Lawrence had become impotent in his early fortiesâwhat a terrifying loss to a man who writes poems to his erect phallus. Someone had theorized that his condition was related to tuberculosis, which it took him many years to admit he had; but who is to say what pure Greek fate he had wrought for himself in the labyrinth of the Lawrencian mind, in the recesses of the blue-black blood? Frieda had whispered the sad news around, possibly to justify an affair or two. How curious it is, Dubin thought, as you write a man's life, how often his experiences become yours to live. This goes on from book to book: their lives evoke mine or why do I write? I write to know the next room of my fate. To know it I must complete Lawrence's life. He died at forty-four. I'm fifty-eight but if I die now I die young. My concern with aging has made me conscious of death. William Dubin's in his last life, no longer those one lives to learn withâif he learns. In middle age some degree of accomplishment kept me young, aware of youth in me. The future was my next biography; now it's age. Subjectivity sickens me. I fear myself fearing.
Dubin had taken the measure of himself and measured less.
Almost as he was thinking this, the rains swept summer aside and autumn
flowed in. The muggy heat evaporated: weather turned crisp cool; sky cold blue; air transparent. Whirring flocks of birds settled on the lawns, pecked in the dying grass, and flew off in rushing flights. The yellowing trees giving off yellow candlelight turned dull-gold.
He went back to his work, pushed on, wished he was writing in the barn.
Â
As he jogged the long walk one wet late-afternoon, Dubin slipped on a stone, fell heavily, and lay in the road in torment. He felt he had broken his ankle. After excruciating minutes the pain let up and he managed to hobble on. He arrived at the highway, where he was able to hitch a ride in a pickup truck to the hospital emergency room.
Kitty came for him in her new apple-green Toyota. They had traded in the Ford; she would not drive the car that had killed Lorenzo. The swelling was reduced with ice and the strained ankle bound with an ace bandage. Dubin was advised to stop walking for at least a week. The effect was depressingly confining. He had given up the article and gone back entirely to the book. Money was becoming a problem, but if he had to borrow he'd have to borrow. Kitty wouldn't like it. He'd try the article later at a chapter break.
The biographer had to cut out calisthenics and set aside his diet. Immediately he gained weight, felt leaden, heavy, unfocused. In the cellar he located Maud's old bike, cleaned and oiled it, and with Kitty's assistance got it up the stairs. He pedaled the bicycle to the bridge, but the ankle was not that much healed and the pressure of pedaling became painful. The next day he was at a loss what to do for activity. He was restive, nervous. When Dubin stopped running he ran withinâa running runs within. To catch up with himself he got into the new automobile.
Dubin went on his long walk in Kitty's car. It took not more than fifteen minutes to drive the route slowly, so he drove it several times. He drove at twenty an hour, puffing a cigar, though not much tasting it; trying to see what he usually saw when he was walking: the seasonally changing landscape ârumpled yellow autumn hills and darkening orange mountains. Close by, eternally a scattering of stiff farmhouses, weathered barns, squat and tall silos, cows in spongy pastures. As he drove his route he was surprised by the narrowness of the road he usually walked. It reminded him of the thin long hallways of the railroad flats he had lived in as a child. Ahead the light receded; the road was shadowy, empty. Dubin drove the emptiness. What
am I afraid of other than myself? At the highway he turned left instead of right, and in a burst of speed was halfway to Winslow before returning. The next day he repeated the drive until he had lost count of the number of voyages he had made, and a fog descended on the deserted road.
He could think of nothing that was working as he wanted it to. He had returned the biographies and letters to their proper places in the shelves. Dubin thought of all the lives he had hoped to write that he never would. His nose twitched like a rabbit's as he flipped through Kitty's
Handbook of Psychiatry
, Vol. II. He read in it nothing that gave him pleasure or relief, and hid the book in a closet. Dubin, weary of himself, wanted to be better than he was, free of twitches, tics, compulsive gestures. He wanted to be self-sufficient, in control, good to others, good to his wife. He wanted to breathe in the purity of fresh morning. He was disheartened by his monotonous days and nights. I'm like a rock with an iron fence around it. I'm not doing anything for anybody. He got into the apple-green Toyota and drove to the green bridge.
Dubin journeyed the usual way, not seeing much, head constricted, attention wandering. It began to drizzle and he automatically flicked on the wipers, trying not to think though his mind steamed with thought; and when he lit a cigarillo, his hand trembled. On the wet road close to the path to the quarry Dubin passed a man squatting by his car; he had just changed a rear tire and was lowering the hydraulic jack. The biographer passed him in a spurt of speed. A quarter of a mile farther up the road he pulled to the side and shut off the ignition, tensely trying to think whether to turn back, struggling to control the rush of fear he felt at the thought. The man he had passed in the road was Evan Ondyk. Maybe I ought to talk to him? Dubin touched the starter, turned with difficulty, and reluctantly drove back. He felt shaken, unwell. A vital self had walked out of his life, leaving this old bag.
Lowering his window, he gravely hailed Ondyk. “Need any help?”
“I thought it was you, William. No, thanks, all's done.” He lifted the flat-tired wheel, then the jack, into the trunk of the car and slammed down the lid.
Dubin parked on the left side of the road, ten feet beyond Ondyk's Buick on the right. He turned off his wipers but left the motor running. He was still in flight.
“Evan,” he said with an effort through the half-open window, “I'm not
in the best of shape. In fact I'm not feeling at all well. Would you mind getting into the car with me and talking for a minute? Or I could get into yours?”
“A minute is all I have,” Ondyk said, his eyes darting at Dubin's. He hesitated. “Oh, what the hell, talk away, William. But I can't get into the car with you. This flat tire has made hash of my schedule. I'll have to skip something. If it's lunch with Marisa she'll be sore as hell.”
