Dubin's Lives (49 page)

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Authors: Bernard Malamud

BOOK: Dubin's Lives
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“I assume I needed it. But that was long ago and I found another way. What I'm saying is I think I understand what's happening to me. I've been there before.”
“And you may be there again if you don't do something about it. Simply understanding isn't what it's about, William, you know that. Cure is process —working it through is the only way.”
“The unconscious,” Dubin heard himself hesitantly say, “is not unavailable to those who study themselves.”
“So you intend to continue with your Teddy Roosevelt regime of exercise and calorie counting?”
Dubin laughed unhappily. “It keeps me going.”
“In your wife's car with your bad ankle?”
“Till I can figure out a new move, or find myself making one.”
“In the meantime undergoing a lot of useless suffering. It's pure waste; so is self-obfuscation.”
“We judge ourselves, we take risks,” Dubin told himself. Staring uncomfortably at Ondyk standing in the rain he felt wet. The psychotherapist sneezed.
“You're sure you won't get into the car with me, Evan?”
“This will take one last minute. I hate to breach confidentiality, William, but you know I know you have a very serious problem.”
Dubin knew.
“Impotence is no joy.”
“I don't feel impotent.”
Ondyk stared at him in disbelief. “Can a man who writes biography afford to delude himself?”
Dubin, after another miserable moment, thanked the psychotherapist for his advice. “I regret you got wet on my behalf.”
“No sweat.” Ondyk, in his damp clothes, got into his car.
Dubin, releasing his brake, headed north as Ondyk drove south. For twenty minutes he felt intense relief. Had St. George slain the dragon? He drove the circle backward, but could then not think where to go. His relief
evaporated. On awakening that morning he hadn't known what to do next; nor did he now.
That evening the phone rang. “It's Evan,” Kitty said. “He wants to talk to you.”
“Tell him I'm out.”
He had been reading in Lawrence: “We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh and part of the living incarnate cosmos.”
“Speak to him out of common courtesy if for no other reason,” Kitty said. “You haven't a friend in the world.”
“Only you,” Dubin, on his third drink, said. “Tell your friend I'm out.”
In the night he would regret it. He was alone in the cosmos and desperately needed anyone, even a friend.
 
As Dubin slowly drove the ascending road a gaunt runner in a gray sweatsuit, wearing an electric-red safety bib, came loping down toward him. He was an open-mouthed jogger with an awkward gait, who looked as though he hated every step he ran. Sweat streamed down his glistening face, drawn, bony. Dubin, recognizing Oscar Greenfeld, had in astonishment braked the car.
“Holy cow, is that you, Oscar?”
The flutist flatly ran on six or seven steps before wearily halting. He was reluctant to. Dubin backed up the car. He knew the feeling: if you stopped you'd never start again.
“My God, Oscar, what are you doing in that sweatsuit and red bib?”
Greenfeld, pressing his hand to his left side, drew two long noisy breaths before replying. Gasping, he spoke: “Have to. Doctor prescribed—de rigueur. Don't know whether you heard—I had a heart incident this past winter. Have been doing three miles every day since I got back on my feet. Run everywhere—drive to a road whose view I like, then go. Used to walk, but now I run. Run for heart and flute. Running, as they say, makes wind.”
Dubin moaned in dismay. “Heart attack? Last winter? God in heaven, Oscar, why didn't you tell me in all this time? Have we become such poor friends? I feel dreadful. Why didn't Flora call or at least say something when you came to dinner? You looked awful, I was afraid to ask. I find the whole thing hard to believe.”
Oscar smiled wanly. “I was in Prague for a concert when it happened. Flora flew over and stayed a month till I could leave. I had the attack on
her last birthday, about the time you were fucking her in my house. She told me after we last saw you and Kitty. She felt she finally had to.”
He glowered at Dubin, his white face dark, jaw trembling.
“Oscar,” Dubin, anguished, cried, “believe me, I regret it.”
“William,” Greenfeld said, raising his breathy voice, “I don't pretend to be innocent of evil to others. I've screwed around in my time, but what I wasn't prepared for, nor will I ever be, is that my former best friend would betray me in my own house, where he had always been a welcome guest, with my wife. Hypocrite! Fool! I detest you!”
Oscar, resuming his run, disappeared down the road.
Dubin could not for a while remember how to start the car.
 
A horseman in overalls appeared on the downsloping curved road, a thick-bellied unshaved man wearing field boots, his legs dangling down the flanks of a white heavy-hooved workhorse. Dubin had more than once seen them on this road, wondering where he led the horse or the mare took him. A quarter of a mile up, past acres of unharvested corn, they usually disappeared into the fields. Neither Dubin nor the man had ever so much as nodded to each other when they met. It was that kind of world.
But today as the overalled horseman plodded by Dubin's car, he reined in the white mare and in anger and agitation pointed to the glowing hills under light-shedding seas of autumn clouds.
“Look there! Them Jews are crucifyin' the earth!”
Smacking the horse's flank, he darkly trotted away.
Midway up the nearest hill, a long low one to the north, Dubin beheld an earth-colored savage slash through the foliage where half a dozen twenty-ton yellow bulldozers were shuttling and darting, undercutting and uprooting hundreds of ancient trees.
A deep unyielding pain overwhelmed the biographer as it occurred to him this was part of a highway cloverleaf being built to divert traffic from town. Dubin had been hearing about it for a dozen years, but had never expected to see it built. He looked with heartache at the long ragged gash where the trees had been torn out of the sides of the living hill. Nature itself, inevitably necessary to his sense of who he was or could be, was being disgraced, destroyed. “Willie,” he warned himself, “our natural beauty—inspiration, joy, precious possession, goes gurgling down the drain while you sit in your room writing a life of D. H. Lawrence, of which there are presently too many.
Awake, you stupid prick. Stop wasting life's sweet time. Do something to preserve the natural world! Do what has to be done before it can't be any longer!” Struggling to restrain the dimming that assailed him; to cling to his shaky balance, Dubin, for the first time in his life, fainted away.
A riderless white horse galloped by.
 
