Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  “You just don’t like nonfiction.”

  “I don’t like memoirs.”

  “But you’re writing one.”

  “Not if I don’t show anyone.”

  “But what if it’s good?”

  Hope sparked and flared inside her. She wanted it to be good. She wanted it to be something worth reading. But she’d stopped imagining someone actually reading it. Even Phil Bradford, who was being paid to read what was coming out of her. Especially him.

  “It’s a fucking mess, Bobby. I’m writing it in just about every point of view there is.”

  “Sounds like free jazz to me, baby. No tonal center.” He smiled at her and reached into his satchel and pulled out the album. On the front cover was a photograph in profile of a black man with a thick mustache. He wore a knit cap and aviator sunglasses, and his legs were crossed, his lips parted like he was captivated by something far away. Cecil Taylor—Live in the Black Forest.

  “I can’t believe what you can find in this fucking town, Susan. Ornette came from R&B, but this guy was classically trained. He studied theory and played the piano, but he broke all the rules just as much as Coleman did. His sidemen had to follow whatever he did on the piano, and he never wrote a single note. At least Ornette did notations, but not Taylor. Man, he was out there.” Bobby was shaking his head and staring at the album’s cover, at the handsome musician he’d probably written all about as well, and Susan was back on Walter’s deck under that wide umbrella. Do you know what a remora is? It’s a sucker fish.

  Bobby was saying more about Taylor and his music, but she wasn’t listening. She was watching him. He had slipped on his glasses and was reading something to her from the back cover, and there was such passion in his face and voice. With other men, all that had been directed at her and her only, and it was like being pinned underwater by a ton of roses. Paul pulling her into the shadows where he’d found a rusty gun.

  “I’ve been writing things I never remembered before.”

  Bobby lowered the album. “You have?” He slid it back into the satchel.

  She shrugged. “Yeah. It’s weird, that’s all.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Just, you know, childhood shit.”

  He studied her a moment. A light sheen of sweat lay along the top of his bald head. He drank long from his iced tea, then set it down and reached into a pocket of his satchel and pulled out a stamped letter.

  “This came over from the English Department. They put it in my mailbox.” He slid it over to her, and she knew right away it had nothing to do with the college because it was too thick and had been sent overnight. It was addressed to Professor Susan Dunn. The handwriting looked childlike and labored. No, the fake Professor Bitch you. Gary. A hot fork began to turn inside her and then her eyes shot to the words in the upper left corner of the envelope. They were printed less neatly, like they were written in a hurry, and what they were saying brought a heated stillness to the air, a muffled hum, Bobby sitting across from her just an oval of flesh over a faded Hawaiian shirt—Daniel Patrick Ahearn.

  Bobby was saying something. His words were bubbles rising up from deep waters. Then came the slamming of her heart like a small fist against a locked door, and she was taking in air and saying, “What the fuck, Bobby? What the fuck?”

  “Open it.”

  She tossed it at him. “No, you.”

  “You sure?”

  “How’d he find me? How’d he know I teach?”

  “Google?”

  “But how’s he know my last name? What the fuck, Bobby?”

  The man at the bar turned his gray head and stared at her and she wanted to punch him in the face. He turned back to his wife and fries. Susan needed to stand so she did. “This is fucked up, Bobby. This is so fucked.”

  Bobby slipped his glasses back on. He tore open the envelope and pulled out what looked like twelve to fifteen pages. Susan could see they were handwritten in the same careful scrawl as her name on the envelope. And she was not a “Professor.” What the fuck did he know? What gave him the fucking right?

  “Sit down, baby. This is something you should read, not me.”

  “I don’t want to read it.” But she sat down and he handed it to her and she read the first line, and it was like sipping something poisonous that its maker had tried to make sweet:

  My dear daughter Susan,

  Ive got no right to call you these things. But even with everything that happened

  “Here’s your lunch, folks. Enjoy.” The waitress set down a plate of bright colors that smelled like lettuce and steamed fish, and there was Bobby’s voice thanking her, the muffled clink of silverware wrapped in a paper napkin, and Susan dropped the letter and rushed past the bar down a wide hallway, the walls a smear of posters, the bathroom dark and cool as she retched into one of the sinks. My dear daughter? Jesus Christ. She retched again then ran cold water and cupped some into her mouth and spat. She rinsed the sink and shook her head at the three words pressing into her brain: Daniel Patrick Ahearn.

