Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  Fanny beats my brains, he said to his looking glass.

  Mad, this reaction. He recalled her for the thousandth time in her black dress and pumps of that last unhappy morning together. She had been at her most desirable—why not if what you’re playing with is loss?—as if she had finally become focused as a beautiful woman, defined in a way that had evaded her until the last moment. How else defined? As a bitch? Or a woman who had made a serious mistake and perhaps regretted it? Otherwise promiscuity is narcissism; identity lacking, probably something to do with her ungiving father. I would have been good for her. No use thinking these things, Dubin thought: they took you nowhere. Nowhere was an intensity of not having.

  He stood at the bathroom window, staring at the mist-streaked distant mountains. The Vermont mountains, tying up with others in flanking ranges in New York, ran in a broken semicircle creating small valleys, one of which contained Center Campobello. Lawrence hadn’t cared for mountains “intruding” through his window. Dubin liked them drawing his gaze into the distance; he made no symbol of them. The nearest peak was due north, a scraggy mass of twenty-eight hundred feet, in summertime covered with pines up its low sloping left flank. It had no name he could locate on the map and he called it Mt. No Name. The first snowfall of November had amounted to a thin inch. Most of it had melted. No Name wore on its pate a crooked white crown. The wooded New York hills were dusted with snow —the woods in their winter underwear. He had to tell himself to quit looking. What a fool I was, when it was going well, to take that little hooker to Venice.

  For two days the sunlit study resounded with the pounding of his machine as he retyped his opening chapter. Now I’m traveling again. He felt at the same time wild little thoughts, small fires of Fanny he managed to damp down: Dubin outthought them. After he had stacked twenty-three newly typed pages he consulted his notes and wrote a fine paragraph; but when he reread it twenty minutes later the paragraph grinned through broken teeth. Lawrence was a stiff boy, walked on stilts. His phallic mother was stiffly withdrawn. Who’s the problem, him or me? The way I work or how he evades me? Dubin felt like a sculptor working with hardened clay.

  Why the foreboding? He hadn’t for years felt himself at fate’s mercy but here she was doing her belly dance. A thoughtless girl, careless of him, had made a jackass of Dubin, shamed him as he hadn’t ever been. During which time—before and after—almost anything I say to Kitty as truth is a lie: “Did you miss me in Italy, William?” she asks at breakfast. “Yes and no,” I say, and she laughs at something she isn’t laughing at. Then with a reflective look she says, “I sometimes have the feeling you’d get along well without me.” “Yes, but why would I want to?” “I don’t know,” she says. He felt himself cut down a bloody inch. Doubt Dubin, doubt the biographer. Diminish the man, the writing suffers. He felt short of something he had had before he took off on a wild-goose chase for experience with Fanny.

  Trotting downstairs later to heat the coffeepot, he took a minute to listen to the news on the radio: Nixon in press conference. Dubin shut it off in embarrassment.

  He recalled Emerson’s remark: “All that is clearly due today is not to lie.” Emerson, liar? Everyone lies. Why am I making so much of it? Bad business, tying up behavior with writing biography.

  After pouring his coffee he telephoned Kitty at the library. “Aren’t you working?” she asked.

  He understood the anxious question. If your husband or children ducked duty her boat rocked.

  “You know the answer before you ask the question.”

  “You never call me in the morning,” she explained.

  “I’ll see you at lunch, my coffee’s cold,” Dubin said. “Don’t forget the paper.”

  “I almost never do.” She hung up.

  Kitty rang back. “I didn’t mean to be impatient. If something’s wrong, for Pete’s sake, tell me. Was there anything in the mail that bothered you?”

  “No. You know how it is at the beginning of a long work.”

  “You began months ago.”

  “It’s a long beginning.”

  He awoke the next day in unease. As Dubin shaved he considered calling Maud but it was 4 a.m. in California.

  He wished Kitty were staying home; they’d talk. What would he tell her? Not that he had had the girl but she had had him. Why bother telling her anything if there are no laughs in the story? What good will it do either of us if I make myself, in her eyes, a rare ass?

  At breakfast he suggested he might want the car. “Roger will drive you home, I’m sure.”

  “I can call a taxi.” Her eyes were tired. After sipping her coffee she asked, “Are you still having trouble?”

