Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  “Did you fall asleep?”

  The word no was in his throat, but it wouldn’t come out, and Mark, like the athlete he’d been in high school, the fast and reckless wide receiver, the diving shortstop, aimed the remote under his arm at the TV behind him and watched her face as the image lit up the screen. At first, there was nothing. She was simply watching her silent husband turn on the TV behind him, his back to it. She was watching and waiting to see just what was happening before her. Then there was the gray light of the television on her face and it took only a few seconds; it was as if she’d been burned; her eyes widened and her lower lip twitched and she turned and stepped quickly toward the kitchen.

  Mark’s movement was a thing he would never remember, only the feel of her arms and ribs and belly as he picked her up and pulled her back and swung her around to watch the show. There were her kicking feet, and there were her screams—fear there, and desperation, and hatred. Yes, hatred. Her hair had fallen to each side of her face and she was looking only at the floor so her husband had no choice but to place his palm against her forehead and pull back till she saw it, Frank Harrison Jr. and her in the white Audi coupe, his profile sinking out of sight, but she twisted away, his always fit and physically strong wife, and she was shrieking, “I can’t believe you! I can’t fucking believe you!”

  Then she was past him in the kitchen and what could he do but follow? What could he do but race ahead of her and block the doorway? What could he do but flip the table into the air? What could he do but stomp off its closest leg and start swinging chairs over his head down to the tiled floor, six of those tiles still cracked now eleven weeks and four days later, the three chairs still splintered and left in the garage, the three-legged table upside down in the corner of the kitchen so Laura had to eat at the peninsula, or maybe off her lap in the living room while she watched shows of families being devastated by one of their own.

  MARK DOES NOT MAKE COFFEE. He has taken two Motrin for his Bacardi headache, and he needs something cold and sweet to drink. A Coke. He has none left, but there may be some in the fridge of the main house. He peers out the side window overlooking the pool. Normally on a July Saturday afternoon, Laura would be lying in her bikini on a chaise longue on the concrete soaking in the rays that by September left her darker than any of their friends. Mark would sometimes warn her about the weakened ozone layer, the increased likelihood of skin cancer, but she would half smile at him behind her sunglasses and say, “You worry too much, Mark.”

  It’s true. He does. He always has. But what’s a senior project manager to do if not to anticipate threats and opportunities, to manage risk, to deliver the finished project on time?

  The poolside is empty, the sun too bright off the concrete pad. Mark steps to his mother’s hall closet, the one she has cleared out for him, and he undresses, then pulls on shorts and a shirt and walks to the front window overlooking the driveway and street. There is only his BMW sedan. Laura’s space is empty beside it, which means she’s with tall, bald Frank Harrison Jr., a man Mark now knows many things about: he knows that Harrison is fifty-three years old, his fifty-fourth birthday coming in August. He knows that at six foot one he weighs two hundred and eleven pounds and was a wrestler at Boston College, undefeated in his weight class his senior year. Mark knows that Harrison has nagging sciatica for which he sees an acupuncturist every Tuesday afternoon at 4:45 p.m., and that he lives in a three-story white Federalist with his oblivious wife on High Street in Newburyport, that town nine miles east that at one time was an abandoned cluster of tannery mills and shipyards at the mouth of the Merrimack River, but for years now has been so gentrified that tourists travel to its downtown boutiques and restaurants, its coffee shops and pubs and bookstores, its waterfront theater with a view of pleasure boats moored on the water or cruising east under the bridge. It’s the town where Frank Harrison Jr. will stroll with his wife of twenty-three years on a Saturday evening, and they will dine either at a lobster place on the marina, or eat Italian or Thai in the square of clothiers and day spas that used to manufacture leather.