“You'll get wet out there.”
“I have my rain hat in the car.”
The psychotherapist was standing in the road in the drizzle, his hair covered with droplets of rain. His damp brow glistened and blond mustache drooped. He was a heavy-shouldered handsome man with a slender nose, cleft chin, moody eyes. A familiar stranger, Dubin thought. Confiding in him was difficult.
The biographer caught a glimpse of himself in his mirrorâshock of recognition: eyes tight, shifty, fearfulâmouth compressed, uneasyâcomplexion gray. He heard his own frightened breathing, felt ashamed of what he was intoâconsulting a man he had never much liked, a psychotherapistâembarrassed by his embarrassment. There were, among recurring others, two known Dubins: the man sitting in the car and someone within writhing in shame.
“How's Kitty doing?” he heard himself ask. The question seemed strange, imperiling, as though he'd left her and had to ask a neighbor for news.
Ondyk, in the drizzle, smiled slightly. “Ask her, William, don't ask me.”
“Of course. I'm sorry.”
He cursed his nose twitching spasmodically. Ondyk sneaked a sidelong look at him. Dubin forced himself not to avert his glance.
“I'm not myself,” he said with a hollow laugh. “I'm feeling off-center, off-baseâas if I have two left sides and nowhere to take them. I work little, without concentration. I'm full of odd crawling fears. I may need an assist, Evan. Has Kitty told you?”
“She didn't put it to me like that. She sort of indicated your book on Lawrence might be doing you in.”
“Was that what she said?”
“Something like that.”
“What else?”
“That's her business. Listen, William, you and I aren't great friends, but
it mightn't be a bad idea if I speak to you as one. I'm no literary criticâthat's not my specialtyâbut I could never figure out why a man of your disposition and temperament would want to get so many years of his life involved with a tormented semi-narcissistic figure like D. H. Lawrence. Thoreau I can understand for you, but not this fellow. Not all of us are congenial with each other, as I'm sure you'll agree. I'm thinking of the wear and tear in the long runâwhat a ball-breaking strain it must be to have to identify with someone whose nature is so radically different from yours. Isn't objectivity breached by his constant bilge?”
Dubin did not resist the man's approach. It was easier to reply to than something directly personal.
He answered, lowering his eyes, forcing himself to speak: “He's a strange mindful but essentially a meliorist. He wants a better world but on his own terms: reform sexâthe passional lives of menâand you reform the world. But he had very little faith in mankind and allowed himself some destestable beliefs. One critic said his philosophy might be that of any thug or moron if separated from the warm intense articulate being he was. He could be a forthright detached critic of his work. He knew and did not always approve his nature. And whatever his excesses he remained an artist. His fiction, though not always successful, was the work of a man of genius.”
Dubin, clearing his throat intermittently, said he took no great pleasure in Lawrence's religious primitivism and anti-democratic fantasies. Or in his view of debased social body with its law-oriented degenerate Jews, weak in maleness, leading in the race to total corruption. Or in his hatred of women whose evil power over blood males emasculated them. “He called the public âstinking humanity' and equated socialism with syphilis. He was engorged with the rage of a failed prophet.
“On the other hand,” he said to Ondyk, “I can't say I'm much upset by his hatred of capitalism and outraged sense of the perversion of human life by technology. Finally, he brings his destructive impulses to a life-enhancing end in his books. He lived in a vast consciousness of life. At his best he wants man to risk himself for a plenitude of life through love.”
“Why not?” Ondyk asked.
“Why not?” Dubin hoarsely echoed.
“He sounds better than I thought.”
“When you write biography you want to write about people who will make you strain to understand them.” Dubin said it was like chasing a runner you
would never catch up with. “But the game is, I suppose, to make the reader think that's exactly what you have done, and maybe in a blaze of illumination even have outdistanced him. It's an illusionary farce that holds me by the tail.”
The biographer tried to laugh but nothing came of it.
“Still and all,” Evan said, continuing to observe Dubin, “though I know I am technically out of my depth, you and he are two radically different types, and living every day with the anger, spleen, and hostility of this enraged man is bound to exacerbate your other day-to-day problems.”
“He's hard to take when I'm taking myself hard,” Dubin admitted. “He's hard to take now, but I've worked on him for years and have to finish the job.”
“You have serious problems.”
“I know, but if you don't mind me saying so, Evan, I wish you'd drop this approach. If I give Lawrence up I give up a book, and the thought of that âI confess I've thought of itâmakes me feel shivery and sick. I don't want that kind of failure to contend with at this time of my life. I would have no confidence in anything I went to next.”
The drizzle turned into rain. Ondyk got his porkpie rain hat out of his car, lowered the brim all around, and placed it on his wet head. He flipped up his jacket collar. In the rain he stood patiently at the window observing the uncomfortable biographer. Dubin's motor was still running. He fought an intense urge to step on the gas and bolt.
“What did you mean before when you said you needed an assist? Were you thinking of consulting me professionally?”
“Kitty said it might be a good idea.”
“What's your view?”
Dubin scratched himself nervously. “I'm of two minds. I have my reservations.”
“I've heard you on that subject,” Ondyk said, wiping his wet face with his wet handkerchief. “In any case it doesn't make much difference because I can't take you on, William. Kitty's my patient and though there are therapists who do marriage counseling with husband and wife it's not my dish of fish, so I regret I have to say no.” He smiled moodily. “I know someone in Winslow I could refer you to.”
Dubin didn't think so. “I respect what you do or I wouldn't be encouraging
my wife to see you. But I'm not so sure it's right for me at this time of my life. Maybe when I was younger, but I couldn't afford it then.”
“If you had needed it seriously, you'd have found a means to afford it.”