“How would you know till you had tried?”
“I know myself,” she had said. She spoke with doubt, looking at him as though expecting him to deny the doubt, which he did not do.
She said then with more certainty, “I'm not saying I wouldn't want to try an affair. I've thought about it, frankly, though I don't know who'd be interested in me at my age. I'm not a young woman any more.”
He said again, hesitating to say it, that she was, nevertheless, attractive. “Stop remembering when you were born.”
“I wish I had been more adventurous when I was youngâmore daring. I wish I could have let goâI'm a passionate womanâbut I wouldn't have been comfortable with an affair while Nathanael was walking the dog, or you were picking flowers. And I don't think I'd care for the concealment and dishonesty that goes with an affair, though my grandmother told me my mother was very good at it, could do it all without blinking an eyelash. But I am not my mother. Somewhere along the line I think I bored her.”
Dubin gave her credit: Kitty knew herself not badly, and lived with it, not badly. He thought of her as comparatively untried. Life had fallen on her once like a tree that had cracked and been blown over in a storm. She had crawled out from under a ton of broken branches, shocked, bleeding, traumatized; but after that, life had more or less let her be. A little crippled was fine with life. So long as you're wounded you know you're alive. Yet he felt the more experienced he became, the less she seemed to be. Though Kitty
called herself passionate there were areas of sensual experience she had made no attempt to know. She did not play with what might explode in her face. One tree falling on you in a lifetime was enough forever. She seemed always self-protective; had a quality of that kind, therefore that kind of innocence. Besides she couldn't lie. Perhaps he could teach her?
Was she changingâmight she have changed? Had she thought it over, decided, at her age, because of her age, to take a chanceâin protest of his neglect of her? If she were into an affair now had he forced it on her? But an affair with whom in Center Campobello? Oscarâperhaps evening the score for Flora and Dubin? Not likely: if he'd allowed himself to be attracted by Kitty he'd have gone after her years ago. Only once had he persuaded her to play the harp to his flute. Evan Ondyk? She had said he would not appeal to her as a lover. Roger Foster?âthe desire for a young lover revived? Given the failure of their former attraction, Dubin doubted her interest in Roger now. Still, he couldn't say for sure. Women of Kitty's age could be desirable to younger men. She might be willing if he was. But Dubin thought if she was into an affair it would probably be with a stranger to him, possibly one of the psychiatric social-worker types she met at the Youth Center. Kitty admired people who advised others about their lives.
Dubin had noticed a leak in the hot-water tank and one morning went down to the cellar to see how bad it was. The water was dripping steadily. He hurried upstairs to call the plumber and when he picked up the receiver heard Evan Ondyk on the phone. He was about to hang up when Evan quietly said, “We can have lunch and be together.”
“Is someone on the telephone?” Kitty asked loudly, nervously. Dubin could hear her voice on the phone; at the same time he heard it coming from upstairs. His heart hammered; he didn't speak and could not hang up lest she hear him.
Ondyk after a long moment said he didn't think so. “Where's William?”
“I think in his study. Let's not talk any more now, Evan. I'll meet youâyou know whereâand please don't call me hereâI get anxious when the telephone rings.”
“Kitty, you called me.”
“So you wouldn't call me.”
He insisted he was being careful. “How else can I reach you when time unexpectedly becomes available?”
“Smoke signals,” she said.
They laughed.
“I look forward.”
“I too.” She hung up.
From therapy to bed with the psychotherapist, an easy next step. The bastard probably tells himself he's doing me a favorâfilling in for a friend with a soft cock.
Dubin waited in the cellar till Kitty came down for breakfast. He entered the kitchen, saying there was a leak in the hot-water tank. She said she would call the plumber. Neither of them looked long at the other.
In mid-morning, as she was taking a bath, he left the house and walked to town to rent a car. Dubin parked it on a nearby road on an overcast February day. Before Kitty, wearing flushed-pink stockings, left the house shortly before noon, she said, “The plumber will be here in the morning. I may do some shopping. There's a hamburger for you defrosted in the fridge if you want one for lunch. Coffee is set to boil.”
