Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  She’s telling a story about her ex, how she came home one day from work—an animal hospital where she’s an assistant to the veterinarian, an old, sweet lesbian named Carol—and found him and Adam playing some kind of video game where men blew each other’s heads off. “And they’d been doing it since I’d left that morning and it was a school day.”

  Mark shakes his head, then nods in sympathy, his eyes on her washed-out blues. Strange this ability for his face and head to do the right things. In the tinted sunlight from the window, he is looking at her more clearly now. Her short hair is a dazed blond, treated with chemicals so many times over the years it has no definable color at all. Her teeth are stained with coffee and tobacco, and just beneath her slightly pocked left cheek is a pink scar that directs one’s attention to her weak chin and upper arms which have no tone and jiggle slightly as she talks, making points with her hands in the air above her still-full drink. She is absolutely nothing like his wife in any way, and is that why he is reaching across the table now and taking her small hand, squeezing it once softly and saying, “We should eat.”

  “Oh shit, I’m talking way too much.”

  “No you’re not.”

  “Decided?” The waitress is standing there with her pad and pen. Lisa Schena looks up at her as if she’s just been exposed in some way, a dark splotch spreading across her throat.

  “Just a salad with chicken on it for me.”

  “Dressing?”

  “Creamy Italian, please.”

  “And you, sir?”

  “Same.” Though he does not like creamy Italian dressing, but food now, as hungry as he was earlier, seems entirely beside the point. “And two more of these, please.”

  They are alone again. She is smiling at him. “You drank that one pretty fast.”

  “Hair of the dog.”

  “Tell me about it. We had to put down three yesterday.” She leans to her straw and takes it between her lips and sucks, swallowing twice. Her eyes are on the table but not on the table.

  “What’s your job when you have to do that?”

  “I hold them down in a three-point restraint, then Carol administers the shot. Fun, huh?”

  “That must be hard.”

  “What’s hard are their fucking owners. We had to put down a perfectly healthy retriever just because the new wife didn’t like dogs.”

  “You couldn’t find it a home?”

  “People want puppies. It’s like that with kids, too. You know how many teenagers will never get out of foster care till they’re grown? Just about all of them. People don’t like to pick up where other people left off. People like to buy new.” She shakes her head and glances out the window, one finger tapping the end of her straw. He wants to lean forward and touch her lightly scarred cheek.

  She looks back at him. “Tell me about your ex.”

  “My ex?”

  “You don’t remember that either?”

  Again, this warmth in his face that does not simply come from his body, but him—it seems to come from him. “No, I don’t.”

  “And I thought I was drunk.”

  “We both were.”

  She points at his left hand, her eyes on his ring finger. “You were telling me why you still wear that, remember? I said, ‘You’re married, aren’t you?’ And you said, ‘No, not really.’ And I asked you why you wear that ring, and you told me.”

  The vodka is a small grass fire spreading in his chest, and he knows he doesn’t care where it goes or what it burns. Vow. His own voice in his head, the tissue memory of it leaving his vocal cords from the night before in the neon lot behind The Tap standing close to this woman sitting across from him now. “I told you I’d made a vow.”

  “Yep. Then you kissed me.” Lisa laughs and shakes her head, and it’s as if she’s told a very old joke and the waitress arrives with their salads and Lisa Schena orders another round, her faded blue eyes on his, a smile in them that is no longer on her lips.

  AFTER HER PROMISES TO HIM, that night of the detective’s DVD, Laura had gone to bed early and Mark had followed her. Talking seemed to be finished. If she knew he was only five or six feet behind her, she did not acknowledge it, or him, and she moved into their bedroom, then closed the bathroom door behind her and there was the running of the faucet.

  In Mark’s side pants pocket was her cell phone, her laptop computer still in its case in the front hallway where she sometimes left it for days. He moved across the room and lifted folded laundry off the wingback chair in the corner. It’s where Laura put his clean clothes. Always folded, always in that chair. That night there was a pair of jeans, three T-shirts, and two pair of dress socks, matched and balled together. He placed all this in his bureau and he sat in the chair in the corner and he waited.

  There came the flushing of the toilet, then again, the running of the faucet. She kept her cotton nightgown on a hook on the inside bathroom door so it wasn’t unusual that she would enter the bathroom dressed, then emerge in her nightgown, her clothes under her arm she would drop into the hamper near the closet door. But that night, it was the first time Mark had ever really thought about this transformation. Sitting in the chair in the corner near the window to the street, he saw this as dirt rubbed into the hole she’d put in his chest, for he suspected she did not do this with Frank Harrison Jr. He was almost certain she did not close doors to him.

  She dropped her sweat suit into the hamper. When she turned toward the bed, her eyes on something far, far from this room, she saw him and jerked slightly.

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “Now you do.”

  “I know, Mark. I do.”

  She climbed under the covers on her side of the bed. She lay her head on its pillow. She turned her face toward him. “Are you coming to bed?”

  “Maybe.”

  She nodded. She stared at the ceiling. He could feel her cell phone in his pocket, and he knew that when she was asleep he would check its call history—its sent messages and those she’d received.

