“No. You know how it is at the beginning of a long work.”
“You began months ago.”
“It's a long beginning.”
He awoke the next day in unease. As Dubin shaved he considered calling Maud but it was 4 a.m. in California.
He wished Kitty were staying home; they'd talk. What would he tell her? Not that he had had the girl but she had had him. Why bother telling her anything if there are no laughs in the story? What good will it do either of us if I make myself, in her eyes, a rare ass?
At breakfast he suggested he might want the car. “Roger will drive you home, I'm sure.”
“I can call a taxi.” Her eyes were tired. After sipping her coffee she asked, “Are you still having trouble?”
“Everyone's accounted for but isn't particularly present.”
He thought of telling her truly about Fannyâget himself balanced again. No, he thought, if the writing were going well my conscience would be calm.
“Maybe you're pressing too hard?” she asked.
“Maybe.”
“Shouldn't you try working before giving up for the day?”
“Please don't tell me when to work.”
“Would you like me to read the chapter and give you my opinion?”
He said he would not.
Kitty examined her eyes in a pocket mirror. She had on the blue batik dress she had just bought and an attractive pair of black single-strap shoes.
“I could call Roger and say I wasn't coming in,” she suggested. “We could drive into the Berkshires for the day?”
But Dubin thought she was right: he ought to reassess his priorities.
“Which ones?”
“I might give up on Lawrence. If the book's wrong for me, it's wrong.”
Kitty set down her coffee cup and studied him. She got up, rinsed a dish, put it away, sat down. Her expression was calm, her voice even.
“William, don't make so much of this. You've had dry periods before and you'll have them again. I'll tell you what: let's goof off. I can ask for Monday off. We'll drive to Lake Champlain, and if we feel like it, go on up to Quebec City for the weekend.”
He said, after a long moment, he wouldn't know what to do with himself once he got there.
“Is that how you feel?”
As of now it was how he felt.
She took a last quick swallow of coffee, rinsed her cup and placed it in the dishwasher. “I'm late. Do you want to drive me to work? I really don't mind if you go for a ride by yourself.”
But Dubin said she could have the car.
Kitty buttoned her coat and tied on a head scarf. “Please air the kitchen if you think of it. The house is smelly.”
“What does it smell of?”
“Burnt toast.”
“I think it smells of us.”
She drove off. He realized she hadn't returned to breathe at the burners.
Moved by a variety of useless impulses, he went through the house listing things that needed tending to. You skip work, trivialities assail you. Still, any activity is better than none. Dubin aired the kitchen. He went through the refrigeratorâthrew out two rotting lemons, moldy butter, cheese rinds. Sometimes she didn't know what the hell she had there. He arranged bottles, like with like, and separated butter bars from margarine.
In the cellar he discovered a puddle under the hot-water tank and phoned the plumber. He swept the cellar floor, emptied the kitchen garbage container into the can outside. He tried reading a detective story but couldn't stay with it. Dubin plucked at the strings of Kitty's harp.
In his study he thumbed through his second-chapter notes, looking for a compelling opening idea. If he found one he'd write a sentence. Sentences bred sentences. But the notes tensed him: they were only notes, separate, discrete, like seashells in a box. It was stupid, he thought, to try to work when the idea was not to; to give the brain a rest.
On a card he read, D. H. Lawrence had said to his girl: “I don't believe in the idea of one man for one woman, do you? I mean, there just isn't one woman and one only that a man can marry.” Cunning question, foreshadowing the brushoff; she never got over him.
Dubin climbed the stairs to the third-floor unfinished room they called the attic, where the kids had often played. He flicked on the light, moved by a sense of past time rooted in his children's childhood, and poked around in their abandoned toys, books, folders of drawings and correspondence Kitty had saved. She tore up letters she answered but those she saved were from the children and Dubin. That made family history. He had never been able to find Nathanael's letters.
