The Stories of Richard Bausch (22 page)

“Is this all right?” she said to him, meaning what was on the radio.

“Excuse me?” he said.

“This music. I could look for something else.”

“Oh,” he said. “I don’t mind it.”

She sat back and gazed out her window at a car full of young children. All of them seemed to be singing, but she couldn’t hear their voices. The car
in which they were riding moved on ahead a few lengths, and was replaced by the tall side of a truck.
Jake Plumbly & Son, Contractors.

“I guess I’m in the wrong lane again,” he said.

“No. They’re stopped, too, now.”

He sighed.

“Everybody’s stopped again,” she said.

They sat there.

She brought a magazine out of her purse, paged through it, and left it open on her lap. She looked at her husband, then out at the road. Michael sat with his head back on the seat top, his hands on the bottom curve of the wheel. The music changed—some piano piece that seemed tuneless for all the notes running up and down the scale, and the whisper of a drum and brushes.

She looked at the magazine. Staring at a bright picture of little girls in a grass field, she remembered something unpleasant, and turned the page with an impatient suddenness that made him look over at her.

“What?” he said.

She said, “Hmm?”

He shrugged, and stared ahead.

No ongoing Conflict
or source of unrest existed between them.

But something was troubling her. It had happened that on a recent occasion a new acquaintance had expressed surprise upon finding out that they had been married only seven months. This person’s embarrassed reaction to the discovery had made Ivy feel weirdly susceptible. She had lain awake that night, hearing her new husband’s helpless snoring, and wondering about things which it was not normally in her temperament to consider. In that unpleasant zone of disturbed silence, she couldn’t get rid of the sense that her life had been decided for her in some quarter far away from her own small clutch of desires and wishes—this little shaking self lying here in the dark, thinking—though she had done no more and no less than exactly what she wanted to do for many years now. She was thirty-three. She had lived apart from her family for a dozen years, and if Michael was a mistake, she was the responsible party: she had decided everything.

Through the long hours of that night, she had arrived at this fact over and over, like a kind of resolution, only to have it dissolve into forms of
unease that kept her from drifting off to sleep. It seemed to her that he had been less interested in her of late, or could she have imagined this? It was true enough that she sometimes caught herself wondering if he were not already taking her for granted, or if there were someone else he might be interested in. There was an element of his personality that remained somehow distant, that he actively kept away from her, and from everyone. At times, in fact, he was almost detached. She was not, on the whole, unhappy. They got along fine as a couple. Yet on occasion, she had to admit, she caught herself wondering if she made any impression at all on him. When she looked over at him in the insular stillness of his sleep, the thought blew through her that anything might happen. What if he were to leave her? This made her heart race, and she turned in the bed, trying to put her mind to other things.

How utterly strange, to have been thinking about him in that daydreaming way, going over the processes by which she had decided upon him as though this were what she must remember in order to believe the marriage safe, only to discover the fear—it actually went through her like fear—that he might decide to leave her, that she would lose him, that perhaps something in her own behavior would drive him away.

In the light
of the morning, with the demands of getting herself ready for work, the disturbances of her sleepless hours receded quickly enough into the background. Or so she wished to believe. She had been raised to be active, and not to waste time indulging in unhealthy thoughts, and she was not the sort of person whose basic confidence could be undermined by a single bad night, bad as that night was.

She had told herself this, and she had gone on with things, and yet the memory of it kept coming to her in surprising ways, like a recurring ache.

She had not wanted to think of it here, in the stopped car, with Michael looking stricken, his head lying back, showing the little white place on his neck where a dog had bitten him when he was nine years old. Just now, she required him to be wrapped in his dignity, posed at an angle that was pleasing to her.

She reached over and touched his arm.

“What?”

“Nothing. Just patting you.”

He lay his head back again. In the next moment she might tell him to sit up straight, button the collar of his shirt (it would cover the little scar). She could feel the impulse traveling along her nerves.