The woman with the broken face, her wasted body swathed in voluminous skirts, pursued him heartbrokenly. Dubin, running for dear life along the rocky shore, his heart pounding beyond belief, sank in exhaustion to the ground. With palms clasped he begged mercy; but it was not the pursuing bitch who'd caught up with him: it was a panting sad-eyed man with a hole in the middle of his face. Now the hole slid across the face, now down. But Dubin glimpsed, through a haze of webbed purple capillaries within, a potato nose and downturned stained mouth from which an ancient rotting voice spoke:
“My name is Richard M. Nixon. I am well-acquainted with your distinguished biography of Abraham Lincoln, my fellow Republican, and I offer you a substantial sum to write one of my life, Mr. Dubin. I've got to get the shit scraped off of my good name.”
“And who will scrape it off of mine?”
 
Kitty, for no reason she could relate, unless it was a hopeful letter she had recently received from the State Department, was sleeping better; but Dubin had caught from her, abetted by the breathless summer, the ailment of sleeplessness. Those you live with teach you. Sometimes she woke and asked him in a whisper if he was sleeping. Knowing that the sound of the human voice invariably set her talking, he stayed silent. Kitty fell back to sleep.
The little Dubin slept each night savaged him. Anything woke him if he momentarily dozed. Any new sound in the night. Or her impassioned breathing during dreams. Or the hint of whistling in his nose. Or his heartbeat drumming in his ears on the pillow. Awake, he feared not sleeping. It took him hours to sleep again, as though for not sleeping the magistrate fined you hours of sleep. He slept a ragged dream-macerated sleep. To break the long wakefulness, Dubin read in the middle of the night. He walked miles in a small room. He took long showers in the dark. If he slept afterward he slept on the knife edge of waking. He must sleep or he couldn't work; wouldn't
have the energy even not to work. He feared he would never sleep again. Many were thus afflicted. If he tried pills, although Kitty said he wouldn't, he felt stupid in the morning. The drugged sleep wasted the rest of the day. He would rather be sleepless and work a clear hour or two before his eyelids descended like heavy curtains.
One morning after his alarm had rung, Kitty urged, him, “Sleep, William, I'll take care of you.”
He had to get up.
“No you don't. Stay in bed, it's Saturday.”
“I've been in bed all fucking night.”
He drew on a sock and after five minutes pulled up his pants. Kitty catnapped for a minute, then got into her robe and followed him downstairs.
“Would you like me to scramble you an egg?”
He tried to think.
“Forget your goddamn diet.” Then she laughed. Dubin was standing at the kitchen window. Kitty went over to him and said, “Why don't you laugh?” She tickled him under the arms. “Where's your funny bone?”
“Not there.”
She said she wanted to cry. Resting her head on his shoulder she said she loved him.
After a while he put his arm around her. “I'm a pain-in-the-ass, but try to be patient.”
“I can be patient, but how much longer?”
Dubin couldn't say.
“Do it your way,” Kitty said, “but
please
do something.”
He said he would; she did not ask what.
She hadn't said whether Ondyk had told her they had met on the road.
Dubin saw himself sleeping in a single bed in another house. He slept well there. Would he write better? Would his single life be freer, more varied, joyful? He thought it might in the long run. When he felt better he would ask her to divorce him. Not now but when he was himself once more. Or when he could sleep no longer in this house. That would be a clear sign. He would say he had to leave her because he could not sleep in her bed.
He went relentlessly to his work. Nothing happened. Dubin sobbed noisily.
Kitty knocked on his door. “Can I help?”
He could think of no way.
He wept because his memory was bad. He had at first almost not noticed, or tried not to notice. Recently, forgetting had laid hold hard. It didn't help that Dubin knew Montaigne had complained of a slow mind and incredible lack of memory, despite which he wrote works of genius. Emerson, at sixty-five, was closer to how Dubin felt at fifty-eight: the old man complained of a tied tongue; he said he was “wanting in command of imagery” to match his thought. You had this thing to say and the words would not come; butterflies appeared and flew around the thought. Dubin, against the will, actively forgot names, details, words. He was losing them as though they were coins dropping out of holes in his pockets; or out of his raddled brain. They fell like raindrops into a stream—go find them. Usually when he forgot words he would wait for them to seep back into consciousness like fish drawn up to the hungry surface of a stream. He would remember the initial letter of the forgotten word or sense sounds in it; soon the word reappeared in an illumination. Now words rarely returned when Dubin needed them. He concentrated, trying hard to conjure up a word he could not repossess. It had teased him with its closeness, then burst like a bubble. It was not his to have. He couldn't say what he wanted to; he remained silent.
Dubin forgot what he told himself not to. I'll remember it, he thought, but it hid from him. When he went to bed with a sentence to remember, or one that had come to him as he was trying to sleep, although he kept it alive during the night—unless he wrote it down it had disappeared from his memory by morning. And when he wrote down a sentence, to preserve on paper, it seemed to him he at once forgot a dozen germane to it. As if one sentence is all you are allowed—one to a customer. Or as though someone recites an evil incantation, and therefore a potential paragraph turns to dust. Where are the associations of yesteryear? It was a game of disappearances. Here's this man walking on the road but when you meet up it's his shadow; or it's another man on another road whom you don't remember or even want to know.

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