by Andre Dubus
The taste of toothpaste was fading, and he could taste the bacon and syrup again as he rode onto the athletic field and realized that among the faces he scanned, he was looking only for Melissa. She was not there. For the rest of the morning, playing softball with nineteen girls and boys, he watched the trees, where he had stood with her after Mass, watched for her, in the next moment, to emerge in her cut-offs and blue denim shirt. And he watched the road that began at the field and went back to his house and then hers. He watched secretly, while waiting to bat, talking to friends behind the backstop; or standing in left field (because it was Jim Rice’s position), he watched between pitches and after plays. When he looked from the outfield to the road, most of it hidden by trees along its sides, or looked at the stand of trees behind the first base line, the grass and earth he stood on seemed never touched before, in this way, by anyone; and that earth seemed part of him, or him part of it, and its cover of soft grass.
He remembered her scents and the taste of her mouth; he no longer tasted the syrup and bacon, save once in the third inning when he belched. He tried to taste her, and inhale her, and he smelled grass and his leather glove, the sweat dripping down his naked chest and sides, the summer air that was somehow redolent of freedom: a warm stillness, a green and blue smell of leaves and grass and pines and the sky itself, though he knew that was not truly part of it, but he did believe he could faintly smell something alive: squirrels that moved in the brush and climbed trunks, and the crows and blackbirds and sparrows that surrounded the softball game in trees, and left it on wings, flying across the outfield to the woods where he cross-country skied, or beyond it to the fields where now the corn was tall.
By the eighth inning, and nearing lunchtime, Melissa had not come. He imagined her pausing with vacuum cleaner, or sponge mop, or dust cloth, to wipe her brow with the back of her sun-browned forearm. He tried to imagine her mind: whether in it she saw him, or softball, or lunch and something cold to drink, and it struck him, and the sole-shaped spots of earth and grass beneath him, that he did not know what she liked to eat and drink. He thought of chili-dogs, hamburgers, grilled cheese with tomato, Coca-Cola, chocolate milk, then realized he was thinking of his own lunches, so he thought of Brenda, of tunafish salad, egg salad, and iced tea; but he could not put those into Melissa’s mind. Then, picking up a bat and moving to the on-deck circle (there was no circle, and no one kneeled, waiting to hit; but to him there was a white circle around him), he saw what her mind saw. The image made him smile, yet what he felt was more loving and sorrowful than amused: she wanted a Marlboro. Her mother was in the house, working with her, and more than anything in her life now, Melissa wanted to smoke a cigarette.
FOUR
IT WAS FITTING, Larry thought, that he should be seeing Brenda in daylight, whose hours had so often haunted him with remorse. As he drove slowly on Main Street, the hands of the old clock outside the clothing store joined at noon, and the whistle at the box factory blew. It blew at seven in the morning, at noon, at twelve-thirty and one, and at five in the afternoon; and sometimes he wondered, with sorrow and anger whose colliding left him finally weary and embittered—a static emotion he believed he should never feel, at twenty-five—whether the timing of the whistle had once ordered every worker in town to factories, and to two shifts for lunch, and then to their homes. That was long ago, when people called the town the Queen Slipper City because the workers made women’s shoes; but that market was lost now, to Italian shoes, and the few remaining factories did not need a whistle you could hear wherever you stood inside the town. If you wanted to see factory workers, you had to be parked on one of the old brick streets, outside the old brick factory, when the men and women entered in the morning, left in the afternoon. He imagined those streets in the old days: thousands of men and women carrying lunchboxes, speaking to each other in English, Italian and Greek, Armenian and French, Polish and Lithuanian, walking toward the factories, disappearing into them at seven o’clock, as if the whistle roared at their backs.
