Adultery & Other Choices

by Andre Dubus

  ‘There’s plenty of time,’ Edith says. ‘Would you like pancakes?’

  Sharon gulps the juice and says yes, then pushes back the covers and is waiting for Edith to get up so she can swing her feet to the floor. Edith kisses her again before leaving the room. In the hall she is drawn to the sound of the shower behind her, needs to say something to Hank, but doesn’t know what it is; with both loss and relief she keeps going down the hall and the stairs, into the kitchen.

  Hank and Sharon come down together; by this time Edith has made coffee, brought the Boston Globe in from the front steps and laid it at Hank’s place; the bacon is frying in the iron skillet, the pancake batter is mixed, and the electric skillet is heated. Her eyes meet Hank’s. He does not kiss her good-morning before sitting down; that’s no longer unusual but this morning the absence of a kiss strikes her like a mild but intended slap. They tell each other good-morning. Since that summer three years ago she has felt with him, after returning from a lover, a variety of emotions which seem unrelated: vengeance, affection, weariness, and sometimes the strange and frightening lust of collusive sin. At times she has also felt shy, and that is how she feels this morning as he props the paper on the milk pitcher, then withdraws it as Sharon lifts the pitcher and pours into her glass. Edith’s shyness is no different from what it would be if she and Hank were new lovers, only hours new, and this was the first morning she had waked in his house and as she cooked breakfast her eyes and heart reached out to him to see if this morning he was with her as he was last night. He looks over the paper at her, and his eyes ask about Joe. She shrugs then shakes her head, but she is not thinking of Joe, and the tears that cloud her eyes are not for him either. She pours small discs of batter into the skillet, and turns the bacon. Out of her vision Hank mumbles something to the paper. She breathes the smells of the batter, the bacon, the coffee.

  When Hank and Sharon have left, Edith starts her work. There is not much to do, but still she does not take time to read the paper. When she has finished in the kitchen she looks at the guest room, the dining room, and the living room. They are all right; she vacuumed yesterday. She could dust the bookshelves in the living room but she decides they can wait. She goes upstairs; Sharon has made her bed, and Edith smooths it and then makes the other bed where the blankets on her side are still tucked in. The bathroom is clean and smells of Hank’s after-shave lotion. He has left hair in the bathtub and whiskers in the lavatory; she picks these up with toilet paper. She would like a shower but she wants to flee from this house. She decides to shower anyway; perhaps the hot water and warm soft lather will calm her. But under the spray she is the same, and she washes quickly and very soon is leaving the house, carrying the vacuum cleaner. On the icy sidewalk she slips and falls hard on her rump. For a moment she sits there, hoping no one has seen her; she feels helpless to do everything she must do; early, the day is demanding more of her than she can give, and she does not believe she can deal with it, or with tomorrow, or the days after that either. She slowly stands up. In the car, with the seatbelt buckled around her heavy coat, she turns clumsily to look behind her as she backs out of the driveway.

  At Joe’s she moves with short strides up the sidewalk, balancing herself against the weight of the vacuum cleaner. She doesn’t knock, because he may be sleeping still. But he is not. As she pushes open the front door she sees him sitting at the kitchen table, wearing the black turtleneck. He smiles and starts to rise, but instead turns his chair to face her and watches her as, leaving the vacuum cleaner, she goes down the hall and kisses him, noting as she lowers her face his weary pallor and the ghost in his eyes. In spite of that and the taste of mouthwash that tells her he has vomited again, she no longer feels like a fugitive. She doesn’t understand this, because the feeling began when she woke beside him and therefore it seems that being with him again would not lift it from her. This confuses and frustrates her: when her feelings enter a terrain she neither controls nor understands she thinks they may take her even further, even into madness. She hugs Joe and tells him she has come to clean his apartment; he protests, but he is pleased.

  He follows her to the living room and sits on the couch. But after a while, as she works, he lies down, resting his head on a cushion against the arm of the couch. Quietly he watches her. She watches the path of the vacuum cleaner, the clean swath approaching the layers and fluffs of dust. She feels the touch of his eyes, and what is behind them. When she is finished she moves to the bedroom and again he follows her; he lies on the bed, which he has made. For a while she works in a warm patch of sunlight from the window. She looks out at the bright snow and the woods beyond: the spread and reaching branches of elms and birches and maples and tamaracks are bare; there are pines and hemlocks green in the sun. She almost stops working. Her impulse is to throw herself against the window, cover it with her body, and scream in the impotent rage of grief. But she does not break the rhythm of her work; she continues to push the vacuum cleaner over the carpet, while behind her he watches the push and pull of her arms, the bending of her body, the movement of her legs.

  When she has vacuumed and dusted the apartment and cleaned the bathtub and lavatory she drinks coffee at the kitchen table while he sits across from her drinking nothing, then with apology in his voice and eyes he says: ‘I called the doctor this morning. He said he’d come see me, but I told him I’d go to the office.’

  She puts down her coffee cup.

  ‘I’ll drive you.’

