by Andre Dubus
Ted was drinking iced tea.
“No. I was drunk when we left the party. But I didn’t drink again and I was awake till five. By then I was sober.”
“We drank.”
“I don’t drink for a hangover anyway. I cure it with a workout. Susan’s going to New York.”
“Permanently?”
“Nothing’s permanent. She’s an actress.”
“New York’s not far.”
“Hollywood is.”
“How do you know she’s that good?”
“A hunch.”
“What happened?”
“I spent the night with her.”
“But what happened? Two weeks ago you said you wanted a girlfriend you saw on weekends. You may even have said some weekends. Even if she gets Hollywood, they take her out of thousands of pretty young actresses, that sounds like a weekend to me.”
“I want her to get Hollywood; I want her to get Broadway. And I want her.”
He was with her every night and, before her rehearsals started, they met for lunch and drank martinis and he was out of his office for two hours. On weekends he made picnic lunches and drove with her to the ocean. The water was cold, but the sun was warm and they wore sweatshirts and sat on the beach. At night they ate in restaurants and they made love and slept in her apartment or his. When she started rehearsals, she did not have time for lunch, and all day as he worked, he waited to see her. “I’m easy,” she had said, and when he imagined her living in New York, working as a waitress, rehearsing with men, he could not bear it. He knew she loved him and he believed she wanted to be faithful to him; but she was beautiful and a hedonist and there would be men trying to make love with her, and she would feel something for some of them. Without telling her, he tried to give her license, tried to imagine a situation he could accept: if she were drunk one night in New York and it happened only that night.
But it would not be one night with one man. By now he had seen her in the new play. She played the youngest sister, Beth, in a large family gathered at the mother’s home while the mother died. Beth was the one who had not moved away; had stayed in the small town and lived near her mother, and cared for her when she was sick, as she had cared for her father. The others lived far away and were very busy and usually drunk. Beth was twenty-nine and Ted believed the playwright had given her age and her not having a lover more importance than they deserved, as though she were Laura in The Glass Menagerie; but Susan made Beth erotic and lonely and brave, and you knew she would have a lover, in time, when she was ready, when she chose to; and Ted knew that, unless Susan was very unlucky, she would work in New York and in Hollywood. So it would not be one night drunk with one man; Susan was going on the road for the rest of her life.
She had a toothbrush now in his apartment, a robe, a nightgown, a novel she was reading. Two weeks before the play closed, she had a yard sale, let go of her apartment, and moved into his. It was large and from its living room he could see the Charles River. When the play closed, his pain began; but he was excited, too, about weeknights and weekends in New York, and about Susan acting there. And he believed she had greatness in her, and he wanted to see it. On a Friday afternoon near sunset, they stood at his windows, looking at the river and Cambridge. She said: “I have to do something before I go to New York. I’m six weeks pregnant.”
He looked at her eyes, and knew that what was falling inside him would not stop falling till it broke. He said: “No.”
“No what? I’m not pregnant? Did you think you were shooting blanks?”
“No, don’t do it.”
“I’m twenty-two years old, I’m going to New York, and you want me to have a fucking baby?”
The falling thing in him hit and broke and he trembled and said: “Not a fucking baby. Our baby, Susan. Our baby.”
He had to look away from the death of everything he saw in her eyes.
She looked at the river. Since seeing her doctor in the middle of the afternoon, she had felt very unlucky and as sad as she had ever been; now Ted was begging her to marry him. No one had ever asked her to marry, or even mentioned it, and Ted was begging for it. Finally she looked at him. She said: “It has nothing to do with marriage. I can’t even think about marriage. I don’t want a baby. Why can’t you understand that?”
“Then have it, and give it to me.”
“Have it? You have it.”
“Seven and a half months. That’s all I’m asking.”
“You think it’s numbers? A fucking calendar? You want me to go through all of that so you can have a baby? Go find somebody else to breed with.”
“I did. Now you want to kill it.”
