Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  He called in Italian to the gondolier: “Where are your passengers?”

  The man blew his nose in the water and waved vaguely with his hand: “Al sinistro.”

  Dubin went hastily up the bridge steps and down the other side into the market streets. He hurried through crowds and on the first side street spied a red-haired girl about a block before him, but not the man. Was it his daughter? Though now fatigued Dubin hastened toward her. When he reached the corner she had disappeared, but the first house as he turned into the street was a pension, and he was convinced that was where she was. He thought of entering and seeking her out, then decided not to. If it was Maud it would be wise to talk to her alone. The last thing he needed was to confront his daughter in the presence of her lover—who else?

  Seeing a bakery across the street, Dubin went in, tempting the reluctant baker with a thousand lire to produce a telephone book; then he called the pension number.

  “Is there a signorina Maud Dubin registered there?”

  The padrone wasn’t sure and who was calling?

  “Tell her her father, William Dubin.”

  “I can’t tell her a thing if you’re really her father because there’s nobody here by that name.”

  “She’s red-haired,” Dubin explained, and the padrone laughed and said, “We’ve got two different redheads this week. Eh, signore, they’re a deceptive lot. You can’t tell what they really are until you’ve looked up their legs.”

  “I’m much obliged.” Dubin lingered at the corner to see if either of the women came out and in less than thirty minutes both did; one a girl with hair dyed orange, the other a strawberry blonde with a middle-aged spectacled escort, neither so much as resembling Maud. Dubin, relieved, though irritated with himself for wasting time he could have used to better purpose, hurried back to the Rialto; since a vaporetto was about to depart and he was weary, he hastened up the gangplank.

  It was an interminable trip. He arrived at San Marco at close to seven and broke into a hurried run. What a stupid waste, he thought in anger.

  Dubin absently got off the elevator at the fourth floor and ran up to the next flight. Fanny was not in their room. He began to undress for a shower when it occurred to him that the adjoining room was giving off percussive sighs. As he tried the door it easily opened: the bed was made and unoccupied; but not the floor.

  On the rug, crouched on hands and knees was the red-haired Amadeo, his fiery hairy ass not so handsome as it had seemed in tight Levi’s; and under him, alas, lay Fanny. Dubin observed her gold-braceleted arm around the young man’s strong back. Her eyes were shut, her face drawn; she looked, he thought, before slamming the door, like a woman of fifty.

  The biographer felt as though he had wasted every cent of a large investment and stood on the verge of desolation. Afterward, when he forced himself to go back to the hotel room late that night, Fanny, in a man’s workshirt and denim pants, taut-eyed, pale, her expression ill at ease, fearful, said she had waited hours for him to return, had got anxious, and decided he was simply not interested in her, when the gondolier knocked on the door.

  “Why didn’t you tell him to go fuck himself?” Dubin shouted. “Why did you so quickly and easily demean us?”

  “Don’t think you own me because you brought me to this phony city,” she wept. “I did it because I was sorry for him. Because he’s young,” she said cruelly, “and I like his ass. And because you don’t deserve me.”

  She accused him of loving his wife. “Why do I always get hooked with these married shmucks?”

  After a dismal night when he woke often—listened for sobbing, a voice begging forgiveness, but heard silence, her breathing—hungry to embrace her, to blot out betrayal by making passionate love, Dubin slept as though awake and woke early. What will it profit me to fuck her in anguish? Fanny, her face in a pool of moist hair on her pillow, lay heavily asleep. In sleep her expression was dull, the face and aspect of a stranger. And what, my God, am I doing in the same bed with her, back to back, four thousand miles from home and work? He detested himself for falling into the hands of a child. Dubin felt in himself a weight of mourning he could not shove aside, or otherwise diminish. He was, he thought, ashamed at having offered himself to her to betray. He sensed a more intense commitment to the girl than he had guessed, or perhaps permitted, and wondered if he had been almost in love with her—sad pattern of long past. If that’s so I’m glad to be done with it. Love—given who she is—given her promiscuity and my bad judgment—would have led to something enduringly miserable. Better momentary pain than long heartbreak.

