Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

“What’s that strange odor in here?” Kitty asked, breathing in, exhaling.

  “I passed gas.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “I smoked a cigarillo.”

  “It’s not that either. The room smells sexy.”

  “I was thinking of Faye Dunaway. I was also thinking of Marilyn Monroe.”

  “Don’t take your headache out on me, William,” Kitty said. “It’s your own bloody fault.”

  He said he was being funny.

  The cat meowed in the barn.

  “Is Lorenzo hungry?”

  “I fed him.”

  Lorenzo meowed as though wailing.

  Kitty pulled the door open and shone her flashlight in the dark.

  “What’s that sheet doing on the floor?”

  Dubin tried to think but couldn’t. He was watching Kitty’s light move along the sidewall of the barn to the bolted double doors. She then shone the light on the clutter of garden tools, furniture she had discarded, tractor-mower, bags of peat moss. “Was that something moving?”

  He didn’t think so. “Lorenzo’s been sleeping on the sheet. It needs washing. I was going to bring it home.”

  Lorenzo, eyes glowing, came running in the light. If he says anything, the biographer thought, I’ll bash his head in.

  “What’s the matter with him?” Kitty asked.

  “He wants company, he’s tired of mice.”

  Dubin had picked up the phone and was dialing. He told the repairman his furnace had gone on the blink and he was afraid the house pipes would freeze if something wasn’t done quickly. The man reluctantly said he would come over.

  “He’ll be over in ten minutes,” Dubin told Kitty. “Please let him in. I’ll knock off my last paragraph and go home.”

  “I’d still like to know what the smell in this room is.”

  “You know them all,” he said.

  “You’re not exactly endearing tonight.”

  Dubin rubbed his eyes.

  Kitty left the barn, slamming the door.

  Through the toilet window he watched her going back in the snow until the light disappeared. He wondered if she had noticed Fanny’s boot tracks.

  Then he sat down on the sofa, sickened. He felt cold.

  Fanny came into the room with her dungarees and bra on. She was barefoot and cold, her face without color.

  “I was scared shitless,” she said. “I thought I had broken my ankle. It hit something and hurt like hell.”

  He inspected her bruised blue ankle. “Does it still hurt?”

  “It feels as if someone drove a nail into it.”

  Dubin said he was sorry. He still felt nauseated, half frozen.

  “I don’t want to have to do anything like that again, William,” Fanny said. “I don’t want to have to hide from her. Next time I swear I won’t. I mean it, William.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Dubin said.

  “I won’t hide from her again,” Fanny said, her eyes taut.

  He said he would see her in the city.

  One Sunday Kitty rose early, dark-eyed and tight-lipped. She stretched her arms limply. When she had left the bed she removed her nightgown, slowly scratched her blemished buttock.

  At breakfast he noticed her lusterless eyes and formal anxious altered voice. Her tight control tightened him. Kitty mulled over things till she had something: she put two and two together and usually came close to four. Had she now come up with Fanny in his life?

  He asked if she had had a bad dream.

  Kitty was gazing at the fried egg on her plate. She’d hardly touched breakfast. They were at the table together but she sat at the table alone.

  Dubin spoke soberly: “Why don’t you tell me what’s bothering you?”

  She said she hated to. “I really do.”

  “Then it’s something physical?”

  She looked at her plate. “I’m sure you’ll say it’s nothing.”

  “You think it’s cancer?” he asked, beginning to eat his fried egg.

  Kitty told him her left nipple had altered in size and she had found a mucus stain in her brassiere.

  “Do you think it’s cancer?”

  “It could be,” she said unhappily.

  “What else could it be?” Dubin dipped his bread into the egg yolk.

  “I don’t know. For God’s sake don’t start preaching at me. I hate it when you righteously preach.” She was frightfully tight.

  He changed his tone. “Have you felt a lump?”

  “No,” she said tensely.

  “Is the breast sore?”

  She nodded, not crying, though her eyes were moist.

  He sipped his coffee. Dubin then put his cup down and got up and kissed her. He said he was sure it wasn’t cancer.

