Andre Dubus: Selected Stories (60 page)
He follows her to the living room and sits on the couch. But after a while, as she works, he lies down, resting his head on a cushion against the arm of the couch. Quietly he watches her. She watches the path of the vacuum cleaner, the clean swath approaching the layers and fluffs of dust. She feels the touch of his eyes, and what is behind them. When she is finished she moves to the bedroom and again he follows her; he lies on the bed, which he has made. For a while she works in a warm patch of sunlight from the window. She looks out at the bright snow and the woods beyond: the spread and reaching branches of elms and birches and maples and tamaracks are bare; there are pines and hemlocks green in the sun. She almost stops working. Her impulse is to throw herself against the window, cover it with her body, and scream in the impotent rage of grief. But she does not break the rhythm of her work; she continues to push the vacuum cleaner over the carpet, while behind her he watches the push and pull of her arms, the bending of her body, the movement of her legs.
When she has vacuumed and dusted the apartment and cleaned the bathtub and lavatory she drinks coffee at the kitchen table while he sits across from her drinking nothing, then with apology in his voice and eyes he says: ‘I called the doctor this morning. He said he’d come see me, but I told him I’d go to the office.’
She puts down her coffee cup.
‘I’ll drive you.’
He nods. Looking at him, her heart is pierced more deeply and painfully than she had predicted: she knows with all her futile and yearning body that they will never make love again, that last night’s rushed and silent love was their last, and that except to pack his toilet articles and books for the final watch in the hospital, he will not return to his apartment she has cleaned.
It is night, she is in her bed again, and now Hank turns to her, his hand moving up her leg, sliding her nightgown upward, and she opens her legs, the old easy opening to the hand that has touched her for ten years; but when the nightgown reaches her hips she does not lift them to allow it to slip farther up her body. She is thinking of this afternoon when the priest came to the room and she had to leave. She nodded at the priest, perhaps spoke to him, but did not see him, would not recognize him if she saw him again, and she left and walked down the corridor to the sun-porch and stood at the windows that gave back her reflection, for outside the late afternoon of the day she cleaned Joe’s apartment was already dark and the streetlights and the houses across the parking lot were lighted. She smoked while on the hospital bed Joe confessed his sins, told the priest about her, about the two of them, all the slow nights and hurried afternoons, and she felt isolated as she had when, months ago, he had begun to die while, healthy, she loved him.
Since breakfast her only contact with Hank and Sharon was calling a sitter to be waiting when Sharon got home, and calling Hank at the college to tell him she was at the hospital and ask him to feed Sharon. Those two phone calls kept her anchored in herself, but the third set her adrift and she felt that way still on the sun-porch: Joe had asked her to, and she had phoned the rectory and told a priest whose name she didn’t hear that her friend was dying, that he was an ex-priest, that he wanted to confess and receive communion and the last sacrament. Then she waited on the sun-porch while Joe in confession told her goodbye. She felt neither anger nor bitterness but a vulnerability that made her cross her arms over her breasts and draw her sweater closer about her shoulders, though the room was warm. She felt the need to move, to pace the floor, but she could not. She gazed at her reflection in the window without seeing it and gazed at the streetlights and the lighted windows beyond the parking lot and the cars of those who visited without seeing them either, as inside Joe finally confessed to the priest, any priest from any rectory. It did not take long, the confession and communion and the last anointing, not long at all before the priest emerged and walked briskly down the corridor in his black overcoat. Then she went in and sat on the edge of the bed and thought again that tomorrow she must bring flowers, must give to this room scent and spirit, and he took her hand.
‘Did he understand everything?’ she said.
He smiled. ‘I realized he didn’t have to. It’s something I’d forgotten with all my thinking: it’s what ritual is for: nobody has to understand. The knowledge is in the ritual. Anyone can listen to the words. So I just used the simple words.’
‘You called us adultery?’
‘That’s what I called us,’ he said, and drew her face down to his chest.
Now she feels that touch more than she feels Hank’s, and she reaches down and takes his wrist, stopping the hand, neither squeezing nor pushing, just a slight pressure of resistance and his hand is gone.
