She stared at a panful of brown eggs she had collected as Dubin apologized. “To tell the truth, Fanny, I was a victim of a fit of unreasoning jealousy. Forgive me, my feeling for you is immense.”
“What would you say if I told you I’d had an abortion last summer?” she asked wearily, grimly.
“I’d regret it.”
“I don’t. I never really cared for the guy.”
“I regret that too.”
“What else do you regret?”
“That I wasn’t single and closer to your age when we met.”
“What are you really saying?”
“Let’s go on for a while. Let’s see what happens.”
“I can’t,” she said flatly, nasally, her stiffened eyes fixed on his face. “I wish you wouldn’t ask me that any more.”
“I won’t,” he said compassionately. Dubin hurried out of the barn and drove at once to Winslow. After searching through a tray of rings at a jeweler’s he found one he liked, a hammered gold band with six glowing rubies. He wrote out a check for $450.
Dubin picked up a hothouse gardenia for Fanny and peacefully drove back to Center Campobello. He would give her the gift and depart. At the barn door he met Bosell, who said he thought Fanny had gone into the house to nap.
He tried writing her a note on the parlor table. Dubin wrote two: “From a former lover who never made it as a friend.” And since that didn’t say much, tried “Goodbye, dear Fanny, with thanks for all you gave me.” He left neither. He left the ring in its blue velour box and the gardenia in a glass of water. He hurried up the driveway to his car.
A window was noisily raised at the front of the house. “William!”
Dubin trotted back.
Fanny had come downstairs after her nap. Her face was refreshed, softened, flushed by sleep. She was standing at the parlor table, wearing Dubin’s ruby ring and holding his white flower.
“It looks like a wedding ring. I feel like a bride.”
The flickering red candle Fanny had left on the bookcase gave forth a darkish private light.
She had put on Bach: Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott …
They had eaten in the parlor and were now in her bedroom, deceptively small in the shadowy light. Fanny, in her see-through caftan, wearing white bra and black underpants, pattered in bare feet from bathroom to bedroom, watering her potted plants out of a drinking glass.
The bedroom was furnished as her city apartment had been, with the exception of Myra’s standing lamp with its large orange shade: the same chairs, pictures on the walls, even the colored snap with pigeons in San Marco, the same books in the bookcase; almost everything but the single bed —double in the city. What this meant he seemed to think he knew. Dubin, listening to the choral bang of the cantata, sat in striped boxer shorts and undershirt, his clothes piled on a straight-back chair, black winter shoes stuffed with black socks tucked under it. In the bathroom he combed his gray hair with her slightly soiled bone comb and rinsed his mouth. Fanny had once instructed him to urinate before getting into bed. “You’ll come better.” She educates me. He was grateful.
Wohl auf, der Bräutigam kömmt …
She glanced at him momentarily anxiously as he took the water glass from her hand and held it as they kissed. Their first kiss, after a season of separation, loss, before renewing joy, hurt. Dubin set the glass down and began to unbraid Fanny’s warm hair. She shook it out, heavy full. Her shoulders, breasts, youthful legs, were splendid. He loved her glowing flesh. Fanny removed her heart-shaped locket and his bracelet, placing them on the bookcase near the dripping red candle. She kept the ruby ring on. Forcefully she pulled his undershirt over his head; he drew down her black underpants. Fanny kissed his live cock. What they were doing they did as though the experience were new. It was a new experience. He was, in her arms, a youthful figure. On his knees he embraced her legs, kissed her between them.
So geh herein zu mir,
Du mir erwalte Braut!
She led him to bed, flipped aside the blanket. He drew it over their hips.
“Hello, lover.”
“Hello, my child.”
“I’m not your child.”
“Hello, dear Fanny.”
They wrestled in her narrow bed, she with her youth; he with his wiles. At her climax Fanny’s mouth slackened; she shut her eyes as though in disbelief and came in silence.
Mit harfen und mit zimbeln schon.
Dubin slept with his arms around her; she with her hand cupping his balls.
When he awoke that Christmas-day morning he felt, as he stared at the bedroom floor, that weeds were growing between the boards. Kitty, awake, said, “If I am born again I hope it will be with B-cup breasts.”
“Don’t get up,” she said. Sitting, she drew off her blue-flowered nightgown and moved toward him. Dubin lay back. Though he willingly embraced her warm familiar body he felt no stirring of desire. She held his phallus but it lay inert.
Kitty, lying motionless, her head on his breast, shifted to the edge of the bed and lay looking out the window.
Dubin said he was sorry.
“You’re doing this to punish me.”
“What for?”
“For being who I am. For having married you. Because you lived your life with me.”
“I lived with you willingly.”
“I think you willed it.”
“I will waking up, for Christ’s sake. I will my goddamned work. There are times I will living.”
“Love can’t be willed.”
“There is a will-to-love.”
“The thought depresses me.”
“Don’t let it,” he shouted at her.
“Oh crap,” said Kitty.
“Don’t piss on the past. Don’t deny the love I felt for you because you don’t think I feel it now.”
“I know you don’t.”
