Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  And so there was no one to call on this quiet March morning, no one of his gender to give him counsel. For a brief moment he imagined calling Claire, but his eyes began to fill at even the thought for he could already hear his sister’s loving voice and she would immediately begin to mother him. This would leave him feeling weak and not up to the crisis he found himself standing in. She would turn on Laura, too, and he could not have that for he still wanted his wife, he wanted her more than he ever had, especially now, her murderous laptop on the couch in the living room, her having walked away from him without a word, and then he was climbing the carpeted stairs to their bedroom.

  From the dimness of the hallway he could hear the shower running, see the blue-gray light of their bedroom he had not slept in. He was unbuttoning his shirt. He was going to undress and step inside the shower with her. She’d be surprised at first, but she’d let him in. There was so much he wanted to say to her. There was so much she was wrong about, all those sentences she’d written to Harrison a razor cutting across Mark’s organs. They would wash each other. They would begin to cleanse themselves of this. He saw himself drying her body with a towel, her sternum and small breasts and soft, flat belly with its purple stretch marks, her hips that had expanded for their children, her long runner’s legs. Surely she would want to make love to him. Surely she would feel, as he did, that they just had to. Then, before she’d sit down and write that final letter, they could talk. Mark and Laura Welch would lie on their bed together and talk like they used to, or perhaps never had before.

  But it was Laura who was talking. And it was on the other side of the bathroom door. For half a heartbeat, Mark thought Frank Harrison Jr. was in there with her, that some time during the night he’d walked right into their house and made himself at home. But the phone cradle on Laura’s bedside table was empty and now Mark’s ear was pressed to the closed bathroom door.

  There was only the muffled sound of falling water in the shower, his heart jerking between his ears. There was his own breathing. A car passing by outside. For a full minute or two, he listened to the falling water and heard only that. Nothing else. He was only hearing things, that’s all. Bad things. He just needed more sleep. Maybe after he and Laura—

  “A detective, I guess. Honey, what’re we going to do?”

  An electric jolt through his limbs, his hands on the doorknob that wouldn’t turn, the yanking and yanking. There was his yelling in the air, his wife’s name in it like a leaf being swept away in a wind not of his making. There was the sting of his palm slamming the door again and again, then he was kicking it, then he was in the dim hallway and in Mary Ann’s room, her white cordless phone in its cradle beside her white bedspread and stuffed white animals beneath the poster of a black rapper whose eyes on Mark seemed to be judging him, weighing whether or not he could do now what truly had to be done, the phone in his hand a gun, the talk button he pressed the trigger, the words coming out of his mouth blanks for there was nothing but the electronic flatline of a dial tone unrolling itself endlessly into the vast emptiness he’d been left in.

  And by whom? A liar and a cheat, her contrition the night before not an act but a performance. And so the scope of the problem had just gotten wider and deeper and he had no choice now but to physically force the solution.

  ON THE COP’S WALLS are nothing. No posters or photographs. No cheap framed paintings. Just four vacant walls that surround Mark now like mirrors, though something has changed; he no longer feels he is watching himself.

  Beside him, Lisa Schena sleeps on her back, her face turned away from him. The sheet is pulled to her upper chest, and he cannot see her breasts but he can still feel them in his hands, so much larger than Laura’s, so much fleshy abundance. Her lovemaking had been abundant too, though making love, he knows, is not what they just did. Yet he feels grateful toward her, the way one does toward a doctor who has just prescribed you the right medicine and then gives you a free dose. But what is this medicine that has sunk him back into his own body the way a baby is slapped breathing into this life? He doubts it is simply what Lisa Schena has just given to him, her breasts and tongue and spread legs, her fingers squeezing his hips as he entered what felt to him to be dangerous territory, for him, for her, the act itself somehow maligned, but her need was strong and so was his and then her legs locked him into a pleasure he began to give himself to, but again, for a long while it was only his body doing it, not him, and so he lasted longer than perhaps he ever had before, her moans a foreign language in his ear. How strange it was to touch and feel this new body. Places were soft that used to be firm, places went out that used to go in, and she moved in a rhythm that was like learning a dance he’d only seen once and that was long ago.

