Townie

by Andre Dubus III

  I pulled one of his writing notebooks from his desk, ripped out a piece of paper, and recorded his workout program. He thanked me. He smiled widely and gave me a sweaty hug. “Hey, man, when you coming back to school?”

  I shrugged. I was surprised to hear him ask the question. He hadn’t said much at all about my having dropped out. A few weeks earlier at Ronnie D’s bar, Pop turned to me and said, “I don’t worry about what you’re doing right now because you’ve already got discipline.” He took in my chest and shoulders and sipped his beer.

  Now I stepped away from my father and handed him his workout program. “Start light, Pop, and work your way up slowly, all right?”

  ON A Friday in late August, Mike W. pulled up to the pumps in a small Japanese car. He was one of those who used to hang around our house weekday afternoons, smoking dope in our living room or kitchen. This was something people had stopped doing, not because I’d kicked them out, but because Suzanne no longer sold anything and spent most of her time across the river as a student at Bradford.

  Mike W. had shoulder-length hair but was always clean-shaven and looked healthy, and he’d never been disrespectful to my sister or the rest of us. I didn’t know him well, but I liked him. He stepped out of his car as I filled his tank.

  He nodded at me. “Working out?”

  “Yep.”

  “I was down in Riverside the other night. The Lynches are still talking about getting you, you know.”

  I glanced over at him.

  “Dana’s got some legal shit hanging over his head, but he says he’s coming for you soon.”

  “Let him come.” I was talking tough, but my heart was beating faster.

  “I told him I heard you’re a pretty good boxer, but he still thinks you sucker-punched Steve.”

  “Let him think that then.” I topped off his tank and hung up the gas nozzle and clicked it down into place.

  Mike paid me, told me he was moving down to New Jersey for college, was studying history but planned to go to Law School. I wished him luck and waved as he drove off. I watched his small car accelerate under the railroad trestle for Lafayette Square. When he drove out from under the shadows, the sun glinted off his back bumper, and I stood there in the smell of fresh gasoline feeling left behind.

  8

  IN THE FALL I went back to school. Back to Bradford College where my father lived and worked and where I’d fallen in love with a girl from Iran. Her name was Marjan, and as far as I knew, she did not even know I existed. She had long black hair and dark eyes and a kind smile. She wore clean, pressed clothes and had a languid, graceful walk, and I spent months trying to put myself near her just to watch her laugh or brush her hair back from her face or hear her talk, her accent sweet and exotic and from a country I’d never heard of. She smoked cigarettes and even though I did not, I would go into the smoke room if she was there and I’d listen to her chat with the others, listen to that accent, watch her puff elegantly on a Marlboro Light.

  She lived in Tupelo East, one of the dorms deep in the campus away from the street and not far from where my father lived with his second family. On weekend nights, instead of cruising around with Sam and Bobby, going to bars or some house party where I kept my back to the wall and scanned the room for whomever I might have to fight, I went to Marjan’s dorm instead.

  I knew nothing about her. Nothing about her culture. I knew she lived with another Iranian, a short, sweet-faced girl named Parvine, that boys never went into their room. I heard they came from a strict culture and the two sexes just did not mix. I went to my classes, I read the assigned books and wrote papers and took blue book exams, but I thought mainly of workouts and her, how to get bigger and how to get closer to her.

  BECAUSE THE campus was small and he lived on it, I saw more of my father than I had since I was a boy. I was eighteen and he was forty-one, and I began to learn the rhythm of his days. Every morning he got up early and drove to the Sacred Hearts church down in Bradford Square for the seven o’clock mass. He’d come home, eat breakfast, then write most of the morning. Just before lunch he’d put on running shoes and shorts and go for a run. If he had time he’d drive down through Bradford and across the Merrimack to Kenoza Lake. If he didn’t, he’d run a three-to-five-mile route through the quiet residential streets off campus, and he’d take a shower and shave his cheeks and throat, then eat a light lunch while he prepared for his afternoon classes.