“I’m saying not to deny I loved you.”
“What good is that to me now?”
“It preserves the past. It keeps you from making something into nothing.”
“When I was a little girl I used to fantasy a church bell tolling when someone was advising me to count my blessings if I was feeling loss. I remember the sound.”
“Why bother?”
“Don’t feel superior to me. You’re the one who’s impotent.”
He didn’t say whom he was not impotent with.
You tell the truth, Dubin thought, it stands erect, finds the well. You lie as I lie to her it plays dead. She gets no use of it.
Kitty, on her back, monotonously recited complaints he had heard many times in many voices:
“We were never passionately in love. I suppose it was a mistake to have got married. I should have waited. We had the best of intentions, and hopes, but it was surely a mistake. What you lack of love in marriage, of true passion, if you’re me, you never make up. You miss it always, even when, I suppose, you oughtn’t to. I went through my young married life telling myself the good things I had—my home, children, hardworking faithful husband—a decent life, surely—but I missed something.”
“The bell tolled?”
“Often.”
“Tough,” Dubin said. “Whatever you missed you’d have missed with any man. Marriage doesn’t make up for what life fails to deliver.”
“With some it does, the right marriage.”
“Yes, for a while, but a time comes when you miss what you’ve always wanted more of. I would have lacked something with any woman I married.”
“We missed more, married to each other. The kids missed something too. They sensed our lack of deep love for each other. Both of them sensed it and I’m sure it bothered them.”
“People bother people. If it was there to sense I’d want them to.”
“They were hurt by our tensions, irritations, quarrels. We pretended a better relationship than we had.”
“Doesn’t everyone? You put it together as best you can. You protect it.”
“It was not the bes
t of marriages.” Kitty wept briefly into the pillow.
Dubin lay on his side, his back to her, trying to tote it up as a fairly decent marriage. Not in this mood.
She blew her nose. Shifting into dispassion, she told him she had dreamed that she had bought a plane ticket to Amsterdam to see the spring tulips but had landed, instead, in Newark, New Jersey, where William Dubin lived with his parents.
“I went up a couple of rickety flights of stairs in a broken-windowed tenement, but when I got to your door I was afraid to ring. Finally I had to. I was a widow with a child, who needed help. I’d been told you were looking for a wife. The door opened, and a woman ran down the hall and hid in the bathroom. I came across you in a small room at the end of a hallway. You were a man with earlocks and dark lonely eyes. You were wearing a yarmulka and studying a book in Hebrew. The letters looked like broken bits of a puzzle. This man is a rabbi, thought. It would be a mistake to marry him.”
“Marry a Jew?”
“A rabbi. Someone who, for obvious reasons, would never be devoted to me.”
“What brought you to a rabbi?”
“My peculiar fate. He knew about me when I arrived and said he would marry me. I wept.”
“Why would a rabbi marry you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why didn’t you go home and marry someone else?”
“I couldn’t.”
Afterward, Kitty said, “I’m sure I failed you more than I thought, but that’s just the point—I would have done better with someone more like myself. You should have married a Jewish woman who was better put together and needed less attention, someone who slept nights and wouldn’t keep you awake. You’d have waked fresh as a daisy, running to work.”
“Who would you have done better with?”
Her eyes were moist. “If Nathanael hadn’t died.”
“I wish to God he hadn’t.”
After a long hesitation, Dubin, turning to her, said their talk was self-defeating.
“I’m not afraid of the truth, are you?”
“What truth are we telling each other?”
“That we live side by side but not together. We live in the same house, but I can float around for days yet not make contact with you. After your affair with Fanny in Venice, the feeling we had for one another that we’d kept more or less intact, began to unravel. You speak of a will-to-love. If what I get is what you’ve willed there’s not much to sustain me.”
“You make it sound more negative than it was, or is. Will or no will, I’ve always appreciated you as a woman.”
“I want more than appreciation.”
“So it was a bad marriage?”
She was observing him gravely, uneasily, sadly. “It’s not much of one, I’m afraid. Not any more. I have to be honest.”
He damned her honesty, felt at a loss, had not wanted to fail in marriage. “Then I owe you an apology,” Dubin said.
“I admit we tried, but we aren’t sufficiently suited to each other or there’d be less holding back, much more giving. That has to be said.”
“Who I am is not Nathanael?”
“He was in love with me when we got married. I loved him. He wanted me close by. He did not resent me for needing him. He wasn’t cold to me, even when I made the mistake of being cold to him.”
“Nate the saint, except when he bopped you in the eye?”
“He was dreadfully sorry for that. He was a good man. He gave affection easily.”
“Once I had the impression I was giving you love,” Dubin said. “It felt like love, but maybe less came across than I thought. Maybe at most I was thinking I was giving love, a rationale or self-deception suiting your needs to my ethic or aesthetics, or both.”
He had thought this before but had never said it to her. Kitty listened as though she had often heard it.
