Andre Dubus: Selected Stories

by Andre Dubus

  They put on gym shorts and sneakers and took their gloves and ball to the backyard.

  ‘When we get warmed up I’m going to throw at your face, okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘You’re still scared of it there and you’re ducking and you’ll get hurt that way.’

  The new baseball smooth in his hand and bright in the sun,

  smacking in Chris’s glove, coming back at him, squeezed high in the pocket and webbing; then he heard the back door and held the ball and watched his father walking out of the shade into the light. He squinted at his father’s stocky body and sunburned face and arms, his rumpled hair, and motioned to Chris and heard him trotting on the grass. He was nearly as tall as his father, barely had to tilt his head to look into his eyes. He breathed the smell of last night’s booze, this morning’s sleep.

  ‘I heard you guys last night,’ he said. ‘I already told him.’

  His father’s eyes shifted to Chris, then back.

  ‘She’ll come by tomorrow, take you boys to lunch.’ He scratched his rump, looked over his shoulder at the house, then at Jimmy. ‘Maybe later we’ll go eat some lobsters. Have a talk.’

  ‘We could cook them here,’ Chris said.

  ‘Sure. Steamers too. Okay: I’ll be out in a minute.’

  They watched him walk back to the house, then Jimmy touched Chris, gently pushed him, and he trotted across the lawn. They threw fly balls and grounders and one-hop throws from the outfield and straight ones to their bare chests, calling to each other, Jimmy listening to the quiet house too, seeing it darker in there, cooler, his father’s closet where in a corner behind blue and khaki uniforms the shotgun leaned. He said, ‘Here we go,’ and threw at Chris’s throat, then face, and heard the back door; his breath quickened, and he threw hard: the ball grazed the top of Chris’s glove and struck his forehead and he bent over, his bare hand rubbing above his eye, then he was crying deeply and Jimmy turned to his running father, wearing his old glove, hair wet and combed, smelling of after-shave lotion, and said: ‘He’s all right, Pop. He’s all right.’

  PART VIII

  ADULTERY

  … love is a direction and not a state of the soul.

  Simone Weil, Waiting on God

  to Gina Berriault

  WHEN THEY HAVE finished eating Edith tells Sharon to clear the table then brush her teeth and put on her pajamas; she brings Hank his coffee, then decides she can have a cup too, that it won’t keep her awake because there is a long evening ahead, and she pours a cup for herself and returns to the table. When Sharon has gone upstairs Edith says: ‘I’m going to see Joe.’

  Hank nods, sips his coffee, and looks at his watch. They have been silent during most of the meal but after her saying she is going to see Joe the silence is uncomfortable.

  ‘Do you have to work tonight?’ she says.

  ‘I have to grade a few papers and read one story. But I’ll read to Sharon first.’

  Edith looks with muted longing at his handlebar moustache, his wide neck, and thick wrists. She is lighting a cigarette when Sharon comes downstairs in pajamas.

  ‘Daddy quit,’ Sharon says, ‘Why don’t you quit?’

  Edith smiles at her, and shrugs.

  ‘I’m going out for awhile,’ she says. ‘To see a friend.’

  Sharon’s face straightens with quick disappointment that borders on an angry sense of betrayal.

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Terry,’ Edith says.

  ‘Why can’t she come here?’

  ‘Because Daddy has work to do and we want to talk.’

  ‘I’ll read to you,’ Hank says.

  Sharon’s face brightens.

  ‘What will you read?’

  ‘Kipling.’

  ‘“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”?’

  ‘Yes: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”’

  She is eight and Edith wonders how long it will be before Sharon senses and understands that other presence or absence that Edith feels so often when the family is together. She leaves the table, puts the dishes and pots in the dishwasher, and turns it on. She is small and slender and she is conscious of her size as she puts on her heavy coat. She goes to the living room and kisses Hank and Sharon, but she does not leave through the front door. She goes to the kitchen and takes from the refrigerator the shrimp wrapped in white paper; she goes out the back door, into the dark. A light snow has started to fall.