  “Everyone’s accounted for but isn’t particularly present.”

  He thought of telling her truly about Fanny—get himself balanced again. No, he thought, if the writing were going well my conscience would be calm.

  “Maybe you’re pressing too hard?” she asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Shouldn’t you try working before giving up for the day?”

  “Please don’t tell me when to work.”

  “Would you like me to read the chapter and give you my opinion?”

  He said he would not.

  Kitty examined her eyes in a pocket mirror. She had on the blue batik dress she had just bought and an attractive pair of black single-strap shoes.

  “I could call Roger and say I wasn’t coming in,” she suggested. “We could drive into the Berkshires for the day?”

  But Dubin thought she was right: he ought to reassess his priorities.

  “Which ones?”

  “I might give up on Lawrence. If the book’s wrong for me, it’s wrong.”

  Kitty set down her coffee cup and studied him. She got up, rinsed a dish, put it away, sat down. Her expression was calm, her voice even.

  “William, don’t make so much of this. You’ve had dry periods before and you’ll have them again. I’ll tell you what: let’s goof off. I can ask for Monday off. We’ll drive to Lake Champlain, and if we feel like it, go on up to Quebec City for the weekend.”

  He said, after a long moment, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself once he got there.

  “Is that how you feel?”

  As of now it was how he felt.

  She took a last quick swallow of coffee, rinsed her cup and placed it in the dishwasher. “I’m late. Do you want to drive me to work? I really don’t mind if you go for a ride by yourself.”

  But Dubin said she could have the car.

  Kitty buttoned her coat and tied on a head scarf. “Please air the kitchen if you think of it. The house is smelly.”

  “What does it smell of?”

  “Burnt toast.”

  “I think it smells of us.”

  She drove off. He realized she hadn’t returned to breathe at the burners.

  Moved by a variety of useless impulses, he went through the house listing things that needed tending to. You skip work, trivialities assail you. Still, any activity is better than none. Dubin aired the kitchen. He went through the refrigerator—threw out two rotting lemons, moldy butter, cheese rinds. Sometimes she didn’t know what the hell she had there. He arranged bottles, like with like, and separated butter bars from margarine.

  In the cellar he discovered a puddle under the hot-water tank and phoned the plumber. He swept the cellar floor, emptied the kitchen garbage container into the can outside. He tried reading a detective story but couldn’t stay with it. Dubin plucked at the strings of Kitty’s harp.

  In his study he thumbed through his second-chapter notes, looking for a compelling opening idea. If he found one he’d write a sentence. Sentences bred sentences. But the notes tensed him: they were only notes, separate, discrete, like seashells in a box. It was stupid, he thought, to try to work when the idea was not to; to give the brain a rest.

  On a card he read, D. H. Lawrence had said to his girl: “I don’t believe in the idea of one man for one woman, do you? I mean, ther
e just isn’t one woman and one only that a man can marry.” Cunning question, foreshadowing the brushoff; she never got over him.

  Dubin climbed the stairs to the third-floor unfinished room they called the attic, where the kids had often played. He flicked on the light, moved by a sense of past time rooted in his children’s childhood, and poked around in their abandoned toys, books, folders of drawings and correspondence Kitty had saved. She tore up letters she answered but those she saved were from the children and Dubin. That made family history. He had never been able to find Nathanael’s letters.

  On an impulse he searched in a footlocker for Maud’s white wool hat with blue band. Was it still alive or had it been given away? He could not find it, nor any of the dolls she had played with. He remembered a valentine she’d drawn and searched for it. Dubin found the one he’d had in mind, a red-crayoned heart addressed to “Willyam, Be My Valentine,” but it was signed “Gerald” in black letters. In apology he touched the paper to his lips.

  He kept hunting for something of Maud’s, perhaps a note from summer camp when she was nine or ten. Maud still wrote rarely, once in a while a satisfying letter, then months of titbit phone calls. Some were talky calls, others little more than formalities: she was checking in, and what she really said was what she didn’t say. She didn’t say what most affected her. That ran in the family, began with his mother. Dubin left the attic room. He had wanted one of Maud’s affectionate notes as a child to keep in his pocket. The uses of the dwindling past.

