On the road a jogger trotted toward him, a man with a blue band around his head.
He slowed down as Dubin halted.
“What are you running for?” the biographer asked him.
“All I can't stand to do. What about you?”
“Broken heart, I think.”
“Ah, too bad for that.”
They trotted in opposing directions.
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Dubin dropped his bag and embraced his wife. His arms stiffened as it seemed to him hers did. Kitty was nothing if not intuitive, sensed change of emotional weather before it was weather. He had considered telling her he had holed up for a few nights with a young woman in Veniceâwouldn't say who because it would humiliate, wound her, more than if it had been someone other than Fanny Bickâanyway, it had come to nothing, if not less.
Kitty seemed constrained, preoccupied. He wondered whether she sensed something not quite right, off-balanceâsomething wrong? Dubin said nothing about the trip, wouldn't unless she asked, would then say the necessary
lies. It was painful not to be honest with a woman who did not lie. He was, on arrival, heavyhearted.
“You're late,” she said. “Let's eat, I'm ravenous.”
He unlocked his bag and produced a sculptured silver bracelet he had bought her in Stockholm. As she admired it, after a moment of hesitation he unwrapped a pair of antique gold earrings he had chosen for Maud and handed them to Kitty. She inspected the bracelet and earrings with interest. “They're beautiful, William, but one or the other would have been enough. Do you mind if I keep the bracelet and give the earrings to Maud?”
“Suit yourself.”
They kissed affectionately, sat down for a drink, enjoyed dinner. She had prepared a tasty coq-au-vin. Kitty had the wishbone and when they broke it she won the wish.
“For Gerry?”
“For your new biography, and I guess for him too.”
Dubin thanked her.
“How was he?”
He told her in detail; said Gerald had changed his name back to Willis.
She shook her head, eyes distant. “You were so loving to him. It was thoughtful of you to go see him; thank you.”
He asked her not to thank him.
He built a fire in the living-room fireplace and they talked as they sipped coffee. The worst is over, Dubin thought, sitting by the fire, looking forward to his work in the morning. Kitty played the harp, some songs by Mahler. She sang in a small sweet voice.
Dubin woke that night relieved to be rid of Fanny. The week abroad had seemed a year. He sensed his wife was awake and drew her to him. Soon they made love. He would not admit the girl to his mind.
Before she slept he asked Kitty how she had fared while he was away.
“Not badly. I kept busy. The house behaved.”
“You weren't afraid to be alone at night?”
She said she was.
“Why didn't you sleep at Myra's?”
“It doesn't bother her to be alone day or night. I want her to respect me.”
“She respects you.”
“I want her to.”
“Well, I'm home now,” Dubin said. He asked her if Maud had called.
“I called her. She had a nasty cold but is back in class now.”
“Anything new with her?”
“Not with her but there is with me,” Kitty said in the dark bedroom. “I've been working part-time in the library. Mrs. Eliscu is sick and Roger Foster rang me up the day you left to help him out. At least I get paid for work I do. I put in four weekday mornings and one afternoon. I'd prefer afternoons, but they need me most in the morning. I hope you don't mind? I can do your errands after lunch. I'll bring back the paper when I come home at one. Roger asked me to work a full day, but I said I simply couldn't.”
“Let's get back to sleep, we both have to work in the morning.”
“When we were first married I always got up with you.”
Dubin remembered.
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After flipping through a folder full of outlines the biographer began his working day. Rereading what he had written before he took off with Fanny, he was satisfied although a mild sense of waste lingered. Now he felt he'd soon complete the opening chapter and wrote well all morning. Dubin wrote listening to Lawrence's high-pitched insistent voice in his ear, to some degree resisting what he passed on as truth. He had to distance himself from the man to see what he must see. Lawrence wore a coat of many colors, pretending to wear nothing.
Dubin liked what he was writing. Nothing like interrupting the course of daily life to get the mind flowing, enjoying. At least he'd been to another country and had gone through something intense and different; now he lived his life writing another's. He felt for his wife a rush of affection.
On the Saturday morning following the Monday of Dubin's arrival from Sweden, Kitty came upstairs with an airmail letter. “From Italy.” He went on with his typing. “Thanks.” After a minute she left.
He thought he would finish the page.
When he had completed it, Dubin reached for the letter. It was addressed, as he had guessedâhis thoughts of her already were fatiguingâin Fanny's large open slanted writing. Dubin's impulse, after a flash of self-disgust, sadness, remembrance of desire, was to destroy her letter without reading it. He had sensed he would hear from her, although not so soon. Standing apart from himself he tore open the envelope to get it over with so he could go on with his work.
The girl wrote: “I'm in Murano now with the capitano of the motorboat you waited for with me. I changed my mind about going to Rome. I'm writing this after midnight. The stars are out. I love the late hours when nobody but me is awakeâfeel closer to myself. I'm smoking as I look out of Arnaldo's window across the lagoon where Venice is. I like it a lot more than when you and I first came here, have got used to it.
“William, I've been thinking of you a lot and just got out of bed to write to you. I'm wearing the black nightie you liked me in. Over that I have on Arnaldo's sweater. He isn't a bad guy. He has a sense of humor and makes me laugh. He also cooks for us and I don't have to do very much although I wouldn't mind. Anyway, I had this urge to write you. Try not to think too badly of me if you can. Though we aren't the same kind of people in some ways, I think we are alike in others. I wear your bracelet even in bed. Maybe it will bring me luck. I hope you are less angry nowânot that you don't deserve to beâand will write me sometimes. William, I would honestly like to hear from you. I remember some of our nice talks. I'm sorry it ended the way it did. Kind regards, Fanny B.”
