Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (48 page)

“Stay a while,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to keep you here till you smile.”

“What time do they close?”

“Time enough. I’ll tell you something you don’t have to believe tonight, or for a long time. You’ll keep working for your father and, after a while, it’ll be all right. You’ll see him at the store, and you won’t think of him with Brenda. There might be a twitch, like some old injury that reminds you it was there. But you won’t see the pictures. You probably feel that twitch whenever you see your father anyway, because you’ve always fought, you two, and you’ve always loved each other.” He nodded, and she saw, so joyfully that she had to force her words to be slow and calm, that he was listening, truly listening, and how many times had she ever been able to tell one of her children something she knew, and to help the child? So much of motherhood was casting lines to children beyond reach, that she could count with less than two digits the times their hands had clutched the rope and pulled. “Finally, at the store, it’ll be the same. You’ll go get Richie the way I do, sitting in the car, tooting the horn, and you’ll bring him to my place for dinner. I’ll get a third chair for the table. Then one evening your father will come out to the car while Richie’s still inside. He’ll look sinful as a scolded boy, and he’ll ask you in for a beer. You’ll want to curse or cry, but you’ll go have the beer instead, and Brenda won’t be in the house. Because he will be planning this, because he loves you. You’ll just pass the time of day over your beer, and you’ll have a second, and when you leave with Richie he’ll offer you his hand. You’ll shake it. One day after work he’ll take you out for drinks and dinner. He’ll show up at a play or a dance concert, just him and Richie, and afterward they’ll take you someplace for a beer. He’ll invite you to Sunday dinner, and you’ll go, and everyone will have tense stomachs and be very polite, and Brenda won’t kiss or touch your father, but she’ll kiss you hello and goodbye. Soon you’ll be dropping in and someday it won’t even hurt anymore. You and your father will be able to laugh and fight again. Everyone will survive. I told you I’d make you smile.”

“Was I?”

“You have tears in your eyes. But there was a smile.”

“You know why?”

“No.”

“Because I knew all that. When I heard it, I knew I had known it since I woke up this morning.”

“Good. You know why I like my waitress friends so much? And what I learned from them? They don’t have delusions. So when I’m alone at night—and I love it, Larry—I look out my window, and it comes to me: we don’t have to live great lives, we just have to understand and survive the ones we’ve got. You’re smiling again.”

“Tears too.”

“Wipe them fast, before my friends think something terrible is happening.”

IX

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
Richie’s father phoned to say he was still at Carol’s and would be home around midnight.

“Are you all right?” his father said.

“Sure.”

“Are you going to bed now?”

“After a while.”

He put the phone back on the receiver on the kitchen wall and looked at it, then at the clock on the stove. He went down the stairs to his room and took his key ring with the keys to his bicycle lock and the front door and back door; he was passing the open bathroom when he stopped and looked at Jim Rice over the toilet with its raised seat. He went in and brushed his teeth, and his rump tightened against the danger of the bristles and the flavor in his mouth, and his careful brushing of his hair, and tucking in and smoothing of his shirt. He started to pray
Lead us not into temptation
but stopped at
Lead
and hurried out of the house, leaving on lights for his coming back.

Houses were lighted, and leaves of trees near the streetlight, but beneath him the grass was dark and he walked carefully, like a stranger on his lawn. Then he was on the road under the trees, and he could see objects now, distinct in the darkness: shrubs and flowers, and mailboxes near doors, and above him the limbs of trees. He watched the trees where that morning they had talked; then the blacktop ended, and clumsily he stepped through weeds and in and out of ruts, and started to sweat in the warm, close air whose density made him feel he moved through smoke he could neither see nor smell nor taste. He did not risk stumbling loudly through the trees, approaching her like someone frightening or, worse, an awkward boy. He looked up at the treetops against the stars and sky, then left the trail, and went around the trees and stood beside them, in their shadows, and looked at the infield through the backstop screen, and scanned the outfield.

