by Andre Dubus
‘If you don’t mind.’
‘Sure. I like kids. I’d like to have one of my own, without a husband.’
As he kissed her belly he imagined her helping him pitch the large tent he would buy, the four of them on a weekend of cold brook and trees on a mountainside, a fire, bacon in the skillet …
In the morning he scrambled their eggs, then phoned Norma. He had a general dislike of telephones: talking to his own hand gripping plastic, pacing, looking about the room; the timing of hanging up was tricky. Nearly all these conversations left him feeling as disconnected as the phone itself. But talking with Norma was different: he marvelled at how easy it was. The distance and disembodiment he felt on the phone with others were good here. He and Norma had hurt each other deeply, and their bodies had absorbed the pain: it was the stomach that tightened, the hands that shook, the breast that swelled then shrivelled. Now fleshless they could talk by phone, even with warmth, perhaps alive from the time when their bodies were at ease together. He thought of having a huge house where he could live with his family, seeing Norma only at meals, shared for the children, he and Norma talking to David and Kathi; their own talk would be on extension phones in their separate wings: they would discuss the children, and details of running the house. This was of course the way they had finally lived, without the separate wings, the phones. And one of their justifications as they talked of divorce was that the children would be harmed, growing up in a house with parents who did not love each other, who rarely touched, and then by accident. There had been moments near the end when, brushing against each other in the kitchen, one of them would say: Sorry. Now as Mary Ann Brighi (he had waked knowing her last name) spread jam on toast, he phoned.
‘I met this woman last night.’
Mary Ann smiled; Norma’s voice did.
‘It’s about time. I was worried about your arm going.’
‘What about you?’
‘I’m doing all right.’
‘Do you bring them home?’
‘It’s not them, and I get a sitter.’
‘But he comes to the house? To take you out?’
‘Peter?’
‘What.’
‘What are we talking about?’
‘I was wondering what the kids would think if Mary Ann came along this afternoon.’
‘What they’ll think is Mary Ann’s coming along this afternoon.’
‘You’re sure that’s all?’
‘Unless you fuck in front of them.’
He turned his face from Mary Ann, but she had already seen his blush; he looked at her smiling with toast crumbs on her teeth. He wished he were married and lovemaking were simple. But after cleaning the kitchen he felt passion again, though not much; in his mind he was introducing the children to Mary Ann. He would make sure he talked to them, did not leave them out while he talked to her. He was making love while he thought this; he hoped they would like her; again he saw them hiking up a trail through pines, stopping for Kathi and David to rest; a sudden bounding deer; the camp beside the stream; he thanked his member for doing its work down there while the rest of him was in the mountains in New Hampshire.
As he walked with David and Kathi he held their hands; they were looking at her face watching them from the car window.
‘She’s a new friend of mine,’ he said. ‘Just a friend. She wants to show us this night club where children can go on Sunday afternoons.’
From the back seat they shook hands, peered at her, glanced at Peter, their eyes making him feel that like adults they could sense when people were lovers; he adjusted the rearview mirror, watched their faces, decided he was seeing jumbled and vulnerable curiosity: Who was she? Would she marry their father? Would they like her? Would their mother be sad? And the night club confused them.
‘Isn’t that where people go drink?’ Kathi said.
‘It’s afternoon too,’ David said.
Not for Peter; the sky was grey, the time was grey, dark was coming, and all at once he felt utterly without will; all the strength he had drawn on to be with his children left him like one long spurt of arterial blood: all his time with his children was grey, with night coming; it would always be; nothing would change: like three people cursed in an old myth they would forever be thirty-three and eight and six, in this car on slick or salted roads, going from one place to another. He disapproved of but understood those divorced fathers who fled to live in a different pain far away. Beneath his despair, he saw himself and his children sledding under a lovely blue sky, heard them laughing in movies, watching in awe like love a circling blue shark in the aquarium’s tank; but these seemed beyond recapture.