  No one’s ever made me feel that before.

  A rolled towel slapping at him in rebuke, and he reminded himself to reach down and touch that part of Lisa Schena he had not always taken the time to touch on his wife, and that’s when he began to feel himself drift back into his own body and its actions, when he felt the presence of lovely Laura who for all he knew was fucking Frank Harrison as he did what he did with Lisa Schena, her moans suspended, her breath jagged in his ear, her legs straightening as she arched her hips and let out a long exhalation of air, then a whimper, and Mark felt Laura there in the cop’s room behind him, her long hair pulled back in a runner’s ponytail, her arms crossed under her breasts, stunned that he would do this yet he was doing it, not his body but him, this knowledge dropping the weight of his days and nights into his loins where it became broken glass and splintered wood and cracked tiles, all gathering in tiny bits before hurling themselves into world-weary yet warm Lisa Schena.

  She’s snoring slightly. It feels like a violation of her privacy to hear it. He’s sober now, or close to it, and outside the sliding doors the light has faded slightly. There’s the gurgling hum of the air-conditioning unit, the room comfortably cold. He thinks of his car back in the parking lot behind the Sea Spray Motel, its wood glue and tiling materials and steel pipe in the trunk. It’s not too late to at least repair the kitchen table leg, but he doesn’t want to wake this woman, and if he leaves he’ll be a prick.

  He thinks of pregnancy, diseases. Unlike his own Laura, Lisa Schena is still in her fertile years and he just ejaculated deep into her womb. Also she’s known him less than a day, yet she called him and fucked him, and how many other men has she done this to?

  He looks back at her short ugly hair, her pocked cheek, her tanned upper chest rising and falling in peaceful, trusting breaths, and he feels like a creep for even beginning to judge her.

  I love how you don’t judge me.

  Another one of Laura’s razor-blade gifts for him. But couldn’t she see that’s who her husband was? A professional judge and jury, a man paid well to control the situation?

  THE DETECTIVE WAS a retired state trooper, a heavy-faced Irishman with sad eyes and deep laugh lines around his mouth, and he’d given Mark the name Frank Harrison Jr., told him his job and place of work, the town he lived in, but no street address. So on that snowy morning, Laura most certainly back on the phone with her lover, Mark had pulled off the highway in Newburyport, the four-foot pipe from the garage on the backseat of his BMW.

  He stopped at a Mobil station and borrowed their phone book from a young man slumped on a stool behind the counter. There were many Harrisons but only one Frank, and he lived on Olive Street. The boy directed Mark to it. “A half mile into town,” he said. “On the left just past the high school.” And he looked like a high school kid himself. He wore a Bruins sweatshirt, his left cheek stuffed with a wad of chew so that his directions sounded slightly slurred, and he was taking in the wrinkled button-down shirt Mark had slept in, the fact that he wasn’t wearing a coat, his unshaven face, his bloodshot eyes that burned from lack of sleep.

  When Mark drove his sedan down Olive Street, it was just after eight on a Wednesday morning. Olive was narrow, the way so many were in this old shipbuilding tow
n, the houses on both sides of him historic landmarks that had been recently restored. Their clapboards and shutters were newly painted, and many of them had granite steps leading to small fir porches, brass street numbers screwed into plaques beside their front doors.

  Number 37 was on the right, a shingled two-story whose roof pitched steeply into copper gutters only a banker would own. And there he was stepping out his front door, Frank Harrison Jr. He wore a beige overcoat and a gray suit, his tie a muted blue, his head not bald but balding, and he looked younger than Mark, fitter, taller, these traits fuel for the fire he knew he was setting, his arm reaching back for the pipe. Then he was on the sidewalk facing Harrison and his happy home.

