Dale Loves Sophie to Death

by Robb Forman Dew

  Dinah’s gradual relief was so pleasurable that she didn’t mind if he thought she had been careless on Toby’s behalf. She didn’t mind his censure at all now that she knew that Toby only had some virus. Just a virus. Dread still lay solidly in her stomach like a heavy, indigestible food, but she could feel her body reacting just as if her limbs had been numbed and were now coming back to life with a sharp tingle.

  “Then he’s all right?” she asked.

  He looked at her with a puzzled expression, and then he seemed to be really cross. “Well, no. You see,” he said with considerable patience, as to someone of very slow wits, “he’s got something very like an inflamed hip. I think he ought to stay off that leg for some time. He shouldn’t walk on it at all.”

  Dinah looked at him, but she had nothing at all to say. She knew it was not serious. This virus amounted to nothing in the long run. This virus was not death! Her social sense had deserted her, and she didn’t respond to his careful explanation of Toby’s ailment as solemnly as Dr. Van Helder clearly seemed to expect her to. In fact, to his obvious bewilderment, she could only smile and smile at him in great relief.

  Chapter Ten

  Lost and Strayed

  Over the past few weeks Martin had lost his capacity for enthusiasm, and he was beginning to realize that he was crippled by the loss. His thoughts occupied his head in the same way he now inhabited his own house. He wasn’t likely to take much satisfaction in what grace the rooms possessed, but generally he derived a happy serenity from the sturdiness of the tall building itself and the comforting familiarity of it. Now the walls stood high and foreign to him, and the spaces he wandered through were no longer defined by custom; the rooms seemed never to have had a designated function. In the same way, he had lost the habit of organized reflection and contemplation. On the one hand, he was perfectly aware of his aberrant state of mind, but on the other hand, the dismal conclusions that beset him did not seem in the least unreasonable.

  One morning he had come awake very early in his own bedroom, because he had forgotten to draw the curtains the night before, and he had been as stunned by the thought awaiting him when he surfaced into consciousness as he was by the heavy sunlight that bore down on his eyelids so that he dared not open them. He was at once overwhelmed by the knowledge that he had lived more than half his life! In this instance, it was simply the brevity of the span of his existence that staggered him and frightened him. What he wished he wanted at that moment was his mother, but in fact, he supposed he must want God. So he just lay still, since it was too late for him to believe in the reassurance of his mother or any God he might evoke. That morning Martin lay completely awake without any solace, but in the days that followed he looked back on that relatively benign realization of his own passing life with an almost affectionate indulgence.

  The universe became ominous to Martin rather quickly, and he tried to avoid his own perceptions. Sometimes he simply slept deep into the day or got up before dawn and then napped throughout the afternoon. These erratic habits kept him at a distance from the rest of humanity, but paradoxically, he was obsessed with the news broadcasts on television, and whatever times he chose to eat or sleep, he arranged his day around these programs. He watched television in hope of being presented with some fact that would pull him back into a limited and measured view.

  For a while he hit upon a comforting spell of fervent organization; he thought he had come upon an arrangement that would help him make a system for his days. Somewhere along the way Dinah had acquired a surgical steel cart her father had salvaged from the hospital when he was in med school. She had used it all through graduate school as a typing table, and it now sat at one end of the kitchen to house all the various portable appliances that they had accumulated over the years but rarely used. The kitchen was a long and narrow room with windows at one end and a glass door at the other. Martin was most comfortable there, and he devoted considerable attention to his solitary meals. For several days, his eye had been caught by the ill-assorted gadgets on the crowded cart. It was an aggravation to his inherent, personal orderliness that transcended even this crisis of philosophy. The little table had become a catchall of sorts and was heavily laden with dust in the spaces between the orange juicer and the ice crusher, and so forth. At last he set himself to clearing it off and sponging and scrubbing the steel surface with boiling water. It glowed with the soft sheen of sterile steel when he was done, and he could make good use of it. He regulated his schedule, and he lived with a certain sense of satisfaction for several days. He prepared his meals with great care and then transferred the food directly to the spotless metal surface of the cart and wheeled his dinner in front of the television. When he finished eating, he sponged down the table itself; there were no plates to be washed. He had made a gesture toward simply getting on with his days, and he was pleased with himself for it.

  He sat in front of the news, eating his meals and taking an obscure and chilling comfort in the disasters of the day. His sorrow was there at every moment; in fact, he felt that in its amplitude it encompassed the earth like a mist. But his sorrow and pity were easily attributable. He knew their cause. He watched the numbing ordeal of the Cambodians with despair and with rage. Murders and rapes and fires touched him with impotent horror, as they would any person of even meager imagination, but lurking turbulently beneath these clearly defined disasters and atrocities was a knowledge so devastating to him that he knew there was danger there. He had finally understood the transience of the earth. What awaited him, if he was unable to exhaust his anxiety on immediate concerns, was the knowledge, for instance, of black holes, of a finite sun, of the vast and godless universe.

