Adultery & Other Choices

by Andre Dubus

  He had little money, only what an assistantship gave him, and he didn’t like her to pay for their evenings out, so when they saw each other at night it was most often at her apartment. Usually before he came she would shower and put on a dress or skirt. He teased her about that but she knew he liked it. So did she. She liked being dressed and smelling of perfume and brushing her long black hair before the mirror, and she liked the look in his eyes and the way his voice heightened and belied his teasing. She put on records and they had drinks and told each other what they had done that day. She was pretending to be in her first year of graduate school, in American history, so she could be near Hank; she attended classes, even read the books and wrote the papers, even did rather well; but she was pretending. They drank for a while, then she stood between the hot stove and the refrigerator and cooked while he stood at the entrance of the alcove, and they talked. They ate at a small table against the wall of the living room; the only other room was the bathroom. After dinner she washed the dishes, put away leftovers in foil, and they unfolded the couch and made love and lay talking until they were ready to make love again. It all felt like marriage. Even at twenty-seven, looking back on those nights after five years of marriage, she still saw in them what marriage could often be: talk and dinner and, the child asleep, living-room lovemaking long before the eleven o’clock news which had become their electronic foreplay, the weather report the final signal to climb the stairs together and undress.

  On those nights in the apartment they spoke of marriage. And he explained why, even on the nights of Iowa winter when his moustache froze as he walked from her door around the lawyer’s house and down the slippery driveway to his car, he did not want to spend the night with her. It was a matter of ritual, he told her. It had to do with his work. He did not want to wake up with someone (he said someone, not you) and then drive home to his own room where he would start the morning’s work. What he liked to do, he said (already she could see he sometimes confused like to with have to) was spend his first wakeful time of the day alone. In his room, each working morning, he first made his bed and cleared his desk of mail and books, then while he made his coffee and cooked bacon and eggs on the hot plate he read the morning paper; he read through the meal and afterward while he drank coffee and smoked. By the time he had finished the paper and washed the dishes in the bathroom he had been awake for an hour and a half. Then, with the reluctance which began as he reached the final pages of the newspaper, he sat at his desk and started to work.

  He spoke so seriously, almost reverently, about making a bed, eating some eggs, and reading a newspaper, that at first Edith was amused; but she stifled it and asked him what was happening during that hour and a half of quiet morning. He said, That’s it: quiet: silence. While his body woke he absorbed silence. His work was elusive and difficult and had to be stalked; a phone call or an early visitor could flush it. She said, What about after we’re married? He smiled and his arm tightened her against him. He told her of a roommate he had, when he was an undergraduate. The roommate was talkative. He woke up talking and went to bed talking. Most of the talk was good, a lot of it purposely funny, and Hank enjoyed it. Except at breakfast. The roommate liked to share the newspaper with Hank and talk about what they were reading. Hank was writing a novel then; he finished it in his senior year, read it at home that summer in Phoenix, and, with little ceremony or despair, burned it. But he was writing it then, living with the roommate, and after a few weeks of spending an hour and a half cooking, reading, and talking and then another hour in silence at his desk before he could put the first word on paper, he started waking at six o’clock so that his roommate woke at eight to an apartment that smelled of bacon and, walking past Hank’s closed door, he entered the kitchen where Hank’s plate and fork were in the drainer, the clean skillet on the stove, coffee in the pot, and the newspaper waiting on the table.

  So in her ninth month she began worrying about Hank. What had first drawn her to him was his body: in high school he had played football; he was both too light and too serious to play in college; he was short, compact, and hard, and she liked his poised, graceful walk; with yielding hands she liked touching his shoulders and arms. When he told her he ran five miles every day she was pleased. Later, not long before they were lovers, she realized that what she loved about him was his vibrance, intensity; it was not that he was a writer; she had read little and indiscriminately and he would have to teach her those things about his work that she must know. She loved him because he had found his center, and it was that center she began worrying about in her ninth month. For how could a man who didn’t want to spend a night with his lover be expected to move into a house with a woman, and then a baby? She watched him.

