“No,” she said, “you must tell me.”
Nothing was wrong with him, Dubin insisted. “Don’t worry about what doesn’t exist.”
“I won’t if you promise not to hide from me what does.” She laughed breathlessly, her eyes not looking at him. If she believed him with reservation, what, Dubin wondered, did she not believe?
Had she sensed some sort of withdrawal from her? Something more serious—of another kind than had happened last winter? It was months since Fanny and he had become lovers; doesn’t an experience of love produce a newly experiencing self? All the exciting new sex diminishing the less exciting sex, the lesser pleasure? Something added, therefore something elsewhere subtracted? Kitty and her husband lived as married, but Fanny had joined the merry company. Dubin has two wives? Here’s Kitty gazing out of a window reflecting herself, and beholds, in the wood in the distance, the shadow of a presence; aware of something not fearsome but a source of fear? Dubin, staring through the same glass, sees himself in view, Fanny, in white, standing dimly by his side, all but invisible. He searches the glass, amidst images of leafy trees and darkening shallow clouds, for Kitty, expecting her to be reflected nearby; but she stands alone, amid tall trees, in the deeper distance. What it amounts to, the biographer thinks, is that one may be able to mask dishonesty but not its effects: the diminution of libido, ebb of feeling for a woman, love for her. Deceit distances. He dreamed of Kitty pacing the black-railed widow’s walk on the roof.
Dubin had caught a cold that became heavy bronchitis and he could not get to the city in mid-November. He called Fanny very early one morning, as Kitty slept, to say he couldn’t possibly be going down this week. Fanny said she would drive to Center Campobello, but Dubin in his laryngitic voice told her he was reasonably sure he could make it to her after another week. Kitty then caught Dubin’s cold, and since the trip was promised to her, he felt he oughtn’t to go alone this time. It snowed a few days before Thanksgiving, a light snow that melted in a day as though a dropped handkerchief had been snatched up. Fanny urged Dubin to come by himself—he had a perfect excuse with Kitty ill; but he said it was getting more difficult to lie his way into the city so often.
“What’s so often about coming here a month ago? I thought you had the excuse of talking to a lawyer about something?”
He said it wasn’t a good one. “And it isn’t like me to take off for New York in winter weather to talk to a lawyer when the woods are full of them here. I don’t travel much in wintertime.”
“Wouldn’t it be groovy if we could fuck by phone,” she said bitterly.
Dubin was silent.
“What I mean,” Fanny said after a moment, “is I miss you. When I get lonely I feel like crawling up a wall. If you can’t come here, William, I’ll zip up there. I bought snow tires and I’d like to come up this next weekend.”
“There’s at least one dinner date this weekend. Could you make it the one after?”
“Are you sure you really want me to come? Sometimes I have the feeling you don’t care all that much.”
“You’d be wrong,” he said.
“I’m ready to drive up any weekend if you can’t come to me. If we don’t get together one way we have to another or what’s our life all about?”
“The experience of the absent loved one has inspired some beautiful poetry.”
“I don’t write poetry, I never could.”
“Let’s try to be together every third weekend or so, though please keep in mind I have no good reason suddenly to be out alone any given night of any particular weekend, let alone two nights in a row. It’s not usual.”
“I think you have a damn good reason.”
“I know I have, but unfortunately not one I can give my wife.”
“Unfortunately, old boy.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone, little girl.”
“I’m not your little girl and you are hurting me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Fanny.”
“Other men get out from under their wives—why can’t you?”
Dubin explained that he’d worked home for years. “It’s hard to find excuses to get out alone when circumstances change. Though in a way it’s mad, Fanny, what it amounts to is that one works in a room with the door shut and everyone knows where he is and expects him to be there for all time. Between biographies I am freer.”
Fanny’s tone softened. “Couldn’t you please try to come here? You said your wife’s cold is about gone. I’d rather have you come here than go to that lousy motel.”
“I thought you liked it?”
“I like it when you’re in my apartment with me—in my bed. I like to share my home with you as well as my ass. Why don’t you move to New York so we can see each other easier and more often?”
“I’ve thought about it but it’s not feasible right now. Kitty dislikes the city.”
“Why don’t you do what you want?”
“Some things you want to do you don’t.”
“I wouldn’t live that way.”
But she called him in the barn the next morning to tell him, happily, that she had got a week of her vacation shifted from January to December and had decided to spend the time in Center Campobello. “Can you swing that in mid-week for a day or two or three—not next week but the one after?”
“Make it for the one after,” Dubin said. “We’ll see each other as often as we can but I imagine you realize we won’t be able to meet every day while you’re here? I hope you’ll be understanding and flexible about that.”
“We could also meet in the afternoon. We can go on your walk together. I’d meet you at the bridge and we could walk together most of the way.”
He said he would enjoy that. “But what about seeing each other intimately?”
“Couldn’t I stay in your barn with you—not when you’re working but at least part of the time?”
