by Andre Dubus
‘Yes. You son of a bitch.’
‘Now wait a minute. None of this was on purpose. You think I want my Goddamn head to start writing whenever it decides to? It’s not like being unkind, for Christ’s sake. You think surgeons and lawyers and whatever don’t go through this too? Shit: you came, didn’t you?’
‘I could do that alone.’
‘Well, what am I supposed to fucking do?’
He got out of bed and went for the bottle of sherry and brought it back with another glass; but at the doorway to his room, looking at her leotarded legs, the stretch of belly and chest and the inner swell of breasts exposed by the sweater, at her wide grim mouth concentrating on smoking, and her grey eyes looking at the ceiling, he stopped and stayed at the threshold. He said softly: ‘Baby, what am I supposed to do? I don’t believe in all this special crap about writers, you know that. We’re just like everybody else. Everybody gets distracted by their work, or whatever.’
He cut himself off: he had been about to say Housewives too, but the word was too dangerous and, though he believed that vocation one of the hardest and most distracting of all, believed if he were one he could never relax enough to make unhindered love, he kept quiet. Monica would not be able to hear what he said; she would hear only the word housewife, would slip into jargon, think of labels, roles, would not be soothed. She did not look at him. She said: ‘You could try harder. You could concentrate more. You could even pretend, so I wouldn’t feel like I was getting fucked by a dildo.’ She was often profane, but this took him by surprise; he felt slapped. ‘And you could shut up about it. And not laugh about it. And you could Goddamn not ask me your fucking questions when you stop laughing. I want a lover, not a Papermate.’
The line pleased him, even cheered him a little, and he almost told her so; but again he heard his own warnings, and stopped.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘let’s go to Boston. To Casa Romero and have a hell of a dinner.’
She stayed on his bed long enough to finish the cigarette; she occupied herself with it, held it above her face between drags and studied it as though it were worthy of concentration; watched her exhaled smoke plume and spread toward the ceiling; for all he knew (he still stood naked in the doorway) she was thinking, perhaps even about them. But he doubted it. For a girl so young, she had a lot of poses; when did they start learning them, for Christ’s sake? When they still wrote their ages with one digit? She exhaled the last drag with a sigh, put the cigarette out slowly, watching its jabs against the ashtray as if this were her last one before giving them up; then quickly she put on her skirt, buttoned her sweater, pulled on her boots, slung her suede jacket over her shoulder, and walked toward him as if he were a swinging door. He turned sideways; passing, she touched neither him nor the doorjamb. Awfully slender, he thought. He followed her down the short hall; stood at the doorway and watched her going down the stairs; he hoped his semen was dripping into the crotch of her leotards, just to remind her that everything can’t be walked away from. ‘Theatrical bitch,’ he said to her back, and shut the door.
Which six hours later he opened when she knocked and woke him. She was crying. Her kiss smelled of vermouth. She had been drinking with her roommate. She missed him. She was sorry. She loved him. He took her to bed with fear and sadness which were more distracting than this afternoon’s thinking; he pretended passion and tenderness; he urged his cock Come on come you bastard, while all the time he felt defeat with this woman, felt it as surely as if it stood embodied behind him, with a raised sword. Some night, some day, the sword would arc swiftly down; all he could do was hang on to the good times with Monica while he waited for the blade.
Monica did, though, give him Lori. They were friends from summers in Maine, where Lori lived, and Monica’s parents, from Manhattan, had a summer house. The girls met when Lori was fifteen and Monica sixteen. It was Monica who convinced Lori to enroll in the college, and to take Hank’s courses. Then Monica transferred to Maine after her freshman year, because she didn’t like her art teachers; but Lori came to the college anyway and saw Monica on the weekends when she drove down and stayed with Hank. He liked Lori on those weekends, he liked seeing her in his class, and some week nights they walked to town and drank beer; a few people probably thought they were lovers, but Hank was only afraid of gossip that was true, so he and Lori went to Timmy’s, where students drank. And the night after Monica left him, he picked her up at the dormitory, for dinner at the Linharts. They did not become lovers until over a month later and, when they did, Hank realized it was the first time since Edith that he had made love with a woman who was already his good friend. So their transition lacked the fear and euphoria that people called romance. For Hank, it felt comfortable and safe, as though he had loved her for a long and good time.