  It is seven-thirty. She has told Joe not to eat until she gets there, because she wants to cook shrimp scampi for him. She likes cooking for Joe, and she does it as often as she can. Wreathed in the smells of cooking she feels again what she once felt as a wife: that her certain hands are preparing a gift. But there were times, in Joe’s kitchen, when this sense of giving was anchored in vengeful images of Hank, and then she stood in the uncertainty and loss of meaningless steam and smells. But that doesn’t happen anymore. Since Joe started to die, she has been certain about everything she does with him. She has not felt that way about anyone, even Sharon, for a long time.

  The snow is not heavy but she drives slowly, cautiously, through town. It is a small town on the Merrimack River, and tonight there are few cars on the road. Leaving town she enters the two-lane country road that will take her to Joe. She tightens her seat belt, turns on the radio, lights a cigarette, and knows that none of these measures will slow the tempo of her heart. The road curves through pale meadows and dark trees and she is alone on it. Then there are houses again, distanced from each other by hills and fields, and at the third one, its front porch lighted, she turns into the driveway. She turns on the interior light, looks at her face in the rearview mirror, then goes up the shovelled walk, her face lowered from the snow, and for a moment she sees herself as Joe will see her coming inside with cheeks flushed and droplets in her long black hair. Seeing herself that way, she feels loved. She is thirty years old.

  When Joe opens the door she feels the awkward futility of the shrimp in her hand. She knows he will not be able to eat tonight. He has lost thirty pounds since the night last summer when they got drunk and the next day he was sick and the day after and the day after, so that finally he could not blame it on gin and he went to a doctor and then to the hospital where a week later they removed one kidney with its envelope of cancer that had already spread upward. During the X-ray treatments in the fall, five days a week for five weeks, with the square drawn in purple marker on his chest so the technician would know where to aim, he was always nauseated. But when the treatments were finished there were nights when he could drink and eat as he used to. Other nights he could not. Tonight is one of those: above his black turtleneck the pallor of his face is sharpened; looking from that flesh his pale blue eyes seem brighter than she knows they are. His forehead is moist; he is forty years old, and his hair has been grey since his mid-thirties. He holds her, but even as he squeezes her to him, she feels him pulling his body back from the embrace, so she knows there is pain too. Yet still he holds her tightly so his pulling away causes only a stiffening of his torso while his chest presses against her. She remembers the purple square and is glad it is gone now. She kisses him.

  ‘I’m sorry about the shrimp,’ he says. ‘I don’t think I can eat them.’

  ‘It’s all right; they’ll keep.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe so.’

  The apartment is small, half of the first floor of a small two-story house, and it is the place of a man who since his boyhood has not lived with a woman except housekeepers in rectories. The front room where they are standing, holding each other lightly now like dancers, is functional and, in a masculine disorderly way, orderly; it is also dirty. Fluffs of dust have accumulated on the floor. Edith decides to bring over her vacuum cleaner tomorrow. She puts her coat on a chair and moves through the room and down the short hall toward the kitchen; as she passes his bedroom she glances at the bed to see if he rested before she came; if he did, he has concealed it: the spread is smooth. She wonders how he spen
t his day, but she is afraid to ask. The college is still paying him, though someone else is teaching his philosophy courses that he started in the fall and had to quit after three days. She puts the shrimp in the refrigerator; always, since they were first lovers, when she looks in his refrigerator she feels a tenderness whose edges touch both amusement and pathos. The refrigerator is clean, it has four ice trays, and it holds only the makings of breakfast and cocktail hour. Behind her he is talking: this afternoon he took a short walk in the woods; he sat on a log and watched a cock pheasant walking across a clearing, its feathers fluffed against the cold. The land is posted and pheasants live there all winter. After the walk he tried to read Unamuno but finally he listened to Rachmaninoff and watched the sun setting behind the trees.

