“Good morning,” Dubin said.
The man grunted. Once he hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat at the snow. Every so often, as they went on, he lifted his arms as if pointing a shotgun at a sparrow flying overhead. “Bang bang.” The bird flew off. The man lowered his arms and trudged on with Dubin.
Who the hell is he? Does he think he knows me because he’s seen me walking here? They were alone on the road and he was uneasy with the stranger.
“You live nearby?”
The man barely nodded.
They walked on, saying nothing. Dubin, after a while, would point at something in the distance and say what it was: “Frost’s farmhouse one summer—the poet. His daughter Irma went crazy that year.”
The man trudged along with him, scanning the sky. Is he an escaped convict, Dubin worried, or just some poor bastard looking for company?
Suppose he knifes me? He saw himself lying dead in a pool of blood in the frozen snow. There’s Dubin lying in the road with a gaping wound in his chest, his gray-blue eyes staring at the gray-blue sky. It’s a long hard winter.
The man hung close by, their arms bumping as they walked. Dubin reconciled himself to his company. After all, it’s a public road. He’s picked me to walk with, though who he is he’s not about to say.
“Neither am I,” he said aloud.
The stranger, tight-eyed, scanned the sky.
Suppose a man like him clings to you forever? You try to shake him and he follows you home. You have him arrested and he convinces the judge he’s your uncle and moves in. Suppose, by one means or another, he stays forever? Who is he to you then? Dubin talked to himself sub voce.
As he was experiencing these thoughts two crows flew overhead in the white sky. The man dropped to his knee with a grunt and raised his arms as though sighting up a gun barrel.
“Boom boom.” To Dubin’s astonishment one of the black birds wavered in flight and plummeted to the ground. The stranger let out a hoarse shout and plunged into the white field to retrieve the crow. Holding it up for Dubin to see, he pressed the dead bird to his chest and awkwardly ran, kicking up snow, diagonally across the field in the direction he had come.
Can a crow have a heart attack?
One of us is mad, the biographer thought.
Dubin ran in his rectangular circle.
He remembered, when he was twelve, one day walking home from school with his seventh-grade teacher, a broken-nosed knowing nasally talkative young man. As they were walking, this strange reddish-haired woman wearing a green hat trimmed with brown felt flowers approached in excitement from down the block. When William saw his insane mother coming toward them he said goodbye in the middle of somebody’s sentence and hurried across the street. When he looked back she was standing alone on the sidewalk, sobbing, crazily waving her fist.
“In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus, nie hätt’ ich gesendet die Kinder hinaus!” Kitty sang at her harp.
As Samuel Johnson, at the top of the stairs, was turning the key of his chamber at Pembroke College, he heard his mother distinctly call, “Sam!”
Willie.
Leo!
The child had been sucked by the waves beyond the ropes. Willie screamed at the lifeguard who jumped into the boat and rowed in the choppy green water to where the child had drowned.
Leo, she called, Willie.
Willie, she wailed, Leo.
Q. Why don’t you keep a journal?
A. I’m afraid what it might say.
At night they sat in opposing armchairs, hers a wingback against possible drafts, reading in separate pools of light. He had offered to build a fire, but she said she felt hot. He watched her pulse beat on her neck.
“This is one of those nights I keep sweating, then getting cold.”
“Don’t open the window.”
“I will if I want to.”
As they were reading, Kitty, a day behind with the day’s news, read him humorous snippets from yesterday’s papers.
“Don’t,” Dubin said. “I find it hard to concentrate.”
“Why bother?”
Afterward she said, “We used to talk about everything in the world. We talk about nothing now.”
He got up to put on a record, not because he wanted to listen to it, but because he must think of Fanny. His thoughts of the girl were a gluey collage representing an unalterable desire to be with her.
Why don’t I tell my wife and maybe the misery will yield?
It seemed to him he had not told her because Fanny was still possible. If he answered her letter they might meet.
Mad, Dubin thought, after the treatment she had dished out in Venice. What can I anticipate, given who she is, but more of the same? What fantasy am I living? What imbecility?
He was, in his thoughts, living with Fanny, living it as they hadn’t before. Dubin was in Rome with her, in the same rooms, eating with Fanny, enjoying her, enjoying life. They walked through the Borghese Gardens in winter sunlight; wherever he turned he felt her warmhearted embrace. Before his eyes the girl changed: had become loving, loyal, protective, kind. She loved Dubin and he, in his right mind, loved her.
“Tell me about Lawrence,” Kitty sometimes said as they sat alone in the room, and Dubin would make the effort to relate episodes of the man’s life.
“You tell it so interestingly. Why is it so hard to write?”
“It resists the pen. The second thought hides from the first.”
“Why don’t you try dictating?”
“That’s not for me.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve tried it,” Dubin said. He was on the verge of shouting.
“I feel cold. Is there a draft?” she asked, looking around.
“It’s you, the house is warm.”
Shivering, she tried to read. She glanced at the book she had opened, took in a few sentences, then stole a look at him, or looked away. She read slowly, every word of every sentence. She wanted to know in toto what each sentence said. He knew what book she was reading.