Still, with Lori, he was careful: so careful that at times he thought all the will and control it demanded of him was finally the core of love; that for the first time he knew how to go about it. He watched her shyness, listened to it, loved it, and did not try to cure it. While he did this, he felt his love for her growing deeper, becoming a part of who he was in the world.
She was his fourth young girl since divorce. Each had lasted a year or more; with each he had been monogamous; and they had left him. None but Monica had told him why, in words he could understand. The other two had cried and talked about needing space. When the first left him he was sad, but he was all right. The loss of the second frightened him. That was when he saw his trap. Drinking with Jack, he could smile about it: for what had been spice in his married twenties was now his sustenance. Certainly, he told Jack, when he was married he had fallen in love with his girl friends, or at least had the feeling of being in love, had said the words, had the poignant times when he and the girl held each other and spoke, in the warm spring, of the end that was coming to them on the school calendar. But all those affairs had simply given him emotions which he had believed marriage, by its nature, could not give.
For the first time in his life he felt a disadvantage with women. Too often, as he looked at a young face in his apartment or across a restaurant table, he knew he had nothing to offer this girl with her waiting trust fund, this girl who had seen more of the world than he ever would; he imagined her moving all those clothes and other pelf into his apartment and, as he talked with the girl, he wished for some woman his own age, or at least twenty-five, who was not either married or one of those so badly divorced that their pain was not only infectious but also produced in them anger at all men, making him feel he was a tenuous exception who, at any moment, would not be. They met with women’s groups, shrank each other’s heads without a professional in the room, and came away with their anger so prodded they were like warriors. He had tried two of those and, bored and weary, had fled. Once with honey-blonde Donna, the last one, he had left a bar to enter a night of freezing rain, ten minutes to chip his windshield clear while she sat in the car; then driving home so slowly and tensely he could feel his heart beating, he said: ‘Probably some man froze all this fucking rain too.’ Perhaps because she was as frightened as he was, she gently, teasingly, said ‘MCP,’ and patted his shoulder.
He only argued with Donna once. He believed in most of what women wanted, believed women and men should work together to free themselves, believed The Wild Palms had said it first and as well as anyone since. Some trifles about the movement had piqued him: they had appropriated a word he loved, mostly because of its comic root, and he could no longer have the Cold War fun of calling someone a chauvinist. And, on his two marches in Washington during the Vietnam War, he had been angered by the women who took their turn on the speakers’ platform and tried to equate dishwashing with being napalmed. The only important feeling he had about these women was he wished they had some joy. The night he argued with Donna he was drunk and, though he kept trying not to see the Ms. on her coffee table, it was finally all he could see, and he said abruptly: ‘Donna, just as an unknown, average, .260-hitting writer, who sometimes
writes a story and tries to publish it, or a piece of a novel, I’ve got to say one thing: I hate totalitarian magazines whether they’re called Ms. or Penthouse.’
‘Totalitarian?’
‘That.’ He picked up Ms. and dropped it on its cover so all he saw was an advertisement encouraging young girls to start working on lung cancer now, older women to keep at it. ‘They hate literature. They just want something that supports their position. It’s like trying to publish in China, for Christ’s sake.’ Then, because he was angry at magazines and nothing else, and she was suddenly an angry feminist, they fought.
