Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

She taps “I hope so” and then “Goodnight.” I go to bed. I put the blanket over me and tuck it in. I wear the gloves and my clothes. It’s cold but not as cold for me as it was. And it could be considered a good day. When it began I had nothing to eat and no prospect of a meal and no blanket or gloves. Probably also been a better day for the rest of them because they gave me these things and for Miss James because she knows it and spoke to me tonight. I turn out the light and wait for what I hope will he beautiful dreams. Really, outside of my friendships and conversations here, dreams are what I live for most.

Paul walks to the point. When he was here two winters ago he wrote a story about a writer who came to a similar village to get over a woman in New York City who had stopped seeing him.

In the story and real life she was an actress who was portraying an actress on a daytime television soap opera who was in love with a writer of soap operas who couldn’t give up his wife for her.

One night, in the story and real life, she told Paul she couldn’t see him anymore as she was in love with — and thinks she’ll be marrying — the actor who plays the writer on the show.

In the story and real life he had to sit down for fear of falling down and she said he was beginning to look and sound like one of the more unconvincing morose characters on her soap.

The writer you’re in love with?” he asked and she said “Abe would never act so callow or doleful in real life or on the show.” She asked him to leave and he said “Not yet.”

“Do I have to call the police?” and he said, “Please, let’s go to bed one last time and then I swear I’ll go.”

Both in real life and the story she said “You’ve got to be even crazier and wormier than I first thought you were when I met you and then, for some stupid unself-protective reason, changed my mind.”

He slapped her face, pushed her into her bedroom and told her to take off her clothes.

In the story he had to pin her arms down and sit on her while he removed her clothes.

In real life he didn’t pin her arms down and he thinks she took off her clothes while she sat on the edge of the bed.

In the story and real life she said if he was so intent on physically overpowering her, then she wasn’t going to fight back, as she could get hurt even worse that way. “Irreparably, even,” she said in real life.

He doesn’t remember using that last line in the story; he thinks he felt it would have sounded too banal to be believed. Now he’d use it, and he makes a note in his scratch pad to add that line to the story if the line he might have written in place of it isn’t a better one and if this one can seamlessly be worked in.

Both in real life and the story she pleaded again for him to leave, and he said he wouldn’t. When she cried because she was frightened of the harm he might do her in bed and later, out of self-reproach, when he was through, he broke down, in real life, said he must have been temporarily insane to have threatened her like that, and left.

In the story he held her down, got on top of her and tried making love.

She said something like “As I said before, Perry, you don’t have to force me as I’m not about to resist. I don’t want to risk rupturing my vaginal walls and maybe as a result restrict my childbearingness and facility for having sex unrestrainedly with other men.”

The act was physically painful and difficult for them both.

In real life, a month before that night she said “It’s sleeping, Paul; let’s wait.”

In the story she later said that rape or whatever he wanted to call it, it could have been pleasurable for her if he were the man she was in love with but for her own reasons didn’t want to make love with tonight while he most demonstrably did. “But you’re not. In every possible way you’re unattractive and hateful to me, no more now than before.”

He said he could make her attracted to him and she said that was only his insufferable hubris speaking in him again. He said hubris was one of a dozen or more words he’d looked up at least twenty times in the last ten years and would still have to look up again when he got home.

In the story he looked up the word when he got home and gave the definition.

In real life now he doesn’t know what the word means and writes it down in his scratch pad and underlines it.

In the story and real life he made an evening call for her from the phone booth on this point a week after the incident in her apartment.

In the story and real life he said something like I’m calling from this point, which is on an icy peninsula a mile out to sea, and where I can hear the sounds of buoys, gulls, bells, waves, fishing boat motors from nearby and far-off, the clinking and pinging of the halyard against the flagpole at the point’s tip, and somehow it’s the maddest and saddest and happiest and sappiest and sanest phone call I’ve ever made. For you see I’m both speaking to you while at the same time so totally alone and now being covered like everything else out here including the mouthpiece and coin slots and telephone wires and poles with snow.”

In the story she said “I hope you get buried to death and die,” and hung up.

In real life she said he sounds awful and there’s nothing she can do for him, and hung up.

He phones her and says “Storm, hi. I’m calling you from that peninsula point phone I last phoned you from and which I never would have done if it wasn’t around the same time and so soon after seeing some of the same people and the same sea and shore sounds couldn’t be heard and the point wasn’t as deserted as it was when I phoned you in what a few fall months will be two winters ago.”

“If it’s snowing,” she says, “I hope you freeze your balls off and die, goodbye.”

“And if it’s raining or let’s say the meteors are showering as they are now but weren’t then showering? Or the sun’s thundering and mountains are lightninging and stars and moon are closing in and the earth’s fissuring and oceans are tidalwaving and this village and your city and our country and countries and continents are disappearing worldwide? Day the earth ended — a time-torn title for a short story but a workable theme for one I’d work on if I hadn’t used it twice before. Remember the husband and wife archeological team? The last two people on earth who seek shelter in the cave they’ve been exhuming for years? And just as the cave’s crumbling with them in it they discover an intact skull and complete skeleton and enfaced slate and stylus that are probably a million years older than the oldest bones and writing materials ever found of protohuman American, and also the skeleton’s digging and cooking utensils that are very much like our own. And what about old Philly Worstwords, who’s awakened from a series of dreams of the successive loves of his youth and artistic successes of his middle age, to find his top floor apartment walls collapsing and all the surrounding buildings plummeting? And from that hospital bed in his now towering wall-less single room, observing the dissolution of his neighborhood and then the entire city and countryside beyond. ‘Why me?’ he kept asking — remember that, Storm? ‘Why me, why me, why me?’”

It’s raining. The rain stops. The puddles dry up. The night falls. The day comes. It’s raining. There’s thunder. Lightning can be seen by those who can see or who see it or those who remember it when they saw. Something like that. A master I’m not. I get out of bed. It’s time. The rain stops. I suppose the puddles are beginning to dry up.

I wash and shave. I’ve come a long way. Last night I was asleep. Tonight I’ll most likely be asleep. The night after tonight, or tomorrow night as they say, I’ll probably be asleep too. And maybe one time during the day of these days I’ll be asleep in what’s called a nap. But still asleep. A sleep that might last for about an hour. That’s about the length of my naps. Though some have been as long as two hours. One nap I had lasted three hours I believe. A long time ago. And one lasted so long that it could no longer be called a nap. But I should get going. I’ve come so far this time that I feel I want to continue.