Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  Let me think about it.

  I’m sorry you have to.

  There was need in his voice, and just the shadow of an edge of aggression. He was, after all, a man who willed things into place that had never been there before. He leaned over and kissed her, and she kissed him back, though she could already feel herself looking for the door.

  Then came this Bobby Dunn and his love of harmolodics. He’d written his Ph.D. dissertation on it and was confident it would be published, though his confidence was different from Alan’s. Alan’s came from directing earth movers and cement trucks and towering cranes hauling iron. Bobby’s seemed to come from years of loving a sound that not many did, of wrestling with the right words, sentence after sentence and page after page, that might compel the reader to listen more deeply, to open her mind and her heart, which she found herself giving to Bobby Dunn in that hot red kitchen and its smells of smoking olive oil and cooking spinach. He was a talker, so she sipped her wine and she listened to his story of Coleman dispensing with recurring chord patterns altogether, and she could not say she no longer loved Alan Chenier, only that she had clearly packed her bags once again and now she was stepping through yet another door held open for her, this one by Dr. Bobby Dunn and his free jazz and sideways smile.

  I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themself, but to be with me. Bobby played his own chords and let her do whatever she needed to do. He never expected her to shop for food or to cook. He never expected her to keep their nest clean and colorful and nurturing. He never expected her to fuck just because he wanted to. Instead, Bobby shopped for food and Bobby cooked. He hung paintings on the walls and he watered the plants and Bobby made love with her when she wanted to. Bobby liked when she read to him, and when they were at an Eckerd party, a male colleague standing too close to her or lingering too long beside her, there was Bobby’s trusting sideways smile at her. Go on, follow yourself but be with me. This freedom was new, not one boy or man like this before. Once each of their doors closed behind her, she became a possession in a bright room, which left her feeling prized, then kept, then confined. But even that was better than being alone. For when she was alone, soon there came a muffled starkness to everything, a shadowed stillness that felt dangerous, though there was also the feeling that whatever bad thing was coming she deserved it.

  The last night of her residency in July, two of Phil Bradford’s fingers resting on her hip, he had leaned in close to her at loud, drunken Charlie O’s and said: “Girl, you can write. Now you just need to believe that.”

  But she didn’t. What she really believed, yet one more debilitating time, was that she was not a writer but a reader. That year she discovered books at Arcadia High. Only two miles away, it was still there, a one-story brick-and-glass hole teeming with the children of cattle ranchers and citrus tree farmers, kids who seemed to be passing through that place as if it and even their teen years were inconveniences they had to tolerate on their way to sitting in saddles or behind tractor wheels. And Susan Dubie was the girl with the Yankee accent and bad skin who from eleven to fourteen was shunned. But by her fifteenth birthday her skin had cleared and she grew breasts and hips, and it was like when Noni sold the Penny Arcade and bought them their first new car, a red 1981 Plymouth Reliant. There was that Chrysler star on the hood, those cream-colored seats, and that smell—like the world had changed its mind and from now on everything would be good.

  People looked at them differently. In the grocery store parking lot when Noni would unlock the trunk and load it with groceries, Susan would see a man or woman passing by, maybe pushing an empty or full cart, and there would be respect in their eyes, an acknowledgment that here was something good in front of them that belonged to somebody else who must be doing something right.

  Those first boys her sophomore year, they looked at her and her new body the same way. But after years of being ignored or called zit face or fucking Yankee, they could just keep looking and only look and she quickly tired of being their show. On free periods when too many of them all were milling about, she’d go to the library because that was where she found the first book that did something substantial to her. It was by a man with three names, and it was about a rich boy in Los Angeles, his girlfriends and boyfriends, the parties in big houses with expensive liquor and cocaine and the stolen sports cars of mothers and fathers who were never around. In one scene, he and some friends find the body of a young woman in the alley behind a restaurant, and they don’t do anything; they just stare at it and smoke cigarettes, then drive off to another party. The last scene is of the young man throwing up in his father’s office at dawn, sitting in his black leather chair waiting for him to come home just so they can talk, though he has no idea about what or why.

