Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (25 page)

We ate by candlelight: oyster cocktails, then a roast with rice and thick dark gravy, garlic-tinged. We had lemon ice-box pie and went back to the fireplace with second cups of coffee.

‘I love to cook,’ she said from the record player. She put on about five albums, and I saw that we were supposed to sit at the fire and talk for the rest of the evening. The first album was Jackie Gleason,
Music, Martinis, and Memories
, and she sat beside me, took my hand and sipped her coffee. She rested her head on the back of the couch, but I didn’t like to handle a coffee cup leaning back that way, so I withdrew my hand from hers and hunched forward over the coffee table.

‘I think I started cooking when I was seven,’ she said to my back.

‘No, let’s see, I was eight—’ I looked down at her crossed legs, the black dress just covering her knees, then looked at the fire. ‘When we lived in Baton Rouge. I had a children’s cookbook and I made something called Chili Concoction. Everybody was nice about it, and Daddy ate two helpings for supper and told me to save the rest for breakfast and he’d eat it with eggs. He did, too. Then I made something called a strawberry minute pie, and I think it was pretty good. I’ll make it for you some time.’

‘Okay.’

I was still hunched over drinking coffee, so I wasn’t looking at her. I finished the coffee and she asked if I wanted more, and that irritated me, so I didn’t know whether to say yes or no. I said I guess so. Then watching her leave with my cup, I disliked myself and her too. For if I wasn’t worthy of the evening, then wasn’t she stupid and annoyingly vulnerable to give it to me? The next album was Sinatra; I finished my coffee, then leaned back so our shoulders touched, our hands together in her lap, and we listened. Once she took a drag from my cigarette and I said keep it, and lit another. The third album was Brubeck. She put some more ice in the bucket, I made toddies, and she asked if I understood
The Bear
. I shrugged and said probably not. She had finished it the day before, and she started talking about it.

‘Hey,’ I said. ‘When are they going to sleep?’

She was surprised, and again I disliked myself and her too. Then she was hurt, and she looked at her lap and said she didn’t know, but she couldn’t make love anyway, not here in the house, even if they were sleeping.

‘We can leave for a while,’ I said. ‘We won’t go far.’

She kept looking at her lap, at our clasped hands.

‘They’ll be all right,’ I said.

Then she looked into my eyes and I looked away and she said:

‘Okay, I’ll tell them.’

When she came back with a coat over her arm I was waiting at the door, my jacket zipped, the car key in my hand.

We broke up in January, about a week after New Year’s. I don’t recall whether we fought, or kissed goodbye, or sat in a car staring mutely out the windows. But I do remember when the end started; or, rather, when Yvonne decided to recognize it.

On New Year’s Eve a friend of ours gave a party. His parents were out of town, so everyone got drunk. It was an opportunity you felt obliged not to pass up. Two or three girls got sick and had to have their faces washed and be walked outside in the cold air. When Yvonne got drunk it was a pleasant drunk, and I took her upstairs. I think no one noticed: it was past midnight, and people were hard to account for. We lay on the bed in the master bedroom, Yvonne with her skirt pulled up, her pants off, while I performed in shirt, sweater, and socks. She was quiet as we stood in the dark room, taking our pants off, and she didn’t answer my whispered Happy New Year as we began to make love, for the first time, on a bed. Then, moving beneath me, she said in a voice so incongruous with her body that I almost softened but quickly got it back, shutting my ears to what I had heard: This is all we ever do, Harry—this is all we ever do.

The other thing I remember about that night is a time around three in the morning. A girl was cooking hamburgers, I was standing in the kitchen doorway talking to some boys, and Yvonne was sitting alone at the kitchen table. There were other people talking in the kitchen, but she wasn’t listening; she moved only to tap ashes and draw on her cigarette, then exhaled into the space that held her gaze. She looked older than twenty, quite lonely and sad, and I pitied her. But there was something else: I knew she would never make love to me again. Maybe that is why, as a last form of possession, I told. It could not have been more than an hour later, I was drunker, and in the bathroom I one-upped three friends who were bragging about feeling tits of drunken girls. I told them I had taken Yvonne upstairs and screwed her. To add history to it, I even told them what she had said.

