Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  “I went to his son’s house, Laura. While you were with him in your little rendezvous, I was at his fucking son’s house.”

  “Mark.”

  “You think he’ll leave his wife for you? He fucks around all the time, Laura. You’re just the latest hole for him.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Am I? Talk to his son. He told me all about it. Talk to his fucking son.”

  She was moving now, past him and through the kitchen and out the front door, the eye disintegrating too soon, too soon, and Mark’s feet were light again, his legs the ones he had as a kid, for he was in their driveway slapping both hands on the hood of her car, Laura’s Honda pulling fast away from him, bouncing into the street, then jerking forward and speeding up. “You’re going to write that fucking letter!” He was running alongside it, Laura’s face so peculiar, so still even as his fist was punching the glass that separated them, and he was yelling directives at her that she would—goddamnit!—follow.

  But it was Mark Welch doing the following. For nine days, he called in sick. For nine days, and a weekend in between, he was the man living behind the wheel of his sedan, his heart a sick companion lodged between his ears, like having a one-way conversation with one who answered in tubercular coughs. He was the man driving three cars behind Harrison’s as he drove to his acupuncturist and the gym. He was the man following him to the state park in New Hampshire to run with Laura Welch, her husband having rented a small blue Yaris for that, to sit in the pines in it and watch his wife kiss Harrison, a big handsome man in an expensive running suit, black and shiny, his bald head shiny too. Then they would stretch on the ground together side by side, they’d chat and laugh, and Mark could see through the trees Laura’s face. It was more relaxed and contented than he could ever remember, and so he was the man who had tried to break into Harrison’s coupe while he was running with Mark’s wife. He was the man who let all the air out of his rear tires, then regretted it immediately for that meant Harrison would have to sit with Laura in her Civic while they waited for Triple A, though Mark had not waited for that, for in the blue shadows of dusk, his wife’s windows had fogged up, most likely from the heat of their running but maybe the other, too, a thought then an image then a feeling he felt himself push away from, like pushing back from a poker table when your downfall is imminent, standing and walking away, the non-feeling deepening then, this existing inside a body that did what it did. Like following Anna Harrison from her law office to the sandwich shop where she ate alone at a small table in the corner with a book, the same kind of literary-looking paperbacks Laura read for her book group. Mark was the man sipping coffee on the other side of the shop, the place loud with well-dressed workers and young mothers and their young kids, so much normal and happy noise that Anna Harrison, her sandy hair pinned back too tightly so that she appeared compromised in some way, did not notice. Nor did she notice him follow her out, or hang back ten or fifteen paces, the man in a coat and tie for that is what his hands dressed him in those mornings, they’d shaved his face as well, and splashed aftershave onto his cheeks, that sweet-smelling burn in his skin that seemed to reach him long after. The question was: Does he tell her? Does he tell her that her husband and his wife—what? Such an old and predictable story, ageless really, like some virus that affects some marriages and not others. And that’s how she appeared to him, too. She was the woman who had accepted this sickness she lived with, a woman who took her pleasures where she could—a good novel, a hot cup of minestrone soup, a freshly baked roll and cold glass of water on a clean napkin. And if he did tell her, perhaps that would be it for her and she would be ready for what is sick to finally die, and then Frank Harrison Jr. would be living in an apartment somewhere and who would be sharing it with him but Laura Murphy Welch?

  Mark had followed her the most. As she left the realty office for the gym, as she left the gym for a run with Harrison in the state park, as she left the state park for the Marriott. Three times that first week, she left work at noon to have lunch with Harrison at the Panera two blocks from his bank. They took window seats, brazenly happy together, each leaning forward as the other spoke, nodding their heads, sometimes laughing, one or the other reaching over to touch a hand or arm, his wife’s face looking as it had only twice before that he could remember—after the agony of giving birth to their daughter and son, the skin of her face smoother somehow, a light in her eyes that could only come from deep relief and a hard-earned joy.

