Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  “We had our baby today, Danny.”

  Sullivan looked up, his eyes suddenly empty of numbers. “Already?”

  “Eight weeks early. Everything’s okay, though.” Robert felt himself smile, and now, telling the news to a man, a father, though twice divorced, Robert felt genuinely happy. “We have a little girl. She’ll be in the hospital for a while, I guess.”

  “Your wife?”

  “She’s good.” Robert’s forehead felt like plastic.

  Dan Sullivan stood and offered his hand. “Good for you, kid. Sit down.” He waved at a sawed-off barstool, its upholstered seat sealed with duct tape. He left the office and was back before Robert had even sat. He was carrying a bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey and two highball glasses, still steaming from the machine. It was the last thing Robert wanted, his bourbon-dry gut already shrinking back at the news, but when Sullivan poured him three fingers and put the glass in his hand Robert knew he would drink it. His manager raised his own glass, said something in Gaelic, then tapped Robert’s, and Robert drank the Bushmills slowly, enough for his insides to acclimate themselves, and when they did things weren’t so bad: it was a warm, amber day on the beach and his gut was lolling in the water. His manager must’ve seen something in Robert’s face and poured them each one more, though this one was shorter.

  Sullivan raised his glass again. “A girl’s the way to go, Bobby.” His manager drank down the Bushmills and Robert followed suit, the second glass feeling a bit shy in kick and weight, Robert remembering something about Danny’s grown son tending bar here till his father had to fire him for stealing from the register. Sullivan sat back behind his desk and took a deep drag off his cigarette, the numbers back in his eyes again. “I’ll get Davey to cover for you till you’re all set. Give yourself a couple of days, all right?”

  Robert thanked him and left the office. He’d meant to give his notice too, to tell him he was done for the season, but Sullivan’s gesture of the Bushmills and toast had thrown him. The aftertaste of the Irish whiskey was a bit coarse in Robert’s throat, and he walked to the bar and filled himself a glass of ginger ale from the soda gun. The waitresses were gone from the window. It was set now with napkins and silver and clean water glasses. Devon, one of the bus girls, was setting a table at a corner booth, and it was hard not to stare at her young ass in her black pants, but the word daughter was in his head and he made himself look away. Outside and across the boulevard, the beach was already full of people sunbathing, others throwing a Frisbee or football back and forth, still others wading out into the green and white surf. He was exhausted, the glass in his hand heavier than it should be, his legs stiff and unsure. And he felt the toast too, his face and head a wide reckless expanse with no borders, and there was the feeling of being left behind, something important going on someplace else he really should not miss.

  Then he was in his car backing over the broken shells, perhaps breaking more himself. Though the windows were rolled down, the inside of the car was hot and he began to sweat beneath his ironed shirt. A screen door slammed back on its jamb and there was Jackie standing on her porch in her sunbathing bikini, holding her folded lounge chair and a glass of something iced. She’d pulled her hair out of its ponytail and now it hung thickly just past her shoulders. He didn’t wave or acknowledge her in any way, mainly because the car was moving forward, he told himself, but in the rearview mirror he watched her watch him go, her lovely face looking small and sad with resolve, her breasts as ample and inviting as two peaches on a limb on the other side of a steep gorge.

  In Exeter, Robert stopped for coffee and flowers. He parked across from the small gazebo off the main square and stepped up under the awnings of the shops and restaurants that filled the old mill buildings all the way to the river. The air was warmer here than on the beach, no breeze, and his mouth was dry, his shirt sticking to the middle of his back. Down a side street was a florist. He went inside and ordered a dozen long-stemmed roses but then changed his mind; red wasn’t the appropriate color for the occasion and, under the circumstances, he didn’t want Althea to think he was trying to romance her. He asked the lady behind the counter to make up a fifty-dollar mixed bouquet, then stepped outside to escape the earth-strangled odors of all those green stems in the water. Across the road was a Mexican restaurant, its doors open. In the dark bar two men sat laughing. Robert considered a quick beer, but the Bushmills had worn off, leaving him sleepier than ever, his eyes burning slightly, the terrible all-nighter behind him like a faraway sound. The sight of the two men bruised him in a way he couldn’t pinpoint, and when he walked into a newsstand at the corner for a cup of coffee, he saw the humidor of cigars and knew not only was he genuinely afraid of Althea leaving him now, but he was lonesome too, lonesome for at least one male friend to whom he could hand a cigar.

