Adultery & Other Choices

by Andre Dubus

  ‘We never saw the movies,’ he said.

  ‘What movies?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘Not many,’ she said, and he could hear the grin in her voice.

  ‘Remember—what was the name of it? When it rained?’

  ‘Marjorie Morningstar,’ she said.

  She slid close to him and he put his arm around her.

  ‘Vicki told me it was so good, and I wanted to see it,’ she said.

  ‘It was the rain. Everybody was staying in their cars and you couldn’t see much through the windows.’

  ‘It wasn’t the rain. It was you.’

  ‘I wanted my clothes off.’

  ‘So did I,’ she said.

  ‘We could’ve got caught anyway, naked during the whole movie, and I bet we did it more times than Natalie Wood.’

  ‘Because we really did it. You want to go home now?’

  ‘Don’t you want to see the rest?’ he said. ‘I thought you liked it.’

  ‘Not anymore. Let’s go.’

  He lifted the speaker off his window and hung it up outside.

  ‘We’ll have to be careful when we carry the kids in,’ she said.

  ‘They won’t wake up. You sure you don’t want to see the rest?’

  ‘If you don’t hurry and take us home, it’ll be just like Bakersfield.’

  He drove home and carried each child to bed; none of them stirred. He tiptoed out of their bedroom and into his own, where Carol waited in the dark. She lifted her arms to him as, undressing, he stared at the stretch of white between her tan shoulders and legs. But it was over in a rush, before he had even got started. After that he slept badly. At half past two by the bedside clock he woke, his palms pressing against the mattress as though to push him upright. For a moment he thought he was back in the desert. Then he turned to Carol and, silently, with quick hands, he pulled her out of sleep. This time it took longer and he was able to marvel and anticipate and remember all at once, recalling the first time parked right in front of her house, the porch light watching them but they were safe down in the darkness of the seat and anyway it was late, her parents were asleep, and anyway it happened so fast they hadn’t worried about anything except letting it happen, then she had sighed, peaceful, relieved, and said We finally did it and squeezed him till he grunted; after that it was all the time and they even had a bed when she was babysitting, and once the Heatheringtons had come home early so he had to escape through the bedroom window, unbuckled, shoes in hand, leaving her to smooth the bed, her skirt, and her face before fleeing to a lighted part of the house; best of all was home on that first leave, pulsating with four months’ absence, and they had spent entire afternoons on a blanket in the woods—

  Now he fell away from her, sprawled and grateful and silent, his body sinking into the mattress, into a heavy sleep that lasted until almost noon. He woke to the sound of Carol’s voice in the living room. She was talking on the phone, telling someone—probably Cathy Thorton—about going to Bakersfield.

  ‘It’ll be like a honeymoon,’ she said. ‘What? Oh they’re great. You ought to take ’em—they don’t make you sick or anything, you just have to remember to take ’em. Uh-uh, not a pound. Really, they’re great—’

  She sounded very happy and he was not ready for that—not right now—so when she hung up and came toward the bedroom he closed his eyes and pretended he was asleep.

  The Shooting

  THE GUN FIGHT between the sailor and the Marine riot squad was in a Navy housing area on the base, so the civilian police were not involved, and during much of the fight Sergeant Chuck Everett was in sole command. Moments after the fight ended, a Navy photographer took a picture of Sergeant Everett; two days later the picture was on the front page of the local newspaper, a weekly which reported the news of Oak Harbor for its thirty-five hundred citizens. Except for occasional accidents (a curving road, treacherous to drunks, led north from the town to Deception Pass, where a high bridge crossed the water from Whidbey Island to the mainland), the newspaper’s tragedies were drawn from the Naval Air Station: a year ago a bomber had crashed on Olympic Peninsula; three months ago another had gone into the cold sea off Puget Sound. The story of the gun fight was the first of its kind.

