Adultery & Other Choices

by Andre Dubus

  She was going to the punch bowl when she heard a knock on the front door. She turned quickly, immediately angered by her speed and the leap of hope in her breast. Before going to the door, she paused to fill her glass and light a cigarette. But when she opened the door, she looked over the shoulders of the lone Marine standing there and scanned the front lawn and the street before the house. Then she looked at him. It was Anderson, and for an instant she thought of slamming the door and leaving him to stand there, cold and puzzled, before returning to the barracks to tell the others.

  He was a tall nineteen year old boy with a round, pleading face which was now smiling at her. The width of his belly and hips was more than even an old officer or Staff NCO could bear with any sort of pride. He had his own car, he received money from home, and he was the only private in the barracks. Joe was thinking of giving him an Undesirable Discharge, because of repeated minor offenses. Ellen smiled.

  ‘Merry Christmas, Anderson. I’m glad you could come.’

  In spite of herself, she nearly was. For she spent the next hour controlling her face and voice, adding to the conversation, smiling and nodding and passing platters and filling glasses, knowing that no one else was coming.

  Captain Flaherty was the first to leave. Anderson left when the First Sergeant and Paula did; Ellen watched him from the door, walking on the First Sergeant’s left, nodding his head and laughing. Then Gunny Holmes glanced at Ed, who nodded, and all three of them stood at once. At the door Ellen told Katie to drop by some time. She didn’t watch them walk to their cars; she firmly closed the door, and went to the living room, where Joe was looking out the window and biting his pipestem.

  ‘I wish Ed wouldn’t do that,’ he said.

  Ellen went to the window. On the sidewalk Ed and Gunny Holmes were talking angrily.

  ‘Is Holmes arguing?’ she said.

  ‘Agreeing. Ed’s probably telling him he wants a piece of the Staff NCOs tomorrow. The ones that didn’t come.’

  ‘Good for him.’

  Joe flushed, but she didn’t care.

  ‘And Holmes will probably take the troops to the drill field tomorrow and chew them out,’Joe said. ‘Then he’ll harass them for a few days.’

  ‘I hope he does.’

  He flushed again and started to say something, but instead he knocked the ashes from his pipe.

  ‘Bad for morale,’ he said.

  ‘Morale. Oh, Joe—Joe, look at that food!’

  She pointed at the table, where sandwiches and cookies were piled. Only the punch bowl was nearly empty.

  ‘And there’s more in the kitchen. They don’t even care about you. You bring their problems home at night, you get them out of jail and make them write to their mothers and you patch up their marriages. You even work out their budgets and you don’t do that in your own home—’

  He interrupted her. He only said her name, very quietly, but his face was stern.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I’m not complaining, but they don’t care, Joe. You give them everything and they don’t care if you’re even alive.’

  ‘They probably don’t, during peacetime. But that doesn’t matter. It’s combat that counts, and when the shooting starts they look for a leader. Even Rosener and Holmes would. I remember—’ He paused, staring into the fire place, and when he spoke again his voice was impassioned with memory ‘—when I took over that company in Korea, it was up on the lines. There weren’t any platoon leaders left and the exec was running the show. I don’t think he even had a year in the Corps and he was so confused that he got tied down to the CP, looking at maps and talking to battalion on the radio. I got there about noon—’

  She turned her back and went to the punch bowl, then past it, to the kitchen where the bourbon was. He followed her.

  ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Here: I’ll make you an Old Fashioned. Anyway, I wanted to get oriented, so I crawled up to the perimeter—’ He went to the sink, looking out the window. ‘—I went to different foxholes, checking out the terrain with binoculars, and pretty soon I could feel the effect I was having, and I stopped crawling. They hadn’t seen an officer for a day or so, I guess. I walked up and down the line and stopped at each hole and chatted with the men—’ He chuckled, and gave her the drink. ‘—pretty soon I drew some incoming, but it didn’t matter: they knew where we were anyway.’

  ‘I wish they could need you without getting shot at.’

  ‘Oh, there’s more to it than that. Most of them didn’t come because they’d be uncomfortable or because it would look like brown-nosing.’

  ‘Like Anderson.’

  Joe smiled.

  ‘He came for an Honorable Discharge. But he won’t get it. The others came because they’re professionals.’

  ‘I should have known it would be that way.’

  ‘I should have warned you.’

  ‘No: I should have known.’

  She called Posy, who had been watching television in a bedroom. Ronnie was playing at a friend’s house.

  ‘Would you like to have some friends over tomorrow?’ Ellen said. ‘You’ll have plenty of refreshments.’

  She waved toward the sandwiches and cookies on the table. Posy watched her quietly.

  ‘But there’s still enough for eighty hungry Marines, so let’s give most of it to the neighbors.’

  Joe kissed her cheek and hugged her, then went to the bedroom. Posy covered a platter of sandwiches with waxed paper, and took it outside. When Joe came to the kitchen, wearing a sport shirt and slacks, Ellen asked him to make an Old Fashioned. He touched her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it. I just to have to figure out what to do.’

