by Andre Dubus
‘Don’t let it get sunburned,’ she said. ‘You’ll get caught.’
‘Poor limp thing.’
‘I’ll keep the sun off.’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Yes you can.’
‘I’m an old man.’
‘You’re my young lover. Your stomach’s growling; have you eaten lunch?’
‘Grape Nuts. I slept late.’
‘You should live with me. I’d feed you better than that.’
‘It’s what I wanted. She feeds me what I want.’
‘You taste like me.’
A squirrel darted up the hemlock. After a while I said, ‘Wait.’ I stroked her arm, then tugged it, and she moved up beside me. I was on her, in her, taking a long time, the sun on my back, sweating against her belly, listening to the monologue of moans.
‘Did you?’ I said.
‘Yes. I want you to.
Her tongue-moistened fingers went up to my nipples. She had taught me I had those.
‘Oh love,’ she said.
‘Again?’
‘I think so. Yes. God, yes.’
She took me with her and I collapsed on her damp belly and breasts and listened to the pounding of her heart.
‘It felt like spurting blood,’ I said.
‘Did it hurt?’
‘I couldn’t tell.’
‘My young lover.’
‘I’m starving.’
‘You have to run first.’
‘Maybe I’ll cop out.’
‘No, you have to be strong, taking care of two women. Would you like to live with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like to live with you. We should all rent one big house.’
‘And who’d mop up the blood?’
‘There wouldn’t be any blood.’
‘She’d cut my throat.’
I got up and dressed and went down to the car for the Löwenbraüs, then back up the slope treasuring my hard climbing calf muscles; now I wanted to run. She was dressed, lying on her back, her hands at her sides, eyes closed, face to the sun.
‘I wonder how we’ll get caught,’ she said.
‘He’ll smell you when I undress.’
‘I mean Terry. If he caught us I wouldn’t care, I wouldn’t stop unless you wanted to. You probably would. You’d be embarrassed.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘You would. You keep trying to fit me into your life, but it’s hard for you, and if you got caught you’d throw me out. But you’re part of my life: you’re what allows me to live with Hank.’
‘Am I a what? I don’t want to be a what.’ I held up the Löwenbraü. ‘This is one. It’s what’s going to make me belch for the first mile.’
‘You’re my lovely what.’
‘Good old Jack, just part of the family.’
‘Sure. You make me a good wife. If I didn’t love you I’d have to love someone else. We married too young—’
‘We all did.’
Once at a party Terry was in the kitchen with Edith and two other wives. They came out grinning at the husbands: their own, the others. They had all admitted to shotgun weddings. That was four years ago and now one couple is divorced, another has made a separate peace, fishing and hunting for him and pottery and college for her; and there are the Allisons and the Linharts. A deck-stacking example, but the only one I know.
‘He needs us, Sharon and me, but he can’t really love anyone, only his work, and the rest is surface.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘I don’t mean his friendship with you. Of course it’s deep, he doesn’t live with you, and best of all you’re a man, you don’t have those needs he can’t be bothered with. He’d give you a kidney if you needed one.’
‘He’d give it to you too.’
‘Of course he would. But he wouldn’t go to a marriage counselor.’
‘You funny girl. After a long carnivorous fuck you talk about a marriage counselor. Who are you, sweetheart?’
‘My name is Edith Allison and I’m the leader of the band. I wanted to go to a marriage counselor so he’d talk. Because he wouldn’t talk just to me. He wanted everything simple: he’d been screwing Jeanne, now he’d stopped, and that was that.’
‘What more did you want?’
‘You know what I wanted. Remember me back in May? I still believed in things. I wanted to know where we were, what Jeanne meant. Now that I have you I know what she meant: that he doesn’t love me. You love the person you’re having the affair with. But it doesn’t matter now, I can live with him like that, on the surface. He’ll be busting out again soon. He’s been hibernating with that novel since he broke off with Jeanne. Before long he’ll look around and blink and screw the first thing that walks into his office.’
