“Marry a Jew?”
“A rabbi. Someone who, for obvious reasons, would never be devoted to me.”
“What brought you to a rabbi?”
“My peculiar fate. He knew about me when I arrived and said he would marry me. I wept.”
“Why would a rabbi marry you?”
“I don't know.”
“Why didn't you go home and marry someone else?”
“I couldn't.”
Afterward, Kitty said, “I'm sure I failed you more than I thought, but that's just the pointâI would have done better with someone more like myself. You should have married a Jewish woman who was better put together and needed less attention, someone who slept nights and wouldn't keep you awake. You'd have waked fresh as a daisy, running to work.”
“Who would you have done better with?”
Her eyes were moist. “If Nathanael hadn't died.”
“I wish to God he hadn't.”
After a long hesitation, Dubin, turning to her, said their talk was self-defeating.
“I'm not afraid of the truth, are you?”
“What truth are we telling each other?”
“That we live side by side but not together. We live in the same house, but I can float around for days yet not make contact with you. After your affair with Fanny in Venice, the feeling we had for one another that we'd kept more or less intact, began to unravel. You speak of a will-to-love. If what I get is what you've willed there's not much to sustain me.”
“You make it sound more negative than it was, or is. Will or no will, I've always appreciated you as a woman.”
“I want more than appreciation.”
“So it was a bad marriage?”
She was observing him gravely, uneasily, sadly. “It's not much of one, I'm afraid. Not any more. I have to be honest.”
He damned her honesty, felt at a loss, had not wanted to fail in marriage. “Then I owe you an apology,” Dubin said.
“I admit we tried, but we aren't sufficiently suited to each other or there'd be less holding back, much more giving. That has to be said.”
“Who I am is not Nathanael?”
“He was in love with me when we got married. I loved him. He wanted me close by. He did not resent me for needing him. He wasn't cold to me, even when I made the mistake of being cold to him.”
“Nate the saint, except when he bopped you in the eye?”
“He was dreadfully sorry for that. He was a good man. He gave affection easily.”
“Once I had the impression I was giving you love,” Dubin said. “It felt
like love, but maybe less came across than I thought. Maybe at most I was thinking I was giving love, a rationale or self-deception suiting your needs to my ethic or aesthetics, or both.”
He had thought this before but had never said it to her. Kitty listened as though she had often heard it.
“I don't suppose it's very hard to fool yourself about loving,” Dubin went on. “It isn't easy to give if you're anchored in an involved subjectivity. Some people complicate their feelings in self-protective ways. I must be one of them. You think you're sailing with a cargo of love, but never deliver because you haven't hoisted anchor, although you have the illusion you had.”
“You're erecting a monument to impossibilityâWhy I never really loved my wife.”
“I'm trying to respond to your argument. On the other hand, not all are receptive to those who've taught themselves to love a little. I imagined love for you. To me it felt like love. I thought you could feel it coming from me âI think you did, but maybe less than I imagined, as though I'd set the thermostat to warm but you, with your nature, never got over feeling chilly in our house.”
Dubin said he regretted that. He regretted Dubin, the lacking man. “I regret he comes out meager when he means to be generous, potent, large in love.”
“You're not large in love.”
“To be honest,” he confessed, sitting up with the force of his insight, “William Dubin, the biographer, is grateful to you for having through the years described to him what his lacking love, lacking nature, come toâfor having kept him up with himself so that he could be a truthful measure, as well as recorder, of the lives of those he writes about, and therefore a better biographer.”
Kitty got out of bed, tight-jawed. “It's more of the same, another denial of me. Everything sooner or later goes back to your biographies. That's your grand passionâif you could fuck your books you'd have it made.”
“I'd rather do the same for you.”
“No, you wouldn't,” she cried. “You could if you wanted to. Your explanation of your rationale is itself a rationale. I sense something unsaid, as though you were evading truth in pretending to tell it.”
It's a way of life, the biographer thought. I must stop thinking of myself as a truthful man.
As they were dabbling at breakfast, Kitty, struggling for control, said as she tremblingly poured his coffee, “I hear someone has bought the Wilson farm.”
He said he hadn't heard about it.
Â
On New Year's Day night, Dubin trudging up the snowy road to the farm, was caught in the flaring lights of a truck that had backed out of Fanny's driveway. He'd been thinking of his desire for her; it was sometimes only desire. Was it, too, a lacking love?
The driver brought the truck to a stop. “Is that you, Mr. Dubin?” He had poked his head out of the window.
“Dubin,” said the biographer, shielding his eyes in the light, as he stood by a snowbank.
The truck lights went off. “Roger Foster here. I want you to know I intend to wait you out for Fanny. I got a long life ahead of me.”
Dubin said his father was a waiter.
He jogged past the truck.
Roger drove on with his lights off.
Â
One winter's late-afternoon Maud Dubin arrived home with her large suitcase and duffel bag and went at once up to her old room to sleep. “For a visit?” Dubin asked his wife when he returned after a quick hour at the farm. “She's pregnant,” Kitty said unhappily. He was overwhelmed by a long sense of loss. He had been concerned with Maud rarely lately and castigated himself for it.
