Dubin had noticed a leak in the hot-water tank and one morning went down to the cellar to see how bad it was. The water was dripping steadily. He hurried upstairs to call the plumber and when he picked up the receiver heard Evan Ondyk on the phone. He was about to hang up when Evan quietly said, “We can have lunch and be together.”
“Is someone on the telephone?” Kitty asked loudly, nervously. Dubin could hear her voice on the phone; at the same time he heard it coming from upstairs. His heart hammered; he didn’t speak and could not hang up lest she hear him.
Ondyk after a long moment said he didn’t think so. “Where’s William?”
“I think in his study. Let’s not talk any more now, Evan. I’ll meet you—you know where—and please don’t call me here—I get anxious when the telephone rings.”
“Kitty, you called me.”
“So you wouldn’t call me.”
He insisted he was being careful. “How else can I reach you when time unexpectedly becomes available?”
“Smoke signals,” she said.
They laughed.
“I look forward.”
“I too.” She hung up.
From therapy to bed with the psychotherapist, an easy next step. The bastard probably tells himself he’s doing me a favor—filling in for a friend with a soft cock.
Dubin waited in the cellar till Kitty came down for breakfast. He entered the kitchen, saying there was a leak in the hot-water tank. She said she would call the plumber. Neither of them looked long at the other.
In mid-morning, as she was taking a bath, he left the house and walked to town to rent a car. Dubin parked it on a nearby road on an overcast February day. Before Kitty, wearing flushed-pink stockings, left the house shortly before noon, she said, “The plumber will be here in the morning. I may do some shopping. There’s a hamburger for you defrosted in the fridge if you want one for lunch. Coffee is set to boil.”
She paused trying to think whether there was something else to say but there wasn’t. Kitty did not return to dip her head over the burners. Now she knew what an affair might do for one.
Dubin followed her at a distance in his rented car. She drove to a motel a few miles away, her apple-green automobile turning into its driveway. As he rode by he observed his wife enter the cabin where Ondyk’s Buick was parked. Fair is fair. It was the same motel Dubin had been in with Fanny.
He arrived home nervously excited. He felt, too, nostalgic regret. He felt relief accompanied by an oppressive surge of energy. Sitting at his desk with a sheet of paper before him he listed the steps of a divorce. He remembered more law then he had thought. It occurred to him that he had kept up with recent changes in divorce law in New York State.
In the weeks that followed Dubin pretended to know nothing about Kitty’s affair. He sometimes felt an embarrassed self-punitive regret when she went off to be with her lover. When she went to meet him she wore the silver bracelet Dubin had got her in Stockholm after he had bought the gold one in Venice for Fanny. And lately Kitty also wore an old locket she had, a medallion of Mary the Mother. She usually left her wedding ring home when she went to see Evan. Dubin pretended not to notice, or seem suspicious. He doubted she could have carried on an affair when she was a young woman. The years, her need, made the difference.
He still kept his eye open for her diary. What was she writing about her affair? He felt a desire to know. In her clothes closet he came across her blue gardening sneakers. They were long sneakers, split at the toes, comic. Her droopy faded orange straw hat looked as if it belonged to somebody’s grandmother. He thought of himself and her, a generation ago, as a young man and woman who had just met, and moved by mutual respect and the magic of possibility, were willing to try to know and love each other. It was, in this world, a brave thing to do, and they had for a while done it. There was indeed, Dubin thought, a married state; and if you had lived in it for years with someone who had treated you considerately you wanted to go on thinking of her as the considerate woman she was. You wanted to go on respecting her whether she was still your wife or not. He hoped she would not spoil that for him.
One afternoon Dubin discovered Kitty’s diary in the kitchen oven. It had been elsewhere, but now it was in the oven. Kitty sometimes temporarily shoved things in it to get them out of the way. He had asked her not to, but she said she had never in her life caused a fire. Dubin riffled through the last pages of the notebook. She had written little about herself recently, not a word about Ondyk, nothing directly about Dubin. He discovered, not without surprise, that she had been reading biographies of accomplished women. Four she mentioned were Charlotte Bronte, Rosa Luxemburg, Jane Welsh, Eleanor Roosevelt. She commented on how they had fought for strength and resisted the tyranny of lovers and husbands.
Most of her notes in the diary were about Jane Welsh, Thomas Carlyle’s wife, a woman of exceptional intellect, character, wit, with vivid powers of literary expression, who might have had, Kitty wrote, “a remarkable writing career if she weren’t enmeshed in a miserable Victorian marriage. What an age!” Carlyle, though he could at times be a tender and affectionate husband, especially when he was miles from her, in Scotland or elsewhere writing letters to her, was an almost totally self-centered man of genius; for years bound to, and groaning in his bowels over, the multi-volumed lives of Cromwell and Frederick the Great it took him forever to write, while his unhappy wife was sometimes suffering from illness and neglect in the next room. Once after she had been seriously hurt in a street accident she wrote in her diary, “Oh, my husband! I am suffering torments! Each day I suffer more horribly. O, I would like you beside me. I am terribly alone. But I don’t want to interrupt your work.” Though Carlyle depended heavily on her, he was all but blind to her loneliness; he gave her little emotionally and nothing sexually. Like Ruskin he seemed to have been impotent throughout his married life. When she died in London, he, in Scotland, dreamed she had died. She was buried in her father’s grave and Carlyle’s remorse began. For fifteen years he mourned her. “Oh that I had you yet for five minutes beside me, to tell you all.”
