by Andre Dubus
That moment carries him through the rest of the day; or it helps him do what he must do to get through a winter Saturday. He is a disk jockey and five afternoons a week his voice leaves him and goes into ears he will never know. When he was younger he was an actor. Then he had a son and named him David, and then a daughter and they named her Kathi, and he went into radio. For a while he hated his life, and at night he drank. Then after a couple of months he started feeling good. He started feeling very good. His work was not exciting, but he liked making money and bringing it home to Norma and David and Kathi. He liked having money to go see plays, and he liked not having to worry about being in one. He put on weight and made friends who came over on Saturday nights. This happy adjustment to the possibility of peace coincided with his admission that he had no more talent than thousands of others, and he would have spent his life trying to do TV commercials while he looked for work on the stage. For a long time he enjoyed those pleasures that money and family love can bring. But now his family is in Colorado and Norma is married to an affluent man and, though he sends money for the children, they don’t need it.
They left last summer and on that morning he woke with a heart heavy and dead, as if waking for the funeral of his dearest friend, and he drank juice and took bacon from the refrigerator and laid three strips in a skillet, but he was trembling and his stomach fluttering and he put the slices back in the package, shoving them curved and folded under the cellophane. He would have had a drink but he didn’t want their memory through the years to smell and taste again booze on their father’s morning lips. Then he was faint with fear and he breathed deeply several times and got into the shower, his heart no longer grieving as if for another’s death: it was his own execution he cleansed himself for, scrubbing under the hot spray, trying to feel and see nothing but his hand and the bar of soap and his lathered and dripping flesh, but he saw himself driving there and he saw them coming out of the house with love and goodbye in their faces and he raged aloud No No No, eyes closed and fists swinging at air and spray and then he slipped: his feet gone and arms reaching, one against the flat wet wall, the other toward the handle of the glass door, clutching at it and missing as his head struck the back of the tub and he lay gazing up at the spray that now hit his belly and groin; then he closed his eyes and waited to be knocked out. After a while he opened his eyes and touched his head. A swelling; no blood. He stood up: he was able to. He would be able to shave now, to put on clothes, to drive there, to do it all. Before leaving the bathroom he looked once at the tub where he wanted to lie bleeding while the water struck him hot, then warm, and finally cold while he slept.
The day was blue and warm, the breeze from the east: a beach day. They were waiting on the front steps of the house he had left: plump, red-haired Kathi, her eyes excited and green and troubled with love, eight years old yet Peter knew that as well as her fatherless Colorado mornings and nights and the shyness of stepfather suppers she saw every moment of his waking and preparing which now he mustered himself to conceal. His son was ten, his light brown hair over his ears and down close to his shoulders, near blond from their days at the sea, bony once but now muscles too, his shoulders broad and sloping, and his hand in Peter’s was loving, but Peter could feel in it too his separate peace and he knew that because Kathi was a girl he would live in a different way in her memory than in his son’s. When Peter left home, David would not help Kathi and Norma help him load the car, and when Peter went inside and kissed him, holding his turning face, he would not leave the house, so Peter went out with Kathi and Norma and kissed them both and started the car; then David came running, it was dusk and in that light he ran gray and without features, then he stooped and picked up something from the dark lawn, he was close to the window now, arm lifting as he ran, his face clear now, crying, shouting You bum You bum You bum and throwing something that missed as Peter fled. When they saw each other two days later the boy had accepted Peter’s betrayal; he moved back into Peter’s love, accepted that too, but his acceptance had about it an aura of manly decision, and Peter could feel his eyes and his touch saying: You have chosen to go. All right. Then I must grow without you and since there’s nothing I can do but accept it, I might as well do better than that: I choose it. So on the front steps as the three of them sat, the car in the driveway to their right packed for the trip west, David’s blue eyes were pained for his father and for himself, yet that pain was muted by his resolve to endure. Holding him, Peter tried very hard to be grateful for that resolve.
