They were interrupted by Kitty. She had knocked once and walked in. “Oh, I beg your pardon, I had no idea you were talking.”
Fanny got up quickly.
“Don't go, please,” Kitty said.
“Your husband loaned me a book.”
“We were chatting,” Dubin explained.
Fanny left the room and, later, forgot the book she had come to borrow, when she went home for the day.
Dubin, that evening, had thoughts of asking her to go for a walk with him sometime, the short walk.
The next time Fanny was in the house Dubin spied her on the porch, taking time out for a cigarette. He went out with his coffee cup and sat on the bottom step as she sat behind him on a canvas chair. Fanny's legs were parted and her lemon underpants were visible at the crotch. Her feet were bare.
Dubin turned to the hills. To the north was the nameless mountain he looked at when he wanted to look at a mountain.
He asked Fanny what her plans were in New York.
She said she didn't know.
He talked facing the hills, his back warm in sunlight.
“Plans are not my strong point,” Fanny said.
Dubin, after a moment, asked her where she had got her name.
“My name? My mother was the one who named me.”
“After a relative, friend? Who?”
“No, she named me after Fanny Price in
Mansfield Park.
She was on a Jane Austen kick when she was pregnant.”
“You don't say,” said Dubin, turning to her. “Do you know Jane Austen had a favorite niece named Fanny Knight? She was charmed by the girl, reread her letters the day she was dying. The sad thing was that Fanny later
wrote her sister their Aunt Jane had lacked refinement. She was ashamed of her aunt and, in essence, betrayed her memory.”
“I don't think my mother knew that,” Fanny said.
She had made no attempt, as they talked, to bring her knees together.
Dubin drank up his coffee and went upstairs.
A few minutes later he was jolted, at his desk, by a single swift knock on the door as the girl slipped into the room.
He was about to wave her out when she untied her wraparound skirt and whipped it off. Her blouse and underpants came off and she was naked.
Dubin was struck by her youthful beauty.
He mumbled his gratitude.
Fanny tossed her yellow underpants at him. He caught them and tossed them back. They struck her breasts and fell to the floor.
The girl studied him curiously, nervously.
“Whatever you're offering,” Dubin said, “I regret I can't accept.”
“Your wife went to the flower farm. It's an hour each way.”
“This is her house.”
“It's yours as well.”
“Under the circumstances I can't accept.”
Her face had reddened. She was angered. “All this beautiful bullshit about seize the day and what life is all about.”
He hoarsely laughed at the jest.
Fanny pulled her clothes on in a grim instant and was gone. Nothing of her remained that he could find.
Dubin reached for his pen and after a while slowly began to write.
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Fanny quit. She had told Kitty she was off to the city, although Kitty had heard she was still in town, living with Roger Foster. Dubin one day at lunch asked his wife what she had thought of the girl.
“She is sexy,” Kitty said, “but I'm better proportioned.”
Kitty had waked that morning saying she ought to go to Montreal to see her father's grave, then possibly her mother's in Augusta, on her way back.
“I owe him a visit. I've never really made my peace with him. Will you come with me, William? We could do it in a day there and one back.”
“Is something bothering you?” When Kitty thought of visiting graves she was asking her life questions.
She seemed distracted. “I wish you'd come with me. I hate long drives alone.
“Why didn't you suggest it before I began my chapter?”
“It wasn't on my mind then.”
Dubin said his work was going well. “It'll take me a week to get back into it if I go off with you now.”
Kitty, as she dressed, thought it through at the bedroom window. He watched her watching a flicker in the chestnut. A maple, barely missing the house, had fallen in a storm shortly after they had moved in, and Kitty had planted a chestnut there, now a luxuriant tree.
“I guess it's something I'll have to do myself.”
He tried to persuade himself to drop his work and take off with her. But the journey was to cemeteries and he wasn't in the mood. He had his own graves to visit, that he hadn't been to in years.
Kitty said, “I have to go, why am I lingering?”
After lunch she slipped on two silver bracelets and a large ring. She painted her toenails, packed an overnight bag, and drove off toward the Northway.
They had kissed at the doorâgoodbye, not for long. She squeezed his hand. He regretted he could not go with her. She asked him to check the burners and Dubin promised but forgot.
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On occasion he liked eating a meal out of a canâspaghetti, baked beans, carry-over from boyhood, youthâeating alone; but he prepared instead a hamburger Kitty had left defrosting. The meat burned in the pan, so he called a cab and went downtown. Dubin ate a plate of soup and a roast-beef sandwich at a restaurant counter, and since light still glowed in the evening skyâearly fall had run a cool hand through the airâwalked home. The stars appeared in misty swarms, Dipper brilliant. The biographer pondered the mystery of northâdirection of deathâwhite, silent, frigid, sans soul. Where was Kitty now? He hoped she would not drive at night. The moon had not yet risen. Walking alone in the dark he felt sadness of a sort. He thought he would listen to Schubert lieder, then decided, forget it, I'll go to a movie. Schubert, dead at thirty-one, was the first life Dubin had written for
Short Lives.
No one had written a good long life of Schubert. He had lived long in music and short in life.
