Separate Flights

by Andre Dubus

  ‘Not all over. It was a good scene, though, in Boston. Hotel, took her to the airport in the morning, sad loving Bloody Marys. Then up in the air. Gone. Me watching the plane. Thinking of her looking down. Gone. Back to France. Maybe I’ll go see her someday.’

  ‘You love her, huh?’

  ‘I was fucking her, wasn’t I?’

  ‘I guess it was tough breaking it off, her right down in Boston.’

  ‘Jack.’ Grinning. ‘What made you think I broke it off? Why would I do a stupid thing like that?’

  ‘Well, when the shit hit the fan Edith said you broke it off.’

  ‘Course she said that. It’s what I told her.’

  ‘Have a beer, you sly son of a bitch.’

  I held up two fingers to Betty and she slid off the stool.

  ‘Wait,’ the fish man said. ‘I’ll get this one for the boys, and—lemmee see—’ he pulled out a pocket watch from his khakis, peered down in the red-lighted dark ‘—yeah, Betty, I’ll have one more, then I’ll be getting home and put my fish in the oven.’ Hank cocked his head and watched him. ‘Don’t get it started, the wife’ll come home and start looking around, wanting to know where’s the dinner.’

  ‘I don’t blame her,’ Betty said.

  ‘Oh sure. She works all day too, and I get home a little earlier, so I put the dinner on.’

  She gave us the beer and we raised our mugs to him and said thanks. He raised his, smiled, nodded, sipped. He picked up his fish, turning it in his hands, then lowered it to the bar.

  ‘If I’m going to fry it I can start later, but when I’m baking like with this one, I need a little more time.’ He looked through the door at two men going into the dining room. ‘Someday I’m going to come in here and get me one of those fish platters. I’ll be about ready for one, one of these days.’

  Hank was watching him.

  ‘Did you ever want to leave with her?’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You said you loved her.’

  ‘I still do. You’re nineteenth century, Jack.’

  ‘That’s what you keep telling me.’

  ‘It’s why you’ve been faithful so long. Your conscience is made for whores but you’re too good for that, so you end up worse: monogamous.’

  ‘What’s this made for whores shit.’

  ‘The way it used to be. Man had his wife and kids. That was one life. And he had his whore. He knew which was which, see; he didn’t get them confused. But now it’s not that way: a man has a wife and a girlfriend and they get blurred, you see, he doesn’t know where his emotional deposits are supposed to be. He’s in love, for Christ sake. It’s incongruous. He can’t live with it, it’s against everything he’s supposed to feel, so naturally he takes some sort of action to get himself back to where he believes he’s supposed to be. Devoted to one woman or some such shit. He does something stupid: either he breaks with the girl and tries to love only his wife, or he leaves the wife and marries the girl. If he does that, he’ll be in the same shit in a few years, so he’ll just have to keep marrying—’

  ‘Or stay monogamous.’

  ‘Aye. Both of which are utter bullshit.’

  ‘And you think that’s me.’

  ‘I think so. You’re a good enough man not to fuck without feeling love, but if you’re lucky enough for that to happen, then you feel confused and guilty because you think it means you don’t love Terry.’

  I looked him in the eyes and said: ‘Have you been talking to my mistress?’

  ‘Mistress pisstress. I’ve been talking to you for three years. I’ve been watching you watching women.’

  I believed him. If he knew about Edith and me, it was because he’d guessed: they had not been talking.

  ‘Am I right?’ he said.

  ‘I worry about Terry, that’s true. Just getting caught, I mean. I worry about love affairs too: the commitment, you know.’

  ‘What’s commitment got to do with a love affair? A love affair is abandon. Put the joy back in fucking. It’s got to be with a good woman, though. See, Jeanne knew. She knew I’d never leave Sharon and Edith. Commitment. That’s with Terry. It doesn’t even matter if you love Terry. You’re married. What matters is not to hate each other, and to keep peace. The old Munich of marriage. You live with a wife, around a wife, not through her. She doesn’t run with you and come drink beer with you, for Christ sake. Love, shit. Love the kids. Love the horny wives and the girls in short skirts. Love everyone, my son, and keep peace with your wife. Who, by the way, is not invulnerable to love either. What’ll you do if that happens?’

