Dirty Love
Authors: Andre Dubus III
DIRTY LOVE
ANDRE DUBUS III
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
for Fontaine
CONTENTS
A
T FIRST THERE IS ONLY THE COFFEE TABLE IN FRONT OF HIM
, a swath of sunlight across its glass surface. There’s the neat stack of women’s magazines, the TV remote lying perfectly parallel beside them. There is the oak floor and yellow wall, the tiled kitchen and granite countertop, the closed bedroom his mother left hours ago because it is almost noon on a Saturday in July and he is waking once again in the garage apartment he built for her. There is no dust, no empty cans or glasses, though his mouth is salt and ash and a familiar ache grips his head. He closes his eyes, but there’s the video again. The picture is color and high-resolution. It is a bright spring day in a park in New Hampshire, and there are patches of snow on the ground. Mark Welch has not seen this in a while. The first weeks it came daily, but then, as things have become what they have, he’s stopped seeing it so often and its power has faded. Still, he’d rather not see it now and he’d only made himself watch it twice, both times on the Sony flat-screen in the living room of the main house, his heart kicking like a hanged man’s feet.
The sun is shining through pine trees onto a clearing of vacant picnic tables and an empty fire pit, its cinderblock walls scorched black. Just beyond it is a two-door coupe, a white import, its trunk closed and facing the camera. The doors are closed, too, and now the lens slowly moves in as if the one filming does not wish to startle. There, in the front seat, a man behind the wheel talks in profile to a woman. He is bald from his own hand, the way so many men are now, choosing to shave away thinning hair so as to appear younger, still virile, though the effect is coldly narcissistic. He is talking and smiling at the woman. Her hair is long and tied back in a ponytail, and now the camera zooms too quickly so there is only the reflection of pine branches in the import’s rear window. The frame of the image shifts slightly, pulls back, and the woman is visible again, her small curved nose, her left eye, how it turns down at the corner when she laughs, the way she does now with the bald man behind the wheel. This was one of the first things Mark had noticed about her, and he had seen it in the movie theater in that silly romance they went to that first time, how when she’d laughed he’d half turned in the flickering glow and watched her face; there were other things he’d noticed before that: there was her voice, tentative but somehow decisive too, the sound of one who consistently willed herself through fear or embarrassment. There was her thick, straight hair falling down her back like a girl’s and not the thirty-one-year-old showing him condominiums along Pickering Wharf in her navy business skirt and white blouse, those runner’s legs leading to maternal hips. And it was the way she smiled at him in the realtor’s office, as if she’d been waiting for him for years and now that he’d finally come she was shy about it.
But in the video, in that front seat of that two-door under the sun-mottled pines in the park, there are gray streaks in her hair that has thinned over the years. There are small bags under her eyes that turn down as she laughs. There are lines at the corners of her lips. And what about those other changes? Though to the man behind the wheel, there are none for he has only known her a few months, maybe a year, so even though he has probably visited her flat belly and seen the stretch marks—light purple and in a vertical pattern—between her navel and pubic hair, they can mean nothing to him, not like they do to Mark. No, he used to kiss them with gratitude, a sign not just of the births of their daughter and son, grown now, but of her body’s aging alongside his, a measure of their two and a half decades together.
In the video all this is covered by her nylon jogging suit because they’ve both just run side by side in that park in New Hampshire, the bald man behind the wheel and Laura. He and she have run together in the woods and now the man passes her a water bottle and she drinks. In seconds, she will lower the bottle. She will smile at the bald man behind the wheel and he will lean toward her, then sink out of sight. In seconds he will sit up and place Laura’s running shoes on the rear dash, then Laura will lift her hips to make things easier for him, and soon there will be only Laura sitting behind the wheel of this two-door import, her head back, her hand gripping the dash as the bald man does to her what he does, and Mark Welch, the husband of Laura Welch, who twenty-four years ago was Laura Murphy, he now stands in his mother’s garage apartment, his temples pulsing, and he walks through her dim bedroom into the bathroom.
He uses the toilet, splashes his face with cold water three times. He squeezes his eyes shut, and there are the smells of toothpaste and chamomile and cotton. In the darkness he sees the reflection in the swimming pool from last night. He’d been sitting at the round table near the diving board sipping Bacardi with a splash of Coke, his second or his fourth. He’d been watching his wife through the kitchen window, watched her rinse her plate or glass from hours earlier, watched her load them into the dishwasher. When Mary Ann and Kevin were small, when the house was full of their friends and various cousins, that machine would be filled and emptied twice a day, but Mary Ann is in business school down in Cambridge and Kevin has dropped out of Pratt to design his own video games in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, so now, while her cuckolded husband lives with his mother in the attached garage, only Laura Welch inhabits the house and it will take her a full week to fill the machine with what she’s used and left dirty.
Maybe she knew he was out there beside the pool alone after midnight. But probably she did not for just before she flicked off the kitchen’s overhead light she studied her reflection in the window. It was the look a mechanic gives a car engine she knows very well, checking the trouble areas first, then those—thanks to good design and her own hard work—that are still reliable; it was the look of a woman who knows there are probably fewer miles ahead of her than there are behind her, but right now the ride is fairly smooth and there are places along the way to look forward to, places where she will not have to be alone, and for this she’s grateful.
