Dirty Love

by Andre Dubus III

  When Francis’s phone rang, she almost didn’t answer it, but the caller ID said The Whaler and she picked it up and got fucking Danny Sullivan on the other end. “My Sunday help called in sick, Dev. Do me this favor, all right?”

  Devon wanted to ask if he’d called Paula, but she knew the answer already; Paula had a kid at home and Devon didn’t, and now she’s running the vacuum over the carpet in 106, Kurt Cobain screaming in her head, his voice beautiful though he’s trying to ruin it to make a point and right now she doesn’t want to ruin anything beautiful so she flicks to a new song. She gets that West Coast blonde singing how all she wants to do is have some fun, but that’s not right either. Devon stops vacuuming. She leans the handle against her hip and pulls her iEverything from her front pocket and flicks her finger over the glass till she gets something that’s not down but not up either. Irish rock and roll, the singer’s voice worried but hopeful, which is how she feels, so she turns it up, the guitar humming back and forth behind her eyes, drums like rising thunder. She scans for texts, but there are none, even from Sick, and she pushes her iEverything back into her front pants pocket and keeps vacuuming. Hollis is beginning to feel like only a dream she had, the respectful way he looked at her just a wish she had.

  But it feels good to move her body and sweat a little and, unlike Paula, she gets down on her hands and knees and makes sure to reach the dust under the bed. Something big gets sucked into the beater bar. Devon can feel the high vibration of it in the handle, the singer singing how he still hasn’t found what he’s looking for, and Devon pulls the beater bar out from under the bed and there’s something red and made of cotton and she gets her fingers around it and yanks it out, the bar spinning again. A pair of thong underwear. Devon tosses them toward the closed door. She wipes her fingers on her knee and pushes the beater back under the bed and works it back and forth.

  That picture of Amanda Salvi. She must’ve taken it herself because it was a side view to make her waist look smaller, her bare breasts bigger, the side of her ass naked too because she was wearing a thong just like the one Devon was going to throw in the trash. Salvi must’ve just sent it to her father’s phone because it came up as Devon was getting ready to punch in Bobby Connors’ number. Her iEverything was in the back of his car, Devon was sure, because she’d had it in her hand nodding off against Luke’s chest the night before, streetlights whizzing by outside.

  On the radio the DJ was selling concert tickets or cars, and Bobby and Trina were fighting again, Trina bitching about something he said or did. She was always bitching at him. Devon was drunk, her eyes closed, and she wanted music and she’d come to hate Trina’s voice, a rusty razor thrown through something good. She was going on about Tracy Fields, how Bobby’s been texting her, Trina fucking knows he has. Bobby’s voice. One low grunt of denial here and there, the switching of radio stations till he got some hip-hop fuck music, a black woman’s street moans as she practically licked the microphone.

  “Bobby, are you fucking listening to me?”

  Trina’s jealousy was like a fever she could never get rid of, and until Sick, Devon had never understood it. And it was strange leaning into Luke because she hadn’t been this close to him in three years, not since that night in his boat. For five or six weeks that fall and early winter, people called them a couple. He texted her every day and she texted him back and on weekends they’d cruise around in Bobby’s Sentra with him and Trina. It was the closest Devon had felt to Trina since middle school. Their boyfriends were best friends, and now there was this glue between them and it smelled like Axe and denim and hair gel and cum.

  The morning after Luke’s party and Luke’s boat, Devon had texted Trina before she even got out of bed.

  I’m not an MV anymore.

  No f-ing way!

  Way

  U swallow?

  Y

  U my gurl!

  There was the feeling she’d put something important behind her and now she was somebody different: older, wiser, better. But that was like being at the beach and surfing your first wave, then standing there waist-deep in water thinking you were through now; how could she not have thought of all the waves that were coming one after the other without a break? She could have turned around and walked up onto the sand, but once you were in the water, it was hard to get out.

