Dubin's Lives (45 page)

Read Dubin's Lives Online

Authors: Bernard Malamud

“How do you define the real world? All things share in the Buddha nature if one can find it in herself. I want to live in Buddha, that's where it is for me and I wish you wouldn't try to dissuade me now that I know where I want to be. Frankly, Papa, Zen would be good for you too.”
She was walking in the surf.
He followed her along the ribbed hard sand. The wind was down; the fog had lifted but not the fog in Dubin. Of himself he had said nothing; she hadn't asked.
Maud strode on; Dubin followed. He was tempted to say, “My child, I understand your pain. I live with my own. Let me tell you about it.” He didn't say it; he was, he thought, the father.
She walked on, eyes in the distance. My daughter, the stranger. He looked back: the waves washed the smooth shore and flowed into the sea. When he looked again their footsteps had reappeared.
Maud walks in Dubin's dreams.
It was a quiet long summer, two alone in a big house. The weather had turned humid-hot, and in the evening they sat on the porch facing the long-trunked graceful silver maples. Kitty's garden showed bunches of red phlox within a border of late-blooming yellow lilies. She served salads in white bowls, or cold sliced meats and cheeses they carried out on earthenware plates, with brown bottles of Alsatian wines. As they ate they watched the reflection of dull-gold sunsets on the heavy hills. The grass yielded light at dusk. Swallows darting in broken circles above the trees swooped low over the green lawn. Lorenzo, after long watching the birds, slept on the warm planks by the porch rail.
“He sleeps his life away,” Kitty said.
“It's his to sleep.”
At dark she lit a three-candle candelabrum he had bought her in Venice their first time there. Kitty smoked to keep the mosquitoes away. The biographer would watch the candles melt until the stars appeared. Afterward they read downstairs until their bedroom had cooled off, and then read in bed. Kitty was into Lawrence's poetry again.
“My God, listen to this—he's talking about his lonely erect phallus: ‘How beautiful he is! without sound, / without eyes, without hands; yet flame of the living ground. / He stands, the column of fire by night. / And he knows from the depths; he quite / alone understands.' Isn't it just like D. H. Lawrence to write that?” Kitty laughed.
Dubin said he knew the poem. “He loved his thing.”
“Don't you?”
“Yes.”
He was reading the
Confessions of St. Augustine,
often putting the book down when he could not concentrate. “Love means that I want you to be,” Augustine had said. As Dubin read he heard the
ping
of the moths hitting the window screens and saw lightning bugs flash in the trees in the outside dark. There was no breeze through the open windows; the curtains were limp. Kitty lay with her eyes shut, fanning herself in long strokes with a magazine.
“Lord, it's hot.”
“Not that hot.”
“I feel hot. Don't tell me it's only me.”
“It's cooling now,” Dubin said.
It was cooler at midnight, but they were restless in bed. Kitty said it looked like another uncomfortable summer. “Whatever's happened to Northeast weather? Where are the east winds and cool summers?” Dubin didn't know. In the warm dark when they moved apart to try to sleep, Fanny crept close to him, Dubin lay close to her.
Sometimes as he wrote he felt lust arise from nowhere, tempting him at his task. That morning he had gored Fanny on his horn. Fanny pressed her fleshy firm breasts to his lips, caressed his buttocks. Her experienced tongue traveled up his inner thigh to the head of his cock. She dipped it again and again into her mouth. Then she rose on her knees, placing herself above his erect flesh and locked it in her moist vagina, riding rhythmically, enacting an ancient legend in sweet time. Seizing her, he held her motionless, pumping upward until she burst into flame. William, she groaned in silence. He came, at length, extravagantly.
Dubin felt the shame of lust at his age.
“Clouds arose from the slimy desires of the flesh and from my youth's spring. They clouded over and darkened my soul, so that I could not distinguish the calm light of chaste love from the fog of lust.”
Augustine's youth's spring; Dubin's late wasteful autumn. Not that flesh is slime, but some emotions are outworn. The expense of spirit: not because he had had her in his wife's company, but because he had had her when he hadn't; when she was no longer his to have.
