by Andre Dubus
‘Is that what you want?’
‘I don’t know. I’m just scared.’
‘Because I know about it?’
‘Because there’s something to know.’
She went inside. I read the batting averages and pitching records, then the rest of the paper, listening to her washing last night’s pots and dishes. Then she started cooking bacon and I sat waiting, smelling and listening to the bacon, until I heard Natasha and Sean coming downstairs. We ate for a long time, then Terry lit a cigarette and said, ‘Well,’ and went to the bedroom and shut both doors. I could hear her voice, but that was all. Natasha and Sean were upstairs getting dressed; when Terry came back to the kitchen she went to the foot of the stairs and called them and said to put on bathing suits. ‘We’re going to the beach!’
‘The beach!’ they said. ‘The beach!’
‘How did you get it done?’ I said.
‘He answered. He’d said he would. I asked how Edith was and he told me.’
‘That was the signal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Poor Hank. And what if you had decided to see him?’
‘I wouldn’t have called.’
She had been smoking a lot all morning. Now she started making a Bloody Mary.
‘Do you want one?’
‘No. How’s Edith?’
‘All right. Her fever’s gone.’
For some years now I have been spiritually allergic to the words husband and wife. When I read or hear husband I see a grimly serene man in a station wagon; he is driving his loud family on a Sunday afternoon. They will end with ice cream, sticky car seats, weariness, and ill tempers. In his youth he had the virtues of madness: rage and passion and generosity. Now he gets a damp sponge from the kitchen and wipes dried ice cream from his seat covers. He longs for the company of loud and ribald men, he would like to drink bourbon and fight in a bar, steal a pretty young girl and love her through the night. When someone says wife I see the confident, possessive, and amused face of a woman in her kitchen; among bright curtains and walls and the smell of hot grease she offers her husband a kiss as he returns from the day sober, paunchy, on his way to some nebulous goal that began as love, changed through marriage to affluence, is now changing to respectable survival. She is wearing a new dress. From her scheming heart his balls hang like a trophy taken in battle from a young hero long dead.
I wheezed again with this allergy as I stood on the lawn and watched Terry and Natasha and Sean drive off to Plum Island. They had a picnic basket, a Styrofoam cooler of soft drinks and beer, a beach bag of cigarettes and towels, and a blanket. They left in a car that needed replacing. This morning’s lovely air was now rent apart by the sounds of power mowers. One was across the street, two blocks down to the right; the man behind it wore a T-shirt and shorts and was bald. The one to the left was on my side of the street, behind shrubs, and I only saw him when he got to the very front of his lawn, turned, and started back. I sat on the grass and chewed a blade of it and watched the bald man. I wondered what he was thinking. Then I thought he must be thinking nothing at all. For if he thought, he might cut off the engine that was mowing his lawn and go into the garage and jam the garden shears into his throat.
Yet once in a while you saw them: they sat in restaurants, these old couples of twenty and twenty-five and thirty years, and looked at each other with affection, and above all they talked. They were always a wonder to see, and when I saw them I tried to hear what they said. Usually it was pleasant small talk: aging sailors speaking in signals and a language they have understood forever. If I looked at most couples with scorn and despair, I watched these others as mystified as if I had come across a happy tiger in a zoo; and I watched them with envy. It can be faked, Hank said once. We were in a bar. The afternoon bartender had just finished work for the day, his wife was waiting for him in a booth, and they had two drinks and talked; once they laughed aloud. There are two kinds of people, Hank said. The unhappy ones who look it and the unhappy ones who don’t.