‘Jesus. I hope somebody goes in before I do.’
‘He’d probably do that too.’
‘Now, now: bitchy bitchy.’
‘Well, he screws his wife once in a while, so why not another man.’
‘He screws you? Frigid like you are?’
‘I try hard.’
‘I hear you can go to St. Louis and screw for that man and woman who wrote the book. The one about coming.’
‘Really?’
‘Sure. They watch you and straighten out your hang-ups.’
‘Let’s you and I go. I’d like them to watch us. We’d make them hot.’
‘You might get rid of your guilt. Do you good.’
‘Why spoil my fun? Maybe you’d learn to come more.’
‘What would a wee dirty lass like you have told a marriage counselor?’
‘I was trying to keep from being a wee dirty lass. I’m glad now I didn’t. What are you doing?’
‘Touching you.’
‘Isn’t it getting late?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you again?’
‘I don’t know.’
We left our shirts on, a wrong move: they reminded us that time was running out. My back hurt but I kept trying; Edith didn’t make it either, and finally she said: ‘Let’s stop.’ Our shirts were wet. We gathered up the bottles, the cigarettes, the blanket. In the car she made up her face.
‘What’ll you do with the bottles?’ I said.
‘I think I’ll burn candles in them at dinner. And if he notices—which he wouldn’t—I’ll tell him they’re souvenirs from this afternoon. Along with my sore pussy.’
‘He’ll see them in the garbage. You know, when he empties it or something.’
She started the car and grinned at me, almost laughing.
‘And then what, Charlie Chan?’
‘He’ll wonder why in the hell you drank six bottles of imported beer this afternoon.’
‘Well, he doesn’t deserve honesty, but a few clues might be nice.’
‘Sometimes I think—’
It was possible she wanted him to catch her; you have to keep that in mind when you’re making love with a man’s wife. But I didn’t want to talk about it.
‘Sometimes you think what?’
‘Sometimes I think I love you even more than I think I do. Which is a lot.’
‘Which is a lot. Impotent as you are, you try hard.’
She turned the car around and drove slowly and bouncing out of the woods. At the highway she stopped and put on sunglasses.
‘Light me a Lucky,’ she said. ‘My last one till—?’
I thought of the acting and the lies and, right then, if she had said we must stop seeing each other, I would have been relieved.
‘I don’t know, I’ll call you.’
As she drove onto the highway both of us pretended we weren’t eyeing the road for friends’ cars. My damp shirt and chest cooled in the air blowing through the window.
‘My pecker aches.’
‘I’m going to keep the sitter another hour and take a nap.’
‘Let me give you some money for her.’
‘Another time. Mother sent me some.’
&
nbsp; ‘The empties are in the chest.’
‘I’ll go by the dump.’
Summer school was in session, and walking downtown you’d see college girls licking ice cream cones. Once I was teaching Goodbye, Columbus and a blonde girl with brown eyes like a deer stopped me at the door before class and said: ‘Mr. Linhart, what is oral love?’ She was licking a lollipop. I looked away from her tongue on the lollipop and said fellatio; when she asked what that was I mumbled in the heat of my face that she ought to ask a girl. It took me a couple of hours to know she was having fun with me. After that I tried to talk to her but she had only wanted that fun; she had a boyfriend who waited every day in the hall outside our classroom, and seeing them holding hands and walking down the hall I felt old and foolish. That was three years ago, when I was twenty-seven.
On summer afternoons there were no classes, and the buildings were empty. Most days when I climbed the three flights of stairs in the old, cool building Hank would be working with his back to the open door; he’d hear me coming and he’d turn smiling, stacking and paper-clipping the manuscript. ‘Hi,’ he’d say, his voice affectionate like he was talking to a woman or a child. There are several men I love and who love me, all of us married, passive misogamists, and if we did not have each other to talk to we would probably in our various ways go mad. But our love embarrasses us; we show our affection in reverse: Where you been, you sonofabitch? Look at that bastard, he wouldn’t buy a round for Jesus Christ—But Hank only did that if it made you feel better.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘You can’t write, you fucker, so let’s go run.’
