He said there'd be no pressure and felt low. She had changed. If a man needs his daughter so much, Dubin thought, maybe he needs somebody else more.
Maud's voice was tender when she said goodbye.
In their bedroom, later, Dubin thanked Kitty for the party.
She was sitting in a chair, her skirt hiked up over her knees, legs raised, looking long at them.
“I have pretty good legs,” she said. “Not bad for my age.”
Dubin agreed.
“Did you like the evening?”
“Yes. Thanks for going to all the trouble.”
She got up to undress. “I don't think of it as trouble, but you don't look very happy.”
“I haven't pretended to be,” he said, though he had.
Kitty asked whether he might care to talk to Evan Ondyk. She said it doubtfully.
“Were you talking to him about me?”
“No. About myself.”
“What would you like me to say to him?”
“Stop being ironic. He might be able to help you pinpoint what's bothering youâto figure out where you stand.”
“I know where I stand. He doesn't know. I doubt he knows where he stands.”
“I know people he's helped. He's an excellent psychotherapist.”
“I don't need his advice. His view of life is reductive. With him a lot more is determined than with me. I know how free I am. I've picked the horse I ride.”
“Never mind the horse. How free do you feel?”
“Once I asked him his interpretation of Thoreau and he came up with the usual can of oedipal worms. There's that but there's more.”
“He's not a literary critic.”
“He's not wise.”
“Neither are you,” said Kitty.
“That's true,” Dubin answered after a pause, “but I know as much about life as he does. Once I didn't, now I do.”
“No, you don't. Maybe you do about the careers of certain accomplished literary figures, but not necessarily about yourself and not necessarily about the unconscious.”
“Biographyâliterary or otherwiseâteaches you the conduct of life. Those who write about life reflect about life. The unconscious is mirrored in a man's acts and words. If he watches and listens to himself, sooner or later he begins to see the contours of the unconscious self. If you know your defenses you pretty much understand what it's about. In my work I've discovered how to discover. You see in others who you are.”
“Mirrored is right. You ought to hear yourself in the bathroom.”
“I hear, I listen. That's the point I'm making. I've lived fifty-eight years.”
“Fifty-seven.”
“Fifty-seven. I think I know myself reasonably well. No one knows himself entirely. There's a mystery in knowing. The big thing is what you do with what you know.”
“You exercise? You lose weight?”
“Right now I'm saying to myself that I
can
exercise and lose weight.”
“Where will it get you?” Kitty asked. “You're still a depressed man who has trouble working. William, I feel there's more to this than either you know or have said.”
She's clever, he thought, but I won't clobber her with honestyânot hers or mine.
He said he had real literary problems with his book. “So far it's a dry piece of work, a compilation of facts rather than a living lifeâit reads like de La Grange's
Mahler
or Blotner's
Faulkner.
I want the juices of life in it. My reaction to it is not, simply, neurosis.”
Kitty had never said it was. “I feel in the dark,” she said, her voice strained. “In the dark I'm afraid. I feel you can't work well for a reason, William. If you know what it is please tell me. Don't keep me in the dark.”
Dubin told her he would tell her when he knew.
“Losing weight won't do it,” Kitty said, looking at him with moist dark eyes. “Nor what you think you know about life because you write biographies. Working it out with someone usually helps. If you don't want to talk to Evan, why don't you go see Dr. Selensaal in Winslow? I hear he's very good.”
“I haven't got that kind of time. Winslow is seventy miles one way and seventy back. It'll kill a day to go there.”
“Go once and talk to him instead of frittering the morning away getting nothing done.”
“Once leads to twice, then twice a week. I haven't got that kind of time.”
“Stop yakking about time, for Christ's sake. You're not doing much with it.”
“Life is what I'm thinking of,” Dubin said. “I know its structure and spin and many of its ways of surprise, if not total pattern or order. I know enough, in other words, to take my chances. I want to run my life my own way, not like yours or Nathanael's. I don't want to go on sharing with you to my dying day the benefits of your previous marriage.”
“That's cruel.”
Kitty drew her dress over her head. He looked away from the mark on her buttock through her white underpants. When he looked again she was slipping on a nightgown.
“Don't be so fucking proud,” Kitty said in bed.
My pain is tolerable, Dubin thought. All I can not do is work.
He fought winter as if it were the true enemy: if he tore into it the freeze would vanish, his ills be gone, his life, his work, fall into place. He would overcome belly, mood, joyless laborâlust for Fanny, the burden of his unhappy experience with her. Dubin assailed winter by daily testing himself: running through its icy womb to demonstrate he was not afraid of the dead season. Not fearing it, he would fear less the dysfunctioning selfâwhat was or was not happening. He ran in rain, slush, in end-of-December fogâto show weather, winter staring at him as he went by, the quality of Dubin's self, his premise, the thought he ran by. As a youth he would hold a burning match till the flame touched his fingertips: if you held the glowing matchstick until the very end, the girl you loved would love you.
It was as hard a winter as Dubin feared it would be. He had to force himself, after breakfast, to open the kitchen door and step into the frozen morning, facing his icy breath. The cold struck him like a blow of a fist. His face tightened; he could tell every stroke he had shavedâa cut on his chin burned like acid. Dubin walked three steps and broke into a run, his spine touched by chill; across the inert grass, through light snow, along the solitary path of the icy-damp morning wood. Thoreau had called winter a resonant instrument that twanged its own music. Dubin, as he ran, heard branches creak in the cold; once on an icy day a dead tree exploded. The listening wood, animistic, druidic, recalled Stonehenge. Occasionally he saw a small animal stirring, rat or weasel scuttering through the brush; or a dark bird in flight, unrecognizable. Dubin thumped alone along the path in the wood.
