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Authors: Bernard Malamud

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BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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“Let's be happy,” she said.
He was willing.
“I hope you know what you're doing.”
“Don't you?”
“I don't want you to be disappointed in your decision, or in me.”
Dubin said he thought it would be a good life. He had gone through it often in his mind and thought they were doing the right thing. “All it takes is character.”
“That's not all it takes.”
“Whatever it takes I think we have.”
She laughed as though he had said something very witty. Her dark clear eyes were eyes to dance to, he thought. Sometimes she looked older, less pretty. She sometimes looked as though she didn't want her looks to influence his decision.
“I trust you, I think,” Kitty said. “You seem to say the right things. In a way you remind me of my husband.”
He hoped not too much.
Her eyes grew anxious. “Let's not get married until we know and love each other.”
“Let's get married and know and love each other.” He said it with doubt like a cold stone in his gut, yet felt he had to say it.
“Where do you get your nerve or whatever it is?” she asked.
He said he had drifted enough in life.
They were married one cold day in spring. Dubin felt inspired. The bride wept at the wedding.
 
“That isn't how I remember it,” Kitty said behind a yawn in the bedroom. “A lot happened that you've forgotten.”
 
Dubin drove to New York with Evan Ondyk, the Center Campobello psychotherapist, who'd been practicing in town for two years. Ondyk had heard through a patient, a friend of Kitty's, that Dubin was driving to the city. He had called him to ask for a ride. His Buick was in the garage for a new transmission. The biographer respected Ondyk's poker playing but not his mechanistic judgments of people, as though possibility did not go beyond Freud. On the other hand he read a lot and talked well about books.
“Why did you pick D. H. Lawrence to write about?” Whoever knew Dubin sooner or later sprang that question.
“Someday he'll tell me.”
“Why didn't you try Freud?” Ondyk asked. “We could use a good biography of the man—nobody's done very much past Ernest Jones unless he goes at Freud to attack psychoanalysis. It would be useful, for instance, if someone could find out how he felt about analyzing his daughter Anna. Or from her how it went. Also what his relationship was to his wife's sister. That's ambiguous territory. Jung, in an interview, is on record as saying Minna told him that she and Freud were intimate. Freud himself said—I think to Fliess —that he was forty-one when he gave up sex with his wife. Why, if true? It would be interesting to know.” “I was considering Chekhov,” Dubin replied. “He died at Lawrence's age of the same disease, tuberculosis. There were other similarities: problems of loving, impotency, what-all.” “Why didn't you do him instead of Lawrence? He's a much more sympathetic person.”
Dubin said he didn't read Russian.
He pondered Ondyk, wondered about his judgment of him. Is there more to him than I think? One has so few facts to go by. He had the reputation of being a good practitioner. He was a deliberate effective card player, peering over his hand to psych out who was holding what. He often called when Dubin bluffed. Eyeball to eyeball, who would best understand the other? the biographer wondered. Someone said Ondyk was not content in his marriage and went off periodically to the city for his sexual pleasure.
Dubin would have liked to be alone but the ride was pleasant. It was a fine autumn day. His vision was stereoscopically sharp, his heart light. A resurgence of sadness had occurred and gone. Here I am, a single man on a date. He felt at peace, serene, had in the mirror that morning looked youthful. He hadn't talked to himself. Fanny had been in his thoughts. It was early October and on the Taconic many of the sun-filled trees, although in high color in the hills above Center Campobello, were yellow-green and growing greener as they drove south. This was a rented car because Kitty needed theirs. She'd been surprised that he had not asked her to go with him but Dubin reminded her how rarely he got out of the house alone. “Being married doesn't mean being tied like cats by our tails.” Afterward he recalled the simile was Montaigne's; and Kitty reminded him that lately he'd been making remarks about marriage. “Have I?” Dubin asked. He explained he liked a long drive alone once in a while and she said she understood. He wore tartan slacks and a blue blazer, and in his briefcase carried a bottle of perfume and a Schubert record as presents for Fanny.
“Well, have a good time,” Ondyk said. “What are you here for?”
Dubin said he hoped to relax a little from work.
“How's it going?”
“Not badly.”
“How's Kitty?”
“She's well,” said Dubin.
“Attractive woman,” Ondyk said.
He didn't say what he was in the city for.
After Dubin had left the psychotherapist at his hotel and checked into his own, it seemed to him he could use a brighter tie so he went out and bought a yellow one, and while he was at it, a new belt with a heavy silver buckle. He had got to the Gansevoort shortly after three. At four he showered, changing into fresh underwear although he had changed into fresh underwear that morning; and he dressed again. Dubin imagined Fanny would appear at about five. He
would order drinks sent up—no, it might be better if they went down to the bar. Afterward he would invite her up and she could say yes or she could say no. They'd go to bed, have dinner late, and let the evening find its way. They would not have to decide one minute what they were going to do the next. If Fanny liked, they could either go for a walk along Fifth Avenue or see a movie. It would be a nice thing to do between twice in bed.