The house, once he was insideâhe had hesitated at the doorâwas surprisingly empty. Dubin was staggered, as he entered, at the surge of loneliness
he felt, like acid invading the bone. Ridiculous, he thought. Standing at the foot of the stairs the biographer, shaken, tried to puzzle out what was affecting him. As a rule he enjoyed solitude. Being away from home, or occasionally remaining alone there, awoke moods he rarely experienced when his life was geared with Kitty's. What he felt now was more than a melancholy sense of being alone, or perhaps remembrance of that feeling in the past; this seemed a spontaneous almost soiled awareness, more apparent than ever, of one's essential aloneness: the self's separate closed self-conscious subjectivity. Dubin defined it for all time, as previously defined: death's insistence of its presence in life, history, being. If so, nothing new but why once more at this moment?
What had set it off? The absence of his children, a constant remembrance? One day their childhood, and your enjoyment of it, was over. They take off as strangers, not confessing who they presently are. You tried to stay close, in touch, but they were other selves in other places. You could never recover the clear sight of yourself in their eyes. They had become, as though by need, or their own definition, distant relatives. Dubin thought he had got used to the thought. Therefore it must be mainly Kitty's unexpected going to her father's grave? Perhaps he should have gone with her? He switched on the light, waiting as if expecting more light, then trod up the stairs, uneasy still, as though he were a man with three legs who remembered having only two. He wandered in the silent empty house, avoiding his study. What was Lawrence up to when Dubin was away: magicked the circuits of his dark blood? The biographer went up to the third floor to Gerald's old room, sat on the boy's bed. The pall of loneliness hung closeânegates the sufficient self. Who rides Dubin's back? It occurred to him it wasn't so much he was missing his wife as being oppressively aware of himself.
In Maud's room he put in a person-to-person call to Berkeley. She wasn't in; he left a call-back message. Dubin was looking up Gerry's number in Stockholm in Kitty's address book when the telephone shrilly rangâMaud returning his call?
It was Kitty saying she was in Philadelphia.
He listened very carefully. “Weren't you going to Montreal?”
“When I left the house I felt I wanted to see Nathanael's grave. I've not been there for years. I hope you don't mind?”
He didn't think there was any reason he'd mind.
“I honestly almost never think of him any more. But when I got to the
highway I had the impulse to see his grave, and drove south instead of north.”
“I don't mind.”
“You're easier on me these days,” Kitty said.
“One learns,” Dubin said. Then he said, “One thinks he does.”
“You sound constrained. Are you all right?”
He was fine.
“I'll go to the cemetery with some flowers in the morning, then drive home.”
He said he was surprised to hear her in Philadelphia as he was thinking of her in Montreal.
“Your voice sounds distant. Has something happened?”
“I called Maud. I thought you were Maud calling back.”
“Give her my love,” said Kitty. “I wish they weren't so far away.”
Dubin said he'd go out for a short walk before turning in, and Kitty said she was sorry she wasn't there to walk with him.
When he hung up she called back.
Dubin said he'd thought it was Maud again.
“I'm not Maud, I'm me. Please tell me what you're worried about. Is it the Lawrence?”
He said no.
“He's a hard person to love.”
“I don't have to love him. I have to say truthfully who he was and what he accomplished. I've got to say it with grace.”
“Then is something else worrying youâmoney, for instance?”
He confessed he worried about money.
“Are we spending too much?”
“We'll be all right for another year and then we may be tight.”
Kitty said if she had to she would look for a paying job. “Good night, love, don't worry. I'll be home tomorrow.” She was tender on the phone when either of them was away.
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The night was dark deep and starlit, and Dubin walked longer than he thought he might. He was standing at the poster window of the Center Campobello Cinema when the last show broke and he saw, amid two dozen people straggling out, Fanny Bick in bluejeans and clogs, carrying a shoulder bag. She was wearing a white halter tied around the midriff, her hair bound with a red cord. Dubin sensed her before he saw her. He watched, thinking
she would look up and see him but she didn't. She seemed to be still into the film, conscious of herself; he recognized the feeling. He had not expected to lay eyes on her again and now he felt he would have regretted not seeing her. Roger Foster was not in the crowd. To make sure he hadn't stopped in the men's room, Dubin crossed the street and let Fanny walk on; when he was sure she was alone he recrossed the street and followed her.
No more than a diversion, the biographer thought. He doubted he would talk to her; then he thought he must talk to her. His odd loneliness still rode himâa discomfort he wanted to be rid of, something from youth that no longer suited him. He felt a hunger to know the girl, could not bear to have her remain a stranger. The lonely feeling would ease, he imagined, if he knew more about her. Crazy thing to feel it so strongly, as though he'd earned the right to know. Here I am hurrying after her as if we are occupying the same dream.
Fanny sensed something. Her pace quickened, the clogs resounding in the shadowy lamplit street. At the next corner she nearsightedly glanced back nervously.
“Wait up, Fannyâit's William Dubin.”
She waited, austerely, till he caught up with her. If she was relieved she hid it. But her face, pallid in the street light, and restless eyes, offered no welcome.
Dubin was about to tip his hat but had none. He hoped he hadn't frightened her by pursuing her.
Fanny denied the importance of it.
He explained, with a gesture alluding to the loveliness of the night, that he'd been out for a stroll before going to bed. He was, this evening, alone in the house. “I happened to see you leave the movie and thought I'd say hello. Do you mind if I walk with you?”
She said it was a free country.
“Come on, Fannyâyou'll have to do better than that. I'm sure you know I enjoy your company.”