by Andre Dubus
Until they got back to his apartment and took salty dogs to bed, Hank believed they would make love. He thought of her long body under him. But, his heart ready, his member was dull, numb, its small capacity for drink long passed. So Hank parted her legs and lowered his face: when she came he felt he had too: the best way to share a woman’s orgasm, the only way to use all his senses: looking over the mound at her face between breasts, touching with hands and tongue, the lovely taste and smell, and he heard not only her moan-breaths but his tongue on her. and her hands’ soft timpani against his face.
Now he lies peacefully against the pillows; the drinks on his desk beside the bed are still half-full, and he hands one to Lori. Sometimes he takes a drag from her cigarette, though he remembers this is the way to undo his quitting nine years ago when he faced how long it took him to write, and how long he would have to live to write the ten novels he had set as his goal. He is nearly finished the second draft of his third. Lori is talking about Monica. Something in her voice alerts him. She and Lori were friends. Perhaps he is going to learn something new; perhaps Monica was unfaithful while she was still here, when she was his student and they were furtive lovers, as he and Lori are now. He catches a small alcoholic slip Lori makes: No, I can’t, she says, in the midst of a sentence which seems to need no restraint.
‘You can’t what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I promised Monica I wouldn’t.’
‘When I tell a friend a secret, I know he’ll tell his wife or woman. That’s the way it is.’
‘It’ll hurt you.’
‘How can anything about Monica hurt me? I haven’t seen her in over a year.’
‘It will.’
‘It can’t. Not now.’
‘You remember when she came down that weekend? Last October? You cooked dinner for the three of us.’
‘Shrimp scampi. We got drunk on hot sake.’
‘Before dinner she and I went to the liquor store. She kept talking about this guy she’d met in art class.’
‘Tommy.’
‘She didn’t say it. But I knew she was screwing him then. I could tell she wanted me to know. It was her eyes. The way she’d smile. And I got pissed at her but I didn’t say anything. I loved her and I’d never had a friend who had two lovers at once and I thought she was a bitch. I was starting to love you too, and I hated knowing she was going to hurt you, and I couldn’t see why she even came to spend the weekend with you.’
‘So she was screwing him before she told me it was over. Well, I should have known. She talked about him enough: his drawings anyway.’
‘That wasn’t it. She was pregnant. She found out after she broke up with you.’ He has never heard Lori’s voice so plaintive except when she speaks of her parents. ‘You know how Monica is. She went hysterical; she phoned me at school every night, she phoned her parents, she went to three doctors. Two in Maine and one in New York. They all placed it at the same time: it was yours. By that time she was two months pregnant. Her father took her in and they had it done.’
An image comes to Hank: he sees his daughter, Sharon, thirteen, breast-points under her sweater: she is standing in his kitchen, hair dark and long; she is chopping celery at the counter for their weekly meal. He pulls Lori’s cheek to his chest and strokes her hair.
‘I’m all right,’ he says. ‘I had to know. I know if I didn’t know I’d never know I didn’t know; but I hate not knowing. I don’t want to die not knowing everything about my life. You had to tell me. Who else would? You know I have to know. I’m all right. Shit. Shit that bitch. I could have—it would have been born in spring—I would have had all summer off—I could have taken it. I can raise a kid—I’m no Goddamn—I have to piss—‘
He leaves the bed so quickly that he feels, barely, her head drop as his chest jerks from beneath it. He hurries down the hall, stands pissing, then as suddenly and uncontrollably as vomiting he is crying; and as with vomiting he has no self, he is only the helpless and weak host of these sounds and jerks and tears, and he places both palms on the wall in front of him, standing, moaning; the tears stop, his chest heaves, he groans, then tears come again as from some place so deep inside him that it has never been touched, even by pain. Lori stands naked beside him. She is trying to pull his arm from its push against the wall; she is trying to hold him and is crying too and saying something but he can only hear her comforting tone like wind-sough in trees that grew in a peaceful place he left long ago. Finally he turns to her, he will let her hold him and do what she needs to do; yet when he faces her tall firm body, still in October her summer tan lingering above and between breasts and loins, he swings his fists, pulling short each punch, pulling them enough so she does not even back away, nor lift an arm to protect herself; left right left right, short hooked blows at her womb and he hears himself saying No no no—He does not know whether he is yelling or mumbling. He only knows he is sounds and tears and death-sorrow and strong quick arms striking the air in front of Lori’s womb.
Then it stops; his arms go to her shoulders, he sags, and she turns him and walks him back down the hall, her left arm around his waist, her right hand holding his arm around her shoulders. He lies in bed and she asks if he wants a drink; he says he’d better not. She gets into bed, and holds his face to her breast.
‘Seven months,’ he says. ‘That’s all she had to give it. Then I could have taken it. You think I couldn’t do that?’
‘I know you could.’
‘It would be hard. Sometimes it would be terrible. I wasn’t swinging at you.’
‘I know.’
‘It was just the womb.’
