Dubin said he was not only for himself. “My dear Fanny—”
The telephone rang shrilly.
He grabbed for it in the dark.
“Hello, dear—” Kitty was on the phone, her voice affectionate. Though he had been expecting her call Dubin was displeased to have it come as he was lying in bed with Fanny.
His wife sounded distraught. “Gerald has disappeared. I spoke to everybody I could locate who might know him, but nobody would say where he is now. I can’t tell you what yesterday was like. Finally I met a young Swedish couple who said he had joined the Communist Party and gone into the Soviet Union. I’m told other deserters have. I feel desolate.”
She wept on the phone. His teeth were on edge.
“It’s so dreary here,” Kitty said. “It’s been raining since I got off the plane. I’ve had almost no sleep. The hotel room is drafty. The Old City is beautiful and I was hoping to see it in the sun with Gerald, but he’s not here.”
“Why don’t you see some of it yourself, anyway, by bus or launch? See something, for Christ’s sake. Gerry may show up if you stay around a few days.”
“I’m going to the American Embassy Monday morning to talk with them about how to get in touch with him, although I imagine they aren’t much interested in deserters. I wish you had come with me.”
Dubin said he hadn’t been able to.
“What’s the matter with your voice?—You sound as though you’d got a cold.”
“I haven’t.”
Fanny coughed; Dubin cleared his throat.
Kitty worriedly asked, “Should I go to Moscow? I don’t really know what to do next. Will you come with me? Shall I wait for you here?”
He advised her not to rush it. “We’d better go to Washington first. After we talk to a lawyer we may want to see someone in the State Department. Find out all you can about Gerry, then come home. Could he be in another city? He told me he liked Uppsala.”
“Nobody I talked to seems to think he’s in Sweden.”
Dubin doubted anyone knew with certainty. “He may write soon. He could be with the Eskimos in Lapland. Better come home.”
She said she’d fly home Tuesday, and Dubin said he’d pick her up at the airport.
“Goodbye.”
He turned on the light. Fanny had got out of bed—he thought to go to the bathroom but she had pulled on her underpants and was buttoning a blouse.
“Good God, Fanny, what are you getting dressed for? We’ve got the whole night before us.”
She sat at the edge of the bed. “Listen, William, I’ve told you how good I think we are together and I mean more than in bed. I want you in me but I also want you by me. I feel happy when we’re with each other, sometimes like we were blessed. I know I am good for you but not on the run.”
Dubin said he was sorry Kitty had happened to call just then. “I’m worried about Gerry but that doesn’t mean we can’t go on with our plans to enjoy ourselves alone here. She won’t be back till Tuesday. We’ve got two and a half days to ourselves.”
“I’ve been thinking about us and still can’t explain what’s happening,” Fanny said. “One thing I do know is I’m not someone who’s around just to keep your mind off old age. I have got to be more to you than a substitute for your lost youth, whatever the hell that is. If you want to know something, William, everybody feels they have lost some part of their youth. I know I have, and maybe that’s what it’s for. Maybe if you lose it you make up by learning something you have to know—the way I imagine you have, and the way I’d like to. But I have to be myself, Fanny Bick, a woman living with or married to a man who wants her—wants to live with her and enjoy their life. I am sick of hiding myself, of not being who I am. It drives me up a wall. I am entitled to an open ordinary and satisfying life of my own.”
She stepped into her sandals.
Dubin urged her to stay. The storm had swept the clouds away. A wet sunset hung in the trees. “Tomorrow will be a lovely day. We’ll walk in the woods; we’ll do anything we please and we can talk out our problems and see what they add up to.”
“I know what they add up to and what they will go on adding up to if you don’t make a decision. Besides, you will be edgy about where Gerald is and that’s not what I want to deal with when I spend a weekend with you. Not this weekend if I can help it.”
She had collected her underclothes, diaphragm box, toilet things, and dropped them into her tote bag.
Dubin, barefoot, in striped pajamas, followed her downstairs. “At least stay till Sunday. Let’s have breakfast together. Fanny, it’s obscene for you to be going off like this. We mean more to each other than that.”
“I don’t want to be in this house any longer,” Fanny said. “I feel your wife’s presence all over the place. I really don’t like her. I don’t think you do either.”