  ‘Looks like Posy’s taking care of it.’

  ‘That’s not what I mean.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  During the short dusk and the beginning of night, Posy delivered all but a hundred cookies and twenty sandwiches. Sometimes Ellen stood at the living room window and watched her: a platter held in both arms, walking straight-backed under the streetlights. When she had finished, she called friends and asked them to come over the next afternoon. Once Ellen heard her say: We have a few left-overs from this big open house Mother had. Ellen brought her a glass of sherry.

  ‘It’ll make your feet warm,’ she said.

  At nine o’clock, when she was kissing Posy goodnight, the phone rang. Joe answered. Ellen went to Ronnie’s bedroom and pulled the blankets over his shoulders. Near his face on the pillow was a half-eaten oatmeal cookie. She dropped it in the wastebasket. In the hall, Joe was chuckling into the phone.

  ‘Okay, boy,’ he said. ‘Then we can get a battalion from Lejeune and occupy.’

  He laughed again. Ellen was putting on her coat and scarf when he hung up.

  ‘I’m going to Becky’s for a minute. Who was that?’

  ‘Larry Sievers. He says we’ll steal that A3D next week and bomb Castro.’

  ‘Where’s he drinking tonight?’

  ‘At home.’

  ‘That’s nice, for a change.’

  She stepped outside. The wind was strong and, walking against it, she turned her face and clenched her hands in her pockets. She hadn’t told Joe goodbye, and that bothered her. When she got to Becky’s she knocked fast and loud, her back to the wind.

  ‘A flop,’ she said, when Becky opened the door.

  She had three drinks. With the first one she was still controlling herself, telling them very calmly why no one had come. After the second she was complaining bitterly, and she knew it, but she couldn’t stop.

  ‘Goddamnit,’ she said to Becky, when she was finally ready to leave, ‘we don’t have ranks and service numbers. We’re women.’

  ‘Bless you for that,’ Pete said, and he put his arm around her waist as they walked to the door. She forgot to draw in her stomach muscles.

  ‘A lot of good
it does,’ she said, and kissed them both and left. The wind struck her back now, pushing her forward.

  Joe was asleep in his chair in the living room, an open book on his lap; the fire was dying. She poked the coals and put another log on the andirons. Then in their bedroom she undressed and put on a silk kimono. Joe had brought it from Japan and once, when she was wearing it over her naked body as she was now, he had reached inside the wide arm and touched her breast. She had wondered how he learned that. At the mirror she combed her hair and freshened her lipstick and dabbed perfume on her wrists and throat. Then she was ready. She did not even look at the drawer where her diaphragm was. She walked past it, and into the living room where she turned off the lamps and arranged throw-pillows on the carpet before the fire. With the cover flap, she marked Joe’s place in the book, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin, and set it on the coffee table. Then she started waking him up. He was annoyed at first, but soon she was taking care of that.

  AT THE DINNER table two days after Christmas, Joe told her about the pressure chamber. They had simulated forty thousand feet and taught him to use an oxygen mask. They also taught him to bail out. There were three seats in an A3D, he told her, two facing forward and one aft. The escape hatch was opposite the seat facing aft; it opened onto a chute in the belly of the plane. A horizontal bar was at the top of the hatch and you had to grab it with your arms crossed and pull yourself into the chute. Ellen watched him across the table as he held up his arms, the forearms crossed and the hands grasping an imaginary bar. Then he stood up to show how his body would turn as he uncrossed his arms, and he would slide out of the plane on his belly.

  ‘There’s not much time,’ he said. ‘Everybody’s got to move out fast.’

  But no one did. She told him goodbye four days before New Year’s and he said he’d be back for the party. On New Year’s Eve they flew back from California and, minutes away from Whidbey Island, they went down.

  When her doorbell rang in mid-afternoon Ellen was in the bedroom checking her social calendar. She found the date of the wives’ club luncheon in December; that was when her last period had begun. Then she counted days on the calendar, until her finger touched Christmas. She counted them again, and decided she had probably not conceived. Now she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to or not. It’s up to you, Joe had said Christmas night and a couple of times since then. But she was thirty-five and she had gained weight and maybe a pregnancy would ruin her figure forever. When the child was five, she would be forty; fifteen, fifty; twenty, fifty-five. That was all right. But her weight… . And if Joe got orders in June she would be—she counted on her fingers—six months pregnant and travelling perhaps across the country: motels and those weary distorted days of emptying one house and filling another: packing boxes and wardrobes and scratched furniture and confusion.

  But she was thirty-five. She’d be forty soon, and she had two children (a boy and a girl, people said, such nice planning) and she was the president of the wives’ club and she was the Major’s wife. Gunny Holmes might have marched the troops to the drill field and chewed them out, but it wouldn’t have been for her and even if he had mentioned her name, it wouldn’t have mattered to them. Ed Williams might have admonished the Staff NCOs about courtesy and loyalty to the Commanding Officer. No one, though, would be told: You hurt Mrs. Forrest. There was no recourse, either. She couldn’t scowl at the Marines as they saluted her at the gates; they would only smile at her and joke about it in the barracks. There was nothing, nothing at all, and she was again counting the calendar days since the last wives’ club luncheon when the doorbell rang.