She looked out the window and reflected that something had tipped over inside her, and she felt almost dizzy. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Abruptly, her mind presented her with an image of herself many years older, the kind of wife who was always hectoring her husband about his clothes, his posture, his speech, his habits, his falterings, real and imagined, always identifying deficiencies. It seemed to her now that wives like that were only trying to draw their husbands out of a reserve that had left them, the wives, marooned.

“What’re you thinking?” she said.

He said, “I’m not thinking.”

She sought for something funny or lighthearted to say, but nothing suggested itself. She opened the magazine again. Here were people bathing in a blue pool, under a blue sky.

“Wish we were there,” she said, holding it out for him to see.

He glanced over at the picture, then fixed his attention on the road ahead. He was far away, she knew.

“Is something wrong?” she said.

“Not a thing,” he told her.

Perhaps he
was
interested in someone else. She rejected the thought as hysterical, and paged through the magazine—all those pictures of handsome, happy, complacently self-secure people.

Someone nearby honked his horn. Someone else followed suit; then there were several. This tumult went on for a few seconds, then subsided. The cars in front inched ahead, and Michael eased up on the brake to let the car idle an increment forward, closing the distance almost immediately.

He said, “I read somewhere that they expect it to be worse this week because the high schools are all letting out for the summer.”

They stared ahead at the lines of waiting cars, three choked lanes going off to the blinding west, and the river. He had spoken—her mind had again wandered away from where she was. And she had been thinking about him. This seemed almost spooky to her. She started to ask what he had said, but then decided against it, not wanting really to spend the energy it would take
to listen, and experiencing a wave of frustration at the attention she was having to pay to every motion of her own mind.

“How could it be worse?” he said.

She made a murmur of agreement, remarking to herself that soon he was going to have to turn the car’s air-conditioning off, or the engine might overheat. She looked surreptitiously at the needle on the temperature gauge; it was already climbing toward the red zone. Perhaps she should say something.

But then there was the sudden commotion in the street, perhaps four cars up—some people had got out of two of the cars and were scurrying and fighting, it looked like. It was hard to tell with the blaze of sunlight beyond.

“What is that?” she said, almost glad of the change.

He hadn’t seen it yet. He had put his head back on the rest, eyes closed against the brightness. He sat forward and peered through the blazing space out the window. It was hard to see anything at all. “What?” he said.

She leaned into the curve of the window as if to look under the reflected glare. “Something—”

“People are—leaving their cars?” he said. It was as though he had asked a question.

“No, look. A fight—”

Scuffling shapes moved across the blaze of sunlight, partly obscured by the cars in front. Something flashed, and there was a cracking sound.

“Michael?”

“Hey,” he said, holding the wheel.

The scuffle came in a rush at them, at the hood of the car—a man bleeding badly across the front of a white shirt. He seemed to glance off to the right.

“What the-”

Now he staggered toward them, and his shirt front came against the window on her side; it seemed to agitate there for a few terrible seconds, and then it smeared downward, blotting everything out in bright red. She was screaming. She held her hands, with the magazine in them, to her face, and someone was hitting the windshield. There were more cracking sounds. Gunshots. The door opened on his side, and she thought it was being opened from without. She was lying over on the seat now, in the roar and shout of the trouble, her arms over her
head, and it took a moment for her to understand in her terror that she was alone. She was alone, and the trouble, whatever it was, had moved off. There were screams and more gunshots, the sound of many people running, horns and sirens. It was all at a distance now.

“Michael,” she said, then screamed. “Michael!”

The frenetic, busy notes of jazz were still coming from the radio, undisturbed and bright, mixed with the sound of her cries. Someone was lifting her, someone’s hands were on her shoulders. She was surprised to find that she still clutched the magazine. She let it drop to the floor of the car, and looked up into a leathery, tanned, middle-aged face, small green eyes.

“Are you hit?” the face said.

“I don’t know. What is it, what happened? Where’s my husband?”

“Can you sit up? Can you get out of the car?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think so.”

