by Andre Dubus
When they stopped eating fresh bread in the morning he was out of work for a while, but his children were grown and his wife did not worry, and then he got his last and strangest job. He was not an authorized constable, he carried no weapons, and he needed only one qualification other than the usual ones of punctuality and subservience: a willingness to work for very little money. He was so accustomed to all three that none of them required an act of will, not even a moment’s pause while he made the decision to take and do the job. When he worked a daylight shift he spent some time ordering possible vandals off the campus: they were usually children on bicycles; sometimes they made him chase them away, and he did this in his long stride, watching the distance lengthen between him and the children, the bicycles. Mostly during the day he chatted with the maintenance men and students and some of the teachers; and he walked the campus, which was contained by an iron fence and four streets, and he looked at the trees. There were trees he recognized, and more that he did not. One of the maintenance men had told him that every kind of New England tree grew here. There was one with thick, low, spreading branches and, in the fall, dark red leaves; sometimes students sat on the branches.
The time he saw three girls in the tree he was fooled: they were pretty and they wore sweaters in the warm autumn afternoon. They looked like the girls he had grown up knowing about: the rich girls who came from all parts of the country to the school, and who were rarely seen in town. From time to time some of them walked the three blocks from the campus to the first row of stores where the commercial part of the town began. But most of them only walked the one block, to the corner where they waited for the bus to Boston. He had smelled them once, as a young man. It was a winter day. When he saw them waiting for the bus he crossed the street so he could walk near them. There were perhaps six of them. As he approached, he looked at their faces, their hair. They did not look at him. He walked by them. He could smell them and he could feel their eyes seeing him and not seeing him. Their smells were of perfume, cold fur, leather gloves, leather suitcases. Their voices had no accents he could recognize. They seemed the voices of mansions, resorts, travel. He was too conscious of himself to hear what they were saying. He knew it was idle talk; but its tone seemed peremptory; he would not have been surprised if one of them had suddenly given him a command. Then he was away from them. He smelled only the cold air now; he longed for their smells again: erotic, unattainable, a world that would never be open to him. But he did not think about its availability, any more than he would wish for an African safari. He knew people who hated them because they were rich. But he did not. In the late sixties more of them began appearing in town and they wore blue jeans and smoked on the street. In the early seventies, when the drinking age was lowered, he heard they were going to the bars at night, and some of them got into trouble with the local boys. Also, the college started accepting boys, and they lived in the dormitories with the girls. He wished all this were not so; but by then he wished much that was happening was not so.
When he saw the three girls in the tree with low spreading branches and red leaves, he stopped and looked across the lawn at them, stood for a moment that was redolent of his past, of the way he had always seen the college girls, and still tried to see them: lovely and nubile, existing in an ambience of benign royalty. Their sweaters and hair seemed bright as the autumn sky. He walked toward them, his hands in his back pockets. They watched him. Then he stood under the tree, his eyes level with their legs. They were all biting silenced giggles. He said it was a pretty day. Then the giggles came, shrill and relentless; they could have been monkeys in the tree. There was an impunity about the giggling that was different from the other graceful impunity they carried with them as they carried the checkbooks that were its source. He was accustomed to that. He looked at their faces, at their vacant eyes and flushed cheeks; then his own cheeks flushed with shame. It was marijuana. He lifted a hand in goodbye.
He was not angry. He walked with lowered eyes away from the giggling tree, walked impuissant and slow across the lawn and around the snack bar, toward the library; then he shifted direction and with raised eyes went toward the ginkgo tree near the chapel. There was no one around. He stood looking at the yellow leaves, then he moved around the tree and stopped to read again the bronze plaque he had first read and marvelled at his second day on the job. It said the tree was a gift of the class of 1941. He stood now as he had stood on that first day, in a reverie which refreshed his bruised heart, then healed it. He imagined the girls of 1941 standing in a circle as one of the maintenance men dug a hole and planted the small tree. The girls were pretty and hopeful and had sweethearts. He thought of them later in that year, in winter; perhaps skiing while the Arizona took the bombs. He was certain that some of them lost sweethearts in that war, which at first he had followed in the newspapers as he now followed the Red Sox and Patriots and Celtics and Bruins. Then he was drafted. They made him a truck driver and he saw England while the war was still on, and France when it was over. He was glad that he missed combat and when he returned he did not pretend to his wife and family and friends that he wished he had been shot at. Going over, he had worried about submarines; other than that, he had enjoyed his friends and England and France, and he had saved money. He still remembered it as a pleasurable interlude in his life. Looking at the ginkgo tree and the plaque he happily felt their presence like remembered music: the girls then, standing in a circle around the small tree on that spring day in 1941; those who were in love and would grieve; and he stood in the warmth of the afternoon staring at the yellow leaves strewn on the ground like deciduous sunshine.