It was a long wait doing nothing, so Dubin unlocked his briefcase and read several of his notes about Lawrence and Jessie Chambers, a good companion but bookish and apparently not much interested in sex. It was a stillborn affair, hard on them both. Lawrence had wanted to love her but couldn't. It was said she reminded him of his mother. The girl had a broad tremulous mouth and uneasy eyes. “I could never love you as a husband should love his wife,” he had frankly told her. Lawrence never kept bad news from anyone. The letters Dubin had discovered showed him at his hardest to her.
The biographer thought it must be close to five when he discovered it was close to six. He hurried down to the lobby to see if Fanny was there. Dubin waited for her amid a crowd of new arrivals. He had not waited for her before; it was difficult to say how late she was when she was late. The lobby was afloat with men, single and married, meeting pretty women in bright dresses and pants suits, single and married. Dubin admired an Indian stewardess in a golden-red sari, standing with a white-turbaned bearded Sikh pilot; they were waiting for a limousine to the airport. In the bar the pianist was playing an aria from Puccini. The lobby stirred with expectancy—a sense of adventure, sexuality—Faust ascending, but no Fanny. Fearing he had missed her—perhaps she had gone up as he was coming down, Dubin entered an elevator and rode up to his floor; but she was not in the corridor by his room, nor had he expected she might be. The years I've wasted being on time.
He descended in the elevator, then stood for a while in front of the hotel, trying not to dislike the girl for desiring her. At seven he waited outside till eight. Dubin felt his age. When one is my age the old and maimed stand out in a crowd. One recovers of youth only what he can borrow from the young. Perhaps this is not my privilege. It was a pleasant evening. He eyed passing couples, young with young; and young women with older men—these he envied most—looking as though they had been intimate or were about to be. The young ones did not look at him. Those his age knew whom he was waiting for. Waiting Dubin thought he did comparatively well. It was a matter of temperament, perhaps. He waited not so well for the small things
of life but better for the important. Some wait badly. Kitty waited badly. “Un bel di vedremo,” the Puccini went in the bar. Puccini, the cantor of longing. Kitty sometimes plucked the aria on her harp. But waiting in expectation is easier than waiting in doubt. It was easier to wait for one who was coming than one who was not.
At nine Dubin ordered a roast-beef sandwich on rye and a bottle of ale sent to his room. If she still came the long wait would have been worth it. He had decided that Fanny had planned not to come because he had not taken her when she had offered herself. There are some things one ought not to do. There are some chances one ought to take.
Looking in the mirror over the bathroom sink, Dubin disliked the yellow tie he had bought. He changed it for a purple one before going down to the bar. He washed his hands and face and went downstairs.
At the bar Nixon was lying on television. His expression was sincere as he sincerely lied.
Dubin ordered a brandy, sipping as he observed the middle-aged bartender.
He told the bartender he seemed sad.
“You look kinda wiped out yourself.”
The biographer confessed his lonely nature.
“I have my daughter dead about a year,” said the bartender. “She took an overdose when she was twenty.”
Dubin was sorry to hear it. “I have a daughter myself.”
After a while he said, “Mark Twain lived in heartbreak after his daughter Susy died: ‘The mind has a dumb sense of vast loss—that is all.'”
“They stay in your thoughts,” said the bartender, rubbing the wood with his cloth.
Dubin in his heart of hearts mourns Dubin.
A light fog lay on Venice that end-of-October late afternoon they arrived via an hour in Rome where it had been sunny and warm. Dubin and Fanny after debarking the vaporetto—terribly slow but he was eager to point out hazy sights, mist-enshrouded palazzi—were following a porter wheeling their luggage up a narrow calle. There, as the mist thinned and they could see others approaching, it seemed to the biographer that a red-haired girl clinging to the arm of a gray-haired man—both backed against the wall to let the newcomers and their baggage go by, Fanny and the elderly gent momentarily stood between Dubin and the redhead half hidden from him—was his daughter Maud. He, startled, his legs beginning to tremble, had been about to cry out her name, but the need for concealment was inexorable so he turned from her, pulling his hat brim low over his eyes, and when, no more than a minute later, he gazed back at the couple they were shadows in the fog. The bronze hair had disappeared like the flaming sun sinking in a cloud-massed charcoal sunset.