Now I went inside and upstairs and turned on the ball game. Hank’s marriage wasn’t a grave because Hank wasn’t dead; he used his marriage as a center and he moved out from it on azimuths of madness and when he was tired he came back. While Edith held to the center she had been hurt, and for a few days when she started guessing that Hank was not faithful I didn’t like being with them: you could smell the poison on their breaths, feel the tiny arrows flying between them. Now she had a separate life too and she came home and they sat in the kitchen with their secrets that were keeping them alive, and they were friendly and teasing again. It was as simple as that and all it required was to rid both people of jealousy and of the conviction that being friendly parents and being lovers were the same. Hank and Edith knew it, and I knew it. I had waked happy, believing Terry knew it too, and now after her one night she was at the beach with the children, and we were husband and wife again. I sat watching the game. Far off, as though from the streets behind the black and white ball park, I could hear the power mowers.
After dinner Terry came to the living room where I was reading on the couch. Upstairs the children were watching television.
‘Hank came to the beach.’
‘He found you? On a hot Sunday at Plum Island? My God, the man’s in love.’
‘He says he is.’
‘Really?’
‘Oh, I know it’s just talk, it’s just a line—he wants to see me tonight.’ She was smoking. ‘I wish I hadn’t last night. But I did and it doesn’t seem really right to say yes and then next morning say no, I mean it’s not like I was drunk or something, I knew what I was doing. But I’m scared, Jack.’ She sat on the couch; I moved to make room, and she took my hand. ‘Look at me. What do you really think? Or really feel. You’re not scared of this? People screwing other people?’
‘No, I’m not scared.’
‘Then why am I? When I’m the one who—Jesus.’
‘What did you feel at the beach?’
‘Guilty. Watching my children and talking to him.’
‘Did you tell him you’d meet him?’
She lowered her eyes and said, ‘Yes.’
‘And now you don’t feel like it because it’s embarrassing to leave the house when I know where you’re going. If I didn’t know, you’d have got out with some excuse. Does Hank know that I know?’
‘I didn’t tell him. It just seemed too much, when we’re all together. Won’t you feel strange? When you see him tomorrow?’
‘I don’t think so. What are you going to do tonight?’
‘I’m going to think about it.’
She went to the kitchen. I listened to her washing the dishes: she worked very slowly, the sounds of running water and the dull clatter of plate against plate as she put them in the drainer coming farther and farther apart so that I guessed (and rightly) she had done less than half the dishes when I heard her quickly cross the floor and go into the bathroom. She showered fast, she must have been late, then she opened the bathroom door to let the steam out. Late or not, of course she spent a long while now with the tubes and brushes and small bottles of her beauty, which was natural anyway and good, but when people came over or we went out she worked on it. I had always resented that: if a car pulled up in front of the house she fled to the bathroom and gave whoever it was a prettier face than she gave me. But I thought, too, that she gave it to herself. She closed the bathroom closet, ran the lavatory tap a final time, and came out briskly into the bedroom; lying propped on the couch, I looked over the Tolstoy book; she had a towel around her, and I watched her circling the bed, to our closet. She was careful not to look at me. On the way to the mirror she would have to face me or turn her head; so I raised the book and read while she pushed aside hangered dresses, paused, then chose something. I felt her glance as she crossed the room to the full-length mirror. I tried to read, listening to the snapping of the brassiere, the dress slipping over her head and down her body, and the brush strokes on her hair. Then I r
aised my eyes as she stepped into the living room wearing her yellow dress and small shiny yellow shoes, her hair long and soft, and behind the yellow at her shoulders it was lovely. When I looked at her she opened her purse and dropped in a fresh pack of cigarettes, watching it fall. She had drawn green on her eyelids.
‘Well—’ she said.
‘All right.’
‘I’ll do the dishes when I get back.’
‘No sweat.’
She looked at me, her eyes bright with ambivalence: love or affection or perhaps only nostalgia and, cutting through that tenderness, an edge of hatred. Maybe she too knew the marriage was forever changed and she blamed me; or maybe it wasn’t the marriage at all but herself she worried about, and she was going out now into the night, loosed from her moorings, and she saw me as the man with the axe who had cut her adrift onto the moonless bay. My face was hot. She turned abruptly and went upstairs and I listened to her voice with the children. She lingered. Then she came downstairs and called to me from the kitchen: ‘The movie should be over around eleven.’ I read again. I could have been reading words in Latin. Then the screen opened and she was back in the kitchen, my heart dropping a long way; she went through the bathroom into the bedroom, the car keys jingled as she swept them from the dresser, and my heart rose and she was gone. After a while I was able to read and I turned back the pages I had read without reading; I read for twenty minutes until I was sure Hank was gone too, then I went to the bedroom and phoned Edith.
