“Yes?”
“It's me. Can I come in?”
He took his time getting to the door to unlatch it.
“The furnace has pooped out,” Kitty said, stepping into the study. “I was reading in bed, wondering if you'd ever come home and felt myself getting awfully chilly. When I looked at the thermostat it was fifty so I came to tell you.”
“Did you call the furnace guy?”
“He comes faster for you.”
“You could have phoned me from the house and not frozen your ass coming here in this cold.”
Kitty looked around the room. She was wearing a heavy cloth coat, boots, and Dubin's red wool hat.
“Was your light out for a while? I was in Maud's room and could see no reflection of light in the snow.”
“I had a headache and was resting my eyes in the dark.”
“Why didn't you quit, for Pete's sake? It's mad to work as much as you've been this week.”
“I've got only one paragraph to recopy.”
“Can't it wait till tomorrow?”
“I want to get it done.”
“What's that strange odor in here?” Kitty asked, breathing in, exhaling.
“I passed gas.”
“It's not that.”
“I smoked a cigarillo.”
“It's not that either. The room smells sexy.”
“I was thinking of Faye Dunaway. I was also thinking of Marilyn Monroe.”
“Don't take your headache out on me, William,” Kitty said. “It's your own bloody fault.”
He said he was being funny.
The cat meowed in the barn.
“Is Lorenzo hungry?”
“I fed him.”
Lorenzo meowed as though wailing.
Kitty pulled the door open and shone her flashlight in the dark.
“What's that sheet doing on the floor?”
Dubin tried to think but couldn't. He was watching Kitty's light move along the sidewall of the barn to the bolted double doors. She then shone the light on the clutter of garden tools, furniture she had discarded, tractor-mower, bags of peat moss. “Was that something moving?”
He didn't think so. “Lorenzo's been sleeping on the sheet. It needs washing. I was going to bring it home.”
Lorenzo, eyes glowing, came running in the light. If he says anything, the biographer thought, I'll bash his head in.
“What's the matter with him?” Kitty asked.
“He wants company, he's tired of mice.”
Dubin had picked up the phone and was dialing. He told the repairman his furnace had gone on the blink and he was afraid the house pipes would freeze if something wasn't done quickly. The man reluctantly said he would come over.
“He'll be over in ten minutes,” Dubin told Kitty. “Please let him in. I'll knock off my last paragraph and go home.”
“I'd still like to know what the smell in this room is.”
“You know them all,” he said.
“You're not exactly endearing tonight.”
Dubin rubbed his eyes.
Kitty left the barn, slamming the door.
Through the toilet window he watched her going back in the snow until the light disappeared. He wondered if she had noticed Fanny's boot tracks.
Then he sat down on the sofa, sickened. He felt cold.
Fanny came into the room with her dungarees and bra on. She was barefoot and cold, her face without color.
“I was scared shitless,” she said. “I thought I had broken my ankle. It hit something and hurt like hell.”
He inspected her bruised blue ankle. “Does it still hurt?”
“It feels as if someone drove a nail into it.”
Dubin said he was sorry. He still felt nauseated, half frozen.
“I don't want to have to do anything like that again, William,” Fanny said. “I don't want to have to hide from her. Next time I swear I won't. I mean it, William.”
“There won't be a next time,” Dubin said.
“I won't hide from her again,” Fanny said, her eyes taut.
He said he would see her in the city.
Â
One Sunday Kitty rose early, dark-eyed and tight-lipped. She stretched her arms limply. When she had left the bed she removed her nightgown, slowly scratched her blemished buttock.
At breakfast he noticed her lusterless eyes and formal anxious altered voice. Her tight control tightened him. Kitty mulled over things till she had something: she put two and two together and usually came close to four. Had she now come up with Fanny in his life?
He asked if she had had a bad dream.
Kitty was gazing at the fried egg on her plate. She'd hardly touched breakfast. They were at the table together but she sat at the table alone.
Dubin spoke soberly: “Why don't you tell me what's bothering you?”
She said she hated to. “I really do.”
“Then it's something physical?”
She looked at her plate. “I'm sure you'll say it's nothing.”
“You think it's cancer?” he asked, beginning to eat his fried egg.
Kitty told him her left nipple had altered in size and she had found a mucus stain in her brassiere.
“Do you think it's cancer?”
“It could be,” she said unhappily.
“What else could it be?” Dubin dipped his bread into the egg yolk.
“I don't know. For God's sake don't start preaching at me. I hate it when you righteously preach.” She was frightfully tight.
He changed his tone. “Have you felt a lump?”
“No,” she said tensely.
“Is the breast sore?”
She nodded, not crying, though her eyes were moist.
He sipped his coffee. Dubin then put his cup down and got up and kissed her. He said he was sure it wasn't cancer.
She studied his face to see if he thought otherwise. “What makes you say so?”
“No lumps.” He said she ought to see the doctor anyway. “Once you're on a cancer kick, it's wise to.”
Kitty said she would, then confessed that even the thought of a mammogram frightened her.
