Stephen Dixon: Love and Will: Twenty Stories

“Try college.”

“No master’s.”

“Get a master’s.”

“No stomach for going back to school.”

“Find a stomach. What about private lessons?”

“Some people teach,” I started to say, but the teller said “Next.” Enos waved a fistful of checks at me and went up to the teller and said “This one I’d like in cash, the rest deposited.” I told him I had to run. He said “Wait, we got to get together. At my place for dinner one night or one of the old bars. You listed?”

“No phone.”

“Still rebelling?”

“No afford. Deposit’s too high. Those rings. Bad tone. They don’t fit in my small room. And stuff the bell up with tissues and I don’t know when someone calls.”

“Then reach me through my agent.” He gave me a card. “Be speaking to you, Bud.”

A few blocks further downtown I saw one of my father’s old friends.

“Mr. Landau,” I said.

“Sorry, I don’t quite catch you.”

“Ira Quiver’s son, Buttinsky. How are you?”

“Buddy. It’s been a long time. How’s dad?”

“He died last month.”

“How’s mother taking it?”

“She died three years ago.”

“Sorry to hear that. Good seeing you again. Regards home.”

“You too to Mrs. Landau and stay well.”

I watched him go. My father and he were very close. They used to kick the can and get in the movies two-for-five together on the Lower East Side. The day my father died I called him and gave the time and place of the funeral. It was in the neighborhood. I live a few blocks from the building I grew up in and where my folks lived the last forty years of their lives. He didn’t come. A month ago I got a condolence card from his wife saying “Lou forgot and never told me and I avoid the obits like the plague. He hasn’t been in his right mind these past years. He started to forget his name and address and who his wife is the day your father first got so seriously ill. Sometimes he tells me he wants to visit Ira and Liz and the kids, and sneaks out when the cook’s not looking and for a day and night nobody knows where he is. If you ever see him on the street or buzzing the bells of your parents’ old building, please put him in a cab and personally deliver him home.”

A few blocks farther downtown I saw one of the women I worked with at my Christmas job in a department store. She was across the avenue, separated from me by a lot of traffic, walking in her very distinctive way past Philharmonic Hall. Her height, singer’s chest and quick dignified walk were how I could pick her out in the crowd from so far away. We’d sold men’s pajamas. During the slower moments we talked about music, recordings, love, sex and the stage. She told me she was studying to be an opera and operetta singer and one time asked me to explain how I liked having it done with the lips and tongue as a few of her boyfriends complained she didn’t do it excitingly enough for them though none could pinpoint what was wrong. I asked her to demonstrate how she did it. She turned her back to the main floor customers, voyeurs and exhibitionists flitting past and did these rapid up-and-down motions with her tongue. I said it looked like a paddlewheel working at breakneck speed. I suggested she move it slower, like an oar of a rowboat piloted by a one-armed lethargic oarsman in calm waters with no express place to go, and see one of the raunchier porno flicks that were all over town: the best cost five bucks. She said she’d seen the best and doing it their way especially with one of her boyfriends would ravage her vocal cords. “Those cords come first in my life,” she said, “so I don’t want them cut or touched.” I ran across the avenue against the light and tapped her shoulder.

“Hi,” she said. “How weird seeing one of my coworkers,” as we were called, “outside the store. You like to walk?”

“Love it.”

“Besides singing I like to do it more than anything. And on these raw days, almost more.”

“What do you like to do more on these raw days?”

“Don’t horse me.”

“You mean you like to do that too?”

“You’d think with our musical background and education we’d have much more to say.”

We walked uptown. It was a grind keeping up with her. She had long legs and a big gait and was taller, taller than I and I’m tall, besides wearing platform shoes that hoisted her a half foot more. She was also beautiful and people stared, several drivers honked their horns at her and one trucker even rolled down his window in this weather to whistle. Things like that still went on. I actually pictured her practicing this walk nude with these shoes on and a glass of water on top of a book balanced on her head.

We passed most of the places I’d recently passed. The bus stop Mr. Landau was still waiting at. I waved. He licked his fingertip and held it above his head to learn something about the wind. “I know that man,” I said, “honest.”

And Enos coming out of a high-priced men’s store with clothes boxes. “Two times in twenty minutes is kind of pushing it,” he said. He stared at Carla and winked that man-to-man wink at me and hailed a cab. I winked back at him and my eyelids got stuck.

“Who’s that?” she said.

“Fiddler I know.”

“What’s with your eye? Never met anyone who could hold a tic that long.” I pried my eyelids apart. “That’s better. He looked prosperous. I like prosperous men. All creative and performing types have just about the same thing going for them, so why not one who’s rich?”

“Beats me. And I’m cold. I’d like a hot chocolate or just to head home.”

“Your place? You could show me something for voice you’ve done.”

“You wouldn’t like my closet. Too raw. I’ve lieder based on passages from German sex manuals, but you’d be too chilled to sing them and I’ve no piano.”

“I’ve got hot water and a pot.”

She lived a few blocks away. I sat in her living room. She had a grand piano, perfectly tuned. When I wanted to play I subwayed to other boroughs or pretended to be a customer in a piano store. I went through a movement of last night’s sonata while she made hot chocolate in the kitchen. “That’s nice,” she said, “but it can’t be sung as nobody has that range.” I told her it was written for kit violin and contrabassoon.

“All serious geniuses are self-destructive and ultimately boring,” she said. “You ought to give your fiddler friend my number and name.”

I devised an elaborate plan of getting into bed with her, starting with wandering through the ancient instrument rooms at the art museum and then drinks, dinner, coffee at an espresso house whose jukebox only played opera overtures and arias and barcaroles, and then a cab home. She passed through the room chumping on a thick sandwich and sipping the only hot chocolate and from the bedroom said “Listen, composer, I’ve a voice lesson in an hour and acting and fencing classes after that, so if we want to make it a duet we better do it right now.”

She had an upright in the bedroom, also perfectly tuned. She took off her clothes and went into the bathroom. I took off my clothes and played a new melody that was in my head. “Hey,” she yelled, “tinkle something madrigalian for me in here.”

There was a harpsichord opposite the toilet. I sat on the toilet seat cover and played a madrigal by Gesualdo while she hummed along as she swabbed her underarms and genitals with a washrag. I said “If you take a lot of these steamy stand-ups and hot showers, you could ruin your plectra and keys.”

“Come here,” she said, and still with her back to me, grabbed my penis from behind, vised it between her thighs and sort of gave it a shoeshine with the washrag. Then she leaned forward, popped me in, clutched the two towel racks on either side of the sink and right at the end of her lovemaking broke out into several bars from Lucia’s Mad Scene but the peak in high coloratura F instead of Donizetti’s original E-fiat.