by Andre Dubus
“And now?”
“Tonight? A puppy.”
“Not even a bear cub?”
“Maybe a cub. Ah, Daddy, you crazy wonderful old thing. Let’s dance.”
“Dance?”
“Come on.”
“I wouldn’t know how. Not to your music.”
“What if I’ve got something you can dance to?”
“Jesus. After today—Don’t you have anything you want to say?”
“Sure. But I’ve got Sinatra too.”
“No.”
“I do. Think you can handle it?”
“I was dancing to Sinatra when—”
“—I know, I know,” she said, standing, “when I just wore pants to the beach.”
She finished her drink and put out her cigarette, and near the fireplace she kneeled on the carpet and opened the leather cassette box Dennis had given her. He was last fall’s lover. Her cassettes were arranged alphabetically, and she took Sinatra and put it in the cassette player on the mantel, and turned to her father. He stood, and said: “Want to roll back the carpet?”
“Take off your shoes,” and she reached down to a bent leg and pulled off her sandal, then the other one, watching him sitting to untie and remove his shoes. She crossed the room to him, her arms held out, and he took her hand and waist, and together they turned and swayed and side-stepped between her four chairs, then past them to the rectangular space at one end of the room, near her bedroom door. The song was “My Funny Valentine” and he sang it with Sinatra, softly in her ear; and he was her father, yes, but not of a girl anymore, and as a woman she saw him more clearly, as if her own erotic life had given her an equality or superiority that years alone could not have.
So she saw him as a man too, apart from her mother for two years, alone too much (at least without a woman too much), and he had fallen in love with a very loveable young woman. That was all. And her simple feelings about it made her think she ought to feel more but could not, because the love she had given others and taken from them had left her unable or unwilling to look at . the complexity of love; had left her knowing only the tight circle that surrounded the lovers themselves, so she could feel little more than recognition of pain touching Larry or Richie. He sang in her ear, and she rested her head on his chest, and thought that no, it was not some jaded selfishness; it was being a woman and having the courage to admit that when you loved, you changed your life, if that was what it took, and you changed other people’s lives, and you could not let even your own children stop you. Because lovers had always to be selfish, turned to each other, their backs to the world, if they wanted to keep their love. As much as she had wanted Diana to stay, for their friendship and to share the rent, she had known Diana was right when she moved the few miles to Brookline, dropped her old life and went to a new one, with the hope that this time this love would be the one that lived and grew like a tree. When you had loved several times, there was a great urge to give up and say it did not exist and had never existed, had always been a trick of nature to keep itself going, and at those times you wanted only to take lovers to help you make it through the nights, as Kristofferson sang. But you had to fight that, even if you did take the lovers, had to keep alive that part of yourself that still hoped, believed, so if love did come you would be ready enough, and strong enough, and then no one could stop you, not even yourself.
Sinatra started “I Get a Kick Out of You” and her father gently moved her backward, and danced a slow jitterbug, his hand on her waist guiding her into a turn, and she circled under their clasped and shifting hands, faced him, her right hand in his left, their free arms waving with the beat, his fingers snapping.
“So you fell in love,” she said. “So what.”
“I’m not sure that’s what it is.”
“What is it then?”
His eyes were closed now, his head moving from side to side with the music.
“I don’t know. Maybe I never will.”
He raised his arm, and she turned toward him and past him, under his arm, and behind her he turned so when she completed hers they were facing.
“Why not call it falling in love?” she said.
He pulled her to him, into a slow dance, but faster and with circles like a waltz, and said: “Because at a certain age you don’t fall. You just sort of gradually sink.”
“Lordy.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s bad.”
“What do you call it then?”
“Different. You don’t leap anymore. It’s solid, though.”
“So you sink.”
“Something like that. And you know what? I don’t care what’s wrong with her.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“It doesn’t matter. I don’t care. Comes from age.”
They moved apart, holding both hands, then raised their arms and turned from each other, back-to-back, their twisting hands touching, then he took her right with his left, and they danced sideways, back and forth in their rectangle, to the faster beat. At the song’s end he swirled with her, then dipped, his left arm supporting her back as beside her he bent his forward knee and leaned with it, as though to kneel. He pulled her up, and held her, and they danced slowly, silently, to “Little Girl Blue.” She remembered lunch once with René at a French restaurant that he said was good. He was some sort of chemist and was working in Boston now and all she understood about it was that he might go back to France, and he might not. They were eating paté and she was talking about her father and he said he would like someday to meet him. No you wouldn’t, she said. He paused, his downturned fork in his left hand, his bread in the right. Why is that? She said she had gone to Paris three years ago and when she got back she told her father the Parisians were rude and did not like Americans, and he had said: If it wasn’t for us, they’d be talking German now. René smiled and said: Perhaps we would not talk about history. And she said: Besides, I don’t think he likes men who are fucking his daughter. He chewed, watching her, then drank wine, and said: And has he met many of these men? Not if I could help it, she said, and moving on the carpet with her father’s body she knew she would not tell him about René, even if he asked if she were seeing anyone, and for the same reason she had hidden the tracks of René’s life into hers: for too long her lovers had seemed from the start ephemeral, no one to arouse his paternal interest; so she had said nothing about any of them, as an adolescent dilettante might decide to stop drawing her parents’ enthusiasm toward each new avocation.
