Andre Dubus: Selected Stories

by Andre Dubus

  If you weren’t there, on the job, they either stole from you, at the least by giving away your ice cream to their friends and taking some home as well, or they screwed up in other ways, and the operation went lax, and you had two stores selling ice cream but something was wrong. So he was at both stores every day, and he sometimes worked the counters there too, and washed dishes, and swept floors, all of this to keep things going, Goddamnit, and because he could not be idle while others worked, and every night he was there to close out the register; he took the money with him for night deposit, the .45 in his belt till he was in the car, then on the seat beside him. He carried the pistol in his hand when, at the bank, he walked from the car to the night depository. He had a permit. When he told the police chief, who approved the permit, how much money he carried to the bank each night, the chief asked if he had ever thought of buying a safe. Greg shrugged. He said he liked doing it this way, but that each store did have a safe he used only on nights when he couldn’t get there, but anybody could get money from a safe if they wanted to so badly that they’d take the whole damn thing. He alternated the stores, taking the money from the inland one on one night, the beach store on the next, so his manager at one store would not always be last to be relieved of the money, and so last to go home. But most nights, when he reached the second store, his people were still cleaning up anyway, and he helped them with that. Some nights he thought he did not use a safe because he hoped some bastard, or bastards, would try to take his money. His pattern was easy enough to learn, if anyone were interested.

  Larry was the only man he knew whom he could trust to do everything, and Larry had never wanted to give himself fully to the stores. During college he had needed his days free, and after college he needed his nights for dance or play rehearsals. This was not a disappointment for Greg; when he felt anything at all about Larry’s lack of involvement with the stores, it was relief, for he wanted Larry to be his own man and not spend his life following his father. He believed the business of fatherhood was to love your children, take care of them, let them grow, and hope they did; and to keep your nose out of their lives. He did not know, and could not remember if he had ever known, whether Larry hoped to be a professional actor or dancer, perhaps even an established one with all the money and its concomitant bullshit, or if he was content to work with the amateur theater and dance companies in the Merrimack Valley. As far as he knew, Larry had never said, and he had never asked, and Larry’s face had always been hard for him to read.

  But before Brenda, when with no woman or a faceless one for his daydream he rode the Waterway and walked the Amazon on his dark sundeck at night, he had hoped that a time would come when Larry would want or need a break from performing, and would want to work the stores for a few months, and earn much more money, perhaps for an adventure of his own, a shot at New York or Hollywood or wherever else the unlucky bastards born with talent had to go to sell themselves. But not after last night. Probably, after last night, he would not ever show up at the store again, unless it was to collect his final paycheck. As difficult as it was for Greg to believe, as much as his heart and his body refused to accept it, both of them—the heart surrounded by cool fluttering, and the body weary as though it had wrestled through the night while he slept—threatening to quit on him if Larry simply vanished, that was what Larry had said he would do.

  Greg had phoned him to come and have a night-cap, at ten at the earliest, saying he had work to do till then. He had no work, unless waiting for Richie to go to bed was work, and finally he supposed it was. Greg had phoned his two managers and told them to put the money in the safes. He did not know what he expected from Larry. An unpredictable conversation or event was so rare in his life that, as well as shyness, guilt, and shame, he felt a thrill that both excited him and deepened his guilt. He brought Larry up to the living room and tried to begin chronologically. He saw his mistake at once, for early in Greg’s account Larry saw what was coming and, leaning forward in his chair, said: “Are you going to tell me you’ve been seeing Brenda?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe this.”

  Greg looked at the floor.

  “It’s divorce that did it,” he said.

  “Whose?”

  “Yours. Mine.” He looked at Larry. “Fucking divorce. You think I chose her?”

  “What am I supposed to think?” Larry said, and was out of the chair: he never seemed to stand up from one, there was no visible effort, no pushing against the chair arms, or even a forward thrust of his torso; he rose as a snake uncoils, against no resistance at all, and Greg fixed on that detail, finding in it his son of twenty-five years, holding that vision while the room and Larry and Greg himself faded in a blur of confusion and unpredictability.

  “It just happened,” Greg said. “It always just happens.”

  “Beautiful. What happened to will?”

  Greg stood and stepped toward him.

  “Don’t talk to me about will.” And they were lost, both of them, in anger, in pride, facing each other, sometimes even circling like fighters, then one would spin away, stride to a window, and stare out at the dark trees of the back lawn; and it was at one of those times when Larry was at the window, smoking, silent, that Greg watched his back and shoulders for a moment, then took their long-emptied and tepid beer cans down to the kitchen, returned with beer and opened and placed one, over Larry’s shoulder, onto the windowsill, then opened his own and, standing halfway across the room from Larry, spoke softly to the back of his head.

