Love Warps
the Mind
a Little
JOHN DUFRESNE
W.W. NORTON & COMPANY
NEW YORK | LONDON
This book is for my sisters, Paula Sullivan and Cindy Wondolowski,
and for my brother, Mark Dufresne,
and in memory of my friends
Francis Bartlett, Ethel Berard, and Meg O’Brien.
“But is there any comfort to be found?
Man is in love and loves what vanishes,
What more is there to say?”
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
“Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”
Love Warps the Mind a Little
1.
Love Without Its Wings
THE DAY I FINISHED MY BEST STORY YET—ABOUT A SOCIAL WORKER WHOSE CHILD gets Lyme disease, slips into a coma, suffers brain damage, becomes a burden to his father—after I typed it, retyped it, and mailed it off to the Timber Wolf Review, my wife, Martha, came home from work and, just like that, asked me to leave our apartment forever. What’s with you? I said, as if I didn’t know. She packed my green plaid suitcase, threw toiletries in an overnight bag, and set it all by the kitchen door.
A month earlier, Martha and I had gone on a couples retreat with some other folks from the parish out at the Trappist monastery in Spencer. The idea of the weekend was to reinvigorate your marriage, renew your vows, and rededicate your life to Jesus. I should tell you I’m not a religious person, and I was more than a little skeptical about the efficacy of this therapeutic undertaking. I doubted that a gang of cloistered celibates would have much to offer us struggling spouses other than the customary Pauline counsel. But then we all got to sharing our feelings so openly, talking about our hopes and fears, and we got so honest and nonjudgmental and everything, and the truth is such a dangerous drug and all, and I was feeling splendid, feeling like the world was pure, refreshing, like some god had created it with humor and generosity, that I was regrettably moved to reveal to Martha the unpleasant truth of my infidelity I told her about Judi Dubey. But I said, Martha, I’m finished with all that, I promise. That last part was a lie, it turns out.
So as I stood there in the kitchen, my back to the door, hand on my suitcase, I could see that my disclosure had been festering inside Martha all these weeks and had turned her hateful. I told her I loved her. She jabbed me in the stomach with my typewriter. You don’t know what love is, she told me, which is probably true. I mean, who does? I asked if we could talk about this. I said, Forgiveness is divine, isn’t it? She said, You got what you wanted. Which was also probably true, though I didn’t understand it then. I took my last look around the kitchen, trying to secure the details: the cast iron skillet on the stove, the yellow dish towel folded over the handle on the oven door, the crucifix, the wall calendar from Moore’s Pharmacy I knew they’d all wind up in a story some day. A guy like me, who had just given up a career in order to write stories, would be the central character. A story about love and anxiety.
Martha told me to take the goddamn dog and get the hell out. Spot heard the jingle of his leash and came blasting into the kitchen from the parlor and slid right past me into the door. He started barking. I cuffed him one.
Martha shook her head, called me pathetic. “You’re thirty-six years old. You’re working part-time in a fish-and-chips store, and you’re breaking my heart.”
Sure, the job thing again. I said, “Martha, you knew I was a writer when you married me.”
She laughed. “You haven’t published a damn thing in your life.”
I said, “Neither did Emily Dickinson.”
Spot grabbed his leash and tugged. I told Martha we should talk about this.
She pulled a book of matches from the El Morocco out of her pocket. “Found them in your shirt this morning.”
I don’t smoke. I lied and said my friend Francis X. had asked me to hold them for him.
“Your shirt smelled like that slut.”
When I think about that afternoon now, I wonder if I had acted purposefully, if, in fact, I wanted to get caught, wanted to hurt Martha so badly that she would never take me back. At the time, I imagined I was acting spontaneously, if recklessly, a slave to my late-blooming libido. But infidelity, as you know, is anything but spontaneous. You can’t possibly conduct a proper affair without a lot of deliberating, scheming, speculating, and conniving. It’s a delicate balance where the excitement must equal the guilt and the sex must be as bright as the future you gamble. Was I no longer in love with Martha? Had I allowed her to become a stranger? If I sound disingenuous, I don’t mean to.
