“When are you coming? A lot is going to waste—I mean not using what you have is wasting it.”
Once she wrote, “Suppose you got sick, how would I know? What could I do to see you? Sometimes I feel as though you aren’t in my life.”
He wrote her an affectionate letter. In it he said: “I’m happier now than I’ve been in years. There ought to be a way of having other selves to be with those we love.”
Now was a new season, unfortunately without her. He would love to point out changes in nature, share them with her if only in Central Park; but he could not get off to the city. Kitty had insisted she’d go with him the next time round—they’d drive down together, as he had promised. She knew how thoroughly he had done his research; how trivial to voyage to New York to squeeze out a minor fact or two in the Public Library when there’d be many to check after he had completed a full draft. She knew he’d signed his contract for three long biographical articles. If he went to New York now it was mostly as a break; “for fun,” Kitty said. She could use a little herself.
When she asked when he might be going he said he wasn’t sure. She could go by herself if she liked—shop, visit friends, take in a play; but Kitty said she’d wait for him. It was more fun going together. Dubin waited: the work was flowing. And he was enjoying hoarfrost mornings before warm tangy autumn days; burning-leaf smell of trees yellowing in afternoon sun; a failing luminosity at twilight—most beautiful time of year. Melancholy too: signs of winter’s fingers in woods and fields. Landscape as metaphor. Nature repeating the same old tale, usually with same effect; it plays in memory: what dies is present, what’s present dies.
Although he missed Fanny he sometimes thought that so long as they cared for each other, admitted the reality and importance of their relationship, he did not always have to be with her. She was his in principle; he had somehow earned the privilege of her. The mild sadness that went with it—dominant emotion of his life, he often thought—touched but did not taint his desire for her. Unless it was the unyielding presence of Kitty in his thoughts that salted in the sadness.
Then Fanny drove up to Center Campobello one Saturday morning and called from her motel as he was working in the barn. There had been talk she might come up but Dubin had hoped he would be in the city before that.
“I’m here,” she announced, “to see the color and whoever wants to see me.” Her laughter was strained and he imagined her sober expression.
Dubin had called her at the beginning of the week to say once more why he was finding it hard to get away; told her Kitty had insisted on going with him. “I’ll have to drive down once with her and not see you. After that I’ll try to come back alone.”
“But couldn’t we see each other for an hour after I get home from work? It’s better than not at all.”
“I wouldn’t want to leave you with the evening in your lap after we’d been to bed.”
“Let’s take what we can get, William,” Fanny had said. “I feel very generous after I’ve been with someone who means a lot to me.”
He had said he’d tell Kitty they’d be coming down next week.
But Fanny hadn’t waited. She had felt like driving up, she said. “Can’t we meet tonight? I’d love to eat with you, then come back here. I have a nice room in this motel. They have cotton sheets on the bed. Some private people own it. It even has curtains and white window shades. I’ll bet you like it.”
He said after a minute he would try to arrange it. “One way or the other. But I won’t be able to see you tomorrow, Fanny. Don’t plan on that. I’m usually home all day Sunday.”
“Not even in the morning? I plan to leave by one o’clock. I’m having dinner with my friends in the Village who I told you about.”
In the afternoon Dubin went for a drive and called Kitty to say the car had broken down. He was at a garage in Glens Falls and would have to wait until they got the part they needed from a neighboring town. “Don’t wait for me. I’ll pick up a sandwich across the street.”
“I hate to eat alone,” Kitty said.
Dubin felt shame; he said nothing.
“Maybe it’s time to trade in this lousy car for a new one?”
He said they ought to consider it.
He met Fanny at the motel. They ate an early dinner in a nearby inn and returned to her room. She pulled down the shades and asked to be undressed. They made love impetuously, sensuously. She loved lavishly. He was excited by the aromas of her hair and flesh. She liked him to kiss the dark aureoles of her nipples. “William!” she cried as she came. Dubin fell through the sensuous sky into a mountain of leaves, bounced once, and fell peacefully asleep.
