He said he and his wife had discussed the subject more than once that past winter.
“What did you decide?”
“Nothing new. We were married, we stayed married.”
Fanny reached down and plucked a blade of grass to suck on. “Like she expects you to go on forever protecting her?”
“Like she has character,” Dubin answered. “Like I respond to it.”
She threw the grass away. “Maybe I have character too.”
Dubin hoped so.
After a wet morning and overcast late morning a warm sunny afternoon evolved. Large long clouds slowly sailed by.
“Oh, shit,” the girl suddenly cried, hopping on one leg. “My foot is bleeding. I stepped on something.”
She had cut the ball of her left foot on a piece of slate. Fanny sat down in the grass. The cut bled. Dubin got down on his knees to examine her foot.
“It doesn't look deep but it ought to be bandaged so you can get back to your car. The pond is close by. I could wet my handkerchief, wash the cut, and bandage your foot.”
“You don't have to wash my foot, William. Just tie something around it so I don't get my sandal sticky with blood when I put it on. I just bought a new pair.”
Dubin tried finger pressure to stop the bleeding.
“Here's some kleenex,” Fanny said, pulling a wad out of her bag. “Use it and don't get your hankie bloody.”
But he insisted on binding his handkerchief around her foot, knotting it on the arch. “The cut should be sterilized.”
“I have a tube of first-aid cream in my glove compartment.”
“I'll go get it.”
“Not now,” said Fanny. “I won't get blood poison. Or will I?” she asked worried.
“I'll get the cream.”
“No,” she said. “It's not a bad cut.”
“Is the bandage too tight?”
“It feels comfortable.”
With Dubin's assistance she got up. “Every time I see you I get some kind of free medical treatment. Did you ever want to be a doctor?”
“A lawyer,” he said, “a drastic mistake.”
The biographer suggested they turn back to the car but Fanny still wanted to see the water in the quarry.
“Can you go where it's rocky?”
“I'll take it easy. I think the bleeding has stopped.”
They went on in the grass, Fanny hop-walking on her heel, and passed through the warm leaf-dappled mildewed oak wood; then ascended the sloping granite rock to look down at the green water in the jagged deep basin.
“It's a lot bigger than I thought. Do you swim here?”
“I come to look at the water.”
“Want to try?”
“It's dirtier than I thought. Besides, we have no towels.”
“You could dry yourself with your underwear.”
“Why don't you go in yourself?”
“Never mind,” Fanny said. “It might start my foot bleeding again.”
They sat at the edge of the water, opposite them a palisade of earth and marble debris out of which some alders and white birch grew and many thick ferns; below, the granite wall was stained tan, gray, black.
The granite had been almost totally mined and the pit left to weather many years before Dubin came to Center Campobello. He had found the quarry in an adventurous jaunt with Kitty and still came every season to observe the reflection of the trees in the water. In the autumn Dubin watched yellow leaves floating in green water.
Fanny, piling her hair on her head, tried to see herself in the pond.
“Do you like my hair this way? It's not too short?”
Dubin didn't think so.
She let her hair fall and combed it, looking for herself in the water.
Fanny, with her bandaged foot and shorn hair, sat close to William Dubin as if they had no prior history. Her thighs were bare, bosom relaxed. The day was high and quiet.
Dubin recalled Venice dispassionately. Ah, William, nature's child, who would remotely have guessed you'd find your way to this spot in her company this day? He sat listening as the girl, her fingers interlocked behind her head, unshaved armpits visible, talked about her travail in Rome.
Harvey's death had seriously got her down. “He was always kind to me, sort of kidded me out of the blues I got into. I met him through his shmucky son Mitchell, who was an orthodontist in Jersey City. Mitch misused me when I was a kid and Harvey found out in a stupid letter I wrote that he had left around. I mentioned the sexual things he had taught me and told him those I liked. After he read the letter Harvey got pissed and warned him to leave me alone or I might get him thrown in the can on a statutory-rape rap, plus impairment of the morals of a minor. Harvey said if I or my father didn't bring charges he just might.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen when I met him, sixteen when Harvey broke it up.”
She said she had met Mitchell at her cousin Mildred's wedding. “He was built, with a good ass and strong shoulders. He had brown hair, reddish sideburns, and came on very macho. Anyway, he gave me a lot of attention and a wedding is where you want to feel good. He turned me on by talking about sex in a way that made me feel it was very mysterious and only he knew how to make it happen.
“I was having hot thoughts and went with him to his apartment after the wedding. Then for the next year almost, till Harvey found that letter, we were in bed or on the floor every Sunday afternoon. I took the bus in Trenton to Jersey City, then a cab to his apartment. He gave me the carfare. Mitchell taught me all the joys of sex and some that were kinky.”
“Bastard,” murmured Dubin.
“When I finally got away from him I was pretty much scared of sex for years. I bet you never guessed that? The best thing that came of my experience with Mitchell was that night Harvey called me when I was feeling low, and we got to be friends, and I have never regretted it.”
“Why did you let the affair with the son go on so long?”
