by Andre Dubus
It was the people singing, and her friends’ clapping praise. While she sat with the pains of Blake’s attacks: the one with his cock, the one with his tongue, the one with his heart. And her friends were listening to four boys in their early twenties who were content to imitate someone else. While her betrayal on the cliff called for poetry or an act of revenge. Up there. On that cliff, where in the brightest daylight of sun on ocean she had lain beside her sisters; where she and her friends had gone with sandwiches and apples in the days of dirty hands and knees, up there she had tried for love and felt nothing but that cruel cock—And she walked down alone, with some bravery against pain, with some pride in her bravery, and re-entered a lowland of laughter and mediocrity, where she could never explain what had happened up there above the sea. The guitars and voices taunted her: the safe musicians who practiced to albums. Her friends’ laughter drained her.
But what was that before? The anger, the You dumb shit voice—Yes: Hank. It was Chekhov. And first of all, she had no way of knowing whether tonight’s understanding of her anger in that bar over a year ago came from reading Chekhov. But it didn’t matter. What if she had learned from reading, even from hearing Hank talk about Chekhov? That didn’t mean she was too dumb to understand her own life without someone else’s help. It meant she was getting smarter. Now she wrote with joy, with love for herself in the world. Wasn’t that what she was in school for? To enter classrooms and to hear? And if that made her understand her life better, wasn’t that enough and wasn’t that why she could not study for the grades for the graduate school which would give her a job she could not even imagine and therefore could not imagine the graduate school either? Wasn’t she in fact an intelligent young woman trying to learn how to live, and if no profession pulled at her, if she could not see herself with a desk and office and clothes and manners to match them, that only meant she was like most people. This fall Hank talking in class about ‘The Kiss’ and what people had to endure when they had jobs instead of vocations; Ryabovich, with his dull career, existing more in the daydreams he constructed from the accidental kiss than he did in the saddle of his horse.
She wanted to phone Hank and tell him but she did not want to stop writing, and now it was time to write about Hank anyway. Already she was with her second lover and she had tried not to think about the future but it kept talking to her anyway at times when she was alone, but she would not talk back, would not give words to her fear, but now her pen moved fast because her monologue with her future had been there for some time and she knew every word of it though she had refused, by going to sleep or going to talk to someone, ever to listen to it. Already two lovers and she wished she could cancel the first and, if she and Hank broke up, there would be a third and she would be going the way of her sisters who had recovered, she thought, too many times from too many lovers, were growing tougher through repeated pain; were growing, she thought, cynical; and when they visited home, they talked about love but never permanent love anymore, and all the time she knew but wouldn’t say because they still talked to her like a baby sister and because she didn’t want to loosen what she saw as a fragile hold on their lives, she knew what they needed was marriage. Two lovers were enough. Three seemed deadly. If she could not stay with the third, it seemed the next numbers were all the same, whether four or fifteen: some path of failure, some sequence of repetitions that would change her, take her further and further from the Lori she was beginning to love tonight.
And now here was Hank on a sunny October Saturday, having for the first time since she had known him cancelled his day with Sharon, walking beside her, on his back a nylon knapsack he said held wine and their lunch, a blanket folded over his left arm, his right arm loosely around her waist as they walked on his running road she had never seen except in her mind when he talked about it. And he was happy, his boyish happiness that she loved, for the first time since last Saturday night when she told him about Monica because she could not hide from him any longer something she knew he would want to know. Tuesday night she had gone to his apartment and he told her of his fight Monday and that he and Jack had just been to Timmy’s where he had apologized to Johnny and bought the bar a round, and he said Jack had been right. Johnny had grinned and said: The middleweight champ of Timmy’s as soon as he walked in; and he told her about running with Jack and how it hadn’t worked. She slept with him that night and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday, and he held her and talked. He did not tell her he still couldn’t make love. He did not even mention it. During those four nights she felt he was talking to spirits, different ones who kept appearing above them where he gazed, felt that he was struggling with some, agreeing with others, and lying beside him she was watching a strange play.