III

W
AITING IN LINE
for my first confession in five months I felt some guilt but I wasn’t at all afraid. I only had to confess sexual intercourse, and there was nothing shameful about that, nothing unnatural. It was a man’s sin. Father Broussard warned me never to see this girl again (that’s what he called her: this girl), for a man is weak and he needs much grace to turn away from a girl who will give him her body. He said I must understand it was a serious sin because sexual intercourse was given by God to married couples for the procreation of children and we had stolen it and used it wrongfully, for physical pleasure, which was its secondary purpose. I knew that in some way I had sinned, but Father Broussard’s definition of that sin fell short and did not sound at all like what I had done with Yvonne. So when I left the confessional I still felt unforgiven.

The campus was not a very large one, but it was large enough so you could avoid seeing someone. I stopped going to the student center for coffee, and we had no classes together; we only saw each other once in a while, usually from a distance, walking between buildings. We exchanged waves and the sort of smile you cut into your face at times like that. The town was small too, so occasionally I saw her driving around, looking for a parking place or something. Then after a while I wanted to see her, and I started going to the student center again, but she didn’t drink coffee there anymore. In a week or so I realized that I didn’t really want to see her: I wanted her to be happy, and if I saw her there was nothing I could say to help that.

Soon I was back to the old private vice, though now it didn’t seem a vice but an indulgence, not as serious as smoking or even drinking, closer to eating an ice cream sundae before bed every night. That was how I felt about it, like I had eaten two scoops of ice cream with thick hot fudge on it, and after a couple of bites it wasn’t good anymore but I finished it anyway, thinking of calories. It was a boring little performance and it didn’t seem worth thinking about, one way or the other. But I told it in the confessional, so I could still receive the Eucharist. Then one day in spring I told the number of my sins as though I were telling the date of my birth, my height, and weight, and Father Broussard said quickly and sternly: ‘Are you sorry for these sins?’

‘Yes, Father,’ I said, but then I knew it was a lie. He was asking me if 1 had a firm resolve to avoid this sin in the future when I said: ‘No, Father.’

‘No what? You can’t avoid it?’

‘I mean no, Father, I’m really sorry. I don’t even think it’s a sin.’

‘Oh, I see. You don’t have the discipline to stop, so you’ve decided it’s not a sin. Just like that, you’ve countermanded God’s law. Do you want absolution?’

‘Yes, Father. I want to receive Communion.’

‘You can’t. You’re living in mortal sin, and I cannot absolve you while you keep this attitude. I want you to think very seriously—’

But I wasn’t listening. I was looking at the crucifix and waiting for his voice to stop so I could leave politely and try to figure out what to do next. Then he stopped talking, and I said: ‘Yes, Father.’

‘
What?
’ he said. ‘
What?
’

I went quickly through the curtains, out of the confessional, out of the church.

On Sundays I went to Mass but did not receive the Eucharist. I thought I could but I was afraid that as soon as the Host touched my tongue I would suddenly realize I had been wrong, and then I’d be receiving Christ with mortal sin on my soul. Mother didn’t receive either. I prayed for her and hoped she’d soon have peace, even if it meant early menopause. By now I agreed with Janet, and I wished she’d write Mother a letter and convince her that she wasn’t evil. I thought Mother was probably praying for Janet, who had gone five years without bearing a child.

It was June, school was out, and I did not see Yvonne at all. I was working with a surveying crew, running a hundred-foot chain through my fingers, cutting trails with a machete, eating big lunches from paper bags, and waiting for something to happen. There were two alternatives, and I wasn’t phony enough for the first or brave enough for the second: I could start confessing again, the way I used to, or I could ignore the confessional and simply receive Communion. But nothing happened and each Sunday I stayed with Mother in the pew while the others went up to the altar rail.

Then Janet came home. She wrote that Bob had left her, had moved in with his girlfriend—a graduate student—and she and the boys were coming home on the bus. That was the news waiting for me when I got home from work, Mother handing me the letter as I came through the front door, both of them watching me as I read it. Then Daddy cursed, Mother started crying again, and I took a beer out to the front porch. After a while Daddy came out too and we sat without talking and drank beer until Mother called us to supper. Daddy said, ‘That son of a bitch,’ and we went inside.

