“At first I thought it was a bull.”
“With those teats?”
“I'm not wearing my contacts.”
They climbed over another low wall into county property, walking along an overgrown broad path, remnant of a former road. Nearby a narrow brook flowed through the matted grass, turning where some two-trunked silver beeches grew. Fanny thought it would be fun-following the water; Dubin said if it was water she liked there was a pond in a quarry not too far from there. Beyond those trees he pointed to.
It seemed, she thought, a good way to go.
Fanny, as they were walking amid a scattering of bushes and small trees on the overgrown path, as if they were now far enough away from Europe to talk about their late mutual misadventure, asked, “Why didn't you answer my letters? I honestly regretted what happened and said I respected you but the letter you sent me was a mean son-of-a-bitch.”
“Mean was how I felt and the winter was freezing. I was in no mood to correspond with you.”
“Is that the way you still feel?”
“Detached,” Dubin told her solemnly. “I think I've earned it.” He said he hadn't felt too bad when he had left Italy but once he was home self-disgust came down hard on him. “After your letter, and for other reasons I won't go into, I was depressed and couldn't work. I've never lived through a worse winter.”
“I said I was sorry,” she said sullenly. “I did a stupid thing but a lot that led to it was your own stupid fault.”
“In Venice you said you did it to hurt me; you did a good job.”
“Because you made it pretty clear to me that you wanted only so much
of me and no more. I wasn't to interfere with you or crawl into your life. I was to be invisible.”
“I was protecting my wife.”
“Who was protecting me?”
He didn't say.
“I'm not saying you weren't considerate and kind in nice ways that I really appreciate. But when I was having a bad trip in Rome and wrote for some advice and understanding, you didn't even bother to be civilized. I felt pretty bad.”
“That's what I was hoping.”
“You got your hope.”
“For your sakeâ”
“Whosever,” Fanny said bitterly.
If it was only her body I wanted, why the long heartbreak? And if I was in love with a child how could I have been?
“Are you still sore at me?”
“I told you how I feel, I've lived the experience, lived through it.”
“I don't bear grudges either,” Fanny said quietly. “I don't have that kind of nature.”
He complimented her on her nature.
He would give her, Dubin reflected, fifteen minutes, then walk her to her car and hit the road.
Fanny, her mood amiable, strode on freely. That she should now be walking by his side after the winter he had experienced seemed to him almost laughable, one of life's little jokes. Yet better so than having the memory of her as she was in Italy locked in the mind forever as his last view of her.
The biographer told her they were passing an abandoned orchard. “Nobody sprays the trees or picks the worm-eaten apples. They stay on the branches into winter, looking like red bulbs on a Christmas tree. I've seen crows peck at them through snow.”
Fanny said she had never seen anything like that. “Why doesn't somebody spray the apples?”
“There was a house here belonging to the people who owned the orchard. When the man died the widow had it moved away on rollers. The land, I understand, later went to the county for non-payment of taxes.”
They arrived at a clearingâbefore them in the long fields a spangling of wild flowers, soft islands of blue, yellow, white, violet in the hazy green grass.
He remembered Lawrence had said wild flowers made him want to dance. Dubin felt happy but kept it to himself. The flower-stippled meadow extended to a crescent of oaks a quarter of a mile away.
“Do you know wild flowers, Fanny?”
“Just a few. Most of my life I've lived in cities, first in Trenton, and when I was seventeen we moved to L.A. I like the country, though, and have since I was small and was sent to camp. I once thought of majoring in environmental studiesâpreserving animals, forests, the land, you know.”
“Why didn't you?”
“I got good enough grades but my heart wasn't in staying in college. I was restless with myself.”
He pointed to buttercups, then daisies. “Those are oxeye daisies. Do you know what the word means?âthe day's eye, Fannyâbeautiful, the sun in a flower.”
She fished a plastic case out of her bagâher contact lenses. Fanny wet them with the tip of her tongue, then pulled her eyelids apart and dabbed in each lens with her index finger. “Jesus, what pretty flowers!”
He pointed to a cluster of light-blue tiny flowers. “Do you know those?”
“Yes, forget-me-nots, I know them.”
“Do you know the red ones thereâtrillium? They're also called red rooster.”
Fanny clucked like a hen.
Dubin picked a flower and handed it to her.
At first she looked as though she didn't know what to do with it, then held it in her left hand.
“The bright yellow flat open ones are celandine,” he said. “I once knew a girl by that name.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“I loved her.”
“Is there a Fanny flower?”
“Not that I know but there is a sweet William.”
“Male chauvinism,” Fanny laughed.
Dubin chuckled huskily. He waded into the grass and plucked a white blossom. “This could be wild lily of the valley. I'm not sure, I'll have to look it up when I get home.” He slipped the flower into his wallet.
“Do you have a flower book?”
“My wife has a dozen.”
Fanny thought she would buy herself one next time she went into a bookstore. “It's about time I got to know some of them.” Then she asked, “What about the blossoms on those bushes? Do you know the names of them?”