‘ “Ivan Ilyitch’s life was most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.” ’
‘Who said that?’
She wasn’t literary but that didn’t matter; I loved her for that too and anyway I didn’t know what did matter with a woman except to find one who was clean and peaceful and affectionate and then love her.
‘Tolstoy. Our lives aren’t so simple and ordinary.’
‘Is she gone too?’
‘A movie. That’s what she tells me so the kids can hear repeated what she told them. A new twist to the old lying collusion of husband and wife against their children. But she also told me the truth.’
‘He’s going to see some Western. He says they relax him and help him write next day. I hate Westerns.’
‘I love them. There’s one on the tube tonight and I’ll watch it with the kids.’
‘We’ll have to do something about these cars.’
‘Maybe a car pool of sorts.’
‘Dear Mother, please buy me a car so I can see my lover while Hank sees his.’
‘Is she really that rich?’
‘She’s that rich. I miss you.’
‘Tomorrow. Eleven?’
‘I’ll go shopping.’
‘I’ll go to the library.’
‘You use that too much. Some day she’ll walk over and see if you’re there.’
‘She’s too lazy. Anyway, if things keep on like this maybe I can stop making excuses.’
‘Don’t count on it.’
‘Being a cuckold’s all right, but it’s boring. Get a sitter and take a taxi.’
‘Go watch the movie with your children.’
Terry hadn’t put her beauty things away; they were on the lavatory and the toilet tank, and I replaced tops on bottles and put all of it into the cabinet. I went to the foot of the stairs and called.
‘What!’ When their voices were raised they sounded alike; I decided it was Sean.
‘Turn to Channel Seven!’
‘What’s on!’
‘Cowboys, man! Tough hombre cowboys!’
‘Cowboys! Can we watch it!’
‘Right!’
‘All of it!’
‘Yeah! All of it!’
‘Are you gonna watch it!’
‘I am! I’ll be up in a while!’
I got a pot out of the dishwater and washed it for popcorn. Once Sean called down that it had started and I said I knew, I knew, I could hear the horses’ hooves and I’d be up evermore ricky-tick. There were Cokes hidden in the cupboard so the kids wouldn’t drink them all in one day. I poured them over ice and opened a tall bottle of Pickwick ale and got a beer mug and brought everything up on a tray.
‘Hey neat-o,’ Natasha said.
‘Popcorn!’
I pulled the coffee table in front of the couch and put the tray on it.
‘Sit between us,’ Natasha said.
Sean hugged me when I sat down.
‘We got a good Daddy.’
‘Now Mom’s watching a movie and we’re watching a movie,’ Natasha said.
‘What movie did Momma go to?’
‘I believe a Western.’
‘You didn’t want to go?’
‘Nope. I wanted to see this one. He’s going to hit that guy soon.’
‘Which guy?’
‘The fat mean one.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because if he doesn’t hit him we won’t be happy.’
