Dubus - Meditations from a movable chair: essays

Emotionally intense Dubus presents his memories and meditations like panes in a stained glass window held up against the light of his own passion and conviction.

Chicago Tribune

Graceful, dignified the exquisite rhythms of Dubuss sentences are matched by no one else writing today.

Time Out

Beautiful as a view is beautiful, or a child, or a righteous struggle with a victorious ending.

Los Angeles Times

Overwhelming often inspiring [Dubus] cuts to the heart of things without pretense.

The Washington Post

Andre Dubuss rousing assembly of observations and considerations about pride inand detachment fromthe body is as strong and honest as an oak.

Esquire

ALSO BY ANDRE DUBUS

The Lieutenant

Separate Flights

Adultery & Other Choices

Finding a Girl in America

The Times Are Never So Bad

Voices from the Moon

The Last Worthless Evening

Selected Stories

Broken Vessels (nonfiction)

Dancing After Hours

The author of nine works of fiction, Andre Dubus received the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rea Award for excellence in short fiction, the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Boston Globes first annual Lawrence L. Winship Award, and fellowships from both the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations. Until his death in 1999, he lived in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 1999

Copyright 1998 by Andre Dubus

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Vintage Books, Vintage Contemporaries, and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Some of the essays in this work were originally published in the following: Carrying and Messages in the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine; Love in the Morning in Double Take; Song of Pity and Digging in Epoch; Imperiled Men in Harpers; About Kathryn in Health Magazine; A Hemingway Story in The Kenyon Review; First Books in Ken Lopezs Catalogue of First Books; Giving up the Gun and Witness in The New Yorker; Sacraments, Communion, and Girls in Portland Magazine; Brothers in Salon; Mailer at the Algonquin in The Sewanee Review; Legs, Grace, and Autumn Legs in The Southern Review; Bodily Mysteries in Special Report; A Country Road Song and Liv Ullmann in Spring in Yankee; Good-bye to Richard Yates in Richard Yates, An American Writer: Tributes in Memoriam, published by Seymour Lawrence.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Alfred A. Knopf edition as follows:
Dubus, Andre, [date]
Meditations from a movable chair : essays / by Andre Dubus
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80192-0
1. Dubus, Andre, [date]Biography. 2. Novelists, American20th century
Biography. I. Title.
PS3554.U265Z47 1998
813.54dc21 97-50551 [B]

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

I thank the late Michael Rea, and Elizabeth Rea, and Frieda Arkin, and Scott Downing, and the Thursday Nighters.A. D.

To Marion Ettlinger and Joseph Hurka

Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change.

Ernest Hemingway,
The Gambler, the Nun,
and the Radio

And where are the windows? Where does the light come in? Maybe the light is going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builders faulty craftsmanship, and if thats the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

Richard Yates,
Builders

Y OU HAVE TO KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE down there. In Louisiana winter, my father played golf every weekend, unless a lot of rain was falling; you can work up a sweat just carrying a golf bag on that flat land. If you want to, you can go into the rice fields or swamps or the woods near the bayou and scare up a cottonmouth. No need to wait for the long hot summer. If youre a woman, you can be raped on your lawn two nights after Christmas, like my sister Kathryn.

She tells me about it on the phone. Two nights after Christmas is a Friday. After work at the bank, she goes to the gym, where she reads on the treadmill. On the way home, she stops to buy coffee. Maybe thats where he saw me, she says on the phone. She is long divorced, and has eight grown children and four grandchildren. A daughter lives with her. She gets a pound of rich dark coffee and walks into the lulling winter air and the beginning of her weekend. She drives to her street, one flanked by houses, and when she turns onto it, she sees in her rearview mirror a car turning behind her.

She is a calm woman. Yet an instinct tells her to drive past her house. But now she is home, and she turns into the driveway, where her daughters car is parked. She drives behind the house, and stops on a concrete slab there, near the back door. The instinct is quelled. She cannot see the front of her house now, nor most of the driveway. She takes a while leaving the car, getting her gym bag and purse and the bag with the coffee. She carries these to the back door; then he is there: a large black man holding a knife, and saying, Give me your money. She tells him she has only five dollars, and gives him her wallet. He asks how much is in the house. She says there is nothing in the house. She can feel her daughter in there. To his questions, she answers: Yes, she is married; he is at work; he gets off at seven. She knows it is now around seven-thirty.

The man takes her arm and pulls her around to the side of the house. He removes her glasses, flings them. Her neighbors house is near. The rape commences, and she thinks how silly this is, to die in her own yard. She no longer sees the knife, and she waits for it. He is talking and she says, What? and she hears Oral sex and says, No; and, to God, she says silently: Dont You dare do this to me. It doesnt happen. She lies beneath his heavy weight. He hears something in the house: maybe the shower, maybe her daughters footsteps. He says: Whos in the house?

My daughter. Knowing, oh Lord, the wrong image came to her brain, the wrong words to her tongue. But how cunning can she be? He is raping her, she is waiting for a blade to slash or pierce her body, and she is as conscious of her daughters body as she is of her own. What other words can she speak? The fabricated husband was long ago, when she was still standing, still wearing gym pants and underwear; he has been shocked out of her mind. Who is in the house? My daughter. Whom are you trying to protect? My daughter. Whose face, whose name, whose body fills your heart and mind, right now? My daughter.

Want me to go fuck her too?

Dont you