  ‘That’s her business.’

  ‘All right. I believe you.’

  ‘You should; it’s true.’

  ‘So why are you so uptight?’

  ‘I’m not, man. What brought all this on, anyway?’

  ‘I didn’t like that look of awe in your face. When I said I spent the night with Jeanne, and never broke up with her. I love you, man. You shouldn’t feel awe for anything I do. I don’t have more guts than you. I just respond more, that’s all. I don’t like seeing you cramped. Chicks like you, I see it, Jack. Hell, Edith gets juiced up every time you call the house. Other day Sharon said she wanted a jack-in-the-box, I thought Edith would fall off the couch laughing. Wicked laugh. Lying there laughing.’

  ‘Jack-in-the-box,’ I said, smiling, shaking my head.

  He slapped my shoulder and we drained our mugs and left. ‘Take care,’ I said, passing the fish man. ‘See you boys.’ He raised his mug. Going out the door Hank turned left, toward the dining room; I waited while he talked to the hostess, nodding, smiling, reaching for his wallet. He gave her four dollars and waved off the change.

  ‘What was that about?’

  We walked to the front door and I started to go outside, but turned instead and went into the fish market.

  ‘I bought him a fish platter.’

  I went to the lobster tank, and an old man in a long white apron came from behind the fish counter.

  ‘He’ll be gone before it’s ready,’ I said.

  ‘Told her to give him a beer too. He won’t waste a beer. By the time he’s done, there it’ll be.’

  ‘All right: cool.’ I turned to the old man. ‘How much are you getting for lobsters?’

  ‘As much as we can,’ winking, laughing, then a wheeze and a cough.

  The chicken lobsters were a dollar seventy-nine a pound; she loved to eat, she’d say mmmm, sucking the claws, splitting open the tail. I asked for two and didn’t watch him weigh them or ring them up. I couldn’t; it was like when they call you in to pay for your crime: your father, your boss: the old humiliation of chilled ass and quickened heart. They were four dollars and fifty-two cents. I did not think about the bank balance until I bought the wine. On the way to Hank’s I stopped at the liquor store and bought Pinot Chardonnay, Paul Masson: two-fifty. Seven dollars. Two on beer. Nine. I went next door into the A&P; Hank was waiting in the car, listening to the Red Sox in a two-nighter. Eight at the service station: seventeen. I bought half pints of strawberry, chocolate, and vanilla ice cream, a bunch of bananas, a can of chocolate syrup, a jar of cherries, a pressurized can of whipped cream, but no nuts, there were only cocktail nuts, salted things. My children didn’t know what a banana split was; I had told them the other day how the boys and I used to eat them after a movie, and if I could spend seven on Terry and me then certainly they deserved—was love no more than guilt? I have a girl so Terry should have a lover. We get lobster and Pinot Chardonnay so the kids should have this junk. The banana splits cost four dollars and twenty-eight cents. A twenty-one-dollar day, only two on something I wanted: the beer with Hank. Now I could slide back the door in my mind, look at the bank balance written there: forty-three dollars and eighty cents. I ‘ had glanced at it yesterday, I hadn’t really wanted to see, but it sprang like a snake and got in my head and stayed there. Eight days before payday and a week’s groceries still to buy. What now? Stop drinking? Stop smoking? So we c
ould sit stiff and tight-faced night after night, chewing blades of grass, watching the food and milk and gas all going down down down. We had tried that once, for six weeks: nothing but red wine, a dollar and a quarter a half gallon. Nothing happened. The bourbon and gin and beer money never turned up; it jumped into the cash register at the supermarket, the service stations, it went to the utilities and telephone gangs, the landlord, it paid for repairs on a bad car, it went to people who sold bad shoes to children and to people who sold worse toys. It just kept going, and days before payday it was gone; when the last milk carton was empty, Terry put powdered milk in it and didn’t fool the kids, and every day there was more space in the refrigerator and cupboard, and each day I woke wanting payday to come and hating the trap I was in: afraid of death and therefore resisting the passage of time, yet now having to wish for it.

