Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (43 page)

They had lived apart for over a year and were amicably divorced (he did not even have to go to court) and still all he knew, or thought, was that somehow it had to do with his youth: that had he been older (
as my father is
, he thought, driving now past a salt marsh, nearing the sea;
as my father is
) he would not have been so awed and enslaved by her passion, and his too; but without hers his own was ordinary, as it had been before her, as it was since he lost her. So her passion. Older, he believed, he would not have explored it; he would have left it in her depths, like a buried, undetonated bomb. That was all he knew now, and perhaps that had been the source of his fear on those nights, as he lay waiting.

Ahead of him was a bridge over a tidal stream, beyond it was the junction with the road that paralleled the sea; then he saw a farm stand on his side of the bridge, and he slowed and signaled and turned onto the dirt and gravel in front of the stand, a simple place: a rectangular roof resting on four posts and only one wall, at the rear, and in its shade were the boxes of fruit and vegetables, and an old woman behind a counter whose surface was just wide enough to hold a scale and cash register. She spoke to him as he chose tomatoes; she told him they were good, and the corn was picked fresh this morning. He praised the tomatoes and they talked about the long dry spell, and how so much of last summer was cool and rainy, and last fall was more like summer than summer was. He took three large tomatoes that Brenda could eat today and tomorrow, then nine more with graduated near-ripeness that she could place in the kitchen window, to ripen in the sun, and he imagined each of them red on a new day. In his heart he sang:
My true love brought to me three red tomatoes, nine tomatoes ripening
, then he remembered as a boy hunting grouse, which some natives here called partridges, with his father; and seeing him and his father walking armed into woods made him pause, holding the last tomato above the crisp paper bag. Then he started talking to the woman again, asked how her stand was doing, and she said Pretty well, and weighed the tomatoes and punched the register and said You know how it is, and he said he did, and paid her, and left.

So he did not go to the sea, but back to 495, and to Brenda’s, sadly now, the stage fright gone at some time he did not remember. She came to the door barefoot and wearing white shorts and a red tee shirt, and he could not speak. He wanted to hold her very tightly, in silence, then move her backward, with the grace of a dance, to the couch, pull her shirt up past her shoulders and hair and above her head and raised arms, and fumble at her shorts. The couch was a new one; that is, it was a year old. They had sold all the furniture in their apartment, and left it like a box that had contained their marriage.

“I brought you some tomatoes,” he said, and handed her the bag; she took it at its top, and the weight lowered her hand.

“Come in the kitchen,” she said, and her voice was all right, not impenetrable like her eyes, like her lips had been. They had shown neither surprise nor guilt, nor pity, nor dislike—none of the emotions he had imagined as he drove to the house, walked around it to her door at the back. She had finished lunch, and he recognized its traces: jellied madrilène had been in a bowl, cottage cheese and lettuce on a plate, and a small wooden bowl held dressing from her salad. A tall glass was half-filled with tea and melting ice. She offered him some, and he said Yes, that would be good, and at the counter, with her back to him, she squeezed a wedge of lime over a glass, dropped in the wedge, went to the freezer for ice, then set the glass in front of him and poured the tea. She turned her back to him, and exclaimed over the tomatoes as she took them out of the bag, and put the nine in the window and the three in the refrigerator. He said to her body bent at the vegetable bin: “Are you dancing?”

“Only alone.”

She straightened, shut the door, then sat opposite him and lit a cigarette from her pack on the table.

“Here?” he said.

“Yes. I’ll get back with a company soon. When things are settled.”

“Right.”

“Are you?”

“We have a performance next week.”

“What are you doing?”

“One I choreographed. To Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major.”

“That’s ambitious. The whole thing?”

“Second movement.
Adagio Assai
. It’s nine and a half minutes.”

“It’s beautiful. I’d like to see it.”

“Would you?”

“Yes.”

“Will you?”

“Yes.”

