Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  He’d have to bring in all the principals, sit them down in the Mauer Conference Room at the long table that could seat twenty-two. His first few jobs as project manager, he’d sit in a chair at one side or another, his suit jacket off and his tie loosened, just one of the many contributing members of the team. At the time he was a believer in Motivational Theory Y, that all people are naturally driven and all you have to do is treat them with respect, hold the bar high but not unattainably high, and set them loose.

  But his first two projects were managerial disasters. They were completed, but they came in weeks late, over budget, and three of his people had quit halfway through. He’d almost lost his job, but Teddy Burns gave him a second chance. He called him early on a Friday morning, Laura and the kids still in bed, and said, “Retraining Day, Mark. Come in in hiking gear, running shoes if you don’t have boots. See you at seven.”

  It was early May. They drove up to the White Mountains, a two-hour ride in Teddy Burns’ black Range Rover, Mark’s young, fit, and prematurely bald boss behind the wheel. Mark sat beside him in the Nike sweatshirt Laura had bought him the previous Christmas. On his feet were the worn sneakers he reserved for yard work, and he sipped from the insulated mug of dark roast he’d brewed at home, sipping it slowly. He looked out at the weeds alongside the highway, the newly leafed-out trees, and he tried not to feel patronized and insulted by all this.

  Teddy Burns was a lanky vegetarian who supervised every project manager on the East Coast. Before rising to upper management, he’d delivered some of the biggest projects the company had ever contracted: Elco Systems right before they went public; Bascomb’s Internal Review software; and Zebra Inc. right after the Chinese bought every share of its stock. He had a girlfriend he called his partner, an angular blonde attorney who at office parties sipped Pinot Grigio and eyed the roomful of project managers before her as if she were there to make some sinister but necessary decision about them.

  While Teddy drove he’d been talking about new software applications on one of the many electronic gadgets he owned, something to do with GPS systems and the world’s dwindling supply of water. Mark nodded and sipped. He responded when needed, but he was from a generation of phone booth users, people who grew up with just a few channels on the TV you couldn’t get without fiddling with the antenna on top, a generation of people who went out and bought a hardcover book or vinyl album and then had to wait till they got back home to read it or listen to it; they didn’t download them from wherever they were, sampling one song or chapter before pressing a button to skip over to another.

  “You’re a big sister, Mark.”

  “What?”

  “Like right now. You don’t give a shit about my new apps, but you’re acting like you do.”

  “I thought we called that being polite.”

  Teddy Burns was staring at him, one hand on the wheel, his eyes expectant yet scrutinizing. “Polite’s one thing. Being a big sister’s another.” He shifted into the passing lane though there was no one to pass. Mark could feel the effortless acceleration of the Range Rover, his head pulling back slightly against the leather headrest. “Is this when you go after my manhood, Teddy?” He was surprised he’d said it. Teddy Burns could fire him before he even eased up on the gas. He could pull over and tell Mark to find his own way home. But Teddy was smiling and shaking his head.

  “I knew it. I knew there was a real PM in you somewhere. Boston wants me to send you packing, but here’s what I know: you’re playing the role of big sister, but you’re really the mean little brother.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “You heard me.”

  Burns was right. When Mark and his older sister Claire were kids, especially after their father died, Mark had always hated being left out. More than once, whenever she was set to go to a party without him, he’d let all the air from a tire of her Camaro. He’d listen in on her phone calls for anything he could blackmail her with later. If she didn’t lend him five or ten bucks, he’d call her fat and ugly, two things she was not, though he suspected Claire secretly thought she was. Every American girl did. “Yeah, well, whatever. I appreciate your giving me another shot, Teddy.”

  “Not good.”

  “What’s not good?”

  “You just established your edge with me and now you’re softening it by sucking up. That’s Weak Matrix, man.”

  “How’s that Weak Matrix?”

  “Because now your people don’t know who’s in charge—the edgy guy with balls? Or the smoother and compromiser?”