  He immediately thought of calling his father. It was almost noon in August; he’d be putting up the hay, driving the baler while a couple of hired hands caught the bales, then stacked them onto the trailer. At this moment he was a grandfather and didn’t know it, and as Robert paid for the wrapped flowers he told himself to make the call from the hospital, though he hadn’t seen or talked to his mother and father in over four years. What would they have talked about? Robert’s tips? The tuition money he still owed them? The poetry he wasn’t writing? But now there was something to show, something worth his mother calling his father from the fields to the phone for. But the notion of his baby girl being identified as his father’s granddaughter left Robert feeling naked and weak, like the better man would get picked to step in and finish a job with which Robert, of course, could not be trusted. That poet-in-residence had told Robert he should start looking at other people instead of expecting everyone to look at him. There was the week of drinking and skipping all his classes, then leaving school, and then his father standing in his bedroom doorway saying, “You’re all talk, aren’t you, son? Nothing but talk.”

  Robert thought of Althea’s anemic face and dark dry eyes. Jackie in her bikini watching him go.

  He drove slowly. The coffee was bitter and too hot and wasn’t mixing well with the Bushmills. A band of sweat came out on his forehead and he wiped it off with the back of his arm, then dumped his coffee out the window, the plastic lid falling away. In the rearview mirror he watched it roll and flip onto the yellow divider, then lie flat, seemingly accepting its fate as the tires of a pickup truck just missed it. But Robert didn’t feel so lucky; the surge of joy he’d felt earlier when he’d told Sullivan of the birth had now backed up on him and turned into an almost suffocating awareness of his own worthlessness, and as he took the left turn for the hospital, his stomach queasy, it seemed almost inconceivable that in his short marriage to Althea she had, in her quiet way, left him feeling not only worthy, but exceptional, a man not only capable of being a real poet, but a husband and father too.

  The hospital sat on a rise surrounded by woods, its windows reflecting the glare of the sun. Robert squinted, his head aching. He parked in the shade of a sugar maple and got out with the flowers. When he swung the door shut it pinched off the head of a daisy and a flower he didn’t know. He opened the door to retrieve them, but they were both crushed. He reached inside the bouquet for the flowerless stems but couldn’t find them, his fingers feeling thick and clumsy. He left them there, hoping Althea would not see them. Inside the hospital at the information desk he asked an elderly woman for his wife’s room number. It was on the second floor, she told him, Room 214. Robert asked about the neonatal unit too, and the woman said it was on the third floor, though this time she smiled at him, an understanding and encouraging smile, one with which she obviously hoped to fortify him. Robert hadn’t been looking for or expecting that; it frightened him. He walked quickly to the elevators, remembering the doctor’s words earlier, that his daughter appears healthy, and Robert’s face flushed with shame that this hadn’t been the primary word on his mind since he’d first heard it.

  In the elevator he presse
d the button for the third floor, bypassing his wife’s. The neonatal unit’s door was locked. Robert had to press an intercom button beside it to announce who he was. He cleared his throat and leaned close to the speaker, his throat dry from the coffee, a bad taste in his mouth. He pressed the button.

  “Your name, please.” The voice was clear and free of static.

  “Robert Doucette.”

  There was no answer. Robert saw he was holding the wrapped flowers tilted to the floor, their heads lolling on their stems, and he righted them.

  “We have infant girl Doucette.”

