by Andre Dubus
Acclaim for
Andre Dubus’s
Dancing After Hours
“He is a bull outside our literary china shop.… Dubus at his best—a best unlike anyone else’s—imparts not an easy benediction but a difficult one.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“So deeply imagined that the lives of his characters become part of any close reader’s permanent bank of important memories.… I was stunned by the frank lyricism and generosity of vision, the unabashed spirituality, the blunt yet never tawdry writing about sex.”
—Boston Sunday Globe
“Reinforces Dubus’s reputation as a deeply resonant fictional voice.… His stories are remarkable for their lyricism, for the riches Dubus uncovers in the mundane, and for the enormous generosity of spirit that infuses them.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Stories as raw and unsettling to read as they are impossible to put aside.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Like Chekhov’s, Dubus’s best stories contain the arc of a whole life in the language of specific moments … beautiful … illuminating.”
—Village Voice
“The bulk of these tales are perfectly turned. They join a sharp eye for the nuances of single and married life in America with a born storyteller’s ability to interpret and shape seemingly mundane materials in moving and suspenseful ways.”
—Miami Herald
“His emotional probing results in a spiritual clarity, a certain shining forth of what it means to be alive and human right now, that other writers have a hard time matching.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Perfectly wrought, constructed with an intensity and artistry that no novelist—even if he is a great one— ought to try if he is not willing to give the [short-story] form its just amount of awe.… Mr. Dubus’s characters are people we more than feel for—we end up cheering for them.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A compassionate, unsentimental portrait of the American soul at this hour.… Andre Dubus is a master, and his new collection is a proud addition to one of the finest shelves of books in our literature.”
—Tobias Wolff
“More than any writer I can think of, he makes me aware of the simple pleasure of reading a story.… Andre Dubus is my hero.”
—Elmore Leonard
Andre Dubus
Dancing After Hours
Andre Dubus lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts. The author of nine previous books of fiction, as well as Broken Vessels, a collection of essays, he was a peacetime Marine Corps captain, a member of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a college teacher. Dubus won the Boston Globe’s first annual Laurence L. Winship Award, the PEN-Malamud Award, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from both the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He died in 1999.
Also by Andre Dubus
The Lieutenant
Separate Flights
Adultery & Other Choices
Finding a Girl in America
The Times Are Never So Bad
We Don’t Live Here Anymore
Voices from the Moon
The Last Worthless Evening
Selected Stories
Broken Vessels (nonfiction)
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, FEBRUARY 1997
Copyright © 1996 by Andre Dubus
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.
“Sunday Morning” was originally published in Boston Review, “A Love Song” in Crazyhorse, “All the Time in the World” and “Dancing After Hours” in Epoch, “The Timing of Sin” in Esquire, “The Colonel’s Wife” in Playboy, “Woman on a Plane” and “The Lover” in Ploughshares, “The Intruder” in Sewanee Review, “Falling in Love” in War, Literature and the Arts, “At Night,” “Blessings,” “The Last Moon,” and “Out of the Snow” in Yankee. “Blessings” was also published in a limited edition by Raven Editions.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc. and Arthur Schwartz Music Ltd. for permission to reprint from “Dancing in the Dark” by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, copyright © 1931 by Warner Bros. Inc. (renewed). Rights for extended renewal term in U.S. controlled by Warner Bros. Inc. and Arthur Schwartz Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Arthur Schwartz Music Ltd. and Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL, 33014.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Dubus, Andre, [date]
Dancing after hours : stories / by Andre Dubus.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80191-3
I. Tide.
PS3554.U265D36 1996
813′.54–dc20 95-32032
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger
v3.1
To Jack Herlihy
and in memory of
Richard Yates and James Valhouli
I am grateful to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and Frieda Arkin, and Scott Downing; and the Thursday Nighters, who come to my home and share their work.
Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things. There is need of only one thing.
—St. Luke 10:41
She thought, Once long ago, I have lived this selfsame moment, this swoon, and thought how everything is known at birth, the lather of our begetting, known, then forgotten, blotted out.
—Edna O’Brien, TIME AND TIDE
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Intruder
A Love Song
Falling in Love
Blessings
Sunday Morning
All the Time in the World
Woman on a Plane
The Colonel’s Wife
The Lover
The Last Moon
The Timing of Sin
At Night
Out of the Snow
Dancing After Hours
The Intruder
BECAUSE KENNETH GIRARD LOVED HIS parents and his sister and because he could not tell them why he went to the woods, his first moments there were always uncomfortable ones, as if he had left the house to commit a sin. But he was thirteen and he could not say that he was going to sit on a hill and wait for the silence and trees and sky to close in on him, wait until they all became a part of him and thought and memory ceased and the voices began. He could only say that he was going for a walk and, since there was so much more to say, he felt cowardly and deceitful and more lonely than before.