  He nods. Looking at him, her heart is pierced more deeply and painfully than she had predicted: she knows with all her futile and yearning body that they will never make love again, that last night’s rushed and silent love was their last, and that except to pack his toilet articles and books for the final watch in the hospital, he will not return to his apartment she has cleaned.

  It is night, she is in her bed again, and now Hank turns to her, his hand moving up her leg, sliding her nightgown upward, and she opens her legs, the old easy opening to the hand that has touched her for ten years; but when the nightgown reaches her hips she does not lift them to allow it to slip farther up her body. She is thinking of this afternoon when the priest came to the room and she had to leave. She nodded at the priest, perhaps spoke to him, but did not see him, would not recognize him if she saw him again, and she left and walked down the corridor to the sun-porch and stood at the windows that gave back her reflection, for outside the late afternoon of the day she cleaned Joe’s apartment was already dark and the streetlights and the houses across the parking lot were lighted. She smoked while on the hospital bed Joe confessed his sins, told the priest about her, about the two of them, all the slow nights and hurried afternoons, and she felt isolated as she had when, months ago, he had begun to die while, healthy, she loved him.

  Since breakfast her only contact with Hank and Sharon was calling a sitter to be waiting when Sharon got home, and calling Hank at the college to tell him she was at the hospital and ask him to feed Sharon. Those two phone calls kept her anchored in herself, but the third set her adrift and she felt that way still on the sun-porch: Joe had asked her to, and she had phoned the rectory and told a priest whose name she didn’t hear that her friend was dying, that he was an ex-priest, that he wanted to confess and receive communion and the last sacrament. Then she waited on the sun-porch while Joe in confession told her goodbye. She felt neither anger nor bitterness but a vulnerability that made her cross her arms over her breasts and draw her sweater closer about her shoulders, though the room was warm. She felt the need to move, to pace the floor, but she could not. She gazed at her reflection in the window without seeing it and gazed at the streetlights and the lighted windows beyond the parking lot and the cars of those who visited without seeing them either, as inside Joe finally confessed to the priest, any priest from any rectory. It did not take long, the confession and communion and the last anointing, not long at all before the priest emerged and walked briskly down the corridor in his black overcoat. Then she went in
and sat on the edge of the bed and thought again that tomorrow she must bring flowers, must give to this room scent and spirit, and he took her hand.

  ‘Did he understand everything?’ she said.

  He smiled. ‘I realized he didn’t have to. It’s something I’d forgotten with all my thinking: it’s what ritual is for: nobody has to understand. The knowledge is in the ritual. Anyone can listen to the words. So I just used the simple words.’

  ‘You called us adultery?’

  ‘That’s what I called us,’ he said, and drew her face down to his chest.

  Now she feels that touch more than she feels Hank’s, and she reaches down and takes his wrist, stopping the hand, neither squeezing nor pushing, just a slight pressure of resistance and his hand is gone.

  ‘I should be with him,’ she says. ‘There’s a chair in the room where I could sleep. They’d let me: the nurses. It would be a help for them. He’s drugged and he’s sleeping on his back. He could vomit and drown. Tomorrow night I’ll stay there. I’ll come home first and cook dinner and stay till Sharon goes to bed. Then I’ll go back to the hospital. I’ll do that till he dies.’

  ‘I don’t want you to.’

  She looks at him, then looks away. His hand moves to her leg again, moves up, and when she touches it resisting, it moves away and settles on her breast.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says, ‘I don’t want to make love with you.’

  ‘You’re grieving.’

  His voice is gentle and seductive, then he shifts and tries to embrace her but she pushes with her hands against his chest and closing her eyes she shakes her head.

  ‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Just please don’t. It doesn’t mean anything any more. It’s my fault too. But it’s over, Hank. It’s because he’s dying, yes—’ She opens her eyes and looks past her pushing hands at his face and she feels and shares his pain and dismay; and loving him she closes her eyes. ‘But you’re dying too. I can feel it in your chest just like I could feel it when I rubbed him when he hurt. And so am I: that’s what we lost sight of.’

  His chest still leans against her hands, and he grips her shoulders. Then he moves away and lies on his back.

  ‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ he says, ‘I don’t trust this kind of talk at night.’

  ‘It’s the best time for it,’ she says, and she wants to touch him just once, gently and quickly, his arm or wrist or hand; but she does not.

  In late afternoon while snowclouds gather, the priest who yesterday heard Joe’s confession and gave him the last sacrament comes with the Eucharist, and this time Edith can stay. By now Hank is teaching his last class of the day and Sharon is home with the sitter. Tonight at dinner Sharon will ask as she did this morning: Is your friend dead yet? Edith has told her his name is Mr. Ritchie but Sharon has never seen him and so cannot put a name on a space in her mind; calling him your friend she can imagine Joe existing in the world through the eyes of her mother. At breakfast Hank watched them talking; when Edith looked at him, his eyes shifted to the newspaper.