  Sitting in his small rented Yaris, Mark had felt small himself, a grasping failure of a man. How could he deny what he was seeing? Wasn’t it time to let her go? But to allow the question into his head and heart was to allow a black tumor to take residence there where it would grow. But the only thing growing was this distance between himself and the world he supposedly lived in. He’d become a man things happened to, and he found himself groping for the tools of his work: Risk response and its plans for contingency and mitigation. The monitoring and controlling of the results of those plans. Staring out the driver’s window of his parked rental car across Water Street into the Panera booth, his wife and lover settled there so comfortably, the only contingency plan he could consider was this: He would not leave her, he would not kick his wife from her home, for then she would create one with Harrison. Mark would move into his mother’s apartment. He would stop telling Laura she could no longer see him. He would stop telling her to write a letter telling him goodbye. He would pull back and throw his hands up and let what was coming come. Let his wife’s mistake take care of itself. For in Harrison’s lean and shaven profile—the way he leaned forward at all times, the way his ears lay flat as a wolf’s against his bald head—Mark sensed the predator his son’s choice of words had revealed. Her husband would let her keep a place of refuge she would need later, and in the meantime, he would take the high road. He would be her “bully” husband who had chosen to move into his mother’s apartment until his wife came around, until Laura Murphy Welch came back from the woods one day scratched and bloody and looking for the man who had loved her all along.

  MARK STEERS SLOWLY down his street. It is late afternoon, one of his neighbors is grilling burgers, the charred smell of it in the air. In the driveway are his mother’s Buick and Laura’s Honda, his space vacant between them, and he pulls between the two cars and thinks of his father before he became Welchy, a big man who walked in the door at the end of the day laughing loudly, swooping Claire and Mark up into his stubbled kisses that smelled like Vitalis and cigar smoke, popcorn and whiskey, his eyes taking in his children as if they were his only cure. Then he was gone and Mark was fourteen, scooping a grounder into his glove and gunning it to Danny O’Neil, the smack of the leather, the runner two strides late, the sun low behind the field so that they were all in a warmly shadowed light that seemed etched from someplace golden and far away where somebody good was in charge and they didn’t have to worry about anything, just play.

  For so many years he has worried, but not now. Strangely, not now. Between his legs is the lingering warmth of what he’d emptied into Lisa Schena, and he wants to call her and apologize. If she’ll let him, he may even want to see her again, he is not sure. He is not sure of much, but he knows something has tipped and shifted, and something else has let go and something else is now coming.

  He rises out of his sedan. He leaves the sunroof open and the windows down. If it rains tonight, then it fucking rains. He unlocks his trunk and takes the plastic tub and places into it the glue and mortar bag and various tools he’s going to have to learn to use. When he slams the hood, Laura is there, her profile in the kitchen window, her hair and face and torso silhouetted against the rear window to their backyard, the maple trees in the late afternoon light. She’s talking on the phone. Maybe to Harrison. Maybe to one of their children, whom they never seem to see much of anymore, something that probably won’t change and there’s little to be done about it. Laura is only in shadow. Her long hair hangs down her straight back, and
she is young again and there is the dull stab of remorse, not for what he’s done today, but for something he never did but vowed he would for this quiet woman who was nothing like those he’d dated before, no biting wit or even very much charm, no seeming desire to rise up some glimmering corporate tower. She didn’t have one’s generous curves or another’s dark eyes promising pleasures both sensual and intellectual. But there was something so accepting about this woman who had sold him his condo that he was soon inviting her into it, the sun low over the water, Mark distracted by the gold in her hair, her deep green eyes, her high cheekbones and straight clavicle, and he liked how she wanted to hear about him, his job and his boyhood, but not like she was interrogating him or sizing him up. There was a calm to her, a passivity he could only do one thing with—to take it in his two hands and begin to shape, then manage her as he saw fit.