  “I wasn’t compromising—”

  “No, but you were smoothing. That’s what you did for the Laity account, and you did it even more with Converse.”

  “I had to keep them happy, didn’t I?”

  “Yes and no.” Teddy accelerated past a lumbering motor home with California plates. Its driver was silver-haired and tanned, his plump wife beside him, all their putting-up-with-bullshit-like-this forever in their rearview mirrors. Teddy shot past them over a rise into a banking curve. Off to the left was a sloping valley of pines and blue spruce, mountains looming over them like benevolent big sisters.

  “Smooth things out with the client, yes. But do not be the smoother and compromiser with your own team. That gives them the power. If they can’t work out a solution to a task, then you force them to.”

  “What? Put a gun to their heads, Teddy?”

  “See, good. Keep that edge. Hold on to it. Look, do you know why I am where I am?”

  Because you’re a self-absorbed prick.

  “Do you?”

  Mark could feel Teddy Burns staring at him. To the north, snow lay lazily in a ridge between two peaks. “Because you’re not a big sister.”

  “True, but that’s not what you were going to say. What did you really want to tell me?”

  “That’s it.”

  Teddy slowed for a curve. Mark sipped his coffee, tepid now, bitter. Fuck it. “That you’re a self-absorbed prick, that’s why.”

  Teddy Burns started to laugh. He glanced over at Mark and laughed harder. It was high and unrelenting, like the guttural chatter of some exotic monkey, and Mark began to laugh too.

  “Stellar, man. That’s stellar. I am a self-absorbed prick, which is why they pay me so fucking well. Your problem is you’ve subscribed to the wrong motivational theory. That’s what big sisters do. They believe everyone has their heart in the right place at the right time and all you have to do is point them in the right direction. Wrong. People are naturally fucking lazy. They’d rather lie around all day eating, fucking, and scratching their balls. That’s why pricks are needed, my friend. It’s called micromanagement and it works.”

  He went on from there, gleefully lecturing as he parked the Rover in a dirt lot in a sunlit clearing, continuing to make points as they both began to climb a shaded trail under the pines, and while Mark still didn’t much like Teddy Burns, he admired how he could climb and talk without being winded, but more, he admired his insight into him, Mark Welch, who on this mountain hike over ten years ago, began to feel free now to work the way he’d been pulled to for a long while yet was semiconsciously ashamed of himself for; he’d always wanted to sit at the head of the conference table, not alongside the others, and he’d never felt right taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves elbow to elbow with his team. Instead, because he was overprepared for each project and knew it, because he had done his goddamned homework, he’d wanted to issue directives, to delegate and wait, to monitor and control risks, to send his people off to do what he damn well told them to and then to complete the project under budget and on time.

  Since that morning with Teddy Burns, despite a few, but only a few, backward steps, Mark had become overwhelmingly successful. He had earned himself a reputation as an immensely productive hard-ass, a PM who was consistently given all the important projects because he could be counted on, even before the project commenced, to prepare and to plan, as he was doing that weeknight as he lay beside L
aura reading her book, picturing himself in the Mauer conference room the following morning, addressing his new team, already searching for any negative and positive risks, and that’s when Laura had sidled over, run her hand across his hip, and began to play with his balls.

  At first it was just her fingertips, a light scratching, and at first Mark had barely noticed. He was thinking of Lucas O’Brien, a software engineer they’d hired as a consultant who would have to be given, once again, a written set of tasks and a firm deadline. He held a doctorate from MIT and encouraged others to view him as somewhat absentminded, a genius of course, so he’d be free from the same constraints everyone else was forced to work under. Now Laura’s head was under the covers and when she took Mark into her mouth, he made himself forget Lucas O’Brien and the rest. He closed his eyes and lay his hand on her back. He felt grateful for this distraction, grateful he had a loving wife doing this to him now, though she’d never done it quite this way before, cupping his balls as she did what she did with her mouth. And a few moments later, as she straddled him the way she preferred, she’d reached behind and touched them again, twice, these testicles of Mark’s she’d barely seemed to notice before. It was like being with someone in the woods who has just read an Audubon guide on trees, then seeing her awakened appreciation for them, the novelty of them.