Then Norma came out and when she saw them she turned her head and stood wiping her eyes, then faced them and pressed Peter’s hand and started for the car. He rose and pulled Kathi and David up with him. They followed Norma to the car. She turned and, looking at some point on his neck or chest, she reached for him, hugged him very hard, patted his back, whispered, ‘Take care,’ and had turned and was gone even as he whispered the ‘You too’ she never heard. She circled the car and got in and he couldn’t see her face till he crouched between David and Kathi, only a glance at her profile, her fingers brushing quickly at her eyes, then he was looking into their faces, and then long hugs and many kisses, tight squeezes till they all gasped, and saying again and again, ‘At Christmas you’ll fly out,’ then he asked who had first turn in the front seat, it was Kathi, and he picked her up and put her on the seat and buckled her in and while he was doing that David got into the back and buckled his belt. Norma had mercifully started the engine and he leaned in and kissed David and then stepped back smiling, waving, calling out to their mournful and smiling faces to have a good trip, to write him about the trip, to paint pictures of the trip, to send him pictures of the trip, giving them that final image as they drove away, their arms waving out the windows: their father standing erect and smiling in the morning sun, wishing them well.
Then he drove home through tears and again tried to prepare a meal and again could not eat; then he lay on his bed and submitted with curiosity and hope to the rape of grief. He lay there for an hour while the faces of David and Kathi assaulted him. Then he gave up: he could neither die of a broken heart nor go crazy. He got up from the bed, smoothed the wrinkles he had made, took off his clothes, laid them neatly on the bed, put on jockstrap and gym shorts, his heart still heavy as he tied his white leather running shoes, but his blood quickening with challenge and hope; he tied a red handkerchief around his forehead to keep sweat out of his eyes and went outside, and he ran.
It is what he is doing now, wearing a nylon running suit, a windbreaker, mittens, and a ski cap. He is now two miles from home on a road going east from his apartment. He lives in a small town, so already he is out in the country; he runs past farmhouses, country homes, service stations. There are not many cars and most of the time he has the privacy of his own sounds—his steady breathing, his feet on the wet plowed and sanded blacktop—and, more than that, the absolute privacy of his body staking its claim on a country road past white hills and dark green trees, gray barns, and naked elms and maples and oaks waiting for spring: his body insisting upon itself, pumping blood and pounding up hills. Running is the only act in his life that gives him what he pays for. It is as simple as that.
Two and a half miles from his house, at the top of a hill, he looks across the sparkling white meadows, shadowed by trees and barns, and sees the Merrimack and chunks of ice flowing to the sea. Then he turns and starts back. Sweat has turned to ice on his handlebar moustache, he is running against a cold wind that has now frozen a drop of sweat on his freeze-burning cheek, he can see the droplet of ice at the bottom of his vision, one nostril is frozen partly shut, the temperature is around nineteen but the wind hits him with a chill below zero, his jockstrap is frozen hard as a shield at his crotch, and its edges chafe his legs. He approaches a man walking, a man over sixty, beneath his clothing he is wiry, he is walking briskly on the side of the road in boots and corduroys and sweaters and mackinaw, his face is red in the cold, and somehow Peter knows he is not walking to som
eplace, he is walking to walk, and when Peter is close enough they smile at each other and the man says, ‘I wish I could do that,’ and Peter says, ‘You don’t need to.’ The man’s eyes are good ones, and Peter waves and runs on, feeling light-hearted at the sight of the old man with a smile and a fast walk and bright eyes; and against and through the cold wind he runs happily home with aching lungs.