“We’ll talk about this when you’ve calmed down,” I said. “In the meantime, what about my mail?”
“I’ll forward it to you.”
I gave her Judi Dubey’s address, but not her name.
2.
Feeling Around for My Shoes
JUDI SAID I COULD STAY AT HER HOUSE UNTIL I GOT BACK ON MY FEET. MY EMOtional feet, she said she meant. That didn’t sound like sweetheart talk to me. We sat at her kitchen table. She lit a cigarette, exhaled, waved the match like a wand. She said Spot could sleep in the cellar tonight. Spot raised his chin from the floor. But tomorrow I’d have to buy him a doghouse for the backyard. I’m allergic, she said. She sneezed, in case I didn’t believe her. There I was, in need of consolation and comfort, but all I was getting were more problems. Spot won’t like that, I told her. Spot doesn’t have to like it, she said.
To be honest, I had hoped for a warmer reception, more cordial and enthusiastic. This was the same woman who, when I was supposed to be home with my wife, but was here romancing her instead, wouldn’t want me to leave, would lock her legs around my waist so I couldn’t get up, tell me just ten more minutes, baby, or one more quick one, or whatever. And I’d be reaching over the edge of the bed, feeling around for my shorts and my shoes, saying, Honey, come on. You know what time it is? So this evening’s formality made me feel vulnerable.
I drummed my fingers on my typewriter case. I got up. I said, Maybe this is a bad idea; I should just go. But who was I kidding? Where was I going on foot with a suitcase, an overnight bag, a Royal portable, a twenty-pound bag of dog chow, and a drooling Irish setter? I’d walked enough for one day. I was being petulant. Still, I lifted the suitcase. I’d figure something out by the time I reached the back door. Judi could see right through me, though. She smiled. She’s a psychotherapist. Laf, she said, sit. Spot sat. He looked at Judi, looked at me. Woofed. I sat down. Judi stood and went to the sink, ran the water over her cigarette, tossed the butt into the wastebasket. She told me how my arrival, while not unwelcomed, was a big change in her life.
I could understand that.
She said she enjoyed living alone, was a creature of habit, and wasn’t sure she wanted to live with anyone else right now, even someone she cared about, like me. She sat down again, with her back away from the chair.
I apologized for my irritability. I explained how it had been a trying day. I smiled. I said, “What are you doing?”
Judi kept her eyes closed. She said, “Pulling a ball of mercury up through my spine.” She held her breath. “And now,” she said, “I’m letting it drift and settle.” She exhaled slowly. “What were you saying?” She opened her eyes.
I thanked her for letting me crash. I said, So why don’t we make love. She told me to first get Spot situated down cellar while she made room in her closet for my stuff.
“Can I leave the typewriter on the table?” I like to work at the kitchen table.
“Put it in the mud room.”
Judi was very expressive in bed. She choreographed every move. She liked to make it last forever. And she liked to ta
lk about it, check on my progress, my response to her maneuvers. Me, I’d just as soon concentrate on what I was doing and feeling. Sometimes I think she made a bigger deal of it than necessary. I also think she lied about her dreams. Each was loaded with prescience and significance, with archetypes and allegorical figures. She never just dreamed about missing a history test or going bald. She was after coherence, even in sleep.
And there’s a connection there with why she didn’t like my stories. She wanted to know what the hidden meaning was. I told her, There isn’t one. Why would I hide it? I told her, It’s just a story about a woman who loves her husband to death but realizes that she can’t live with him. Or whatever it happened to be. Judi asked me why I wanted to write about made-up people. She said truth was more interesting.
I told her truth is imagined, not absolute. It used to be true that the earth revolved around the sun, that an imbalance of humors caused disease, that gods walked among us. For some folks today it’s true that the earth is six thousand years old and dinosaurs never existed. Truth is fiction, I said. She wasn’t buying it. She gave me one of those glassy-eyed, indulgent, therapeutic nods that say, Why don’t you go with that thought while I plan tonight’s dinner menu.
So after we made love, Judi told me she’d been expecting me for a week. She took her journal out of the night table drawer and read me the dream that foretold my coming. In the dream, a woman dressed in a fleece jacket ties me to a sled and starts me speeding down a mountain. Just as I am about to fly off a ledge, I scream Judi’s name, and she wakes up.