First he saw Conroy, the dog, a blond motion, then a halted silhouette in left center field. He looked to both of Conroy’s sides, saw only the expanse of dark grass and the woods past the outfield. Then he stepped out of the shadows, stood in the open, and peered down the edge of the trees. He saw the brightening glow of her cigarette, then it moved down and away from the small figure that was Melissa, profiled, sitting on the ground. Above her, cicadas sang in the trees. At once he moved and spoke her name. Her face jerked toward him, and he said: It’s Richie; then he was there, standing above her, looking down at her forehead and her eyes. He could not see their green. He sat beside her, crossed his legs like hers.

“I didn’t think you’d still be here,” he said.

“Is that why you came late?”

“No. I had to wait for my Dad to call.”

“Where is he?”

“Visiting my sister in Boston.”

“Can you see Conroy?”

He looked at left field.

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Straight that way.”

He pointed his right arm and she touched it with her cheek, sighting down it. Slowly he tightened his bicep so her face would feel its muscles.

“I don’t want him in those woods. Once he went in there and wouldn’t come out for an hour.”

“Look where my finger is.”

“Okay, I see him.”

“I think he’s coming this way.”

“He is.”

She drew on her cigarette, then tossed it arcing in front of them, and he watched it burn in the grass. He could see its thin smoke, but he could still not see the color of her eyes. She wore the cutoff jeans from this morning and the blue denim shirt with its sleeves rolled up, and the shirttails knotted in front; her skin looked darker.

He had not noticed her shifting, but she had, when she looked down his arm, and now her knee still touched his, and her left arm his right, till one of them moved; and her shoulder rubbed his or rested against it. Beneath the sound of cicadas, his breath was too quick, audible; he tried to slow it, held it for moments after inhaling, and breathed through his nose.

“Why did you have to wait for your father to call?”

“He wanted me to. So I’d know when he’d be home.”

“Oh. I thought maybe she was sick or something. Your sister.”

“No.”

“He sounds nice.”

“My dad?”

“Yes.”

“I hope so.”

“That’s a funny thing to say.”

He nodded. In her eyes now was a shade of green. Except for tobacco smoke and lipstick, her scents had faded since morning: the cologne or cosmetic was gone. Her clothes and skin too, morning-fresh when she had kissed him, held the smells of the day: its long hot sunlit air, and the restful and pleasant odor of female sweat.

“Why did you say it?”

“Because I want him to be.”

“Are you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

He was watching her mouth, and he swallowed, and knew he was lost. If only he could be lost without fear. If only his heart could keep growing larger and larger until he had to hold her, else it would burst through his ribs, if only he could look to the stars—and he did: abruptly lifted his face to the sky—and find in them release from what he felt now, or release to feel it. He looked at her eyes, her nose, her lips.

“You know,” she said. “What you told me this morning, that you’d tell me sometime.”

“Last night—”

“Go on,” she said. “Last night.”

“My brother came over, to see my dad. He’s twenty-five, and I was in bed. But I got up to tell him hello. I was on the stairs going up to the kitchen, but then I heard what they were saying. So I just stayed and listened. After a while I went back to my room.

It’s under the living room, and they were right over me, so I heard it all.”

He lay on his back. Then she was beside him, her arm touching his, and he slid his hand under her palm. Slowly and gently he squeezed, and her fingers pressed. When he found that he was trembling, he did not care. He watched the stars, and talked. When he paused after telling her of that morning, of his father’s tears he never saw, she said: “You poor guy.”

He did not correct her. But he did not feel that way at all. He did not even have to control his voice, for there were no tears in it, nor in his breast. What he felt was the night air starting to cool, and the dew on the grass under his hand holding Melissa’s, and under his arms and head and shirt, and only its coolness touching his thick jeans, and the heels of his shoes. He felt Melissa’s hand in his, and the beating of his heart she both quickened and soothed, and he smelled the length of her beside him, and heard in the trees the song of cicadas like the distant ringing of a thousand tambourines. He saw in the stars the eyes of God too, and was grateful for them, as he was for the night and the girl he loved. He lay on the grass and the soft summer earth, holding Melissa’s hand, and talking to the stars.

