Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  Among other cures he added hydrotherapy: re Carlyle, daily on arising—his wife’s advice—dumping a bucket of cold water on his head. In Dubin’s case a cold shower in winter, hot turning gasping cold—each morning, to get him up and onto the daily merry-go-round; the icy water beating blood into his dull brain as he snorted and pranced in the tub. And at night hot to tepid water to ease a bit, he hoped, a deepening frustration. Though he slept during long intervals of night—vaguely sensing Kitty’s controlled restlessness—he dreamed he wasn’t asleep, hadn’t dared to sink into deep sleep, as though he might be murdered there; Dubin awoke fatigued. His sleep pretended sleep, cheated itself. Some mornings he stayed forty minutes in the hot shower before he could bring himself to turn the cold knob; or if he dared not, to step out of the tub, get into underwear and begin exercise. And if the long day was especially long, therefore especially unproductive—too many hours to count the ways—he went to bed directly after supper.

  “I’ve never seen you this way,” Kitty worried.

  He had had bad times before, Dubin says.

  “Never quite like this. You managed always to do something you liked. At least a little.” She looked at him with feeling. “Would it help if we got into bed and kept ourselves company?”

  He doubted it; thanked her.

  “Sleep well, darling.”

  Dubin left her sitting in the living room with yesterday’s newspaper and a handbook of psychiatry Nathanael had owned. She also consulted a medical adviser.

  He got into his pajamas and hurried to sleep. He slept quickly, trying to dawdle. When he went to bed this early he was up at five and fought to sleep again—on principle—but couldn’t. Sleep had for a few hours possessed him, not he it. Dubin tossed aside his blankets and staggered in the dark to the shower. Afterward as he diddled with breakfast, the sheer stretch of morning ahead weighed heavily on his imagination. He left the house early, earlier after each early bedtime, to lose himself out of doors; to not think despite the turgid flow of thought: how to get back to productive work, without which his ego was more savagely self-obsessed.

  He went through the bare pewter-trunked silver maples, away from the house—sometimes whistling, pretending God’s not too far off his heaven, in case anyone’s listening—then hurried through Kitty’s silent wood, trotting now, the will rampant. Dubin jogged the short walk to the bridge but if it brought no relief—there were times it did—he traveled the long route. Nothing like a little “agitation,” Johnson had said, to escape misery. He ran from his gross belly, from Fanny in all her guises, naked to not quite. She flung her underpants at him for the thousandth time; tempting him, betraying him. He ran from heartbreak revived, his dreary discipline, loyal wife, depression afflicting him. Sometimes his legs went faster than his body cared to go.

  What a miserable price to pay for unpleasure! My God, whatever hit me so hard? She meant at first not much to me—almost nothing; she gave me little, only what I took, why do I so unwillingly mourn her? Now he regretted his stiff-assed frigid letter to her basically warm one; considered writing another canceling the intent of the first, but would not. He felt—shame on Dubin—jealous of her jape of a lover who had wooed and won her with his red-pompommed sailor’s cap and lavender pants, fifteen minutes after he had handed her into his motor taxi on a Venetian canal. The capitano had driven his passenger to Murano, put her safely to bed, and banged her madly. The gondolier had taken her fancy the day before with his manly ass and a lilting love song; the capitano, a day later with his pompommed pitch in a splashing speedboat. For shame, Fanny, what are you doing to yourself? She had canceled out Rome and settled for amiable fornication on an isle of glass. That Dubin would so often replay his humiliation with her was an astonishment to him. It’s she who sent me into this tailspin, though not only she. I blame me for offering myself as victim. What was he doing to himself?

  Kitty had her theory: “You hit the jackpot with H. D. Thoreau. You want, naturally, to repeat with D. H. Lawrence. It’s inhibiting—you’re afraid you won’t. You must think of yourself as being off the Rock Candy Mountain, plodding along a plateau, hunting another mountain. What an honor it was that night, not to mention President Johnson asking you to write his life. God, I wish you had. I’ll bet you could have said anything you felt you had to about him. After that a letdown was bound to occur, William, and you’ll have to ride it out. Patiently, I hope.” She laughed breathily. “Don’t you think so?”

  Dubin nodded. What she said was true enough, yet not the truth. At meals he sat opposite her, looking out of the window behind her, saying little, agreeing with her, pretending things might be worse; wearing a mask. Nietzsche had said the profound man is he who needs a mask. Dubin, if not profound, was profoundly disgusted with Wm. Dubin, which calls for a small disguise in the presence of your believing wife. Kitty now got out of bed after he had done exercising, drew on her black and burgundy African robe, and yawning, followed her husband downstairs to prepare breakfast as she had used to almost every day when the kids were young. She kept him company, a gracious gesture, for which he saw her plain.

  He plunged into the snowy woods. The bleak landscape gave forth bleakness; he gave it back. Though his flesh diminished the paunch persisted.

  In the evening, after a long day and subdued supper, unless she could persuade him to go out with her to see a movie, or turn on TV, they sat in silence in opposing armchairs, Kitty knitting as she talked from one thought to another, or sat regarding him above her slightly lowered newspaper as he pretended to be reading a book. I am in my thoughts a detached lonely man, my nature subdued by how I’ve lived and the lives I’ve written; subdued by the dyer’s bloodless hand.