He entered the highway going south, and that quick transition of hands and head and eyes as he moved into fast traffic snapped him out of himself, into the sound of Mary Ann’s voice: with none of the rising and falling rhythm of nursery talk, she was telling them, as if speaking to a young man and woman she had just met, about Lennie’s. How Lennie believed children should hear good music, not just the stuff on the radio. She talked about jazz. She hummed some phrases of ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow,’ then improvised. They would hear Gerry Mulligan today, she said, and as she talked about the different saxophones, Peter looked in the mirror at their listening faces.
‘And Lennie has a cook from Tijuana in Mexico,’ Mary Ann said. ‘She makes the best chili around.’
Walking into Lennie’s with a pretty woman and his two healthy and pretty children, he did not feel like a divorced father looking for something to do; always in other places he was certain he looked that way, and often he felt guilty when talking with waitresses. He paid the cover charge for himself and Mary Ann and she said: All right, but I buy the first two rounds, and he led her and the children to a table near the bandstand. He placed the children between him and Mary Ann. Bourbon, Cokes, bowls of chili. The room was filling and Peter saw that at most tables there were children with parents, usually one parent, usually a father. He watched his children listening to Mulligan. His fingers tapped the table with the drummer. He looked warmly at Mary Ann’s profile until she turned and smiled at him.
Often Mulligan talked to the children, explained how his saxophone worked; his voice was cheerful, joking, never serious, as he talked about the guitar and bass and piano and drums. He clowned laughter from the children in the dark. Kathi and David turned to each other and Peter to share their laughter. During the music they listened intently. Their hands tapped the table. They grinned at Peter and Mary Ann. At intermission Mulligan said he wanted to meet the children. While his group went to the dressing room he sat on the edge of the bandstand and waved the children forward. Kathi and David talked about going. Each would go if the other would. They took napkins for autographs and, holding hands, walked between tables and joined the children standing around Mulligan. When it was their turn he talked to them, signed their napkins, kissed their foreheads. They hurried back to Peter.
‘He’s neat,’ Kathi said.
‘What did you talk about?’
‘He asked our names,’ David said.
‘And if we liked winter out here.’
‘And if we played an instrument.’
‘What kind of music we liked.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘Jazz like his.’
The second set ended at nearly seven; bourbon-high, Peter drove carefully, listening to Mary Ann and the children talking about Mulligan and his music and warmth. Then David and Kathi were gone, running up the sidewalk to tell Norma, and show their autographed napkins, and Peter followed Mary Ann’s directions to her apartment.
‘I’ve been in the same clothes since last night,’ she said.
In her apartment, as unkempt as his, they showered together, hurried damp-haired and chilled to her bed.
‘This is the happiest day I’ve had since the marriage ended,’ he said.
But when he went home and was alone in his bed, he saw his cowardice again. All the warmth of his day le
ft him, and he lay in the dark, knowing that he should have been wily enough to understand that the afternoon’s sweetness and ease meant he had escaped: had put together a family for the day. That afternoon Kathi had spilled a Coke; before Peter noticed, Mary Ann was cleaning the table with cocktail napkins, smiling at Kathi, talking to her under the music, lifting a hand to the waitress.
Next night he took Mary Ann to dinner and, driving to her apartment, it seemed to him that since the end of his marriage, dinner had become disproportionate: alone at home it was a task he forced himself to do, with his children it was a fragile rite, and with old friends who alternately fed him and Norma he felt vaguely criminal. Now he must once again face his failures over a plate of food. He and Mary Ann had slept little the past two nights, and at the restaurant she told him she had worked hard all day, yet she looked fresh and strong, while he was too tired to imagine making love after dinner. With his second martini, he said: ‘I used you yesterday. With my kids.’
‘There’s a better word.’
‘All right: needed.’
‘I knew that.’
‘You did?’
‘We had fun.’
‘I can’t do it anymore.’
‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. You probably spend more time with them now than when you lived together.’
‘I do. So does Norma. But that’s not it. It’s how much I wanted your help, and started hoping for it. Next Sunday. And in summer: the sort of stuff you do, camping and hiking; when we talked about it Saturday night—’
‘I knew that too. I thought it was sweet.’