I asked Judi if she saw herself in the dream. Me, I’ve never had a dream that I wasn’t in.
I was the snow you fell into, she said.
I asked her what kind of sled it was. She smiled and said I asked the silliest questions. She kissed me on the nose, gave my dick a little squeeze. She put on her headphones, listened to the sounds of the rain forest until she fell asleep.
I had a Speedway sled when I was four. That’s why I asked. On the bottom my mother had written my name and address with red nail polish: Lafayette Proulx, 16 Security Road, Worcester, Mass. My first home. But I couldn’t use that address in a story. Irony needs to present itself more subtly than that. Security Road was in the Lincolnwood Housing Project and got leveled in a tornado.
I heard Spot barking, scratching at the cellar door. I looked at Judi. With her eyes closed she reminded me of Martha, which is odd, I thought, because they don’t look alike. Sure, they’re both slim, both have dimples, both are about five feet six. But Martha’s blond and has these guileless blue, almost silver, eyes that are impossible not to stare at. Judi’s hair is auburn and her eyes are a greenish brown. I thought about where I could buy a doghouse. I thought about my fourteen stories out there in the mail and how they’d all be coming back to the wrong address. Or not coming back. I could hope. Just maybe at that precise moment in Vermont, an editor is sitting at his desk, reading my manuscript, shaking his head, thinking he’s discovered the next John Cheever. He’s so excited he has to go for a walk. He comes back and wakes his significant other and tells her that she has to read the story immediately. While she reads, he writes me a letter: Dear Mr. Proulx: We here at Pond Apple are happy to accept your miraculous and devastating short story, “Someone Winds Up Dead,” for publication in our Winter/Spring issue. Payment is two copies. Please send more. The significant other calls from the bedroom. Hurry, she says, I need you now.
Then I imagined Martha getting this letter of acceptance, staring at the envelope, tossing it in the trash. I hoped she wasn’t swallowing Percodans and wine like last time. I hoped she was sleeping. I was ashamed of my cynicism. That night I dreamed Ed McMahon accepted my story for the Publishers’ Clearinghouse Literary Review.
3.
Fly Away Home
JUDI DID LIKE ONE STORY I WROTE AND SOME POEMS. SHE LIKED THE POEM THAT ended, “I want to dance the poozle/ with you all night long./ I want to infiltrate your everything.” She didn’t know I changed the title from “Martha” to “Choreography” before I read it to her.
The story she liked is called “We Are Unable to Come to the Phone Right Now,” and it’s about a guy who grows up in a family of sociopaths but seems wholly unaffected by their depravity. He becomes a successful and contented dispensing optician. I wrote the story to try to figure out how lunacy can just slide off someone’s back like that. Judi found the story’s incongruities amusing and provocative. She was reminded, she said, of her clients’ troubled lives. But in real life, she told me, the suppressed emotional trauma of such a childhood would necessarily manifest itself in disabling and destructive behaviors. Here’s the thing: The story’s about her. I switched genders, occupations, changed the names to protect the guilty Goes to show you, I guess, how the mind doesn’t always see what the eyes see. It sees what it needs to see.
Judge for yourself. Judi’s family lived (and still lives) in a Quonset hut out in Millbury by the Blackstone Valley Rod & Gun Club. In their gravel yard they had a twenty-four-foot travel trailer stabilized with leveling jacks. Judi’s mom, Trixie, lived in the hut with her second husband, Hervey Jolicoeur. Her ex-boyfriend, Noel Prefontaine, lived in the trailer with his son, Edmund. Judi’s sister, Stoni, lived at home. She was a nurse at Memorial and a two-hundred-pound junkie. Stoni’s boyfriend, Arthur Bositis, worked in the kill room at Boston Beef and was at the house all the time except when Stoni’s fiancé, Richie Muneyhun, was furloughed from the Worcester County House of Correction. When he was fourteen, Judi’s brother, George, hanged himself from an exposed joist in the bathroom because, his note said, the house was so dark, the rain so loud. Trixie told me that. Judi never mentioned a brother. Sometimes I had the alarming notion that maybe I was the sanest person Judi had ever been with.