  Mark knows that Anna Harrison is a narrow-hipped, large-breasted woman with an automatic smile. That she works part-time as a legal secretary in a law office six blocks from their Federalist, and she usually walks there and back, her sandy hair shoulder-length and pinned away from her face, a face Mark would consider still attractive were it not for that smile and her eyes that, glancing up from the sidewalk in front of her, appear to him weary and slightly dumbfounded and a bit frightened too, as if to do anything other than what she does every day might invite catastrophe. Or perhaps he’s wrong about that. Maybe she’s just constantly thinking of their children who are no longer under her daily care: Frank III, Thomas, and Gayle, the younger two in college—the boy a hockey player at Bates, the girl at the University of Florida at Gainesville, Frank III following his father into the banking business, though not at Providential where Frank Harrison Jr. is a commercial loan officer, a well-groomed fleecer of the public who arrives at work between 8:13 and 8:17 a.m., who parks his white coupe in front of the concrete river wall behind the bank in this upriver town where, just two miles east, there’s the gym Laura has been a member of for twelve years. It’s where she stretches, lifts light dumbbells, takes classes in yoga and Pilates. It’s where she does all this, then goes running after for she never lets anything come between her and running. Even when she was pregnant with Mary Ann and Kevin, she ran into their third trimesters. It’s a habit she developed as a withdrawn child growing up in central New Hampshire, a solitary activity that matched her solitary nature.

  That’s how she’d always explained it to Mark anyway, that she needed time to herself, that she never should have gone into real estate because it’s a job that forces her to talk to people, but that’s also why, Mark would tell her, she’s been so successful at it; prospective buyers can sense just how little she cares whether they like the property or not, that what she really wants to do is be done with this walk-through, pull on her sweats and Nikes, and run away from them all; this is the softest sell possible and so she sells more than most, her lack of charm a quality Mark had come to trust for he always knew where he stood with her. Other women, women like Anna Harrison, seemed to smile on reflex, as if this were something they were taught to do as young girls—be nice, be pretty, nice is pretty—and so you never knew if a woman was genuinely pleased with something you’d said or done, or not. But Laura only smiled when she felt like it, her eyes turning down at the corners, so it was a gift to them all when she did, a gift to Frank Harrison Jr. too, who must have charmed her into doing that at the gym, the place he drove his Audi coupe to every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, pulling out behind the bank between 4:33 and 4:39 each time, driving through town along the river, past the brick post office and the old Whittier Hotel, past the music shop and Pedro Diego’s Mexican restaurant and the insurance office above Valhouli’s Barbers that has been there since Mark’s father was a boy and he would go there for a nickel haircut and years later, when he was husband to Dorothy and father to Claire and young Mark, he’d own two of the abandoned mills near Lafayette Square, one he sold for a profit, the other he lost so much money on he spent fewer and fewer nights at home, going instead to the bars of Railroad Square till he was hardly ever home at all. After a while, only a year or two, it seemed, he was no longer Bill Welch, property owner and entrepreneur, but Welchy, who drank boilermakers with off-duty cops and men from the mills, Welchy who bought dawn breakfasts for old waitresses and young runaways, Welchy who ran up tabs he couldn’t pay and who died on a moonless night in February in the backseat of a ’63 Impala that belonged to a man who had gone through the dead drunk’s pockets and called the Welches’ house at two-fifteen in the morning. Mark Welch was still a boy then, but he remembers his mother’s voice on the phone in the hallway outside his bedroom. He remembers the crack of light beneath his door like some unnatural fire he would never escape. “Are you sure? William Welch?�
� There was some kind of wire being pulled through her words, one that was about to snap. But then she said, “Thank you. Thank you very much for calling.” And Mark could hear the phone being set carefully into its cradle. He heard little else. Only his own heartbeat; for the first time it was no longer in his chest but in his head, something steady he listened to between his ears even as the police car pulled in front of the house, even as the front door opened and closed twice, even as he began to hear the nearly calm voice of his mother telling Mrs. Steinberg from next door to let them sleep until they wake up, let the poor children sleep.

