Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  “Later he told my wife, ‘No man worked harder for peace than I did.’ And when we left he loaded us with presents. She got a green scarf with border designs of a million LBJs strung together, and a glass bowl embossed with the Presidential seal. He gave me a waterproof watch engraved, ‘Do Unto Others As You Would Have Others Do Unto You.’ The watch never kept good time but I had the medal framed and there it hangs on the wall—I feel a certain affection for it now—and here we are, you and I.”

  They were standing within inches of each other, Fanny leaning against the wall, breathing audibly, her pelvis casually thrust forward. She seemed relaxed, as if she’d forgiven him for having burdened her with his desire to know her. Now that she was about to quit working for them, perhaps she had decided that he had wanted not very much from her. She’s sought after by men, Dubin thought; yet even in the best of circumstances he doubted he would have tried to entice her into bed. She was only a couple of years older than Maud and he sensed in himself something resembling incest taboo once removed—you don’t bed down a girl your daughter’s age—let alone other inhibitions. I like to look at pretty women, though in her case maybe I overdid it considering I had her cornered in the house.

  “Here’s a picture my wife snapped of Johnson handing me the medal.”

  Fanny examined it closely. “You look like a puppy dog who doesn’t want to bite the bone.”

  “That’s more or less the way I felt.”

  Neither of them spoke for a moment. He thought she was about to leave but she wasn’t.

  “What are you writing now?” Fanny asked, not at all concerned she wasn’t doing her work; neither was Dubin.

  He responded quickly: “A new life of D. H. Lawrence, English novelist, poet, prophet, superb letter writer, man of genius and rages. He lived almost forty-five years—from 1885 to 1930—just about as long as Thoreau. They both died of TB—short lives.”

  “Was he as important as Thoreau? I mean why did you pick him after the other one?”

  “He’d been in and out of my mind for years,” Dubin said, his voice grown gravelly. “One day I woke up in his presence. Not that he was actually there, you understand, but I couldn’t put him aside in my thoughts. So far as I could remember I hadn’t dreamed of him, yet I could not shake the sight of this fierce consumptive bright blue-eyed red-bearded man hectoring me. The experience was puzzling because, try as I would, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. To answer your question, maybe I decided to write about him because I wanted to elucidate the mystery.”

  “Which one?”

  “Are there two?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Fanny said.

  Dubin said he had read nothing by Lawrence for years. “But he and Thoreau, though they led vastly different lives, had more in common—apart from being major writers—than is apparent. As writers their themes were alike—death and resurrection. As men both were oppressed by dominating possessive women. Both greatly loved and celebrated the natural world. Both were puritans. And both were less than fully heterosexual. Thoreau, as I said, sublimated his sexuality. Lawrence seemed never entirely at peace with his sexual nature. He felt he needed a man’s love as well as a woman’s to complete him, but he never seemed able—maybe he lacked the good fortune —to realize a bisexual relationship. He apparently proposed a blutbrüder-shaft to Middleton Murry, who though he seemed to be homoerotically inclined, was afraid of Lawrence. He grabbed his hat and ran. Lawrence once said that the idea of putting his arm around a woman’s waist and dancing with her appalled him. If it weren’t for Frieda, his sexually talented wife, he’d have been a lot more limited. She wrote someone that she had fought with Lawrence over his homosexual inclinations and had won—whatever that meant. She apparently could handle any kind of sexual experience. Ultimately he made a mystique of sex, preaching it as a dark force of blood-consciousness through which man experiences the primal mystery. It’s a paradox that his theories occupied him, especially toward the end of his life, more than the physical sex that by then had failed him.” “What about Lady Chatterley’s Lover? That had a lot of real live sex in it. Didn’t he write that near the end of his life?” “It too is ideologically charged, but you’re right—his sensuous world is real, affecting, no matter what the theories come to.”

  Fanny, after a moment, wondered if Dubin’s coffee was cold.

  He thought it might be.

  They gazed seriously at each other.

  “You sure know a lot about him.”

