Something Is Out There Read online

  ALSO BY RICHARD BAUSCH

  Real Presence

  Take Me Back

  The Last Good Time

  Spirits and Other Stories

  Mr. Field’s Daughter

  The Fireman’s Wife and Other Stories

  Violence

  Rebel Powers

  Rare & Endangered Species: Stories

  Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea

  The Selected Stories of Richard Bausch (Modern Library)

  In the Night Season

  Someone to Watch Over Me: Stories

  Hello to the Cannibals

  The Stories of Richard Bausch

  Wives & Lovers: Three Short Novels

  Thanksgiving Night

  Peace

  For my whole family…

  Perhaps you know Malraux’s Anti-memoirs? His priest tells us that people are much more unhappy than one might think… and that there is no such thing as a grownup.

  —Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

  Contents

  The Harp Department in Love

  Byron the Lyron

  Reverend Thornhill’s Wife

  Son and Heir

  Trophy

  Something Is Out There

  Blood

  Overcast

  One Hour in the History of Love

  Immigration

  Sixty-five Million Years

  THE HARP DEPARTMENT IN LOVE

  This morning, while Josephine Stanislowski is tearfully packing winter clothes into a big box for the attic, her friend and neighbor Ruthie calls about the surprise party she’s having for her husband, Andrew, celebrating his graduation from college. It’s a party Josephine helped enthusiastically, several weeks ago, to plan. “Oh, God, it’s Friday, isn’t it,” Josephine says before she can catch herself. “That’s right.”

  “You didn’t forget.”

  “I lost track of the days, Ruthie. Sorry.”

  “You all right? You sound like you’ve been crying.”

  “I had a pepper and egg sandwich,” Josephine says, and is dejected about the lie. “It made my nose run.”

  “You sound awful.”

  Excitable, garrulous Ruthie knows only the outlines of Josephine’s situation—Monday, after a big blowup, John Stanislowski moved into the little efficiency downtown, his old studio overlooking the river; he says he’s through. Josephine has told Ruthie the change is temporary, so he can work on his new music.

  “The cake isn’t ready,” Ruthie goes on. “And the idiot just called to say he’s getting off an hour early.”

  Josephine manages the automatic response. “Uh-oh.”

  “I won’t be able to get everything laid out and the time’s all messed up now and I can’t get in touch with everybody,” says Ruthie. “But he’ll come right by you. Do you think you could delay him for me?”

  It’s a fifteen-minute walk from the university. They both know he’ll stop and buy a quart of beer at the little Korean one-stop, as he does every day. So, twenty minutes.

  “I’ll—I’ll pretend I need help with something,” Josephine gets out. “Should we have a signal when you’re ready for him?”

  “Let’s say the signal will be that I’ll call you. And don’t let him get suspicious. Make it something good.”

  “I will,” Josephine tells her. “I have a big heavy box of clothes that has to go in the attic.”

  “You’re packing his clothes away?”

  “Winter clothes. Mine, too. I do it every year.”

  “I guess he’s not coming to the party.”

  “Actually, he said he might.”

  “It would mean a lot to me.”

  After a brief pause, Josephine says, “Call when you’re ready.”

  They talk a little about how Ruthie wants things to go, and Josephine hears herself pretending she still has any interest in it. Somewhere she finds the strength to say, “It’s gonna be perfect, Ruthie.”

  “You always make me feel better,” Ruthie tells her. Then: “Oh, I’ll kill them if that cake’s not ready. I’ve gotta go, honey. Bye.”

  “Bye,” Josephine says. But the connection is broken.

