Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

“Iris?” she said, suddenly filled with the urge to turn and run.

“In here, baby,” Iris said.

Natasha made her tentative way in, imagining Duego sitting in there with his polite overly formal air and his speech that was so much like rehearsed phrases. But it was a man Iris’s age or older. He was seated across from her at the kitchen table. The room smelled strongly of coffee. The man had a shaved head, was soft featured though a bit emaciated, his cheekbones standing out, with deep-set light blue eyes, and a well-trimmed white beard that made the hairless scalp all the more striking. He reached forward to shake hands, half-rising from his chair.

“This is Liam Adams,” Iris said. “An old friend.”

Natasha shook hands, staring at him. He did not look the slightest bit familiar.

“Hello,” Liam Adams said.

“Mr. Adams and I go way back.”

Natasha stood silent, with a half smile of greeting.

“I’m visiting from New York,” he said.

“We knew each other in the mayor’s office,” said Iris. “When you were small.”

“I remember you when you were this big.” Mr. Adams held his hand out below the level of the tabletop.

“He’s moving back to Memphis.”

“Because of the attacks,” Natasha guessed.

“Actually, I’d been planning to for a couple of years.” His smile was wide, and he had small yellow in-turning teeth. His blue eyes seemed too young for the elderly features. “But the Twin Towers got me focused on it, I guess. I grew up here, you know. And — and New York requires so much energy.”

Soon they were all three seated at the table. “Did you know my mother?” Natasha asked.

“No.”

“It was just you and me, honey, when I took the job in the mayor’s office.”

“And I came in a year later, right?” Mr. Adams said.

“That’s right.”

He shook his head, smiling wistfully. “I got married in New York. Twenty years we were together. Never thought I would get married. I’d been single so long.”

The other two were silent.

“She passed away in ’96.”

“I’m sorry,” Iris said.

“March.” He sipped the coffee, staring out the window.

She stood and moved to pour more coffee. He watched her and, thanking her, lifted the cup and drank again. Iris sat down, moved the flat of her hands across the surface of the table. “Well,” she said. “This is certainly strange.” Then she laughed. “I can’t believe it. All these years—”

“You were going to say?” Natasha asked her.

“Well, it’s just been so long.”

There was a pause.

“I couldn’t come to Memphis and not call you,” Mr. Adams said.

“That would’ve upset me.”

Natasha thought of the news she had and stared at them both. Iris asked him where he was when the towers were hit.

“I was walking my dog. Eighth Avenue, up on Ninety-First. I didn’t see it until I went in and made some toast for myself and sat down in front of the TV.”

“Such a terrible thing,” said Iris. “Natasha’s husband was there, too. In New York. But like you, a few blocks north.”

“I lost a neighbor. Didn’t know him that well. But I saw him that morning, and he talked about not going to work that day. But he went. There are so many ironies like that in it — people going along at the beginning of a working day like any other and something so bad coming.”

“Would you like to stay for lunch?”

“No, I should go. Some other time.”

Iris saw him out, then sat at the kitchen table and looked at the coffee in her cup. “Imagine,” she said.

Natasha watched her, and when she put one hand to her forehead and seemed about to cry, Natasha pulled her chair around and sat close.

Iris looked at her. “What?”

“Are you all right?”

“Little headache. Had it before he got here.”

“I’m pregnant.”

Her grandmother turned to her and stared, eyes wide, mouth open as if she might shout or cry. “Oh, sweetie,” she said. “Is it true? Is it really true?”

5

ARTICLE 3. Whether it can be said that a person may still be in love with someone other than her spouse and decide against acting on it out of fear of hurting him, who is dear to her?

We proceed thus to the Third Article: It seems that it can be said that a person may still be in love with someone other than her spouse and decide against acting on it out of fear of hurting him, who is dear to her.

Objection 1 .

The crux of this case is against the grain of genuine straightforward honesty in my wife, who has in all other instances taken pains to be direct and truthful with me while denying that there is something more giving her these panics and night spells than the memory of having been trapped and believing she had lost me.

Objection 2 .

Further, she has shown herself to be quite strong in asserting herself and her version of things when confronted or questioned, even with the lately subtle and guarded form reservations and questions have mostly taken (she will not speak of it directly), and there is clearly the same puzzlement as mine about all this in the one person she would confide in other than her husband if indeed there were such a circumstance, her grandmother, who I have come to believe continues in the same dark as I am about the cause of these confusions of feeling.

On the contrary , It is well known that in many circumstances involving a dishonesty in order to protect the feelings of someone whose well-being is in question, there exists an extreme scrutiny about matters of no bearing on the essential question, in order to preserve the deception.

I answer that , The idea itself is so contrary to the experience of being with my wife in every single other instance, and that when I watch her with her grandmother, or her friend Marsha, or our friend Andrew Clenon, it is impossible to put together this bright, intelligent, warm, expressive, and clever person with the one who seems inwardly, in spite of all her effort, to cower at the prospect of intimacy with me. That is, any intimacy beyond simply lying next to each other to read or talk. And she shows the quickest tendency to a kind of interior cringing at any suggestion that something is not the same, that something is missing. Ease is missing. She denies it and asks for time, and there seem to be moments when she comes toward me, but it all feels produced .

Reply Obj. 1 .

The essential circumstance which is such cause of dismay is something emanating from those more than two weeks we were apart, and all the hurts and doubts stem from uncertainty about a singular event I am not privy to but about which there is undeniable evidence.

Reply Obj. 2 .

What really amounts to only a few hours of fearing she had lost me does not seem at all sufficient as a cause of such a long period of lingering aftershock.

6

The two women worked on the bending exercises for Iris’s knee, and some lifting with two-pound weights, and then Natasha drove her to the bank and to the store. Iris talked excitedly and happily about the new baby. “It’s just what this world — just what we need now,” she said. “Have you thought about a name? I bet not. Well, it’s new. I wonder what you’ll settle on. Have you-all talked about it? I can come over and babysit every day. It’s going to be so wonderful living so close. My God, I’ll — I’m about to be a great-grandmother.” She was using the cane, but was clearly less dependent on it, touching it to the ground with each step. “Imagine that. A great-grandmother.”