Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [80]
But on weekends, Pop still went out and got drunk. It’s what he’d always done, as if the disciplined rituals of the week built pressure inside him that by Friday or Saturday night just had to blow. When he began teaching at Bradford Junior College in 1967, he was thirty-one, only ten or eleven years older than his students, and because it was the sixties, there were a lot of parties with students and faculty in the same place, some at our small rented cottage in the woods in New Hampshire. But now he was in his forties, many of his colleagues older than that, and very few of them still wanted to drink and hang out with these eighteen-, nineteen-, and twenty-year-olds.
But Pop did.
One Saturday night early in my first semester back, I was sitting on the third floor of Tupelo East in the common area, hoping for Marjan to happen by. I was watching two skinny rockers from Connecticut play cards, and I could hear my father’s voice in the concrete stairwell. He sounded happy and drunk and mischievous. He was with Theo Metrakos who had his Ph.D. in literature now and taught at the college and lived with his wife across the lawn from my dad and Lorraine. Pop was urging his friend to follow him, to come up and “meet the women.”
Women. Pop always called them that, these girls from California and New York and Illinois, from New Jersey and Iran and India and England. He called them women, but I saw them as girls, and it was strange seeing him emerge from the stairwell in his jeans and cowboy boots, his cotton shirt and leather vest and trimmed beard and reddened face, his eyes scanning the hallways and common area, his reluctant friend behind him.
Pop saw me and laughed, like I’d taken a wrong turn and must be lost. I laughed too, though I didn’t feel like it.
“Where’s it at, man? Where’s it at?” He came over, took me in sitting there. I caught the sweet juniper scent of gin. I shrugged and felt caught, though he was the one acting caught. A heavy girl in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms passed and he called her over and put his arm around her, said, “It’s good, Marie. It’s really fucking good.”
She nodded and smiled. Her cheeks were flushed, but she looked genuinely pleased about something. Metrakos stood over the two boys playing cards, his hands in his corduroys. He didn’t seem as loaded as Pop, though he may have been. He addressed them by their first names, asked how were they doing? Were they adjusting all right?
In less than thirty years he and my father would both be gone, but now they were still young and alive and they called themselves Butch and Sundance. They taught together, ran together, drank together, and went out on double dates with their wives. One late night, drunk and hungry for lobsters, they broke into a seafood restaurant out on the beach just to pull a few from the tank. Probably it had been Pop’s idea; he’d always been the more impulsive one, the reckless leader of the two. When Pop was done with his week’s work, that quality that drew people to him seemed to magnify, like life was one all-night party on the first day of some weekend-long fiesta, and I could see it was hard for people not to want to be around him then, especially those like Marie who had read his work and knew she was standing close to the man who had written such graceful stories. I had just begun to read them myself. Weeks before, on a quiet Sunday morning, I took one of his collections off the shelf and read a story called “Killings.” It was set in a place like Bradford Square and was about a father planning revenge for the murder of his youngest son. The sentences were lean and lyrical and cut deeply into the people Pop was writing about; it was only twenty-one pages long but felt as strong to me as The Grapes of Wrath, a novel I’d just read for school and was so moved by I had to go walking after. I had to go walking after reading