  Back at the table, Bobby was waiting for her, his food untouched. “You okay, baby?” She shook her head and told him to eat then sat down and picked up what she’d dropped. But even with everything that happened you are my daughter. Our daughter.

  Your mother was a very good mother. I hope you remember that about her. She did not deserve

  Dark pinpoints of heat seemed to be holding the pages in Susan’s hands. She began to read faster.

  Susan, I used to be Danny.

  You’re a grown woman now so maybe I can tell you this. Danny was all blood and body. Danny didn’t know how to think or sit back. Danny was a reactor. When he was a kid he used to read comic books but he could of been a hero of one himself and you could call it “The Reactor.”

  He described being a new kid, implying that he was teased but that Danny would “only take it for a half-minute or two maybe less.” White heat gushing. Susan’s grandmother trying to keep him cooled down with her love. But then I—but then Danny found another kind of love and everything got messed up.

  There were crossed-out words, but Susan could make out the word Your then the word mother. Her mouth was dust and ash, and she could feel her heart beating in it, and she kept reading this long story about men on the beach making him feel like he didn’t deserve his wife who didn’t talk much but when she did it was all about you. Suzie Woo Woo.

  Suzie Woo Woo, an echo inside an echo inside her.

  He went on to say that Linda quit school at sixteen and she loved the beach and the strip and she read books and kept to herself. He said: Don’t forget Linda was quiet and if you’re beautiful and quiet other girls that age think you’re stuck up and then your on the outs.

  Yes, Susan thought. Yes. She glanced over at Bobby. He was watching her and slowly chewing his food. He looked like he wanted to ask her something, but he kept quiet.

  She kept reading, her father telling her all about beating up a man for just looking at Linda, for giving him a “sneer,” and how he didn’t trust her because when he got hauled off to jail she didn’t follow him.

  He had never trusted the strip rats but it never came to him not to trust her. She had chosen him. She and Danny and how from day one they could never hold back from each other. Susan. Danny lost his way. That’s not the right way to put it really because it looks like I’m making excuses for him. I’m not. He deserved everything he got and more. But he went crazy for a while. That’s what I’m trying to say. And when people are crazy it’s like being around a drunk or somebody so high on something your conversation with them is from another planet. You can’t talk to them. Linda couldn’t—

  He went on to say that he went crazier “behind the walls,” that he was on Suicide Watch. But he wasn’t strong enough to take his own life. A better man would of thought of you first anyways. A half orphan becoming a full orphan. But Danny was no man. He was nothing.

  “You should eat.” Bobby was holding his mug of ice
d tea. Behind him the bar was empty, and the woman bartender was flipping through channels on a TV Susan had not noticed earlier. “He’s fucking explaining himself to me.”

  “As in, justifying?”

  “This is so—” What? This long letter from this man she did not know, the one who had forever taken her mother from her, who the fuck did he think he was, telling her all this shit? Like she fucking cared about his time in prison? “I’m just so fucking angry right now, Bobby.”

  “Maybe you should read it later.”

  I see you’re a professor and I’m very proud of you for that. “I can’t read this.” She flicked the pages in Bobby’s direction. They skittered against his plate, the upper third of her father’s pages folding into themselves. “He’s telling me he’s proud of me. Who the hell is he to tell me that?”

  “You should eat something.” Bobby picked up the letter. He reached for the envelope beside her plate.

  “And he has no idea what a fucking comma is or grammar or— I can’t eat.” She stood. “I need a drink.”