  “I wish I knew more. I don’t pretend to see him plain. For instance, in his letters he speaks as if he were telling the factual truth but one can’t take him at face value—the letters give autobiographical information yet there is a sense of their belonging to his creative work. I hope to figure him out as I go deeper into the life.”

  “I was thinking what you said about sex failing him—”

  “You understand, Fanny, he was never an exponent of free sex? He didn’t like people aimlessly copulating. He said sex should come on us unaware, ‘as a terrible thing of suffering and privilege and mystery.’”

  The girl seemed, then, troubled. “I think we’re entitled to have sexual pleasure any way we want. Not worried or afraid, I mean. Why should we be?”

  “Why, indeed?”

  “I’m not ashamed of the way I live my life, Mr. Dubin.”

  “William,” he said.

  “William.”

  “I should hope not—What I’m saying,” he went on, “is that too many people think of Lawrence’s sexual doctrine as exactly the opposite of what it was. Though an innovator in fiction, he was in many ways a conservative person. Marriage, for instance: his own with Frieda was rough-and-tumble —there was much they were at odds about, especially her desire to see her children. Katherine Mansfield saw bruises on her body when they went bathing together. In the presence of Frieda’s daughter he threw a glass of wine in her mother’s face. She once socked him with a stone plate across the skull. Yet, beyond question, it was a vital enduring relationship. A true marriage, he said, established an unconscious connection ‘like a throbbing blood-circuit’; and he once wrote a correspondent something like this: ‘Your most vital necessity in this life is that you should love your wife completely and explicitly in entire nakedness of body and spirit.’”

  Fanny said she couldn’t have guessed.

  “On the other hand, despite her marriage to him, Frieda sought and had sexual experiences with other men. She thought of herself as a liberated woman. She told people she was close to, that Lawrence, who was always shaky in sex, was impotent at forty-one.”

  Fanny sighed. “It sort of wipes you out. I mean a man like that. You wouldn’t think so.”

  “What stays with me most from the biographies I write,” Dubin went on, “apart from what one learns about the map of human lives—the unexpected turns and dramatic twists they take—the joyous ways they do, and the tragic ways they don’t, work out”—the biographer’s eyes momentarily misted and he had to cough a huskiness out of his throat—“what stays with me most, is that life is forever fleeting, our fates juggled heartbreakingly by events we can’t foresee or control and we are always pitifully vulnerable to what happens next. Therefore what the poets say about seizing the day, dear Fanny, is incredibly true. If you don’t live life to the hilt, or haven’t, for whatever reason, you will regret it—especially as you grow older—every day that follows.”

  “Do you regret it?” she serenely asked.

  Dubin gazed at her gravely.

  “I’d regret it beyond bearability if I were not involved in the lives of others.”

  “You mean in your books?”

  “Largely so, but not only so.”

  “And that gives you your big charge? To me life is what you do. I want it to enjoy, and not make any kind of moral lesson or fairy tale out of it.”

  He felt momentarily let down, despondent.

  She seemed, however, affected by him, her color heightened, and in h
er eyes something resembling affection seemed to show.

  Dubin impulsively drew a book out of one of the shelves. “Accept,” he said, handing it to her, “a copy of my earliest work: Short Lives. Nobody in it lives to forty.”

  After momentary hesitation she took the book and pressed it to her breast.

  “You’re beautiful, Fanny,” Dubin whispered.

  She touched his arm with four fingers.

  Moved by her, though he told himself he had wooed her falsely with the business of his Medal of Freedom, his refusal to write President Johnson’s life, his too long account of the lives of his betters, Dubin drew Fanny into his arms with immense relief. She rose to him on bare toes, with pointed breasts, forceful hips, hairy chin, hungry tongue. They kissed deeply.

  They passed on the stairs as strangers—sometimes she brushed against him—he felt her hair graze his forearm. Dubin, returning to his study, forcefully concentrated; let her flow off in a flood of facts. Sometimes he sensed her presence outside his door but did not open it. He thought often of their embrace. It had caused Fanny to reverse direction, stop evading Dubin—gave him satisfaction: the small victories of life. But while he worked his study was a privileged place, really sanctum. He was headily into his chapter and feeling a long sense of future pleasure: savored the joys of accretion, of laboring and constructing order; appreciative of the self who served him best.

