A deep unyielding pain overwhelmed the biographer as it occurred to him this was part of a highway cloverleaf being built to divert traffic from town. Dubin had been hearing about it for a dozen years, but had never expected to see it built. He looked with heartache at the long ragged gash where the trees had been torn out of the sides of the living hill. Nature itself, inevitably necessary to his sense of who he was or could be, was being disgraced, destroyed. “Willie,” he warned himself, “our natural beauty—inspiration, joy, precious possession, goes gurgling down the drain while you sit in your room writing a life of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are presently too many. Awake, you stupid prick. Stop wasting life’s sweet time. Do something to preserve the natural world! Do what has to be done before it can’t be any longer!” Struggling to restrain the dimming that assailed him; to cling to his shaky balance, Dubin, for the first time in his life, fainted away.
A riderless white horse galloped by.
The woman with the broken face, her wasted body swathed in voluminous skirts, pursued him heartbrokenly. Dubin, running for dear life along the rocky shore, his heart pounding beyond belief, sank in exhaustion to the ground. With palms clasped he begged mercy; but it was not the pursuing bitch who’d caught up with him: it was a panting sad-eyed man with a hole in the middle of his face. Now the hole slid across the face, now down. But Dubin glimpsed, through a haze of webbed purple capillaries within, a potato nose and downturned stained mouth from which an ancient rotting voice spoke:
“My name is Richard M. Nixon. I am well-acquainted with your distinguished biography of Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Republican, and I offer you a substantial sum to write one of my life, Mr. Dubin. I’ve got to get the shit scraped off of my good name.”
“And who will scrape it off of mine?”
Kitty, for no reason she could relate, unless it was a hopeful letter she had recently received from the State Department, was sleeping better; but Dubin had caught from her, abetted by the breathless summer, the ailment of sleeplessness. Those you live with teach you. Sometimes she woke and asked him in a whisper if he was sleeping. Knowing that the sound of the human voice invariably set her talking, he stayed silent. Kitty fell back to sleep.
The little Dubin slept each night savaged him. Anything woke him if he momentarily dozed. Any new sound in the night. Or her impassioned breathing during dreams. Or the hint of whistling in his nose. Or his heartbeat drumming in his ears on the pillow. Awake, he feared not sleeping. It took him hours to sleep again, as though for not sleeping the magistrate fined you hours of sleep. He slept a ragged dream-macerated sleep. To break the long wakefulness, Dubin read in the middle of the night. He walked miles in a small room. He took long showers in the dark. If he slept afterward he slept on the knife edge of waking. He must sleep or he couldn’t work; wouldn’t have the energy even not to work. He feared he would never sleep again. Many were thus afflicted. If he tried pills, although Kitty said he wouldn’t, he felt stupid in the morning. The drugged sleep wasted the rest of the day. He would rather be sleepless and work a clear hour or two before his eyelids descended like heavy curtains.
One morning after his alarm had rung, Kitty urged, him, “Sleep, William, I’ll take care of you.”
He had to get up.
“No you don’t. Stay in bed, it’s Saturday.”
“I’ve been in bed all fucking night.”
He drew on a sock and after five minutes pulled up his pants. Kitty catnapped for a minute, then got into her robe and followed him downstairs.
“Would you like me to scramble you an egg?”
He tried to think.
“Forget your goddamn diet.” Then she laughed. Dubin was standing at the kitchen window. Kitty went over to him and said, “Why don’t you laugh?” She tickled him under the arms. “Where’s your funny bone?”
“Not there.”
She said she wanted to cry. Resting her head on his shoulder she said she loved him.
After a while he put his arm around her. “I’m a pain-in-the-ass, but try to be patient.”
“I can be patient, but how much longer?”
Dubin couldn’t say.
“Do it your way,” Kitty said, “but please do something.”
He said he would; she did not ask what.
She hadn’t said whether Ondyk had told her they had met on the road.