  Just two days later, a Sunday afternoon, she was doing algebra homework at the dining room table, the drone of football announcers out in the living room. Her hungover father dozed in front of the TV, and her mother was baking lasagna in the kitchen, and Devon’s iEverything had vibrated on the table.

  Go for a ride?

  I’m doing homework.

  Take a break.

  A thinning of the blood in her fingers, a shiver across her face.

  Ok.

  So easy to leave the house. A smile at her mother, some line about Dunkin’s and she and her friend needing a coffee for homework.

  “But we’re eating soon.”

  “I know. I’ll be right back.”

  From behind the wheel of his father’s Mercedes, Luke kept glancing at her as he drove. His hair was in a perfect flow across his forehead and he wore a new sweater and chewed wintergreen gum, and she felt bad that all she did was brush on some mascara and pull on a sweatshirt, her hair down around her shoulders. But he couldn’t stop looking at her face and smiling at her, smiling at her lips. Smiling at her mouth.

  “I keep thinking about, you know—”

  “Yeah.”

  “The other night.”

  Something like that, Devon can’t remember it all, only what his voice sounded like—high in his throat, almost scared—and she knew it was her doing that to him, her, this girl he had always ignored.

  It was a day with no clouds, the sky so blue it was hard not to believe in something big behind it all. Then Luke was parking his dad’s Mercedes in a stretch of woods near the highway. Half the leaves were off the trees, and Devon could see through the trunks and branches all the cars rushing past, everybody in a hurry, even on a Sunday.

  There was no kissing. No touching. But there was Luke’s face. His eyes dark with a need for her, his throat flushed pink, and when he put his hand on her shoulder, his fingers were trembling and how could she not use this power she’d been given? How could she not lean down and wait for him to unbutton and unzip his jeans, his soft grunts, his hand on her back like he was her patient and she was the only one who could cure him.

  That calm in him after. The way he put on the radio and drove them down into Lafayette Square, the shy smile he gave her, his eyes grateful but distant too. At the Dunkin’s drive-up window, he ordered them two sweet coffees, and even though hers was too hot she sipped it right away.

  When he dropped her off, he didn’t even put the car in park. He rested his hand on her knee, said, “That was awesome.”

  “You’re awesome.” But stepping out of the car and walking back up to her house with her coffee, she knew she didn’t mean it.

  On weekends he wanted to do more things. They’d be stretched out on a bed in the dark room of some party house, drunk voices on the other side of the door, and she’d let him get a finger inside her and it felt good but wrong too. He moved like a boy running down a field trying to hurl a ball into a net, the ball everything, and all that power she’d held over him seemed to leak out over grass, its center lost, and she’d pull his hand away and unzip his jeans and lower her face and mouth to what she knew would make the boy stop running and running and then she could just walk away and rinse her mouth and leave all the players and spectators with nothing to do because she was the main show, wasn’t she?

  Except she wasn’t the only one who did this. So many girls had learned how to do this. Trina did it to Bobby (before she started doing all of it with him end of freshman year), Tracy Fields, with her thick red hair and crooked eyeteeth, her field hockey calves—she did it just to make boys go away. She did it the way some girls kissed.

  Dru
nk together, Devon and Tracy in a bright kitchen drinking hard lemonade they’d spiked with vodka nips, Eddie Vedder howling through an electric rain out in the living room of so many wasted kids two lamps were already broken and a girl ran out crying and it was like storm clouds you ignore till it’s too late. Tracy was saying, “A tongue or a dick in your mouth, what’s the fucking difference? It’s not even sex. Sex is when you give them this.” Her fingers curled against Devon’s crotch and a laugh jumped out of her.

  “And none of these motherfuckers are ever getting that from me, baby.” Both of them were laughing now. Tracy’s eyes seemed faraway but sincere, and Devon could see this was Tracy’s code. It was good to have a code.