  “Mark?”

  He did not answer. Let her lie there in his quiet for a while.

  “Mark?”

  He crossed one leg over the other. He stared at her. In the lamplight, he could see she’d removed whatever makeup she’d worn earlier, maybe the third touch-up of the day, it occurred to him—the first for work, the second probably right before the gym for Harrison, the third to hide Harrison from her husband. Now it was off, and the bags beneath her eyes were easier to see, as was the loose flesh beneath her chin, the nearly brittle thinness of her hair. It all looked grotesque to him now. For years there’d been her desire for solitude, all those hours she needed to run and be alone. There’d been her sloppiness in constantly paying the bills late. Her quiet at dinner parties that bordered on rude. There was Mary Ann as a teenager when she and her mother hardly spoke to one another or else screamed and cried and he had to step in as if he had two sixteen-year-old daughters and not one. There was Laura’s polite coldness to his mother, the way she’d never quite embraced taking her in once she turned eighty. There was Laura’s constantly getting his orders wrong at the grocery store; they’d be hosting a cookout, and he’d tell her to buy eight pounds of ground beef, but she’d come back with five because she never really fucking listened to him and he’d have to drop everything and drive to the store himself. There was her bad breath between meals. There was her nightly television habit of watching banal crime dramas, her eyes fixed to the screen as unquestioningly as a child’s. There was her mediocre cooking, her preference for frozen vegetables, a lot of salt, and bland dishes she wasn’t ashamed to serve with ketchup. And now she’d lied and cheated and adulterated. She’d shifted their home off its very foundation and shoved shards of hot glass into Mark Welch’s blood and brain and heart: and this searing ache was for what? For her? Look at her; what was he losing anyway?

  But this was a question that died before he could even fully think it, for he loved her. He did. He had since that fir
st afternoon twenty-five years ago when she led him from one empty home to another.

  “Mark? Honey, you’re not going to do anything foolish, are you?”

  “Please don’t call me that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  She stared at him a moment. He had misstepped and knew it, for in her eyes was a hardening, some sort of decision being made about him, or them. Or her and Harrison. Or all three. She turned her back to him. She did not reach over to switch off her lamp.

  “Laura?”

  “What?”

  “You need to take a personal day tomorrow.”

  “Why?” She kept her back to him. She didn’t move.

  “Because you’re going to write him a letter, and then you’re going to show it to me.”

  Mark recognized the tone of his voice. It was the same he used when ordering a poorly motivated team member to do one thing or another. And so he was ordering his wife—for she was, by definition, a member of his team, wasn’t she?—to stay home. He could not have her out of the house and away from him where she could so easily call or meet up with Harrison. He did not even want her in the company of the other women at the realty office—gray-eyed Barb Thompson and her endless supply of cardigan sweaters, the fearful and forever dieting Kathy Ann, Lexus-driving Linda Brown—for he knew women instinctively looked after one another, even when one of their own was wrong, and in fact, had just badly hurt another woman. In their feminine presence, quiet Laura may very well begin to cry, then talk. There would be tissues handed to her, consoling hugs given, and soon Mark Welch, her cuckolded husband, would be on the outside of this womb of solidarity, and because he was on the outside, he would necessarily be in the wrong.

  “Laura? Did you hear me?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was thick with the sleep that was already coming, her breathing shallow and steady. This did not surprise him. She had always fallen asleep when she most needed to: when she hadn’t sold a property in months; when she and he had had a bad fight over a bill she’d paid late; when her husband was an ineffective PM and feared losing his job and the house. He’d lie in bed, his hands beneath his skull, and he’d picture the foreclosure, watch the humiliation of the moving van backing to their front door. As they lay side by side, he’d told Laura his very real fears, but she’d only nodded her head as if he were recounting a TV football game, and then she was asleep. It’s where she went when there was trouble of any kind, to her dream world or to wherever she went in her head when she ran mile after mile down a long road away from what anyone else would call her life.

  Mark sat there for quite some time. He was reviewing the difficulty of monitoring her when he also had to be at work. So there would be no work. He was between large projects anyway. He had never called in sick and so now he would. Maybe for days. He took out her cell phone. He was no expert with these things. With his own cell phone, he knew only how to make a call, take a call, and get his messages. He did not want to know how to do anything else. He refused to be one of these men who stared at small screens in their palms. He knew their weekly calendars were in there, as were their emails, as was the news and any other distractions they could find. But to Mark, this constant staring into a small screen was the sure way to miss the big screen, which was the one day and night you had to reach your goals, and if you didn’t see big, you would fail to see opportunities and you would fail to see threats.

  But he had failed, hadn’t he? If Laura had not shown a new interest in his testicles, would he have detected what he ultimately did? For days afterward, he told himself he had overreacted, that his wife had tried something new with his body, that’s all. Maybe all those other changes he saw in her was simply evidence of her happiness with him and the life they’d built. But the following Saturday, as she changed into her Nike sweats for her second trip of the day to the gym, he waved at her from the backyard where he’d been raking wet leaves and twigs. He waited twenty minutes, then drove to the gym, cruising slowly through its massive lot. There were cars and vans and SUVs of all kinds, half of them coated with dried road salt, but no gray Civic belonging to his wife. His heart began to thump in his brain, his hands on the wheel felt tiny and far away. He drove through the lot five or six times, then he drove home and walked straight into the hallway for her laptop computer in its case, but it was not there. Nor was her cell phone.