  She puts the receiver back in its cradle, and walks into the living room of her now empty-feeling house to sit with a guitar on her lap and cry. She plays a few desultory chords, trying to get control of herself. Major chords. What John Stanislowski to his students used to call happy chords, being ironical. Then, without explaining or introducing it, he would play a Bulgarian song in G minor and make them want to dance, and when it was done he would reveal the fact. Nothing inherently cheerful or sad about the major and minor keys, he would say. She can hear his voice. The guitar smells of cedar. It’s a new one, bought only last month. The odor is familiar and something she has always loved, but just now it’s a little suffocating, so she sets it in its stand on the other side of the room. She has spent most of the morning folding the clothes. It’s a task she has performed every spring for the past four years—packing the heavy flannels, the sweaters, and the corduroy slacks. It’s important to keep to routines as much as possible. She goes back to work, stuffing the big box, sniffling into the busy silence and searching her mind for excuses she might use to escape having to attend Ruthie’s party. She mulls over possible lies to tell, different scenarios of feigned illness and emergency. Nothing seems right; it all sounds like evasion. And there’s the business of delaying Andrew.

  When the box is packed at last, its lid forced closed and fastened, she gets down on her knees for leverage and pushes it out into the hallway. Reaching up, she opens the attic stairs, but then lacks the heart to do more. A tide of anxiety washes over her. She moves from room to room, looking at the pictures on the walls and the books in the bookcases, the musical instruments—guitars, banjos, mandolins, a piano, even a harp—trying to be brave, trying to concentrate on it all as home, her home. But her stomach hurts, and it’s hard to breathe right.

  “Oh,” she says aloud. “You are so wrong about me.” It’s as if Stanislowski’s standing right there.

  • • •

  This predawn she had a dream about turtles, and remembered her childhood fascination with them, her mother talking about how they carry their homes on their backs. The dream felt occult, as if meant to impart something to her about her childhood and her mother, or take her back to a version of herself then. She didn’t get another minute’s sleep. The night wore on like silence during a bad argument.

  Now she dusts the surfaces, and straightens things, puts last night’s saucer and cup and cheese plate away. She wanders into the bathroom and blows her nose with toilet paper, washes her face, and puts on some makeup, exactly as if she’s someone to whom appearances matter. Then she goes into the kitchen and makes herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She can’t finish it. She lies down on the sofa and thinks about staying awake for fear of bad dreams.

  Waking with a start, she realizes that she has been asleep for more than an hour.

  It’s become afternoon, somehow. She sits up and stretches and then stands up. The house feels so goddamned unpleasantly spacious.

  She lies back down on the sofa and tries to read, but the words dissolve into worry. Finally she dozes still more, and wakes up from another dream, one that leaves only a sense of itself as disturbing. She supposes it might have been about the turtles again.

  On the refrigerator are photographs of her and Stanislowski being happy together, playing music, standing in a crowded piazza in Rome, on the corner of Beale and Second with friends, entertaining guests out on the back lawn of this house.

  The two of them have lived here for almost four years. He’s Stan to friends and family. Professor Emeritus of Music at
Memphis School of the Arts. A fixture, a feature of the cultural landscape. Thirty years older than she is, he has lived in many houses; but this is her first—the first mortgage, and the first place she has occupied for more than a few months. Now she’s alone with two cats and the musical instruments. No matter how many lights she turns on, the rooms seem gloomy and forlorn, nobody else here except the cats, whose names are Cat One and Cat Two. They’re outside types; she lets them in at night.

  Ruthie’s husband works the front desk in the physical education building at the university. On sunny, warm days he walks to and from work. He comes along in the late afternoons in summer with a quart of cold beer in a paper bag, sipping it as he goes. He’s been going to night school for the past five years seeking his degree in history, the first in his family to go to college. For the party, Ruthie has invited all his friends from school, along with a few neighbors, and his mother and father, who have flown in from Chicago. It’s a special day and Josephine helped plan it because Ruthie has what she calls S.O.D.—special occasion disorder. The condition, Ruthie says, manifests itself as anxiety and confusion and an inability to focus on the practical matters of preparation for any social gathering; it’s a kind of paralysis, really, and she’s not kidding when she talks about it. The only thing for it is an organized and concerned friend like Josephine, who designed some of the banners with which Ruthie will festoon the porch and the front hall, and wrapped the presents, and even mapped out the rearrangement of chairs in the front room. She also took care of the invitations, and this week she e-mailed one to Stanislowski at his school address, to remind him. He called to ask what she could be thinking of; he never liked Andrew particularly. “Ruthie invited us both,” Josephine told him. “As you know. And of course she’d like you to come.”

