by Andre Dubus
‘It’s not that I don’t like things.’
‘You can’t, is that it?’
‘Yes. Sometimes I take pills.’
‘To cheer you up?’
‘They’re not that good. He keeps calling, he doesn’t want me to go through with the divorce, he wants me to take him back. Sometimes I think I ought to. It’s not worth it.’
‘What’s not worth it?’
She shrugs. Peter is angry, he wants to tell her that for years he hasn’t thought about sin, hasn’t believed in sin, hasn’t used the word sin, but now he is thinking depression is a sin, perhaps the only one that many people can commit. But he takes their glasses to the kitchen for more brandy. Her house is clean; he knows that unhappy women often lapse into disorder and dirt, and walking back to the living room he feels affection for Jo, he thinks of her dusting furniture as his voice comes over the radio. He sits beside her and tells her funny stories, he clowns for her, and it is like the stage again, he is not Peter Jackman, he is a changing face, a cracking voice, he is a field of laughter, and she laughs and sometimes succeeds in really laughing, and when she does this she reaches across the short distance between their chairs and grips his arm or hand, and he regrets but cannot ignore the current in her fingers and without a word he accepts. Still he rises, hoping to leave, but when they kiss her tongue is a desperate cry on his, so he follows her creeping up the stairs past her daughters’ rooms and into her bed where with a heart like packed snow he makes love and then lies stroking her face as though with a cool cloth against fever. When she is sleepy he gets up and dresses in the moonlight and she says very quietly: ‘Peter? Will you come back sometime?’
He tells her he will, and he goes out into the night.
‘I want you to care,’ he says.
‘I can’t,’ Miranda says.
She is sitting on the orange couch; at another time he would be sitting beside her, but his (and her) Saturday night has riven them, though he is the only one who knows it; or he believes he is the only one who knows it. So he faces her from a basket chair across the narrow room. She is sipping tea, and she is tired. She is smoking Marlboros, one after the other. Like many girls her age, she smokes almost continually. A part of Peter admires this; he sees it as insouciance toward death. Another part of him sees it as insouciance toward life.
‘What does that mean, you can’t? Do you mean you can’t feel anything because you just aren’t able to, or do you mean you can’t because you’re not supposed to?’
‘I’m not supposed to.’
‘But did you feel anything when I told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘No.’
‘Then you’re not free. And I’m not either. But I already know that. It’s you that has to know it. We both made love with other people last night. We’re supposed to care. If we can’t, then we’re trapped in something else.’
‘I’m tired,’ she says.
She puts out her cigarette and lights another. In the past few minutes he has built a cage around her and behind it her face is confused and frightened. He knows she would like to put on music and smoke dope and quietly merge with the beats and rhythms from her record player. It is late Sunday night, Miranda has an hour ago returned from Connecticut and submitted to his pleas on the phone—he had been phoning every half hour since six o’clock—and has let him come over for a drink. He is drinking bourbon, though he knows he shouldn’t, for it will oil his tongue and he will talk and one of his rules with Miranda, one of the rules which allows him to keep her, is not to talk too much of how he feels, for if she knows how much he loves her (she knows), how much he needs her (she knows), she will bolt under the pressure. She doesn’t actually bolt: she doesn’t send him away, she doesn’t walk out on him. She simply goes away inside herself, while she turns to him a smile, gives to him a hand; and that makes him more lonely than any escape by any woman he’s ever known. So daily with her he lives with songs he will never sing and screams he will never scream. But tonight he is drinking, and in a fearful moment of release he decides to go to the kitchen and pour himself another, knowing as he watches it pour that he too will be pouring soon, and within his relief there is a core of anger, the contradictions tangled like barbed wire in him again, for what he feels is love and he wants to tell it to Miranda, yet at the same time he is angry because she has managed them so that he can’t tell her, and now, going back to the living room with his bourbon, he wants with all his heart to carry her away and make her his wife, yet he also would like to grab her by the shoulders and shake her till she cries.
