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Authors: Bernard Malamud

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BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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She seemed to hesitate. “I don't mind if you don't, Mr. Dubin.”
“Was it a good film you saw?”
“Good enough—sort of a love story.”
“Anything I ought to see?”
They were walking together, her clogs setting the rhythm.
“It's better than nothing.”
He laughed at that, felt awkward, as he had in his house when she was conscious of him observing her, imposing himself.
“I'm sorry you left without saying goodbye,” Dubin said. “I'd bought you a copy of
Sons and Lovers.
Would you like me to bring it to you?”
“Thanks anyway.”
“Where can I send it? I heard you were living with Roger Foster. He used to do odd jobs for me when he was in college. He wore a green sweater and his beard had a green cast. I confess I never liked him very much. Perhaps the fault is mine.”
“Well, he has a blue sweater and a dark beard now and doesn't do odd jobs any more, and neither do I, certainly not house cleaning.”
“It seemed to me a curious experience for somebody like you. I hope I conveyed my understanding, my respect. I regret we hadn't met under better circumstances.”
“Who said I was living with Roger?”
Dubin cleared his throat. “My wife happened to mention it.”
“She sure is all over the place. I live in a room in his house but not with him. His sister and brother-in-law live there too.”
“Fanny, I'm sorry about the incident in my study,” Dubin said. “I regret we couldn't be congenial.”
She made no reply.
He asked her if she had left because of that.
“Not that I know. I just got awfully tired of the cleaning crap. I'll never do anything like that again.”
He asked her if she had read
Short Lives,
the book he had given her.
Fanny said she hadn't.
“I've wondered,” he remarked a moment later as they were walking along the store-darkened street—he had no idea where she lived—“why you wear that Star of David?”
“I wear it because I own it. A friend of mine gave it to me and I wear it when I think of him. I wear other things too.” Then she asked, “Your wife isn't Jewish, is she?”
He said she wasn't.
“How did you happen to meet her?”
He said he'd tell her the story sometime.
“What was she doing when you met her?”
“She was a widow with a child.”
“She sure is conscious of everything.”
“She has a sensitive nature.”
“So have I,” Fanny said.
The stores were thinning and there were more private houses. At the corner she turned and he followed her into a short street. In mid-block an orange VW was parked in front of a dour narrow wooden house with a thin high gable. The two-story house was dark, its window shades drawn.
A bright half-moon shone through a copper beech on the lawn. The dark-green house in dappled moonlight looked like a piece of statuary, or an old painting of an old house. Dubin had on a light sweater and loafers, Fanny her jeans and white halter.
He told her D. H. Lawrence used to go wild in the glow of the full moon.
“I'll bet it doesn't do that to you.”
“I'm a controlled type,” he confessed.
She yawned.
Dubin pointed in the sky. “Look, Fanny, the Big Dipper. And that's Andromeda, really a galaxy, like ours heading into infinity—if there is an infinity and not just a finite wheel with no apparent end, if we crawl forever around its rim. In this universe, finite or infinite, man is alive amidst an explosion of gases that have become stars in flight, from one of which we have evolved. A marvelous privilege wouldn't you say?”
Fanny, momentarily silent, said she thought so too.
“Lawrence called it ‘the great sky with its meaningful stars.'”
“Does he mean besides astrology?”
“Besides that.”
“Does everything have to mean something?”
“Where there's mind there's meaning. I like the idea of the cosmic mystery living in our minds, and that enormous mystery reflecting our small biological and psychological ones. I like that combination of mysteries.”
“Like our minds are the universe, sort of?” Fanny reflected.
“Yes,” he told her. “Perhaps we were invented to see the stars and say they're there.”
“That's not why I was invented.”
“Tell me why.”
“I wish I really knew. Why do you bring all that up now?”
“So that I shan't appear naked when we meet again.”
She smiled dimly. “I guess I better go in now. Thanks for the astronomy lesson.”
Dubin asked her when she would be leaving for New York.
“Next week I plan to go.”
The biographer had had a thought: “I've got some research to do at the New York Public Library. Can I drive you down?”
Fanny said she'd be driving her own car. “Roger's going with me.”
Dubin had to conceal his disappointment.
“He's coming for the ride and going back by bus. You can tell your wife I'm not living with him. He wants to marry me but I don't dig getting married just yet. I have other things to try out before I do.”
“Marvelous. What sort of things?”
Fanny raised her arms in the moonlight. “I'm young yet. I don't do everything for a purpose. I do some things for fun.”
“Fun is a purpose.”
“It's a purpose that doesn't take away your fun.”
“May I hope to see you in the city, Fanny? Couldn't we have dinner together?”
She gave it a moment's reflection. “That fine with me.”
“Good. Where shall we meet? Where will you be living in New York?”
“I don't know yet. I haven't looked for an apartment. Do you want me to come to the restaurant?”
“Would you care to meet me at my hotel?”
She said that was as good as any other place.
They arranged a meeting a week hence. Dubin said he would be at the Gansevoort. “That's Melville's mother's maiden name.”
Fanny stifled a yawn. “This night makes me sleepy.”
“I won't keep you,” he said. “I'm happy we're going to meet again. I was inept the last time we were together. In afterthought I realized how kind you were being.”