  “That’s her—I mean that’s me. I’m Robert. She’s my daughter.” And it occurred to Robert their child did not yet have a name. The door buzzed loudly and Robert entered the floor. There was a polished passageway, and in it was one chair next to a sink beneath a fire extinguisher. A dark-haired nurse greeted him and smiled, this one genuinely warm but brief and businesslike. She handed him a yellow gown and said he would have to leave the flowers on the chair and wash his hands at the sink. Robert did as he was told. He dried his hands quickly, put the gown on over his shirt, and was tying its sash at his waist as he followed the nurse into the unit.

  At its center was a brightly lit nurses’ station with four or five women sitting behind a circular counter writing or reading something or speaking quietly on a phone. One stood and pulled a clear bottle from a cabinet. The nurse led him past a large, dim room whose windows were covered with closed blinds, eight or nine tiny cribs scattered in the shadows, transparent bassinets on wheel stands, really. At each one was some sort of electronic monitor. Some were unplugged and dark, others lit up with green, red, and orange lights. Next to these were metal stands with intravenous bags hanging from their hooks. Two or three babies were crying, their voices high and strained and plasticine, as if their vocal cords were only thin distressed membranes. Robert tried to swallow but his throat was too dry, his heart beating in his palms and fingers. He followed the nurse into another large room, this one a bit brighter, its window blinds pulled up halfway. There were four bassinets, and the nurse stopped at the first one on the right. There was an intravenous stand and an electronic monitor. All of its lights were lit up green and red, its screen and opaque orange showing the graphic rise and roll of a beating heart.

  “Here she is.”

  Robert’s eyes filled.

  There were so many tubes and wires running into the bassinet Robert was at first not sure what he was seeing. Then he saw her bare chest in the folds of the linen; it was red and orange really, a network of tiny blue capillaries beneath the skin. She was not much larger than his hand.

  Her arms and legs were thin, crooked, and short, and her eyes were closed, her face the size of a small apricot. Her lips were tiny rims of purple, and they were parted, her dark round mouth smaller than a dime. She had no hair and hardly any eyebrows or lashes. On her bare chest and stomach were the monitor wires connected to what looked like small round Band-Aids. Just above the miniscule diaper was the stump of her severed umbilical cord, pink and blue, still bloody at the tip. Around her upper arm was a blood pressure cuff no wider in circumference than a cigar band, and taped to her wrist was the IV tube, which dwarfed it.

  Robert wiped at his eyes and nose. “Is she all right?”

  “Yes. She just needs a little extra help right now. Would you like to hold her?”

  He looked at the nurse: she was smiling, her eyes bright with a certain knowledge she seemed to know Robert did not yet have, one she was happy to give him now. For Robert it was like looking into an angel’s loving face while sitting on the toilet, or masturbating, or stealing money, or standing there with a sleepless hungover head and body and freshly washed genitals while your wife recovered from surgery she probably never would have had, this infant deprived of eight precious weeks in her mother’s womb, this miniature infant girl, her belly rising and falling in short, almost desperate-looking breaths.

  How could he not? A cool sweat came out on his forehead and the back of his neck.

  “Here.” The nurse stepped closer, reached into the bassinet, and picked the baby up with cupped hands, her head fitting snugly between two of the woman’s fingers, the wires and tube reaching only so far. Robert held out both palms. They trembled slightly, and as the nurse slid the child onto his hand he was terrified of dropping her. The infant turned her head to the right and left, then nudged her nose and cheek into the soft flesh at the base of his thumb, her feet barely reaching his other hand. The flowers he’d bought were five times heavier than this. She began to blur. He sniffled and held her close to his chest. Her ear was pinkish red and perfectly formed but as small as if he were seeing it from a hundred feet in the air. The nurse covered her with a light blanket smaller than a man’s handkerchief. His daughter blurred again. The nurse dragged a rocking chair over and set it beside him. Robert was afraid the tube and wires wouldn’t reach. The nurse began to uncoil some slack from the IV stand, but Robert shook his head and told her that’s okay, he’ll stand. She looked at him briefly, as if she were making sure that was what he really wanted; there was something like satisfaction in her eyes. Warmth, too. Wisdom. She turned and took all that to another baby in another room.

