by Andre Dubus
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 took 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.
They had lived apart for over a year and were amicably divorced (he did not even have to go to court) and still all he knew, or thought, was that somehow it had to do with his youth: that had he been older (as my father is, he thought, driving now past a salt marsh, nearing the sea; as my father is) he would not have been so awed and enslaved by her passion, and his too; but without hers his own was ordinary, as it had been before her, as it was since he lost her. So her passion. Older, he believed, he would not have explored it; he would have left it in her depths, like a buried, undetonated bomb. That was all he knew now, and perhaps that had been the source of his fear on those nights, as he lay waiting.
Ahead of him was a bridge over a tidal stream, beyond it was the junction with the road that paralleled the sea; then he saw a farm stand on his side of the bridge, and he slowed and signaled and turned onto the dirt and gravel in front of the stand, a simple place: a rectangular roof resting on four posts and only one wall, at the rear, and in its shade were the boxes of fruit and vegetabl
es, and an old woman behind a counter whose surface was just wide enough to hold a scale and cash register. She spoke to him as he chose tomatoes; she told him they were good, and the corn was picked fresh this morning. He praised the tomatoes and they talked about the long dry spell, and how so much of last summer was cool and rainy, and last fall was more like summer than summer was. He took three large tomatoes that Brenda could eat today and tomorrow, then nine more with graduated near-ripeness that she could place in the kitchen window, to ripen in the sun, and he imagined each of them red on a new day. In his heart he sang: My true love brought to me three red tomatoes, nine tomatoes ripening, then he remembered as a boy hunting grouse, which some natives here called partridges, with his father; and seeing him and his father walking armed into woods made him pause, holding the last tomato above the crisp paper bag. Then he started talking to the woman again, asked how her stand was doing, and she said Pretty well, and weighed the tomatoes and punched the register and said You know how it is, and he said he did, and paid her, and left.
So he did not go to the sea, but back to 495, and to Brenda’s, sadly now, the stage fright gone at some time he did not remember. She came to the door barefoot and wearing white shorts and a red tee shirt, and he could not speak. He wanted to hold her very tightly, in silence, then move her backward, with the grace of a dance, to the couch, pull her shirt up past her shoulders and hair and above her head and raised arms, and fumble at her shorts. The couch was a new one; that is, it was a year old. They had sold all the furniture in their apartment, and left it like a box that had contained their marriage.
“I brought you some tomatoes,” he said, and handed her the bag; she took it at its top, and the weight lowered her hand.
“Come in the kitchen,” she said, and her voice was all right, not impenetrable like her eyes, like her lips had been. They had shown neither surprise nor guilt, nor pity, nor dislike—none of the emotions he had imagined as he drove to the house, walked around it to her door at the back. She had finished lunch, and he recognized its traces: jellied madrilène had been in a bowl, cottage cheese and lettuce on a plate, and a small wooden bowl held dressing from her salad. A tall glass was half-filled with tea and melting ice. She offered him some, and he said Yes, that would be good, and at the counter, with her back to him, she squeezed a wedge of lime over a glass, dropped in the wedge, went to the freezer for ice, then set the glass in front of him and poured the tea. She turned her back to him, and exclaimed over the tomatoes as she took them out of the bag, and put the nine in the window and the three in the refrigerator. He said to her body bent at the vegetable bin: “Are you dancing?”
“Only alone.”
She straightened, shut the door, then sat opposite him and lit a cigarette from her pack on the table.
“Here?” he said.
“Yes. I’ll get back with a company soon. When things are settled.”
“Right.”
“Are you?”
“We have a performance next week.”
“What are you doing?”
“One I choreographed. To Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major.”
“That’s ambitious. The whole thing?”
“Second movement. Adagio Assai. It’s nine and a half minutes.”
“It’s beautiful. I’d like to see it.”
“Would you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you?”
“Yes.”
He reached to his shirt pocket for a cigarette, but stopped and his hand went to her Benson and Hedges, and holding the gold pack, and shaking out a cigarette, he felt for a moment married to her again, in this apartment, all the darkness left behind them in the other place, as if their only trouble had been renting an apartment that was cursed, evil, that had to be fled or exorcised. Then the illusion ended, and he felt his eyes brimming, and he could not remember what he had come to say. Last night he had wanted to come to her in rage, but he was in too much pain then to drive here, to knock and enter, let alone yell at her what was in his mind. She looked up from tapping ash into the ashtray (it was new too; or a year old) and saw the tears in his eyes, then her hand covered his and she sat rubbing the back of his palm. He could say nothing at all. With the back of his other hand he wiped his eyes. Then he knew why he had come: in love, and simply to look at her, to sit like this, for a few minutes resurrected from their time together before they destroyed their capacity or perhaps their right to share it till one of them died. She was silent. But those dark brown eyes were not: they were wet, and then tears distinct as silver beads went down her dark cheeks. Her full lips, too, were those of a woman whose heart was keening, and he was certain he would never again see her face like this, for him, and he committed it to memory.
