The Stories of Richard Bausch (35 page)

And she began to cry.

“Jean,” he said, “for God’s sake.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, crying, “I just need some time.”

“Time,” he said. “Jean.
Jean.’”

She breathed once, and when she spoke again there was resolution in her voice, a definiteness that made his heart hurt. “I’ll be over to pick up a few things tomorrow afternoon.”

“Look,” he said, “what is this? What about us? What about the boys?”

“I don’t think you should let them see me tomorrow. This is hard enough for them.”

“What is, Jean.”

She said nothing. He thought she might’ve hung up.

“Jean,” he said. “Good Christ. Jean.”

“Please don’t do this,” she said.

Casey shouted into the phone.
“You’re
saying that to me!”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and hung up.

He dialed Dana’s number, and Dana answered.

“I want to speak to Jean, please.”

“I’m sorry, Casey—she doesn’t want to talk now.”

“Would you—” he began.

“I’ll ask her. I’m sorry, Casey.”

“Ask her to please come to the phone.”

There was a shuffling sound, and he knew Dana was holding her hand over the receiver. Then there was another shuffling, and Dana spoke to him. “I hate to be in the middle of this, Casey, but she doesn’t want to talk now.”

“Will you please ask her what I did.”

“I can’t do that. Really. Please, now.”

“Just tell her I want—goddammit—I want to know what I did.”

There was yet another shuffling sound, only this time Casey could hear Dana’s voice, sisterly and exasperated and pleading.

“Dana,” he said.

Silence.

“Dana.”

And Dana’s voice came back, very distraught, almost frightened. “Casey, I’ve never hung up on anyone in my life. I have a real fear of ever doing anything like that to anyone, but if you cuss at me again I will. I’ll hang up on you. Jean isn’t going to talk to anyone on the phone tonight. Really, she’s not, and I don’t see why I have to take the blame for it.”

“Dana,” he said, “I’m sorry. Tell her I’ll be here tomorrow—with her children. Tell her that.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“Goodbye, Dana.” He put the receiver down. In the boys’ room it was quiet, and he wondered how much they had heard, and—if they had heard enough—how much they had understood.

There was dinner to make, but he was practiced at it, so it offered no difficulty except that he prepared it in the knowledge that his wife was having some sort of nervous breakdown, and was unreachable in a way that made him angry as much as it frightened him. The boys didn’t eat the fish he fried, or the potatoes he baked. They had been sneaking cookies all day while he watched football. He couldn’t eat either, and so he didn’t scold them for their lack of appetite and only reprimanded them mildly for their pilferage.

Shortly after the dinner dishes were done, Michael began to cry. He said he had seen something on TV that made him sad, but he had been watching
The Dukes of Hazzard.

“My little tenderhearted man,” Casey said, putting his arms around the boy.

“Is Mommy at Dana’s?” Rodney asked. “Mommy had to go do something,” Casey said.

He put them to bed. He wondered as he tucked them in if he should tell them now that their mother wouldn’t be there in the morning. It seemed too much to tell a child before sleep. He stood in their doorway, imagining the shadow he made with the light behind him in the hall, and told them good night. Then he went into the living room and sat staring at the shifting figures
on the television screen. Apparently,
The Dukes of Hazzard
was over; he could tell by the music that this was a serious show. A man with a gun chased another man with another gun. It was hard to tell which one was the hero, and Casey began to concentrate. It turned out that both men were gangsters, and Jean, who used to say that she only put TV on sometimes for the voices, the company at night, had just told him that she was not coming home. He turned the gangsters off in mid-chase and stood for a moment, breathing fast. The boys were whispering and talking in the other room.

“Go to sleep in there,” he said, keeping his voice steady. “Don’t make me have to come in there.” He listened. In a little while, he knew, they would begin it all again; they would keep it up until they got sleepy. He turned the television back on, so they wouldn’t have to worry that he might hear them, and then he lay back on the sofa, miserable, certain that he would be awake all night. But some time toward the middle of the late movie, he fell asleep and had another dream. It was, really, the same dream: he was with Jean and the kids in a building, and they were looking for a way out; one of the boys opened a door on empty space, and Casey, turning, understood that this place was hundreds of feet above the street; the wind blew at the opening like the wind at the open hatch of an airliner, and someone was approaching from behind them. He woke up, sweating, cold, disoriented, and saw that the TV was off. With a tremendous settling into him of relief, he thought Jean had changed her mind and come home, had turned the TV off and left him there to sleep. But the bedroom was empty. “Jean,” he said into the dark, “Honey?” There wasn’t anyone there. He turned the light on.