‘Monica’s?’
‘I don’t know.’
That night he dreams: it is summer, the lovely summers when he does not teach, does not have to hurry his writing and running before classes, and in the afternoons he picks up Sharon and sometimes a friend or two of hers and they go to Seabrook beach in New Hampshire; usually Jack and Terry Linhart are there with their daughter and son, and all of them put their blankets side by side and talk and doze and go into the sea, the long cooling afternoons whose passage is marked only by the slow arc of the sun, time’s symbol giving timelessness instead. His dream does not begin with those details but with that tone: the blue peaceful days he teaches to earn, wakes in the dark winter mornings to write, then runs in snow and cold wind and over ice. The dream comes to him with an empty beach: he feels other people there but does not see them, only a stretch of sand down to the sea, and he and Sharon are lying on a blanket. They are talking to each other. She is on his right. Then he rolls slightly to his left to look down at the fetus beside him; he is not startled by it; he seems to have known it is there, has been there as long as he and Sharon. The dream tells him it is a girl; he loves her, loves watching her sleep curled on her side: he looks at the disproportionate head, the small arms and legs. But he is troubled. She is bright pink, as if just boiled, and he realizes he should have put lotion on her. She sleeps peacefully and he wonders if she will be all right sleeping there while he and Sharon go into the surf. He knows he will bring her every afternoon to the beach and she will sleep pink and curled beside him and Sharon and, nameless, she will not grow. His love for her becomes so tender that it changes to grief as he looks at her flesh in the sun’s heat.
The dream does not wake him. But late next morning, when he does wake, it is there, as vivid as if he is having it again. He sees and feels it before he feels his headache, his hung-over dry mouth, his need to piss; before he smells the cigarette butts on the desk beside him, and the tequila traces in the glasses by the ashtray. Before he is aware of Lori’s weight and smell in bed. Quietly he rises and goes to the bathroom then sneaks back into bed, not kindness but because he does not want Lori awake, and he lies with his dream. His heart needs to cry but his body cannot, it is emptied, and again he thinks it is like vomiting: the drunken nights when he suddenly wakes from a dream of nausea and goes qui
ckly to the toilet, kneeling, gripping its seat, hanging on through the last dry heaves, then waking in the morning still sick, red splotches beside his eyes where the violence of his puking has broken vessels, and feeling that next moment he would be at the toilet again, but there is nothing left to disgorge and he simply lies in bed for hours.
But this will not pass. He will have to think. His employers at the college and his editor and publisher believe his vocations have to do with thinking. They are wrong. He rarely thinks. He works on instincts and trying to articulate them. What his instincts tell him now is that he’d better lie quietly and wait: today is Sunday and this afternoon he and Lori are taking Sharon for a walk on Plum Island. He lies there and imagines the three of them on the dunes until he senses Lori waking.
She knows what he likes when he wakes hung over and, without a word, she begins licking and caressing his nipples; his breath quickens, he feels the hung-over lust whose need is so strong it is near-desperate, as though only its climax can return him from the lethargy of his body, the spaces in his brain, and he needs it the way others need hair of the dog. Lori knows as well as he does that his need is insular, masturbatory; knows that she is ministering to him, her lips and fingers and now her mouth medicinal. But she likes it too. Yet this morning even in her soft mouth he remains soft until finally he takes her arms and gently pulls her up, rolls her onto her back, and kneels between her calves. When it is over he is still soft, and his lust is gone too.
‘It wasn’t tequila,’ he says. ‘This morning.’
‘I know.’
Then he tells her his dream.
The day, when they finally leave his apartment, is crisp enough for sweaters and windbreakers, the air dry, the sky deep blue, and most of the trees still have their leaves dying in bright red and orange and yellow. It has taken them two hours to get out of the apartment: first Hank went to the bathroom, leaving a stench that shamed him, then he lay in bed while Lori went; and because he was trying to focus on anything to keep the dream away, he figured out why his girl friends, even on a crapulent morning like this one, never left a bad smell. Always they waited in bed, let him go first; then they went, bringing their boxes and bottles, and after sitting on the seat he had warmed they showered long and when they were finished, he entered a steamy room that smelled of woman: clean, powdered, whatever else they did in there. Very simple, and thoughtful too: let him go first so he would not have to wait with aching bowels while they went through the process of smell-changing; and they relied on him, going first, not to shower and shave and make them wait. It was sweetly vulpine and endearing and on another morning he would have smiled.
While he showered, Lori dressed and put on bacon. At breakfast he talked about last night’s movie, about the day as it looked through the window near the table, about Plum Island’s winter erosion, about the omelette, about anything, and Lori watched him with her soft brown eyes, and he knew she knew and was helpless, and he wished she didn’t hurt that way, he knew the pain of being helpless with a lover, but there was nothing he could do except wish they both weren’t helpless.
