Dubin's Lives

by Bernard Malamud

  One of his problems, Dubin thought, was that he too often saw himself with her eyes.

  He stared out of the window at her shorn garden. He saw her buried in it.

  Although his ankle was healed he had not resumed his walk-run on the long road. He had given up losing weight; hadn’t the strength to go on with it. Dubin was eight pounds heavier than he’d been early that summer and it was a tight fit into his clothes. He’d had two suits altered by the tailor. “You’re bulging,” Kitty said. “You ought to go on with your long walks.” She piled concern on concern. The husband of a full-time wife is an overworked husband. Whatever she noticed she named. He ate what she fed him —more when she wasn’t there: cheese, cake, chocolate. He ate in a hurry, hardly tasting what was in his mouth. It came to nothing: repletion, shame of gluttony. What was happening in his life, the world, in this cursed house, rose to his throat.

  Dubin tried sleeping in Gerry’s room, in Maud’s; it did no good; he could not sleep in three rooms. Kitty asked him to return to their double bed. “What for?” “I sleep better with you there.” She seemed newly frightened, as though for her life. She no longer sniffed the burners before going to bed. Her harp rusted. At night Dubin poured himself half a water-glassful of brandy, sipping as he tried to read. Kitty stared at him. Was he saying his thoughts aloud? He asked her and she smiled vaguely. Dubin went to bed drunk, then woke at two. He changed beds, not to awaken her by his restlessness, whispered lamentation. If he woke her she talked. He left the bed at 5 a.m. and dressed in the bathroom. The sky was night-dark, the light of the town rising like silver fumes. There were black trees, then the silver bowl of town, then dark hills. At seven the red sun had burned through the morning mist. His hangover nauseated him. Dubin made coffee. Kitty came down in a gray robe. “It’s going to be a beautiful day.” He carried his dishes to the sink, trod upstairs to work.

  “Fanatic,” she cried from the bottom of the stairs. “Fanatic!”

  He worked without energy but feared not working. He labored, striving not to forget. He must hold on to the facts and to language. He must keep the right thing in the right place. The facts could be preserved by often studying his note cards, thousands of them. My notes are good, he muttered. I must go on stringing sentences. If I put them together in the right order I can rewrite later, when I feel myself; make what I’ve written come to life. Breathe into dead words. But the wrong words were coming up too often. When he tried to think of a distinctive synonym of a noun or verb he was down to a rare one or two. He felt for words in a fog, so busy trying to remember that he failed to think. He read the dictionary, then shoved it aside. Language is not life. I’ve given up life to write lives.

  The past when he reached for it was not there. It was hard to sustain that illusion, a colorless weightless fabric that dissolved as he felt for it. He forgot Lawrence’s past, did not always remember what went where, came first. Was he seriously sick before his mother died, or sick after? A confusion of villas, countries, complaints. But he lives in his work; who needs me to record how or where he lived outside it?

  He searched his files for correspondence with old friends, some who’d been dead for years, to recall who they’d been. What his experience with them had been. He reread Kitty’s long letters to him and his to her. Marriage had diminished their variety: one moved to monochrome. Forgetting was without color. He wanted to forget they’d been married as strangers holding to strange pasts. In a sense they were afraid not to be strangers. He wanted to forget that love hadn’t come to full-flowering sensuality, as Lawrence had preached it, whatever else it had come to. They had been happy but never sensually so, one with the other. He wanted to forget he did not now love her.

  As the days went by, the depression he had held off with upraised hands, as though it was a poisonous cloud, slipped through his fingers and smote him with suffocating force. It fell on his head like a smothering garment. To breathe he pounded his chest, bellowed his name. Dubin felt the entrapment, experienced dullness, nullity. He lived within six sheets of glass, shouting soundless pleas for freedom. He could feel himself cry out but was encased in glass to his head. I am distant to all that surrounds me but my dwarfish scaly self. In reflexive defense he read for the thousandth time: “A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear.” He recited Coleridge’s pain to lighten his own and sank into the poet’s pit, sipping brandy as the melancholy Coleridge savored tincture of opium. Lawrence, in sickness and depression, lay in bed coughing all night as he stared at a black window. Samuel Johnson sat on a three-legged stool in a tiny room, gazing into a vile abyss. He prayed to God and it came back nought: “My memory grows confused, and I know not how the days pass over me.” Dubin knitted and purled the fabric of nothing, entirely nothing. His head shrank as he monotonously recited his name. He went through the movements of life but it was like inching forward on a bed of coals. He could not escape the imprisoning consciousness, the fixed self nailed to its past. He sat alone in a drafty house, forgetting.

