DIRTY LOVE
ANDRE DUBUS III
W. W. Norton & Company
New York London
DEDICATION
for Fontaine
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
LISTEN CAREFULLY
AS OUR OPTIONS HAVE CHANGED
MARLA
THE BARTENDER
DIRTY LOVE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
COPYRIGHT
ALSO BY ANDRE DUBUS III
LISTEN CAREFULLY
AS OUR OPTIONS HAVE CHANGED
AT FIRST THERE IS ONLY THE COFFEE TABLE IN FRONT OF HIM, a swath of sunlight across its glass surface. There’s the neat stack of women’s magazines, the TV remote lying perfectly parallel beside them. There is the oak floor and yellow wall, the tiled kitchen and granite countertop, the closed bedroom his mother left hours ago because it is almost noon on a Saturday in July and he is waking once again in the garage apartment he built for her. There is no dust, no empty cans or glasses, though his mouth is salt and ash and a familiar ache grips his head. He closes his eyes, but there’s the video again. The picture is color and high-resolution. It is a bright spring day in a park in New Hampshire, and there are patches of snow on the ground. Mark Welch has not seen this in a while. The first weeks it came daily, but then, as things have become what they have, he’s stopped seeing it so often and its power has faded. Still, he’d rather not see it now and he’d only made himself watch it twice, both times on the Sony flat-screen in the living room of the main house, his heart kicking like a hanged man’s feet.
The sun is shining through pine trees onto a clearing of vacant picnic tables and an empty fire pit, its cinderblock walls scorched black. Just beyond it is a two-door coupe, a white import, its trunk closed and facing the camera. The doors are closed, too, and now the lens slowly moves in as if the one filming does not wish to startle. There, in the front seat, a man behind the wheel talks in profile to a woman. He is bald from his own hand, the way so many men are now, choosing to shave away thinning hair so as to appear younger, still virile, though the effect is coldly narcissistic. He is talking and smiling at the woman. Her hair is long and tied back in a ponytail, and now the camera zooms too quickly so there is only the reflection of pine branches in the import’s rear window. The frame of the image shifts slightly, pulls back, and the woman is visible again, her small curved nose, her left eye, how it turns down at the corner when she laughs, the way she does now with the bald man behind the wheel. This was one of the first things Mark had noticed about her, and he had seen it in the movie theater in that silly romance they went to that first time, how when she’d laughed he’d half turned in the flickering glow and watched her face; there were other things he’d noticed before that: there was her voice, tentative but somehow decisive too, the sound of one who consistently willed herself through fear or embarrassment. There was her thick, straight hair falling down her back like a girl’s and not the thirty-one-year-old showing him condominiums along Pickering Wharf in her navy business skirt and white blouse, those runner’s legs leading to maternal hips. And it was the way she smiled at him in the realtor’s office, as if she’d been waiting for him for years and now that he’d finally come she was shy about it.
But in the video, in that front seat of that two-door under the sun-mottled pines in the park, there are gray streaks in her hair that has thinned over the years. There are small bags under her eyes that turn down as she laughs. There are lines at the corners of her lips. And what about those other changes? Though to the man behind the wheel, there are none for he has only known her a few months, maybe a year, so even though he has probably visited her flat belly and seen the stretch marks—light purple and in a vertical pattern—between her navel and pubic hair, they can mean nothing to him, not like they do to Mark. No, he used to kiss them with gratitude, a sign not just of the births of their daughter and son, grown now, but of her body’s aging alongside his, a measure of their two and a half decades together.
In the video all this is covered by her nylon jogging suit because they’ve both just run side by side in that park in New Hampshire, the bald man behind the wheel and Laura. He and she have run together in the woods and now the man passes her a water bottle and she drinks. In seconds, she will lower the bottle. She will smile at the bald man behind the wheel and he will lean toward her, then sink out of sight. In seconds he will sit up and place Laura’s running shoes on the rear dash, then Laura will lift her hips to make things easier for him, and soon there will be only Laura sitting behind the wheel of this two-door import, her head back, her hand gripping the dash as the bald man does to her what he does, and Mark Welch, the husband of Laura Welch, who twenty-four years ago was Laura Murphy, he now stands in his mother’s garage apartment, his temples pulsing, and he walks through her dim bedroom into the bathroom.
