by Andre Dubus
It was not the shit. Shit was nothing. It was the spiritual pain that twisted her soul: Drew’s helplessness, and Alvin reaching into it with his hands. She had stopped teaching because of pain: she had gone with passion to high school students, year after year, and always there was one student, or even five, who wanted to feel a poem or story or novel, and see more clearly because of it. But Emily’s passion dissolved in the other students. They were young and robust, and although she knew their apathy was above all a sign of their being confined by classrooms and adolescence, it still felt like apathy. It made Emily feel isolated and futile, and she thought that if she were a gym teacher or a teacher of dance, she could connect with her students. The women and men who coached athletic teams or taught physical education or dance seemed always to be in harmony with themselves and their students. In her last three years she realized she was becoming scornful and bitter, and she worked to control the tone of her voice, and what she said to students, and what she wrote on their papers. She taught without confidence or hope, and felt like a woman standing at a roadside, reading poems aloud into the wind as cars filled with teenagers went speeding by. She was tending bar in summer and finally she asked Jeff if she could work all year. She liked the work, she stopped taking sleeping pills because when she slept no longer mattered, and, with her tips, she earned more money. She did not want to teach again, or work with teenagers, or have to talk to anyone about the books she read. But she knew that pain had defeated her, while other teachers had endured it, or had not felt it as sharply.
Because of pain, she had turned away from Jeff, a man whom she looked forward to seeing at work. She was not afraid of pain; she was tired of it; and sometimes she thought being tired of it was worse than fear, that losing fear meant she had lost hope as well. If this were true, she would not be able to love with her whole heart, for she would not have a whole heart; and only a man who had also lost hope, and who would settle for the crumbs of the feast, would return her love with the crumbs of his soul. For a long time she had not trusted what she felt for a man, and for an even longer time, beginning in high school, she had deeply mistrusted what men felt for her, or believed they felt, or told her they felt. She chronically believed that, for a man, love was a complicated pursuit of an orgasm, and its evanescence was directly proportionate to the number of orgasms a particular man achieved, before his brain cleared and his heart cooled. She suspected this was also true of herself, though far less often than it was for a man.
When a man’s love for Emily ended, she began to believe that he had never loved her; that she was a homely fool, a hole where the man had emptied himself. She would believe this until time healed the pain. Then she would know that in some way the man had loved her. She never believed her face was what first attracted these men; probably her body had, or something she said; but finally they did like her face; they looked at it, touched it with their hands, kissed it. She only knew now, as a forty-year-old woman who had never lived with a man, that she did not know the truth: if sexual organs were entities that drew people along with them, forcing them to collide and struggle, she wanted to be able to celebrate them; if the heart with intrepid fervor could love again and again, using the sexual organs in its dance, she wanted to be able to exalt its resilience. But nothing was clear, and she felt that if she had been born pretty, something would be clear, whether or not it were true.
She wanted equilibrium: she wanted to carry what she had to carry, and to walk with order and strength. She had never been helpless, and she thought of Drew: his throbless penis with a catheter in it, his shit. If he could not feel a woman, did he even know if he was shitting? She believed she could not bear such helplessness, and would prefer death. She thought: I can walk. Feed myself. Shower. Shit in a toilet. Make love. She was neither grateful nor relieved; she was afraid. She had never imagined herself being crippled, and now, standing behind the bar, she felt her spine as part of her that could be broken, the spinal cord severed; saw herself in a wheelchair with a motor, her body attenuating, her face seeming larger; saw a hired woman doing everything for her and to her.
Kay’s lighter and cigarettes were on the bar; Emily lit one, drew on it twice, and placed it on the ashtray. Kay was coming out of the dark of the tables, into the dim light at the bar. She picked up the cigarette and said: “Oh, look. It came lit.”