“How would you know?”
“I know what I feel in my gut.”
He grabbed her arms. “Fanny, you’ve got to stay. We’re friends—genuinely friends. That has to mean something, no matter how our friendship is limited. We have to yield to circumstance for the time being.”
“I can’t any more.”
“I beg you—”
“I can’t,” Fanny said gloomily.
“When will you be in touch with me?” Dubin asked as she slipped into a raincoat. “When shall I come to the city?”
She didn’t want to think about that now.
“You’re making a mistake,” he told her.
She studied him solemnly without replying.
He put on the driveway light and watched her back her car out and turn on the road, eyes fixed before her. She had barely returned his wave.
Dubin watched till Fanny had gone.
“Maybe I’ve done her a favor to let her go.” He listened to himself talking to himself. He heard himself groan.
Eight
Dubin and his daughter walk the wet strand of dark shore. A fast step or two and she will lose him in the fog. He hears the mewling of invisible gulls.
A droning wind blowing from the dunes of this sliver of San Francisco beach had driven them from the cold sand where they had tried to picnic, then from the rocks. They shared a sandwich and gulp of tepid coffee and wandered along the gray shore. Long white-capped waves, flowing from the mist-hidden swelling sea, broke in froth at their feet. Hers were wet, slender, rosy; his corded, purple-veined, sticky with sand. Dubin, in green sweater and dark trousers rolled to his knobby knees, trailed Maud in the thinning rising fog. Years ago, in Cuernavaca, he and Kitty had got her the off-white peasant dress she was wearing; it looked like a wedding dress but she did not look like a bride. In the wind it clung to her back and wet legs. Her shoulders were thin, hair brownish-red. She had snipped off most of the edge of streaky black. Maud as they walked seemed, in Dubin’s eyes, to be looking through shadows. Her face had spilled its bloom; she was twenty and seemed thirty. Kitty, after rereading her last letter, had announced the end of an affair.
Dubin had said he must go see her.
“Yes, do,” Kitty said. “I can’t, I’ve had one very long trip this spring.”
On the beach they walk apart.
He asked her to tell him what had happened.
Maud spoke a Chinese poem: “I am not disheartened in the mindless void. / Wheresoever I go I leave no footprint. / For I am not within color or sound.”
“I asked a simple question.”
“My response is not hard to understand.”
“Are you into Zen?” her father asked.
“If Zen will have me” …
After Fanny had left he waked, that Sunday morning without her, to a cardinal’s shrill whistling. Dubin at length got out of bed, drew up a shade, and peered into the trees. The red bird, at his glance, flew off. After a woodpecker had stopped rattling away—he often ticked when Dubin typed —the biographer listened to another birdsong: wood thrush warbling a fluting melody. Does the bird hear music or does it hear noise? Will I
ever hear a nightingale? He went back to bed and tried to sleep, remembered it had felt late, and at once rose. The clock said past noon. He hadn’t slept so long in years. Had it coming to him.
He had liked that day alone: the company of Wm. Dubin, who’d been with him all his life—nobody’s father, husband, or lover. He was a man in a house getting himself breakfast; enjoyed scrambling an egg. He thought he’d skip the Sunday paper—too heavy, too long—and drew out of the bookshelf Far from the Madding Crowd, had liked it when he was seventeen. Though Lawrence had called Thomas Hardy “a bad artist,” Dubin tended to favor his work and the kind of person his fiction seemed to say he was. Lawrence had had his Frieda; he bedded her and yawped. His passionate love for a woman had sprung his ideology of wise blood, as though passionate love could be thus contained, reduced. Hardy, although strongly moved by a variety of women, had flitted from one to another, not daring much. For years he’d been sexually attracted—one after another—to three female cousins, “lower-class” women, none of whom he had appeared to have had an affair with. Then he contracted an essentially loveless marriage to a tough overweight childlike woman, who ultimately freed him from their prison by dying. Hardy was of course of his late-Victorian time; but time or none, he was not as frank or honest about himself as the miner’s son. Hiding his knocked-up cook of a mother, and his unaccomplished simple relatives, Thomas Hardy fabricated a “biography” “by” his second wife and former secretary, Florence. “If I get you here,” he wrote her after the death of his wife, “won’t I clutch you tight.” The book for years had misled its readers about his nature and experience. Lawrence, though he admired Hardy’s sensibility, and his “instinct,” could not stand the way the sexually repressed characters in his novels maimed and ultimately destroyed themselves; failed “life’s plenitude” by succumbing to the stupid blind power of the community. Yet Dubin, sympathetic to the older writer, considered he might someday write a biography of Thomas Hardy. He wondered why he wasn’t doing it now instead of the one of Lawrence.