The fight ended when it was over, so it wasn’t serious. But one of the reasons he finally left her, chose loneliness instead, was what she read. She did not read him. This hurt him a little, but not much; mostly, he was baffled. He could not understand why she would make love with him when she was not interested in his work. Because to him, his work was the best of himself. He believed most men who were fortunate enough to have work they loved saw themselves in the same way. Yet Donna’s affection was only for what he was at night, when he was relaxing from that day’s work, and forgetting tomorrow’s, in much the same way he saw most movies that came to town, no matter what they were. And his bantering night-self was so unimportant to him that often, at his desk in the morning, he felt he had not spent last evening with Donna; someone else had talked with her, made love with her; some old, close friend of his.
Typed on a sheet of paper, thumbtacked to the wall over his desk, was this from Heart of Darkness: No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself not others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means. A woman had to know that: simply know it, that was all. He did not need praise from her, he rarely liked to talk about his work, and he had no delusions about it: he liked most novels he read better than he liked his own. But the work was his, and its final quality did not matter so much as the hours it demanded from him. It made the passage of time concrete, measurable. It gave him confidence, not in the work itself, but in Hank Allison: after a morning at the desk he had earned his day on earth. When he did not work, except by choice, he disliked himself. If these days occurred in succession because of school work, hangovers, lack of will, sickness, he lost touch with himself, felt vague and abstract, felt himself becoming whomever he was with. So he thought Donna knew little more about him than she would if, never having met him, she came across his discarded clothing and wallet on her bedroom floor. At times this made him lonely; it also made him think of Edith, all of her he had not known during their marriage, especially the final three polygamous years; and with no way now to undo, to soothe, to heal, he loved her and grieved for what she had suffered: the loneliness of not being fully known.
One night in Donna’s bed, lying tensely beside her peaceful, post-orgasmic flesh, in the dark yet seeing in his mind the bedroom cluttered with antique chairs and dressing table and family pictures on the wall and, resting on the mantel of the sealed fireplace, faces of her grandparents and parents and herself with her two children, a son and daughter, he wondered why he was with her. He knew it was because of loneliness, but why her, with her colliding values, her liberated body which she had shared—offered actually—on their second date, lying here among the testaments of family, marriage, traditions? He suspected that her feminism existed solely because, as her marriage ended, her husband had become mean. He was behind on child support; often he broke dates with the children. Hank believed she was happy now, in these moments this night, because she had just made love, her children slept healthy down the hall, and she was lying amid her antiques and photographs of her life, on a four-poster bed that had been her great-aunt’s. When he tired of trying to understand her, he said: ‘I don’t know why you like me.’
‘Why Hank.’
Her voice was wrong: she thought he felt unloved, needed comfort. He left the bed to piss, to break the mood. When he returned and covered himself he said: ‘You’re not interested in my work. That’s me. All you see is what’s left over. I don’t think that’s me.’
‘I’ve hurt you, and it was stupid and selfish. Bring them over tomorrow night. I’ll read them in order.’
‘Wait.’ He spoke with gentle seriousness, as he did at times with Sharon, when they were discussing a problem she was having or a difference between them, and he wanted her to hear only calm father-words, and not to listen for or worry about his own emotions beneath them. ‘I’m not hurt. I just don’t understand how you can feel for me, and know nothing at all about that part of my life. Maybe two-thirds of it; only about an eighth of my day, in hours, but usually two-thirds of it, which is all of it except sleeping; no matter what I’m doing, it’s down there inside me, I can feel it at work; whether I’m with Sharon or you or teaching; or anything.’ He was about to explain that too, but veered away: some nights with Donna he had the same trouble he would have with Monica much later; but Donna either had not noticed or, more likely, because she had been with more men, she had simply understood; probably she had her own nights like that, as they moved together in that passion which, true as it was, did not totally absorb them, but existed in tandem with them.
‘What about my work?’ she said.