He uses the toilet, splashes his face with cold water three times. He squeezes his eyes shut, and there are the smells of toothpaste and chamomile and cotton. In the darkness he sees the reflection in the swimming pool from last night. He’d been sitting at the round table near the diving board sipping Bacardi with a splash of Coke, his second or his fourth. He’d been watching his wife through the kitchen window, watched her rinse her plate or glass from hours earlier, watched her load them into the dishwasher. When Mary Ann and Kevin were small, when the house was full of their friends and various cousins, that machine would be filled and emptied twice a day, but Mary Ann is in business school down in Cambridge and Kevin has dropped out of Pratt to design his own video games in a cramped apartment in Brooklyn, so now, while her cuckolded husband lives with his mother in the attached garage, only Laura Welch inhabits the house and it will take her a full week to fill the machine with what she’s used and left dirty.
Maybe she knew he was out there beside the pool alone after midnight. But probably she did not for just before she flicked off the kitchen’s overhead light she studied her reflection in the window. It was the look a mechanic gives a car engine she knows very well, checking the trouble areas first, then those—thanks to good design and her own hard work—that are still reliable; it was the look of a woman who knows there are probably fewer miles ahead of her than there are behind her, but right now the ride is fairly smooth and there are places along the way to look forward to, places where she will not have to be alone, and for this she’s grateful.
Then there was nothing, only a black window and the yellow glow of the exterior light, its still reflection on the pool’s surface. Mark stared at it and sipped, stared and sipped. It has not been a smooth ride for him, has it? No, it has not. But there’s a distance now, a distance from everything. Work and all its endless tasks, his mother and her constant caring for him up there in that apartment he built her—cooking for him, pouring him a drink, making his bed on the couch, trying to get him to talk about Laura and the eviction and divorce his mother insists he must demand. There’s the distance from his own body. He’d never kept it as fit as Laura had hers, but he had not neglected it either. He didn’t smoke, didn’t eat badly, had always drunk moderately, getting drunk only two or three times a year. He occasionally lifted weights in his basement, or jogged for half an hour around his neighborhood, and in the summer he’d swim laps in his pool till he was tired and he would climb out and sit in the sun beside his solitary, sunning wife.
But now his body feels like some dumb beast he merely exists inside, and every now and then it lets him know it needs him to do something: To eat. To piss or shit. To move or just lie down and rest. He does not remember climbing the exterior stairs to his mother’s apartment and couch last night. He does not remember how long he sat near the pool in the dark or when he left the bar where he?
??d been earlier. But he remembers the woman’s face. Not Laura’s at the kitchen sink but the one in the parking lot. She wasn’t much older than Mary Ann, probably thirty or thirty-one. They’d been talking at the bar under all the noise, the loud mindless chatter, the blaring sound system—ghetto rap that made Mark feel like some white relic from a forgotten time—the drunken laughter of young men in tight T-shirts showing off their gym muscles, tans, and tattoos. It was a place for people his kids’ ages, and Mark felt conspicuous in his Tommy Bahama silk shirt, his slightly gelled hair combed back, the silver glint of his Movado wristwatch, a gift from his company after delivering the Infinity Systems project two weeks early. In the bar mirror behind the top-shelf vodkas, under the amber light of the lamps hanging from a tin ceiling, he did not appear unattractive to himself. Or, to be more precise, he did not appear unattractive to a woman he almost hoped might be looking. At fifty-six, like his very own Laura, his hair had thinned and there was more of his upper forehead visible now, but there was only a scattering of gray at the temples, and his face, while lined around the mouth and under the eyes, the skin more loose under the chin, was still the face he’d had all his adult life, his blue eyes deep-set, his chin not square but not weak either, his teeth small but fairly straight and still in his head.