‘I should be with him,’ she says. ‘There’s a chair in the room where I could sleep. They’d let me: the nurses. It would be a help for them. He’s drugged and he’s sleeping on his back. He could vomit and drown. Tomorrow night I’ll stay there. I’ll come home first and cook dinner and stay till Sharon goes to bed. Then I’ll go back to the hospital. I’ll do that till he dies.’
‘I don’t want you to.’
She looks at him, then looks away. His hand moves to her leg again, moves up, and when she touches it resisting, it moves away and settles on her breast.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to make love with you.’
‘You’re grieving.’
His voice is gentle and seductive, then he shifts and tries to embrace her but she pushes with her hands against his chest and closing her eyes she shakes her head.
‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘Just please don’t. It doesn’t mean anything any more. It’s my fault too. But it’s over, Hank. It’s because he’s dying, yes—’ She opens her eyes and looks past her pushing hands at his face and she feels and shares his pain and dismay; and loving him she closes her eyes. ‘But you’re dying too. I can feel it in your chest just like I could feel it when I rubbed him when he hurt. And so am I: that’s what we lost sight of.’
His chest still leans against her hands, and he grips her shoulders. Then he moves away and lies on his back.
‘We’ll talk tomorrow,’ he says. ‘I don’t trust this kind of talk at night.’
‘It’s the best time for it,’ she says, and she wants to touch him just once, gently and quickly, his arm or wrist or hand; but she does not.
In late afternoon while snow clouds gather, the priest who yesterday heard Joe’s confession and gave him the last sacrament comes with the Eucharist, and this time Edith can stay. By now Hank is teaching his last class of the day and Sharon is home with the sitter. Tonight at dinner Sharon will ask as she did this morning: Is your friend dead yet? Edith has told her his name is Mr. Ritchie but Sharon has never seen him and so cannot put a name on a space in her mind; calling him
your friend
she can imagine Joe existing in the world through the eyes of her mother. At breakfast Hank watched them talking; when Edith looked at him, his eyes shifted to the newspaper.
When the priest knocks and enters, Edith is sitting in a chair at the foot of the bed, a large leather chair, the one she will sleep in tonight; she nearly lowers her eyes, averts her face; yet she looks at him. He glances at her and nods. If he thinks of her as the woman in yesterday’s confession there is no sign in his face, which is young: he is in his early thirties. Yet his face looks younger, and there is about it a boyish vulnerability which his seriousness doesn’t hide. She guesses that he is easily set off balance, is prone to concern about trifles: that caught making a clumsy remark he will be anxious for the rest of the evening. He does not remove his overcoat, which is open. He moves to the bed, his back to her now, and places a purple stole around his neck. His hands are concealed from her; then they move toward Joe’s face, the left hand cupped beneath the right hand which with thumb and forefinger holds the white disc.
‘The body of Christ,’ he says.
‘Amen,’ Joe says.
She watches Joe as he closes his eyes and extends his tongue and takes the disc into his mouth. His eyes remain closed; he chews slowly; then he swallows. The priest stands for a moment, watching him. Then with his right palm he touches Joe’s forehead, and leaves the room. Edith goes to the bed, sits on its edge, takes Joe’s hand and looks at his closed eyes and lips. She wants to hold him hard, feel his ribs against hers, has the urge to fleshless insert her ribs within his, mesh them. Gently she lowers her face to his chest, and he strokes her hair. Still he has not opened his eyes. His stroke on her hair is lighter and slower, and then it stops; his hands rest on her head, and he sleeps. She does not move. She watches as his mouth opens and she listens to the near gurgling of his breath.
She does not move. In her mind she speaks to him, telling him what she is waiting to tell him when he wakes again, what she has been waiting all day to tell him but has not because once she says it to Joe she knows it will be true, as true as it was last night. There are still two months of the cold and early sunsets of winter left, the long season of waiting, and the edges of grief which began last summer when he started to die are far from over, yet she must act: looking now at the yellow roses on the bedside table she is telling Hank goodbye, feeling that goodbye in her womb and heart, a grief that will last, she knows, longer than her grieving for Joe. When the snow is melted from his grave it will be falling still in her soul as it is now while she recalls images and voices of her ten years with Hank and quietly now she weeps, not for Joe or Sharon or Hank, but for herself; and she wishes with all her splintered heart that she and Hank could be as they once were and she longs to touch him, to cry on his broad chest, and with each wish and each image her womb and heart toll their goodbye, forcing her on into the pain that waits for her, so that now she is weeping not quietly but with shuddering sobs she cannot control, and Joe wakes and opens his eyes and touches her wet cheeks and mouth. For a while she lets him do this. Then she stops crying. She kisses him, then wipes her face on the sheet and sits up and smiles at him. Holding his hand and keeping all nuances of fear and grief from her voice, because she wants him to know he has done this for her, and she wants him to be happy about it, she says: ‘I’m divorcing Hank.’
