by Andre Dubus
His third wife was nearly forty when they married; she had two daughters who were aging her with their listless work in high school, slovenly lives at home, strong-willed disobedience, and unsavory boyfriends, whose tight clothing seemed only a cover to get from their cars to the house and, with the girls, back to their cars. Lee did what he could, with tender hesitance; the girls’ father had moved to Houston when they were six and eight, and sent them checks on birthdays and at Christmas. Lee silently predicted pregnancies, abortions, and a few years of too much drinking and cocaine. Then after college, which even they would be able to attend and muddle through, they would work at jobs to pay for clothes, cars, and apartments; and, like most people, they would settle softly into mundane lives. For Lee, the household was often frenzied and barely tolerable, with three females crying at once, but he was forty-nine, he had spent most of his adult life with families, and he could bear it.
His wife did not hold up as well, and told him to get a vasectomy. He did not want to. Gently and reasonably he said he would not mind being sterile if it simply happened to him, if nature retired him from the ranks of fertility; but he did not want it done to him by a doctor; and, more importantly, he did not want to choose to have it done, but this was a hair he could not split for her. She was not gentle, and if her argument was reasonable, her scorn for his feelings, her crying and cursing him for not loving her, made reason hard to discern. She would not make love with him until he gave in; and he did, because he understood her fears more than he understood his resistance, and he wanted to keep peace, so when he consented, he began to see her demand as a request that could not be made calmly. Who could turn away from a drowning woman because her plea for help came not as a whisper but a scream? Undressing for surgery, he felt he was giving up his life as he had known it; and afterward, when he brought his sperm to be tested, he hoped the surgeon had failed; or, rather, that his sperm remained, undaunted by scalpel, or his wife, or himself. His wife was relieved, and soon he was, too, and peace returned, or they returned to it.
When it did not last, when its not lasting slowly burned to ashes all kindness and respect in the marriage, when the marriage ended and Lee Trambath was in a bachelor apartment again, and seeing his two stepdaughters there and in restaurants, and dating again, he thought of his vasectomy as a concealed deformity, something he was hiding from women. No one he dated wanted more children, but still he always felt he was dissembling, until he told them, and one and all looked into his eyes as though he had spread yellow roses between them on the bar, the dinner table, or the bed.
He had married his first two wives when they were in their twenties, and he was the first husband of both; and always, however small, the shadows of sadness and failure were cast upon him: all his love and serious intent had increased the population of divorcées by two. His union with his third wife was his first with a divorcée; and her ex-husband, or what he had done to her, or what she believed he had done to her with no provocation at all, was a fulcrum in her marriage to Lee: he could trace the extremities of her anger and sorrow to that man he had never known. Now, dating, he collided with the presence of a man, or men, he only knew because a woman was pouting or crying or yelling or throwing a kitchen utensil at him, once a pot holder, once a breadboard. The pain and bitterness, fear and distrust, of these women seemed all to be caused by one of his gender, not only husbands and lovers, but fathers and stepfathers as well. Confronted by these lives in which not one woman, including the woman herself, had ever been anything but kind, generous, and consoling, he began not only to believe it but to feel responsible for it, and he tried to atone. No one he dated ever accused him of being harsh, cruel, inattentive. They praised his patient listening, his lack of fear and cynicism in the face of love. They never accused him of anything; still they made him feel like a drugged coral snake, sleeping and beautiful, which they took the risk of wearing around their throats while the clock ticked and the effect of the drug subsided: with the first slow movement of his flesh, they would grab him and hold him on the table and, with an oyster fork, pierce his brain.
He began to wonder what he had done to his wives. The first had never remarried, had kept his last name, and for the past seventeen years had lived on Cape Cod with one man. The second had married again, and the third was dating. What cracks had he left in their hearts? Did they love less now and settle for less in return, as they held on to parts of themselves they did not want to give and lose again? Or—and he wished this—did they love more fully because they had survived pain, so no longer feared it? This could not be true of his third wife: she would need a strong, gentle, and older man, someone like a father without the curse of incest. But perhaps the first two wives were free of him, were saved. Lee was so afraid of what he might have done to his daughters, even his stepdaughters, whose lives he had entered when they were already in motion at a high and directionless speed, that he wondered about them as he did about the time and manner of his death: seldom, and with either terrible images or a silent blankness in his mind, like a window covered with shining white paint. With the women he loved after his last marriage, he started smoking again, and drinking more.
There were three of these women, separated by short intervals of pain, remorse, and despair. When he and the last one had their final quarrel—she threw the breadboard—he was nearly fifty-five, and he gave up on love, save the memory of it. Always his aim had been marriage. He had never entered what he considered to be an affair, something whose end was an understood condition of its beginning. But he had loved and wanted for the rest of his life women who took him in their arms, and even their hearts, but did not plan to keep him. He had known that about them, they had told him no lies about what they wanted, and he had persisted, keeping his faith: if he could not change their hearts, then love itself would.
