He turned to Kitty. “Will you sleep with me—make love?”
“In this heat?”
“It’s cooler now.”
“All right.” Her arms were warm, bosom soft.
After a while she asked, “What’s the matter?”
“I don’t think it’s going to work.”
“Are you sure?”
He said he was sorry.
“It’s too hot,” Kitty said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
Better this way, Dubin thought.
She fell asleep. He slept an hour and awoke, indecently mourning the girl. He had done it badly. They’d been friends, better friends than he’d had any right to expect, given the restrictions he had laid on her. With Fanny he had felt a dozen years younger, had acted like a young man, a young woman’s lover. Not having her increased his not having. The mourning was harder to bear than the lust. They were two faces of the same loss, not having her you wanted most.
Dubin slept through the ringing alarm, aware of Kitty trying to rouse him and then letting him sleep. He woke heavily, with an increasingly burdensome sense of having mishandled the girl. He felt a gross hollow rooted in himself. The biographer played back the loneliness of his youth. There was more to their lives than he had allowed to happen. Out of the confusion caused by Kitty’s call from Stockholm, Gerry’s disappearance, his own guilt for being at that moment in bed with Fanny—he had botched it with her; had—without thinking it through—let her walk out of his life.
Perhaps he had allowed it to happen because it had momentarily seemed to simplify life. Dubin felt he had blown it finally when he went looking for her car, expecting to find it where he had found it; to feel justified in letting her go; to be betrayed again so that he could blame her rather than himself. He had indulged in jealousy to re-create the wound of mourning, lust, loneliness. What he ought to have done once she left and he regretted it was to get into his car, drive to New York, and there await her return even if it meant living a few days in a hotel and working in his room. He could have wired Kitty he would pick her up at Kennedy instead of Albany and then stayed with her at the Gansevoort until Fanny had come back and they had talked. I’d have promised her more. More what or more how he couldn’t say, but more better. If he had been there waiting for her they would easily have made it up. Instead he had allowed himself to be eaten, undermined, by his jealousy.
He sent off another letter to Fanny via the apartment on West 83rd Street. It was returned in two weeks. He mailed the same letter in another envelope to the law office and then had a very good day. By the end of June he had heard nothing from Fanny yet went on writing to her. It was not a bad way to keep her present: about to reply; therefore in his future. It was a good way to keep his mind at peace and protect his work. He felt so until, one by one, his letters came back stamped “Return to sender.” They hadn’t been forwarded; she must have requested that: “Don’t forward anything return-addressed Center Campobello, I want to get rid of that shmuck.” Dubin worked at forgetting. No sense trying to kick the corpse of farewell into life. She left me before and I beat it out of my system. It shouldn’t be so hard to do again in summertime. The season is easier, gentler—in my favor. There are green-leaved trees and many flowers around. Yet he had a self-conscious intrusive sense of himself abandoned by a girl, left exposed in his emotional long underwear, if not bare ass. He was embarrassed to have intruded on her youth. Dubin’s nose twitched. He felt less vital than a year ago. His face was smaller, wrinkled, pouched under the eyes. He was losing hair, hated the sight of his comb after combing. His belly was expanding—if not in cubits, in eighth-inches; but growing in the long haul. His thick toenails were hard to cut. He had one pink foot and one white. He was adamantly a late-middle-aged gent. One paid for the pursuit of youth—from Faustus to Wm. Dubin. Wanting that much to be young was a way of hurrying time. The years ran forward backward. He counted on two fingers the time to sixty, obscene age. They say an old man dies young, back-slapping myth.
