Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  Dubin had taken the measure of himself and measured less.

  Almost as he was thinking this, the rains swept summer aside and autumn flowed in. The muggy heat evaporated: weather turned crisp cool; sky cold blue; air transparent. Whirring flocks of birds settled on the lawns, pecked in the dying grass, and flew off in rushing flights. The yellowing trees giving off yellow candlelight turned dull-gold.

  He went back to his work, pushed on, wished he was writing in the barn.

  As he jogged the long walk one wet late-afternoon, Dubin slipped on a stone, fell heavily, and lay in the road in torment. He felt he had broken his ankle. After excruciating minutes the pain let up and he managed to hobble on. He arrived at the highway, where he was able to hitch a ride in a pickup truck to the hospital emergency room.

  Kitty came for him in her new apple-green Toyota. They had traded in the Ford; she would not drive the car that had killed Lorenzo. The swelling was reduced with ice and the strained ankle bound with an ace bandage. Dubin was advised to stop walking for at least a week. The effect was depressingly confining. He had given up the article and gone back entirely to the book. Money was becoming a problem, but if he had to borrow he’d have to borrow. Kitty wouldn’t like it. He’d try the article later at a chapter break.

  The biographer had to cut out calisthenics and set aside his diet. Immediately he gained weight, felt leaden, heavy, unfocused. In the cellar he located Maud’s old bike, cleaned and oiled it, and with Kitty’s assistance got it up the stairs. He pedaled the bicycle to the bridge, but the ankle was not that much healed and the pressure of pedaling became painful. The next day he was at a loss what to do for activity. He was restive, nervous. When Dubin stopped running he ran within—a running runs within. To catch up with himself he got into the new automobile.

  Dubin went on his long walk in Kitty’s car. It took not more than fifteen minutes to drive the route slowly, so he drove it several times. He drove at twenty an hour, puffing a cigar, though not much tasting it; trying to see what he usually saw when he was walking: the seasonally changing landscape —rumpled yellow autumn hills and darkening orange mountains. Close by, eternally a scattering of stiff farmhouses, weathered barns, squat and tall silos, cows in spongy pastures. As he drove his route he was surprised by the narrowness of the road he usually walked. It reminded him of the thin long hallways of the railroad flats he had lived in as a child. Ahead the light receded; the road was shadowy, empty. Dubin drove the emptiness. What am I afraid of other than myself? At the highway he turned left instead of right, and in a burst of speed was halfway to Winslow before returning. The next day he repeated the drive until he had lost count of the number of voyages he had made, and a fog descended on the deserted road.

  He could think of nothing that was working as he wanted it to. He had returned the biographies and letters to their proper places in the shelves. Dubin thought of all the lives he had hoped to write that he never would. His nose twitched like a rabbit’s as he flipped through Kitty’s Handbook of Psychiatry, Vol. II. He read in it nothing that gave him pleasure or relief, and hid the book in a closet. Dubin, weary of himself, wanted to be better than he was, free of twitches, tics, compulsive gestures. He wanted to be self-sufficient, in control, good to others, good to his wife. He wanted to breathe in the purity of fresh morning. He was disheartened by his monotonous days and nights. I’m like a rock with an iron fence around it. I’m not doing anything for anybody. He got into the apple-green Toyota and drove to the green bridge.

  Dubin journeyed the usual way, not seeing much, head constricted, attention wandering. It began to drizzle and he automatically flicked on the wipers, trying not to think though his mind steamed with thought; and when he lit a cigarillo, his hand trembled. On the wet road close to the path to the quarry Dubin passed a man squatting by his car; he had just changed a rear tire and was lowering the hydraulic jack. The biographer passed him in a spurt of speed. A quarter of a mile farther up the road he pulled to the side and shut off the ignition, tensely trying to think whether to turn back, struggling to control the rush of fear he felt at the thought. The man he had passed in the road was Evan Ondyk. Maybe I ought to talk to him? Dubin touched the starter, turned with difficulty, and reluctantly drove back. He felt shaken, unwell. A vital self had walked out of his life, leaving this old bag.