He leaned back in his chair, sipped his drink. Tonight he would break his martini rule, have a third before dinner. He loved women who knew and forgave his motives before he knew and confessed them.
But he would not take her with the children again. He was with her often; she wanted a lover, she said, not love, not what it still did to men and women. He did not tell her he thought they were using each other in a way that might have been cynical, if it were not so frightening. He simply followed her, became one of those who make love with their friends. But she was his only woman friend, and he did not know how many men shared her. When she told him she would not be home this night or that weekend, he held his questions. He held onto his heart too, and forced himself to make her a part of the times when he was alone. He had married young, and life to him was surrounded by the sounds and touches of a family. Now in this foreign land he felt so vulnerably strange that at times it seemed near madness as he gave Mary Ann a function in his time, ranking somewhere among his running and his work.
When the children asked about her, he said they were still friends. Once Kathi asked why she never came to Lennie’s anymore, and he said her work kept her pretty busy and she had other friends she did things with, and he liked being alone with them anyway. But then he was afraid the children thought she had not liked them; so, twice a month, he brought Mary Ann to Lennie’s.
He and the children went every Sunday. And that was how the cold months passed, beginning with the New Year, because Peter and Norma had waited until after Christmas to end the marriage: the movies and sledding, museums and aquarium, the restaurants; always they were on the road, and whenever he looked at his car he thought of the children. How many conversations while looking through the windshield? How many times had the doors slammed shut and they re-entered or left his life? Winter ended slowly. April was cold and in May Peter and the children still wore sweaters or windbreakers, and on two weekends there was rain, and everything they did together was indoors. But when the month ended, Peter thought it was not the weather but the patterns of winter that had kept them driving from place to place.
Then it was June and they were out of school and Peter took his vacation. Norma worked, and by nine in the morning he and Kathi and David were driving to the sea. They took a large blanket and tucked its corners into the sand so it wouldn’t flap in the wind, and they lay oiled in the sun. On the first day they talked of winter, how they could feel the sun warming their ribs, as they had watched it warming the earth during the long thaw. It was a beach with gentle currents and a gradual slope out to sea but Peter told them, as he had every summer, about undertow: that if ever they were caught in one, they must not swim against it; they must let it take them out and then they must swim parallel to the beach until the current shifted and they could swim back in with it. He could not imagine his children being calm enough to do that, for he was afraid of water and only enjoyed body-surfing near the beach, but he told them anyway. Then he said it would not happen because he would always test the current first.
In those first two weeks the three of them ran into the water and body-surfed only a few minutes, for it was too cold still, and they had to leave it until their flesh was warm again. They would not be able to stay in long until July. Peter showed them the different colors of summer, told them why on humid days the sky and ocean were paler blue, and on dry days they were darker, more beautiful, and the trees they passed on the roads to the beach were brighter green. He bought a whiffle ball and bat and kept them in the trunk of his car and they played at the beach. The children dug holes, made castles, Peter watched, slept, and in late morning he ran. From a large thermos they drank lemonade or juice; and they ate lunch all day, the children grazing on fruit and the sandwiches he had made before his breakfast. Then he took them to his apartment for showers, and they helped carry in the ice chest and thermos and blanket and their knapsack of clothes. Kathi and David still took turns showering first, and they stayed in longer, but now in summer the water was still hot when his turn came. Then he drove them home to Norma, his skin red and pleasantly burning; then tan.
When his vacation ended they spent all sunny weekends at the sea, and even grey days that were warm. The children became braver about the cold, and forced him to go in with them and body-surf. But they could stay longer than he could, and he left to lie on the blanket and watch them, to make sure they stayed in shallow water. He made them promise to wait on the beach while he ran. He went in the water to cool his body from the sun, but mostly he lay on the blanket, reading, and watching the children wading out to the breakers and riding them in. Kathi and David did not always stay together. One left to walk the beach alone. Another played with strangers, or children who were there most days too. One built a castle. Another body-surfed. And, often, one would come to the blanket and drink and take a sandwich from the ice chest, would sit eating and drinking beside Peter, offer him a bite, a swallow. And on all those beach days Peter’s shyness and apprehension were gone. It’s the sea, he said to Mary Ann one night.
