by Andre Dubus
Soon he would soften inside her, and she was racing against the ebbing of his blood. He watched her face. Long ago he had learned that in lovemaking the one giving pleasure felt the greater intimacy; beyond a certain pitch of passion, the one receiving was isolated by muscles and nerves. He could have been watching her suffer pain; he could have been watching her die. She cried out. Then she was still, her eyes open, her breath deep and slowing. Before moving away, she reached between them and pinched the condom’s opening. She took it with her, hanging from her fingers as she stood and smiled at him, and left the room.
He closed his eyes and listened to rain on the window. It saddened him now, all that rain and gray. He heard her footsteps in the hall, then soft on the carpet, and her lighter twice, and blown smoke; she sat on the bed and he spread his fingers for the cigarette; then she lay beside him and placed a cool glass ashtray on his stomach. He opened his eyes and looked at hers and said: “What more could I ask?”
“You could have asked sooner.”
“I was trying to do something. Learn something. Do you know I could own a restaurant by now, if I wanted to? I never wanted to. I have money. I’m not just solvent; I have money. When I die, my children will be able to make down payments on houses. Big payments. I have five children. All grown, and none of them married. Nobody’s in a hurry anymore. To marry.”
“Nobody has to be.”
“Exactly. And that’s all I ever was. What are people now? Their jobs? I started behind the bar and in kitchens. Now I read all this stuff. History. Philosophy. Looking for myself, where I fit in. I must be part of it, right? I’m here. So I must be. You know where I fit? I earn and invest and spend money. You know why? Because I fell in love. When I was very young. If I hadn’t, I might have joined the French Foreign Legion. Then I’d know, wouldn’t I? What my part was. My part was this—” He gestured with a hand toward his penis; then he touched his heart. “And this. If you look at the country today, you see families torn apart. Kids with blood splashed on them. It all started with families. Like this, you and me, naked. People made love, settled land, built towns. Now the beginning is dying and we’re left with the end. I’m part of that, too. Three divorces. So that’s where I fit. At the beginning and the end. It was always love for me, love of a woman. I look back and I think love needs tenacity. Maybe that’s what I didn’t have. And where is love in all this? It’s not here. You don’t love me.” Her eyes were gentle as she shook her head. “Probably I could love you. But what for? Reverse my vasectomy and start over? Own a restaurant? Somewhere I missed something. Something my cock can’t feel. Even my heart can’t feel. Something that keeps you from fucking while sharks are eating your neighbors; while one is coming for you. I broke the hearts of three wives. It’s not what I set out to do. We were in bed, and there were all those fins. I ripped childhood from five children. It’ll always be with them, that pain. Like joints that hurt when it rains. There’s more to it, but I can’t find it. It’s not walking with a cane and giving cigar rings to grandchildren. You know anyone in AA?”
She nodded. Her eyes were damp, and he knew from them what his own face showed.
“You know that look they have when it’s really behind them? When they’ve been dry for years? Like there’s a part of them that nothing in the world can touch. Not pain. Not grief. Not even love. But where do I go for that? What street is it on? Where’s the door?” He held the ashtray and sat up. “Where?” Looking at Doreen, he felt tears in his throat, then in his eyes and on his face. “I want that door,” he said; then he could not speak. His stomach tightened, his body jerked forward, and his head bowed as he wept. She took the ashtray and cigarette from him and tightly held him with one arm, and with a hand she petted his cheek, pressing it against hers; she gently rocked him.
“You poor man,” she said.
He knew what she felt, at the core of her tender voice and touch. He had held in his arms suffering women and children, knew that all anyone could do was hold and touch and speak, watch and listen, and wish the pain would end. Gratefully he leaned against her, moving with the push and pull of her arm. He could see nothing beyond this sorrow, could not imagine what he might say or do when it left him in Doreen’s embrace.