“I don’t want to kill anything. What I want is not to be pregnant. What I want is never to have fucked you.”
“Well you did. Now it’s time for some sacrifice. Okay? Maybe pain, too. And what’s new about those. For just seven and a half months. Of your life you think is so fucking significant.”
She raised her hand to slap his face, his glare, his voice, but she did not; all the bad luck and sadness she had felt till she told him filled her, and his face enclosed her with it, and she felt alone in a way she had never felt alone before. She did not want to be alive. Then she was crying and with her raised hand she covered her eyes. He touched her arms and she recoiled, stepped back, wiped her tears, and opened her eyes.
“You don’t know anything,” she said. “You think I could have a baby and not love it? Are you that stupid? I can’t love a baby. Not now. I thought I could love you. That was enough.”
“You don’t love anyone.”
“Yes I do. And I didn’t mean I wished I had never fucked you. But I won’t fuck you again. War hero with your cane. Sacrifice. Pain. Don’t ever think I don’t know about those. Don’t ever think you’re the only one in pain. Do something for me. Leave. I’m going to Cindy’s. I don’t want you here while I pack. Lurking around and crying and asking me to change my life. Okay? Just leave. Go drink someplace. You’re good at that.”
She wanted something different. She could not imagine what it was: some transformation, of Ted, of herself, of time. He said: “You’re good at evicting.”
He walked out, and she phoned Cindy and said: “Cindy?” then sobbed.
Soon she was in New York, but for a long time a desert was inside her; it was huge and dry and there was nothing in it. Someday she would get an intrauterine device, but not now; maybe later in the summer, or in the fall. First she needed work to flood that dry sand.
On a summer evening Ted went to dinner with Nick, then to Fenway Park to watch the Red Sox play the Orioles; it was a very good game, well pitched and intense, and till the Red Sox lost in the ninth, with the tying run on third and the winning run on second, Ted’s sorrow was not deep; was only a familiar distraction like his knee, which kept his leg in the aisle. He had drunk martinis with Nick before dinner and wine with dinner and they drank beer during the game. Then Nick walked with Ted to his apartment and they rode the elevator upstairs. Ted poured two snifters of cognac and held their stems in his left hand and took them to the living room, where Nick stood, looking out the open windows. Ted said: “That’s where she was, the last time I saw her. We were looking at the river.”
He felt alert, but his left knee bent now and then, on its own, and he knew he was drunk. When he drank a lot, he drank standing: his right knee was useless as a signal, but the left one warned him. The sounds of car engines rose from the street, and faint voices of people walking. Nick said: “What’s it been? A month?”
“Five weeks tonight.”
Ted raised the snifter and breathed the sharpness of the cognac, tasting it before he drank; then he drank. He looked over the glass rim at Nick, drank again and looked at light reflected on the dark river, looked across it at the lights of Cambridge. He said: “Then she went to the abattoir. ‘The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no.… The little children are freezing to death.… ’ ” He knew Nick was watc
hing him, but he could not feel Nick watching; he felt the lucidity and eloquence of grief let out of its cage by drinking. “ ‘I want to have time to look for my children and see how many I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead.… I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.’ ”
Closing his eyes, he saw Susan’s face, felt that if he opened them quickly, but at the right moment out of all the night’s moments, her face would be in front of him; she would be standing here. Nick said: “That was good. Chief Joseph.”
Ted opened his eyes and said: “I used to know the whole thing.” He looked away from the river, at Nick, and said loudly: “You know what I say, Nick? From where the sun now stands I will ejaculate no more forever in the body of a woman who will kill our child,” and saying it, and saying it loudly, released all the grief, as something he felt he could see, touch, in the air before his face, and now he felt only rage, and the strength and conviction it brings; it filled him, and his arms and cognac and cane rose with it, his mouth opened to cry out with it; he saw Nick and the windows, but he did not see them; then it was gone, as the flame of a candle is blown out, and the gentle breath that dispelled it was a woman’s. She was many women; she was any woman whose eyes, whose touch, whose voice, whose lips would draw him again, and he closed his mouth and lowered his arms, lowered his head. He looked at Nick’s brown loafers, feeling only helpless now; and ashamed, knowing what a woman could do to him, knowing she could do it because he wanted her to. Then Nick’s hand was on the back of his neck, squeezing, and Nick said: “You’ve got to start dating again. This time get one on the pill.”