  A shocking multitude of single hairs appeared in his comb. His chest hair was turning gray. A rotting tooth had to be pulled. He held a book two feet from his face to focus the words. His handwriting grew in size: he’d been avoiding glasses. His haggard face was slack, faded eyes furtively hiding. He looked straight at no one. If he slept he was awakened by cramps twisting his feet. In the dark of night Dubin hopped on the floor to unknot his muscles. Kitty prescribed bananas to supply missing potassium. She knew what was missing. She made banana pudding, baked banana bread. He suffered indigestion, feared an ulcer, eructated, farted. He pissed in a limp stream dribbling in his underpants. Dubin had discovered his prostate. St. Paul might have wished it on fornicators. He had entered the age of aging. I shall never recover what I have lost. He feared illness, immobility; the disgrace of death.

  Yet he worked. It was not impossible: the movements of life. He moved his fingers, watched them move. The moving fingers wrote sentences Dubin hadn’t invented. He copied them from cards. It meant little but he worked. In the window, the sky was heavy with streamers of moving blue-gray-black clouds blown high from the northeast, eerily, mysteriously floating with outstretched wings, not east but west. A flock of honking geese headed not south but north. He feared their voyage. An avalanche of slashing rivers of rain poured into a forest of raised spears of light. In the dark distance stood winter with its white sword. Dubin shut his eyes not to see what he dared not confront.

  Time timed; crept faster. He slept with his watch in his hand. Time tightened its iron fingers around his throat. He turned the clock away, struck it, blinded it. If he thought of tomorrow today withered. Time ran in Dubin; he ran in time. Time excoriated the man from his toenails to the hairs of his head. Stuck its dirty fingers up his old ass. Time preached dying. Life was a trace of dark light in a gaseous entity, a darkly glowing sail in an irradiated universal sea of loss.

  Dubin feared ineptitude, imbalance, disorder. The sameness of each boring day slowed the effort to go on. Whispering, sighing, moaning, he raged against the yellow mirror: face of cast-iron gravity; against the crackbrained psychic homunculus. He had done it wrong, made the wrong choices: ought never to have married her; ought never to have let the girl go. In one place he found himself in another. In the bathroom in the cellar. Lost self, selves. Dubin feared his mother’s fate, saw her go mad in his looking glass. When had not wanting to live occurred to her?

  Or should he burn the book? Free himself from dead life.

  A spectral face glowed like a candle flame; waxen, with red beard and rancid enraged ice-blue eyes; he cursed in an agitated high-pitched voice: You rat-faced Jew, I am unknown to you—as Christ is Who was born to the Spirit, Word, the Man, the Male. Your Jew mind is antagonistic to the active Male Principle. You dare not live as man ought. Sex, to you, is functional, equivalent to passing excrement. You fear primal impulses. Work which should be an extension of human consciousness you distort to the end-all of existence. You write muckspout lives
because you fear you have no life to live. Your impotence is Jewish self-hatred. I detest and loathe you! Mud-worm! Dog! Stay yer bloody distance. Th’art blind to the joy of my life. Tha s’lltna touch me. Burn yer blahsted book for s‘lltna live t’ see it done!

  Dubin waked running, fearing what he might do. He ran to Gerald’s room, pulled up the window, called his name. Gerry, come home. No one in the night replied. He heard Maud whisper to a whispering voice. Her room was empty, white shades drawn. My children, help me—remember the hours I sat by your beds. Kitty lay heavily asleep, openmouthed. He must not wake her, she mustn’t see who he was. Downstairs he dialed Ondyk—twelve rings and no reply. Dubin cursed him for sleeping with his phone jack disconnected. I’ll go to his house and pound on the door. He ran into the night, feared he would destroy himself or his book.