“Forget it.”
“I don't think I want to.”
They had parted friends, he hoped.
The house, when he returned, had lost its lonely quality, although Maud, if she had telephoned, did not call again.
Dubin, standing at the darkened bedroom window, looked up at the wash
of stars in the night sky. In the universe even the dark is light. “Why should I feel lonely?” Thoreau had asked. “Is not our planet in the Milky Way?”
He would tell that to Fanny.
 
Dubin talks to his mirror: he weighs how some things happen to happen: Kitty's letter, many years ago, had crossed his desk shortly after he began a new job.
There were two handwritten letters in green ink, the second cancelling the first: “Please don't print my recent ‘personals' note. I should have known not to write that kind of letter when I was feeling low. Could you kindly destroy this with the other I sent you?”
Having read it because someone had mistakenly laid it on his desk, Dubin searched through a folder in the next office for the first letter. It read, “Young woman, widowed, fairly attractive, seeks honest, responsible man as friend, one who, given mutuality of interests and regard, would tend to think of marriage. I have a child of three.”
Dubin would tend to think of marriage.
After a night of peering into his life, of intense dreams; of being tempted to take a chance because the time had come to take a chance—he was past thirty and neither his vocation nor his relationship with women satisfied him —he wrote her in the morning: “My name is William Dubin. I'm an assistant editor at
The Nation.
Your letter happened to cross my desk. I've read it and would rather not destroy it.”
He had had the job a week and had recently also been writing obituaries of literary figures, on assignment for the
Post.
Dubin told her he was thirty-one and unmarried. He'd been in the army two years. He was Jewish. He was responsible. He wrote that he had practiced law for a year, had finally, like Carlyle, decided it was not for him, and was no longer practicing. He said he loved law but not practicing it. His father had lamented his giving up his profession. He had for a while felt lost, a burden of loss. Wherever his life was going he did not seem to be going with it. “People ask me what I'm saving myself for. Whatever that may be—I want to change my life before it changes me in ways I don't want to be changed.”
He said he had never written to anyone as he was writing to her now. “I am touched that only you and I know about the letter you sent and withdrew. I know something I have no right to know; in that respect I'm privileged.
I sense you understate yourself. You seem to be capable of a serious act of imagination: to be willing to love someone willing to love you. Plato in the Republic says that marriages between good people might reasonably be made by lot. I assume we're that kind of people. Obviously, for whatever reason, you've been flirting with the idea yourself. I have the feeling I've been predisposed to it all my life, although I can't say why. Your letters have excited me. Mayn't we meet?”
She wrote: “Dear Mr. Dubin, Yours disturbs me. It does because it moves me terribly. I am—at least at the moment—afraid to go further. Let me think about it. If you don't hear from me, please forgive me. It will be best not to have said no. Ever, Kitty Willis.”
Another letter from her came in less than a month. He almost tore it apart as he tore it open.
“Dear Mr. Dubin, I am twenty-six, my little boy is three and a half. I wish I could believe I know what I'm doing. I thought I ought to say I don't think life will be easy for anyone living with me. I sleep poorly, fear cancer, worry too much about my health, my child, our future. I'm not a very focused person. It took my husband years to learn what I'm telling you in this short letter. I want at this point to get these things down: My father was a suicide when I was four. My mother went abroad with a lover when I was nine. She died in Paris of lung cancer and is buried in Maine. I was brought up by a loving grandmother—my rare good luck. My poor husband died of leukemia at forty. It's such a chronicle of woe I'm almost ashamed to write it.”
“Of course I'm more than the sum of my hangups and traumas,” she wrote. “Nathanael and I were reasonably happily married, and I ought to make someone a decent wife. I can't say my emotional season is spring but I love life. Fortunately, I have a strong reality element that keeps me balanced against some of my more neurotic inclinations. You have to know if we're going to be serious about each other. I had hoped to write earlier, but it took me some time to put my thoughts together. I don't want to ensnare you with my unhappy history, Mr. Dubin. I sense you lean to that tilt.”
They had met at the Gansevoort bar. Each recognized the other. Kitty looked as though she was looking for him. She was a tallish slim-figured woman with bright brown hair and luminous dark eyes. Her eyes, as she greeted him, were contemplative, unsure, not very gay. She hadn't, Dubin thought, fully joined her resolution.
“I'm glad you came.”
“I had to.”
He agreed they had to.
“How serious we are,” she said after a moment. Kitty laughed breathily. “I admit I ask myself why I'm here.”
“What do you answer?”
She looked at him with a vague smile, shook her head.
He tried to tell her why, a way of telling himself.
She listened as though she had come to believe in him and all he had to say now was what he had already said in his letters.
This he managed to do.
They ordered drinks. It was not a bad meeting, though they were constrained. Kitty studied him, not seeming to care that he saw her studying him. Dubin was not at all sure of her, much more the gentile lady than he had supposed. Then he placed his hand on hers and Kitty did not withdraw it. She looked at him holding her hand, then withdrew it and pressed it to her cheek. He remembered that gesture for years. One night they went out and enjoyed themselves, enjoyed each other, gambled a kiss. She kissed with passionate intensity. They were hungry kisses he thought of many times. Not long afterward they agreed to be married.
BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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