  She walked fast to the bar. Their waitress/bartender had settled on a cooking channel, a pretty brunette smiling into the camera above a stove of sautéing mushrooms and onions. The sound was on low, and the TV chef’s voice was like one that hangs on in daylight after a night dream you don’t remember. The woman bartender was talking now, and Susan could see that she’d never really looked at this woman once. She wore a western button-down shirt with blue pearl buttons, and she was somewhere in her sixties, her hair a dried-out blond with gray roots, her face thin and lined, her lipstick faded but still bright in the corners of her lips. She was the age her own mother would have been, and she was saying something about the food.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Is it all right? Would you like something else?”

  “Yeah, a vodka on the rocks.”

  But as the woman filled a glass with ice, Susan did not want that drink. She did not know what she wanted. I see you’re a professor and I’m very proud of you for that. That hot day in May in Gainesville. Climbing those metal stairs to that bunting-draped temporary stage. The bright sun and sweating under her robe and mortarboard, how she took her degree from the smiling dean, and from the crowd came Paul’s “Yo, Susan!” and it was pathetic how she squinted out at the crowd looking for him.

  Susan. Danny lost his way. What did that fucking mean? People lost their way all the goddamn time and they didn’t hurt anybody.

  But that one word Susan. That stopped her. The directness of it. The sincerity, maybe. She didn’t know. The woman bartender was talking again, and Bobby was handing her a ten. Susan looked up at him. He was giving her that same careful expression he’d had last night when he first walked into their kitchen. “Want me to read it to you?”

  “No. Yeah, I don’t fucking know.” She picked up the cool, beaded glass then put it back down. “Let’s go someplace else.”

  “Fine.” Bobby asked the woman if they could get Susan’s untouched lunch to go, and the woman put an empty Styrofoam container on the bar then disappeared into the kitchen, Bobby walking back to their table for her lunch and his leather satchel and Black Forest jazz and this letter from a man who said he was proud of her, this Daniel Patrick Ahearn who used to fucking call himself Danny.

  31

  LOIS SAT cross-legged in her front window display spraying her chamois cloth with vinegar and water. She was cleaning yet another mirror she did not recall buying, this one a nineteenth-century Italian rococo, and she was sweating from having already cleaned three others—two Victorian dresser mirrors and an English bull’s-eye with a chipped gilt frame. Now Marianne was in the back looking for more, and Lois began wiping the glass free of dust and smudges when she saw Susan and her husband stepping out of the Sawgrass Saloon. Bobby had his leather bag over one shoulder like a woman or an aristocrat, and he wore small round sunglasses, his bald head glistening with sweat. He seemed to be guiding Susan to his Kia, and she didn’t look so good. Her short hair was still a mess, and she was too thin and looked shaken, too.

  Oh, Lord, what now? They’d had such a good time last night, the three of them, and when Susan and Bobby opened their gift right there in the bright kitchen, they seemed to be very happy with those Dresden lamps, especially Bobby, who kept glancing over at his wife as if those lovers at the base of those two lamps might seal something that had become unglued.

  Before he’d met Suzie for lunch, Bobby had come into the shop and shown Lois the album he bought over at Midge Perkins’s store. She was a birdlike little bitch, who sold anything older than 1975, and Lois didn’t like her, and she almost told Bobby that, but he was so excited about his purchase that she’d kept her mouth shut.

  Last night Suzie kept saying, “You shouldn’t have, Noni. You really shouldn’t have,” but she’d kept running her fingers over the porcelain lace of the woman’s dress, and Lois knew she’d done the right thing. But now they both looked so damn serious as they disappeared into Bobby’s little car then drove west down Oak Street. Was that girl ever going to stay with a man?

  “Would you like me to take over?” Marianne was holding a square mirror with a black and gold frame. A strand of hair hung over her left eye, and there were tiny beads of sweat above her upper lip, though her lipstick still looked fresh. Lois was thirsty, and her shoulders burned. She could feel her sundress sticking to her upper back. “Please. I’m getting too old for this, honey.”