  When he finished the novel, Sharon was two and they were buying a house in Bradford, Massachusetts, where he taught and where Edith believed she could live forever. Boston was forty minutes to the south, and she liked it better than Chicago; the New Hampshire beaches were twenty minutes away; she had been landlocked for twenty-four years and nearly every summer day she took Sharon to the beach while Hank wrote; on sunny days when she let herself get trapped into errands or other trifles that posed as commitments, she felt she had wronged herself; but there were not many of those days. She loved autumn—she and Hank and Sharon drove into New Hampshire and Vermont to look at gold and red and yellow leaves—and she loved winter too—it wasn’t as cold and windy as the midwest—and she loved the evergreens and snow on the hills; and all winter she longed for the sea, and some days she bundled up Sharon and drove to it and looked at it from the warmth of the car. Then they got out and walked on the beach until Sharon was cold.

  Hank was happy about his novel; he sent it to an agent who was happy about it too; but no one else was and, fourteen months later, with more ceremony this time (a page at a time, in the fireplace, three hundred and forty-eight of them) and much more despair, he burned it. That night he drank a lot but was still sober; or sad enough so that all the bourbon did was make him sadder; in bed he held her but he was not really holding her; he lay on his side, his arms around her; but it was she who was holding him. She wanted to make love with him, wanted that to help him, but she knew it would not and he could not. Since sending his novel to the agent he had written three stories; they existed in the mail and on the desks of editors of literary magazines and then in the mail again. And he had been thinking of a novel. He was twenty-six years old. He had been writing for eight years. And that night, lying against her, he told her the eight years were gone forever and had come to nothing. His wide hard body was rigid in her arms; she thought if he could not make love he ought to cry, break that tautness in his body, his soul. But she knew he could not. All those years meant to him, he said, was the thousands of pages, surely over three, maybe over four, he had written: all those drafts, each one draining him only to be stacked in a box or filing cabinet as another draft took its place: all those pages to get the two final drafts of the two novels that had gone into ashes, into the air. He lived now in a total of fifty-eight typed pages, the three stories that lived in trains and on the desks of men he didn’t know.

  ‘Start tomorrow,’ she said. ‘On the new novel.’

  For a few moments he was quiet. Then he said: ‘I can’t. It’s three in the morning. I’ve been drinking for eight hours.’

  ‘Just a page. Or else tomorrow will be terrible. And the day after tomorrow will be worse. You can sleep late, sleep off the booze. I’ll take Sharon to the beach, and when I come home you tell me you’ve written and run with Jack and you feel strong again.’

  At the beach next day she knew he was writing and she felt good about that; she knew that last night he had known it was what he had to do; she also knew he needed her to tell him to do it. But she felt defeated too. Last night, although she had fought it, her knowledge of defeat had begun as she held him and felt that tautness which would yield to neither passion nor grief, and she had known it was his insular will that would get him
going again, and would deny her a child.

  When he finished the novel fourteen months ago she had started waiting for that time—she knew it would be a moment, an hour, a day, no more: perhaps only a moment of his happy assent—when she could conceive. For by this time, though he had never said it, she knew he didn’t want another child. And she knew it was not because of anything as practical and as easily solved as money. It was because of the very force in him which had first attracted her, so that after two years of marriage she could think wryly: one thing has to be said about men who’ve found their center: they’re sometimes selfish bastards. She knew he didn’t want another child because he believed a baby would interfere with his work. And his believing it would probably make it true.

  She knew he was being shortsighted, foolish, and selfish; she knew that, except for the day of birth itself and perhaps a day after, until her mother arrived to care for Sharon, a baby would not prevent, damage, or even interrupt one sentence of all those pages he had to write and she was happy that he wrote and glad to listen to on those nights when he had to read them too; those pages she also resented at times, when after burning three hundred and forty-eight of them he lay in despair and the beginnings of resilience against her body she had given him more than three hundred and forty-eight times, maybe given him a thousand times, and told her all the eight years meant to him were those pages. And she resented them when she knew they would keep her from having a second child; she wanted a son; and it would do no good, she knew, to assure him that he would not lose sleep, that she would get up with the baby in the night.

