Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  She was plump and large-breasted. She wore red lipstick and smoked Pall Malls, and he kept buying her Brandy Alexanders and talked about whatever came up though he seemed to listen to her more, even though all these years later, half-drunk on the beach on his fifty-third birthday, he could not summon one thing she’d told him except, “Your eyes are so sweet.” Then, later, “Enough. You’re coming with me.” In the orange light of a Tiki lamp, they were on her and her brother’s couch, Francis’s erection in her gripping hands as she pulled him to that warm darkness between her legs, and how could he tell her he’d never done this before?

  There were whores in Japan. They lived with their families in alley boxes that smelled like dead fish, and they’d looked like schoolgirls to him, those black bangs, those cheeks they’d covered with so much rouge they became laughing clowns leading his buddies one at a time to where Triz was leading him now. How warm it was. How tight and slippery, a tremor of pleasure as she arched her hips and pulled him in deeper. It had seemed to him she was offering him something so personal and private he must have lied to her in some way to get it. She was looking straight into his face, and he could not bear her eyes for she seemed to be searching for something he knew she would not find and then maybe she’d stop and he lowered his cheek against hers. Her skin had the sweet talcum scent of makeup, her hair stiff with spray. She was making sounds he’d never heard a woman make before—moans of encouragement, but also melancholic surrender, not to him but to something inevitable and ageless, as if she were foreseeing their own distant deaths but until then they had this; they had this.

  Then it was winter two years later, and Francis was making love with Elizabeth Harrington one month shy of their wedding date. It was her first time, his second. There was no Tiki lamp, no trailer couch or shot glasses above. There was no red lipstick, no sounds coming from Beth, and because it was her first time he moved as slowly and as gently as he could, her silence, he assumed, a biting down on her pain and discomfort. They were under a blanket on her bed in the cold-water apartment she shared with another nursing student, a fast-talking girl from the south shore. Outside the window in the slanting afternoon light stood the elevated tracks of the subway train, and Beth held his face in her hands and made him look at her. Her eyes did something to him. There was so much hard will in them—Yes, Francis, I’ve chosen you, I’ve chosen you, I’ve chosen you. Her lips were parted, her chin raised almost in defiance at each of his thrusts, and it was this and the way she held his face and the iron clatter of a train passing full of men and women and children that set everything loose and that good woman Triz had made him withdraw but even his wet shame on her soft pale belly she seemed to think was sweet, and in the Tiki lamp light she smiled up at him as if he’d just brought her flowers, and Francis had closed his eyes against that smile as what was inside him was now pulsing into Elizabeth Harrington, this woman he too had chosen, this woman he had chosen for life.

  For life, goddamnit. He was walking close to the water. When he leaned down to pick up a smooth stone the sand rose up and smacked his forehead and knees. Where before there’d been resentment, there was now only outrage at the unfairness of how he’d been treated. Though he could not quite pinpoint what had been done to him or by whom, only the empty-chested feeling that he’d been sent something beautiful by someone beautiful and someone else had not done his job and delivered the damn package. Then he was back in his car driving again. He was drunk and knew it, but it wasn’t far to his street and what was he doing going home like this?

  Fuck it, Brandt.

  Triz, her black hair and red lipstick, her brown eyes and that smile as she held him and pulled him to her. So long ago, but was it a door he should have kept open? A door that would have pointed to a road taking him someplace softer? A road that would have led to children? That would have led him to no shame in anything about himself—his eyes “sweet,” his seed “sweet”—no shame, no shame, no shame. A nodding off, his eyes opening to see how the sun struck the side of a house, its white trim nearly gold, then the horrible bouncing over curb and lawn and the looming house jolting him into darkness.

  FRANCIS STANDS IN Devon’s room. He’s surprised at how neatly she keeps it. The bed is made, the bedspread tucked cleanly under the pillows at the headboard. The closet door is closed, and the T-shirt and shorts she put on after her shower lie at the foot of the mattress, one folded on top of the other. Her laptop leans against the bedside table in its unzipped case, and there’s a tiny wink of blue light there.