“Please don’t ever tell him,” he said.
She shook her head.
“I know no one can ask that,” he said. “Of a lover. A wife.”
“You can.”
He stood and skirted the small table, and was on his knees, with both arms turning her chair, her body, to face him, and his face was in her lap, her hands moving in his hair; her lap was cotton shorts and the tight flesh of her large strong thighs, and pressing his face to it, he said: “Please, Brenda. Please.”
“Never,” she said, and as he started to rise, he held her against his chest, and her arms went around him, released him as he stood and looked down at her upturned face. He bent to it, not touching her, and kissed her lips. Then he went out of the kitchen and through the living room and out the door, holding still her unlit cigarette, glimpsed through a blur the birdbath and fountain, turned the corner of the house into the direct light of the sun, and walked fast to his car.
V
IN LATE AFTERNOON Brenda lay on the couch in the living room, barefoot and wearing a leotard, drinking iced tea while her sweat dried and her body cooled. Across the room were two windows facing the back lawn, and at their sides pale blue curtains moved back and forth with the breeze, as though someone stood behind each of them and gently, rhythmically, pushed. She was looking at the curtains and the windows and nothing in particular beyond when she saw Greg: he walked into her vision from the right of the window, where the driveway was. He walked slowly on the grass, profile to her, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, his hard stomach pushing against his blue shirt and protruding over his belt. Her only movement on the couch was to reach for a cigarette on the coffee table and light it, as she looked at his dark muscular arm— the left one—beneath the short sleeve of his shirt, and at the side of his clean-shaven dark face, slightly bowed, as if with thought or fatigue. She did not know why his arms were so well-muscled; nor why, at forty-seven, his biceps had not begun to flatten, his triceps to sag. He did not know either. She had asked him, had jokingly accused him of clandestine push-ups or isometrics or some other exercise that no one did anymore. Or no one she knew. Nearly all her friends, women and men, had rituals of aerobic exercise, and many now had joined clubs where they used a Nautilus machine. She meant to join one tomorrow. But Greg told her he did nothing at all, had not done a push-up since the Army, and would never do one again on purpose, unless it was to raise himself from a barroom floor out of his own vomit. His vanity about not being vain was endearing. Also, she knew that, at times, the refusal of his arms and legs to age normally gave her confidence in the longevity of his body.
Now, at the fountain and birdbath, he turned from her, and stood looking down at the water that trickled over the sides of the bath, into the stone fountain, watching it as if he saw ideas in its motion. About what, though? Larry and Richie and Carol? His walk along the Amazon? Sometimes when he was tired and a little drunk and bitter, and certain he would never see, much less walk in, that jungle on that river, he said: Surely by now some sons of bitches have laid a highway; while Brenda imagined the riverbanks so thick with trees and brush and vines that, after hacking with machetes for the first mile, they would give it up, then travel the river by boat. Still, she would go with him.
She would go with him because he wanted to, she would go with him there before Venice and Athens and the Greek islands and Spain, the places where she wanted to walk with him on city and village streets and eat long and leisurely dinners and sleep till lunchtime and make love in the afternoons that only hotels, and especially hotels in a foreign country, could give you. She had done that in Mexico City on her December honeymoon with Larry, and in the afternoons there she never felt that she was distorting daylight by performing a nocturnal act in defiance of schedules and telephones, commitments and errands and chores. In Mexico City, she and Larry knew no one, and did not speak the language anyway. It was odd, she thought, perhaps even sinister, that the world had contrived to give lovers only the night; and the world wanted those nights to be earned, too, by what used to be the sweat of the brow, but was now too often foolish work in rooms with temperatures so regulated that they did not seem to exist on the earth, with her seasons. Then, on the purchased bed, surrounded by the dwelling and the acquisitions that filled it, you could have the night. Yet afternoon was the time she felt most erotic, and before dancing today, she had masturbated on this couch. She would go with Greg first to insects and discomfort because she loved the boy she had found in his older man’s body, beneath his man’s style. She called it Peter Pan, to herself, and she called him that when he was tired, and a little drunk, and bitter; and on nights when, making love, she sensed it in his body: a tender and humble and grateful presence that seemed to swoon in her arms.