Focusing on That Split Second When Everything in Life Changes

On June 3, Slobodan Milosevic blinked. President Martti Ahtisaari of Finland offered him a deal, and, in the time it takes for lashes to fall and rise, he said OK. There have certainly been other blinks in the on-again-off-again negotiations that followed. But it was that one big blink, after 10 weeks of NATO bombardment, that brought the war in Yugoslavia back into large print on the front page.

Tht’s what drama’s about, after all--a long, stultifying stare, and then a blink. And the short story, the most economical of one-act dramas, relies on getting that blink on cue. Richard Bausch has written many fine novels, but itis as a story writer--and particularly in his latest collection, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” that he displays his supreme mastery over the blink.

“Everything happened so fast,” a husband says to his wife in one story. “Everything,” in the story “Two Altercations,” turns out to be more than just the gun battle the young couple witnesses while stuck in rush-hour traffic. It includes the blood on their wind-shield, and it includes Michael’s flight, abandoning Ivy in the car in his blind panic. “Everything” also encompasses Ivy’s open-eyed realization that her 7-month-old marriage to Michael was a mistake.

Sometimes the small blinks of the eye are reflections of tiny movements of the mouth, words small in size but huge in impact. “OK is OK, and wonderful is wonderful, and nice is nice. They all mean different things,” a man says to a woman. Indeed they do, especially hen they are the first small movements of the mouth, following an adulterous tussle. Especially when the man concerned is the kid brother of the woman’s husband.

In no story in the collection are words subjected to as intense a microscropic examination as in “The Voices From the Other Room,” where Larry and his sister-in-law Ellen enjoy a postcoital moment, reduced by Bausch to disembodied Mamet-like dialogue, stripped of deceptions of description and feeling, until every retaliatory sentence becomes a blink.

At other times, the blinks are actions, moments in which marriages are lost and triggers are pulled. “In the next instant, as if to pause any longer might somehow dilute his will,” Kaufman, the hero of “Fatality,” shoots his son-in-law. “In what seemed no space of time,” Aldenburg, a shoe salesman with a failing marriage, saves a busload of children, in the finest story of the collection, “Valor.” In these split seconds, the stories of “Someone to Watch Over Me” separate the goats from the little lambs that are lost in the woods.

Bausch’s territory is an uneasy Balkan state, a country peopled by neighbors so different from one another that the real surprise is that they cohabited so long. Old men marry young women, merchant marines marry middle-class college girls. Like Tennessee Williams, whose “Babydoll” and “Streetcar” were populated with just such misfits, Bausch knows that these countries come pre-loaded with drama, just waiting for the right spark to set them off.

Yet there is a gentleness to Bausch’s endings. Ivy takes a shower after the traffic altercation, reconciling herself to her husband, becoming “reasonably certain that she had dealt with her own disappointment and upset--and he could do whatever he wanted, finally, because she was already putting the whole unpleasant business behind her.”

Aldenburg, unable to find the TV report of his heroic deed and save his marriage, shakes his wife and feels “abruptly quite wrong, almost ridiculous. It came to him that he was going to have to go on being who he was. He reached over and touched her shoulder, very gently so that she would know that whatever she might say or do, she had nothing to fear from him.”

Bausch, like the best war correspondents, knows that, as uneasy as it may be, there is always a truce after the blink.