He smiles and touches her cheek and she strokes his cool hand.
M
Y NAME IS
Luke Ripley, and here is what I call my life: I own a stable of thirty horses, and I have young people who teach riding, and we board some horses too. This is in northeastern Massachusetts. I have a barn with an indoor ring, and outside I’ve got two fenced-in rings and a pasture that ends at a woods with trails. I call it my life because it looks like it is, and people I know call it that, but it’s a life I can get away from when I hunt and fish, and some nights after dinner when I sit in the dark in the front room and listen to opera. The room faces the lawn and the road, a two-lane country road. When cars come around the curve northwest of the house, they light up the lawn for an instant, the leaves of the maple out by the road and the hemlock closer to the window. Then I’m alone again, or I’d appear to be if someone crept up to the house and looked through a window: a big-gutted grey-haired guy, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, staring out at the dark woods across the road, listening to a grieving soprano.
My real life is the one nobody talks about anymore, except Father Paul LeBoeuf, another old buck. He has a decade on me: he’s sixty-four, a big man, bald on top with grey at the sides; when he had hair, it was black. His face is ruddy, and he jokes about being a whiskey priest, though he’s not. He gets outdoors as much as he can, goes for a long walk every morning, and hunts and fishes with me. But I can’t get him on a horse anymore. Ten years ago I could badger him into a trail ride; I had to give him a western saddle, and he’d hold the pommel and bounce through the woods with me, and be sore for days. He’s looking at seventy with eyes that are younger than many I’ve seen in people in their twenties. I do not remember ever feeling the way they seem to; but I was lucky, because even as a child I knew that life would try me, and I must be strong to endure, though in those early days I expected to be tortured and killed for my faith, like the saints I learned about in school.
Father Paul’s family came down from Canada, and he grew up speaking more French than English, so he is different from the Irish priests who abound up here. I do not like to make general statements, or even to hold general beliefs, about people’s blood, but the Irish do seem happiest when they’re dealing with misfortune or guilt, either their own or somebody else’s, and if you think you’re not a victim of either one, you can count on certain Irish priests to try to change your mind. On Wednesday nights Father Paul comes to dinner. Often he comes on other nights too, and once, in the old days when we couldn’t eat meat on Fridays, we bagged our first ducks of the season on a Friday, and as we drove home from the marsh, he said: For the purposes of Holy Mother Church, I believe a duck is more a creature of water than land, and is not rightly meat. Sometimes he teases me about never putting anything in his Sunday collection, which he would not know about if I hadn’t told him years ago. I would like to believe I told him so we could have philosophical talk at dinner, but probably the truth is I suspected he knew, and I did not want him to think I so loved money that I would not even give his church a coin on Sunday. Certainly the ushers who pass the baskets know me as a miser.
I don’t feel right about giving money for buildings, places. This starts with the Pope, and I cannot respect one of them till he sells his house and everything in it, and that church too, and uses the money to feed the poor. I have rarely, and maybe never, come across saintliness, but I feel certain it cannot exist in such a place. But I admit, also, that I know very little, and maybe the popes live on a different plane and are tried in ways I don’t know about. Father Paul says his own church, St. John’s, is hardly the Vatican. I like his church: it is made of wood, and has a simple altar and crucifix, and no padding on the kneelers. He does not have to lock its doors at night. Still it is a place. He could say Mass in my barn. I know this is stubborn, but I can find no mention by Christ of maintaining buildings, much less erecting them of stone or brick, and decorating them with pieces of metal and mineral and elements that people still fight over like barbarians. We had a Maltese woman taking riding lessons, she came over on the boat when she was ten, and once she told me how the nuns in Malta used to tell the little girls that if they wore jewelry, rings and bracelets and necklaces, in purgatory snakes would coil around their fingers and wrists and throats. I do not believe in frightening children or telling them lies, but if those nuns saved a few girls from devotion to things, maybe they were right. That Maltese woman laughed about it, but I noticed she wore only a watch, and that with a leather strap.