PART VII

TOWNIES

T
HE CAMPUS SECURITY
guard found her. She wore a parka and she lay on the footbridge over the pond. Her left cheek lay on the frozen snow. The college was a small one, he was the only guard on duty, and in winter he made his rounds in the car. But partly because he was sleepy in the heated car, and mostly because he wanted to get out of the car and walk in the cold dry air, wanted a pleasurable solitude within the imposed solitude of his job, he had gone to the bridge.

He was sixty-one years old, a tall broad man, his shoulders slumped and he was wide in the hips and he walked with his toes pointed outward, with a long stride which appeared slow. His body, whether at rest or in motion, seemed the result of sixty-one years of erosion, as though all his life he had been acted upon and, with just enough struggle to keep going, he had conceded; fifty years earlier he would have sat quietly at the rear of a classroom, scraped dirt with his shoe on the periphery of a playground. In a way, he was the best man to find her. He was not excitable, he was not given to anger, he was not a man of action: when he realized the girl was dead he did not think immediately of what he ought to do, of what acts and words his uniform and wages required of him. He did not think of phoning the police. He knelt on the snow, so close to her that his knee touched her shoulder, and he stroked her cold cheek, her cold blonde hair.

He did not know her name. He had seen her about the campus.

He believed she had died of an overdose of drugs or a mixture of drugs and liquor. This deepened his sorrow. Often when he thought of what young people were doing to themselves, he felt confused and sad, as though in the country he loved there were a civil war whose causes baffled him, whose victims seemed wounded and dead without reason. Especially the girls, and especially these girls. He had lived all his life in this town, a small city in northeastern Massachusetts; once there had been a shoe industry. Now that was over, only three factories were open, and the others sat empty along the bank of the Merrimack. Their closed windows and the dark empty rooms beyond them stared at the street, like the faces of the old and poor who on summer Sundays sat on the stoops of the old houses farther upriver and stared at the street, the river, the air before their eyes. He had worked in a factory, as a stitcher. When the factory closed he got a job driving a truck, delivering fresh loaves of bread to families in time for their breakfast. Then people stopped having their bread delivered. It was a change he did not understand. He had loved the smell of bread in the morning and its warmth in his hands. He did not know why the people he had delivered to would choose to buy bread in a supermarket. He did not believe that the pennies and nickels saved on one expense ever showed up in your pocket.

When they stopped eating fresh bread in the morning he was out of work for a while, but his children were grown and his wife did not worry, and then he got his last and strangest job. He was not an authorized constable, he carried no weapons, and he needed only one qualification other than the usual ones of punctuality and subservience: a willingness to work for very little money. He was so accustomed to all three that none of them required an act of will, not even a moment’s pause while he made the decision to take and do the job. When he worked a daylight shift he spent some time ordering possible vandals off the campus: they were usually children on bicycles; sometimes they made him chase them away, and he did this in his long stride, watching the distance lengthen between him and the children, the bicycles. Mostly during the day he chatted with the maintenance men and students and some of the teachers; and he walked the campus, which was contained by an iron fence and four streets, and he looked at the trees. There were trees he recognized, and more that he did not. One of the maintenance men had told him that every kind of New England tree grew here. There was one with thick, low, spreading branches and, in the fall, dark red leaves; sometimes students sat on the branches.

