Jamaica, that her friends evidently know about as women sometimes are supposed to know about these matters among themselves.

I answer that , there seems no evidence of involvement with anyone else, and I further admit that I have been watching her, and attending very carefully to her movements and her communications with others. Though there have been several calls from her friend Constance, and she has been going on afternoon walks with her friend Marsha. She seems vaguely unhappy to hear from Constance. Several times the calls have further upset her, though from what I can hear they are only talking about Constance’s decision to sell the house she spent so much of herself on and move permanently to New York; but there has seemed more distance between us after these conversations.

Reply Obj. 1 .

Although there have been stresses in the daily round of news and in the country as a whole, people seem to be making their way along in their lives without noticeable effects on mood or bearing.

Reply Obj. 2 .

Intimacy, of course, involves trust. And the trouble now is there seems an undeniable lessening of trust, on both sides. It would seem that, even if what happened in Jamaica was a momentary fling with an old flame — this person who by her own account she was willing to lie and cheat for and her affair with him was less than a year old when I first met her — even if this was the thing hidden, I cannot but conclude that whatever has existed between us is now made false, and it is the falseness of it that is causing all the quiet suffering.

ARTICLE 2. Whether it is feasible to believe that love can exist in an atmosphere of suspicion and the sense of having been betrayed?