  Harrison was just stepping off the last step. A leather briefcase hung by his side, and in his right hand was an insulated coffee cup, the kind Mark himself would fill with dark roast before driving to work. Harrison stopped. His eyes took in Mark and his four-foot pipe the way a man would a natural disaster on the TV news just before changing the channel, this problem obviously someone else’s.

  “Do you like ruining other people’s lives, motherfucker?”

  Mark noticed Harrison’s shoes were slightly scuffed, that his suit pants had a double crease in them from hurried ironing. Just beneath his left cheekbone was a shaving nick.

  “I’m talking to you, you piece of shit.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You know who I am. Don’t give me that. You know who I fucking am.” The pipe in Mark’s hand felt like an extension of the long bones in his arm, and he stepped forward with it and raised it to his shoulder.

  “No, I honestly don’t.”

  There were the sounds of car engines starting, a door or two opening and closing. A woman down the street was calling something to her Tommy, something about his lunch. Mark stepped forward. He was close enough now to swing the pipe and do some damage, but his lower legs seemed to be stuck in three feet of mud, and he felt like a man with his penis out in a family waiting room in a hospital somewhere. Something had changed in Harrison’s face too, his pinkish young face, and Mark was on the cusp of knowing his mistake before the banker even opened his mouth.

  “You looking for Frank Harrison Jr.?”

  “You know I am.”

  “Well that would be my father, not me. Now get away from my property before I make a call.” Frank III walked across his small, damp lawn, his scuffed business shoes slopping through what little snow still clung to the grass. He climbed into his Hyundai and backed out of the driveway, his face not on Mark Welch, it seemed, but on all he knew and would rather not know about his good father. He stopped and stared hard at Mark out his open window, waiting for him to leave before he did.

  A flash of movement, a curtain parting in one of Frank III’s front windows. It was the face of a young boy. He was four or five years old, and he, too, was staring at Mark and his steel pipe, his eyes deeply curious, his lips parted. A woman’s hand pulled him firmly away and the curtain fell closed and then Mark was driving a bit too fast down narrow Olive Street. There was the vague hope that his license plate was obscured from view, though he did not really care either way. Let them come. Let them all come for him for it was clear from the son that the father had done this many times before, and Mark now despised Frank Harrison Jr. more than he could contain.

  He drove west along the river, passing house after house, fathers and mothers and children leaving them to climb into cars and minivans for the day’s demands, so many of the kids shouldering backpacks they could barely carry. He accelerated onto the chain bridge over the river, its muddy banks spotted with snow, and he kept hearing the indignant voice of Harrison’s son, how this had all become a tiresome game and look how easily he had turned in his own father. Maybe some of the men at Harrison’s doorstep had been contractually fleeced by him, and that’s what the son had seen before, but Mark doubted that. It was the young man’s tone—Well that would be my father, not me. This moral separation he was nearly spitting out of his mouth, a morality rooted in something far more intimate than a businessman’s slippery code of ethics.

  Mark slowed beneath the highway overpass, then upshifted onto the ramp, gunning the engine across three lanes. An SUV honked, which was a surprise to him for he had not seen it, nor had he been looking. He kept seeing Laura’s pale angular face, those small bags under her eyes as he would tell her that it appears her lover, her sweetheart, her nonjudgmental companion did this kind of thing all the time, that she was just one among many notches in his fucking jockstrap.

  And this steel pipe nonsense would have to stop. That was a boy’s revenge. If he did physically hurt Frank Harrison Jr., he would merely create a martyr and a patient for his wife to nurse. And there would be law enforcement to deal with, charges that could get him jailed and that could get him sued as well. He could lose his house to the very man who was taking his wife, and he saw Harrison and Laura sharing what was once his: his bed, his kitchen, his pool, Mark’s mother’s apartment empty of her.