The time he saw three girls in the tree he was fooled: they were pretty and they wore sweaters in the warm autumn afternoon. They looked like the girls he had grown up knowing about: the rich girls who came from all parts of the country to the school, and who were rarely seen in town. From time to time some of them walked the three blocks from the campus to the first row of stores where the commercial part of the town began. But most of them only walked the one block, to the corner where they waited for the bus to Boston. He had smelled them once, as a young man. It was a winter day. When he saw them waiting for the bus he crossed the street so he could walk near them. There were perhaps six of them. As he approached, he looked at their faces, their hair. They did not look at him. He walked by them. He could smell them and he could feel their eyes seeing him and not seeing him. Their smells were of perfume, cold fur, leather gloves, leather suitcases. Their voices had no accents he could recognize. They seemed the voices of mansions, resorts, travel. He was too conscious of himself to hear what they were saying. He knew it was idle talk; but its tone seemed peremptory; he would not have been surprised if one of them had suddenly given him a command. Then he was away from them. He smelled only the cold air now; he longed for their smells again: erotic, unattainable, a world that would never be open to him. But he did not think about its availability, any more than he would wish for an African safari. He knew people who hated them because they were rich. But he did not. In the late sixties more of them began appearing in town and they wore blue jeans and smoked on the street. In the early seventies, when the drinking age was lowered, he heard they were going to the bars at night, and some of them got into trouble with the local boys. Also, the college started accepting boys, and they lived in the dormitories with the girls. He wished all this were not so; but by then he wished much that was happening was not so.

When he saw the three girls in the tree with low spreading branches and red leaves, he stopped and looked across the lawn at them, stood for a moment that was redolent of his past, of the way he had always seen the college girls, and still tried to see them: lovely and nubile, existing in an ambience of benign royalty. Their sweaters and hair seemed bright as the autumn sky. He walked toward them, his hands in his back pockets. They watched him. Then he stood under the tree, his eyes level with their legs. They were all biting silenced giggles. He said it was a pretty day. Then the giggles came, shrill and relentless; they could have been monkeys in the tree. There was an impunity about the giggling that was different from the other graceful impunity they carried with them as they carried the checkbooks that were its source. He was accustomed to that. He looked at their faces, at their vacant eyes and flushed cheeks; then his own cheeks flushed with shame. It was marijuana. He lifted a hand in goodbye.

He was not angry. He walked with lowered eyes away from the giggling tree, walked impuissant and slow across the lawn and around the snack bar, toward the library; then he shifted direction and with raised eyes went toward the ginkgo tree near the chapel. There was no one around. He stood looking at the yellow leaves, then he moved around the tree and stopped to read again the bronze plaque he had first read and marvelled at his second day on the job. It said the tree was a gift of the class of 1941. He stood now as he had stood on that first day, in a reverie which refreshed his bruised heart, then healed it. He imagined the girls of 1941 standing in a circle as one of the maintenance men dug a hole and planted the small tree. The girls were pretty and hopeful and had sweethearts. He thought of them later in that year, in winter; perhaps skiing while the
Arizona
took the bombs. He was certain that some of them lost sweethearts in that war, which at first he had followed in the newspapers as he now followed the Red Sox and Patriots and Celtics and Bruins. Then he was drafted. They made him a truck driver and he saw England while the war was still on, and France when it was over. He was glad that he missed combat and when he returned he did not pretend to his wife and family and friends that he wished he had been shot at. Going over, he had worried about submarines; other than that, he had enjoyed his friends and England and France, and he had saved money. He still remembered it as a pleasurable interlude in his life. Looking at the ginkgo tree and the plaque he happily felt their presence like remembered music: the girls then, standing in a circle around the small tree on that spring day in 1941; those who were in love and would grieve; and he stood in the warmth of the afternoon staring at the yellow leaves strewn on the ground like deciduous sunshine.

So this last one was his strangest job: he was finally among them, not quite their servant like the cleaning women and not their protector either: an unarmed watchman and patrolman whose job consisted mostly of being present, of strolling and chatting in daylight and, when he drew the night shift, of driving or walking, depending on the weather, and of daydreaming and remembering and talking to himself. He enjoyed the job. He would not call it work, but that did not bother him. He had long ago ceased believing in work: the word and its connotation of fulfillment as a man. Life was cluttered with these ideas which he neither believed nor disputed. He merely ignored them. He liked wandering about in this job, as he had liked delivering bread and had liked the Army; only the stitching had been tedious. He liked coming home and drinking coffee in the kitchen with his wife: the daily chatting which seemed eternal. He liked his children and his grandchildren. He accepted the rest of his life as a different man might accept commuting: a tolerable inconvenience. He knew he was not lazy. That was another word he did not believe in.

