Adultery & Other Choices

by Andre Dubus

  Corporal of Artillery

  AFTER THREE years, eleven months, and two days service, Corporal Fitzgerald re-enlisted for six years, collected a re-enlistment bonus and, that same afternoon, went to the bank in Oceanside and paid the balance of the note on his 1959 Chevrolet which was four years old. He had thought that would make him feel good, but it didn’t. The balding man who took his money also took the pleasure, as though it hovered between them and the banker inhaled it and grinned before Fitzgerald had a chance. So he went home and paid the rest of the bills by mail: the hospital in San Diego, because the government would pay for your wife to have babies but not a nervous breakdown; the set of encyclopedias, and the revolving charge account which he had told Carol was supposed to revolve, not rocket. That had been for clothes and he realized when he wrote the check that he was paying ten per cent service charges. He walked to the corner and dropped the envelopes in the mail box, then stood there for a moment looking at the red and blue container of at least six years of his life (already knowing, though, that it was actually fifteen and a half, for if a man did ten years—halfway to retirement—he was a fool to get out). For a while he did not turn away from the mailbox. Even after being deprived at the bank, he had expected this final settling of accounts to yield a satisfaction which would carry him through at least the next two weeks in the desert. But he felt nothing. Or he would not acknowledge what he was beginning to feel. He read the times for mail pick-up and walked home to Carol, who seemed happy, free of burden.

  For re-enlisting he rated thirty days leave, all at one shot, and the First Sergeant had even told him he could miss the two week firing exercise at 29 Palms. That was how happy the First Sergeant was; he had been trying to fill the Battery’s re-enlistment quota and he had worked on Fitzgerald for a long time: a series of what began as a rather formal interview in the First Sergeant’s office, changed to friendly conversations on the drill field or atop some hill at Camp Pendleton, and evolved into fervid sermons, these occurring again behind the closed door of the office where First Sergeant Reichert—a slender man with a thick soft black moustache and a red dissipated face—asked him questions he could not answer and gave him answers he did not want and which he tried to resist. Fitzgerald had a whimsical variety of answers, but most frequently I don’t know, to the recurring question: What are you getting out FOR? What are you going to DO?

  Almost four years ago he had spurted into marriage: on leave in Bakersfield, after Boot Camp and infantry training, he had become convinced that he could not return to the Marines without Carol. So he had brought her along, finding himself after bare transition the head of a household, and easily and amazingly enough able to feed his wife and himself as well as the three children who came as steadily as the combination of Carol and diaphragm failed to work. He had counted on his breadwinning lasting forever, though he was uncertain about what form it would take. As the expiration of his enlistment drew near, First Sergeant Reichert stepped in with the disrupting ability to convince him—for hours and sometimes days at a time—that his life was comfortably made for him, that it could never get better than it was now. Reichert finally won by writing the sum of Fitzgerald’s debts on one scrap of paper and his re-enlistment bonus—fourteen hundred and forty dollars—on another, then dangling them over his desk, crumpling them together with a clap of his hands, throwing the ball of paper into the wastebasket, and saying: You see? Redemption, lad, redemption.

  Besides that, he could go to Bakersfield next day and forget about 29 Palms. But Fitzgerald had been smart about taking leave: he told the First Sergeant he would wait until payday, the week after the firing exercise. He did not tell the First Sergeant, or Carol either, that if he went home right after shipping over he wouldn’t want to come back. And with Feeney there maybe he just by God wouldn’t.

  There were a lot of things he didn’t tell Carol because she was finally a good girl and it wasn’t her fault. Even during her bad time, she had chosen as her targets the children and the people who wanted the bills paid, leaving him fairly unscathed. Or most of the time. Still he was a little tough on her the morning after his re-enlistment, when he woke knowing he had to get aboard a truck and ride out to 29 Palms for two weeks of Mickey Mouse. She got up before he did and put on make-up. While he was eating buckwheat cakes, she woke the children and they all got in the car to drive him to the barracks. It touched him that Carol was looking pretty just to feed him and drive him in and he wondered if she’d still do that six years from now, in 1969, when—if he was very lucky—he might be a staff sergeant. He decided she wouldn’t, so now her face and hair and smell only annoyed him. As she turned into the Battery parking lot, he said: ‘Look: it’s just two weeks. Anybody comes around selling encyclopedias for kids that can’t read, you lock the door.’