  Lowering his window, he gravely hailed Ondyk. “Need any help?”

  “I thought it was you, William. No, thanks, all’s done.” He lifted the flat-tired wheel, then the jack, into the trunk of the car and slammed down the lid.

  Dubin parked on the left side of the road, ten feet beyond Ondyk’s Buick on the right. He turned off his wipers but left the motor running. He was still in flight.

  “Evan,” he said with an effort through the half-open window, “I’m not in the best of shape. In fact I’m not feeling at all well. Would you mind getting into the car with me and talking for a minute? Or I could get into yours?”

  “A minute is all I have,” Ondyk said, his eyes darting at Dubin’s. He hesitated. “Oh, what the hell, talk away, William. But I can’t get into the car with you. This flat tire has made hash of my schedule. I’ll have to skip something. If it’s lunch with Marisa she’ll be sore as hell.”

  “You’ll get wet out there.”

  “I have my rain hat in the car.”

  The psychotherapist was standing in the road in the drizzle, his hair covered with droplets of rain. His damp brow glistened and blond mustache drooped. He was a heavy-shouldered handsome man with a slender nose, cleft chin, moody eyes. A familiar stranger, Dubin thought. Confiding in him was difficult.

  The biographer caught a glimpse of himself in his mirror—shock of recognition: eyes tight, shifty, fearful—mouth compressed, uneasy—complexion gray. He heard his own frightened breathing, felt ashamed of what he was into—consulting a man he had never much liked, a psychotherapist—embarrassed by his embarrassment. There were, among recurring others, two known Dubins: the man sitting in the car and someone within writhing in shame.

  “How’s Kitty doing?” he heard himself ask. The question seemed strange, imperiling, as though he’d left her and had to ask a neighbor for news.

  Ondyk, in the drizzle, smiled slightly. “Ask her, William, don’t ask me.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.”

  He cursed his nose twitching spasmodically. Ondyk sneaked a sidelong look at him. Dubin forced himself not to avert his glance.

  “I’m not myself,” he said with a hollow laugh. “I’m feeling off-center, off-base—as if I have two left sides and nowhere to take them. I work little, without concentration. I’m full of odd crawling fears. I may need an assist, Evan. Has Kitty told you?”

  “She didn’t put it to me like that. She sort of indicated your book on Lawrence might be doing you in.”

  “Was that what she said?”

  “Something like that.”

  “What else?”

  “That’s her business. Listen, William, you and I aren’t great friends, but it mightn’t be a bad idea if I speak to you as one. I’m no literary critic—that’s not my specialty—but I could never figure out why a man of your disposition and temperament would want to get so many years of his life involved with a tormented semi-narcissistic figure like D. H. Lawrence. Thoreau I can understand for you, but not this fellow. Not all of us are congenial with each other, as I’m sure you’ll agree. I’m thinking of the wear and tear in the long run—what a ball-breaking strain it must be to have to identify with someone whose nature is so radically different from yours. Isn’t objectivity breached by his constant bilge?”

  Dubin did not resist the man’s approach. It was easier to reply to than something directly personal.

  He answered, lowering his eyes, forcing himself to speak: “He’s a strange mindful but essentially a meliorist. He wants a better world but on his own terms: reform sex—the passional lives of men—and you reform the world. But he had very little faith in mankind and allowed
himself some destestable beliefs. One critic said his philosophy might be that of any thug or moron if separated from the warm intense articulate being he was. He could be a forthright detached critic of his work. He knew and did not always approve his nature. And whatever his excesses he remained an artist. His fiction, though not always successful, was the work of a man of genius.”

  Dubin, clearing his throat intermittently, said he took no great pleasure in Lawrence’s religious primitivism and anti-democratic fantasies. Or in his view of debased social body with its law-oriented degenerate Jews, weak in maleness, leading in the race to total corruption. Or in his hatred of women whose evil power over blood males emasculated them. “He called the public ‘stinking humanity’ and equated socialism with syphilis. He was engorged with the rage of a failed prophet.