“I don’t suppose it’s very hard to fool yourself about loving,” Dubin went on. “It isn’t easy to give if you’re anchored in an involved subjectivity. Some people complicate their feelings in self-protective ways. I must be one of them. You think you’re sailing with a cargo of love, but never deliver because you haven’t hoisted anchor, although you have the illusion you had.”
“You’re erecting a monument to impossibility—Why I never really loved my wife.”
“I’m trying to respond to your argument. On the other hand, not all are receptive to those who’ve taught themselves to love a little. I imagined love for you. To me it felt like love. I thought you could feel it coming from me —I think you did, but maybe less than I imagined, as though I’d set the thermostat to warm but you, with your nature, never got over feeling chilly in our house.”
Dubin said he regretted that. He regretted Dubin, the lacking man. “I regret he comes out meager when he means to be generous, potent, large in love.”
“You’re not large in love.”
“To be honest,” he confessed, sitting up with the force of his insight, “William Dubin, the biographer, is grateful to you for having through the years described to him what his lacking love, lacking nature, come to—for having kept him up with himself so that he could be a truthful measure, as well as recorder, of the lives of those he writes about, and therefore a better biographer.”
Kitty got out of bed, tight-jawed. “It’s more of the same, another denial of me. Everything sooner or later goes back to your biographies. That’s your grand passion—if you could fuck your books you’d have it made.”
“I’d rather do the same for you.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” she cried. “You could if you wanted to. Your explanation of your rationale is itself a rationale. I sense something unsaid, as though you were evading truth in pretending to tell it.”
It’s a way of life, the biographer thought. I must stop thinking of myself as a truthful man.
As they were dabbling at breakfast, Kitty, struggling for control, said as she tremblingly poured his coffee, “I hear someone has bought the Wilson farm.”
He said he hadn’t heard about it.
On New Year’s Day night, Dubin trudging up the snowy road to the farm, was caught in the flaring lights of a truck that had backed out of Fanny’s driveway. He’d been thinking of his desire for her; it was sometimes only desire. Was it, too, a lacking love?
The driver brought the truck to a stop. “Is that you, Mr. Dubin?” He had poked his head out of the window.
“Dubin,” said the biographer, shielding his eyes in the light, as he stood by a snowbank.
The truck lights went off. “Roger Foster here. I want you to know I intend to wait you out for Fanny. I got a long life ahead of me.”
Dubin said his father was a waiter.
He jogged past the truck.
Roger drove on with his lights off.
One winter’s late-afternoon Maud Dubin arrived home with her large suitcase and duffel bag and went at once up to her old room to sleep. “For a visit?” Dubin asked his wife when he returned after a quick hour at the farm. “She’s pregnant,” Kitty said unhappily. He was overwhelmed by a long sense of loss. He had been concerned with Maud rarely lately and castigated himself for it.
“How many months?” he afterward asked.
“Probably two.” Kitty paced around the room with her hands clasped.
“Has she spoken of an abortion?”
“She wants to have the baby.” Her unhappiness yielded a tender smile; she loved little babies.
Maud slept fifteen hours and in the early morning appeared in her father’s study in bathrobe and boots. She laid down on his desk a pack of cigarettes and book of matches. Her face was fresh after sleep and a shower, her eyes trying to be calm.
He knew she had never liked talking to him in his study—he was, she had said, always there. “Would you rather talk in your room,” Dubin asked, “or maybe go for a walk later?”
She said she would rather talk now.
He thought of the child she had been and was once more aware of loss. Of what? That
he hadn’t married her? That his love could not control her fate? He hid from her his sense of desecrated life.
Maud lit a cigarette, her hand trembling. “Mother said she’s told you? Not much of an annunciation, I’m afraid.”
“I hate accidents determining people’s fates,” Dubin said.
“I’ve made my peace with it.”
He advised her not too quickly to make peace. Maud smoked silently.
He wanted to put his arms around her—his daughter, who ran through experience as though she was slicing bread—but sensed she would rather he didn’t.
“It’s hard to believe. I pictured you chaste in Zen.”
“Believe,” Maud said dryly.
“This is what satori came to?”
“Do you really want to know?”
He nodded, wanting to know but not to hear.
She said a letter had come after she’d been four months at the commune —“from a man I’ve had a long affair with. He asked to see me. I thought I wouldn’t—I was the one who had broken it off but maybe the Zen hadn’t taken—I was finding it hard to concentrate. And I kept on thinking of you telling me to remember I was Jewish and live in the real world. Anyway, I saw him again and got pregnant.”
He sighed. “So I helped initiate the conception?”
“Don’t be ironic, Papa.”
“I’m bitter.”
“Don’t be, I’m not. The Zen Master asked me to stay in the commune. He said I could have my baby there and the commune would help me to take care of it. They are incredibly kind people but I felt I had no right to stay because I had failed their teaching. So I went home.”
“Does the man know you’re pregnant—the father, or whatever you call him?”
“You call him the father, he’s a fatherly man.”
“Does he know?”
She shook her head.
“Why haven’t you told him?”
“It wouldn’t do any good—he’s married.”
After a while Dubin asked, “Any chance of his divorcing his wife?”
Dubin's Lives Page 41