At the door to the living room he stops. He looks at her quiet and lovely profile: she sips the tea, wipes her lips with the back of her cigarette hand, the lips shaping a kiss as they press themselves dry, then she draws on the cigarette, exhales, and begins again with the tea. She knows now that he is at the door but she doesn’t know he is stopping to watch her, and in that moment, when she is drying tea from her lips, he is struck with a purifying love which he knows, if he could sustain it, would save him. He sees a sad young girl who is trying to live as well as she can; who does not hurt him out of spite or malice but only so she can survive; who gives him as much of herself as she is able to and only balks when he demands more; and who has gotten him through many nights. He could not help falling in love with her; what he could have helped was what happened afterward, and he had chosen to make love with a woman who wore an engagement ring; and standing in the doorway he is about to simply say I love you, and kiss her goodnight, and then go home and let her sleep. But now, though she doesn’t look at him, she is aware that he is watching her and looking at her profile he knows this and the distance of the moment is broken and he makes a final choice: he crosses the room and settles into the chair.
‘Talk to me,’ he says.
Her eyes raise to his, then she looks down at her hands with the cigarette and tea, and then she sips and smokes.
‘You have to tell me what’s happening in you. Do you think it’s me you love, is that it? Are you waiting to be sure? Talk to me, Miranda. Why are you making love with me? You can tell me that, can’t you? Don’t you know it’s painful for me when you go off for a weekend and we pretend you didn’t? If we could at least talk about it maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. If you’d say anything at all about what you feel, even if you’d say you loved him and you were just doing some humbug with me, even that, even if I had that definition of what I am, but you won’t even say that much, you just sit there and look at your hands. And there’s death in you. With your dope and your silence and your two lovers. You erase yourself. Well, you’re not going to erase me too. And that’s what happens when I’m lonely and I end up with Jo. And I’m not going to do that anymore. I’ve been there. Jesus, I’ve been there, Miranda—’
Sitting in the basket chair he is subtly overwhelmed, memory launches a sneak attack, his blood remembers making love with a landlocked heart, and he sits there with the ghosts of love past: the affairs with melancholy wives when he was a husband, and with each new one he believed he was in love, yet always the day came for goodbye and usually it came some time after both hearts had turned away or back onto themselves. No matter, all were goodbyes from the instant of their first hello, all were liaisons whose passions were fed by the empty cupboards of the lovers’ homes; and all the time to make these couplings profound instead of privative he tried as best he could to believe he was in love, his love for Norma long dead, killed by their mutual adulteries, symptoms of a more complex distance which he has never truly understood; and with each new woman he said to himself, She must be the last, she will be the last, she is the last, because there was death in that repetition of lovers, each goodbye was a little death, and the affairs themselves were too because they were shallow and ephemeral and so he felt shallow and ephemeral too, his soul untapped on his march to death, a stranger between the thighs of a stranger—‘Miranda.’ He stands up. He wants to cross the room
and take the cup and cigarette from her hands, but he doesn’t dare, for he is afraid that his eyes and the touch of his hands cannot reach her. So he stands at his chair and uses his voice. ‘Miranda: will you live with me?’ She looks up at him and in her eyes there is a flicker of assent, he sees it, grabs it, holds on for his very life while she looks down again into her empty tea cup, her cigarette is finished too, she reaches for the pack, picks it up, changes her mind, puts it down, then changes her mind again and takes a cigarette. ‘I love you, Miranda. I can’t keep sharing you. I want you to come live with me. Now; tonight.’ He looks around the room to see what he can pack in their cars: the photographs from the walls, the table lamps, the coffee table, cushions; from the bedroom the record player and records; he has a vision of the two of them carrying things downstairs, with each load their hearts are lighter, they ascend the stairs together for another load, their impulsiveness gives them easy laughter—‘We can pack some things tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll get a truck and move the rest while you’re at work. When you come home it’ll be all done. This week I’ll build you a darkroom, there’s room in the kitchen, it’s too big anyway. We’ll do it. Won’t we? I know I shouldn’t sound like something wounded you have to bring in off the street. But I don’t have time anymore to be smart—will you live with me?’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why? You want to. I can feel it. It’s not him stopping you. If you really loved him you wouldn’t want me at all. So why can’t you?’