Yet he was the son of an entrepreneur, and worked for him too. His father had worked at a shoe factory as a young boy, long enough to vow that someday he would never again work for another man. Now he made a lot of money selling a frozen tantalizer of people’s craving for sweets. It was good ice cream, made by another man who owned and worked his own business in the Merrimack Valley, and Larry’s father, by charming him and paying him well, was his only distributor. Ice cream. It seemed to Larry the only delightful food of childhood that adults so loved: they never spoke of, or indulged in, candy and cookies and popsicles, even malts and milkshakes, as they did ice cream. The faces of both men and women became delighted, even mischievous, as they said: Let’s go get some ice cream. So his father sold it. He was good to his workers, he did not keep them working so few hours a week that he could pay them under the minimum wage, and the young people who worked his counters started at minimum wage, no matter how few their hours were, and his father raised their salaries as soon as he approved of their work. Since he was at the stores every day, working with them, they were soon either gone or making more money. Now his father was planning a way for all workers, above their salaries, to share in the profits, and was working on a four-day week for his daily and nightly managers, because he believed they should be with their young families, and he said there ought to be a way of allowing that and still selling fucking ice cream. This was as deeply as Larry had talked with his father about the philosophy of work in society; but Larry thought of him, a man who seldom read a book, as a good-spirited, money-making, gun-carrying anarchist. And a man now who had violated the lines and distances between them: lines they had drawn and distances created through the years, so they could sit in the same room, in the comfort of acknowledged respect and love.
He crossed the bridge on Main Street, turned right and followed the Merrimack River, glimpsed a sparkle of sun on its moving surface, this river that law and people were allowing to live again as a river ought to, so that now instead of receiving waste along its upriver banks, it was hosting salmon at its mouth. He turned left, passing an old cemetery where once he had walked, reading gravestones, but there were too many dead children and babies there, and he left, his head lowered by images of what were now nuisance illnesses or complications of birth taking the suffering breath from children, and breaking forever the hearts of mothers and fathers. His car climbed under trees and past large old houses and he reached the one where Brenda lived, in an apartment at the rear, on the first floor, and in the lawn behind her kitchen was a birdbath in the middle of a fountain that looked as old as the eighteenth-century tombstones in the cemetery. But he drove on.
Just for a while, up the hill, and around the reservoir where the purple loosestrife was growing now, purple-flowered stalks standing in the marshy ground near the bank; Canada geese were on the water, and across it were tall woods. A long steep hill was there, but you could only see it in winter when the leaves had fallen, and now it was marked by the rising green curve of trees. He turned onto Route 495, three lanes going east to the sea, cutting through wooded hills. Just for a while, so he could breathe against the quickness of breath and coolness beneath his heart that were stage fright before a performance, when he needed it; but, going to see Brenda, it felt too much like the fear and shame he believed he deserved.
He did not know how it started: somewhere in his mind, his spirit, as though on what he called now—and then too, sometimes, then too—those Faustian nights of their marriage, he swayed in feigned drunkenness to a melody he had dreamed. Rose from the couch in pantomime of a tired and drunken husband, waved and sighed goodnight to Brenda and the man they had brought home with them from one of a succession of bars in neighboring towns. In these bars there was music, usually one man or woman with a guitar, and the bar stools had arms and were leather-cushioned, the bar had a padding of leather at its front, and a long mirror behind it, and men and women alone came to drink and hope, but few of them to both hope a
nd believe they would get what he and Brenda trapped them into receiving. Ah, teamwork: he and Brenda, and Mephistopheles. Start talking to a man alone, Brenda sitting between him and Larry, the man at first cordial, guardedly friendly, drawn to Brenda (Larry could see that, over the rim of his glass, in the mirror), but for the first drink or two the man’s eyes still moved up and down the mirror, and to the door, for it was Friday night and time was running out and he was wasting it with a married couple. Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night. That was Marlowe’s Faustus speaking to time, as Mephistopheles approached on it. Yes. The line itself was from Ovid’s Amores. Yes.
The highway rose to his right while curving to his left and he was going up and around too fast, and he stopped breathing as he shifted down, into the curving descent, and headed north. He breathed again, and slowed for the exit to the New Hampshire beaches. Easy enough, those nights. Lovely enough, was Brenda, so at the bar she had to say very little by way of promise; her eyes spoke to the man, and when Larry went so often to the men’s room, she touched the man’s hand, murmured to him, and always afterward she told Larry what she said, and always it was nothing, really, or almost nothing: something gentle, something flirtatious, that any woman might say to a man; because, Larry knew, she could no more say Come home and fuck me than she could sing an aria. She could dance one, though. Larry also knew, and she admitted it, that she feared risking the man’s startled No way, lady, and that, equally, or perhaps above all, she delighted in mystery, so long as she was the source of it. The men followed them home for a nightcap.