Dusk comes to his rooms before it comes to the sky. He turns on the lights and goes outside and stands on the shoveled and icy sidewalk and watches it come. He is drinking a hot toddy. On the common across the street, where stoned kids sprawl in the warm seasons, pines and bare maples and elms cast their final shadows on the snow. Beyond the common is a white church whose lighted steeple rises above the trees, above everything in the town, and stands against the darkening sky. There is a wide strip of light to the west, but all color has gone with the sun and as he sips and shivers and watches, the light fades and dusk is here, the worst time for the lonely, when sounds are louder and silence has a shape Peter can feel as he walks through it, and when death on a cold wind touches the windows. Then dusk is gone too, night has come dark and cold, Peter looks up at the stars and tries to recall this morning with Miranda, but the memory is cerebral and nothing against the dark. He goes inside and, like his children, he is wary of turning corners and opening closet doors, and he wants to tell his children they are right, that long ago when he told them it was only their imagination he was right too but not right enough, for what they saw yet couldn’t see frightened them, and it was real.
He makes another drink and turns the records over, he is listening to Brubeck and Mulligan, and he sits on the bed, looking at the yellow phone on the bedside table. His body is vibrant from his run, he feels strong and able, and he’d better be, for now the demons are here, they are moving in the room, they are waiting. They won’t come and get him. Always they watch and keep their distance; when he feels strong they watch quietly, like prone dogs; when he weakens they grow restive, and he can almost hear them. He has learned the rules: they are powerless to close that final distance, they cannot seize him unless he opens his own gates. He picks up the phone and dials the area code of loss, then the numbers of where they live. Norma answers.
‘Are you all right?’ she says.
‘Yes,’ and he tightens his closed eyes and pictures her in the house in Colorado. She has not changed with the times: her brown hair is cut short, she uses lipstick, she smokes Luckies. She is wearing slacks and a tight sweater, showing the good curves of her body that finally he could no longer touch. He has not seen the house; probably he never will. The children have written to him that it is new and big and has large windows and from the kitchen window they look at mountains. Kathi painted a picture of the house and sent it to him; it seems to be a ranch house. She drew her own face grinning out her bedroom window. Beyond the house a smiling sun shone over the mountains, and a grinning dog stood on the green lawn.
He asks for the children and she says she’ll get them, she leaves the phone and he listens to her calling them, he strains to hear every sound in the house, and now he is listening for smells and colors too, for warmth and light, he is listening for joy and sorrow and everything he doesn’t know, and now Kathi is on one phone and David on another, and Peter’s voice is warm and cheerful: ‘I liked your letters and your pictures. How are you?’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine; how are you?’
‘Good. What were you doing?’
‘When?’
‘Just now. When I called.’
‘Watching TV.’
‘Cartoons,’ Kathi says. ‘It’s snowing.’
‘Is it a good snow?’
‘Yeah!’ David says. ‘We didn’t go to school.’ ‘So we get three days off,’ Kathi says. ‘’Cept tomorrow we’re supposed to have skiing lessons. But maybe we won’t.’
‘Skiing lessons? Both of you?’
‘Yeah,’ David says. ‘We’re in the same group too.’ ‘It’s hard to walk on them.’
‘Do you like it?’
‘It’s neat!’ David says.
‘Do you like it, Kathi?’
‘Maybe so. I’ll see.’
‘Good. You learn to ski, and then it’ll be spring and then in summer we’ll go to the beach every sunny day, I’m getting bunk beds to go in my living room—’
‘Bunk beds?’ David says. ‘Neat!’
‘I want the top,’ Kathi says.
