“Do you mean Flora?”
“Her or whoever?”
“You’re the only one I sleep with.”
Dubin wondered if lying, or the habit of lying,could make a man impotent. You lied to someone and could not lie with her.
“You might have no trouble with another woman,” Kitty said.
“I might not.”
“If you’re sleeping with someone and it’s working with her when it’s not with me, maybe we ought to think of parting.”
He felt his nose twitch.
“Unless”—she hesitated—“would you want to go to Evan now—for advice?”
“You go to him. I wouldn’t want to.”
“There are other therapists not too far away. There’s a new man in Winslow I hear is good.”
“How do you know who’s new in Winslow? How do you know these things?”
“Evan told me.” A moment later she said, “If you’re thinking of divorce you ought to let me in on it.”
“I think of it often,” Dubin said.
Kitty, sitting on the edge of the bed, slipping on her mules, turned to him grimly.
“I wish you’d tell me the truth. Do you have a girl in town?”
“Neither in or out of town.”
“Did you have during this past winter? I had the feeling you did, when you brought those sex-goodies for me to try with you. I’ll bet you had a girl then.”
He admitted he had.
“That’s what I thought,” Kitty said with satisfaction. “Who was she?”
“Nobody you know.” Dubin was lying back with his eyes shut.
“You can go to her if you like. Why don’t you just go to her?”
“She’s not there to go to.”
“Then find yourself someone who is,” she said angrily.
He said he had no plans to.
“Are you ashamed you’d be impotent?”
“I am ashamed. Your question deepens my shame.”
“You deepen your shame.”
Afterward they were uneasy with each other. In her presence he lacked; because he lacked she lacked. For each negation or strangeness there is an opposing negation or strangeness. They had got into bed as though they were fragile; as though neither thought it would work. When it did not they looked at each other in loneliness and embarrassment. Neither suggested trying again the next night, or in the foreseeable future.
He thought of himself as crippled. Dubin imagined going to New York to look for a hooker on Eighth Avenue to test his virility. But even reverie didn’t work. The hooker said she couldn’t take him on because she was overbooked; but she offered him a remedy for his trouble:
“You got to boil it in salt water to clean out the pipe.”
“Why don’t you blow it out?”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I have this sore in my throat.”
Dubin didn’t think he would go to the city.
Kitty suggested a vacation.
“Not just now,” he said.
“Then when?”
“I’m not sure, but not now.”
“How’s the work going?”
“Surprisingly well.”
“What do you think we ought to do?”
“Give it time. Wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?”
“If we should seriously be thinking of separating.”
She turned away from him, her eyes bruised.
“You’d rather think of divorce than therapy?”
He said he would rather work it out on his own if he could.
“How do you expect to do that?”
“I wish I knew,” he said, trying to be conciliatory. “You might walk into the room and pick up a pin. The thing might rise and salute.”
They laughed, Dubin wheezily; then looked at each other sadly.
“One feels out of it,” Kitty said.
He went on working in the barn, living with the slug of impotence in his mind. But as long as he wrote he felt he was not impotent. Kitty tried to arrange her time so she was doing something gainful almost all day. She went to bed early. When Dubin got into bed she stirred but did not waken. If she was awake she did not say so. He was afraid to touch her or himself. He felt for her a terrible pity.
“Oh, come on,” Kitty said, awaking happily one morning. “We haven’t been hit by the plague. Let’s not give in to our moods. Let’s have some parties. Let’s see friends.” Dubin said it was a fine idea. She made breakfast singing, “We’ll sail the ocean blue.” In the afternoon she persuaded him to help her bake bread. “We haven’t done that since the kids were little. Do you remember how it excited them?” The day went well.