  Susan hadn’t known there were books like that. Noni only read magazines and watched TV. The only book in their house was The Thirst for War, a thick military history Paul had left behind. Susan’s life was nothing like this rich boy’s in Los Angeles, but going inside his head and heart for three hundred pages made her feel less alone and somehow more alive, and every afternoon during her free period she’d be in the Arcadia High School library reading novels, most of which she knew now were deeply adolescent but that she’d loved anyway—tales of dead girls in love with live boys, of horses and thieves and men carrying straight razors in dark attics and a few young women who could rise out of all this by their wits alone. Then there was her first year up at Gainesville, her dorm mate bright and blond, a tennis player and swimmer whose father lived in New York and sent her three hundred dollars a month for “extras,” which too often became white lines laid out on the glass coffee table of their suite, tequila shots, Valiums for the morning after.

  Her name was Andrea, and she called Susan “the Dark One” because all she did the first few weeks of the first semester was read novels on her bed, her headphones on to block out Andrea’s stereo. But now Susan was reading books written for grown people, and the first was Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a book so heartbreaking that days after finishing it she was still under its influence, young Jake Barnes and his war wound that would forever keep him from making love with a woman, though he’s in love with the beautiful and fallen Brett Ashley who loves him too and is fucking all his friends.

  One night, as Susan walked through campus under palm trees and security lamps, the happy, oblivious sounds of other students seeped from open dorm windows and the air itself felt tender, the people in it cruel. She drifted back to her room, where she drank too much vodka with Andrea and three tanned boys from Miami, and then it was two in the morning and the boy moving inside her was the first since Gustavo, her legs around him as he clenched and froze and moaned into her ear, and her eyes filled with tears she hid from him, not because he wasn’t Gustavo, but because he would always have what Jake would never have and did he even deserve it? Did any of them?

  She read more novels, those assigned in her classes and those she found at the used bookstore downtown: Faulkner and Willa Cather and Saul Bellow, F. Scott Fitzgerald and more Hemingway, Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright and Virginia Woolf. She stayed up late in her room writing papers until her eyes burned, though what she wrote never seemed to do any justice to what these novels kept doing to her: it was like being penetrated and opened up and pulled into layered parts of herself she hadn’t even suspected existed. And even for those books she did not love, there was still this sense that the dark parts inside her no one would ever truly know were now blossoming like night flowers. She felt grateful and almost too alive, all this blossoming ready for the next thing. Soon, sitting alone on her bed reading another book seemed redundant. It was time to move, time to do something. But what?

  All those boys. Five her first year, the third her favorite. Peter Wilke. His narrow shoulders and white skin. The pink-tinted glasses he wore. His smell—sweat and sage and American Spirits. How he only wanted to make love if she let him feed her first, walk her downtown to Raul’s for a
taco and beer. And he liked to sit on her bed before and after and listen to her read to him. It was her idea to do this. It’s what she’d done with Gustavo, though with Peter it wasn’t the same.

  “You read like it’s you.”

  “What?”

  “Like you are those people in that story.”

  “I am.”

  “You are?”

  She explained that that’s what happened to her, that when she was reading a great book she and her life disappeared completely. He asked if that was good and she was surprised he’d asked that, for she’d always felt that any life other than one’s own had to be better in some way, at least for a while, because it would be new. Like the tall, dark boy she drifted from Peter for—Chad from New Jersey. Big shoulders, skin the color of cinnamon, his loud laugh and white teeth and the way people in rooms parted for him like he was an approaching king. When he was inside her, it was always too fast and too hard, which felt good in a way.