  But there was no sleeping. There were his mother’s words on the phone from earlier, and there was his father’s name, and there was Mark Welch’s heart having moved up to his head where, all these years later, he’d heard it once again as he watched those videos he’d paid an investigator from Boston to film, heard it as he walked by Anna Harrison on the sidewalk, heard it as he followed her husband’s white coupe three cars behind as Frank Harrison Jr. drove past the car dealerships on River Street, the machine shops and boarded-up Dairy Queen, past the Exxon station and Dunkin’ Donuts, then across the highway overpass for the turn to the gymnasium on the hill where he’d met and wooed the apparently restless and unhappy Laura Murphy Welch.

  THE HOUSE IS TOO COOL and smells like itself. Fabric softener from the laundry room, rust in the pipes, floor varnish where the sun’s been shining through the windowpanes all morning. Laura has the air conditioner on too high and goose bumps rise along Mark’s forearms as he opens the fridge. How empty it seems. In the bright space there are five or six containers of strawberry yogurt, a carton of eggs, jars of condiments, raw hamburger meat wrapped in plastic. On the bottom shelf, behind a grapefruit, two cans of Coke lie on their sides like forgotten children. He pulls one out and opens it, its sudden spray surprising him, but not really. He ignores any mess he’s made, and drinks long in the open doorway of the fridge.

  He belches and tastes last night’s rum. He’s been drinking too much too often. He knows this. If he were a team member on one of his own projects, Mark would identify himself as a possible risk and he would begin to monitor and control that risk, for if he did not, he could become a threat to the long-term integrity of the project.

  But what if the larger project has already been jettisoned completely?

  Mark closes the refrigerator door and glances over at the upside-down table in the corner. The broken leg lies in the middle of it between the other three. It is a clean break, the upper part of the leg splintered but still fastened to the tabletop. To fix it, all he has to do is glue and clamp.

  He stares at the floor. Six cracked tiles. He still has a box of them in the basement from when he’d hired a crew to lay a new floor five years ago. It would be more work to replace those. He’d have to break them up fully, wouldn’t he? Pry the pieces up off the dried mortar bed, scrape the old mortar down to the subfloor, then, on and on. He is tiring just thinking about it. He glances up at the light fixture. It’s back where it belongs, Laura having fixed that one herself.

  He takes his Coke and walks through the dining room. They’d only used it for holidays, and it seems impossibly small to him now, the table covered with a lacy runner down the center, the silver candelabra there in the middle with its five new ivory candles, their wicks still white and coated with wax. It was a wedding gift, and when did Laura apply that wallpaper border along the tops of the walls? It’s one continuous illustration of cows grazing in a field, and it had taken her all afternoon, a Sunday not so long ago because the kids were gone and Mark would walk through the room now and then and ask her if she needed any help. She was in shorts and a dark top, her long hair pulled back. She was standing on their stepladder, the adhesive roller in one hand, the other on the border she was slowly rolling against the wall, her reading glasses at the tip of her nose. She’d said, “No, honey. Thanks,” and kept working. Mark stared at her long runner’s legs, a varicose vein behind her left knee. He stared at her ass and her hips and straight back, and he watched the twitch of the smaller muscles in her forearm as she smoothed the cows along. All these years and she was the only woman he’d slept with, a fact he gave himself no extra credit for, for that’s what he’d vowed after all, but he’d wanted her then as fiercely as when they’d first begun to make love in their early thirties in that condominium she’d sold him on Pickering Wharf. Later that afternoon, after the border was finished and their dining room looked more colorful but cheerfully antiseptic, like something from the kind of home magazine Laura enjoyed reading, Mark had brought her a bottle of light beer and stood beside her as she pointed out two air bubbles in the corner above the door. They were in shadow and she hoped no one would see it. He could smell her sweat and that deeper woman smell that Laura’s sweating gave off, and he pulled her to him and kissed her deeply, her glasses still at the end of her nose. A surprised sound came out of her, and she pulled off her glasses and dropped them on the table and soon they were making love on the carpet, her shorts and underwear around one ankle, the stepladder inches from her lovely head.