Ted looked at him, tossed his cane onto the couch, and held Nick’s arm. He said: “The pill isn’t a philosophy. I need a philosophy to go out there with. You know? I can’t just go out there with a cock, and a heart. Maybe I need a wife.”
“Wives are good. I’d like a wife. I’m two baseball seasons from forty. Do you know at the turn of the century, in America, the average man lived forty-seven years? For women, it was forty-six. Maybe a wife is what you need.”
“I need a vacation.”
“You’ve been on one for five weeks.”
“Not from women. From women, too. I mean two weeks someplace. Mexico. Alone. I don’t speak Spanish. I can order from a menu. But I won’t understand the rest. I’ll be alone. I need to think, Nick. All I’ve been doing is feeling. Find a village near an airport. Something in the mountains. Bring some books, have one drink before dinner, maybe a beer while I eat. Hole up, walk around; be silent. Look the demon in the eye.”
Nick rubbed his neck and said: “Drink bottled water. Peel the fruit. Don’t shit your brains out.”
“If I did, all you’d see in the bowl is water.”
“Stop that. It’s just something that happened. And leave the demon here. You’ve looked at it enough.”
“No. I haven’t looked at it. I’ve fucked it. Now I’m going to look at it; talk to it.”
Holding Nick’s arm, he closed his eyes and pressed the back of his neck into Nick’s hand.
Blessings
FOR MADELEINE
EARLY IN THE MORNING ON THE FIRST anniversary of the day her family survived, the mother woke. At first she thought it was the birds. In the trees near the cabin, their songs in the early twilight were too sharp, more a sound of intrusion or alarm than the peace she and Cal had rented for two weeks on this New Hampshire lake. She had never liked to wake early, and on most days of her adult life she woke before she was ready, and needed coffee and a cigarette at once. But in this early morning, in the gray beginning of light, she was awake and alert as though in evening, when her body was most vibrant, when she and Cal drank their two martinis, sometimes three, and she told him of the birds and animals she had seen that day (pheasants lived on their Massachusetts land; foxes stalked them; and there were birds in the trees and at her feeder and pecking on the earth below it), and whom she had seen and what she had heard, and the questions and answers or attempts at them she had stored up in her silent monologues with herself. Much of the time these were dialogues with Cal, though she was alone in the house or on their land or cross-country skiing on the meadow across the road or walking long and fast in trails through woods. Cal would often interrupt her, smiling, watching her, and ask: “What did I say to that?” To her wondering whether families and America were worse now than when she and Cal were children, or even when their own daughter and son were children, or if all this horror of children beaten and raped at home, or kidnapped for pornographic pictures and movies, or for the erotic and murderous desires of one man, was nothing new at all, and only the reporting of it in newspapers and magazines and television was new. Or why those women, certainly with good intentions, were trying to stop a supervised hunt ordered by the game-management people to kill some of the weak among too many deer in a small state-protected woods in a neighboring town, the women threatening—and not bluffing, she knew, and with good intentions, she knew—to go in with the hunters and stand in front of their shotguns to save the deer, and even insisting that if the deer starved to death that winter, it was not only nature’s way but painless. Why didn’t they know that, having killed or run off for buildings and asphalt the deer’s natural predators, people had to perform the function of coyotes and wolves? She also, on those evenings, entertained Cal, made him laugh at her anecdotes about the supermarket, or traffic, or phone calls from friends. By evening, Cal’s body and mind were near the state of hers when the alarm clock woke her, and, as relaxed and cheerful as he might be, he looked in need of a nap until midway or more through his first martini. Her name was Rusty. It had been Margaret until Cal Williams met and courted her when she was twenty-one and he was twenty-three; he had called her Rusty, because of her hair, because he was in love with her, and it had become her name.