“Daddy, you fell asleep watching television,” Michael said from his room.

“Oh,” Casey said, “Thanks, son. Can’t you sleep?” “Yeah.”

“Well—goodnight, then.”

“Night.”

So Jean is gone. Casey keeps the house, and the boys. He’s told them their mother is away because these things happen; he’s told them she needs a little time to herself. He hears Jean’s explanations to him in everything he says, and there doesn’t seem to be anything else to say. It’s as if they were all waiting for her to get better, as if this trouble were something physiological, an
illness that deprives them of her as she used to be. Casey talks to her on the phone now and then, and it’s always, oddly, as if they had never known anything funny or embarrassing about each other, and yet were both, now, funny and embarrassed. They talk about the boys; they laugh too quickly and they stumble over normal exchanges, like
hello
and
how are you
and
what have you been up to.
Jean has been working longer hours, making overtime from Dana’s husband. Since Dana’s husband’s office is right downstairs, she can go for days without leaving the house if she wants to. She’s feeling rested now. The overtime keeps her from thinking too much. Two or three times a week she goes over to the boys’ school and spends some time with them; she’s been a room mother since Michael started there two years ago, and she still does her part whenever there’s something for her to do. She told Casey over the phone that Rodney’s teacher seems to have no inkling that anything has changed at home.

Casey said “What
has
changed at home, Jean?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.

The boys seem, in fact, to be taking everything in stride, although Casey thinks there’s a reticence about them now; he knows they’re keeping their feelings mostly to themselves. Once in a while Rodney asks, quite shyly, when Mommy’s coming home. Michael shushes him. Michael is being very grown up and understanding. It’s as if he were five years older than he is. At night, he reads to Rodney from his Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. Casey sits in the living room and hears this. And when he has to work late, has to leave them with a baby-sitter, he imagines the baby-sitter hearing it, and feels soothed somehow—almost, somehow, consoled, as if simply to imagine such a scene were to bathe in its warmth: a slightly older boy reading to his brother, the two of them propped on the older brother’s bed.

This is what he imagines tonight, the night of the last performance of
Swan Lake,
as he stands in the balcony and watches the Hall fill up. The Hall is sold out. Casey gazes at the crowd and it crosses his mind that all these people are carrying their own scenes, things that have nothing to do with ballet, or polite chatter, or finding a numbered seat. The fact that they all move as quietly and cordially to their places as they do seems miraculous to him. They are all in one situation or another, he thinks, and at that instant he catches sight of Jean; she’s standing in the center aisle below him. Dana is with her. Jean is up on her toes, looking across to the other side of the Hall,
where Casey usually sits. She turns slowly, scanning the crowd. It strikes Casey that he knows what her situation is. The crowd of others surges around her. And now Dana, also looking for him, finds him, touches Jean’s shoulder and actually points at him. He feels strangely inanimate, and he steps back a little, looks away from them. A moment later, it occurs to him that this is too obviously a snub, so he steps forward again and sees that Dana is alone down there, that Jean is already lost somewhere else in the crowd. Dana is gesturing for him to remain where he is. The orchestra members begin wandering out into the pit and tuning up; there’s a scattering of applause. Casey finds a seat near the railing and sits with his hands folded in his lap, waiting. When this section of the balcony begins to fill up, he rises, looks for Dana again, and can’t find her. Someone edges past him along the railing, and he moves to the side aisle, against the wall. He sees Jean come in, and watches her come around to where he is.

“I was hoping you’d be here tonight,” she says, smiling. She touches his forearm, then leans up and gives him a dry little kiss on the mouth. “I wanted to see you.”

“You can see me anytime,” he says. He can’t help the contentiousness in his voice.