  “On the other hand,” he said to Ondyk, “I can’t say I’m much upset by his hatred of capitalism and outraged sense of the perversion of human life by technology. Finally, he brings his destructive impulses to a life-enhancing end in his books. He lived in a vast consciousness of life. At his best he wants man to risk himself for a plenitude of life through love.”

  “Why not?” Ondyk asked.

  “Why not?” Dubin hoarsely echoed.

  “He sounds better than I thought.”

  “When you write biography you want to write about people who will make you strain to understand them.” Dubin said it was like chasing a runner you would never catch up with. “But the game is, I suppose, to make the reader think that’s exactly what you have done, and maybe in a blaze of illumination even have outdistanced him. It’s an illusionary farce that holds me by the tail.”

  The biographer tried to laugh but nothing came of it.

  “Still and all,” Evan said, continuing to observe Dubin, “though I know I am technically out of my depth, you and he are two radically different types, and living every day with the anger, spleen, and hostility of this enraged man is bound to exacerbate your other day-to-day problems.”

  “He’s hard to take when I’m taking myself hard,” Dubin admitted. “He’s hard to take now, but I’ve worked on him for years and have to finish the job.”

  “You have serious problems.”

  “I know, but if you don’t mind me saying so, Evan, I wish you’d drop this approach. If I give Lawrence up I give up a book, and the thought of that —I confess I’ve thought of it—makes me feel shivery and sick. I don’t want that kind of failure to contend with at this time of my life. I would have no confidence in anything I went to next.”

  The drizzle turned into rain. Ondyk got his porkpie rain hat out of his car, lowered the brim all around, and placed it on his wet head. He flipped up his jacket collar. In the rain he stood patiently at the window observing the uncomfortable biographer. Dubin’s motor was still running. He fought an intense urge to step on the gas and bolt.

  “What did you mean before when you said you needed an assist? Were you thinking of consulting me professionally?”

  “Kitty said it might be a good idea.”

  “What’s your view?”

  Dubin scratched himself nervously. “I’m of two minds. I have my reservations.”

  “I’ve heard you on that subject,” Ondyk said, wiping his wet face with his wet handkerchief. “In any case it doesn’t make much difference because I can’t take you on, William. Kitty’s my patient and though there are therapists who do marriage counseling with husband and wife it’s not my dish of fish, so I regret I have to say no.” He smiled moodily. “I know someone in Winslow I could refer you to.”

  Dubin didn’t think so. “I respect what you do or I wouldn’t be encouraging my wife to see you. But I’m not so sure it’s right for me at this time of my life. Maybe when I was younger, but I couldn’t afford it then.”

  “If you had needed it seriously, you’d have found a means to afford it.”

  “I assume I needed it. But that was long ago and I found another way. What I’m saying is I think I understand what’s happening to me. I’ve been there before.”

  “And you may be there again if you don’t do something about it. Simply understanding isn’t what it’s about, William, you know that. Cure is process —working it through is the only way.”

  “The unconscious,” Dubin heard himself hesitantly say, “is not unavailable to those who study themselves.”

  “So you intend to continue with your Teddy Roosevelt regime of exercise and calorie counting?”

  Dubin laughed unhappily. “It keeps me going.”

  “In your wife’s car with your bad ankle?”

  “Till I can figure out a new move, or find myself making one.”

  “In the meantime undergoing a lot of useless suffering. It’s pure waste; so is self-obfuscation.”

  “We judge ourselves, we take risks,” Dubin told himself. Staring uncomfortably at Ondyk standing in the rain he felt wet. The psychotherapist sneezed.

  “You’re sure you won’t get into the car with me, Evan?”

  “This will take one last minute. I hate to breach confidentiality, William, but you know I know you have a very serious problem.”

  Dubin knew.

  “Impotence is no joy.”

  “I don’t feel impotent.”

  Ondyk stared at him in disbelief. “Can a man who writes biography afford to delude himself?”

