Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  A small pickup truck pulled into the lot. Behind the wheel was a young man with a dark wispy beard. His eyes were scanning for a place to park, and he appeared so confident he’d find one, his life so completely and utterly under his control, that Mark wanted to roll down his window and say something to him, anything, anything that might better prepare him for the chaos that lay ahead.

  MARK ROLLS AS QUIETLY from the bed as he can. The floor is a deep carpet, and he moves barefoot across it to his clothes. He turns his back to sleeping Lisa Schena. He pulls on his underwear. As he steps into his shorts, it is clear he is doing it, not his fingers and feet and straightening legs. He glances down at this sleeping woman. Her mouth is a partly open oval, her closed eyes two slits, and it’s as if she dreams of something horrible or simply surprising, not what she expected at all. Her forehead and cheeks are sunburned, and Mark imagines her lying on the beach earlier planning to call him. Then all that sun, the drinks, and what they’d both done. What he had done and not just Laura, who had taken a burning torch and held its flame to the dry wood of their house, but now he has taken his own torch and held it there too.

  Outside the slider, the last of the sun lies brightly over the small pressure-treated deck and its two plastic chairs. The roofs of the houses appear the color of ash, the sky above them a blanched blue.

  On the cane chair against the wall are the two unopened cans of beer. He takes one and grips the handle of the sliding door and begins to pull.

  “Lovin’ and leavin’ me?” Lisa Schena smiles and yawns and stretches one arm behind her head, her knuckles tapping the headboard.

  “Not me.” He smiles too, though it feels forced. “I’ll be out here.”

  There is the comforting slide of the heavy door in its oiled track, then Mark is sitting with his foot on the rail, the beer cool and surprisingly good. He watches a gull glide silently on air currents not far overhead, and he feels he is that bird, alone and floating, a scavenger of the used-up and discarded.

  Then Lisa is out there too, sitting in the chair beside him. She rests her feet on the rail next to his. She taps two menthol cigarettes from her pack and offers him one. He takes it and smokes it the way he did the night before when he’d stood with her under the neon light listening to her go on and on.

  There’s a crack-hiss as she opens her beer can, the muted thump of arcade machines out on the strip, the sucking, pounding surf.

  “You’re being quiet,” she says. “Having regrets?”

  “No.” He looks at her. Her hair is flattened in the back and there’s a smudge of eyeliner beneath her right eye.

  “Me neither.”

  But he does have regrets, or knows he will soon, the way a man who’s just broken a bone knows the nerveless shock of the sudden and new is only temporary. Now he misses his wife, the familiarity of her, the constancy of her, though he hasn’t felt that for months.

  “I had my tubes tied by the way, so no worries there.”

  “That’s good.”

  “You all right?”

  He nods at her. He smiles. He sips from the cop’s can of Busch. “Was he your boyfriend?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who lives here.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You don’t know?”

  She inhales on her cigarette, and Mark thinks of his wife’s spotless lungs, her nearly viceless body. Lisa Schena blows the smoke straight out her mouth. She raises the beer to her lips. “Maybe it’s none of your business.”

  Mark nods. He lets the coldness of what she just said hang in the air between them. It is a technique he uses at work as well, asking questions that lead to the near admission of a flaw or lack of judgment, and then he will just sit there quietly, letting the truth ripple back in the other’s face like pond water on a mossy rock.

  “Is he still your boyfriend?”

  “You’re a prick, aren’t you, Mark?”

  He nods his head and smiles. Maybe she’s right. Why not admit it? Who better to admit it to than Lisa Schena, who drinks too much and sleeps around and helps kill animals to support herself and her fucked-up son?

  “That’s right, I get paid very well to be one, too.”

  “Are you working now?”

  “No.”

  “Then knock it the fuck off.” Her cigarette is only half-smoked, but she flicks it over the railing down to the sandy yard below. She turns to him. “Are you judging me?”

  “You tell me. Would he be all right with this?”