Dubin saw himself sleeping in a single bed in another house. He slept well there. Would he write better? Would his single life be freer, more varied, joyful? He thought it might in the long run. When he felt better he would ask her to divorce him. Not now but when he was himself once more. Or when he could sleep no longer in this house. That would be a clear sign. He would say he had to leave her because he could not sleep in her bed.
He went relentlessly to his work. Nothing happened. Dubin sobbed noisily.
Kitty knocked on his door. “Can I help?”
He could think of no way.
He wept because his memory was bad. He had at first almost not noticed, or tried not to notice. Recently, forgetting had laid hold hard. It didn’t help that Dubin knew Montaigne had complained of a slow mind and incredible lack of memory, despite which he wrote works of genius. Emerson, at sixty-five, was closer to how Dubin felt at fifty-eight: the old man complained of a tied tongue; he said he was “wanting in command of imagery” to match his thought. You had this thing to say and the words would not come; butterflies appeared and flew around the thought. Dubin, against the will, actively forgot names, details, words. He was losing them as though they were coins dropping out of holes in his pockets; or out of his raddled brain. They fell like raindrops into a stream—go find them. Usually when he forgot words he would wait for them to seep back into consciousness like fish drawn up to the hungry surface of a stream. He would remember the initial letter of the forgotten word or sense sounds in it; soon the word reappeared in an illumination. Now words rarely returned when Dubin needed them. He concentrated, trying hard to conjure up a word he could not repossess. It had teased him with its closeness, then burst like a bubble. It was not his to have. He couldn’t say what he wanted to; he remained silent.
Dubin forgot what he told himself not to. I’ll remember it, he thought, but it hid from him. When he went to bed with a sentence to remember, or one that had come to him as he was trying to sleep, although he kept it alive during the night—unless he wrote it down it had disappeared from his memory by morning. And when he wrote down a sentence, to preserve on paper, it seemed to him he at once forgot a dozen germane to it. As if one sentence is all you are allowed—one to a customer. Or as though someone recites an evil incantation, and therefore a potential paragraph turns to dust. Where are the associations of yesteryear? It was a game of disappearances. Here’s this man walking on the road but when you meet up it’s his shadow; or it’s another man on another road whom you don’t remember or even want to know.
Dubin forgot what he read as he was reading it, and much of what he had recently read. Books fell apart in his head; or went up in smoke. He could not repeat, step by step, a long argument. He remembered only the bare bones of what he must know to keep working on his biography. He had notes in place of memory; had to reread often to recall what he had forgotten. He forgot the contents of some of Lawrence’s novels; he forgot the arrangement of his Trinitarian metaphysic in the novels. He forgot how important things had happened to him, though not the stations of his short life. When he reread what he had written about him, it seemed to Dubin that someone else had written it. Instead of a chisel he had a hammer to cut stone. I am barely a geographer of D. H. Lawrence. How can my small mind encompass his? He forgot nothing.
Augustine had discovered God in his memory: he had left Him there, abandoned Him, and there God had remained. “I recall Thee to my remembrance.” God had returned. Dubin discovered realms of space in his memory. Am I forgetting life, or is life forgetting me? He feared telling Kitty what was happening to him, although she sometimes looked as if she
knew. Had guessed? What are you forgetting? her eyes seemed to ask. You, Dubin thought, I am forgetting you. What one forgot conceived a further forgetting: a hole unraveling. Unweaving Fanny, he had unwoven the tapestry of their experience. His rotting bones lay amid skeins of memories. Memory cannibalized past experience. It was a maw that ate itself.
