On their way home the next morning, Kitty driving, chatty, Dubin quiet, barely aware of scene or sight, he worried about the spreading dishonesty he was into. Awful, if you thought of yourself as an honest man. You spoke pebbles and pieces of metal and when you determined to say honest words you kept spitting out bits of brackish metal.
Since lying was beyond Kitty, or she beyond it, lying to her tainted his pleasure with Fanny, at least in afterthought. Kitty was trustworthy; Dubin hated to think he wasn't. Of course he could tell her the truth and hope for the best. Some men were able to inform their wives and still manage to carry on an affair. But Kitty wouldn't tolerate it; Dubin didn't see how they could go on living together if she knew. She wasn't constituted for an emotionally, not to say morally, ambiguous relationship. To protect her peace of mind he had to lie though he wanted to protect her from his lies. Nor did he intend, at least yet, to give up Fanny. At times he wondered if his deceit to Kitty might induce dishonesty in his work. The thought bothered him although he knew enough about the lives of writers to understand that even the morally deficient might write well. So he kept his sad secret, recalling that Freud had said no one could keep a secret forever. “If his lips are silent his fingertips give him away.”
Yet he concealed his thoughts of Fanny; disguised details of other trips to the city; received letters from her in a post-office box he had recently rented. He called her once a week and she, him, more often, on his barn telephone; but there were times she would try to reach him in the house at night if she'd been unable to make a morning call. Dubin only rarely telephoned her at work. At night, if Kitty answered, Fanny hung up. Kitty reached for the phone when it rang. If he answered but couldn't speak to Fanny because his wife was there, Dubin hung up.
“Who was that, William?”
“Wrong number probably, somebody rang off.”
“We've had a spate of hang-ups lately.”
“They come and go. There seems to be a season for them.”
He asked Fanny not to call him at home. “Then when can we talk?” she asked angrily. “If I can't get you in the barn in the morning because I am too busy to sneak in a call, that means I can't talk to you at all when I have
something to tell you. I save most of my news to tell you. I'm taking environmental studies and psychology at N.Y.U. three nights a week. I wanted to talk about what I was writing in my psych paper and see if you like my ideas. I also think of us in bed. Do you suppose we could go to Europe again? I'm getting two weeks off this winterâthey're not giving me a summer vacation, because I am new. But my boss says they like me and I make up time when I come in late. They like it that I'm going to school at night. I might get a raise the first of the year.”
“Europe would be different this time,” Dubin felt.
“If there hadn't been a last time there wouldn't be a this time,” Fanny said.
He said he wasn't thinking of last time. “I was thinking we might go to Athens if I could come up with a good enough reason why, like maybe a cache of unpublished Lawrence letters had been discovered thereâ”
“Why don't you put your mind to it?”
He said he would think about it.
They arranged he would telephone her from the barn twice a week before she left for work, and she would not call him unless it was absolutely necessary.
When he phoned before eight she was usually alert, eager to talk, had much to say and said it warmly. Dubin would walk across the hoarfrost field to call her, then return for a second cup of coffee and to shave. He would afterward trot off to the barn to do his day's work. Fanny once in a while phoned in mid-morning to say a quick hello.
One early morning when he thought Kitty was sleeping, she was watching him cross the field to call Fanny, as a crow circled overhead cawing at him. At lunch she asked why he went to the barn so early, then returned to the house before going out again.
He said that if he first set up the day's work it made breakfast more serene.
Dubin groaned softly in her presence.
“What's up, William? Is something troubling you?”
He did not at once reply but, when he saw the worry in her eyes, shook his head, smiling, then dimmed the smile.
“I thought I heard you say âdeceit,'” she said.
“That was the word on my mind.”
“Did Lawrence ever deceive Frieda?”
She often guessed where his thoughts were. Dubin told her that with Lawrence the deceit went the other way. “Frieda had deceived Weekley, her first husband, with at least two lovers. Lawrence she deceived mostly with Angelo Ravagli, their Italian landlord, who became her third husband. Once she traveled on the Continent with John Middleton Murry, but he said he turned her down because he didn't want to betray Lawrence. Some say they did sleep together. My own guess is they didn't while Lawrence was alive. I don't think Murry lied when he wrote he hadn't slept with her then because he didn't want to betray Lawrence.”
“How complicated it is.”
Dubin said it was.
“Do you think I might be deceiving you?” Kitty asked with a faint smile.
I wish you were, he thought.
Dubin was leaving, that end-of-October weekend, for New York, a year almost to the day when he and Fanny had flown to Venice.
“This is a quickie trip,” he explained to Kitty. “I'll be gone Friday and part of Saturday. I should be back by early evening.”
“Why can't I come?”
“I'll be going again in two or three weeks to attend other business. Come with me then, it'll be a longer weekend.”
“Why are you going now?”
He said he wanted someone who knew wills to look at theirs and suggest changes. “We wrote it when the kids were young.”
“Don't you remember enough law to read a will?”
“Not as much as you think.”
“Why don't you do the will when you go next time? What's so important right now?”
“Offices are closed on Saturdays and Sundays. I can see someone late this afternoon.”
“You could also telephone from here.”
He didn't want to. “I've mailed the will out, a friend of mine has read it, I want to talk to him about changing it.”
Her eyes were troubled. “Why are you suddenly concerned about a will? There's nothing wrong with you, is there?”
