Books |
Dancing After Hours
Andre Dubus
By
Published: Jan 01, 2004
Category:
Fiction
So long ago it might have been in another life, I spent a day with Andre Dubus and wrote a long profile about him. It was a study in contradictions. On one hand, there was the sheer physicality of the guy. He was short and barrel-chested and bearded — he looked a latter-day Hemingway. And there was a basis for his toughness: He was a former Marine. But why had he joined the Marines? Because he was a small kid from Louisiana who listened to opera on Saturday afternoons.
There was more. Dubus went to Mass every morning because, as he said, "I can’t live in a world in which Ronald Reagan is the ultimate reality." And he loved women — as John Updike said, "Andre writes about them as if they were a giant lap."
That tenderness about women is what comes through most clearly in his stories. Women, like men, have their dreams, but even more than their men, they abandon them to have children and keep house. At the end of the day, they hope their husbands will overlook the sinks filled with dishes and the laundry that hasn’t been ironed and find in them the girls they once were. But cigarettes and beer and adultery and never enough money take their toll; the marriages falter. It is a typical Dubus image that a divorced Boston father returns his kids to their mother on a wintry Sunday afternoon and, as he drives off, realizes that the frost inside the car windows is the frozen breath of his children.
As a Marine, Dubus was trained to run toward trouble, which is why, one night a few years after our encounter, he stopped his car on a Boston expressway to help the driver of a stalled car. Another car plowed into them, and when he woke up, he was in a hospital facing a hard choice: long months of rehab or the amputation of one leg at the knee. Dubus had young children and needed to work; he voted for amputation. Maybe that was the wrong choice; his wife left him and, a few years later, he died.
In his stories, damage has always been so present it’s like a character; after his accident, his characters’ defects were even more dramatic. Sometimes the defect is emotional: "When her heart truly broke, she was thirty-seven years old, she had two teenaged girls, and her husband loved another woman." And sometimes it starts with the body: "His hand with the cane was close to her left arm, and she could feel the air between their hands and wrists and forearms and biceps, a space with friction in it, and she veered slightly closer so their skin nearly touched."
Like all great short story writers — Chekhov and Raymond Carver, in particular — the real subject of a Dubus story is how, even among the defective, life is a search for love. This quest becomes more intense when it’s addressed in reality, that is, when the characters aren’t Hollywood- bound and the ending isn’t sugar-sweet. At its darkest, in a story called "The Last Moon," a high-school coach’s wife and her lover, a sixteen-year-old student, plot the murder of her husband. Why kill him? "He’s just ordinary," she says. "I can do better." And the boy thinks she means him.
The masterpiece is the title story. Its main character isn’t just crippled — Drew is a quad, who requires a full-time attendant to move him around. He comes to a bar where Emily Moore is a forty-year-old bartender. "Her body had vigor and beneath its skin were firm muscles, and for decades her friends had told Emily they envied it," Dubus writes. But Emily is very much like other Dubus characters: "Believing she was homely as a girl and a young woman had deeply wounded her."
Drew and Emily meet. They talk. And what talk! Here is Drew, telling Emily about his wife’s pregnancy:
One guy in a hundred with my condition can get his wife pregnant. Then, wow, she was. Then on New Year’s Eve my wife and my ex-best friend came into the bedroom and stood there looking down at me. I thought they’d spent a lot of time in the living room, watching videos. But I never suspected till they came to the bed that night. Then I knew; just a few seconds before they told me the baby was his, I knew. You know what would have been different? If I could have packed my things and walked out of the house. It would have hurt; it would have broken my heart, but it would have been different.
A minute later, Drew recalls going to court and hearing the judge declare the end of the marriage.
"I looked up at my wife, and asked her if she’d like Chinese lunch and a movie."
"Why?"
"I couldn’t let go."
She reached and held his hand.
"Oh, Drew."
You can say there’s something sad and sentimental about stories with these characters and this kind of dialogue. Or you can admire Andre Dubus’s willingness to strip glamour from life and get right into the gritty, naked emotions: desire and need, hope and loneliness. Which reaction is yours? Start with these stories and see.
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