  Mark’s cheeks burn. He squats and lifts the tub and carries it to his front door. He has not approached it since there was snow on the ground. He climbs the three concrete steps. His heart thumps softly in his chest, and he has to lift his leg and rest the tub on his thigh to grasp the brass knob that won’t turn. He is only vaguely surprised by this. His keys are in his pants pocket but he will have to put down the tub to get them. He reaches over it and knocks on his own door. His mother is surely in her kitchen cooking herself something, leaving a plate for her son. Or she might be out by the pool nursing a glass of white wine over a magazine, one eye out for Laura. Maybe the three of them could go out there together, all three adults, no hard feelings. They could sit by the water till the sun is down and through the trees come the soft lights of their neighbors. His mother would politely excuse herself, and Mark and Laura Welch would talk. He would tell her things. He would apologize. Maybe she would too, though he no longer needed that, and they would talk not about what had happened, only what had to happen next. They’d speak quietly. Calmly. Maybe they would reach over and touch. Maybe they would even kiss. Maybe Laura would stand and walk away as she had every right to do. Or she would softly squeeze his fingers and lead him back into their house and up to their room and into their bed and they would make love, no matter what each of them had done earlier or with whom, and it would be different this time. He would pay more attention, and he would let her do whatever she wanted, then and later, every day and every night and week and month she chose to stay with him, which she might not, this woman whose footsteps he now heard through the door, this woman he could hear moving through their entryway, his heart in his head once again for he did not know if he was even up for any of this, this change from change, the door swinging inward as he straightened, his wife’s face lovely and surprised and waiting.

  MARLA

  SOMETIMES AFTER DRESSING FOR WORK, MARLA WOULD STAND at the kitchen sink with the last of her coffee and feel as if her small apartment and everything in it were props for a movie she wasn’t even in, as if she were working for all this for somebody else. She was twenty-nine years old and had been a teller at Providential Bank for eight years. She owned a Honda two-door, and her bedroom closet was full of large tasteful outfits with shoes to match. In her carpeted living room was a high-definition TV and DVD player enclosed in an oak cabinet with glass doors, the bottom shelves filled with workout discs she never used beneath musicals from the forties she watched once or twice a month. Alone again on a Saturday night, she’d curl up on the couch with a bowl of buttered popcorn and watch two movies back to back. She’d listen to the orchestra’s manly horns and womanly strings and watch men who could sing and dance their leading ladies into a swoon under the stars over a glittering sea, and Marla would pull her cat Edna into her lap and stroke her head till she purred, and she’d try to pretend she wasn’t miserable, even with all she had.

  On Thursday nights she’d go out with her friends from the bank, usually to Pedro Diego’s downtown because they had nine kinds of margaritas and they kept the place lit up in an aquamarine light. It made the tiled cocktail tables, the huge cacti in the corners, and the straw sombreros hanging on the wall all seem to be in an underwater tequila dream, and when she was a little drunk she always felt prettier, or maybe just more hopeful, or reckless, which occurred to her once might be the same thing. She’d borrow one or two cigarettes from Lisa’s pack of Marlboros and she’d suck her peach margarita through the straw, laugh at Nancy’s nasty jokes, listen to Nancy bitch about their supervisor, Dorothy, who was fifty-six years old and seemed to have married the bank twenty-five years earlier. But there was a sadness in Dorothy’s eyes, even when she was briskly handing you a memo making your job more tedious. If you looked past the hard lines of her face, her short, unstylish hair, you could see how dark and sad her eyes really were. Not pissed off the way the other girls saw her, but melancholy. Lonely, Marla was sure.

  Nancy’s husband Carl was a computer salesman with a square, handsome face, blue eyes with nothing behind them, and the beginnings of a gut he didn’t bother working off anymore. He and Nancy had two teenage sons and lived in a five-bedroom on Whittier Lake north of town. Three or four times a year they would host a party for their favorite coworkers from his job and hers, and their place would be full of casually dressed husbands and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, all sipping drinks, chatting and laughing and munching cheese sticks and buttery stuffed mushrooms, appetizers Marla was careful not to touch. Instead, she’d grab a carrot to chew on while she sipped from a glass of white wine. Soon many of the women would get around to talking about their young children, and something seemed to come into the air between them that wasn’t there just a few moments before; the light in their eyes became more genuine somehow, and they nodded their heads not out of habit or good manners, but because they really did know what the other was talking about. The air would be heavy with it. And often it left Marla feeling so excluded she’d refill her wineglass and walk out onto the deck.

