The Stories of Richard Bausch (54 page)

This particular Sunday
in the third year of their marriage, the Truebloods are leaving a gathering of the two families—a cookout at Kenneth’s parents’ that has lasted well into the night and ended with his father telling funny stories about being in the army in Italy just after the war. The evening has turned out to be exactly the kind of raucous, beery gathering Shannon said it would be, trying to beg off going. She’s pregnant, faintly nauseous all the time, and she’s never liked all the talk. She’s heard the old man’s stories too many times.

“They’re good stories,” Kenneth said that morning as she poured coffee for them both.

“I’ve heard every one of them at least twice,” said Shannon. “God knows how many times your mother has heard them.”

He said, “You might’ve noticed everybody laughing when he tells them, Shannon. Your father laughs until I start thinking about his heart.”

“He just wants to be a part of the group.”

“He chokes on it,” Kenneth said, feeling defensive and oddly embarrassed,
as if some unflattering element of his personality had been cruelly exposed. “Jesus, Shannon. Sometimes I wonder what goes through your mind.”

“I just don’t feel like listening to it all,” she told him. “Does it have to be a statement of some kind if I don’t go? Can’t you just say I’m tired?” “Your father and sisters are supposed to be there.” “Well, I’m pregnant—can’t I be tired?”

“What do you think?” Kenneth asked her, and she shook her head, looking discouraged and caught. “It’s just a cookout,” he went on. “Cheer up—maybe no one will want to talk.”

“That isn’t what I mean, and you know it,” she said.

Now she rolls
the window down on her side and waves at everybody. “See you,” she calls as Kenneth starts the car. For a moment they are sitting in the roar and rattle of the engine, which backfires and sends up a smell of burning oil and exhaust. Everyone’s joking and calling to them, and Kenneth’s three brothers begin teasing about the battered Ford Kenneth lacks the money to have fixed. As always he feels a suspicion that their jokes are too much at his expense, home from college four years and still out of a job in his chosen field, there being no college teaching jobs to be had anywhere in the region. He makes an effort to ignore his own misgiving, and anyway most of what they say is obliterated by the noise. He races the engine, and everyone laughs. It’s all part of the uproar of the end of the evening, and there’s good feeling all around. The lawn is illuminated with floodlights from the top of the house, and Kenneth’s father stands at the edge of the sidewalk with one arm over
her
father’s broad shoulders. Both men are a little tight.

“Godspeed,” Kenneth’s father says, with a heroic wave.

“Good-bye,” says Shannon’s father.

The two men turn and start unsteadily back to the house, and the others, Kenneth’s mother and brothers and Shannon’s two younger sisters, are applauding and laughing at the dizzy progress they make along the walk. Kenneth backs out of the driveway, waves at them all again, honks the horn and pulls away.

Almost immediately his wife gives forth a conspicuous expression of relief, sighing deeply and sinking down in the seat. This makes him clench
his jaw, but he keeps silent. The street winds among trees in the bright fan of his headlights; it’s going to be a quiet ride home. He’s in no mood to talk now. She murmurs something beside him in the dark, but he chooses to ignore it. He tries to concentrate on driving, staring out at the road as if alone. After a little while she puts the radio on, looks for a suitable station, and the noise begins to irritate him, but he says nothing. Finally she gives up, turns the radio off. The windshield is dotting with rain. They come to the end of the tree-lined residential street, and he pulls out toward the city. Here the road already shimmers with water, the reflected lights of shops and buildings going on into the closing perspective of brightnesses ahead.

“Are you okay to drive?” she asks.

“What?” he says, putting the wipers on.

“I just wondered. You had a few beers.”

“I had three beers.”

“You had a few.”

“Three,” he says. “And I didn’t finish the last one. What’re you doing, counting them now?”

“Somebody better count them.”

“I had three goddamn beers,” he says.

In fact, he hadn’t finished the third beer because he’d begun to experience heartburn shortly after his father started telling the stories. He’s sober all right, full of club soda and coffee, and he feels strangely lucid, as if the chilly night with its rain-smelling breezes has brought him wider awake. He puts both hands on the wheel and hunches forward slightly, meaning to ignore her shape, so quiet beside him. He keeps right at the speed limit, heading into the increasing rain, thinking almost abstractly about her.

“What’re you brooding about?” she says.

The question surprises him. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’m driving.”

“You’re mad at me.”

“No.”

“Sure?” she asks.

“I’m sure.”

What he is
sure of is that the day has been mostly ruined for him: the entire afternoon and evening spent in a state of vague tension, worrying about his wife’s mood, wondering about what she might say or do or refuse to do in
light of that mood. And the vexing thing is that toward the end, as he watched her watch his father tell the stories, the sense of something guilty began to stir in his soul, as if this were all something he had betrayed her into having to endure and there was something lurid or corrupt about it—an immoral waste of energy, like a sort of spiritual gluttony. He’s trying hard not to brood about it, but he keeps seeing her in the various little scenes played out during the course of the day—her watchfulness during his own clowning with his brothers and her quiet through the daylong chatter of simple observation and remarking that had gone on with her father and sisters, with Kenneth’s parents. In each scene she seemed barely able to contain her weariness and boredom.

At one point while his father was basking in the laughter following a story about wine and a small boy in Rome who knew where the Germans had stored untold gallons of it, Kenneth stared at Shannon until she saw him, and when for his benefit she seemed discreetly to raise one eyebrow (it was just between them), her face, as she looked back at his father, took on a glow of tolerance along with the weariness it had worn—and something like affectionate exasperation, too.

