by Andre Dubus
‘Don’t you want me to do it for you?’ she said.
‘No, I’m all right.’
She smoked for a while, her head on my shoulder.
‘Do you really think it’s a worse sin when it happens to you?’ she said.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
I told her what the Brothers had taught me.
‘You believe that?’ she said. ‘That God gave you this seed just to have babies with, and if you waste it He’ll send you to hell?’
‘I guess so.’
‘You have wet dreams, don’t you?’
‘That’s different. There’s no will involved.’
‘What about me? It just happened to me, and I didn’t use up any eggs or anything, so where’s my sin?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe sins are different for girls.’
‘Then it wouldn’t be a sin for me to masturbate either. Right? I don’t, but isn’t that true?’
‘I never thought of that.’
‘Well, don’t. You think too much already.’
‘Maybe you don’t think enough.’
‘You’re right: I don’t.’
‘I’ll tell you why it’s a sin,’ I said. ‘Because it’s reserved for married people.’
‘Climax?’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’re supposed to be married to touch each other too,’ she said. ‘So why draw the line at climax? I mean, why get all worked up and then stop and think that’s good?’
‘You’re right. We shouldn’t do any of it.’
‘Oh, I’m not sure it’s as bad as all that.’
‘You’re not? You don’t think it’s a sin, what we do?’
‘Maybe a little, but it’s not as bad as a lot of other things.’
‘It’s a mortal sin.’
‘I don’t think so. I believe it’s a sin to talk about a girl, but I don’t think what you do with her is so bad.’
‘All right: if that’s what you think, why don’t we just go all the way?’
She sat up to throw her cigarette out the window, then she nestled her face on my chest.
‘Because I’m scared,’ she said.
‘Of getting pregnant?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m just scared of not being a virgin, that’s all.’
Then she finished our argument, won it, soaked her small handkerchief in my casuistry. Next morning at breakfast I was tired.
‘You’re going to ruin your health,’ Mother said. ‘It was after one when you got home.’
‘I flexed my bicep and said I was fine. But now Daddy was watching me from his end of the table.
‘I don’t care about your health,’ he said. ‘I just hope you know more than Janet did.’
‘Honey,’ Mother said.
‘She got it reversed. She started babies before she was married, then quit.’
That was true. Her twin boys were four now, and there were no other children. Bob had finished his undergraduate work and was going to start work on a Ph.D. in political science. Early in the summer Mother had gone up there and stayed two weeks. When she got back and talked about her visit she looked nervous, as though she were telling a lie, and a couple of times I walked into the kitchen where Mother and Daddy were talking and they stopped until I had got what I wanted and left.
‘I won’t get pregnant,’ I said.
‘Neither will Yvonne,’ Daddy said. ‘As long as you keep your pants on.’
Then finally one night in early fall we drove away from her house, where we had parked for some time, and I knew she would not stop me, because by leaving her house she was risking questions from her parents, and by accepting that she was accepting the other risk too. I drove out to a country road, over a vibrating wooden bridge, the bayou beneath us dark as earth on that moonless night, on through black trees until I found a dirt road into the woods, keeping my hand on her small breast as I turned and cut off the ignition and headlights. In a moment she was naked on the car seat, then I was out of my clothes, even the socks, and seeing her trusting face and shockingly white body I almost dressed and took her home but then she said: Love me, Harry, love me—
The Brothers hadn’t prepared me for this. If my first time had been with a whore, their training probably would have worked, for that was the sort of lust they focused on. But they were no match for Yvonne, and next morning I woke happier than I had ever been. At school that day we drank coffee and held hands and whispered. That night on the way to her house I stopped at a service station and bought a package of condoms from a machine in the men’s room. That was the only time I felt guilty. But I was at least perceptive enough to know why: condoms, like masturbation and whores, were something the Brothers knew about. I left that piss-smelling room, walked into the clear autumn night, and drove to Yvonne’s, where they had never been.
