Dubin's Lives (41 page)

Read Dubin's Lives Online

Authors: Bernard Malamud

Dubin, raising his voice, accused her of having depreciated his love for her. “You weren't satisfied with what I had to give—what I gave you. You had to define it to death. The day we were married you began to educate me. You defined love. You defined marriage. You insisted on telling me what I was giving and what I wasn't. I gave with feeling and you gave it a name.”
“I wanted it to be a strong enduring love, in and of this world. I had experienced a strong loving love. I wanted what I needed. I had to tell you.”
“Love was love to me. It needed not defining but nurturing. It wanted a life of its own. It didn't need Nathanael for company or comparison, or you dissecting it.”
He wasn't certain what he was saying, that he was telling the truth about the past. He was trying to but it seemed, in their quarrel, impossible to recall exactly; to say what had truly happened to them. Or exactly what was happening now. How can you define the truth if you can't tell it? How can you tell the truth if you begin with lies?
Kitty said, “I wasn't doubting you—for the sake of doubt—or comparing your love to Nathanael's. I was trying to understand your feelings, your nature, my own. I wanted deep whole lasting love. I can't keep myself from
analyzing or defining. I am not Frieda Lawrence. I am not your earth mother.”
She wept copiously, in a low wail. “You'll leave me, I know in my heart.”
Dubin told her not to cry. He racked his brain thinking how not to fail her yet go on with Fanny.
Then he put his arms around Kitty. “Let's get into bed.”
She raised her tear-stained face. “Why?”
“I want you.”
“I just got dressed.” She slowly removed her clothes. He tried not to notice her aging body, tried not to think of Fanny's youth.
In bed Dubin's flesh failed him. He was unable to perform. He lay back frustrated, told himself not to be alarmed.
Kitty, lying on her pillow, wondered if it was her fault. “I mean maybe all this talk of divorce upset you?”
He said it wasn't her fault, yet hoped it was.
“These things happen. Don't be upset.”
“It hadn't happened to me before.”
“It's an incident, it's not for all time.”
He said he hoped not; he was too young for that. “Lawrence was impotent at forty-two, but he was a sick man.”
“Don't think of it.”
Afterward Kitty told him she'd been seeing Evan Ondyk again, and Dubin was sorry for her and for himself.
“I was thinking of going away for a while,” she said. “Maybe for a week —at the most, two. I'll go see Gerald in Stockholm.”
He thought it would be a good thing for her to do. “I should be myself when you get back.”
“Don't worry about it,” Kitty said calmly. “You've been ever so much better than Nathanael that way. It started with him around thirty-eight, yet on the whole he functioned well.”
Dubin said he wasn't worried.
 