“Won’t you see me for a little bit tomorrow?” Fanny asked. “Even an hour would be all right.”
He promised he would.
She held up her hands to show him she was growing back her fingernails. He kissed both hands.
On Sunday Dubin rose early, left Kitty sleeping heavily and drove to the motel to have breakfast with Fanny. He had scribbled his wife a note saying he had written something that had come apart during the night and he had to puzzle out why. He was taking an early drive and would be back in time for lunch. He disliked what the note said but left it anyway.
After they had made love, as she was sitting cross-legged in bed, Fanny remarked, “I don’t know exactly what we’re doing, or what you’re doing, but whatever it is hits me right. I felt this one today way up my ass.”
“Bingo.”
Fanny laughed. “We’re good together.”
“Is that what it is? Hasn’t this happened to you before?”
“Not often. Only once or twice I can remember.”
“I’m glad it happens when you’re with me but I marvel a little.”
“Maybe it’s because of the way you want it. I dig the hungry way you go after me.”
“You make me feel hungry. I have a long pleasure with you, on the edge of pain. Is it simply that we physically suit each other?”
“It has to be more than that,” Fanny replied. “I think I come the way I do because I like myself better when I am with you.”
Dubin kissed her knees.
“If we have it this good,” Fanny said, “don’t you think it’s crazy not to see each other a lot more than we do?”
He said they would. She placed her warm palm on his.
He did not have to lie to Kitty when he arrived home shortly before noon. She hadn’t seen the note and he tore it up. She had taken a sleeping pill in the middle of the night and was awakening as he came into the bedroom and raised the shades.
“Why didn’t you wake me to eat with you?” Kitty said drowsily after glancing at the clock.
He said he had wanted her to sleep.
She shook him out of solid slumber. He woke with a long-drawn groan. She had had a mad dream—could not remember worse: She was a young woman with a baby in a crib. The crib was in flames. It had taken her an endless time to find the burning child’s room. She had heard it shrieking and raced up the stairs. Kitty grabbed up the baby, its bedclothes afire, and ran to the bathroom to hold it in the shower, but the door was locked. William, let me in! She hastened from room to room, trying to find him, sick with fright. It occurred to her the child was Nathanael’s and she ran to the telephone to call him but Nathanael was in his grave. Kitty had wakened, trying to remember whether she had fainted in the dream.
Dubin held her till she stopped shuddering.
He asked her what was worrying her.
“I don’t know,” Kitty said, “except a confusing lot of ongoing things. Neither of the kids is nearby or settled. I worry about them. I also worry about Vietnam. I hate the goddamn war. I think I will stop watching the news at night—those burning children running across the road. No wonder I have nightmares.”
Dubin told Kitty in their austere high-ceilinged room at the Gansevoort that he would meet her for dinner at half past seven, or eight. Would she want to see a movie afterward?
“M
ake it half past seven,” Kitty said, “I’m famished by eight. We’ll see about the movie. We might want to do something else.”
He told her he was having a drink with a biographer of Frieda Lawrence.
“Anyone I know?”
“Have you met Fritz Halsman?” He knew no Fritz Halsman and was surprised and irritated by the sincerity of his question.
“No. Why don’t you invite him to dinner with us if he’s free?”
“Maybe next time. He’s not that interesting. I’m only checking a point with him.”
Kitty was wearing a new fall dress with a cloche hat. She looked good in hats that framed the face. She had enjoyed the drive and said they ought to come into the city more often.
“Why bother living in the country?”
“New York was no decent place to bring up children. We both thought so years ago.”
Dubin left quickly to say nothing else. When he lied he talked too much. In the cab he sat silent as the driver talked.
Dubin got to Fanny’s as she was arriving in a taxi. They kissed in the street. “How much time do we have?” she asked.
“About two hours.”
“Then we don’t have to hurry.”