She telephoned friends, who immediately accepted her invitations. She’d been, as Nathanael’s wife, a less than accomplished cook, but as Dubin’s, Kitty cooked well. They entertained at one dinner party the Greenfelds, Habershams, and Morphys. Morphy was an internist, their nearest neighbor before the covered bridge, who grew small evergreens on his farm for the Christmas tree trade. At another party the Ondyks came with Ossie Lapham and his wife. Ossie was an ornithologist and she, Renata, a twenty-eight-year-old pretty American type who was reading Colette for the first time. She told Dubin Colette had changed her life but didn’t say how. Later she asked him if he had ever wanted to have an affair. He said he had. “So have I.” “Don’t fall in love with him,” Dubin advised.
Kitty had a sound instinct for parties of whatever sort and people enjoyed them. She was, at the beginning of the first dinner party, constrained with Flora, but carried the evening off well. Oscar wasn’t drinking that night. He seemed to be brooding, looked pale, strained; he volunteered no information and Dubin asked nothing.
After dinner he danced with Flora. Neither mentioned her last phone call or his non-response. “I wear my sleeve on my heart,” said Flora.
“In regard to what?”
“In regard to my heart.”
He regretted not having gone to her when she had phoned that Sunday morning, after Fanny had left. It might have lessened the effect of her departure if he had spent the day with Flora. In Oscar’s presence Dubin felt little guilt; he attributed it to his affection for him, and for having been punished enough also to have been punished for betraying a friend. As the guests were leaving, Kitty stood at the door with her arm around her husband.
In bed they kissed affectionately. “We used to fall asleep in each other’s arms,” she said. Soon they were exploring their familiar bodies, hesitated, pressed on, trying to invent strategies to outwit the failed flesh; failed.
“Would you still rather wait and see than do anything about it?”
Dubin said he had been to a doctor.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to go without fuss.”
“What did he say?”
“It’s not diabetes, or the Lariche blood-vessels business, or anything like that. He couldn’t say what it was.”
“Now that we know that,” she said quietly, “maybe this would be a good time to talk to a psychotherapist?”
“Whatever I feel I don’t feel impotent,” Dubin said.
The point seemed important to make. He said he wanted to wait a while longer to try to figure out what was happening. “It’s my life, I want it to tell me what it knows.”
“Mother of God,” said Kitty, “the way you complicate everything twice over. What happens in these cases has been determined. It’s cut-and-dried. You can read about it in books. I imagine it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to cure yourself.”
“That’s a strange tack for somebody who’s always trying to cure herself. This may be a temporary thing. I want to try to work it out.”
“Don’t be a fanatic,” Kitty said. “What happens to me while you’re working it out? What happens to my young life?”
“I can satisfy you in other ways.”
“I don’t want a satisfaction, I want a functioning husband.”
Afterward sh
e told him to work it out anyway he pleased. “I don’t want to discourage you.”
She tried not to appear worried, though her eyes and mouth worried. She watered the garden for half an hour, and holding the dripping hose, studied it for another half hour. From afar she contemplated Dubin reading on the porch, glancing away when he looked her way. She had probably told Ondyk about his present incapacity. It was her prerogative though he hated having Ondyk know. He hadn’t earned the right.
Dubin had avoided him at their last dinner party. He had talked at length with Marisa, an insecure self-conscious woman. She often blew her nervous nose. Marisa spoke of her husband glowingly in his presence, but he did not mention her in hers. Kitty had talked seriously with Evan more than once that night; she seemed uncomfortable without him. If she had discussed Dubin with him, she did not admit it. “I don’t want to tell you what I talk about with him,” Kitty said. “He is now a member of the family,” the biographer said.
“Would you like me to leave him and find someone else?”
“Whoever you find, don’t bring him into the house. I don’t want to treat as a friend anybody whose business it is to look up my ass, or yours.”
She walked away. Kitty seemed to retreat inwardly. She had stopped playing her harp. They ate in silences. When they walked she went ahead of him, as she used to at times when they were first married. She developed a cough and coughed heavily at night.
“Why don’t you do something about it?”
“Why don’t you?”
He slept in Gerald’s room; she slept in Maud’s.
They argued as they hadn’t in years, nasty arguments, each topping the other in accusation, neither able to forgo having the last word. Kitty needled him; Dubin shouted. The windows vibrated, his force alarming him.