So this last one was his strangest job: he was finally among them, not quite their servant like the cleaning women and not their protector either: an unarmed watchman and patrolman whose job consisted mostly of being present, of strolling and chatting in daylight and, when he drew the night shift, of driving or walking, depending on the weather, and of daydreaming and remembering and talking to himself. He enjoyed the job. He would not call it work, but that did not bother him. He had long ago ceased believing in work: the word and its connotation of fulfillment as a man. Life was cluttered with these ideas which he neither believed nor disputed. He merely ignored them. He liked wandering about in this job, as he had liked delivering bread and had liked the Army; only the stitching had been tedious. He liked coming home and drinking coffee in the kitchen with his wife: the daily chatting which seemed eternal. He liked his children and his grandchildren. He accepted the rest of his life as a different man might accept commuting: a tolerable inconvenience. He knew he was not lazy. That was another word he did not believe in.
He kneeled on the snow and with his ungloved hand he touched her cold blonde hair. In sorrow his flesh mingled like death-ash with the pierced serenity of the night air and the trees on the banks of the pond and the stars. He felt her spirit everywhere, fog-like across the pond and the bridge, spreading and rising in silent weeping above him into the black visible night and the invisible space beyond his ken and the cold silver truth of the stars.
On the bridge Mike slipped and cursed, catching himself on the wooden guard rail, but still she did not look back. He was about to speak her name but he did not: he knew if his voice was angry she would not stop and if his voice was pleading she might stop and even turn to wait for him but he could not bear to plead. He walked faster. He had the singular focus that came from being drunk and sad at the same time: he saw nothing but her parka and blonde hair. All evening, as they drank, he had been waiting to lie with her in her bright clean room. Now there would be no room. He caught up with her and grabbed her arm and spun her around; both her feet slipped but he held her up.
‘You asshole,’ she said, and he struck her with his fist, saw the surprise and pain in her eyes, and she started to speak but he struck her before she could; and when now she only moaned he swung again and again, holding her up with his left hand, her parka bunched and twisted in his grip; when he released her sh
e fell forward. He kicked her side. He knew he should stop but he could not. Kicking, he saw her naked in the bed in her room. She was slender. She moaned and gasped while they made love; sometimes she came so hard she cried. He stopped kicking. He knew she had died while he was kicking her. Something about the silence of the night, and the way her body yielded to his boot.
He looked around him: the frozen pond, the tall trees, the darkened library. He squatted down and looked at her red-splotched cheek. He lifted her head and turned it and lowered it to the snow. Her right cheek was untouched; now she looked asleep. In the mornings he usually woke first, hung over and hard, listening to students passing in the hall. Now on the snow she looked like that: in bed, on her pillow. Under the blanket he took her hand and put it around him and she woke and they smoked a joint; then she kneeled between his legs and he watched her hair going up and down.
He stood and walked off the bridge and around the library. His body was weak and sober and it weaved; he did not feel part of it, and he felt no need to hurry away from the campus and the bridge and Robin. What waited for him was home, and a two-mile walk to get there: the room he hated though he tried to believe he did not. For he lived there, his clothes hung there, most of all he slept there, the old vulnerable breathing of night and dreams; and if he allowed himself to hate it then he would have to hate his life too, and himself.
He walked without stealth across the campus, then up the road to town. He passed Timmy’s, where he and Robin had drunk and where now the girls who would send him to prison were probably still drinking. He and Robin had sat in a booth on the restaurant side. She drank tequila sunrises and paid for those and for his Comfort and ginger, and she told him that all day she had been talking to people, and now she had to talk to him, her mind was blown, her father called her about her grades and he called the dean too so she had to go to the counselor’s office and she was in there three hours, they talked about everything, they even got back to the year she was fifteen and she told the counselor she didn’t remember much of it, that was her year on acid, and she had done a lot of balling, and she said she had never talked like that with anybody before, had never just sat down and listed what she had done for the last four years, and the counselor told her in all that time she had never felt what she was doing or done what she felt. She was talking gently to Mike, but in her eyes she was already gone: back in her room; home in Darien; Bermuda at Easter; the year in Europe she had talked about before, the year her father would give her when she got out of school. He could not remember her loins, and he felt he could not remember himself either, that his life had begun a few minutes earlier in this booth. He watched her hands as she stirred her tequila sunrise and the grenadine rose from the bottom in a menstrual cloud, and she said the counselor had gotten her an appointment in town with a psychiatrist tomorrow, a woman psychiatrist, and she wanted to go, she wanted to talk again, because now she had admitted it, that she wasn’t happy, hadn’t been happy, had figured nobody ever could be.