Then there was nothing, only a black window and the yellow glow of the exterior light, its still reflection on the pool’s surface. Mark stared at it and sipped, stared and sipped. It has not been a smooth ride for
him
, has it? No, it has not. But there’s a distance now, a distance from everything. Work and all its endless tasks, his mother and her constant caring for him up there in that apartment he built her—cooking for him, pouring him a drink, making his bed on the couch, trying to get him to talk about Laura and the eviction and divorce his mother insists he must demand. There’s the distance from his own body. He’d never kept it as fit as Laura had hers, but he had not neglected it either. He didn’t smoke, didn’t eat badly, had always drunk moderately, getting drunk only two or three times a year. He occasionally lifted weights in his basement, or jogged for half an hour around his neighborhood, and in the summer he’d swim laps in his pool till he was tired and he would climb out and sit in the sun beside his solitary, sunning wife.
But now his body feels like some dumb beast he merely exists inside, and every now and then it lets him know it needs him to do something: To eat. To piss or shit. To move or just lie down and rest. He does not remember climbing the exterior stairs to his mother’s apartment and couch last night. He does not remember how long he sat near the pool in the dark or when he left the bar where he’d been earlier. But he remembers the woman’s face. Not Laura’s at the kitchen sink but the one in the parking lot. She wasn’t much older than Mary Ann, probably thirty or thirty-one. They’d been talking at the bar under all the noise, the loud mindless chatter, the blaring sound system—ghetto rap that made Mark feel like some white relic from a forgotten time—the drunken laughter of young men in tight T-shirts showing off their gym muscles, tans, and tattoos. It was a place for people his kids’ ages, and Mark felt conspicuous in his Tommy Bahama silk shirt, his slightly gelled hair combed back, the silver glint of his Movado wristwatch, a gift from his company after delivering the Infinity Systems project two weeks early. In the bar mirror behind the top-shelf vodkas, under the amber light of the lamps hanging from a tin ceiling, he did not appear unattractive to himself. Or, to be more precise, he did not appear unattractive to a woman he almost hoped might be looking. At fifty-six, like his very own Laura, his hair had thinned and there was more of his upper forehead visible now, but there was only a scattering of gray at the temples, and his face, while lined around the mouth and under the eyes, the skin more loose under the chin, was still the face he’d had all his adult life, his blue eyes deep-set, his chin not square but not weak either, his teeth small but fairly straight and still in his head.
A drunk woman was talking to him. She had too much makeup on in some places and not enough in others. Her eyes—blue or green or brown—seemed unadorned above cheeks caked with some sort of blush that was supposed to hide acne scars, though Mark could still see them, and he felt immediately sorry for her till he took in the rest of her—her braless breasts behind a bright green sleeveless tube top, her tanned belly, the faded denim skirt riding too high above smooth legs and small feet in high heels, her nails painted an almost fluorescent orange. What he felt then was something other than pity, though now, as he leaves his mother’s bathroom to make coffee in her galley kitchen, he does not remember what that was only that he was surprised the woman was talking to him and he began talking back. It was about music. He had to lean closer to hear her.
“I ate wrap.”
“You ate a wrap?”
“No.” Her voice had been warm and moist in his ear and he could feel it in his groin, a stirring where for months nothing had stirred.
“No, I hate
rap
!”
He nodded in agreement. He was drawn to her: her hatred for this music; her warm, wet voice in his ear; her smell—fruity perfume, cigarette smoke, and coconut oil. Then they were outside in the rear parking lot leaning against her car smoking menthol cigarettes. He wasn’t sure why he said yes when she’d offered him one, but he smoked it like a cigar, inhaling only to his jawbone before blowing out the smoke and watching it rise in the light of the neon beer signs in the bar’s windows a floor above them. And he watched her profile as she talked on and on about something he only vaguely remembers now staring at his mother’s coffeemaker. But then the woman was no longer talking and they were kissing hard up against her car, a ten-year-old Chevy sedan. They were kissing and her tongue was in his mouth. He remembers how soft her lips were, how she tasted like menthol and beer. He remembers his erection pressing against his pants against her tanned belly above that faded denim skirt, and there’s the feeling, though far away, as if it’s floating ten feet above him, that something precious has been irrevocably ruined, and it is not he who should be held accountable. No, not at all: it is Laura, his very own Laura who sleeps alone in their king-size bed, who eats alone at their kitchen’s peninsula, who watches TV alone on the sectional sofa in their living room, and does she still watch those same shows? The crime dramas where so often a family’s life appears ordered and comfortably predictable and then one early morning a man or woman is soon watching her own nest burn?
Almost always, however, it is the husband who does it. This is Laura’s view, too. It’s his fault. Even for this. Eleven weeks and four days ago, she is filmed spreading her legs for another man’s tongue after having just exercised and so she must have still been sweating quite a bit and yet the bald man did it anyway and she said, well
screamed
really. “It’s because of
you
! All you do is
criticize
me! I’m never good enough no matter what I fucking
do
! You
made
me do it!”