The cold rose in an almost invisible haze from the icy ridged road. The low still polar sky was white as far as he could see. A light snow had struck the hills and whitened the surrounding fields. Nature shrouded, playing dead. Dubin, as he walked, lived in his frozen thoughts. Was that Oscar Greenfeld
ahead, plodding past the abandoned farmhouse down the road? The biographer walked on, heavily clothed, not attempting to catch up with the flutist. Dubin wore two scarves, his tan-and-black over a thick black scarf, waffle stompers, earmuffs under his red wool hat.
He tried to think what he'd been thinking of but now and then his thoughts froze. The shrunken afternoon was already into dusk on this Saturday in a below-zero January. Dubin was fifty-eight. That was not Oscar ahead, no wooden flute he held in his hand. It was a man with a double-barreled shotgun resting on his forearm as he trudged on in the dusk. He wore a plaid hunter's cap, heavy sweater, sealskin Eskimo boots. Dubin lingered to see what he shot at from the road but the hunter, from time to time stopping to survey the field, shot at nothing.
The biographer made up his mind to pass quickly and the hunter let him hurry by. A minute later he called his name: “Mr. Dubin?”
It was Roger Foster.
They walked together, Dubin at a loss for something to say. Roger embarrassed him.
“What's the gun for?” he finally asked. “I thought the hunting season was over?”
“Not much really, Mr. Dubin,” Roger said. “I thought I'd like to take a potshot at a rabbit or two but haven't laid eyes on one. You can hardly see them this time of the year but sometimes you can spot a cottontail against a tree or rock. No harm done because I generally miss when I shoot. My heart's not in it. I guess I went out with Dad's gun because I felt sort of down. Thought I'd stir up a little excitement for myself but haven't so far.”
Dubin grunted.
Neither spoke as they walked on, then Roger said in a tone of regret, “I don't guess you like me all that well, Mr. Dubin. I really don't know why. I grant you're a good biographer, but so far as understanding live people, I honestly don't think you know the kind of man I am.”
Dubin nodded. Who knows the passing stranger, or the stranger you pass, he thought, even if your wife in a desperate moment aberrantly falls for him.
“I'll bet you still think of me as a sort of stud because I had that reputation in my early twenties, though I am honestly not that way now. Give me credit for growing up—people do.”
“Roger,” Dubin said, “I admit I don't know you very well although every
so often you unexpectedly enter my life. I have no plans for you to be in it, but now and then you suddenly are—as though you'd stepped out of the pages of Dostoyevsky and begun tracking me. I've come across this fateful phenomenon more often than one would think in biographies I've read or written. Somebody looks around and there's this guy tailing him, for good or ill. I suppose it's different when it's a woman—it's as if you'd been expecting her. Anyway, when you least anticipate or want it, a stranger appears, generally an unlikely person, who for one or another reason attempts to define himself to you, and against every expectation, not to mention your resistance, insists on assuming a role in your life. I have no idea what yours is in mine, but I don't want you to feel I am antagonistic to you in principle or that I am angry about something I am not at all angry about. The older I get, the less I hold people's pasts or past relationships against them—or, for that matter, against myself.”
“To tell the honest truth,” Roger said, “I made no reference to anybody but myself, but since you might be thinking about the time Mrs. Dubin, who I happen to greatly respect, was working in the library, all I want to say is that if there's anybody I was interested in, and still am, it's Fanny Bick.”
Dubin blew on his icy gloved hands, his breath pure white. How much does he know? He thought: I will tell him nothing.
“The fact of it is, Mr. Dubin, I happen to love Fanny and hope to marry her someday.”
“Ah?” said Dubin. “And does she hope to marry you?”
Roger laughed throatily, wryly, his moody eyes drawn to the white field. “I've asked her at least four times, including when she was visiting here in December, but she told me she was interested in somebody else, and though she honestly didn't mention your name, the message I got was whoever he was is you.”
Dubin did not for a minute speak. “What makes you think so?”
“I know Fanny admires your biographies and yourself. Also I sort of know that you helped her put herself together after she had a shaky time in Europe last year. She has a different emphasis than since I first met her. She's a lot more serious about herself in a way she didn't use to be. I also know you have this mutual friendship that means a lot to her.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“Not in so many black-and-white words but it's what I guess. At first I thought it might be something sort of non-sexual, only now I don't think that
any more, if you don't mind me saying so, Mr. Dubin. I don't think of you as that kind of a person.”
“What kind of person am I?”
“I wish I really knew.”
“What do you want from me, Roger?”
They had stopped walking. Each peered into the other's face.
“I admit you've been helpful in advising Fanny, but otherwise the fact is you're married, Mr. Dubin, with two grownup kids and a wife who happens to need you,” Roger said, looking down at Dubin's galoshes. “What's more, you're a good thirty or more years older than Fanny. When we first met she liked me an awful lot, and I honestly and sincerely think she still has a real affection left that might get to be permanent under different circumstances. I figure if you weren't around I might stand a good chance to marry her, although I also admit she has this affinity for older men. Mr. Dubin, I'm speaking to you as if I were your own son—I'm not proud. I thought I would respectfully tell you how I feel about her, hoping you might make some decision that would give me a fair shake, or at least a halfway decent chance in the future.”
“To marry her?”
“To marry her if I could—if she wants to get married. Not everybody does nowadays, though I and both my sisters honestly do. What I'm trying to say to you is I love Fanny very much.” His voice shook.
“So do I.”
Roger, to Dubin's embarrassed surprise, sank down on one knee in an awkward gesture of supplication, or despair. In his left hand he still held his shotgun.
Dubin walked on, then broke into a trot.
 