“No,” Dubin said, sweating. “I happened to come across it in our safety deposit box and thought I ought to have it checked out. A legal instrument should be kept up to date.”
She said talk of the will had worried her.
Dubin swore there was nothing wrong with him. He was irritated with himself for fabricating the will.
Ultimately he was able to lie with less guilt. He geared himself to it: had to protect his relationship with Fanny, at the same time not hurt Kitty. Still, he wouldn't eat his heart out over every fib he told. Not all evil is pure evil. Not all lies are forever.
When William Dubin returned from his youth-renewing short visit to Fanny, for which he blessed her, he felt a surge of love for his wife, followed by a saddening sense of lossâawareness of an illusion he seemed to favor: that as he fulfilled himself he did the same for Kitty. That was not true in any way. He had experienced pleasure he would like her to experience, dish her out a bit of pure lustful joy; but if another woman was the source of his pleasureâif you lived on her bodyâthat diminished desire, affectionâobligationâfor the other, the wife. He continued to hide from Kitty his feeling for Fanny, his happy involvement with her; but it did not hide well. The Freudian fingertips showed: because of Fanny he was a different man, had grown new attributes, elements of a new selfâhow could you hide that? You pretended you were your old self, but the old self had changed. You pretended it hadn't, adding to pretense.
Kitty, he knew, sensed something. She had embraced him on his return almost with compassion, as if he had come back with a wound and only she knew it. She asked him again if he was well. Dubin said that next time a will or something of the sort came up he'd take care of it without mentioning it to her.
“No,” she said, “you must tell me.”
Nothing was wrong with him, Dubin insisted. “Don't worry about what doesn't exist.”
“I won't if you promise not to hide from me what does.” She laughed breathlessly, her eyes not looking at him. If she believed him with reservation, what, Dubin wondered, did she not believe?
Had she sensed some sort of withdrawal from her? Something more seriousâof another kind than had happened last winter? It was months since Fanny and he had become lovers; doesn't an experience of love produce a newly experiencing self? All the exciting new sex diminishing the less exciting sex, the lesser pleasure? Something added, therefore something elsewhere subtracted? Kitty and her husband lived as married,
but Fanny had joined the merry company. Dubin has two wives? Here's Kitty gazing out of a window reflecting herself, and beholds, in the wood in the distance, the shadow of a presence; aware of something not fearsome but a source of fear? Dubin, staring through the same glass, sees himself in view, Fanny, in white, standing dimly by his side, all but invisible. He searches the glass, amidst images of leafy trees and darkening shallow clouds, for Kitty, expecting her to be reflected nearby; but she stands alone, amid tall trees, in the deeper distance. What it amounts to, the biographer thinks, is that one may be able to mask dishonesty but not its effects: the diminution of libido, ebb of feeling for a woman, love for her. Deceit distances. He dreamed of Kitty pacing the black-railed widow's walk on the roof.
Â
Dubin had caught a cold that became heavy bronchitis and he could not get to the city in mid-November. He called Fanny very early one morning, as Kitty slept, to say he couldn't possibly be going down this week. Fanny said she would drive to Center Campobello, but Dubin in his laryngitic voice told her he was reasonably sure he could make it to her after another week. Kitty then caught Dubin's cold, and since the trip was promised to her, he felt he oughtn't to go alone this time. It snowed a few days before Thanksgiving, a light snow that melted in a day as though a dropped handkerchief had been snatched up. Fanny urged Dubin to come by himselfâhe had a perfect excuse with Kitty ill; but he said it was getting more difficult to lie his way into the city so often.
“What's so often about coming here a month ago? I thought you had the excuse of talking to a lawyer about something?”
He said it wasn't a good one. “And it isn't like me to take off for New York in winter weather to talk to a lawyer when the woods are full of them here. I don't travel much in wintertime.”
“Wouldn't it be groovy if we could fuck by phone,” she said bitterly.
Dubin was silent.
“What I mean,” Fanny said after a moment, “is I miss you. When I get lonely I feel like crawling up a wall. If you can't come here, William, I'll zip up there. I bought snow tires and I'd like to come up this next weekend.”
“There's at least one dinner date this weekend. Could you make it the one after?”
“Are you sure you really want me to come? Sometimes I have the feeling you don't care all that much.”
“You'd be wrong,” he said.
“I'm ready to drive up any weekend if you can't come to me. If we don't get together one way we have to another or what's our life all about?”
“The experience of the absent loved one has inspired some beautiful poetry.”
“I don't write poetry, I never could.”
“Let's try to be together every third weekend or so, though please keep in mind I have no good reason suddenly to be out alone any given night of any particular weekend, let alone two nights in a row. It's not usual.”
“I think you have a damn good reason.”
“I know I have, but unfortunately not one I can give my wife.”
“Unfortunately, old boy.”
“I don't want to hurt anyone, little girl.”
“I'm not your little girl and you are hurting me.”
“I don't want to hurt you, Fanny.”
“Other men get out from under their wivesâwhy can't you?”
Dubin explained that he'd worked home for years. “It's hard to find excuses to get out alone when circumstances change. Though in a way it's mad, Fanny, what it amounts to is that one works in a room with the door shut and everyone knows where he is and expects him to be there for all time. Between biographies I am freer.”
Fanny's tone softened. “Couldn't you please try to come here? You said your wife's cold is about gone. I'd rather have you come here than go to that lousy motel.”
“I thought you liked it?”