by Andre Dubus
She turned and kissed him long, then raising her face above his, she said: ‘Because you’re so alive.’
As if she had suddenly pulled the blankets from him, a chill went up his back and touched his heart, which felt now dry and withered, late autumn’s leaf about to fall slowly through his body. Feeling her bones against him, he thought of her as a skeleton lying amid the antiques in the dark, a skeleton with a voice struggling for life, with words that were the rote of pain and anger from the weekly meetings of women. Then he felt like crying for her. It seemed that, compared to hers, his own life was full and complex and invigorating. He wished he knew a secret, and that he could give it to her: could lay his hand on her forehead and she would sleep and wake tomorrow with the same dreary job as a bank teller, the same mother-duties, and confusion and loneliness and the need to feel her life was something solid she was sculpting, yet with an excited spirit ready to engage the day, to kick it and claw it and gouge its eyes until it gave her the joy she deserved. But he had nothing to tell her, nothing to give. He held her quietly, for a long time. Then he rose and dressed. He never spent the night with her. She did not want the children, who were three and five, to know; nor did Hank; and it was implicit between them that since their affair had begun impetuously soon, it was tenuous, was at very best—or least—a trial affair. There would probably be another man, and another, and her children should not grow up seeing that male succession at breakfast. He leaned over and kissed her, whispered sweetly, then drove home.
The point was, finally, that Donna did not read. He guessed all men did not have to love women who were interested in their work; somehow a veterinarian could leave his work with its odors in the shower before dinner, spend his evening with a beloved woman who did not want a house pet. But he could not. Literature was what he turned to for passion and excitement, where he entered a world of questions he could not answer, so he finished a novel or poem or story feeling blessed with humility, with awe of life, with the knowledge that he knew so little about how one was supposed to live. So, better to have the company of a girl who loved literature and simply had not read much because she was young, far more exciting to listen to a girl’s delight at her first reading of Play It As It Lays or Fat City, than to be with a woman in her thirties who did not read because she had chosen not to, had gone to the magazines and television.
Two nights later they went to dinner and, with coffee and brandy, sipping the courage to hurt her, he spoke about their starting too fast, becoming lovers too soon, before they really knew each other; he said their histories were very different, and being sudden lovers blurred their ability to see whether they were really—he paused, waiting for a series of concrete words besides the one word compatible, wanting his speech to at least sound different from the ones other men and women were hearing across the land that night. During his pause she said: ‘Compatible.’
Then relief filled her face as quickly as pain does, the pain he had predicted, and for an instant he was hurt. Then he smiled at his fleeting pride. He was happy: she had wanted out too. Then she told him she had been three days late last week and her waiting had made her think about the two of them, she had been frightened, and had wanted to stop the affair. But not their friendship. They ordered second brandies and talked, without shyness, about their children. They split the bill, he drove her home, and they kissed goodnight at her door.
As he leaves Lori in the car in front of Edith’s house he kisses her quickly, says he loves her. Edith opens the door: small body, long black hair, her eyes and mouth smiling like an old friend. He supposes that is what she is now and, because they have Sharon, in some way they are still married. Though he cannot define each scent, the house smells feminine to him. Like Donna, Edith does not let lovers stay the night, and for the same reasons. Hank knows this because, in their second year of divorce, when he could ask the question without risking too deep a wound, he did. Now he asks: ‘What kind of smell does a man bring into a house?’
‘Bad ones.’
‘I smell bacon and the Sunday paper. Both neuter. But there’s something female. Or non-male.’
‘It’s your imagination. But there has been a drought.’
‘I’m sorry. What happened to what’s-his-face?’
She shrugs, and for a moment the smile leaves her eyes: not sadness but resignation or perhaps foreknowledge of it, years of it. Then she looks at him more closely.
‘What happened?’ she says.
‘Something shitty.’
‘With Lori?’
‘No.’
‘Good. I think she’s the one.’
‘Really? Why?’
