Dubin's Lives (46 page)

Read Dubin's Lives Online

Authors: Bernard Malamud

 
The old house gave forth sounds at night—more, recently. It groaned, banged and creaked, without apparent cause. The biographer had long ago heard that the man who had built it had killed himself in the barn. Were his miseries adrift in the house at night? Was he? Dubin had never told Kitty about the suicide.
Kitty, one night, sat up suddenly in bed. “What was that?”
“What?”
She had heard gnawing scraping noises in the ceiling above their bed. He thought a field mouse or chipmunk might have come up inside the wall.
“If only Lorenzo were alive.”
“If only.”
That night Dubin listened to slow steps on the driveway, but when he got up to peer out of the window, could see no one, nothing in the pitch-dark.
“Should we call the police?” she whispered.
After a time he realized the “footsteps” was water dripping, after rain, from a leak in the gutter.
“What was that?” she whispered as he was falling asleep.
They listened sharply.
“Nothing. What did you think you'd heard?”
“Nothing.”
“It was nothing,” he said.
Sometimes when the furnace, heating water, rumbled, an upstairs door near the chimney shook.
Once Dubin woke to lonely secret steps coming up the stairs, but as he strained to hear, heard only his heartbeat drumming against the mattress.
When the wind blew, the house sighed, moaned, made sounds like living presences. One summer night Kitty, waking in fright, said she had heard a window slowly go up. Dubin listened sitting up, then pulled a sock on, and dragged himself throughout the house from floor to floor, turning on lights, inspecting window screens to see if one was slashed or missing. All were intact.
“It's mad to get up,” he told her. “If I met someone I'd be a dead duck if he hit me on the head. We're safer putting the light on but not getting out of bed.”
“I'd never get back to sleep,” she said, “if someone didn't check the house.”
When he returned to bed after his ritual exploration Kitty locked arms around him and fell asleep. Dubin, his senses alert, lay awake listening for noises in the night.
The window shades rattled. A door slammed in a cross-draft.
“What was that?”
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
“If I can.”
When he urinated, the toilet bowl sounded faintly like a ringing bell.
“Is that the phone?”
“What phone?” she wanted to know.
He was tired of the house—of living in the country. He'd had his fill of housebound cold Northeast winters; of short savage springs; increasingly hot humid summers. Kitty was right, the weather had changed for the worse: cold was colder, hot hotter. He wouldn't mind once more living in the city, chancy as the city was. Millions lived there in peace; millions who hadn't been insulted or mugged. One day on a bus, or as he walked along Madison, he might meet Fanny.
Dubin worried about Maud, chaste in Zen: and Gerald, in the Soviet Union—to what intent, purpose, future? They were into fates he couldn't have foreseen. He felt at times embittered by his worries about them. And he was fed up with his work; of the endless effort it took to keep going.
And tired of living with Kitty. He was bored with the bounds of marriage;
would like to be free before he was too old to enjoy it. Sherwood Anderson had one day escaped from his paint factory, left one or another wife to go to Chicago and write in a rooming house. Gauguin, taking years to sever himself from wife and children, frantically traveling wherever he could, at last made it to Tahiti. Could Dubin do what they had done?—take off and live as he pleased? He preferred, at his age, more solitude, time to himself. When he said something of the sort Kitty's knee-jerk response was: “If you want a divorce you can have a divorce. Don't stay for my sake.” He would have to take off before pity restrained him; pack some necessary things and go to New York. One day while she was out of the house he would drive up in a van to collect his clothes, papers, books, and the pine table he liked to write on in the barn. Kitty would get along one way or another.
She now worked two afternoons a week at the Youth Opportunity Center. She saw Ondyk once a week and stayed on after their session for a drink. Considerate of Evan, the biographer thought. Kitty had returned from Stockholm muted, nervous. She wrote long explanatory letters in behalf of Gerald to the State Department and a letter of inquiry to the American Embassy in Moscow. She wrote she had heard that her son, a deserter, was in the Soviet Union—where she couldn't say—and would appreciate it if they tried to find him and put him in touch with his parents. She received official letters in reply—they were looking into the matter—from Washington and Moscow. She wrote every week to Maud in her commune in South San Francisco. “What ails my children?” Kitty asked. She stood at the edge of her garden, regarding her flowers. She rarely played the harp—now and then for five minutes. She had again taken to reading her
Handbook
of
Psychiatry
, the second volume. Her or me? Dubin thought. He expected, if he looked, to find his name in the index. She seemed forlorn, abandoned by her second husband, such as he was. Her voice was dry; she was thin, distant, out of it somehow. She would look long at her extended legs as she sat in a chair. Whatever she had bought to wear lately seemed wrongly styled or colored. She had bought a fall hat with a bright green ribbon and returned it the next day. “I thought you didn't like green?” Dubin said. “I wondered if it might work this time.” She needed, she said, a pair of reading glasses. Lately as she read she had seen floating black spots, but would not go to an eye doctor. “I'm not in a mood to tempt fate.” “What do you get out of waiting but anxiety?” “I dislike running to doctors.” “Do you think you're being brave?” “Oh, let up, William, I'm being myself.”
