by Andre Dubus
“You have to know how it started, you have to know the accident. The women, you know: when there’s a divorce, they get dropped. You know what I mean. They lose the friends they had through the marriage. The husband’s friends. Goddamn if I know why. Doesn’t matter if the husband was the asshole. Still it happens. And they’re out of his family too. So I’d have her over for dinner. After you guys split up. Her and Richie and me. Shit, I—” Now he did not know, and in a glimpse of his future knew that he never would know, why he had invited her, not even once a week and not only to dinner, but ice-skating and cross-country skiing, always with Richie, and finally canoeing and swimming in lakes, and by June when the ocean was warm enough Richie still went with them, but he and Brenda were lovers. “I just didn’t want her to be alone. To feel like the family blamed her.”
“The family?” Larry said to the window screen. “You and Richie?”
“Well, Carol’s not here. And Mom’s—”
“—Come on, Pop.”
“Will you let me explain?”
“Go on. Explain.” He spoke to the window still, to the dark outside, and Greg was about to tell him to turn around, but did not.
“That’s how it started. Or why it started. I’ll leave all that analyzing to you. All it does is make your tires spin deeper in the hole.”
“That might be good, depending on the hole.”
“Jesus. What happened is, sometime in the spring there, I started loving her.”
“Great.” Now he turned, swallowed from his beer, looked at Greg. “I knew you and Richie were doing things with her. He told me.”
“What did you think about it?”
“I tried not to think anything about it. So I thought it was good for Richie. He likes her a lot. I even thought it was good for her.”
“But not for me.”
“Like I said, I tried not to think anything about it. It looks like one of us should have. Mostly you. What do you mean, you started loving her? Are we talking about fucking?”
“Come on, Larry.”
“Well, are we?”
“What do you think?”
“I’m staying on the surface: my little brother and my father have been taking care of my ex-wife.”
“You want to hear me say it. Is that it?”
“Isn’t that why you called me here?”
Greg pinched his beer can, pressing it together in its middle, and said: “I called you here to say I’m going to marry her.”
Like wings, Larry’s arms went out from his body, his beer in one hand.
“Marry her? Marry her?”
“Larry, look; wait, Larry, just stand there. I’ll get us a beer. You want something different? I got everything—”
“—You sure the fuck do.”
“Come on, Larry. Scotch, rum, tequila, vodka, gin, bourbon, brandy, some liqueurs—”
“—I’ll take mescal.”
“You’ll take tequila.”
“And everything else, it seems.”
Greg left him standing with his empty can, and carrying his own bent one descended the short staircase, got the tequila from one cabinet, a plate from another, took a lime from the refrigerator and quartered it on the cutting board, put the lime and salt shaker and shot glass and bottle on the plate, then opened himself a beer. Upstairs he walked past Larry and laid the plate on top of the television set near where Larry stood. Greg sat in an armchair across the room.
“Let me talk to you about love,” he said.
“Paternal?”
“Love, Goddamnit. I don’t believe I feel it the way you do.”
“Looks like you do. You even chose the same woman.”
“I didn’t choose. Now let me talk. Please. You get to be forty-seven, you love differently. I remember twenty-five. Jesus, you can hardly work, or do anything else; you wake up in the morning and your heart’s already full of it. You want to be with her all the time. She can be a liar, a thief, a slut—you don’t see it. All you see is her, or what you think is her, and you can walk off a roof with a shingle and hammer in your hands, just thinking about her. But at forty-seven, see, it’s different. There’s not all that breathlessness. Maybe by then a man’s got too many holes in him: I don’t know. It’s different, but it’s deeper. Maybe because it’s late, and so much time has been pissed away, and what’s left is—Is precious. And love—Brenda, for me—is like a completion of who you are. It’s got to do with what I’ve never had, and what I’ll never do. Do you understand any of that?”
“All of it,” Larry said, and stepped to the television set, and, with his back to Greg, poured a shot of tequila, sprinkled salt onto his thumb, licked it off, drank with one swallow, then put a wedge of lime in his mouth and turned, chewing, to Greg. “But it sounds like you could have had that with anybody.”