  After, as he lay beside her in the dark, her breaths rising and falling in an easy sleep, he could feel again the touch of her fingertips on his testicles—tentative, then inquisitive, then, as she cupped them in her palm, comparative; she seemed to be comparing. And not one against the other either.

  Mark’s face had flashed with heat. He seemed to be lying more still than he had been just one heartbeat earlier. He turned his head carefully on its pillow and took in what he could see in the darkness: Laura’s narrow back to him under the covers, the strap of her nightgown over her bare shoulder, a wisp of hair. Through the curtains came the shadowed glow of the streetlight in front of their sidewalk, yard, and home, all of which felt to him, in this moment of unwanted clarity, suddenly imperiled by some malicious presence he should not be so surprised at only just now discovering. For there were other details to consider: her more frequent trips to the gym, sometimes two on Saturdays—one for weights, she said, the other for Pilates or yoga. Her longer and longer runs. There was the way she’d been greeting him at the end of the day. There was still the brush of her lips on his as he sat in front of CNN, but there was also how happy—yes, that was the word—how happy she seemed at dinner. Just the two of them sitting side by side at the island or sometimes at the round table they’d used when the kids still lived here. She’d ask him questions about his day and work, and she really seemed to be interested in whatever he told her, her eyes on his as she chewed and sipped and swallowed, her hair down around her lovely, muscular shoulders. She’d ask him follow-up questions, too, even technical ones that should have bored anyone. “Did he enter those stats into the program?”

  And this revived interest in him made Mark ask her questions about her day, questions he actually meant, which told him there’d been a time when he did not really care what she told him, but he forgot about that, enjoying instead his revived wife and her renewed interest in him, the way, after dinner, they washed dishes together side by side, how, if it was warm enough, they’d then go for a walk down their street past their neighbors’ homes, half-acre lots like their own, the houses set back away from the street.

  They’d walk along in the twilight, chatting about what they saw—a broken bird feeder in front of the Kazarosians’, a new satellite dish on the roof of the Doucettes’, the screened porch being built onto the back of the Battistinis’. Often, Mark and Laura would talk about Mary Ann and Kevin, and Laura’s voice sounded lighter even then, as if she knew she’d done her best with them and now it was up to their children to live their own lives; it was as if she’d finally accepted something in herself Mark hadn’t even known she’d been wrestling with; he’d always seen her as a good mother. Loving, attentive, consistent. Hadn’t she? When had these changes in her begun?

  He kept seeing the leaves of fall, candy in a basket. Even though their daughter and son were grown, Laura still left the porch light on every October 31st. She bought wrapped chocolates and left them in a basket next to the railing outside. But last Halloween, she wore a witch’s hat and greeted each group of kids herself. She welcomed them warmly, complimenting their costumes every time. Mark had been on the couch in front of the TV. He tried to remember her ever being this way before. In her voice—almost overexuberant—was not simply holiday cheer but joyous relief, like some terminally ill patient who’s just been told she’s not sick anymore. Then those more frequent workouts, those longer runs, the way she began to really see and listen to him. Gone was that weary, and wary, look she’d had around him for years, that she was bone-tired from all that being a mother and realtor asked her to do, and now she had to be a wife, as well, whatever that meant.

  Mark pushes shut Laura’s underwear drawer. Outside the front windows are the bright green leaves of their maple trees. His eyes ache just looking at them. She’s with Harrison now. Mark knows this. She got up early, the way she always has. She pulled on her running shorts and athletic bra and all the rest. She probably ate a banana and drank half a cup of coffee, and did she bring a change of clothes? Would she and Harrison drive to the Marriott after their run in the state park? Would they shower, fuck, then shower again?

  MARK DRIVES HIS BMW up the highway. His Oakleys help with the glare off the asphalt, though not quite enough. His AC is on and his sunroof is open and he drives just beneath the speed limit. He does not know this until he becomes aware of cars passing him, a driver or passenger glancing at him so briefly he is clearly irrelevant.