“Casey,” she says, “I know this is not the place—it’s just that—well, Dana and I were coming to the performance, you know, and I started thinking how unfair I’ve been to you, and—and it just doesn’t seem right.”

Casey stands there looking at her.

“Can we talk a little,” she says, “outside?”

He follows her up to the exit and out along the corridor to a little alcove leading into the rest rooms. There’s a red velvet armchair, which she sits in, then pats her knees exactly as if she expected him to settle into her lap. But she’s only smoothing her skirt over her knees, stalling. Casey pulls another chair over and then stands behind it, feeling a dizzy, unfamiliar sense of suffocation. He thinks of swallowing air, pulls his tie loose and breathes.

“Well,” she says.

“The performance is going to start any minute,” he says.

“I know,” she says. “Casey—” She clears her throat, holding the backs of her fingers over her lips. It is a completely uncharacteristic gesture, and he wonders if she might have picked it up from Dana. “Well,” she says, “I think we have to come to some sort of agreement about Michael and Rodney. I mean seeing them
in school—” She sits back, not looking at him. “You know, and talking on the phone and stuff—I mean that’s no good. I mean none of this is any good. Dana and I have been talking about this quite a lot, Casey. And there’s no reason, you know, that just because you and I aren’t together anymore—that’s no reason the kids should have to go without their mother.”

“Jean,” he says, “what—what—” He sits down. He wants to take her hand.

She says, “I think I ought to have them awhile. A week or two. Dana and I have discussed it, and she’s amenable to the idea. There’s plenty of room and everything, and pretty soon I’ll be—I’ll be getting a place.” She moves the tip of one finger along the soft surface of the chair arm, then seems to have to fight off tears.

Casey reaches over and takes her hand. “Honey,” he says.

She pulls her hand away, quite gently, but with the firmness of someone for whom this affection is embarrassing. “Did you hear me, Casey. I’m getting a place of my own. We have to decide about the kids.”

Casey stares at her, watches as she opens her purse and takes out a handkerchief to wipe her eyes. It comes to him very gradually that the orchestra has commenced to play. She seems to notice it too, now. She puts the handkerchief back in her purse and snaps it shut, then seems to gather herself.

“Jean,” he says, “for God’s sweet sake.”

“Oh, come on,” she says, her eyes swimming, “you knew this was coming. How could you not know this was coming?”

“I don’t believe this,” he says. “You come here to tell me this. At my
goddamn job.”
His voice has risen almost to a shout.

“Casey,” she says.

“Okay,” he says, rising. “I know you.” It makes no sense. He tries to find something to say to her; he wants to say it all out in an orderly way that will show her. But he stammers. “You’re not having a nervous breakdown,” he hears himself tell her, and then he repeats it almost as if he were trying to reassure her. “This is really it, then,” he goes on. “You’re not coming back.”

She stands. There’s something incredulous in the way she looks at him. She steps away from him, gives him a regretful look.

“Jean, we didn’t even have an argument,” he says. “I mean, what is this about?”
“Casey, I was so unhappy all the time. Don’t you remember anything? Don’t you see how it was? And I thought it was because I wasn’t a good mother. I didn’t even like the sound of their voices. But it was just unhappiness. I see them at school now and I love it. It’s not a chore now. I work like a dog all day and I’m not tired. Don’t you see? I feel good all the time now and I don’t even mind as much when I’m tired or worried.”

“Then—” he begins.

“Try to understand, Casey. It was ruining me for everyone in that house. But it’s okay now. I’m out of it and it’s okay. I’m not dying anymore in those rooms and everything on my nerves and you around every corner—” She stops.

He can’t say anything. He’s left with the weight of himself, standing there before her. “You know what you sound like,” he says. “You sound ridiculous, that’s what you sound like.” And the ineptness of what he has just said, the stupid, helpless rage of it, produces in him a tottering moment of wanting to put his hands around her neck. The idea comes to him so clearly that his throat constricts, and a fan of heat opens across the back of his head. He holds on to the chair back and seems to hear her say that she’ll be in touch, through a lawyer if that will make it easier, about arrangements concerning the children.