  His favorite classroom was on the second floor of the library, a small seminar room overlooking Tupelo Pond, a tiny man-made estuary on the campus you could cross by walking over a paved stone bridge, its four-by-four rails painted white.

  As a full-time faculty member Pop was expected to hold office hours, but while he had one, he was never in it. If a student needed to meet with him to discuss his or her work, he’d suggest they talk in the student union building or down in Bradford Square over a beer at Ronnie D’s bar.

  Before he’d married Lorraine, he might stay there quite a while, taking up a booth with four or five of his students, most of them young women, drinking and talking and flirting, maybe having a bar hotdog for supper. But since marrying Lorraine, he was expected to be home for a sit-down dinner and eat it with her and the kids at her antique dining table that took up most of the room.

  “Nine thousand pounds,” he’d say over and over again. “That woman owns nine thousand pounds of furniture.” She did, and she’d had it moved up from Louisiana: carved bookcases and plush sofas, dishes and silver and shaded lamps, carpets and polished hardwood beds and bureaus and end tables.

  Married housing on campus looked like small, split-level ski lodges. They had tiny kitchens and open carpeted rooms that led to sets of bedrooms at each end. There were sliding glass doors to an upper deck overlooking trees and a lawn and a paved walk to the other campus houses.

  When she moved in, none of Pop’s bookshelves matched hers so she asked him to make a room for himself on the second floor. It held everything he owned: a few pine bookcases of hardcover books he’d been collecting on his own for years; his clothes and record player and stack of albums, mainly jazz—Stan Getz, Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck and Cannonball Adderley. There was Dylan, too. And Kris Kristofferson and Joan Baez. He no longer owned the wooden black desk I remembered, but a metal study carrel that had come with the college. On it was his pipe collection, his humidor and ashtray, the manual typewriter he used after writing drafts longhand in bound notebooks. On the windowsill sat his collection of Akubra Australian cowboy hats he wore around campus and downtown, and in the middle of the floor was his new weight bench, the barbell lying across its upright forks. But in the rest of the house, there was little evidence of him or the life he’d lived so far, and whenever I’d stop by for a quick visit, he looked like he’d wandered into somebody else’s house and couldn’t find the door out of there.

  But she didn’t look so happy either. After supper she’d put her kids to bed, then sit at the kitchen table sipping black coffee, smoking a More cigarette, and staring off into the near distance as if she were completely alone in the room. I had heard she’d been content with her first husband, an affable man who one morning had died at the breakfast table in front of her and the kids.

  But on weekends, Pop still went out and got drunk. It’s what he’d always done, as if the disciplined rituals of the week built pressure inside him that by Friday or Saturday night just had to blow. When he began teaching at Bradford Junior College in 1967, he was thirty-one, only ten or eleven years older than his students, and because it was the sixties, there were a lot of parties with students and faculty in the same place, some at our small rented cottage in the woods in New Hampshire. But now he was in his forties, many of his colleagues older than that, and very few of them still wanted to drink and hang out with these eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds.

  But Pop did.

  One Saturday night early in my first semester back, I was sitting on the third floor of Tupelo E
ast in the common area, hoping for Marjan to happen by. I was watching two skinny rockers from Connecticut play cards, and I could hear my father’s voice in the concrete stairwell. He sounded happy and drunk and mischievous. He was with Theo Metrakos who had his Ph.D. in literature now and taught at the college and lived with his wife across the lawn from my dad and Lorraine. Pop was urging his friend to follow him, to come up and “meet the women.”

  Women. Pop always called them that, these girls from California and New York and Illinois, from New Jersey and Iran and India and England. He called them women, but I saw them as girls, and it was strange seeing him emerge from the stairwell in his jeans and cowboy boots, his cotton shirt and leather vest and trimmed beard and reddened face, his eyes scanning the hallways and common area, his reluctant friend behind him.

  Pop saw me and laughed, like I’d taken a wrong turn and must be lost. I laughed too, though I didn’t feel like it.