  One early afternoon a few days after they had kissed, Fanny tapped on his door and Dubin opened it imagining she had finished Short Lives and would want to know if they could talk about it. But she apologized for not yet having read the book—had merely knocked to say hello. She seemed unsure of herself calling on him in his study. Her eyes were characteristically tense. Observing this, Dubin invited her in. He had known he would if she came to the door.

  Fanny sat in his armchair, crossed her fine bare legs and smoked. Dubin lit a cheroot. She had washed her hair and it hung loose and light. Pendant silver hoops dangled from her ears, a fine touch while working. Dubin turned his chair to face Fanny. He regretted the menial work she did in the house. He knew she typed and had thought of asking her to type for him, but only Kitty typed for him.

  Fanny wondered if she could borrow Sons and Lovers and Dubin, with a bound, got her his copy from the bookshelf. She said as she fingered the book that she had enjoyed their recent talk. “I also wanted to say—and I’m sorry if I’m taking your time but I don’t know how else we can tatk—I just wanted to say that the real truth about my own sexual experience, at least as I am now, is that I have become a better person because of it.”

  “I wish I were a better person,” Dubin said.

  He imagined she had felt a need to say this and might just as well to an older man. If you said it to a young man he would want to put you to bed to make you a better person.

  “I’m not kidding,” she said.

  He acknowledged it with a nod. “You’re gifted, Fanny.”

  “How do you mean that?”

  “Truly. Some people are gifted in life.”

  Her body eased. She seemed about to reach out her hand but they weren’t within touching distance.

  Dubin then asked her why she had joined the meatless sexless commune on Tupper Lake.

  “I like to try things.”

  The biographer, touched by her remark, said he wished he had her kind of freedom when he was her age.

  “What kept you from having it?”

  “I was a satisfied romantic—loved longing. It made an occasional poem for me.”

  “Did you have any affairs?”

  “I enjoyed the presence of women—I’m describing an almost aesthetic need, not saying it was all.”

  He said that his mother had been a sick woman and he had no sisters. He had had a younger brother who had drowned when he was nine. His mother was a disturbed woman afterward. She had died when he was thirteen. Thereafter his only company at home was his father. “He never remarried and I missed a feminine presence in the house. I missed a woman. I tried to appease this lack by often falling in love.”

  “Did you sleep with any of them?”

  “Not usually those I loved. Not often others. It was a different world in those days, Fanny, though perhaps I was not as daring as I might have been. There was much I missed.”

  “Not that different,” Fanny said. “My father, who is about your age, screwed around a lot.”

  They were interrupted by Kitty. She had knocked once and walked in. “Oh, I beg your pardon, I had no idea you were talking.”

  Fanny got up quickly.

  “Don’t go, please,” Kitty said.

  “Your husband loaned me a book.”

  “We were chatting,” Dubin explained.

  Fanny left the room and, later, forgot the book she had come to borrow, when she went home for the day.

  Dubin, that evening, had thoughts of asking her to go for a walk with him sometime, the short walk.

  The next time Fanny was in the house Dubin spied her on the porch, taking time out for a cigarette. He went out with his coffee cup and sat on the bottom step as she sat behind him on a canvas chair. Fanny’s legs were parted and her lemon underpants were visible at the crotch. Her feet were bare.

  Dubin turned to the hills. To the north was the nameless mountain he looked at when he wanted to look at a mountain.

  He asked Fanny what her plans were in New York.

  She said she didn’t know.

  He talked facing the hills, his back warm in sunlight.

  “Plans are not my strong point,” Fanny said.

  Dubin, after a moment, asked her where she had got her name.

  “My name? My mother was the one who named me.”

  “After a relative, friend? Who?”

  “No, she named me after Fanny Price in Mansfield Park. She was on a Jane Austen kick when she was pregnant.”

