by Andre Dubus
All the time she was talking. It was the first time she had stolen anything. Or anything worth a lot of money. He made himself smile by thinking of selling her to the men in the house; he thought of her sitting amid the stereos and television sets and bicycles. Then he heard her say something. She had asked if he was going to sell his old set so he could get some bucks out of the night too. He said he’d give the old one to a friend, and when she asked for directions he pointed ahead in despair. He meant to get out at the corner but when she said Here? and slowed for the turn he was awash in the loss of control which he fought so often and overcame so little, though he knew most people couldn’t tell by looking at him or even talking to him. She turned and climbed up the street, talking all the time, not about the street, the buildings, but about the stereo: or the stealing of it, and he knew from her voice she was repeating herself so she would not have to talk about what she saw. Or he felt she was. But that was not the worst. The worst was that he was so humiliated he could not trust what he felt, could not know if this dumb rich drunk girl was even aware of the street, and he knew there was no way out of this except to sleep and wake tomorrow in the bed that held his scent. He had been too long in that room (this was his third year), too long in the building: there were six apartments; families lived in the five larger ones; one family had a man: a pumper of gasoline, checker of oil and water, wiper of windshields. Mike thought of his apartment as a room, although there was a kitchen he rarely used, a bathroom, and a second room that for weeks at a time he did not enter. Some mornings when he woke he felt he had lived too long in his body. He smoked a joint in bed and showered and shaved and left the room, the building, the street of these buildings. Once free of the street he felt better: he liked feeling and smelling clean; he walked into town. The girl stopped the Volvo at another of his sighed directions and touched his thigh and said she would help him bring the stuff in. He said no and loaded everything in his arms and left her.
Robin had wanted to go to his room too and he had never let her and now for the first time grieving for her lost flesh, he wished he had taken her there. Saw her there at nights and on the weekends, the room—rooms: he saw even the second room—smelling of paint; saw buckets and brushes on newspaper awaiting her night and weekend hand, his hand too: the two of them painting while music played not from his tinny-sounding transistor but a stereo that was simply there in his apartment with the certainty of something casually purchased with cash neither from the employment office nor his occasional and tense forays into the world of jobs: dishwashing at Timmy’s, the quick and harried waitresses bringing the trays of plates which he scraped and racked and hosed and slid into the washer, hot water in the hot kitchen wetting his clothes; he scrubbed the pots by hand and at the night’s end he mopped the floor and the bartender sent him a bottle of beer; but he only worked there in summers, when the students were gone. He saw Robin painting the walls beside him, their brushstrokes as uniform as the beating of their hearts. He was approaching the bar next to the bus station. He did not like it because the band was too loud, and the people were losers, but he often went there anyway, because he could sit and drink and watch the losers dancing without having to make one gesture he had to think about, the way he did at Timmy’s when he sat with the girls and was conscious of his shoulders and arms and hands, of his eyes and mouth as if he could see them, so that he smiled—and coolly, he knew—when girl after girl year after year touched his flesh and sometimes his heart and told him he was cool.
He went into the bar, feeling the bass drum beat as though it came from the floor and walls, and took the one untaken stool and ordered a shot of Comfort, out of habit checking his pocket although he knew he had three ones and some change. Everyone he saw was drunk, and the bartender was drinking. Vic was at the end of the bar, wearing a bandana on his head, earring on one ear, big fat arms on the bar; Mike nodded at him. He drank the shot and pushed the glass toward the bartender. His fingers trembled. He sipped the Comfort and lit a cigarette, cold sweat on his brow, and he thought he would have to go outside into the cold air or vomit.