On an impulse he searched in a footlocker for Maud's white wool hat with blue band. Was it still alive or had it been given away? He could not find it, nor any of the dolls she had played with. He remembered a valentine she'd drawn and searched for it. Dubin found the one he'd had in mind, a red-crayoned heart addressed to “Willyam, Be My Valentine,” but it was signed “Gerald” in black letters. In apology he touched the paper to his lips.
He kept hunting for something of Maud's, perhaps a note from summer camp when she was nine or ten. Maud still wrote rarely, once in a while a satisfying letter, then months of titbit phone calls. Some were talky calls, others little more than formalities: she was checking in, and what she really said was what she didn't say. She didn't say what most affected her. That ran in the family, began with his mother. Dubin left the attic room. He had wanted one of Maud's affectionate notes as a child to keep in his pocket. The uses of the dwindling past.
The biographer walked downtown in his galoshes, mackinaw, long tan-and-black scarf Kitty had knitted him; took her a year to do the thing. The day was crisp, the wind whipping by, snow flurries scattered through the leafless trees all morning. After withdrawing cash from the bank, having nothing better to do he crossed the street and paid the gas bill, groaning inwardly at the uselessness of the act on a perfectly good day. Since it was already close to one, he thought he'd stop off at the library and let Kitty drive him home. As he came up the street he saw her standing with Roger on the library steps; Dubin could tell as she spokeâthe way her body movedâthat she was emotional. Roger, since Dubin had last seen him, wore an Edwardian haircut with long sideburns. The biographer considered turning quickly and walking back before they spotted him. Kitty seemed troubled. Dubin worried that Roger, having heard from his friend Fanny about the asinine Venetian adventure, had told his wife the happy news.
But they had seen him and instantly stopped talking. Dubin had paused to retie his shoelaces and pull up his socks. He approached with tight gut,
concerned that he had lost first chance to tell her himself; that the librarian, whose business it was not, had informed her in his place. Roger thrust forth his hand and Dubin unwillingly took it.
“Kitty said you've been abroad, Mr. Dubin.”
“For a week. What else have you heard?”
Kitty gazed at him with surprised wet eyes. Before he could speak again âto utter what idiocy?âshe broke in: “Mrs. Eliscu has cancer of the breast. Roger heard from her husband a half hour ago. They have three small children.”
With a hidden sigh Dubin expressed regret. He also regretted his stupid remark to Roger but no one had made anything of it.
“Have a good time?” Roger asked. He'd never been comfortable with Dubin, and wasn't now, in his green suit, blue tie, field boots. Roger rarely wore an overcoat. He had hot blood, he had once told Dubin. Where? Dubin had almost asked. With a nod, Roger walked down the steps to his car at the curb.
“Anybody I can give a lift to?”
Dubin said Kitty had their car.
“He knows,” she said impatiently.
“Then why did he ask?”
Roger waved and drove off.
“Why aren't you nice to him?” Kitty asked.
He said he had nothing against Roger. I feel like a jackass and he acts like one. Kitty seemed apart from, almost uncomfortable with him.
If they weren't talking about Fanny, I ought to be, he thought.
“What brought you here?” Kitty asked as though expecting bad news.
He said he had walked into town to get some cash.
“I could have done that easily.”
“I needed something to do.”
“Are you giving up on your book?”
“Not as of right now.”
They kissed as though greeting, then got into the car and drove to the supermarket. Twice, as they walked the long grocery aisles, Kitty dropped a can he had picked off the shelves.
“My hands are small,” she explained to her husband.
They hadn't for years shopped together for groceries, and Dubin enjoyed it despite the wasted day.
Though the biographer felt he was dealing with a literary as well as a psychological problem, obviously one tied up to the other. There were too many reverberations of Fanny, too much static in his head, too much guilt. He had reacted as though his character had failed him; the true failure was one of judgment. Dubin wanted to put his thoughts in order by getting to work and doing it well. To not work regularly was to fall into the condition he was out to avoid: purpose sidetracked, the mind adrift; Dubin left on the pier, the ship gone. Montaigne had believed his effective judgment was instrumental in keeping him in good physical health.