She paused trying to think whether there was something else to say but there wasn't. Kitty did not return to dip her head over the burners. Now she knew what an affair might do for one.
Dubin followed her at a distance in his rented car. She drove to a motel a few miles away, her apple-green automobile turning into its driveway. As he rode by he observed his wife enter the cabin where Ondyk's Buick was parked. Fair is fair. It was the same motel Dubin had been in with Fanny.
He arrived home nervously excited. He felt, too, nostalgic regret. He felt relief accompanied by an oppressive surge of energy. Sitting at his desk with a sheet of paper before him he listed the steps of a divorce. He remembered more law then he had thought. It occurred to him that he had kept up with recent changes in divorce law in New York State.
In the weeks that followed Dubin pretended to know nothing about Kitty's affair. He sometimes felt an embarrassed self-punitive regret when she went off to be with her lover. When she went to meet him she wore the silver bracelet Dubin had got her in Stockholm after he had bought the gold one in Venice for Fanny. And lately Kitty also wore an old locket she had, a medallion of Mary the Mother. She usually left her wedding ring home when she went to see Evan. Dubin pretended not to notice, or seem suspicious. He doubted she could have carried on an affair when she was a young woman. The years, her need, made the difference.
He still kept his eye open for her diary. What was she writing about her
affair? He felt a desire to know. In her clothes closet he came across her blue gardening sneakers. They were long sneakers, split at the toes, comic. Her droopy faded orange straw hat looked as if it belonged to somebody's grandmother. He thought of himself and her, a generation ago, as a young man and woman who had just met, and moved by mutual respect and the magic of possibility, were willing to try to know and love each other. It was, in this world, a brave thing to do, and they had for a while done it. There was indeed, Dubin thought, a married state; and if you had lived in it for years with someone who had treated you considerately you wanted to go on thinking of her as the considerate woman she was. You wanted to go on respecting her whether she was still your wife or not. He hoped she would not spoil that for him.
One afternoon Dubin discovered Kitty's diary in the kitchen oven. It had been elsewhere, but now it was in the oven. Kitty sometimes temporarily shoved things in it to get them out of the way. He had asked her not to, but she said she had never in her life caused a fire. Dubin riffled through the last pages of the notebook. She had written little about herself recently, not a word about Ondyk, nothing directly about Dubin. He discovered, not without surprise, that she had been reading biographies of accomplished women. Four she mentioned were Charlotte Bronte, Rosa Luxemburg, Jane Welsh, Eleanor Roosevelt. She commented on how they had fought for strength and resisted the tyranny of lovers and husbands.
Most of her notes in the diary were about Jane Welsh, Thomas Carlyle's wife, a woman of exceptional intellect, character, wit, with vivid powers of literary expression, who might have had, Kitty wrote, “a remarkable writing career if she weren't enmeshed in a miserable Victorian marriage. What an age!” Carlyle, though he could at times be a tender and affectionate husband, especially when he was miles from her, in Scotland or elsewhere writing letters to her, was an almost totally self-centered man of genius; for years bound to, and groaning in his bowels over, the multi-volumed lives of Cromwell and Frederick the Great it took him forever to write, while his unhappy wife was sometimes suffering from illness and neglect in the next room. Once after she had been seriously hurt in a street accident she wrote in her diary, “Oh, my husband! I am suffering torments! Each day I suffer more horribly. O, I would like you beside me. I am terribly alone. But I don't want to interrupt your work.” Though Carlyle depended heavily on her, he was all
but blind to her loneliness; he gave her little emotionally and nothing sexually. Like Ruskin he seemed to have been impotent throughout his married life. When she died in London, he, in Scotland, dreamed she had died. She was buried in her father's grave and Carlyle's remorse began. For fifteen years he mourned her. “Oh that I had you yet for five minutes beside me, to tell you all.”