He could not say that on the hill he became great, that he had saved a beautiful girl from a river (the voice then had been gentle and serious and she had loved him), or that he had ridden into town, his clothes dusty, his black hat pulled low over his sunburned face, and an hour later had ridden away with four fresh notches on the butt of his six-gun, or that with the count three-and-two and the bases loaded, he had driven the ball so far and high that the outfielders did not even move, or that he had waded through surf and sprinted over sand, firing his Tommy gun and shouting to his soldiers behind him.
Now he was capturing a farmhouse. In the late movie the night before, the farmhouse had been very important, though no one ever said why, and sitting there in the summer dusk, he wa
tched the backs of his soldiers as they advanced through the woods below him and crossed the clear, shallow creek and climbed the hill that he faced. Occasionally, he lifted his twenty-two-caliber rifle and fired at a rusty tin can across the creek, the can becoming a Nazi face in a window as he squeezed the trigger and the voices filled him: You got him, Captain. You got him. For half an hour he sat and fired at the can, and anyone who might have seen him could never know that he was doing anything else, that he had been wounded in the shoulder and lost half his men but had captured the farmhouse.
Kenneth looked up through the trees, which were darker green now. While he had been watching his battle, the earth, too, had become darker, shadowed, with patches of late sun on the grass and brown fallen pine needles. He stood up, then looked down at the creek, and across it, at the hill on the other side. His soldiers were gone. He was hungry, and he turned and walked back through the woods.
Then he remembered that his mother and father were going to a party in town that night and he would be alone with Connie. He liked being alone, but, even more, he liked being alone with his sister. She was nearly seventeen; her skin was fair, her cheeks colored, and she had long black hair that came down to her shoulders; on the right side of her face, a wave of it reached the corner of her eye. She was the most beautiful girl he knew. She was also the only person with whom, for his entire life, he had been nearly perfectly at ease. He could be silent with her or he could say whatever occurred to him and he never had to think about it first to assure himself that it was not foolish or, worse, uninteresting.
Leaving the woods, he climbed the last gentle slope and entered the house. He leaned his rifle in a corner of his room, which faced the quiet blacktop road, and went to the bathroom and washed his hands. Standing at the lavatory, he looked into the mirror. He suddenly felt as if he had told a lie. He was looking at his face and, as he did several times each day, telling himself, without words, that it was a handsome face. His skin was fair, as Connie’s was, and he had color in his cheeks; but his hair, carefully parted and combed, was more brown than black. He believed that Connie thought he was exactly like her, that he was talkative and well liked. But she never saw him with his classmates. He felt that he was deceiving her.
He left the house and went into the outdoor kitchen and sat on a bench at the long, uncovered table and folded his arms on it.
“Did you kill anything?” Connie said.
“Tin cans.”
His father turned from the stove with a skillet of white perch in his hand.
“They’re good ones,” he said.
“Mine are the best,” Kenneth said.
“You didn’t catch but two.”
“They’re the best.”
His mother put a plate in front of him, then opened a can of beer and sat beside him. He sat quietly, watching his father at the stove. Then he looked at his mother’s hand holding the beer can. There were veins and several freckles on the back of it. Farther up her forearm was a small yellow bruise; the flesh at her elbow was wrinkled. He looked at her face. People said that he and Connie looked like her, so he supposed it was true, but he could not see the resemblance.
“Daddy and I are going to the Gossetts’ tonight,” she said.
“I know.”
“I wrote the phone number down,” his father said. “It’s under the phone.”
“Okay.”
His father was not tall either, but his shoulders were broad. Kenneth wondered if his would be like that when he grew older. His father was the only one in the family who tanned in the sun.
“And please, Connie,” his mother said, “will you go to sleep at a reasonable hour? It’s hard enough to get you up for Mass when you’ve had a good night’s sleep.”
“Why don’t we go into town for the evening Mass?”
“No. I don’t like it hanging over my head all day.”
“All right. When will y’all be home?”
“About two. And that doesn’t mean read in bed till then. You need your sleep.”
“We’ll go to bed early,” Connie said.
His father served fried perch and hush puppies onto their plates and they had French bread and catsup and Tabasco sauce and iced tea. After dinner, his father read the newspaper and his mother read a Reader’s Digest condensation, then they showered and dressed, and at seven-thirty, they left. He and Connie followed them to the door. Connie kissed them; then he did. His mother and father looked happy, and he felt good about that.
“We’ll be back about two,” his mother said. “Keep the doors locked.”
