The House on Alexandrine

Chapter 2

DANIEL CORBIN HAD been born in Ann Arbor where his father was a molecular biologist at the university. Daniel's mother had been one of his graduate students. Daniel was their only child. He had once heard his mother say, "Danny's birth put my research back two or three years." Daniel had been in his early teens and knew she didn't mean anything personal by it. Later he realized that in itself said a lot about their relationship. High school was followed by four months in the Marines which ended in a medical discharge. He had begun having nightmares and screamed in his sleep. He could never remember the nightmares but hated the constant lack of privacy, the sense of being smothered, of never having any privacy in the bathroom. Nobody appreciated the screaming and after several weeks an agreement was reached and Corbin went home. Then he wandered for a bit before entering the University of Iowa in September 1963. When he left seven years later, he had a Master's in English plus twenty hours toward a Ph.D., the habit of writing daily and a wife: Carolyn Hoag. They were married privately on April 2, 1967. He didn't have the courage to marry her on the first. His father had died two weeks before. The death was like stripping off a shirt that is too tight and binds across the back. Corbin had the sense that he could breathe freely. At the same time, as he often told himself, he loved his father. It was his wife's idea to move to Detroit. She had a Master's in theater and a job at Macomb Community College. Corbin taught English composition at a community college in Dearborn. His job and his marriage ended one night in October 1972, when he got drunk and gave his wife a black eye. He didn't remember why he hit her, could never remember the reasons for any of their quarrels, but the marriage had been going downhill for several years. Carolyn used to tell Corbin that she forced him to treat her badly. He didn't 19 2 0 T H E H O U S E O N A L E X A N D R I N E know what she meant by that but he knew he often ignored her. He found it hard living with someone, having the person always right there, always intruding on what he thought of as his space. Sometimes he would pretend he was alone and would look right through her when she walked across the room. He was also wrapped up in an endless novel about his father. That was the book he burned in February. After burning it, he went on a two week drunk, moved into the house on Alexandrine and got a job bartending at a student hangout at Cass and Willis. He also started writing again but it was all too autobiographical and he couldn't keep his father out of it. When he read other people's books it always seemed that their faults were obvious, but he could never tell what was wrong with his own writing, or not completely. Corbin didn't see Duane on Sunday or Monday, intentionally stayed out of his way in fact. The temperature was in the mid-9Os and he was sure he could bake bread by leaving the dough beside his typewriter on the kitchen table. The short story he was working on concerned an incident which had happened at Iowa: a professor of economics, a respected scholar in his sixties, had run off with a twenty-two-year-old co-ed. They had gone to Chicago and the professor's wife had taken over his classes. Corbin typed about five thousand words but tore it up Monday evening. It was an anecdote, not a story, and it lacked an emotional center. It was just words, lots of words. Corbin's apartment was half the size of Isaac and Duncan's. The bedroom was shallow and wide, about the size of a large station wagon, with five small windows looking out onto Alexandrine. A pagoda roof gave the ceiling a variety of slopes and angles. There was a brown metal bed, a battered chest of drawers and a small desk with a white metal chair. Either the Marine Corps had made Corbin compulsively neat or he had been that way before. In any case, his...