  “I’m all right with it. Or I was till now. I think you need to leave.”

  “Do I?” He begins to smile, the act as dangerous and unavoidable as what they’d both just done. He thinks of his semen having dripped out of her onto the cop’s sheets.“You just cheated on him, didn’t you?”

  “Fuck you.” A flame flares up behind his left eye, the back of her knuckles sliding away like a snake’s head, and he is on his feet, the plastic chair sailing out away from them, the clatter of it on the neighbor’s roof before falling though Mark’s eyes are not on it but on Lisa Schena’s, her wrist locked between his squeezing fingers.

  “What gives you the right to do that, huh? What?”

  “Let go of me.” Laura’s words, not this woman’s, but they come from her mouth like some memorized lines from a script written before any of them were born. And her eyes have changed. What before appeared streetwise now looks lost and scared, alone and used to being alone, all in a nearly colorless blue.

  For a half-breath of air, he must admit that he needs to see this, that he is still here and capable of being seen. But now a whimper of fear comes from her, the same sound she’d made earlier, and he lets go as quickly as if he’d touched something poisonous.

  “Leave.” She lowers her wrist and begins to rub it. He wants to apologize, to tell her he’s never touched a woman like that before, even his lying, cheating wife. But no words seem to be forming.

  “I said leave.” There is no fear in her voice, only outrage, and Mark is pulling open the slider and stepping into the coldness of the cop’s room. The scent of their sex lingers in the air as he stoops for his sandals, and Lisa Schena’s voice is in the room, her half-shadowed form filling the doorframe. “You’re a loser, Mark. That’s all I pick. It’s all I ever fucking find. Just one more man who never grew up and is a fucking bully and a coward and a piece of shit.”

  There are more words, more of Lisa Schena’s endless sentences, but Mark is down the stairs now, pausing in the cop’s TV room just long enough to strap on his sandals and hurry through the small, neat kitchen and out the door, its frame slapping the railing so hard the dead potted plant falls to the ground below, a soft thump that sounds to Mark like the making of a bruise.

  HE TAKES THE LONG WAY HOME. It’s a road that hugs the ocean for a mile or two before cutting west for small towns of Cape and ranch houses, double-wide mobile homes with white picket fences between their driveways and patches of green lawns. In one, a shirtless man stands under the dying sun before a gas grill, barbecue smoke rising into his face though he holds his ground and doesn’t move, squinting into the heat as he flips cooking meat with a spatula. Then he’s gone and Mark passes the Beachside Motel, the beach three miles away. He passes a clapboard restaurant, its front deck festooned with red, white, and blue bunting from the Fourth last week, a holiday he celebrated by sitting near the pool at the umbrella table with his mother. Every Fourth of July for years, ever since the kids were little, he and Laura would host a daylong pool party. Five or six families would spend their entire holiday with them—the Brandts and Salvuccis, the Battastinis and Doucettes from next door, Claire and Tom and their kids before they moved to Connecticut. Rock and roll would be blasting on the boom box, ten to fifteen children splashing in the water, inflatable floaties around their arms, most of the mothers sitting at the shallow end with their feet in. Some would be sipping a drink or cup of wine, and they’d all be talking and laughing with one another, Laura visiting with them
briefly before she hurried into the kitchen for more chips and dip, cold drinks for the kids, hamburger patties or marinated chicken from the fridge for Mark, who spent so much of his time at the smoking gas grill, cooking flesh and chatting with whoever happened to wander over. He’d sip a beer or a Bacardi and Coke, and he’d take in all this happy chaos he looked forward to each year.

  Once the kids became teenagers they started drifting off to their own parties, and so the Fourth became a party for adults. The drinking got harder and started sooner, and there was less swimming and more smoking around the umbrella table, more dirty jokes. One year Charlie Brandt drank too much and called his wife a cow, and she threw a bowl of French onion dip at him that grazed his shoulder before falling into the pool. Mark had to walk him inside the house to lie on the couch and sleep it off.

