Dubin's lives by Bernard Malamud

Author:Bernard Malamud [Malamud, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780140187601
Publisher: London : Penguin Books in association with Chatto & Windus, 1979.
Published: 2003-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

He hadn't seen Fanny in weeks, felt inertia, lassitude, stasis, wanted not to see her. Was he therefore feeling less for the girl? Less what? He had got used to her, knew her too well? Some of the excitement, the surprise, was gone? Only her presence, in truth, surprised and she was not present. Though Kitty and he had resolved his temporary mishap and were again comfortable in bed, Dubin felt he wasn't that much interested in the sexual life. She had postponed going away because of him. She didn't seem to understand how much he wanted to be alone, left alone; he wanted to be, at least for now, without challenge to emotion, attention, thought; if possible, also, without desire. Who needs that forever goad? Fanny seriously complicated his life. Having one major problem was enough for him--the Lawrence biography. That continued to go well: at times it carried Dubin aloft as if he were in a balloon with a spy glass surveying the floating earth. It was the "complication"--the task he wanted most to be concerned with. Gerry and Maud were an ongoing other; he was used to their problems, and to Kitty's tangled skein. But Fanny was a complication coming on too fast and strong. She was, in his life, unique; still he didn't want her pressing him to go abroad with her, urging him to move to New York; he didn't want her suggesting they live together, implying divorce. It was all right for Kitty to bring up divorce but not Fanny. Was what he felt for Fanny love? It wasn't the way he had felt toward women in his youth. Do men of more than fifty love less keenly than young men? He thought the opposite was true: the years deepened the need, the force, the channel of love. At fifty there had to be more at stake: love as a breakwater against age, loss of vital energy, the approach of death. Dubin enjoyed the girl's feeling for him but how much was he offering in return? Obviously not too much at the moment although they shared a real enough friendship. He sometimes felt as if he was waiting for her to say it didn't seem to be working and why didn't they simply call it quits? There were moments when he thought breaking it up now might be a relief--a lot less to worry about; he'd be freer to concentrate on his work. Maybe she was expecting him to make a decision--more Fanny, less Kitty; or vice versa; or simply no Fanny at all? There was a real problem, did he have a real choice? She hadn't telephoned lately, nor he her. He thought she might still be annoyed by the barn incident with Kitty though her two or three short letters hadn't mentioned it. He had more than once expressed regret. Her letters outlined what she was doing, reading, experiencing; they made no request nor persuasion. She was, she said, "tired," but not of what.

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