  Martin was even made miserable by his own intelligence. He knew that it was ultimately a threat to his own ego that he was fending off, and yet apathy encroached from all sides. He had hours, sometimes days, when he could not think of a reason to lift a finger, write a word, have a child. If he could not manage to keep his imagination engaged, he drifted off into a nether world of all the consequences of life and growth and change and motion. This was the sorrow that held him most securely: the final despair at the idea that, indeed, continuity was the one vision he must abandon.

  Martin’s little cart, carefully set with his knife and fork and a lamb chop or a bit of roast chicken, was a tentative barrier thrown up against a menacing havoc of ideas, and it worked out very nicely for almost a week. It worked out fine until the evening when he was arranging everything tidily in the cool, high-ceilinged kitchen—he was broiling a hamburger for his supper—and it dawned on him that he could have achieved even greater efficiency by placing the pan of food itself on the impervious metal surface. When this thought occurred to him, the charm of the whole enterprise collapsed like a house of cards. He could have adopted this plan, and it would even have enlarged his menu; he could have soup, salads, spaghetti…But Martin replaced all the appliances on the metal cart, rolled it back to its place by the stove, and ate his meals from then on off the everyday china and at the kitchen table. He was gravely depressed that he had expended so much determined thought and energy on such a small and essentially frivolous exercise.

  Martin missed the Hofstatters, and he knew that they would welcome him; they were not petty, but he couldn’t bring himself to face Ellen’s grim disapprobation. Besides, in those moments when he could wrench his thoughts back to earth, he—on his part—felt a certain disapproval of her. He suspected there was something slippery and perturbing beneath the surface of her unique interpretation of morality. The most fearsome thing about Ellen was her unnerving tendency to say exactly what she thought, and in this case she had been unusually strident in her anger.

  She had sat waiting for him one day when he emerged from the pond. He had straggled out to see her regarding him with a narrowed, steely look. “I think you ought to know something, Martin,” she said as he began to dry himself. “I think you ought to know that you’re beginning to disgust me! I wouldn’t have thoug
ht that you would be unkind. To anyone. But especially not to Dinah.”

  He was taken aback, because his and Claire’s lovemaking had been going on for several weeks, and he hadn’t thought Vic and Ellen cared one way or another. It certainly hadn’t made much of an impression on Claire, who went mildly through the days, just as always. It hadn’t even made much of an impression on him, although he had never had any sort of affair before. He hadn’t, until that moment, even considered it an affair. It seemed far too menacing a description when he thought of it that way. As he tried to towel the murky water out of his hair, he made an attempt to turn and lighten the conversation. “Ellen, I think I’m still a good and proper man.” He meant to instill this with enough self-disdain to satisfy her.

  “Well,” Ellen said, looking straight at him, unnervingly, so that he was aware of a slight roll of flesh over the waistband of his suit, “I’m just sorry I know what you are. I’m sorry to find out. It’s just too bad I know, because you’re not much more than ludicrous! In fact, I’m sorry to see that you’re almost pitiful.”

  He became angry now himself. “You sure as hell are righteous today, aren’t you?” He still wanted to deflect this confrontation. He just wanted her to back off.

  “The thing is,” she said, more softly, “you aren’t even thinking about what you’re doing. Dinah couldn’t stand it, you know. This is something she just couldn’t stand. You ought to know that you’re causing real injury.” She held up her hand to keep him from protesting. “Even if Dinah never knows, you ass!” She had worked up a keen anger once more. “Even if Dinah never knows, she is as much what she is in your mind as she is a person in her own right! That’s what couples are, you know. And you know what you and Dinah are! You can’t ever really be two separate people again.” She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he had nothing he could say, although he knew that in a little while he would discover some way in which he disagreed with her. Right now she had jumped the gun on him. “Besides,” she went on, “you have no right to impose this on us. Vic and I think of you and Dinah together. You just don’t have the right to make this our burden, too.”

  Martin stalked off to the house to get dressed. He didn’t believe that Ellen even liked Dinah very much. After a fairly silent dinner with Vic and Ellen and Katy, he and Claire were sitting alone in the yard while Katy ran around, full of energy. Martin spoke out to Claire and said something he immediately regretted: “I think Ellen’s just jealous for her own sake.” There was less arrogance in this than there seemed to be, because Martin had an intense knowledge of Ellen’s passion for control, but Claire had almost sneered at him when she smiled at that. “Oh, no. No, no. If Ellen wants something, she just about always gets it. She’s put off by something else this time,” she said.

  But Martin didn’t believe this entirely. He put Claire’s opinion down to the tendency of people to overestimate the influence of their siblings or their parents. Those early battles form an indelible impression of the victor’s strength, so that it is easily forgotten that the protagonists are never evenly matched. Martin couldn’t imagine that Claire, so much younger and less certain than Ellen, could ever have triumphed.