  Because that really wasn’t why he didn’t want a baby; he probably thought it was; but it wasn’t. So if she told him how simple it would be, he still wouldn’t want to do it. Because, whether he knew it or not, he was keeping himself in reserve. He had the life he wanted: his teaching schedule gave him free mornings; he had to prepare for classes but he taught novels he knew well and could skim; he had summers off, he had a friend, Jack Linhart, to talk, drink, and run with; he had a woman and a child he loved, and all he wanted now was to write better than he’d ever written before, and it was that he saved himself for. They had never talked about any of this, but she knew it all. She almost felt the same way about her life; but she wanted a son. So she had waited for him to sell his novel, knowing that would be for him a time of exuberance and power, a time out of the fearful drudgery and isolation of his work, and in that spirit he would give her a child. Now she had to wait again.

  In the winter and into the spring when snow melted first around the trunks of trees, and the ice on the Merrimack broke into chunks that floated seaward, and the river climbed and rushed, there was a girl. She came uninvited in Christmas season to a party that Edith spent a day preparing; her escort was uninvited too, a law student, a boring one, who came with a married couple who were invited. Later Edith would think of him: if he had to crash the party he should at least have been man enough to keep the girl he crashed with. Her name was Jeanne, she was from France, she was visiting friends in Boston. That was all she was doing: visiting. Edith did not know what part of France she was from nor what she did when she was there. Probably Jeanne told her that night while they stood for perhaps a quarter of an hour in the middle of the room and voices, sipping their drinks, nodding at each other, talking the way two very attractive women will talk at a party: Edith speaking and even answering while her real focus was on Jeanne’s short black hair, her sensuous, indolent lips, her brown and mischievous eyes. Edith had talked with the law student long enough—less than a quarter of an hour—to know he wasn’t Jeanne’s lover and couldn’t be; his confidence was still young, wistful, and vulnerable; and there was an impatience, a demand, about the amatory currents she felt flowing from Jeanne. She remarked all of this and recalled nothing they talked about. They parted like two friendly but competing hunters after meeting in the woods. For the rest of the night—while talking, while dancing—Edith watched the law student and the husbands lining up at the trough of Jeanne’s accent, and she watched Jeanne’s eyes, which appeared vacant until you looked closely at them and saw that they were selfish: Jeanne was watching herself.

  And Edith watched Hank, and listened to him. Early in their marriage she had learned to do that. His intimacy with her was private; at their table and in their bed they talked; his intimacy with men was public, and when he was with them he spoke mostly to them, looked mostly at them, and she knew there were times when he was unaware that she or any other woman was in the room. She had long ago stopped resenting this; she had watched the other wives sitting together and talking to one another; she had watched them sit listening while couples were at a dinner table and the women couldn’t group so they ate and listened to the men. Usually men who talked to women were trying to make love with them, and she could sense the other men’s resentment at this distraction, as if during a hand of poker a man had left the table to phone his mistress. Of course she was able to talk at parties; she wasn’t shy and no man had ever intentionally made her feel he was not interested in what she had to say; but willy-nilly they patronized her. As they listened to her she could sense their courtesy, their impatience for her to finish so they could speak again to their comrades. If she had simply given in to that patronizing, stopped talking because she was a woman, she might have become bitter. But she went further: she watched the men, and saw that it wasn’t a matter of their not being interested in women. They weren’t interested in each other either. At least not in what they said, their ideas; the ideas and witticisms were instead the equipment of friendly, even loving, competition, as for men with different interests were the bowling ball, the putter, the tennis racket. But it went deeper than that too: she finally saw that. Hank needed and loved men, and when he loved them it was because of what they thought and how they lived. He did not measure women that way; he measured them by their sexuality and good sense. He and his friends talked with one another because it was the only way they could show their love; they might reach out and take a woman’s hand and stroke it while they leaned forward, talking to men; and their conversations were fields of mutual praise. It no longer bothered her. She knew that some women writhed under these conversations; they were usually women whose husbands rarely spoke to them with the intensity and attention they gave to men.

