Separate Flights

by Andre Dubus

  While I ate the Grape Nuts, Natasha and Sean came in, brown arms and legs and blond hair crowding through the door at once, the screen slamming behind them. Natasha is nine; she is the love child who bound us. Sean is seven. Looking at them I felt love for the first time that day.

  ‘You slept late,’ Sean said.

  ‘That’s because you were up late, you guys were fighting,’ Natasha said. ‘I heard you.’

  ‘What did you hear?’

  ‘I don’t know—’ She was hiding whatever it was, down in her heart angry words breaking into her sleep. ‘Yelling and swear words and then you left.’

  ‘You left?’ Sean said. He was simply interested, not worried. He lives his own life. He eats and sleeps with us, comes to us when he needs something, but he lives outside with boys and bicycles.

  ‘All grown-ups fight from time to time. If they’re married.’

  ‘I know,’ Sean said. ‘Where’s Mom?’

  I pointed to the ceiling, to the sound of the vacuum cleaner.

  ‘We want to eat,’ he said.

  ‘Let her work. I’ll fix it.’

  ‘You’re eating,’ Natasha said.

  ‘I’ll hurry.’

  ‘Is that your lunch?’ Sean said. ‘Grape Nuts?’

  ‘It’s my supper.’

  I asked what they had done all morning. It was hard to follow and I didn’t try; I just watched their loud faces. They interrupted each other: Natasha likes to draw a story out, lead up to it with history (‘Well see, first we thought we’d go to Carol’s but then they weren’t home and I remembered she said they were going—’). Sean likes to tell a story as quickly as he can, sometimes quicker. While they talked, I made sandwiches. It was close to noon but I lingered; Natasha was stirring Kool-Aid in a pitcher. In twelve minutes Edith would be waiting at the Shell station, but I stood watching them eat, and I hoped something would change her day and she wouldn’t be there. But she would. An advantage of an affair with a friend’s wife was the matter of phone calls: there was nothing suspicious about them. If Edith called and talked to Terry I’d know she couldn’t see me this afternoon. I asked the children if they wanted dessert.

  ‘Do we have any?’ Natasha said.

  ‘We never have dessert,’ Sean said.

  I looked in the freezer compartment for ice cream, then in the cupboard for cookies, sweets to sweeten my goodbye, and there were none. Sean was right: we never had desserts because I didn’t like them and Terry liked them too much; she controlled her sweet tooth by having nothing sweet in the house.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I knew I was being foolish but I couldn’t stop. ‘I’m a stupid daddy. I’ll bring some dessert home with me.’

  ‘Where you going?’ Natasha said.

  ‘To get the car worked on,’ my voice jumping to tenor with the lie.

  ‘Can I go?’ Sean said. He had a moustache of grape Kool-Aid.

  ‘Me too,’ Natasha said.

  ‘No, it takes a long time, then I’m going to run with Hank.’

  ‘We don’t mind,’ Natasha said. ‘We’ll watch you.’

  There is not one God, I thought. There are several, and they all like jests.

  ‘No you won’t,’ I growled, and went at her with fingers curled like talons, then tickled her ribs; her sandwich dropped to her plate, she became a fleshed laugh. ‘Because after we run we’re going to a bar and drink beer. It’s what mean old men do.’

  They were laughing. Now I could leave. Then Terry came downstairs, one of my old shirts hanging out, covering her shorts.

  ‘I want us to start having desserts.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yay!’ Sean said. ‘Desserts.’

  ‘We never have desserts,’ Natasha said.

  Terry stood looking at us, smiling, confused, ready to joke or defend.

  ‘We’re depriving the kids of a basic childhood experience.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Mother’s desserts.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  I wished she were the one going off to wickedness; I would stay home and make cookies from a recipe book.

  ‘Well, I’m off.’

  I kissed their Kool-Aid mouths, touched lips with Terry, and went out. She followed me to the screen door.

  ‘Did you get enough to eat?’

  ‘Sure. Not as good as lobster,’ talking over my shoulder, going down the steps, ‘but cheaper anyway.’

  She didn’t answer. In the car I thought adultery is one thing, but being a male bitch waging peripheral war is another, this poison of throwing gift-lobsters at your wife’s vulnerable eyes, drying up her sweetness and hope by alluding to the drought of the budget. Which was also a further, crueler allusion to her awful belief in a secular gospel of good news: we were Americans, nice, healthy, intelligent people with nice, healthy, intelligent friends, and we deserved to eat lobsters the day after a fight, just as we deserved to see plays in Boston and every good movie that came to town, and when I told her there was no money she was not bitter, but surprised. She was also surprised when the bank told her we were overdrawn and she found that she had forgotten to record a check, or when someone wrote her about a bill that lay unopened in her desk.