Dubin recomposed the old diet; rising at daybreak; water therapy; jogging the long walk in rain or shine, principally humid heat. Nothing to celebrate but discipline as evasion of a larger pain—ducking from that before it laid on with a bludgeon, insult he was sick of; indulged in to protect the self, self that lived the Lawrence. The dieting was strict, a pleasure-denying effort he was in no mood for. He came to the table with small appetite and left hungry. As in a former time he gobbled squares of chocolate hidden in a drawer. In bed hunger burned in every capillary. Not to brood or tear at himself he went quietly down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. Dubin made himself a liverwurst sandwich on rye, then one of cream cheese and jam smeared on white bread; he devoured both and still was hungry. He ate, he figured, Fanny, her live flesh. He drank wineglasses full of heavy cream—her breasts vanished. He ate her bare-boned; she no longer tempted. No aphrodisiac skeletons. Afterward he savaged himself for her hold on him.
But as the weeks went by his painful discipline fed him. It compels order; is order, he thought. I wish I could do it more easily, but if I can’t I will do it this way. If, as in the past, he went into the bathroom to rinse his mouth after eating, he cut out desire for chocolate, feasting at night. If he still felt hunger he drank a glass of skim milk, sometimes two. Dubin lost weight without gaining virtue. Kitty wanted to know how much more he intended to shrink. He said he felt better: loss of flesh lightened the mind.
“You’re not depressed again, are you?”
He was trying not to be.
“Then what’s eating you?”
He felt her eating him and rose from the table. “I don’t want to account for every move I make. Stop asking so many goddamn questions.”
She studied him impassively; then Kitty got up and stalked out of the room.
His heart sank. Cutting off contact with her, such as it was—as he had caused it to be—punished him most. Not that he blamed her; it was an effectual defense. Dubin considered apologizing but decided not to. It would be a relief if she didn’t talk to him for a few days.
He walked-ran day after day although it was a living bore, the sameness, the ritual. This extraordinary world—is this how life wants me to live it? But he ran to keep himself on keel, to wind himself into work the next morning. Dubin arose at the alarm ring, strayed into the bathroom, stepped blindly into the shower. Hot water poured on his head. He modified it to tepid, cold, colder—till it attacked and he gasped, ran in the tub. He held his head in the cold spray until he was numbed; then toweled himself at the open steamed window, feeling wet when dry. He exercised in his underpants in Maud’s room, bent touching toes, pedaled on his back, pulled his knees into his bulging gut, willed pushups, other self-savaging. If the day was hot he exercised just out of bed, then showered, and went down to breakfast at least awake. He heard Lawrence scream murder.
The biography was going comparatively well, considering that Fanny, a more accomplished sexual person than Connie Chatterley, haunted his thoughts, rode like a witch astride each sentence he wrote. If the afternoon was impossible he jogged at dusk, at times having to rest against a tree, or lie on his back in the warm grass in the shade of maples grown thick with summer leafage. Dubin began in a walk then upped it to a slow jog. The idea was not to think but let momentum carry him. His spine loosened as he moved, hips and shoulders relaxed, bound energy came unbound. Going uphill in the heat, sweating, breathing laboriously, he stared at his feet as he plodded on. Downhill, he gazed into the shimmering distance. Sometimes a ring of gnats circled his head. Fanny floated in and out of the mind, invisibly kept him company. A short affair and long mourning. Having gone, why didn’t she go? What kept her imprinted like a burn on the brain? Yet his sense of loss was more than loss of Fanny. What you dug out of left a hole deeper than the hole. He disliked himself for having twice succumbed to her, and twice to this self-inflicted punishment.
One Sunday morning as he was backing up on the driveway to get the car closer to t
he house so he could hose it, Dubin heard a savage yowl, hiss, scream through the window. He jammed the brake and frantically hopped out of the car. He knew what he had done. The wheel had crushed Lorenzo lying asleep on the warm asphalt. The cat vomited his tongue, his legs twitched as he died. Dubin, moaning, hid his eyes in his hands. Ten minutes later he furtively entered the house, stole a bath towel from the linen closet, and wrapped the remains of Lorenzo in it. He carried the bloody bundle to the barn, found a shovel, and buried the dead cat in Kitty’s Wood. He remembered secretly burying Maud’s black-and-white kitty there many years ago. Why does every misery happen twice? “Forgive me, Lorenzo,” but the dead cat had nothing to say. Dubin buried him in a hole three feet deep, then returned wearily across the field, hoping Kitty hadn’t seen the accident; but when he approached the house she was standing at the window observing him; her face dark, mourning.