‘One Goddamn page.’
‘In four hours?’
‘Three hours and forty-six minutes. Let’s go.’
I started walking downstairs before he asked what I had done with my day. Walking over to the gym he was quiet. By the flagpole he lit a cigarette, then flung it to the sidewalk, crumpled his pack and threw it hard, like an outfielder; it arched softly, red and white in the sun.
‘You just quit.’
‘Goddamn right.’
‘Which time?’
‘For the last time.’
‘You won’t make it.’
‘You watch. They’re pissing me off. They’re trying to kill me.’
‘They have no souls.’
‘Exactly.’
‘So they’re not trying to kill you.’
‘Not the cigarettes. I mean the fuckers that make ’em.’
There were tennis players in the locker room. We had lockers next to each other and I glanced at him as he pulled up his jockstrap then gym shorts.
‘Jesus, don’t you ever get fat?’ I said.
‘I’m fat now.’
He pinched some tight flesh at the back of his waist.
‘Bullshit,’ I said.
I rarely believed that Edith preferred my flabbier waist and smaller cock. But sometimes I believed it and, when I did, I felt wonderful.
‘You smell like beer, man.’
‘I had a couple.’
‘I’ll carry you in.’
‘Watch me go, baby.’
On the clipped grass behind the gym we did push-ups and sit-ups and side-straddle hops, then started jogging on a blacktop road that would take us into the country.
‘Five?’ I said.
‘I oughta do ten. Run off my Goddamn frustration.’
‘A page a day’s not bad.’
‘Shit.’
It was a hot, still day. We ran easily, stride for stride, past the houses where children waved and called to us and women looked up from their lawns or porches. I belched a couple of times and he grinned and punched my arm. Then the houses weren’t close together anymore, the country was rolling and we climbed with it, pounding up the blacktop, not talking as we panted up hills, but going down or level we talked: ‘Goddamn, there’s that lovely orchard.’ ‘Hold your breath, mothuh, here comes the hog stench.’ ‘Jesus, look at that cock pheasant.’ Then he was all right, he had forgotten his work, he was talking about shooting pheasants in Iowa, walking through frozen cornfields, the stalks lying brown in the sun. We ran to the top of a wooded hill two and a half miles from the gym and started back, still stride for stride: it would be that last two hundred yards when he’d kick. We ran downhill through sudden cool shade between thick woods; in fall the maple leaves turned orange and yellow and scarlet, and it was like peeping at God. Then on our left the woods stopped, and the hog smell lay on the air we breathed as we ran past the cleared low hills and the barn, chickens walking and pecking in front of it, then past the hog pen and the gray shingled house. A white dog came out from under the porch, barking; he had missed us on the way up, and now he chased us until he was almost at our legs, then we looked back at him and yelled ‘Hey white dog!’ and he trotted away, looking back at us over his shoulder, sometimes stopping to turn and bark. Running has taught me that most dogs are cowards. But there used to be a Doberman pinscher living on this road: he loped after us so quietly that we never knew he was there until we heard his paws on the road and we’d yell and turn on him and crouch to fight, watching him decide whether he wanted to chew on us. He always looked very detached; that’s what scared us. Then he’d trot back down the road, dignity intact; we were glad when last year he moved away. All the other dogs were like the white one at the farmhouse. Past the farm there were trees again, pines motionless in the still air, and then to the right, up a long green hill, the apple orchard.
‘You’re a little screwed up this summer,’ Hank said.
‘Do I look it?’
‘Yep.’
‘Should’ve taught summer school.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘Thought I wouldn’t this year. Needed a break, I thought. Now I need the money.’
‘Need the work more.’