  ‘I spent twenty-one bucks today. What’s the score?’

  ‘Sox, 2-1. Top of the third. You broke?’

  There were driving lanes in the big parking lot, but people drove through the parking spaces too; they drove in circles, triangles, squares, trapezoids, and other geometric figures, and I had to look in all directions at once.

  ‘Not for a couple of days.’

  ‘Here.’ He took out his wallet.

  ‘No, man. That’s not why I said that.’

  ‘Jesus, I know that. How much you need?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Come on. Some day you’ll come through for me.’

  ‘I need about forty bucks, man. I’ll go to the bank.’

  He was holding out two twenties and Reggie Smith was catching a fly ball on the warning path.

  ‘Edith got a check from Winnetka.’

  ‘It won’t last for shit if you support me too.’ Thinking of the imported beer, the babysitter.

  ‘We needed two hundred, so she asked for three and her mother sent five.’

  ‘Five? No shit: you mean there are people in the world who can write a check for five hundred dollars and not break into tears? I’ll pay it back a little at a time, okay?’

  ‘Sure. Buy me a bottle some time. Buy me one round of beer some time, you cheap cocksucker.’

  At his house he said to come in for a quick one. I was worried about the ice cream but he reached back and took it from the bag, so I followed him in. She was at the stove. She smiled at us over her shoulder; she had changed her shorts and shirt and had a red ribbon in her black hair. She looked as if she’d changed souls. She stirred a pot of something and looked in the oven while Hank put up the ice cream and opened two ales and a beer. Then she sat at the table and asked Hank for a cigarette.

  ‘I quit.’

  ‘Good luck, baby.’

  I gave her one of mine, and took one too.

  ‘Oh, a Lucky,’ she said.

  ‘See what you did. As long as he was with me he didn’t smoke.’

  ‘I like to corrupt.’

  ‘You looked like a girl from the forties just then,’ I said. ‘Or early fifties. Taking the tobacco off your tongue. Except their fingernails were painted. You’d see that red fingernail moving down their tongues, and I used to love watching them.’

  ‘Why?’ Hank said.

  ‘I don’t know. I think it was watching a woman being sensual. You were a little hard on that fish man.’

  ‘I know. Didn’t seem so funny once I got in the car.’

  ‘What fish man?’

  I watched her listen to the story and I thought how she didn’t know Hank and Jeanne hadn’t ended till she went back to France. And whether he guessed or not he could never know what she was like out there on the blanket. Now she was just an attentive young wife, listening to her husband, her eyes going from him to Sharon with her coloring book on the floor. Still they had a marriage. He was talking to her about his day. She had got that money for them. Her dinner smelled good, and her house was clean. I felt it was my house too, and I remembered what I was like before I loved her, during that long time when I wasn’t in love; I need to be in love, I know it is called romantic, it isn’t what they call realistic, I am supposed to settle into the steady seasons, the ticking Baby Bens, of marriage.

  ‘Hank, that was cruel.’

  ‘I know. But he had no balls. Cooking, for Christ sake.’

  At my back door I smelled spaghetti sauce. She was ironing in the kitchen and I looked past her at the black iron skillet of sauce on the stove. I didn’t give her a chance to ask me how the day had been; I saw the question in her face as she looked up from ironing and reached for her drink at the end of the ironing board. Edith had not been drinking when Hank and I got there, and I wondered if other wives drank before their husbands came home.

  ‘This guy gave me some lobsters,’ I said, as the screen door shut behind me. ‘I saved his daughter from drowning and he gave me all he had.’

  ‘Oh let me see.’

  She hurried around the ironing board and took the bag and looked in. I put the wine in the freezer compartment.

  ‘Wine too?’

  ‘Sure. And some stuff for the kids.’

  I gave her the supermarket bag.