  “You don’t say,” said Dubin, turning to her. “Do you know Jane Austen had a favorite niece named Fanny Knight? She was charmed by the girl, reread her letters the day she was dying. The sad thing was that Fanny later wrote her sister their Aunt Jane had lacked refinement. She was ashamed of her aunt and, in essence, betrayed her memory.”

  “I don’t think my mother knew that,” Fanny said.

  She had made no attempt, as they talked, to bring her knees together.

  Dubin drank up his coffee and went upstairs.

  A few minutes later he was jolted, at his desk, by a single swift knock on the door as the girl slipped into the room.

  He was about to wave her out when she untied her wraparound skirt and whipped it off. Her blouse and underpants came off and she was naked.

  Dubin was struck by her youthful beauty.

  He mumbled his gratitude.

  Fanny tossed her yellow underpants at him. He caught them and tossed them back. They struck her breasts and fell to the floor.

  The girl studied him curiously, nervously.

  “Whatever you’re offering,” Dubin said, “I regret I can’t accept.”

  “Your wife went to the flower farm. It’s an hour each way.”

  “This is her house.”

  “It’s yours as well.”

  “Under the circumstances I can’t accept.”

  Her face had reddened. She was angered. “All this beautiful bullshit about seize the day and what life is all about.”

  He hoarsely laughed at the jest.

  Fanny pulled her clothes on in a grim instant and was gone. Nothing of her remained that he could find.

  Dubin reached for his pen and after a while slowly began to write.

  Fanny quit. She had told Kitty she was off to the city, although Kitty had heard she was still in town, living with Roger Foster. Dubin one day at lunch asked his wife what she had thought of the girl.

  “She is sexy,” Kitty said, “but I’m better proportioned.”

  Kitty had waked that morning saying she ought to go to Montreal to see her father’s grave, then possibly he
r mother’s in Augusta, on her way back.

  “I owe him a visit. I’ve never really made my peace with him. Will you come with me, William? We could do it in a day there and one back.”

  “Is something bothering you?” When Kitty thought of visiting graves she was asking her life questions.

  She seemed distracted. “I wish you’d come with me. I hate long drives alone.

  “Why didn’t you suggest it before I began my chapter?”

  “It wasn’t on my mind then.”

  Dubin said his work was going well. “It’ll take me a week to get back into it if I go off with you now.”

  Kitty, as she dressed, thought it through at the bedroom window. He watched her watching a flicker in the chestnut. A maple, barely missing the house, had fallen in a storm shortly after they had moved in, and Kitty had planted a chestnut there, now a luxuriant tree.

  “I guess it’s something I’ll have to do myself.”

  He tried to persuade himself to drop his work and take off with her. But the journey was to cemeteries and he wasn’t in the mood. He had his own graves to visit, that he hadn’t been to in years.

  Kitty said, “I have to go, why am I lingering?”

  After lunch she slipped on two silver bracelets and a large ring. She painted her toenails, packed an overnight bag, and drove off toward the Northway.

  They had kissed at the door—goodbye, not for long. She squeezed his hand. He regretted he could not go with her. She asked him to check the burners and Dubin promised but forgot.

  On occasion he liked eating a meal out of a can—spaghetti, baked beans, carry-over from boyhood, youth—eating alone; but he prepared instead a hamburger Kitty had left defrosting. The meat burned in the pan, so he called a cab and went downtown. Dubin ate a plate of soup and a roast-beef sandwich at a restaurant counter, and since light still glowed in the evening sky—early fall had run a cool hand through the air—walked home. The stars appeared in misty swarms, Dipper brilliant. The biographer pondered the mystery of north—direction of death—white, silent, frigid, sans soul. Where was Kitty now? He hoped she would not drive at night. The moon had not yet risen. Walking alone in the dark he felt sadness of a sort. He thought he would listen to Schubert lieder, then decided, forget it, I’ll go to a movie. Schubert, dead at thirty-one, was the first life Dubin had written for Short Lives. No one had written a good long life of Schubert. He had lived long in music and short in life.