  She studied his face to see if he thought otherwise. “What makes you say so?”

  “No lumps.” He said she ought to see the doctor anyway. “Once you’re on a cancer kick, it’s wise to.”

  Kitty said she would, then confessed that even the thought of a mammogram frightened her.

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “No, I’ll go alone,” Kitty said. “I always have.”

  On Tuesday she visited the surgeon in Center Campobello, who said it was not cancer. He said it was a papilloma, a nodule he located close to the surface of the breast near the nipple.

  Kitty afterward told Dubin that the surgeon had said a papilloma was usually benign and he thought he could treat it in his office. A week later —she had been calm since seeing him—he made the incision. After a biopsy, which revealed no sign of malignancy, Kitty gave out a sob of relief. Later she bought a new dress. Arriving home, she embraced Dubin and said she loved him very much. She moved gingerly but freely, as though she was free of dread yet was worried for having once more tried her fate. How many more times could she do it and still escape cancer?

  Dubin, as he combed his hair before the mirror, said he was glad it had come to nothing.

  “It wasn’t exactly nothing,” Kitty said. “He removed a nodule that was blocking the duct. That wasn’t nothing, and it wasn’t my imagination.”

  He admitted it.

  “You look critical?”

  “I’m not but it wasn’t cancer. The average is still in your favor.”

  “I’ll bet you weren’t in the least worried,” Kitty said, brushing her eyelids with a tissue. “You didn’t seem to be. I’ll bet you were thinking about your friend Lawrence and the mystique of the female breast in Indian cow worship. Or maybe you were thinking of Lady Chatterley’s handsome ass and well-shaped healthy teats.”

  He’d been thinking mostly of Fanny.

  “That was your sixth or seventh cancer scare since I’ve known you,” Dubin said. “I expected nothing serious.”

  “My mother had cancer. You may be wrong someday.”

  He said he hoped he wouldn’t be.

  Kitty that night suggested making love “in celebration,” and he offered the next night, said he was worn out.

  “My problems?”

  “Mine.”

  In the morning she seemed distant to him. He felt distant from her. It seemed to Dubin he felt more affection for her when Fanny was around. When she was, Kitty was often in his thoughts, tenderly at times.

  With Fanny gone he was constantly thinking of her. That he was working well was not surprising because his mood was good. He lived much in his thoughts of his developing work and in long reveries of Fanny. Dubin invented and discarded reasons to take off for New York. It irritated him that he had to go through so much fantasy to experience the girl.

  The next night he made love to his wife. She hadn’t wanted to, but responded to his impulse. He was careful not to touch her healing breast. To heighten their pleasure Dubin tried one of the things Fanny had taught him.

  “Where did you pick that up?” Kitty wanted to know.

  “Do you like it?”

  “I’m not sure. I think so.”

  “
Do you object?”

  “No.”

  Afterward she asked, “Where did you pick up that little adventurous bit you tried tonight?”

  “From a book I read.”

  “What made you read that kind of book?”

  He was about to say he was human. Dubin said, “To bring something new to our sex lives.”

  “Do you have any complaints about me?” Kitty asked.

  He said he hadn’t.

  “I’ll bet you do. Nathanael thought I was pretty good in bed. He thought me a passionate woman. I am passionate.”

  “One responds differently to different people,” Dubin said. “He was your first husband. I’m your second and for too long I was your step-husband.”

  “If you say ‘step-husband’ again I swear I’ll leave you.” Her voice quavered with anger.

  He pictured her leaving; probably she would ask him to leave.

  The next day Kitty, as she was dressing, quietly asked Dubin if he wanted a divorce. “I don’t think you want or need me any more. I sense it. If something has gone wrong why don’t you tell me? Have you met someone you’d rather be with?”

  Dubin said he hadn’t.

  “Is that girl you went to Venice with still around?”

  He said she wasn’t.

  “Who was she?”

  He would rather not say.

  “Do I know her?”

  He would rather not say.

  “Then I do and she’s around,” said Kitty.