  When I got to the Shell station Edith was parked across the street. I told the man to change the oil and grease it.

  ‘I’ll go run some errands with the wife,’ I said, thumbing over my shoulder at Edith. ‘Then I’ll come pick it up.’

  He looked across the street at Edith.

  ‘Keys in the car?’

  I slapped my pockets.

  ‘Yes.’

  I wondered what twelve months of daylight would do to adulterers. In daylight it seemed everyone knew: the fat man in the greasy T-shirt nodding at me as I told him twenty weight and a new filter and grease, the women who drove by and glanced at me as I waited to cross the street, and the little suntanned boy, squinting up at me, pulling a wagon with his tricycle on the sidewalk beside her car. I got in and said: ‘He knows too.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘That kid. He knows where we’re going.’

  She drove through the city. It is built on the Merrimack, which is foul, and the city itself is small, ugly, and has the look of death, as a man with cancer does. The industry was shoes, but the factories have been closing. On the main street the glass-fronted stores, no matter their size, all have the dismal look of pawn shops or Army surplus stores. But urban renewal has started: on the riverbank they have destroyed some old gray wooden buildings; in their place a shopping center will be built, and then as we stop at the red light and look toward the river we shall see instead the new brick buildings with wide glass windows, and specials posted on the glass of the supermarket, and the asphalt parking lot with cars, shopping carts, and unhappy women. Our city is no place for someone who is drawn to suicide.

  When Edith got to the divided highway I twisted around and opened the ice chest on the floor in the back. Already we had a ritual like husband and wife: it was for me to begin the drive by opening two beers, lighting two cigarettes. Today she had added something: two Löwenbraüs, two Asahis, and two San Miguels angled up at me in the ice.

  ‘She brings such presents,’ I said, and kissed her cheek.

  ‘Cold presents from a cold woman.’

  An opener was in the glove compartment, under one of her scarves that was red and soft like pants in my hand. The Asahis opened with a pop. Edith glanced in the rear-view mirror, swallowed, then took the lighted cigarette from my fingers.

  ‘I think I’ll change to Luckies,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Sure, do that. Why not just let him babysit for us.’

  We avoided naming them: we said he, she, him, her.

  ‘He’d be glad to.’

  ‘Well she wouldn’t, sweetheart.’

  I told her about the fight; the sun was warm on my face and arm at the window, the air smelled of trees and grass, we were driving in rolling wooded country under a blue sky, and I was too happy
to care about last night. I told it quickly.

  ‘I think he wants to make love with her,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why? Because she’s pretty and he likes her and he hasn’t had any strange since Jeanne. Why do you think?’

  ‘I mean why do you think he wants to?’

  ‘The way he looks at her. And the way he looked when we ‘ came back from getting beer last night.’

  ‘Guilty?’

  ‘Sheepish. Does that bother you?’

  ‘Not me.’

  ‘Good. We can babysit for each other,’ smiling, her eyes bright.

  ‘She blooms, she blooms,’ I said. ‘And in May you were so hurt.’

  ‘In May I was alone.’

  I am surrounded by painful marriages that no one understands. But Hank understands his, and I think for him it has never been painful; the pain was Edith’s, and she came to me with it in May, at a party. When she asked me to go outside I knew she had finally caught Hank, and because she is small and her voice soft I saw her as vulnerable, and I felt she lacked the tough spirit to deal with adultery. First I found Terry in the kitchen so she wouldn’t miss me, then start looking about to see which woman was missing too. I told her where I was going and she understood too that Edith had finally caught on; she looked at me with that veiled excitement we feel in the face of other people’s disasters. In the backyard, away from lighted windows, Edith and I sat side by side on a picnic table.

  ‘You probably already know this, I guess Terry does too and everybody else: about Hank and that phony French bitch that somebody brought to our Christmas party—’

  ‘Jeanne.’

  ‘And they crashed that party.’ She touched my shirt pocket for a cigarette. ‘I forgot my purse inside. Bumming cigarettes, that’s how I first got suspicious: he’d come home with Parliaments, I guess they lay around in bed so long he smoked all his, and now I don’t know what to do, I can’t stand to see him naked, I keep thinking of—shit: I ought to divorce him, I could do that but I don’t really want to, but why shouldn’t I? When he doesn’t love me.’

  She stopped. My arm was around her; I patted her shoulder, then squeezed her against my side. There was a time in my life when I believed I could help people by talking to them, and because of that I became a confidant for several people, most of them young girls who were my students. People told me about marriages, jobs, parents, and boyfriends, and I listened and talked a lot and never helped anyone at all. So now if someone comes to me I offer what I know I can give: the friendship of a listening face. That night I held Edith and listened and said very little. After a while she jumped down from the table and walked toward the shadows of the house. She was wearing a white dress. I was about to call to her when she stopped and stood smoking with her back turned. Then she came back to the table.