  He knows where he is going, though he is not sure why he is going there. It’s no longer to catch her in a lie because she has stopped lying to him. How beautiful she looked to him then. In the kitchen ten or twelve days ago now. That’s when all things began to feel far away. She was clearly out of his reach and grasp, free of his control. His recognition of this truth was at first a dizzying plummet into a black void from which he would never return. But then came that distance, this detachment of the observer, and now he sees the sign for the Marriott rising above the planted maples around its parking lot, then he is taking the exit and is soon pulling slowly past the parked cars, their windshields and chrome blinding under the sun. He does not see Laura’s Honda or Harrison’s white Audi coupe. So Mark backs into the shade of an ancient pine, his tires touching the curb, and he puts the gear in park, leaves the engine running for the AC, and he waits.

  He watches his finger press the button to close the sunroof, though he had no thought about doing so beforehand. There are advantages to this new feeling, a certain lightening of the load. The management of risk is one of his primary tasks as a PM. You must identify it, analyze it, then develop a response to it. You must monitor and control it.

  That first night of the detective’s DVD, eleven weeks and four days ago, Laura’s screaming voice, “You made me do it!” There was the breaking of furniture and the smashing of floor tiles, there was the inadvertent damage to a ceiling fixture, and then Laura was running to the front door and Mark was there, blocking it.

  “Let me go!” She yanked on his shirt collar, she tried pushing him to the side, but she could not move him. She bolted through the laundry room for the back door, but his arms were around her again, around her shoulders and upper arms and breasts. She struggled and then stopped struggling, both of them breathing hard. He dropped his forehead to her hair. Her heart was beating in her back against his chest against his heart.

  “Why, Laura? Why did you do this to us?”

  She was quiet. Her breathing was already slowing back to normal. “Please let go of me.”

  He held on. There came the creaking of the stairs behind the door to his mother’s apartment. She was maybe one or two steps from opening that door. T
here was Laura’s voice, soft and hard at once. “I don’t want to see her.”

  He let go of his wife. He moved to the door and opened it.

  “Is everything all right?” His mother held on to the railing. She’d cleaned off her makeup, and her gray hair was matted on one side. She wore her yellow robe over whatever it was she slept in.

  “We’re having an argument, Ma. Good night.”

  He closed the door slowly. He turned toward Laura, but she was in the kitchen stepping over a broken chair, the light on her hair and back all wrong somehow. The stairs began to creak behind him, and Mark followed his wife into the living room. The TV was still on, the screen blue. Laura sat on the couch with her legs drawn up and her arms around them and if he’d ever seen her sit like that, he couldn’t remember when. Without looking up at him, she said: “Did you film that yourself?”

  “No.” He sat on the coffee table. There was the new thought that he had misbehaved somehow, one he dismissed instantly.

  “Who did it?”

  “No one you know.”

  “You hired someone?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “Who?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She shook her head. She stared at the wall across the room, though she seemed to be seeing something in the air. “Does he know us?”

  “Why, Laura? Why do you care about that?”

  “Do you?”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer him. She was staring at the air again. Was she seeing Frank Harrison Jr.? His bald head? His— “Are you afraid for Frank, Laura? You worried about his wife over in Newburyport finding out? Are we talking about reputations here? Because—” his voice broke then, something he had no warning of whatsoever, and he would stop what was coming if he could but he couldn’t and now he was crying—“because I don’t care about that, Laura. I just can’t believe you did this.” There was only his crying now, his chin on his chest, his shoulders heaving up and down. Then Laura was there. Not crying herself, but kneeling on the floor beside the couch and the coffee table, holding him, saying, “I’m sorry, honey. I’m so sorry.” Then maybe she did cry a bit, though Mark did not know for sure. All he knew was that he was crying into her hair and squeezing her arm as if it were the one rope thrown to him as he hung over some new and unknown abyss and he wasn’t letting go. Ever. He would not let go.