He finished the shot then moved through the crowd to Vic and spoke close to his ear and the gold earring. ‘I need some downs.’ Vic wanted a dollar apiece. ‘Come on,’ Mike said. ‘Two.’ Vic’s arm left the bar and he put two in Mike’s hand; Mike gave him the dollar and left, out onto the cold street, heading uphill, swallowing, but his throat was dry and the second one lodged; he took a handful of snow from a mound at the base of a parking meter and ate it. He walked on the lee side of buildings now. He was dead with her. He lay on the bridge, his arm around her, his face in her hair. At the dormitory the night shift detectives would talk to the girls inside, out of the cold; they would sit in the big glassed-in room downstairs where drunk one night he had pissed on the carpet while Robin laughed before they went up to her room. The girls would speak his name. His name was in that room, back there in the dormitory; it was not walking up the hill in his clothing. He had two joints in his room and he would smoke those while he waited, lying dressed on his bed. When he heard their footsteps in the hall he would put on his jacket and open the door before they knocked and walk with them to the cruiser. He walked faster up the hill.
PART TWO
The Misogamist
IN THE SUMMER of 1944 Roy Hodges was back from the Pacific. He was a staff sergeant, a drill instructor at the Recruit Depot at San Diego. He was twenty-six years old, and he was training eighteen-year-old boys. He was also engaged to marry Sheila Russell, who was twenty-six and had been waiting for eight years in Marshall, Texas, to marry him. At eighteen, and still a virgin, her goodbye kiss was sad, loving, and hopeful. She told him she would not go out with other boys while he was gone. After boot camp he went home on leave, and on the first night he took her virginity. She believed he was giving his too; he had bought out of it with a middle-aged whore when he was fifteen. He took her much more easily than he had expected. Every night and sometimes the afternoons for three weeks he made love with her, and she aroused in him an excitement he had never felt before with a woman; nor did he ever feel it again. In the evening she drank beer with him and learned to smoke his cigarettes, and he liked that too. Then they drove in his father’s Ford out into the country, the woods. It was early spring and there were no mosquitoes. Gently with her on the blanket he sometimes remembered with a heart’s grin the attacking mosquitoes as he lay with Betty Jean Simpson in high school; with her, he had often thought of Sheila at home, and thinking of that pure side of his life had increased his passion for Betty Jean. Now, memory of Betty Jean and the mosquitoes on his rump waxed his passion with Sheila. And he finally felt in control of her: she was both his sweet, auburn-haired brown-eyed girl and his lustful woman. When he left her again, her goodbye kiss was erotic, fearful, and demanding.
He had told her, the night before leaving, that they would get married when his tour was up. She could tell her family and friends; he would write to his parents. Which he did: from sea duty, on a battleship. But most of the letter was about the sea. He had never in his life been out of sight of land: a sailor had told him the horizon was always twelve miles away; he wrote that to his parents, and told them to think of him seeing forty-eight miles of the Pacific by standing in one spot and turning in a circle. He wrote that he had won the heavyweight boxing championship in intramurals aboard ship; that in the final match he had won by jabbing and hooking the charging face of a slugging, body-punching sailor from Pittsburgh; that his commanding officer, a captain, had been a corporal in the Banana Wars, was tough and hard, and would throw you in the brig on bread and water if you looked at him wrong. He wrote of inspections, of gunnery, of Honolulu: the strange city and people and food.
His letters to Sheila were the same. He thought he should write love letters, write of their love on the blanket, but even while a sentence took shape in his mind it seemed false; the abstract words had little to do with what had occurred on the blanket; they had even less to do with how he felt abou
t it. So finally he simply wrote that he loved and missed her. Both were true; but he did not know the extent of their truth.
He found it even more difficult to write of their future life together. Again, the words in his mind were abstract, for he could not imagine himself performing the concrete rituals of marriage. He did not know what work he would do as a civilian; he did not even want to know; sitting on his foot locker and feeling the roll of the sea, he could not imagine himself as a civilian in Marshall, Texas. And he could not see himself at night and on the weekends with Sheila. His days now were filled: in the normal pattern of the service, on some days he did very little, but because he did it in uniform it seemed worthwhile; on other days, when they practiced gunnery and he imagined actual combat, the work was intense. Either way, during the hours of his work he did not need Sheila, or anyone female. It was at night that he missed her, in the compartment smelling of male sweat and shoe polish and leather; that was when he wrote to her. When he was in port, on liberty, he did not miss her at all; he thought of her, usually after drinking and whoring, with paternal tenderness; and he sent her gifts, knowing they were junk, knowing he was incapable of buying gifts for a woman anyway, incapable of understanding their affinity for things which couldn’t be used.