  While he gets ice and pours bourbon she looks around the kitchen for signs. In the dish drainer are a bowl, a glass, and a spoon and she hopes they are from lunch, soup and milk, but she thinks they are from breakfast. He gives her the drink and opens a can of beer for himself. When he feels well he drinks gin; once he told her he’d always loved gin and that’s why he’d never been a whiskey priest.

  ‘Have you eaten since breakfast?’

  ‘No,’ he says, and his eyes look like those of a liar. Yet he and Edith never lie to each other. It is simply that they avoid the words cancer and death and time, and when they speak of his symptoms they are looking at the real words like a ghost between them. At the beginning she saw it only in his eyes: while he joked and smiled his eyes saw the ghost and she did too, and she felt isolated by her health and hope. But gradually, as she forced herself to look at his eyes, the ghost became hers too. It filled his apartment: she looked through it at the food she cooked and they ate; she looked through it at the drinks she took from his hand; it was between them when they made love in the dark of the bedroom and afterward when she lay beside him and her eyes adjusted to the dark and discerned the outlines and shapes of the chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed and, hanging above it, the long black crucifix, long enough to hang in the classroom of a parochial school, making her believe Joe had taken with him from the priesthood a crucifix whose size would assert itself on his nights. When they went to restaurants and bars she looked through the ghost at other couples; it delineated these people, froze their gestures in time. One night, looking in his bathroom mirror, she saw that it was in her own eyes. She wondered what Joe’s eyes saw when they were closed, in sleep.

  ‘You should eat,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have something light I could fix?’

  ‘My body.’ He pats his waist; he used to have a paunch; when he lost the weight he bought clothes and now all his slacks are new.

  ‘Your head will be light if you take walks and don’t eat and then drink beer.’

  He drinks and smiles at her.

  ‘Nag.’

  ‘Nagaina. She’s the mother cobra. In “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.” Would you eat some soup?’

  ‘I would. I was wondering first—’ (His eyes start to lower but he raises them again, looks at her) ‘—if you’d play trainer for a while. Then maybe I’d take some soup.’

  ‘Sure. Go lie down.’

  She gets the heating ointment from the medicine cabinet in the bathroom; it lies beside the bottle of sleeping pills. On the shelf beneath these are his shaving cream, razor, after-shave lotion, and stick deodorant. The juxtaposition disturbs her, and for a moment she succumbs to the heavy weariness of depression. She looks at her hand holding the tube of ointment. The hand does not seem to be hers; or, if it is, it has no function, it is near atrophy, it can touch no one. She lowers the hand out of her vision, closes the cabinet door, and looks at herself in the mirror. She is pretty. The past three years show in her face, but still she is pretty and she sips her drink and thinks of Joe waiting and her fingers caress the tube.

  In the bedroom Joe is lying on his back, with his shirt off. The bedside lamp is on. He rolls on his belly and turns his face on the pillow so he can watch her. She lights him a cigarette then swallows the last of her bourbon and feels it. Looking at his back she unscrews the cap from the tube; his flesh is pale and she wishes it were summer so she could take him to the beach and lie beside him and watch his skin assume a semblance of health. She squeezes ointment onto her fingers and gently rubs it into the flesh where his kidney used to be. She is overtaken by a romantic impulse which means nothing in the face of what they are facing: she wishes there were no cancer but that his other kidney was in danger and he needed hers and if only he had hers he would live. Her hands move higher on his back. He lies there and smokes, and they do not talk. The first time she rubbed his back they were silent because he had not wanted to ask her to but he had anyway; and she had not wanted to do it but she had, and her flesh had winced as she touched him, and he had known it and she had known that he did. After that, on nights when she sensed his pain, or when he told her about it, she rose from the bed and got the ointment and they were silent, absorbing the achieved intimacy of her flesh. Now his eyes are closed and she watches his face on the pillow and feels what she is heating with her anointed hands.

