Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [177]
Now I was bellowing at them till the veins in my forehead pulsed and my throat burned. I was in the foyer, my back to the staircase, then I was surrounded by twelve big men. Not one of them was under six feet eight or 300 pounds, and they were all wearing suits and ties, their hair cut short as Marines, but in this dream I thought they played football for the University of Texas at Austin, these giants I would sometimes see on campus. But now they were in my family’s front hallway, backing me against the staircase balusters, and for a second I planted my feet to start throwing punches, to create a hole for myself to slip through, but there was no way through them, these young men who were born stronger than I was, who were far superior physically to me in every way. I began to panic and looked behind me. Maybe I could climb over the stair rail, but sitting on the treads was Fontaine, my wife of nearly two years.
The first time I saw her, a girlfriend had taken me to a modern dance show at Bradford College. I’d never seen modern dance before, these athletes who made art with their bodies. My girlfriend and I had sat side by side, neither one of us touching the other, our end within sight down the road like a break in the trees or something burning. Still, I felt guilty for staring at the dark-skinned dancer in the middle of the troupe. But how could anyone not stare at her? And it wasn’t her wildly curly black hair or her muscular thighs, her small waist and large breasts; it was the way she moved through the air like an angry spirit, then a joyful one, then one who will never need anything from anyone, some lone hunter disappearing over a rise, her bow and quiver of arrows slung over her shoulder, her feet leaving no prints.
Over a year later, I was behind the bar at the Irish pub just before the lunch crowd came in. It was a weekday, an October sun laying coolly out on the street, the pub in shadows, and she walked in with a seat cushion for one of the booths. She nodded at me and said hi and I said hi back, and I tried not to stare at her as she placed the cushion where it went, her wild curly hair pulled back loosely behind her, this dancer who made her living upholstering furniture.
The following spring Pop invited me to give a reading with him in New York City. He was driving down in his new handicapped-accessible Toyota with the enclosed wheelchair rack on the roof. He was going with friends who would be driving with him, so I went with two of mine, one of whom was close with this Greek dancer named Fontaine. She wanted to come along and take a Luigi class and visit a friend, and when she climbed into the backseat of the car, I was sitting there too. For the five-hour ride south to New York, we talked without a break. After a while, I asked her what she wanted to do with her life.
“I’m already doing it.”
“What’s that?”
“Dancing and drawing.”
She looked at me, her brown eyes seeing not only me but what she’d just said and accepted fully as her life. There was a stillness to her that seemed to come from somewhere other than here, and I had to look away for a recognition was rising up in me from before I was born.
She’d grown up in Salisbury, the town across the river from Newburyport. It was a cracked asphalt strip of tattoo parlors and gun shops, of country western bars and used truck dealerships and trailer parks under the pines. She’d gotten her first job at thirteen working as a chambermaid for one of the motels on the road to the beach, and she made beds and emptied ashtrays and threw out used condoms and empty beer cans. Her father, who’d lived in Greece as a boy, owned a linen delivery business and a laundromat, though there never seemed to be much money. She lived with her twin sister, her mother and father and widowed grandmother in a small ranch house down a street where some of the kids at the bus stop called Fontaine and her sister niggers.
When she got older, she spent her summer days at Salisbury Beach, not far from where I’d been arrested for fighting under the Frolics. She dated