“No. Those feelings came from her. I didn’t feel them before.”
“All right. All right, then. But why marry, for Christ’s sake?”
“I need it. She needs it. It’s against the law, in Massachusetts. We’ll have to do it some other place. But I’m going to see Brady. See if he can work on changing the law.”
“You’re bringing this shit to the fucking legislature?”
“Yes.”
“God damn. Why don’t you just fuck her?”
“Larry. Hold on, Larry.”
“I am holding on, Goddamnit.”
Larry’s face was reddened, his breath quick; he half-turned toward the television set, picked up the bottle and shot glass, then replaced them without pouring. He looked at Greg, and breathed deeply now, his fists opening and closing at his sides, in front of his pelvis, at his sides. Then, at the peak of a deep breath, he said quietly: “You have to marry her,” and exhaled, and in the sound of his expelled breath Greg heard defeat and resignation, and they struck his heart a blow that nearly broke him, nearly forced him to lower his face into his hands and weep.
“Yes,” he said. So many times in his life, perhaps all of his life, or so his memory told him, he had stood his ground against opponents: most of them in the flesh, men or women whose intent was to walk right through him, as if he were not there, as if the man he was did not even occupy the space that stood in their way; there had been the other opponents too, without bodies, the most threatening of all: self-pity, surrender to whatever urged him to sloth or indifference or anomie or despair. Always he had mustered strength. But now he felt the ground he held was as vague as a principle that he had sworn to uphold, and he could not remember feeling anything at all about it, yet was defending it anyway because he had said he would. The word marry was as empty of emotion for him as, right now, was the image of Brenda’s face. And it struck him that perhaps she too, like so much else, like Goddamn near everything else, would become a duty. Because when you fought so much and so hard, against pain like this as well as the knee-deep bullshit of the world, so you could be free to lie in the shade of contentment and love, the great risk was that you would be left without joy or passion, and in the long evenings of respite and solitude would turn to the woman you loved with only the distracted touch, the distant murmurs of tired responsibility. Again he said: “Yes.”
“She’ll want children, you know,” Larry said.
Greg shrugged.
“You’ll give them to her?”
“There’s always a trade-off.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“You can’t marry a young woman, then turn around and refuse to have kids.”
Larry turned to the television, poured tequila, and, ignoring both salt and lime, drank it, and Greg watched the abrupt upward toss of his head. Larry put the glass on the plate, his downward motion with it hard, just hard enough so it did not crack the plate; but the striking of the thick-bottomed glass on china created in the room a sudden and taut silence, as though Larry had cocked a gun they both knew he would not actually use.
“You do that, Pop,” he said, facing the corner behind the television. “I’m
going.”
Then he was walking past Greg and out of the room, and Greg moved in front of him, and when Larry sidestepped, Greg did too; Larry stopped.
“Where?” Greg said.
Larry started to go around him but Greg stepped in front of him, looked at his eyes that were sorrowful and already gone from the room, as if they looked at a road in headlights, or a bed somewhere in a stripped and womanless room, or simply at pain itself and the enduring of it, and Greg thought: Why they must have looked that way with Brenda, around the end, they must—
“Where are you going?”
“Away. And I don’t want your blessing. I’ve already got your curse.”
Then, very fast, and with no touch at all, not even a brush of arm, of sleeve, he was around Greg and across the short distance to the stairs, where Greg watched his entire body, then torso and arms and head, then the head, the hair alone, vanish downward. He stood listening to Larry’s feet going down the second flight. He listened to the first door, to the entryway and, as it closed, to the front door open and close, not loudly as with the glass and plate, but a click that seemed in the still summer night more final than a slamming of wood into wood.
THREE
RICHIE PRAYED Please Jesus Christ Our Lord help us as he went up the stairs into the kitchen; then he saw his father standing on the east sundeck. His back was to Richie, and a coffee mug rested on the wall, near his hip. Then he turned, smiled, raised the mug to his lips, blew on the coffee, and drank. Beyond him were the maples that grew near the house, at the edge of the woods.