  He was in the dining room when she left for work. He had wanted to check for any emails, to open the most recent one from Devon’s mother, but he was afraid Devon might walk in, and the last thing she needed now was to feel conspired against. It was already a mistake to encourage her to write so personally. She left with a loud “Bye” at the door so he at first thought she was angry till he reached the front windows and saw her walking under the late-day sun in her black-and-white restaurant uniform, those big red headphones over her ears, so perhaps she had the volume turned up and that’s why her own was too.

  He would not be in here if she had not ripped a sheet from the notebook he held. On the desk is nothing but a layer of dust and the brass lamp Beth bought in a barn in Vermont. Or maybe it was that flea market in Boston. Or one of the mall stores she went to more often in her last years. He walks over to the wastebasket. There, under three or four used tissues, is a wadded piece of notebook paper. He reaches in for it, half squatting to spare his back, both knees aching in response. Against the white tissues the liver spots on the back of his hand stand out, and this makes him feel old and unseemly as he straightens and carefully opens what his grand-niece has so tightly compressed. He lays the page on the desk and smooths it out. His glasses dangle from around his neck, and he lifts them into place and reads:

  Luke’s boat

  Uncle Francis dying

  He lowers the page. He looks at her bed and her folded shorts and T-shirt. He continues to read.

  Aunt Beth dying Why did Devy cross that out? Because she did not want to write about it? Or because her chilly great-aunt dying was not such a bad thing to her?

  Getting old

  Sick finding out Illness with a mind of its own? No, there was that name in one of Marie’s emails. Sick. Yes, Devon’s ex-boyfriend, Sick. Why a name like that?

  When I was twelve years old, my mom taught me how to make eggplant parmigiana. She told me the secret was to first bake the breaded slices of eggplant and not to fry them because then it all comes out too oily and the eggplant tastes too much like eggplant which nobody really likes when you think about it.

  Wrapping my finger in a bandaid while staring at the stack of Penthouse magazines on the back of my father’s toilet. Charlie. With a daughter in your house, for Christ’s sake.

  The next paragraph is crossed out but easy to read.

  Sitting on the closed toilet and ignoring my throbbing finger I wrapped too tightly with a bandaid

  Opening my dad’s dirty magazine and seeing a hard penis pointing at the hole of a vagina

  Francis glances over at the open doorway, his cheeks heating with the knowledge he has now transgressed. But there are only a few more lines and despite beginning to feel like some ancient creep, he is also becoming more informed about the home Devon fled. He notices his fingers are shaking slightly, and he shrugs it off.

  Feeling sick because the only vagina I’d seen that up close was my own two months before this when I had to use a mirror for my first tampon.

  I found out about my father’s girlfriend because I used his phone.

  Francis balls up the notebook sheet as tightly as he can. He pushes it back down into the wastebasket and covers it up with the tissues. He’s staring at the tiny blue light just beneath the zipper of her computer case, and he knows she spends her nights in front of that machine. He’s tempted to open it and turn it on, but no, he won’t do that. He won’t.

  Feeling like a thief,
he walks across the carpet of his grand-niece’s room and pulls the door closed behind him. It’s been nearly five months and no word of any kind from his nephew Charlie Brandt. Of course he would have a mistress, wouldn’t he? Of course he would. Francis sent him several emails to update him on Devy’s GED plans, her solid work ethic, but there’s been no response of any kind, only those from Marie asking Francis to tell Devon to text her or email her more often, to pass on her love. Such strange times we live in, entire families separated into their own private cybercells, the same warm blood pumping through their organs and limbs.

  On the kitchen table are the vase of white phlox, Devon’s barely touched glass of iced tea, beside it her pen and pencil.

  Luke’s boat.