  He stood in the entry to his home for longer than he ever had. There was the oval antique mirror hanging beside the interior door, the wooden pegs beneath it for their keys. There was the coatrack against the wall, a blue sweatshirt of Kevin’s hanging there for years, his baseball cap on the hook beside it. It was from his first B-League season when they went deep into the playoffs and Kevin had made a diving stop at short that broke his wrist. There was the pine trunk Mary Ann would sit on to pull off her winter boots or to pull on her roller blades. Laura had painted the trunk on a tarp near the pool, a sage green Mark had not appreciated until it sat in the entryway and looked to him the color of home. There was the smell of wool and old paint and dust in the woven mat under his feet, three pairs of Laura’s running shoes in a neat row across from the trunk. And there was the empty place where her laptop should have been but was not. He told himself this was not a bad thing, for it would force him—the head of this family, the manager of the Welch Team—to remain calm. Over the years he had created a Strong Matrix, which meant he was in control, and if he lost that now, he could lose it all, so he would not look at her emails. He would not open her cell phone. Not yet.

  And maybe she’d run an errand before heading back to the gym. It was not good that this thought had not come to him already. It showed he wasn’t thinking clearly. He drove back to the lot. He waited in his car for nearly an hour. When he returned home, the March sky a darkening blue, Laura’s car was in her place in the driveway. Inside the house, water was running in pipes in the walls, and he took the stairs two at a time to their bedroom.

  He could hear the shower. He opened the door. There was steam and the smell of soap and there was his wife’s nude silhouette behind a rubber curtain.

  “Good workout?”

  “Oh, you scared me.”

  “Go back to the gym?”

  “Yeah, it was a tough class.”

  “Why so long? You run an errand?”

  “No, just the gym.”

  He pulled the door closed. He kept his hand on the knob. He looked down at his yard sneakers, the toes damp and muddy. She was speaking again, her voice like the chirp of a bird who has flown into a black tunnel but does not yet know it.

  There was the greedy, grasping need for him to know everything now, before she even stepped from the shower naked and cleansed of whatever she’d done. But no, he would stay quiet. He had identified the risk and now he would develop a response to it. He would delegate and subcontract and wait for a full report.

  Mark stood. He walked around the foot of their bed and stared down at her. The light was in Laura’s face, though her features were soft and in complete repose. It was the look of one newly relieved of a long-held burden, and did she feel relieved just before falling asleep?

  Downstairs his heart was a blooming pulse in his head. He moved through the kitchen, the overhead light fixture hanging from a wire and aiming at the windows like the spotlight from a police cruiser. He stepped over the broken chairs on the floor and retrieved Laura’s laptop from its case in the hallway.

  In the kitchen he filled a glass with ice and poured himself three fingers of Bacardi and a splash of Coke and he carried his drink and his wife’s computer and cell phone into the living room. There was the masochistic temptation to watch the DVD again, to see her head lower out of sight in Harrison’s Audi TT coupe. But there came a tremor in his hands and fingers and he drank long and deep. He took her cell phone and pressed buttons that beeped until he found a bar for messages, sent and received. There were none in either file. Had she been deleting these for months? Or had she alway
s done this? He opened her laptop and turned it on. The spartan light of the screen was like the parting of a wound.

  What he’d expected to find was filth. Lusty bravado. Pornographic descriptions of what they both yearned for once they were together again. What he found first were work emails going back months, brief and routine messages about house keys and For Sale signs and balloon colors for Open Houses. There were a few old emails to and from Mary Ann, all of them upbeat. From Laura: That’s great about your project, honey. When can you come home for a visit?

  Mary Ann: As soon as I can find the time. You know I always miss you guys! Love, M.A.

  Mark sipped his drink. He felt both calmed by these messages but also aggrieved. You guys.

  He found no emails to or from Frank Harrison Jr. He typed his name into the email history bar, but nothing came up. Why was he even doing this? The truth was out, so what was he searching for? He wasn’t sure, but the phrase Know thine enemy slipped between the heartbeats in his head and that’s when he aimed the cursor at the general history at the top of the screen and that’s when he saw an endless stack of Gmail accounts, one after the other. The tips of his fingers became cold as bone. He aimed at one of the Gmails and opened it, but he needed a user name and a password. He typed in his wife’s first name and the rest appeared in the box: LauraMW. She’d never been practical or very careful; she was the woman who lay under the sun at noon with no sunblock, the woman who ran at night in dark clothing; so he typed in the code to their debit card. Eight characters were needed. He typed it in twice, one after the other, the email opening instantly. It was difficult not to feel slightly proud of himself for knowing his wife so well, and it was difficult not to judge her harshly for being so careless, though his judgment of her had never felt so justified as it did now, for before him were two long emails between LauraMW and FrankJH. He drained his drink and he began to read.