“About time,” Kitty wrote. Her last entry on Jane Welsh read: “She waked between thirty and forty times a night, averaging three hours of sleep, âall in fractions.' But she was not a defeated person, a victim, thanks to her talent for friendship, writing, self-preservation. She felt marriage was a âshockingly immoral institution.' And âan extremely disagreeable one.'” Kitty called Carlyle “a narcissistic, nervous,
obsessed, impotent biographer.
” Dubin noted the emphasis.
The entry after that in her diary was a despairing one about Gerald. Dubin tossed the notebook back into the oven and seriously considered turning the gas on.
One night she came to Maud's room, where he was sleeping, and standing by the bed in the dark, told him she had had a terrible dream about their daughter: “She had given birth but wouldn't let me see the baby. Then a black man went into the room and stabbed it. I sank into a faint so deep I don't know how I managed to wake up and come here.”
“Do you want to get into bed with me?”
She said, after momentary silence, “Would you mind first going down to look at the burners? I meant to but forgot.”
There's this hissing open burner in her head, he thought, and I live with it as though it were real.
Dubin got up as she slipped into Maud's narrow bed. Stepping into his slippers he went down to the kitchen to sniff the gas. First he tightened the knobs, then breathed over the burners to make sure no gas was leaking. He felt he had to smell them if she asked him to. It was a responsibility: you lied about your girl but not about the gas. He tried to estimate how often he had smelled the burners since he had married Kitty. How many cubic feet of gas had he inhaled in the hundreds of times he had bent over the burners for her? One married her wounds with the woman. One ingested them. And it worked the other way, he supposed. His wounds had wounded her.
What would I smell for Fanny? Only her body. Her breasts smell like flowers and her cunt like the salt sea.
The bed lamp was on when he returned to Maud's room. Kitty's head lay on the pillow in darkish light.
“Is there something I can do for you?” she asked.
“Nothing,” said Dubin, “except please let me sleep if I fall asleep. You stay here, I'll go to our bed.”
“Are you sure?”
“Nothing at all.”
As he was becoming sleepy, Kitty slid into their bed with him. “William,” she said, “I have something to tell you: I've been having an affair with Evan. It started a couple of months ago, and you know why.”
“That horse's ass,” he said dully.
“No, he isn't. He's considerate and appreciative and a lot wiser than you think. He asked me to go to bed with him and I did. He's not very happy with Marisa, and I was hard up and disgusted with you. But what I want to say now is that I've broken it off. I don't regret what I've done, but I didn't do it easily. If it weren't for you I don't think I would have done it.”
“Is he still your therapist?”
“I don't think we'd better. I'm sorry because he was good with me. I don't know what to do about that.”
“Would you want a divorce?” Dubin asked her.
She said bitterly she no longer knew what she wanted.
Â
Winter
Dear William, Dear MotherâIf this ever reaches you it will be through a contact I had with a friend in the French Embassy when I first came here. I'm in her room writing this as she packs. She's leaving the Soviet Union to marry a medical student in France and has promised to try to sneak this letter out. If she does you will get it from Rouen but won't be able to answer. I have no address to give you. I am in serious troubleâwhich won't surprise you. I sleep in a freezing shack. I have little to eat. I am worn out and sick.
Here's what happenedâI was recruited in Stockholm by the KGB into Soviet espionage. I wasn't sure I wanted to accept but finally talked myself into it. I think I thought I was being true to myself. I was flown into the Soviet Union from Finland after a boat trip across the Baltic. In Moscow I was trained to work with coding and code-breaking electronic equipment.
Colonel Kovacol, in charge of my unit, twice cited me for excellent work. As you might expect it didn't take me long to fall out of favor. Whatever reasons I came here for, I didn't come out of a love for communism, and I underestimated the effects of totalitarianism. Men
are
superfluous in this society. The worst things in American life are all here, derived from a terrifying materialism. Everybody eats now but few think independently and those who do and say so usually end up in prison. It depressed me that I always go one worse when I hope to go one better. Finally I made up my mind to ask out, I requested to be sent back to Sweden. That was, of course, a stupid mistake. I should have waited until they had some reason of their own to send me out of the country.