Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  “I don’t know how you do it,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Read all this literature.” He smiled sadly and tapped the Chekhov with his finger. “I just read ” The Bishop,’ and I feel like slitting my throat.”

  She hadn’t read that one in a while, and she’d never taught it, but she could still feel the close airless room the old bishop lay dying in, his feeling he’d lived the wrong life and would quickly be forgotten, and he was.

  She took a long drink of her tea. It was cold and sour with lemon, and she felt grateful for it, though she preferred Bobby’s, which he made with agave. She missed him. She did. “But don’t you find it beautiful?”

  Walter nodded. On his lower left jaw was a nick from shaving. He was looking at her the hungry way men always had, though there was something disarmed about him. It had been there when she’d borrowed his truck a few hours earlier, too, like a lion who was done hunting but still gazed at the gazelles.

  “I used to read thrillers.” He smiled. Susan put one cracker and an olive on her plate. “Did you enjoy them?”

  “I thought I did. They made me feel like some hero in my own exciting little movie. But this—” He nudged the book with two fingers, around one of them a turquoise and silver ring larger than any class ring Susan had ever seen. It was like being with Saul Fedelstein again but without the unapologetic pleasure Saul took in his many spoils.

  “That damn bishop. Chekhov makes me feel like the bishop and who the hell needs that?”

  “You think you’ll be forgotten?” It was a question she didn’t mean to sound so personal, but it was, and now he looked at her as if she’d just opened some door he was welcome to walk through. He glanced down at her lips and throat and lifted his glass. “I just feel like the good Russian doctor made me sit down in front of a mirror and stare at it awhile.”

  “Some say that’s what art’s supposed to do.” She could hear Bobby’s voice, feel his big hand on her bare hip. Life’s one big fucking mess, Susan. To shape it too much is a lie. “My husband would disagree, however.”

  “Would he? Why?” Walter looked at her hand around her glass. His tone had an edge she now recognized. Even lions who were done hunting pricked their ears when another male came prowling near the gazelles.

  “He thinks life is one big shitstorm and to fashion it into neat, clear stories is dishonest.”

  “What does he do?”

  Funny how this never came up last night, not with Walter anyway. Marianne had asked her what her husband taught, but Walter, sipping his tequila and staring at her, seemed to be listening to music from another time. Now he looked slightly put out, his eyes back on her face as if he were quietly preparing himself to be betrayed.

  “He’s a musicologist.”

  “A musician?”

  “No, he’s a scholar. He studies musicians and their music.”

  Walter nodded once. It was a dismissive gesture, and she didn’t like it. She lifted her glass and sipped her tea, swallowing twice.

  “But doesn’t music do the same thing literature does?”

  “Not the kind he listens to.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “Just this obscure avant-garde jazz. I don’t really know if anyone listens to it but him.” She laughed, but she was beginning to feel she was opening her husband’s underwear drawer and pointing out to Walter the ones with holes in them and those with urine stains that had never come completely out. This little move was not new to her, though, was it? It was part of the fuel she’d always needed to walk away from one man to another, an amplification of the previous one’s flaws and a myopic staring at the new one’s attributes. When she went from Brian Heney to Edward LeBlanc, it was that one drank and the other did not. With Marty Finn and Saul Fedelstein, it was that one was bisexual and would always be poor and the other wanted only her and had something she’d never even been close to—deep, seemingly endless wealth and the freedom from work that went with it. When she left Louis for Alan Chenier, she actually told Alan she thought Louis was the most unattractive man she’d ever been with, and Louis knew it and that’s why he was so bent on fucking all the time.

  These betrayals came as naturally to her as slipping off one coat to try on another, but she was not going to do that now. Bobby was more of a friend to her than any man had ever been before. He had taken very little from her and asked for less. That email from him: Play that plastic sax and then come home.

  And what was she doing? She was beginning to write honestly for maybe the first time is what. And she was doing something she hadn’t even known she needed or wanted to do; she was making things right with the woman who’d raised her; she was, perhaps for the first time since she was very young, actually loving Lois.