He turned to Kitty. “Will you sleep with me—make love?”
“In this heat?”
“It's cooler now.”
“All right.” Her arms were warm, bosom soft.
After a while she asked, “What's the matter?”
“I don't think it's going to work.”
“Are you sure?”
He said he was sorry.
“It's too hot,” Kitty said. “I wouldn't worry about it.”
Better this way, Dubin thought.
She fell asleep. He slept an hour and awoke, indecently mourning the girl. He had done it badly. They'd been friends, better friends than he'd had any right to expect, given the restrictions he had laid on her. With Fanny he had felt a dozen years younger, had acted like a young man, a young woman's lover. Not having her increased his not having. The mourning was harder
to bear than the lust. They were two faces of the same loss, not having her you wanted most.
Dubin slept through the ringing alarm, aware of Kitty trying to rouse him and then letting him sleep. He woke heavily, with an increasingly burdensome sense of having mishandled the girl. He felt a gross hollow rooted in himself. The biographer played back the loneliness of his youth. There was more to their lives than he had allowed to happen. Out of the confusion caused by Kitty's call from Stockholm, Gerry's disappearance, his own guilt for being at that moment in bed with Fanny—he had botched it with her; had—without thinking it through—let her walk out of his life.
Perhaps he had allowed it to happen because it had momentarily seemed to simplify life. Dubin felt he had blown it finally when he went looking for her car, expecting to find it where he had found it; to feel justified in letting her go; to be betrayed again so that he could blame her rather than himself. He had indulged in jealousy to re-create the wound of mourning, lust, loneliness. What he ought to have done once she left and he regretted it was to get into his car, drive to New York, and there await her return even if it meant living a few days in a hotel and working in his room. He could have wired Kitty he would pick her up at Kennedy instead of Albany and then stayed with her at the Gansevoort until Fanny had come back and they had talked. I'd have promised her more. More what or more how he couldn't say, but more better. If he had been there waiting for her they would easily have made it up. Instead he had allowed himself to be eaten, undermined, by his jealousy.
He sent off another letter to Fanny via the apartment on West 83rd Street. It was returned in two weeks. He mailed the same letter in another envelope to the law office and then had a very good day. By the end of June he had heard nothing from Fanny yet went on writing to her. It was not a bad way to keep her present: about to reply; therefore in his future. It was a good way to keep his mind at peace and protect his work. He felt so until, one by one, his letters came back stamped “Return to sender.” They hadn't been forwarded; she must have requested that: “Don't forward anything return-addressed Center Campobello, I want to get rid of that shmuck.” Dubin worked at forgetting. No sense trying to kick the corpse of farewell into life. She left me before and I beat it out of my system. It shouldn't be so hard to do again in summertime. The season is easier, gentler—in my favor. There are green-leaved trees and many flowers around. Yet he had a
self-conscious intrusive sense of himself abandoned by a girl, left exposed in his emotional long underwear, if not bare ass. He was embarrassed to have intruded on her youth. Dubin's nose twitched. He felt less vital than a year ago. His face was smaller, wrinkled, pouched under the eyes. He was losing hair, hated the sight of his comb after combing. His belly was expanding—if not in cubits, in eighth-inches; but growing in the long haul. His thick toenails were hard to cut. He had one pink foot and one white. He was adamantly a late-middle-aged gent. One paid for the pursuit of youth—from Faustus to Wm. Dubin. Wanting that much to be young was a way of hurrying time. The years ran forward backward. He counted on two fingers the time to sixty, obscene age. They say an old man dies young, back-slapping myth.
Dubin recomposed the old diet; rising at daybreak; water therapy; jogging the long walk in rain or shine, principally humid heat. Nothing to celebrate but discipline as evasion of a larger pain—ducking from that before it laid on with a bludgeon, insult he was sick of; indulged in to protect the self, self that lived the Lawrence. The dieting was strict, a pleasure-denying effort he was in no mood for. He came to the table with small appetite and left hungry. As in a former time he gobbled squares of chocolate hidden in a drawer. In bed hunger burned in every capillary. Not to brood or tear at himself he went quietly down the creaking stairs to the kitchen. Dubin made himself a liverwurst sandwich on rye, then one of cream cheese and jam smeared on white bread; he devoured both and still was hungry. He ate, he figured, Fanny, her live flesh. He drank wineglasses full of heavy cream—her breasts vanished. He ate her bare-boned; she no longer tempted. No aphrodisiac skeletons. Afterward he savaged himself for her hold on him.