  She waited for Posy to answer it, but heard nothing; then she rose, still trying to decide, wishing it were already decided for her, that she had already conceived, but size twelve, she’d have to diet and exercise…. Going through the living room she saw Posy out the back window, getting two logs from the wood pile, and as her hand went to the doorknob she glimpsed the dying fire: sweet sweet Posy. Then she opened the door and Pete was standing there, his white cap in his hand—that was the first thing she noticed—and the collar of his blue topcoat turned up: six feet of somber dark blue and beyond his anguished face and bare head was the grey sky. Her hand tightened on the doorknob and she opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t, silenced by a welling urge to be suspended here forever, to be deceived and comforted and never to know anything at all. But he was looking at his cap, then at her, and a hand went up and through his hair, and he said: ‘Ellen. Ellen, baby—’

  And stopped again. She saw fire, explosions, a parachute failing to open and someone unreal—it wasn’t Joe, it wasn’t—falling down and down without cease, as in a dream. Then she was underwater and a plane was sinking past her, descending slowly and without hope, and she had to get to it and open it somehow but she couldn’t breathe—

  ‘Is it Joe?’ she said.

  He nodded and stepped forward but before he could touch her she said: ‘In the water?’

  He said: ‘No, Olympic Peninsula,’ then grabbed her as she fell toward him; she gave all her weight to his locked arms and pressed her face against his coarse Navy topcoat, not breathing; then finally she did: a deep dry audible breath, and she said: ‘He didn’t get out?’

  She felt his head shaking against her own, heard him whisper: ‘Nobody did,’ and as if on some strangely distant part of her body she felt his hand patting her back, and she suddenly knew she hadn’t conceived, it could never work out that way, nothing ever could, he was gone and she would have a period soon, her womb’s dark red weeping. How could he be gone? It was the last day of the year and he was gone, the year was over, and he was over; but he was turning at the plane to wave; then she was crying heavily, but still she heard or felt Posy behind her, and she spun around. Posy was holding two logs across her chest, and her face and ears were red from the cold. Then her lips began to quiver and she dropped the logs. Ellen went to her knees and pressed Posy to her breast, crying: ‘Oh, Pete! She knew too! She knew too!’

  And she hugged Posy even more tightly, as if for all time.

  PART THREE

  Adultery

  …love is a direction and not a state of the soul.

  Simone Weil, Waiting on God

  to Gina Berriault

  WHEN THEY have finished eating Edith tells Sharon to clear the table then brush her teeth and put on her pajamas; she brings Hank his coffee, then decides she can have a cup too, that it won’t keep her awake because there is a long evening ahead, and she pours a cup for herself and returns to the table. When Sharon has gone upstairs Edith says: ‘I’m going to see Joe.’

  Hank nods, sips his coffee, and looks at his watch. They have been silent during most of the meal but after her saying she is going to see Joe the silence is uncomfortable.

  ‘Do you have to work tonight?’ she says.

  ‘I have to grade a few papers and read one story. But I’ll read to Sharon first.’

  Edith looks with muted longing at his handlebar moustache, his wide neck, and thick wrists. She is lighting a cigarette when Sharon comes downstairs in pajamas.

  ‘Daddy quit,’ Sharon says, ‘Why don’t you quit?’

  Edith smiles at her, and shrugs.

  ‘I’m going out for awhile,’ she says. ‘To see a friend.’

  Sharon’s face straightens with quick disappointment that borders on an angry sense of betrayal.

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Terry,’ Edith says.

  ‘Why can’t she come here?’

  ‘Because Daddy has work to do and we want to talk.’

  ‘I’ll read to you,’ Hank says.

  Sharon’s face brightens.

  ‘What will you read?’

  ‘Kipling.’

  ‘“Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”?’

  ‘Yes: “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.”’

  She is eight and Edith wonders how long it will be before Sharon senses and understands that other presence or absence that Edith feels so often when the fam
ily is together. She leaves the table, puts the dishes and pots in the dishwasher, and turns it on. She is small and slender and she is conscious of her size as she puts on her heavy coat. She goes to the living room and kisses Hank and Sharon, but she does not leave through the front door. She goes to the kitchen and takes from the refrigerator the shrimp wrapped in white paper; she goes out the back door, into the dark. A light snow has started to fall.

  It is seven-thirty. She has told Joe not to eat until she gets there, because she wants to cook shrimp scampi for him. She likes cooking for Joe, and she does it as often as she can. Wreathed in the smells of cooking she feels again what she once felt as a wife: that her certain hands are preparing a gift. But there were times, in Joe’s kitchen, when this sense of giving was anchored in vengeful images of Hank, and then she stood in the uncertainty and loss of meaningless steam and smells. But that doesn’t happen anymore. Since Joe started to die, she has been certain about everything she does with him. She has not felt that way about anyone, even Sharon, for a long time.