Dubin was about to tell her he couldn’t risk it, then felt a frustrating sense of confinement; how tightly fenced in he was; could go nowhere without informing someone.
“Let’s try,” he said. “I’ve got a sofa convertible to a bed in my study. But we’ll have to be very careful.”
She promised she would be.
In the week she was in town Fanny and Dubin spent more time together than he would have predicted. She registered at the motel but at night would leave her car on the road to the old Wilson farm by Kitty’s Wood. After Dubin had walked the snowy path with her once, she would go along it alone with a flashlight, to the field where the barn stood. He left the study heated for her and she waited till he had trudged back from the house after supper. They were happy to see each other. In dungarees, flannel shirt, boots, she looked like another Fanny, a young woman he had just met he was about to fall in love with. She grasped his hands; they kissed, fumbled with each other’s clothes.
Fanny said she enjoyed the adventure of going through the wood, of being with him here. It didn’t bother her to be near his wife in the house, although it worried Dubin. To get out tonight, he told Kitty he had reached a crucial point in the biography—he went into a discourse of how bad the marriage of Frieda and Lawrence was when they were fighting about her desire to see her three children. Lawrence jealously wanted her not to see them. They quarreled, were murderous to each other. Frieda broke a plate over his head. Lawrence smashed one phonograph record after another on hers. Dubin said it would be helpful if he could put in a few nights of steady work and knock off this chapter—write four or five pages a day instead of the usual two or two and a half.
“You’re crazy,” said Kitty, “to work all morning, then work again at night.”
“Just this week—less than a week. I’ve done it before.”
“But not every night. Please—it’s mad.”
“Why don’t you pick a couple of nights for whatever you want me to do with you and leave the rest for me?”
“Have some nights,” Kitty said. “I’m Queen of the Night and dispense them like
peanuts.”
“Don’t get sore.”
“Why don’t you at least work in the house?”
He said she knew why: everything was in the barn—his books and notes.
Afterward Kitty quietly said she was sure she could find something to do with herself and Dubin thanked her.
He felt more daring than he’d been in years. One had to be daring before it was too late. He was almost fifty-eight hurrying toward sixty. Every year was a cheat, piling up age, reducing vitality. Still, he felt youthful and was sorry Kitty did not.
After Fanny and he had made love and had listened, as they lay warmly in bed, to music on her portable radio, or talked of their lives, she dressed and went through the woods to her car. Fanny said the woods scared her but she wouldn’t let Dubin accompany her to the road.
“It’s easier to spot two people than one.”
“Nobody can see us walking through the woods from the house,” Dubin said. “From the bedroom one can barely see the barn and not much of the woods. From Maud’s room and my study you can see more.”
“Can she see me leave the barn?”
“Not if you go out the study door. Certainly not in the dark.”
“Let’s don’t take the chance,” Fanny said.
After she had gone Dubin removed the bedsheet and reassembled the sofa. He looked for articles of dress or jewelry Fanny might have left behind, discovered her comb, hid it, and went back to the house. Before getting into bed with his wife he took a shower. Dubin lay up against Kitty’s warm body, his arm over her hip, her back to him.
“What time is it?” she yawned.
“Toward midnight.”
“Are you smiling?”
“No.”
“I thought I could feel you smile on my shoulder. How did the work go?”
“Fine.”
“Why do you shower every night?”
“It relaxes me.”
“Do you want to make love?”
“Do you?”
“I will if you want to.”
“No.”
“You’re not depressed?”
“No.”
She fell asleep. In a few hours she would wake, counting the failures of her life. Holding her, Dubin slept. He felt her waken but slept on.
Fanny had arrived on Monday. He did not see her Tuesday but they talked on the phone. On Wednesday night Kitty went with Marisa Ondyk to a high school chorale, and Dubin met Fanny at the motel. They had drinks and later went through the wood to the barn and set up the sofa bed.
“Do you love me?” Fanny asked.
“You know I do.”
“Why don’t you say it?”
“Because you know.”
“I like you to say it,” Fanny said.
Dubin promised he would.
“Why do you love me?”
“Because you’re a lovely lay.”
“Is that all?”
“Because I love you.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re Fanny, named out of Jane Austen. Because of your affectionate nature. Because you want to make something of your life.”
“You make me want to, William. You make me take myself seriously.”
He said that was good.
“We are good together,” she sighed. “Don’t you think so?”
He said he did.
“But I’m not living my life to learn lessons,” Fanny said. “Most of all I want to enjoy it.”
He wanted her to.
“What are you thinking about?”
“You.”
“Doing what?”
“Enjoying your life.”
“Are you enjoying it with me?”
“All the way.”
It was snowing heavily and when Dubin saw it come down he was concerned about her driving in the snow at night. He asked her to sleep in his study and leave early in the morning. “You ought to leave before seven. I’ll drive around to the road and shovel you out if you’re blocked in by snow after the road’s been plowed.”
“I can shovel myself out, I’m strong.”
“Have you got a shovel?”
Fanny laughed to herself. “I’ll bring one next time.”