‘I’m too young.’
‘You’re not too young. You have two lovers.’
‘I wish I didn’t have any.’
‘You mean you wish nobody asked you questions.’
‘Yes. That’s what I wish.’
‘You can’t do that, Miranda. You can’t make love and not have questions. Goddamnit, Miranda—’ But there is nothing to say. He has said it all, and between him and Miranda his guts hang in the air. He is adrift in those desperate spaces of vulnerability where she will never follow, there is no way for him to get back, and he yields to his old stubborn muscle, the heart, and he follows it across the room, watching himself fall to his knees and take the cigarette from her hand and put it out, then hold both her hands and look into her green, brimming eyes and say: ‘Miranda, I can’t do it anymore. I can’t pretend I love you less, I’m not strong enough to keep pretending I’m strong, I can’t keep standing around waiting and staying alive on the little you give, because you’re all I’ve got—don’t you know that? surely you know that—I don’t have my kids, I don’t have work, I have a job—Miranda: listen. I’m not as crazy as I sound. Desperate, yes. I mean I know I spend twenty-three hours every day getting in shape for that one hour when I might go under. Is that what scares you?’ The tears are going down her cheeks now, and she is slowly shaking her head. ‘It has to be that or nothing, Miranda. I can’t go back to the other. Come with me, Miranda. You love me. We’ll make it. Come now, baby, come now—’ Her tears are faster, they flow over her lips and drop to her lap, but still she is shaking her head even as her hand takes the back of his neck and pulls him forward; her other hand goes around his back, his face is in her breasts, and he feels against his forehead the beating of her heart. He tries to stand but her arms hold tightly. His hands on her knees, he pushes himself up, he stands, and her arms fall away. She rises with him. Fiercely she hugs him again, and now there is a turnabout that mollifies his anguish, her silence and her tears on his cheek pull him out of himself, he is holding her, through her soft hair he is stroking her neck, his lips turn to her ear and he says: ‘I’m sorry, Miranda. I have to. It hurts too much, the way it was. I have to try to survive. I’m sorry, baby—’ and he hugs her very tightly, glances once at her damp face as he turns away and ‘ takes his coat and leaves.
There will be no sleep tonight. He knows it when he enters his apartment, which is lighted; from the bedroom comes Janis Joplin on the radio. He goes to the kitchen: bourbon started his evening at dusk and brought his night to its dark crescendo, and now perhaps it will allow him to wane. He makes a drink, brings the bottle to the table, sits down, and props his feet on a chair. He is about to drink but instead he pauses and listens to McCartney. He does not want the music coming down the hall from the bedroom. When it does that it only penetrates the spaces near the door, where the sink is. But over there at the refrigerator and there at the stove and here at the cupboard and counter opposite his chair and here beside him at the dark reflecting window and the wide sill where he rests his arm there is no music and when he looks at these places he sees silence. He goes to the bedroom and gets the portable radio, switching to DC when he unplugs it and listening to McCartney as he goes down the hall; on DC the reception is not as good, and he sets the radio on the counter, plugs it in, switches back to AC, and the faint static is gone. He turns out the overhead light so the room is dark except for the light coming from the hall. He sits and swallows bourbon, then lights a cigarette, his first of the day. The demons are stirring now, he feels them creeping down the hall, and in another moment they are standing by the sink to his right, and he feels like a colonel with an exposed flank. He finishes the drink and then another, but in his mind there is a relentless dagger of sobriety that will not give in to the booze. What he must do is sleep, and he takes the radio to the bedroom and gets into bed.
Right away his legs tell him it is no use. They will not relax, they will not sink into the mattress, they are restless as they are before he runs. He tries hypnotizing his toes and feet and calves, but by the time he is repeating My knees are asleep the calf muscles and feet are yearning again. And he cannot make his mind stop. If he could, then his muscles would follow peacefully and rest like sunning snakes, but his mind is filled with the idea and necessity of sleep, and the more he pushes with his mind the more his muscles and blood push back until the struggle gives him a sensation very much like the need to scratch. Yet still he tries to relax, he closes his eyes and breathes as he would if he were falling asleep, and for a moment it nearly works, his mind has stopped thinking sleep and has begun to drift into a dream when he realizes this and is immediately awake, his heart fast, his arms tight at his sides.
