Wives & Lovers by Richard Bausch

Author:Richard Bausch
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9780061758652
Publisher: HarperCollins

HE’S ASHAMED, AND HE understands that lately whatever he’s feeling seems somehow beside the point. Even so, he keeps finding in himself this little tremor of well-being, like a secret nerve discharging at the synapse. In those moments, it’s almost as if, at the core of himself, he were a man standing on a boulder amidst a fast-flowing river. It convinces him, each time it happens, that things might soon take a turn for the better.

He’s looking for that feeling as Mr. Mason comes back into the room.

“Well,” Mr. Mason says, setting down a plate of crackers and cheese. “I myself always believed in discipline.”

“Yes.” Ridley looks straight at him, focusing. “And it’s gone. Nobody even thinks about it.” He remembers that this is the subject. And then he hopes it is.

Mrs. Mason says, “Civilizations are like arrows in flight. They arc and then fall to earth.”

On occasion, Ridley thinks of her conversation as a series of captions for the pictures her husband paints. The old man has described himself as a history buff. Everybody, according to Mr. Mason, is a buff of this or a buff of that. There are computer buffs and movie buffs and radio buffs and song buffs. Ridley is a medicine buff, though it has been some time since he dropped out of college. He told Mr. Mason that he was a pre-med student when he quit. All this means is that he took one biology and one chemistry course. He failed them both, but this makes no difference to Mr. Mason. “Young Ridley here,” Mr. Mason will say to visitors, “is a medicine buff.” To Ridley’s friends, Mr. Mason says, “Are you medicine buffs like Ridley?”

“Entropy is in God’s plan,” he says now. “As is our struggle with it.”

Mr. Mason’s views are all informed by his religious feeling. He’s nondenominational, he says, with Catholic leanings. Ridley has privately described him to friends as a God buff, since all his talk leads inexorably back to God. Having read the works of Thomas Aquinas, and having once almost decided to attend the seminary, Ridley can talk the talk. Even now, with panic roiling in his heart. “When was the last time anybody asked for sacrifice?” he says. “Even the word sounds strange, doesn’t it?”

“Never sounded strange to me,” says Mr. Mason.

Ridley is always unnerved when something he has said that is a lie, and that he has thought would be picked up by someone and agreed with, is turned back in disagreement. It’s always as though he’s been caught out, the falsehood showing on his face somehow. For a second, he can’t say anything else. The two people sit on their couch, their faces pleasant and empty. He feels them begin to slide out of solidness, feels the beginning of hallucination, and tries to talk again. “It’s a great world,” he says. He had meant to say word. Sacrifice is a great word. The old people simply stare back at him. “My eyes feel funny,” he says.

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