The Stories of Richard Bausch (68 page)

Some nights when sleep wouldn’t come, he had stared out his window at the faint shadows of the unfinished houses and, finding the one house with all its windows lighted, had quietly made his way downstairs to the back door and stood in the chilly open frame, listening for the music, those pretty female voices—the tumult of the reckless, happy young.

Today, a Saturday
, he carried what he had found back to his own recently finished house (some of the men on the construction crew were in fact familiar to him, being subcontractors who worked all the new houses in the area). The piece of glass he dropped in the trash can by the garage door, and the
shoe he brought into the house with him, stopping in the little coat porch to take off his muddy boots.

His wife, Mae, was up and working in the kitchen, still wearing her nightgown, robe, and slippers. Without the use of dyes or rinses, and at nearly forty-seven years of age, her hair retained that rich straw color of some blondes, with a bloom of light brown in it. She’d carelessly brushed it up over her ears and tied it in an absurd ponytail which stood out of the exact middle of the back of her head. She was scouring the counter with a soapy dishcloth. Behind her, water ran in the sink. She hadn’t seen him, and as he had done often enough lately, he took the opportunity to watch her.

This furtive attention, this form of secret vigilance, had arisen out of the need to be as certain as possible about predicting her moods, to be ready for any variations or inconsistencies of habit—teaching himself to anticipate changes. For the better part of a year, everything in his life with her had been shaded with this compunction, and while the reasons for it were over (he had ended it only this week), he still felt the need to be ever more observant, ever more protective of what he had so recently allowed to come under the pall of doubt and uncertainty.

So he watched her for a time.

It seemed to him that in passages like this—work in the house or in the yard, or even in her job at the computer store—her face gleamed with a particular domestic heat. Curiously, the sense of purpose, the intention to accomplish practical tasks, made her skin take on a translucent quality, as though these matters required a separate form of exertion, subjecting the sweat glands to different stimuli.

She saw him now and stepped away from the counter, which shined.

“Look at this.” He held up the shoe.

She stared.

“I found it out by the pond.” Somehow, one had to try to remember the kind of thing one would have done before everything changed; one had to try to keep the old habits and propensities intact.

“Whose is it?” she asked him.

“Someone in a hurry,” he said, turning the shoe in his hand.

“Well, I certainly don’t want it.”

“No,” he said. “Just thought it was odd.”

“Somebody threw it away, right?”

“You wonder where it’s been.”

“What do these girls do to be able to drive those fancy foreign jobs, anyway?”

“The daughters of our landed neighbors.”

“Playing around with the workforce.”

“Maybe it’s encouraged,” he said.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

The question made him want to get outside in the open again. “Sure. Why?”

“It’s odd,” she said. “A high-heeled shoe. You look a bit flustered.”

“Well, honey, I thought a shoe, lying out in the back—I thought it
was
odd. That’s why I brought it in.”

“Whatever you say.” She had started back to work on the kitchen.

Again, he watched her for a moment.

“What,” she said. “You’re not imagining something awful, are you? I’ll bet you looked around for a body, didn’t you.”

“Don’t be absurd,” he said.

“Well, I thought of it. I’ve become as morbid as you are, I guess.”

“I’ll get busy on the yard,” he said.

“You sure you’re okay?”

He tried for teasing exasperation: “Mae.”

She shrugged. “Just asking.”

Was it going
to be impossible, now that everything was over, now that he had decided against further risk, to keep from making these tiny slips of tone and stance? At times he had wondered if he were not looking for a way to confess: Darling, I’ve wronged you. For the past nine months I’ve been carrying on with someone at work—lunch hours, afternoon appointments, that trip to Boston (she met me there), those restless weekend days when I went out to a matinee (the motels in town have satellite movies which are still playing in the theaters). Oh, my darling, I have lavished such care on the problem of keeping it all from you that it has become necessary to tell you about it, out of the sheer pressure of our old intimacy.

