by
Andre Dubus
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He looked at her eyes, and knew that what was falling inside him would not stop falling till it broke. He said: “No.”
“No what? I’m not pregnant? Did you think you were shooting blanks?”
“No, don’t do it.”
“I’m twenty-two years old, I’m going to New York, and you want me to have a fucking baby?”
The falling thing in him hit and broke and he trembled and said: “Not a fucking baby. Our baby, Susan. Our baby.”
He had to look away from the death of everything he saw in her eyes.
noooo
He took a sleeping pill and turned off the bedside lamp. He liked this new way of seeing the house, as if the entire structure were female and he entered it to be at its center with Lydia; and she had made a place for him, his den, as she gave him a place in her body. A great tenderness welled in him. He regretted his rebukes of Lydia, through the years, and his infidelities when he was alone overseas. These were with prostitutes. He had acted in privacy and had never told anyone. Afterward, he had forgiven himself in the same way that, on hungover mornings, he had absolved himself for being a drunken fool: he sloughed off remorse as he shaved his whiskers; then he put on his uniform and went to work. He did not justify his adultery; he believed a better man would have been chaste; but he saw it as an occupational hazard of soldiering. He was an active man, and his need for a woman’s love was nocturnal, or it seemed to be. But during months of separation from Lydia, that need moved into daylight: a tender loneliness, a sense of being unattached, of floating near the boundaries of fear. Also, Robert Townsend loved women: a woman’s eyes could move his blood as the moon pulls the sea. It was neither easy nor simple for him to live for a year without the nakedness of a woman; he had done his best, and on more than a thousand nights he had prevailed.
He wished this night, drugged in the living room, that he had been perfect, that he had made love with no one since he met Lydia on a blind date in La Jolla. He was a second lieutenant wearing dress blues, the date was for the Marine Corps birthday ball, and while his friend waited in the car, he strode up the long walk to the lighted front door; she was living with her parents still, and he was unabashed by the size of the stone house, its expanse of lawn and accumulation of trees. In his left hand, he held his white gloves and her corsage. He rang the doorbell, then stepped back so she would see the height and breadth of him when she swung open the door. Behind him was the ocean, and he smelled it with every breath. Then she opened the door: she was in a silver gown with a full skirt, he was smelling her perfume, and he looked at her tanned face and arms and golden hair and felt that he was looking at the sun without burning his eyes.
“I know you’re having an affair.”
“That’s all it is. It just ended.”
“Because my legs are broken?”
“I don’t know. Yes. Because your legs are broken.” She held her breath for a moment, then released it. “It’s not my first.”
“No.”
“I need a cigarette for this.”
His body started to sit up, to rise from the bed and climb the stairs to get her purse. Then she was gone, to her room, then the bathroom, and she came down with fresh makeup and her cigarettes, and lay beside him and looked at his eyes. She said: “I’ve never loved anyone else.”
As a young man, in his first marriage, he had done some erotic dabbling: one-night stands whose causes, he now knew, were alcohol, night, and vanity. This had only scratched his marriage: a little blood showed, nothing more; for his wife had also fallen from grace, and in the same way. Theirs was a confessional marriage, and the purging of one and forgiving by the other deepened their love. The marriage ended much later, when their sexual mischief was far behind them, and Lee would never understand all of its ending any more than he could explain why, on their first date in college, there was already enough love between them to engender the years it would take to have three children and let their love die. He learned how quickly love died when you weren’t looking; if you weren’t looking.
At the restaurant a flaxen-haired young waitress flirted with him as a matter of course. This was Doreen Brodie. She was tall, and her limbs looked stronger than his. Some nights he had an after-hours drink with her, sitting at the bar, and her blue eyes and thin red lips aroused his passion and, more tempting, swelled his loneliness till it nearly brimmed over, nearly moved his arms to hold her. He did not touch her. She was younger than his children; he was old, a marital leftover wearing a jacket and tie.
He had come to believe that only young women still trusted love, believed in it. He knew this could not be true, that it was the inductive reasoning of his bad luck, that he simply had not met resilient older women because they lived someplace else, or lived here in this little town but somehow had not crossed his path. Yet even if he met such a woman, wasn’t he the common denominator in three divorces? Perhaps he was a sleeping snake. He slipped into masturbation and nearly always, afterward, felt he was too old for this, too, and what he wiped from his hand onto the sheet was his dignity But sometimes on long afternoons when he could think of nothing but Doreen Brodie, of phoning her and asking her for a date, of having dinner with her, of making love with her, and so falling in love with her, he resorted to the dry and heartless caress of his hand; then, his member spent and limp as his soul, he focused clearly on his life again, and he did not call Doreen.
