Stephen Dixon - Gould

Years before, maybe two or three after they split up and he moved back to New York, he wrote “I’m no longer in love with you, you’re for sure no longer or never were in love with me. And you’re with someone, I’m with someone, and you constantly gripe about me in your letters and occasionally say how much you hate my guts. So would it be okay if this is my last letter to you and I don’t get one in return? Give my love to B-J

I’ll of course keep in touch with him and try to see him when I can.” “Give Brons your nothing,” she wrote back. “Keep in touch with your nothing, you great bullshit artist. Besides, although I’ve rarely bad-mouthed you to him, he said ‘If he’s against you, Mommy, then he’s against me, and I never want to talk to him again.’ I told him that his relationship with you is his business and apart from me, but he doesn’t see it that way. So I’m sorry but he doesn’t want to be bothered anymore with my passing on your feeble greetings and bogus love. For a little unurban kid, he’s hip to your schemes.” He got a letter from her two years later (he’d written Brons a few letters during this time but got no answer) saying an old letter of his popped up from behind a file cabinet she was giving to Goodwill because she’s redoing her house outside and in (“I’ve come into some family money and this savvy stockbroker fellow I know pretty well invested it for me and I made a killing”) and she read it and thought of the days they were close and how good he was for Brons at such a vulnerable age and for so many years and she harbors no ill will to him anymore and just wanted to know how he was, and the correspondence resumed and Brons wrote and called that he wanted to see him, so he flew out, stayed in her guest room for a night and in her bedroom the rest of the week. Or a few years after that he remembered one of the many things he’d left behind in her house — a drawing several centuries old he had when he met her and hung on her wall but had never given her and now wanted — and included in the letter more than enough money to send it special delivery and apologized for the inconvenience this would cause her and swore he’d never ask for anything else of his again and she wrote back “Why not fly out to pick it up personally plus the rest of your little art treasures — none of them fit in with anything I own anymore — and see Brons along the way? He’s dying to see you but is too shy to ask and can’t face the hurt if you refuse. As for me, I’m comfortably with someone now (if I can be juvenile for a second: the coolest, cutest dude I’ve ever flipped over, and he’s nine years younger than me), so I’ll make and receive no demands. In other words, if you think I’m encouraging you to come because I’m lusting after you, you’d be nuts. This is all for Brons.” So he’d fly out and the new guy had gone backpacking in the Sierras for two weeks and he’d sleep with her after the first night. “Why not?” she’d say each time he came out. “We were always great together in bed and I’d only get horny in a few days knowing you’re in the next room beating your meat.” Or she’d call after a year and say “I was thinking of the three of us in Portugal and Spain, hitchhiking along back roads — people there had never seen such a gorgeous towheaded boy before, it seemed, the way they kept mussing his hair. And I wondered what you’ve been up to, working at, reading and yes, even though she disliked me — I liked her, by the way, or admired her — how your mom was holding up too. .” Anyway, always resumptions in their correspondence, overtures to fly out from both of them, he’d scrape up the dough to go, for a few years, annual visits in June and the same arrangements at her house every time. Till she wrote that last letter, his to hers, their postcards, then it all stopped.

So he was immediately drawn to her in the laundry room. The day? — sunny and dry. And her hair up or down? — now he’s not sure. Up, he thinks. Down, he thinks. Either way, she looked great. Through their entire relationship she had bangs, so she had bangs that day, but wore the rest of her hair many different ways. And she seemed vulnerable in the room, also protective of her son, more so with both those at the same time than he thinks he ever saw since, for a while clutching Bronson’s shoulders from behind, using him as a shield or device of some kind — well, literally to hold on to and hide behind — because she felt so discomposed or shy, and saying “shield” and her placing Bronson between them or keeping him there would make her less protective of him than he just said, and she also seemed interested, even attracted to Gould. Of course, the vulnerability and shyness, which he noticed when she first met other men she was attracted to, but it was probably mostly an act. And was it shorts she had on or long pants? Jeans, tight . not jeans but these thin summerweight cotton pants, he just remembers, red, and tight to her skin, and he now thinks a yellow tank top. But long solid legs on the small short body, but perfect legs, it seemed, and if the pants were long — they were long — then he could see the outlines of her skin through the cloth. “So-and-so” (she mentioned a well-known West Coast writer a little younger than Gould) “once said my legs were the most amazing and dazzling — lots of z’s — on earth. ‘Naturally,’ he said, ‘I haven’t eyed out every woman’s legs, but there are just so many kinds and I doubt any pair could be better than yours.’ Am I sounding too conceited and slight?” and he said “It’s okay, what else did the big brain say?” and she said “That I ought to model them. Or have a fashion photog take black and white shots of me only from the top of the thighs down and to blow up the best one to poster size, stencil the word ‘legs’ below the photo and to make a half-million copies of it and have someone market them to poster stores. That men would want to marry me just for my legs or pay five dollars for a thirty-second peep at them in some sideshow or porno place where just my legs were visible. Then he got really gross about my legs, where he’d like them in regard to him — he was pig rich from his novel by then and had big strong arms and a wrestler’s neck and chest and beautiful bushy blond hair but an ugly face on the largest head I’ve seen on someone who wasn’t a sad idiot and decrepit breath could that be the right word?” and he said “If you mean ‘stinky,’ no, but I get the point.” “And would I mind if he told his best pal about me — the Playboy of the Potato World, he called him: a fat cat from Idaho, you see, or son of one, and all from tubers — since he thinks I’ll fall for him madly and he wants to know someone who’s seen my legs with nothing above or on them in bed. ‘Tell whoever you want,’ I said jokingly, and his pal — Brons Sr., though without the S just yet — shows up at my place a day later, says who he is and that he’s selling eros but not from door to door, just to mine, and swore he never used that line before,” and he said “Why, did he think it a good one?” “And I tell you we flashed on each other right there and were on the floor in five minutes with not even the front door closed — that must be a record — with him lapping my legs up and down and around till they were greasy from his spit, and in a month we were married and with kid. Really, I don’t know what the big fuss is with men over legs. What are they, at their very best, but shapely sticks to walk on and cross. You guys get gunned up by everything. Even some with my poor chest: they must think of it as a pubescent girl’s and that turns up the heat. Or they see me as a boy or something in between, the creeps, where they then get both. But I’m being too egocentric again, aren’t I?” and he said “No, I swear, I love your stories.”