by Andre Dubus
“Time, you mean?”
“No. My life.”
Gracefully he turned and she followed him, on the balls of her feet, her left hand on the back of his neck, her right hand in his left, rising and swinging outward from their circle.
“Richie does, though,” he said. “Fits it in.”
“Still wants to be a priest?”
“Yes.”
“That would be funny. In this family.”
“I hope he does it. I tell you, some days I think he ought to go for one of those monasteries. Where nobody talks.”
“Trappists.”
“That’s the one. They make good preserves.”
“Great preserves. Daddy?”
“What?”
“Be happy.”
“Okay.”
“And bring Brenda here for dinner.”
“Okay.”
“A lot.”
“That’s very nice.”
“No it’s not. It’s not nice at all. I love you, Daddy. That’s all it is.”
He hugged her then, and they stood in the music in the room, holding each other, and she felt the life in his chest and hoped it would be long, and happy with love, and she wished more than she had wished for anything, in a very long time, that she could give him those, that they would flow from her heart to his as they stood embraced to a song.
EIGHT
JOAN’S LOVE had died of premature old age. She lived in a small apartment in the town of Amesbury on the Merrimack River. The apartment was on the second floor of a wooden building that years ago had housed a family. She had chosen the place because the other tenants were quiet, retired, and old (at forty-seven she was the youngest) and because her apartment had room for no one but herself to sleep. She had bought a double bed not to share but because she was accustomed to one, and she liked to roll toward its middle and spread out when she was nearing sleep. The closet would not hold all her clothes, but she was as tired of giving them attention as she was of love, and she gave clothes for all seasons to Goodwill. She placed small rugs at either side of the bed, and the rest of the floor was bare. It was old dark wood with slight undulations, and she liked it. There were two windows at the side of the room, and two at the front, and she pushed the dressing table and chest of drawers against walls, clear of the windows. Since she was on the second floor she rarely had to close the Venetian blinds, or even lower them, and nearly always she kept them raised. She liked waking to the blue or gray coming through the windows to her right, and at her feet; and going to sleep looking at their dark, and a gleam from the streetlight half a block away. Three recent and large photographs of her children, in color, hung on the wall above her bed. The other three walls were bare, their flat surfaces interrupted only by a door in one, and two windows in each of the other two. The closet was beside her bed. The two front windows were opposite the foot of the bed, above the short, slanted, blue-shingled roof of the front porch, and past that she could look down on the lawn with its two maples and one oak, and the quiet street.
A chair at the window would clutter the room, so on some nights when she could not sleep for an hour or so past her usual time, she brought a straight-backed chair from the kitchen, and sat at the window, and with the blinds raised she smoked and gazed out at the night, and opened her mind to whatever images came, casting away the ones that brought sorrow or anger or remorse, as deftly as, when snapping beans, she tossed out the ones that were wrinkled. In truth, she could have kept a chair at the window, grown used to its jutting into the little space she had, but she planned to live out her life in this quiet place, alone, and she was cautious about patterns, like becoming the old woman sitting at the window. Old age meant nothing to her; she did not care whether she attained it or not. But she did not want to look like she was living out the last days of a long life, when she was only resting from twenty-seven years of marriage. She meant to keep resting too, until someday a neighbor found her (not too long after death, she hoped), lying on her bed, open-mouthed in final peace (given her with suddenness and without pain, she hoped).
The bedroom was adjacent to the living room, whose door opened to the corridor above the stairs. The living room was small enough too, and she did not have in it a couch anyone could sleep on; she had one armchair with a hassock and floor lamp for reading, a small antique roll-top desk for paying bills and writing an occasional note to Carol, whom she saw less than the other children, and twice a year or so a letter to her brother in Monterey. There were three other chairs in a semicircle facing her armchair, and outside their circle, against the walls, were her bookshelves, filled with fiction written from 1850 to 1950, and of these her favorites were Zola, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Jean Rhys, de Maupassant, and Colette. There was a television set she rarely watched and a radio and phonograph she played every day, and at night when she came home, with the volume low both day and night, for she always felt she could hear her old neighbors, most of them living alone, either sleeping at night or napping in the afternoon or simply being quiet. She played classical music in daylight, mostly symphonies by Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, whose sounds changed the very look of the apartment, as tangibly as a fresh coat of paint on the walls. So did Bach’s cantatas, and Horowitz playing Scarlatti and Schumann, Chopin and Debussy. Larry and Brenda knew this music, yet when they talked with her about it, they might as well have tried explaining a philosophical abstraction. All she knew was that its deep beauty changed the walls and ceilings and floors of her home. Late at night she liked Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Brubeck and Ellington and Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan, and these, as she sat at the window, or leaned back in the armchair in the dark, sculpted her sadness into something strong and lovely.