Hardy and Dubin both had blue-gray eyes.
Flora had called. She had seen Kitty at the airport the day she delivered Oscar to a flight for a concert in Salt Lake City.
“If you’re free, come over.”
Dubin, after a moment, doubted he could make it.
“Have you given me up, William?”
“I find it hard to poach in Oscar’s domain.”
“I am my own domain.” She hung up.
He had decided on a bath for a change. Lying, afterward, in his bed, he fell asleep. When he awoke it was night, a crescent moon in the lit sky. He lay in bed wondering if he was lonely.
He ate supper out of a sardine tin with a squeeze of lemon and a sliced tomato. After rinsing spoons, forks, and cup he put in a long-distance call to Maud. The girl who answered said she was in San Francisco. He sat down and wrote her a letter; he owed her several. And he was glad Kitty was getting back Tuesday. He worried on and off about Gerald; but in bed at midnight, when he thought back on the day, it hadn’t been a bad Sunday.
After a good morning of work Dubin had driven into town for a paper, conscious that he had dreamed heavily during the night, though he could remember nothing of his dreams. He tucked the newspaper under his arm and experienced something stronger than an impulse to walk a few blocks to Roger Foster’s house, although a hand in his head was waving him back. Dubin hurried on, possibly to see what he hadn’t come here yesterday for fear of seeing. “What’s fate for?” He had thought while shaving: if she went to Roger’s house after leaving me she’d be gone now—has to be at work today. If for some reason she’s still with him, I don’t want to know.
Yet here’s Dubin spying her out; and as he had imagined he might, without surprise, came upon Fanny’s white Volvo parked in the street in front of Roger’s house. His reaction was quickly to flee; instead he circled her car to be certain it was Fanny’s; and on the back seat spied a yellow apple and her sandals. It was as though the apple bled. Wait up, Dubin, a hoarse voice advised, but his thoughts raced on. He pictured clearly and in living color a scene from the past: Here’s Dubin and Fanny at odds in Venice though he had left it for good a year and a half ago. When the performance was over he was convinced he had made a mistake in letting the girl go. How could he, in his right mind, have done it? He ought by some means or other to have persuaded her to stay. His legs wobbled.
Dubin had considered going for a drive to mull over what to do but couldn’t bear to leave the spot without having talked to Fanny. He felt he had misplaced something, an arm or leg. Let me be sane, the biographer thought: nothing very serious has happened. There’s been no irrevocable break—of course we’ll meet again. We are important to each other. Why should I think she’s slept with Roger because she may have stayed the night in his house?—perhaps slept in a room there as she’d done when she first came to this town. Even two nights. How unkind I am to her. Suppose she did sleep with him—hadn’t she every right to, given the situation and how I mishandled her? Besides, they’re friends: the guy loves her, wants to marry her, and Fanny’s warmhearted response to feeling is one of her talents. I mustn’t think of it as another betrayal. If anybody’s to blame it’s me.
He’d gone home thinking he’d telephone Fanny and ask to see her. The phone rang for a full five minutes. He then called the library, asked for Roger, and when the librarian said hello, Dubin remained silent. Roger hung up. Still, he was at work, not in bed with her. Dubin then picked up his Hardy novel but reading it felt unreal. Boldwood’s morbid jealousy of Bathsheba embarrassed him. He drove again to Roger’s house, went up the porch steps, rang the bell. No one came to the door. As he was driving home Dubin turned in mid-block and rode back to town. It was now almost five o’clock. He waited fifteen minutes under a locust tree up the street from the red-brick library building. When Roger came out and locked the door Dubin trailed him from a block behind, then lingered in his parked car, hoping Fanny would come out of the house—if she ever did—and drive off to New York City. He’d follow and signal her in her mirror to pull over so they could talk.