  She woke as he was dressing, looked at him with one eye and reached for her tights. “I am,” Fanny said, “just as moral as you.”

  “How would that work?”

  “Don’t give me that apeshit sarcasm.”

  He said he had asked an honest question.

  “He needed me more than you ever did.”

  “His needs, assuming you’re right, hardly constitute a requisite of morality.”

  “I have no obligations to you.”

  “Maybe you should have thought you had. Listen, Fanny,” Dubin asserted, “I’m going out for a walk to air my brain. I’ll have your breakfast sent up. You needn’t get up yet, it’s early. Maybe you ought to think a bit about yourself.”

  “All you wanted was cunt.”

  “If that’s all I wanted I deserved what I got.”

  “What else did you want?”

  “Passion, beauty—I want the world,” Dubin shouted.

  She fell back in bed and wept.

  When he returned after two hours of aimless walking, aimless thought—not much relieved, conscious once more of his years, appearance, pain—Fanny had eaten and was reading in bed.

  “What will you do?” he asked her dully.

  “What do you mean?” Though her face was calm her voice wavered.

  “What are your plans?”

  She studied him unhappily. “I think I want to go to Rome and maybe Naples but all I have on me is less than fifty in traveler’s checks and about ten in bills and change.”

  “And your air ticket home.” He handed it to her.

  “And my air ticket home.”

  “I’ve packed,” Dubin told her, “and we’re checked out. Why don’t you dress and meet me across the street in Alitalia at eleven? I’m told there are two flights to Rome today.”

  “What time is the first?”

  “I think at noon. If you decide not to go there you can have your ticket changed to the Air France late-afternoon flight to Paris and from there to New York.” “I have to see a friend in Rome.” She said it as though the friend was female but he suspected a man.

  He said he would meet her at eleven.

  She arrived at eleven-fifteen in a tight black dressy dress and black pumps —a stunning woman, or so it seemed. Dubin resisted a resurgence of desire —“Carmen, il est temps encore”—born of frustration, the overthrow of his late happy adventure.

  They greeted one another courteously. Fanny, before looking at him, glanced at the floor. Dubin nodded formally. She had on her blue glasses reflecting ceiling lights, and her Star of David—Jewish type she was meeting in Rome?—and still wore Dubin’s handsome bracelet. Her hair was full, thick; to his surprise she had plucked the offending blond hairs on her chin. The girl could not have looked more attractive, or more innocent. Why? My need to absolve her? He was moved to say: “Let’s forget it, Fanny—a serious mistake, no doubt of it, but not fatal. The moment’s mistake; not for all time. Let’s talk it over and maybe stay together the rest of the week? Perhaps there’s something for us both to recover.”

  But he couldn’t bring himself to say it. Pain is divisive. It spoke one word: shmuck.

  At my age, Dubin modified it, all young women are desirable. I will keep it in mind and not hastily forgive her.

  She paid for her ticket to Rome but the biographer insisted she accept a hundred in cash. “It isn’t much, still if you’re
careful you can make it last a week. I suggest you not track around without money.”

  “You don’t owe me anything.”

  He said he owed himself.

  “Do you want the bracelet back?” She had slipped it off her wrist.

  Dubin with a flip of his fingers refused to have it. “It’s yours. I bought it for you with pleasure. Do what you please with it.”

  “You could give it to Maud.”

  “Maud will have to inspire her own bracelets.”

  “Do I deserve it?”

  He laughed hoarsely.

  “Are you punishing me with kindness?” she asked bitterly.

  “That wouldn’t be kind.”

  “I did it to hurt you,” Fanny confessed.

  “You hurt me.”

  She slipped her hand through the gold band. Fanny dug into her suede bag and returned Sons and Lovers. He accepted the book.