On her living room wall were framed, glass-covered prints by Monet and Manet and Cézanne, and a Renoir print hung in the kitchen. Where there was room—on windowsills, the tops of bookshelves, and hanging from the kitchen ceiling—she had put potted plants. The kitchen, with its small working space, and small refrigerator and gas stove, was made for one person, and she ate there, at a table she constantly bumped as she cooked and cleaned. She had bought two chairs for the table, and only Richie or Larry sat in the extra one with any regularity, and once every month or six weeks Carol sat in it, and ate what Joan cooked and was garrulous (and honest, Joan believed) about its flavor.
The sadness that stayed with her was less an emotion than a presence, like the Guardian Angel she had believed in as a child. You never felt the Angel, as you felt shyness or confidence or affection; but often, when you had forgotten about it, you felt it standing beside you, so close that its airy body touched your side, and one large wing enfolded your back. These might be times of danger, to your body or to the self that in childhood you worried most about, the heart and soul that were your name. Or they might be times when you were flirting with the forbidden, pretending to yourself that you would only look but not touch, while knowing that the closer you approached, the more certain was your fall. Now, though, her sadness did not manifest itself only on certain occasions that were connected to it, either directly or by association. Its wing did not wait to touch her when Richie phoned, or when she phoned him, or waited in the car for him to come out of the house and go with her to her apartment; or when she saw a mother with a young son on the sidewalks of the town, or a family with a young son at the restaurant where she worked. No: the wing remained on her back, the body at her side, even when she was in good spirits, alone in her rooms or drinking after work with the other waitresses; her peaceful solitude or talk and laughter were not destroyed, but they were distracted, and so diminished.
She would rather endure carrying Richie in her womb, and the bursting pain of bearing him, than what she had suffered the day she told him and, that same day, left him, and what she had to keep enduring, it seemed, for the rest of her life. She should have left before she conceived him, but she could not wish that, because then he was no
t alive, and she could not imagine that, nor wish for it, nor survive with her sanity one day in a world he had either left or, because of her, had never joined. Yet a time had come when, still married, and living every day with Richie, she had believed if the phone rang once more, if she drove across the Merrimack to the supermarket one more time, if she cooked one more meal, or if Greg did or said or only started to do or say one of the fifty to one hundred things she could not witness without a boredom that was plummeting toward revulsion, she would go mad. But it was none of these that had defeated her. Nor was it Greg. She could make a list of his parts she disliked, even despised; but any wife could make the same sort of list, any wife who loved; or any husband, for that matter. It was that she had outlived love. A century ago she might have died in childbirth or from the flu, while she was young. Nutrition and medicine had preserved her life, yet without the resilience to love so long. Then each phone call or errand or chore, each grating part of Greg, was love’s passing bell.
The restaurant where she worked was owned by Hungarians, the chef had come from an expensive Hungarian restaurant in Boston, and Joan was proud of the good food and low prices that drew from the Merrimack Valley customers who dressed casually and worked for salaries that did not allow luxuries. The restaurant was a white wooden building with two dining rooms and an eight-stool bar, and it was in the shade of trees beside Route 110, a two-lane country road. She could have sat forever at her bedroom window with what Greg sent her twice a month, though she had asked for nothing—at least nothing material—but she worked five nights a week to be with people. She had never been a waitress, and now she was a good one, and she liked the work: liked learning the names and some of the lives of the regular customers, and knowing their drinks before they ordered, so as she turned to each one she could name the drink with a question in her voice. They would nod and praise her memory, and she knew their smiles came from a deeper source: she made them happy by making them feel welcome, by giving them what at least felt like affection, and usually was, beneath the simple exchange of money for food. While she served their tables they talked to her, and often people calling for reservations asked for her station, and always people gave her good tips. She did not need the money, but its meaning gratified her.
The kitchen closed at ten and the bar closed between twelve and one, so when she had cleared all her tables she sat with the other waitresses, at a table near the bar, and drank till closing time. She had always had a little to drink before dinner, when Greg came home, but only as a break from cooking and a greeting to her husband, and the drinks themselves were not important. But now, for the first time in her life, she knew the pleasure of finishing an intense period of fast hard work, and sitting down to drinks with the other workers; their talk was never serious, but gay and laughing, the sounds of release, and each cold drink, each cigarette, soothed her, from her tired feet and legs to her brain, till she felt as if she were talking and laughing from a hammock.
At ten-thirty that night, she was at a table with three women when she glanced down the length of the long dining room, her eyes drawn to its door that opened to the front parking lot, and she saw Larry standing at it, watching her, and knew that was why she had looked and that whatever it was, it was bad. How many times had she felt the tingling heat of lactation in her breasts when he was a boy and no longer nursed but was crying in pain? She stood, and the women stopped talking and looked at her.
“It’s my son,” she said. “I’ll see what he wants.”
“Call him over,” one said, and Joan saw another motioning her to silence, and so she knew that what was in her heart had reached her face too. Richie. It’s Richie, seeing him dead under a bent bicycle. She was walking toward Larry and he came to her and they stood between the wall and the room of tables covered for tomorrow.
