Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  It was as hard a winter as Dubin feared it would be. He had to force himself, after breakfast, to open the kitchen door and step into the frozen morning, facing his icy breath. The cold struck him like a blow of a fist. His face tightened; he could tell every stroke he had shaved—a cut on his chin burned like acid. Dubin walked three steps and broke into a run, his spine touched by chill; across the inert grass, through light snow, along the solitary path of the icy-damp morning wood. Thoreau had called winter a resonant instrument that twanged its own music. Dubin, as he ran, heard branches creak in the cold; once on an icy day a dead tree exploded. The listening wood, animistic, druidic, recalled Stonehenge. Occasionally he saw a small animal stirring, rat or weasel scuttering through the brush; or a dark bird in flight, unrecognizable. Dubin thumped alone along the path in the wood.

  He left the trees, trotting on the dirt road to the bridge, the stream misting by his side, his breath flowing behind him. If a car appeared this early in the morning, neither jogger nor driver dared look at the other. He slowed down at the bridge, limped through the booming snow-covered construction, crossed the highway, and at the fork relentlessly ran into the long route. There were times he turned back at the wooden bridge: temporary cure: felt he could get into writing if he tried. Dubin turned back rarely. He went on if when he thought of himself it touched pain. The trick was to get into the winter world and out of within—shift the weight of inner conflict to outside. The cock’s tail turns where the cock’s head had been. His thoughts therefore were images of gnarled broken-fingered oaks, naked birches—imagine a white tree! And there were more winter birds around than he had guessed —the flyways were overpopulated, the South crowded; some birds remained in the snow. And the frozen circular road.

  It took him a half hour to turn the shivery clinging cold in his clothes to warmth gained in running. He slowed to a fast walk, past farmhouses with monumental barns looking like forever; cows in winter pasture as still as statues, their breaths flags in motion; frozen fields undulating up the mist-streaked hills. He pushed on in winter silence, every step striding against the force of nothing, aware of roadside mustard-yellow willows, their long yellow strings limply dancing in the cutting wind. He plodded breathlessly up the road, conscious of the weight of ascent, dismal cold, the unhappy task he had set himself. Walking uphill, Dubin stared at his feet lest the hike to the top slay him. Trotting down, he kept his eyes on the beckoning distance. The ascents were endless. Segments of the road he had once thought level, he realized, were pitched up from five to ten degrees. He tried not to stop on the walk up; it was hard to get started again. Ravenous for summer, for an end to the barren season, he hurried on thinking of the next rise or bend. He felt with each step resistance of the long long walk-run, monotony of self-inflicted cure. Climbing is not ascending. My will is my enemy. It restoreth not my soul. Yet he stayed with it: if he overslept he ran faster.

  The flutist remembered him at this time as a strained, almost haggard man in motion, heavily bundled up, a grim-faced man who had lost weight, or might, without knowing it, be ill. He wore a red wool hat his wife had knitted, a long striped scarf his wife had knitted, galoshes with unbuckled buckles that clinked as he ran, and a poplin fleece-lined coat with a brown fur collar. Dubin ran slowly, heavily, in snow or slush, as if his boots were lead and each step an ordeal, his sober inward grayish-blue eyes set dimly in the distance. What he saw there Greenfeld hesitated to guess. When they met, although the biographer appeared to be drowning in all there was to say, he was mute. Sometimes in passing he would stammer half a sentence, break off, and hurry on.

  William, Oscar cried, let’s not forget our friendship. William, it’s a lonely world!

  Greenfeld was haunted by the expression of Dubin’s eyes as he looked back —embittered?—as though the fault was the flutist’s that he did not then know what his friend was living through.

  When he had returned to the house, after resting awhile he sat at his desk. Dubin never did not work though he stayed with it for shorter intervals of time, down to an hour and a half each morning. He wrote long swirling sentences on sheets of yellow foolscap and reflected on each. Kitty, one Saturday morning, brought up a cup of consommé. He took a grateful sip and thanked her but did not finish it.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “Warming—after that long haul.”

  “Why don’t you eat the rest?”

  He did not want to eat between meals.