One morning he gave her a list of things he needed from town: “newspaper, typewriter ribbon, stamps, cigarillos.” At the door she turned. “I hate your fucking little lists, I’ve always hated them. Hereafter tell me what you want. I won’t look at a list.”
When she returned to the house to smell the burners he said, “I put things down on paper because you don’t. If you hadn’t forgotten to buy a quart of milk that day, I wouldn’t have hit a tree and broken my bones. Make your own list, but for Christ’s sake make one.”
The door slammed as though it had exploded. A window shade snapped and rolled upward.
The front page of the newspaper she brought home was torn, and Dubin mended it with diaphanous tape.
“Why bother?” Kitty asked. “Isn’t it to show me up? That I haven’t the sense to pick up an untorn newspaper?”
“The wire they bale them with tears them,” he said. “I don’t mind mending the paper. If I pay for it I’d like to be able to read what it says.”
“You explain everything—absolutely everything.”
“What we’re really arguing about is my sexual inadequacy, and that I haven’t taken your advice.”
Getting into bed that night after he had gone downstairs to make sure he had locked the front door, as Dubin lay back his head cracked against hers. Kitty screamed. He bellowed: “How the hell did I know your head was on my pillow!”
“I wanted to be affectionate.” Tears flowed from her eyes.
He sat in the kitchen at the table where she had piled three pounds of ripe tomatoes in a glass bowl. Dubin bit into a blood-red tomato, hungrily sucking its meat and tepid seedy juice. He devoured two large tomatoes seasoned with coarse salt, then went to bed.
Kitty was awake. “What’s that rotten smell?”
“My thoughts.”
She rolled over on her side.
He fantasied himself on his walk. He tried to see what he always saw, but this time a stranger with dirty eyes sneaked out of the wood and struck Dubin on the head with a lead pipe. The biographer lay bleeding in the road. The man removed his wallet, counted five singles, and again struck Dubin with the pipe.
“Is that all a man’s life means to you?” muttered the bloody-headed biographer.
“Fuck you,” said the stranger. “I don’t owe you a thing.”
Kitty came by. She wept aloud for what she had not done with her life but not for what she had done with it.
“Shush,” she said the next morning as he growled at himself in the mirror. He knew he frightened her but could not stop talking to the suffering man in the warped glass.
What if I am impotent forever? Suppose it goes from the cock to the brain? What shall I do? What can I do?
The fanatic regime of two winters ago that Dubin had revived to prevent a great misery happening, he continued to practice in order to change the heartbreaking fate that had befallen him.
One night the ghost of the old man who had hanged himself in the barn tramped across the field to the yellow black-shuttered house and trod up the stairs. Opening the creaking bedroom door, he flung his bloody noose on their bed.
“I am not going to be left to Frieda’s tender mercies until I am well again. She is really a devil—and I feel as if I would part with her for ever—to let her go alone to Germany, while I take another road. For it is true, I have been bullied by her long enough. I really could leave her without a pang, I believe. The time has come to make an end, one way or another.”
Kitty mourned the dead cat. “He liked to keep me company. I loved the way he stretched out on the kitchen floor with the sun on him.” After supper she cut up meat scraps for Lorenzo before remembering he was no longer there to eat them. She hid the cat’s dish in a drawer. Thinking it might relieve her to know where Lorenzo was buried, Dubin showed her his grave one evening and Kitty planted an iris bulb in it. “We found him and we lost him.”
As they were walking across the field she said, “William, let’s be kind. Let’s not be nasty. I’m not blaming you for the cat’s death or anything else. Let’s be considerate and kind.”
He put his arm around her, wanting to suggest going to bed, not daring to.
They slept badly in the heat although they slept alone. Dubin wore himself out trying to sleep. He could barely drag himself to the shower. August caught fire from July. At 7 a.m. the thermometer showed seventy-four; at noon it boiled at over ninety. The sun for days flamed. The woods were dry. Trees in the morning mist were like gloomy sculptures: a drunken slanted maple; thick-armed oak; bushy orange-berry mountain ash. Crows barked in the tops of furry pines. Dubin, on his way to the hot barn, cawed at the crows.