For the rest of the fall and a few weeks of winter, we were hot and happy lovers. I marveled at my own joy, my lack of remorse. Once, after a few weeks, I asked her if she ever felt bad. It was late at night and we were sitting at a bar, eating oysters on the half-shell. For a moment she didn’t know what I meant, then she smiled.
‘I feel wonderful,’ she said.
She dipped her last oyster in the sauce, and leaned over the tray to eat it.
‘Do we have enough money for more?’ she said.
‘Sure.’
They were ninety cents a dozen. We watched the Negro open them, and I felt fine, eating oysters and drinking beer at one in the morning, having made love an hour ago to this pretty girl beside me. I looked at her hair and wondered if she ought to let it grow.
‘Sometimes I worry though,’ she said.
‘Getting pregnant?’
‘Nope, I never said you had to use those things. I worry about you.’
‘Why me?’
‘Because you used to think about sins so much, and now you don’t.’
‘That’s because I love you.’
She licked the red sauce from her fingers, then took my hand, squeezed it, and drank some beer.
‘I’m afraid someday you’ll start feeling bad again, then you’ll hate me.’
She was right to look for defeat in that direction, to expect me to move along clichéd routes. But, as it turned out, it wasn’t guilt that finally soured us. After a couple of months I simply began noticing things.
I saw that she didn’t really like football. She only enjoyed the games because they gave her a chance to dress up, and there was a band, and a crowd of students, and it was fun to keep a flask hidden while you poured bourbon into a paper cup. She cheered with the rest of us, but she wasn’t cheering for the same thing. She cheered because we were there, and a young man had run very fast with a football. Once we stood up to watch an end chasing a long pass: when he dived for it, caught it, and skidded on the ground, she turned happily to me and brushed her candied apple against my sleeve. Watch out, I said. She spit on her handkerchief and rubbed the sticky wool. She loved sweets, always asked me to buy her Mounds or Hersheys at the movies, and once in a while she’d get a pimple which she tried to conceal with powder. I felt loose flesh at her waist when we danced, and walking beside her on the campus one afternoon I looked down and saw her belly pushing against her tight skirt; I lightly backhanded it and told her to suck her gut in. She stood at attention, saluted, then gave me the finger. I’m about to start my period, she said. Except for the soft flesh at her waist she was rather thin, and when she lay on her back her naked breasts spread and flattened, as though they were melting.
Around the end of November her parents spent a weekend with relatives in Houston, leaving Yvonne to take care of her sister and brother, who were fourteen and eleven. They left Saturday morning, and that night Yvonne cooked for me. She was dressed up, black cocktail dress, even heels, and she was disappointed when she saw I hadn’t worn a coat. But she didn’t say anything. She had already fed her brother and sister, and they were in the den at the back of the house, watching televisio
n. Yvonne had a good fire in the living room fireplace, and on the coffee table she had bourbon, a pitcher of water, a bucket of ice, and a sugar bowl.
‘Like they do in Faulkner,’ she said, and we sat on the couch and drank a couple of toddies before dinner. Then she left me for a while and I looked into the fire, hungry and horny, and wondered what time the brother and sister would go to bed and if Yvonne would do it while they were sleeping. She came back to the living room, smiled, blushed, and said: ‘If you’re brave enough, I am. Want to try it?’
We ate by candlelight: oyster cocktails, then a roast with rice and thick dark gravy, garlic-tinged. We had lemon ice-box pie and went back to the fireplace with second cups of coffee.
‘I love to cook,’ she said from the record player. She put on about five albums, and I saw that we were supposed to sit at the fire and talk for the rest of the evening. The first album was Jackie Gleason, Music, Martinis, and Memories, and she sat beside me, took my hand and sipped her coffee. She rested her head on the back of the couch, but I didn’t like to handle a coffee cup leaning back that way, so I withdrew my hand from hers and hunched forward over the coffee table.