  ‘Oh look,’ peering in, taking out the jar of cherries, the whipped cream, the chocolate syrup. ‘What a nice daddy.’

  She took the ironed clothes on hangers upstairs, then put the ironing board and basket of waiting clothes in the wash room. I got the ball game on the radio and sat at the kitchen table with the Boston Globe while she looked for her big pot and found it and put it on the stove. I skimmed the news stories I couldn’t believe while I told her Hank had written only a page, he had quit smoking, we had had a good run, drunk some beer, and he had loaned me forty dollars. She was happy about the money, but she said very seriously we must be sure to pay him back, ten dollars a payday till it was done. All this time I was following the ball game and getting through the news about Nixon and the war, getting to those stories I could believe: a man winning a tobacco spitting contest; a woman and her son drowning, taken into the sea by waves on the coast of Maine; the baseball news. I could also believe all stories about evil. I was accustomed to lies from the government and the press, and I never believed them when they spoke with hope or comfort. So I believed all stories of lies, atrocity, and corruption, for they seemed to be the truth that I was rarely told and that I was waiting for. I knew that my vision was as distorted as the vision of those who lied, but I saw no way out. When I finished the paper, I started to tell Terry about the fish man, but with the first word already shaping my lips, I stopped.

  In a marriage there are all sorts of lies whose malignancy slowly kills everything, and that day I was running the gamut from the outright lie of adultery to the careful selectivity which comes when there are things that two people can no longer talk about. It is hard to say which kills faster but I would guess selectivity, because it is a surrender: you avoid touching wounds and therefore avoid touching the heart. If I told her the story, she would see it as a devious way of getting at her: the man’s cooking would be the part of me she smothered; Hank’s buying the seafood platter would be my rebellion. And she would be right. So I treated our disease with aspirins, I weaved my conversation around us, and all the time I knew with a taste of despair that I was stuck forever with this easy, lying pose; that with the decay of years I had slipped gradually into it, as into death, and that now at the end of those years and the beginning of all the years to come I had lost all dedication to honesty between us. Yet sometimes when I was alone and away from the house, always for this to happen I had to be away from the house, driving perhaps on a day of sunlight and green trees and rolling meadows, I would hear a song from another time and I could weep (but did not) for the time when I loved her every day and came up the walk in the afternoons happy to see her, days when I never had to think before I spoke. As we ate lobsters and drank wine we listened to the ball game.

  And later, after the spaghetti dinner that wasn’t eaten, we made love. We had watched the children, who were impatient
for banana splits and so ate only a little and that quickly, sucking spaghetti, spearing meatballs, their eyes returning again and again to the door of the freezer compartment, to Terry slicing bananas, punching open the can of chocolate syrup. They were like men late for work eyeing the clock behind a lunch counter. They loved the banana splits, ate till I feared for their stomachs, then I went with a book to the living room couch, and Terry put the meatballs and spaghetti sauce in the refrigerator to be warmed again another day.

  When she got into bed I pretended to be asleep but she touched my chest and spoke my name until I looked at her.

  ‘I went a little crazy last night,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have got drunk.’ She found my hand and held it.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve got to grow up.’

  ‘Who ever told you grown-ups weren’t violent?’

  ‘Not with their husbands.’

  ‘Read the papers. Women murder their husbands.’

  ‘Not people like us.’

  ‘Sailors’ wives, is that it? Construction workers?’

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘Maybe some people have enough money so they don’t have to kill each other. You can have separate lives then, when things go bad. You don’t have to sweat over your beer in the same hot kitchen: watching her fat ass under wilted blue cotton, her dripping face and damp straight hair. Pretty soon somebody picks up a hammer and goes to it. Did Hank make a pass?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘I said yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  ‘All right, then: what did you do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘He tried to kiss me on the porch, so I went inside.’

  ‘Where?’ Grinning at her. ‘Here?’

  ‘To the kitchen. To get a beer.’

  ‘And he followed you in and—’

  ‘Said he loved me and kissed me and said he didn’t love Edith. Then I felt dirty and we went outside and sat on the front steps.’