“Is anything wrong?”
“Yes. I need to talk.”
“Is anything wrong. With somebody.”
“No. No, everybody’s fine.”
“Thank God. I thought something had happened.”
“Something did. But everybody’s well.”
“Good. Then let’s hear about it.”
She saw Richie in his bed, with whatever he dreamed; now she knew the trouble was love and she felt the hammock again, lifting her, and she sank into its idle swing. She could hear about love from there, without a sigh or the tensing of a muscle. She led him to an empty table opposite the end of the bar, near the television turned to a Red Sox game but without sound, and two empty tables away from her friends, and she seated him with his back to the women, to protect his face.
“Dad called me to the house last night.”
“Don’t you want a drink?”
“Yes. What’s that?”
“Vodka and tonic.”
“I’ll have one.”
She stood, and he reached out a hand that fell short of hers, and said: “Wait. Let me—”
“—Relax, and have a drink. I thought you’d come from the morgue.”
She got the drinks from young handsome black-bearded Lee at the bar, and he shook his head at her money. Larry was smoking and staring at the silent ballgame. She sat and he lit her cigarette and said: “Dad and Brenda have been seeing each other. Now they’re getting married.”
She leaned back in her chair, and studied his face.
“Well,” she said, and she saw Greg, foolish and wild, and angry and sweet, both too much and not enough of him to live in the world, let alone with one woman; at least by the time he burned out Brenda he would be nearly dead. “What about you?”
“I’m going fucking nuts. Excuse me. I’m going nuts.”
“Don’t. At least he didn’t take her from you.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You left her or you lost her. That’s all. Nothing else matters.”
“My father marrying her matters.”
“Of course it does. It stinks.”
“It’s even against the law,” he said, and he looked down at his drink, as though ducking his petulance.
“What law?”
“Massachusetts.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. But it doesn’t have anything to do with you. Listen: your father has always been a son of a bitch. That’s one reason I loved him for so long.”
“Why?”
“Because he never wants to be one. It was exciting, watching him struggle.”
“How long would you have stayed? If it weren’t for Richie. The accident.”
“Richie was no accident.”
“Really? You were—” He closed his eyes, his lips quietly counting. “Thirty-five.”
“Your father thought it would save us.”
“Did you?”
“He could always talk me into things.”
“I told him last night I wasn’t coming home again. Or to work either.”
She nodded, watching him. You knew so much about your children; too much. They changed so little from infancy that, if you dared, you could come very near predicting their lives by the time they started school. At least the important parts: Richie had always been solitary and at peace with it; Carol had wanted happiness whose source was being loved, and she had looked for it with each new friend, had changed her child’s play and dress and even speech with these friends, and had never looked for it by doing something she loved, or even doing nothing at all, in her own solitude; and Larry, the one with talents, with real gifts, had always waited for someone—a friend, his family, a teacher—to see those gifts and encourage him. He could no more leave his father now than he could have twenty years ago.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I understand. But I don’t think you will.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll only break your heart, and Richie’s, and your father’s.”
“Not yours?”
“I live here now. You can’t work at the stores? Really?”
“No.”
“But you don’t hate hi
m.”
“No.”
“You’re just hurt.”
“Just.”
“Want another?”
“All right.”
Lee refused her money again, and she thanked him with the freedom she had earned: very early, on this job, she had let men know that she did not want a lover. She had done it with subtlety and, if that wasn’t clear, with kindness; and she accepted free drinks because she was a worker there, and a good one.
“I love this time of night,” she said to Larry. “You should come in more often, about now.”
“Maybe I will.”
“We have fun. What about you? Do you have fun?”
“When I’m working.”
“At the stores? Or performing?”
“Dancing. Acting. Are you coming next week?”
“Yes. Somebody’s working for me. Listen: can I tell you something?”
“After last night, anybody can tell me anything.”
“You’re a good dancer, a good actor. I’ve seen you, and I know. I don’t have the training to judge like a professional. But I feel it. But you only want to be a performer. Then you wait for it to happen. You don’t go after it. You let too much get taken from you. You wait too much for things to happen. You think too Goddamn much.”
“Jesus.”
“You know it’s true. I’m not trying to hurt you. I want to tell you something.”
“What’s that got to do with Dad marrying my Goddamn ex-wife?”
“Look at you. You can’t even sound angry when you say that. I think some artists would be set free by all this. No more father, no more job, no ex-wife in the same town. They’d use this like a train to take them away. New York; wherever. Just throw themselves at the world: here I am. What makes me feel so—what gives me pain about you is that you won’t. So sometimes I think you got just enough of a gift to be a curse, and not enough to be a blessing. You share that with your father.”
“What’s his gift?”
“The second part: here I am, world. And the world always sees him. But there’s no talent to see. Only the energy, the drive.”