The Last Moon
THE MURDER BEGAN SOMEPLACE IN HER heart, a place she had never been: it was like a shadowed mountain pass, then a brilliant plain. The plain drew her. She stepped into it one night in bed with the sixteen-year-old boy. They lay naked in the dark room; it was late winter and cold still, and the light of streetlamps came through the windows. The boy held her; his breath was slowing now, and he pushed his hair away from his left eye. Soon he would be ready again. She was twenty-five; she was a guidance counselor at the only high school in town; her husband coached three sports. Now it was basketball, and he was thirty miles away, at a game.
She was on the bed she had chosen with her husband nineteen months ago, when they bought the house and began to buy things to put in it. They were engaged then, and they married a month later. Now she did not feel the bed holding her, or the room, the dead witness of its walls; she felt only her body, as when running early in the morning in this New England town where trees shaded lawns and the park and her office at school, she felt only her blood and muscles and breath, and not the earth her feet struck; as on the high diving board she felt only her gathered flesh, and not the board that held her above air and water. She said: “We could kill him.”
Her voice, her words, seemed to stay in the air above their faces, as though, looking at the boy’s eyes, she could reach up and with a finger touch each word. She could look at them; she could listen to her voice: it was low and strong, and slightly buoyant, enough so she could brush away the words, scatter them in the dark air, say she did not truly intend them; and in her tone was muted anticipation of the boy saying yes, and so taking the words from the air, making them part of his body, and of hers. The boy said: “Why?”
“I’d have the house. There’s insurance on the mortgage. And another policy for two hundred thousand. We could do anything.”
He believed her, and he would tell the detectives this, when they broke him; and he would say it on the witness stand, crying, looking again and again at his mother and father. He would tell it first on a warm spring afternoon to a boy who had been his friend since they were six; the boy would be horrified and, after days of pain, would tell his older brother, then his parents.
She was not lying about the house and the money, but they were not the truth. The truth was in this place where she breathed and her heart beat as she lay in the boy’s arms. She felt the boy’s breath on her cheek, felt her own going out of her parted lips, and she could see how to do it. She could see him doing it, and she could see herself at that moment sitting in the café, drinking tea. She knew now that he would say yes. He had said “Why?” and he would say How? and then he would say yes, not with that word alone, but with many words. She would use many words, too; that is how they would plan it. She would talk about the house and the money, and where they could go with the money, when he was older, when he did not live at home; she would say: “We can make love in Spain.” But she would never tell him where they were truly going. She would plead not guilty, and people would hear and read what the boy said about the house and the money. In prison she would tell the truth only to her pale and thin girlfriend, weeping as she told it, because she was young and smart, strong and pretty, and she was in prison forever.
In bed the boy stared; they had been lying in the dark long enough for her to see the light in his eyes. No naked girl had kindled this boy until she did. In her office, before she invited him to her house, his eyes were bright, as they were now: he sat in the chair in front of her desk and he could not look away from her; he looked at her hands on her desk, her shoulders beneath pale blue cotton, her blond hair, her mouth; he could not look at her eyes. This was in autumn, and she wanted his frenzy inside her. In bed that night in late winter, the skin of her face
felt his eyes, as if their focused light were a point of warmth. He said: “He’s really big.”
“You could use a gun.”
“I’ve never shot one.”
“You’ll be close. Can you get a gun?”
“My brother-in-law has some.”
“You could take one. Then put it back.”
“Where would he be?”
“In his car. You’ll wait in the backseat. At night while they’re playing a game on the road.”
“What if guys are in the parking lot?”
“He does things in his office. He always goes home last. I’ll give you a key. You’ll take his money and his watch, and throw the watch in the river.”
“Do you hate him?”
“He’s just ordinary. I can do better.”
The boy thought better meant him; she saw this in his eyes.
