Gone So Long

by Andre Dubus III

  But this low mood didn’t last long. Lois started talking about all the things she forgot every single day, like that she had a business to go to, and Bobby said: “Think you’ll ever sell it, Lois?”

  “Nope. I’ll probably drop dead selling some rich bitch a German mirror.”

  “She’s really good at it, Bobby. You should’ve seen her at this auction we went to. She kicked ass.”

  Bobby glanced over at Susan. The red splotches on his throat had faded, though he looked like he needed to explain himself to her. He also looked relieved at how quickly the conversation had turned, and that’s when Lois had said, “Suzie, there’s something on my bed for you two. Can you go get it?”

  Susan’s mouth was dry, and she wanted cool water. She stared at the white Dresden lamps on her bureau. Their silk shades were more ivory than white, their bell shapes too much of a thematic exclamation mark to the entwined lovers at the bases of the lamps. They were saccharine and tacky, yet somehow beautiful too. Like the lights of a Ferris wheel a mile away at night, and Susan knew how much Lois had spent on these and she lay there feeling moved and grateful. She needed to pee.

  She lifted her leg off her husband’s hip. Bobby was snoring lightly, and there came the image of Lois’s revolver on her bed. It had lain there beside catalogues and prescription bottles and a dispenser of Scotch tape. Beside it was the big box wrapped in Christmas colors, and before picking it up Susan put the gun back inside Noni’s drawer and pushed it shut. She hadn’t seen that gun in over twenty years, and she didn’t quite know what to think of it now. It was probably good for Lois to have it, out here living alone, though it made Susan feel uneasy, and as she peed then brushed her teeth, she could see the last line she’d written yesterday. Something about fucking boys again and spending a dark inheritance.

  A pale gray light came through the window above the shower. It was early. Her legs felt heavy and her stomach too empty, but she couldn’t imagine eating anything. She wanted to get back to work. Her reaction last night to there being no acceptance letter felt like a setback, like the old Susan who still needed her writing to give her some kind of reward and glory. But what she needed was to get writing again, right now, for it and nothing else.

  She stood naked in the dim hallway and glanced down at Lois’s closed bedroom door. There was the muffled hum of the air conditioner, and Susan hoped her grandmother would sleep another hour or so, Bobby too. She thought she might be able to drink some coffee, but that could wait. In her bedroom she pulled on some fresh underwear and the shorts and top that lay on the floor beside Bobby’s clothes and sandals. She opened her laptop and file and read the last few words of yesterday’s last line: this falling, reckless sense that she was spending some dark inheritance she could not get rid of fast enough. From here she could see Bobby’s long bare foot hanging off the bed. His toes were bent and callused. She wrote: When I first met Saul I was teaching as an adjunct at Miami Dade Community College and living with Marty Finn. Marty had a performance at a black box theater in Coconut Grove and because I’d seen it already, I waited for him at a bar near the beach. My hair was long then, and I wore big hoop earrings and knew what I looked like, the way I’ve known ever since I was sixteen and drunk Gustavo peered into the window of Noni’s shop and saw me reading behind the register.

  Am I this shallow? I don’t know. I’m not sure. When Saul Fedelstein appeared beside me I had been there for nearly an hour, and he smelled of gin and baby oil, his white hair combed back, his shirt collar open. He leaned one elbow on the bar and looked at me. Behind us, men and women talked and laughed over the notes of the piano the player played. Jazz, maybe. I’m not sure of that. Only Saul raising two fingers to the bartender and ordering a Blue Glacier.

  “A what?”

  “You can taste mine.”

  He didn’t offer to buy me one, and when his drink came in a martini glass, light blue as a swimming pool and up with a twist, he gestured for me to taste it and I did. It was strong. I could taste vodka and gin and something sweet. Then he turned the glass and raised it to his lips and put them right where mine had been.

  I’d been sipping a Pinot Grigio. It’s the kind of thing one drinks when waiting for something to happen, but now something was happening, its heat spreading out through my sternum. “What is that?”

  “I don’t see a ring on your finger.”

  “I asked you a question.”