“Do you go to Mass at all?” he said.
“Not for years.”
“Why?”
“Do you?”
“No,” he said. “Why don’t you?”
“I don’t feel anything there anymore. Is that why you don’t go?”
“No. I know it’s there. I just can’t fit it in.”
“Time, you mean?”
“No. My life.”
Gracefully he turned and she followed him, on the balls of her feet, her left hand on the back of his neck, her right hand in his left, rising and swinging outward from their circle.
“Richie does, though,” he said. “Fits it in.”
“Still wants to be a priest?”
“Yes.”
“That would be funny. In this family.”
“I hope he does it. I tell you, some days I think he ought to go for one of those monasteries. Where nobody talks.”
“Trappists.”
“That’s the one. They make good preserves.”
“Great preserves. Daddy?”
“What?”
“Be happy.”
“Okay.”
“And bring Brenda here for dinner.”
“Okay.”
“A lot.”
“That’s very nice.”
“No it’s not. It’s not nice at all. I love you, Daddy. That’s all it is.”
He hugged her then, and they stood in the music in the room, holding each other, and she felt the life in his chest
and hoped it would be long, and happy with love, and she wished more than she had wished for anything, in a very long time, that she could give him those, that they would flow from her heart to his as they stood embraced to a song.
VIII
JOAN’S LOVE HAD died of premature old age. She lived in a small apartment in the town of Amesbury on the Merrimack River. The apartment was on the second floor of a wooden building that years ago had housed a family. She had chosen the place because the other tenants were quiet, retired, and old (at forty-seven she was the youngest) and because her apartment had room for no one but herself to sleep. She had bought a double bed not to share but because she was accustomed to one, and she liked to roll toward its middle and spread out when she was nearing sleep. The closet would not hold all her clothes, but she was as tired of giving them attention as she was of love, and she gave clothes for all seasons to Goodwill. She placed small rugs at either side of the bed, and the rest of the floor was bare. It was old dark wood with slight undulations, and she liked it. There were two windows at the side of the room, and two at the front, and she pushed the dressing table and chest of drawers against walls, clear of the windows. Since she was on the second floor she rarely had to close the Venetian blinds, or even lower them, and nearly always she kept them raised. She liked waking to the blue or grey coming through the windows to her right, and at her feet; and going to sleep looking at their dark, and a gleam from the streetlight half a block away. Three recent and large photographs of her children, in color, hung on the wall above her bed. The other three walls were bare, their flat surfaces interrupted only by a door in one, and two windows in each of the other two. The closet was beside her bed. The two front windows were opposite the foot of the bed, above the short, slanted, blue-shingled roof of the front porch, and past that she could look down on the lawn with its two maples and one oak, and the quiet street.
A chair at the window would clutter the room, so on some nights when she could not sleep for an hour or so past her usual time, she brought a straight-backed chair from the kitchen, and sat at the window, and with the blinds raised she smoked and gazed out at the night, and opened her mind to whatever images came, casting away the ones that brought sorrow or anger or remorse, as deftly as, when snapping beans, she tossed out the ones that were wrinkled. In truth, she could have kept a chair at the window, grown used to its jutting into the little space she had, but she planned to live out her life in this quiet place, alone, and she was cautious about patterns, like becoming the old woman sitting at the window. Old age meant nothing to her; she did not care whether she attained it or not. But she did not want to look like she was living out the last days of a long life, when she was only resting from twenty-seven years of marriage. She meant to keep resting too, until someday a neighbor found her (not too long after death, she hoped), lying on her bed, open-mouthed in final peace (given her with suddenness and without pain, she hoped).
The bedroom was adjacent to the living room, whose door opened to the corridor above the stairs. The living room was small enough too, and she did not have in it a couch anyone could sleep on; she had one armchair with a hassock and floor lamp for reading, a small antique roll-top desk for paying bills and writing an occasional note to Carol, whom she saw less than the other children, and twice a year or so a letter to her brother in Monterey. There were three other chairs in a semicircle facing her armchair, and outside their circle, against the walls, were her bookshelves, filled with fiction written from 1850 to 1950, and of these her favorites were Zola, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, and Jean Rhys, de Maupassant, and Colette. There was a television set she rarely watched and a radio and phonograph she played every day, and at night when she came home, with the volume low both day and night, for she always felt she could hear her old neighbors, most of them living alone, either sleeping at night or napping in the afternoon or simply being quiet. She played classical music in daylight, mostly symphonies by Schubert and Mozart and Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, whose sounds changed the very look of the apartment, as tangibly as a fresh coat of paint on the walls. So did Bach’s cantatas, and Horowitz playing Scarlatti and Schumann, Chopin and Debussy. Larry and Brenda knew this music, yet when they talked with her about it, they might as well have tried explaining a philosophical abstraction. All she knew was that its deep beauty changed the walls and ceilings and floors of her home. Late at night she liked Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, Brubeck and Ellington and Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan, and these, as she sat at the window, or leaned back in the armchair in the dark, sculpted her sadness into something strong and lovely.