The old house gave forth sounds at night—more, recently. It groaned, banged and creaked, without apparent cause. The biographer had long ago heard that the man who had built it had killed himself in the barn. Were his miseries adrift in the house at night? Was he? Dubin had never told Kitty about the suicide.
Kitty, one night, sat up suddenly in bed. “What was that?”
“What?”
She had heard gnawing scraping noises in the ceiling above their bed. He thought a field mouse or chipmunk might have come up inside the wall.
“If only Lorenzo were alive.”
“If only.”
That night Dubin listened to slow steps on the driveway, but when he got up to peer out of the window, could see no one, nothing in the pitch-dark.
“Should we call the police?” she whispered.
After a time he realized the “footsteps” was water dripping, after rain, from a leak in the gutter.
“What was that?” she whispered as he was falling asleep.
They listened sharply.
“Nothing. What did you think you’d heard?”
“Nothing.”
“It was nothing,” he said.
Sometimes when the furnace, heating water, rumbled, an upstairs door near the chimney shook.
Once Dubin woke to lonely secret steps coming up the stairs, but as he strained to hear, heard only his heartbeat drumming against the mattress.
When the wind blew, the house sighed, moaned, made sounds like living presences. One summer night Kitty, waking in fright, said she had heard a window slowly go up. Dubin listened sitting up, then pulled a sock on, and dragged himself throughout the house from floor to floor, turning on lights, inspecting window screens to see if one was slashed or missing. All were intact.
“It’s mad to get up,” he told her. “If I met someone I’d be a dead duck if he hit me on the head. We’re safer putting the light on but not getting out of bed.”
“I’d never get back to sleep,” she said, “if someone didn’t check the house.”
When he returned to bed after his ritual exploration Kitty locked arms around him and fell asleep. Dubin, his senses alert, lay awake listening for noises in the night.
The window shades rattled. A door slammed in a cross-draft.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“If I can.”
When he urinated, the toilet bowl sounded faintly like a ringing bell.
“Is that the phone?”
“What phone?” she wanted to know.
He was tired of the house—of living in the country. He’d had his fill of housebound cold Northeast winters; of short savage springs; increasingly hot humid summers. Kitty was right, the weather had changed for the worse: cold was colder, hot hotter. He wouldn’t mind once more living in the city, chancy as the city was. Millions lived there in peace; millions who hadn’t been insulted or mugged. One day on a bus, or as he walked along Madison, he might meet Fanny.
Dubin worried about Maud, chaste in Zen: and Gerald, in the Soviet Union—to what intent, purpose, future? They were into fates he couldn’t have foreseen. He felt at times embittered by his worries about them. And he was fed up with his work; of the endless effort it took to keep going.
And tired of living with Kitty. He was bored with the bounds of marriage; would like to be free before he was too old to enjoy it. Sherwood Anderson had one day escaped from his paint factory, left one or another wife to go to Chicago and write in a rooming house. Gauguin, taking years to sever himself from wife and children, frantically traveling wherever he could, at last made it to Tahiti. Could Dubin do what they had done?—take off and live as he pleased? He preferred, at his age, more solitude, time to himself. When he said something of the sort Kitty’s knee-jerk response was: “If you want a divorce you can have a divorce. Don’t stay for my sake.” He would have to take off before pity restrained him; pack some necessary things and go to New York. One day while she was out of the house he would drive up in a van to collect his clothes, papers, books, and the pine table he liked to write on in the barn. Kitty would get along one way or another.