  Dubin was fifty-seven on the twenty-seventh of December, 1973, and the last thing he wanted, or needed, was to celebrate the dismal occasion, but Kitty had urged, insisted. “William, let’s get out of the rut we’re in. We haven’t had a dinner party since before you went off to Italy.” He was born in a cold season yet liked to think he had been conceived in spring. Dubin dragged his feet because he had forgotten Kitty’s birthday, last April, and wanted her to forget his.

  Kitty, who had been a poor cook for her first husband, was an excellent one for her second. She roasted two ducks, produced three bottles of Cabernet Sauvignon and five of Lanson champagne, and arranged masses of red and lavender anemones and bronze chrysanthemum daisies in white vases. He decided her favorite color was white.

  She had invited, for this festive occasion, the Greenfelds, Ondyks, Habershams, and, of course, Myra Wilson. The Habershams were old friends, Fred, an activist civil-rights attorney; his wife, Ursula, also a lawyer, was a Vermont Senator, one of three women in the legislature. The Ondyks came, Evan, the psychotherapist, and his wife, Marisa, an insecure lady with a nervous nose she often blew and lips drawn at the corners. If you kissed her on the cheek she said, “Mmmuh,” meaning a passionate kiss in return. Her passion was a play-reading group she had formed that Kitty sometimes attended. Marisa preferred tragic roles; Kitty read comic ones.

  She and Flora were currently amiable and though they were never entirely at ease with each other—one coveted “more,” one “less”—greeted the other cordially. It was, through the years, an ambivalent relationship. Flora was an animated woman of regal bearing, a violinist without professional career or children. Kitty pitied her for not having children, not because she hadn’t had them, but because she had wanted them and Oscar hadn’t. Dubin had always responded to Flora; they kissed on meeting. Kitty called her “born dissatisfied.”

  “She pretends, hides so much. When you talk to her you can sense all she’s holding back.”

  “We all hide,” Dubin confessed.

  “Obviously,” she said sadly.

  “Then why blame her?”

  “She pretends not to.”

  Myra Wilson, at seventy-eight, was a still vital self-reliant white-haired farmer’s widow. Living alone had not soured or scared her. She lived competently
and said little about her ailments, poor circulation, arthritic pains in shoulders and neck. “So long as I have my bottle of aspirins.” Kitty admired her independence and invited the old woman to her dinner parties; she almost daily attended her. They talked often and at length on the phone. Kitty was genuinely fond of old people, perhaps women more than men: she had been brought up, she often said, by a loving grandmother. Dubin, for this birthday and this mood, would have wanted some young people around, but only Flora was younger than fifty. Not that much younger. But she was womanly and attractive in a low-cut black dress. She was the one woman Dubin was drawn to that night.

  “We hardly ever see you, William,” Flora said. “Oscar says he meets you on his walk once in a while. I hear you’re into your new biography?”

  “Deeply,” he sighed.

  Oscar Greenfeld and the biographer embraced after skirting each other during drinks.

  “What’s wrong, old boy,” Oscar asked.

  “Does it show?”

  “A strained swimming against the stream.”

  “My work, I guess.”

  “Not going well?”

  “No.”

  “If I’d known I’d’ve brought my pipe to flute you up.”

  “Too bad you didn’t,” said Dubin.

  He went through the evening with a show of having a good time. Knowing he wasn’t, he ate too much too quickly, tasted little, shoveled down more food, grew irritated with himself. He hurried upstairs to brush his teeth, then flung the brush into the sink bowl.

  Dubin slogged through the night in a saddened mood. There he was, not being who he was or felt like. Kitty, taken in by his pretense—mask?—seemed to assume the party was working for him. For dessert she sailed in with a birthday cake she had baked from scratch, lit with a flickering white candle; and the guests toasted the biographer with champagne as he smiled with his head bowed.

  Kitty would not play the harp when Flora asked her to, despite the applause of her dinner guests. “No, no,” she laughed and almost cried, “I’d spoil the fun.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Flora.

  “Let her alone,” said Greenfeld.

  Afterward Maud called. Dubin, sitting in the downstairs bathroom that morning, had heard Kitty dial Maud and quietly ask her to remember to telephone her father that night. He assumed Kitty had also called Gerald but doubted she’d been able to persuade him to put in a collect call.

  “Hi, Papa,” Maud said, “happy birthday.”

  Dubin said he missed her and was counting on her coming home for the winter vacation.

  “I miss you too. I will if I can.”

  As he sat at the phone in the hallway he was watching Kitty in the kitchen by the sink, both faucets running, talking seriously with Ondyk.

  If she’s consulting him about me, I’ll break her ass, Dubin thought.

  Maud said she’d be home in early February. “I’d like to take off a few days after finals. I hate to leave the sun.”

  “It would help me to see you,” he told her.

  Her voice grew serious. “Is something the matter?”

  “I like to look at you,” he said. “I like you around.”

  “Don’t put more pressure on me, Pa. I’m taking five exams.”