But as the weeks went by his painful discipline fed him. It compels order; is order, he thought. I wish I could do it more easily, but if I can't I will do it this way. If, as in the past, he went into the bathroom to rinse his mouth after eating, he cut out desire for chocolate, feasting at night. If he still felt hunger he drank a glass of skim milk, sometimes two. Dubin lost weight without gaining virtue. Kitty wanted to know how much more he intended to shrink. He said he felt better: loss of flesh lightened the mind.
“You're not depressed again, are you?”
He was trying not to be.
“Then what's eating you?”
He felt her eating him and rose from the table. “I don't want to account for every move I make. Stop asking so many goddamn questions.”
She studied him impassively; then Kitty got up and stalked out of the room.
His heart sank. Cutting off contact with her, such as it was—as he had caused it to be—punished him most. Not that he blamed her; it was an effectual defense. Dubin considered apologizing but decided not to. It would be a relief if she didn't talk to him for a few days.
He walked-ran day after day although it was a living bore, the sameness, the ritual. This extraordinary world—is this how life wants me to live it? But he ran to keep himself on keel, to wind himself into work the next morning. Dubin arose at the alarm ring, strayed into the bathroom, stepped blindly into the shower. Hot water poured on his head. He modified it to tepid, cold, colder—till it attacked and he gasped, ran in the tub. He held his head in the cold spray until he was numbed; then toweled himself at the open steamed window, feeling wet when dry. He exercised in his underpants in Maud's room, bent touching toes, pedaled on his back, pulled his knees into his bulging gut, willed pushups, other self-savaging. If the day was hot he exercised just out of bed, then showered, and went down to breakfast at least awake. He heard Lawrence scream
murder.
The biography was going comparatively well, considering that Fanny, a more accomplished sexual person than Connie Chatterley, haunted his thoughts, rode like a witch astride each sentence he wrote. If the afternoon was impossible he jogged at dusk, at times having to rest against a tree, or lie on his back in the warm grass in the shade of maples grown thick with summer leafage. Dubin began in a walk then upped it to a slow jog. The idea was not to think but let momentum carry him. His spine loosened as he moved, hips and shoulders relaxed, bound energy came unbound. Going uphill in the heat, sweating, breathing laboriously, he stared at his feet as he plodded on. Downhill, he gazed into the shimmering distance. Sometimes a ring of gnats circled his head. Fanny floated in and out of the mind, invisibly kept him company. A short affair and long mourning. Having gone, why didn't she go? What kept her imprinted like a burn on the brain? Yet his sense of loss was more than loss of Fanny. What you dug out of left a hole deeper than the hole. He disliked himself for having twice succumbed to her, and twice to this self-inflicted punishment.
One Sunday morning as he was backing up on the driveway to get the car closer to the house so he could hose it, Dubin heard a savage yowl, hiss, scream through the window. He jammed the brake and frantically hopped out of the car. He knew what he had done. The wheel had crushed Lorenzo lying asleep on the warm asphalt. The cat vomited his tongue, his legs twitched as he died. Dubin, moaning, hid his eyes in his hands. Ten minutes later he furtively entered the house, stole a bath towel from the linen closet, and wrapped the remains of Lorenzo in it. He carried the bloody bundle to the barn, found a shovel, and buried the dead cat in Kitty's Wood. He remembered secretly burying Maud's black-and-white kitty there many years ago. Why does every misery happen twice? “Forgive me, Lorenzo,” but the dead cat had nothing to say. Dubin buried him in a hole three feet deep, then returned wearily across the field, hoping Kitty hadn't seen the accident; but when he approached the house she was standing at the window observing him; her face dark, mourning.

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