  Chuck Everett was twenty-five years old, in his seventh year of peacetime service; he was a large man with a wide face that always looked sunburned, though at Whidbey Island there was more rain than sun, more grey than blue. Every Thursday he went to the Post Exchange and got a crewcut. At the Marine Barracks he worked as a Sergeant of the Guard, rotating the duty with two other sergeants. It was a good job, and he didn’t mind when his duty came every third day. On those nights he inspected posts between midnight and dawn. There were twelve posts, some on the west side of the island, some on the east side. Crossing the island, he drove through Oak Harbor; at that time of night the town was silent, and he could hear only the engine of his pick-up, and the sound of its tires on the pavement, which was usually wet from fog. He liked driving through town, liked to wonder if all those civilians were asleep or if maybe some of them were up to a little hankypank. It took him over an hour to inspect all the sentries, and as he drove he often daydreamed about things whose details he could not recall the next day. He could only remember having a pleasant drive in the wet sea-smelling air.

  There were other nights, though, when he felt a vague restlessness, and he thought about girls. One April night a month before the gunfight, he went to see Toni. Her husband was with a bomber squadron on a carrier in the Pacific. She lived in a fourplex, in Navy housing just off the base, up the road from the main gate. The Navy Shore Patrol would be out in their truck, and if they saw his pick-up at Toni’s, he’d get busted to corporal at the very least. He was both scared and excited, and as he turned off the headlights and drove slowly down her street, he wondered if he’d be able to get one up, and he remembered one of his favorite pieces ever, when he was a senior in high school and he and Loretta Cain had one schoolday afternoon sneaked into a storage compartment for athletic equipment. It was under the bleachers in the gym, there was a lot of floor space, and you could walk in it if you bent nearly double. Its only door opened onto the gym floor. Chuck and Loretta lay on a wrestling mat among basketballs, volley balls, tackling dummies and the smell of old sweat. They were just getting started when a p.e. class came in to play basketball. Chuck paused and listened to the dribbling, the shouts, the whistle. Then he went ahead and did it.

  Now he parked down the street from Toni’s, realizing as he walked back to her house that the truck’s exact location didn’t matter, that if the Shore Patrol saw it anywhere in Navy housing he would have to make up one hell of a story. Then he wondered how loud he’d have to knock to wake her up. He was in luck. There was a light on at the back of the house, in the kitchen; he went to the back door and watched her putting dishes away, a sixteen-ounce Hamm’s on the kitchen table and a burning cigarette in the ash tray. He waited to see if another Hamm’s would come in from the living room, with a man holding it. When he thought she was alone he tapped the glass and her shoulders jerked, then she saw him and was frightened and surprised and pleased all at once. She didn’t look caught, though, so he knew it was all right. He didn’t think she was playing around, but you had to figure if a married woman would go with you, she’d go with another. She had a chain lock on the door and as she worked it she started to giggle, a fine-looking dark little girl, not twenty yet, alone at one-thirty in the morning but still her hair combed and some lipstick left, and he thought what a good idea this was. She spoke in a laughing whisper: ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Patrolling,’ he said, and grinned and shut the door. ‘How come you’re awake?’

  ‘Johnny Carson.’ She stepped back and cocked her head, hands on her hips, playing wife with him. ‘You crazy man. Want a beer?’

  ‘Nope,’ he said. ‘I’m on duty.’

  Then he was laughing and she was too, but she stopped when he took off his cap,
careful not to touch its spit-shined visor, and laid it on the table; then he unbuckled his white web pistol belt and lowered it to a chair. By the time he got to the buttons of his battle jacket she was pulling her blouse out of her Levis and walking away from him, past the room where the child was sleeping, to the bedroom. When he finished he drove to the Shore Patrol office and had a cup of coffee with the sailors.