  The biographer walked downtown in his galoshes, mackinaw, long tan-and-black scarf Kitty had knitted him; took her a year to do the thing. The day was crisp, the wind whipping by, snow flurries scattered through the leafless trees all morning. After withdrawing cash from the bank, having nothing better to do he crossed the street and paid the gas bill, groaning inwardly at the uselessness of the act on a perfectly good day. Since it was already close to one, he thought he’d stop off at the library and let Kitty drive him home. As he came up the street he saw her standing with Roger on the library steps; Dubin could tell as she spoke—the way her body moved—that she was emotional. Roger, since Dubin had last seen him, wore an Edwardian haircut with long sideburns. The biographer considered turning quickly and walking back before they spotted him. Kitty seemed troubled. Dubin worried that Roger, having heard from his friend Fanny about the asinine Venetian adventure, had told his wife the happy news.

  But they had seen him and instantly stopped talking. Dubin had paused to retie his shoelaces and pull up his socks. He approached with tight gut, concerned that he had lost first chance to tell her himself; that the librarian, whose business it was not, had informed her in his place. Roger thrust forth his hand and Dubin unwillingly took it.

  “Kitty said you’ve been abroad, Mr. Dubin.”

  “For a week. What else have you heard?”

  Kitty gazed at him with surprised wet eyes. Before he could speak again —to utter what idiocy?—she broke in: “Mrs. Eliscu has cancer of the breast. Roger heard from her husband a half hour ago. They have three small children.”

  With a hidden sigh Dubin expressed regret. He also regretted his stupid remark to Roger but no one had made anything of it.

  “Have a good time?” Roger asked. He’d never been comfortable with Dubin, and wasn’t now, in his green suit, blue tie, field boots. Roger rarely wore an overcoat. He had hot blood, he had once told Dubin. Where? Dubin had almost asked. With a nod, Roger walked down the steps to his car at the curb.

  “Anybody I can give a lift to?”

  Dubin said Kitty had their car.

  “He knows,” she said impatiently.

  “Then why did he ask?”

  Roger waved and drove off.

  “Why aren’t you nice to him?” Kitty asked.

  He said he had nothing against Roger. I feel like a jackass and he acts like one. Kitty seemed apart from, almost uncomfortable with him.

  If they weren’t talking about Fanny, I ought to be, he thought.

  “What brought you here?” Kitty asked as though expecting bad news.

  He said he had walked into town to get some cash.

  “I could have done that easily.”

  “I needed something to do.”

  “Are you giving up on your book?”

  “Not as of right now.”

  They kissed as though greeting, then got into the car and drove to the supermarket. Twice, as they walked the long grocery aisles, Kitty dropped a can he had picked off the shelves.

  “My hands are small,” she explained to her husband.

  They hadn’t for years shopped together for groceries, and Dubin enjoyed it despite the wasted day.

  Though the biographer felt he was dealing with a literary as well as a psychological problem, obviously one tied up to the other. There were too many reverberations of Fanny, too much static in his head, too much guilt. He had reacted as though his character had failed him; the true failure was one of judgment. Dubin wanted to put his thoughts in order by getting to work and doing it well. To not work regularly was to fall into the condition he was out to avoid: purpose sidetracked, the mind adrift; Dubin left on the pier, the ship gone. Montaigne had believed his effective judgment was instrumental in keeping him in good physical health.

  He had returned heavier than he’d left, as though misery had paid interest in flesh. He disliked the bounce of his belly as he briskly walked or ran. He disliked the naked sight of himself in the closet-door mirror; pictured youthful slimness, not impossible. He figured he’d cut out brandy after dinner—drink less wine at the dinner table, eat smaller portions. Kitty had a booklet of low-calorie foods; he’d ask her to watch his intake. To get himself effectively together he had to put himself in shape. In fooling with Fanny he’d allowed desire to overflow the workaday life. A pipe had broken, the psyche was flooded. He must rid himself of his ongoing half-jealous thoughts of the girl—these irritating intrusive two-bit emotions—make the floodwaters of the unconscious recede. He had once more to be the man he’d been; who Dubin was.