  When the sun was down, Mark would build a fire in the pit a few yards from the diving board, and his married friends would pull their chairs around it and he’d put something quieter on the boom box and he’d sit in one of the chaise lounges, Laura joining him there, her back against his chest, his arms around her just under her breasts, and he’d lie back and listen to their friends chat and laugh or go quiet now and then as they stared into the flames and listened to a tenor saxophone floating a note through them that was both joyful and melancholy, which is how he felt then, his wife’s head against his shoulder, the smell of her hair and skin, its baby oil and chlorine and dried sweat, her breath rising and falling beneath his palm, and he’d feel so tender toward her it scared him, the way holding his children as babies had scared him, that he’d been entrusted with these precious responsibilities and there were so many ways for them to get hurt or worse, and then—as he kissed Laura’s hair or cheek, one of their friends telling a story or joke—he’d want to apologize to her. He’d want to tell her he was sorry for always being on her case—about meals and bills, about what she watched on TV, about how little money she actually made, about how she took too long on her runs, about what a bitch she was around his mother, what a baby she’d always been with Mary Ann, letting their daughter take charge too soon, because Laura was too damn quiet and meek and if she wasn’t fucking up in some way then she was running by herself or sleeping too soon too deeply when they all needed her, goddamnit; her family had needs.

  None of this would be fully in Mark’s head, but holding his wife close on the chaise in the firelight among friends, he could feel all those moments leading to this one like the lingering echo of gunshots.

  Once, a little drunk, he’d kissed Laura’s jawbone and whispered in her ear, “I’m sorry.” But Bobby Batastini had just told a story and everyone was laughing, Laura too, her stomach muscles bunching under Mark’s fingers. She had not heard him, and he wasn’t going to say it again.

  But why not?

  Mark drives slowly through a town square. It’s nothing more than two banks, a gas station convenience store, a strip mall, and a Chinese restaurant. He’s rolled down his windows and opened his sunroof, and the wind coming in is warm and smells of asphalt and chicken wings and gasoline. A sadness has opened up in him that surprises him.

  A fucking bully and a coward and a piece of shit!

  He upshifts past a narrow green. In the center stands an eight-foot slab of granite, the names of dead young men etched into it. World War II, Korea, Vietnam. Beside this is a shorter slab, the grass around its base newly placed sod; Iraq and Afghanistan. He accelerates down the road, warm air slapping at the side of his face, and there’s the gut-twisting thought that he’s a dodger of important moments, that he may, in fact, be a coward.

  Laura, a Saturday morning in the fall. They’d both slept late. Mary Ann was away at college, and from downstairs came the smell of slightly burned pancakes, Kevin and one of his buddies eating them in front of ESPN. Outside their bedroom windows, the maple leaves were such a bright orange it was as if the tree was on fire and Mark could not stop looking at it.

  Laura put her hand on his chest under the covers. “Hey, let’s do something today. Just you and me. I won’t even go to the gym.”

  But they were building Mark’s mother’s apartment then, and the builder had given Mark a punch list of things to do. Door hardware to pick up, handicapped rails for the bathroom, drawer and cabinet pulls for the kitchen. These were tasks he enjoyed doing, and he knew, lying there beside Laura, he could have included her in them too, that they could go somewhere for breakfast, then drive to the Home Depot together, maybe even go for a walk together after that. But lately he’d seen a confused and tender hunger in her, as if she needed something from him she used to think only he could give, but now she was on the cusp of knowing she might be able to get it from somewhere else, too, and that’s why she’d looked so vulnerable that fall Saturday morning in their bed, her eyes soft, her lower lip tentative; she was asking Mark to stop her.

  But her face, her voice, her hand on his chest, simply made him tired. They were all asking him to drop one project for another, and he did not drop projects. He saw each and every one to completion, and then he began another.

