Adultery & Other Choices by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online Page A

were his clothes and sneakers. That was the day after his parents told the police he had not come home. In the evening paper there were front-page photographs of policemen on the bank of the bayou, and men in outboards, dragging the muddy bottom. There was also a school picture of Larry; Paul remembered the day last fall when they had combed their hair and lined up to sit on the stool. He remembered he had hay fever that day and while the photographer took his picture he held his breath so he wouldn’t sneeze. They found Larry at the bottom of the bayou. It was a hot afternoon and he had gone swimming alone.
    â€˜He was in your class ?’ Amy said at supper.
    â€˜He should never have gone in the bayou,’ his mother said. ‘It’s treacherous.’
    â€˜Did you know him well?’ Barbara said.
    â€˜I sat right in front of him for three years.’
    That night he calmly prepared for sleep: kissed his father and mother and sisters and kneeled in prayer while inside the vast cavern of his body he shivered and tingled in anticipation of what waited for him in bed. He did not think Larry had committed any real mortal sins, with all the conditions they required, so he would not be in hell but in the fire of purgatory where souls thrashed in pain but their faces gazed with the serenity of hope; caressing his heart with a prayer he asked God to take Larry out of purgatory soon, and he saw him in khakis in the flames, his small hard hands clasped beneath his upturned housedust face. Then in bed Paul saw in the dark between him and the pale ceiling Larry getting off his bicycle and looking at the muddy bayou. For a while Larry stood looking at it; in the middle a stick swirled and went downstream. Then he undressed and walked down the bank and into the water. The bottom was soft and slippery and he threw himself forward in the shallow water and began to swim. Near the middle of the bayou the current hit him. He turned and stroked toward shallow water but the current pushed and twisted him, a thousand hands on his body, and in moaning panic he swallowed water and his arms weakened, his legs dragged heavily behind him, then he was under, somersaulting down and down, an acrobat slowly sinking in thick muddy water that rushed into his throat as he sank until he lay at the bottom, in the deep soft mud. He lay on his back, his arms angling out from his body, his mouth open and eyes closed, as in sleep. He lay in the dark cold all afternoon and all night and when the sun rose he was down there and he lay all morning until a grappling hook came slowly toward him in a cloud of mud like brown smoke.

Graduation
    S OMETIMES , out in California, she wanted to tell her husband. That was after they had been married for more than two years (by then she was twenty-one) and she had settled into the familiarity so close to friendship but not exactly that either: she knew his sounds while he slept, brought some recognition to the very weight of his body next to her in bed, knew without looking the expressions on his face when he spoke. As their habits merged into common ritual, she began to feel she had never had another friend. Geography had something to do with this too. Waiting for him at the pier after the destroyer had been to sea for five days, or emerging from a San Diego movie theater, holding his hand, it seemed to her that the first eighteen years of her life in Port Arthur, Texas had no meaning at all. So, at times like that, she wanted to tell him.
    She would look at the photograph which she had kept hidden for four years now, and think, as though she were speaking to him: I was seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and I got up that day just like any other day and ate Puffed Wheat or something with my parents and went to school and there it was, on the bulletin board —But she didn’t tell him, for she knew that something was wrong: the photograph and her years in Port Arthur were true, and now her