Although he had a box fan there he decided to stop working in the barn. The sun beat down on the roof, and by mid-morning the heat lay on him like an overcoat. He had considered putting in an air-conditioner, but in this climate it seemed an obscene act. Maybe next year if the summer started hot. The biographer returned to his cooler study in the house. He hung on the wall his Medal of Freedom and framed picture of Thoreau. With the fan on, the room was bearable, though the muted rattle of the vibrating blades was no help. In Kitty’s garden wheelbarrow he trundled back boxes of note cards, folders of manuscript pages. He left the barn reluctantly, imagining the telephone ringing, no one there to answer.
Dubin began to write one of the articles he had contracted for. It was hard to write with his mind on Lawrence; he was impatient to be back to him but was worried about money. He worked on the biography for two hours each morning and then for two wrote the article. Each sentence was like lifting a rock. Exhausted, he went downstairs to make himself iced coffee. Kitty, her hair up, hot face glistening, was sitting on the porch reading the paper as she fanned herself with her left hand. She seemed not to know he was there. Renewed energy lasted perhaps twenty minutes. Dubin tried another shower, dried himself, returned to his desk. When he read what he had written that morning he laid down the pen. Lassitude came over him. If the weather was minding its business this should be fall beginning. Against the will he felt he ought to lay off a few days. I will write faster once it gets cool.
From his bookshelves he plucked an armful of lives and letters he knew wel
l. Dubin thumbed through lives of Jung, Freud, Swift, Samuel Johnson, Chekhov, Goya, Montaigne, Ruskin, Darwin, Hardy, Mahler, Virginia Woolf. On August 21, 1581, Montaigne, after a night of torment, had passed a stone, “having, to tell the truth, exactly the shape of a prick.” “My thoughts have been clouded with sensuality …” Johnson lamented. “A strange oblivion has overspread me.” “I wind round and round in my present memories the spirals of my errors”: Augustine. “Why is it so dull here?” asks Chekhov. “It is snowing, a blizzard, there is a draft from the windows, the stove is sizzling hot, I had the thought of writing, and am not writing anything.” “I am sometimes so agitated that I can no longer stand myself,” Goya told a friend. “I lack force and work little.” Freud devastated Dubin: “Anyone turning biographer has committed himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to flattery, and even to hiding his own lack of understanding: for biographical truth is not to be had, and even if it were it couldn’t be useful.” “I shall be like that tree,” said Swift, “I shall die first at the top.” “But really, for me,” Lawrence wrote in a letter, “it’s been a devilish time ever since I was born. But for the fact that when one’s got a job on, one ought to go through with it, I’d prefer to be dead any minute.” Dubin read to learn what he didn’t know or might have forgotten. He sought insights as if hunting for burning bushes on Sinai: how men hold themselves together. But the biographies reminded him of the life he wasn’t writing; the life he wasn’t living.
Lawrence had become impotent in his early forties—what a terrifying loss to a man who writes poems to his erect phallus. Someone had theorized that his condition was related to tuberculosis, which it took him many years to admit he had; but who is to say what pure Greek fate he had wrought for himself in the labyrinth of the Lawrencian mind, in the recesses of the blue-black blood? Frieda had whispered the sad news around, possibly to justify an affair or two. How curious it is, Dubin thought, as you write a man’s life, how often his experiences become yours to live. This goes on from book to book: their lives evoke mine or why do I write? I write to know the next room of my fate. To know it I must complete Lawrence’s life. He died at forty-four. I’m fifty-eight but if I die now I die young. My concern with aging has made me conscious of death. William Dubin’s in his last life, no longer those one lives to learn with—if he learns. In middle age some degree of accomplishment kept me young, aware of youth in me. The future was my next biography; now it’s age. Subjectivity sickens me. I fear myself fearing.
Dubin's Lives Page 36