  But that night, listening to Hank, she was frightened and angry. He and Jeanne were watching each other. He talked to the men but he was really talking to her; at first Edith thought he was showing off; but it was worse, more fearful: he was being received and he knew it and that is what gave his voice its exuberant lilt. His eyes met Jeanne’s over a shoulder, over the rim of a lifted glass. When Jeanne left with the law student and the invited couple, Edith and Hank told them goodbye at the door. It was only the second time that night Edith and Jeanne had looked at each other and spoken; they smiled and voiced amenities; a drunken husband lurched into the group; his arm groped for Jeanne’s waist and his head plunged downward to kiss her. She quickly cocked her head away, caught the kiss lightly on her cheek, almost dodged it completely. For an instant her eyes were impatient. Then that was gone. Tilted away from the husband’s muttering face she was looking at Hank. In her eyes Edith saw his passion. She reached out and put an arm about his waist; without looking at him or Jeanne she said goodnight to the law student and the couple. As the four of them went down the walk, shrugging against the cold, she could not look at Jeanne’s back and hair; she watched the law student and wished him the disaster of bad grades. Be a bank teller, you bastard.

  She did not see Jeanne again. In the flesh, that is. For now she saw her in dreams: not those of sleep which she could forget but her waking dreams. In the mornings Hank went to his office at school to write; at noon he and Jack ran and then ate lunch; he taught all afternoon and then went to the health club for a sauna with Jack and afterward they stopped for a drink; at seven he came home. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he didn’t have classes but he spent the afternoon at school
in conferences with students; on Saturday mornings he wrote in his office and, because he was free of students that day, he often worked into the middle of the afternoon then called Jack to say he was ready for the run, the sauna, the drinks. For the first time in her marriage Edith thought about how long and how often he was away from home. As she helped Sharon with her boots she saw Jeanne’s brown eyes; they were attacking her; they were laughing at her; they sledded down the hill with her and Sharon.

  When she became certain that Hank was Jeanne’s lover she could not trust her certainty. In the enclosed days of winter she imagined too much. Like a spy, she looked for only one thing, and she could not tell if the wariness in his eyes and voice were truly there; making love with him she felt a distance in his touch, another concern in his heart; passionately she threw herself against that distance and wondered all the time if it existed only in her own quiet and fearful heart. Several times, after drinks at a party, she nearly asked Jack if Hank was always at school when he said he was. At home on Tuesday and Thursday and Saturday afternoons she wanted to call him. One Thursday she did. He didn’t answer his office phone; it was a small school and the switchboard operator said if she saw him she’d tell him to call home. Edith was telling Sharon to get her coat, they would go to school to see Daddy, when he phoned. She asked him if he wanted to see a movie that night. He said they had seen everything playing in town and if she wanted to go to Boston he’d rather wait until the weekend. She said that was fine.

  In April he and Jack talked about baseball and watched it on television and he started smoking Parliaments. She asked him why. They were milder, he said. He looked directly at her but she sensed he was forcing himself to, testing himself. For months she had imagined his infidelity and fought her imagination with the absence of evidence. Now she had that: she knew it was irrational but it was just rational enough to release the demons: they absorbed her: they gave her certainty. She remembered Jeanne holding a Parliament, waiting for one of the husbands to light it. She lasted three days. On a Thursday afternoon she called the school every hour, feeling the vulnerability of this final prideless crumbling, making her voice as casual as possible to the switchboard operator, even saying once it was nothing important, just something she wanted him to pick up on the way home, and when he got home at seven carrying a damp towel and smelling faintly of gin she knew he had got back in time for the sauna with Jack and had spent the afternoon in Jeanne’s bed. She waited until after dinner, when Sharon was in bed. He sat at the kitchen table, talking to her while she cleaned the kitchen. It was a ritual of theirs. She asked him for a drink. Usually she didn’t drink after dinner, and he was surprised. Then he said he’d join her. He gave her the bourbon then sat at the table again.