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The traffic light changed and they crossed the street and she led him down a brick alley between brick shops, then across a courtyard. His life was repeating itself, yet it felt not repetitious but splendid, and filled with grace. He lowered his eyes to rain moving on darkened bricks. God in heaven, he thought, if there is one, bless us. As a boy he was an Episcopalian. Then, with his first wife, he became his flesh and what it earned. Only his love for his children felt more spiritual than carnal. Holding one in his arms, he felt connected with something ancient, even immortal. In the arms of his passionate wife he felt a communion he believed was the supreme earthly joy. It had ended and he had found it again with other wives and other women, and always its ending had flung him into a dark pit of finitude, whose walls seeped despair as palpable as the rain he walked in now, after too many years.
“A crush. I have them all the time. I have one on the guy who delivers springwater.”
“You, too?”
“We have the same guy?”
“I had an affair with one. It ended my first marriage.”
They stopped and looked at each other. LuAnn said: “That’s why it ended, and you never told me?”
“It was eighteen years ago, and it was dramatic and tragic and all that. Now it seems like another life.”
[...] Before he got to the passenger door, I was feeling that first wave of thrill. Oh, thrill is dangerous; living is dangerous. He filled the seat. I gave him a cigarette and a light and lit mine. He’s divorced and isn’t with his children enough; he doesn’t go home to them and wake up with them. He takes them on weekends, but sometimes he doesn’t have whole weekends; the home takes him—girls run away or try to kill themselves, or some staff have the flu. So he hurts. He’s one of those who hurts and just keeps going. There was a tree between us and the streetlamp in front of my car, and the road was lit, but we were in shadows there, and the lilacs between us and the home are tall, and I couldn’t see the downstairs windows. There were houses across the street with lights low, people watching television. You could make love on their front lawns and they wouldn’t know. Murder somebody, and they wouldn’t know till morning. I wanted to kiss him and I was trying to think of something to say, about Sylvie, about anything. Three drags on my cigarette. Two or three on his. Then he said: ‘I like watching you read.’ I didn’t say anything; it was in my face, though. Probably since he got in the car like a panther, if panthers were shaped like bears. Probably since I said: Join me.’ He leaned to kiss me and I leaned, and we were kissing and I reached behind him and dropped my cigarette out his window, and I felt him drop his. Then our hands were free: shirts unbuttoned. I was wearing jeans; we pulled them down and my underpants, and his. I wanted to get in the passenger seat, with him kneeling on the floor and my feet on the dashboard. I said: ‘Move.’ He pushed the seat back, got a condom from his wallet, and took off his shoes and slacks and shorts, and I was pushing my underpants and jeans—I had them to my ankles; then I knew I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Because of those seconds when we weren’t kissing and touching. I was touching my jeans and my pants and my skin. I saw myself walking into my house. I saw myself walking through the kitchen and the dining room to Ted in the living room. I didn’t see Ted. Or Julia and Elizabeth and Sam in their beds. I saw my face and the front of my body, walking toward—me. Walking on the floor toward me. And I knew I must not do this. I wanted to. All I could feel was my body and this thing in my chest that wanted to explode. Into blossom. But I knew, and I pulled on my underpants and I was pulling up my jeans and feeling with my feet for my moccasins, all that breathing in the car, and I said: ‘I can’t.’ I looked at him. I hadn’t stopped looking at him, but I looked at his eyes and said: ‘I’m sorry.’ I had my jeans up and my moccasins on and by the time I was buttoning my shirt, he was dressed. His eyes were beautiful. He said: ‘Don’t be.’
In the stadium the music was joyful and LuAnn walked to its beat. They passed the boys playing basketball, and she said: “I’ll go to confession today.”
“Really?”
“It’s at four on Saturdays.”
“I didn’t know you did that.”
“Not much.”
“Do you think you need to?”
“Yes.”
“To be forgiven?”
“No. I’m always being forgiven. But I’ll get strength from it. We do it face-to-face now. I’ll just go sit with the priest and tell him.”
“If you tell him like you told me, you’ll have another struggle on your hands.”
“It’s a very simple language. I’ll say I placed myself in the occasion of sin, and I nearly committed adultery, and I don’t want that to happen, ever.”