By the time Janet and the boys rode the bus home from Ann Arbor, Mother was worried about something else: the Church, because now Janet was twenty-three years old and getting a divorce and if she ever married again she was out of the Church. Unless Bob died, and Daddy said he didn’t care what the Church thought about divorce, but it seemed a good enough reason for him to go up to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and shoot Bob Mitchell between the eyes. So while Janet and Paul and Lee were riding south on the Greyhound, Mother was going to daily Mass and praying for some answer to Janet’s future.

But Janet had already taken care of that too. When she got off the bus I knew she’d be getting married again some day: she had gained about ten pounds, probably from all that cheap food while Bob went to school, but she had always been on the lean side anyway and now she looked better than I remembered. Her hair was long, about halfway down her back. The boys were five years old now, and I was glad she hadn’t had any more, because they seemed to be good little boys and not enough to scare off a man. We took them home—it was a Friday night—and Daddy gave Janet a tall drink of bourbon and everybody talked as though nothing had happened. Then we ate shrimp
étouffée
and after supper, when the boys were in bed and the rest of us were in the living room, Janet said by God it was the best meal she had had in five years, and next time she was going to marry a man who liked Louisiana cooking. When she saw the quick look in Mother’s eyes, she said: ‘We didn’t get married in the Church, Mama. I just told you we did so you wouldn’t worry.’

‘You
didn’t?
’

‘Bob was so mad at Father Broussard he wouldn’t try again. He’s not a Catholic, you know.’

‘There’s more wrong with him than that,‘ Daddy said.

‘So I can still get married in the Church,’Janet said. ‘To somebody else.’

‘But Janet—’

‘Wait,’ Daddy said. ‘Wait. You’ve been praying for days so Janet could stop living with that son of a bitch and still save her soul. Now you got it—right?’

‘But—’

‘Right?’

‘Well,’ Mother said, ‘I guess so.’

They went to bed about an hour past their usual time, but Janet and I stayed up drinking gin and tonic in the kitchen, with the door closed so we wouldn’t keep anybody awake. At first she just talked about how glad she was to be home, even if the first sign of it was the Negroes going to the back of the bus. She loved this hot old sticky night, she said, and the June bugs thumping against the screen and she had forgotten how cigarettes get soft down here in the humid air. Finally she talked about Bob; she didn’t think he had ever loved her, he had started playing around their first year up there, and it had gone on for five years more or less; near the end she had even done it too, had a boyfriend, but it didn’t help her survive at all, it only made things worse, and now at least she felt clean and tough and she thought that was the first step toward hope.

The stupid thing was she still loved the philandering son of a bitch. That was the only time she cried, when she said that, but she didn’t even cry long enough for me to get up and go to her side of the table and hold her: when I was half out of my chair she was already waving me back in it, shaking her head and wiping her eyes, and the tears that had filled them for a moment were gone. Then she cheered up and asked if I’d drive her around tomorrow, down the main street and everything, and I said sure and asked her if she was still a Catholic.

‘Don’t tell Mother this,’ she said. ‘She’s confused enough already. I went to Communion every Sunday, except when I was having that stupid affair, and I only felt sinful then because he loved me and I was using him. But before that and after that, I received.’

‘You can’t,’ I said. ‘Not while you’re married out of the Church.’

‘Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Church is so smart about sex. Bob wouldn’t get the marriage blessed, so a priest would have told me to leave him. I loved him, though, and for a long time I thought he loved me, needed me—so I stayed with him and tried to keep peace and bring up my sons. And the Eucharist is the sacrament of love and I needed it very badly those five years and nobody can keep me away.’

I got up and took our glasses and made drinks. When I turned from the sink she was watching me.

‘Do you still go to confession so much?’ she said.

I sat down, avoiding her eyes, then I thought, what the hell, if you can’t tell Janet you can’t tell anybody. So looking at the screen door and the bugs thumping from the dark outside, I told her how it was in high school and about Yvonne, though I didn’t tell her name, and my aborted confession to Father Broussard. She was kind to me, busying herself with cigarettes and her drink while I talked. Then she said: ‘You’re right, Harry. You’re absolutely right.’