  But Peter sent her heartbroken letters that made her hate herself and then she began to hate him for making her feel that way, something Chad never noticed at all, so she was on to the next boy, then the next, and she wasn’t even sure which boy’s it was she had vacuumed out of her in that cold windowless room, the fluorescent light above her so bright but far away, like it was time for her to be judged but no one really had the time.

  This was the first thing she’d ever written about. It was late fall, just days before Thanksgiving. That afternoon she’d put her feet in stirrups for an aging doctor who talked to her like she was a pet dog (“That’s it, good girl.” ), it was fifty degrees and a wind off the ocean blew dead pine needles across campus. Andrea had taken care of her that day, bringing her Tylenol and a glass of water. She even made her brownies, and Susan could not say she felt remorse for doing what she had, but her relief was that of someone who’d gotten away with something and she just knew one day she would have to pay for it.

  The next morning, Andrea gone, Susan skipped her algebra class and sat on her bed with a notebook and pencil. She wasn’t sure what she was doing or why, but she was trying to capture how that fluorescent light had looked above her, how it seemed so close while also being so far away. She wrote. When Peter was inside me, he might as well have been in Canada. She wrote about Chad, and Sanjit, the shy boy from India whose penis was long and thin and curved so much to the left she thought something was wrong. She wrote about how much she loved words, but how she never seemed able to use them much when talking to boys, or how maybe she just wouldn’t. Then, of course, she began writing about Gustavo, his smell opening up inside her—cigarette smoke and orange rinds and worn denim. The first time she saw him was the first time he saw her.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, the one day Susan sat behind the register at Lois’s store earning pocket money that she spent mainly on paperbacks. Sunday was Gustavo’s only day off from the citrus plant, and because he did not go to the clapboard Catholic church on Pinellas with the rest of the Mexican families, he’d sleep late and pull on his cowboy boots and walk to the Sawgrass Saloon, where they served breakfast all day. He’d order cold beer and steak and eggs. Sometimes he’d shoot pool by himself and play songs on the jukebox—Freddy Fender and the Mavericks and he liked the high plaintive voice of Patsy Cline. He never even knew she’d died young in a plane crash. What he’d done was drink three shots of Jim Beam that Sunday, because he was the loneliest man in the world. This was Susan’s idea of him anyway. This was the story she’d written about him that day, and the one that followed, so she could forgive him because she had to forgive him.

  In 1986 she was sixteen and she’d started reading the Brontë sisters. When Gustavo had stepped out into the flat bright sun on Oak Street, she was sitting behind the register with a novel in her lap, being pulled into a desire she had not yet felt for a man: Heathcliff, standing in a frock coat under a heavy gray sky, one boot propped on a peat-covered stone.

  Don had just cleaned up at an estate auction. He’d brought back brass lamps and a gleaming chestnut armoire for rifles and shotguns. There were three western saddles etched with engravings, and a collection of Stetson cowboy hats that had hardly ever been worn. Lois liked the saddles and Stetsons so much she displayed them in the front window, resting the cowboy hats against the saddles like the men who owned them were off bathing in a river.

  Gustavo needed shade. He was half drunk in the sun and so far from home and he stepped up onto the sidewalk under the portico. It was one of the Stetsons that stopped him. It was the only black one, its headband tiny beads of turquoise. It was the hat of a man who’d worked and sweated his way to his dreams coming true, and Gustavo wanted it but did not have to look at its price to know it would never be his. Every Friday he sent half his pay home to Culiacán, and the only way he would ever wear a hat like that would be if he stole it. But then he saw her, Susan Dubie, in her halter top and jean shorts reading a book, “and, well, he forgot about that hat.”

  That was the last line Susan wrote that morning when she didn’t go to class. She knew there was so much more to their story than that, but she wasn’t up to writing it then, and besides, she seemed to have written herself into something big and invisible and important. Its blooming presence made her put down her pencil and close her notebook. It made her take a long deep breath and let it out. She was staring at a jagged scratch in the door casing, seeing it for the very first time, and it was as if every cell in her legs and arms and face, in her chest and stomach and all the organs within it had her name on it and that name was Susan Dubie and she was a writer.