She ordered, and Emily worked with ice and limes and vodka and gin and grapefruit juice and salt, with club soda and quinine water, and scotch and bottles of beer and clean glasses, listening to Roland Kirk and remembering him twenty years ago in the small club on the highway, where she sat with two girlfriends. The place was dark, the tables so close to each other that the waitresses sidled, and everyone sat facing the bandstand and the blind black man wearing sunglasses. He had a rhythm section and a percussionist, and sometimes he played two saxophones at once. He grinned; he talked to the crowd, his head moving as if he were looking at them. He said: “It’s nice, coming to work blind. Not seeing who’s fat or skinny. Ugly. Or pretty. Know what I mean?”
Emily knew then, sitting between her friends, and knew now, working in this bar that was nearly as dark as the one where he had played; he was dead, but here he was, his music coming from the two speakers high on the walls, coming softly. Maybe she was the only person in the bar who heard him at this moment, as she poured gin; of course everyone could hear him, as people heard rain outside their walls. In the bar she never heard rain or cars, or saw snow or dark skies or sunlight. Maybe Jeff was listening to Kirk while he cooked. And only to be kind, to immerse herself in a few seconds of pure tenderness, she took two pilsner glasses from the shelf and opened the ice chest and pushed the glasses deep into the ice, for Alvin and Drew.
Kirk had walked the earth with people who only saw. So did Emily. But she saw who was fat or ugly, and if they were men, she saw them as if through an upstairs window. Twenty years ago, Kirk’s percussionist stood beside him, playing a tambourine, and Kirk was improvising, playing fast, and Emily was drumming with her hands on the table. Kirk reached to the percussionist and touched his arm and stepped toward the edge of the bandstand. The percussionist stepped off it and held up his hand; Kirk took it and stepped down and followed the percussionist, followed the sound of the tambourine, playing the saxophone, his body swaying. People stood and pushed their tables and chairs aside, and, clapping and exclaiming, followed Kirk. Everyone was standing, and often Kirk reached out and held someone’s waist, and hugged. In the dark they came toward Emily, who was standing with her friends. The percussionist’s hand was fast on his tambourine; he was smiling; he was close; then he passed her, and Kirk was there. His left arm encircled her, his hand pressing her waist; she smelled his sweat as he embraced her so hard that she lost balance and stood on her toes; she could feel the sound of the saxophone in her body. He released her. People were shouting and clapping, and she stepped into the line, held the waist of a man in front of her; her two friends were behind her, one holding her waist. She was making sounds but not words, singing with Kirk’s saxophone. They weaved around tables and chairs, then back to the bandstand, to the drummer and the bass and piano players, and the percussionist stepped up on it and turned to Kirk, and Kirk took his hand and stepped up and faced the clapping, shouting crowd. Then Kirk, bending back, blew one long high note, then lowered his head and played softly, slowly, some old and sweet melody. Emily’s hands, raised and parted to clap, lowered to her sides. She walked backward to her table, watching Kirk. She and her friends quietly pulled their table and chairs into place and sat. Emily quietly sat, and waitresses moved in the dark, bent close to the mouths of people softly ordering drinks. The music was soothing, was loving, and Emily watched Kirk and felt that everything good was possible.
It would be something like that, she thought now, something ineffable that comes from outside and fills us; something that changes the way we see what we see; something that allows us to see what we don’t.
She served four people
at the bar, and Jeff came through the swinging door with two plates and forks and knives, and went through the gate and around the bar to Alvin and Drew. He stood talking to them; Alvin took the plate Jeff had put in front of Drew, and began cutting the steak. Jeff walked back to the bar, and Emily opened two bottles of Tecate and pulled the glasses out of the ice chest. Jeff said: “Nice, Emily.”
Something lovely spread in her heart, blood warmed her cheeks, and tears were in her eyes; then they flowed down her face, stopped near her nose, and with the fingers of one hand she wiped them, and blinked and wiped her eyes, and they were clear. She glanced around the bar; no one had seen. Jeff said: “Are you all right?”
“I just had a beautiful memory of Roland Kirk.”