“I'll go with you,” he said.
“No, I'll go alone,” Kitty said. “I always have.”
On Tuesday she visited the surgeon in Center Campobello, who said it was not cancer. He said it was a papilloma, a nodule he located close to the surface of the breast near the nipple.
Kitty afterward told Dubin that the surgeon had said a papilloma was usually benign and he thought he could treat it in his office. A week later âshe had been calm since seeing himâhe made the incision. After a biopsy, which revealed no sign of malignancy, Kitty gave out a sob of relief. Later she bought a new dress. Arriving home, she embraced Dubin and said she loved him very much. She moved gingerly but freely, as though she was free
of dread yet was worried for having once more tried her fate. How many more times could she do it and still escape cancer?
Dubin, as he combed his hair before the mirror, said he was glad it had come to nothing.
“It wasn't exactly nothing,” Kitty said. “He removed a nodule that was blocking the duct. That wasn't nothing, and it wasn't my imagination.”
He admitted it.
“You look critical?”
“I'm not but it wasn't cancer. The average is still in your favor.”
“I'll bet you weren't in the least worried,” Kitty said, brushing her eyelids with a tissue. “You didn't seem to be. I'll bet you were thinking about your friend Lawrence and the mystique of the female breast in Indian cow worship. Or maybe you were thinking of Lady Chatterley's handsome ass and well-shaped healthy teats.”
He'd been thinking mostly of Fanny.
“That was your sixth or seventh cancer scare since I've known you,” Dubin said. “I expected nothing serious.”
“My mother had cancer. You may be wrong someday.”
He said he hoped he wouldn't be.
Kitty that night suggested making love “in celebration,” and he offered the next night, said he was worn out.
“My problems?”
“Mine.”
In the morning she seemed distant to him. He felt distant from her. It seemed to Dubin he felt more affection for her when Fanny was around. When she was, Kitty was often in his thoughts, tenderly at times.
With Fanny gone he was constantly thinking of her. That he was working well was not surprising because his mood was good. He lived much in his thoughts of his developing work and in long reveries of Fanny. Dubin invented and discarded reasons to take off for New York. It irritated him that he had to go through so much fantasy to experience the girl.
The next night he made love to his wife. She hadn't wanted to, but responded to his impulse. He was careful not to touch her healing breast. To heighten their pleasure Dubin tried one of the things Fanny had taught him.
“Where did you pick that up?” Kitty wanted to know.
“Do you like it?”
“I'm not sure. I think so.”
“Do you object?”
“No.”
Afterward she asked, “Where did you pick up that little adventurous bit you tried tonight?”
“From a book I read.”
“What made you read that kind of book?”
He was about to say he was human. Dubin said, “To bring something new to our sex lives.”
“Do you have any complaints about me?” Kitty asked.
He said he hadn't.
“I'll bet you do. Nathanael thought I was pretty good in bed. He thought me a passionate woman. I
am
passionate.”
“One responds differently to different people,” Dubin said. “He was your first husband. I'm your second and for too long I was your step-husband.”
“If you say âstep-husband' again I swear I'll leave you.” Her voice quavered with anger.
He pictured her leaving; probably she would ask him to leave.
The next day Kitty, as she was dressing, quietly asked Dubin if he wanted a divorce. “I don't think you want or need me any more. I sense it. If something has gone wrong why don't you tell me? Have you met someone you'd rather be with?”
Dubin said he hadn't.
“Is that girl you went to Venice with still around?”
He said she wasn't.
“Who was she?”
He would rather not say.
“Do I know her?”
He would rather not say.
“Then I do and she's around,” said Kitty.
“I sleep with her twice a day.”
“Then what
is
the matter with you. What's made you so unresponsive these last few months? Are we about to go through another awful winter? Why has my husband become my second cousin once removed? Removed is the word. We never talk any more. I don't really know what's happening to you. Tell me what's happening to you? Have you been sleeping with Flora?”
He said that had happened once.
“Then what's eating you, for Christ's sake?”
“Maybe it's marriage. Sometimes I feel boxed in, unfree.”
“Boxed in, how?”
“A long marriage gets hard to take. You must feel it yourself.”
He was thinking of her sameness, dissatisfactions, eccentricities. He was bored with her fears, her unforgotten unforgettable past.
“What do you mean âunfree'?âunfree for what?”
“To forget for ten minutes that I'm married.”
“That sounds like more than a whim. You must have a reason to want to feel unmarried. What is your need?”
Dubin didn't say.
“Wouldn't a divorce make you feel happier, freer?”
“No,” he said, but his heart was gladdened by the thought.
Kitty criticized his natureâDubin's sobriety, sameness, inability to enjoy life. She said she enjoyed life. “Until we met, you lived on romantic dreams, on nothing really. Now your devotion is work. Your work is all you think of and then you complain you aren't free.”
Kitty spoke bitterly, her hands nervously in motion. She had slept with a bracelet on he had once given her. She had dressed and looked good though her eyes were angry.