  He was driving too fast now, the median strip to his left a brown blur. Then a car horn honked and he was downshifting onto the exit ramp for his town. For a moment, perhaps two and a half heartbeats echoing in his head, he began to see Laura as a victim, one who’d been conned by a professional player. He started to feel his arms go around her, then hers around him as it began to sink into her what she’d truly stumbled into in that gym on the hill. But as he turned down his street, an empty driveway awaited him, one he drove into just enough to back out and drive to the only place she could have gone, Frank Harrison Jr.’s place of work, the Providential Bank on Water Street.

  Mark drove slowly through the downtown of his youth. On both sides of him, the brick mill buildings were bustling with businesses, bars and restaurants, a microbrewery and music supply shop, lawyers’ offices and a yoga studio and lofts for sale overlooking the river and its brush-covered banks on the other side. Men and women walked along the wet sidewalk, most in winter coats and hats, though he did not see them or think of them at all, his heart crashing in his head, his eyes scanning each parked car for Laura’s Civic or Harrison’s white Audi TT coupe.

  He steered down the asphalt ramp into the lot behind the bank, and when he saw a white vehicle between a Mercedes and a minivan, he knew he would once again grab the four-foot pipe whether it was the logical thing to do or not. But it was a small sedan of some kind, and Mark backed into a space against the concrete river wall, and he waited.

  It occurred to him he had not yet called in sick. He pressed his phone to his ear. In seconds Darla was on the other end. Twenty-nine years old, she was warm and competent and wore small wire-rimmed glasses that slightly magnified her brown eyes that were constantly anticipating what everyone around her needed, especially her boss, Mark Welch. She’d been married for two years in her early twenties, had no children, and on her vacations would fly to a European country where Mark suspected she’d find a lover whether she was looking or not, her calves upside-down hearts he disciplined himself not to stare at as she’d leave his office, her skirt or business pants hugging the firm, warm rest of her too.

  But now her voice was a bath into which he was lowering his bruised and aching body, and Mark felt so wronged, so deeply and unfairly wronged, that for a brief moment he could not speak at all.

  “Mark? This is your phone, isn’t it?”

  “Darla?”

  “You all right?”

  Through the windshield he could see the fluorescent lights on in the second-story windows of the bank, a bespectacled man in a suit talking to someone at a desk Mark could not see. “No, I’m not.”

  “You sick? The flu’s going around.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You should rest.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Should I notify anyone?”

  “I’ll send emails.”

  “I’m happy to do that for you.”

  She was, too. She was happy to help him.

&nbs
p; “I know you are, Darla. I know you are.”

  “Go back to bed, Mark.”

  “Darla?”

  “Yes?”

  He could feel the words forming in the back of his throat, and he longed to tell her, burned to tell her. He did not really know her, had never even seen her once outside the building they both worked in, but she would listen to him, and if she did not fully listen, at least she would hear him. At least one human ear would receive what he had to tell her.

  “Mark? You still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to bed.”

  He did not remember having said another word, but now he was staring at his cell phone. #1 got him to his messages. #2 called home. #3 called Laura’s cell phone. There were numbers for his children and one for his mother. There was a number for the central office and Teddy Burns, who’d been so right about his true nature and so Mark had learned to manage with edge and force, never abusively but through the use of incriminating details he’d simply point out to an underperforming team member, a clear and undeniable record of each and every one of his failures.

  All he does is criticize me. Nothing I ever do is good enough for him.

  He’s a bully, Laura. He doesn’t even know what he has.

  I love how you don’t judge me.

  Bully? When he’d first read this hours earlier, the word had bounced off him like a ping-pong ball. How about normal? How about a man with average expectations? How about that? But now the word seemed to hang in the air of his car like a bad smell, and he started his engine and put it in gear.

  He was driving again, this time through the back streets and their small vinyl-sided houses, their short driveways and muddy yards. Then he was crossing Main for the realtor’s office. Its spaces were in the rear, and they held every car but Laura’s. She was with him. She was certainly with him. He could call her. He could pick up his cell phone and punch in #3, but if she answered, it would be in the presence of her lover, and her husband would immediately appear to him weak and placating. No. Mark would drive back home, a foreign word to him now, a foreign country, but he would drive there and he would wait.