by Andre Dubus
They drove out to the street and she waved at us. We waved and I watched her smile and hair. Then I looked at Joe.
“What,” he said.
“You’re telling me that you go to bed with your wife, you take your time, you get hard, your wife gets on top and does what she wants to do till she’s finished, and you don’t feel anything.”
“That’s right. And, let me tell you, there’s a lot more to our marriage than sex.”
That night Jack and I went to dinner at a restaurant in Haverhill with Gene and Jean Harbilas. Gene is my doctor. He and I drank vodka martinis, then we had a good bordeaux with dinner. The dinner was very good, but I had been sitting, either in the car or my chair, since leaving home early that afternoon to visit Joe, and for the last hour or so my lower back muscles ached enough to make me sweat. After dinner the young black chef came out to meet us. He was from the Gold Coast and spoke English with a French accent. He told us he had studied in Paris, and met his wife there. Someone asked what brought him to Haverhill.
“It is my wife’s home,” he said.
I thought how strange it was, to meet two men from Africa on the same day in the Merrimack Valley.
1990
BREATHING
AT MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL Hospital, Patrick was a good nurse. He loved adrenaline, he told me; he had been a paramedic. One night when I still had my left leg, I woke to a young nurse standing above me, crying out: “Oh my God.” She ran from the room. In came Patrick. Blood was spurting from an artery in my left leg. I could not see it, and I do not recall how I knew it. Two doctors came next, a black woman and a white man. But for a short time I was alone with Patrick. I told myself I was in good hands, but I did not do this with words; I surrendered myself. I focused only on breathing. I slowed my breathing, and tried to remain absolutely in the present, in each moment. I did not think. Much later, perhaps years, I remembered there was something I had not told my children, something they may be able to use. That waiting to die or to stay alive was like getting an injection as a child, when you first learned not to think, but to gather yourself into the present, to breathe slowly, to relax your muscles, even your arm as the nurse swabbed it with alcohol, to feel the cool alcohol, to smell it, to feel your feet on the floor and see the color of the wall, and nothing else as your slow breathing opened you to the incredible length and breadth and depth of one second.
1990
Part Five
BROKEN VESSELS
for Suzanne
ON THE TWENTY-THIRD of June, a Thursday afternoon in 1988, I lay on my bed and looked out the sliding glass doors at blue sky and green poplars and I wanted to die. I wanted to see You and cry out to You: So You had three years of public life which probably weren’t so bad, were probably even good most of the time, and You suffered for three days, from Gethsemane to Calvary, but You never had children taken away from You. That is what I wanted to do when I died, but it is not why I wanted to die. I wanted to die because my little girls were in Montauk on Long Island, and had been there since Wednesday, and would be till Sunday; and I had last seen and held and heard them on Tuesday. Cadence is six, and Madeleine is seventeen months.
I wanted to die because it was summer again, and all summer and fall of 1987 I had dreaded the short light and long dark of winter, and now it was June: summer, my favorite season since boyhood, one of less clothes and more hours in the sun: on the beach and the fishing boats and at Fenway Park and on the roads I used to run then walk, after twenty-five years of running; and the five-mile conditioning walks were so much more pleasurable that I was glad I lost running because of sinus headaches in my forties. It was summer again and I wanted to die because last summer I was a shut-in, but with a wife and two daughters in the house, and last August I even wrote. Then with the fall came the end of the family, so of writing; and now the long winter is over and I am shut in still, and without my children in the house; and unable to write, as I have been nearly all the days since the thirteenth of November 1987 when, five days after the girls’ mother left me, she came with a court order and a kind young Haverhill police officer, and took Cadence and Madeleine away.