Anguished, regretful, feeling imperiled—Dubin had the impulse to chase after them to determine if she was indeed Maud, but how could it be during the academic term at Berkeley where he had telephoned and talked with her only a few nights ago? He was surely mistaken, had more than once confused
Maud with another redheaded girl nearby. One is struck by the color and recognizes someone who isn't there. Fanny, wearing her blue shades, had noticed nothing and chattered amiably. The porter pushed ahead with the bags. Dubin was still shaken though he had for the most part recovered his calm when they entered the courtyard of the Hotel Contessa. Behind them the setting sun appeared as a fiery half disk in the silvery fog and the evening promised pleasure.
“What's the weather saying for tomorrow?” he asked the black-suited segretario at the desk as he examined their passports.
“Improving, professore.” His nose had twitched: that swinging single with this ambitious vecchio? Dubin felt he must look older with her than when alone.
“I have no university connection. I'm a professional biographer.”
“Please pardon me, I meant as compleement.”
He nodded genially, not altogether displeased by the man's curiosity nor by the aura of expectancy Fanny stirred up around her wherever she appeared. He'd been mildly surprised by her unseasonable getup—a voluminous violet dress, not her best color, and a wide-brimmed straw hat—though summer, although it could be said to be lingering in Rome, had departed Venice. She wore her wire-framed dark glasses, jade earrings, and a small gold crucifix in place of her Star of David.
“For the fun of it,” Fanny had said. “I like to feel at home where I am.”
“Will you feel at home with yourself?”
“Some people are freer than others.”
That, Dubin granted. Fanny on holiday surprised, had overturned his expectations. She'd be a beautiful woman if she saw herself as one. This is she, Dubin reflected. Let her be.
With her unfurled by his side who would have noticed him in a foggy Venetian street? He was certain it hadn't been Maud they had passed yet wondered: if I was hiding, was she?
The portiere beckoned two bellmen. One, a vital youth, gathered Fanny's three bags as if by instinct, none of which he would yield to an older man who lugged Dubin's worn suitcase; and together with the assistant secretary, they all rose slowly in the wire-doored wood-paneled lift.
The assistant secretary, a closely shaved and powdered man with a sculptured black mustache, led them twice to a wrong room before leading them
to the right one. “I deed not recognize eef it was a three or a seven on my paper.”
“It's on the key,” said Dubin. “But you are absolutely right,” said the astonished young man, his eyes mostly on Fanny. They had entered an attractive double room through an adjoining single that Dubin wanted locked on their side. The assistant secretary offered to return immediately with the key but Dubin said he would ask the maid to take care of it in the morning. The man unhappily assented, though a thousand-lire note seemed to settle his nerves.
Their room on the top floor of the Contessa was a magnificent high ornate-ceilinged one with French doors leading to a small balcony overlooking the Grand Canal. The fog had lifted and the view before them—Venice afloat in a rising sea on a serene late-October early evening—and the anticipation of his amorous adventure, filled Dubin with satisfaction at the rightness of his decision to do what he was presently doing.
They had met by chance, after the Big Apple fizzle, on Grand Street in Center Campobello. Dubin, at the tail end of his country walk, had intended to slip past her; but Fanny, approaching as he hesitated, abruptly explained she had returned to pick up a lamp she had bought but hadn't been able to carry in her overloaded VW.
“I was hoping I would see you. I lost the name of the hotel I wrote on a piece of paper, and you weren't registered in the two others I tried.”
“Which did you try?”
“I went to the Brevoort, also the Plaza.”
“I was registered at the Gansevoort. Why didn't you telephone or at least drop me a line afterward?”
“It was on my mind,” Fanny said, “but I thought your wife mightn't like it. Also I was annoyed at myself for losing the name of the place.”
Dubin said his wife didn't open his mail. He searched her eyes, she seemed contrite.
Two days later he telephoned Fanny in New York and proposed a week in Italy.
“Why not,” she said after momentary hesitation. “I haven't found a job yet so it's okay with me, if you can make it.”
On the plane he had asked himself, “What am I doing here, a man my age with a young woman hers?” The answer came easily and happily: “Enjoying myself. I have it coming to me.”
Fanny was affectionate, buoyant; they joked. She sat snuggled close, straw hat on her lap, head against his shoulder, her hair spread like a flag across his chest. She had shown nervousness before the flight, which had disappeared after they had ascended. Dubin's difficulty was afterthought: he regretted deceiving Kitty. There ought to be a better way. He recalled Lawrence's remark: “Honesty is more important than marital fidelity.”
“—Kitty, I'm going off with a chick for a week. A night out in life. I want the experience before I'm too old to have it. Don't fret, I'll be back soon as good as new and as loyal as ever.”
Fat chance. She'd probably have told him she'd be elsewhere when he returned. Kitty was vulnerable, why upset her? He had lied to protect her.
Fanny and he embraced on the Venetian balcony, Dubin nuzzling her neck. Her hot floral breath drew his mouth to hers.
