The Last Worthless Evening by Andre Dubus

Author:Andre Dubus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2010-06-15T04:00:00+00:00

Molly

for George Gibson

ONE

WHEN CLAIRE’S HUSBAND left her and their daughter, she was twenty-five years old and Molly was three. By the time she was thirty Claire knew other men like Norman, knew them because their sad wives were her friends. These men were absolutely competent in their work, even excellent, better than others because more committed or obsessed. Or possessed. But they and Norman could not be husbands and fathers, unless their wives and children wanted little more than nothing, or little more than what money gave them. So Norman had left to be free, to work as an anthropologist all the way across the country in California, as if he needed that distance between him and Massachusetts to make final his leaving. Every month he sent Claire a check drawn on the Wells Fargo Bank in Pacifica. After receiving the third check, she divorced him.

Norman was a tall, angular man who appeared clumsy: a coffee cup in his large and bony hands seemed to be in its last moments before fragmentation; a car in his control looked alive, like a horse that senses his rider is a novice and is deciding whether to be gentle and patient, or a rascal. But he was not clumsy. He moved that way, looked that way even at rest in a chair, because he seemed to live always in a world that was not physical. Or nearly always. At his long table in his large cluttered den he studied artifacts and catalogued them, and his hands and face then, his sloping shoulders and long arms, reminded her of a pianist’s. To him, his den was not cluttered: it was perfectly in order; but that order was for Claire an accumulation of objects that she knew were part of her own history in America and with Norman but now, unearthed and collected, had no connection with the world she lived in.

She prepared meals that he ate as a pet dog eats its dry food, out of hunger while knowing there is better food he would gobble if only he could get it. But for Norman there was no better food. He did not smoke, and before dinner he drank whatever she did, and he took his alcohol as he did his food: quickly, and without visible pleasure or lack of it, and always moderately. Some evenings, with what she believed at the time was mischievous curiosity, she mixed herself a bloody mary or salty dog and gave him only the seasoned tomato juice or salted grapefruit juice, and he drank these, fooled and never knowing it. Then she realized he would not care if he did know it, and with scorn but fear too she saw him not as a fool but as a creature who needed almost nothing that she did. After that she nightly gave him juice and doubled the vodka in her own drinks, wanting to drink his portion as she sat across the living room from him, and Molly played

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