  “Where’s it at, man? Where’s it at?” He came over, took me in sitting there. I caught the sweet juniper scent of gin. I shrugged and felt caught, though he was the one acting caught. A heavy girl in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms passed and he called her over and put his arm around her, said, “It’s good, Marie. It’s really fucking good.”

  She nodded and smiled. Her cheeks were flushed, but she looked genuinely pleased about something. Metrakos stood over the two boys playing cards, his hands in his corduroys. He didn’t seem as loaded as Pop, though he may have been. He addressed them by their first names, asked how were they doing? Were they adjusting all right?

  In less than thirty years he and my father would both be gone, but now they were still young and alive and they called themselves Butch and Sundance. They taught together, ran together, drank together, and went out on double dates with their wives. One late night, drunk and hungry for lobsters, they broke into a seafood restaurant out on the beach just to pull a few from the tank. Probably it had been Pop’s idea; he’d always been the more impulsive one, the reckless leader of the two. When Pop was done with his week’s work, that quality that drew people to him seemed to magnify, like life was one all-night party on the first day of some weekend-long fiesta, and I could see it was hard for people not to want to be around him then, especially those like Marie who had read his work and knew she was standing close to the man who had written such graceful stories. I had just begun to read them myself. Weeks before, on a quiet Sunday morning, I took one of his collections off the shelf and read a story called “Killings.” It was set in a place like Bradford Square and was about a father planning revenge for the murder of his youngest son. The sentences were lean and lyrical and cut deeply into the people Pop was writing about; it was only twenty-one pages long but felt as strong to me as The Grapes of Wrath, a novel I’d just read for school and was so moved by I had to go walking after. I had to go walking after reading my father’s story, too. The air was cool and smelled like rain, and I walked up the grassy median of Columbia Park. At the base of an oak I stopped and looked up at its bare branches against the sky. There was the feeling something important had just been revealed to me, that my father had created many stories like the one I’d just read and that’s where most of him had been my whole life, in those pages, with people like the father who had lost his son.

  Now a few other students had heard his voice and were walking up to him in the hallway; there were those parties when I was a boy, how Pop’s voice was always at the center of them, how he seemed to be the axis of the wheel everyone else lounged on, spinning around what he had to say or yell or laugh about. Then the parties would end and Pop would become another man, one who worked quietly and alone, then went running alone, then left in his car alone to go teach, a man who returned to us tired and distracted and needing sleep to get ready for the next day’s solitary work.

  Metrakos smiled at me, then walked into the hallway where Pop was leaning close to Marie, his hand on the shoulder of a blonde girl from Long Island. Theo whispered something into my father’s ear, then ushered him gently back down that concrete stairwell at Tupelo, and it was clear to me Metrakos was mellowing while my father, ten years older, was not.

  WEEKS LATER, there were two feet of snow on the ground, the air so cold and dry it hurt your lungs to breathe through the mouth. There was a loud crowded party at one of the international student houses on campus across from my father’s, and I was at this party hoping to see Marjan, to maybe get her alone and introduce myself and talk, but it was the kind I hated because it was full of young men in polyester shirts and pants, smelling of cologne and dancing to disco music which sounded to me synthetic and soulless, its relentless beat the echo of some narcissistic machine.

  The place was small and dark and hot. Some of the women were dancing, too—an Indian girl from Bombay, one from Bahrain, another from Venezuela, their movements sweet and graceful in jeans and blouses, their gold bracelets jangling. Many were drunk, including me, sipping beer after beer, and though Sam wasn’t with me, he and I had vowed to always run one mile the next day for each beer we drank. I’d begun to lose count but believed I was going to have to run seven, maybe eight miles in the morning. The Bee Gees came on, a song I hated from a movie I hated, and I drained my beer and was just about to leave when I saw Marjan dancing, her long dark hair swinging, her friend Parvine dancing beside her.

  There was a banging on the bathroom door behind me. The tall girl from Bombay turned to me. “Your father’s been in there with Louisa a long time. People need to use the bathroom.”