  ‘That’s not fair.’

  ‘It’s expensive and it’s paid for.’

  ‘Well he did make me feel like a bad mother.’

  ‘Yeah: well you’re not, so let’s learn from experience. I learn, and I’m just twenty-two years old. That’s what everybody keeps forgetting around here.’

  She was hurt instead of angry and, once in the truck, he was sorry. In that evening’s sunset he squatted outside his tent and wrote her a letter. She answered by return mail and they were all right again.

  He was a scout-observer for a forward observation team, so he spent the entire two weeks in the desert sitting on steep hills of loose rock, his lips chapping, his face burning, though it would not change color for it was densely freckled. He and the lieutenant took turns calling in fire missions, adjusting the 105 Howitzers on imaginary targets: convoys of trucks, tanks, gun emplacements, and columns of advancing troops. He got through the two weeks without making any mistakes, and on the final evening he sat on a small rock at the base camp, his metal tray of food resting across his knees. The camp was in a horseshoe of low cliffs which were beginning to turn purple in the sunset. At one end, the officers’ large pyramidal tents were in line on a rise of sand overlooking the rest of the camp. The lower walls of these tents were uniformly rolled up and, when he looked up there once, he could see the cots inside. Below the officers’ area were the Staff NCOs’ pyramidals and the troops’ tents.

  He ate everything on his tray. It was too much and he did not particularly enjoy its taste, but the meal was something he deserved at the end of the firing exercise. When he finished he smoked a Camel, thinking that was one commercial that didn’t lie, then he field-stripped it, rose lethargically, and joined the line of troops waiting to clean their trays. Then he walked slowly over deep yielding sand, back to his tent. The cliffs were dark purple now and the camp was in their shadow.

  His tent was waist-high. On hands and knees he crawled through the opening, squeezing past the tent pole, then squatted to brush off his trousers before lying on his outstretched sleeping bag, which was zipped against sand and dust. Thorton was lying opposite him, almost as near as Carol in the double bed at home.

  ‘Duty on the moon,’ Thorton said. ‘Nothing growing, nothing moving.’

  He had said that about a dozen times in the last two weeks.

  ‘Nothing but Marines,’ Fitzgerald said.

  ‘Like I said: nothing. Got a cigarette?’

  ‘Not for a short-timer.’

  He tossed his pack onto Thorton’s chest.

  ‘Why don’t I just keep ’em?’

  ‘Go ahead. I got two more packs.’

  ‘Call me when your hitch is up, and I’ll put you on the payroll.’

  ‘What payroll?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You better find out fast, before the First Sergeant gets you.’

  Thorton sat up and folded his arms on his knees.

  ‘When my hitch is up,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘I’ll ship for six more.’

  ‘Okay, John Wayne.’

  ‘I’d be throwing ten years away.’

  ‘If you can take twenty years of this, lots o’ luck.’
/>   ‘Nineteen and a half.’

  Then it was dark outside. Breathing the smells of dust and canvas, Fitzgerald made desultory conversation with Thorton: cursing by rote sand and chapped lips, conjuring a shower hot at first then cold; and they talked about Gunny Palenski whom they at once liked and hated, and beer from the very bottom of a chest of ice, and girls in the back seats of cars. They had said all this nearly every night, and they realized it together and stopped. Fitzgerald sat up, took off his boots and shirt and trousers, and squirmed into his sleeping bag; he left it unzipped, lying on his back, looking up at the tent wall sloping across his face.