And it was: for on that day, a long Saturday at the beach, when he had all day felt peace and father-love and sun and salt water, he had understood why now in summer he and his children were as he had yearned for them to be in winter: they were no longer confined to car or buildings to remind them why they were there. The long beach and the sea were their lawn; the blanket their home; the ice chest and thermos their kitchen. They lived as a family again. While he ran and David dug in the sand until he reached water and Kathi looked for pretty shells for her room, the blanket waited for them. It was the place they wandered back to: for food, for drink, for rest, their talk as casual as between children and father arriving, through separate doors, at the kitchen sink for water, the refrigerator for an orange. Then one left for the surf; another slept in the sun, lips stained with grape juice. He had wanted to tell the children about it, but it was too much to tell, and the beach was no place for such talk anyway, and he also guessed they knew. So that afternoon when they were all lying on the blanket, on their backs, the children flanking him, he simply said: ‘Divorced kids go to the beach more than married ones.’
‘Why?’ Kathi said.
‘Because married people do chores and errands on weekends. No kid-days.’
‘I love the beach,’ David said.
‘So do I,’ Peter said.
He looked at Kathi.
<
br /> ‘You don’t like it, huh?’
She took her arm from her eyes and looked at him. His urge was to turn away. She looked at him for a long time; her eyes were too tender, too wise, and he wished she could have learned both later, and differently; in her eyes he saw the car in winter, heard its doors closing and closing, their talk and the sounds of heater and engine and tires on the road, and the places the car took them. Then she held his hand, and closed her eyes.
‘I wish it was summer all year round,’ she said.
He watched her face, rosy tan now, lightly freckled; her small scar was already lower. Holding her hand, he reached over for David’s, and closed his eyes against the sun. His legs touched theirs. After a while he heard them sleeping. Then he slept.
Finding a Girl
in America
Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living. Antoine de Saint Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
for Suzanne and Nicole
ON AN OCTOBER night, lying in bed with a nineteen-year-old girl and tequila and grapefruit juice, thirty-five-year-old Hank Allison gets the story. They lie naked, under the sheet and one light blanket, their shoulders propped by pillows so they can drink. Lori’s body is long; Hank is not a tall man, and she is perhaps a half inch taller; when she wears high-heeled boots and lowers her face to kiss him, he tells her she is like a swan bending to eat. Knowing he is foolish, he still wishes she were shorter; he has joked with Jack Linhart about this, and once Jack told him: Hell with it: just stick out that big chest of yours and swagger down the road with that pretty girl. Hank never wishes he were taller.
Tonight they have gone to Boston for a movie and dinner, and at the Casa Romero, their favorite restaurant, they started with margaritas but as they ate appetizers of Jalapeño and grilled cheese on tortillas, of baked cheese and sausage, they became cheerful about the movie and food and what they would order next, and switched to shots of tequila chased with Superior. They ate a lot and left the restaurant high though not drunk; then Hank bought a six-pack of San Miguel for the forty-five minute drive home, enough for one cassette of Willie Nelson and part of one by Kristofferson, Hank doing most of the talking, while a sober part of himself told him not to, reminded him that he must always control his talking with Lori; for he loves her and he knows that with him, as with everyone else, she feels and thinks much that she cannot say. He guesses her mother has something to do with this, a talk-crackling woman who keeps her husband and three daughters generally quiet, who is good-looking and knows it and works at it, and is a flirt and, Hank believes from the bare evidence Lori so often murmurs in his bed, more than that. But he does not work hard at discovering why it is so difficult for Lori to give the world, even him, her heart in words. He believes some mysterious balance of power exists between lovers, and if he ever fully understands the bonds that tie her tongue, and if he tells her about them, tries to help her cut them, he will no longer be her lover. He settles for the virtues he sees in her, and waits for her to see them herself. Often she talks of her childhood; she cannot remember her father ever kissing or hugging her; she loves him, and she knows he loves her too. He just does not touch.