  “My father’s in there?”

  “Yes, with that girl from Brazil.”

  Louisa. She had dark skin and wore tight jeans and would walk around campus holding four or five textbooks to her chest. She was a junior or senior but didn’t seem to have a boyfriend.

  The music was too loud. I leaned close to the girl from Bombay, could smell her perfume and skin. “How long’s he been in there?”

  She shrugged. “An hour, perhaps longer.”

  I stepped to the door and knocked on it, could barely hear my own knocking above the party noise. “Pop. Pop, people need to use the toilet. Go someplace else.”

  A line of fluorescent light shone at the bottom of the door. I tried the knob, but it was locked. I pressed my ear to the door. Heard his voice, then hers. So maybe they were just talking. Let somebody else deal with it. I shrugged at the Indian girl and made my way past the polyester boys from Turkey and Iran, Nigeria, Kenya, and New Jersey. In the candlelit gloom I caught a glimpse of Marjan dancing with two Asian girls, and I pulled the slider open and stepped out onto the frozen deck.

  It felt good to be in the cold air, that disco a bit muffled behind me now. I opened another beer and drank. Across the lawn and through the bare trees not more than fifty yards away, was my father’s darkened campus home. It was after one or two in the morning, and the shades were drawn, not a light on anywhere. I pictured my little stepbrother and stepsister asleep in those small rooms on the first floor. And what about Lorraine? Was she sitting up in bed, smoking a More and waiting for him? I felt complicit somehow.

  I went back inside. Pop and Louisa had finally come out of the bathroom, and he looked happy to see me and gave me a big hug and soon enough he and I and students I didn’t know started in on a bottle of Cuervo in the kitchen, licking the salt off the skin between our thumb and forefinger, throwing back the tequila, biting into a wedge of lemon because we could find no limes.

  The disco finally ended and became something much better, some kind of African music with a lot of drums and horns. The night sky outside began to lighten, and Pop had gotten into a conversation in the corner with the tall girl from Bombay. One by one the polyester boys drifted away and the music had been off a long time and I was sweetly drunk, Marjan walking down the stairs from above. She was smiling at me. I went over and put out my hand and shook hers. It was small and cool. I told her my name. She glanced from me to my father in the corner, then back at me. She looked confused.
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br />   “Same name. I’m his son.”

  She nodded and let go of my hand and walked past me. Parvine followed, and I began to follow, too, but Pop was up out of the corner, his hand on my shoulder. “Shit, sun’s coming up. We got to get home before Lorraine’s out of bed. C’mon.”

  I didn’t want to go to his house, but I had my mother’s Toyota I shouldn’t be driving now anyway, and it was a Sunday so she wouldn’t need it, and Pop and I were hurrying over the shoveled walkway, the snow on both sides of us a shade of blue in the false dawn, our breath in front of us.

  When we got to his front door, Pop was giggling. He whispered. “You can crash in the spare room, okay, man?”

  I nodded. I hadn’t slept in the same house as him since I was a boy. He gripped the knob but it wouldn’t turn.

  “Shit, she locked me out.”

  “You don’t have a key?”

  He shook his head and smiled widely, though his eyes seemed to be looking ahead in time to the trouble he was in.

  Maybe it was his idea, maybe it was mine, but eight feet to the left of his door was the window to the spare room, and we pressed our hands against it and were able to slide it open. We pushed in the screen and I squatted and gave Pop ten fingers and he put his boot in my hands and pushed off and scrambled loudly through the window and down into the darkness. I grabbed the windowsill and pulled myself up and halfway in, my legs still hanging outside, kicking at air, and there was Lorraine leaning against the jamb of the doorway to the spare room, the hallway light on behind her. She wore a white nightgown and I could see the outline of her small body, her arms crossed over her breasts, and I fell in headfirst and stopped my fall with my hands, my boots hooking for a second in the window frame before I rolled all the way into her house.

  Pop stood up. “Why’d you lock the door?”