Outside, he put the shoe in the trash, then retrieved it and set it on the wooden sill inside the garage. He would throw it away when it was not charged with the sense of recent possession, a kind of muted strife: he could not shake
the feeling that the wearer of the shoe had not parted with it easily. He felt eerily proprietary toward it, as though any minute a woman might walk down the street in the disarming, faintly comical limp of a person bereft of one shoe, and ask him if he had its mate. He conjured the face: bruised perhaps, smeared and drawn, someone in the middle of the complications of passion, needing to account for everything.

They had been
married more than twenty-five years, and the children—two of them—were gone: Cecily was married and living in New York, and Todd was in his first year of college out in Arizona. Cecily had finished a degree in accounting, and was putting her husband through business school at Columbia. They were planners, as Dornberg’s wife put it. When the schooling was over, they would travel, and when the travel was done, they’d think about having children. Everything would follow their carefully worked-out plan. She did not mean it as a criticism, particularly; it was just an observation.

“I have the hardest time imagining them making love,” she’d said once.

This was a disconcerting surprise to Dornberg. “You mean you try to imagine them?”

“I just mean it rhetorically,” she said. “In the abstract. I don’t see Cecily.”

“Why think of it at all?”

“I didn’t say I dwelled on it.”

He let it alone, not wanting to press.

“Come here,” she said. “Let’s dwell on each other a little.”

The hardest thing during the months of what he now thought of as his trouble was receiving her cheerful, trustful affection, her comfortable use of their habitual endearments, their pet names for each other, their customary tenderness and gestures of attachment. He wondered how others bore such guilt: each caressive phrase pierced him, each casual assumption of his fidelity and his interest made him miserable, and the effort of hiding his misery exhausted him.

The other woman was the kind no one would suppose him to be moved by. Even her name, Edith, seemed far from him. Brassy and loud in a nearly obnoxious way, she wore too much makeup and her brisk, sweeping gestures seemed always to be accompanied by the chatter of the many bracelets on her bony wrists. She had fiery red hair and dark blue, slightly crossed
eyes—the tiny increment of difference made her somehow more attractive—and she had begun things by stating bluntly that she wanted to have an affair with him. The whole thing had been like a sort of banter, except that she had indicated, with a touch to his hip, that she was serious enough. It thrilled him. He couldn’t catch his breath for a few moments, and before he spoke again, she said, “Think it over.”

This was months before the first time they made love. They saw each other often in the hallways of the courthouse, where he worked as an officer on custody cases (he had seen every permutation of marital failure, all the catastrophes of divorce) and she was a secretary in the law library. They started looking for each other in the downstairs cafeteria during coffee breaks and lunch hours, and they became part of a regular group of people who congregated in the smoking lounge in the afternoons. Everyone teased and flirted, everyone seemed younger than he, more at ease, and when she was with him, he felt the gap between him and these others grow narrower. Her voice and manner, her easy affection, enveloped him, and he felt as though he moved eloquently under the glow of her approval.

Of course, he had an awareness of the aspects of vulgarity surrounding the whole affair, its essential banality, having come as it did out of the fact that over the past couple of years he had been suffering from a general malaise, and perhaps he was bearing middle age rather badly: there had been episodes of anxiety and sleeplessness, several bouts of hypochondria and depression, and a steady increase in his old propensity toward gloom. This was something she had actually teased him about, and he had marveled at how much she knew about him, how exactly right she was to chide him. Yet even in the unseemly, forsaken-feeling last days and hours of his involvement with her, there remained the simple reprehensible truth that for a time his life had seemed somehow brighter—charged and brilliant under the dark blue gaze she bestowed on him, the look of appreciation. Even, he thought, of a kind of solace, for she
was
sympathetic, and she accepted things about his recent moods that only irritated Mae.

Perhaps he had seen everything coming.

Once, they Stood
talking for more than an hour in the parking lot outside the courthouse, she leaning on her folded arms in the open door of her small blue sports car, he with the backs of his thighs against the shining fender of someone’s
Cadillac. He had gone home to explain his lateness to Mae, feeling as he lied about being detained in his office the first real pangs of guilt, along with a certain delicious sense of being on the brink of a new, thrilling experience.