She had suggested cards but he had declined. He had never felt, he thought, this much apart from her. There were two houses and she was in the other. Kitty sat huddled in the Queen Anne chair, wearing pants and two sweaters, a rose cardigan over a black pullover. She’s hurt by what she doesn’t know.
From behind his book, held to his face, he reflected on his silence. He had nothing to say because he hadn’t said it when it was his to say. What you don’t say grows into not saying. A locked house is full of locked rooms.
He was, in his silence, elsewhere. He was not who she thought he was. Whoever he was, wearied by sticky fantasies, he wanted escape from his dream-drugged existence. He did not forever want to go on dreaming of Fanny Bick as she wasn’t now and never would be. Dubin waited for his drawn-out steamy reverie at last to come to an end. He waited for it to wither, die in the mind. Until it died he was separate, alone, a small fog in a chair, pretending to read. He chilled the room with his presence. Kitty hugged herself against the cold.
At ten o’clock she glanced at her wristwatch, yawned, and shut the fat book.
“You’ve been whispering to yourself all night, William. Why don’t you let me in on it?”
“What have I been saying?”
“I wish I knew. Will it help,” she asked, her hands clasped white between her knees, “if I were to stay home mornings—I mean from the library?”
God, no, he thought.
He didn’t think so, Dubin said. He wanted not to say it. He tried to say he needed her but felt no need.
“Is there something I can do for you? Some other way I can help?”
He said he was grateful for her patience.
“Patience is minimal. I’d like to do more for you if you’d let me.”
Only patience, he urged. The misery could not go on forever.
She spoke firmly: “You’re splendid with your gymnastics, William. You take brave walks in every weather. You diet as planned—I give you credit,
though I’d go mad if I had to do it if I were feeling like you. You do what you’ve set yourself to, although I don’t know what it comes to except you’ve lost weight, your clothes droop, your face is strained. You’re out on your private little black sailboat in the rough green sea and here I am alone on a dreary lava-like shore. I don’t know how to comfort you. I’ve never seen you so low so long. It has me frightened.”
He asked her not to be.
“I can’t help it,” her voice wavered.
He spoke these words: “I’ve lost weight and move more easily. I feel lighter, a change at least. Something good may be happening. One day you wake and whatever it was that was sitting on your head has flown off. You feel yourself again.”
“I hope so.” She seemed doubtful. “Nathanael wasn’t a psychiatrist—he almost became one but wouldn’t because he enjoyed physical medicine. But he read a lot in psychotherapy, possibly because of me. I remember his saying that a sudden depression usually had a specific cause—you lost a job or love object—some specific disappointment or loss would set it off. William, did anything unusual happen to you while you were abroad?”
Dubin thought, Right here I could get off the train. I could walk out from under the pile of rocks I wear as a hat.
“I saw Gerald,” he said. “It wasn’t a happy time.”
The train chugged on. There was no station. He had not got off.
“I don’t mean Gerald. I mean something in Italy.”
His eyes would not meet hers. “Why Italy?” he asked irritably, not wanting her to guess what was his to say.
“Just a feeling I have.”
He said, believing it, the trouble was his work. If he solved that he’d solve everything.
She vehemently denied it. “It isn’t your work that’s doing this to you. It’s you doing something to your work. I know your doubts about Lawrence as subject but you had similar doubts about Thoreau. You always have doubts at this stage. Please don’t put it ass-backwards. It’s not your work that hurts your work, it’s you.”
“Why would I need Evan Ondyk if I have you?”
“I’m not trying to sell you anything,” Kitty said with hauteur. “But I think you need help.”
He said he was not a child any more. “I don’t deny I could have been helped by analysis once but I’ve lived my life without it. Now I have to go on what I know.”
“I’ve been reading about depression and I think you’ve had it more often than you think, sometimes simply as lack of joie de vivre—”
“Does the book explain why you sometimes lack joie de vivre?”
“Not as much as you. Sometimes I think you’ve never felt young in your life; you’ve almost always interpreted it as obligation or lost opportunity. I’m basically a more carefree happier person than you.”
He hoarsely denied it.
“There are times your nature dampens mine,” she said.
“That works both ways.”
“Let’s drop it,” Kitty said. “Forget the joie de vivre. I know you know a lot about people, William, because of the way you contemplate human lives, but I’m saying you could cut out a lot of unnecessary suffering if you consulted with someone. The will isn’t everything.”
“It keeps me going,” the biographer shouted.
“If you know what’s wrong with you,” she said, her voice thickening, “for Christ’s sake, tell me.”
He said things changed in time; he needed time.
“But what about me while you’re dieting and exercising for wisdom? I feel like shit when you want nothing I have to give.”
“I want everything,” Dubin shouted, waving his arms.
“You seem to want nothing I have to give. You hide your life, whispering what I can’t hear. You’re not affectionate. We never really talk to each other.”
“What the hell are we doing now?”
“We aren’t talking. You’re yelling, we are not talking.”
“You have no confidence in me. You insult me by giving me psychiatric advice. Spare me Nathanael’s textbooks. I don’t want to be his posthumous patient. I don’t want to be yours.”