He was sleeping on his right side now, his face toward her, his left hand resting on her stomach. Below his hand her legs were tensed to spring from the bed, to run not from but at an intruder in the room, while her hand grabbed whatever weapon it could to swing at his face; beneath Cal’s hand her stomach rose and dropped with her accelerated breath, and she felt her heart beating with that adrenaline they now said could kill you, if you were sedentary, if your heart were accustomed to a soft cushion of quotidian calm. Hers was not; but even if it were, she knew the thought of a heart attack would still be as distant as their home among the pines and poplars and maples and copper beeches on the long, wide hill. For she knew it was not the birds that had alerted the muscles in her legs and arms and the one beating beneath her ribs, ready to fight the intruder her body was gathered for, the intruder she had known when she first woke was not there; it was the day itself that woke her: the fourteenth of July.
It had waked her before, while Cal slept as he did now, as he had on that night one year ago when the day ended and she and Cal and Gina and Ryan had showered the salt water and perhaps some of the terror from their bodies, had eaten even, for they were very hungry, and their bodies were frail, too, with a weakness that food alone could not strengthen, and in the restaurant in Christiansted they had drunk a lot, all of them, before and during and after dinner. Then Gina had gone to her room in the hotel and Ryan to his, and she and Cal had gone to bed, and soon Cal was asleep, while she smoked and listened to Gina and Ryan settling in their rooms on either side of hers, and she knew Cal slept so easily not because he was oblivious but because his body was more in harmony with itself and life, and death, than hers. His family had survived. The young captain and mate were dead, the captain at least ashore now to lie beneath a monument marking his passage on earth and his possession of his final six feet of it, while the mate was forever in the Caribbean, swallowed by its creatures, parts of him—some bones, perhaps even flesh (where was his head, his face?)—left to sink, to become parts of the bottom of the sea, parts of the sea itself. Cal’s body and mind and heart had endured that, and in bed after dinner they dema
nded of him, as they should, as hers could not or would not, that he sleep. For a week after his mother’s death, when he was forty-eight, he skipped the evening drinks, ate early and with the effort of a tired child, and was in bed sleeping by seven.
For a long time that night a year ago, she did not sleep. Once she heard Gina flush the toilet and she looked at her traveling clock on the bedside table and it glowed two-fifteen at her; at three-twenty Ryan flushed his toilet. And both times she heard the children drop heavily into their beds and the sleep their bladders had barely disturbed; and each time she quietly and briefly wept, for their sounds recalled to her the nights of Gina’s and Ryan’s growing up when she woke hearing them walking down the hall to their rooms, their light footsteps only audible when the flushing that woke her had ceased and she could hear the moving weight of their small warm bodies above the faint sound of water filling the tank. Her weeping that night in the hotel at St. Croix was soundless, her tears so few they did not even leave her eyes which she wiped dry with the sheet, and it was neither joyful nor frightened nor relieved: it simply came, as milk had once come from her breasts.
Sometime after three-twenty she slept. They stayed one more week on the island, to answer questions and sign statements, to attend the captain’s funeral, a young blond man from California whose young blond, tanned woman wore a white dress and sat with his family in the front pew—a father and mother and two older brothers, who arrived in three different planes from the United States and wore black—and all through the service she stared at the casket, her face still lax with the disbelief that for others becomes in moments a truth they must bear all their lives. Then at the grave, as the brothers at her sides turned her tall, strong body away from the open hole where the captain lay under flowers, the young woman having plucked the first from a wreath and dropped it onto the casket, she collapsed: her knees bent, her body fell, and the two brothers strained to hold her as, doubled over, her lowered face covered by the long blond hair fallen forward and down, she keened.