The Stories of Richard Bausch (72 page)

He walks back to the car, gets in, pulls around, and backs into the driveway of the house across the street from hers. Leaving the engine idling, he rolls the window down and rests his arm on the sill, gazing at the incongruous shape of the cake there in the falling dark. He feels almost glad, almost, in some strange inexpressible way, vindicated. He imagines what she might do if she saw him here, imagines that she comes running from her house, calling his name, looking at the cake and admiring it. He conjures a picture of her, attacking the tiers of pink sugar, and the muscles of his abdomen tighten. But then this all gives way to something else: images of destruction, of flying dollops of icing. He’s surprised to find that he wants her to stay where she is, doing whatever she’s doing. He realizes that what he wants—and for the moment all he really wants—is what he now has: a perfect vantage point from which to watch oncoming cars. Turning the engine off, he waits, concentrating on the one thing. He’s a man imbued with interest, almost peaceful with it—almost, in fact, happy with it—sitting there in the quiet car and patiently awaiting the results of his labor.

He was up
high, reaching with the brush, painting the eaves of the house, thinking about how it would be to let go, simply fall, a man losing his life in an accident—no humiliation in that. He paused, considering this, feeling the wobbly lightness of the aluminum ladder, and then he heard the car pull in. His daughter Susan’s red Yugo. Susan got out, pushed the hair back from her brow. She looked at him, then waved peremptorily and set about getting Elaine out of the car seat. It took a few moments. Elaine was four, very precocious, feisty, and lately quite a lot of trouble.

“I want my doll.”

“You left it at home.”

“Well, I want it.”

“Elaine,
please.”

Their voices came to him, sounds from the world; they brought him back. “Hello,” he called.

“Tell Granddaddy hello.”

“Don’t want to.”

Elaine followed her mother along the sidewalk, pouting, her thumb in her mouth. Even the sight of Granddaddy on a ladder in the sky failed to break the dark mood. Her mother knelt down and ran a handkerchief over the tears and smudges of her face.

“I’ll be right down,” he said.

“Stay,” said his daughter in a tired voice.

He could see that she looked disheveled and overworked, someone not terribly careful about her appearance: a young woman with a child, going through the turmoil following a divorce. He had read somewhere that if you put all the world’s troubles in a great pile and gave everyone a choice, each would probably walk away with his own.

“Mom inside?” his daughter asked.

“She went into town. I don’t think she’ll be gone long.”

“What’re you doing up there?”

“Little touch-up,” he said.

“When did she leave?”

He dipped the brush into the can of paint. “Maybe ten minutes ago. She went to get something for us to eat.”

“Is the door open?”

“Go on in,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “Finish what you’re doing. You don’t have a lot of light left.”

“Susan, I wouldn’t get it all if I had a whole day.”

“Stay there,” she told him, and went on inside with Elaine, who, a moment later, came back out and stood watching him, her hands clasped behind her back.

“You’re up high,” she said.

“Think so?”

“Granddaddy?”

“Just a minute, honey.”

He waited, listening. Susan was on the phone. He could not distinguish words, but he heard anger in the tone, and of course he was in the usual awkward position of not knowing what was expected, how he should proceed.

“I can come up if I want to, right?” Elaine said.

“But I’m not staying,” he told her, starting down.

“Are you going to bring me up there?” she said.

He said, “It’s scary here. The wind’s blowing, and it’s so high an eagle tried to build a nest in my hair.”

“An eagle?”

“Don’t you know what an eagle is?”

“Is it like a bird?”

When he had got to the ground, he laid the paint can, with the paintbrush across the lidless top, on the bottom step of the porch, then turned and lifted her into his arms. Everything, even this, required effort: the travail of an inner battle which he was always on the point of losing.

“Goodness,” he said. “You’re getting so big.”

She was a solid, dark-eyed girl with sweet-smelling breath, and creases appeared on her cheeks when she was excited or happy.

“Is an eagle like a bird or not?”

“An eagle,” he said, turning with her, “is exactly like a bird. And you know why?” A part of him was watching himself: a man stuffed with death, charming his granddaughter.

She stared at him, smiling.

“Because it
is
a bird,” he said, extending his arms so she rode above his head.

“Don’t,” she called out, but she was still smiling.

He brought her back down. “I want a kiss. You don’t have a kiss for me?”

“No,” she said in the tone she used when she meant to be shy with him.

“Are you in a bad mood?”

She shook her head, but the smile was gone.

“You don’t even have a kiss for me?”

She sighed. “Well, Granddaddy, I can’t because I’m just exhausted.” “You poor old thing,” he said, resisting the temptation to suppose she had half-consciously divined something from merely looking into his eyes.

“Put me down now,” she said. “Okay?”

He did so, kissed the top of her head, the shining hair. She went off into the yard, stopping to examine the white blooms of clover dotting that part of the lawn. It was her way. She enjoyed being watched, and this was a ritual the two of them had often played out together. He would observe her and try to seem puzzled and curious, and occasionally she would glance his way, obviously wanting to make certain of his undivided attention. Sometimes they would play a game in which they both narrowly missed each other’s
gaze. They would repeat the pattern until she began to laugh, and then all the motions would become exaggerated.

Now she held her dress out from her sides, facing him. “Granddaddy, what do you think of me?”

Pierced to his heart, he said, “I think you’re so beautiful.”

She sighed. “I know.”

Behind him, in the house, he heard Susan’s voice.

“Mommy’s mad at Daddy again,” Elaine said.