Dubin, as he tore the letter up, felt a punitive sense of disgust. From the gondolier to capitano in a short hop over his head. Another promiscuous lover to make her a better person. “I wear your bracelet even in bed.”
Curbing an impulse to lay on sarcastically, the biographer typed out a plainspoken note. “You're right, Fanny, we have fundamental differences of values, not to speak of simple taste. Life is cheapened when there is no basic consideration by people of others. You've cheapened and shamed me. Please don't bother writing again. Yours most sincerely, William B. Dubin.”
He tore her letter to shreds and burned the mound of paper in an ashtray.
In the afternoon he walked with Kitty to the green bridge.
The weekend was pleasantâunexpected visitors from New York City, an old law-school friend with his wife. They drove to Great Barrington to see a mutual friend.
On Monday morning, after quickly putting down a solid paragraph, Dubin felt as though he had walked into a wall. His thoughts were scattered. He felt vapid, vague, something pecking at the back of his mind, as though he'd forgotten to do what he had meant to. Nothing he could think of except to be joyfully into his biography. After a half hour of trying to concentrate he realized there'd be no second paragraph, good or bad, that day. It was a darkish November morning. Dubin turned on the desk lamp but that didn't
help. He set aside his notes and spent the rest of the morning on business correspondence.
In the afternoon he went for his walk and after returning got into the car and slowly drove the same route, as though searching for something he had lost on the road.
“You look like someone holding his breath underwater,” Kitty said as she came down the stairs. “Would you like me to fix you a drink?”
“Too early.” Dubin remarked he'd had a poor day.
“They come and they go,” she said.
“They come and they go.”
“Sometimes I feel I'd like to see you give up that freaky D. H. Lawrence.”
Dubin said he couldn't, had invested years in him. His voice sounded throaty.
Kitty, at the window, cheerfully said it was beginning to blizzard. She called any snowstorm a blizzard.
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Fanny beats my brains, he said to his looking glass.
Mad, this reaction. He recalled her for the thousandth time in her black dress and pumps of that last unhappy morning together. She had been at her most desirableâwhy not if what you're playing with is loss?âas if she had finally become focused as a beautiful woman, defined in a way that had evaded her until the last moment. How else defined? As a bitch? Or a woman who had made a serious mistake and perhaps regretted it? Otherwise promiscuity is narcissism; identity lacking, probably something to do with her ungiving father. I would have been good for her. No use thinking these things, Dubin thought: they took you nowhere. Nowhere was an intensity of not having.
He stood at the bathroom window, staring at the mist-streaked distant mountains. The Vermont mountains, tying up with others in flanking ranges in New York, ran in a broken semicircle creating small valleys, one of which contained Center Campobello. Lawrence hadn't cared for mountains “intruding” through his window. Dubin liked them drawing his gaze into the distance; he made no symbol of them. The nearest peak was due north, a scraggy mass of twenty-eight hundred feet, in summertime covered with pines up its low sloping left flank. It had no name he could locate on the map and he called it Mt. No Name. The first snowfall of November had
amounted to a thin inch. Most of it had melted. No Name wore on its pate a crooked white crown. The wooded New York hills were dusted with snow âthe woods in their winter underwear. He had to tell himself to quit looking. What a fool I was, when it was going well, to take that little hooker to Venice.
For two days the sunlit study resounded with the pounding of his machine as he retyped his opening chapter. Now I'm traveling again. He felt at the same time wild little thoughts, small fires of Fanny he managed to damp down: Dubin outthought them. After he had stacked twenty-three newly typed pages he consulted his notes and wrote a fine paragraph; but when he reread it twenty minutes later the paragraph grinned through broken teeth. Lawrence was a stiff boy, walked on stilts. His phallic mother was stiffly withdrawn. Who's the problem, him or me? The way I work or how he evades me? Dubin felt like a sculptor working with hardened clay.
Why the foreboding? He hadn't for years felt himself at fate's mercy but here she was doing her belly dance. A thoughtless girl, careless of him, had made a jackass of Dubin, shamed him as he hadn't ever been. During which timeâbefore and afterâalmost anything I say to Kitty as truth is a lie: “Did you miss me in Italy, William?” she asks at breakfast. “Yes and no,” I say, and she laughs at something she isn't laughing at. Then with a reflective look she says, “I sometimes have the feeling you'd get along well without me.” “Yes, but why would I want to?” “I don't know,” she says. He felt himself cut down a bloody inch. Doubt Dubin, doubt the biographer. Diminish the man, the writing suffers. He felt short of something he had had before he took off on a wild-goose chase for experience with Fanny.
Trotting downstairs later to heat the coffeepot, he took a minute to listen to the news on the radio: Nixon in press conference. Dubin shut it off in embarrassment.
He recalled Emerson's remark: “All that is clearly due today is not to lie.” Emerson, liar? Everyone lies. Why am I making so much of it? Bad business, tying up behavior with writing biography.
After pouring his coffee he telephoned Kitty at the library. “Aren't you working?” she asked.
He understood the anxious question. If your husband or children ducked duty her boat rocked.
“You know the answer before you ask the question.”
“You never call me in the morning,” she explained.
“I'll see you at lunch, my coffee's cold,” Dubin said. “Don't forget the paper.”
“I almost never do.” She hung up.
Kitty rang back. “I didn't mean to be impatient. If something's wrong, for Pete's sake, tell me. Was there anything in the mail that bothered you?”