The Stories of Richard Bausch (69 page)

She said, “What.”

“Let’s make love.”

“Darling,” she said.

They lay quiet
in the stripe of shadow which fell across the bed. During their lovemaking he had felt a chill at his back, and as he’d often romantically strived to do when he was younger, he tried to empty his mind of anything but her physical being—the texture of her skin, the contours of her body, the faint lavender-soaped smell of her; her familiar lovely breathing presence. But his mind presented him with an image of the other woman, and finally he was lost, sinking, hearing his wife’s murmuring voice, holding her in the shivering premonition of disaster, looking blindly at the room beyond the curve of the bed, as though it were the prospect one saw from high bluffs, the sheer edge of a cliff.

“Sweet,” she said.

He couldn’t speak. He lay back and sighed, hoping she took the sound as an indication of his pleasure in her. Part of him understood that this was all the result of having put the affair behind him; it was what he must weather to survive.

“Cecily called while you were weeding,” she said.

He waited.

“I wanted to call you in, but she said not to.”

“Is anything wrong?”

“Well,” his wife said, “a little, yes.”

He waited again.

She sighed. “She didn’t want me to say anything to you.”

“Then,” he said, “maybe you shouldn’t.”

This made her turn to him, propping herself on one elbow. “We always tell each other everything.”

He could not see through the cloudy, lighter green of her eyes in this light. Her questioning face revealed nothing.

“Don’t we?” she said.

“We do.”

She put one hand in his hair, combed the fingers through. “Cecily’s afraid Will has a girlfriend at school. Well, he has a friend at school that Cecily’s worried about. You know, they have more in common, all that.”

“Do you think it’s serious?” he managed.

“It’s serious enough for her to worry about it, I guess. I told her not to.” He stared at the ceiling, with its constellations of varying light and shadow.

“Will’s too single-minded to do any carrying on,” she said. “He probably doesn’t even know the other girl notices him.”

“Is that what you told Cecily?”

“Something like that.”

“Did you tell her to talk to Will about it?”

“Lord, no.”

“I would’ve told her to talk to him.”

“And put ideas in his head?”

“You don’t mean that, Mae.”

“I guess not. But there’s no sense calling attention to it.”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“It’s not as if he’s saving old shoes or anything.”

“What?”

She patted his chest. “Just kidding you.”

“Is it such
an odd thing, putting that shoe in the garage?” he said.

They were in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the day’s newspaper open before them. She had been working the crossword puzzle. The light of early afternoon shone in her newly brushed and pinned-back hair.

“Well?” he said.

She only glanced at him. “I was teasing you.”

He got up and went out to the garage, took the shoe down from its place on the sill, and carried it to the garbage cans at the side of the house. The air was cooler here, out of the sun, like a pocket of the long winter. He put the shoe in the can and closed it, then returned to the kitchen. She hadn’t moved from where she sat, still looking at the puzzle.

“I threw it away,” he said.

Again, her eyes only grazed him. “Threw what away?”

“The shoe.”

She stared. “What?”

“I threw the shoe away.”

“I was just teasing you,” she said, and a shadow seemed to cross her face.

He took his part of the paper into the living room. But he couldn’t concentrate. The clock ticked on the mantel, the house creaked in the stirring breezes. Feeling unreasonably ill-tempered, he went back into the kitchen, where he brought the feather duster out of the pantry.

“What’re you doing?” she said.

“I’m restless.”

“Is it what I told you about Cecily?”

“Of course not.” He felt the need to be forceful.

She shrugged and went back to her puzzle.

“Is something bothering you?” he asked.

She didn’t even look up. “What would be bothering me?”

“Cecily.”

“I told her it was nothing.”

“You believe that?”

“Sure. I wouldn’t
lie
to her.”

In the living room, he dusted the surfaces, feathered across the polished wood of the mantel and along the gilt or black edges of photographs in their frames: his children in some uncannily recent-feeling summer of their growing up, posing arm in arm and facing into the sunlight; his own parents staring out from the shade of a porch in the country fifty years ago; Mae waving from the stern of a rented boat. When he was finished, he set the duster on the coffee table and lay back on the sofa. Could he have imagined that she was hinting at him? He heard her moving around in the other room, opening the refrigerator, pouring something.