  “I sleep with her twice a day.”

  “Then what is the matter with you. What’s made you so unresponsive these last few months? Are we about to go through another awful winter? Why has my husband become my second cousin once removed? Removed is the word. We never talk any more. I don’t really know what’s happening to you. Tell me what’s happening to you? Have you been sleeping with Flora?”

  He said that had happened once.

  “Then what’s eating you, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Maybe it’s marriage. Sometimes I feel boxed in, unfree.”

  “Boxed in, how?”

  “A long marriage gets hard to take. You must feel it yourself.”

  He was thinking of her sameness, dissatisfactions, eccentricities. He was bored with her fears, her unforgotten unforgettable past.

  “What do you mean ‘unfree’?—unfree for what?”

  “To forget for ten minutes that I’m married.”

  “That sounds like more than a whim. You must have a reason to want to feel unmarried. What is your need?”

  Dubin didn’t say.

  “Wouldn’t a divorce make you feel happier, freer?”

  “No,” he said, but his heart was gladdened by the thought.

  Kitty criticized his nature—Dubin’s sobriety, sameness, inability to enjoy life. She said she enjoyed life. “Until we met, you lived on romantic dreams, on nothing really. Now your devotion is work. Your work is all you think of and then you complain you aren’t free.”

  Kitty spoke bitterly, her hands nervously in motion. She had slept with a bracelet on he had once given her. She had dressed and looked good though her eyes were angry.

  Dubin, raising his voice, accused her of having depreciated his love for her. “You weren’t satisfied with what I had to give—what I gave you. You had to define it to death. The day we were married you began to educate me. You defined love. You defined marriage. You insisted on telling me what I was giving and what I wasn’t. I gave with feeling and you gave it a name.”

  “I wanted it to be a strong enduring love, in and of this world. I had experienced a strong loving love. I wanted what I needed. I had to tell you.”

  “Love was love to me. It needed not defining but nurturing. It wanted a life of its own. It didn’t need Nathanael for company or comparison, or you dissecting it.”

  He wasn’t certain what he was saying, that he was telling the truth about the past. He was trying to but it seemed, in their quarrel, impossible to recall exactly; to say what had truly happened to them. Or exactly what was happening now. How can you define the truth if you can’t tell it? How can you tell the truth if you begin with lies?

  Kitty said, “I wasn’t doubting you—for the sake of doubt—or comparing your love to Nathanael’s. I was trying to understand your feelings, your nature, my own. I wanted deep whole lasting love. I can’t keep myself from analyzing or defining. I am not Frieda Lawrence. I am not your earth mother.”

  She wept copiously, in a low wail. “You’ll leave me, I know in my heart.”

  Dubin told her not to cry. He racked his brain thinking how not to fail her yet go on with Fanny.

  Then he put his arms around Kitty. “Let’s get into bed.”

  She raised her tear-stained face. “Why?”

  “I want you.”

  “I just got dressed.” She slowly removed her clothes. He tried not to notice her aging body, tried not to think of Fanny’s youth.

  In bed Dubin’s flesh failed him. He was unable to perform. He lay back frustrated, told himself not to be alarmed.

  Kitty, lying on her pillow, wondered if it was her fault. “I mean maybe all this talk of divorce upset you?”

  He said it wasn’t her fault, yet hoped it was.

  “These things happen. Don’t be upset.”

  “It hadn’t happened to me before.”

  “It’s an incident, it’s not for all time.”

  He said he hoped not; he was too young for that. “Lawrence was impotent at forty-two, but he was a sick man.”

  “Don’t think of it.”

  Afterward Kitty told him she’d been seeing Evan Ondyk again, and Dubin was sorry for her and for himself.

  “I was thinking of going away for a while,” she said. “Maybe for a week —at the most, two. I’ll go see Gerald in Stockholm.”

  He thought it would be a good thing for her to do. “I should be myself when you get back.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Kitty said calmly. “You’ve been ever so much better than Nathanael that way. It started with him around thirty-eight, yet on the whole he functioned well.”

  Dubin said he wasn’t worried.