  Reveille—Gunny Palenski’s hoarse raging voice—was at five o’clock Friday morning; he woke and stared at the forward tent pole outlined against pre-dawn light at the tent’s opening. Some time during the night he had zipped his sleeping bag and now he did not want to get up into the gelid morning and shave with cold water and stand in line for chow; he smelled hot grease from the field galley and tried not to think of those fried eggs turning cool on his tray quicker than he could eat them. He knew one thing: for a month or even two after he retired he would sleep late, getting up about ten or whenever his body refused to stay in bed any longer, putting on a T-shirt and khakis, drinking coffee for a while, maybe shaving, maybe not. Then he would get a job, having had that space of slow mornings when there was no ringing clock to force him out of bed and into uniform while Carol was sleep-walking in the kitchen, pushing himself to the table and eating because he had to, just as he made himself go to the barracks for another day of sometimes doing nothing, not one damned thing, and on other days people ran around and hollered at you until you wanted to kick over all the bunks and wall lockers and set the place on fire. He looked over at Thorton who had closed his eyes again and said:

  ‘Let’s hit it.’

  They got up, dressed quickly, rolled up their sleeping bags, took the tent down and helped each other fold the shelter halves into U-shaped blanket rolls which they strapped to their field marching packs. Fitzgerald laid the packs side by side and placed their helmets on top of them; then he and Thorton walked to chow, passing troops who cursed and panted as they broke their tents; to the east, a smear of rose-colored light showed over the hills.

  ‘First ones finished,’ Thorton said.

  ‘Goddamn right.’

  When they reached Camp Pendleton in late afternoon, Carol was waiting in the parking lot. The red Chevrolet was shining, its grill and hood seeming to show off for him as he approached. From the back seat Mike and Susan were calling him. He got in, leaned over Jerry in the car seat, and kissed Carol; all of it happened so fast and awkwardly that he didn’t really see her, so he pulled away. She was wearing a pink dress, her blonde hair was shorter, and its dark streaks had disappeared.

  ‘I washed the car,’ she said. ‘And I got my hair done.’

  ‘It looks great.’

  ‘The car or my hair?’

  ‘Both. I meant the hair.’

  She smiled at him and backed out of the parking lot. Mike, who was three and the oldest child, said:

  ‘You buy me gum?’

  ‘Daddy didn’t go to the store,’ Fitzgerald said. With his left hand he was touching Mike and Susan: rubbing their shoulders, stroking their heads; but he was looking at Carol.

  ‘You’ve been sunbathing,’ he said.

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘All over?’

  ‘Just what you see.’

  ‘I want to see the rest.’

  ‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘I didn’t give them naps, except Jerry.’

  Mike and Jerry were blond, but Susan had red hair like his and, so far, she had been spared his freckles. He sank a little in the seat and smiled at that splash of color in one family.

  ‘How was it?’ Carol said.

  ‘All right. They brought beer out last Sunday and we played volleyball.’

  ‘Did you have enough money?’

  ‘I had two bucks and I got one off Thorton. I wasn’t going to shave that day, but the Gunny caught me and reamed me out.’

  ‘He did?’

  ‘ I told him to shove it up his ass.’

  She grinned suddenly. She always got tickled when he talked that way, and once in a while after a beer or two she’d try to say something nasty-funny. She had told him it was nice, knowing that nobody could tell you how to talk, and he thought that was funny and sort of sad too, as though she were playing grown-up when here she was with three kids and not even old enough to vote yet. Not that he had ever voted, or ever would either. He never got the word on what those politicians were talking about and he didn’t believe them anyway.

  ‘You see that doctor again?’

  ‘Just once. He said I won’t have to see him much longer, ’cause the birth control pills will help me relax.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You don’t mind about my hair, do you?’

  ‘Long as you had the money. It looks good.’

  ‘I got groceries and cigarettes till payday and filled the car and opened a charge account at the drug store so I can get tranquilizers and the pills. Did I leave anything out?’

  He was going to say something about the charge account, but he remembered how she was before and now it looked like she’d be all right, so he let it pass.

  ‘Beer,’ he said. ‘Did you get beer?’

  ‘A whole case.’ She sounded so pleased that he felt sorry for her. ‘And I put a six-pack in the refrigerator.’