He reached to his shirt pocket for a cigarette, but stopped and his hand went to her Benson and Hedges, and holding the gold pack, and shaking out a cigarette, he felt for a moment married to her again, in this apartment, all the darkness left behind them in the other place, as if their only trouble had been renting an apartment that was cursed, evil, that had to be fled or exorcised. Then the illusion ended, and he felt his eyes brimming, and he could not remember what he had come to say. Last night he had wanted to come to her in rage, but he was in too much pain then to drive here, to knock and enter, let alone yell at her what was in his mind. She looked up from tapping ash into the ashtray (it was new too; or a year old) and saw the tears in his eyes, then her hand covered his and she sat rubbing the back of his palm. He could say nothing at all. With the back of his other hand he wiped his eyes. Then he knew why he had come: in love, and simply to look at her, to sit like this, for a few minutes resurrected from their time together before they destroyed their capacity or perhaps their right to share it till one of them died. She was silent. But those dark brown eyes were not: they were wet, and then tears distinct as silver beads went down her dark cheeks. Her full lips, too, were those of a woman whose heart was keening, and he was certain he would never again see her face like this, for him, and he committed it to memory.

“Please don’t ever tell him,” he said.

She shook her head.

“I know no one can ask that,” he said. “Of a lover. A wife.”

“You can.”

He stood and skirted the small table, and was on his knees, with both arms turning her chair, her body, to face him, and his face was in her lap, her hands moving in his hair; her lap was cotton shorts and the tight flesh of her large strong thighs, and pressing his face to it, he said: “Please, Brenda. Please.”

“Never,” she said, and as he started to rise, he held her against his chest, and her arms went around him, released him as he stood and looked down at her upturned face. He bent to it, not touching her, and kissed her lips. Then he went out of the kitchen and through the living room and out the door, holding still her unlit cigarette, glimpsed through a blur the birdbath and fountain, turned the corner of the house into the direct light of the sun, and walked fast to his car.

V

I
N LATE AFTERNOON
Brenda lay on the couch in the living room, barefoot and wearing a leotard, drinking iced tea while her sweat dried and her body cooled. Across the room were two windows facing the back lawn, and at their sides pale blue curtains moved back and forth with the breeze, as though someone stood behind each of them and gently, rhythmically, pushed. She was looking at the curtains and the windows and nothing in particular beyond when she saw Greg: he walked into her vision from the right of the window, where the driveway was. He walked slowly on the grass, profile to her, his hands in the pockets of his khakis, his hard stomach pushing against his blue shirt and protruding over his belt. Her only movement on the couch was to reach for a cigarette on the coffee table and light it, as she looked at his dark muscular arm— the left one—beneath the short sleeve of his shirt, and at the side of his clean-shaven dark face, slightly bowed, as if with thought or fatigue. She did not know why his arms were so well-muscled; nor why, at forty-seven, his biceps had not begun to flatten, his triceps to sag. He did not know either. She had asked him, had jokingly accused him of clandestine push-ups or isometrics or some other exercise that no one did anymore. Or no one she knew. Nearly all her friends, women and men, had rituals of aerobic exercise, and many now had joined clubs where they used a Nautilus machine. She meant to join one tomorrow. But Greg told her he did nothing at all, had not done a push-up since the Army, and would never do one again on purpose, unless it was to raise himself from a barroom floor out of his own vomit. His vanity about not being vain was endearing. Also, she knew that, at times, the refusal of his arms and legs to age normally gave her confidence in the longevity of his body.