On the winter night of the murder, she sat in the café, at a table covered with a white cloth, and drank tea with a slice of lemon. She wore a brown sweater and jeans and hiking boots; her leather purse was on the table, and her dark blue parka hung on the back of the chair. She lifted the cup with her thumb and forefinger, felt the solid curve of its handle, the heat of tea in her mouth and throat. She glanced at her watch, knowing the time before she saw the gold hands. She felt each second in her chest and stomach, faster than her breath, slower than her heart. She watched a graying man and woman wearing sweaters and eating cake at a table; they put forks of cake in their mouths, looking at each other, as if they were speaking, or smiling. She watched the large and pleasant woman in a loose green blouse, sitting behind the counter and looking out the window, where people from the movie theater were on the sidewalk.
It would be soon now, the boys leaving the locker room, her husband in his blue suit and white shirt unbuttoned at the collar, the knot of his maroon tie pulled down from his throat, standing in the doorway of his office, talking to the boys as they left. In the car the boy lay waiting, the revolver warm in his hands, the boy afraid of failing and afraid of not failing, afraid of his parents and police and prison; but he was ablaze; he would do it. She watched two teenaged girls drinking Cokes at the counter, and saw the boy on the floor of the car and her husband at his desk in his office; they were inside her, in that place where she lived now.
This place would not have come to her if she had not taken the boy. Before she took him, she knew: even as she waited for him at her house on the first night, she knew that he was not what she wanted, that the boy and her desire were the form of something else she moved closer to when he rang the bell and she opened the door, and pulled him inside and closed the door, and locked it. People she knew, people she had always known, would call it passion, or happiness. They did not know. They were someplace behind her—they always were—and people like them came into the café now, moviegoers sitting at the counter and tables. She watched them. She had watched her husband, these days of snowfall and sunlight, these nights since the one when she said: “We could kill him,” and in her heart then he was dead and she was in motion; and for the next eleven days and twelve nights she heard and saw him from that distance, and she made love with him because it was dazzling. The boy was behind her, too; she believed she would keep him for a while, and someday spit him out of her, return him to the place she watched herself watching now: people eating cake and sipping tea.
While beneath her fast heart, her husband left his office and the gymnasium, his gray overcoat unbuttoned, his head bare as he walked into the parking lot under his last moon. The boy lay in the dark and her husband opened the door, and dim light was in the car, and he got inside and closed the door, and it was dark again. The boy rose, and her husband’s head and the revolver and the bullet and the boy were poised. In her body she saw the flash, heard the explosion of powder, saw the sudden hole and the spray of blood, her husband’s dead eyes and falling face. Her hands rested on the table. It could be in this second; or the next; or the one a minute ago. Her right hand moved toward the cup, and she felt that her arm could reach through the night sky, her thumb and forefinger open to hold the moon.
The Timing of Sin
ON A THURSDAY NIGHT IN EARLY AUTUMN she nearly committed adultery, was within minutes of consummating it, or within touches, kisses; it was difficult to measure by time or by her mouth and tongue and hands, or by his. She made love with her husband, Ted Briggs, on Thursday night and Friday night and at first light Saturday morning, before her young children woke. Early Saturday afternoon, wearing sunglasses and sneakers, gray gym shorts and a blue tank top and blue nylon jacket, LuAnn Arceneaux kissed her children, the girls ten and eight and the boy six, and Ted, broad and bearded, standing with his cane in the kitchen; and carrying her purse, she went through the mudroom and walked down the long, curving driveway, a forty-three-year-old woman with dark skin and long black hair she wore this afternoon in a ponytail. She smelled the tall pines she walked past on her right, and the sunscreen she had rubbed on her face and arms and shoulders and legs. When she rounded the curve, she saw Marsha stopping her car in the road, then turning into the driveway, a Japanese car with dust on most of its red surface, and Marsha waving behind the windshield. LuAnn got into the car and they kissed cheeks.