  That’s when Marty breezed in with Troy and three others I knew but did not know. Marty’s smile at me was wide, sweet, and sincere, his thick red hair sticking up in three or four places the way I liked it, and as they made their way to the bar Saul reached into the front pocket of his silk pants and slid his card just under the base of my glass. “When that’s over, call me. We could have some fun.”

  Fun? As in playing some kind of game? Even when Susan was a girl, she rarely went looking for that. How many times had her best friend up north, Kimberly Mitchell, told her, “All you want to do is read. You’re no fun.” And she wasn’t. Not for anyone, really. Not for Marty, or before him Brian Heney with his long hair and thick back and fingers scarred from fishhooks and anchor chains. Susan could still see one of his hand-rolled cigarettes between two of those fingers as he raised it to his lips and squinted out at the sun on the water, one of his hands on her ass, even in public. That’s what he and the others got from her. Her body, their simple belief that that meant they got her.

  “You don’t let in the joy, baby.” It’s the last thing Marty said to me before he left. He ran his finger over my eyebrow, something I used to like, though standing beside his packed yellow Cooper on a Wednesday afternoon, it felt like a curse, and I stepped away and watched him drive off. I went back inside and lay down on my bed. I stared at Marty’s half of the closet, the bifold doors still open and the light on over an empty pole and a few hangers, one of my silk scarfs draped over it. He’d borrowed it from me for a dance piece, and when I’d given it to him there was the sense that I gave very little. I wished he’d taken it with him, for Marty was warm and kind, and another woman would have loved him but I did not, and now I was alone in this quiet apartment. It was too quiet. Too empty. The two things that my darkness loved.

  Less than a week after Marty left, I found Saul’s card and I called him. We could have some fun.

  She had not had fun. But Saul was the first man—the only man—who wanted no more from her than she’d wanted from him, which was to be left alone but not so alone that she’d end up in bed for days feeling nothing, this nothingness that years later her husband would call her enemy.

  The bedsprings squeaked. Bobby turned over onto his back, his arm splayed out where she’d lain.

  Is it an accident that I’ve married only one man, and that man has devoted his intellectual life to a musician whose work celebrates chaos?

  Yes, but this direction felt only partially true.

  The poet Jack Gilbert: “Teach me mortality, frighten me into the present.” I married Bobby because I was afraid not to marry him.

  I sat on a concrete bench under the sun outside the Student Union. I was between classes and eating a salad off my lap, and a group of boys sat in the shade of the pines twenty yards away. They were laughing and talking too loudly the way young men do. They looked as if they’d just come from the gym, their tank tops spotted with sweat, their shoulder and arm muscles swollen and pronounced. It was not a look that had ever excited me, but it was hard to ignore their glowing masculine health. Then one of them glanced over at me on the bench and nodded at the others, and there was a quieting and a focusing that both flattered and assaulted me. I turned my body as if wanting a different angle of the sun and there, on a bench beside mine, sat a young woman in shorts and a bikini top, her honeyed hair long and curly, a sheen of sweat along her shoulders and clavicle and between her breasts.

  My invisible years are beginning. I’ll be walking across the quad between two female students in their tight tops and jeans and boots, ch
atting about whatever comes up, maybe scheduling a conference or answering a question about an assignment, and I’ll notice a young or not so young man walking in the opposite direction glancing from one student to the next, their eyes passing over me in the center as if I were air.

  This is new, and it is not unlike going from healthy to sick, or how I might imagine what losing a limb is like; what you formerly relied upon you can’t anymore, and there’s very little you can do about it.

  Then I found myself sitting in Bobby Dunn’s small red kitchen while he sautéed spinach and seemed to look right past any beauty of mine that remained, and he was speaking to that part of me I tried to show in the classroom, my love for stories that brought me into the dark, bottomless hearts of others.

  Maybe Bobby’s passion spoke to my own, which felt endless when our bodies are not, and so I married him.

  So you don’t love him at all? It was a voice inside Susan’s head she did not write, for her face was warm with the kind of shame that comes from monopolizing a conversation. It was Corina Soto she should be turning her attention to. Not this solipsistic anti-memoir. Not this.