‘I don’t know. I hope you can keep her. What is it? Work?’
‘No. I’ll talk to you tonight. Where’s Sharon?’
‘Cleaning her room. I’ll get her.’
She goes to the foot of the stairs and calls: ‘Sharon, Dad’s here.’
‘I’m sorry about the drought,’ he says.
‘What the hell. I should have been a teacher so I’d have more livestock to pasture with. It’s all right now, did you know that? For women. A friend of mine is having an affair with one of her students. She’s thirty-seven and he’s nineteen.’
She is not attacking him; those days are long past. He is sorry for her, knows her problem is geographical too, that she would do better in Boston. He is grateful and deeply respects her for staying here so he and Sharon can be near each other, but he can only tell her such things on the phone when he’s had some drinks.
Sharon comes down in jeans and a sweater, carrying a windbreaker. He hugs her and they kiss. Her new breasts make him uncomfortable; he rarely looks at them, and when he embraces her he doesn’t know where to put them, what to do about their small insistence against him. They both kiss Edith and walk arm-in-arm to the car. Lori opens the door, and Sharon gets into the back seat.
Sharon and Lori get along well, and sometimes talk like two teen-aged girl friends, as if he’s not there. That they are both teenagers, one in her first year of it, the other in her last, gives Hank both a smile and a shiver. He wonders if someday he will have a girl who is Sharon’s age. It could happen in five years. And who, he wonders as he drives on a country road winding east, ever started the myth that a young girl gave an older man his youth again? Not that he would want his confused youth again. But they were supposed to make you feel younger. All he knows is that with Lori he feels unattractive, balding, flabby. That she wakes with a hangover looking strong and fresh, and is; while at thirty he lost that resilience and now a bad hangover affects his day like the flu. Remembering how in his twenties he could wake six hours after closing a bar, then eat breakfast and write, he feels old. And when people glance at him and Lori while, in Boston, they walk holding hands, or enter a restaurant, he feels old. The beach is worse: he watches the lithe young men and wonders if Lori watches them too, and his knowing that most of them, probably all except the obsessively vain and those who are simply exempt by nature, will in a few years have enough flesh at their waists to fill a woman’s hands, does not help. He feels old. Yet with Donna and the divorcee before her, he had felt young, too young, his spirit quickly wearied by their gravity. So, again, no answers: all he knows is that whoever spread the word about young girls had not been an older man in love with one.
Sharon and Lori are talking about school and their teachers and homework and how they discipline themselves to do it, how they choose which work to do first (Lori works in descending order, beginning with the course she likes most: Sharon does the opposite; they both end with science). Last summer Sharon started and stopped smoking; quit when Edith kissed her just after running, and smelled Sharon’s breath and hair; which she might not have, she told Hank on the phone, if her sense of smell hadn’t been cleansed of her own cigarettes by an hour’s run. Hank liked that: he had a notion that kids got away with smoking now because their parents didn’t kiss them much; when he was a boy, he and his friends had chewed gum and rubbed
lemon juice on their fingers before going home, because someone always kissed them hello. Edith talked to Sharon, and that night Hank took her to dinner and talked to her, pleaded with her, and she promised him, as she had Edith, that she was not hooked, had smoked maybe two packs, and from now on, she said, she would not give in to peer pressure. That was the night Hank and Edith started worrying about dope, talked on the phone about it, and he wondered how divorced parents who were too hurt and angry to talk to each other dealt with what their children were doing. Now, at least once a month, while he and Sharon cook dinner in his small kitchen, he mentions dope. She tells him not to worry, she’s seen enough of the freaks at school, starting with their joints on the bus at seven in the morning.
He is not deeply worried about dope, because he trusts Sharon, knows she is sensible; that she tried cigarettes with her girl friends because at thirteen she wouldn’t think of death; but he is as certain as he can be that, seeing the stoned and fruitless days of the young people around her, she will take care of herself.