  “I’ve never really understood academic people.” Walter’s chin was down, his eyes on hers as they’d been the night before. It was like he was appraising her and considered her of very high value but was not yet sure how to incorporate her into his holdings. “Do you know what a remora is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a sucker fish. They spend their entire lives swimming beside marlin or sharks sucking bits of food and feces off the bigger fish.”

  “You’re saying scholars are parasites?”

  “I’m saying they make a living off other people’s work.”

  “I’d say bankers do that more than scholars, wouldn’t you? And besides, scholars create their own work. My husband’s written a beautiful book about the music he loves.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “I need to get going.”

  “Eat something first.”

  That black olive now looked grotesque to her, though she should eat the cracker, but to reach for it now would feel like she was signing some kind of contract she was not prepared to honor. She stayed a few more minutes so as not to be rude. She talked about his view from the porch, and he nodded and kept glancing back at her as if he knew he’d stepped over the line and wasn’t quite sure what to do about it. She stood and thanked him for the tea and his truck, then she was behind the wheel of her old Honda, which, after Walter’s pickup, felt like a go-cart, the air inside it hot enough to bake something on her dashboard. She broke into an instant sweat and pressed her window buttons, rolling down all four as she accelerated under the oak arches of Marianne and Walter’s ranch onto the asphalt of I-17 heading north. She switched on her AC too, the hot wind from outside blowing back her hair, but now her nipples felt tender again, and she tried to ignore this, for there was the cleansing sense that she had just behaved herself, and she didn’t want to feel too virtuous about this, but she did. Instead of betraying Bobby, she had stood by him and as soon as she got back to Lois’s she would write back to him. She might even call him, just to hear his voice, the sounds of Ornette Coleman’s happy madness filling the house without her.

  PART

  THREE

  23

  MIDAFTERNOON JUST north of Baltimore, Daniel gets tired of his book on tape and shuts it off. No, it isn’t that he’s tired of it, it’s more that he isn’t listening to it and he has to keep pressing the button to make it go back and when it begins to play again, he still doesn’t listen much.

  It’s called A People’s History of the United States, a title that intrigued him because of the word People’s. The actor reading it has a deep voice with some loose stones in it, and the book begins with Columbus arriving at the shores of what he thinks is the Indies and Asia. But it’s the Bahamas and the people living there are Arawak, and soon enough Columbus kills or enslaves them all, just another con from the yard taking territory the only way it’s ever been done.

  The Ping On boys from Chinatown were some of the worst, though none of them had ever gotten cleared to come down to Norfolk. Danny had seen a few of them up to Walpole, though. Little Chinese fuckers tatted up more than anyone else. One of them was trying to move in on one of the Winter Hill micks and things got hot for a
while, though Danny was down at Norfolk then and only heard about it, one dead from each crew, both shanked two days apart, and then things were square.

  Chinatown. He was still going on his long walks after work, and he’d stick close to the water, light a Winston, and smoke it slowly along Atlantic past the harbor hotels. They were built of iron and glossy granite and tinted glass and they had doormen with gold tassels on their shoulders, men who when he strolled by their grand entrances looked through him as if he were dirty steam in the air from under a manhole cover. He would never be a man with money. He’d never thought to want it then. But at least when he was inside the screws saw him. At least there he had existed.

  But what was this sudden desire for respect? That was wrong, too. Who did he think he was? He was lucky to be walking free at all, and he should remember that. He should never forget that. But was he lucky? Yes, he’d done his time but he had not paid his “debt” because he never could, not for what he’d done, and so it seemed almost cruel that he’d gotten out at all.