They were talking about the lovely weather before Marsha backed onto the road; then she drove past trees with yellow leaves, and red ones, and Marsha said the river would be beautiful, in this light, with the leaves at its banks. Marsha’s nylon jacket and shorts were silver, and LuAnn guessed she was wearing the purple tank top. Her hair was auburn, cut above her shoulders, and her sunglasses were dark. They lit cigarettes and LuAnn said they could just take beer to the park and lie in the sun, and Marsha said she could do that; her son, who was seven, had refused every morning this week to get out of bed, to dress, and to go to school, and she fought him as he dressed, and she and Bill and Annie encouraged him at breakfast, and snapped at him, and ordered him, and he went to school. LuAnn said that Julia and Elizabeth and Sam were good on school mornings; sometimes they fought with each other, but they did that in summer, too; and Marsha said if a workout didn’t give her the same relief smoking and drinking did, she’d get a six-pack now; she said she had brought them a bottle of water. They were driving on a road built through a forest. LuAnn wondered if the road had once been a trail for loggers, for horse-drawn wagons and carriages. Large houses were acres apart, built on lawns surrounded by trees. LuAnn said: “Maybe something’s wrong at school. A bully.”
“I think he doesn’t like the way I am in the morning. I don’t like morning. Not on weekdays.”
“We made love this morning.”
“During cartoons?”
They drove out of the trees. There was a farm on the left, and beyond the dead cornstalks LuAnn saw the river; across the road from the farm were houses, and after the farm they were on both sides of the road. LuAnn said: “I woke up early.”
“That’s really good.” Children were on the grass and sidewalks, cars were on the road, and men were mowing lawns. “If I ever woke up first, without the clock radio, I probably wouldn’t even think of that. I’d creep to the kitchen and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and stare. I work too Goddamned much.”
“I don’t miss it.”
“I’m sick of it. I want your life. Or Ted’s money. Imagine: in the morning. Ted will be a lamb all day. He’ll take you to dinner.”
“A stallion. When his day starts with sex, he sort of stays fixed on it.”
“So you’ll put on something pretty, go to Boston, have dinner.”
“I feel like a movie. Some nice video the children can see.”
“Get Zorro. Little girls love Zorro.”
At an intersection Marsha stopped, waited for cars to pass, then turned left and drove a block between houses with small front lawns, and swaths of lawns or low wooden fences between them. There was a one-story yellow house with green trim and a maple with red leaves in the yard and a blue tricycle on the front porch; LuAnn im
agined herself living in it; she loved her life and she knew she would love it in that yellow house, too. As a young woman working in Boston for an insurance company, then a small publisher, she had thought very little about money; then she had married Ted, a lawyer, and always there was plenty of money; so all her life she had not worried about it, except having so much of it; when she paid the monthly bills, she sent checks to homes for those who have no homes. On Thursday nights she went to a home for teenaged girls and read a story to some of them. It was not something she felt like leaving her house to do on Thursday nights; but she believed in sharing her gifts, and she liked the girls.
Just this summer she and Ted had bought the big house on the country road and she loved being in it, and was grateful for the money they had; it saved her from a job, and from some difficulties, and she had a housekeeper. She could live in the yellow house. She would miss looking out her windows at the rise and fall of wooded land, miss the solitude of trees, the private spaces her large house gave, and her big kitchen. But she knew that she and Ted, and Julia and Elizabeth and Sam, would be no different. She wished Marsha could quit her job. Marsha turned onto a narrow street and drove downhill, the red-brick hospital on their left, and farther down a yellow-brick church where LuAnn went to Mass. Marsha turned and drove past the church; they tossed their cigarettes out the windows, and went past the football stadium, and turned into a parking lot. The high school team was playing and through her open window LuAnn heard the band, and she looked at people sitting high in the stands. She and Marsha put their sunglasses on the dashboard, got out of the car, took off their jackets, and put them on the front seat, covering their purses. Marsha was wearing the purple top and holding her key ring. She came around the car and they started walking fast, across the lot and onto an asphalt path. To their right, black boys without shirts played basketball on a court. A woman on a bicycle rode toward them, and a young couple on Rollerblades came from behind them and skirted them and went bending and swaying up the slope. Large trees stood scattered in the park, and the high sun shone on the path and warmed LuAnn’s face. She said: “I almost cheated Thursday night.”