Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  But she did. She stood and brought him tissues from the bathroom. She sat straight on the couch across from him. “Mark. I’m sorry.” Her voice was raw and naked and he believed her. Her period of contrition had begun. This was a word he had not had in his head for years, not since church when he was a boy, but it came to him then as he wiped his eyes and blew his nose. In the warm light from the lamp, he stared at his beautiful, cheating wife. She was contrite now, and Mark began to feel the cloak of work fall around his shoulders. He began to see this as an opportunity and not a threat, a positive risk that must be managed and monitored and controlled. This was simply a problem to be solved, and he was forcing the most logical solution. They talked calmly for a long while. She promised to break things off with Frank Harrison Jr. She promised never to see him again.

  IN FRONT OF THE MARRIOTT a white painter’s van drives slowly by the entrance. A man sits in the passenger side smoking a cigarette. He looks in Mark’s direction, but he does not see him or even his BMW sedan, its engine running, the air too cool now. Mark watches his hand turn down the controls. He is thirsty. Or his body is. Water is needed. Cold, clear water. He sees himself buying a bottle of it somewhere. He could walk into the lobby of the Marriott for it. Or he could step into the restaurant there. It’s a place he and Laura have been to with friends, the Salvuccis and one time the Brandts, Charlie drinking too much and going on about one thing or another. Mark could sit at the bar and order himself a beaded glass of ice water. Maybe his body would order a burger and a cold beer, and he would sit near the front windows where he could see anyone walking into or out of the hotel, though catching her in a lie was no longer the point, was it? No, the project of saving his marriage seems to have failed and he’s inherited a new task. This is not unusual. Some projects collapse for any number of reasons: investors withdraw at the last minute; a design flaw is discovered that prevents forward momentum; the contract with the company is cancelled for reasons both opaque and obvious, often a lack of innovative nerve on the part of stockholders in one boardroom or another. But in this case, there’s simply been a change of heart. Or, more accurately, a shift from the hiding of the heart to the showing of it, though Mark had to force that exposure, didn’t he?

  And so this new task, what is it? He is not sure, but he begins to see those cracked tiles again, that splintered table leg, those broken chairs in the garage. There’s the urge to repair things, to see some tangible fruit of his labor. He watches himself put the car in gear and pull out of the lot for the highway. He accelerates into the travel lane and is soon leaving other cars behind him. The sun is unrelenting and in the median is tall yellow-green grass the public works department has not cut. Soon it’ll be filled with purple loosestrife, that weed that comes just as summer wanes. Its appearance always depressed Laura, for it signaled the end of her days by the pool, but for Mark it meant fall and crisp days and dying leaves that brought bare branches and the kind of clarity that made work easy.

  Mark steers into the Home Depot parking lot. Because it is a Saturday in Seabrook, New Hampshire, the lot is two-thirds full. There are the trucks and vans of tradesmen, but there are more SUVs and minivans and sedans like his, the cars of American homeowners who have taken the day to tinker with or improve their most valuable investment. Mark walks away from his car without locking it. This is a town of gun shops and tattoo parlors, of one strip mall after the other selling beach furniture and Bibles, motorcycles and patio bricks, neon towels and American flags and stone statues of black men holding a lantern for your fine stallion, a lawn ornament Mark has seen in front of a mobile home on cinderblocks just past the Walmart and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  If anybody here wants his BMW, they can have it. Today it is just another object among heaps of objects, and as he moves into the shade of the entrance, he has to admire the ad man or woman who chose the word HOME over HOUSE, for who, when things are good, would not want to improve and fortify their very home?

  He pulls a cart free and pushes it toward the automatic door. It slides open for him and him only. A man ten or fifteen years older than he is smiling at him, an orange apron tied around his small gut, a yellow tape measure clipped to his belt.

  “Can I help you find anything today, sir?”