“About time,” Kitty wrote. Her last entry on Jane Welsh read: “She waked between thirty and forty times a night, averaging three hours of sleep, ‘all in fractions.’ But she was not a defeated person, a victim, thanks to her talent for friendship, writing, self-preservation. She felt marriage was a ‘shockingly immoral institution.’ And ‘an extremely disagreeable one.’” Kitty called Carlyle “a narcissistic, nervous, obsessed, impotent biographer.” Dubin noted the emphasis.
The entry after that in her diary was a despairing one about Gerald. Dubin tossed the notebook back into the oven and seriously considered turning the gas on.
One night she came to Maud’s room, where he was sleeping, and standing by the bed in the dark, told him she had had a terrible dream about their daughter: “She had given birth but wouldn’t let me see the baby. Then a black man went into the room and stabbed it. I sank into a faint so deep I don’t know how I managed to wake up and come here.”
“Do you want to get into bed with me?”
She said, after momentary silence, “Would you mind first going down to look at the burners? I meant to but forgot.”
There’s this hissing open burner in her head, he thought, and I live with it as though it were real.
Dubin got up as she slipped into Maud’s narrow bed. Stepping into his slippers he went down to the kitchen to sniff the gas. First he tightened the knobs, then breathed over the burners to make sure no gas was leaking. He felt he had to smell them if she asked him to. It was a responsibility: you lied about your girl but not about the gas. He tried to estimate how often he had smelled the burners since he had married Kitty. How many cubic feet of gas had he inhaled in the hundreds of times he had bent over the burners for her? One married her wounds with the woman. One ingested them. And it worked the other way, he supposed. His wounds had wounded her.
What would I smell for Fanny? Only her body. Her breasts
smell like flowers and her cunt like the salt sea.
The bed lamp was on when he returned to Maud’s room. Kitty’s head lay on the pillow in darkish light.
“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Dubin, “except please let me sleep if I fall asleep. You stay here, I’ll go to our bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing at all.”
As he was becoming sleepy, Kitty slid into their bed with him. “William,” she said, “I have something to tell you: I’ve been having an affair with Evan. It started a couple of months ago, and you know why.”
“That horse’s ass,” he said dully.
“No, he isn’t. He’s considerate and appreciative and a lot wiser than you think. He asked me to go to bed with him and I did. He’s not very happy with Marisa, and I was hard up and disgusted with you. But what I want to say now is that I’ve broken it off. I don’t regret what I’ve done, but I didn’t do it easily. If it weren’t for you I don’t think I would have done it.”
“Is he still your therapist?”
“I don’t think we’d better. I’m sorry because he was good with me. I don’t know what to do about that.”
“Would you want a divorce?” Dubin asked her.
She said bitterly she no longer knew what she wanted.
Winter
Dear William, Dear Mother—If this ever reaches you it will be through a contact I had with a friend in the French Embassy when I first came here. I’m in her room writing this as she packs. She’s leaving the Soviet Union to marry a medical student in France and has promised to try to sneak this letter out. If she does you will get it from Rouen but won’t be able to answer. I have no address to give you. I am in serious trouble—which won’t surprise you. I sleep in a freezing shack. I have little to eat. I am worn out and sick.
Here’s what happened—I was recruited in Stockholm by the KGB into Soviet espionage. I wasn’t sure I wanted to accept but finally talked myself into it. I think I thought I was being true to myself. I was flown into the Soviet Union from Finland after a boat trip across the Baltic. In Moscow I was trained to work with coding and code-breaking electronic equipment. Colonel Kovacol, in charge of my unit, twice cited me for excellent work. As you might expect it didn’t take me long to fall out of favor. Whatever reasons I came here for, I didn’t come out of a love for communism, and I underestimated the effects of totalitarianism. Men are superfluous in this society. The worst things in American life are all here, derived from a terrifying materialism. Everybody eats now but few think independently and those who do and say so usually end up in prison. It depressed me that I always go one worse when I hope to go one better. Finally I made up my mind to ask out, I requested to be sent back to Sweden. That was, of course, a stupid mistake. I should have waited until they had some reason of their own to send me out of the country.
Kovacol told me there was no way out for a foreigner who knew the secrets of their coding computers. He asked me what I thought I was accomplishing by quitting and I said I wanted to rectify a serious error. I didn’t say my life was full of them. He said the fate of a bourgeois humanist was bound to be narrow. He said I was lucky he didn’t shoot me on the spot and then discharged me from the unit without pay. The friend I had come with from Stockholm, the one who had given them my name originally, wouldn’t see me again.