  Besides starving his belly he wrestled it off. From youth he had exercised daily—shades of Gatsby—his personal need, in accord with controlling, shaping. But after Maud was born, though Kitty approved calisthenics, he performed superficially—too much to do to earn a living. And he was walking more after they had moved into the country; had invented his long course in nature, part of which he trotted. Now Dubin revived the old setting-up exercises, not easy to go back to at age fifty-six: pushups, bending, pedaling, pulling his knees into the offending gut. In his striped shorts he danced around Maud’s room as Kitty slept, the floorboards creaking, a squeak for each shift. He worked resolutely a half hour each morning, protesting in the pit of the self at the effort one had to make, the inertial strain of fabricating monotonous movement, as though he were dragging a carcass of himself back and forth across the floor, frightful bore if present necessity. Indeed necessity. Dubin fought the possessed self.

  Afterward, although Kitty was rising early, for her, to go to the library, he had breakfast alone. He’d got into the habit when Maud was an infant and Kitty, when she could, slept later. Dubin liked being alone at that hour, enjoying morning light, morning quiet, thinking whatever thought; relaxed. Now breakfast, given diet, was a chore. He kept the repast simple: fruit followed by sugarless black coffee, with half a slice of bread. For lunch the food made little difference; he ate minuscule portions. Kitty shook her head. But dinner, in principle, satisfied—if that was the word—where there wasn’t that much satisfaction. Kitty broiled fish or lean meat, served one green or yellow vegetable, offered sugarless dessert. She clicked her tongue at his modest helpings. Dubin finished the meal hungry—praise moderation, though little after not much all day was hard to bear.

  It wasn’t easy, after rising from the table, not to dip his fingers into a Swiss chocolate bar he had hidden in a desk drawer; but if he went quickly upstairs and brushed his teeth he brushed away the compelli
ng hunger. He learned to eat slowly, let each forkful of food, each permitted sip of wine, ride the length of the tongue. He savored well the little he ate; and still smoked an occasional cigarillo though he’d given up serious smoking long ago.

  Kitty, although friendlier to less rather than more, disliked seeing him at diet’s mercy.

  At his own mercy, he insisted.

  “But isn’t the diet what you went on mainly because of your trouble working?”

  He more or less nodded.

  She said no more; nor did he.

  The day’s work, if it comes to something, burns out night’s dross; night craps in your pants. For the investment the biographer makes in gathering himself together on cold hard mornings, in coming drearily to life, he expects some accomplishment during the day—a good deed, it helps. Dubin felt he was getting nothing much. But though change took its time he daily expected signs of a forthcoming visit. He watched for it out of his better eye, two might scare it away. After Thanksgiving, when winter set in with a wind and a bang, he sat regularly at his desk, promising himself he would stay with it if something good evolved; but day after day very little did—an aimless page or two; so he went—after three prescribed working hours—for a routine walk in any weather, the next sequential imposition on the poor self; a man had to conjure up some relief from nothing much achieved.

  Work generally pulls me out of the clutch of the subjective self; but since I’m not working well I have to spring myself another way, if I know another way. S. Johnson, unable to work, would walk twenty-six miles to Birmingham, to shake himself into shape. Dubin was not prodigal with miles, limited himself to four or five each day. “The safe and general antidote against sorrow is employment,” Johnson said. Dubin hopes to find an antidote growing in nature.

  In December he switched to walking after breakfast, then trying to initiate prose after pouring out on paper a bag of thoughts gathered on the road. He entered his study at about ten and stayed for two and a half hours, his pen at the ready; then lingered at the window, staring at the unnamed mountain; or read and reread his meager mail. Or paced back and forth in the room to shake things in his head into place. At length he laid out a page of notes, concentrating on surprise in arrangement, but too often settling merely for changing the language of the initial note, not going far beyond that; and felt textual thinness, that he was adding little to the naked facts. Go, Dubin, back to obituaries. How can my small brain light up the dark forest of D. H. Lawrence’s psyche? He felt distant from the action, from growth of character, inner motivation; sat peering at young Lawrence, handsome youth, floating off in pale water amid lily pads; or trotting into the white-flowered bushes with his mum as pale-faced Jessie peeks through the leaves; Dubin, secondary voyeur, not really knowing what they were up to, barely able to guess. He was not with it, whatever it was. It was—whatever—with Fanny. He lived on memories of her; Lawrence would have scorned him for the little he’d had yet lived on.