Andre Dubus: Selected Stories

by Andre Dubus

  If she were not married he was certain he would receive communion daily while remaining her lover because, although he knew it was rarely true, he maintained and was committed to the belief that making love could parallel and even merge with the impetus and completion of the Eucharist. Else why make love at all, he said, except for meat in meat, making ourselves meat, drawing our circle of mortality not around each other but around our own vain and separate hearts. But if she were free to love him, each act between them would become a sacrament, each act a sign of their growing union in the face of God and death, freed of their now-imposed limitations on commitment and risk and hope. Because he believed in love, he said. With all his heart he believed in it, saw it as a microcosm of the Eucharist which in turn was a microcosm of the earth-rooted love he must feel for God in order to live with certainty as a man. And like his love for God, his love for her had little to do with the emotion which at times pulsated and quivered in his breast so fiercely that he had to make love with her in order to bear it; but it had more to do with the acts themselves, and love finally was a series of gestures with escalating and enduring commitments.

  So if she were free to love him he could receive communion too, take part without contradiction in that gesture too. And if their adultery were the classic variety involving cuckoldry he would know quite simply it was a sin, because for his own needs he would be inflicting pain on a man who loved his wife. But since her marriage was not in his eyes a marriage at all but an arrangement which allowed Hank to indulge his impulses within the shelter of roof, woman, and child which apparently he also needed, the sin—if it existed—was hard to define. So that finally his reason for not receiving communion was his involvement in a marriage he felt was base, perhaps even sordid; and, in love as he was, he reeked or at least smelled faintly of sin, which again he could neither define nor locate; and indeed it could be Hank’s sin he carried about with him and shared. Which is why he asked her to marry him.

  ‘It’s obvious you love Hank,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her head on his bare shoulder; then she touched his face, stroked it.

  ‘If you didn’t love him you would divorce him, because you could keep Sharon. But your love for him contradicts its purpose. It empties you without filling you, it dissipates you, you’ll grow old in pieces.’

  ‘But if I were divorced you couldn’t be married in the church. What about your Eucharist? Would you give that up?’

  ‘I’d receive every day,’ he said. ‘Who would know? I’d go to Mass and receive the Eucharist like any other man.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re a Catholic at all.’

  ‘If I’m not, then I don’t know what I am.’

  IV

  SHE WAKES FRIGHTENED beside Joe and looks in the grey light at the clock on the bedside table—six-forty. Joe is sleeping on his back, his mouth open; his face seems to have paled and shrunk or sagged during the night, and his shallow breath is liquid. She quietly gets out of bed. Her heart still beats with fright. This is the first time she has ever spent the night with Joe, or with any of her lovers; always the unspoken agreement with Hank was that for the last part of the night and the breakfast hour of the morning the family would be together under one roof; sometimes she had come home as late as four in the morning and gotten into bed beside Hank, who slept; always when he came home late she was awake and always she pretended she was asleep.

  She dresses quickly, watching Joe’s face and thinking of Sharon sleeping and hoping she will sleep for another half-hour; although if she wakes and comes down to the kitchen before Edith gets home, Edith can explain that she has been to the store. Yet she knows that discovery by Sharon is not what she really fears, that it will probably be another seven years before Sharon begins to see what she and Hank are doing. At the thought of seven more years of this her fear is instantly replaced by a rush of despair that tightens her jaws in resignation. Then she shakes her head, shakes away the image of those twenty-eight seasons until Sharon is fifteen, and continues to dress; again she is afraid. She needs a cigarette and goes to the kitchen for one; at the kitchen table she writes a note telling Joe she will be back later in the morning. She plans to clean his apartment but does not tell him in the note, which she leaves propped against the bedside clock so he will see it when he wakes and will not have to call her name or get up to see if she is still with him. She writes only that she will be back later and that she loves him. She assumes it is true that she loves him, but for a long time now it has been difficult to sort out her feelings and understand them.