  Saul Fedelstein standing on the balcony of their suite overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was late June and he was in a white linen suit, his silk shirt unbuttoned to his deeply tanned sternum. What little hair he had left on his head he’d combed back with Parisian hair gel, and the sun was low over Capri Island, and Saul had just told her that Rudolf Nureyev had once owned that island, that it was known for its “hedonistic weekends and Roman orgies.” He said this with a slight nod before he sipped from his Negroni. It was a typical Saul gesture. Like he’d been there and done that himself. Behind him the balcony’s wall was a white stone, but in that light it was the color of nectarines, as was Saul’s suit, his back slightly stooped with the age he could no longer deny. They had just made love, but he’d had to take two pills first and it took longer for him to get it up and even longer for him to come, and she’d begun to chafe and now she lay on the chaise lounge with her own Negroni, wanting to leave this place and go home.

  But where was that? Saul’s yacht in Naples, Florida? Her and Lois’s house off the county road in Arcadia?

  He was looking north at the yellow villas built into the hills among the pine and chestnut and olive trees. Beneath an arbor to her right was a bowl of lemons, and she could smell them and she almost said to Saul, Like you’ve ever been in an orgy. But she kept quiet. There was the tinny acceleration of a motorcycle somewhere, a man’s laughter carrying up from one of the open-air restaurants on the beach. Her vagina burned, and her lover looked grotesque to her then, and she felt like getting drunk.

  Saul looked down at her. In his left breast pocket was the triangle of a blue silk kerchief. He was smiling at her, but it felt less like warmth and more like an appraisal. “You’re not so much fun anymore, Susan.”

  Her face grew hot.

  “We eat, we drink, we fuck, but you’re elsewhere, my dear.” He made a slight circular motion with his drink, the cubes clinking lightly in his glass. “I think we should call it quits.” He said this in the same tone he’d used over a year earlier when he’d slid his card under her wine glass. We could have some fun. And Susan Lori could see, yet again, one reason why he’d been so successful in business: he simply ran the actual numbers—not the ones he hoped for, but the ones he truly saw—and he made his decision quickly and cleanly.

  “Don’t look so hurt.”

  “I’m not hurt.” But she was. Except for Marty Finn (and yes, Gustavo) she did the leaving. What was this?

  That night he took her to dinner at a place on the highest peak over Positano. It was one of the only modern buildings on the Amalfi Coast, and one-quarter of its main floor seemed to float out into the air over a drop to the rocks and sea hundreds of feet below. Saul had reserved them a table in the center window at the very edge of the candlelit room, and he started by ordering them champagne, tomato bruschetta, and fried ravioli.

  For the chauffeured drive up the hill, he’d been as quiet as if she were a subordinate who’d just been demoted and he was being respectful of her newly changed status. But now he was expansive. He drank deeply and pointed out their view of the sun setting over the sea. It made the water a flat and shadowed maroon that to Susan Lori was the color of melancholy itself, and while he went on about the private ships moored out there and who owned them and other pleasures to be found along the coast, some he’d experienced as a very young man before his second wife, she kept her eyes on his aging face, and it was hard to swallow and her eyes stung and she shook her head once to keep from crying.

  The creaking roll of the bedsprings, Bobby sitting up on one elbow. His face looked slightly swollen, and he was smiling at her, and it was as if he were lying naked on the floor of that restaurant in Positano. She wanted him to go back to sleep.

  “I’m just getting in some work.”

  He nodded. She looked back down at the screen. Her fingers began to move again.

  Then Saul was talking about his middle daughter, Rachel, who was six years older than Susan. “You’re like her.”

  “What do you mean?’

  “I used to think she had no ambition, but now I know better.”

  If Susan had said something then, she did not remember it now. Bobby rose out of her old bed, and she ignored him.

  “I’ve told you about her.”

  “Not much, no.”

  In the candlelight he was staring at her. Somewhere in the ceiling above them Italian accordion music emitted from hidden speakers. The room was air-conditioned and smelled like melting wax and the olive-oil-fried ravioli the waiter was setting before them. Then came the stewed tomato of the bruschetta, and Saul said, “I didn’t see it right away, but—”

  “What?”