  He drove the circular route backward, his lights plowing the moving haze. At the bridge he turned into a curved lane, then skidded along it into a dirt road, and from there to the other way to the bridge. A dozen times he passed Ondyk’s white-framed dark-shuttered house and each time warned himself against his own dreadful pride. At the edge of town he crossed a railroad track against a swinging pendulum signal, as a black locomotive dragging a single freight car loomed out of the churning mist and rumbled by. He drove watching his reflection in the windshield, the overhead light on. A stranger sat in the lit car gloomily crouched over the wheel, driving in the circular dark. Whoever saw him would know he was breaking—had broken—down. Hastily he flicked off the interior light, backed up the car, and drove the opposite way, past Kitty’s Wood, the deserted Wilson farmhouse, on the long lonely country road. Here I will live out my days and nights riding forever.

  The motor pinged, gave out on the descending road. Dubin jammed his shoe on the gas but nothing came of it. He coasted as far as he could, until the car came to a tedious stop near a dead spruce at the side of the level potholed roadway. He inspected the gas gauge with a lit match. Empty. Kitty clung to his every move. He had asked her to get gas. He turned off the headlights and switched on the flasher. Its orange blinkings lit the heavy-shadowed road. His watch had stopped at one minute past three. Dubin waited in the car, fearing to return home; detested being where he was but did not know where else to go. With both bony hands he fought panic.

  The moon rose in a glowing saucer of light in the indigo sky; under it the mountains shone luminously black. In the haze of moonlight on the night field a farmhouse was visible—a light in a window, or perhaps in front of a barn. Dubin’s fear of himself rose like a river about to flood. Shoving the car door open he plunged into the rutted field, running in the soft earth toward the farmhouse, skirting a section of withering silage corn. Nearby stood a grove of trees. Approaching them, he lost sight of the light. He was not sure where the trees were in relation to the farmhouse, if it was a farmhouse. Then he spied the light through the trees. Dubin trod on dead leaves in the dimly lit wood of maples and oak wearing tatters of brown foliage. If it was a farmhouse he would watch a minute to see if anyone was up before he went to the door.

  He would knock, he thought, and tell whoever answered that his car had broken down. He would ask to use the telephone and try Ondyk again. He would rather call Oscar Greenfeld but felt he couldn’t. He did not want to go home. He did not want to be near the manuscript. If he called Kitty he would ask her to hide it. Dubin thought that if the farmer would drive him to the bus station he would take an early bus to New York City. There he would phone Kitty and tell her where he had abandoned her car, but not where he had holed up. He would say he’d get in touch with her when he felt himself again, whenever that was. When he had been away from her for a while. He could not imagine what he would do with himself in the city. He wondered if Maud would leave the Zen commune to come see him in New York. He did not think she would. He did not think he would ask her.

  He heard a growling bark of a dog and retreated into the wood. His testicles shrank. The thought of a dog to contend with was more than he could bear. Why hadn’t he waited in the car till morning, or got a hitch on the highway and tried Ondyk again? What farmer in his right mind would open his door to a stranger’s knock at this time of the night? I’d better get out of here before the dog sniffs me. Was the animal leashed? He listened for the clink of a chain but heard none. Nor did he hear a barking dog. Dubin moved stealthily back through the trees. When he came out of the wood he saw no cornfield in the darkened moonlight. It would have to be on the other side of the wood—a larger wood than the grove of trees he had imagined. He must go carefully not to alert the dog, chain or no chain. Once he got to the cornfield and saw his flasher in the road he’d know where he was, at least for the moment.

  The moon slowly moved behind a darkly glowing white cloud mass, and Dubin saw by the light of a cluster of bright stars that he was standing in an unfenced small graveyard, perhaps a family cemetery. He sank down to see who his company was. He touched the nearest stone slab with his fingers but the carved limestone letters had been eroded by wind and rain, the snow, the seasons. Whoever lay dead there was not saying who he had been. Crawling to the next grave, he felt the slender long headstone above it, and found it too was effaced. He rose to his feet, and as the clouds broke and moonlight flooded the graveyard, he discovered to his horrified surprise that the stone he had touched had been erected before an open grave. Dubin ran.

