“What did you expect after undressing in my study?”
“I don’t know what I expected. I was afraid of you and didn’t want to be, so I went with you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t respond more appropriately to your needs.”
“You did in your books. The only one I don’t like is Short Lives.”
“Is that so? It’s awfully popular in paperback.”
“Oh?” Fanny said nervously. “I don’t want to read about people ass backwards. I don’t dig death hanging over everything they do or created. Are you afraid of death?” .
“Not of death but maybe what leads to it.”
“Doesn’t life lead to it?”
“I’m speaking of sickness, accident—being incapacitated; unable to run my life; that can be worse than death. I’m afraid of the unexpected. What I expect I can deal with. On the other hand these short lives show how intensely and creatively life can be lived even when it is early aborted. In terms of years lived, they missed little; they weren’t counting.”
“If you’re dead you’re dead,” Fanny said. “Nobody has to tell me what to do with my life, only how to get it together. I know all I want to about death. I don’t want my nose rubbed in it.”
“It’s late,” Dubin said after a minute, “let’s go home.”
She stared at him.
He helped her up, noticing she stood firmly on the cut foot.
Fanny promised to wash the blood out of his handkerchief and mail it to him.
He asked her where she had got the locket she was wearing.
She fingered it. “Harvey gave it to me about a week before his heart attack.”
“A whole heart for a broken one?”
“He liked me a lot.”
Fanny asked him whether Dubin would answer if she wrote to him once in a while.
He was not much a letter writer, he said.
Why waste what the winter had taught him?
As they were moving down the granite slope half a dozen black birds rose from the oak trees and flapped off toward the reddened sun. The dark rays of the dying sun touched the tips of the trees. Overhead, massive bronze clouds in long convoys were moving east. As Fanny and Dubin came out of the wood a softened early-evening light lay on the long field of wild flowers.
Fanny began to name them. “There’s celandine, oxeye daisy, red rooster —what a ball those names are.” Farther on she said, “There’s forget-me-not, which I knew, and those bushes are bridal wreath.”
She plucked a red trillium and thrust it into her shoulder bag, then began to collect a bouquet of daisies.
The clouds were crimson, those close to the hills were violet ships voyaging to black mountains.
Fifteen or more billion years after creation, the biographer thought, here’s this sea of wild flowers on earth and amid them this girl picking white daisies.
“Look,” said Fanny as they were walking in the grass, “there’s wild lily of the valley, if you guessed right. I’ve learned the names of them all.”
She touched Dubin’s arm.
He touched the curve of her back. Fanny, letting her bouquet of daisies slip from her hand, turned to him.
The biographer, assailing doubt, took her in his arms. Fanny sank into the warm grass, arching her hips as he drew down her underpants.
This evens it, Dubin thought, for the cruel winter.
Six
Dear Fanny. In the movie that August night she reached for his hand and kissed it, a gesture that stirred him. Ponce de León had galloped in the wrong direction: the fountain of youth is the presence of youth. In her company he enjoyed the sense of fountain within, experienced flowers of splashing water.
He had seen her in the city twice in June and again in July; had come to New York for two-day visits. This time he arrived for a week one late afternoon on a Saturday in August, a warmish pleasant summer’s day, Fanny’s twenty-third birthday. She had written, “I want to spend my birthday with you.” On the train Dubin had opened his paper, anticipating their meeting, going to bed with her. Soon a thin gloom stole over him and he lowered the newspaper to track down why. Easy enough: Kitty and Maud had driven him to the train station. There were kisses goodbye. He was on his way to the city, he had announced, to complete a contract for three articles he’d write to earn some needed cash; have a look in at the Public Library; maybe visit an old friend or two. “Have a good time,” Kitty had said. “Lots of fun,” Maud affirmed, not at her best that day. Her hair was still an unhappy mix of red streaked black. She looked as though she hated to see him go, and for a moment he wanted not to leave her. When he looked again she needed someone else and he thought that natural.