What really worries him about Sharon has to do with him and Lori, and with him and Monica, and with the two girls before Monica. It also has to do with Edith: although her lovers have not spent the night, have probably not even used the house, by now Sharon must know Edith has had them. But he doesn’t worry much about Edith, because he feels so confused, guilty, embarrassed, honest and dishonest about himself and his lovers and Sharon, that he has little energy left to worry about Edith’s responsibilities. Also, he understands very little about mothers and daughters, the currents that run between them. But about Sharon he knows this: with each of his young girl friends—she did not meet Donna or the divorcee before her—she has been shy, has wanted to be their friend, more to them than her father’s daughter. He has also sensed jealousy, which has disturbed him, and he doesn’t know whether Sharon feels the girl is taking her mother’s place, or her own, in his life. Always he has talked with her about his girl friends, and pretended they were not lovers. Yet he knows that she knows. So he is hung on his own petard: he does not want her to have lovers early, before she has grown enough to protect herself from pain. He wants to warn her that, until some vague age, a young boy will stick it in anything and say anything that will let him stick it. He doesn’t know when he will tell her this. He does not want her girlhood and young womanhood to become a series of lovers, he does not want her to become cynical and casual about making love. He does not, in fact, want her to be like his girl friends. Yet, by having four whom she’s known in five years, and two whom she hasn’t, that is exactly the way he is showing her how to live.
Lori makes things better. When he became her friend, she had had one quick and brutal affair with a co-worker in a restaurant in Maine where they both waited tables the summer before she came to college. He hurt her physically, confused her about what she was doing with him, and after two weeks she stopped. So she was more the sort of girl he wanted Sharon to be. And Lori—shy, secretive not by choice, brooding (though it didn’t appear on her smooth face; he had to look at her drooping lip-corners)—was warm and talkative with Sharon, enjoyed being with her, and Hank thought they were good for each other: Sharon, with her new breasts and menses, her sophistication that came from enduring divorce and having parents who were not always honest with her yet tried to be as often as they could, for the two purposes of helping her with divorce and preparing her to face the implacable and repetitive pains in a world that, when they were much younger, neither of them had foreseen. On the other hand Lori: with her quiet, tender father, his voice seldom heard, his presence seeming to ask permission for itself, and her loud mother whose dominance was always under a banner of concern for her daughter and, beneath that (Hank guessed), Lori’s belief that her father was, had been, and would be a cuckold, and not only that but one without vengeance, neither rage nor demand nor even the retaliatory relief of some side-pussy of his own. So as Hank listens he thinks Sharon needs warm recognition from Lori, and that Lori needs to be able to talk, giggle, be silly, say whatever she wants, and from Sharon (and yes: him at the wheel beside her) she draws the peace to be able to talk without feeling that someone is standing behind her, about to clamp a hand on her shoulder and tell her she’s wrong.
Wondering about Sharon and Lori gives him some respite but it is not complete. For all during the drive there is the cool hollow of sadness around his heart, and something is wrong with his body. Gravity is more intense: his head and shoulders and torso are pulled downward to the car seat. He crosses the bridge to the island, turns right into the game preserve, driving past the booth which is unmanned now that summer is over. To their right is the salt marsh, to their left dunes so high they cannot see the ocean. He parks facing a dune, and walking between Lori and Sharon, holding their hands, he starts climbing the grass-tufted slope of sand; his body is still heavy.
At the dune’s top the sea breeze strikes them cool but not cold, coming over water that is deep blue, for the air is dry, and they stop. They stand deeply inhaling the air from the sea. On the crest of the dune, his eyes watering from the breeze, holding Lori’s and Sharon’s hands, breathing the ocean-smell he loves, Hank suddenly does not know what he will do about last year’s dead fetus, last night’s dream of her on the summer beach with him and Sharon; he cannot imagine the rest of his life. He sees himself growing older, writing and running and teaching, but that is all, and his tears now are not from the breeze.