  As he came into the moonlit wood to try to find his way back to the cornfield, he heard what he thought was a rushing wind and listened in fright as it became the sound of an animal coming at him through the spattering dead leaves. Dubin stood momentarily immobilized, then with a choking cry tore his belt out of his pants, and as the dog hurtled up at him, swung at it in panic with the belt buckle. The silver buckle struck the dog’s skull with a thud-like crack. The animal yelped, withdrawing with a whimpering snarl. Dubin, dropping the belt, rushed to a tree and jumped for a low limb. He lifted his leg over it as the dog with a snarling growl flung himself up at him, fastening its slobbering teeth into his right shoe, as he tried in terror to drag himself up the tree. He was unable to move. The dog, its eyes glowing yellow, clung like a deadweight to his foot.

  “Help,” Dubin cried. “Help me!”

  The door of the farmhouse, twenty feet away, shot open, and through the trees he saw a somber oblong of light as a burly man with a rusty pistol appeared in the lit doorway. The man raised the gun and fired into the wood.

  “Git ‘im!”

  The dog quivered and fell to the ground at Dubin’s feet, growling throatily, threshing its legs as though running a race it had long ago lost.

  Dubin dropped from the branch and ducked through the brush. With a cry the farmer holding his smoking pistol came charging into the wood. A moan of deep-boweled lamentation rose like slow smoke. Dubin heard a bullet thwack into a tree as several dead leaves fluttered down on his head. For a minute he ran in a circle, then stepped into the crotch of a two-trunked oak with ragged low boughs. Catching one, he managed to pull himself up into the oak’s bare crown. He shinnied and climbed, straining, writhing, until he was fifteen feet above the ground, where he watched through the branches the white-faced farmer hunting him with a gun.

  “I’ll git you for murderin’ my dog, you homusexual bastard!” He was a large-faced gray-haired man in a white undershirt, dirty work-pants, earth-stained leather boots. His face poured sweat as he wandered in the gloomy wood. He seemed dazed, frightened, mourning his dog.

  Dubin shivered in the cold tree. He was moved to call out—beg the man’s pardon, explain what had happened tonight, perhaps tell him the story of his life—why it had brought him at this moment to this wood. But he dared not utter a sound—felt the farmer would shoot at his voice. He’d be dead before he could identify himself—a madman hiding in a stranger’s tree.

  The farmer sank to his knees before his dead dog, its head and neck dark with blood. He lay with his cheek on the dog’s flank, his shoulders shaking. Dubin, watching from
above, thought: At midnight I was in bed unable to sleep, and a few hours later am up somebody’s tree after causing him to kill his dog. He regretted there wasn’t time to live more than once and maybe do things better another time.

  To his dismay, the burly farmer, rising, began to shoot into the trees. He would stand under one, grimly shoot a bullet into it, then pass to the next. “I’ll git you, you-Jew-son-of-a-bitch, one way or t’other!”

  Dubin, on the verge of calling out who and where he was, held back, fearing the man would fire before he had two words out. He saw himself fall to the ground like an ungainly huge bird.

  The farmer aimed his pistol and shot into Dubin’s tree. The bullet broke a branch over his head; it brushed his face as it cracked through others on its way to the ground. To keep himself from falling, he clasped the trunk of the rough oak with both arms.

  The gun banged twice more as the man aimed at nearby trees. When the pistol was empty, he stumbled into the house, probably to reload. Dubin began hastily to descend, but before he could get halfway down, the farmer reappeared with a quilted blanket and tenderly covered his dead dog. Lifting the animal as if it were a child, he carried it into the wood. Dubin knew an empty grave where he could bury it.

  It had begun to rain. The moon had gone; the wood was pitch-black. He slid down the tree, his raw hands bleeding. Avoiding the wood where the farmer had disappeared, he ran in the brush through the trees into the open. Skirting the lit narrow farmhouse, Dubin ran in the wet dark, expecting a bullet in the back of his head.

  Then he saw the cornfield. In the rain he trotted alongside the rows of silage corn, the stalks sighing in the wet. As he turned the end of the sloping field, he beheld through trees the blinking orange light of Kitty’s car on the road. In a few minutes he was in it, drenched to the flesh, his teeth chattering. His watch read a minute after three.