  As now, driving home, and knowing it is neither discovery by Sharon nor rebuke by Hank that makes her grip on the wheel so firm and anxious that the muscles of her arms tire from the tension. For she knows Hank will not be disturbed. He likes Joe and will understand why she had to stay the night; although, on the road now, in the pale blue start of the day, her decision to sleep with Joe seems distant and unnecessary, an impulse born in the hyperbole of bourbon and night. She wishes she had gone home after Joe was asleep. But if she is home in time to cook breakfast, Hank will not be angry. So why, then, driving through the streets of a town that she now thinks of as her true home, does she feel like a fugitive? She doesn’t know.

  And yet the feeling persists through breakfast, even though she is in luck: when she enters the kitchen she hears the shower upstairs; she brings a glass of orange juice upstairs, stopping in her room long enough to hang up her coat and change her sweater and pants; then she goes to Sharon’s room. Sharon sleeps on her back, the long brown hair spread on the pillow, strands of it lying on her upturned cheek; her lips are slightly parted and she seems to be frowning at a dream. The room smells of childhood: the neutral and neuter scents of bedclothes and carpet and wood, and Edith recalls the odors of Joe’s apartment, and of Joe. She sits on the side of the bed, pausing to see if her weight will stir Sharon from the dream and sleep. After a while she touches Sharon’s cheek; Sharon wakes so quickly, near startled, that Edith is saddened. She likes to watch Sharon wake with the insouciance of a baby, and she regrets her having to get up early and hurry to school. Sharon pushes up on her elbows, half-rising from the bed while her brown eyes are blinking at the morning. Edith kisses her and gives her the juice. Sharon blinks, looks about the room, and asks what time it is.

  ‘There’s plenty of time,’ Edith says. ‘Would you like pancakes?’

  Sharon gulps the juice and says yes, then pushes back the covers and is waiting for Edith to get up so she can swing her feet to the floor. Edith kisses her again before leaving the room. In the hall she is drawn to the sound of the shower behind her, needs to say something to Hank, but doesn’t know what it is; with both loss and relief she keeps going down the hall and the stairs, into the kitchen.

  Hank and Sharon come down together; by this time Edith has made coffee, brought the Boston Globe in from the front steps and laid it at Hank’s place; the bacon is frying in the iron skillet, the pancake batter is mixed, and the electric skillet is heated. Her eyes meet Hank’s. He does not kiss her good-morning before sitting down; that’s no longer unusual but this morning the absence of a kiss strikes her like a mild but intended slap. They tell each other good-morning. Since that summer three years ago she has felt with him, after returning from a lover, a variety of emotions which seem unrelated: vengeance, affection, weariness, and sometimes the strange and frightening lust of collusive sin. At times she has also felt shy, and that is how she feels this morning as he props the paper on the milk pitcher, then withdraws it as Sharon lifts the pitcher and pours into her glass. Edith’s shyness is no different from what it would be if she and Hank were new lovers, only hours new, and this was the first morning she had waked in his house and as she cooked breakfast her eyes and heart reached out to him to see if this morning he was with her as he was last night. He looks over the paper at her, and his eyes ask about Joe. She shrugs then shakes her head, but she is not thinking of Joe, and the tears that cloud her eyes are not
for him either. She pours small discs of batter into the skillet, and turns the bacon. Out of her vision Hank mumbles something to the paper. She breathes the smells of the batter, the bacon, the coffee.

  When Hank and Sharon have left, Edith starts her work. There is not much to do, but still she does not take time to read the paper. When she has finished in the kitchen she looks at the guest room, the dining room, and the living room. They are all right; she vacuumed yesterday. She could dust the bookshelves in the living room but she decides they can wait. She goes upstairs; Sharon has made her bed, and Edith smooths it and then makes the other bed where the blankets on her side are still tucked in. The bathroom is clean and smells of Hank’s after-shave lotion. He has left hair in the bathtub and whiskers in the lavatory; she picks these up with toilet paper. She would like a shower but she wants to flee from this house. She decides to shower anyway; perhaps the hot water and warm soft lather will calm her. But under the spray she is the same, and she washes quickly and very soon is leaving the house, carrying the vacuum cleaner. On the icy sidewalk she slips and falls hard on her rump. For a moment she sits there, hoping no one has seen her; she feels helpless to do everything she must do; early, the day is demanding more of her than she can give, and she does not believe she can deal with it, or with tomorrow, or the days after that either. She slowly stands up. In the car, with the seatbelt buckled around her heavy coat, she turns clumsily to look behind her as she backs out of the driveway.