  THE SAILOR, they said afterward, had always been funny. Someone remembered that he never laughed much. Someone else remembered that he never talked much either. The Senior Medical Officer gave the final opinion. He was a bear-shaped captain, perhaps the only officer in the Navy who had taken advantage of an old regulation allowing beards: his was red and bushy. He had considerable wit, a large and colorful vocabulary, and he loved to talk, to lead a conversation to some strange point which existed largely for his own amusement, then to end it with a deep laugh, a slap on the shoulder, the ordering of another round. His fellow officers liked to listen to him, to quote him, to retell his stories; but his beard, his diction, his playfulness, kept them instinctively on guard. This captain read a copy of the investigation, pulled at his beard, and said Philip Korsmeyer had probably had a passive-aggressive reaction to service life in general and to his new role as a husband and nascent father. Everyone else, or at least everyone who by that time was still interested, readily agreed that this was so.

  The written report of the investigation—original and five copies—had the appearance or at least the heft of finality. There were statements by an ensign and chief petty officer who commanded Korsmeyer’s division. They said he was quiet, did his job, never caused any trouble; yet there had been, they felt, something different about him. From the six members of the Marine riot squad came six statements which all, in their repetition, presented a rock-like segment of truth: when the Corporal of the Guard sounded the buzzer they reported to his desk; he told them this was the real thing, issued them ammunition for the four riot guns and two MI’s, and sent them by truck to the housing area, where Corporal Visconti deployed them for a fire fight with someone whom they couldn’t see and didn’t shoot at anyway, the fire fight being led by Sergeant Everett and, later, Captain Melko.

  There were also statements by a sailor and his wife, who lived next door to the Korsmeyers; Mary Korsmeyer had used their phone to call the Marine Barracks. The longest statements were by Mary Korsmeyer, Captain Melko, and Sergeant Everett. The Commanding Officer of the Marine Barracks, a major, was mostly concerned with the statements of Captain Melko and Sergeant Everett; for there was the question of a cease fire order having gone unheard. The Major was not entirely satisfied with the opinion of the investigating officer, a lieutenant-commander, who concluded that ‘in the heat of battle, Sergeant Everett did not hear Captain Melko’s order to cease fire.’ Except for an interest in the story itself, the Senior Medical Officer found that Mary Korsmeyer’s statement was the only one useful to him. It was from this statement that he decided what had been wrong with Philip Korsmeyer.

  Phil Korsmeyer himself did not know what was wrong, though for a month or so he knew something terribly strange was happening to him, and he also knew that it was terribly unique: that his friends in the squadron and his plump sweet Mary were not the sort of people who were visited by such nightmares, which were fearfully repetitious so that some mornings after a free night he woke relieved, but brave and curious enough to lie there for a while and try to remember if perhaps he had had the dream after all and had forgotten it. While Mary made breakfast he lay with his eyes closed, trying to force his mind back into the mysteries of night and sleep; then, satisfied that he had been spared for a night, he would get up and dress with the hope that whatever it was had left him forever.

  After two months his hope became desperate, he started smoking before breakfast, and he was doing a couple of things that Mary called a nervous habit and which she said made her nervous too. He pinched his cheek while they talked over soiled plates at the dinner table, and he did a lot of pacing in the living room, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped. They were six months married and she was three months pregnant and she thought he was nervous about being a father and maybe a husband as well. He was twenty years old, tall and slender, and she had believed that marriage would fill him out (it was what her mother told her), but instead he seemed to be getting thinner. Or maybe she only thought so because, with her baby, she was gaining weight.

  About two weeks before the gun fight he became very quiet, distracted; when she asked if he wanted to try another channel or what he wanted to eat, he wouldn’t answer. At first she simply asked him again in a louder voice. But after a few days she was certain that he regretted her pregnancy and therefore their life together. So one night when she asked him to throw her the cigarettes and he kept staring at the television, she said ‘Hey!’ and loudly clapped her hands. His face jerked at her, his eyes returning in a startled instant from that fearful distance. She left the room and he followed her. She stood at the kitchen sink, gulping milky water from a glass unwashed since dinner, looking out the window at the dark, while he asked her what was wrong.

  ‘You don’t love me,’ she said.

  He tried to soothe her, but his hands on her shoulders and arms were no more intimate than the brushing touch of a stranger on a bus.