On Tuesday evening, the twenty-first of June in 1988, I ate pizza and Greek salad with my girls and Jack Herlihy, who lives with me, who moved into my basement in January of 1988 to help me pay the mortgage; to help me. But Wednesday and Thursday I could not eat, or hardly could, as though I were not the same man who had lived on Tuesday: in early afternoon, with my son Andre helping me, I had worked out with bench presses and chin-ups in the dining room, where Andre had carried the bench and bar and plates from the library. He rested the chinning bar on its holders on the sides of the kitchen doorway and stood behind me and helped me pull up from the wheelchair, then he pushed the chair ahead of me, and after sets of chin-ups I pulled the chair back under me with my right leg and my stump, and he held me as I lowered my body into it. This was after I had shadowboxed in my chair on the sundeck, singing with Louis Armstrong on cassette, singing for deep breathing with my stomach, and to bring joy to a sitting workout that took me most of the summer of 1987 to devise, with gratitude to my friend Jane Strüss, who taught me in voice lessons in the winter and spring of 1984 that I had spent my adult life breathing unnaturally. The shadowboxing while singing gives me the catharsis I once gained from the conditioning walks and, before those, the running that I started when I was nineteen, after celebrating or, more accurately, realizing that birthday while riding before dawn with a busload of officer candidates to the rifle range at Quantico, Virginia, during my first six weeks of Marine Corps Platoon Leaders’ Class, in August of 1955.
I came home from training to my sophomore year at McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana; and to better endure the second six weeks of Platoon Leaders’ Class in 1957, then active duty as an officer after college, I ran on the roads near my home for the next three years, a time in America when no one worked out, not even athletes in their off-seasons, and anyone seen running on a road had the look of either a fugitive or a man gone mad in the noonday sun. When I left the Marines in 1964 I kept running, because it — and sometimes it alone — cleared my brain and gave peace to my soul. I never exercised for longevity or to have an attractive body and, strangely, my body showed that: I always had a paunch I assumed was a beer gut until the early spring of 1987 when my right leg was still in a cast, as it was for nearly eight months, and I drank no beer, only a very occasional vodka martini my wife made me, and I could not eat more than twice a day, but with Andre’s help on the weight-lifting bench I started regaining the forty or so pounds I had lost in the hospital, and my stomach spread into its old mound and I told my physical therapist, Mary Winchell, that it never was a beer gut after all. Mary came to the house three times a week and endured with me the pain of nearly every session, and the other pain that was not of the body but the spirit: that deeper and more deleterious pain that rendered me on the twenty-second and twenty-third of June 1988 not the same man at all who, after my workout on the twenty-first of June, waited for Cadence and Madeleine to come to my house.
When they did, Jack was home doing his paperwork from the Phoenix Bookstore, and he hosed water into the plastic wading pool I had given Cadence for her sixth birthday on the eleventh of June. The pool is on the sundeck, which I can be on this summer because in March David Novak and a young man named Justin built ramps from the dining room to the sunken living room, and from the living room to the sundeck. I wanted to be with Cadence, so Jack placed the feet of the wooden chaise longue in the pool and I transferred from my chair to the chaise, then lowered myself into the cold water. I was wearing gym shorts, Cadence was in her bathing suit, and I had taken off Madeleine’s dress, and rubbed sun screen on her skin, and in diapers and sandals she walked smiling on the sundeck, her light brown and curly hair more blonde now in summer; but she did not want to be in the water. Sometimes she reached out for me to hold her, and I did, sitting in the pool, and I kept her feet above water t
ill she was ready to leave again, and turned and strained in my arms, and said Eh, to show me she was. But she watched Cadence and me playing with a rubber Little Pony that floated, her long mane and tail trailing, and a rubber tiger that did not float, and Madeleine’s small inflatable caramel-colored bear Cadence had chosen for her at The Big Apple Circus we had gone to in Boston on the fourth of June, to begin celebrating Cadence’s birthday: Jack and Cadence and me in one car, and Madeleine with my grown daughter Suzanne and her friend Tom in another.