A drunk woman was talking to him. She had too much makeup on in some places and not enough in others. Her eyes—blue or green or brown—seemed unadorned above cheeks caked with some sort of blush that was supposed to hide acne scars, though Mark could still see them, and he felt immediately sorry for her till he took in the rest of her—her braless breasts behind a bright green sleeveless tube top, her tanned belly, the faded denim skirt riding too high above smooth legs and small feet in high heels, her nails painted an almost fluorescent orange. What he felt then was something other than pity, though now, as he leaves his mother’s bathroom to make coffee in her galley kitchen, he does not remember what that was only that he was surprised the woman was talking to him and he began talking back. It was about music. He had to lean closer to hear her.
“I ate wrap.”
“You ate a wrap?”
“No.” Her voice had been warm and moist in his ear and he could feel it in his groin, a stirring where for months nothing had stirred.
“No, I hate rap!”
He nodded in agreement. He was drawn to her: her hatred for this music; her warm, wet voice in his ear; her smell—fruity perfume, cigarette smoke, and coconut oil. Then they were outside in the rear parking lot leaning against her car smoking menthol cigarettes. He wasn’t sure why he said yes when she’d offered him one, but he smoked it like a cigar, inhaling only to his jawbone before blowing out the smoke and watching it rise in the light of the neon beer signs in the bar’s windows a floor above them. And he watched her profile as she talked on and on about something he only vaguely remembers now staring at his mother’s coffeemaker. But then the woman was no longer talking and they were kissing hard up against her car, a ten-year-old Chevy sedan. They were kissing and her tongue was in his mouth. He remembers how soft her lips were, how she tasted like menthol and beer. He remembers his erection pressing against his pants against her tanned belly above that faded denim skirt, and there’s the feeling, though far away, as if it’s floating ten feet above him, that something precious has been irrevocably ruined, and it is not he who should be held accountable. No, not at all: it is Laura, his very own Laura who sleeps alone in their king-size bed, who eats alone at their kitchen’s peninsula, who watches TV alone on the sectional sofa in their living room, and does she still watch those same shows? The crime dramas where so often a family’s life appears ordered and comfortably predictable and then one early morning a man or woman is soon watching her own nest burn?
Almost always, however, it is the husband who does it. This is Laura’s view, too. It’s his fault. Even for this. Eleven weeks and four days ago, she is filmed spreading her legs for another man’s tongue after having just exercised and so she must have still been sweating quite a bit and yet the bald man did it anyway and she said, well screamed really. “It’s because of you! All you do is criticize me! I’m never good enough no matter what I fucking do! You made me do it!”
“I made you do it.” He was still breathing hard, one hand resting on the kitchen’s tiled peninsula. At his fingertips was a pool of water and bits of broken glass. Behind him three chairs lay in various pieces on the floor, the heavy birch table on its side, one of its legs gone. Above him, the light fixture was swinging slowly back and forth, its glass face undamaged, the bulbs inside unbroken, though it was hanging by its wires and there was a gouge in the ceiling where the chair he’d swung over his head had scraped the sheetrock before hitting the light, then the floor. This was a detail he would not notice for hours, but he would remember her screaming face and how the light, swinging slowly overhead like that, made her appear as if she were on a night train heading somewhere away from here, away from him, her contorted, raging face so lovely in its betrayal.
She had called ninety minutes earlier. The sun was low in the trees behind their house, and Mark let the phone ring until the machine picked up. His fingers were steady as he turned up the volume and listened.
Hey, it’s me. I had a late showing and now I’m off to the gym. There’s leftover lasagna in the fridge. Be home soon.