She wrote him love letters. They were not scented but they might as well have been; on their pages he felt the summer evening quiet of her front porch, heard the creaking of the chain that held the swing where she sat, where perhaps she had even written the letter; and he smelled her washed flesh and hair, and the lilac bush beside the porch. Reading these letters, touching them, sometimes after reading them just looking at each page as if they were pictures, he deeply loved her. He could have wept. He wanted to hold her. Yet he also felt, and with fear, the great division between them.
He was afraid because there was nothing wrong with Sheila. There was nothing he could hold against her, nothing he could point to and say: That’s it; that’s why I feel this way. She was pure in a way that excited his love: a good Methodist, she believed that making love with him was a sin. Yet she had sinned with him anyway, and he felt blessed. Betty Jean Simpson was the town punch: anyone who could move suitably as a boy in the world had a shot at her. The only element of challenge was finding a location where he thought she had never been, a fresh spot on the earth’s surface, free of the memory of past and present boys; while at the same time the knowledge of those boys gave him advance acquittal in case she got pregnant. Sheila’s sin was as secret as her parts were; each spot of earth and sheltering tree and concealing bush were new; as her breasts and loins were, eighteen years old and for the first time stroked and plunged into action. He would never forget that. (Nor would he ever make love with a virgin again, nor anyone who loved him, and when it was over with Sheila, when he had broken her heart, he wondered—this on the drill field one day at San Diego, while calling cadence to a marching platoon—if she had ever had an orgasm with him; saddened, he realized she had not, and he knew someone else would take her there, someone strong and gentle who could be for her what he could not, and that was almost enough to make him write to her again, to seek forgiveness and to return to her and nail down once and for all, with marriage, what he had started that first night he so easily unclothed her and shaped her into his sweet and sinful lover.) She was a cheerful girl. He had dated her for three years before joining the Marines, and he knew he had not been fooled. She was undemanding, acquiescent (a quality, strangely, that Betty Jean did not share, as though compensating for her round heels with trifling demands that were nevertheless rigid); there was nothing wrong with her.
It followed then, in his mind, that something was wrong with him: to prefer a life with men, broken periodically by forgettable transactions with whores. He began to believe that he was reaching a pivotal point in his life: either Sheila, who at times seemed to live in a fairy tale rather than in the world he knew; or whores, threats of VD, promises of nothing. Then he saw it wasn’t that at all. In Marshall he would not miss the whores; he would long for the men. Now he knew what the pride in performing his duties and the immediate camaraderie of the Corps, as well as the deeper one—the sense that he belonged to a recognized group of men, past and present, dead and living—had been bringing him to: he had, as the troops said, found a home. He was a career man.
He wrote to her, asking how she felt about leaving Marshall and living with him on or near Marine bases until he retired. She answered his letter on the day she got it. Again her stationery in his fingers brought to him her smells, her lowered face as she talked to him, strolling with him. In a voice whose sweet compliance he could almost hear, she told him of course she would miss Marshall, she had never thought she would live any place else, but she loved him and would marry him and go with him wherever he had to go; and she looked forward to those new places.
His next leave was in summer and they made love with sweat and mosquitoes and he told her he must now work hard to get promoted so they could afford to be married. He did not name a rank. Now he could sense a brooding quality in her lovemaking, as though resigning herself to annual trysts granted by the Marine Corps which would someday grant the promotion and money that would allow them to live as they should; and he felt her trying to possess him. For the first time she asked what he did on liberty; she asked if he did this with other girls. He lied. He had lied about Betty Jean Simpson too, but in a different way: he had simply told her nothing about where he was going on a particular night. Now telling her a direct lie made him feel diminished as a man, and he held that against her. At the train station her goodbye kiss was both vulnerable and sternly possessive.