  “You’re mad,” she said.

  After she left he went back to his tortuous sentences. It was a bright sunny day after the New Year. Later she brought up the mail. Kitty bent to kiss him as she handed him an airmail letter.

  Fanny hoped to hear from him.

  “It isn’t easy to write to someone who won’t answer you. I know you’re there, William, because my letters aren’t returned to me. At least your first letter, I had the pleasure of opening it before it hit me in the face like a bucket of ice.

  “As you can see by the postmark I have left Murano. Arnaldo wasn’t easy to get along with. He was good in bed though not much more than that. When I said I was leaving he begged me to stay. He wanted to marry me but I don’t want to be married yet. He got awfully angry, beat his stringy cock on the table. I felt terribly depressed. I hate myself for this kind of thing —I mean going to bed with the nearest guy when I am anxious. In my mind I don’t seem to be that kind of person. In my mind you are my friend.

  “I am now in Rome, staying with this old friend of mine I mentioned to you that day we broke up. Harvey says I am genuine, whatever mistakes I make. I’m the only woman he knows who can be easy with him when he is impotent. He’s sixty-two and was once a singer. He knew my father in L.A. and didn’t much care for him. My father used to say I was oversexed and I used to feel awful until one day I realized what his problems are.

  “Recently, when Harvey and I were standing in a movie line I passed out. In the hospital I thought I was pregnant—that Arnaldo had knocked me up, but it turned out I had developed a cyst in a fallopian tube because of the IUD I had changed to. I hate the Pill because it makes me bleed. Anyway, I was operated on and lost a tube. I felt deathly depressed until the doctor said I could still have children. Harvey has been kind to me. He says I am independent and enjoy life, which is partly true.

  “I’ve been thinking of going back to the States to find some sort of steady work—don’t ask me what. I have ideas about what I ought to be doing but am afraid of the next move. I don’t want to get into something I can’t get out of if I make the wrong choice. Or into something that won’t come to much, and will make me feel, again, that I am up Shit Creek in a leaky rowboat. William, please advise me about my life. I like the way you talk to me about myself.

  “I wish you would sometime write me a letter saying things I could think about. What happened at the Hotel Contessa between us wasn’t all my fault, if you’ve stopped to think about it. You were kind in your way but your mind wasn’t really on me. And not everybody can be lovers —I’m sure you’ll agree with that. But I have the feeling we could have been good friends. Could you specifically say what I ought to be thinking about in the way of a job or career, or recommend books that might be helpful? Or give me the names of courses I could take when I get back to New York City?”I’d like to be better organized and enjoy my life more, but Harvey isn’t that well put together and has problems that remind me of my own, so I don’t think I ought to stay here. I don’t think I’m so good for him either. I’m afraid of my day-to-day life. A day scares me more than a week or month. But the truth of it is I want to be responsible, to work my life out decently. Couldn’t we at least talk about that? Affectionately, Fanny B.

  “P.S. This is my last letter unless you answer it, gently.”

  Dubin burned the letter.

  She wrote once after that: “I’m not writing to humiliate myself but to show you I have respect for you though you don’t seem to have much for me. F.”

  He
kept this letter, her last. She had enclosed a snapshot of herself in jeans, sneakers, and embroidered blue blouse, her long hair stringy, her sad face plain. She was not an ideal woman. Why was he so drawn to her?

  In the woods, later, he thought if he had had her in Venice he might not have wanted her afterward. Yet he thought he wanted more than just wanting her.

  Dubin awoke in moonlight, unhappy to wake. He’d gone to bed after supper, too intent on sleep to draw the shades. What was that song of Schubert’s about a man who was awakened by starlight? It was late January and the ground was covered with snow. Kitty had been sleeping in Maud’s bed, not to disturb him. Dubin, moonlight spilling on his face, thought he ought to get up and draw the shade. He lay there, trying to rouse himself. At last he flung the blanket aside. At the window the moon was full, the somber hills bathed in a darkish bronze glow. He stared at his wristwatch on the night table: it wasn’t ten yet. He looked again in disbelief, watched the second hand move. He had slept a few hours and now it felt as though today was tomorrow. He felt a sadness of waste. Dubin dressed and went down the stairs.