Clearly she meant it as a gift to him, for when she looked at him again she smiled.

He might’ve smiled back. He had been laughing at something his father said. Again, though, he thought he saw the faintest elevation of one of her eyebrows.

This expression, and the slight nod of her head, reminded him with a discomforting nostalgic stab (had they come so far from there?) of the look she had given him from the other side of noisy, smoky rooms in rented campus houses, when they were in graduate school and had first become lovers and moved with a crowd of radical believers and artists, people who were most happy when they were wakeful and ruffled in the drugged hours before dawn—after the endless far-flung hazy discussions, the passionate sophomoric talk of philosophy and truth and everything that was wrong with the world and the beautiful changes everyone expected.

Someone would be talking, and Shannon would confide in him with a glance from the other side of the room. There had been a thrill in receiving this look from her, since it put the two of them in cahoots; it made them secret allies in a kind of dismissal, a superiority reserved for the gorgeous
and the wise. And this time he thought for a moment that she was intending the look, intending for him to think about those other days, before the job market had forced them to this city and part-time work for his father; before the worry over rent and the pregnancy had made everything of their early love seem quite dreamy and childish. He almost walked over to take her hand. But then a moment later she yawned deeply, making no effort to conceal her sleepiness, and he caught himself wishing that for the whole of the evening he could have managed not to look her way at all. With this thought in his mind, he did walk over to her. “I guess you want to go.”

“For two hours,” she said.

“You should’ve told me.”

“I think I did.”

“No,” he said.

“I’m too tired to think,” she told him.

Now, driving through the rainy night, he glances over at her and sees that she’s simply staring out the passenger window, her hands open in her lap. He wants to be fair. He reminds himself that she’s never been the sort of person who feels comfortable—or with whom one feels comfortable—at a party: something takes hold of her; she becomes objective and heavily intellectual, sees everyone as species, everything as behavior. A room full of people laughing and having a good innocent time is nevertheless a manifestation of some kind of pecking order to her: such a gathering means nothing more than a series of meaningful body languages and gestures, nothing more than the forms of competition, and, as she has told him on more than one occasion, she refuses to allow herself to be drawn in; she will not play social games. He remembers now that in their college days he considered this attitude of hers to be an element of her sharp intelligence, her wit. He had once considered that the two of them were above the winds of fashion, intellectual and otherwise; he had once been proud of this quirk of hers.

It’s all more complicated than that now, of course. Now he knows she’s unable to help the fear of being with people in congregation, that it’s all a function of her having been refused affection when she was a child, of having been encouraged to compete with her many brothers and sisters for the attentions of her mother, who over the years has been in and out of mental institutions, and two of whose children, Shannon’s older sisters, grew sexually
confused in their teens and later underwent sex-change operations. They are now two older brothers. Shannon and Kenneth have made jokes about this, but the truth is, she comes from a tremendously unhappy family. The fact that she’s managed to put a marriage together is no small accomplishment. She’s fought to overcome the confusion and troubles of her life at home, and she’s mostly succeeded. When her father finally divorced her mother, Shannon was the one he came to for support; it was Shannon who helped get him situated with the two younger sisters; and it was Shannon who forgave him all the excesses he had been driven to by the mad excesses of her mother. Shannon doesn’t like to talk about what she remembers of growing up, but Kenneth often thinks of her as a little girl in a house where nothing is what it ought to be. He would say she has a right to her temperament, her occasional paranoia in groups of people—and yet for some time now, in spite of all efforts not to, he’s felt only exasperation and annoyance with her about it.

As he has felt annoyance about several other matters: her late unwillingness to entertain; her lack of energy; and her reluctance to have sex. She has only begun to show slightly, yet she claims she feels heavy and unsexy. He understands this, of course, but it worries him that when they’re sitting together quietly in front of the television set and she reaches over and takes his hand—a simple gesture of affection from a woman expecting a child—he finds himself feeling itchy and irritable, aware of the caress as a kind of abbreviation, an abridgement: she doesn’t mean it as a prelude to anything. He wants to be loving and gentle through it all, and yet he can’t get rid of the feeling that this state of affairs is what she secretly prefers.

When she moves
on the front seat next to him, her proximity actually startles him.

“What?” she says.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You jumped a little.”

“No,” he says.

“All right.” She settles down in the seat again.

A moment later he looks over at her. He wants to have the sense of recognition and comfort he has so often had when gazing upon her. But her face looks faintly deranged in the bad light, and he sees that she’s frowning,
pulling something down into herself. Before he can suppress it, anger rises like a kind of heat in the bones of his face. “Okay, what is it?” he says.

“I wish I was in bed.”

“You
didn’t
say anything to me about going,” he says. “Would you have listened?”

“I would’ve listened, sure,” he says. “What kind of thing to say is that?”

She’s silent, staring out her window.

“Look,” he says, “just exactly what is it that’s bothering you?”

She doesn’t answer right away. “I’m tired,” she tells him without quite turning to look at him.

“No, really,” he says. “I want to hear it. Come on, let it out.”

Now she does turn. “I told you this morning. I just don’t like hearing the same stories all the time.”

“They aren’t all the same,” he says, feeling unreasonably angry.

“Oh, of course they are. God—you were asking for them. Your mother deserves a medal.”

“I like them. Mom likes them. Everybody likes them. Your father and your sisters like them.”