And so it went on: every year with a mingling of reluctance, fear, and passionate anticipation—all blurring his deeper and true feeling of love for her, his knowledge that for his own good he ought to marry her—he returned to Marshall. By the time she was twenty-two he was in the first year of his second enlistment, he was a corporal, and he had promised her that sergeant was the rank. He spoke to her father about it; he even spoke quite easily to her father, who had a small farm and believed in hard work and bad luck and little else, and who liked Roy’s having man’s work which was based on skill yet had nothing to do with rain or dry seasons or prices. In her father’s eyes Roy saw neither suspicion nor misgivings, and he felt that his decision to wait until he made sergeant was that of a worldly, responsible man. Roy also suspected that Mr. Russell knew what he and Sheila did after they left the house for what they called a ride and a talk, and that further, Mr. Russell didn’t care about it as long as he wasn’t forced to.
Not so with Mrs. Russell: thin and nearly as wiry as her husband, beauty long gone from her strong face which had kept its humor and cheer in the eyes and their crinkled corners and the quick grin above the body which had waked so early and worked so hard for so long. She did not look at Roy with suspicion either; it was worse than that: at times, when her eyes met his, there was a flicker of pain: Why did you do it to us? Or that was the question and the pain he saw before she looked away or, more often, started talking and her eyes brightened again, as if the question had come against her will, like a sad, irrelevant memory while talking with a friend. Why did you do it to us? Not: Why have you taken my daughter’s virginity and left her single? Not even: Why have you brought a secret sin between my daughter and me? But more than that, a vaster accusation, as if she represented in those moments—and, thankfully, they were sparse—all the women who lived on one side of the line he had drawn between them and the others: the forgotten sensations and names, the remembered faces and prices. And when she looked at him that way he felt that God and time, life and death, were on her side; that he was a puny and defenseless man who had committed a sin of Old Testament proportion, the kind of sin you never escaped from, no matter where you went, or how long you stayed there. So that at times, drinking and talking with Mr. Russell, sounding to himself like a reasonable, ambitious, and absolutely trustworthy man, he suddenly felt the judg
mental presence of the mother and daughter in the room, as if in concert they had focused on him a knowing glare, and all his talk of money and promotion and career seemed no more than a boy’s chatter about what he’d be when he grew up.
He was promoted to sergeant on the second of December, 1941. On the seventh he had still not written to tell her. He woke up that morning in a cheap two-room apartment in Los Angeles; woke tasting last night’s beer and smelling traces of perfume and lovemaking. He had gone to the city with three friends, and had left them at a bar and walked home with the girl. She was not in bed with him. Then he remembered her name was Lisa. He wanted to make love to clear his hung-over head. He heard the radio in the kitchen, not music but a man’s voice, and he imagined her making coffee and bringing him a cup, bringing him herself too, and he thought of that and then breakfast and the afternoon left to hitchhike back to the base. He took his wallet from the bedside table and was looking in it to see if there was another condom (there was) when she came to the door in an old blue robe, with her black hair unbrushed, last night’s lipstick faint on her lips. She stood quietly in the doorway, looking at him, knowing she was about to tell him the most important news he had ever heard, and then she said: ‘I think you better come to the kitchen. I think you better come hear what’s on the radio.’
He didn’t want to go; he was put off by her dramatics, and wanted her in bed. But looking at her face he suddenly knew with both fear and eagerness that somehow the news of the nation or even the world was affecting him; and since his only involvement with the world was as a Marine he knew by the time he reached the kitchen that, while he had been in bed with a strange girl, America had gotten into the war. He listened to the radio for perhaps thirty minutes, then he borrowed her leg-dulled razor and shaved and put on his uniform; for a moment he wanted to take Lisa to bed again, but as the desire struck him he tossed it aside as a foolish indulgence.