She had her diaphragm on, had been wearing it since that morning. Upstairs she showed him a pair of lace-edged underpants she had bought during her lunch hour. “Let’s get into bed,” said Dubin. “I knew you’d like them,” Fanny said.
Dubin was back at the hotel at 7:40, going on about the war ending soon. Then he warned himself to shut up. He had showered at Fanny’s and was about to change his underwear when it occurred to him the shorts he kept in her dresser drawer were striped, whereas the pair he had been wearing were a solid blue. When he got back to the hotel he changed his underclothes and shirt in the bathroom to be sure Fanny’s scent wasn’t detectable on him. He used Kitty’s soap.
Their dinner was excellent. He enjoyed his wife’s wit and flushed good looks. She wanted to return to their room after dinner but he talked her into going to a movie that had just opened.
On their way home the next morning, Kitty driving, chatty, Dubin quiet, barely aware of scene or sight, he worried about the spreading dishonesty he was into. Awful, if you thought of yourself as an honest man. You spoke pebbles and pieces of metal and when you determined to say honest words you kept spitting out bits of brackish metal.
Since lying was beyond Kitty, or she beyond it, lying to her tainted his pleasure with Fanny, at least in afterthought. Kitty was trustworthy; Dubin hated to think he wasn’t. Of course he could tell her the truth and hope for the best. Some men were able to inform their wives and still manage to carry on an affair. But Kitty wouldn’t tolerate it; Dubin didn’t see how they could go on living together if she knew. She wasn’t constituted for an emotionally, not to say morally, ambiguous relationship. To protect her peace of mind he had to lie though he wanted to protect her from his lies. Nor did he intend, at least yet, to give up Fanny. At times he wondered if his deceit to Kitty might induce dishonesty in his work. The thought bothered him although he knew enough about the lives of writers to understand that even the morally deficient might write well. So he kept his sad secret, recalling that Freud had said no one could keep a secret forever. “If his lips are silent his fingertips give him away.”
Yet he concealed his thoughts of Fanny; disguised details of other trips to the city; received letters from her in a post-office box he had recently rented. He called her once a week and she, him, more often, on his barn telephone; but there were times she would try to reach him in the house at night if she’d been unable to make a morning call. Dubin only rarely telephoned her at work. At night, if Kitty answered, Fanny hung up. Kitty reached for the phone when it rang. If he answered but couldn’t speak to Fanny because his wife was there, Dubin hung up.
“Who was that, William?”
“Wrong number probably, somebody rang off.”
“We’ve had a spate of hang-ups lately.”
“They come and go. There seems to be a season for them.”
He asked Fanny not to call him at home. “Then when can we talk?” she asked angrily. “If I can’t get you in the barn in the morning because I am too busy to sneak in a call, that means I can’t talk to you at all when I have something to tell you. I save most of my news to tell you. I’m taking environmental studies and psychology at N.Y.U. three nights a week. I wanted to talk about what I was writing in my psych paper and see if you like my ideas. I also think of us in bed. Do you suppose we could go to Europe again? I’m getting two weeks off this winter—they’re not giving me a summer vacation, because I am new. But my boss says they like me and I make up time when I come in late. They like it that I’m going to school at night. I might get a raise the first of the year.”
“Europe would be different this time,” Dubin felt.
“If there hadn’t been a last time there wouldn’t be a this time,” Fanny said.
He said he wasn’t thinking of last time. “I was thinking we might go to Athens if I could come up with a good enough reason why, like maybe a cache of unpublished Lawrence letters had been discovered there—”
“Why don’t you put your mind to it?”
He said he would think about it.
They arranged he would telephone her from the barn twice a week before she left for work, and she would not call him unless it was absolutely necessary.
When he phoned before eight she was usually alert, eager to talk, had much to say and said it warmly. Dubin would walk across the hoarfrost field to call her, then return for a second cup of coffee and to shave. He would afterward trot off to the barn to do his day’s work. Fanny once in a while phoned in mid-morning to say a quick hello.
