Stephen Dixon - Love and Will - Twenty Stories

He sits down, opens the newspaper. Explosion someplace. A woman shot. A woman raped. Two boys find a decomposed body on a beach. Milton Bax wins Endenta Prize. New movies. Spy grabbed. Two dozen pregnant whales run aground. Famous physicist dies of mysterious disease. A young woman crossed the ocean in a canoe. Television listings. Sports. Ads. Juniper Holland’s “perfect brownie” recipe. He crumples up the paper, sticks it into the fireplace. Lights the paper, watches it bum. An ash floats through a hole in the fireplace screen and he grabs it in the air. His hand’s smudged from the ash. He rubs his hand on his pants. Now his pants are smudged. He brushes his pants till only an indelible spot’s left. He sits in the chair. Think about something. Let something just come to mind. Daydream.

He remembers a real event. It was a number of years ago. Three. He was married then and was changing the baby’s diapers. Esther. “I peepee,” she liked to say, and he or Jill would change her. “If you know when you peepee,” he used to say, “then you should try to peepee and kaka into the toilet.” “Toilet?” she used to say. “Potty,” he used to say. “Potty and toilet, same thing.” “Same thing?” she used to say. “Sweetheart, don’t repeat everything I say.” “Don’t repeat?” she used to say. Though it only sounded a little like “Don’t repeat.” Like her “toilet” only sounded a little like “toilet.” “Potty” she could say. “Dough repee,” she used to say. “Toyet. Same sin.” She didn’t peepee into the toilet till she was three. People said that was very late. He and his wife didn’t mind her not using the toilet till then. Some things one gets used to. And he liked changing her most times. The softness of the diapers, patting her crotch and bottom with a warm washrag, drying her, pinning the diapers on her, the rubber pants, the long pants or stretchies or shorts. She would be on her back on the changing board and he would be sitting in front of her on the same bed and he would often lean over and kiss her forehead or the top of her head or her cheek. Sometimes he’d say “Kiss daddy,” and she’d kiss his cheek. Then he’d finish dressing her, if he hadn’t already finished, and stand her up on the floor or just lift her off the board and put her into or back into bed.

But he was changing her, he remembers, when the phone rang. He looks at his hand. Still a little dirt. He picks at it with his fingernail, then spits into a handkerchief and rubs it into his hand till the spot’s gone. It’s not that I mind dirt, he thinks. He smells his hand. It smells from spit, but that’ll go away quickly enough. And an ash really isn’t dirt. I could, in fact, almost any other day, walk around with my hand smudged like that or even worse. Not the whole hand smudged, but a much larger spot than there was. Anyway: walk around or just stay here without paying any attention to the smudge till it disappeared through nothing I consciously did.

He turns around and looks out the window. About fifteen feet from his window are two windows in a brick wall. Above the wall — his apartment and the apartment or apartments he’s looking at are on the top floors of their buildings — is some gray sky. Maybe I should stare at that slit of sky till something passes in it. A bird, helicopter, sheet of newspaper, a plane. Rain, even. Stare till it rains. It can’t snow. Not the season for it. What else could be in the sky that might pass, drop, stay there awhile, float by? A cloud, of course. Hailstones would be unlikely. A balloon. On the other side of the building he’s looking at is a street. Someone could walk on it holding a balloon. The balloon could be released, accidentally, intentionally, and float past that slit of sky he’s looking at. He looks at that sky for around two more minutes, tells himself to look at it another minute and if nothing passes in it, to stop. He looks at it another minute. Nothing passes. He faces forward, rests his head back against the chair, remembers.

The phone rang. He yelled something like “Jill, would you get it? — I’m changing the baby.” She yelled she would and ran to her studio from wherever she was and picked up the phone. “Oh Randi,” she said, “hi,” and that’s all he remembers hearing from that phone call. That was all he heard. Because he remembers that maybe an hour later he thought about why he hadn’t heard more of the phone conversation than just “Oh Randi, hi,” and decided it was because she must have started speaking very low after that or else had shut the door. He never asked her about it, though once or twice had wanted to. But she came into the baby’s room a few minutes later, while he was on the floor putting away Esther’s books and toys and Esther was sitting on the floor trying to string beads, and looked very sad. She was very sad, but when she came into the room, or rather, stood inside the door with her shoulder against the jamb, as if, if she didn’t lean against it she wouldn’t be able to stand, all he could tell was that she looked very sad. What he thought then was that she was sad because of something she’d learned over the phone or something that had happened to her since she put the phone down. Because, he thought, what could Randi have told her that made her look so sad? And how come she didn’t let him speak to Randi? She was his niece. They were quite close. Maybe Randi had called to tell him something about his sister, but something so terrible that she was now relieved she wouldn’t have to be the one to tell him. “What is it,” he said, “something wrong?” She nodded. She brought her hand to her mouth.