Driving the car, he is in love with Sharon, needs to see her, listen to her voice, touch her as they walk on the beach. At the house, Lori waits in the car, for she is shy about going in; she and Edith have talked outside, either because Edith was in the yard when they arrived or she walked with Hank and Sharon to the car and leaned over to talk to Lori at the window. Edith divorced him, and he has told Lori that she feels no jealousy or pain, but still Lori is uncomfortable. Hank understands this. He would feel the same. What he does not understand is why Lori loves him, and he prefers not to try, for he is afraid he will find no reason strong enough for him to rely on.
It is not the age of his body that makes him wonder. In the past three or four years, love handles and a bald spot have appeared, and all his running has no effect on the love handles, and he knows they are here to stay, and the bald spot will spread like a tonsure. But it isn’t that. It’s the fettered way he is thirty-five. When Monica left him, she flared after a night of silence when her eyes in turn glowered and sulked; she said, as they were finishing their last drinks in the bar near her college in Maine: I want out. You worry about your writing first, your daughter second, money third, and I’m last. All evening he had known something was coming. But he had never been broken up with so cleanly, precisely, succinctly. At once he was calm. He simply watched Monica’s face. She was taut with fury. He was not. He was not even sad yet. He watched her, and waited for whatever he was going to say. He had no idea what it would be. He was simply repeating her words in his mind. Then he said: You’re right. Why should you put up with that shit? Her fury was still there. Perhaps she wanted a fight. Yet all he felt was forgiveness for her, and futility because he had loved a woman so young.
Then he felt something else: that his forgiveness and futility were familiar, coming from foreknowledge, as if on that first night he took her to dinner in Boston and they ate soft-shelled crabs and his heart began to warm and rise, he had known it would end; that at the most he would get love’s year. It ended with the four sentences in the bar, his two the last, and they drove quietly to her apartment near the campus; at the door he embraced her more tightly than he had intended, because holding her he saw images of death, hers and his years from now, neither knowing of the death of the first, the odds bad that it would be him since he had fifteen years on her and was a man. Then he gave her a gentle closed-lip kiss, and was walking back to his car before she could speak.
He put Waylon Jennings in the deck, and on the two-hour moonlit drive home he longed for a beer and did not cry. When he got to his apartment he drank a six-pack with bourbon and did cry and nearly phoned her; all that kept him from it was his will to keep their last scene together sculpted forever with him, Hank Allison Goddamnit, showing only dignity and strength and tenderness. She had seen him as he was now, on nights when writing or money or guilt and sorrow about Sharon or, often enough, all three punched him around the walls of his apartment, and he counter-punched with one hand holding a beer, the other a bourbon on the rocks. But she had never seen him like this because of her. So each time he went to the kitchen to get another beer or more bourbon and looked at the phone on the wall, he remembered how he was and what he said when she told him in the bar, and how he was at the door, and turned, sometimes lunged, away from the phone.
He drank in his bedroom, at his desk but with his back to it, and he listened to Dylan, the angry songs about women, the volume low because he rented the upstairs of a house whose owners were a retired couple sleeping beneath him, and he started his cure: he focused on every one of her flaws, and with booze and will and Dylan’s hurt and angry encouragement, he multiplied them by emotion until they grew so out of proportion that he could no longer see what he had loved about her. He relived her quick temper and screaming rage, so loud and long that some nights he was afraid she was going mad, and always he had to command her to stop, squeeze her arms, tell her she would wake the couple downstairs; and her crying, never vulnerably, never seeming to need comfort, more a variation of her rage and nearly as loud, as she twisted from him and fled from room to room until again he had to hold and command; and the source of these rages and tears never defined so he could try to deal with them, these sources always just a little concrete but mostly abstract so on those nights he felt the impotence of believing she already was mad; and his impotence brought with it a detachment which in turn opened him up to shades of despair: he imagined her ten years from now, when her life would be more complicated and difficult, when it would attack her more often, with more strength. Listening to ‘Positively Fourth Street’ he sipped the smooth Jack Daniel’s and chased it with the foamy bite of beer and thought if she had stayed with him she would have so drained his energy that, after spending his nights as a shrink and a lion-tamer, he would wake peaceless and weary to face his morning’s work. He recalled her mischievous face as, in front of his friends, in bars or a
t the beach, she pinched his love handles or kissed his bald spot. This usually did not bother him because he was in good condition, and she smoked heavily and could not run half a mile, was slender only because she was made that way, and she was young, and she dieted. And he guessed she was doing this for herself rather than to him; testing herself; actually touching his signs of age to see if she really wanted a man fifteen years older, with an ex-wife, a twelve-year-old daughter, and child support.
Beneath the teasing, though, something was in her eyes: something feral, and at times as she smiled and teased he looked into her eyes and felt a stir of fear which had nothing to do with her fingers squeezing his flesh, her lips smacking his crown. It was more like the detached fear he had once, looking at a Russell’s viper in a zoo, the snake coiled asleep behind glass, and Hank read the typed card on the cage, about this lethargic snake and how one of its kind finally got Russell and his name.