He helped her. There were many people standing on the curb and in the open doors of stopped cars. She heard sirens. Somehow she had barked the skin of her knee. She stood out of the car and the man supported her on his arm, explaining that he was a policeman. “We’ve had some trouble here,” he said. “It’s all over.”

“Where’s my husband.” She looked into the man’s face, and the face was blank. A second later, Michael stepped out of the glare beyond him, and stood there, wringing his hands. She saw into his ashen face, and he seemed to want to turn away. “Oh, Michael,” she said, reaching for him.

The policeman let her go. She put her arms around Michael and closed her eyes, feeling the solidness of his back, crying. “Michael. Oh. Michael, what happened?”

“It’s okay,” he told her, loud over the sirens. “It’s over.”

She turned her head on his shoulder, and saw the knot of people working on the other side of the car. Her window was covered with blood. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, my God.”

“We’ll need statements from you both,” the policeman said to them.

“My God,” Ivy said. “What happened here?”

He had been
thinking about flowers, and adultery.

One of the older men in the admissions office, Saul Dornby, had sent a dozen roses to his wife, and the wife had called, crying, to say that they had
arrived. Michael took the call because Dornby was out of the office, having lunch with one of the secretaries. Dornby was a man who had a long and complicated history with women, and people had generally assumed that he was having an affair with the secretary. He was always having affairs, and in the past few weeks he had put Michael in the position of fielding his wife’s phone calls. “I know it’s unpleasant for you, and I really do appreciate it. I’ll find some way to make it up to you. It would break Jenny’s heart to think I was having lunch with anyone but her—any
female
but her. You know how they are. It’s perfectly innocent this time, really. But it’s just better to keep it under wraps, you know, the past being what it is. After all, I met Jenny by playing around on someone else. You get my meaning? I haven’t been married four times for nothing. I mean, I have learned one or two things.” He paused and thought. “Man, I’ll tell you, Jenny was something in those first days I was with her. You know what I mean?” Michael indicated that he knew. “Well, sure, son. You’re fresh married. Of course you know. Maybe that’s my trouble—I just need it to be fresh like that all the time. You think?”

Dornby was also the sort of man who liked to parade his sense of superior experience before the young men around him. He behaved as though it were apparent that he was the envy of others. He was especially that way with Michael Blakely, who had made the mistake of being initially in awe of him. But though Michael now resented the other man and was mostly bored by his talk, he had found that there was something alluring about the wife, had come to look forward to talking with her, hearing her soft, sad, melodious voice over the telephone. Something about possession of this intimate knowledge of her marriage made her all the more lovely to contemplate, and over the past few weeks he had been thinking about her in the nights.

Sitting behind the wheel with the sun in his eyes and his wife at his side paging through the magazine, he had slipped toward sleep, thinking about all this, thinking drowsily about the attraction he felt for Dornby’s wife, when something in the static calm around him began to change. Had his wife spoken to him?

And then everything went terrifyingly awry.

He couldn’t say exactly when he had opened the door and dropped out of the car. The urge to leave it had been overwhelming from the moment he realized what was smearing down the window on his wife’s side. He had simply found himself out on the pavement, had felt the rough surface on his
knees and the palms of his hands, and he had crawled between stopped cars and running people to the sidewalk. It had been just flight, trying to keep out of the line of fire, all reflex, and he had found himself clinging to a light pole, on his knees, while the shouts continued and the crowd surged beyond him and on. He saw a man sitting in the doorway of a cafeteria, his face in his folded arms. There were men running in the opposite direction of the rushing crowd, and then he saw a man being subdued by several others, perhaps fifty feet away on the corner. He held onto the light pole, and realized he was crying, like a little boy. Several women were watching him from the entrance of another store, and he straightened, got to his feet, stepped uncertainly away from the pole, struggling to keep his balance. It was mostly quiet now. Though there were sirens coming from the distance, growing nearer. The gunshots had stopped. And the screams. People had gathered near his car, and Ivy stepped out of the confusion there, saying his name.