Stephen Dixon: Gould

The summer before he knew her she was on a two-month bus trip to almost the northern tip of Alaska and back where just about every new hallucinogenic drug known at the time was used aboard. Brons was left with her parents, her ex-husband was the driver and paid most of the costs of the trip, some West Coast writers and artists and a couple of well-known beatniks from the East joined the bus for a few days at a time, “I think I banged every guy on the bus at least twice, including my husband, though I didn’t know it was him both times till after we woke up. That’s the kind of adventure it was, free and fun and powerful and out-and-out unpredictable and outrageous and the most lovingly communal of moving communes, where you made peace and even sweetly balled the ones you once loathed. You would have freaked out in a day if you were on it, no matter how many chickies you could have laid, and pissed everyone off with your stodgy worries and complaints and morning regimens and needs like exercise and a newspaper and coffee and if you didn’t shit by ten A.M. every day you’d get frantic,” and he said “I wouldn’t have minded the sex with the different women, if they were clean. But I doubt I could have done it with anyone else if you were along, maybe because I wouldn’t have even needed to — would that be the same with you?” and she said “Of course not. That’s what the trip was about. To lose it for a week or month or however long you’re aboard; but all the conventional ways of living, I’m saying, which are okay for when you’re home,” and he said “Anyway, the drugs, since I’ve a predisposition to bad trips — I blame it on my hyperactive imagination — would have driven me close to insane if I’d taken them. So I never would have chanced going on it and you would have had the bus to yourself, not that any of your friends would have invited me.” A twelve-hour psychedelic movie was made of the trip, a great deal of it financed by her ex-husband, and they occasionally went to parties where parts of it were shown, once with a group in the room accompanying it with flute, drum, bell and saxophone music and another time where a woman did shadow puppet theater against the images on the screen, and each excerpt was so slow, set-up and preachy about the delights of various drugs and their individual medical, therapeutic and dietary uses and incompetently shot and edited that even though she was in a lot of it, mostly high and looking silly and acting amateurishly and dressed in costumes and paper hats and masks and things but a couple of times in a more somber, natural mood and just holding a lit cigarette or iced tea and talking normally about how she enjoyed the long trip and being with her friends and seeing the interesting and dramatic scenery but missed her kid, that he usually, without popping any pills or smoking pot like the rest of the people watching it from mattresses and pillows on the floor, soon fell asleep.

He once awoke in the morning to her going down on him. He once awoke late at night to her and some guy he’d never seen humping on the rug by his bed. He loved seeing her standing on the heat register outside their bedroom during some of the colder winter days, her light nightgown billowing above her knees from the air coming up, hugging herself. That smile of hers then, the little girl again, when she caught him looking at her. “I’d say come, come to me,” she once said, “but that’d mean taking my arms from around me to open them to you and I’m just too cold.” She could balance herself over a sink and pee in it without any threat of collapsing the washstand, when their one toilet was taken or clogged. She was the fastest woman he’d ever known, dashing to the store a mile away for a single item and racing back in a total of something like twelve minutes. She beat him in races and he was fast, and she was also a terrific swimmer and could do lap after lap for an hour straight and come out of the pool breathing evenly. She taught him the butterfly stroke, the scissor kick, the butterfly kiss, how to part his hair with his fingers but where it stayed parted the whole day, to blow into a leaf’s seedcase and get a loud toot and a few times a quick tune, to fix a wall switch, replace a pane of glass, unstop a toilet, and once, something he could never do and when the plunger he used wouldn’t budge it, she shoved her hand into the toilet bowl hole and pulled out her son’s shit-smeared toy seal, and also insisted that when they drove together or when he was alone with Brons that he keep his hands in the ten-to-two position on the steering wheel, something she said her ex-husband insisted she do “and he used to race cars at Indianapolis and was so skilled at the wheel that I once saw him drive blindfolded for half a mile.” One of the front wheels blew on the car she was driving and the car spun around, ripped through a fence on the right side of the highway and flipped over and landed on its roof, and neither of them was hurt though they both couldn’t sleep or slept very little for weeks. “We got out alive,” she said the next day, “because I steered into the spin rather than away from it, which is what I want you to learn to do for slick roads or something like what happened to us, till it becomes automatic,” and he said “But we ran off the road, car was completely out of control, and landed on our heads and were lucky we didn’t get killed, so why do you say your way’s better than any other?” and she said “If I had tried correcting the skid the way most people instinctively do we’d have ended up in oncoming traffic and got creamed for life.” Every other month or so she’d put on garageman’s overalls her father had given her and change the oil in her car and lube it more thoroughly, she said, than any service station ever would. She had a cat she trained to sit up and beg and jump on and off stools and run down piano keys and ring, she swore, to get someone to come to the door to let it in, though he always thought it was by accident, since there was a ledge