  Dubin, after another miserable moment, thanked the psychotherapist for his advice. “I regret you got wet on my behalf.”

  “No sweat.” Ondyk, in his damp clothes, got into his car.

  Dubin, releasing his brake, headed north as Ondyk drove south. For twenty minutes he felt intense relief. Had St. George slain the dragon? He drove the circle backward, but could then not think where to go. His relief evaporated. On awakening that morning he hadn’t known what to do next; nor did he now.

  That evening the phone rang. “It’s Evan,” Kitty said. “He wants to talk to you.”

  “Tell him I’m out.”

  He had been reading in Lawrence: “We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos.”

  “Speak to him out of common courtesy if for no other reason,” Kitty said. “You haven’t a friend in the world.”

  “Only you,” Dubin, on his third drink, said. “Tell your friend I’m out.”

  In the night he would regret it. He was alone in the cosmos and desperately needed anyone, even a friend.

  As Dubin slowly drove the ascending road a gaunt runner in a gray sweatsuit, wearing an electric-red safety bib, came loping down toward him. He was an open-mouthed jogger with an awkward gait, who looked as though he hated every step he ran. Sweat streamed down his glistening face, drawn, bony. Dubin, recognizing Oscar Greenfeld, had in astonishment braked the car.

  “Holy cow, is that you, Oscar?”

  The flutist flatly ran on six or seven steps before wearily halting. He was reluctant to. Dubin backed up the car. He knew the feeling: if you stopped you’d never start again.

  “My God, Oscar, what are you doing in that sweatsuit and red bib?”

  Greenfeld, pressing his hand to his left side, drew two long noisy breaths before replying. Gasping, he spoke: “Have to. Doctor prescribed—de rigueur. Don’t know whether you heard—I had a heart incident this past winter. Have been doing three miles every day since I got back on my feet. Run everywhere—drive to a road whose view I like, then go. Used to walk, but now I run. Run for heart and flute. Running, as they say, makes wind.”

  Dubin moaned in dismay. “Heart attack? Last winter? God in heaven, Oscar, why didn’t you tell me in all this time? Have we become such poor friends? I feel dreadful. Why didn’t Flora call or at least say something when you came to dinner? You looked awful, I was afraid to ask. I find the whole thing hard to believe.”

  Oscar smiled wanly. “I was in Prague for a concert when it happened. Flora flew over and stayed a month till I could leave. I had the attack on her last birthday, a
bout the time you were fucking her in my house. She told me after we last saw you and Kitty. She felt she finally had to.”

  He glowered at Dubin, his white face dark, jaw trembling.

  “Oscar,” Dubin, anguished, cried, “believe me, I regret it.”

  “William,” Greenfeld said, raising his breathy voice, “I don’t pretend to be innocent of evil to others. I’ve screwed around in my time, but what I wasn’t prepared for, nor will I ever be, is that my former best friend would betray me in my own house, where he had always been a welcome guest, with my wife. Hypocrite! Fool! I detest you!”

  Oscar, resuming his run, disappeared down the road.

  Dubin could not for a while remember how to start the car.

  A horseman in overalls appeared on the downsloping curved road, a thick-bellied unshaved man wearing field boots, his legs dangling down the flanks of a white heavy-hooved workhorse. Dubin had more than once seen them on this road, wondering where he led the horse or the mare took him. A quarter of a mile up, past acres of unharvested corn, they usually disappeared into the fields. Neither Dubin nor the man had ever so much as nodded to each other when they met. It was that kind of world.

  But today as the overalled horseman plodded by Dubin’s car, he reined in the white mare and in anger and agitation pointed to the glowing hills under light-shedding seas of autumn clouds.

  “Look there! Them Jews are crucifyin’ the earth!”

  Smacking the horse’s flank, he darkly trotted away.

  Midway up the nearest hill, a long low one to the north, Dubin beheld an earth-colored savage slash through the foliage where half a dozen twenty-ton yellow bulldozers were shuttling and darting, undercutting and uprooting hundreds of ancient trees.