He said Jack was right. The country had gone fucking crazy. He said I’ll bet ninety percent of abortions are because somebody’s making love with somebody they shouldn’t. So were too many people. So had he, for too long. But no more. Things were screwed up and the women had lost again. A sexual revolution and a liberation movement and look what it got them. Guys didn’t carry rubbers anymore. Women were expected to be on the pill or have an IUD and expected also to have their hearts as ready as their wombs. And women were even less free than before, except for the roundheels, and there were more of them around now but he didn’t know any men who took them any more seriously than the roundheels from the old days of rubbers in the wallet and slow courting. Goddamn. The others (Like you, he said to Lori) are trapped. Used to be a young woman when they were called girls could date different guys and nobody had a hold on her, could date three guys in one weekend; by the end of a year in college she might have dated six, ten, any number, gone places, had fun, been herself. Now girls are supposed to fuck. Most students don’t even date: just go to the dormitory room and drink and smoke dope and get laid. Guy doesn’t even have to work for it. But then he’s got the girl. Unless she’s a roundheel, and nobody gives a shit about them. But the good ones. Like you. What they do is go through some little marriages. First one breaks up, then there’s another guy. Same thing. Three days or three room-visits or whatever later, and they’re lovers. Somebody else meets her, wants to take her to Boston to hear some music, see a play, she can’t. Boy friend says no. Can’t blame him; she’d say no if he wanted to take somebody to hear some music. Girl gets out of college and what she’s had is two or three monogamous affairs, even shared the same room. Call that freedom? Men win again. Girls have to make sure they don’t get pregnant, they have to make love, have to stay faithful. Some revolution. Some liberation. And everybody’s so fucking happy, you noticed that? Jack is right, Goddamnit; Jack is right. He’s glad now they stuck it out. He and Terry. He said I’ve got a good friend who’s also my wife and I’ve got two good children, and the three of them make the house a good nest, and I sit and look out the window at the parade going by: some of my students are marching and some of my buddies, men and women, and the drum majorette is Aphrodite and she’s pissed off and she’s leading that parade to some bad place. I don’t think it’s the Styx either. It’s some place where their cocks will stay hard and their pussies wet, some big open field with brown grass and not one tree, and nobody’s going to say anything funny there. Nobody’ll laugh. All you’ll hear is pants and grunts. Maybe Aphrodite will laugh, I don’t know. But I don’t think she’s that mean. Just a trifle pissed-off at all this trifling around.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Lori says, as they enter the woods and she can see the lake.
‘This is the first time I’ve walked it,’ Hank says.
‘It is? You’ve never brought a woman here?’
‘No. Not even Sharon.’
‘Why?’
‘Never thought about it. When I think of this place I think of running. I’ve never even been here after it snows. Too slippery.’
‘Not for walking. With boots.’
‘No.’
‘Can we come here in winter?’
‘Sure.’
He moves hi
s arm from her waist and takes her hand. They walk slowly. An hour passes before they start up the long hill; he looks down the slope at sun on the pines, and their needles on the earth, at boulders, and the lake between branches. At the top he says: ‘Blackberries grow here.’
‘Do you and Jack ever pick them?’
‘We say we will. But when we get to the top we just sort of look at them as we gasp on by.’
He turns left into the woods, and they climb again, a short slope above the road; then they are out of the trees, standing on a wide green hill, looking down and beyond at the Merrimack valley, the distant winding river, and farms and cleared earth; surrounding all the houses and fields, and bordering the river, are the red and yellow autumn trees. He unfolds the blanket and she helps him spread it on the grass. He takes off the pack and brings out a bottle of claret, devilled eggs wrapped in foil, a half-gallon jug of apple cider, two apples, a pound of Jarlsberg cheese, Syrian bread, and a summer sausage. She is smiling.
‘Cider?’
She nods and takes the jug from him and he watches the muscle in her forearm as she holds it up and drinks, watching her throat moving, her small mouth. When she hands him the jug he drinks, then opens the wine with a corkscrew from the pack.
‘I didn’t bother with glasses.’ They pass the bottle. She lightly kisses him and says: ‘You went to a lot of trouble. I thought you’d just buy a couple of subs.’
They eat quietly, looking at the valley. Then Hank lies on his back while Lori sits smoking. When she puts out the cigarette she returns it to her pack.
‘That does it,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Anybody who’d take a stinking butt home instead of leaving it here ought to be loved forever.’
She lies beside him, rests her head on his right shoulder, and he says: ‘I think when we started making love I wasn’t in love with you. I felt like you were one of my best friends, and I needed someone to keep me going. I figured you’d be like the other young ones, give me a year, maybe a little more, then move on. But I chose that over staring at my walls at night. I wasn’t thinking much about you. Then after a few months I didn’t have to think about you anyway, because I was in love, so I knew I wasn’t going to hurt you. I figured you’d leave me, and I’d just take a day at a time till you did. Like I did with Monica. I should never have made love with Monica. I haven’t had the dream since Monday after the fight—’
‘—She shouldn’t have made love with you.’
‘Same thing. I can’t do that again. Ever. With anyone. Unless both of us are ready for whatever happens. No more playing with semen and womb if getting pregnant means solitude and death instead of living. And that’s all I mean: living. Nobody’s got to do a merry dance, have the faulty rubber bronzed. But living. Worry; hope the rabbit doesn’t die; keep the Tampax ready; get drunk when the rabbit dies; but laugh too. So I can’t make love with you. I’m going to court you. And if someday you say you’ll marry me, then it’ll be all right, and—’
‘—It’s all right now.’
