Dubin's Lives (22 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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“I wish you would sometime write me a letter saying things I could think about. What happened at the Hotel Contessa between us wasn't all my fault, if you've stopped to think about it. You were kind in your way but your mind wasn't really on me. And not everybody can be lovers —I'm sure you'll agree with that. But I have the feeling we could have been good friends. Could you specifically say what I ought to be thinking about in the way of a job or career, or recommend books that might be helpful? Or give me the names of courses I could take when I get back to New York City?”I'd like to be better organized and enjoy my life more, but Harvey isn't that well put together and has problems that remind me of my own, so I don't think I ought to stay here. I don't think I'm so good for him either. I'm afraid of my day-to-day life. A day scares me more than a week or month. But the truth of it is I want to be responsible, to work my life out decently. Couldn't we at least talk about that? Affectionately, Fanny B.
“P.S. This is my last letter unless you answer it, gently.”
Dubin burned the letter.
She wrote once after that: “I'm not writing to humiliate myself but to show you I have respect for you though you don't seem to have much for me. F.”
He kept this letter, her last. She had enclosed a snapshot of herself in jeans, sneakers, and embroidered blue blouse, her long hair stringy, her sad face plain. She was not an ideal woman. Why was he so drawn to her?
In the woods, later, he thought if he had had her in Venice he might not have wanted her afterward. Yet he thought he wanted more than just wanting her.
Dubin awoke in moonlight, unhappy to wake. He'd gone to bed after supper, too intent on sleep to draw the shades. What was that song of Schubert's about a man who was awakened by starlight? It was late January and the ground was covered with snow. Kitty had been sleeping in Maud's bed, not to disturb him. Dubin, moonlight spilling on his face, thought he ought to get up and draw the shade. He lay there, trying to rouse himself. At last he flung the blanket aside. At the window the moon was full, the somber hills bathed in a darkish bronze glow. He stared at his wristwatch on the night table: it wasn't ten yet. He looked again in disbelief, watched the second hand move. He had slept a few hours and now it felt as though today was tomorrow. He felt a sadness of waste. Dubin dressed and went down the stairs.
Kitty, reading in bed, called to him through Maud's closed door. “Is there something you need, William?”
“I waked and can't sleep. I'm going out for a short walk. It's a full moon.”
After a minute Kitty asked, “Would you want company? I'll get dressed.”
He didn't think so.
Dubin drew on his overcoat and wool hat and buckled on his galoshes. He took along a thick stick that had once belonged to Gerald. Maybe he would go to the bridge.
“It's a freezing night,” she said through the door, “don't go far.”
He didn't think he would.
He was at first afraid to enter the wood. Then he went through it, dimly lit trees casting shadows on the darkly lit snow.
At the road he turned left instead of right toward the bridge. A few fleecy clouds floated in the night-blue winter sky. After some minutes of careful walking on and off the snowy road he passed the Wilson farmhouse, a narrow two-story white frame house with a sloping addition on the left side. It lay off the road about two hundred feet. An orange light burned in the upstairs darkened bedroom. It was Myra's night light, an old woman alone in a farmhouse in the dead of winter. He imagined her sleeping in a bed she had lain in with her husband for fifty years. Ben, the dog, growled as Dubin went by. He gripped his stick.
Oscar Greenfeld's house was a half mile farther up the road, a two-story spacious red clapboard with a large lawn. Dubin thought of their friendship with regret. How strange to love a man and rarely see him. Dubin had enjoyed coming to Oscar's house in the past—walking along this road in
summer, driving the front way through the streets in winter. They played chess, talked and drank. The flutist had come less often to Dubin. He never came with Flora. If you're not alone with a friend there's no friendship, he said. In his company Dubin drank more than he was used to, and Kitty worried when he got into the car at one or half past one a.m. to drive Oscar home. The flutist didn't drive. Flora drove him there but wouldn't call for him that late at night, though she stayed up waiting. That was one of the things about her that antagonized Kitty: Kitty went for Dubin when she had to. Neither of them cared for the drinking, and driving on icy streets. Oscar Greenfeld stopped coming to Dubin's house; then Dubin stopped going to him. After an evening together hitting the brandy bottle, Oscar when he woke the next morning could reach for his flute and move to Mozart on the music stand. With Mozart dealing out the notes Oscar could toot away most of his hangover. Dubin, working with words, felt he was pushing rocks with his nose, so he stopped visiting the flutist although they talked on the phone. But a telephone conversation now and then could not be called friendship.
He drank, Oscar told Dubin, because he was not a better flutist.
“You're one of the best, Oscar.”
“Not in my ears.”
“Rampal says so.”
“Not in my ears.”
“That's not the only reason you drink,” the biographer said.
“I never said so.”
As Dubin entered the driveway he heard Oscar's flute, clearly, limpidly, deep within the house. He listened: Schubert's “Serenade.” Lately Oscar had been transcribing lieder into flute songs. The song was like a lit candle in the night. In his “Short Life of Schubert” the biographer had written that the composer, on hearing the song sung at a concert, was supposed to have said, “You know, I never remembered it was so beautiful.” How moving a simple song is, Dubin thought. How often they go to sadness. It's as though the sad song was the natural one, the primal song. Someone sings without knowing why and it's a song expressing hunger for love, regret for life unlived, sorrow for the shortness of life. Even some of the joyful songs evoke memories of something lost that one hopes endures.
The moon bathed the birch trees on the lawn in liquid light. There were several white trees in an irregular circle, inclined in different directions, looking like white-clad dancers in the snow. Oscar had written a flute song
called, “The Birch Dancers.” He said he wrote it one night when he couldn't sleep, after looking out the window at the white trees.