When the movie was over, I tucked them in and kissed them and went downstairs to Tolstoy and the couch; as I read I kept glancing at my watch and at midnight I thought how she never uses the seat belt, no matter how many times and how graphically and ominously I tell her. I kept reading and I remembered though trying not to Leonard in Michigan: he had married young and outgrown his wife and he hated her. When he was drunk, he used to say Nobody hates his wife as much as I hate mine. And one night drinking beer—he was a big weight-lifting man and drank beer like no one I’ve ever known—he said I’ve thought of a way a man can kill his wife. You take her for a ride, you see, and you have a crash helmet with you and it’s just resting there on the seat between you, she wonders what it’s there for, but the dumb bitch won’t say anything, she won’t say anything about anything and the world can fall down and still she’ll just blink her Goddamn dumb eyes and stare and never let you know if there’s anything burning behind them, then you get out on some quiet straight country highway and put that son of a bitch on your head and unbuckle her seat belt and hold onto that son of a bitch and floorboard into a telephone pole and throw the crash helmet way the fuck out into the field—
I wished the movie hadn’t ended and I was still upstairs watching it with the children; the TV room was a good room to be in, the cleanest in the house because it was nearly bare: a couch, two canvas deck chairs, the TV, and a coffee table. A beach ball and some toy trucks and cars were on the floor. The secret was not having much life in the room. It was living that defeated Terry: the rooms where we slept and ate and the living room and dishes and our clothes. The problem was a simple one which could be solved with money, but I would never make enough so that I could pay someone to do Terry’s work. So there was no solution. Two years ago Terry had pneumonia and was in the hospital for a week. Natasha and Sean and I did well. Everyone made his own bed and washed his own plate and glass and silver, and we took turns with the pots; every day I washed clothes, folded them as soon as they were dry, and put them away; twice that week I vacuumed the house. All this took little time and I never felt harried. When Terry came home, I turned over the house to her again, and the children stopped making their beds and washing their dishes, though I’d told her how good they had been. We could do that again now, and I could even have my own laundry bag and put my things in it every night, wash my clothes once a week and wash my own dishes and take turns with the pots, I could work in the house as though I lived with another man. But I wouldn’t do it. If Terry had always kept house and was keeping it now, then I could help her without losing and I would do it. But not the way she was now.
In Michigan when I was in graduate school, she found us an old farmhouse in the country for a hundred a month, and for a while she was excited, I’d come home and find the furniture rearranged, and one afternoon she painted the bathroom orange. The landlord had paid for the paint, and for two buckets of yellow for the kitchen; he was an old farmer, he lived down the dirt road from us, he liked Terry, and he told her when she finished the kitchen he�
�d buy paint for the other rooms. Whatever colors she wanted. For a few days she talked about different colors, asked me what I thought the bedrooms should be, and the halls, and then a week went by and then another and one day when I was running down the road Mr. Kenfield was at his mailbox and he asked me how the painting was coming. I called over my shoulder: ‘Fine.’ That afternoon we painted the kitchen. I was sullen because I should have been studying, and we painted in near silence, listening to the radio, while Natasha watched and talked. When we were done I said: ‘All right, now tell Kenfield you’re too busy to paint the other rooms. At least now when he comes for coffee he’ll see the yellow walls. And if he pisses he’ll see the orange ones. Now I’m going upstairs to do my own work.’
All through graduate school that’s what she kept doing: my work. When I brought a book home she read it before I did, and when my friends came over for an afternoon beer and we talked about classes and books and papers, she sounded like a graduate student. Once I daydreamed about her soul: she and Rex and I were sitting at our kitchen table drinking beer, and I watched her talking about Sons and Lovers and I remembered her only a year ago when I was a lieutenant junior-grade and she was complaining about the captain’s snotty treatment of reserve officers, deriding the supply officer’s bureaucratic handling of the simplest matters, and saying she wished there were still battleships so I could be on one and she could go aboard. And in that kitchen in the farmhouse in Michigan I daydreamed that Rex and I were ballplayers and now it was after the game and Terry had watched from behind the dugout and she was telling us she saw early in the game that I couldn’t get the curve over, and she didn’t think I could go all the way, but in the fifth she saw it happen, she saw me get into the groove, and then she thought with the heat I’d tire, but after we scored those four in the seventh—and he didn’t tag him, I know he didn’t—she knew I’d go all the way—And she kept talking, this voice from behind the dugout. And from behind the dugout she came up to my den where I worked and brought a book downstairs and later when I came down at twilight, blinking from an afternoon’s reading, I’d find her on the couch, reading.