The affair commenced less than a week later. They went in her car to a motel outside the city. The motel was off the main road, an old establishment with a line of rooms like a stopped train—a row of sleeper cars. She paid for the room (she was single and had no accounts to explain to anyone), and for a while they sat on opposing beds and looked at each other.

“You sure you want to do this?” she said.

“No.” He could barely breathe. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Oh, come on,” she said.

“I haven’t,” he told her. “I’ve been a good husband for twenty-five years. I love my wife.”

“Why are you here, then?”

“Sex,” he said. “I can’t stop thinking of you.”

She smiled. “That’s what I like about you. You’re so straight with me.”

“I’m scared,” he said.

“Everybody is,” she told him, removing her blouse. “Except the stupid and the insane.”

There was a moment, just as they moved together, when he thought of Mae. He looked at the shadow of his own head on the sheet, through the silky, wrong-colored strands of her hair, and the room spun, seemed about to lift out of itself. Perhaps he was dying. But then she was uttering his name, and her sheer difference from Mae, her quick, bumptious energy and the strange, unrhythmical otherness of her there in the bed with him—wide hips and ruddiness, bone and breath and tongue and smell—obliterated thinking.

Later, lying on her side gazing at him, she traced the line of his jaw. “No guilt,” she said.

“No.”

“I love to look at you, you know it?”

“Me?”

“I like it that the pupils of your eyes don’t touch the bottom lids. And you have long eyelashes.”

He felt handsome. He was aware of his own face as being supple and strong and good to look at in her eyes.

Not an hour after this, seeing his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, he was astonished to find only himself, the same plain, middle-aged face.

Saturday was the
day for household maintenance and upkeep. The day for errands. While he ran the mower, hauling and pushing it back and forth in the rows of blowing grass, he felt pacified somehow. He had forgotten the shoe, or he wasn’t thinking about it. He knew Mae was inside, and he could predict with some accuracy what room she would be working in. Between loads of laundry, she would run the vacuum, mop the floors, and dust the furniture and knickknacks—every room in the house. Toward the middle of the morning, she would begin to prepare something for lunch. This had been the routine for all the years since the children left, and as he worked in the shaded earth which lined the front porch, digging the stalks of dead weeds out and tossing them into the field beyond the driveway, he entertained the idea that his vulnerability to the affair might be attributed in some way to the exodus of the children; he had felt so bereft in those first weeks and months of their absence.

But then, so had Mae.

He carried a bag of weeds and overturned sod down to the edge of the pond and dumped it, then spread the pile with his foot. Somewhere nearby was the
tunk tunk
of a frog in the dry knifegrass. The world kept insisting on itself.

She called him in to lunch. He crossed the field, and she waited for him on the back deck, wearing faded jeans and a light pullover, looking, in the brightness, quite flawlessly young—someone who had done nothing wrong.

“Find another shoe?” she asked him.

He shook his head. “Got rid of some weeds. It’s such a pretty day.”

“Why did you save the other one?”

He walked up on the deck, kicking the edge of the steps to get dried mud from his boots. “I guess I did save it.”

“It was the first thing I saw when I went through the garage to put the garbage out.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

The breeze had taken her hair and swept it across her face. She brushed at it, then opened the door for him. “You seem so unhappy. Is there something going on at work?”

“What would be going on at work? I’m not unhappy.”

“Okay,” she said, and her tone was decisive. She would say no more about it.

He said, “It just seemed strange to throw the thing away.”

“One of the workmen probably left it,” she said. “Or one of their girlfriends.”

The kitchen smelled of dough. She had decided to make bread, had spent the morning doing that. In the living room, which he could see from the back door, were the magazines and newspapers of yesterday afternoon. The shirt he had taken off last night was still draped over the chair in the hallway leading into the bedroom. He suddenly felt very lighthearted and confident. He turned to her, reached over and touched her cheek. “Hey,” he said.