right under the bell so all the cat had to do was touch it when it wanted to rub against something. She had an art show at a reputable gallery in San Francisco just for the framings she did of old etchings and prints and some of them where there was no picture of any sort inside and one reviewer called it the rarest and most rewarding of exhibits to witness: the start of a new art form the artist invented and another reviewer said her work amounted to little more than a simple pastime she’d become as accomplished at as a hundred other hobbyists in the Bay Area and would her next project involve putting together ribbons, pine cones, juniper berries and leaves into charming seasonal wreaths? She became so depressed by the second review that she quit making and selling the framings, dismantled the remaining ones and gave the frames to Goodwill and converted her art studio into a sewing room. She also succeeded in getting him to say “Excuse me” and “Thank you” and “You’re welcome” and “God bless you” or “Gesundheit” and expressions like that to people at the appropriate times, which he must have been taught to do as a boy and possibly even practiced for years but only when she pointed it out did he realize he hadn’t done it for a long time before he met her, or not as a rule, and to answer the phone with a hello rather than a “yeah?” or “yuh?” or grunt. She was always planting flower bulbs, rearranging flower beds, cutting flowers and turning them into bouquets and placing them in vases and jars around the house, and when some of the petals fell to the floor or table, putting them in a saucer of water on the kitchen windowsill. And other things and glimpses, but does any of this explain, once it was clear to them they should break up, why he did everything he could not to? He was doing relatively little during the time he was with her — odd jobs, full-time jobs, but none of them paying much — and had no idea what he’d do in the future, and living with her in her comfortable home in a pleasant community and with an interesting enough group of friends around her and for the first year having her car to drive till he was able to afford his own, gave him some stability, he could call it, or permanence of some sort, or grounding in a way, even if he had to work hard at all those jobs to keep it going, or just a place to sleep and eat and a woman to be with and lay and whom he truly loved for a while, and her child. Finally she said “I want to start seeing other men in a more serious vein, not simply a night here and escapade there when I’m fed up with you or want to take revenge because of something you did or said or am just turned on for a day or two to another guy, so I want you out of here for good and that’s the last time I’m going to say it,” and he said “Maybe things can still work out between us, they always have, and if they really work out you won’t feel you need to see anyone else, just as I never have, and I won’t have to leave,” and she said “We’ve tried and tried and for the most part it’s been wretched year after wretched year and it’s never going to work and you know it, besides that you didn’t hear much of what I said,” and he said “I heard, I was listening, and you’re right, of course, about almost everything, so why am I acting so desperately now? But what about Brons — won’t my going hurt him?” and she said “He’s of the age where it’ll hurt for a short time and then, with all his other interests and activities and because I’m here for him and I’ll make sure his father calls and shows up more, he’ll get over it quicker than you think. It’s also possible, because you can be so cloistering—” and he said “You probably mean ‘cloying,’” and she said “I probably mean both, but what are you implying, that I’m not good with words? Anyway, what I was saying is that Brons will ultimately feel, because of your way of engulfing anyone you love, immensely relieved,” and he said “Is that what you think I was with you, engulfing? And also that ‘relief business; you’ll feel that way about me too once I’m out of here?” and she said “I wasn’t even thinking of them for myself.” So he left, drove to New York in a U-Drive-It car, later saw them and her new boyfriend in Spain, felt he went crazy there for a few days, maybe over her, maybe it was other things — he forgets now — but quickly recovered, and that was the last he saw of them except for brief visits to California because Brons asked him to come — two? three? — and a business trip when he only saw them for a day. And now he didn’t even have a photo of her, though when he was living with her he had a few, including a topless shot of her and several other women from the bus trip she took to Alaska, and one with her, Brons and him mugging four times in a New York City photo machine, but he did have several of Brons, one a newspaper photo, which the Chronicle photographer sent him the original of when he wrote to him for it: Brons on his shoulders: “Father and Son, Gould and Bronson Bookbinder, Enjoying the First Spring Day in Golden Gate Park”—“Why didn’t you tell them his real last name and that he was my son, instead of claiming he was your own?” and he said “I thought it’d be too much trouble getting that across to the photographer and that the paper wouldn’t run the photo if they thought Brons and I weren’t related and I was living with his mom. But I guess also because I liked the idea of it written that way”—others of Brons at his birthday party three years straight, graduating nursery school, entering first grade, on Stimson Beach making a huge sand sculpture of some sea animal with a shovel and pail, he and Brons in a rowboat on the Stanford University lake, the two of them fishing off a cliff near Tarragona, Brons sitting in the driver’s seat of his father’s sports car and pretending to steer, and which Gould occasionally looked at if he didn’t mind getting up on a chair in front of his open bedroom closet and taking out the shoebox of them and most of his other photos, some dating back to the time he was a boy himself.