He kneeled on the snow and with his ungloved hand he touched her cold blonde hair. In sorrow his flesh mingled like death-ash with the pierced serenity of the night air and the trees on the banks of the pond and the stars. He felt her spirit everywhere, fog-like across the pond and the bridge, spreading and rising in silent weeping above him into the black visible night and the invisible space beyond his ken and the cold silver truth of the stars.

On the bridge Mike slipped and cursed, catching himself on the wooden guard rail, but still she did not look back. He was about to speak her name but he did not: he knew if his voice was angry she would not stop and if his voice was pleading she might stop and even turn to wait for him but he could not bear to plead. He walked faster. He had the singular focus that came from being drunk and sad at the same time: he saw nothing but her parka and blonde hair. All evening, as they drank, he had been waiting to lie with her in her bright clean room. Now there would be no room. He caught up with her and grabbed her arm and spun her around; both her feet slipped but he held her up.

‘You asshole,’ she said, and he struck her with his fist, saw the surprise and pain in her eyes, and she started to speak but he struck her before she could; and when now she only moaned he swung again and again, holding her up with his left hand, her parka bunched and twisted in his grip; when he released her she fell forward. He kicked her side. He knew he should stop but he could not. Kicking, he saw her naked in the bed in her room. She was slender. She moaned and gasped while they made love; sometimes she came so hard she cried. He stopped kicking. He knew she had died while he was kicking her. Something about the silence of the night, and the way her body yielded to his boot.

He looked around him: the frozen pond, the tall trees, the darkened library. He squatted down and looked at her red-splotched cheek. He lifted her head and turned it and lowered it to the snow. Her right cheek was untouched; now she looked asleep. In the mornings he usually woke first, hung over and hard, listening to students passing in the hall. Now on the snow she looked like that: in bed, on her pillow. Under the blanket he took her hand and put it around him and she woke and they smoked a joint; then she kneeled between his legs and he watched her hair going up and down.

He stood and walked off the bridge and around the library. His body was weak and sober and it weaved; he did not feel part of it, and he felt no need to hurry away from the campus and the bridge and Robin. What waited for him was home, and a two-mile walk to get there: the room he hated though he tried to believe he did not. For he lived there, his clothes hung there, most of all he slept there, the old vulnerable breathing of night and dreams; and if he allowed himself to hate it then he would have to hate his life too, and himself.

He walked without stealth across the campus, then up the road to town. He passed Timmy’s, where he and Robin had drunk and where now the girls who would send him to prison were probably still drinking. He and Robin had sat in a booth on the restaurant side. She drank tequila sunrises and paid for those and for his Comfort and ginger, and she told him that all day she had been talking to people, and now she had to talk to him, her mind was blown, her father called her about her grades and he called the dean too so she had to go to the counselor’s office and she was in there three hours, they talked about everything, they even got back to the year she was fifteen and she told the counselor she didn’t remember much of it, that was her year on acid, and she had done a lot of balling, and she said she had never talked like that with anybody before, had never just sat down and
listed
what she had done for the last four years, and the counselor told her in all that time she had never felt what she was doing or done what she felt. She was talking gently to Mike, but in her eyes she was already gone: back in her room; home in Darien; Bermuda at Easter; the year in Europe she had talked about before, the year her father would give her when she got out of school. He could not remember her loins, and he felt he could not remember himself either, that his life had begun a few minutes earlier in this booth. He watched her hands as she stirred her tequila sunrise and the grenadine rose from the bottom in a menstrual cloud, and she said the counselor had gotten her an appointment in town with a psychiatrist tomorrow, a woman psychiatrist, and she wanted to go, she wanted to talk again, because now she had admitted it, that she wasn’t happy, hadn’t been happy, had figured nobody ever could be.