  The baggage porter wheeled her suitcases to the dock on the canal. Dubin waited with her for the water taxi to return. It was another beautiful day, sky and water combining light; in the lagoon a scattering of islands they had planned to visit but never would. If one could embrace the day.

  “You’ll like Rome,” he said.

  “Where are you headed?”

  He wasn’t sure.

  “I’ll bet you hate me?”

  “I wish we had done it differently.”

  “It was your fault as well as mine.” Her mouth was firm.

  He nodded gravely. “What will you do when you get back to the States?”

  “I don’t know. I might get married, maybe not.”

  “What do you believe in, Fanny?”

  She reddened. “Do you mean do I believe in Gd?—I do.”

  “Do you believe in yourself?”

  “I try.”

  Dubin, after a moment, advised her to go on with her studies.

  She said they didn’t teach in college what she wanted to learn.

  “What do you want to learn?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I see.” He saw nothing.

  The motoscafo was approaching.

  “Take care, Fanny.”

  “Ciao. I appreciate what you did the night I got sick.”

  After hesitation they kissed lightly. Not better than nothing.

  The motorboat slowly docked backward, piloted by a young capitano in lavender pants.

  He wore a damp cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a white French sailor’s cap with a red pompon. With gallant care the capitano assisted Fanny and her luggage into the chugging boat and seated her on a bench behind the wheel outside the cabin. There were no other passengers. He raised the accelerator, twirled the wheel, and at once they were off in the water in a wide churning arc.

  When the boat hit mid-canal, Fanny, her hair flying around her shoulders, light in the sun, turned to wave goodbye to Dubin—to Venice? He lifted his hat, feeling as he did, glad at last to be alone, and had then his moment of elation.

  Three

  Q. What makes a clown sad?

  A. Other clowns.

  Dubin waits in the Swedish rain.

  Marriage was his Waiden—act to change his life; and what’s past but persists. Change you change your past, they say. I was the waiter’s true son, shared his inertia, fear, living fate—out of habit, compassion, impure love.

  Who am I, Pa?

  What do you mean who you are? You are an educated boy.

  Years after Hannah Dubin’s death he seemed not to know what to do with himself. If your train’s on the wrong track every station you come to is the wrong station. The wrong stops, year after year, were vocation and women he couldn’t make it with. It seemed to William Dubin he was not prepared to invest a self in a better self—give up solitude, false dreams, the hold of the past. The train chugged on: the wrong train.

  In his twenties he was a half-reclusive too subjective romantic youth; yet fed up with self-indulgent falling in love, living in reverie, trafficking in heartache; worn out by what didn’t happen: what he could not, or dared not, make happen.

  Q. Why did it happen?

  A. Who knows for sure? One day I took a chance, made a move, got involved. Life is to invest in life.

  Dubin hadn’t intended to fly to Stockholm. He’d been there with Kitty after Gerald had deserted the army in West Germany, and had fled to Sweden two years ago. After Venice the biographer had wanted nothing more than to take himself home and immerse his head in work; but that he was in Europe with Gerald nearby—a few hours into Scandinavia—made him want to see his adoptive son. Dubin had loved him as a child; he had intensely returned affection. The death of his father showed; the mother trying to be father had trouble being mother. It wasn’t hard for her new husband to imagine himself the child. That was the first step to father. He had rescheduled his flight home and in a little more than five hours, shortly after an astonished view of Norway’s fjords, had registered in a small Swedish hotel on the Skeppsbron, at the edge of the blue cold Baltic.

  Strangers approaching each other in simple good faith: an act of trust was the imagined beginning. Though neither considered her/himself adventurous, each adventured. Kitty had invented a self-advertisement; and Dubin, though it was none of his business, had imaginatively responded. To that extent it was an arranged marriage: they had arranged it—he to escape his rooming-house existence, repetitive experience, boredom; he was thirty-one with little to show but fingers crossed, a self-critical Bronx Jew with no vocation he was pledged to. She was a troubled lonely ex-Episcopalian lady, a once and former doctor’s wife, wanting a husband and protector of her child.