‘We’ll work it out, and I’m going to try to work mornings from six to ten instead of afternoons so we’ll have the rest of the day for the beach, I’m pretty sure I can swing it, and we’ll get brown as old wet driftwood—’ then they are all talking about summer coming, and flying to Boston, they are talking about the beach, David wants boiled lobsters at the cheap screened picnic table restaurant near the sea, Kathi hates school, she wants summer, David doesn’t mind school, he says Kathi won’t make friends, that’s why she doesn’t like it, and when she assents with her silence (Peter can feel that silence: it is hot-faced while a chill creeps like fog over her heart) his own heart breaks, his arms yearn to hold her, to protect her, to do anything that will take her happily through her days, realizing at once that this is true and not true, for he will do anything for Kathi except submit to the death of living with and trying once more after the long killing pain to love her mother, and all he can say is, ‘Try, Kathi; I was shy too; you have to try, no one will come to you, people aren’t like that, they go their own ways, you give it a try, you hear.’ Knowing he is saying nothing, and now they are all saying I love you, they are all smacking kisses into the three phones, his closed eyes see Kathi and David, then they start over again I love you I love you I love you and kisses and kisses over the wires, through his clear night and their late afternoon snow, and when he hangs up he does not cradle the receiver, demons move in from the walls, he reaches over and depresses the button and then he calls Jo. As always her voice is guarded, as though she were a fugitive. He asks her to dinner. Her voice doesn’t change, but she accepts. Then he takes off the records, turns on the radio so he will not come home to silence, leaves on the lights, and flees his apartment.
Some people divorce because they hope for resurrection and afterwards you can see in them a new energy, a new strength. But Peter believes Jo did it with her last effort, like a suicide stepping onto the chair and ducking her head into the noose.
‘It’s been so long since I’ve had a good meal,’ she says.
‘What do you eat?’
‘Frozen things. Things in cans. Pizza. It’s rotten to do it to the girls. Sometimes I feel guilty and I cook something and eat it with them.’
They have brandy and they have pulled their chairs near the fireplace, where two logs are burning. In the restaurant she smoked a lot and talked a lot, and she ate a large meal, oysters on the half-shell, broiled scallops, and Peter, his back tingling like a nervous gunfighter’s (for the demons followed him into his car, and in the chatter behind him they stalked among tables), savored his shrimp broiled on a stick with tomato and bacon and resting on a nest of spinach, he sipped Chablis, putting a stake on the good meal, the bottle of wine, and Jo was good to be with, better than eating alone; but she has not laughed since dinner, her smile is forced, and in her voice and dark eyes her ache is bitter, it is defiant, and he feels they are not at a hearth but are huddled at a campfire in a dangerous forest.
He met her in the early fall, before Miranda. She is one of his listeners, one of the women he talks to on weekday afternoons, the only one he really knows. In the fall the station had a contest with one hundred winners: the wives who wrote the best letters telling why they should leave their husbands at home and go to a New England Patriot football game. All my life I’ve been watching men, she wrote. When I was a very little girl I watched boys throwing rocks and beating each other up and racing across the schoolyard after school. When I was a teen-ager I watched them playing football and basketball, and at home they played
street hockey and when the ponds froze they played ice hockey across the street from my window. I watched them drive off in cars, I watched them hitchhike to Florida, I watched them go into the service and I watched them come home strutting and winking about their adventures. I always believed when I got married it would be my turn. My husband would watch me. He doesn’t. He watches football on television. If I’m going to spend my life watching men who aren’t watching me, then at least once it should be fun, and I should be able to dress up and go out to do it. Maybe my husband will see me on television and then he can watch me watching.
Peter sat with her at the game, she told him about her letter, she was pleased that he remembered it. During the game he watched her. She was excited, she was having fun, but there was a desperate quality about her fun, as though she had just been released from prison. It was the same that night, after the studio party where they drank enough to impassion their intent: in the motel she made love with a fury, but he knew it was forced, that her tightening arms, her bucking hips were turned against the fetters which clanked at her heart. The affair was short because that clanking never went away. It was in her voice: when she was pretending—and nearly always she pretended—her voice was low and flat, as if she had just waked from a deep sleep; but most of the time her voice was high and brittle with cheer, her laughter was forced and shrill, and he could hear in it the borders of hysteria. Like most unfaithful wives she was remorseless: she felt she deserved a lover. Yet it did her no good. Her heart was surrounded by obdurate concentric circles of disappointment and bitterness; she could not break through, so Peter couldn’t either, and finally they broke it off and both pretended that aversion to the deceptions and stolen time of adultery was the reason.
‘You always liked to eat,’ Peter says.
‘I know.’
‘What else don’t you like anymore?’