She stood there thinking, and then she did something he recognized as a characteristic gesture, a jittery motion she wasn’t quite aware of: her long, dark hair hung down on either side of her face, and occasionally she reached up with her left hand and tucked the strands of it behind the ear on that side of her head. The one ear showed.

In the house, Susan was shouting into the phone. “I don’t care about that. I don’t care.”

“Daddy was cussing,” Elaine said. “It made Mommy cry.”

Susan’s voice came from inside the house. “I don’t care what anybody has or hasn’t got.”

“Grandaddy,” Elaine said. “You’re not watching me.”

“Okay, baby,” he said, “I’m watching you.”

“See my dress?”

“Beautiful,” he said.

“Granddaddy, are you coming with me?” Again, she tucked the strands of hair behind the one ear. He walked over to her and, when she reached for it, gave her his hand.

“Where are we going?”

“Oh, for a walk.”

She took him in a wide circle, around the perimeter of the front yard.

“Isn’t this nice,” she said.

A girl the bulk of whose life would be led in the next century. The thought made him pause.

“Granddaddy, come on,” she said impatiently. “Men are so slow.” “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I’ll try to do better.”

Her mother’s voice came to them from the house. “You can do without a radio in your car.”

“Mommy wants to see Grandmom,” Elaine said.

“What about me?” he said, meaning to try teasing her.

“Grandmom,” Elaine said with an air of insistence.

There had been
times during the months of his daughter’s recent troubles when he had sensed a kind of antipathy in her attitude toward him which was almost abstract, as though in addition to other complications she had come to view him only in light of his gender. He had even spoken to his wife about this. “I suppose since I’m a representative of the same sex to which her ex-husband belongs, I’m guilty by association.”

“Stop that,” his wife said. “She’s upset, and she wants to talk to her mother. There’s nothing wrong with that. Besides, don’t you think it’s time you stopped interpreting everything to be about you?”

“Oh, no,” he said. “I’m clearly not in this at all. I’m the ineffectual, insensitive Daddy kept in the dark.”

“Come on, William.”

His wife’s name was Elizabeth. But for almost forty years he had been calling her Cat, for the first three letters of her middle name, which was Catherine. Some of their friends did so as well, and she signed her cards and letters with a cartoon cat, long-whiskered and smiling, a decidedly wicked look in its eye. She had even had the name printed on the face of the checkbook: it read William and Cat Wallingham. They were one of the few married couples in Stuart Circle Court these days. “The only traditional couple,” William would say, “in this cul-de-sac.” And in what his wife and daughter would indicate was his way of joking at the wrong time and with the wrong words, he would go on to point out that this was almost literally true. The college nearby, where he had spent the bulk of his working life as an administrator, had begun to expand in recent years, and the neighborhood seemed always to be shifting; houses were going up for sale, or being rented. The tenants came and went without much communication. Living arrangements seemed confused or uncertain. And there were no older couples nearby anymore.

The only other married people in the cul-de-sac, as far as they knew, were a stormy young couple who had already been through two trial separations, but who were quite helplessly in love with each other. The young woman had confided in Cat. Occasionally William saw this woman working in her small fenced yard—an attractive, slender girl wearing tight jeans and a
smock, looking not much out of high school. He almost never saw the husband, whose job required travel. But it was often the case that they were in the middle of some turbulence or other, and sometimes Cat talked about them as if they were part of the family, important in her sphere of concerns. Last year, William would come home from work (it was the last one hundred days before his retirement; he had been counting them down on a calendar fixed to the wall in the den) and find Cat sitting in the living room with the young neighbor, teary-eyed, embarrassed to have him there, already getting up to excuse herself and go back to her difficult life.

When his daughter’s marriage began to break, William found himself thinking of this couple across the way, their tumultuous separations and reconciliations, their fractious union that was apparently so … well, glib, and also, in some peculiar emotional way, serviceable. Or at least it seemed so from the distance of the other side of the street. He had felt a kind of amusement about them, waffling back and forth, ready to walk away from each other with the first imagined slight or defection, no matter their talk of love, their supposed passion. And during the crucial beginning of Susan’s divorce, he’d found it hard to take her crisis seriously. It had felt so much the same, coming in to find Susan sitting there with the moist eyes and the handkerchief squeezed into her fist, showing the same anxiousness to get away from him. Perhaps Susan still held this all against him; and he knew he had seemed badly insensitive. In fact he has bungled everything, since he rather liked Susan’s husband and honestly believed that the two of them were better together than apart. He had made these feelings known, and now that she was in the process of getting the divorce, she had distanced herself from him.

“Granddaddy,” Elaine said
, pulling him, then letting go, “I don’t want to go for a walk anymore.” She ran across the yard to the largest of two willow trees, under which there was an inner tube hung on a rope. Parting the dropping branches, she entered the shade there, and in a moment she’d put her head and chest through the inner tube. She lifted her small feet and suspended herself, swinging, obviously having forgotten him. He waited a minute, and when he was certain she was occupied, went into the house. It was cool in the dim hallway. Susan made a shadow at the other end, still talking on the phone. She did not look up as he approached.

“I know that,” she said, “I know.”

He waited.

“I don’t care what he says. It’s been late every month, and this is not amicable. This has ceased to be amicable.”

He went back out onto the porch. Elaine had lost interest in the swing, was standing with her hands on it, staring out at the road, singing to herself. He walked along the front of the house to where the porch ended in flagstone stairs. His wife had planted rose bushes here, and they climbed the trellis he’d erected, forming a thorny arch under which he stood.