  Mark drains the Coke and leaves the can on the dining room table. He climbs the front stairs to the second floor. He avoids the kids’ rooms and walks down the hallway into the bedroom he no longer considers his. Very little has changed. There is the same coral duvet spread across their king-size bed. Three decorative throw pillows are stacked in a pyramid on top of where both their heads used to lie, and he can see she’s taken another pillow and put it where his was before he’d carried it to his mother’s next door. On her bedside table is a magazine, Runner’s World. A page is marked with a subscription flyer, and he sees that she’s reading an article of advice on running in all four seasons, something she’s been doing for years so why does she need to read this? And isn’t it interesting, he thinks, that she no longer runs alone but with Frank Harrison Jr., that that time she needed so badly for herself she’s given so readily to another?

  He closes the magazine and walks to her bureau. It’s a dark walnut that matches his smaller one, now empty, on the other side of the room. The surface of hers is as clear and spare as it always was. There’s the jewelry box sitting on the lace coverlet. There’s her antique hairbrush and comb and hand mirror, though she only uses the large one against the wall in front of him. In the upper corner of the mirror, stuck between the glass and the wood frame, are photos of the kids when they were in middle school. The pictures have been there for years, and many times Mark has leaned closer to study them, but not today. Today he notices the mirror is tilted down at a slight angle, something he’d probably done months ago just before he and Laura had made love late on a Saturday night or early on a Sunday morning.

  Laura preferred being on top, and Mark would sometimes peek around her shoulder and hair to see their reflection in the mirror, to see himself penetrating his lovely, athletic wife. Once she’d caught him doing it and whispered, “That turn you on? Huh? You like a show?” He hadn’t answered, just kissed her deeply, but he liked how game she was, how she’d always seemed to enjoy their lovemaking as much as he did. Over the years they’d heard of friends of theirs who made love rarely, maybe once every two to three months, if that.

  This was something Laura would tell him, for husbands did not offer that kind of information, though one did, Charlie Brandt. It was a pool party at the Welches’. The yard was crowded with friends and their kids, some of them grown. One was the Salvuccis’ daughter, a dark-haired university student in a bikini, and it was hard not to linger on her as she walked barefoot and flat-bellied under the sun to one of the coolers for a beer. Charlie had nudged Mark. He’d leaned closer, smelling of gin and hair gel. “I got one just like that.”

  “Marie know this?”

  “You shittin’ me? But hey, she’s got no leg to stand on, brother. She stopped fucking me soon as she got fat and she’s been fat for ten years.”

  Mark had never liked Charlie much. He was an insurance salesman w
ho stood too close to you and talked too loud, mainly about himself. But his wife was Laura’s friend from the Salem realtor’s office and so he’d become a regular at the Welches’ various parties, and now Mark judged him for cheating like that. Charlie kept talking. Mark had turned over the chicken breasts on the grill. He squinted in the smoke and glanced at Marie sitting with Laura and three other women at the umbrella table. She was a heavy Italian woman with a kind and pretty face, and she was laughing at something one of the others had said and Mark felt sorry for her then and told himself that if Laura ever shut him off he’d go to counseling and do whatever it took to get her back, but he wouldn’t cheat like Charlie Brandt who was now wandering off in the direction of the Salvuccis’ daughter in his Bermuda shorts and flip-flops, his gin and tonic in his hand like a conversation starter.

  Mark opened the top drawer of Laura’s dresser. Fifteen or twenty pair of panties were rolled up and nestled beside one another, three neat rows of pink and pale blue, beige, white, and even a few red. Did she wear those for Frank Harrison Jr.? He pictured her standing before him as he lay waiting on the Marriott’s bed. Did she shuck them off quickly so they could get to it? Or did she make a dance out of it, something she’d never done for her husband?

  That’s when he’d first felt the cool draft of suspicion blow between his ribs, when she’d done something entirely new. It was a weeknight, and they’d both gone to bed early. He was tired and distracted, thinking of his next project, an alternative search engine whose design they had to deliver in fourteen months. He was the lead PM and already suspected the scope of this was too large for its projected cost and time required. Laura’s lamp was on. She was reading a novel for her monthly book club, this one by a woman writer with an Indian name. Mark lay on his back and began to plan the meeting he would have to run the following morning.