Only one refused her: a young businessman from Tennessee, on one of those trips to another state, to visit another company, to observe, to comment, to learn, to advise, and the way they spoke of it, you expected to see them wearing field uniforms of some sort, military or civilian, green and new and creased, and to have binoculars hanging from their necks, pistols from their belts. In their living room, the man from Tennessee had passionately kissed her—or returned her kiss—but said Back home a man can get shot doing this, and fled to his motel. But the others stayed. Larry had a drink, sitting beside Brenda on the couch; then pleading sudden drunkenness or fatigue or both, he would leave them, shutting the hall door behind him, going the few paces into the bathroom where he would shut that door too, loudly, and stand at the toilet, even at times sway there, because his performance did not stop the moment he left the living room. Whether he used it or not, he flushed the toilet so they would hear that further sound of his drunken decline of consciousness. At the lavatory he stood before the fluorescent-lighted mirror and ran the tap full force, then shut it off and brushed his hair and tossed the brush clattering to the counter that held what he called Brenda’s spices: save for his shaving cream and aftershave lotion and deodorant and razor and hairbrush, the surface was nearly covered with bottles and jars, their glass or plastic or perhaps their contents aqua and gold and amber and lilac and white, creams and fluids whose labels he had never read, nor contents sniffed in their containers, because he did not want to alter their effect when he breathed them from her flesh. In the first year of their marriage he had worked hard at cooking something more than broiled chops or fish and steamed vegetables, and had learned too much, so that now he enjoyed meals both a little more and a little less, because after a few bites he could name their seasonings.
Leaving the bathroom, he looked always at the closed door to the living room; beyond it, their voices were lower than the music, so he could hear only Brenda’s soft tones, and the man’s deeper ones, but no words amid Weather Report or Joni Mitchell or Bonnie Raitt. He walked heavily down the hall, to the bedroom, and shut that door too with force, enough for them to hear if indeed they still listened. Then the music was faint, and he had to concentrate to hear a melody as, at the opposite side of the apartment, he undressed anyway with the sounds of a drunk: sitting in a chair he took off his boots and threw them toward the closet. He left his clothes on the chair, brought cigarettes and lighter to the bedside table, and lay on his back in the dark, naked, warming under blanket and quilt in winter, or a light blanket in fall and spring, and summer was best when he lay under nothing at all, and waited.
He imagined the living room, drew it into the bedroom with him, so he did not see dark walls and light curtains and pale ceiling, the silhouettes of chairs and chest and dressing table with its mirror, but black-haired Brenda on the couch, and the man across the coffee table from her. Some nights they would dance, and that was how she let them know, though most nights she did not have to: her face alone was enough, and they crossed the room to sit beside her on the couch Larry had left. Always she knew how much passion a man could bear before he would risk discovery by the husband. Except with the exploring businessman from Tennessee, haunted by shootings in the hills, or perhaps something else: the Old Testament, or Jesus. He won’t wake till noon, she would say, her tongue moving on an ear, a throat.
Sometimes his hand slid under the covers, where his erection pushed them into a peak, or on warm nights his hand rose to it, standing in the dark air, and he touched it, held it, but nothing more. Though some nights he did more, and still waited unslaked for Brenda, listening to the faint music, seeing their dance slowing to an embrace, a kiss, their feet still now, only their bodies swaying to the rhythm. Or he listened for the man’s feet crossing the floor, the weight of two bodies on the couch. He never heard any sound but music, then a long silence when the cassette ended. He wanted Brenda to put a tape recorder in her purse, leave the purse in the kitchen when they brought someone home, and he would turn on the recorder before he left them and went to the bedroom, and she would bring the purse to the floor by the couch. But she was afraid of the clicking sound when it stopped. He wanted to go out the bedroom window, and around the apartment to the living room; Brenda wanted that too, but they were both afraid a neighbor would see him looking in the window, and call the police. And he was afraid to creep down the hall, and listen at the living room door; each time he wanted to, but was overwhelmed by imagining the man suddenly leaving Brenda to piss, opening the door to find him crouched and erect in the hall.