Listening to the serenade, this lied of yearning, he reflected that Schubert had often intertwined themes of love and death. In a certain time of his life the two experiences had become one. He had died of typhus at thirty-one. A few years before, at twenty-six or -seven, he had been infected with syphilis. “Each night when I go to sleep,” he wrote to a friend, “I hope I won't wake again; and each morning reminds me of yesterday's misery.” Love, he told his friend, offered only pain. The doppelgänger seeks the mystical fusion of love and death.
Dubin did not go into the house. When the song had ended he left the driveway and walked toward town.
in diesem Hause wohnte mein Schatz;
sie hat schon längst die Stadt verlassen,
doch steht noch das Haus auf demselben Platz.
It looked in the garish moonlight like a piece of stark statuary, or an old painting of an old house. Ah, Fanny, what if you had found me in the Gansevoort that night in the city, would a different beginning have made a happy end?
A window went up with a rasp on the top floor of the house under the high-gabled roof, and Dubin was too surprised to duck into the shadow of the beech tree. A naked large-shouldered man leaned out into the wintry night and stared down at the astonished biographer. This was not the Eve of St. Agnes, nor was Dubin Porphyrio, so he could not have expected to be gazing at Fanny, naked or clothed; but it was a strange surprise, and not unrelated to his mood, to behold Roger Foster's bare curly-haired chest and moonlit thick-sideburned handsome face.
“Good Christ, Mr. Dubin, is that you down there?” the librarian said in surprise.
On a freezing night in January he talks to you naked from his window without a shiver.
“I'm afraid so.”
“Anyone in particular you're looking for?”
Dubin calmly replied, “Nobody in particular. I couldn't sleep and am out for a short walk.”
“Sorry about that. Anything I can do for you? Would you care to come in for a drink or maybe a cup of hot coffee?”
“Thank you, no.”
He wanted to ask about Fanny but dared not.
“How are things going, Roger?”
“Pretty good. All's well at the library, what with the help of your kind wife.”
“Wonderful,” said Dubin.
“Has anybody heard anything from Fanny?” Roger asked.
“She's in Rome, I believe. Haven't you heard from her?”
“Just a postcard a couple of weeks ago, that she was in Venice having herself a ball.”
“You don't say,” said Dubin.
“She sure gets around.”
“She seems to.”
“You know, Mr. Dubin,” Roger then said, “someday I hope we get to understand each other better. We have things in common—bookwise, I mean to say. We keep your biographies, every one of them, on our shelves. I know you've never liked me all that well but I'm not such a bad egg, if you ask around, and I hope to accomplish more than you might think.”
“You put it well, Roger, I wish you luck.”
“And I wish
you
luck, Mr. Dubin.”
He breathed in the cold air, exhaling his steamy breath.
“Well, good night now, it's getting chilly.”
Roger shut the window and pulled down the shade.
Dubin waited a minute perhaps for Fanny to peek through a slit in the drawn window shade. She did not.
After walking home he listened to a recording of “Death and the Maiden.” It was after midnight. Kitty came down in her robe and had a drink as she listened.
They went to sleep in the same bed, Kitty wearing a black chiffon nightgown. She offered herself and he accepted. Afterward she changed into a white flannel nightgown and got back into their double bed.
“I want to travel again soon,” Kitty said. “There's so much of the world
we haven't seen, so much that's varied and beautiful. Let's have more fun than we've been having. When do you think we'll travel again?”
Dubin didn't know.
It seemed to him he'd been sleeping deeply when he heard a shrill ring and sat stiffly upright in bed. At first he thought the doorbell had sounded and was about to run down the stairs when it shot through him that the phone had rung piercingly once and stopped.
No one answered his insistent hellos.
“Maybe it was Maud,” Kitty said. “Or Gerald.”
If it was Fanny calling from Rome he was glad she had rung off.
Kitty had snuggled close and fallen asleep.
Dubin lay awake.
Middle age, he thought, is when you pay for what you didn't have or couldn't do when you were young.
 
The man trudged diagonally across the snowy field to the slushy road. Dubin watched him as he came, listing to the left. He seemed insufficiently dressed for the cold—had on a ragged jacket, thin pants, wet boots. He wore no hat, his thin black eyes expressionless. He was a burly man with heavy ears and small features, face unshaved. He waited in the road till Dubin had caught up with him without trying, and then walked along at the biographer's side.
“Good morning,” Dubin said.
The man grunted. Once he hawked up a gob of phlegm and spat at the snow. Every so often, as they went on, he lifted his arms as if pointing a shotgun at a sparrow flying overhead. “Bang bang.” The bird flew off. The man lowered his arms and trudged on with Dubin.
Who the hell is he? Does he think he knows me because he's seen me walking here? They were alone on the road and he was uneasy with the stranger.
“You live nearby?”
The man barely nodded.
They walked on, saying nothing. Dubin, after a while, would point at something in the distance and say what it was: “Frost's farmhouse one summer—the poet. His daughter Irma went crazy that year.”
The man trudged along with him, scanning the sky. Is he an escaped convict, Dubin worried, or just some poor bastard looking for company?
Suppose he knifes me? He saw himself lying dead in a pool of blood in the frozen snow. There's Dubin lying in the road with a gaping wound in his chest, his gray-blue eyes staring at the gray-blue sky. It's a long hard winter.
The man hung close by, their arms bumping as they walked. Dubin reconciled himself to his company. After all, it's a public road. He's picked me to walk with, though who he is he's not about to say.

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