As a young man, in his first marriage, he had done some erotic dabbling: one-night stands whose causes, he now knew, were alcohol, night, and vanity. This had only scratched his marriage: a little blood showed, nothing more; for his wife had also fallen from grace, and in the same way. Theirs was a confessional marriage, and the purging of one and forgiving by the other deepened their love. The marriage ended much later, when their sexual mischief was far behind them, and Lee would never understand all of its ending any more than he could explain why, on their first date in college, there was already enough love between them to engender the years it would take to have three children and let their love die. He learned how quickly love died when you weren’t looking; if you weren’t looking.
At the restaurant a flaxen-haired young waitress flirted with him as a matter of course. This was Doreen Brodie. She was tall, and her limbs looked stronger than his. Some nights he had an after-hours drink with her, sitting at the bar, and her blue eyes and thin red lips aroused his passion and, more tempting, swelled his loneliness till it nearly brimmed over, nearly moved his arms to hold her. He did not touch her. She was younger than his children; he was old, a marital leftover wearing a jacket and tie.
He had come to believe that only young women still trusted love, believed in it. He knew this could not be true, that it was the inductive reasoning of his bad luck, that he simply had not met resilient older women because they lived someplace else, or lived here in this little town but somehow had not crossed his path. Yet even if he met such a woman, wasn’t he the common denominator in three divorces? Perhaps he was a sleeping snake. He slipped into masturbation and nearly always, afterward, felt he was too old for this, too, and what he wiped from his hand onto the sheet was his dignity But sometimes on long afternoons when he could think of nothing but Doreen Brodie, of phoning her and asking her for a date, of having dinner with her, of making love with her, and so falling in love with her, he resorted to the dry and heartless caress of his hand; then, his member spent and limp as his soul, he focused clearly on his life again, and he did not call Doreen.
He had married friends and went to their homes for dinner, or joined the
m at bars, but mostly he was alone in his apartment. So working nights, which had been an intrusion on his marriages and an interference with his dating, became a blessing. He started reading history or philosophy during the day, going for long walks, and keeping a journal in spiral notebooks. He wrote every morning before breakfast: reflections on what he read, on people at the restaurant, sketches of the town and river and sky as he saw them on his walks. He wrote slowly, used a large dictionary, and took pleasure in precise nouns, verbs, and adjectives. He liked working with colors. He wrote nothing painful or erotic; he did not want his children to feel pity or shame when they went through his effects after his death. For a summer and fall, a winter and part of a spring, Lee Trambath lived like this, till an April morning when he woke to the sound and smell of rain.
As he dressed he remembered that yesterday he had meant to buy coffee, but, drawn by sunshine and a salty breeze from the sea, he had walked along the river, instead of to the store. He wanted to write about rain, try to put its smell and sound on paper. But he had no coffee, and he put on his raincoat and a felt hat and went downstairs and outside. At once his face and throat and hands were pleasantly wet. Across the street was the gray river. He watched rain falling on it, and cars moving slowly, their headlights glowing. Then he walked to the end of the block and turned left, onto the main street. He smelled rain and the sea. The grocery store was in the next block, but his stride was slowing as he approached a newsstand with a kitchen for breakfast and lunch. In front of it, he stopped. Until nearly a year ago he had come here for breakfast, read newspapers, bought paperback books. Some time after he ducked the breadboard and backed out of her kitchen, backed out of her dining and living rooms and front door, he had begun his rituals of abstinence: his journal; his breakfast at home; his study of America, hoping to find in that huge canvas perhaps one brush stroke to illuminate the mystery of his life; his walks, whose purpose was for at least one hour of light to see where he lived, smell it, touch it, listen to its sounds. Standing in the cool rain, he lost his eagerness to write about it, but he kept its thrill. The rain on his face was like joyful tears, given him by the clouds; he could not recall when he had last wept. Now a new excitement welled in him—that of a holiday—and he moved to the door and swung it open and went inside, looking first to his left at the counter for tobacco and boxed candy at that wall, and beyond it the shelves of magazines and racks of books; then he looked to his right at tables for two and four where people were eating, and a long counter facing a mirror. Seated at the counter were a policeman, a young couple looking at each other as they talked, a gray-haired man alone, and Doreen Brodie reading a newspaper. To her right were three empty stools. He walked between tables and sat beside her. He had never seen her in daylight, had never seen her anywhere save at the restaurant. She looked at the mirror opposite the counter, saw him there, smiled at his reflection, then turned the smile to him and said: “Well. What brings you out in the rain?”