For a few weeks they let me alone, then began to tail me to see if I had any contacts. I had one a short while, a man I met one night in a park. At first he didn’t trust me but then became sympathetic. When he told me he was a Jew I said you were, William, and told him about my situation here. Arkady Davidovich turned out to be a dissident. For some weeks he and his wife helped me with food parcels they hid in various spots I had been told to look in, but I stopped picking them up when I realized the secret police were tight on my tail. Arkady and his wife have two kids, a boy thirteen and a girl nine, and I didn’t want them to get into worse trouble because of me. We don’t meet any more but sometimes they manage to slip an envelope with a couple of rubles to me. I walk into a crowd and when I come out usually there are two or three rubles in my pocket. Lately—now that I am being followed day and night—that happens rarely.
I’ve tried to get into the U.S. Embassy, but the Soviet guards recognize me and won’t let me in. If I wait for an American to come out they shove me along with their nightsticks. I don’t know how they do it but when I call from a public booth the call is jammed. I hear a buzz and when I talk my voice breaks into noise. It’s as though your self had destructed.
I don’t know how much longer I can last. I’m on the move and they are generally close behind but not making the arrest, though I’ve begun to hunger for it. If I’m lucky I’ll end up in a strict-regime labor camp in the Gulag. Frankly, it would be a relief. I wouldn’t have to scrounge for bread or try to hide where they watch me hiding. I have a croupy cough and almost constant diarrhea. Maybe that’s the punishment they’ve arranged till I collapse.
I’m afraid of my fate. I’m afraid of myself for the fate I’ve created. Right now I’d give half my life to be free the other half.
I wish I could say there was something you could do for me. Maybe talk to the press? But if you do they might shoot me at once. I’ve blocked my exits. All my life I’ve been walking in a tunnel believing I was out in the open. The only really generous thing I ever really did was to stop taking food from a dissident Jew and his family.
Tell Maud I think of her a lot. My mother is my mother, and you are my father, William. Some simple things take a long time to get thought out.
Gerry.
Dubin mourned D. H. Lawrence.
In a letter to his sister-in-law Else, he said: “It is very lovely, the wind, clouds, the running sea that bursts like a blossom on the island opposite. If only I was well, and had my strength back!
“But I am so weak. And something inside me weeps black tears. I wish it would go away.”
Frieda held his ankle as he lay dying. “I held his ankle from time to time, it felt so full of life, all my days I shall hold his ankle in my hand.”
After Lawrence’s death, Middleton Murry, the ex-friend he detested, came to stand at his grave; and soon thereafter Frieda and he became lovers. Murry later wrote in his diary, “With her for the first time in my life, I know what fulfilment in love really meant.”
Kitty could not sleep. Dubin woke and saw her not sleeping.
“Haven’t you slept yet?”
“No. When will we leave for Russia?”
“When the visas come.”
“What will we do when we get there?”
“Cry out his name.”
“Maud hasn’t called.”
“I know.”
Kitty slept, snoring lightly. She spoke in her sleep, “Nat, dear Nat.”
Dubin, with sweet pleasure, remembered his mother covering him with a second blanket on a very cold night.
He lay awake, recomposing a letter to Gerry he carried in his head. Then he got out of bed and went upstairs to sleep in the boy’s bed.
A breeze blew up in the late afternoon, making sea sounds in the tops of leafless trees; at night winter dipped its cold hands into the wind. But a half-moon brightened the night-blue sky, lit, softened, as though spring might begin as moonlight, a not bad idea in a cold climate.
Dubin again worked in the barn study. Kitty hadn’t asked why he worked when or where he worked. He wrote there mornings and returned after supper till almost midnight, except those nights he left the light on and went early to Fanny’s farm. If the phone rang, he had told Kitty, he would not answer, wanted no interruptions.
The biographer, carrying a heavy birch stick, trotted through the woods and up the road to the farm. The snow had melted but at night the dirt road hardened and was ridged. In a few weeks it would be mud season. He had given up his afternoon walks and this was his new route, from house to house by way of his barn, Kitty’s Wood, the farm
, then back to the barn study to be alone a few minutes before he went home. In bed, awake as Kitty slept her early sleep, he considered fasting a day a week.
Dubin ran, this windy pre-spring night, to Fanny’s. Where else? The wind buffeted him and he ducked behind trees to catch his breath. On the road the going was easier with the wind blowing behind him. Fanny’s large barn was dark and silent. Her kitchen light was on. Through the window he saw her sitting at the table in her padded jacket and beige wool hat, reading the local paper. Snowdrop yawned at her feet. Her boots were muddy. She looked dismally tired. Dubin, concerned about her, knocked the clapper and entered, using the key she had given him. The sink was full of dirty dishes he quickly washed for her.
The farm, Fanny confessed, had seriously been worrying her. She hadn’t wanted to give it this much time and labor. Craig Bosell had fallen off a ladder in his cellar and broken his right hip; he was in the hospital. She could not replace him at the modest salary he accepted. The day after he left, one of the Toggenburgs was killed in the goat pasture by a dog that had burrowed under the wire fence. He had torn her udder and chewed off an ear. Fanny had chased the hound with an ax as Snowdrop yelped but the bloody doe was dead. Bawling, she dug the goat a grave. Dubin helped bury her.
Dubin's Lives Page 43