Stephen Dixon: Love and Will: Twenty Stories

No, the painter dies. The great one. In the middle of the night. Everyone in the house was asleep. The nurse who was sitting beside him had just fallen asleep. She said she heard a sound in her sleep. We all know what sound. It woke her. Most of the world’s newspapers the next day carried the news of his death on the front page.

He goes into the apartment. His wife’s waiting for him at the door. “I got this postcard today.” She holds it out. He takes it and reads. “Your husband is in love with me, what can I say? Leave him, he doesn’t love you. When he makes love with you, it’s all sham. That’s what he tells me. He pretends to have a good time with you in bed. Oh, all right, maybe he still has a good time with you — at the very end, but every man is like that then. But he has a good time from beginning to end when he’s with me in bed. Or on the floor. Or against the wall. Or on the coach. Or even under the coach, and once, I kid you not, in the bathtub. It’s me he loves, me he loves making love with, me he wants to be with when he sleeps with you or is just with you. Let him go. Let him be with me. Make him happy, no matter how unhappy it might make you. Are you still reading this? So, what are you going to do? Sincerely, Cecile Strick.”

“I never heard of her,” he says. “It’s some postcard. How can anyone write so small? Must take a special pen or at least a special fine or extra-fine point on a pen. What’s this word mean — coach? Couch? Has to be couch. But under the couch? Whoever heard of that? And who has a bathtub so large? I suppose some people have, and that it could be done in just about any size tub. But I’ve never known a Cecile in my life. My Aunt Cecile. Forgot her. She’s been dead tor twenty years — no, more like twenty-five. I was still in college then.”

“You never told me about her.”

“Sure I did. I had to. My Uncle Nate used to beat her up. It’s my feeling, but maybe I got the idea from someone in the family, that he beat her up on the head so much that he was the cause in some way of her getting brain cancer. That’s what she died of. She was only around fifty. Maybe fifty-five. She died, actually, more than thirty years ago. I wasn’t in college yet. So maybe she wasn’t even fifty. I can’t believe she’d be around eighty now if she had lived. He hit her on the head with a chair a number of times and once or twice knocked her out. I remember my father telling me about it. I even remember the calls he used to get from Cecile that Nate was trying to kill her again.”

“You never told me about him or her.”

“Never told you about Uncle Nate? I don’t see how I couldn’t have. My father’s only brother. Or only one that lived past the age of five. Whenever we’d see him he used to give us a fifty-cent coin each. I remember wanting to go over with my brother and sister just to get that fifty cents. And they were always shiny — mint condition, almost. As if he got them straight from the bank and had asked for them to be brand-new. After he gave us the coin, or just me if I only went with my father, I’d show it to my mother at home. She was never impressed. They didn’t get along. But poor Cecile. He once tried to throw her out a window, from maybe ten stories up. They lived on Riverside Drive, around Seventy-Ninth or Eightieth.”

“What number?”

“Ninety-Eight.”

“That’s on Eighty-First, southeast corner. Didn’t Bill live there for a year? Sublet somebody’s apartment — Dan Freer’s?”

“I think you’re right.”

He called today — Bill did. I was going to tell you. He wants you to call him back.”

“Did he say about what?”

“Nothing. Just to call back. He sounded loaded. Two o’clock. Loaded. He’s never going to be able to finish it.”

“Don’t worry. He starts it, gets into it, gets loaded for a week or so, and then he finishes it. I’ve been through it with him before. I’ll call after dinner. But Cecile and Nate.”

“You’re making them up. It’s impossible for you to have had an uncle and aunt I never heard of.”

“No, I must have told you about them. If you forgot it’s because I probably only mentioned them once or twice in five years. Why would I mention them more? I saw Cecile maybe twenty times in my entire life, and only brief visits — maybe once a dinner at their home and they at ours. Nate was a bookie, worked out of his apartment, so we didn’t, I think, for that reason — the kids at least — go over there much or stay very long. He usually had, maybe ten hours a day, someone in the kitchen manning the half-dozen phones, and sometimes two to three people working there and in the master bedroom for very big races and sports games. And policemen coming over to get paid off or make bets, and things like that. But I liked going over — and they were only ten or so blocks from us — for the good snacks, and Cecile was always very kind to me, and that half dollar. But when he tried to throw her out the window — well, after that my mother didn’t want us to go over there at all. If she disliked him before, she hated and maybe even feared him now. Cecile was two-thirds of the way out the window — head first and face down and he was holding her by her legs and shaking her, shaking her, maybe just to scare her or I don’t know what. That’s what the doorman saw and told my father and my father told my mother and I overheard. Then some people on the street screamed — or maybe they were in the park, because most of the apartment faced the river — and he pulled her back in. He also shot her once — after the window incident — or shot at her, missed, or just grazed her arm — burned her. Whatever the bullet does. I know she was hurt but not that hurt. Nate said the wound came from the broken bottle the bullet smashed, but Cecile always claimed she’d been shot, not just shot at. Or not, as Nate told my father, that he shot at her clothes closet ten feet to the left of her, but because he was such a bad shot, the bullet hit a perfume bottle, I think it was, ten feet to the left of the closet. Once when we were there I asked my father to show me where the bullet went. He showed me a hole in their bedroom wall. The bullet had been dug out but the hole was still there.”

“Maybe he was kidding you.”

“About the hole?” She nods. “He did do that. I forget now where the hole was — by the dresser, the closet, whatever.”

“Not that I’m saying there wasn’t a shot. But I think it would have been patched up. By the way, you don’t think you should call Bill now? If he was heading for a big drunk before, the later you call him, the more incomprehensible he’ll probably be, if he does pick the phone up.”

“Maybe I’ll wait till tomorrow — around ten; noon, even. Or see if he calls back tonight. Whatever it is, I know it can hold. But last time I saw Aunt Cecile was a day or two before she died. Or a week or two, but she looked so bad — or that’s my memory of it, and I probably only saw her for a few seconds — that I think of it as a day or two. I don’t know why my folks brought me there. And my mother came this time. I suppose they thought I was old enough. Fifteen, maybe fourteen. Maybe they wanted me to play with my cousins Catherine and Ben — distract them.”

“Catherine and Ben? Since when do you have cousins with those names?”

“Catherine’s since died. She got the same brain cancer her mother had, but the doctors said it wasn’t hereditary. ‘Coincidence,’ they said. I remember the figure of one out of five thousand that two people in the same family would get it. That was about the same as for two people living on the same city block. For a while she was my favorite cousin. We played together a lot, or at least once a month. But hardly ever at her apartment. Almost always at ours or in Riverside or Central Parks. Nate used to beat up his kids too. Ben didn’t get it as much. He locked himself in the bathroom or screamed hysterically if he thought he was going to get hit or ran to the neighbors, or just wasn’t a target for Nate’s violence as much as Catherine and Cecile were. Maybe because those two yelled and fought back. Catherine lost a front tooth to him once. And he hit her head too. Once with a teapot. Picked it up to throw at her and when the water came out of the spout and top — or tea did. Maybe it scalded him and he got even madder because of that, but he hit her head with it. She had to go to the hospital. Had several stitches — maybe thirty. He was a madman. He died by walking into a streetlamp.”