‘Bothers me. You’d think a man would do something. All that time. Read. Even think. Noble fucking pursuits. I run errands. Makes me wonder what’d happen if I didn’t have to make a living.’
‘You’ll never find out.’
‘Good. Probably mean suicide. Man ought to be able to live with himself. Idly. Without going mad. Women do it.’
‘Not so well.’
‘Work is strange.’
‘All there is.’
‘This. This is good.’
‘Best of all.’
We stopped talking and right away my head was clear and serene, I was lungs and legs and arms, sun on my shoulders, sweat seeping through the red handkerchief around my forehead, dripping to my eyes, burning, and I flicked it away with a finger. At the houses near the college he moved ahead of me, a pace or two. I caught him and ran beside him for a while, then he kicked and was gone; I stretched my legs, arms swinging, breath in gasps, and watched his back ten then twenty yards away as he sprinted past the gym and slowed and walked, head going up and down for air, hands on his hips. I walked beside him. He didn’t smile at beating me, but I felt a smile as though in his rushing breath.
‘Competitive bastard,’ I said.
Then he smiled, and I believed then he knew I was making love with Edith and he was telling me he knew, saying, You see Edith can’t touch me and you can’t either, what matters here is what matters to me and what matters to me is I will write and I will outrun you and I will outlive all of you too, and that’s where I am.
He didn’t smoke, either. After the shower, a long time of hot water on the shoulders and legs and back muscles, then warm then cool, we drank Heineken draft in tall frosted mugs. We were alone in the bar, then a thin bald man came in carrying wrapped fish. Adjacent to the lounge was the dining room, where people ate fish from the sea and looked out at the dirty Merrimack; if you walked out of the lounge, across the hall, you went into the fish market. Before starting to drink, Hank and I had gone in and stood in the smell of fish, looking at the lobsters in a tank. I thought of Terry, but not with guilt; I had loved and run and sweated that out of me. I stood shifting my weight from one leg to
another so I could feel the muscles, and I breathed my own clean smell with the salt water and fish, and resolved not to smoke for an hour, to keep the sharp sense of smell I always had after running restored innocence to my lungs; and I loved and wanted to embrace Edith and Hank and Terry, who in their separate ways made my life good. I felt at the border of some discovery, some way I could juggle my beloveds and save us all. But I didn’t know what it was.
The man with the fish sat to our left, put his fish on the bar, and ordered a Schlitz. Betty was tending bar; she was a middle-aged blonde who had lived all her life in this town. She sat on a high stool near the taps and talked to the fish man. He looked at the Heineken sign over the mirror and asked if that was imported beer; she said yes it was. He said he’d never heard of it and she told him oh yes, it was quite popular, it sold ten to one here.
‘Schlitz,’ Hank said, so they couldn’t hear. ‘Some people like it better inside the horse.’
‘Did you see her before she left?’
‘Yeah, I saw her.’ He gave me the foxy smile I got after he beat me running.
‘To tell her goodbye?’
‘Remember when I went to New York to see my agent?’
‘Ah. I didn’t know you could lie so well.’
He held out two dollars to the woman.
‘We’ll have a round, and give my friend on the end a Heineken.’
The fish man looked over at us.
‘Well, thank you. Thank you very much.’
‘Beats that horse piss Schlitz is bottling.’
Betty grinned. The fish man was embarrassed and he started to say something, maybe about Schlitz, then he just watched her filling the mug; when he tasted it, he said: ‘Well, by golly, it does have something to it, doesn’t it?’
He and Betty talked about beer.
‘I’ve never spent the night with anyone but Terry.’
‘Same old thing. Sleep, dream, wake up in the morning; piss; brush your teeth.’
‘Have a cigarette, lover.’
‘Hell no. Every time I want one I’m going to hold my breath for sixty seconds and think of the Marlboro man and the Winston assholes and all the rest of them, and that’ll do it.’
‘All right, I won’t till you do. But you won’t be able to stand Edith. I quit once for three days and Terry smelled like an ash tray.’