  He said there’d be no pressure and felt low. She had changed. If a man needs his daughter so much, Dubin thought, maybe he needs somebody else more.

  Maud’s voice was tender when she said goodbye.

  In their bedroom, later, Dubin thanked Kitty for the party.

  She was sitting in a chair, her skirt hiked up over her knees, legs raised, looking long at them.

  “I have pretty good legs,” she said. “Not bad for my age.”

  Dubin agreed.

  “Did you like the evening?”

  “Yes. Thanks for going to all the trouble.”

  She got up to undress. “I don’t think of it as trouble, but you don’t look very happy.”

  “I haven’t pretended to be,” he said, though he had.

  Kitty asked whether he might care to talk to Evan Ondyk. She said it doubtfully.

  “Were you talking to him about me?”

  “No. About myself.”

  “What would you like me to say to him?”

  “Stop being ironic. He might be able to help you pinpoint what’s bothering you—to figure out where you stand.”

  “I know where I stand. He doesn’t know. I doubt he knows where he stands.”

  “I know people he’s helped. He’s an excellent psychotherapist.”

  “I don’t need his advice. His view of life is reductive. With him a lot more is determined than with me. I know how free I am. I’ve picked the horse I ride.”

  “Never mind the horse. How free do you feel?”

  “Once I asked him his interpretation of Thoreau and he came up with the usual can of oedipal worms. There’s that but there’s more.”

  “He’s not a literary critic.”

  “He’s not wise.”

  “Neither are you,” said Kitty.

  “That’s true,” Dubin answered after a pause, “but I know as much about life as he does. Once I didn’t, now I do.”

  “No, you don’t. Maybe you do about the careers of certain accomplished literary figures, but not necessarily about yourself and not necessarily about the unconscious.”

  “Biography—literary or otherwise—teaches you the conduct of life. Those who write about life reflect about life. The unconscious is mirrored in a man’s acts and words. If he watches and listens to himself, sooner or later he begins to see the contours of the unconscious self. If you know your defenses you pretty much understand what it’s about. In my work I’ve discovered how to discover. You see in others who you are.”

  “Mirrored is right. You ought to hear yourself in the bathroom.”

  “I hear, I listen. That’s the point I’m making. I’ve lived fifty-eight years.”

  “Fifty-seven.”

  “Fifty-seven. I think I know myself reasonably well. No one knows himself entirely. There’s a mystery in knowing. The big thing is what you do with what you know.”

  “You exercise? You lose weight?”

  “Right now I’m saying to myself that I can exercise and lose weight.”

  “Where will it get you?” Kitty asked. “You’re still a depressed man who has trouble working. William, I feel there’s more to this than either you know or have said.”

  She’s clever, he thought, but I won’t clobber her with honesty—not hers or mine.

  He said he had real literary problems with his book. “So far it’s a dry piece of work, a compilation of facts rather than a living life—it reads like de La Grange’s Mahler or Blotner’s Faulkner. I want the juices of life in it. My reaction to it is not, simply, neurosis.”

  Kitty had never said it was. “I feel in the dark,” she said, her voice strained. “In the dark I’m afraid. I feel you can’t work well for a reason, William. If you know what it is please tell me. Don’t keep me in the dark.”

  Dubin told her he would tell her when he knew.

  “Losing weight won’t do it,” Kitty said, looking at him with moist dark eyes. “Nor what you think you know about life because you write biographies. Working it out with someone usually helps. If you don’t want to talk to Evan, why don’t you go see Dr. Selensaal in Winslow? I hear he’s very good.”

  “I haven’t got that kind of time. Winslow is seventy miles one way and seventy back. It’ll kill a day to go there.”

  “Go once and talk to him instead of frittering the morning away getting nothing done.”

  “Once leads to twice, then twice a week. I haven’t got that kind of time.”

  “Stop yakking about time, for Christ’s sake. You’re not doing much with it.”

  “Life is what I’m thinking of,” Dubin said. “I know its structure and spin and many of its ways of surprise, if not total pattern or order. I know enough, in other words, to take my chances. I want to run my
life my own way, not like yours or Nathanael’s. I don’t want to go on sharing with you to my dying day the benefits of your previous marriage.”

  “That’s cruel.”

  Kitty drew her dress over her head. He looked away from the mark on her buttock through her white underpants. When he looked again she was slipping on a nightgown.

  “Don’t be so fucking proud,” Kitty said in bed.

  My pain is tolerable, Dubin thought. All I can not do is work.

  He fought winter as if it were the true enemy: if he tore into it the freeze would vanish, his ills be gone, his life, his work, fall into place. He would overcome belly, mood, joyless labor—lust for Fanny, the burden of his unhappy experience with her. Dubin assailed winter by daily testing himself: running through its icy womb to demonstrate he was not afraid of the dead season. Not fearing it, he would fear less the dysfunctioning self—what was or was not happening. He ran in rain, slush, in end-of-December fog—to show weather, winter staring at him as he went by, the quality of Dubin’s self, his premise, the thought he ran by. As a youth he would hold a burning match till the flame touched his fingertips: if you held the glowing matchstick until the very end, the girl you loved would love you.