One evening she asked, “Don't you think it's time we had sex?”
He said perhaps it was.
“You never court me any more.”
It's because in a long marriage your wife becomes your sister, he thought. Dubin asked her why she didn't court him.
“You never exactly encourage it.”
Kitty brushed her teeth and got into a nightgown he liked. Tonight she lay in bed, waiting for him to begin. He asked her if she was tired and she said she wasn't, was he? He wanted, after Fanny, Dubin thought, someone like Fanny. With her the sexual act began long before the sexual act. Dubin was in his wife when to his surprise his penis wilted like a plucked flower. That hadn't happened before during intercourse. He withdrew and fell back in bed. She tried to bring him to life but he did not respond.
“Had you come?”
He said no.
“Do you feel all right?” she asked gently.
Dubin said he had up to then.
“Well, don't blame yourself. Let's try tomorrow. I'm tired myself.”
“Then why did you suggest it?”
“It's been a long time.”
They tried for three nights but he achieved no erection. He felt his fear on her body.
“Don't be worried,” she urged. “I'm sure it's temporary. Maybe the poor thing is bored. I wish I could plant it in my garden and let it grow like an asparagus.”
“I wish you could.”
“Are you scared?”
He said he was.
She kissed him. “Let's not make ourselves tense. We'll wait a week and try again. Why do you think it happened in medias res?”
“Maybe because you think of it as in medias res.”
“Oh, cut it out.”
“One day it happens,” he said.
“It shouldn't to you yet. Some men even go on into their eighties. One has to stay with it.”
“I'll stay with it if it lets me.”
“Is it my fault? I haven't felt much like sex since I came back from Stockholm.” She looked at him hopefully, then uneasily.
He asked her if she had been reading about impotence in men.
Kitty confessed she had recently read a chapter in a book.
“Maybe that did it. I respond as you expect me to.” He felt he was going after her unjustly but couldn't stop. “If you define me from the book maybe that's the kind of man you get.”
She said that was totally irrational.
“All I'm saying is if I'm spinach in your thoughts that's what you'll get when you open the can.”
“If you're spinach to me it's because you think of
me
as a vegetable.”
“You're reading the book, not I.”
“It could be physical,” she said earnestly. “Diabetes, for instance, can bring it on. Have you had a blood-sugar test recently?”
He said he hadn't.
“Maybe it's something else—I don't mean to wish diabetes on you,” she said with an uncertain laugh, “but something seems wrong. You blame me—that's what your wisecracks and ironies amount to—but you've changed in a way I can't really understand. Have you been sleeping with someone?”
“Do you mean Flora?”
“Her or whoever?”
“You're the only one I sleep with.”
Dubin wondered if lying, or the habit of lying,could make a man impotent. You lied to someone and could not lie with her.
“You might have no trouble with another woman,” Kitty said.
“I might not.”
“If you're sleeping with someone and it's working with her when it's not with me, maybe we ought to think of parting.”
He felt his nose twitch.
“Unless”—she hesitated—“would you want to go to Evan now—for advice?”
“You go to him. I wouldn't want to.”
“There are other therapists not too far away. There's a new man in Winslow I hear is good.”
“How do you know who's new in Winslow? How do you know these things?”
“Evan told me.” A moment later she said, “If you're thinking of divorce you ought to let me in on it.”
“I think of it often,” Dubin said.
Kitty, sitting on the edge of the bed, slipping on her mules, turned to him grimly.
“I wish you'd tell me the truth. Do you have a girl in town?”
“Neither in or out of town.”
“Did
you have during this past winter? I had the feeling you did, when you brought those sex-goodies for me to try with you. I'll bet you had a girl then.”
He admitted he had.
“That's what I thought,” Kitty said with satisfaction. “Who was she?”
“Nobody you know.” Dubin was lying back with his eyes shut.
“You can go to her if you like. Why don't you just go to her?”
“She's not there to go to.”
“Then find yourself someone who is,” she said angrily.
He said he had no plans to.
“Are you ashamed you'd be impotent?”
“I am ashamed. Your question deepens my shame.”
“You deepen your shame.”
Afterward they were uneasy with each other. In her presence he lacked; because he lacked she lacked. For each negation or strangeness there is an opposing negation or strangeness. They had got into bed as though they were fragile; as though neither thought it would work. When it did not they looked at each other in loneliness and embarrassment. Neither suggested trying again the next night, or in the foreseeable future.
He thought of himself as crippled. Dubin imagined going to New York to look for a hooker on Eighth Avenue to test his virility. But even reverie didn't work. The hooker said she couldn't take him on because she was overbooked; but she offered him a remedy for his trouble:
“You got to boil it in salt water to clean out the pipe.”
“Why don't you blow it out?”
“I couldn't,” she said. “I have this sore in my throat.”
Dubin didn't think he would go to the city.
Kitty suggested a vacation.
“Not just now,” he said.
“Then when?”
“I'm not sure, but not now.”
“How's the work going?”
“Surprisingly well.”
“What do you think we ought to do?”
“Give it time. Wait and see.”
“Wait and see what?”
“If we should seriously be thinking of separating.”

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