  When the priest knocks and enters, Edith is sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, a large leather chair, the one she will sleep in tonight; she nearly lowers her eyes, averts her face; yet she looks at him. He glances at her and nods. If he thinks of her as the woman in yesterday’s confession there is no sign in his face, which is young: he is in his early thirties. Yet his face looks younger, and there is about it a boyish vulnerability which his seriousness doesn’t hide. She guesses that he is easily set off balance, is prone to concern about trifles: that caught making a clumsy remark he will be anxious for the rest of the evening. He does not remove his overcoat, which is open. He moves to the bed, his back to her now, and places a purple stole around his neck. His hands are concealed from her; then they move toward Joe’s face, the left hand cupped beneath the right hand which with thumb and forefinger holds the white disc.

  ‘The body of Christ,’ he says.

  ‘Amen,’ Joe says.

  She watches Joe as he closes his eyes and extends his tongue and takes the disc into his mouth. His eyes remain closed; he chews slowly; then he swallows. The priest stands for a moment, watching him. Then with his right palm he touches Joe’s forehead, and leaves the room. Edith goes to the bed, sits on its edge, takes Joe’s hand and looks at his closed eyes and lips. She wants to hold him hard, feel his ribs against hers, has the urge to fleshless insert her ribs within his, mesh them. Gently she lowers her face to his chest, and he strokes her hair. Still he has not opened his eyes. His stroke on her hair is lighter and slower, and then it stops; his hands rest on her head, and he sleeps. She does not move. She watches as his mouth opens and she listens to the near gurgling of his breath.

  She does not move. In her mind she speaks to him, telling him what she is waiting to tell him when he wakes again, what she has been waiting all day to tell him but has not because once she says it to Joe she knows it will be true, as true as it was last night. There are still two months of the cold and early sunsets of winter left, the long season of waiting, and the edges of grief which began last summer when he started to die are far from over, yet she must act: looking now at the yellow roses on the bedside table she is telling Hank goodbye, feeling that goodbye in her womb and heart, a grief that will last, she knows, longer than her grieving for Joe. When the snow is melted from his grave it will be falling still in her soul as it is now while she recalls images and voices of her ten years with Hank and quietly now she weeps, not for Joe or Sharon or Hank, but for herself; and she wishes with all her splintered heart that she and Hank could be as they once were and she longs to touch him, to cry on his broad chest, and with each wish and each image her womb and heart toll their goodbye, forcing her on into the pain that waits for her, so that now she is weeping not quietly but with shuddering sobs she cannot control, and Joe wakes and opens his eyes and touches her wet cheeks and mouth. For a while she lets him do this. Then she stops crying. She kisses him, then wipes her face on the sheet and sits up and smiles at him. Holding his hand and keeping all nuances of fear and grief from her voice, because she wants him to know he has done this for her, and she wants him to be happy about it, she says: ‘I’m divorcing Hank.’

  He smiles and touches her cheek and she strokes his cool hand.

  A BIOGRAPHY OF ANDRE DUBUS

  Andre Dubus (1936–1999) is considered one of the greatest American short story writers of the twentieth century. His collections of short fiction, which include Adultery & Other Choices (1977), The Times Are Never So Bad (1983) and The Last Worthless Evening (1986), are notable for their spare prose and illuminative, albeit subtle, insights into the human heart. He is often compared to Anton Chekhov and revered as a “writer’s writer.”

  Born on August 11, 1936, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, Dubus grew up the oldest child of a Cajun-Irish Catholic family in Lafayette. There, he attended the De La Salle Christian Brothers, a Catholic school that helped nurture a young Dubus’s love of literature. He later enrolled at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, where he acquired his BA in English and journalism. Following his graduation in 1958, he spent six years in the United States Marine Corps as a lieutenant and captain—an experience that would inspire him to write his first and only novel, The Lieutenant (1967). During this time, he also married his first wife, Patricia, and started a family.

  After concluding his military service in 1964, Dubus moved with his wife and their four children to Iowa City, where he was to earn his MFA from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. While there, he studied under acclaimed novelist and short story writer Richard Yates, whose particular brand of realism would inform Dubus’s work in the years to come. In 1966, Dubus relocated to New England, teaching English and creative writing at Bradford College in Bradford, Massachusetts, and beginning his own career as an author. Over an illustrious career, he wrote a total of six collections of short fiction, two collections of essays, one novel, and a stand-alone novella, Voices from the Moon (19
84)—about a young boy who must come to terms with his faith in the wake of two family divorces—and was awarded the Boston Globe’s first annual Lawrence L. Winship Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.

  In the summer of 1986, tragedy struck when Dubus pulled over to help two disabled motorists on a highway between Boston and his home in Haverhill, Massachusetts. As he exited his car, another vehicle swerved and hit him. The accident crushed both his legs and would confine him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Plagued by residual pain, he sunk into a depression that was further exacerbated by his divorce from his third wife, Peggy, and subsequent estrangement from their two young daughters, Cadence and Madeleine. Buoyed by his faith, he continued to write—in his final decade, he would pen two books of autobiographical essays, Broken Vessels (1991) and Meditations from a Moveable Chair (1998), and a final collection of short stories, Dancing After Hours (1996), which was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist—and even held a workshop for young writers at his home each week.