Grabbing her Handbook of Psychiatry, Kitty ran up the stairs.
To quiet his self-disgust for renewing, replenishing the deceit, Dubin sniffed the gas burners for her.
He found the brandy bottle and poured himself a glassful.
He drank with his hat on in the cold house, his coat draped on his shoulders. The wind clattered down from the mountains. He drank, listening to the roaring wind blowing snowflakes through the straining groaning cracking branches of trees. After midnight he felt himself go to bed in a blizzard. Dubin wound the clock gloomily, unable to look it in the face. The wind wailing around the house seeped in through storm windows. He felt it like a live presence in the room. Undressing, he got into the lonely bed, compounded by two. Kitty slept soundly at first, her breathing heavy. Dubin lay awake listening to the storm: primordial blast blowing from the beginning of the world. If it could only change a man’s life. Snowflakes spat at the windows. He slept and woke heavily, resisting waking. The drinking had added to the weight of the heaviness. It was a black heaviness, iron on the soul. Or you were drowning in nothing and this stone arm forced your head under; the arm was your own.
He rose in the live morning dark and stumbled groggily, step by step, through the brutal routine of the day. I must go through it. It is to show the depression it is not all. It is to show I fear it only so much, only so far. It is depression, an entity, it is not all. I know its black heaviness. I must be detached. I will not lock hands with it so that it becomes an adversary, another self; an ax to strike me with. I will wait for it to go its way. If I daily do what I have to, go through the motions, it will leave the house. It wants me to be its love, fuck it, marry it, but I won’t. I welcome the white blizzard. It is a thing to think of, to be in other than depression. Thoreau was wrong in saying nature doesn’t sympathize with sorrow. It does because it interrupts; it flings its frozen self at you, assails the plots and conjurations of my bleak brain.
He was old in the bathroom mirror. Dubin was afraid not to shave. He told himself not to but didn’t know what else to do. This was the wrong day not to shave. He had rarely not shaved when he wasn’t sick in bed.
In the lusterless mirror his left eye was fixed, distant, cold; contemplating his frightened right eye.
Dubin felt himself groan.
“Hush,” said Kitty from the bedroom. “It never ends.”
“Stupid bastard,” Dubin groaned.
“Who?” she wanted to know.
He groaned in silence.
“Be silent,” Carlyle writes himself in his journal, “be calm, be not mad.”
Dubin tries to get a religious thought going.
“Love,” Lawrence wrote, “is a thing to be learned through centuries of patient effort.”
Where can I find the time?
“Please come out of the bathroom.”
She was up early, dressed, studying herself in the long mirror. A night’s decent sleep had helped her mood, looks; had brightened her eyes, quickened last night’s lank hair.
“I wouldn’t go on the long walk if I were you. It’s going to blizzard.”
“I thought it was.”
“So far it’s been only the wind with snow flurries. The radio says a blizzard is coming.”
“I thought it had begun.”
“That was the wind,” Kitty said.
He’d come back to the house if it snowed heavily, Dubin said.
“No further than to the green bridge,” she cautioned. “And put on long johns and your wool socks or you’ll catch cold.”
He looked away from her. They ate breakfast in silence. He listened to her chew her crisp toast.
Kitty left for the library. She returned to sniff the gas burners. “Ta ta,” she called as she left.
He looked at his work, tried not to think how he felt. He held the misery off, kept it at bay with a stile
tto as he wrote out his long yellow page of snaky sentences, reflecting on each, trying to connect them; by some act of grace to weave a tapestry, a life, a biography. Then on a white page he wrote a dozen new sentences and read them with care to see what they said; to find out if they were taking him seriously. He read them with dignity to show the sentences he had written and respected them, and must himself be respected. They were not to crawl or slither or flop around. They must go somewhere seriously into the life of Lawrence, revive, re-create, illumine it. But the last sentence, when he read it, said, “I am trapped.” Dubin with a cry flung his pen against the wall. Disgust rose to his gorge and he fought the approach of panic. I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to get away from my fucking mind.
He left the kitchen door and ran through the trees into the field. Here the wind leapt at him, struck him, clawed his face. He gasped, choked, stood immobilized by the wind. His eyes teared, breath ached, as he tried to push on. The wind was a gorgon with an armlock on his stone head.
He retreated into the house, waited shivering in the kitchen, to recover his strength. He wanted not to go anywhere, to stand there till the weather abated, winter disappeared, the world changed. But he was afraid, if he stayed, of nothing, heavy, painted black. He was afraid of the silence ticking. After endless minutes he went out the front door, stumbled down the steps, hurried along the street. A heavy wind tore through the tops of moaning trees. He made his way downtown, icy snowflakes stinging his face.
Dubin hurried to the library. If he bought a newspaper he could read it there, forget himself; he dared not return to the empty house. Could he sit in the library reading the paper? Not with Kitty around, concerned to see him there. It was best not to buy a paper. He’d be better off into his routine, part of it rather than nothing. Not doing what he had to added to the misery of not doing. He would walk in the weather rather than do nothing.
Dubin's Lives Page 18