He had felt there was much purposeful forgetting in his life; now it all seemed purposeful. The purpose was to diminish displeasure, or suffering, or mourning; or simply not to live in active remembrance of the sadnesses of the past. Associative links between one unhappy experience and another had expired in pain and humiliation. He remembered comparatively little of his poor father and crazy mother. His dead brother was drowned in his mind. That had happened almost a half century ago. Dubin had misptaced—displaced?—most of his childhood; he often felt he could replay it minutely; but when he pressed himself to, all he could recall were the bare bones of things. He could remember the color of his mother’s eyes, but not their true expression. He remembered only vaguely her features, not the sound of her voice; yet he remembered things she had said. He had once, as a child, noticed menstrual blood on her petticoat and she told him she had had a nosebleed. “There on the back, Mama?” “I turned my head to look for something.” After school she gave him a peeled apple with a slice of buttered white bread. When he was sick she mashed a plateful of potatoes in hot milk. One day he had asked her to take him to the movies and she had promised. In those days a child had to ask an adult to take him in and Willie didn’t like to. He waited all afternoon for his mother to come down and accompany him to the movies. She came down wearing an old hat. They walked half a block, and then she said she couldn’t go, and wept, and went back upstairs. He remembered her grief when her young son was brought home dead. He remembered her thereafter as an insane woman with an altered face and voice, although not much of that time of her life because she was dead before he was fourteen. Once she was in the kitchen, talking sanely to him, when on hearing footsteps in the hall she had with a fearful glance put on her insane face. “Don’t go, Willie, out in the rain.” She entered his dreams sane and left mad. She began with words of love and ended with sounds that frightened him. He loved and feared her. He forgot words, to forget her; but she, with her fears, lived in his flesh.
When she was dead and he and Charlie Dubin were alone in the house sitting shivah, the waiter sat soaking his purple-veined feet as he read his newspaper. William had felt shame for his father, for his ineffectuality, unwillingness to try to be more than a poor waiter—for hiding his crazy wife in the back bedroom. Without knowing why, as he looked at him, he felt then a sudden keen compassion for the old man. It seemed to the son that whatever else Charlie could or couldn’t do, he had done what he had to. The boy was ashamed of having been ashamed of him. Years later he forgave his mother for having lived her insane life in his presence. It was the only life she had to live.
He had told his children little about them, because Charlie and Hannah Dubin had never been present as grandparents. Kitty knew them only as legend. She had met Charlie once and he had tried to please her. Only when Maud had said she wanted to know more about them had Dubin told her at length what he remembered. When he tried to write down what he recalled of their lives, he was surprised at how short an account it had come to. His memories of them had fused into few memories. He had once left himself a week to write about them, but had written all he could in less than two evenings. Where was it all? Where had that part of his life gone? Dubin shook blots out of his fountain pen but could not turn them into words.
Forgetting dimmed the remembering self: kept it in hiding. Often he took in experience, half forgetting. He was not always present in the present; was not always attentive to what was there to be experienced, kept in mind, recalled, remembered. Dubin followed his thoughts where they went, elsewhere. He used to warn himself to observe and remember. He listened carefully to what Kitty said she saw, or had seen: color in colors he hadn’t noticed; sounds he hadn’t heard. Gerry observed interesting odd combinations of things and events. Maud, in any given experience, saw more details than Dubin saw. He thought he saw whole forms better than they, but wasn’t sure. Perhaps he had taken to writing lives in part to teach himself what others saw better. Thoreau looked with eyes, ears and hands, wrote down what he saw, afterward reinvented the world out of his journal. Lawrence observed with genius—a dozen eyes in each eye; saw everything at a glance, retained it, had the language to describe, now or years later, whatever or whomever he had looked at. Kitty, too, saw quickly who was who, though not always what was what. Dubin was a slow study: it took him years to understand who any given man was, including some he thought he had known well; for instance Oscar Greenfeld. He honed his observations in nature on Wordsworth’s, Thoreau’s, Hardy’s; now on Lawrence. Eventually he saw better than he had seen, including inscapes of the self. Dubin sensed what he had forgotten, remembered having lived much in reverie as a youth. There were times he had hidden from life; felt himself, after all these years, doing something of the same now—was walking backward; away from living. He feared the consequences; thought, I must stop that. I must change in some serious way or come to grief.