  ‘Three apiece.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s four days till payday, so we get three apiece a day.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They lived in a government housing area in Oceanside: two-storied red brick buildings, with grey roads curving in from the highway then out again, paved oxbows which existed to get Marines to and from the Base. Fitzgerald took a long shower, just the way he and Thorton had talked about it; when he finished, Jerry was in the playpen and Mike and Susan were watching cartoons. Carol opened two beers and they went outside, sitting on a slab of concrete they called the porch. They sat close to each other, their bare feet on a patch of dirt where the grass had died. Just over the roofs across the street, the sun was falling toward the ocean they could not see.

  ‘We’ll get to Bakersfield Tuesday evening,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘Wednesday we’ll have everybody out to my place, starting at noon.’

  ‘Can we?’

  ‘Sure. The old man’ll like that.’

  ‘I wonder what they’re all doing now.’

  ‘Same old things.’

  He smiled, thinking of big crazy Feeney with a beer in his fist and a long narrow cigar between his teeth.

  ‘Except Feeney,’ he said. ‘He’s probably thought up something different.’

  ‘You think he’s still there?’

  ‘Feeney? Sure he’s there.’

  ‘I love that silly man.’

  ‘Yeah, well don’t tell him that.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that way.’

  ‘I know.’

  She lit a cigarette and he watched her fingers: they were deliberate and steady.

  ‘You take a tranquilizer today?’

  ‘Not a one.’

  He patted her knee.

  ‘You won’t tell anybody at home, will you?’ she said.

  ‘Nobody’s business.’

  ‘I’ll be so glad to see Vicki, I’ll probably tell her myself.’

  He went inside and got two more beers, then listened quietly as she talked about her visit to the doctor, and going to the beach with Cathy Thorton, and how the kids had behaved without him. Then he said: ‘About that charge account. Let’s close it.’

  From the corner of his eye he watched her jaws tighten on whatever it was she had to hold back.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I don’t need tranquilizers much more anyway and I can stock up on the pills on paydays.’

  ‘Sure. It’ll work out.’

  ‘I don’t know how y
ou close one. Do you just walk in and say I want to close my account?’

  ‘I don’t know either, but I’ll find out tomorrow. You remember Feeney shoplifting? The time he got brassieres ’cause he said everything else was guarded?’

  She was laughing now.

  ‘I bet he just wanted them,’ she said.

  ‘Not Feeney: he didn’t have to steal ’em. Suppose I don’t shave all week-end.’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  ‘It’s not enough to scratch anyway.’

  ‘Yes it is, but I never feel it.’

  She pressed her leg against his.

  ‘Is that right?’ he said.

  ‘That’s right. I missed you.’

  ‘I got kinda tired of Thorton too. Okay: I won’t shave till Monday. I’ll get in shape for Bakersfield. Maybe I won’t stick to it, but I’m planning on not shaving for thirty days.’

  ‘Don’t. Grow a red beard.’

  ‘It’d take me three months, but I’ll get some itchy fuzz. And we’ll tell the folks we want my old room so the sun won’t come in and every morning we’ll by God sleep till we can’t sleep anymore. And they better not bust in on us either, ’cause they might get embarrassed.’

  ‘It’ll be safe too.’

  ‘Damn right. Do they make you sick?’

  ‘No. I’m not gaining weight either.’

  She stood up.

  ‘I have to start dinner.’

  ‘Hell with it. Let’s sit here till dark then we’ll pick up some hamburgers and go to the drive-in.’

  ‘What’s on?’

  ‘Who cares? How ’bout a beer while you’re up.’

  ‘Your last one?’

  ‘Nope. We’ll drink as much as we want then buy some more.’

  At dark they reached the movie—a musical—and Fitzgerald said: Anyway, it’s not The Sands of Iwo Goddamn Jima and Carol laughed and unwrapped his hamburger for him. Soon the children were sleeping on the back seat. The movie was all right but Fitzgerald didn’t care much for Debbie Reynolds and he grew restless, looking into the cars around him until he could see nothing but silhouettes. He slid down in the seat, watching Debbie through the steering wheel and remembered he and Carol going to the drive-in at Bakersfield, sometimes with Feeney and that wild black-haired girl, whatever her name was, but most of the time alone.