  And was it that party when she caught Luke? Or the one over the line in New Hampshire? That brick house in pine trees behind an apartment complex where old people lived? Luke didn’t even bother to lock the door, and when Devon walked in looking for him, she didn’t know what she was seeing at first, Luke standing at the toilet with his pants around his knees holding a hairy pumpkin in both hands, his dick going in and out of it, the pumpkin a plump face and fine brown hair, Megan Monroe.

  Devon had yanked the door shut so hard a mirror in the hall shook on its nail. She was pushing through dancing bodies holding Solo cups and smoking joints and cigarettes till she was outside walking in the cold without her coat down the driveway through the pine trees in the dark.

  Something hurt and something didn’t. His face just before he jerked it toward her, his eyes closed, his mouth half-open, his sickness getting healed and it didn’t matter who the doctor was, and that’s what hurt. Her power was in every girl, in every girl’s open mouth.

  Devon crossed her arms. She felt like crying, but she felt free of something, too, boring Luke McDonough and his constant need for her to be just one thing. She knew she’d never loved him, but had she ever even liked him?

  Ahead was the building of old people’s apartments. Every window had curtains over it, the shades pulled, lamplight shining through the cracks. She wanted to keep walking, but her coat was back in the party and so was her ride with Bobby and Trina, and three hours later she was drunk in the backseat of Bobby’s car and every time Luke touched her shoulder or knee she’d pull away till he stopped doing it, and then for a few months Luke and Megan Monroe were a couple and maybe he’d texted his friends about what Devon Brandt had done to him whenever he wanted, or maybe, though she doubted it even then, Devon had become beautiful all of a sudden because only fifteen minutes into any party and a handsome boy was talking to her, one of the boys the other boys wanted to be, the LAX boys, the hockey boys, the big smart ones who lifted weights and talked about law school and business school and their bright shining tomorrows, and they always wanted to get her alone, and drunk or straight or half-drunk, Devon would wander down a hallway with one, or out onto a deck with another, or go on a beer run in a car with someone else, and it took a while, maybe a year, maybe more, before it came to her that those first steps with him or him or him were steps into her hope that this would be something—no, this would—that one’s cute half-smile, his eyes on her chin because he was too shy to look up, or that other one’s straight white teeth, his smile because he liked whatever it was she’d just said to him, and she would go and it was never any different, the talking going quiet, the hand on her waist, the kiss that didn’t lead to more kisses but to what they really wanted. Once or twice, maybe four times, she’d turn and start to walk away, but their voices—so hungry, so insistent, some confused and actually hurt, others with a raised tone, a little dangerous—it was easier to just trade his tongue in her mouth for what was behind his zipper. It’s not even sex. Sex is when you give them this.

  But then other girls began to treat her differently. If she walked by a group of them standing at their open lockers, or at the mall huddled outside H&M or Forever 21, or gathered around a keg in a loud basement under blue light, they’d glance over at her as coldly as if she’d just betrayed each one of them. It was like every girl had been sworn to some kind of secret at birth and now Devon Brandt was going around and telling each boy she met just what it was.

  But Devon had never felt joined to these other girls in the first place. They had only begun to notice and respect her once all the boys began to notice her too. And these two things just did not go together.

  One night in winter. There was ice in the streets, and Christmas was over but lights were still strung around the windows and doors and hedges, most of them unplugged, and Devon was standing with the others under the streetlight on the sidewalk in front of Bobby’s house when Belinda Miles ran up and slapped her across the face. “Stay the fuck away from Victor! You hear me?! I’ll fucking kill you!”

  Bobby grabbed her and pulled her back, and Luke was laughing, four or five others too, girls and guys, though Trina was staring at Devon from under the streetlight. She wore a fake fur coat with a fake fur hood, her made-up face inside it all shadow. The next day Devon got a text from her.

  People are talking.

  So.

  U cant do shit with hooked up guys.

  I didn’t know about Vic.

  For real?

  He told me they broke up.