The money I give to the church goes in people’s stomachs, and on their backs, down in New York City. I have no delusions about the worth of what I do, but I feel it’s better to feed somebody than not. There’s a priest in Times Square giving shelter to runaway kids, and some Franciscans who run a bread line; actually it’s a morning line for coffee and a roll, and Father Paul calls it the continental breakfast for winos and bag ladies. He is curious about how much I am sending, and I know why: he guesses I send a lot, he has said probably more than tithing, and he is right; he wants to know how much because he believes I’m generous and good, and he is wrong about that; he has never had much money and does not know how easy it is to write a check when you have everything you will ever need, and the figures are mere numbers, and represent no sacrifice at all. Being a real Catholic is too hard; if I were one, I would do with my house and barn what I want the Pope to do with his. So I do not want to impress Father Paul, and when he asks me how much, I say I can’t let my left hand know what my right is doing.
He came on Wednesday nights when Gloria and I were married, and the kids were young; Gloria was a very good cook (I assume she still is, but it is difficult to think of her in the present), and I liked sitting at the table with a friend who was also a priest. I was proud of my handsome and healthy children. This was long ago, and they were all very young and cheerful and often funny, and the three boys took care of their baby sister, and did not bully or tease her. Of course they did sometimes, with that excited cruelty children are prone to, but not enough so that it was part of her days. On the Wednesday after Gloria left with the kids and a U-Haul trailer, I was sitting on the front steps, it was summer, and I was watching cars go by on the road, when Father Paul drove around the curve and into the driveway. I was ashamed to see him because he is a priest and my family was gone, but I was relieved too. I went to the car to greet him. He got out smiling, with a bottle of wine, and shook my hand, then pulled me to him, gave me a quick hug, and said: ‘It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? Let’s open some cans.’
With arms about each other we walked to the house, and it was good to know he was doing his work but coming as a friend too, and I thought what good work he had. I have no calling. It is for me to keep horses.
In that other life, anyway. In my real one I go to bed early and sleep well and wake at four forty-five, for an hour of silence. I never want to get out of bed then, and every morning I know I can sleep for another four hours, and still not fail at any of my duties. But I get up, so have come to believe my life can be seen in miniature in that struggle in the dark of morning. While making the bed and boiling water for coffee, I talk to God: I offer Him my day, every act of my body and spirit, my thoughts and moods, as a prayer of thanksgiving, and for Gloria and my children and my friends and two women I made love with after Gloria left. This morning offertory is a habit from my boyhood in a Catholic school; or then it was a habit, but as I kept it and grew older it became a ritual. Then I say the Lord’s Prayer, trying not to recite it, and one morning it occurred to me that a prayer, whether recited or said with concentration, is always an act of faith.
I sit in the kitchen at the rear of the house and drink coffee and smoke and watch the sky growing light before sunrise, the trees of the woods near the barn taking shape, becoming single pines and elms and oaks and maples. Sometimes a rabbit comes out of the treeline, or is already sitting there, invisible till the light finds him. The birds are awake in the trees and feeding on the ground, and the little ones, the purple finches and titmice and chickadees, are at the feeder I rigged outside the kitchen window; it is too small for pigeons to get a purchase. I sit and give myself to coffee and tobacco, that get me brisk again, and I watch and listen. In the first year or so after I lost my family, I played the radio in the mornings. But I overcame that, and now I rarely play it at all. Once in the mail I received a questionnaire asking me to write down everything I watched on television during the week they had chosen. At the end of those seven days I wrote in
The Wizard of Oz
and returned it. That was in winter and was actually a busy week for my television, which normally sits out the cold months without once warming up. Had they sent the questionnaire during baseball season, they would have found me at my set. People at the stables talk about shows and performers I have never heard of, but I cannot get interested; when I am in the mood to watch television, I go to a movie or read a detective novel. There are always good detective novels to be found, and I like remembering them next morning with my coffee.