“Want some milk?” she called.

“No, thanks,” he called back.

“Sure?”

“Mae. I said no thanks.”

She stood in the arched entrance to the room and regarded him. “I don’t suppose your restlessness would take you to the dining room and family room as well.”

“No,” he said.

“Too bad.”

When she started out, he said, “Where’re you going?”

“I’m going to lie down and read awhile. Unless you have other ideas.”

“Like what?” he said.

“I don’t know. A movie?”

“I don’t feel like it,” he told her.

“Well, you said you were restless.”

He could think of nothing to say. And it seemed to him that he’d caught something like a challenge in her gaze.

But then she yawned. “I’ll probably fall asleep.”

“I might go ahead and get the other rooms,” he offered.

“Let it wait,” she said, her voice perfectly friendly, perfectly without nuance. “Let’s be lazy today.”

He had ended
the affair with little more than a hint; that was all it had taken. The always nervy and apparently blithe Edith had nevertheless more than once voiced a horror of being anyone’s regret or burden, was highly conscious of what others thought about her, and while she obviously didn’t mind being involved with a married man, didn’t mind having others know this fact, she would go to lengths not to be seen in the light of a changed circumstance: the woman whose passion has begun to make her an object of embarrassment.

The hint he had dropped was only a plain expression of the complications he was living with. It happened without premeditation one afternoon following a quick, chaste tussle in the partly enclosed entrance of an out-of-business clothing store in the city. They’d had lunch with five other people, and had stayed behind to eat the restaurant’s touted coffee cake. They were casually strolling in the direction of the courthouse when the opportunity of
the store entrance presented itself, and they ducked out of sight of the rest of the street, embracing and kissing and looking out at the row of buildings opposite, feeling how impossible things were: they couldn’t get a room anywhere now, there wasn’t time. They stood apart, in the duress of knowing they would have to compose themselves. The roofs of the buildings were starkly defined by gray scudding clouds—the tattered beginning of a storm.

“It’s getting so I feel like I can’t keep up,” he said.

Her eyes fixed him in their blue depths. “You’re not talking about you and Mae, are you.”

“I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“Sure you do,” she said. Then she took his hands. “Listen, it was fun. It was a fling. It never meant more than that.”

“I don’t understand,” he told her.

Edith smiled. It was a harsh, knowing smile, the look of someone who knows she’s divined the truth. “I think we both understand,” she said. Then she let go of him and walked out into the increasing rain.

Two days later she took another job, at one of the district courts far out in the suburbs; she told everyone they knew that she had wanted out of the city for a long time, and indeed it turned out that her application to the new job was an old one, predating the affair. The opportunity had arisen, and she’d been thinking about it for weeks. This came out at the office party to bid her farewell. He stood with her and all the others, and wished her the best of luck. They were adults, and could accept and respect each other; it was as if everything that had happened between them was erased forever. They shook hands as the celebrating died down, and she put her arms around his neck, joking, calling him sexy.

The dark was
coming later each night.

He went out on the deck and watched the sky turn to shades of violet and crimson, and behind him Mae had begun to prepare dinner. There were lights on in the other house. Two cars had pulled up. Dornberg heard music. As he watched, a pair drove up on a motorcycle—all roaring, dust-blown, the riders looking grafted to the machine like some sort of future species, with an insectile sheen about them, and a facetlessness: the nylon tights and the polished black helmets through which no human features could be seen. When the motorcycle stopped, one rider got off, a woman—
Dornberg could tell by the curve of the hips—who removed her helmet, shook her hair loose and cursed, then stalked off into the light of the half-finished porch, holding the helmet under her arm like a football. Her companion followed, still wearing his helmet.

Inside Dornberg’s house, Mae made a sound, something like an exhalation that ended on a word. He turned, saw that she was standing in the entrance of the living room, in the glow of the television, gesturing to him.