He left the trees, trotting on the dirt road to the bridge, the stream misting by his side, his breath flowing behind him. If a car appeared this early in the morning, neither jogger nor driver dared look at the other. He slowed down at the bridge, limped through the booming snow-covered construction, crossed the highway, and at the fork relentlessly ran into the long route. There were times he turned back at the wooden bridge: temporary cure: felt he could get into writing if he tried. Dubin turned back rarely. He went on if when he thought of himself it touched pain. The trick was to get into the winter world and out of withinâshift the weight of inner conflict to outside. The cock's tail turns where the cock's head had been. His thoughts therefore were images of gnarled broken-fingered oaks, naked birchesâimagine a white tree! And there were more winter birds around than he had guessed âthe flyways were overpopulated, the South crowded; some birds remained in the snow. And the frozen circular road.
Â
It took him a half hour to turn the shivery clinging cold in his clothes to warmth gained in running. He slowed to a fast walk, past farmhouses with monumental barns looking like forever; cows in winter pasture as still as statues, their breaths flags in motion; frozen fields undulating up the mist-streaked hills. He pushed on in winter silence, every step striding against the force of nothing, aware of roadside mustard-yellow willows, their long yellow strings limply dancing in the cutting wind. He plodded breathlessly up the road, conscious of the weight of ascent, dismal cold, the unhappy task he had set himself. Walking uphill, Dubin stared at his feet lest the hike to the top slay him. Trotting down, he kept his eyes on the beckoning distance. The ascents were endless. Segments of the road he had once thought level, he realized, were pitched up from five to ten degrees. He tried not to stop on the walk up; it was hard to get started again. Ravenous for summer, for an end to the barren season, he hurried on thinking of the next rise or bend. He felt with each step resistance of the long long walk-run, monotony of self-inflicted cure. Climbing is not ascending. My will is my enemy. It restoreth not my soul. Yet he stayed with it: if he overslept he ran faster.
The flutist remembered him at this time as a strained, almost haggard man in motion, heavily bundled up, a grim-faced man who had lost weight, or might, without knowing it, be ill. He wore a red wool hat his wife had knitted, a long striped scarf his wife had knitted, galoshes with unbuckled buckles that clinked as he ran, and a poplin fleece-lined coat with a brown fur collar. Dubin ran slowly, heavily, in snow or slush, as if his boots were lead and each step an ordeal, his sober inward grayish-blue eyes set dimly in the distance. What he saw there Greenfeld hesitated to guess. When they met, although the biographer appeared to be drowning in all there was to say, he was mute. Sometimes in passing he would stammer half a sentence, break off, and hurry on.
William, Oscar cried, let's not forget our friendship. William, it's a lonely world!
Greenfeld was haunted by the expression of Dubin's eyes as he looked back âembittered?âas though the fault was the flutist's that he did not then know what his friend was living through.
Â
When he had returned to the house, after resting awhile he sat at his desk. Dubin never did not work though he stayed with it for shorter intervals of
time, down to an hour and a half each morning. He wrote long swirling sentences on sheets of yellow foolscap and reflected on each. Kitty, one Saturday morning, brought up a cup of consommé. He took a grateful sip and thanked her but did not finish it.
“Don't you like it?”
“Warmingâafter that long haul.”
“Why don't you eat the rest?”
He did not want to eat between meals.
“You're mad,” she said.
After she left he went back to his tortuous sentences. It was a bright sunny day after the New Year. Later she brought up the mail. Kitty bent to kiss him as she handed him an airmail letter.
Â
Fanny hoped to hear from him.
“It isn't easy to write to someone who won't answer you. I know you're there, William, because my letters aren't returned to me. At least your first letter, I had the pleasure of opening it before it hit me in the face like a bucket of ice.
“As you can see by the postmark I have left Murano. Arnaldo wasn't easy to get along with. He was good in bed though not much more than that. When I said I was leaving he begged me to stay. He wanted to marry me but I don't want to be married yet. He got awfully angry, beat his stringy cock on the table. I felt terribly depressed. I hate myself for this kind of thing âI mean going to bed with the nearest guy when I am anxious. In my mind I don't seem to be that kind of person. In my mind you are my friend.
“I am now in Rome, staying with this old friend of mine I mentioned to you that day we broke up. Harvey says I am genuine, whatever mistakes I make. I'm the only woman he knows who can be easy with him when he is impotent. He's sixty-two and was once a singer. He knew my father in L.A. and didn't much care for him. My father used to say I was oversexed and I used to feel awful until one day I realized what
his
problems are.
“Recently, when Harvey and I were standing in a movie line I passed out. In the hospital I thought I was pregnantâthat Arnaldo had knocked me up, but it turned out I had developed a cyst in a fallopian tube because of the IUD I had changed to. I hate the Pill because it makes me bleed. Anyway, I was operated on and lost a tube. I felt deathly depressed until the doctor
said I could still have children. Harvey has been kind to me. He says I am independent and enjoy life, which is partly true.
“I've been thinking of going back to the States to find some sort of steady workâdon't ask me what. I have ideas about what I ought to be doing but am afraid of the next move. I don't want to get into something I can't get out of if I make the wrong choice. Or into something that won't come to much, and will make me feel, again, that I am up Shit Creek in a leaky rowboat. William, please advise me about my life. I like the way you talk to me about myself.