“Pancake batter’s ready,” he said. “Bacon’s in the skillet. You want eggs too?”
“Sure.”
His father stepped into the kitchen, and slid the screen shut behind him; at the stove he turned on the electric burner under the old black iron skillet where strips of bacon lay. From the refrigerator behind him he took a carton of eggs and a half-gallon jar of orange juice, poured a glass of it, and gave it to Richie, who stood a few paces from his father, drinking, waiting, as his father placed a larger iron skillet beside the first one, where grease was spreading from the bacon. His father poured a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and Richie knew now it was coming: what he wanted neither to hear, nor his father to be forced to tell. So when his father began, looking from the bacon to Richie, stepping to the counter opposite the stove to stir the batter, back to the stove to look at the bacon and turn on the burner under the second skillet, all the while glancing at Richie, meeting his eyes, and talking about love and living alone, or at least without a wife, and how Richie living here made him happy, very happy, but a man needed a wife too, it was nature’s way, and a man wasn’t complete without one, and that he, Richie, should also have a woman in the house, that was natural too, and come to think of it natural must come from the word nature, and the needs that Mother Nature put in people; or God, of course, God, Richie stopped him. He said: “I heard you and Larry last night.”
For a moment his father stood absolutely still, the spatula in one hand, the cigarette in the other halted in its ascent to his lips. Then he moved again: drew on the cigarette, flicked its ash into the garbage disposal in the sink beside the stove, turned the bacon, leaned the spatula on the rim of the skillet, then faced Richie.
“What do you think?” he said.
“I want you to be happy.”
Blushing, his father said: “Well—” He looked at the floor. “Well, son, that’s—” He raised his eyes to Richie’s. “Thank you,” he said. He looked over his shoulder at the bacon, then back at Richie. “You like Brenda?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t mind her moving in with us? After we’re married?”
“No. I like her.”
“There must be something.”
“Larry.”
“Yes.”
“Am I going to visit him, like I do Mom?”
His father had not thought about that, Richie saw it in his face, the way it changed as abruptly as when he had stood so still with the spatula and half-raised cigarette, but more completely, deeply: the color rushed out of it, and the lips opened, and he stood staring at Richie’s eyes, his mouth, his eyes. Then in two strides his father came to him, was hugging him, so his right cheek and eye were pressed against his father’s hard round stomach, his arms held against his ribs by the biceps squeezing his own, the forearms pulling his back toward his father.
“You poor kid,” his father said. “Jesus Christ, you poor, poor kid.”
Still his father held him, and vaguely he wondered if the cigarette were burning toward the fingers that caressed his back, and he understood that his father had not yet thought about him seeing Larry because there had been so much else, and he would have got around to that too, he always got around, finally, to everything; but there had not been time yet (then he understood too it was not time but relief, peace; there had not been those yet); then against his cheek his father’s stomach moved: a soft yet jerking motion, and he knew that above him his father was crying. He had never seen his father cry. Nor did he now. In a while, in his father’s embrace, the motion ceased and his father said, in almost his voice, but Richie could hear in it the octave of spent tears: “He’s got to come through. Larry. You pray for that, hear? He will. He’ll come through, he’ll come see us.”
Richie nodded against the shirt, the taut flesh; then with a final hug his father squeezed breath out of him and turned back to the stove. Richie waited for him to wipe his tears, but his hands were lifting out bacon and holding a plate covered with paper towel. When he took the batter from the counter, his cheeks and eyes were dry, so maybe as he held Richie he had somehow wiped them; but Richie, already forming the embrace and tears into a memory he knew he would have always, had no memory of his father’s hands leaving his back where they petted and pulled. He slid open the screen, stepped onto the sundeck, leaned against its low wall, and watched a gray squirrel climb a maple. The tree was so close that Richie could see the squirrel’s eyes and claws as it spiraled up the trunk, in and out of his vision. Near the top it ran outward on a long thick limb, then sat among green leaves, while Richie imagined the tears in his father’s eyes, and going down his cheeks, then stopping; then disappearing as though drawn back up his face, into his eyes, lest they be seen.