Kitty put her garden to bed. October was cool sunny warming in the afternoon. He watched her from his window, on her knees, cutting perennial stalks, pulling weeds, pruning, transposing plants. She sprinkled pine needles around rhododendron roots, azalea, mountain laurel. The mountain laurel had done well that summer. Something had done well. A boy she worked with at the Youth Center raked dead leaves. The garden was now for next year. She had complained about autumn flowers, said they didn’t grow well for her. Even chrysanthemums, usually an easy flower, had not flourished for her. He imagined the garden under snow.
She came into the kitchen as he stood there with his cup of cold coffee and tiredly washed her hands at the sink. Neither spoke. She opened drawers, looked in them for a while, closed them. She put things away, tidied up mechanically. When they passed in the hall Kitty smiled vaguely. She seemed to be elsewhere; he wasn’t sure where she was. Dubin was elsewhere. She was listless, scattered; he hardly recognized her. He hoped someone might help her; he couldn’t. One morning she entered his study without knocking and seated herself in the armchair. She had come in, Dubin figured, because she knew he wasn’t doing much, as if that made the work interruptible. The thought angered him. She never sat down when he was working well; she’d come in for a stamp or something she had run out of and duck out. Now her presence irritated him, her determined unhappy face, her wilting shoulders. He didn’t like the greenish pants or brown blouse she wore. They were colors she punished him with.
Kitty seemed not to know how to begin, then began, sitting stiffly upright, her dark eyes excluding him. This isn’t how I want to talk to her, Dubin thought. She ought to think of a better way than to come barging in. It takes two to talk at ease.
“I know who the girl is who was with you in Venice,” Kitty said.
“Do you?” Once he hadn’t wanted her to know, now he didn’t care.
“Fanny Bick,” Kitty said coldly. “I don’t know why I was so dense in guessing it. I could feel you come alive while she was in the house the summer she worked here. Once I heard you talking together in your study as though you were lovers. They sound like lovers talking, I remember thinking, but I forgot about her when she left. Recently I remembered the airmail letters you were getting from Italy after you came home, then I remembered thinking I’d seen that handwriting before.”
Dubin admitted it was Fanny.
“Why didn’t you tell me when I asked you?”
“I wasn’t out to hurt you.”
“It doesn’t hurt any the less now.”
“I told you I’d had an affair. I didn’t say who with.”
“Were you ashamed of her?”
“No.”
“You took up with her a second time,” Kitty said angrily.
He said she had nothi
ng to worry about. “I don’t see her any more.”
“Did you use to see her in town?”
He said he had.
“Weren’t you also seeing her in New York? I suspected you were visiting someone.”
He said he had seen Fanny in New York, but that was over now.
“You lied to me?”
“Many times.”
“Do you still love her?”
“Still?”
“I assumed you loved her?”
He said he had put her out of his mind.
Kitty’s voice wavered. “Why don’t you go back to her? Maybe you’d be better off.”
She wasn’t there to go back to, Dubin said.
“I’ll bet you wish she was.”
“I wish you’d let up. I wish you’d get out of here.”
“Think it over,” she said coolly. “You’re obviously not getting much from me or giving me very much. If I’m the cause of your discontent, and/or sexual problem, I’m willing to let you go. Some men are impotent only with their wives.”
“And some with their mistresses. I read the same chapter you did in that goddamn book.”
Though he felt any change would be helpful now, he didn’t say it.
“You can leave or I will if you’d rather,” Kitty said, seeming to pretend detachment. “We can make the other arrangements later.” Her eyes were listless, bruised.
Dubin said if anyone ought to go it should be he.
“Then go,” she said bitterly, rising, standing by the chair. “Go today if you want.”
He said he couldn’t go then. Circumstances weren’t right.
“It’s your own damn fault. You’re crippled out of pride.”
“Does Ondyk say that?”
“I say it,” she shouted. “I also say you can be an awfully stupid bastard. Ask Oscar to toot that in your ear.” Kitty slammed the door.
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