He hears a plane, turns around to that slit of sky but doesn’t see anything. Then he sees it for a couple of seconds. Flying west. A jumbo jet. It could be going to any number of places. California, Tahiti, Japan. It could be going, eventually, east. If it is, it’ll soon turn around. But chances are much better, not that he really knows what he’s talking about, that it’s going west, or west now but north or south soon. He looks at the two windows. He’s never seen anyone in the right one. The shade’s always down. Never even seen the room. He’s seen artificial light behind the shade. In the evening, very late, maybe five or six times. But he’s never seen the shade raised even an inch from the sill in the year and two months he’s lived here. The fourteen months since Jill asked him to leave their apartment, which he did and got this apartment that same day. In the other window — it’s much smaller — he’s seen a woman showering maybe fifteen times. Showering or just shampooing, if one doesn’t always shower, meaning clean one’s body, which he’s never seen her do, except for her face and neck, when one shampoos. He wonders if the shaded window is part of the same apartment as that bathroom. The bathroom door is at the end of the left wall. If it was in the right wall, then the bathroom would have to lead to the shaded room. Though maybe the shaded room is a hallway in that apartment or a public hallway in that building. If he steps up to his window he can see four windows on the same floor to the right of the shaded window, two with blinds, two with shades, all opened or closed or lit or unlit at various times of the day, but none, except for the one next to the shaded window and there only a little, can he see inside. Not the right angle or too far away. But a public hallway wouldn’t have a shaded window. Makes no sense. For the last two months the bathroom window has had a shade on it. Almost to the sill. Possibly because she caught him watching her showering several times. Sometimes it was by accident. He’d be slumped below the top of the padded chair when he’d hear a shower go on, look around or above the chair and see her showering. Or he’d enter his apartment, shut the door and see her showering. Hear and see at the same time sometimes. The shower part of her bathtub is right by the bathroom window. For a while at night when he came home he wouldn’t tum on his apartment light till he found out if she was showering or not. If she was, he’d watch her in the dark till she left the bathroom or put her bathrobe on. If she only put on her underpants or bra, he’d continue to watch her till she left the room. If she put both underclothes on, he’d crawl away from the window to one of the lights, turn it on and stand and go about the apartment as if he just came home. But he only caught her showering once in the eight or so times when he came home and went through this routine, so he gave it up. She’s a woman of about thirty-five, somewhat plump, somewhat pretty, who spends a great deal of time lathering her long dark hair. Sometimes he’s seen her entirely covered with lather, which would start at her hair and slide down on all sides and sometimes in large clumps to the rest of her body, or the parts of her body he could see above the bathtub rim. He’s gotten quite excited sometimes when he’s seen her showering or drying herself and then putting on her underclothes. Once when she saw him looking at her while he was standing in the middle of the room and pretending to flip through a magazine, she slammed the window down and pulled the single shower curtain around her where he couldn’t see her showering anymore, not that he would have been able to see much through the smoked glass. Once when it was night and he was reading in this chair, he heard her singing in the shower. He doesn’t know if he had been so absorbed in the book that he had missed the shower going on, or else if the shower and singing had started at the same time. Anyway, he stood up, with his back to her put the book on the chair, shut the light, opened his door, slammed it, crawled to the far right corner of the window and raised his head just above the sill to watch her. By the time she was drying herself while standing in the tub, he had his pants down and his handkerchief out. He wonders about a woman who’d shower in front of an open window, one that faces another open window, especially one in which she must have known a man had caught or watched her showering several times. Maybe she has a let-him-look attitude about it, all he’s seeing is a body, one not much different than any other woman’s body her age, and if it does anything to him, it has nothing to do with her. Or maybe she liked showering in front of him, showing off her body, so to speak, the pleasure it might give him, let’s say, maybe even showering more times than she normally would because he was there, but then felt the situation had possibilities or ramifications she hadn’t thought about, so she stopped. He can’t see her toilet or sink from his window. They must be on the right side of the bathroom.