  He discovered Chinatown when the weather turned cold. By then he’d bought a lined denim jacket and cut his hair and shaved off his sideburns. He’d lost some weight, too, and he still preferred walking along the harbor and seeing water, the gulls gliding overhead, the smell of barnacles and rust and seawater. After everything, he’d never stopped loving that smell of the strip. Across Fort Point Channel were acres of brick mills and warehouses being turned into office buildings and restaurants. One night in November, a light snow falling, Danny could see three white circus tents set up over there too, a spinning Ferris wheel all lit up with red and white bulbs, him and Linda and Suzie on one at night just like that so long ago, their baby daughter between them and Linda holding on to her with both hands, his wife’s long hair sifting away from her face as their car rose up and up till they could see out into the black ocean just before sinking down, down to the sweeping, curving bottom, and Danny turned and ran across Atlantic Avenue, a truck’s horn booming, snow falling under streetlights he hurried under, his head down and his hands in his pockets. Up ahead were the skyscrapers of the banking district, so many of their windows a fluorescent glow, men and women working overtime doing who knows what. Off to his left was South Station, and he ran across Summer Street and considered walking into the terminal and catching a train somewhere, anywhere, though his PO would call it in and then Danny’d be back behind the walls where at night he wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere.

  Up against the concrete wall of the terminal three men sat huddled under a tarp and blankets and newspapers, their faces in shadow, then Danny was across the street, cars moving by him slickly on the asphalt, and he cut right up a street called Kneeland and soon he was in the neon-lit barrooms and brightly lighted laundries and teahouses of Chinatown.

  There was the skin-tender feeling he was fleeing something while being pulled toward something else, and that something turned out to be standing next to a barroom called Pinky’s Lounge. In its small front window was a neon-tubed Miller High Life sign, the first l in Miller out so that it read Mi ler High Life. And there, in the darker shadows of a Chinese dry-cleaning store, a woman was smoking a cigarette. On her feet were white platform shoes with six-inch heels, her legs bare, her miniskirt white too. Her fake fur coat was buttoned all the way up, and black hair hung loose around her shoulders, big hoop earrings hanging from her ears, but it was the way she stood, one arm folded under her breasts as she drew deeply on the butt, its tip glowing bright.

  It was Linda. His Linda, alive again in front of a closed Chinese laundry.

  And she was looking right at him. The way she used to, like she’d been waiting for him and now he’d finally come, and two hands took hold of Danny’s guts and squeezed and he turned and retched against a shuttered window. He wiped his mouth and looked back across the street just as a sedan pulled up and dead Linda leaned into the open passenger-side window, climbed in, and was gone.

  The hand had let go, but Daniel’s heart was pounding on a door bolted shut.

  The next night, even though he told himself not to, Daniel walked right back to Chinatown. The snow had stopped. It was colder and his lined denim jacket and wool cap did not feel like quite enough. And the thing is, as he came around that corner for Pinky’s Lounge, his hands in his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched in the cold, he told himself to turn back and just go walking along the channel, go smell seawater and rusty freighter and put your mind on anything but this woman. But there in front of the closed laundry, the fluttering neon light of the barroom on the sidewalk, a man was holding her up against the wall. His hands were around her throat and her stilettos were kicking in the air, and her night bag was flopping against his back. They were both so quiet and Daniel was already moving, the man’s hair blond bristles, his neck wide, and all Daniel could see of the woman was the top of her head, just a glimpse of her hair and her hanging stilettos and night bag which dropped to her side and Daniel’s first punch was on a run into the side of the man’s face. The man’s arms dropped and the woman dropped and the man spun out and away, giving the Reactor an open target, this face Daniel can still see as clearly as that moment over twenty years ago. This man had the small eyes and fleshy face of a screw, his mouth open for air and an answer to what was happening, his right arm flapping out beside him, and in the quarter breath of the Reactor’s next punch Daniel could see who this son of a bitch looked like—Polaski, Polaski the bully and the sadist, and even though he’d gotten his years ago from Willie Teague, Daniel never got to give it to him himself, but he did now, the second punch an overhand right that shot the man straight back and down, his skull slapping concrete, then Daniel was on him, swinging at his unprotected face, swinging and swinging, and it was strange how the man became Chucky Finn and Chico Perez and all the rest. It was like dancing to a very old song in very old shoes in a room you’ve never really left, and maybe the Reactor would not have quit at all were it not for the crying behind him. The gasps for air and the crying; they were the openhearted cries of a girl who was truly hurt, and that stopped him. The Reactor had spewed what he spewed and the vault was already closing and Danny—yes, it was Danny who’d done that—rose to his feet and glanced back once at what lay there and did not move.