  “I can’t today, honey. I’ve got that punch list.” And when he climbed out of bed, her hand sliding from his chest, he sensed he’d just enlarged the scope of a project he was not even aware of, one whose costs he would ultimately have to cover.

  Mark passes an auto body shop. He passes a boat supply business and pizza joint, then he’s driving onto the bridge over the Merrimack River. The sun is low to the west, and there are dozens of motorboats cutting through the currents. On the bow of one, two young women in bikinis lie back on their elbows on towels, and he feels again Lisa Schena’s legs around his hips. Are you judging me?

  He had been. How could he say he had not?

  Up ahead is the turnoff for downtown, and he takes it, stopping briefly beneath the overpass to let three teenage boys cross in front of him. They wear low shorts and loose T-shirts, one in a Red Sox cap and untied basketball shoes, and all of them have earplugs in one ear, the wires running into their shorts pocket, each of them hearing different music in their heads while also talking about whatever it is they are.

  There is the feeling he is a man not of these times, one who has been left behind long ago and should have been. Then he is driving along High Street. On both sides are the large Federalists built before this country was a country. Some have ornate painted fences set into stone walls, others deep lawns cut down the center with a walkway. Frank Harrison Jr.’s is poured concrete stamped to look like English cobblestone. It’s pretentious, and Mark eases up on the gas. He sees two cars in the driveway. One of them is Harrison’s white coupe and the other is his wife’s white SUV, both of them matching the white clapboards and white flower boxes overflowing with small red flowers of some kind.

  Then all of this is in Mark’s rearview mirror, and in his head is only a light pulsing, the kind he gets when he knows he has forgotten to complete an important task and can’t quite remember what it is. The last of the sun is in his eyes. He flips down the visor, glimpses on the sidewalk an old man. He’s in a scally cap and a yellow shirt, his shoulders and chest and belly sagging, a metal cane at his side, and he just stands there, staring down at the concrete as if it is telling him something.

  WHEN MARK RETURNED from Harrison’s bank and the realtor’s office’s parking lot, Laura’s car was in the driveway and whatever snow there’d been had melted, the asphalt wet and black. Entering his own house, it was as if he were willingly stepping onto a ship whose lower holds were filling with icy seawater, its bow beginning to shift skyward.

  Laura stood in the kitchen, waiting for him. She wore her blue Nike running suit, and her hair was tied back, and she had one hand on the edge of the sink as if to balance herself.

  “Where did you go, Laura, and don’t tell me it was the fucking gym.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “What? You can’t do what?”

  “We talked about it, and I—”

  “Who? Y
ou and fucking Harrison?”

  “If you yell at me again, I’ll leave.”

  Mark’s heart was kicking at the inside of his skull. In the shadows of the kitchen, his wife stood straight and poised, her chin raised, and she appeared to him terrified yet resolute. This did something to him. The earth seemed to have more gravity, his feet in iron boots as he pulled a stool toward him and sat.

  “We love each other.”

  He stared at her, at her straight jaw, the bags beneath her eyes she hadn’t tried to minimize with makeup, at her closed lips, at her long throat and arms, at her hand on the edge of the sink in the sunlight coming through the window, a tremor in her fingers. It was as if his grief were a hurricane and this was its eye, and he wanted it to never end, this calm, this quiet. Just the two of them in this space that would soon be swept away.

  “Why are you shaking, Laura? Are you afraid of me?”

  She said nothing. She kept her eyes on his. She blinked. “You treat me like I work for you, Mark. You always have. Well I don’t work for you, all right?”

  “You really think that?”

  She shrugged. “I blame myself more than I blame you.”

  “That’s not fair, Laura.” He had to say it, he had to take a stand, but he did not believe his own words and they seemed to fall to the floor between them.

  “At first I needed it, I guess. I was drifting really. Even though I had a job and my running, I was—”

  “What?”

  “Just what I said.” She crossed her arms. She leaned back against the counter. She seemed to be waiting for something now.