  “All that reading you do.”

  “People read, Saul.”

  “Meh. Rachel read a lot too, and then she killed herself.”

  It was a piece of news that only diminished his mood for half a breath. He was leaning forward. He grasped her wrist and held it. “You’re a bright girl. Go do something with your life.”

  It was such a cliché. And on another night, she might have pushed his hand away. She might’ve told him to go fuck himself or maybe some other woman younger than his youngest daughter. But that night her eyes welled up and she nodded and said, “Thank you.”

  He’d never quite held her hand like this before. There was no need in it. No sexual adoration, just an older man wanting to pull up a young woman, that’s all, and she did not want him to let go.

  The toilet flushed. Noni was up. Bobby began to get dressed, and Susan stared at his bare buttocks as he stepped into his underwear. He pulled on his shorts and shirt and picked up his sandals. In the hallway, Noni half yelled, “I made coffee.”

  He winked and raised his chin at her to continue. “I’ll get it.”

  She heard herself say thank you. She should stop soon, but why?

  When they got back to the States, Saul gave her a check for $10,000 to get started. This had made her feel like a call girl, but how else could she have described those months with Saul Fedelstein?

  No, it was more than that. Yes, it was transactional for them both, but there were other moments between them, too. They’d be sitting together in the deep cushions of the stern, sipping wine and looking out at the sun setting into the water, and he’d rest his hand on her knee and wink over at her like she was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time, and he just knew she was going to accomplish something one day. And so often she would wake before he would, their cabin smelling like warm teak and the sea, the sky a blue promise outside the port windows, and she’d lie there awhile staring at him while he slept. There was the slight drift and sway of the water beneath them, which felt to her like real life. Nothing nailed down or fixed or permanent in any way, and she’d take in the lines in his forehead, his slack mouth and white stubble, the dry skin of his throat, and
she’d feel a strange gratitude toward him. Like he was doing his best to solve a problem she did not even know she had.

  And now he’d sent her packing, and she found a small place to rent that was too empty, too quiet, and the grief she felt was like a weight pressing her head against the floor. She cried a lot. And slept too much. She tried to read but then bought a small TV she’d watch for hours, taking in very little of it, smoking one cigarette after another, drinking an entire bottle of wine so cheap Saul would not have allowed it on his boat. She kept seeing his lined and almost comically tanned face inches from the candle in the center of their table. She kept feeling his hand in hers.

  And then she killed herself.

  That was not something Susan Lori had even considered before, but hearing those words high above the sea from Saul about his middle daughter, it was like being guided to some fateful door she somehow needed to know about.

  That August, her bank account getting low, Susan Lori signed on to teach three courses at a community college just north of Miami. But it had been a year since she’d taught, and, standing in front of a roomful of students, some young, others her age or older, she felt like an impostor about to get caught at any moment. These were composition courses, and she assigned a lot of papers so she would have a lot of homework to do herself.

  That was a bad fall. It was the first and only time she’d slept with a student, and his name was Gary. He was twenty-four and had gone back to school after serving in the Army in Iraq. He still kept his hair military-short, and he wore a faded baseball cap at all times, and he had a wide waist and short arms and legs that bulged every time he moved. His first paper had been a reflection on “something significant that had happened” to him, and while many of the other students wrote about dying grandparents or divorce or a bad car accident, his paper was one long unedited description of watching the sun rise over the desert. It was written a bit abstractly and had no punctuation whatsoever, but what struck Susan Lori as she sat in the living room of her rented apartment reading it over a glass of red wine was its subtle structure. Because the reflection wasn’t about the sunrise or the desert at all. It was really about what Gary alluded to only once, the van of dead “hajis” in the foreground. He goes on to describe the colors of the sun and the flatness of the landscape and it’s only toward the end of the essay that we learn where the narrator has been the whole time, on the flat roof of the building he was on watch to protect. And it’s only in the final lines that we learn of his fingers on the trigger of the M16 he’d emptied into the oncoming headlights of that van hours earlier. It’s the kind of van entire families travel in, and now the sun’s coming up and he watches it “spread its light over the dirty land.”