I got the idea for my actual story at Judi’s thirtieth birthday party. We had finished the three tubs of fried chicken from Chicken Delight and the Carvel birthday cake. Judi had opened her gifts—a bottle of Giorgio, a savings bond, an electric curling iron—and was sitting in the living room talking to her fourteen-year-old cousin, Layla, who was Edmund’s date. Edmund was with me and the others at the kitchen table. He told me he was entering divinity school that fall in West Virginia. “Going to be a preacher in the International Foursquare Gospel Church.”
“You’re Catholic,” I said.
“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I’d rather be a priest. Just that priests don’t get to do the wild thing.”
Hervey handed me a bottle of warm ale from the case on the floor. He told me about the bandage on his head, his shaved scalp. Said on his last job he pissed off some Puerto Rican drywaller, who then fired a two-inch nail into Hervey’s head with a nail gun. “I thought the spic just punched me. I didn’t know about the nail till later when I tried to take off my hat. Doctors told me I was lucky to be alive.” I thought, You should have asked for a second opinion, but I didn’t say anything. Then he asked me was Judi any good in the sack. I told him it was none of his business. I said it nicely, with a smile. He said, Hey, don’t get all worked up, my friend. I excused myself, went to the bathroom where George had hanged himself, and wrote down what I had just heard. I made a note to ask Arthur more about the sounds and smells in the kill room.
When I came out, Trixie asked me did I think everything was going swell. I said yes. She told me she was so stressed, being the hostess and all. “Stoni,” she said, “where are the roofies?” They were in the sugar bowl on the table. Trixie took two. Noel took a few. Arthur said he’d had enough for now. All of this, by the way, is in my story about James the dispensing optician.
A while later Stoni lifted her head from the table, looked across at her mom, who was sitting now on Noel’s lap, and said, “You fucking bitch. I ought to kick your ass. You drove Daddy away, and now you’re driving Hervey away.”
Noel said, “Hey now, Stoni, just hold on. She ain’t no fucking bitch. She’s your mother, for Christ’s sake. Don’t forget that, you tr
ashy little whore. Look at you, you’re a goddamn mess, your own self.”
Arthur said, “Who you think you’re talking to, asshole?” He came around the table after Noel. Trixie was crying by now and she slipped right off Noel’s lap like a fried egg off a Teflon pan, ended up puddled on the floor. Arthur grabbed Noel by the throat, put his other thumb in Noel’s eye socket. “One more word and you lose the eye, motherfucker.”
I woke Judi on the couch, and we said good night to everyone. I had to get home before Martha started worrying, making phone calls. No one got hurt until later. That’s when Edmund and Layla stopped by a bungalow on Eddy Pond. Layla waited in the car, listened to Little Walter on ’BCN. Edmund went into the house through the window. Someone in the neighborhood called the police. The old woman inside startled Edmund. He shot her dead.
4.
Difficulty Worth Living For
WHEN I WOKE THE NEXT MORNING, JUDI WAS GONE AND SPOT WAS BARKING at the cellar door. I let him out in the backyard to do his business, and I made coffee. I called Petland and ordered a doghouse. They could deliver it in an hour. I sat down to write. In a high school algebra class, Brother Doherty once told me that what I didn’t know would make a good book. I always hated that son of a bitch, but I’ve let his wisdom guide me ever since. I write about what I don’t know. I figure if I know it already, what’s the point of writing about it?
All right then, here’s a guy. He’s thirty-seven and lives alone in an eight-room adobe house in Hobbs, New Mexico. His name’s Dale. He teaches at the junior college. Wait, he doesn’t live alone. He has a poodle, no, a Shih Tzu, with a slipped disk and a food allergy. Dale teaches . . . I’m a moron about economics, so he teaches economics. The Shih Tzu’s name is Keynes. Dale owns several handguns, collects presidential campaign buttons, and watches a big-screen TV He eats breakfast every morning before school at Furr’s Cafeteria. He’s a Baptist, but he used to be a Catholic.
Love Warps the Mind a Little Page 1