  That’s not all I want. I want joy, I want to live.

  William Dubin promised life.

  They promised love.

  Kitty came to him with more than modest beauty; it was beauty she qualified. And the clinging remnants of trauma: modified mourning for the young dead, her ongoing burden, derived from a father a suicide at thirty-four, and a husband in his fortieth year destroyed by leukemia—informed in September, buried before Christmas. Kitty, telling herself it needn’t be, feared more of the same. She feared her son’s imagined fate; soon the child held it against her. Against the will she taught him how to miss a dead father.

  Let’s call it half a widow she still was when I met her. She had shed deep mourning but mourning lingered where it knew the ground. And there’s a presence besides the self, the self that opposes the self: she forgets where she is. Or what’s to be done next. She unwinds very slowly from sleep or lack of sleep. Her level of frustration is low: she stamps her foot in a high wind. Or at a sudden blast of an automobile horn. Sometimes at a missed stitch in her knitting; or when she’s misplaced her purse again. And laughs when she finds it. And praises her humor as though to defend it: You can tell from the way Gerald laughs that there’s fun in me. She laughs at that; and laughs when she is embarrassed. Watching a movie she laughs twice to Dubin’s once.

  I took the chance. She took hers with me: an oldish youth in his long letters—man of appetites and hungers, yet the stranger who had responded. I was, to her surprise, in her cast of characters.

  Kitty said she trusted him but feared the future—nothing personal. The day before their wedding they walked in silence in Central Park. Searching his eyes at parting she said, I hope we aren’t making a serious mistake. It isn’t hard to.

  Simply mistake would be serious enough.

  Marriages can be difficult.

  Was yours?

  I was in love then.

  Love is in life, in living, the bridegroom hopefully says. One gets in marriage, I imagine, what he earns.

  Do you think so?

  If she had asked out he thought he’d have let her go.

  They were married in her best friend’s living room; the bride, laughing breathlessly, wore a Mexican dress with flounced sleeves, pearls in her ears, and a gauzy rose shawl on her shoulders. It was a cold spring day.

  Do you think I can
wear a white sweater, I feel shivery?

  Would you want a drink?

  Later, I think.

  She held in her hand a bouquet of white violets and wept silently during the ceremony, performed by her friend’s father, an amiable judge. Kitty told Dubin afterward she always wept at weddings. Tears fill her eyes on ceremonial occasions. And when people go forth to distant places. Everyone’s loss of someone’s presence, significant or small, wakens a sense of prior loss.

  Q. How did you feel?

  A. Inspired.

  Q. In truth?

  A. I could come up with no other feeling.

  Q. I’m sure. What of afterward, what we used to call the honeymoon?

  A. We spent the first week moving into a new apartment. She had asked me to consider living in hers and I thought it was better not to: Let’s both start with something new.

  Not long before the wedding Dubin had made the acquaintance of her obsolete birthmark: for a while appeased, revived for him as a living fact. Kitty permitted, suppressing apology, yet managing to suggest damaged goods—if not impaired passion. He accepted the given.

  As she undressed, she confessed the blemish: a dark skin discoloration that runs up my left inner thigh and spills out on my buttock.

  Why do you call it blemish?

  Birthmark, she said, with half a smile. It inhibited me sexually when I was young.

  Does it now?

  Not since Nathanael. He ridiculed me for making so much of it, called it an error in pigmentation. Inverse pride to make much of it. He told me to walk around naked in the bedroom with the shades up. When I wouldn’t he pulled my underpants off. I was as angry as relief let me be. Once when we were alone on a beach in Maine he asked me to strip off my bathing suit, and eventually I did.

  Dubin said it was a birthmark, not the Scarlet Letter. Why should you think you had earned it?

  It’s my nature. I don’t understand why it should bother me in your presence, William, but it seems to. I have to tell you. They kissed and slid into bed. After a while Kitty said she didn’t think she could come. Dubin held on. She begged him to satisfy himself; then cried, Harder, William, I’m coming.