Dubin said it was odd about the shrubs there. “They're cultivated, not wild. The only way I can explain itâI figure this from the depression in the earthâis that once the house I mentioned stood here. The woman had shrubs growing around the place. That's bridal wreath you asked about. It's beginning to wither.”
“How pretty some of those names are. What do you call those?”
“Mock orange. You have to smell the blossoms to be sure. There are others that look like them but have no scent.”
“I can smell the orange,” Fanny said. She had picked a blossom and touched it to her lips.
“It's mock orange.”
“How do you know them all?”
Dubin said he didn't know that many. “Lawrence seemed to recognize every flower in creation. Thoreau catalogued anything he saw or met in the woods, literally hundreds of flowers. I know few.”
“Man, you know all these.”
“My lucky day. Some fields I pass I don't know more than Queen Anne's lace. My wife taught me most of them and some flowering bushes. When I forget their names I ask her again.”
“How is she doing these days?” Fanny wanted to know. “Are her glands still bothering her?”
He said she was fine.
“You mentioned her yourself just now,” she said slightly stiffly. “Roger happened to tell me she was good in her library work.”
He affirmed his wife was fine.
“Does she still go around sniffing the gas burners?”
Dubin said he was used to the burners. “I try not to say anything when she smells them, and for that I expect her not to comment when I yell at myself in the bathroom mirror.”
“She and I never liked each other much.”
“Cleaning house wasn't your act, Fanny.”
They were walking a few feet apart, Fanny kicking the flowers. “I'm not
criticizing or anything like that but did you know she'd go around smelling the gas before you married her?”
“You can't know everything in advance or what's marriage for? You take your chances. Whoever marries you will be taking one.”
“You can say that again. But I may not want to get married.”
“It's not so bad. In a marriage, after a while you learn what's given: who your wife is and you are, and how well you can live with each other. If you think you have a chance you're married. That's your choice if nothing else was.”
“It's not much of one.”
“We met in a curious way,” Dubin explained. “Once I said I'd tell you about it. It was like not really meeting until we were ready to. She had written a letter more or less advertising for a husband.”
“And you answered it?” Fanny said in pretend-astonishment.
“I happened to read it, though it wasn't addressed to me, and another she wrote canceling the intent of the first. To make it short, I became interested in her. We corresponded until we had developed some sense of each other. If a man and woman stay around trying to define themselves, at a certain point they become responsible one to the other. So we met, looked, talked, and after a while arranged to be married.”
“What do you mean âarranged'?”
“That's how I think of it. Kitty may have a better word.”
“Were you in love with her? Like with Celandine?”
“She was someone I wanted to love.”
“Did she feel that way?”
They had gone through the flowers and were approaching a small wood of thick-armed dark-green oaks whose trunks were spotted with mold.
“I imagine there was an expectation of love. If you feel that, it doesn't take long to happen.”
“Why didn't you live together first and try it out?”
“In those days,” he explained, “few did that, Fanny. You got married. Those who didn't were rare birds and not always happy ones. Kitty was a widow with a child. I needed to be settled.”
“Do you love her now? When I passed you on the road before I thought you looked lonely.”
“Some are lonelier than others. My mother, in her sad way, was very lonely; my father had to be. I suppose I'm more than ordinarily a solitudinous
type. It's not a curse if you learn what the pleasures of it are. But that's another story.”
“I can't stand being lonely. There are no pleasures in it for me.”
“You shouldn't have many worries, you seem to make friends easily.”
She wanted to know how he meant that.
Dubin said he was not saying she was promiscuous.
“You'd better not because I'm not. If I was once I'm not any more.” She looked at him intently. “Do you believe that?”
He wasn't sure but said he did. “What are your questions asking, Fanny?”
“About marriage. Everybody talks about it differently. I like to know what it is.”
“âBear and forbear,' Sam Johnson defined it.”
“That's not much.”
“He was very sensible about marriage as he was in most things.”
“What about you?”
“In the best of marriages you give what you can and get back as much or more. With the right people it's a decent enterprise. It gives pleasure.”
“It sounds too much like work to me.”
“Thomas Carlyle, who had an awful marriage, called it âa discipline of character.'”
“I wouldn't want that kind of marriage,” she said impatiently.
“What kind would you want?”
“I don't think I want to get married. It wore my mother out. She hates my father.”
Dubin said he understood.
“What do you understand?”
“A little more about you.”
“Maybe you do and maybe you don't.”
“I think I do.”
“What I mean is do you really understand what I'm likeâwhat my needs are, for instance?”
He had some idea. “You've described yourself in your letters.”
“I didn't tell you everything.”
“I've seen you in action. Some things I can guess.”
“I bet you'd be wrong.”
“Possibly.”
“Possibly,” she mimicked him.
Fanny dropped the red trillium he had given her into her shoulder bag. “Did you ever want a divorce?”