Read Online The Last Worthless Evening by Andre Dubus - Free Book Online
Authors: Andre Dubus
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row a skiff on one, without coming as close to a cottonmouth as city people do to pigeons?
At night I feel more deeply. And my loneliness now is also like the feeling I sometimes have at Mass, at the Consecration or while singing or receiving the Host; and sometimes watching the sun set; or sometimes taking the hook from a fishâs mouth; and always picking up a dove I have shot and holding its warm body and stroking its soft gray feathers; or listening to jazz, a female vocalist, in a dark club with people at every table but quiet and listening too. So it is not true loneliness, like Ernieâs when I was on the St. Paul and for the seven months of our deployment his wife did not write to him and when we got home to the band playing on the pier and you waiting in your red dress and all the wives and children and lovers waiting she was not there, and he stayed on the pier till he was alone on it, then took a taxi to the apartment he knew had not been his home for months; he only did not know precisely why; and the key was under the mat and the apartment was empty save for his things in cartons on the bare living-room floor, and taped to one of the boxes a letter saying she had left him for a doctor she met and fell in love with at the hospital where she was a pretty twenty-two-year-old nurse coming home alone at night for seven months out of every twelve, to letters from the Western Pacific, silk from Hong Kong, pearls from Kobe, colored photographs of ports as the ship approached them, a kimono and happy shirts from Japanese markets, and the stereo he had brought home the year before. I remember the day he rode the train from Yokosuka to Tokyo and back and carried the stereo aboard.
So mine is not true loneliness, but closer to the love that saints feel for God: a sad and joyful longing. Like St. Teresa of Avila, whose heart held so much love of God that, in harmony with the earth, she transcended it too, was beyond it, reaching for union with Him. If Teresa imagined ascending through the sky I stand under tonight, then wife-lover that I am, abiding companion of Camille, my strong and wise and gentle woman, I traverse the sky to sit with you at breakfast. For about now you are in that cramped kitchen, and I can see you, smell your morning flesh and hair, and your first coffee and cigarette, and the bacon slowly frying and the biscuits in the oven as you read the Chronicle and enter your day.
I believe at night the world leaves us. We do not see it. It is gone. We are left with what little of it we can see, and without those distractions lit by day, our focus does more than simply narrow: it sharpens on what for most of us is the worldâour selves. So the malaise that is held at bay by the visible motion and stillness under sunlightâpeople and cars and buildings and highways and woods and fields and waterâcan in the enclosing dark of night become despair. What does Ernie do now, at watch on the bridge at night, or in Japanese cities? Could bars stay in business if we all worked from midnight till eight, going to whatever home in the morning sun rising with promise, instead of the setting sun, harbinger of twilight and dusk, then night?
So now, seeing little more than the small deck I stand on, and its rail, and hearing only the water gently washing at the shipâs hull, I receive the world less through my senses than through my spirit. But with the lovely smell of the sea. And I look at it too, unable to see anything that is not a prominent silhouette on its surface: another ship, a small boat; I cannot see the myriad waves, only a softly swelling darkness and a swath of moon-shimmer. Far beyond my vision of it, the Pacific ends at the sky, a horizon I see only because of the stars. They are low in the sky at the dark line of the ocean. I am writing on the podium that holds the log, and I stop for minutes between sentences, even words, to look up at the sky covering you like a soft sheet, though it is
At night I feel more deeply. And my loneliness now is also like the feeling I sometimes have at Mass, at the Consecration or while singing or receiving the Host; and sometimes watching the sun set; or sometimes taking the hook from a fishâs mouth; and always picking up a dove I have shot and holding its warm body and stroking its soft gray feathers; or listening to jazz, a female vocalist, in a dark club with people at every table but quiet and listening too. So it is not true loneliness, like Ernieâs when I was on the St. Paul and for the seven months of our deployment his wife did not write to him and when we got home to the band playing on the pier and you waiting in your red dress and all the wives and children and lovers waiting she was not there, and he stayed on the pier till he was alone on it, then took a taxi to the apartment he knew had not been his home for months; he only did not know precisely why; and the key was under the mat and the apartment was empty save for his things in cartons on the bare living-room floor, and taped to one of the boxes a letter saying she had left him for a doctor she met and fell in love with at the hospital where she was a pretty twenty-two-year-old nurse coming home alone at night for seven months out of every twelve, to letters from the Western Pacific, silk from Hong Kong, pearls from Kobe, colored photographs of ports as the ship approached them, a kimono and happy shirts from Japanese markets, and the stereo he had brought home the year before. I remember the day he rode the train from Yokosuka to Tokyo and back and carried the stereo aboard.
So mine is not true loneliness, but closer to the love that saints feel for God: a sad and joyful longing. Like St. Teresa of Avila, whose heart held so much love of God that, in harmony with the earth, she transcended it too, was beyond it, reaching for union with Him. If Teresa imagined ascending through the sky I stand under tonight, then wife-lover that I am, abiding companion of Camille, my strong and wise and gentle woman, I traverse the sky to sit with you at breakfast. For about now you are in that cramped kitchen, and I can see you, smell your morning flesh and hair, and your first coffee and cigarette, and the bacon slowly frying and the biscuits in the oven as you read the Chronicle and enter your day.
I believe at night the world leaves us. We do not see it. It is gone. We are left with what little of it we can see, and without those distractions lit by day, our focus does more than simply narrow: it sharpens on what for most of us is the worldâour selves. So the malaise that is held at bay by the visible motion and stillness under sunlightâpeople and cars and buildings and highways and woods and fields and waterâcan in the enclosing dark of night become despair. What does Ernie do now, at watch on the bridge at night, or in Japanese cities? Could bars stay in business if we all worked from midnight till eight, going to whatever home in the morning sun rising with promise, instead of the setting sun, harbinger of twilight and dusk, then night?
So now, seeing little more than the small deck I stand on, and its rail, and hearing only the water gently washing at the shipâs hull, I receive the world less through my senses than through my spirit. But with the lovely smell of the sea. And I look at it too, unable to see anything that is not a prominent silhouette on its surface: another ship, a small boat; I cannot see the myriad waves, only a softly swelling darkness and a swath of moon-shimmer. Far beyond my vision of it, the Pacific ends at the sky, a horizon I see only because of the stars. They are low in the sky at the dark line of the ocean. I am writing on the podium that holds the log, and I stop for minutes between sentences, even words, to look up at the sky covering you like a soft sheet, though it is
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