  “I’m all set, thanks.” Mark pushes the cart past him. He tells himself to be grateful. Be grateful you don’t have to stand there in that corporate apron smiling at every bitch and bastard to walk through that door. Though there’s something off about this thought, and he stops at the display of propane grills just to turn and glance back. The greeter is now talking to an obese woman in hospital scrubs, nodding his head and pointing down the length of the store. He laughs at something she or he may have just said and the woman laughs too, and Mark keeps walking. The truth is, he does need help finding things—the wood glue for one, the tile section for another. But has he ever asked for help?

  You’re hard on yourself.

  A woman’s voice. He hears it as he pushes his empty cart past shelf after shelf of lightbulbs and fluorescent tubes in boxes, floodlights and smoke alarms and radon test kits. Laura’s? No, his mother’s. Two nights ago as they sat side by side at her small kitchen island eating lobster rolls she’d bought them.

  “What do you mean, Ma?”

  Mark sipped his beer, a cold Bud Light his mother had cracked open for him before sitting on her stool with a glass of chardonnay.

  “An A minus was never good enough for you, honey. Everything had to be perfect.”

  The last light of the afternoon came through the side kitchen window and lay across their hands and plates and beer and wine. Mark glanced at his mother. She was chewing thoughtfully, her eyes on the lifetime ago in her head, and even though there were those lines etched around her mouth and cheeks, her hair so thin he could see her scalp, he saw her again as a young woman, her drunk husband dead and gone, all those years ahead of her working as a secretary at Leary’s Insurance company downtown, coming home each night to cook him and Claire a hot meal they would then share at the mahogany table in the dark dining room that smelled like old drapes.

  “But as much as you wanted that A, you would never ask for help.” She turned to him. “Remember that?”

  “Most men don’t, Ma.”

  “Well that’s a shame. It is.”

  In the corner of her lip was a dot of mayonnaise, her lipstick smeared just above it. She looked her age then, and Mark wanted to reach over and squeeze her shoulder. He kept eating.

  He’s hungry now. Or his body is. This distant rumble in his gut. Greasy fried chicken would do. Maybe that KFC just past the Walmart. But he sees the small plastic table he’d eat at, a loud family nearby, and the thought depresses him. He’s passing racks of C-clamps now, bar clamps, hooks and chains and bungee cords.

  Just before the shelves of fasteners and adhesive is a barrel of threaded pipe, gray and an inch and a half wide and four feet long. They are just like the one that lies in the trunk of Mark’s car, and he grasps one. It is cool and hard, the sure diameter of it fitting nicely inside his fist.

  He sees himself swinging it into the bald head of Frank Harrison Jr., caving it in like a watermelon, the sheet pulled to Laura’s shoulders in the Marriot’s king-size bed, her mouth hanging open in a silent scream.

  But this image seems to come not from his life, but from a movie Mark saw as a boy, and his hand lets go of the pipe and he keeps walking. How exhausted he is. Soon he finds the wood glue, a contractor’s grade in a long plastic bottle he drops into his cart. He moves through busy people and their busy sounds and he finds the tile section, its various tools that apparently make any flooring job easier: wet saws and rubber gloves, grout floats and sponges and big plastic buckets. His stomach is an empty cavern. There’s a throbbing in his forehead. Is he really going to do this? Take all this home and get on his hands and knees to repair the floor he no longer even treads? And does he even know how? Most of the process seems to be common sense, and there ar
e directions on the side of the mortar bag, but will they be enough?

  He begins to lift and drop items into his cart when something buzzes inside his shorts pocket and he nearly slaps at it. He pulls his cell phone free. He squints at it. It is a local number he does not recognize. It could be work, though his new deadline is months away and he is surprised at his disappointment it is not Laura who is calling.

  He watches himself press the talk button, “This is Mark Welch.”

  “Yeah well, this is Lisa Schena.”

  He stares at the stack of mortar bags. His stomach growls. He feels caught in a test of some kind, one he did not know was coming. “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

  “Not yet.” Her voice is young, her tone playful. Then he tastes last night’s menthol cigarette, his erection pressed against his pants against the drunk woman’s bare belly.

  “From The Tap?”