Then he looked at her eyes. She liked to watch him when they made love, and sometimes he opened his eyes and saw on her face that eerie look of a woman making love: as if her eyes, while watching him, were turned inward as well, were indeed watching his thrusting from within her womb. Her eyes now were of the counselor’s office, the psychiatrist’s office tomorrow, they held no light for him; and in his mind, as she told him she had to stop dope and alcohol and balling, he saw the school: the old brick and the iron fence with its points like spears and the serene trees. All his life this town had been dying. His father had died with it, killing himself with one of the last things he owned: they did not have a garage so he drove the car into a woods and used the vacuum cleaner hose. She said she had never come, not with anybody all these years, she had always faked it; he finished his drink in a swallow and immediately wished he had not, for he wanted another but she didn’t offer him one and he only had three dollars which he knew now he would need for the rest of the night; then he refused to imagine the rest of the night. He smiled.
‘Only with my finger,’ she said.
‘I hope it falls off.’
She slid out of the booth; his hand started to reach for her but he stopped it; she was saying something that didn’t matter now, that he could not feel: her eyes were suddenly damp as standing she put on her parka, saying she had wanted to talk to him, she thought at least they could talk; then she walked out. He drank her tequila sunrise as he was getting out of the booth. Outside, he stood looking up the street; she was a block away, almost at the drugstore. Then she was gone around the bend in the street. He started after her, watching his boots on the shovelled sidewalk.
Now he walked on the bridge over the river and thought of her lying on the small one over the pond. The wind came blowing down freezing over the Merrimack; his moustache stiffened, and he lowered his head. But he did not hurry. Seeing Robin on the bridge over the pond he saw the dormitory beyond it, just a dormitory for them, rooms which they crowded with their things, but the best place he had ever slept in. The things that crowded their rooms were more than he had ever owned, yet he knew for the girls these were only selected and favorite or what they thought necessary things, only a transportable bit of what filled large rooms of huge houses at home. For four or five years now he had made his way into the dormitory; he met them at Timmy’s and they took him back to the dormitory to drink and smoke dope and when the party dissolved one of them usually took him to bed.
One night in the fall before Robin he was at a party there and toward three in the morning nearly all the girls were gone and no one had given him a sign and there were only two girls left and the one college fag, a smooth-shaven, razor-cut boy who dressed better than the girls, went to Timmy’s, and even to the bar side of it, the long, narrow room without booths or bar stools where only men drank; he wore a variety of costumes: heels and yellow and rust and gold and red, and drank sloe gin fizzes and smoked like a girl. And Mike, who rarely thought one way or another about fags but disliked them on sight, liked this one because he went into town like that and once a man poured a beer over his head, but he kept going and joking, his necklaces tapping on his chest as he swayed back and forth laughing. That night he came over and sat beside Mike just at the right time, when Mike had understood that the two remaining girls not only weren’t interested in him, but they despised him, and he was thinking of the walk home to his room when the fag said he had some Colombian and Mike nodded and rose and left with him. In the room the fag touched him and Mike said twenty-five bucks and put it in his pocket, then removed the fag’s fingers from his belt buckle and turned away and undressed. He would not let the fag kiss him but the rest was all right, a mouth was a mouth, except when he woke sober in the morning, woke early, earlier than he ever woke when he slept there with a girl. A presence woke him, as though a large bird had flown inches above his chest. He got up quickly and glanced at the sleeping fag, lying on his back, his bare, smooth shoulders and slender arms above the blanket, his face turned toward Mike, the mouth open, and Mike wanted to kill him or himself or both of them, looking away from the mouth which had consumed forever part of his soul, and with his back turned he dressed. Then quietly opening the door he was aware of his height and broad shoulders and he squared them as glaring he stepped into the corridor; but it was empty, and he got out of the dormitory without anyone seeing him and ate breakfast in town and at ten o’clock went to the employment office for his check.
Through the years he had stolen from them: usually cash from the girls he slept with, taking just enough so they would believe or make themselves believe that while they were drunk at Timmy’s they had spent it. Twice he had stolen with the collusion of girls. One had gone ahead of him in the corridor, then down the stairs, as he rolled and carried a ten-speed bicycle. He rode it home and the next day sold it to three young men who rented a house down the street; they sold dope, and things other people stole, mostly things that kids stole, and Mike felt like a kid wh
en he went to them and said he had a ten-speed. A year later, when a second girl helped him steal a stereo, he sold it at the same house. The girl was drunk and she went with him into the room one of her friends had left unlocked, and in the dark she got the speakers and asked if he wanted any records while he hushed her and took the amplifier and turntable. They carried everything out to her Volvo. In the car he was relieved but only for a moment, only until she started the engine, then he thought of the street and the building where he lived, and by the time she turned on the heater he was trying to think of a way to keep her from taking him home.