Now, at the fountain and birdbath, he turned from her, and stood looking down at the water that trickled over the sides of the bath, into the stone fountain, watching it as if he saw ideas in its motion. About what, though? Larry and Richie and Carol? His walk along the Amazon? Sometimes when he was tired and a little drunk and bitter, and certain he would never see, much less walk in, that jungle on that river, he said:
Surely by now some sons of bitches have laid a highway
; while Brenda imagined the riverbanks so thick with trees and brush and vines that, after hacking with machetes for the first mile, they would give it up, then travel the river by boat. Still, she would go with him. She would go with him because he wanted to, she would go with him there before Venice and Athens and the Greek islands and Spain, the places where she wanted to walk with him on city and village streets and eat long and leisurely dinners and sleep till lunchtime and make love in the afternoons that only hotels, and especially hotels in a foreign country, could give you. She had done that in Mexico City on her December honeymoon with Larry, and in the afternoons there she never felt that she was distorting daylight by performing a nocturnal act in defiance of schedules and telephones, commitments and errands and chores. In Mexico City, she and Larry knew no one, and did not speak the language anyway. It was odd, she thought, perhaps even sinister, that the world had contrived to give lovers only the night; and the world wanted those nights to be earned, too, by what used to be the sweat of the brow, but was now too often foolish work in rooms with temperatures so regulated that they did not seem to exist on the earth, with her seasons. Then, on the purchased bed, surrounded by the dwelling and the acquisitions that filled it, you could have the night. Yet afternoon was the time she felt most erotic, and before dancing today, she had masturbated on this couch. She would go with Greg first to insects and discomfort because she loved the boy she had found in his older man’s body, beneath his man’s style. She called it Peter Pan, to herself, and she called him that when he was tired, and a little drunk, and bitter; and on nights when, making love, she sensed it in his body: a tender and humble and grateful presence that seemed to swoon in her arms.

She saw the boy when he took her to his bars. He had two favorites, near his stores, where he drank with men he called his friends, but they could not be, not really. In her life, a friend was a woman you spoke to on the telephone four or five times a week, and bought gifts for, something inexpensive that reminded you of her when you saw it in a shop, and you visited each other and drank coffee or tea or, if at night, a little wine; and you tried to make time at least twice a month for dinner together in a restaurant, or lunch and shopping in Boston, though it was usually once and sometimes not even that because you both had men in your lives, and some of the women had children too. And with your friend you talked, you did not banter; and you knew as much and probably more about her than her husband or lover did, and she knew as much about you. Though no woman knew, or ever would know, about that year with Larry when she learned how heedlessly she could draw someone’s life into her own, into the lustful pleasure and wicked dreams of her marriage, when she had learned that the state of being married, which had opened that life to her, was the very state that kept her from being a slut. So she had to take herself, and her slut with her, and go away from the marriage, and Larry; and she had to hold down that part of her being she had, she supposed now, always known was there, but in the nether reaches of her soul, where it was supposed to be, far from the light of sun and moon, to live only in the solitude of masturbation. She had to push it down again, into an oubliette, and keep it covered with the weight of a new life, and then with the solidity of a man who, by chance, or the circumstance of their being in-laws, turned out to be Greg.

So that, by trying to save herself, she had become again a woman she could not have, even two years ago, predicted herself to be. Now she had broken promises so implicit that you never spoke them:
I will not make love with your father, take him from you and you from him, and your home, and Richie, and
—So she was still a scandal to her self, the self who believed in honor, in trying one’s best to be a decent human being whose life did not spread harm. Sometimes, for no immediate reason save that her mood suddenly changed, she saw her vagina and its hair as a treacherous web, and with luxurious despair she imagined the faces of women, wives and lovers of men whom she had drawn to her from their places at the bar until they sat across the coffee table from her and Larry on the couch, and when Larry left she drew them across the room and into her body, where she spent them and then expelled them forever from her life. Because she and Larry never brought the same one home twice, even if they saw him again in a bar, even if he came to sit with them, for they were afraid that no man could believe his second night with Brenda was anything but collusion between wife and husband, and so perversion. And once she walked them to the door, she took their lovemaking into her bed, and lived it again with Larry, and as his passion crested hers did too, again, and she embraced both him and the lover, and they grew up and around her, like wisteria.

She did not believe any of these men ever felt used; but she knew they ought to, and most of them would not have gone home with her and Larry, would not have accepted the gambit nightcap, had they known the truth beyond her body, her face. So in those moods she punished herself, whether or not the men knew she deserved it; she punished herself by sustaining and deepening the mood with memories of her lies to the men (how many times had she pretended to be seduced? and how many times had she murmured:
I’ve never done this before?
) and with imagining the faces of the women who loved them, carvings of betrayal that hung like masks before her eyes.