  “Probably.”

  “Probably?” He finds himself smiling at this. “You don’t know for sure?”

  “No, you don’t know for sure. Tell me about this Lisa.”

  “She hates rap music—”

  “And?”

  “And she’s—”

  “What?”

  “She’s very—”

  “Hungry.”

  “She is?”

  “Yes. You promised her a meal.”

  “I did?”

  “Mark Welch did. This is you, isn’t it?”

  “I think so.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Not lately, no.” Mark’s breathing seems to pause in his throat. “Not for a long time actually.”

  “That’s too bad, ’cause I kind of like the one I met.”

  “What’d you like about him?” He presses the phone into his ear. He seems to be holding his breath.

  “His eyes. His sad eyes.”

  Mark knows he is supposed to speak now. He knows this, but he can’t quite summon his voice from wherever it is it just went. He looks down into his orange cart and stares at tools and substances of repair.

  BEHIND THE SEA SPRAY MOTEL on Hampton Beach, white sand is feathered across the asphalt under the sun, and he parks behind a faded VW Bug, its top down. There is still the far-off feeling that he is watching his body do things, but now he is a bit more interested in sitting back to see how things play out. In the trunk of his sedan are the tiling materials and the wood glue, and he tells himself he is just having lunch, that’s all, that he is going to eat a meal with this Lisa Schena, then he will drive home and get to work. But he checks his face in the mirror twice and puts an Altoid under his tongue, letting it dissolve slowly as he walks through the heat of the lot.

  Ocean Boulevard is thick with slow-moving cars and Jeeps and vans with open doors, its men, women, and kids looking out at the T-shirt and surfboard shops, the video arcades and pizza bars, the fish shacks and vending carts selling fried dough and cotton candy, the sidewalk crowded with sunburned people in their tank tops and baggy shirts and bikini bottoms, many of them ringed with sand and sea salt above dimpled or skinny thighs, rubber flip-flops flopping, Mark stepping into the dim, cool lounge of Carlo’s.

  It’s a place he’s never been. Its bar is U-shaped and there’s a flat-screen TV hanging above a fish tank built into the wall, five or six gold and black fish drifting listlessly up against the glass. Above them, men play baseball in a bright green field and a song from long ago plays on the sound system, something about rain falling on all our heads, she is sitting at the bar, her back to the wall. A man is leaning close and talking to her. He is sunburned and wears a white beard and a short-sleeved shirt with blue parrots etched all over it. She’s blond, her hair clipped, two things Mark did not notice the night before, but there are her bare brown shoulders in another sleeveless top, this one white, and now she sees him and her expression turns from warmly tolerant to genuinely pleased, and he is not sure he is up for any of this, he is not sure why he is here at all, but he feels himself walk between the tables of families and couples eating and talking and being happily together, toward the bar and this Lisa Schena and the man turning to him now.

  “Oh hi, hon,” she says. “I got us a table by the window.”

  The man leans back slightly. He takes in Mark Welch as if weighing whether or not he is a true rival for her affections. Lisa Schena is off her stool. With two fingers, she taps the back of the man’s hand. “Thank you for the drink. I have a lunch date with my husband.”

  She moves by the man, and Mark follows her. A black denim skirt hugs her hips and she’s wearing leather sandals, and again, there is a stirring where nothing has stirred since there was snow on the ground and his wife, at least in his head, still belonged to him. He disciplines himself to lift his eyes as Lisa Schena leads him through the restaurant to the only available table in the corner near the window. It is small. On it are two dirty plates, a wadded napkin on one, half a Coke sitting in a glass beside an empty breadbasket. Mark glances back at the bar and the man in the blue parrot shirt. His eyes are on the game above, both his hands cupping his glass like he’s afraid it too will disappear on him.

  “You look different in the light.” She’s sitting already, smiling up at him. She has less makeup on today, her cheeks only slightly pockmarked. Her eyes are a washed-out blue, like robin’s eggs left exposed to the weather by their mother.

