Stephen Dixon: Love and Will: Twenty Stories

“Will, please.”

“Got you, Dad. The bows and knots in my shoelaces got shrunken tight. And I’ve got to get rid of these drenched socks and turn on the kitchen lights first. It’s snowing outside.”

“Well, come on.”

“Take it easy. You’ve got to hold on at times too.”

“Oh go take the gaspipe.”

“What? Just screw yourself.”

“And you take the gaspipe.”

“And you go screw yourself.”

I leave him holding the filled urinal. In the kitchen I open an ale. He must have used it when he heard my keys in the locks or while I was untangling my shoelaces’ knots. But I don’t want to be teaching lessons tonight. With his arms reared high and jug in hand he looked like a proffering trodden servant-slave in a hieroglyph. Nor if possible to Dana tomorrow about her unattractive brusqueness with cabbies and waiters or even where her fondling and positioning with me had been remiss. Some days while walking it to the john I thought I might suicidally take a swig of his piss. And morning he’ll badger Mom about my conduct and she being what she is will take the brunt. She’ll say I know he can be rough on you at times but he’s a sick helpless man who if we want to help we’ve got to give in.

“Finished?”

“Yeah.”

I turn him over, empty, wash out and replace the urinal on the table-tray. When he said go take the gaspipe I should have clutched my throat, gagged, fallen to the floor and played dead for a few seconds as if one of his curses had finally worked. I cover him, kiss his forehead, pat his back. “Goodnight.” From what I’ve seen and my mother’s said and said his mother’s said, he’s always been the same too.

“You drink too much.”

“I should have left the glass inside.”

“Not the glass, your breath. From alcohol. It stinks.”

“Anyway it’s only ale.”

“Ale now, what before? Some more later. For ten years at least. From what I can imagine, longer. Your liver.”

“My liver’s okay. Though maybe it’s not. What do I know? That a man starts off at the place where he’s born and ends at the place where he dies. Sound bright? It’s what the priest or anti-priest said in a movie on television I recently saw. But I should get it checked out. By an expert on foie gras. I’m the goose, take a gander. No, but maybe a bad report will give me a good scare. Though I do like to drink. But only wine with my evening mess, beer with my friends more or less, ale for what ails me, never cider cept on salads, hardly the hard stuff anymore, but you used to drink.”

“I got smart. Be like me.”

“Why should I be like you?”

“Because you’re not as smart.”

“Well, by the time you wake up tomorrow I’ll try to have become as smart as you.”

“Not a chance.”

“Why so sure?”

“I’m tired.”

“Ah the good are, when we get down to the nitty-gritty, beyond all the flim-flamming hunky-dories and icy-nicies to the heeby-jeeby really trulies, is that you only tolerate me as much as you do because you think I might beat it out of here and leave you both stranded or stay and start selecting the insulin needles I inject you with daily for their barbs.”

“Go to sleep. I’m tired.”

“Pleasant dreams.”

“The pills?”

“They’re here. Two of them, one for each stomach. Tissues in your pajama pocket. Urinal within easy reach. Bell. Chux. I forgot. Your teeth?”

“Your mom.”

I place the Chux between his penis and thighs. “Now you’re set. Sleep well.”

“Thanks.”

I kiss his forehead and shut the light. In the kitchen I open another ale and dial Dana’s number.

“Hello,” she says.

“Hello, London calling.”

“Yes?”

“Sorry there, Miss. Can’t hear you my very best. Must be a bad connect. Transatlantic tubes must have become untied or innerpacific allied.” But I can just as well imagine our conversation and I hang up. She’d say Will? I’d say the tubes are retied now, Miss. Called in London’s leading gynecologist for the job, pronouncing gyn as gin. She’d say aren’t they called cables instead of tubes and I’d say fables instead of cables and maybe then hang up. Maybe she’ll call back. Twice before when I hung up she did and both times I said we’d been disconnected and we talked about the continually declining phone service in New York till she said didn’t we discuss this same subject last time we were cut off? My continually declining glass. Star fright, snow blight, I wish tonight for tomorrow an empty class. Maybe stout rather than ale or sour mash straight up or with water and or ice. Perhaps a sketch of her in bed on her back in her bedroom on the back of an ordinary white postcard will suffice. Or a story drawn in two strips of four boxes apiece on a postcard showing scenes of my life serially from the start of a standard weekday. Jiggling alarm off at eight, pastry shop clock on my way to work late, teachers’ punch-in clock, wall classroom clocks accompanied by students’ mocks and socks and then three o’clock schlock and clock store clocks on the block and maybe Dana’s shock and my father’s pocket tick-tock and again me in bed behind locks beside my Baby Ben clock drinking bock from a flock of crocks. Or a long amusing letter. Sent several and she said there’s almost nothing about you I like better. I’ll write I’m leaving the city forever as I can’t endure being in it without her. Kissing the folks adios on the avenue I stick out my thumb. Plans are after I get out of the city to make it cross country on the bum. Hop in, a shopper holding open a shopping bag will say. Hop aboard, a boy on a skateboard will say. Hop off, says the bus driver when I can’t cough up the exact fare. Hop to it, says the motorcyclist after slicing off my thumbing thumb with a razor blade and breezing away with it leaving my thumb base bare. I swaddle the hand in a rag, flag down a cab, say tail that motorcyclist who’s copped my thumb, as I read if you’ve lopped off a digit you’ve no more than an hour to get it sewn back on. I find the thumb on a manhole, rush with it to a hospital, the receptionist sends me to the toe-finger section, I get lost in the many corridors and wind up in the room for cadaver dissections, at the hospital pharmacy I ask for digitalis, for I also read doctors adhere fingers back to hands with it along with a dash of Vitalis, the pharmacist asks for my prescription slip, I say are you kidding and bleep bleep your blip blip, she says no prescription no digitalis, but no female pharmacist could be that callous, so I show her my severed thumb, as I figured she faints and lies numb, I leap over the pharmacy counter, just reprisal might be for me to savagely mount her, but I’m losing time all the time so I look for shelf D, find the digitalis and help myself to some Vitalis on shelf V, blend the two ingredients together with pestle and mortar, as the directions suggest add three tablespoons of tepid water, guzzle down the entire mixture, press thumb to hand till it again becomes a fixture, but maybe another letter or continuance of this one where in the digitalis section I also find shrinking powder, though because it’s on the D shelf it’s here called drinking powder, which makes me so small I can sit up in Dana’s hand, after having tumbled out of the same envelope I sent her this letter in from a foreign land. But instead on the bottom of a postcard I draw my face frontwards from chin dimple to dome, and inside the word balloon above me write in wee letters the following poem. Skin of stone, rock for a heart, dead glaze and gaze for a look that once leaked longing, loving, sapless tree about to fall, cold dusty remains of burnt charcoal, bones found in a hundred-year-old grave, thousand-year-old grave, ancient Mesopotamian tomb, empty hospital room, pencil lead, desert of dead, polished ball of solid steel, endless wheel, nothing but space in a carapace, sealed airless Plexiglas box, doors opening on doors and each with numerous locks, vacuum, exosphere, or whichever atmosphere where there’s no breathable air, light bulb with broken filament, lightninglike cracks in buckets of hardened cement, wall of unshatterable glass I exhaust myself trying to smash, moldy lace, unalterable obdurate face, stiff plastic, what was once elastic, but didn’t I, hint I, that just seeing a woman steadily for a month is for me a torrid love affair?