Mark played the message back three times. What struck him were four things. One, she referred to herself only as me, as if no one else could be calling him, as if she were rightfully the only other me in his life. Two, she ended her message with no subject: Be Home Soon. By using no I or will, she was removing herself from whatever would precede her returning home, which meant that when she called she was heading to be with Frank Harrison Jr., for that was the bald man’s name, and maybe she was even sitting in his white two-door import—a 2009 Audi TT coupe—about to unzip his pants. Or, maybe they were driving to that Marriott on the highway two towns over, the one Mark had seen in the second video, Laura and Harrison holding hands as they walked in, then—forty-three minutes later—walked out, their arms around each other’s waists. Maybe Frank Harrison Jr. was driving with one hand on her knee while she called her husband, and what did he feel when she advised Mark on what there was to eat? Did he hear that? That people cooked for each other over here? Ate with one another? Did he hear the word home?
Three, her voice. It was high in her chest, the way it had sounded both times she’d walked into the living room, her pregnant belly stretching the cotton of her nightgown, and said, “Honey, I think it’s coming.” Both times it had happened like that, late at night, her walking in to announce to him in front of the television that he needed to help her go do something momentous. Four, her choice of words: There’s leftover lasagna in the fridge. Be home soon. Work with me, honey. Sit down and eat and believe I’m in Pilates class at the gym. Help me do this thing I must do.
Thirty minutes after dark her Civic pulled into the driveway, the security light switching on as if this were any other night. Maybe that night, a cold Wednesday in March, she and Frank Harrison Jr. had driven to the Marriott down the highway, and afterward, in the hotel bathroom, she’d had to sit on the toilet and let the bald man’s semen drain from her, for she was fifty-five years old and birth control was no longer an issue and so there would have been no need for a condom. There were diseases to think about, but would she consider this? Mark didn’t think so.
He had stood at the darkened living room window and watched her rise up out of the Civic, slinging her gym bag over her left shoulder, her pocketbook over her right. Her keys were clutched in her fingers. There had been a few moments, an hour or two after staring at those videos, when he’d considered changing the locks, barring her from this house they’d shared and maintained since their early thirties. She would try the front door, then the rear, maybe a panic rising in her before she climbed the side stairs of the garage to his mother’s apartment. But Mark couldn’t have that. Not then at least. He w
ould not have his mother involved in this in any way. There was something else too; to kick her out would be to send her into the arms of Frank Harrison Jr.
So he’d left the locks as they were, and he’d stood in the center of the darkened living room and listened to her walk into the kitchen and set her gym bag and pocketbook down. There was the clank of her keys beside them, then a quiet stillness, something missing. Usually, after a long day at the realty office or out showing properties, then a strenuous workout at the gym, after she’d stepped inside and relieved herself of whatever she was carrying, there would come an exhalation of air from her, a sigh—part exhaustion, part relief. But that night she seemed to be standing in the bright kitchen holding her breath.
Maybe she could sense him out there, the TV remote in his hand, the DVD cued just to where he wanted it. He could feel his heart beating in his tongue, and he wished he’d been in the kitchen when she walked in. That’s where he’d usually be, waiting for her as eager and ignorant as a half-blind dog, dinner on the stove or in the oven because he got home before she did. No, that wasn’t quite true. Many nights he would wait for her to cook, and he’d be in the living room on the sectional, his work computer open on his lap, CNN on the television, slickly packaged semi-intellectuals speaking earnestly into the camera. She’d walk in and he’d glance up at her over the rim of his glasses, pucker his lips for a kiss which she’d lean down and give him, just a brush of lips really. So it was the dark quiet living room that had probably stopped her. “Mark? Honey?”
Honey. How nice.
“In here.” His voice had felt old and unused. When he leaned to switch on the lamp the room tilted a moment before righting itself, Laura walking in. She was in her nylon running suit and white Nikes with the pink stripes. Her hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail, and it looked like she’d applied fresh blush to her cheeks. Her eyes appeared a bit sunken, though, those slight bags beneath them that never went away.