  Since Martin had given up visiting the Hofstatters, Claire and Katy often came by to visit him. Claire was always cheerful and friendly, but since Katy was with her, he and she couldn’t have gone upstairs to bed. He didn’t care much, and Claire didn’t seem even to think of it. When he had made his bed on the long leather couch at the Hofstatters’, after the others had gone upstairs for the night, Claire had taken to staying downstairs with him. It had become a matter of course to end up lying there together making love. But Martin didn’t know why he made love to Claire; it took on a masturbatory regulation, because it changed nothing in the long run, and neither of them had any intention of changing anything. There was a disturbing sense, too, of never being able to touch Claire at all. It surprised him to make love to someone who seemed to regard it simply as an easy way to bide one’s time. He did like Claire very much, but one of them—or perhaps both of them—lacked passion. He felt some guilt, of course, because he knew that Ellen was right in one respect. Dinah couldn’t have borne being compared to this young girl, and in a sense he did compare them—it was impossible not to. What he never did think of, however, was one as opposed to the other. He noticed the differences in their bodies, but he never considered the question of preference. His guilt was not the slightest bit profound, because there was never any decision to be made about where his affections lay. He felt, as a matter of fact, sorry for himself in some ways, because he knew that Dinah would be baffled and hurt if she ever found out about Claire. He was so bound to his own wife that her sorrow would be intolerable to him. She might experience the sorrow; he would really suffer it. As to the sex, he just enjoyed it, without any careful introspection. He had a mild regret, now and then, that he was not sixteen, when he had been almost incessantly interested in the bodies of women—interested in the fact that he might have access to the legs, hips, breasts, arms of women’s bodies—but now he was thirty-eight, and he had lost the pervasive intensity of that sweet obsession.

  When Claire came to visit him now, in his house, he was glad to have her company. Katy played with some of his children’s toys he had found for her, and they sat at the table in the kitchen, where he and Claire drank a beer or instant iced tea. Claire was an undemanding guest; she seemed to be equally content wherever she was or whatever the conversation. She tended to be placid or reserved at the same times that Ellen would have been vocally judgmental. Martin knew now that if he had thought about it early on he would have seen that, inevitably, he would have ended up sleeping with Claire, given the way his summers wound their way out. He suspected, as well, that Ellen had foreseen it, too, and he resented her solicitude for Dinah on Dinah’s behalf, really. Of all the feelings Dinah might have about his attachment to Claire, surely Ellen’s pity would have roused her most bitter reaction. But Martin was glad to see Claire now, because the hours during which he had company kept him busy observing the soothing demands of the social amenities. Any visit was a respite from his new and constant awareness of eventual cosmic grief.

  Martin worked over some of the revised articles for the Review, but it was just work; he did it because he knew it must be done by a certain time. He didn’t do it with even a flicker of ardor or excitement. He wandered around the house, and he diverted his mind a good deal by the physical task of cleaning it up. He had been much surprised one morning when he realized that the living-room floor was still littered with the remnants of the wrappings of Katy’s birthday presents from such a long time ago, and he began there, clearing those away, and then moved on to freshening the rooms that were filled with stale heated air and sticky dust from having been closed off for so many weeks.

  He had conversations with Dinah on the phone; he thought he had taken to calling her so often because he knew he had betrayed her; he could never think of much to say, but he liked to make the connection. He also had discussions with her in his head, often while he sat in the kitchen eating his meals. He defended himself against her criticism when he sprinkled his scrambled eggs with lemon pepper. In his mind he justified himself to her for liking his lamb chops well done. He agreed with her on the interpretation of almost every national event. For the most part, though, Martin wandered around the rooms or watched television, with a vague hope that he might discover the philosophy he sought. He wished to be dissuaded—or somehow to dissuade himself—from the reality he now perceived.

  One afternoon he saw Vic arrive carrying an armful of papers, and Martin was irritable when he greeted him at the door, because he had been comfortably settled on the couch and absorbed in a television documentary on a primitive culture—the first inhabitants of Easter Island—that seemed to be addressing all the issues he feared. But he had only seen the problems laid out; he had to switch it off before he saw them explained away or resolved. In the back of his mind, however, he kne
w that it was a good sign that he did not want to be caught watching television in the afternoon.

  He and Vic sat in the kitchen at the table with the manuscripts between them, and Vic took it upon himself to pour them both a beer. It was a hot and humid day, and the greenery outside the windows was unusually still and without vitality. The landscape had the flat look of a painted stage set. Martin was still thinking of the program he had been watching. “Do you know anything about Easter Island?” he asked Vic while they were still sipping from the froth of their beer and before they began sorting through the manuscripts.

  Vic just shook his head and took a long swallow of beer, but he looked up attentively, because he was always willing to have a conversation. It was one of his chief pleasures, Martin had always thought. Martin was quiet a minute, trying to arrange what he would say. The things he had just found out on television seemed momentous to him, and as he had been watching the program, he had been mildly surprised that it had been scheduled at such an obscure hour. But Martin was a modest man, and in everyone’s company save Dinah’s he tended to skirt gingerly those subjects about which he felt most passionate. Even his academic environment had never convinced him that the display of intellectual passion wasn’t really a vanity as base as any other. He despised vanity, but in this case he plunged in, not meaning to be persuasive in any way, but just intending to give Vic information.