“What?” he said, moving to the screen door.

“Speaking of your high-heeled shoe. Look at this.”

He went in to her. On television, a newsman with an overbright red tie was talking about the body of a woman that had been found in a pile of leaves and mud in a wooded section of the county. Dornberg listened to the serious, steady, reasonable news voice talking of murder. The picture cut away and the screen was blank for an instant, and when he heard the voice pronounce the name Edith before going on to say another last name, the name of some other girl, his heartbeat faltered. On the screen now was a photograph of this unfortunate woman, this coincidence, not
his
Edith, some poor stranger, twenty-five years old, wearing a ski sweater, a bright, college-picture smile, and brown hair framing a tanned face. But the moment had shocked him, and the shock was still traveling along the nerves in his skin as Mae spoke. “You don’t suppose—”

“No,” he said, before he could think. “It’s not her.”

His wife stared at him. He saw her out of the corner of his eye as he watched the unfolding story of the body that was in tennis shoes and jeans—the tennis shoes and part of a denim cuff showing as men gently laid it down in a fold of black plastic.

“Tennis shoes,” he managed. But his voice caught.

She still stared at him. On the screen, the newsman exuded professional sincerity, wide-eyed, half frowning. Behind him, in a riot of primary colors and with cartoonish exaggeration, was the representation of a human hand holding a pistol, firing.

Mae walked into the kitchen.

He called after her. “Need help?”

She didn’t answer. He waited a moment, trying to decide how he should proceed. The damage done, the television had shifted again, showing beer being poured into an iced glass in light that gave it outlandishly alluring hues of amber and gold. Already the world of pure sensation and amusement
had moved on to something else. He switched the TV off, some part of him imagining, as always, that it went off all over the country when he did so.

In the kitchen, she had got last night’s pasta out, and was breaking up a head of lettuce.

“What should I do?” he asked, meaning to be helpful about dinner, but he was immediately aware of the other context for these words. “Should I set the table?” he added quickly.

“Oh,” she said, glancing at him. “It’s fine.” The look she had given him was almost shy; it veered from him and he saw that her hands shook.

He stepped to the open back door. By accident, then, she knew. All the months of secrecy were done. And he could seek forgiveness. When he understood this, his own guilty elation closed his throat and made it difficult to speak. Outside, in the dusk beyond the edge of the field, from the lighted half-finished house, the sound of guitar music came.

“Think I’ll go out on the deck,” he told her.

“I’ll call you when it’s ready.” Her voice was precariously even, barely controlled.

“Honey,” he said.

“I’ll call you.”

“Mae.”

She stopped. She was simply standing there, head bowed, disappointment and sorrow in the set of her jaw, the weary slope of her shoulders, waiting for him to go on. And once more he was watching her, this person who had come all the long way with him from his youth, and who knew him well enough to understand that he had broken their oldest promise to each other—not the one to be faithful so much as the one to honor and protect, for he had let it slip, and he had felt the elation of being free of the burden of it. It came to him then: the whole day had been somehow the result of his guilty need to unburden himself, starting with the high-heeled shoe. And there was nothing to say. Nothing else to tell her, nothing to soothe or explain, deflect or bring her closer. In his mind the days ahead stretched into vistas of quiet. Perhaps she might even decide to leave him.

“What are you thinking?” he managed to ask.

She shrugged. Nothing he might find to say in this moment would be anything he could honestly expect her to believe.

“Are you okay?” he said.

Now she did look at him. “Yes.”

“I’ll be out here.”

She didn’t answer.

He stepped out. The moon was rising, a great red disk above the trees and the pond. A steady, fragrant breeze blew, cool as the touch of metal on his cheek. The music had stopped from the other house, though the lights still burned in the windows. Behind him, only slightly more emphatic than usual, was the small clatter of plates and silverware being placed. He watched the other house for a while, in a kind of pause, a stillness, a zone of inner silence, like the nullity of shock. Yet there was no denying the stubborn sense of deliverance which breathed through him.