  “You tell her anything?”

  “You need space and time to work on your new music.”

  “That’s funny.”

  “I’m telling you what I told her. And maybe you’ll write some new music.”

  After a pause, he said, “I don’t know about this—party. I doubt I’ll be there.”

  She kept silent, trying to control her breathing because he would hear it through the line.

  “If I’m not there by the time it starts, I’m not coming.”

  “Okay.”

  “I wish it was last year,” he muttered.

  “Come home,” she said, listening to him breathe into the phone, and then clear his throat. Was he crying?

  Earlier this spring, at an outing with her painting class, she got separated from the others with someone named Bradford Smith, a classmate who had seemed only marginally interesting as a fellow student, much less a friend. They got lost in the woods. The two of them had a long afternoon, which became a surprisingly pleasurable interval of talk and telling stories and laughing about being lost. It began to feel like one of those movies where strangers are thrown together and learn mutual respect and affection, and then something causes them to take a turn toward each other in seriousness, with music. The afternoon ended in an embrace and a kiss, and resulted in a few meetings over the next month, for coffee, or a short walk—nothing more, finally, than a kind of flirtation (for Josephine, it was strangely an accession to the wish to recover the dreamy zaniness of the first day), and it never went farther than that one kiss. Smith was closer to her age and there were elements of common experience and culture that they shared. It was a form of relaxation for her, talking to him—it was even, in a way, a little lazy. But then he got strange and moody, and started talking about love, and just as she was trying gently to remove herself, things went very badly awry. Saturday morning Bradford Smith, in an absurd misguided romantic fervor, approached Stanislowski at the entrance to the music building and expressed his belief that he had won Josephine’s heart. Stanislowski, having worried about her in that way from the beginning, knocked him down, and then came home and packed a bag.

  “Nothing has changed,” she told Stanislowski over the phone. “I love you.”

  “And Bradford Smith?”

  “Oh, Stan—you have to please stop turning the knife in yourself.”

  “It’s your knife, kid.”

  “Will you please.” She sighed. “I never felt anything like love for Bradford Smith. I never felt anything at all for Bradford Smith. I keep saying it and saying it: I’m innocent of what you have imagined about me. I can’t help—I couldn’t help—what he felt.”

  “I might come in a cab,” he said about the party. “And if I do, it means I’m planning on getting really drunk.”

  “That would be the mature thing to do. Soak yourself in alcohol.”

  “Go down blazing,” he said.

  “Live like a song lyric, huh? I used to know high school boys who talked like that.”

  “In your long-ago youth. What was it, six years ago?”

  “The point is, it’s immature talk, Stan.”

  “Well, I’m a bit past immature, wouldn’t you say?”

  “It’s infantile, nevertheless.”

  “Are you preaching at me?”

  “I hope you’ll come to Ruthie’s party. Really. And I’m not preaching. Really.” She hung up, and heard the click on his end as she did.

  He taught music at the university for thirty-five years before retiring last May. He has emeritus status, and still teaches a class there—a Saturday-morning community seminar in composition. Because his hands are arthritic he can’t play very well anymore, but he can still write. Lately, he doesn’t like much of what he has written, and she believes that this has weighed on his mind along with the other matter. His discouragement about the music is all wrong as far as she’s concerned: his new music is wonderful; it is some of the best he has ever written. It has passion, a richer vein of it; the whole feel of it is less intellectual.

  Most of the musical instruments in the house belong to him, though it’s true that she’s the one who mostly plays them now. This has been so since they first bought the house together, four years ago, deciding to live together. She was once his most gifted student. They’ve been married now for a year and nine months.