“Definitely,” Connie said. “And we’ll bar the windows.”
“Well, you never know. Y’all be good. G’night.”
“Hold down the fort, son,” his father said.
“I will.”
Then they were gone, the screen door slamming behind them, and Connie left the sunporch, but he stood at the door, listening to the car starting and watching its headlights as it backed down the trail through the yard, then turned into the road and drove away. Still he did not move. He loved the nights at the camp when they were left alone. At home, there was a disturbing climate about their evenings alone, for distant voices of boys in the neighborhood reminded him that he was not alone entirely by choice. Here, there were no sounds.
He latched the screen and went into the living room. Connie was sitting in the rocking chair near the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. She looked at him, then flicked ashes into an ashtray on her lap.
“Now don’t you tell on me.”
“I didn’t know you did that.”
“Please don’t tell. Daddy would skin me alive.”
“I won’t.”
He could not watch her. He looked around the room for a book.
“Douglas is coming tonight,” she said.
“Oh.” He picked up the Reader’s Digest book and pretended to look at it. “Y’all going to watch TV?” he said.
“Not if you want to.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“You watch it. You like Saturday nights.”
She looked as if she had been smoking for a long time, all during the summer and possibly the school year, too, for months or even a year without his knowing it. He was hurt. He laid down the book.
“Think I’ll go outside for a while,” he said.
He went onto the sunporch and out the door and walked down the sloping car trail that led to the road. He stopped at the gate, which was open, and leaned on it. Forgetting Connie, he looked over his shoulder at the camp, thinking that he would never tire of it. They had been there for six weeks, since early June, his father coming on Friday evenings and leaving early Monday mornings, driving sixty miles to their home in southern Louisiana. Kenneth fished during the day, swam with Connie in the creeks, read novels about baseball, and watched the major league games on television. He thought winter at the camp was better, though. They came on weekends and hunted squirrels, and there was a fireplace.
He looked down the road. The closest camp was half a mile away, on the opposite side of the road, and he could see its yellow-lighted windows through the trees. That’s the house. Quiet now. We’ll sneak through the woods and get the guard, then charge the house. Come on. Leaning against the gate, he stared into the trees across the road and saw himself leading his soldiers through the woods. They reached the guard. His back was turned and Kenneth crawled close to him, then stood up and slapped a hand over the guard’s mouth and stabbed him in the back. They rushed the house and Kenneth reached the door first and kicked it open. The general looked up from his desk, then tried to get his pistol from his holster. Kenneth shot him with his Tommy gun. Grab those papers, men. Let’s get out of here. They got the papers and ran outside and Kenneth stopped to throw a hand grenade through the door. He reached the woods before it exploded.
He turned from the gate and walked toward the house, looking around him at the dark pines. He entered the sunporch and latched the screen; then he smelled
chocolate, and he went to the kitchen. Connie was stirring a pot of fudge on the stove. She had changed to a fresh pale blue shirt, the tails of it hanging almost to the bottom of her white shorts.
“It’ll be a while,” she said.
He nodded, watching her hand and the spoon. He thought of Douglas coming and began to feel nervous.
“What time’s Douglas coming?”
“Any minute now. Let me know if you hear his car.”
“All right.”
He went to his room and picked up his rifle; then he saw the magazine on the chest of drawers and he leaned the rifle in the corner again. Suddenly his mouth was dry. He got the magazine and quickly turned the pages until he found her: she was stepping out of the surf on the French Riviera, laughing, as if the man with her had just said something funny. She was blond and very tan and she wore a bikini. The photograph was in color. For several moments he looked at it; then he got the rifle and cleaning kit and sat in the rocking chair in the living room, with the rifle across his lap. He put a patch on the cleaning rod and dipped it in bore cleaner and pushed it down the barrel, the handle of the rod clanging against the muzzle. He worked slowly, pausing often to listen for Douglas’s car, because he wanted to be cleaning the rifle when Douglas came. Because Douglas was a tackle on the high school football team in the town, and Kenneth had never been on a football team, and never would be.
The football players made him more uncomfortable than the others. They walked into the living room and firmly shook his father’s hand, then his hand, beginning to talk as soon as they entered, and they sat and waited for Connie, their talking never ceasing, their big chests and shoulders leaned forward, their faces slowly turning as they looked at each picture on the wall, at the designs on the rug, at the furniture, passing over Kenneth as if he were another chair, filling the room with a feeling of strength and self-confidence that defeated him, paralyzing his tongue and even his mind, so that he merely sat in thoughtless anxiety, hoping they would not speak to him, hoping especially that they would not ask: You play football? Two of them had, and he never forgot it. He had answered with a mute, affirming nod.