  She’d lean against the railing and look at the lawn sloping down to the stands of pines and birches at the water’s edge. There was a dock there and a boathouse Carl had built himself a few years earlier. Not long after he’d driven the last nail, Nancy had confessed to the girls at Pedro’s that she and her husband made love there while the boys slept up in the house.

  “We just had to,” she’d said, then shook her head and laughed. “But I got two splinters in my butt and I made Carl pull them out with his teeth!”

  Nancy had a small, lined face that was pretty even when she wore her glasses, and sometimes when she laughed they’d slip halfway down her nose, which made Lisa and Cheryl laugh even harder at this picture of Carl’s face buried in their friend’s rear. Marla had laughed too, though she didn’t think it was that funny; it was like being careless with a precious gift, talking that way—not about the boathouse or the marriage itself, but the lovemaking, what men and women who loved each other did when they were alone.

  “You shouldn’t joke, Nancy.”

  “Oh, lighten up, Marla,” Lisa said, coughing now, knocking a cigarette loose from her pack.

  “Why shouldn’t I joke?” Nancy’s eyes were still bright and glistening with mischief.

  “I don’t know—because it’s special, isn’t it?” Marla’s cheeks and throat felt hot and she wished she’d kept quiet. Her friends were giving her a look they seemed to give her more and more, their mouths smiling but their eyes still and careful. Cheryl, with her streaked hair and tiny waist she got from six mornings a week at the gym, nodded her head and said, “She’s right, Nancy; you’re a slut.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  They’d all laughed, even Marla, but the rest of the night she felt that familiar drift away from her friends. She sipped her margarita and listened to them talk, and once again she began to feel sorry for herself; she was twenty-five years old at the time and still had never slept with a man—not just because she believed it was special, but because no boy or man had ever stopped to take much of an interest unless it was to be cruel; in middle school other kids teas
ed her and called her Marla Marmalade, and in high school at parties she willed herself to go to, she was almost completely ignored. Once in a crowded house, a drunk boy had wedged her against the hall wall and pressed his hands into her breasts under her sweater. Junior year, a tall boy with thick glasses would sit with her at lunch sometimes and talk about how bad the food was or how “oblivious” the band teacher was to “reality.” But nothing ever happened, and Marla was never sure why he’d ever sat with her at all. For a while in her early twenties she would drink too much at parties and would sometimes end up with a man who drank too much too. There would be groping and fondling, and once she took a man into her mouth who gripped her hair like he wanted to yank it. But she never opened her legs, was never so drunk she completely lost that part of herself that still believed there was a man out there who would love her.

  She started drinking more moderately and began to view her virginity as a gift she was keeping for herself to open with a man special enough to know it was a gift. She knew this was an outdated notion and sometimes wondered if she really believed it; if she were as attractive as her friends, would she think this way? And for a few years now, it had begun to feel less like a gift and more like a burden; she was turning into one of those rare women who had completely missed the train everyone else had gotten on. She began to be convinced something might be truly wrong with her, that she had a defect everyone could see but her.

  Except for her weight, she did not consider herself all that unattractive; she had thick brown hair she never had to color, and it had natural waves in it her hairdresser said he’d kill for. Her eyes were small and set a little too deeply into her round face, but she had high cheekbones, a straight nose, and a symmetrical mouth full of fairly white teeth. Since high school she’d tried to lose the extra thirty-five pounds that seemed to gather mainly in her hips and thighs, but exercising felt to her like punishment for a crime she couldn’t remember having committed, and when she starved herself she felt as if she was living in a cruel and sadistic world and at three or four in the morning she’d be in her kitchen standing in the light of the refrigerator eating cheese or dipping French bread into a jar of mayonnaise. But still, she wasn’t that heavy, certainly no more than some of the wives and girlfriends she saw with men around town, some of the women so big you could see their thighs rub together when they walked.