“Lucky man.” He held the bottle necks with one hand, and she put the glasses in his other hand; he held only their bottoms, to save the frost.
“I didn’t know him. I saw him play once. That’s him now.”
“That’s him? I was listening in the kitchen. The oil bubbled in time.”
“My blood did, that night.”
“So you cry at what’s beautiful?”
“Sometimes. How about you?”
“It stays inside. I end up crying at silly movies.”
He took the beer to Alvin and Drew, and stood talking; then he sat with them. A woman behind Emily at the bar called her name, and the front door opened and Rita in a peach shirt and jeans came in, and looked at Drew and Alvin and Jeff. Then she looked at Emily and smiled and came toward the bar. Emily smiled, then turned to the woman who had called; she sat with two other women. Emily said: “All around?”
“All around,” the woman said.
Emily made daiquiris in the blender and brought them with both hands gripping the three stems, then went to Rita, who was standing between two men sitting at the bar. Rita said: “Home sucked.” She gave Emily a five-dollar bill. “Dry vermouth on the rocks, with a twist.”
Emily looked at Jeff and Alvin and Drew; they were watching and smiling. She poured Rita’s drink and gave it to her and put her change on the bar, and said: “It’s a glorious race.”
“People?” Rita said, and pushed a dollar toward Emily. “Tell me about it.”
“So much suffering, and we keep getting out of bed in the morning.”
She saw the man beside Rita smiling. Emily said to him: “Don’t we.”
“For some reason.”
“We get hungry,” Rita said. “We have to pee.”
She picked up the vermouth and went to Jeff and Alvin and Drew; Jeff stood and got a chair from another table. Alvin stuck Drew’s fork into a piece of meat and placed the fork between Drew’s fingers, and Drew raised it to his mouth. He could grip the French fries with his fingers, lift them from the plate. Kay went to their table and, holding her tray of glasses against her hip, leaned close to Rita and spoke, and Rita laughed. Kay walked smiling to the bar.
When Alvin and Drew finished eating, Drew held a cigarette and Rita gave him a light. Emily had seen him using his lighter while Rita was at home. He could not quite put out his cigarettes; he jabbed them at the ashtray and dropped them and they smoldered. Sometimes Alvin put them out, and sometimes he did not, and Emily thought about fire, where Drew lived, then wondered if he were ever alone. Jeff stood with their empty plates and went to the kitchen, and she thought of Drew, after this happened to him, learning each movement he could perform alone, and each one he could not; learning what someone else had to help him do, and what someone else had to do for him. He would have learned what different people did not like to do. Alvin did not smoke, or he had not tonight. Maybe he disliked touching cigarettes and disliked smelling them burning to the filter in an ashtray, so sometimes he put them out and sometimes smelled them. But he could empty bags of piss, and wipe shit. Probably he inserted the catheter.
Two summers ago a young woman came to work as a bartender, to learn the job while doing it. Jeff worked with her, and on her first three days the noon crowd wanted fried clams, and she told Jeff she could not stand clams but she would do it. She picked them up raw and put them in batter and fried them, and they nauseated her. She did not vomit, but she looked all through lunch as if she would. On the fourth day, Jeff cooked, but when she smelled the frying clams while she was making drinks, she could see them raw and feel them in her hands and smell them, and she was sick as she worked and talked with customers. She had learned the essential drinks in four days and most of the rare ones, and Jeff called a friend who managed a bar whose only food was peanuts, to make the customers thirsty, and got her a job.
So, was anyone boundless? Most of the time, you could avoid what disgusted you. But if you always needed someone to help you simply live, and that person was disgusted by your cigarettes, or your body, or what came out of it, you would sense that disgust, be infected by it, and become disgusted by yourself. Emily did not mind the smell of her own shit, the sight of it on toilet paper and in the water. There was only a stench if someone else smelled it, only disgust if someone else saw it. Drew’s body had knocked down the walls and door of his bathroom; living without this privacy, he also had to rely on someone who did not need him to be private. It was an intimacy babies had, and people like Drew, and the ill and dying. And who could go calmly and tenderly and stoutly into his life? For years she had heard married women speak with repugnance of their husbands: their breath, their farts, their fat stomachs and asses, their lust, their golf, their humor, their passions, their loves. Maybe Jeff’s wife was one of these; maybe she had been with him too long; maybe he took home too many fish.