  Clearly an honest start. Why didn’t she continue? Because it’s none of your damn business, Francis, that’s why. Still, he wants to know more about her and he wants to know nothing, for what can he truly do? He carries her glass to the sink and dumps it. He sees her holding a mirror between her legs, this poor girl left to her own devices, and Francis plucks the wall phone from its cradle and pushes the buttons that will ring his dead brother’s useless son, though it’s happy hour on a Friday in August and unlike his father and uncle and perhaps their father before them, that hopper of trains to nowhere, Charlie still swallows down the family’s poison and whoever gets hurt gets hurt, including his one and only daughter who jumped overboard and swam to this half-empty old boat she somehow assumed is stable. Should Francis tell her the truth? That until she came, the captain, so free now, so permanently free, had begun to feel it listing and taking on cold water? Should he tell her that he dreads the day she’ll leave?

  2morrow then? Breakfast?

  OK

  9?

  Noon

  NOON?

  I’m working. Bye.

  Luv U!

  The break room is a wall of lockers behind the dishwashing machine, and Devon stands under the fluorescent light with her glass of Diet Coke scrolling through her iEverything the way she used to draw in on a cigarette. She wants one. She’s pissed she wants one because she hasn’t for a while, but that essay stirred things up and she’s been working hard all night to push it back down again. She needs music for that. Mean music. Her Dr. Dre’s are on the shelf of her open locker, but she only has three more minutes. She can smell cigarette smoke the way someone on a diet smells melting chocolate. Behind her, the door to the loading dock is propped open and a new dishwasher she doesn’t know leans in the doorway, his back to her, smoking. He’s older, a bald spot on top of his head, and she almost feels sad for him that he’s still doing shit work like this. She’s close to asking him for a butt.

  Sick: Wuz up D?

  She flicks her finger over the screen and scrolls back to the first words she got from him after Trina posted everything.

  Sick: Y Devon? Y???

  Then he was on her doorstep on a cold morning in his Cobain T-shirt. When she opened the door he stepped back and made a funny sound in his chest, like the last thing he expected was for that door to ever open. He stood there staring at her. His hair hung down over half his face and she wanted to be closer so she could push it back behind his ear.

  She didn’t know what to say. Her throat felt hot. “Hi.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “Fine.” She crossed her arms. There were goose bumps there, though she wasn’t cold.

  He held out to her their butterfly cup. That’s what they called it. When they were together they drank vodka and cranberry juice in it, or hot chocolate, or just water. He’d won it for her last summer at the beach, working the mechanical arm in the big glass box and picking it out of a pile of stuffed animals. But it was in a cardboard box, one of the game’s “mystery” prizes, and only when she opened it, standing in the sun outside the loud arcade, did she see the butterfly etched into the cup. It was blue and green and its wings were spread in flight as if it was going to take her with it, wherever it was going. Then she was kissing him, and Sick’s kiss back was soft and kind, like he wasn’t trying to get anything from her. Like this kiss she just gave him was enough.

  “Why, D?” He stepped toward her in the doorway and pushed the cup into her hand. He swung his hair away from his face and stared at her. Both eyes were puffy and they didn’t look so beautiful anymore, but they were the same cracked blue she’d stared into as she let him be the first, the second, the third, only him. No one else. But how could she tell him she didn’t cheat? How could she tell him that what she’d done had meant nothing to her? She was crying, and Sick was walking away. She may have called his name, but she can’t remember. There was screaming in her head. Sick! Sick! And it was like stepping on a baby bird. It was like plucking a flower and tossing it into a fire. It was like shitting on the pillow of a bed someone had made just for you.

  Then she was in a tattoo parlor on a road of auto body shops and gun stores and a thin man with no more empty skin of his own, shirtless in a black leather vest, was holding her bare right foot in his hand. He’d offered her some Tylenol, but she wanted to feel it. She leaned back on one arm and held the butterfly cup for him to keep glancing up at, and there was the buzzing of the tool, the pricking of her skin against her bone. Her eyes filled and she said to the man, “Put red in there too. I want red.”

  Sick. Whose parents treated him like he was a nothing and would always be a nothing. Sick. Who brought her small gifts every time he saw her. A pebble. An old nickel. Once a silk scarf he pulled from a trash bag out of the Salvation Army box. Sick. Who made sad, sweet sounds during and after. The way he held her and stroked her hair as lightly and gently as if she too had wings and might one day fly away.