  Kitty, reading in bed, called to him through Maud’s closed door. “Is there something you need, William?”

  “I waked and can’t sleep. I’m going out for a short walk. It’s a full moon.”

  After a minute Kitty asked, “Would you want company? I’ll get dressed.”

  He didn’t think so.

  Dubin drew on his overcoat and wool hat and buckled on his galoshes. He took along a thick stick that had once belonged to Gerald. Maybe he would go to the bridge.

  “It’s a freezing night,” she said through the door, “don’t go far.”

  He didn’t think he would.

  He was at first afraid to enter the wood. Then he went through it, dimly lit trees casting shadows on the darkly lit snow.

  At the road he turned left instead of right toward the bridge. A few fleecy clouds floated in the night-blue winter sky. After some minutes of careful walking on and off the snowy road he passed the Wilson farmhouse, a narrow two-story white frame house with a sloping addition on the left side. It lay off the road about two hundred feet. An orange light burned in the upstairs darkened bedroom. It was Myra’s night light, an old woman alone in a farmhouse in the dead of winter. He imagined her sleeping in a bed she had lain in with her husband for fifty years. Ben, the dog, growled as Dubin went by. He gripped his stick.

  Oscar Greenfeld’s house was a half mile farther up the road, a two-story spacious red clapboard with a large lawn. Dubin thought of their friendship with regret. How strange to love a man and rarely see him. Dubin had enjoyed coming to Oscar’s house in the past—walking along this road in summer, driving the front way through the streets in winter. They played chess, talked and drank. The flutist had come less often to Dubin. He never came with Flora. If you’re not alone with a friend there’s no friendship, he said. In his company Dubin drank more than he was used to, and Kitty worried when he got into the car at one or half past one a.m. to drive Oscar home. The flutist didn’t drive. Flora drove him there but wouldn’t call for him that late at night, though she stayed up waiting. That was one of the things about her that antagonized Kitty: Kitty went for Dubin when she had to. Neither of them cared for the drinking, and driving on icy streets. Oscar Greenfeld stopped coming to Dubin’s house; then Dubin stopped going to him. After an evening together hitting the brandy bottle, Oscar when he woke the next morning could reach for his flute and move to Mozart on the music stand. With Mozart dealing out the notes Oscar could toot away most of his hangover. Dubin, working with words, felt he was pushing rocks with his nose, so he stopped visiting the flutist although they talked on the phone. But a telephone conversation now and then could not be called friendship.

  He drank, Oscar told Dubin, because he was not a better flutist.

  “You’re one of the best, Oscar.”

  “Not in my ears.”

  “Rampal says so.”

  “Not in my ears.”

  “That’s not the only reason you drink,” the biographer said.

  “I never said so.”

  As Dubin entered the driveway he heard Oscar’s flute, clearly, limpidly, deep within the house. He listened: Schubert’s “Serenade.” Lately Oscar had been transcribing lieder into flute songs. The song was like a lit candle in the night. In his “Short Life of Schubert” the biographer had written that the composer, on hearing the song sung at a concert, was supposed to have said, “You know, I never remembered it was so beautiful.” How moving a simple song is, Dubin thought. How often they go to sadness. It’s as though the sad song was the natural one, the primal song. Someone sings without knowing why and it’s a song expressing hunger for love, regret for life unlived, sorrow for the shortness of life. Even some of the joyful songs evoke memories of something lost that one hopes endures.

  The moon bathed the birch trees on the lawn in liquid light. There were several white trees in an irregular circle, inclined in different directions, looking like white-clad dancers in the snow. Oscar had written a flute song called, “The Birch Dancers.” He said he wrote it one night when he couldn’t sleep, after looking out the window at the white trees.

  Listening to the serenade, this lied of yearning, he reflected that Schubert had often intertwined themes of love and death. In a certain time of his life the two experiences had become one. He had died of typhus at thirty-one. A few years before, at twenty-six or -seven, he had been infected with syphilis. “Each night when I go to sleep,” he wrote to a friend, “I hope I won’t wake again; and each morning reminds me of yesterday’s misery.” Love, he told his friend, offered only pain. The doppelgänger seeks the mystical fusion of love and death.