‘Let’s go,’ he says, and they walk southward, releasing each other’s hands so they can file between the low shrubs on the dune’s top. He turns back to the girls and points at Canadian geese far out in the marsh, even their distant silhouettes looking fat, and he thinks of one roasting, the woman—who? his mother? he sees no face—bending over to open the oven door, peering in, basting. They walk quietly. He can feel them all, free of house-wood and car-metal that surround most of their time, feeling the hard sand underfoot, the crisp brown shrubs scratching their pants, their eyes looking ahead and down the slopes of the dune, out at the marsh with its grass and, in places, shimmer of standing water, and its life of tiny creatures they can feel but not see; and at the ocean, choppy and white-capped, and he imagines a giant squid and killer whale struggling in a dance miles deep among mountains and valleys. For an instant he hopes Lori is at least a bit sad, then knows that is asking too much.
They walk nearly two miles, where the dune ends, and beneath them the island ends too at the river which flows through the marsh, into the sea. The river is narrow and, where it meets the sea, the water is lake-gentle. It is shallow and, in low tide, Hank and Sharon have waded out to a long sandbar opposite the river’s mouth. Hank goes down a steep, winding path, and they move slowly. At the bottom they cross the short distance of sand and watch the end of the river, and look southeast where the coast below them curves sharply out to sea. They turn and walk up the beach, the sand cool and soft. He is walking slightly ahead of them, holding back just enough to be with them and still alone; for he feels something else behind him too, so strongly that his impulse is to turn and confront it before it leaps on him. He wants to run until his body feels light again. They move closer to the beach and walk beside washed-up kelp and green seaweed. He stops and turns to Lori and Sharon. Their faces are wind-pink, their hair blows across cheeks and eyes.
‘I don’t know where the car is,’ he says. ‘But I know a restaurant it can get us to.’
Sharon points at the dune.
‘On the other side,’ she says.
‘Oh. I thought I parked it in the surf.’
‘It’s right over there.’
‘No.’
He looks at the dune.
‘You want to bet?’
‘Not with you. You’d bet a dinner at the Copley against a hamburger at Wendy’s.’
‘Okay. What’s the Copley?’
‘A place I’m not taking you. Lori and I go Dutch.’
‘That expensive, huh?’
‘We go everywher
e Dutch. You can’t tell me that part of the dune looks different.’
‘See the lifeguard tower?’
He looks north behind him, perhaps a half-mile away. Sharon talks to his back.
‘When we climbed the dune I looked that way and saw it.’
He looks at her. ‘If you’re right, I’ll buy you a meal.’
‘You already said you’d do that.’
‘Right. Let’s climb, ladies.’
He leads them up and, at the top, they see the car to the south.
‘I was a bit off,’ Sharon says.
‘No more than a hundred yards.’
The restaurant is nearby, on the mainland road that curves away from the island; and it is there, seated and facing Sharon and Lori, that whatever pursued him on the beach strikes him: lands howling on his back. He can do nothing about it but look at Sharon’s cheerful face while he feels, in the empty chair beside him, the daughter salined or vacuumed from Monica a year ago. The waitress is large and smiling, a New England country woman with big, strong-looking hands, and she asks if they’d like something to drink. Sharon wants a Shirley Temple, Lori wants a margarita, and Hank wants to be drunk. But he is wary. When his spirit is low, when he can barely feel it at all, just something damp and flat lying over his guts, when even speaking and eating demand effort, and he wants to lie down and let the world spin while he yearns for days of unconsciousness, he does not drink. The only cure then is a long run. It does not destroy what is attacking him, but it restores his spirit, and he can move into the world again, look at people, touch them, talk. Only once in his life it has not worked: the day after Edith told him to leave. He would like to run now. Whatever leaped on his back has settled there, more like a deadly snake than a mad dog. He must be still and quiet. He remembers one of his favorite scenes in literature, in Kipling: ‘Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,’ when Nagaina the mother cobra comes to the veranda where the family is eating, coiled and raised to strike the small boy, the three of them—father, mother, son—statues at their breakfast table.