Everyone wants Dubin to enjoy himself. They were planning a few days on the Maine Coast. Maud, to tell the truth, was mostly bored, a summer at home less than satisfying as she dealt with an excitement within, now apparently on, now apparently off. Kitty had suggested a drive up the coast to cheer her up and Maud had consented to go if she did the driving. He wished, considering the circumstances, they hadn’t insisted on taking him to the train, but they knew he disliked buses. Well, life isn’t ideal. He loved them both and tried to put them out of mind. They returned at once through predictable doors and windows. One can’t easily dispense with the actors of his personal history. The biographer, as he read the newspaper, hefted and measured guilt, yet managed to sidestep it: I’m not twenty, nor forty—I’m fifty-seven. Surely these years entitle me to this pleasure. In life one daren’t miss what his nature requires. Only the spiritually impoverished can live without adventure. After a while the sweep of the broad silver-blue sunlit Hudson, from the window, the smoky Catskills in the distance, helped him cast off the subtle net on his spirit and he listened to himself thinking of being, soon, with Fanny.
Dubin, as the train sped on, reflected without nostalgia how it had been when he was a young man with a prearranged date—rarely with a girl one might meet by chance in park or museum, want to be with, and is. But prearrangement had the advantage—it seemed advantage—of buildup in imagination, anticipation of pleasure. As the time of meeting approached, nature improved, the evening expanded, stars were jewels in the sky. As he shaved, dressed, waited for the last minutes to go by before he left the house, enjoying reverie, expectation; he felt a sense of well-being so intense it could only taint, perhaps spoil, the experience: there were times the girl wasn’t—couldn’t possibly be—as much pleasure as his expectation of her. He would envision more than she was; wanted more to give than he ultimately gave. The occasion therefore became self-defeating, Dubin trying to squeeze out of prevision, desire, something it was not prepared to yield. He had expected more than reality entitled him to—defense against an ordinary fate: an extraordinary woman. Out of hubris, if not fear, young William Dubin had felt an unwillingness to risk himself with someone whose experience was too much like his own. When, years later, Kitty Willis appeared in his life, he felt he had met his equal in possibility, someone who could give him not only what he hadn’t had, but hadn’t thought of having; Dubin had then stopped sidestepping marriage.
Dear Fanny: He had told her when he was coming but hadn’t expected her to be waiting for him when the train arrived. There she was at the rope barrier. Men looked at her as they passed by and she was modestly reserved although her body seemed extrinsic to her clothes, a natural gift Dubin approved in principle. Fanny had changed her hair style since he had seen her last, her thick hair now drawn above her ears and pulled through a silver ring into a loose light mane falling to below her summer-tanned shoulders. She wore a yellow skimp, her bosom snug in the fabric, her legs bare, always good to see in short dresses. She had put on a pound or two and was relaxed, her face womanly. Neither was on probation in the other’s eyes. Dubin felt heartened to have recovered her. He felt himself a gifted man, an excellent biographer.
When they arrived in Fanny’s apartment on West 83 rd Street she unbuttoned his shirt and began quickly to undress. Dubin help
ed. In bed they loved each other generously. He, after a catnap, lay restfully on her pillow, gazing at a gardenia that looked like three gardenias in a water glass on top of her bookcase.
“I put it there for you to see because you like flowers.”
“Dear Fanny.”
The evening grew in pleasure, serenity, magnitude. She took ten minutes to brush her hair as Dubin watched each stroke. They dressed and hailed a cab to a bistro she knew on First Avenue. At a bar with its back to a curtained window, Dubin, man of the world, drank brandy and soda as he talked with the young bartender about the merits of Lawrence’s early novels, and Fanny, sipping Scotch on the rocks, seriously listened, her warm side pressed to his. The bartender, when Dubin began to explicate D. H. Lawrence on sex—a much misunderstood question: “And I who loathe sexuality so deeply am considered a lurid sexuality specialist. Mi fa malo allo stomacho”—let his eyes rest seriously on Fanny’s handsome bosom. Dubin felt expansive, amiable, personally wealthy. “Sex to him, you understand, despite his ideology of blood-being, was a metaphor for a flowering life.”
The bartender gravely nodded.