  Dubin did not go into the house. When the song had ended he left the driveway and walked toward town.

  in diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz;

  sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen,

  doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.

  It looked in the garish moonlight like a piece of stark statuary, or an old painting of an old house. Ah, Fanny, what if you had found me in the Gansevoort that night in the city, would a different beginning have made a happy end?

  A window went up with a rasp on the top floor of the house under the high-gabled roof, and Dubin was too surprised to duck into the shadow of the beech tree. A naked large-shouldered man leaned out into the wintry night and stared down at the astonished biographer. This was not the Eve of St. Agnes, nor was Dubin Porphyrio, so he could not have expected to be gazing at Fanny, naked or clothed; but it was a strange surprise, and not unrelated to his mood, to behold Roger Foster’s bare curly-haired chest and moonlit thick-sideburned handsome face.

  “Good Christ, Mr. Dubin, is that you down there?” the librarian said in surprise.

  On a freezing night in January he talks to you naked from his window without a shiver.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Anyone in particular you’re looking for?”

  Dubin calmly replied, “Nobody in particular. I couldn’t sleep and am out for a short walk.”

  “Sorry about that. Anything I can do for you? Would you care to come in for a drink or maybe a cup of hot coffee?”

  “Thank you, no.”

  He wanted to ask about Fanny but dared not.

  “How are things going, Roger?”

  “Pretty good. All’s well at the library, what with the help of your kind wife.”

  “Wonderful,” said Dubin.

  “Has anybody heard anything from Fanny?” Roger asked.

  “She’s in Rome, I believe. Haven’t you heard from her?”

  “Just a postcard a couple of weeks ago, that she was in Venice having herself a ball.”

  “You don’t say,” said Dubin.

  “She sure gets around.”

  “She seems to.”

  “You know, Mr. Dubin,” Roger then said, “someday I hope we get to understand each other better. We have things in
common—bookwise, I mean to say. We keep your biographies, every one of them, on our shelves. I know you’ve never liked me all that well but I’m not such a bad egg, if you ask around, and I hope to accomplish more than you might think.”

  “You put it well, Roger, I wish you luck.”

  “And I wish you luck, Mr. Dubin.”

  He breathed in the cold air, exhaling his steamy breath.

  “Well, good night now, it’s getting chilly.”

  Roger shut the window and pulled down the shade.

  Dubin waited a minute perhaps for Fanny to peek through a slit in the drawn window shade. She did not.

  After walking home he listened to a recording of “Death and the Maiden.” It was after midnight. Kitty came down in her robe and had a drink as she listened.

  They went to sleep in the same bed, Kitty wearing a black chiffon nightgown. She offered herself and he accepted. Afterward she changed into a white flannel nightgown and got back into their double bed.

  “I want to travel again soon,” Kitty said. “There’s so much of the world we haven’t seen, so much that’s varied and beautiful. Let’s have more fun than we’ve been having. When do you think we’ll travel again?”

  Dubin didn’t know.

  It seemed to him he’d been sleeping deeply when he heard a shrill ring and sat stiffly upright in bed. At first he thought the doorbell had sounded and was about to run down the stairs when it shot through him that the phone had rung piercingly once and stopped.

  No one answered his insistent hellos.

  “Maybe it was Maud,” Kitty said. “Or Gerald.”

  If it was Fanny calling from Rome he was glad she had rung off.

  Kitty had snuggled close and fallen asleep.

  Dubin lay awake.

  Middle age, he thought, is when you pay for what you didn’t have or couldn’t do when you were young.

  The man trudged diagonally across the snowy field to the slushy road. Dubin watched him as he came, listing to the left. He seemed insufficiently dressed for the cold—had on a ragged jacket, thin pants, wet boots. He wore no hat, his thin black eyes expressionless. He was a burly man with heavy ears and small features, face unshaved. He waited in the road till Dubin had caught up with him without trying, and then walked along at the biographer’s side.