“I’ll shovel you out at seven if you’re blocked in.”
Dubin slept badly. He worried about her but when he got up at six the next morning he saw through the bathroom window that the snow had stopped. Later he found Fanny’s path from the barn and ran in it to the edge of the wood, kicking up her tracks in the snow. On the road her car was gone.
On Thursday it was snowing as they lay in the sofa bed. Lorenzo was with them. Dubin had him in the barn because some field mice had chewed up several of his note cards. Lorenzo lay on the bed, noisily licking himself. Fanny said she was leaving Saturday morning. He wasn’t sure he could see her on Friday night but they would meet in the city in two or three weeks.
Their relationship had deepened. Each probed the other’s needs. What he desired she gave him; she got what she seemed to want. After they had made love Fanny got out of bed and went naked to the sink. She drank a glass of water and brought him one.
“What for?”
“To drink, lover. Aren’t you thirsty?”
“‘Lover’ is an old-fashioned way of addressing a lover.”
“In certain ways I am old-fashioned. Do you want the water?”
Dubin drank it. Neither Kitty nor he brought each other water after sex; he got her a tissue. Kitty took a hot shower; Fanny drank a glass of water and used the wet corner of a towel to wash herself.
In the dark he thought of her as his wife. They’d live in New York. He would work in their apartment while she attended school. She could prepare for serious work of some sort once she knew what interested her. Maybe she could do something part-time if they were married. She could have kids if she wanted; he imagined she would. She had said she would in one of her letters. It might be hectic but she was a young woman and he would help where he could. Dubin wouldn’t mind having young children again. He thought he’d be better with them than he’d been the first time. Children were strangers you loved because you could love. If they gave back love when they were grown you were ahead of the game. You had had them because you thought you could love. He felt Fanny would be happy with him, as happy as a second wife might be with a husband thirty-five years older than she. He would value her as she ought to value herself, perhaps help her unravel some of the distortions of her life. He imagined what she would look like at thirty, when he was sixty-five. Dubin liked what he imagined.
Lives ought to begin again around fifty, he thought. Middle age can stand new enterprises, new beginnings. Some marriages go on too long. If they ended by mutual consent after twenty-five years, or when the kids left the house, that might be refreshing for both partners. Getting into the world again to find out what was going on might do them good. Maybe Kitty would worry less about herself if she had to work; would sleep better; think less of illness, the garbage of the past. She’d get the house, of course. Fanny and he could live in Europe for the first year—maybe to try out living together. That might ease the transition into a new life for them all.
“What are you thinking about, William?”
“You are a loving friend.”
“We are more than friends now.”
“We are also good friends,” Dubin said.
“We really could be,” said Fanny.
“I thought we were?”
“If we were living together. I liked coming home from work and you were there.”
“We can’t now, I’m married.”
She said after a minute, “Suppose you weren’t any more?”
“But I am,” Dubin said.
Fanny got up for a glass of water and did not bring him one.
He asked if she would care to see him tomorrow night.
“I thought you didn’t think we ought to meet Friday?”
Dubin said he had changed his mind. “We can be togeth
er without going to bed.”
After a few minutes Fanny asked, “Should we have another lay before I go?”
He didn’t think so. Dubin kissed her mouth and she kissed his, then his eyes, and then again kissed his mouth.
Friday was a clear cold night. As they were comfortably together in bed Dubin got up to go to the toilet. Standing there, he saw through the freezing window a flicker of light amid the silver maples and watched with concern. The light disappeared at intervals and grew brighter as it moved in his direction.
“She’s coming,” he called hoarsely to Fanny. “Grab your clothes—everything—get into the barn.”
Fanny leaped out of bed, hastily gathered her clothes, boots, and portable radio, then hurried naked into the barn.
Dubin had his trousers and shirt on. He stepped into loafers, pulled the sheet off the bed, threw it into the barn after Fanny, slammed the door shut, and closed the sofa bed. He saw her sweater on his worktable and tossed it behind some file boxes on one of the bookshelves.
“William?” Kitty knocked on the door.
“Yes?”
“It’s me. Can I come in?”
He took his time getting to the door to unlatch it.
“The furnace has pooped out,” Kitty said, stepping into the study. “I was reading in bed, wondering if you’d ever come home and felt myself getting awfully chilly. When I looked at the thermostat it was fifty so I came to tell you.”
“Did you call the furnace guy?”
“He comes faster for you.”
“You could have phoned me from the house and not frozen your ass coming here in this cold.”
Kitty looked around the room. She was wearing a heavy cloth coat, boots, and Dubin’s red wool hat.
“Was your light out for a while? I was in Maud’s room and could see no reflection of light in the snow.”
“I had a headache and was resting my eyes in the dark.”
“Why didn’t you quit, for Pete’s sake? It’s mad to work as much as you’ve been this week.”
“I’ve got only one paragraph to recopy.”
“Can’t it wait till tomorrow?”
“I want to get it done.”
Dubin's Lives Page 30