  Then he was Daniel squatting beside this woman. Up close he could see that she was Chinese. Her black hair hung loose around her shoulders the way Linda’s had, and her long throat, though whiter, was Linda’s too, but her face was a mess, and the Reactor’s door paused ajar, belching white heat, and he wanted to go back and kick that sonofabitch in the head until it was soft and wet under his shoe. But there was his parole to think of, and anyway this woman was gasping and coughing, her nose gushing blood over her split lips and teeth and fake fur jacket.

  Daniel helped her up. From inside Pinky’s came the thump of the jukebox, the drone of a game on one of the TVs, a cackle and a laugh. She stood and jerked away from him. “Fuck off!” She started walking, swaying like she was drunk, then her right foot buckled and she bent down and uncinched her stilettos and carried them dangling in one hand as she walked barefoot and crying past Pinky’s Lounge then through a low dirty snowbank into the side street.

  Her night bag lay open on the sidewalk. Daniel squatted and brushed into it a pepper spray canister and four wrapped condoms, two vodka nips, a Bic lighter, and some loose bills, then he was walking by her side, and she said nothing more, just kept crying and bleeding and sniffling to her building. Its front door was dented and covered with hot paint graffiti, its stairwell dusty concrete. She turned to him, and he could smell booze. “I said fuck off.” But as she began to climb the stairs to the second floor, he followed her anyway. Twice she almost fell backward, and he put his hand out for her and then he was at her door, and she yanked her night bag from him and found her key. She was crying again and had to wipe her blood off on the back of her arm and she couldn’t get the key into her lock. Daniel took it from her and she told him to fuck off agai
n, but she didn’t try to push him away or resist when he followed her inside and she sat at her small kitchen table and he went looking for a towel and hot water and soap.

  Her place was even smaller than his, just one open room with a kitchenette and a bathroom you couldn’t enter without the door knocking into the toilet. Her nose wouldn’t stop bleeding and both lips were split and already her left eye was closing up. She kept crying in Chinese and English, pushing his hand away when he pressed a warm wet towel to her lips and eye. His knuckles were bleeding. She jerked away from him and swore in Chinese and lay on her bed under the window.

  But she didn’t fight him when he put a cool wet cloth over her eye. She didn’t fight him when he pulled her out of her bloody fake fur coat or when he pulled a blanket up over her or sat at her small kitchen table till she stopped crying and sniffling and then was asleep.

  He sat there a long while. She was snoring lightly, and her face was turned to the wall. He could see only her jawbone and her black hair. Something bad had just happened to her, but he could not deny that something very good had just happened to him. What he felt sitting in that metal chair at that fold-out table in that beat-up hooker’s one-room walk-up was needed. It was like being a husband again. The joy of getting paid after forty, fifty hours of scraping dried paint chips and caulking open joints between clapboards and hauling and raising ladders and dipping his brush into wet paint and brushing it on back and forth, back and forth, the sun on him, his shoulders a burning ache he took pride in because it had to be taken and then the check and the cash and setting it on the counter for Linda to spend any way she needed to. It was the way she looked up at him, like he was something she knew would always be there the way an oak tree is there or a stone in the corner of the foundation of your house. She’d take their truck and go food shopping, and she’d leave baby Susan behind and he’d play with her and make her laugh and change her diaper when it needed changing and hold her against his shoulder and bounce-walk through the rooms of their cottage, humming to her till she was asleep and he’d lay her down in her crib and feel the way he felt then with this woman but without the love.