  The cold rose in an almost invisible haze from the icy ridged road. The low still polar sky was white as far as he could see. A light snow had struck the hills and whitened the surrounding fields. Nature shrouded, playing dead. Dubin, as he walked, lived in his frozen thoughts. Was that Oscar Greenfeld ahead, plodding past the abandoned farmhouse down the road? The biographer walked on, heavily clothed, not attempting to catch up with the flutist. Dubin wore two scarves, his tan-and-black over a thick black scarf, waffle stompers, earmuffs under his red wool hat.

  He tried to think what he’d been thinking of but now and then his thoughts froze. The shrunken afternoon was already into dusk on this Saturday in a below-zero January. Dubin was fifty-eight. That was not Oscar ahead, no wooden flute he held in his hand. It was a man with a double-barreled shotgun resting on his forearm as he trudged on in the dusk. He wore a plaid hunter’s cap, heavy sweater, sealskin Eskimo boots. Dubin lingered to see what he shot at from the road but the hunter, from time to time stopping to survey the field, shot at nothing.

  The biographer made up his mind to pass quickly and the hunter let him hurry by. A minute later he called his name: “Mr. Dubin?”

  It was Roger Foster.

  They walked together, Dubin at a loss for something to say. Roger embarrassed him.

  “What’s the gun for?” he finally asked. “I thought the hunting season was over?”

  “Not much really, Mr. Dubin,” Roger said. “I thought I’d like to take a potshot at a rabbit or two but haven’t laid eyes on one. You can hardly see them this time of the year but sometimes you can spot a cottontail against a tree or rock. No harm done because I generally miss when I shoot. My heart’s not in it. I guess I went out with Dad’s gun because I felt sort of down. Thought I’d stir up a little excitement for myself but haven’t so far.”

&nb
sp; Dubin grunted.

  Neither spoke as they walked on, then Roger said in a tone of regret, “I don’t guess you like me all that well, Mr. Dubin. I really don’t know why. I grant you’re a good biographer, but so far as understanding live people, I honestly don’t think you know the kind of man I am.”

  Dubin nodded. Who knows the passing stranger, or the stranger you pass, he thought, even if your wife in a desperate moment aberrantly falls for him.

  “I’ll bet you still think of me as a sort of stud because I had that reputation in my early twenties, though I am honestly not that way now. Give me credit for growing up—people do.”

  “Roger,” Dubin said, “I admit I don’t know you very well although every so often you unexpectedly enter my life. I have no plans for you to be in it, but now and then you suddenly are—as though you’d stepped out of the pages of Dostoyevsky and begun tracking me. I’ve come across this fateful phenomenon more often than one would think in biographies I’ve read or written. Somebody looks around and there’s this guy tailing him, for good or ill. I suppose it’s different when it’s a woman—it’s as if you’d been expecting her. Anyway, when you least anticipate or want it, a stranger appears, generally an unlikely person, who for one or another reason attempts to define himself to you, and against every expectation, not to mention your resistance, insists on assuming a role in your life. I have no idea what yours is in mine, but I don’t want you to feel I am antagonistic to you in principle or that I am angry about something I am not at all angry about. The older I get, the less I hold people’s pasts or past relationships against them—or, for that matter, against myself.”

  “To tell the honest truth,” Roger said, “I made no reference to anybody but myself, but since you might be thinking about the time Mrs. Dubin, who I happen to greatly respect, was working in the library, all I want to say is that if there’s anybody I was interested in, and still am, it’s Fanny Bick.”

  Dubin blew on his icy gloved hands, his breath pure white. How much does he know? He thought: I will tell him nothing.

  “The fact of it is, Mr. Dubin, I happen to love Fanny and hope to marry her someday.”

  “Ah?” said Dubin. “And does she hope to marry you?”

  Roger laughed throatily, wryly, his moody eyes drawn to the white field. “I’ve asked her at least four times, including when she was visiting here in December, but she told me she was interested in somebody else, and though she honestly didn’t mention your name, the message I got was whoever he was is you.”