She now worked two afternoons a week at the Youth Opportunity Center. She saw Ondyk once a week and stayed on after their session for a drink. Considerate of Evan, the biographer thought. Kitty had returned from Stockholm muted, nervous. She wrote long explanatory letters in behalf of Gerald to the State Department and a letter of inquiry to the American Embassy in Moscow. She wrote she had heard that her son, a deserter, was in the Soviet Union—where she couldn’t say—and would appreciate it if they tried to find him and put him in touch with his parents. She received official letters in reply—they were looking into the matter—from Washington and Moscow. She wrote every week to Maud in her commune in South San Francisco. “What ails my children?” Kitty asked. She stood at the edge of her garden, regarding her flowers. She rarely played the harp—now and then for five minutes. She had again taken to reading her Handbook of Psychiatry, the second volume. Her or me? Dubin thought. He expected, if he looked, to find his name in the index. She seemed forlorn, abandoned by her second husband, such as he was. Her voice was dry; she was thin, distant, out of it somehow. She would look long at her extended legs as she sat in a chair. Whatever she had bought to wear lately seemed wrongly styled or colored. She had bought a fall hat with a bright green ribbon and returned it the next day. “I thought you didn’t like green?” Dubin said. “I wondered if it might work this time.” She needed, she said, a pair of reading glasses. Lately as she read she had seen floating black spots, but would not go to an eye doctor. “I’m not in a mood to tempt fate.” “What do you get out of waiting but anxiety?” “I dislike running to doctors.” “Do you think you’re being brave?” “Oh, let up, William, I’m being myself.”
One evening she asked, “Don’t you think it’s time we had sex?”
He said perhaps it was.
“You never court me any more.”
It’s because in a long marriage your wife becomes your sister, he thought. Dubin asked her why she didn’t court him.
“You never exactly encourage it.”
Kitty brushed her teeth and got into a nightgown he liked. Tonight she lay in bed, waiting for him to begin. He asked her if she was tired and she said she wasn’t, was he? He wanted, after Fanny, Dubin thought, someone like Fanny. With her the sexual act began long before the sexual act. Dubin was in his wife when to his surprise his penis wilted like a plucked flower. That hadn’t happened before during intercourse. He withdrew and fell back in bed. She tried to bring him to life but he did not respond.
“Had you come?”
He said no.
“Do you feel all right?” she asked gently.
Dubin said he had up to then.
“Well, don’t blame yourself. Let’s try tomorrow. I’m tired myself.”
“Then why did you suggest it?”
“It’s been a long time.”
They tried for three nights but he achieved no erection. He felt his fear on her body.
“Don’t be worried
,” she urged. “I’m sure it’s temporary. Maybe the poor thing is bored. I wish I could plant it in my garden and let it grow like an asparagus.”
“I wish you could.”
“Are you scared?”
He said he was.
She kissed him. “Let’s not make ourselves tense. We’ll wait a week and try again. Why do you think it happened in medias res?”
“Maybe because you think of it as in medias res.”
“Oh, cut it out.”
“One day it happens,” he said.
“It shouldn’t to you yet. Some men even go on into their eighties. One has to stay with it.”
“I’ll stay with it if it lets me.”
“Is it my fault? I haven’t felt much like sex since I came back from Stockholm.” She looked at him hopefully, then uneasily.
He asked her if she had been reading about impotence in men.
Kitty confessed she had recently read a chapter in a book.
“Maybe that did it. I respond as you expect me to.” He felt he was going after her unjustly but couldn’t stop. “If you define me from the book maybe that’s the kind of man you get.”
She said that was totally irrational.
“All I’m saying is if I’m spinach in your thoughts that’s what you’ll get when you open the can.”
“If you’re spinach to me it’s because you think of me as a vegetable.”
“You’re reading the book, not I.”
“It could be physical,” she said earnestly. “Diabetes, for instance, can bring it on. Have you had a blood-sugar test recently?”
He said he hadn’t.
“Maybe it’s something else—I don’t mean to wish diabetes on you,” she said with an uncertain laugh, “but something seems wrong. You blame me—that’s what your wisecracks and ironies amount to—but you’ve changed in a way I can’t really understand. Have you been sleeping with someone?”
Dubin's Lives Page 35