Kirk had said: “Know what I mean?” To love without the limits of seeing; so to love without the limits of the flesh. As Kirk danced through the crowd, he had hugged women and men, not knowing till his hand and arm touched their flesh. When he hugged Emily, she had not felt like a woman in the embrace of a man; she melded; she was music.
Alvin stood and came to the bar and leaned toward her and said: “Are we close to a motel?”
“Sure. Where did you come from?”
“Boston.”
“Short trip.”
“First leg of one. He likes to get out and look around.” He smiled. “We stopped for a beer.”
“I’m glad you did. You can use the bar phone.”
She picked up the telephone and the book beside the cash register and put them on the bar. She opened the Yellow Pages. Alvin said: “We need the newest one.”
“Are the old ones bad?”
“Eye of a needle.”
“Are you with him all the time?”
“Five days a week. Another guy takes five nights. Another the weekend, day and night. I travel with him.”
“Have you always done this work?”
“No. I fell into it.”
“How?”
“I wanted to do grand things. I read his ad, and called him.”
“What grand things?”
“For the world. It was an abstraction.”
———
Now the bar was closed and they had drawn two tables together; Emily was drinking vodka and tonic, Louis Armstrong was playing, and she listened to his trumpet, and to Drew; he was looking at her, his face passionate, joyful.
“You could do it,” he said. “It’s up in Maine. They teach you for—what?” He looked at Alvin. “An hour?”
“At most.”
Kay said to Alvin: “Did you do it?”
“No. I don’t believe in jumping out of airplanes. I don’t feel good about staying inside of one, either.”
“Neither do I,” Emily said.
“You could do it,” Drew said, watching Emily. He was drinking beer, but slowly, and he did not seem drunk. Alvin had been drinking club soda since they ate dinner. “You could come with me. They talk to you; then they take you up.” Emily saw Drew being carried by Alvin and other men into a small airplane, lowered into a seat, and strapped to it. “They told me there was a ground wind. They said if I was a normal,
the wind wouldn’t be a problem. But—”
Jeff said: “They said ‘a normal’?”
“No. What the guy said was: ’With your condition you’ve got a ninety percent chance of getting hurt.” Drew smiled. “I told him I’ve lived with nine-to-one odds for a long time. So we went up in their little plane.” Emily could not imagine being paralyzed, but she felt enclosed in a small plane; from inside the plane she saw it take off. “The guy was strong, very confident. Up in the air he lifted me out of the seat and strapped me to him. My back to his chest. We went to the door of the plane, and I looked at the blue sky.”
“Weren’t you terrified?” Emily lit one of Drew’s cigarettes and placed it between his fingers. When she had cleaned the bar and joined them at the table, she had told him and Alvin her name. Drew Purdy. Alvin Parker. She shook their hands, Alvin rising from his chair; when Drew moved his hand upward, she had inserted hers between his fingers and his palm. His hand was soft.
“It felt like fear,” Drew said. “But it was adrenaline. I didn’t have any bad pictures in my head: like the chute not opening. Leaving a mess on the ground for Alvin to pray over. Then he jumped; we jumped. And I had this rush, like nothing I had ever felt. Better than anything I ever felt. And I used to do a lot, before I got hurt. But this was another world, another body. We were free-falling. Dropping down from the sky like a hawk, and everything was beautiful, green and blue. Then he opened the chute. And you know what? It was absolutely quiet up there. I was looking down at the people on the ground. They were small, and I could hear their voices. I thought I heard Alvin. Probably I imagined that. I couldn’t hear words, but I could hear men and women and children. All those voices up in the sky.”