He had returned heavier than he'd left, as though misery had paid interest in flesh. He disliked the bounce of his belly as he briskly walked or ran. He disliked the naked sight of himself in the closet-door mirror; pictured youthful slimness, not impossible. He figured he'd cut out brandy after dinnerâdrink less wine at the dinner table, eat smaller portions. Kitty had a booklet of low-calorie foods; he'd ask her to watch his intake. To get himself effectively together he had to put himself in shape. In fooling with Fanny he'd allowed desire to overflow the workaday life. A pipe had broken, the psyche was flooded. He must rid himself of his ongoing half-jealous thoughts of the girlâthese irritating intrusive two-bit emotionsâmake the floodwaters of the unconscious recede. He had once more to be the man he'd been;
who Dubin was.
Besides starving his belly he wrestled it off. From youth he had exercised dailyâshades of Gatsbyâhis personal need, in accord with controlling, shaping. But after Maud was born, though Kitty approved calisthenics, he performed superficiallyâtoo much to do to earn a living. And he was walking more after they had moved into the country; had invented his long course in nature, part of which he trotted. Now Dubin revived the old setting-up exercises, not easy to go back to at age fifty-six: pushups, bending, pedaling, pulling his knees into the offending gut. In his striped shorts he danced around Maud's room as Kitty slept, the floorboards creaking, a squeak for each shift. He worked resolutely a half hour each morning, protesting in the pit of the self at the effort one had to make, the inertial strain of fabricating monotonous movement, as though he were dragging a carcass of himself back and forth across the floor, frightful bore if present necessity. Indeed necessity. Dubin fought the possessed self.
Afterward, although Kitty was rising early, for her, to go to the library, he
had breakfast alone. He'd got into the habit when Maud was an infant and Kitty, when she could, slept later. Dubin liked being alone at that hour, enjoying morning light, morning quiet, thinking whatever thought; relaxed. Now breakfast, given diet, was a chore. He kept the repast simple: fruit followed by sugarless black coffee, with half a slice of bread. For lunch the food made little difference; he ate minuscule portions. Kitty shook her head. But dinner, in principle, satisfiedâif that was the wordâwhere there wasn't that much satisfaction. Kitty broiled fish or lean meat, served one green or yellow vegetable, offered sugarless dessert. She clicked her tongue at his modest helpings. Dubin finished the meal hungryâpraise moderation, though little after not much all day was hard to bear.
It wasn't easy, after rising from the table, not to dip his fingers into a Swiss chocolate bar he had hidden in a desk drawer; but if he went quickly upstairs and brushed his teeth he brushed away the compelling hunger. He learned to eat slowly, let each forkful of food, each permitted sip of wine, ride the length of the tongue. He savored well the little he ate; and still smoked an occasional cigarillo though he'd given up serious smoking long ago.
Kitty, although friendlier to less rather than more, disliked seeing him at diet's mercy.
At his own mercy, he insisted.
“But isn't the diet what you went on mainly because of your trouble working?”
He more or less nodded.
She said no more; nor did he.
The day's work, if it comes to something, burns out night's dross; night craps in your pants. For the investment the biographer makes in gathering himself together on cold hard mornings, in coming drearily to life, he expects some accomplishment during the dayâa good deed, it helps. Dubin felt he was getting nothing much. But though change took its time he daily expected signs of a forthcoming visit. He watched for it out of his better eye, two might scare it away. After Thanksgiving, when winter set in with a wind and a bang, he sat regularly at his desk, promising himself he would stay with it if something good evolved; but day after day very little didâan aimless page or two; so he wentâafter three prescribed working hoursâfor a routine walk in any weather, the next sequential imposition on the poor self; a man had to conjure up some relief from nothing much achieved.