  “Break’s over, honey. Let’s move.” Danny Sullivan claps his hands twice.

  “I know.” Devon pushes her iEverything back into her locker and padlocks it. She takes her Diet Coke and walks past him and his smell of cigar smoke and old coffee and she’s relieved to hear him yelling at the new dishwasher behind her because that means he’s not staring at her ass as she pushes open the swinging doors into the loud, reckless din of people eating too much and drinking too much after lying too long in the sun with too many other people and now they’re spending too much money. Devon drains her Diet Coke. She sets her glass onto a tray, then carries it out into this room full of reckless noise she wants only to block out with more noise, the kind she can control with just the flick of her thumb.

  IT’S QUIET NOW. The air is cool, and she can smell the dark ocean. She’s standing near the front door of The Whaler waiting for Francis to pick her up because he never lets her walk home this late. She pulls out her iEverything. She keeps rereading Sick’s message from yesterday: Wuz up D? Normally her thumbs would start answering texts before she even started thinking about them. But this was the Sick before he became her Sick. This was the quiet boy with dyed hair and skinny jeans who only came alive on his iEverything. Onscreen he was funnier and more relaxed. He knew what to say and when to say it. Then he started sending her links to things he thought she’d like—that funny YouTube of the baby smiling after it burped, an interview with Kurt Cobain when he still loved life or at least tolerated it, color pictures of deep space from the Hubble telescope that scared her because it was all just too big and endless and how could there ever be a God for it?

  Sick: Do you need a God?

  D: I guess.

  Sick: Why?

  D: Don’t you?

  Sick: No.

  D: Why not?

  Sick: God’s just a big babysitter. Don’t you want to be FREE?

  D: Yes.

  Sick: Me too.

  Wuz up D? This is his old self from his pre-D life. It’s the tone of the boy who doesn’t hurt anymore, and so maybe he’s just curious about her: Where’s she been for five months? What’s she been doing? Though she’s only ten miles away and everybody knows the answers to those questions. Since April, when Danny Sullivan hired her, Devon’s seen people in the Whale
r she knows: the Welches (and twice Mark drunk at the bar by himself). She’s seen the Battastinis stuffing their faces in the corner booth. In June or July, Luke McDonough’s parents, Nancy and Carl, came in. Nancy had smiled up at her and asked where she was going to school in the fall. Devon had always liked Nancy. She was small and pretty and good to people, but could she really not know one thing about her son’s senior year and the people in it? Did she really not know all about Dirty Devon Brandt standing in front of her in her restaurant clothes holding an empty tray in her hands? Devon’s face was smiling and talking. Words were coming out of her. Words like travel and Gap Year and Europe. A sentence fragment like saving up for it. And she kept glancing at Nancy’s husband not because he was smiling generically up at her, but because he had Luke’s eyes—or Luke had his—and now Devon could see a slight shift in Carl and Nancy’s smiles: they were trying not to show how sorry they felt for her, this girl who so young had already given up on climbing to the top of some shining fucking mountain with swimming pools and boathouses and drunk boys killing men in Call of Duty. She wanted to tell them it was Luke who’d started everything. She wanted to tell them that their lacrosse-playing son heading to Dartmouth had practically made her suck on his penis. But that wasn’t true. She’d wanted to. Or at least she’d wanted to get it over with so she wouldn’t be a mouth virgin anymore.

  Walking away from his parents’ polite table, she could feel it again in her mouth. This warm, hard animal that seemed to have a heartbeat of its own, a life that wasn’t just Luke’s. He’d rested his hand on her back and then her hair. “Squeeze it.” She didn’t know if he meant with her lips or her fingers but she did both and then he was pushing himself in and out of her mouth, and she had to pull back so she wouldn’t choke and the animal that belonged to Luke stiffened even more and spurted Luke’s wet moans down her throat she swallowed so she wouldn’t gag.