  ‘You’re good to me.’

  ‘I haven’t helped you any’

  She stood looking up at me. I got down from the table and held her, pressing her face to my chest and stroking her hair, then we kissed and she squeezed me tightly, her hands moved on my back, and her tongue darted in. We stood a long time kissing in the shadows.

  ‘Come see me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Monday afternoon.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, I want you to. Come at one.’

  Next day was Sunday, and all day while the sun was up I didn’t believe Edith, and I didn’t believe what I had felt holding her, but after dinner in the night I went for a walk and I believed all of it again, and that night in bed I lay awake for a long time, like a child before a birthday. After my twelve o’clock class Monday I drove to Edith’s. When she opened the door I knew from her face that she had been waiting.

  Now the place we were going to, the place we always went to after that first afternoon in her house, was a woods off a highway in New Hampshire: down a wide, curving dirt road, dry and dusty, then she parked in the shade and I opened two San Miguels, got the blanket from the back seat, and we climbed a gentle slope, brown pine needles slippery underfoot. I timidly held her hand. I prefer adultery to be a collision: suddenly and without thinking alone with a woman, an urgent embrace, buckles, zippers, buttons. Walking up through the trees gave me time to watch Terry taking the lunch dishes from the table, stacking them on the counter by the sink, and with a distracted, troubled face starting to wash the dishes from three meals. At the knoll’s top I lay the blanket under pines and a tall hemlock and heard behind me the buttons of her shorts; I turned and, kneeling, pulled the shorts down her warm brown legs. She took her shirt off and reached back for the clasp of her brassiere; then she lay on the blanket and watched me until I was naked, lying beside her with the sun shining over the crown of a gray birch onto my face.

  ‘What’ll we do in winter,’ she said.

  ‘In the car, like kids.’

  ‘If we have a winter.’

  I kissed her eyes and said: ‘When fall comes we’ll make love in the car and when winter comes we’ll fog the windows and make love wearing sweaters and in spring we’ll be back here on this blanket on this hill.’

  ‘Promise me.’

  ‘I promise.’

  Then I was alone thinking of a year of deceiving Terry and Hank and the others whom you don’t and can’t watch out for because they’re faceless and nameless, but they’re always watching you. I could feel Edith knowing what I was thinking.

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘I know you do. No, lie down, love. I want to be on top. There. Hello, love.’

  I reached up for her breasts and watched her face, eyes tightly shut, lips parted, and the long black hair falling across her right cheek, strands of it in her mouth, and she tossed her head, neck arching, and the hair fell back over her shoulder. Then I shut my eyes, and my hands dropped from her breasts and kneaded the earth. For a while we were still, then I opened my eyes to the sun and her face.

  ‘I don’t want to move yet,’ she said. ‘I want to sit here and drip on you.’ Already I could feel it. ‘Can you get the beer?’

  I reached behind me and gave her a bottle and watched her throat as she swallowed. I raised my head to drink from mine.

  ‘You’re much faster now,’ she said.

  On that afternoon in May we went to the guest room, downstairs at the rear of the house, and after an hour I gave up. We had our shirts on and I was wearing socks.

  ‘Are you sure you can’t?’ she said.

  ‘I keep listening for Sharon to come down or Hank to walk in.’

  ‘You’re sure that’s all it is?’

  ‘That’s plenty enough.’

  We went outside and sat on lawn chairs in the sun. After a while Sharon woke up and came out and played at Edith’s feet. I said I would see her tomorrow, at the shopping center north of town, just over the New Hampshire line; then I went home happy and Terry said: ‘You must have had a good day in class.’ I avoided her eyes until she turned back to the stove, then I looked at her long red hair and like singing I thought: I will love them both. I said I would go take a shower, and I went to our bedroom: the bed was unmade and a pair of her Levi’s and a shirt were on the floor, and I had to step over the vacuum cleaner to get into the bathroom, where two wet towels lay on the floor but no clean ones in the closet, and I yelled at her: ‘Could I have a Goddamn towel!’ That night I read in the living room until she was asleep, and next afternoon Edith and I found this road and woods and hill, and that time it wasn’t Sharon and Hank I saw with my closed eyes but Terry at home, and Edith kept working with me until finally I came in spite of thinking, it was like some distant part of me coming, like the semen itself had decided it was tired of waiting, and it spurted out just to give us all a rest. For two or three weeks I was like that, then all at once one day I wasn’t, as though even guilt and fear could not survive the familiarity of passion.

  Now Edith lay beside me and we drank beer going tepid and smoked lying naked in the sun.