“How many months?” he afterward asked.
“Probably two.” Kitty paced around the room with her hands clasped.
“Has she spoken of an abortion?”
“She wants to have the baby.” Her unhappiness yielded a tender smile; she loved little babies.
Maud slept fifteen hours and in the early morning appeared in her father's study in bathrobe and boots. She laid down on his desk a pack of cigarettes and book of matches. Her face was fresh after sleep and a shower, her eyes trying to be calm.
He knew she had never liked talking to him in his studyâhe was, she had said,
always
there. “Would you rather talk in your room,” Dubin asked, “or maybe go for a walk later?”
She said she would rather talk now.
He thought of the child she had been and was once more aware of loss. Of what? That he hadn't married her? That his love could not control her fate? He hid from her his sense of desecrated life.
Maud lit a cigarette, her hand trembling. “Mother said she's told you? Not much of an annunciation, I'm afraid.”
“I hate accidents determining people's fates,” Dubin said.
“I've made my peace with it.”
He advised her not too quickly to make peace. Maud smoked silently.
He wanted to put his arms around herâhis daughter, who ran through experience as though she was slicing breadâbut sensed she would rather he didn't.
“It's hard to believe. I pictured you chaste in Zen.”
“Believe,” Maud said dryly.
“This is what satori came to?”
“Do you really want to know?”
He nodded, wanting to know but not to hear.
She said a letter had come after she'd been four months at the commune â“from a man I've had a long affair with. He asked to see me. I thought I wouldn'tâI was the one who had broken it off but maybe the Zen hadn't takenâI was finding it hard to concentrate. And I kept on thinking of you telling me to remember I was Jewish and live in the real world. Anyway, I saw him again and got pregnant.”
He sighed. “So I helped initiate the conception?”
“Don't be ironic, Papa.”
“I'm bitter.”
“Don't be, I'm not. The Zen Master asked me to stay in the commune. He said I could have my baby there and the commune would help me to take care of it. They are incredibly kind people but I felt I had no right to stay because I had failed their teaching. So I went home.”
“Does the man know you're pregnantâthe father, or whatever you call him?”
“You call him the father, he's a fatherly man.”
“Does he know?”
She shook her head.
“Why haven't you told him?”
“It wouldn't do any goodâhe's married.”
After a while Dubin asked, “Any chance of his divorcing his wife?”
Her complexion reddened. “I wouldn't say so. He's about your age and has been married thirty-five years.”
Dubin broke into a sweat. “My age?”
“Sixty.”
“My God, he's older than I.”
“I've often told myself that.”
“How in Christ did you ever get involved with an old man at your age?”
He had trouble with the question, thought of himself as hypocrite, except that Fanny, when they had met, was an experienced woman.
“I don't think of him as old.”
That drew a mist to her father's eyes.
“Sixty is the age he happens to be,” Maud said, rubbing her cigarette out. “For a while I was frightened about the difference in yearsâthat he was three times my age. Then it became a sort of mythic thing in my mind that he was more than loverâhe was father, friend, and loverâthat there was something extraordinary in our relationship, that it had been happening since man appeared on earth. I stopped being afraid. His age made little difference to meâalthough it did to himâbecause in his heart he was young, because he loved me. He seemed to know everything I wanted to know. I valued myself better when I was with him.”
“I always valued you highly.”
“Too highly, I bet?”
“I never thought so. I thought you valued yourself?”
“I do but with doubt. He was my Spanish teacher in my sophomore year. In class he couldn't keep his eyes off me. When we talked I could see his love. Once he poured a paper cup of water for me in the hall and his hand shook. We began to sleep together. He never asked, it happened when I realized I was in love with him.”
She said they saw each other seriously from then on. “Finally his wife found out and had a breakdown. I felt I had to leave college. I joined the Zen commune in South San Francisco but still missed him. When he wrote to me we got back together for a few days and when I woke up in the motel room the morning he left, I knew I was pregnant.”
“Didn't he ask if you were protected? What sort of ass is he?”
“If I had slept with a fifteen-year-old boy I still would have got pregnant,”
Maud said. “I was stupid about my diaphragm. He had no reason to think I didn't know what I was doing. He's a gentle and courteous man. He taught me an awful lot about poetry. We read the classic Spanish poets together. I was happy with him. What's wrong with happiness?”
Dubin didn't say.
“Was he the man you went to Venice with?”
“I don't know how you know that. I never told you or Mother I went to Venice with anyone. We weren't there when you were, without Mother.”
“How did you know I was there without Mother?”
“You all but confessed it the winter I was here for a week.”
Dubin got up as she rose, kissed her hair, drew her to him. He could feel her pregnant frame trembling. “I'm glad you're home.”
“I suppose you feel betrayed?”
“I feel a lot but not betrayed. You're the one who's betrayed.”
“I don't think of it that way.”
She went to the window, raised it, breathed deeply. “I need a breath of air.”
“You won't get any air through the storm window. My God, you've forgotten you ever lived here.” He opened a window with a ventilating slot at the bottom of the outer frame.