  “You have to know how it started, you have to know the accident. The women, you know: when there’s a divorce, they get dropped. You know what I mean. They lose the friends they had through the marriage. The husband’s friends. Goddamn if I know why. Doesn’t matter if the husband was the asshole. Still it happens. And they’re out of his family too. So I’d have her over for dinner. After you guys split up. Her and Richie and me. Shit, I—” Now he did not know, and in a glimpse of his future knew that he never would know, why he had invited her, not even once a week and not only to dinner, but ice-skating and cross-country skiing, always with Richie, and finally canoeing and swimming in lakes, and by June when the ocean was warm enough Richie still went with them, but he and Brenda were lovers. “I just didn’t want her to be alone. To feel like the family blamed her.”

  “The family?” Larry said to the window screen. “You and Richie?”

  “Well, Carol’s not here. And Mom’s—”

  “—Come on, Pop.”

  “Will you let me explain?”

  “Go on. Explain.” He spoke to the window still, to the dark outside, and Greg was about to tell him to turn around, but did not.

  “That’s how it started. Or why it started. I’ll leave all that analyzing to you. All it does is make your tires spin deeper in the hole.”

  “That might be good, depending on the hole.”

  “Jesus. What happened is, sometime in the spring there, I started loving her.”

  “Great.” Now he turned, swallowed from his beer, looked at Greg. “I knew you and Richie were doing things with her. He told me.”

  “What did you think about it?”

  “I tried not to think anything about it. So I thought it was good for Richie. He likes her a lot. I even thought it was good for her.”

  “But not for me.”

  “Like I said, I tried not to think anything about it. It looks like one of us should have. Mostly you. What do you mean, you started loving her? Are we talking about fucking?”

  “Come on, Larry.”

  “Well, are we?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m staying on the surface: my little brother and my father have been taking care of my ex-wife.”

  “You want to hear me say it. Is that it?”

  “Isn’t that why you called me here?”

  Greg pinched his beer can, pressing it together in its middle, and said: “I called you here to say I’m going to marry h
er.”

  Like wings, Larry’s arms went out from his body, his beer in one hand.

  “Marry her? Marry her?”

  “Larry, look; wait, Larry, just stand there. I’ll get us a beer. You want something different? I got everything—”

  “—You sure the fuck do.”

  “Come on, Larry. Scotch, rum, tequila, vodka, gin, bourbon, brandy, some liqueurs—”

  “—I’ll take mescal.”

  “You’ll take tequila.”

  “And everything else, it seems.”

  Greg left him standing with his empty can, and carrying his own bent one descended the short staircase, got the tequila from one cabinet, a plate from another, took a lime from the refrigerator and quartered it on the cutting board, put the lime and salt shaker and shot glass and bottle on the plate, then opened himself a beer. Upstairs he walked past Larry and laid the plate on top of the television set near where Larry stood. Greg sat in an armchair across the room.

  “Let me talk to you about love,” he said.

  “Paternal?”

  “Love, Goddamnit. I don’t believe I feel it the way you do.”

  “Looks like you do. You even chose the same woman.”

  “I didn’t choose. Now let me talk. Please. You get to be forty-seven, you love differently. I remember twenty-five. Jesus, you can hardly work, or do anything else; you wake up in the morning and your heart’s already full of it. You want to be with her all the time. She can be a liar, a thief, a slut—you don’t see it. All you see is her, or what you think is her, and you can walk off a roof with a shingle and hammer in your hands, just thinking about her. But at forty-seven, see, it’s different. There’s not all that breathlessness. Maybe by then a man’s got too many holes in him: I don’t know. It’s different, but it’s deeper. Maybe because it’s late, and so much time has been pissed away, and what’s left is—is precious. And love—Brenda, for me—is like a completion of who you are. It’s got to do with what I’ve never had, and what I’ll never do. Do you understand any of that?”

  “All of it,” Larry said, and stepped to the television set, and, with his back to Greg, poured a shot of tequila, sprinkled salt onto his thumb, licked it off, drank with one swallow, then put a wedge of lime in his mouth and turned, chewing, to Greg. “But it sounds like you could have had that with anybody.”

  “No. Those feelings came from her. I didn’t feel them before.”

  “All right. All right, then. But why marry, for Christ’s sake?”

  “I need it. She needs it. It’s against the law, in Massachusetts. We’ll have to do it some other place. But I’m going to see Brady. See if he can work on changing the law.”

  “You’re bringing this shit to the fucking legislature?”

  “Yes.”

  “God damn. Why don’t you just fuck her?”

  “Larry. Hold on, Larry.”

  “I am holding on, Goddamnit.”

  Larry’s face was reddened, his breath quick; he half-turned toward the television set, picked up the bottle and shot glass, then replaced them without pouring. He looked at Greg, and breathed deeply now, his fists opening and closing at his sides, in front of his pelvis, at his sides. Then, at the peak of a deep breath, he said quietly: “You have to marry her,” and exhaled, and in the sound of his expelled breath Greg heard defeat and resignation, and they struck his heart a blow that nearly broke him, nearly forced him to lower his face into his hands and weep.