  He’s sleeping on the daybed in the little studio downtown.

  Josephine told Ruthie about his doubts concerning his music, but kept the rest to herself. Ruthie’s a good listener, the kind of friend whose hopes and concerns seem completely transparent in their simplicity, and whose instincts are all predicated on the assumption that the people around her are mutually interested in keeping to the principles of considerate and loving behavior. She has a way of blocking out everything else. It’s what John Stanislowski calls her wall of sweetness. He wondered aloud about Andrew in the first weeks of their acquaintance, because Andrew is often wild and unruly, and he drinks too much. “They’re not slightly compatible,” he said.

  “I think compatibility’s always a mystery, though, don’t you?” Josephine said.

  “You’re talking about us.”

  “Oh, God, sweetie,” she said. “No.”

  Now she sits at the window and picks a little soft melody on the mandolin. “Hickory Wind.” It makes her feel like crying again, so she stops. This is her favorite spot in the house, and she often sat here while Stan worked in the other room. Here is her neighborhood, like a tranquil scene from memory—as if he were indeed still in the next room, in that brooding but happy silence of his striving—such an agreeable, peaceful street, a shaded row of houses, each of them alike without exact duplication. There are brick fronts, clapboard sides, little porches, awnings, green shutters, tall black wooden fences and short metal ones, storm doors—those wonderful black wrought-iron doors of Memphis—and storm windows, slanted roofs and angled ones with cupolas; perfectly kept lawns with fat shrubs and long hedges trimmed flat as little walls, and charming flower beds—a lovely residential avenue in the city, not far from the university. Even now, it calms her, gazing out. It’s the place she used to dream about, growing up. The only thing that announces it as part
of the city is the bus that pulls by now and then, not even often enough for her to have figured out what its schedule might be.

  She can’t understand how she could’ve let Bradford Smith get so close. And perhaps it was no more complex than that there was something thrilling about being admired that way. And something alluring about the ease of it, since he was so undemanding. “I’m human,” she told Stanislowski, “and I didn’t do anything wrong.” And the part about being human was the worst thing she could’ve said. Stanislowski seized on it: “Of course. There it is. You’re human. You’re young, he’s young. You desire life, right?”

  She puts the mandolin down now and picks up a guitar. She can also play the piano, the bongos, the drums, the flute, and all the woodwinds—though those instruments don’t interest her as much, and since Stanislowski doesn’t play them, there are none at the house. She prefers the guitar, the mandolin, the banjo, and the fiddle. She almost never plays the harp, and it sits there in the dining room looking like a small sculpture by Picasso. She expressed this once to Stanislowski, who was amused by it and took to showing the harp to people as a piece by the artist. And it made him laugh out loud when she was asked, a year ago, to teach something about the instrument to a group of visiting Japanese students, and she introduced herself as the university’s Harp Department. It became a standing joke between them. “The Harp Department wishes to have dinner,” she would say. And he would answer: “Is the Harp Department hungry?”

  “Oh very.”

  “May I ask if the Harp Department has any plans on doing the cooking?”

  “No, I believe the Harp Department is too tired for that and would like instead to be spoiled by her husband.”

  “Well,” Stanislowski would say, “whatever the Harp Department wants.”

  Sometimes prone to theatrics—he once stood in a restaurant and demanded quiet in order to report that Josephine had written a beautiful piece of music that day, and he wanted everyone to toast her—Stanislowski is a man of prodigious learning with an ability to quote from all of it, and he’s more entertaining, more involving, than anybody she has known in her life. He makes her laugh, and fills her head with ideas, musical and otherwise. She has endured his temperamental fits as people endure weather, because when things have been right she has felt so happy. Bradford Smith, she sometimes thinks now, was like the letdown that follows long concentration, like drinks and talk on a sunny patio after work on something you love, deeply. He made her feel drowsily at ease, at least until he started getting strange; Stanislowski makes her feel alive, and alert. He has said she makes him feel that, too.