He took off his hat and placed it on the counter and was about to say he was going to buy coffee, but he looked at Doreen’s blue eyes and said: “I woke to the sound of rain. It was the first thing I smelled.” From behind her a young waitress approached and he signaled with thumb and forefinger as if gripping a cup. “Some was splashing through the screen, onto the windowsill. I didn’t close the window. I wanted to write about rain, but I was out of coffee.” He was unbuttoning his coat, removing his arms from its sleeves. “I’ve been writing things. I wanted to write its smell and sound. Its feel in April.” He let his coat fall to the back of his stool. The waitress brought his coffee, and he stopped talking to pay. She was a young brunette wearing glasses, probably a year out of high school and waiting, happily enough, it seemed, for something to happen. He looked at Doreen’s eyes: “It would be a separate section; the rain. Coming right after something I wrote yesterday about William James. He said that fear doesn’t cause running away. Running away causes fear. So if you hold your ground, you’ll be brave. And that sadness doesn’t cause crying. Crying makes us sad. So we should act the way we want to feel. And he said if that doesn’t work, nothing else will anyway.” Then he blushed. “He was a philosopher. I’ve been reading all kinds of things.”
“Does it work?”
“What?”
“Acting the way you want to feel.”
“Sometimes.” He looked away from her, stirred sugar and cream into his cup. Still he felt her eyes.
“What is it you want to feel?”
Beneath his heart, wings fluttered. He looked at her eyes and the wings paused like a hawk’s, and glided.
“You,” he said, and they rushed in his breast, and someplace beneath them he felt the cool plume of a lie. “I want to feel you.”
The lie spread upward, but light was in her eyes, and she was standing, was saying softly: “Let’s go.”
He stood and put on his coat and hat; she had a black umbrella; she left her newspaper on the counter and he followed her out the door. She opened the umbrella, held it between them, and he stepped under it. His arm touched hers; perhaps it was the first time he had ever touched her. He went with her up the street, away from the river; at the corner she stopped and faced traffic, and watched the red light. He looked at her profile. Suddenly he felt the solidity of the earth beneath his feet. Were gravity and grave rooted in the same word? In that moment, looking at her left eye and its long upturning lashes, her nose and lips, and the curve of her chin, he could have told her they must not do this, that he was a waste of her time, her fertility. Then she turned to him, and her eyes amazed him; he was either lost or found, he could not know which, and he surrendered.
The traffic light changed and they crossed the street and she led him down a brick alley between brick shops, then across a courtyard. His life was repeating itself, yet it felt not repetitious but splendid, and filled with grace. He lowered his eyes to rain moving on darkened bricks. God in heaven, he thought, if there is one, bless us. As a boy he was an Episcopalian. Then, with his first wife, he became his flesh and what it earned. Only his love for his children felt more spiritual than carnal. Holding one in his arms, he felt connected with something ancient, even immortal. In the arms of his passionate wife he felt a communion he believed was the supreme earthly joy. It had ended and he had found it again with other wives and other women, and always its ending had flung him into a dark pit of finitude, whose walls seeped despair as palpable as the rain he walked in now, after too many years.
Doreen’s kiss dispelled those years. She gave it to him just across the threshold of her apartment, and he marveled at the resilience of nature. So many kisses in his lifetime, yet here he was, as though kissed for the first time on a front porch in summer in Dayton, Ohio. Oh plenitude, oh spring rain, and new love. He did not see the apartment: it was objects and shadows they moved through. Her unmade bed was box springs and a mattress on the floor, and quickly they were in it, his hat and clothes on the carpet with hers. He did not want it to end; he made love to her with his lips, his hands, his tongue. The muscles of her arms and stomach and legs were hard, her touch and voice soft; he spoke her name, he called her “sweet,” he called her “my lovely,” he perspired, and once from his stomach came a liquid moan of hunger. Finally she rolled away from him, toward the bedside table, and opened a drawer; he heard a tearing sound, and she sat up holding a golden condom.
“I have a vasectomy.”
“What a guy. I’ve got an IUD.”
“I’ve mostly been married.”
“You never know.” He watched her hands as she placed the condom and unrolled it. Then she kneeled above him, guided him in, and said: “I had given up on you.”
“So had I.”
Here it was again, the hot love of a woman, and he closed his eyes and saw the ocean at night, and squid mating on its gentle swell, a documentary he watched on television one afternoon last winter; sharks swam up and ate swaths of squid, but the others kept on, just kept on. Fucking and eating, h
e thought. They were why he left home, to marry and work, and here he was over thirty years later, with a woman nearly as young as his first wife when passion drove them out of their parents’ homes and into the world, into a small apartment that was first an enclosure for their bed, and second for a kitchen to prepare food in and a table to eat it on, and third for plumbing so they could bathe, and flush body waste. All vitality radiated from the bed, enough of it to give him the drive and direction to earn money and father children; he fell in love with them, a love that was as much a component of his flesh as the flow of his blood; and in fact it could only end with that flow’s ending. Now another flow was about to leave his body: the pleasure started in the muscles of his legs where masturbation never reached, and he saw the mockery of himself and his hand, and to rid his mind of this comparison he said her name. He said it again and again, naming her flesh and his delight, but the truth was as loud as their quick breath. His passion spurted from him, was gone, a bit of sterile liquid in a condom, a tiny bit if it were blood. It was enough to stain a sheet, make a child. His children would smile if they knew of this, if he told them he had waked to rain but had no coffee, so—There was nothing to smile about here. He opened his eyes. Doreen’s were closed.