I also think of baseball and hunting and fishing, and of my children. It is not painful to think about them anymore, because even if we had lived together, they would be gone now, grown into their own lives, except Jennifer. I think of death too, not sadly, or with fear, though something like excitement does run through me, something more quickening than the coffee and tobacco. I suppose it is an intense interest, and an outright distrust: I never feel certain that I’ll be here watching birds eating at tomorrow’s daylight. Sometimes I try to think of other things, like the rabbit that is warm and breathing but not there till twilight. I feel on the brink of something about the life of the senses, but either am not equipped to go further or am not interested enough to concentrate. I have called all of this thinking, but it is not, because it is unintentional; what I’m really doing is feeling the day, in silence, and that is what Father Paul is doing too on his five-to-ten-mile walks.
When the hour ends I take an apple or carrot and I go to the stable and tack up a horse. We take good care of these horses, and no one rides them but students, instructors, and me, and nobody rides the horses we board unless an owner asks me to. The barn is dark and I turn on lights and take some deep breaths, smelling the hay and horses and their manure, both fresh and dried, a combined odor that you either like or you don’t. I walk down the wide space of dirt between stalls, greeting the horses, joking with them about their quirks, and choose one for no reason at all other than the way it looks at me that morning. I get my old English saddle that has smoothed and darkened through the years, and go into the stall, talking to this beautiful creature who’ll swerve out of a canter if a piece of paper blows in front of him, and if the barn catches fire and you manage to get him out he will, if he can get away from you, run back into the fire, to his stall. Like the smells that surround . them, you either like them or you don’t. I love them, so am spared having to try to explain why. I feed one the carrot or apple and tack up and lead him outside, where I mount, and we go down the driveway to the road and cross it and turn northwest and walk then trot then canter to St. John’s.
A few cars are on the road, their drivers looking serious about going to work. It is always strange for me to see a woman dressed for work so early in the morning. You know how long it takes them, with the makeup and hair and clothes, and I think of them waking in the dark of winter or early light of other seasons, and dressing as they might for an evening’s entertainment. Probably this strikes me because I grew up seeing my father put on those suits he never wore on weekends or his two weeks off, and so am accustomed to the men, but when I see these women I think something went wrong, to send all those dressed-up people out on the road when the dew hasn’t dried yet. Maybe it’s because I so dislike getting up early, but am also doing what I choose to do, while they have no choice. At heart I am lazy, yet I find such peace and delight in it that I believe it is a natural state, and in what looks like my laziest periods I am closest to my center. The ride to St. John’s is fifteen minutes. The horses and I do it in all weather; the road is well plowed in winter, and there are only a few days a year when ice makes me drive the pickup. People always look at someone on horseback, and for a moment their faces change and many drivers and I wave to each other. Then at St. John’s, Father Paul and five or six regulars and I celebrate the Mass.
Do not think of me as a spiritual man whose every thought during those twenty-five minutes is at one with the words of the Mass. Each morning I try, each morning I fail, and know that always I will be a creature who, looking at Father Paul and the altar, and uttering prayers, will be distracted by scrambled eggs, horses, the weather, and memories and daydreams that have nothing to do with the sacrament I am about to receive. I can receive, though: the Eucharist, and also, at Mass and at other times, moments and even minutes of contemplation. But I cannot achieve contemplation, as some can; and so, having to face and forgive my own failures, I have learned from them both the necessity and wonder of ritual. For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love. And, while my mind dwells on breakfast, or Major or Duchess tethered under the church eave, there is, as I take the Host from Father Paul and place it on my tongue and return to the pew, a feeling that I am thankful I have not lost in the forty-eight years since my first Communion. At its center is excitement; spreading out from it is the peace of certainty. Or the certainty of peace. One night Father Paul and I talked about faith. It was long ago, and all I remember is him saying: Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you. That is the excitement, and the peace; then the Mass is over, and I go into the sacristy and we have a cigarette and chat, the mystery ends, we are two men talking like any two men on a morning in America, about baseball, plane crashes, presidents, governors, murders, the sun, the clouds. Then I go to the horse and ride back to the life people see, the one in which I move and talk, and most days I enjoy it.