On her living room wall were framed, glass-covered prints by Monet and Manet and Cézanne, and a Renoir print hung in the kitchen. Where there was room—on windowsills, the tops of bookshelves, and hanging from the kitchen ceiling—she had put potted plants. The kitchen, with its small working space, and small refrigerator and gas stove, was made for one person, and she ate there, at a table she constantly bumped as she cooked and cleaned. She had bought two chairs for the table, and only Richie or Larry sat in the extra one with any regularity, and once every month or six weeks Carol sat in it, and ate what Joan cooked and was garrulous (and honest, Joan believed) about its flavor.
The sadness that stayed with her was less an emotion than a presence, like the Guardian Angel she had believed in as a child. You never felt the Angel, as you felt shyness or confidence or affection; but often, when you had forgotten about it, you felt it standing beside you, so close that its airy body touched your side, and one large wing enfolded your back. These might be times of danger, to your body or to the self that in childhood you worried most about, the heart and soul that were your name. Or they might be times when you were flirting with the forbidden, pretending to yourself that you would only look but not touch, while knowing that the closer you approached, the more certain was your fall. Now, though, her sadness did not manifest itself only on certain occasions that were connected to it, either directly or by association. Its wing did not wait to touch her when Richie phoned, or when she phoned him, or waited in the car for him to come out of the house and go with her to her apartment; or when she saw a mother with a young son on the sidewalks of the town, or a family with a young son at the restaurant where she worked. No: the wing remained on her back, the body at her side, even when she was in good spirits, alone in her rooms or drinking after work with the other waitresses; her peaceful solitude or talk and laughter were not destroyed, but they were distracted, and so diminished.
She would rather endure carrying Richie in her womb, and the bursting pain of bearing him, than what she had suffered the day she told him and, that same day, left him, and what she had to keep enduring, it seemed, for the rest of her life. She should have left before she conceived him, but she could not wish that, because then he was not alive, and she could not imagine that, nor wish for it, nor survive with her sanity one day in a world he had either left or, because of her, had never joined. Yet a time had come when, still married, and living every day with Richie, she had believed if the phone rang once more, if she drove across the Merrimack to the supermarket one more time, if she cooked one more meal, or if Greg did or said or only started to do or say one of the fifty to one hundred things she could not witness without a boredom that was plummeting toward revulsion, she would go mad. But it was none of these that had defeated her. Nor was it Greg. She could make a list of his parts she disliked, even despised; but any wife could make the same sort of list, any wife who loved; or any husband, for that matter. It was that she had outlived love. A century ago she might have died in childbirth or from the flu, while she was young. Nutrition and medicine had preserved her life, yet without the resilience to love so long. Then each phone call or errand or chore, each grating part of Greg, was love’s passing bell.
The restaurant where she worked was owned by Hungarians, the chef had come from an expensive Hungarian restaurant in Boston, and Joan was proud of the good food and low price
s that drew from the Merrimack Valley customers who dressed casually and worked for salaries that did not allow luxuries. The restaurant was a white wooden building with two dining rooms and an eight-stool bar, and it was in the shade of trees beside Route 110, a two-lane country road. She could have sat forever at her bedroom window with what Greg sent her twice a month, though she had asked for nothing— at least nothing material—but she worked five nights a week to be with people. She had never been a waitress, and now she was a good one, and she liked the work: liked learning the names and some of the lives of the regular customers, and knowing their drinks before they ordered, so as she turned to each one she could name the drink with a question in her voice. They would nod and praise her memory, and she knew their smiles came from a deeper source: she made them happy by making them feel welcome, by giving them what at least felt like affection, and usually was, beneath the simple exchange of money for food. While she served their tables they talked to her, and often people calling for reservations asked for her station, and always people gave her good tips. She did not need the money, but its meaning gratified her.
The kitchen closed at ten and the bar closed between twelve and one, so when she had cleared all her tables she sat with the other waitresses, at a table near the bar, and drank till closing time. She had always had a little to drink before dinner, when Greg came home, but only as a break from cooking and a greeting to her husband, and the drinks themselves were not important. But now, for the first time in her life, she knew the pleasure of finishing an intense period of fast hard work, and sitting down to drinks with the other workers; their talk was never serious, but gay and laughing, the sounds of release, and each cold drink, each cigarette, soothed her, from her tired feet and legs to her brain, till she felt as if she were talking and laughing from a hammock.
At ten-thirty that night, she was at a table with three women when she glanced down the length of the long dining room, her eyes drawn to its door that opened to the front parking lot, and she saw Larry standing at it, watching her, and knew that was why she had looked and that whatever it was, it was bad. How many times had she felt the tingling heat of lactation in her breast when he was a boy and no longer nursed but was crying in pain? She stood, and the women stopped talking and looked at her
