Richard Bausch - Before, During, After

She sat on the bed, crying now for all those whom she would never know, as if they were all one species together, a type of creature, crouched in the failure of light all around them, estranged from where they lived, crushed by expectations and by assumptions.

And she thought about what her husband had assumed.

Finally, she got dressed and walked in the predawn toward Iris’s. It was growing colder, and there was a fine mist. The mist soaked her as she walked. She let herself in, and quietly made her way upstairs, to her old bedroom, for something else to put on. Then she carried it into the bathroom, and looked at her face in the mirror. No bruising. She got out of the wet clothes and stepped into the shower. It was as it had been in Jamaica, the hot water pouring down, mixing with her tears.

“Natasha?” Iris’s voice, full of alarm.

Natasha turned the water off and stepped out. “I’m all right.”

Iris was standing in the doorway. “Is he downstairs?”

“I sent him away,” Natasha said, wrapping a towel around herself.

“You have to go back,” Iris told her, stepping into the small space with her and putting her arm over her shoulder. “You have to find him. Did you tell him about the baby? What happened? Tell me.”

“He was drunk. We had a fight.”

“You have to go find him.”

“Let me get dressed, please?”

“I’ll be downstairs. But you have to be there when he comes back. I’ll make coffee, and we’ll have a cup, but you must go back. Did you argue with him? You can’t argue with him drunk, sweetie, you can’t do anything with them when they’re drunk. You’re just arguing with what they’ve had to drink. But you have to be there when he comes home, and you can talk to him then. You know that.”

“Please?” Natasha said.

The other shook her head, moving out into the hall. “I’ll be downstairs.”

She closed the door and got into the dry clothes. It was hard to breathe fully out, and she waited, trying to decide what she would say, how she would explain it.

Downstairs, her grandmother had put coffee on. She was standing at the stove, and Natasha saw the thick blue veins of her ankles.

“Sit,” Iris said.

Natasha did so and put her hands flat on the table before her, sniffling. “Can I have a vermouth?”

“Coffee. It’s five-thirty in the morning.”

“Vermouth. Oh, please.”

“So you’ll be drunk.”

“I haven’t had anything to drink, Iris. I–I need something to calm me down.”

“What about the baby?”

“Oh,” Natasha said, crying out. “I don’t want the baby. Not like this.”

Iris stared, her mouth partly open.

“Oh, God. I can’t. I can’t .”

“Tell me,” Iris said. “Come on. Tell me now.”

2

He woke with a start, hearing the sound outside of a motorcycle. His head hurt. He had a swooning sense of a thing he was failing to do and then fully realized all of it, sitting up, the muscles of his abdomen twisting and cramping, his heart pounding. He had fallen asleep in his clothes.

He got out of the cot and walked unsteadily to the door of the apartment, which was ajar. He saw the street in gray light. The sky was a flat cloud screen, and there were patches of fog in the road at the end of the block. Little pockets of mist clung to the lower branches of the trees. It was a gray, chilly morning. He went back to the cot and put on his shoes. Up the street, Mr. Baines was sitting on his little porch in a bomber jacket, eating. Faulk, in his agitation, thought of him as the fat landlord. The thought was not something he had known himself capable of having. He had come to a new region of his own being and it frightened him. He wanted to break something, tear something down. Baines waved for him to come over.

“Want some?” he said, as Faulk approached.

“What is it.”

“Lasagna from last night.”

“Not for breakfast.”

“Taking what might be my last morning outside for a while. It’s gonna get cold today.”

Faulk watched him eat.

“Cold front coming.”

He started to move off.

“I’ve got somebody who’ll sublet,” Baines said, “if you change your mind about keeping it. So you see, old Baines will even help someone find a sublet if he wants to marry a young woman and live elsewhere and changes his mind about keeping it.”

“Like I said, it’ll be used as a place to work.”

“Did you work all night? You don’t look good.” The smile didn’t change. But there was a sly glint in the eyes.

“In fact, that’s exactly what I did. I worked all night.”

“What kind of work does a former priest do?”

Faulk hesitated.

“You in the doghouse, old son?”

“I’m writing a book,” Faulk told him. “How about you? You writing one?”

The other man shoved a forkful of the lasagna into his mouth and spoke through chewing. “Baines likes to know how his tenants are doing.”

“I asked if you’re writing a book,” Faulk said.

“You ever taste cold lasagna?”

“No thanks.”

“You gonna be spending the night often?” Something smug about the little smile in that heavy face made Faulk want to batter him. It was the mood of this hour in the world.

“Maybe,” Faulk said.

“Well.” The other grinned at him. “Of course that’s your business.”

He walked back down the street to the car and got in and started it. And began to cry. Who had done it; why had she not told him?

Daylight had not yet cleared the trees at the horizon. Back up the street, the fat landlord was hunched over his repellent dawn meal.

At the house, he let himself in and walked through the rooms. He saw the broken door in its shocking crooked angle against the bathroom sink, and he turned slowly, looking at the windows, the furniture, all the facets of life as it was supposed to be. Then he faced again the destruction of the doorway into the bathroom. The frame, the baseboard, the lintel — crooked, splintered, and broken, bending into the space of the opening. All this had happened.

Feeling the lingering effects of the wine, he made his way into the living room and sat down on the sofa. His own rasping exhalations were the only sound. Without consciously deciding to, he began going over it all again, thinking it through, step by step, and then he remembered that she had been assaulted. She had been assaulted, and this was what she had been waiting to tell him. He saw an image of her sitting up in the bed, the book open on her knees. “Oh, God,” he said.

He could not imagine a way back to her; he believed she would never want to find a way.

She would have gone to Iris’s.

He drove there and then lost courage and drove by, looking at the place in the lawn where Adams had lain. Adams, the one with whom he had gotten drunk — the one whose trivial, silly descent into helplessness was one pass in a night that, if it had ended with simply going to sleep, would not even be something worth remembering. Though Adams was a man suffering, too, reliving the loss of his wife, five years ago, still afflicted with it, and Faulk had spent so much of his life trying to see into such suffering and also seeking to give help, seeking to understand it deeply enough to offer solace.

Kindness.

Through the living room window of Iris’s house, he saw that there was still a light on in the kitchen, though cloudy sun was coming through the tops of the trees now. He had an image of her sitting in that kitchen talking to her grandmother, telling her, if Iris did not already know everything, about what happened in Jamaica. The secret she had been keeping all this time. He saw again the look of pure unknowing on her face as he accused her. He wanted in this moment, more terribly than he would have believed possible, to die.