  Phil’s dream was this: six people (he finally got their number straight) came for him and carried him alive to his grave. They took him from a bed and a room of eclectic familiarity: he could not recall these in detail, but in his daylight memory he felt that the bed was from some other house and time in his life, the enclosing walls and ceiling from another. He thought some of the people were women, but their bodies were vague or robed—he didn’t know which—and their faces were merely shapes without features. They lifted him from the bed and all at once he was in a dark cemetery, and above the staring faces were black crowns of trees. They always brought him to the edge of a grave whose waiting depth he sensed yet never saw, for he was looking up at them, pleading with them and sometimes asking who they were and why were they doing this to him, but he never knew whether all his questions and pleas were only in his mind and for some reason not being voiced, or if he was indeed talking aloud and they were simply ignoring him. In any case, they never seemed to hear. They spoke to him, though, but he wasn’t sure what they said. Remembering—next morning, afternoon, evening, night—he thought they only said one or two words at odd and meaningless intervals.

  Then on a foggy Monday morning in May, two days before he went (as the Navy doctor and the newspaper said) berserk, he learned what they were saying at night. He had just stepped out of the shower, dried himself, put on his shorts, and stood at the steamed mirror; he was wiping it so he could shave when he heard the voice behind him, at the toilet. It said Yes. He spun around, already knowing his eyes were useless for something like this.

  For the next two days he heard the voices, fought them, tried to get back to the far-off land he had left behind, so that sometimes he knew quite clearly that he loved his wife, he was looking forward with curiosity to the birth of a child, he had only one more year to do in the Navy, and he had a job waiting in his uncle’s auto body shop in Eugene, Oregon. He saw all this, knew it to be true, knew that if he could rid himself of the voices of night he could return to those modest yet pleasurable expectancies of his days. But this knowledge came to him only in moments which were more and more separated until, watching television Wednesday night, he suddenly rose, upsetting an ash tray from the arm of his chair, and went quickly to the kitchen: not running only because there wasn’t enough room, for he wanted to run—fear at first, then a sense of victorious flight, of ultimate purpose, having left the voices in the room with the television, though as he jerked open the kitchen drawer and fumbled for a handle, any handle of any knife, they were after him again, at his back in the kitchen: Yes—Well: you, surely—Yes; and he got the paring knife and slashed then sawed at his wrist, the knife had always been du
ll, then Mary was there, moving at him, reaching for him, and he slashed at her too, missing the breasts, and she turned screaming and ran from the house.

  The knife had done little: three cuts, like the footprint of a bird, were scratched near bloodlessly into the pale underside of his left wrist. He laid the knife on the stove and stood holding his wrist, though still there was only enough blood to cover the scratches. He wished he hadn’t struck at Mary, he wished she hadn’t run out, and he wished with all his heart she would come back; yet at the core of his despair, of his knowledge that she was never coming back, there opened for him a despair so ultimate that it gave him hope: abandoned forever, beset by the shades who quietly watched him now from some point which was in his mind yet in the kitchen too—by the refrigerator or stove—so his mind was the kitchen and the kitchen his mind, he now saw that he was about to escape forever. He would move out of this network of betrayal and attack, he would ascend crashing through the night. It was motion he wanted now, and though he was weeping and actually moaning (he hadn’t known that for a minute or two), there was an affirmative briskness in his steps through the living room, three paces down the hall, left into the bedroom where he switched on the overhead light, glancing at the bed covered by a green spread, and at the bedside table which held Mary’s Redbook and package of Rolaids. He took the .22 rifle from the closet and sat on the bed to load the tubular magazine. After inserting four rounds he realized that was three more than he needed, but he liked the joke, liked sitting there in the middle of this joke that was in the middle of the swirl of devils and Mary’s reaching hands and the silence that felt like chaotic voices, as though he sat dying and unnoticed at a party of strange drunks. So he kept loading until the magazine was filled. He was considering trying for the heart or sticking the barrel in his mouth when he heard the siren, then an abrupt squeal of tires outside his house.