His luminous clock on the chest of drawers tells him it is eight minutes after two, and now he knows he will lie awake till four at the least, but probably five or six, and that he will wake at eight as usual and the day that waits for him will be long, his body tired, his reflexes distorted—he will be easily startled—and as dusk comes his heart and nerves will start again and he will have to devise some way to ease himself into the night, to sneak up on sleep. Angrily he throws back the covers and gets out of bed, his feet strike hard on the floor, his legs take him quickly to the kitchen and he gets ice and pours bourbon and returns to the bedroom where he turns on the radio and lowers the volume on Crosby Stills Nash and Young, then gets into bed, propping himself on two pillows so he can drink. He lights a cigarette and watches his exhaled smoke in the dark.
Before he has half-finished the drink he knows he will call Jo. But he tells himself he won’t. It has never worked with Jo and he does not want to hurt another woman, not ever. He does not think he can love Jo, but he is afraid Jo can love him. And he does not want to go to her now, the way he is, for he knows he can mistake relief for love and then it will sour and there will be wounds. He must go it alone, ride out this night, hang on to its neck and mane, and ride. Besides, it is two twenty-seven, she will be asleep (he picks up the phone), he should be tougher than this (he is dialing), he shouldn’t disturb poor Jo in all the ways this call will disturb her (it rings), it isn’t right, he ought—On the second ring she answers. She has been asleep and there is fear in her voice.
‘Jo, I’m sorry.’
‘Peter?’
‘I’m sorry. You were sleeping, I knew you’d be asleep, but—’ He listens to tears coming to his voice, he will not allow them to crest, he stops speaking.
‘What happened?’ Jo says.
He doesn’t answer. He is listening to his silent throat, trying to know if he can talk without crying; but he doesn’t have to. Jo takes over, and in a moment which he even trusts he loves her.
‘Come on over,’ she says.
‘I can’t do that.’
He has answered without listening first and his voice is all right; or at least it doesn’t break into liquid. Jo is working for him.
‘Sure you can. Come on.’
‘It’s awfully late. You won’t get any sleep.’
‘I’ll sleep tomorrow while the girls are at school.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Come on.’
‘I’ll bring some bourbon.’
He turns on the light and blinks, and now his legs are put to good use, they cross the room and take clothes from the closet, he dresses and goes to the kitchen and gets the bottle. Passing his bedroom door again he sees the unmade bed and knowing he is foolishly careful he goes in and makes it, leaving no signs of decline for the demons’ morale. He takes a moment to decide it is all right to turn off the radio, turns it off and the bedside lamp too, gets his coat and gloves and heads fast down the hall and out that door into the foyer, dark stairs rising at his left, and goes out the front door into the cold where, on the narrow, icy front porch, he stops.
The apartment’s lawn is at most twenty feet wide from the front steps to the sidewalk. If he reaches the sidewalk he will go around the corner of the building, to the garage in back. To reach this sidewalk he must simply traverse the lawn, walking on a shoveled walk between low white banks of snow. But he cannot go down that walk. He stands on the porch looking at the two steps and then at the T formed by the two sidewalks and at the smooth hard snow of the lawn. He starts to step onto the first step, his leg moves, it reaches the step, the other leg follows, he is standing on the step but Peter himself is not really there, whoever Peter is has been driven in panic back into the warm and lighted apartment; he is not on the steps. His body stands spiritless and abandoned, it feels as though it has neither bone nor muscle, it is only shivering flesh inside clothing that doesn’t belong to him. He turns away from the dark street and the lawn and goes back into the apartment, where he catches up with himself sitting on the bed and turning on the lamp and taking a shot from the bottle, then corking it and dropping it to the bed and picking up the phone.