‘I think I started cooking when I was seven,’ she said to my back. ‘No, let’s see, I was eight—’ I looked down at her crossed legs, the black dress just covering her knees, then looked at the fire. ‘When we lived in Baton Rouge. I had a children’s cookbook and I made something called Chili Concoction. Everybody was nice about it, and Daddy ate two helpings for supper and told me to save the rest for breakfast and he’d eat it with eggs. He did, too. Then I made something called a strawberry minute pie, and I think it was pretty good. I’ll make it for you some time.’
‘Okay.’
I was still hunched over drinking coffee, so I wasn’t looking at her. I finished the coffee and she asked if I wanted more, and that irritated me, so I didn’t know whether to say yes or no. I said I guess so. Then watching her leave with my cup, I disliked myself and her too. For if I wasn’t worthy of the evening, then wasn’t she stupid and annoyingly vulnerable to give it to me? The next album was Sinatra; I finished my coffee, then leaned back so our shoulders touched, our hands together in her lap, and we listened. Once she took a drag from my cigarette and I said keep it, and lit another. The third album was Brubeck. She put some more ice in the bucket, I made toddies, and she asked if I understood The Bear. I shrugged and said probably not. She had finished it the day before, and she started talking about it.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘When are they going to sleep?’
She was surprised, and again I disliked myself and her too. Then she was hurt, and she looked at her lap and said she didn’t know, but she couldn’t make love anyway, not here in the house, even if they were sleeping.
‘We can leave for a while,’ I said. ‘We won’t go far.’
She kept looking at her lap, at our clasped hands.
‘They’ll be all right,’ I said.
Then she looked into my eyes and I looked away and she said: ‘Okay, I’ll tell them.’
When she came back with a coat over her arm I was waiting at the door, my jacket zipped, the car key in my hand.
We broke up in January, about a week after New Year’s. I don’t recall whether we fought, or kissed goodbye, or sat in a car staring mutely out the windows. But I do remember when the end started; or, rather, when Yvonne decided to recognize it.
On New Year’s Eve a friend of ours gave a party. His parents were out of town, so everyone got drunk. It was an opportunity you felt obliged not to pass up. Two or three girls got sick and had to have their faces washed and be walked outside in the cold air. When Yvonne got drunk it was a pleasant drunk, and I took her upstairs. I think no one noticed: it was past midnight, and people were hard to account for. We lay on the bed in the master bedroom, Yvonne with her skirt pulled up, her pants off, while I performed in shirt, sweater, and socks. She was quiet as we stood in the dark room, taking our pants off, and she didn’t answer my whispered Happy New Year as we began to make love, for the first time, on a bed. Then, moving beneath me, she said in a voice so incongruous with her body that I almost softened but quickly got it back, shutting my ears to what I had heard: This is all we ever do, Harry—this is all we ever do.
The other thing I remember about that night is a time around three in the morning. A girl was cooking hamburgers, I was standing in the kitchen doorway talking to some boys, and Yvonne was sitting alone at the kitchen table. There were other people talking in the kitchen, but she wasn’t listening; she moved only to tap ashes and draw on her cigarette, then exhaled into the space that held her gaze. She looked older than twenty, quite lonely and sad, and I pitied her. But there was something else: I knew she would never make love to me again. Maybe that is why, as a last form of possession, I told. It could not have been more than an hour later, I was drunker, and in the bathroom I one-upped three friends who were bragging about feeling tits of drunken girls. I told them I had taken Yvonne upstairs and screwed her. To add history to it, I even told them what she had said.
3
WAITING IN LINE for my first confession in five months I felt some guilt but I wasn’t at all afraid. I only had to confess sexual intercourse, and there was nothing shameful about that, nothing unnatural. It was a man’s sin. Father Broussard warned me never to see this girl again (that’s what he called her: this girl), for a man is weak and he needs much grace to turn away from a girl who will give him her body. He said I must understand it was a serious sin because sexual intercourse was given by God to married couples for the procreation of children and we had stolen it and used it wrongfully, for physical pleasure, which was its secondary purpose. I knew that in some way I had sinned, but Father Broussard’s definition of that sin fell short and did not sound at all like what I had done with Yvonne. So when I left the confessional I still felt unforgiven.
