Stephen Dixon - Love and Will - Twenty Stories

“Beep beep yourself. I said beep beep it up your nose. I said the pedestrian’s got the right of way. Especially in a snow and sleet storm and even if the red light’s against him which it wasn’t. Oh don’t give me that hand over the ear you can’t hear. Go on, go on, before you miss your precious light. Then open your window a tinkle if you want to understand.” There they go. Waving goodbye to me as if departing for across the States. Bye-bye now mama and papa and all the relatives, afraid for a little chill. Your door’s open I should have yelled. Your back lights aren’t working, muffler’s hanging, fender’s dragging, tire’s flat or very short of air. I’m sure they thought he’s a crack. Nut job to say the least. Looks so dopey in his nitwit Pinocchio hat. La la — listen to your tape deck and stereo set. Turn up the heater some more you Cadillac people, cushy as you are in your own mushy homes. But what do I know what kind of people they are? Besides it was a Buick. Be by me now, sweet, and I wouldn’t rage at all. Die my heart and cross to hope. I’d laugh. Ya ya. Out loud. Ha ha. We’d nip from my mouthwash flask of gay sherry.

Four days ago Thursday I like an idiot called. How’s your flu faring along? Health and energy sufficiently restored to have dinner tomorrow night, tonight? Clown, fool, greenhorn, tool. French or fish at Oscar’s Salt of the Sea I was about to say. She said this iniquitous illness and inexplicable exhaustion and she’ll call me in a few days. I came over anyway. Rang her bell. First a how do you do to her doorman who doubles at suddenly starting and short-stopping her elevator up. Five, but he says he knows. Flowers under my arm. Brush breath sweet, dentin and cementum dehypersensitized. I wanted a yes or no or whether in her indispositions she was giving me the ole heave ho. I also had the collected shorter works of Wordsworth she once wanted to reread. David? No, Will. Just a minute and in a minute she opened the door. Clothed only in a body hose from the belly-button down. Didn’t think you’d come. Putting a top on she said she doesn’t want David finding her naked with another man. David’s the English fellow she’s been wanting to tell me about who’s staying with her this week. She asked what I’m doing and I said looking for his luggage to throw into the backyard. I threw her the flowers instead. For David, I said. She laughed. I started for the door. But why’d she laugh? Wordsworth I must have let just slide down my leg to the floor. The meaning of my flowers-for-David remark was unknown to me then but could now be made to seem clear. Garlands for the victor? To the swines goes the spoiled. Pearls before oxen. Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. I don’t know. Truer sayings have been said but none as known — no. Say it with flowers. All work and no play makes Will a dull boy. She wants to explain things about David and herself but I’m already two flights down the service stairs. Don’t ever try to contact me again is what I yelled.

I called her tonight and she said sure if you want to come by. She didn’t know how it had happened with David so fast — would I like a beer? She’s grown addicted to Heineken’s this past week. A girlfriend rang her up. But I’ve been over all that. Maybe I’ll ring her when I get home. Hello, London calling. Oooh our mouths. Our attacking genitals. I liked us best when — no. The one post she lost her mental self in most was — no. In the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last month — no. Same day we watched the bonsai grow and she zipped us through the Van Gogh exhibit, afraid I might faint from the crowds. Ballet, dinner parties, never a stage play or sporting event, long park walks, and when it was nipping cold, backwards short runs. Do you also dance to records and thumping FM while you’re both undressed? and she said yes. Next thing you’ll say is he’s as loving and rutty as I when you’re both entangled and compressed and she said she’s afraid even more so yes. I told her I never quite felt I was good enough for her anyway and she said she was surprised she got to like me as much as she did. My moral code and standards were usually too rigid and high, too many times she felt compelled to concur with me or be browbeaten, there was something disquietingly revealing about the fact that I never got along with any of her male or female friends. Before we met, she never before told me, she vowed never again to date a psychologist or any man too analytical of himself or critical of her. No, David’s a psychologist, though she thinks they’re called another name in England as lawyers and lorries are, and maybe too self-analytical though not at all critical and like her a bit weary of the supersensitive and inordinately cautious and just plain brilliant and creative types and loves lots of dumb horsing around. Baby powder’s what she used to put on in the morning if we made love the evening or hour before and she was late for work. What could her fellow subway riders and her students be thinking, she said, when she sits down and up comes clouds of scented smoke. Besides everything else I was too caliginous and morose. Can’t stand that in a man. I can’t stand it in myself so we also agreed on that. And also how good we were feeling those days when we were so often laid so well. And that the bed was our preferred mediating place in case anything between us went awry. And that there was nothing wrong with a lifelong streak of vanity, that this summer we’d try two months of northern Maine sanity, that philosophers are not doctors of philosophy who teach and lovers are not people who preach and Blake’s binding with briars my joys and desires the most novel last line we knew in a non-twentieth-century poem. I’m home.

“Will?”

Let me at least remove my guaranteed waterproof shoes, my sopping socks. Why’d I throw away the guarantee? Why do I usually speedily discard vouchers, contracts, receipts, invitations, instructions, stubs, phone numbers, directions, warranties and guarantees and whatever else relevant to me in this category and rely on my time-attested incompetent memory or good luck or the buyer or seller’s good faith or will?

“Junior?”

Why don’t I keep a record of the checks I make out? The poems, drawings and picture-poems I send out? Where they are, how long, and if they’ve ever been there, how much money I’ve still in my account or owe or am owed and who the owers are?

“Will?”

“Coming.” Why won’t I wear a watch? Why do I avoid health checkups yet see my dentist twice a year? Is it only money that keeps me from buying a reliable pair of waterproof shoes or shoelike insulated boots? How come I’ve never been able to resist chocolate, have always hated the flavor of coffee, can’t pass a day without munching several carrots, have never wanted to smoke? Why have the girls and women I’ve fallen in love with dumped me in a maximum of three months? Why have I always reacted to these one-sided falling aways or breakups in the same hurt sorrowful mawkish way? Why am I always so much of the same? Why are things so permanent? Why can’t I tease instead of torment myself for my seemingly eternal limitations? Why can’t I take my satisfactions in just the barely perceptible change? Why have I been so consistently contradictory and thus contradictorily consistent? Why is it such a struggle to lift a toilet seat when I pee when by nature I’m so unlazy? Why do I usually get nauseated in art museums and libraries and end up making runny movements in their johns? Why have I always been a whiz at mathematics and picking up languages and a dunce at any subject scientific or doing anything with a typewriter except two-finger typing and clogging the keys with eraser flecks? Is it the stars, God, gods, my hormones—

“Junior?”

— genetic code, parents, theirs, our great and grand great-grandparents and what we and all the plant and animal life we’ve come in contact with have breathed or ingested or something or ings or body or bodies else? Other influences influencing these influences with still even more influent influences which some people have or might have spoken or written about but which I generally find too tedious to listen to or want to learn about or have simply forgotten about and which in fact might be too complex or mazy or lost in space, time or imagination for any man in this or any of the past thousand centuries to know about if any of those or these are or is the reason or reasons I am the way I am or am what I was or am what I will probably always be?