“In a little while,” she murmured after a long kiss. “We've been traveling all day and I could use a bath.”
“Should we get into the tub together?”
“I'll be out in a sec, lover.”
While she was bathing Dubin tried on a pair of striped pajamas Kitty had not long ago bought him. After a moment of reflection in a closet-door mirror he removed them and changed into fresh underwear. He did not admire his girth in boxer shorts, or his thin legs, so he drew on trousers and buttoned up his shirt.
Fanny, as the tub gurgled and toilet flushed, stepped out of the bathroom in a short white nightgown. Her body glowed. She had brushed her hair full and bright. Dubin, like a man about to be dubbed knight, sank to his knees, his arms clasping her legs as he pressed his nose into her navel.
She reacted in surprise, momentarily stiffening, then with affection ran her hand through his hair.
“I have my suitcase stuff all over the bed so I'd better finish unpacking like I see you have.”
“I thought I'd get my things out of the way.”
“So will I. It won't take long.”
“‘Had we but world enough and time,' dear Fanny,” Dubin, rising, sighed.
“We have all week.”
“You're a practical type.”
“I'm not romantic, if that's what you mean, though sometimes I have romantic thoughts.”
“It lingers in me, perhaps it's my generation.”
“Forget your generation. Even if you are older than I you act young when you want to.”
“L'chayim,” said Dubin, holding aloft an imaginary glass.
“It's cool,” she laughed.
She was sorting the contents of a small store: casual clothing—piles of it —and plastic containers of creams, lotions, deodorants. This consumer's side of her was new to him—he barely knew the girl—and he wondered how it squared away with her abstemious stay in a Buddhist commune.
“It's no ripoff. I happen to have this uncle who owns a drugstore. And my mother sends me clothes she doesn't want.”
Amid her possessions he noticed a rubber diaphragm in a worn plastic case.
“Don't you use the pill?”
“My uncle says it can give you breast cancer.”
“My wife never approved it.”
Fanny also carried a traveling iron and portable clothesline she could rig up in any bathroom. “Anything you want to hang on the clothesline, please do it, Bill.”
He was helping her put away things into drawers and the medicine cabinet.
“Why don't you call me William, Fanny?”
“I don't like to call you what your wife does.”
That hadn't occurred to him, but he preferred William to Bill.
She fell, with a comic groan, into an armchair, her nightie billowing.
“What do you say we get into bed, Fanny?”
“If you wish, Will-yam.”
“Call me Bill if you like. What do you wish?”
“Are you worried I might call you Bill and your wife would hear it?”
He was startled, could not foresee circumstances in which Kitty and Fanny were likely to meet. Don't consider yourself her equal, Dubin thought.
She regarded him cunningly. “Is something bothering you?”
“My mood at the moment is, as they say, macho, but you are being coy.”
“No, I'm not. What did you tell your wife was the reason you were going away for a week?”
“I indicated I had some unexpected bits of research to do in Italy to settle
a few things on my mind. But since she knows I'm presently working on Lawrence's early life, she may have wondered whether I wanted to get away for some other reason—possibly so I could see my work in perspective.”
“Will she believe what you said—about going to Italy?”
“She believes me,” Dubin said soberly.
“This isn't your first affair since you were married, is it, William? I wouldn't think so.”
He thanked her for saying his name. “No, but it is with someone—if you'll pardon the expression—as young as you, a long trip involved, and some elaborate deception. Kitty happens to be easy to lie to, which makes it harder to do. I don't like not to be honest with her.”
“Sometimes you sound innocent.”
“I'm not innocent though my experience is limited.”
“Like to some one-night lays with older-type ladies?”
“Not exactly grandmothers.”
“How many?” she asked curiously.
“A few affairs—none prolonged.”
“In how long a time?”
“I've been married twenty-five years and have been adulterous the last twelve.”
“Adulterous? What were you afraid of?”
“There was no special fear. I was largely satisfied as things were. I was married after thirty and had for years too much to do to go actively looking for extramarital sexual experiences. I was working well and had a family to take care of.”
“But nobody has to go actively looking—it's there. It always is.”
“It may be there but in a way I wasn't,” Dubin explained. “I'm only recently a visitor to the new sexual freedom. How many affairs have you had, Fanny?”
She started at the question. “I never counted.”
“Often with married men?”
She nodded. “I was into that a lot for a while but less so lately.”
“Good,” said Dubin, noting a contradiction.
“Why did you pick me to go away with?”
He asked her if she was looking for compliments.
“Not really but I am kind of curious, William.”
“Your warmth,” he said, “—good looks, womanliness, openness. Because
you touch my arm with your fingers when we talk. You're a little larger than life, Fanny. I mean you make life seem larger. I felt that before you tossed your underpants at me.”
BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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