Fanny, her arm around her middle-aged lover, nudged her head against his chest. Dubin kissed her ear. She had a gift of closeness, could almost not bear not being in contact with whomever she felt affection for. She touched, stroked, quietly pressed. Few men had it so good.
“Let’s dance,” she said. A combo of piano, bull fiddle, and drums in a far corner of the room had begun to play.
Dubin tried to beg off, swore he couldn’t—not this new mode of dance. He had been brought up on fox-trot and waltz, could lindy a little, not more. “I don’t know the steps.”
“Make them up. Hop like a monkey. Peel a banana.”
“Then what?”
“Climb a tree.”
He did as he was told. Fanny danced to his movements in a way that made him look good. She danced deadpan with wide-open myopic eyes, inventing steps and graceful movements of her arms. When she came close he could smell her through her scent and felt he was dancing off the floor. A blonde of thirty or so dancing nearby with a man of Dubin’s age winked at the biographer and told him to save the next one for her. Fanny laughed merrily.
After a supper of omelette, green salad, white wine, Fanny asked him where he wanted to go. Miraculous question: here’s Dubin with nowhere to go except where he pleased. Nothing scheduled, appointed, expected. He was this evening, in truth, a free spirit. Dubin, the single. There were a dozen things to do and he might do them all.
“You name it,” he told her.
“Disco? I know a good one.”
“If you wish.”
“Or we could see friends of mine in the East Village?”
“Young people?”
“About my age. They have two kids. Or we could go to a picture I hear is great.”
“Fine.”
They walked to a movie on Third Avenue. It was there Fanny kissed his hand in the dark and Dubin kissed hers. One did not have to guess with Fanny: she was there, gave instinctually; he easily gave in return. After the film he looked for a bookstore. Dubin remembered how happy it had made Kitty, one evening not long after they had met, when he bought her a book of poems.
Fanny had never read Yeats; he bought her the Selected Poems, exactly what he had got Kitty; and at the florist’s up the block, a white rose. Fanny carried it and the book solemnly in one hand, hugging his right arm with her left as they walked on the Drive, refreshed by the cool air of the river. They walked until it occurred to them that the streets were no longer safe. Dubin felt a melancholy regret at the way the world had gone; and she, sensing his mood, fell silent.
At home Fanny put on the coffeepot while Dubin examined her bookcase and found in it hardback copies of each of his biographies. She had managed to get even the out-of-print Abraham Lincoln—probably had cost her twenty bucks. On the wall above the bookcase hung a medium-enlarged framed colored snapshot of Fanny, pigeons circling her head and shoulders, that Dubin had taken with her camera one morning ages ago—was it really less than a year?——in the Piazza San Marco. He remembered the picture of her in jeans and lank hair she had sent from Rome last winter and asked if he could have a print of the one on the wall.
“Sure, but suppose your wife sees it?”
“She doesn’t poke into my things, and if she did she’d know who I was in Venice with.”
“How is it you never told her?”
“An anonymous woman hurts less.”
Fanny regarded him silently. She began to nibble the nail of her middle finger but there was no nail to nibble. Her fingernails were, as a rule, ragged. “Where does she think you are now?”
“Not where I presently am.”
Dubin moved from the bookcase to get away from the thought. She followed him. “In one way I don’t mind that hassle in Venice we had.”
“Which way?”
“It made me feel closer to you than I might have if everything had gone right. Do you feel close to me, William?”
They kissed.
Fanny drew herself a vitabath. She got her diaphragm out of the bureau drawer and took it into the bathroom. She had been advised after her operation not to take the Pill, she had told Dubin. He was enjoying the thought of sleeping with her again tonight; it had been years since he had slept with a woman twice in a day. He undressed, glad he had slimmed down, tamed his pot belly, a shadow of itself. The telephone rang. Fanny got rid of whoever it was before the guy could seriously unburden himself. Dubin had heard a man’s urgent voice; she didn’t say who. He felt uneasy. As Fanny bathed he thought of her lying nude on her double bed and imagined a line of men coiled around it, a long line of types and ages extending into the hall and down a flight of stairs; from Mitchell the orthodontist to William Dubin the biographer. How many men had she had in her young life—fifty? eighty? —a hundred and fifty? How many diaphragms had she worn out in her comparatively short sexual lifetime? Did she have one on—was it possible? —when he took her amid the wild flowers? Or did she take me? He felt a momentary distrust of her; but as Dubin, lying on Fanny’s sheets, reflected on the course of human lives—on desire, error, pain, understanding, change —he exculpated her in his mind; forgave Fanny her sexual past. And when they were lying in bed after her fragrant bath it seemed to him as if they had come together in innocence. He had re-created her virginity.