  When she is done she warms a can of vegetable soup and toasts a slice of bread. As she stirs the soup she feels him watching from the table behind her. He belches and blames it on the beer and she turns to him and smiles. She brings him the bowl of soup, the toast, and a glass of milk. She puts ice in her glass and pours bourbon, pouring with a quick and angry turning of the wrist that is either defiant or despairing—she doesn’t know which. She sits with him. She would like to smoke but she knows it bothers him while he is eating so she waits. But he does not finish the soup. He eats some of the toast and drinks some of the milk and pretends to wait for the soup to cool; under her eyes he eats most of the soup and finishes the toast and is lifting a spoonful to his mouth when his face is suffused with weariness and resignation which change as quickly to anger as he shakes his head and lowers the spoon, his eyes for a moment glaring at her (but she knows it isn’t her he sees) before he pushes back from the table and moves fast out of the kitchen and down the hall. She follows and is with him when he reaches the toilet and standing behind him she holds his waist with one arm and his forehead with her hand. They are there for a long time and she doesn’t ask but knows he was here after breakfast and perhaps later in the day. She thinks of him alone retching and quivering over the toilet. Still holding his waist she takes a washcloth from the towel rack and reaches to the lavatory and dampens it; she presses it against his forehead. When he is finished she walks with him to the bedroom, her arm around his waist, his around her shoulder, and she pulls back the covers while he undresses. The telephone is on the bedside table. He gets into bed and she covers him then turning her back to him she dials her home. When Hank answers she says: ‘I might stay a while.’

  ‘How is he?’

  She doesn’t answer. She clamps her teeth and shuts her eyes and raising her left hand she pushes her hair back from her face and quickly wipes the tears from beneath her eyes.

  ‘Bad?’ Hank says.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Stay as long as you want,’ he says. His voice is tender and for a moment she responds to that; but she has been married to him for eight years and known him for the past three and the moment passes; she squeezes the phone and wants to hit him with it.

  She goes to the kitchen, the bathroom, and the living room, getting her drink and turning out lights. Joe is lying on his belly with his eyes closed. She undresses, hoping he will open his eyes and see her; she is the only woman he has ever made love with and always he has liked watching her undress; but he does not open his eyes. She turns out the lamp and goes around the bed and gets in with her drink. Propped on a pillow she finishes it and lowers the glass to the floor as he holds her hand. He remains quiet and she can feel him talking to her in his mind. She moves closer to him, smelling mouthwash and ointment, and she thinks of the first time they made love and the next da
y he bought a second pillow and two satin pillowcases and that night showing them to her he laughed and said he felt like Gatsby with his shirts. She said: Don’t make me into that Buchanan bitch; I don’t leave bodies in the road. Months later when she went to the hospital to see him after the operation she remembered what she had said. Still, and strangely, there is a sad but definite pleasure remembering him buying the pillow and two satin pillowcases.

  Suddenly he is asleep. It happens so quickly that she is afraid. She listens to his slow breath and then, outstretched beside him, touching as much of the length of his body as she can, she closes her eyes and prays to the dark above her. She feels that her prayers do not ascend, that they disseminate in the dark beneath the ceiling. She does not use words, for she cannot feel God above the bed. She prays with images: she sees Joe suffering in a hospital bed with tubes in his body and she does not want him to suffer. So finally her prayer is an image of her sitting beside this bed holding his hand while, gazing at her peacefully and without pain, he dies. But this doesn’t touch the great well of her need and she wishes she could know the words for all of her need and that her statement would rise through and beyond the ceiling, up beyond the snow and stars, until it reached an ear. Then listening to Joe’s breathing she begins to relax, and soon she sleeps. Some time in the night she is waked by his hands. He doesn’t speak. His breath is quick and he kisses her and enters with a thrust she receives; she feels him arcing like Icarus, and when he collapses on her and presses his lips to her throat she knows she holds his entire history in her body. It has been a long time since she has felt this with a man. Perhaps she never has.