  It’d been the week between Christmas and New Year’s, every night a party, and they were parked in Victor’s F-150 behind the beer store in Lafayette Square. Victor sat behind the wheel holding the cash he’d collected from everyone. He was Puerto Rican and had a fake ID and always smelled like a cologne nobody else ever wore, sweet and spicy. It made Devon think of palm trees and swimming pools. He was also quiet and polite, and he sat there telling her that nobody at school was as bonita as she was. His truck’s windows were fogged up. A car’s headlights swept through them, then away. He ran one finger along her cheek.

  “What about Belinda?”

  “We’re all done with that.”

  Then they were kissing and then he was no longer quiet or polite, his hand on the back of her head, his moans so loud she was embarrassed for him. After, she stayed in the truck while he went inside for the beer. She wiped at her mouth. She wanted something to drink. She wanted to go back to when he was calling her the most bonita girl in school, and she wanted to stay there, in that moment, just a little while longer.

  Victor dropped two thirty-packs into the snow in the bed of his truck, and he climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine without looking at her.

  Devon said, “I need a beer.”

  “You can wait.” And he said it without a smile. No sweet calm in him, just some kind of regret and it was all her fault.

  T: You need a boyfriend, D.

  Just before winter break, Devon saw a boy walking across the plowed student parking lot under the cold sun. He was holding the handle of a guitar case covered with decals and bumper stickers, and the only one Devon could read was: Kill Your TV. He was skinny and wore skinny jeans and a ratty dungaree jacket, his hair longer than hers, and there was something about how he moved through the lot of cars starting up and pulling away like they weren’t even there, the way he stepped over the guardrail and walked in his sneakers over frozen snow into the bare woods, his hair, his guitar, the way he could turn his back on them all so easily.

  Devon was smoking a Merit up against the brick wall waiting for Trina, who had her own car now, and when she walked up, all shiny hair and tired eyes and breasts in a sweater, Devon said, “Who’s that kid?”

  She pointed to the boy with the guitar disappearing into the woods. Trina shrugged. “Who cares? Sick Something, I know that. Who’d fucking want to be called Sick?”

  A buzz against Devon’s hip. Old Zeppelin in her head. She leans the vacuum handle against the bureau and wedges her fingers into her front pocket and holds her iEverything close to her sweating face.

  Sick: If u say so D.

  Like it’s still two years ago and she’s blowing smoke out the side of her mouth and watching him and his guitar case get lost in the bare trunks and b
are branches and all she wants to do is meet that kid.

  If u say so D.

  He doesn’t believe her. She stands there staring at his words. He doesn’t believe her, and he doesn’t hurt anymore that he doesn’t believe her, and she wants to write something, but what? She lifts her thumbs. They hover over the glass like snake heads. A new song, that old man Plant young again and in tight bell-bottoms, his shirt open, his blond hair curly long, and he’s singing slow that he’s working from seven to eleven every night, so tired there’s no blood left in him, and it was Sick who gave her these headphones, Sick who showed her how music all day in her head could save her. Her thumbs drop to the glass, and she’s going to type U don’t believe me but u should. Just that. But her iEverything buzzes in her palm like an egg hatching, and there, in the upper right corner, is a new one she opens, Sick’s falling away:

  Is this u? Cuz this is me, the man who can’t stop seeing your face in his head.

  An electric guitar is piercing her and it’s all wrong now and she’ll fix it in a second, she will, her insides rising up past the gray music for the bright news in her hand, her thumbs going to work.

  THE RAIN’S BEEN COMING DOWN for five straight days, and Francis stands at the French doors staring out at it. The ground is saturated. In the center of his yard a brown pool is dimpled with what keeps falling, and he worries about Beth’s flowers. What if they drown? That’s possible, isn’t it? For a plant to get too much of a good thing? His right knee hurts. It always does in weather like this. Ever since the front of his car had cracked the house’s foundation and the firefighters had to use the Jaws of Life to pry the steering column off his crushed knee. The poor woman inside that house had been baking pies. Thank God he was out for all of it. Beth at home after the hospital, how fortunate he was to have a nurse for a wife all those weeks he lay in bed on his back.