There was no edge on her voice; not yet; but he could sense the blade against whetstone in her heart. He watched her eyes, kept his voice the same, though with a twinge of impatience he felt he was talking to Sharon. Why was he so often comforting women? He wished he could see himself as they saw him: his face, his body, his gestures; wished he could hear the voice they heard. For now he felt like a mean lover, and he did not want to be, but maybe he was and could not do anything about it; or maybe (he hoped) he simply appeared that way. Whatever, he was sad and confused and lonely, felt lost and homeless and womanless, though he lay in bed with a good woman, a good companion; and he needed answers, or even just one, yet now he must give answers, and in a controlled and comforting voice whose demand on him clenched his fists, tightened his arms.
‘It’s not,’ he said. ‘You told me it wasn’t. We were eating at Ten Center Street, and you said: “It’s not work; I wouldn’t grace it with the name. It’s just a job till I find out what I really want to do.”’ He was still tense, but her face softened with his voice.
‘You’re right,’ she said.
‘I also know about your job. I’ve listened. I can tell you your typical day. But mostly with me you talk about your children and rearing them alone and shithead Max not coming through with the money and not seeing the children when he’s supposed to, because he’s become a chic-freak smoking dope all day with young ass and bragging about leaving the engineering rat-race, when the truth is he was laid off with the rest of the poor bastards during the recession, and he talks about opening a bar when he can hardly afford to drink at one because he’s drawing unemployment. And you mostly talk about men and women. And how everything’s changed since you and Max bought this house and it’s got you muddled and sad and pissed-off and you want to do something about it, for yourself and other women too if you could think of a way, but you don’t know how yet. I don’t mean any of this as an insult. You talk about these things because that’s who you are right now, that’s your struggle, and it never bores me. Because I care about you and because I’m going through my version of the same thing. Everything’s changed for me too. When we were pregnant—’
‘We?’
‘Of course we. Not just Edith. I didn’t vomit and my pants size didn’t change and my breasts didn’t swell and I didn’t feel any pain. But it was we. It always is, unless some prick pretends it isn’t.’
‘Like Max.’
‘I don’t know what he felt then. You said he was different then—’ He waved an arm at the dark room, was about to say He liked all this stuff, but did not.
‘Guilt. Fear. I’d read A Farewell to Arms too recently. Three or four years earlier, but for me that was too recently.’ He saw in her face she did not know the book, and he was about to explain, but thought that would be a worse mistake than his mentioning it. ‘I was afraid she’d die. Off and on, until it was over. While she was delivering I hated my hard-on that had been so important whatever night it seemed so important and the diaphragm wasn’t enough.’
‘Men shouldn’t feel that way.’
‘Should and shouldn’t don’t have much to do with feelings. Anyway, we got married. We were in graduate school and we didn’t know any feminists. We were too busy, and our friends were other young couples who were busting their asses to pay bills and stay in school. It made sense then, graduate school: there were jobs waiting. And I saw Edith as a wife in I suppose the same way my father saw my mother. Which somewhat resembles a nineteenth-century aristocrat, I guess: some asshole out of Balzac or Tolstoy.’ (This time, remembering his marriage, he did not even notice that literature had moved into the bed again, like a troublesome cat.) ‘Well, not that bad. But bad enough. I don’t think I knew it, most of the time. Or maybe I just believed I was right, it was right. It’s the only way I had ever seen marriage. I’m not excusing myself. It gets down to this: I nearly drowned her in my shit creek till one night she found a paddle and broke it over my head. Then she shoved the handle through me. I still feel the splinters. All of which is to say I’m not just politely nodding my head when you talk about trouble between men and women. You’re talking to a comrade in arms, and I lost too.’
Goddamn: he had gotten off the track again, for now she held him with both arms, pulled him against her, and he let her quietly hold him a while, then he shifted, got an arm around her, pulled her head to his shoulder so he was talking to her hair, and said: ‘All of which got us away from the original question. You’re a lovely woman. You could have as many kinds of men as you’re lucky enough to meet—doctor lawyer Indian chief—so what I want to ask is, why me? A man you met at a party, you came up and said “You have foam on your moustache,” and I licked it off and you said “I like watching men lick beer from their moustaches.” Why in the world me?’