  At Joe’s she moves with short strides up the sidewalk, balancing herself against the weight of the vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t knock, because he may be sleeping still. But he is not. As she pushes open the front door she sees him sitting at the kitchen table, wearing the black turtleneck. He smiles and starts to rise, but instead turns his chair to face her and watches her as, leaving the vacuum cleaner, she goes down the hall and kisses him, noting as she lowers her face his weary pallor and the ghost in his eyes. In spite of that and the taste of mouthwash that tells her he has vomited again, she no longer feels like a fugitive. She doesn’t understand this, because the feeling began when she woke beside him and therefore it seems that being with him again would not lift it from her. This confuses and frustrates her: when her feelings enter a terrain she neither controls nor understands she thinks they may take her even further, even into madness. She hugs Joe and tells him she has come to clean his apartment; he protests, but he is pleased.

  He follows her to the living room and sits on the couch. But after a while, as she works, he lies down, resting his head on a cushion against the arm of the couch. Quietly he watches her. She watches the path of the vacuum cleaner, the clean swath approaching the layers and fluffs of dust. She feels the touch of his eyes, and what is behind them. When she is finished she moves to the bedroom and again he follows her; he lies on the bed, which he has made. For a while she works in a warm patch of sunlight from the window. She looks out at the bright snow and the woods beyond: the spread and reaching branches of elms and birches and maples and tamaracks are bare; there are pines and hemlocks green in the sun. She almost stops working. Her impulse is to throw herself against the window, cover it with her body, and scream in the impotent rage of grief. But she does not break the rhythm of her work; she continues to push the vacuum cleaner over the carpet, while behind her he watches the push and pull of her arms, the bending of her body, the movement of her legs.

  When she has vacuumed and dusted the apartment and cleaned the bathtub and lavatory she drinks coffee at the kitchen table while he sits across from her drinking nothing, then with apology in his voice and eyes he says: ‘I called the doctor this morning. He said he’d come see me, but I told him I’d go to the office.’

  She puts down her coffee cup.

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  He nods. Looking at him, her heart is pierced more deeply and painfully than she had predicted: she knows with all her futile and yearning body that they will never make love again, that last night’s rushed and silent love was their last, and that except to pack his toilet articles and books for the final watch in the hospital, he will not return to his apartment she has cleaned.

  It is night, she is in her bed again, and now Hank turns to her, his hand moving up her leg, sliding her nightgown upward, and she opens her legs, the old easy opening to the hand that has touched her for ten years; but when the nightgown reaches her hips she does not lift them to allow it to slip farther up her body. She is thinking of this afternoon when the priest came to the room and she had to leave. She nodded at the priest, perhaps spoke to him, but did not see him, would not recognize him if she saw him again, and she left and walked down the corridor to the sun-porch and stood at the windows that gave back her reflection, for outside the late afternoon of the day she cleaned Joe’s apartment was already dark and the streetlights and the houses across the parking lot were lighted. She smoked while on the hospital bed Joe confessed his sins, told the priest about her, about the two of them, all the slow nights and hurried afternoons, and she felt isolated as she had when, months ago, he had begun to die while, healthy, she loved him.