  Robert looked down at his daughter, this infinitesimal baby girl curled under a piece of cloth in his hands. He held her as close to his chest as he could. He stroked the top of her head with his thumb, her eyes closed, her mouth a dark oval. He wanted to feed her. Shouldn’t they be feeding her something? There was the tube in her arm, but was that enough? He would ask the nurse about this on his way to see Althea. Althea, who had stood barefoot in the shell back lot of The Whaler, her cotton nightgown fitting tightly over her pregnant belly, her dark eyes afraid but strong and ready to act, when all fear ever did for him was scare him away: scare him away from the farm and his father’s joyless toil, from the poet’s class, from school, from the pitiful jottings in his largely empty notebooks, from his quiet wife who had loved him so faithfully and unquestioningly he had taken refuge in the dim chaos of The Whaler and the warmth between Jackie’s thighs. And now this three-pound baby girl in his hands needed a refuge, a solid nest in which to grow, and Robert felt certain he had already failed in giving that to her; and he felt the need to place her back in the bassinet, leave the flowers on the chair in the hallway, and drive away from there. He would go to the bank and withdraw half their savings, almost four thousand dollars. No, he’d leave Althea and the baby all but a thousand. That would be enough to get him to Florida or the West Coast where he’d soon find a job and a place, where he’d go back to just working his shifts, sleeping with an occasional waitress or barmaid, telling himself he was a poet gathering material the way he’d seen so many waitresses use the story that they were only doing this while they saved for night classes; it was the lie restaurant workers told each other so they wouldn’t have to admit the truth, that they’d rather watch life’s swimmers go by from the deep warm sand of the beach. That’s who he was. That’s who Althea married. And she can do better, he thought. She will do better. This one, too.

  Robert stepped closer to the bassinet, but when he began to lower her inside a loud beeping went off, and he stopped where he was, holding the baby midair as the nurse came walking swiftly into the room, her face calm and smiling again when Robert had expected a look of alarm, or at least chastisement.

  “Her IV’s sensitive.” The nurse stepped in beside him, so close he could smell her hair, the lingering scent of shampoo and the deeper scent of her scalp, just skin, the skin of a woman working, and he felt strangely calmed. He let her take the baby and nestle her back into the folds of linen, patting the wires back into place, pressing gently on the intravenous tube in his daughter’s thin arm. Robert took one step back. He breathed deeply through his nose and a sound came out which surprised him and his eyes filled, and there was a hand on his shoulder. “She’s really fine, you know. We didn’t have to ventilate her. She’s a little trooper.”
She squeezed his shoulder and let go. “Is she your first?”

  Robert nodded but could not look at the nurse, not after what he’d just been planning to do. Instead, he looked down at the baby, at his daughter, the rise and fall of her first breaths, at the way her sleeping face was turned to the side, her lips parted, her clavicle almost visible beneath her skin.

  “What are you going to name her?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  And he meant it, not the not knowing, but the we; as far as he knew, he and Althea were still a we. “Has my wife seen her yet?”

  “No, would you like to bring her to her room?”

  “Yes.” He took a breath. “Yes, I would.”

  “I’ll call down and see if she’s awake.”

  The nurse left and Robert kept his eyes on his daughter for a moment longer, then turned and walked to the window. The sun had disappeared and he could see a cloud bank to the east, the air not as bright or dangerous-looking as it had seemed earlier; it was probably raining on the beach, on The Whaler, the cabins, and the marsh. Jackie had probably jumped up and carried her chaise to the porch, maybe stood there in her wet bikini looking out at the rain. He imagined it coming down on the fields of his father’s farm, maybe a downpour. That would stop the baling and send the men into the house, into the kitchen where his mother would serve them coffee or iced tea, probably something sweet she’d baked. Robert had been one of those hands himself: sitting at the table with his shirt sticking to his back and arms, his pants damp and matted with hayseed, his work boots still on because his mother knew they were going right back outside after the rain had passed, the soles heavy with mud and bits of manure and silage, his father sitting in his chair at the table, chewing and staring straight ahead into the rest of the day’s chores, barely tolerating this momentary interruption from the work that called him.