An hour later, Fanny, in skirt and red blouse, left the house with Roger. She was not carrying her worldly goods, not even the shoulder bag. Roger double-locked the front door as she waited on the porch—they looked like a young couple on their way to dinner out. They went down the steps, Roger’s face lit by a happy smile, Fanny talking animatedly—no mourner she —and got into his Chevy. Was her car out of commission? Was that why she had stopped off momentarily, and then it grew to a visit? Dubin swiped at this straw—wanted it to be so; but her car was in the street—not at the garage. Not very likely. They drove away—where Dubin could not know unless he took off after them. The thought was degrading though he favored the action. Where would it get him? He did not follow them.
Instead he drove home; he’d considered Flora’s but quashed that. He felt like a man trying to keep something evil, indecent, from breaking out. This will pass, he promised himself. Don’t go on reacting like a child to a threatened loss of affection. I’ve had my morbid little experiences—no more of that. If I have to give Fanny up I will. This is as good a time as any—better, in fact: I’m into the act. But when he thought of her bestowing on Roger that warm affection she had so often expressed for him, those intimate pleasures she had shared with William Dubin, the floor under him seemed to sag. A spurt of jealousy spread like acid in the blood. He resisted the feeling, as if it was a wild animal he was giving birth to. My God, why is this happening to me? Why should it be? In the shower he thought: she’s had Roger before and nothing came of it. He can’t give her better than I gave—give. She’s bound to come back if I’m patient. Just don’t do the wrong thing. The wrong thing is to suffer needlessly.
So Dubin informed himself, but his thoughts did not appease or console him. He was heavy with desire of her, his penis as if salted, swollen. “Control yourself,” he warned himself, and didn’t like the sound of it. Co
uld Fanny have planned this: had guessed he would check her out at Roger’s—had foreseen his reaction, possibly to force him to define his commitment to her; decided once and for all how genuine, compelling, it was? That wasn’t much Fanny’s way, yet who knew for sure? Whatever her way was he had to have her back—at least till he could sanely reason it out and come to a sane decision.
Reason’s the word: see the situation as is—no one had said goodbye forever, so why jump the gun? Of course Fanny would call him—a question of time. This self-created crisis—his sense, surely illusory, of their affair having ended badly, had hit him in the head upon discovering her car at Roger’s curb. He had once more to contend with the shame of supposed betrayal: Fanny reacts to frustration by sleeping with the nearest guy in sight—had the bitch learned nothing? No, Dubin thought, this is something else again, in truth more serious. Roger is not the gondolier; he wants to marry her, an altogether ultimately more perilous situation for me. This fear tips Dubin’s unsettled self and jealous bubbles bubble forth. My God, what else am I capable of that I didn’t know? How many more hollows will I uncover in myself? How can this sort of thing, not at all admirable in youth, go on happening to a grown man? The biographer warned himself: It’s one thing for a man not to know, not to have learned; it’s another not to be able to live by what one does know. That’s sure danger.
The next day Fanny’s car had disappeared. Dubin had discovered this on his way to the airport to pick up his wife. He’d felt a short-lived relief, until he learned in a long-distance call he made later that Fanny wasn’t at work; was not expected in until Wednesday morning. Roger, he then learned, wasn’t at the library. Where in hell were they?
Kitty’s plane was delayed several hours. Dubin had to return for her that evening. Subdued, worn dark with fatigue, she embraced her husband. On entering the house Kitty cautiously sniffed the burners, interesting reversal. After he had poured her a cup of tea she talked at length of her search for Gerald, ending with her litany of regrets. He observed her carefully, after a while excusing himself to sneak in a call to Fanny via the phone upstairs, leaving Lorenzo to comfort Kitty. No one answered at the girl’s apartment. He wondered where she was and what they were doing. The original misery played its dirty little tune. That night he persuaded Kitty, despite her fatigue, to make love, exchanging an overwhelming desire for momentary release—the small brain of the shmuck was without conscience. But the act eased the acid-eating self: Fanny, wherever she was, Kitty’s grace kept at bay.
Dubin's Lives Page 33