Cadence is tall and lithe, and has long red hair, and hazel eyes that show the lights of intelligence. Always she imagines the games we play. I was the Little Pony and she was the tiger; we talked for the animals, and they swam and dived to the bottom and walked on my right leg that was a coral reef, and had a picnic with iced tea on the plastic bank. There was no tea, no food. Once Madeleine’s bear was bad, coming over the water to kill and eat our pony and tiger, and they dispatched him by holding a rubber beach ball on the bottom of the pool and releasing it under the floating bear, driving him up and over the side, onto the sundeck. Lynda Novak, young friend and daughter of dear friends, was with us, watching Madeleine as Cadence and I sat in the water under a blue sky, in dry but very warm air, and the sun of late June was hot and high.
I had planned to barbecue pork chops, four of them, center cut, marinating since morning in sauce in the refrigerator. When Cadence and I tired of the sun and the pool and the games in it, we went inside to watch a National Geographic documentary on sharks, a video, and while Lynda and Cadence started the movie, and Madeleine walked about, smiling and talking with her few words, and the echolalia she and usually Cadence and sometimes Lynda and I understood, I wheeled up the ramp to the dining room, and toward the kitchen, but did not get there for the chops, and the vegetables, frozen ones to give me more time with the girls. A bottle of basil had fallen from the work table my friend Bill Webb built against the rear wall of the dining room; he built it two days after Christmas because, two days before Christmas, he came to see me, and I was sitting in the dining room, in my wheelchair, and chopping turkey giblets on a small cutting board resting across my lap. You like to cook, he said, and you can’t do a Goddamn thing in that little kitchen of yours; you need a work bench. The basil was on the floor, in my path; I leaned down, picked it up, flipped it into my lap as I straightened, and its top came off and basil spread and piled on my leg and stump and lap and chair.
Nothing: only some spilled basil, but Cadence was calling: Daddy, come see the great white, and I was confronting not basil but the weekend of 17–19 June, one of my two June weekends with Cadence and Madeleine. So I replaced the top on the jar, and with a paper towel picked up the mounds of basil, and with a sponge wiped off the rest of it. Then on the phone (The phone is your legs, a friend said to me once) I ordered pizza and Greek salad to be delivered, and joined my girls and Lynda in the living room to watch sharks, and Valerie Taylor of Australia testing a steel mesh shark-proof suit by letting a shark bite her arm. The pizza and salad arrived when Jack had come home from the bookstore, and he and the girls and Lynda and I ate on the sundeck.
On Friday the seventeenth of June I had had Delmonico steaks, potatoes, and snap beans. Jack was picking up the girls on his way home from the store, at about six-thirty, so at five forty-five I started scrubbing potatoes in the kitchen sink, and snapping the ends off beans and washing them. I had just finished shadowboxing on the sundeck, and I believed I could have the potatoes boiling, the beans ready, and also shower and shave before six-thirty. Too often, perhaps most days and nights, my body is still on biped time, and I wheel and reach and turn the chair to the sink or stove and twist in the chair to reach and learn yet again what my friend David Mix said last January. David lost his left leg, below the knee, to a Bouncing Betty that did not bounce, and so probably saved his life, on the first of August in 1967, while doing his work one morning as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. His novel, Intricate Scars, which I read in manuscript, is the most tenderly merciful and brutal war novel I have ever read. Last winter he said to my son Andre: There comes a time in the life of an amputee when he realizes that everything takes three times as long.
He was precise. That Friday night I stopped working in the kitchen long enough to shower, sitting on the stool, using Cadence’s hand mirror to shave beneath and above my beard; I dried myself with a towel while sitting and lying on my bed, then wrapped my stump with two ace bandages, and pulled over it a tight stump sleeve to prevent edema. Twenty, maybe even thirty minutes, to shave and shower and shampoo and bandage and dress, yet we sat at the table for steak and boiled potatoes and snap beans and a salad of cucumbers and lettuce at nine-fifteen. And Jack was helping, from the time he got home till the meal was ready; but the kitchen is very small, and with the back of my wheelchair against the sink, I can reach the stove and nearly get food from the refrigerator to my right. I occupied all the cooking space; Jack could only set the table and be with the girls. Cadence was teaching Madeleine to seesaw in the hall, and often she called for me to come see Madeleine holding on and grinning and making sounds of delight, and I wheeled out of the kitchen and looked at the girls on the seesaw, then backed into the kitchen and time moved, as David Mix said, three times as fast as the action that once used a third of it.
