Dancing After Hours by Andre Dubus Read Free Book Online

the windows, but he did not see them; then it was gone, as theflame of a candle is blown out, and the gentle breath that dispelled it was a woman’s. She was many women; she was any woman whose eyes, whose touch, whose voice, whose lips would draw him again, and he closed his mouth and lowered his arms, lowered his head. He looked at Nick’s brown loafers, feeling only helpless now; and ashamed, knowing what a woman could do to him, knowing she could do it because he wanted her to. Then Nick’s hand was on the back of his neck, squeezing, and Nick said: “You’ve got to start dating again. This time get one on the pill.”
    Ted looked at him, tossed his cane onto the couch, and held Nick’s arm. He said: “The pill isn’t a philosophy. I need a philosophy to go out there with. You know? I can’t just go out there with a cock, and a heart. Maybe I need a wife.”
    “Wives are good. I’d like a wife. I’m two baseball seasons from forty. Do you know at the turn of the century, in America, the average man lived forty-seven years? For women, it was forty-six. Maybe a wife is what you need.”
    “I need a vacation.”
    “You’ve been on one for five weeks.”
    “Not from women. From women, too. I mean two weeks someplace. Mexico. Alone. I don’t speak Spanish. I can order from a menu. But I won’t understand the rest. I’ll be alone. I need to think, Nick. All I’ve been doing is feeling. Find a village near an airport. Something in the mountains. Bring some books, have one drink before dinner, maybe a beer while I eat. Hole up, walk around; be silent. Look the demon in the eye.”
    Nick rubbed his neck and said: “Drink bottled water. Peel the fruit. Don’t shit your brains out.”
    “If I did, all you’d see in the bowl is water.”
    “Stop that. It’s just something that happened. And leave the demon here. You’ve looked at it enough.”
    “No. I haven’t looked at it. I’ve fucked it. Now I’m going to look at it; talk to it.”
    Holding Nick’s arm, he closed his eyes and pressed the back of his neck into Nick’s hand.

Blessings

FOR MADELEINE
    E ARLY IN THE MORNING ON THE FIRST anniversary of the day her family survived, the mother woke. At first she thought it was the birds. In the trees near the cabin, their songs in the early twilight were too sharp, more a sound of intrusion or alarm than the peace she and Cal had rented for two weeks on this New Hampshire lake. She had never liked to wake early, and on most days of her adult life she woke before she was ready, and needed coffee and a cigarette at once. But in this early morning, in the gray beginning of light, she was awake and alert as though in evening, when her body was most vibrant, when she and Cal drank their two martinis, sometimes three, and she told him of the birds and animals she had seen that day (pheasants lived on their Massachusetts land; foxesstalked them; and there were birds in the trees and at her feeder and pecking on the earth below it), and whom she had seen and what she had heard, and the questions and answers or attempts at them she had stored up in her silent monologues with herself. Much of the time these were dialogues with Cal, though she was alone in the house or on their land or cross-country skiing on the meadow across the road or walking long and fast in trails through woods. Cal would often interrupt her, smiling, watching her, and ask: “What did I say to that?” To her wondering whether families and America were worse now than when she and Cal were children, or even when their own daughter and son were children, or if all this horror of children beaten and raped at home, or kidnapped for pornographic pictures and movies, or for the erotic and murderous desires of one man, was nothing new at all, and only the reporting of it in newspapers and magazines and television was new. Or why those women, certainly with good intentions, were trying to stop a supervised hunt ordered by the game-management people