  Since breakfast her only contact with Hank and Sharon was calling a sitter to be waiting when Sharon got home, and calling Hank at the college to tell him she was at the hospital and ask him to feed Sharon. Those two phone calls kept her anchored in herself, but the third set her adrift and she felt that way still on the sun-porch: Joe had asked her to, and she had phoned the rectory and told a priest whose name she didn’t hear that her friend was dying, that he was an ex-priest, that he wanted to confess and receive communion and the last sacrament. Then she waited on the sun-porch while Joe in confession told her goodbye. She felt neither anger nor bitterness but a vulnerability that made her cross her arms over her breasts and draw her sweater closer about her shoulders, though the room was warm. She felt the need to move, to pace the floor, but she could not. She gazed at her reflection in the window without seeing it and gazed at the streetlights and the lighted windows beyond the parking lot and the cars of those who visited without seeing them either, as inside Joe finally confessed to the priest, any priest from any rectory. It did not take long, the confession and communion and the last anointing, not long at all before the priest emerged and walked briskly down the corridor in his black overcoat. Then she went in and sat on the edge of the bed and thought again that tomorrow she must bring flowers, must give to this room scent and spirit, and he took her hand.

  ‘Did he understand everything?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I realized he didn’t have to. It’s something I’d forgotten with all my thinking: it’s what ritual is for: nobody has to understand. The knowledge is in the ritual. Anyone can listen to the words. So I just used the simple words.’

  ‘You called us adultery?’

  ‘That’s what I called us,’ he said, and drew her face down to his chest.

  Now she feels that touch more than she feels Hank’s, and she reaches down and takes his wrist, stopping the hand, neither squeezing nor pushing, just a slight pressure of resistance and his hand is gone.

  ‘I should be with him,’ she says. ‘There’s a chair in the room where I could sleep. They’d let me: the nurses. It would be a help for them. He’s drugged and he’s sleeping on his back. He could vomit and drown. Tomorrow night I’ll stay there. I’ll come home first and cook dinner and stay till Sharon goes to bed. Then I’ll go back to the hospital. I’ll do that till he dies.’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’

  She looks at him, then looks away. His hand moves to her leg again, moves up, and when she touches it resisting, it moves away and settles on her breast.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to make love with you.’

  ‘You’re grieving.’

  His voice is gentle and seductive, then he shifts and tries to embrace her but she pushes with her hands against his chest and closing her eyes she shakes her head.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Just please don’t. It does
n’t mean anything any more. It’s my fault too. But it’s over, Hank. It’s because he’s dying, yes—’ She opens her eyes and looks past her pushing hands at his face and she feels and shares his pain and dismay; and loving him she closes her eyes. ‘But you’re dying too. I can feel it in your chest just like I could feel it when I rubbed him when he hurt. And so am I: that’s what we lost sight of.’

  His chest still leans against her hands, and he grips her shoulders. Then he moves away and lies on his back.

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I don’t trust this kind of talk at night.’

  ‘It’s the best time for it,’ she says, and she wants to touch him just once, gently and quickly, his arm or wrist or hand; but she does not.

  In late afternoon while snow clouds gather, the priest who yesterday heard Joe’s confession and gave him the last sacrament comes with the Eucharist, and this time Edith can stay. By now Hank is teaching his last class of the day and Sharon is home with the sitter. Tonight at dinner Sharon will ask as she did this morning: Is your friend dead yet? Edith has told her his name is Mr. Ritchie but Sharon has never seen him and so cannot put a name on a space in her mind; calling him your friend she can imagine Joe existing in the world through the eyes of her mother. At breakfast Hank watched them talking; when Edith looked at him, his eyes shifted to the newspaper.

  When the priest knocks and enters, Edith is sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, a large leather chair, the one she will sleep in tonight; she nearly lowers her eyes, averts her face; yet she looks at him. He glances at her and nods. If he thinks of her as the woman in yesterday’s confession there is no sign in his face, which is young: he is in his early thirties. Yet his face looks younger, and there is about it a boyish vulnerability which his seriousness doesn’t hide. She guesses that he is easily set off balance, is prone to concern about trifles: that caught making a clumsy remark he will be anxious for the rest of the evening. He does not remove his overcoat, which is open. He moves to the bed, his back to her now, and places a purple stole around his neck. His hands are concealed from her; then they move toward Joe’s face, the left hand cupped beneath the right hand which with thumb and forefinger holds the white disc.