The campus was not a very large one, but it was large enough so you could avoid seeing someone. I stopped going to the student center for coffee, and we had no classes together; we only saw each other once in a while, usually from a distance, walking between buildings. We exchanged waves and the sort of smile you cut into your face at times like that. The town was small too, so occasionally I saw her driving around, looking for a parking place or something. Then after a while I wanted to see her, and I started going to the student center again, but she didn’t drink coffee there anymore. In a week or so I realized that I didn’t really want to see her: I wanted her to be happy, and if I saw her there was nothing I could say to help that.
Soon I was back to the old private vice, though now it didn’t seem a vice but an indulgence, not as serious as smoking or even drinking, closer to eating an ice cream sundae before bed every night. That was how I felt about it, like I had eaten two scoops of ice cream with thick hot fudge on it, and after a couple of bites it wasn’t good anymore but I finished it anyway, thinking of calories. It was a boring little performance and it didn’t seem worth thinking about, one way or the other. But I told it in the confessional, so I could still receive the Eucharist. Then one day in spring I told the number of my sins as though I were telling the date of my birth, my height, and weight, and Father Broussard said quickly and sternly: ‘Are you sorry for these sins?’
‘Yes, Father,’ I said, but then I knew it was a lie. He was asking me if I had a firm resolve to avoid this sin in the future when I said: ‘No, Father.’
‘No what? You can’t avoid it?’
‘I mean no, Father, I’m not really sorry. I don’t even think it’s a sin.’
‘Oh, I see. You don’t have the discipline to stop, so you’ve decided it’s not a sin. Just like that, you’ve countermanded God’s law. Do you want absolution?’
‘Yes, Father. I want to receive Communion.’
‘You can’t. You’re living in mortal sin, and I cannot absolve you while you keep this attitude. I want you to think very seriously—’
But I wasn’t listening. I was looking a
t the crucifix and waiting for his voice to stop so I could leave politely and try to figure out what to do next. Then he stopped talking, and I said: ‘Yes, Father.’
‘What?’ he said. ‘What?’
I went quickly through the curtains, out of the confessional, out of the church.
On Sundays I went to Mass but did not receive the Eucharist. I thought I could but I was afraid that as soon as the Host touched my tongue I would suddenly realize I had been wrong, and then I’d be receiving Christ with mortal sin on my soul. Mother didn’t receive either. I prayed for her and hoped she’d soon have peace, even if it meant early menopause. By now I agreed with Janet, and I wished she’d write Mother a letter and convince her that she wasn’t evil. I thought Mother was probably praying for Janet, who had gone five years without bearing a child.
It was June, school was out, and I did not see Yvonne at all. I was working with a surveying crew, running a hundred-foot chain through my fingers, cutting trails with a machete, eating big lunches from paper bags, and waiting for something to happen. There were two alternatives, and I wasn’t phony enough for the first or brave enough for the second: I could start confessing again, the way I used to, or I could ignore the confessional and simply receive Communion. But nothing happened and each Sunday I stayed with Mother in the pew while the others went up to the altar rail.
Then Janet came home. She wrote that Bob had left her, had moved in with his girlfriend—a graduate student—and she and the boys were coming home on the bus. That was the news waiting for me when I got home from work, Mother handing me the letter as I came through the front door, both of them watching me as I read it. Then Daddy cursed, Mother started crying again, and I took a beer out to the front porch. After a while Daddy came out too and we sat without talking and drank beer until Mother called us to supper. Daddy said, ‘That son of a bitch,’ and we went inside.
By the time Janet and the boys rode the bus home from Ann Arbor, Mother was worried about something else: the Church, because now Janet was twenty-three years old and getting a divorce and if she ever married again she was out of the Church. Unless Bob died, and Daddy said he didn’t care what the Church thought about divorce, but it seemed a good enough reason for him to go up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and shoot Bob Mitchell between the eyes. So while Janet and Paul and Lee were riding south on the Greyhound, Mother was going to daily Mass and praying for some answer to Janet’s future.