Saturday’s dinner was easy: I simply had to heat the potatoes and beans left over from Friday, and finish frying the steaks we had partially fried then, before we realized we had more than we needed, and the only difficulty was wheeling back and forth from the dining room table to the kitchen, holding dishes and glasses and flatware in my lap, a few at a time, then squirming and stretching in my chair to rinse them in the sink behind me, and place them in the dishwasher between the sink and refrigerator behind me. After dinner Cadence went to a dance concert with Suzanne and Tom.
I bathed Madeleine in the sink. She was happy in the bubbles from dish soap, and I hugged and dried her with a towel, and powdered her body and put a diaper on her, then buckled my seat belt around her and took her down the ramp to the living room. The late June sun was setting in the northwest, beyond the wide and high glass at the front of the house. I put her on the couch and got on it beside her, and Jack sat in a rocking chair at its foot, and we watched Barfly on VCR while Madeleine sat on my chest, smiling at me, pulling my beard and lower lip, her brown eyes deep, as they have been since she was a baby, when she would stare at each person who entered the house, would appear to be thinking about that man, that woman, would seem to be looking into their souls. She is my sixth child, and I have never seen a baby look at people that way. She still does.
That night on the couch she sometimes lay on my chest, her fleshy little arms hugging my neck, her soft and sweet-smelling cheek against mine. I felt her heart beating, and felt from her chest the sounds she made at my face, a series of rising and falling oohs, in the rhythm of soothing: oohoohoohooh. … After sunset, in the cooling room beneath the fan, she puckered her lips and smacked them in a kiss, as Suzanne had taught her, then leaned toward my face, her eyes bright, and kissed me; over and over; then she turned and reached behind her toward Jack, pointing her right hand, with its shortened forefinger. The top knuckle was severed in the sprocket of an exercise bicycle when she was a year and twenty-one days old; she has a tiny stump that Cadence says she got so that when she is older she will understand my stump. I told her to go give Jack a kiss, and lifted her to her feet and held her arms as she stepped off my chest, onto the couch, and followed it back to the arm, where Jack’s arms and face waited for her: she puckered and smacked as she walked, then she kissed her godfather. During most of the movie, before she grew sleepy and I put her in the chair with me and buckled the seat belt around her and took her up the ramp and to the refrigerator for her bottle of orange juice, then to the crib and sang “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” while hers closed, she stayed on my chest, and I held her, drew from her little body and loving heart peace and hope, and gratitude for being spared
death that night on the highway, or a brain so injured it could not know and love Madeleine Elise. I said: Madeleine, I love you; and she smiled and said: I luh you.
Once I paused the movie, and lifted her from me and got onto my chair and went past the television and down the short ramp to the sundeck, and I wheeled to the front railing to piss between its posts, out in the night air, under the stars. Madeleine followed me, with Jack behind her, saying: She’s coming after you, Brother. I turned to see her coming down the ramp, balancing well, then she glanced up and saw what I had not; and still descending, her face excited, she pointed the stump of her finger to the northwest and said: Moon.
I looked ahead of me and up at a new moon, then watched her coming to me, pointing, looking skyward, saying: Moon. Moon. Moon.
About the next day, Sunday the nineteenth, I remember very little, save that I was tired, as if the long preparing of the meal on Friday had taken from me some energy that I suspect was spiritual, and that I did not regain. Suzanne spent the afternoon with me and the girls. At five o’clock, in accordance with the court order, she took them to their mother’s.
Today, the sixth of July 1988, I read chapter nine of St. Luke. Since starting to write this, I have begun each day’s work by reading a chapter of the New Testament. Today I read: “If anyone wishes to come after me let him deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” And: “took a little child and set him at his side, and said to them: ‘Whoever receives this little child for my sake, receives me’.”