“Because I wasn't sure about it and thought the more I learn about sex the better for me. I thought everybody had to know what I learned from him. Besides, he said he loved me and I thought he really did. He even filled my cavities and straightened my front teeth. The first thing he did when I got there on Sundays was to take off my braces so that kisses wouldn't hurt.”
“An ape,” Dubin ventured.
Fanny said he wasn't such a bad guy. “I liked certain things we did. Outside of his habit of screwing whenever he wasn't working his heart was in the right place. He practiced a day a week in a free clinic and wouldn't
charge poor people. Harvey said he was the narcissist of the family. When I understood his nature I felt sorry for him. He's been in psychoanalysis about twenty years.”
Dubin grunted.
“I had a shaky time after we broke up. When I was seventeen I felt fifty years old. I wasn't getting much out of school but hung in because somehow or other my grades were decent. I went to college. About then I began to sleep around. I was afraid I might become frigid after Mitch, and was scared. I got anxious and slept with people I shouldn't have slept with. I was depressed and used to pray. Then one day I read a book by Havelock Ellis and it helped me orient myself differently. I also was seeing a shrink although my father begrudged every nickel. Anyway, by the time I was twenty I began to enjoy sex again and I want to go on enjoying it, like forever.”
“Once you told me your sexual experience had made you a more moral person. Does that relate to the experience with Mitchell or its aftermath?”
“I said a better person.” She looked him full in the face. “I'll bet you thought of me as a hooker?”
“If I did, I don't.”
“I'm not. I was ashamed of what happened in Venice. It was freaky, I was confused.”
Fanny had opened her bag, found the trillium, and tossed it into the water.
He asked her why.
“I wanted to see it float.”
They watched the three-petaled red flower floating in the green quarry water.
Fanny, after a while, asked Dubin what his first sex was like.
“With an older woman,” he replied, “doing a repair job.”
“On you?”
He nodded. “She was married, a teacher of mine. I had read
Sons and Lovers
with her.”
“How long did it last?”
“Not long. Long enough.”
He asked her about Harvey. “Was he your lover before we met?”
“Not really. He was into marijuana and pottery, never quite putting it together. I stayed with him for weeks just to be with one man. There were times when we wanted to love each other but couldn't. I tried to help him keep up his confidence.”
“You were kind to him?”
“We were kind to each other.”
Fanny's arms were wrapped around her knees. She extended her left hand so he could see the bracelet he had bought her. “I wear it for luck.”
“How so?”
“You let me keep it.”
The light on the eastern hills was dark gold as the sun descended in the west.
“It's late,” Dubin said.
“I'll bet you don't know why I first came to Center Campobello,” Fanny said.
“Was there a particular reason?”
“I read your book
Mark Twain
when I was staying in the commune on Tupper Lake. The way he was at the end of his life after Susy died, and then his wife, and he also felt miserable for treating his epileptic daughter like an idiot all her lifeâthat part wiped me out.”
“At the end of his life he lived in a theater of shmalzy misery,” Dubin said.
“Shmalzy?”
“He enjoyed cigars and being a celebrity. He was deteriorating physically and mentally, but maybe in the book I laid on his aging and loneliness a bit much.
Thoreau
is a better-proportioned, more objective work.”
“I read it in Rome. Harvey bought it for me as a present when I was in the hospital. I like Thoreau but wouldn't want to live his kind of life, although I liked the way he felt about himself at Walden. What I mean is that after I finished reading
Mark Twain
somebody said you had a house in this town and I decided to see if you would meet me if I came here.”
“Extraordinary.”
“I hoped we could really talk, that you would want to. I wanted somebody other than a shrink to advise me about my life, how to get it together better than I did. I had the feeling you could tell me useful things about myself. I never thought we would end up going to Venice. When you asked me I felt let down.”
“What did you expect after undressing in my study?”
“I don't know what I expected. I was afraid of you and didn't want to be, so I went with you.”
“I'm sorry I didn't respond more appropriately to your needs.”
“You did in your books. The only one I don't like is
Short Lives.
”
“Is that so? It's awfully popular in paperback.”
“Oh?” Fanny said nervously. “I don't want to read about people ass backwards. I don't dig death hanging over everything they do or created. Are you afraid of death?” .
“Not of death but maybe what leads to it.”
“Doesn't life lead to it?”
“I'm speaking of sickness, accidentâbeing incapacitated; unable to run my life; that can be worse than death. I'm afraid of the unexpected. What I expect I can deal with. On the other hand these short lives show how intensely and creatively life can be lived even when it is early aborted. In terms of years lived, they missed little; they weren't counting.”
“If you're dead you're dead,” Fanny said. “Nobody has to tell me what to do with my life, only how to get it together. I know all I want to about death. I don't want my nose rubbed in it.”
“It's late,” Dubin said after a minute, “let's go home.”
She stared at him.
He helped her up, noticing she stood firmly on the cut foot.
Fanny promised to wash the blood out of his handkerchief and mail it to him.
He asked her where she had got the locket she was wearing.
She fingered it. “Harvey gave it to me about a week before his heart attack.”
“A whole heart for a broken one?”
“He liked me a lot.”
Fanny asked him whether Dubin would answer if she wrote to him once in a while.