He hadn't seen Fanny in weeks, felt inertia, lassitude, stasis, wanted not to see her. Was he therefore feeling less for the girl? Less what? He had got used to her, knew her too well? Some of the excitement, the surprise, was gone? Only her presence, in truth, surprised and she was not present. Though Kitty and he had resolved his temporary mishap and were again comfortable in bed, Dubin felt he wasn't that much interested in the sexual life. She had postponed going away because of him. She didn't seem to understand how much he wanted to be alone, left alone; he wanted to be, at least for now, without challenge to emotion, attention, thought; if possible, also, without
desire. Who needs that forever goad? Fanny seriously complicated his life. Having one major problem was enough for him—the Lawrence biography. That continued to go well: at times it carried Dubin aloft as if he were in a balloon with a spy glass surveying the floating earth. It was the “complication” —the task he wanted most to be concerned with. Gerry and Maud were an ongoing other; he was used to their problems, and to Kitty's tangled skein. But Fanny was a complication coming on too fast and strong. She was, in his life, unique; still he didn't want her pressing him to go abroad with her, urging him to move to New York; he didn't want her suggesting they live together, implying divorce. It was all right for Kitty to bring up divorce but not Fanny.
Was what he felt for Fanny love? It wasn't the way he had felt toward women in his youth. Do men of more than fifty love less keenly than young men? He thought the opposite was true: the years deepened the need, the force, the channel of love. At fifty there had to be more at stake: love as a breakwater against age, loss of vital energy, the approach of death. Dubin enjoyed the girl's feeling for him but how much was he offering in return? Obviously not too much at the moment although they shared a real enough friendship. He sometimes felt as if he was waiting for her to say it didn't seem to be working and why didn't they simply call it quits? There were moments when he thought breaking it up now might be a relief—a lot less to worry about; he'd be freer to concentrate on his work. Maybe she was expecting him to make a decision—more Fanny, less Kitty; or vice versa; or simply no Fanny at all? There was a real problem, did he have a real choice?
She hadn't telephoned lately, nor he her. He thought she might still be annoyed by the barn incident with Kitty though her two or three short letters hadn't mentioned it. He had more than once expressed regret. Her letters outlined what she was doing, reading, experiencing; they made no request nor persuasion. She was, she said, “tired,” but not of what. What good am I for her? the biographer asked himself. Her letters were contained, muted, saying nothing very personal. She did not say, lately, that she loved him. He wrote innocuous replies. Let's be friends, Dubin thought, and from time to time, lovers. That would diminish complication and make life easier to manage. He never broached this to her. Lawrence had distastefully spoken of “merely companionate sex.”
But with the change of season Dubin was glad he had made no serious negative statement to Fanny. Winter broke, retreated, cold waning
although greedily lingering; spring was immanent-tied hand and foot but softly exhaling its herbal breath; mysteriously freed, spying out—stalking—the land as well as memory. Spring lights spring within. My spring gives birth to yours—to you. The girl blossomed, bloomed, in his thoughts. Dear God, what have I done? Why have I allowed myself to doubt my true feeling for her? He missed her company, easy laughter, warmth, intimate voice—whatever it said was intimate—her touch, vibrance, their acceptance and enjoyment of each other. He missed her desire, giving, the flower of their embrace in bed. He thought of her, trying not to, between stitches of biographical sentences; on his long and short walks; as he lay in bed with his wife. He thought of their best times, joyfully together. He wanted, he spoke it aloud, to be with her; but heard no sound. He did not visit her in the city; she did not come to him, one way or another, in Center Campobello.

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