She kisses him, the small mouth, the slow tongue that always feels to him shy and trusting. Then she pulls him so his breast covers hers and she holds his face up and says: ‘I want to finish college.’ She smiles. ‘For the fun of it. But we’re engaged.’
‘That’s almost three years. What if we get pregnant?’
‘Then we’ll get married and I’ll go to school till the baby comes and I’ll finish later, when I can.’
‘You’ve thought about it before?’
‘Yes.’
‘For how long?’
‘I don’t know. But longer than you.’
‘Are you going to tell your folks?’
‘Sure.’
‘They won’t like it.’
‘She won’t. My father won’t mind.’
‘We might as well do it in the old scared-shitless way: drive up there together and tell them.’
‘I’d like that.’
‘Do you want a ring?’
‘No. Something else.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know. We’ll find something.’
‘I like this. So next Saturday we go to Boston and find something. And we don’t know what it is. But it’ll mean we’re getting married.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that night we go to your folks’ for dinner and we say we have a little announcement to make.’
‘Yes.’
‘And your mother will hate it but she’ll try not to show it. And your father will blush and grin and shake my hand.’
‘Maybe he’ll even hug me.’
‘And for three years your mother will hope some rich guy steals you from me, and your father will just go on about his business.’
‘That’s it.’ Then she presses both palms against his jaw and says: ‘And we’re never going to get a divorce. And we’re not going to have American children. We’re going to bring them up the way you and Edith were.’
‘Look what that got us.’
‘A good daughter.’
‘You really think she’s all right?’
‘Man, that chick’s got her shit together,’ she says, then she is laughing and he tries to kiss her as she turns away with her laughter and when it stops she says: ‘Clean tongues and clean lungs and no Monicas and Blakes. That’s how we’ll bring them up. Let’s make love.’
‘The Trojan warriors are at home.’
‘You really did think you’d have to court me. Then let’s go home.’
He kisses her once, then kneels, uncorks the wine bottle, holds it to her lips while she raises her head to swallow; then he drinks and returns the cork and puts the bottle in the pack. As he stands and slips his arms through the straps, Lori shakes out the blanket, and they fold it.
‘Can I keep this in my room at school?’
‘Sure.’
She rests it over her arm and takes his hand and looks down at the valley. Then she turns to the woods, and quietly they leave the hill and go down through the trees to the road above the lake.
‘It took us a long time to get here,’ she says. ‘Did you say this is the halfway point?’
‘Right about where we’re standing.’
‘We didn’t walk very fast. It’ll be quicker, going back.’
‘It always is,’ he says, and starts walking.
A BIOGRAPHY OF ANDRE DUBUS
Andre Dubus (1936–1999) is considered one of the greatest American short story writers of the twentieth century. His collections of short fiction, which include Adultery & Other Choices (1977), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983) and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), are notable for their spare prose and illuminative, albeit subtle, insights into the human heart. He is often compared to Anton Chekhov and revered as a “writer’s writer.”
Born on August 11, 1936, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Dubus grew up the oldest child of a Cajun-Irish Catholic family in Lafayette. There, he attended the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic school that helped nurture a young Dubus’s love of literature. He later enrolled at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, where he acquired his BA in English and journalism. Following his graduation in 1958, he spent six years in the United States Marine Corps as a lieutenant and captain—an experience that would inspire him to write his first and only novel, The Lieutenant (1967). During this time, he also married his first wife, Patricia, and started a family.
After concluding his military service in 1964, Dubus moved with his wife and their four children to Iowa City, where he was to earn his MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. While there, he studied under acclaimed novelist and short story writer Richard Yates, whose particular brand of realism would inform Dubus’s work in the years to come. In 1966, Dubus relocated to New England, teaching English and creative writing at Bradford College in Bradford, Massachusetts, and beginning his own career as an author. Over an illustrious career, he wrote a total of six collections of short
fiction, two collections of essays, one novel, and a stand-alone novella, Voices from the Moon (1984)—about a young boy who must come to terms with his faith in the wake of two family divorces—and was awarded the Boston Globe’s first annual Lawrence L. Winship Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
In the summer of 1986, tragedy struck when Dubus pulled over to help two disabled motorists on a highway between Boston and his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. As he exited his car, another vehicle swerved and hit him. The accident crushed both his legs and would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Plagued by residual pain, he sunk into a depression that was further exacerbated by his divorce from his third wife, Peggy, and subsequent estrangement from their two young daughters, Cadence and Madeleine. Buoyed by his faith, he continued to write—in his final decade, he would pen two books of autobiographical essays, Broken Vessels (1991) and Meditations from a Moveable Chair (1998), and a final collection of short stories, Dancing After Hours (1996), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist—and even held a workshop for young writers at his home each week.