  “Yes,” he said. So many times in his life, perhaps all of his life, or so his memory told him, he had stood his ground against opponents: most of them in the flesh, men or women whose intent was to walk right through him, as if he were not there, as if the man he was did not even occupy the space that stood in their way; there had been the other opponents too, without bodies, the most threatening of all: self-pity, surrender to whatever urged him to sloth or indifference or anomie or despair. Always he had mustered strength. But now he felt the ground he held was as vague as a principle that he had sworn to uphold, and he could not remember feeling anything at all about it, yet was defending it anyway because he had said he would. The word marry was as empty of emotion for him as, right now, was the image of Brenda’s face. And it struck him that perhaps she too, like so much else, like Goddamn near everything else, would become a duty. Because when you fought so much and so hard, against pain like this as well as the knee-deep bullshit of the world, so you could be free to lie in the shade of contentment and love, the great risk was that you would be left without joy or passion, and in the long evenings of respite and solitude would turn to the woman you loved with only the distracted touch, the distant murmurs of tired responsibility. Again he said: “Yes.”

  “She’ll want children, you know,” Larry said.

  Greg shrugged.

  “You’ll give them to her?”

  “There’s always a trade-off.”

  “What the fuck does that mean?”

  “You can’t marry a young woman, then turn around and refuse to have kids.”

  Larry turned to the television, poured tequila, and, ignoring both salt and lime, drank it, and Greg watched the abrupt upward toss of his head. Larry put the glass on the plate, his downward motion with it hard, just hard enough so it did not crack the plate; but the striking of the thick-bottomed glass on china created in the room a sudden and taut silence, as though Larry had cocked a gun they both knew he would not actually use.

  “You do that, Pop,” he said, facing the corner behind the television. “I’m going.”

  Then he was walking past Greg and out of the room, and Greg moved in front of him, and when Larry sidestepped, Greg did too; Larry stopped.

  “Where?” Greg said.

  Larry started to go around him but Greg stepped in front of him, looked at his eyes that were sorrowful and already gone from the room, as if they looked at a road in headlights, or a bed somewhere in a stripped and womanless room, or simply at pain itself and the enduring of it, and Greg thought: Why they must have looked that way with Brenda, around the end, they must—

  “Where are you going?”

  “Away. And I don’t want your blessing. I’ve already got your curse.”

  Then, very fast, and with no touch at all, not even a brush of arm, of sleeve, he was around Greg and across the short distance to the stairs, where Greg watched his entire body, then torso and arms and head, then the head, the hair alone, vanish downward. He stood listening to Larry’s feet going down the second flight. He listened to the first door, to the entry way and, as it closed, to the front door open and close, not loudly as with the glass and plate, but a click that seemed in the still summer night more final than a slamming of wood into wood.

  III

  RICHIE PRAYED Please Jesus Christ Our Lord help us as he went up the stairs into the kitchen; then he saw his father standing on the east sundeck. His back was to Richie, and a coffee mug rested on the wall, near his hip. Then he turned, smiled, raised the mug to his lips, blew on the coffee, and drank. Beyond him were the maples that grew near the house, at the edge of the woods.

  “Pancake batter’s ready,” he said. “Bacon’s in the skillet. You want eggs too?”

  “Sure.”

  His father stepped into the kitchen, and slid the screen shut behind him; at the stove he turned on the electric burner under the old black iron skillet where strips of bacon lay. From the refrigerator behind him he took a carton of eggs and a half-gallon jar of orange juice, poured a glass of it, and gave it to Richie, who stood a few paces from his father, drinking, waiting, as his father placed a larger iron skillet beside the first one, where grease was spreading from the bacon. His father poured a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and Richie knew now it was coming: what he wanted neither to hear, nor his father to be forced to tell. So when his father began, looking from the bacon to Richie, stepping to the counter opposite the stove to stir the batter, back to the stove to look at the bacon and turn on the burner under the second skillet, all the
while glancing at Richie, meeting his eyes, and talking about love and living alone, or at least without a wife, and how Richie living here made him happy, very happy, but a man needed a wife too, it was nature’s way, and a man wasn’t complete without one, and that he, Richie, should also have a woman in the house, that was natural too, and come to think of it natural must come from the word nature, and the needs that Mother Nature put in people; or God, of course, God, Richie stopped him. He said: “I heard you and Larry last night.”

  For a moment his father stood absolutely still, the spatula in one hand, the cigarette in the other halted in its ascent to his lips. Then he moved again: drew on the cigarette, flicked its ash into the garbage disposal in the sink beside the stove, turned the bacon, leaned the spatula on the rim of the skillet, then faced Richie.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I want you to be happy.”

  Blushing, his father said: “Well—” He looked at the floor. “Well, son, that’s—” He raised his eyes to Richie’s. “Thank you,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at the bacon, then back at Richie. “You like Brenda?”