Saint Peter cried after the cock crowed three times (and still was not under the cross; only Saint John and the women were there, and many times Richie wondered if he would have had the courage to go to the cross), and Christ cried, looking down at Jerusalem, and there must have been other times in the Gospels but he could not remember them now. Four summers ago when he was eight he had come home from the athletic field, bleeding and crying, unable to stop the tears and not caring to anyway, for the boys who had hurt him were teenagers, and the salt taste of blood dripped from his nose to his mouth. It was a Sunday, the family was home, and his father picked him up, listened to his story, blurted, and broken by breaths and sobs, then handed him to Carol and his mother, one holding his torso, the other his legs, and Brenda in front of him, touching a wet cloth to his nose, his lips, and his father and Larry ran out of the house. He twisted out of the arms holding him, away from the three faces he loved and their sweet voices that made him surrender utterly to his pain and humiliation and cry harder; he struck the floor in motion, out of the house, onto his bicycle. His father and Larry were faster than he imagined, but he reached the field in time to see them: each held a bully by the shirt and slapped his face, back and forth, with the palm, the back of the hand, the palm, and the cracks of flesh were so loud that he was frightened yet exultant, standing beside his bicycle, on the periphery of watching children. Then his father and Larry stopped slapping, pushed the boys backward, and they fell and crawled away in the dirt, crying, then stood, holding their bowed heads, and walked away. His father and Larry came toward him, out of the small boys and girls standing still and silent. With a bandanna his father wiped blood from Richie’s nose and lips, and with a hand
under Richie’s chin turned his face upward, studied his nose, touched its bone. Then his father and Larry stood on either side of him, their hands on his shoulders, and he walked his bicycle between them, back to the house.
Watching the squirrel (he could see only the bush of its tail, and a spot of gray between green leaves) he could connect none of this with the mystery of his father’s tears: not the actual shedding of them, but the fact that they had to be gone before his father faced him, and gone so absolutely that there was no trace of them, no reddened eyes, or limp mouth, as he had seen on the faces of Carol and his mother. All his instinct told him was that seeing your father cry was somehow like seeing your mother naked, and he had done that once years ago when he had to piss so badly that his legs and back were shivering, and without knocking he had flung open the bathroom door as she stepped out of the shower; as though drawn by it, his eyes had moved to her black-haired vagina, then up to her breasts, and then to her face as she exclaimed his name and grabbed a towel from a rack. He felt the same now as he had felt then: not guilt, as when he had committed an actual sin (using God’s name in vain, or impure talk with his friends, yet frightening for him because he knew that soon it would be not words but the flesh that tempted him, and already his penis had urges that made him struggle); so not guilt, but a fearful sense that he had crossed an unexplained and invisible boundary, and whatever lay beyond that boundary was forbidden to him, not by God, but by the breath and blood of being alive.
When his father called him in, he ate heartily, and with relief, and saw that his father did too. And that relief was in his voice, and his father’s, when they did speak: of the Red Sox, of Richie’s plans for the day—softball in the morning, riding in the afternoon—and what they’d like for dinner. Their voices sounded like happiness. His father asked him if he were jumping or riding on the flat; he said jump, and his father said that’ll be ten then, and peeled a bill from a folded stack he drew from his pocket, and Richie, bringing a fork of balanced egg and speared pancake to his mouth, took it with his left hand, and nodded his thanks, then mumbled it through his food. While his father smoked, he cleared the table; his father said I’ll wash today, but he said he would, and his father said No, you go on and play ball. By then he had cleaned both iron skillets, the way his father had taught him, without soap, only water and a sponge, and they were drying on the heating burners. He sponged the egg yolk and syrup from the two plates, put them and the flatware in the dishwasher, told his father it wasn’t full yet and he’d turn it on tonight when the dinner dishes were in it. He poured the last of the coffee into his father’s cup, brought him the cream, and said he was going. He was at the door to his room when his father called: “Brush your teeth, son.”