  “Is that good or bad?” He sits across from her. He can feel the sun’s warmth coming through the glass.

  “You look younger, but that’s not good or bad for me because I don’t give a shit.”

  “I don’t either.”

  “Really?”

  “I think so.”

  She’s smiling at him as if she’s known him longer than she has. This makes him feel comfortable which then makes him uncomfortable for feeling so comfortable. He’s tempted to stand and leave.

  “You two snuck in.” The waitress is a warm, fleshy face surrounded by gray hair, her hands gathering up the dirty plates, breadbasket, and half-empty glass. “Cocktails?”

  “Bloody Mary for me.”

  “Two,” Mark says.

  Lisa Schena is still smiling at him, and he can see she’s older than he thought, maybe ten years older than his daughter, closer to forty. This is good, but her smile is making him shy and he glances out the tinted window at the beach traffic, the white sand on the other side, the deep blue rim of ocean beyond that.

  “You’re a mess, aren’t you?”

  He looks back at her. “Probably. You?”

  “Just with what I told you last night.”

  He nods his head. His face grows warm, and he glances down at her tanned shoulders and upper arms.

  “You don’t remember shit, do you?”

  “I know we kissed.”

  “Yeah we did, but that was your idea.”

  “It was?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “Hey, I called you, didn’t I?”

  Mark looks back at the bar. The bearded man is gone, and on the TV above the listless fish, a woman is holding a bottle of floor cleaner, smiling earnestly into the camera. It’s the brand Laura has always used. He sees himself kneeling on the kitchen floor with a hammer. He’ll have to break the tiles completely before he can fix them.

  “I was talking about my son.”

  Words come back to Mark now, Lisa Schena’s voice from last night in his head. She was leaning against her Chevy sedan, her ankles and tanned thighs touching one another, that faded denim skirt and the way she crossed one arm under her breasts while she smoked. Wants to live with his fucking father.

  “He wants to live with his dad.”

  “Correct.”

  A busboy begins to wipe down their table, then set it. He is tall and slight. On the wrist of his left hand are the tattooed initials A.R. He disappears just as the waitress sets the Bloody Marys down in front of them, each with a stalk of celery too short for the glass, their ends just barely rising out of th
e vodka and tomato juice.

  “Oh shoot, you don’t have menus.”

  Then two bound menus are on the table between them, but Mark Welch and Lisa Schena leave them where they are. Without a toast they lift their glasses and drink, the vodka going into Mark like a mildly dangerous thought he ignores, and she begins to talk about her son. His name is Adam and he’s always been a difficult kid. “Never listened, always had to have time-outs and then I’d have to physically hold him to his little Fisher Price chair because he could never stay still. His father never did anything, and he’s just as bad anyway, can’t concentrate, can’t ever sit in one place unless it’s in front of a computer. He can’t hold a job now either, and he still has split custody but Adam wants to live with him full-time because there are no rules over there, or at least no boundaries, no expectations or respect for anyone else’s space, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve . . .”

  Mark sips and nods and listens. She is clearly a talker. It’s what she did the night before too, talked and talked and talked while he smoked her cigarettes and stared at her in the bruised neon from the bar, drunk and trying not to glance too much at the soft swell of her breasts or her tanned belly or that denim skirt he wanted to unzip and pull down over her hips, half-drunk but grateful for what was happening to him, this old blood descending to his groin where its gathering heaviness left him feeling slightly new again, or at least not dead yet. Nearly three months of nothing, not even in the mornings, and if it weren’t for his life floating away from him, Laura continuing to do all that she does, he might have begun to worry, he might have begun to think of his prostate and sicknesses that were not uncommon in men his age, but again, this was something happening to a body he merely existed inside and any maintenance beyond breathing and eating and drinking seemed to be someone else’s problem, and last night, when that gathering heaviness turned hard, it was as if a crack of daylight and fresh air had entered him somewhere and so he’d stepped toward Lisa Schena against her car and kissed her, something he wants to do now, too. Shut her up with a kiss, though she isn’t boring him, not in the least.