  She extended her legs, and Marianne set down the mirror and offered her hand, which Lois took. She needed water, and she needed a cigarette, but as she walked back through the shadows of her cluttered shop, through the smells of oiled hardwoods and the vinegar on her fingers, the low gurgling of the dehumidifiers, her own words hung there inside her. Too old for this. Not wiping down mirrors for a window display she’d probably replace in a week, but worrying about that girl ever being happy, that girl who was forty-three years old, for Christ’s sake.

  32

  JUST BEFORE the Dunn exit the sky darkens and it begins to rain. Daniel still has no appetite, but he needs a toilet and so he takes the off-ramp and is soon driving slowly through a town of two-story brick and concrete buildings, their glass fronts beaded with water. There’s a luncheonette up ahead, and he pulls into a small lot and parks beside a sedan, its wheel wells splattered with mud.

  The pain in his lower back has become like a fever in his legs now, and he pats his front pocket for his wad of cash and rises slowly out of his Tacoma and locks it. The rain is warm and soft. He stands there a moment with his eyes closed and raises his face to it. Something heavy rumbles by in the wet street behind him, and he opens his eyes and makes his way over the sidewalk and into the luncheonette. It’s bright and loud with talking people. There are the smells of coffee and hamburger grease, and a young girl in an apron and tight jeans is holding a coffeepot and calling him sir. She’s smiling and calling him sir, “And please sit wherever you like.”

  He asks for the bathroom, and she tells him where it is, raising her coffeepot and pointing with it to the back of the place past a table of old men and women, one of the women delicate and classy-looking. As he passes she smiles up at him, and he steps into the men’s room and there comes the feeling he’s been here before, in Dunn, North Carolina, though he never has, and as he walks into the stall and lashes the door shut, he feels more alone than he did early this morning. Just some dried leaf blowing across an empty field, and now there is very little waiting to be done. What comes out of him seems to have no urine in it whatsoever. He watches the toilet bowl darken with it, and there’s the urge to call for help. But to who? And for what?

  Linda’s eyes. The dark shock in them then the knowing then the gathering herself to face what she knew was coming and could do nothing about, all in a few beats of his poisoned and poisonous heart. She was more stand-up than he’ll ever be.

  He flushes the toilet and washes his hands at one of three sinks. The mirror is long and scratc
hed, and in the upper left corner is a faded decal in the shape of a fish: Jesus Loves You.

  Just outside the door is laughter, talking voices, all the happy, busy noise of the living, and he thinks of his will. He needs to finish writing it out, and then he needs to find a typewriter.

  He avoids the mirror and turns the water to cold. He cups his hands under it and splashes his face three times, chills rolling down his back and into his legs. He pictures them as bones. When he got paroled he worked up his nerve and asked his mother where his wife was buried.

  “The ocean, honey.”

  He wished they hadn’t done that. There should have been a place for Linda’s loved ones to visit. He taps the hand dryer button, the blasting hot air on his big hands. It’s wrong to even think it, but that’s where he would’ve wanted to go. In that same box in that same hole in the ground, him and Linda curled side by side, the smell of the ocean outside their window, a light wind lifting their curtains in a soft, white wave.

  33

  THEY WERE parked in the lot of Susan’s old high school under a sable palm that offered little shade, and Bobby had kept the engine running for the AC. Both sun visors were down. He had his glasses on and was reading the letter to himself, but she was waiting for him to get to where she’d left off back at the Sawgrass. It’s where he says he’s fucking proud of me. In the nearly empty lot were a white painter’s van and a pickup truck with a rack and two long ladders strapped to it.

  “Jesus, baby.” Bobby was looking at her. His eyes looked big behind his glasses, her father’s pages resting on his leg. “He sounds kind of—”

  “What?”

  “Well, sincere.” He touched her shoulder. “Sorry.”

  “Just—just read it. But skip that shit about him being—” She couldn’t say the word. It was a thickening mass in her throat. Bobby lowered his head and read: “ ‘That worm I talked to you about? Well it became a black snake and it filled Danny’s veins so he was scared all the time. But what could he do with this? He was The Reactor.’ ”