Fanny, with her nail scissors, snipped the thorns off the white rose and wound its green stem around his erect cock. She kissed the flower. Dubin wished her a happy birthday.
Kitty, before sex, lowered the shades; Fanny had none on her windows. She came out of the shower naked, dressed in the sunny bedroom and walked around with wet hair, barefoot in cotton underpants. Kitty sneezed when her hair was wet. She was trim. Fanny’s rump was heavier than he had thought, her waist narrower. “Why don’t you get yourself some window shades?” Dubin asked her.
“I have nothing to hide, do you?”
“What about the synagogue across the street?”
“That’s on the second floor and even when I stand at the window with my clothes on nobody down there looks up at me. Even when I don’t have any clothes on they don’t look my way. Or if somebody does he’s searching for God. I don’t need window shades.”
Dubin often watched the elderly Jews at prayer, or as they sat at study around a long table in a brown room on the left side of the synagogue. He bought two large white shades for Fanny’s bedroom windows.
Her apartment, in an old six-story graystone, was not especially attractive, needed painting, bathroom repairs. Roaches haunted the area around sink and range. Dubin sprayed disinfectant liberally, diligently, until no limping survivor remained. Fanny had two medium-size rooms and a small kitchen but the windows, in heavy flaking frames, were large, the apartment light; and she got it for two hundred a month. She had a new job that wasn’t bad —the work interesting—as secretary to an executive secretary in a law office. She did
n’t like nine-to-five, found the hours restrictive, yet had time to think of herself, her needs.
During the week he lived with her, Dubin slept later than usual. Her alarm rang at 7:30. He awoke alert and began his modified exercises; Fanny, into Yoga when she came home, stopped to look on as she dried herself after her shower. Dubin fried an egg and made coffee to get her off on time. She ate slowly, hungrily. She was slow in the morning but not distracted. Fanny was clean but not, like Kitty, neat; he realized how alien to her nature it had been to houseclean for others last summer. It took her about an hour to shower, brush and fix her hair, then select and screw on earrings, a variety of single and double circles of silver mostly. She said, “I’ll hit the can and be right out.” As she slipped on her dress she seemed lost in thought. She left the house anytime from ten to nine to a quarter after, predicting she’d be fired by the end of the month. On his way to pick up a newspaper, he hurried her to the Broadway bus. She was usually in good humor, laughed when he was witty, kissed him slowly at the bus stop, to Dubin’s self-conscious concern, because people were looking and he was embarrassed by his age; but he would rather be kissed.
Afterward he read the Watergate news with intense interest. Nixon had resigned. During the impeachment proceedings Dubin had trotted his walk holding a pocket radio in his hand. Fanny and he looked through the papers every night and talked about the case before going to bed. He wondered what sort of life one might write of Nixon, provided one could stand the monotony of his mind and character. The man made him uncomfortable. It occurred to Dubin how lucky he was to be working on someone of the rich complexity of D. H. Lawrence and felt affection for him, for his self-respect.
Dubin wrote on Fanny’s kitchen table after he had cleared it off and washed the breakfast dishes. He put away the freeze-dry coffee and found a box of sanitary napkins in the food cabinet. In the bedroom he hung up her slight black nightgown on a hook behind the closet door. He liked the sight of her bright short dresses hanging in the closet and thought of buying her one or two on his own. He tossed her used tights into the hamper, gave up on the rat’s nest of bottles, tubes, containers in the bathroom, but took a minute to mop the tiled floor. Dubin then put the plastic garbage bag out; he had bought her a new garbage container. And he enjoyed the happy surprise with which she greeted the order he had made.
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