  Maybe that had been a mistake. Maybe she should have just kept writing without putting a title to herself.

  “Susan? Come and eat!” Noni’s voice flew up from the bottom of the stairs and into this room as if twenty-five years had not passed since they’d shared this house. Susan yelled back that she’d be right down.

  She could smell frying chicken. Her bare shins were cold in the air from the new window unit. That line she wrote down yesterday waiting for Lois. Susan picked it up and read it again: Living with Noni felt like living on the run. No, not on the run. In exile. Like we’d both been exiled.

  And then they’d begun to fight each other, and so what was left but a terrible aloneness? Her grandmother had no friends, none, though once, one night maybe, she and Don had another couple over for drinks out on the screened porch. Another man in antique “acquisitions,” fat and balding, with a booming laugh and a thin, quiet wife who was the only one dressed up and looked disappointed as she stepped out of their Lincoln in front of the house. Susan watched her from the second-floor window, and she’d despised that woman for being disappointed, though why wouldn’t she be? Susan had stayed up in her room and tried to read, even when Lois called up for her to come down and “show yourself.”

  And what had become of that girl? She’d come back here at forty-three with absolutely nothing to show, that’s what. What lay behind her other than a long trail of abandoned writing and aborted pregnancies and severed relationships, the sole constant her enemy, though she never called it that then or put a name to it all, and the only thing she’d ever been able to see through to its end was the reading of a good book and the teaching of one semester at a time, and now her one sliver of hope was that she felt called, yes, called, to finally write the kind of book she truly hated.

  “Don’t let it get cold!”

  “I’m coming.”

  Susan closed the file to her novel and quickly logged on to her email. There were two from Bobby, which she knew she should read, but she couldn’t bring herself to do that just yet. Beneath his was one from Phil Bradford. She tapped it open:

  Remember, I’ll need at least twenty new pages by next month, Susan. And no more Kundera! Nobody wrote better about violence than Hemingway. —PB

  Susan wrote: I’m working on something new. (Sorry.) But don’t expect too much from me. My track record is bad. —S

  She pressed send and s
hut her laptop. Outside her window a small bird landed on an oak branch, its tiny claws embedded in a clump of Spanish moss. Its beak was long and yellow and pointing directly at her. Susan took this as a sign, but as she walked out of her old room and down the narrow wooden stairs into the welcoming smells of smoking fry oil and cooked chicken, she couldn’t say whether it was a sign of something good or bad, only that she was hungry and looking forward to eating with her grandmother, her mother, the source of the story she would most likely fail at writing, too.

  15

  IT WAS nice sitting out here with Susan and their glasses of red wine. The night had cooled and through the screens came the sharp and honeyed scent of jasmine, the wood rot of the riverbanks. In the light from the kitchen window Susan’s short hair made her neck look long and lovely, her profile her mother’s, her wrists too. At dinner she’d seemed down and distracted, and she’d eaten two pieces of chicken one after the other.

  Lois tapped out a Carlton and lit it with her Bic. She inhaled deeply and savored it for a heartbeat before letting it out.

  Susan glanced over at her. “Six?”

  “No more, no less. How the hell’d you quit?”

  “Vanity.”

  “Your teeth?”

  “And my skin and hair and stinky breath.”

  “That never stopped any of them.”

  Susan kept her eyes on the screen and the night on the other side, and Lois knew she’d just stumbled over a line she hadn’t seen was so close.

  “You going to tell me about you and Bobby?”

  Susan raised her glass to her lips. “You ever miss Don?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Susan shrugged. She sipped her wine. “Have you dated anyone since he died?”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t you get lonely out here?”

  “I was thinking of getting another dog.” Lois took a hit off her cigarette. Now that she’d said it out loud, she just might.