So he heard and saw her in his mind where, in the third and final year of their marriage, he so often and so passionately saw her with a lover that one night, set free by liquor and Brenda’s flesh in his arms, he frightened himself by telling her. She increased both his fear and elation when, without questions or reflection, she said she would do it, and her legs encircled his waist. They were in a dance company then, were performing a dance together, and within the week they were going after rehearsals to bars where no one knew them. On the third night they brought home a young bachelor, a manager of a branch bank, and Larry stayed with them nearly too long, so when he left for the bedroom he pretended drunkenness that was real, and when he lay on the bed the room moved, so he stood and sat and stood, until he heard her light feet in the hall, and he lay on the bed and watched her enter the room and cross it in the dark, and it was worth the fear.
His fear was not of anything concrete; certainly it was not rooted in jealousy, for he shared and possessed those dark recesses of Brenda’s spirit, so her apparent infidelity was in truth a deeper fidelity. Also, the fear burned to white ash in what he felt as he waited on those nights. The minutes passed slowly, their seconds piercing him with a thrill like that of a trapezist who, swinging back and forth, lives in those moments of his hands on the bar, his body gaining speed and arc, while also living the two and a half somersaults he will perform, and the moment his hands will meet and grip the empty trapeze swinging toward him, and, if an inch or instant off, his fall to earth. Then she was in the hall, then at the bedroom door, and it swung in and she was framed in it, a cigarette glowing at her side, then she crossed the room. Lying on the bed, he opened his arms. She lay on top of him, her tongue darting and fluttering in his mouth as he unzipped and unbuttoned her clothing, then pushed her up until she was sitting; he lifted his legs around her and off the bed, and stood. He to
ok the cigarette from her and, before putting it out, held it to her lips, then his own, tasting lipstick. He lifted her to her feet and took off her clothes and let them fall to the floor as she began telling him, in the voice she either saved for or only had on these nights, in her throat, but soft, a breathy contralto, and he kneeled and pulled her pants down her smooth hard legs: kissed me for a long time, and touching my breasts, and I started rubbing his thigh and he put his hand inside my pants—
Sometimes he believed that first he remarked that part of her, saw in her brown eyes and open lips bridled yet promiscuous lust, and then his visions of her and a lover began. Then he also wondered if he were truly the one who changed the velocity and trajectory of their marriage, sending or leading them to that terrible midnight. Run slowly, slowly, horses of the night. And he recalled a teacher in college, talking about the mystery of life in general, of plants in the specific, saying that perhaps it was not man’s idea to drink and smoke, that rather we were lured by the desire of the tobacco leaf and grape: smoke me, they whispered; drink me.
Yet it was she who said finally: There’s something dark in us, something evil, and it has to be removed, and he told her We can just stop then; we won’t even talk about it again, not ever, it’ll be something we did one year. He kept insisting in the face of her gaze that lasted, it seemed, for days and nights: those unblinking eyes, sorrowful yet firm, looking at him as though they saw not his face but his demons; saw them with pity for both him and herself; and seeing his demons reflected in her eyes, he shrank from them, and from her, and from himself. Then he blamed himself for all of it, and pleaded for forgiveness, and the chance to live with her in peace as man and wife, and her eyes and her closed lips told him he understood too little about how far they had gone. Then she told him: You take too much credit. Or blame. I liked it. I like it. I could do it right now, with you standing there watching. Her eyes left his and he watched them move about the living room and settle on the couch before they looked at him again. This isn’t our home anymore, she said. It isn’t anybody’s. Or it’s too many people’s. Then he grieved and so could not think, not for weeks, then months, as he lived alone and worked for his father and at night rehearsed dances or plays and then went home and wondered, with fear and pain and nothing else, what she was doing that moment, and with whom.