One early morning when he thought Kitty was sleeping, she was watching him cross the field to call Fanny, as a crow circled overhead cawing at him. At lunch she asked why he went to the barn so early, then returned to the house before going out again.
He said that if he first set up the day’s work it made breakfast more serene.
Dubin groaned softly in her presence.
“What’s up, William? Is something troubling you?”
He did not at once reply but, when he saw the worry in her eyes, shook his head, smiling, then dimmed the smile.
“I thought I heard you say ‘deceit,’” she said.
“That was the word on my mind.”
“Did Lawrence ever deceive Frieda?”
She often guessed where his thoughts were. Dubin told her that with Lawrence the deceit went the other way. “Frieda had deceived Weekley, her first husband, with at least two lovers. Lawrence she deceived mostly with Angelo Ravagli, their Italian landlord, who became her third husband. Once she traveled on the Continent with John Middleton Murry, but he said he turned her down because he didn’t want to betray Lawrence. Some say they did sleep together. My own guess is they didn’t while Lawrence was alive. I don’t think Murry lied when he wrote he hadn’t slept with her then because he didn’t want to betray Lawrence.”
“How complicated it is.”
Dubin said it was.
“Do you think I might be deceiving you?” Kitty asked with a faint smile.
I wish you were, he thought.
Dubin was leaving, that end-of-October weekend, for New York, a year almost to the day when he and Fanny had flown to Venice.
“This is a quickie trip,” he explained to Kitty. “I’ll be gone Friday and part of Saturday. I should be back by early evening.”
“Why can’t I come?”
“I’ll be going again in two or three weeks to attend other business. Come with me then, it’ll be a longer weekend.”
“Why are you going now?”
He said he wanted someone who knew wills to look at theirs and suggest changes. “We wrote it when the kids were young.”
“Don’t you remember enough law to read a will?”
“Not as much as you think.”
“Why don’t you d
o the will when you go next time? What’s so important right now?”
“Offices are closed on Saturdays and Sundays. I can see someone late this afternoon.”
“You could also telephone from here.”
He didn’t want to. “I’ve mailed the will out, a friend of mine has read it, I want to talk to him about changing it.”
Her eyes were troubled. “Why are you suddenly concerned about a will? There’s nothing wrong with you, is there?”
“No,” Dubin said, sweating. “I happened to come across it in our safety deposit box and thought I ought to have it checked out. A legal instrument should be kept up to date.”
She said talk of the will had worried her.
Dubin swore there was nothing wrong with him. He was irritated with himself for fabricating the will.
Ultimately he was able to lie with less guilt. He geared himself to it: had to protect his relationship with Fanny, at the same time not hurt Kitty. Still, he wouldn’t eat his heart out over every fib he told. Not all evil is pure evil. Not all lies are forever.
When William Dubin returned from his youth-renewing short visit to Fanny, for which he blessed her, he felt a surge of love for his wife, followed by a saddening sense of loss—awareness of an illusion he seemed to favor: that as he fulfilled himself he did the same for Kitty. That was not true in any way. He had experienced pleasure he would like her to experience, dish her out a bit of pure lustful joy; but if another woman was the source of his pleasure—if you lived on her body—that diminished desire, affection—obligation—for the other, the wife. He continued to hide from Kitty his feeling for Fanny, his happy involvement with her; but it did not hide well. The Freudian fingertips showed: because of Fanny he was a different man, had grown new attributes, elements of a new self—how could you hide that? You pretended you were your old self, but the old self had changed. You pretended it hadn’t, adding to pretense.
Kitty, he knew, sensed something. She had embraced him on his return almost with compassion, as if he had come back with a wound and only she knew it. She asked him again if he was well. Dubin said that next time a will or something of the sort came up he’d take care of it without mentioning it to her.
Dubin's Lives Page 29