Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

She drives me to the police station. I tell a detective the park story and give a description of the guy who attacked me.

“He sounds like everyone else,” he says. “Why didn’t you call the park precinct when you first heard the man groaning?”

“I did. The officer said he’d send someone.”

“Maybe he did — I don’t see anything on it yet — and they didn’t find anything or went to the wrong spot. Those bushes can be thick.”

I call Jane. She doesn’t answer. I call Dr. Blum’s office and a nurse there says the doctor told Jane to take Jim to Emergency at Roosevelt.

I cab to Roosevelt. Jane’s in the waiting room. They’re working on him now. He’s going to be all right, but they asked me to get out because I was so distraught I was upsetting him. Croup. Your son has croup. They say I’m lucky I brought him in when I did. His larynx. If it wasn’t for your floundering back and forth about the man we would’ve been home long before and gotten Jim out of his wet clothes and spared him all this.”

“He had a cough when we started out today. It could have been the early stages of croup and we didn’t realize it.”

“You wouldn’t believe it, Sol. He was like strangling on his own breath. He suddenly had so much trouble breathing that I thought he’d die. I started giving him mouth to mouth, when Blum called and right away he said croup and rush him here. I got Helen to drive us. Good thing I know someone on the block with a car. You probably would’ve taken him out in the rain looking for a cab.”

I ask about Jim at the admitting desk. The woman says That your wife? She’s very worried, but everything’s going to be fine. We’ve a great staff here, especially for emergencies.”

“Would you also know about a man brought in more than an hour ago with serious wounds in his stomach and chest?”

“Two in the last two hours with knife wounds and another who was fed glass.”

The two with knife wounds.”

“One died, one didn’t.”

“Mine was Caucasian and kind of elderly and very short.”

“He died. You knew him? We’d like getting in touch with his family.”

“I only found him in the park. I should have got him here sooner.”

“In the park. That’s what the police account said. It’s always such a job getting these men located if they don’t have identification on them. After a while they just get shifted to a medical school.”

The nurse said we can see Jim now,” Jane says.

We go to the treatment room, Jim’s about to be moved to the children’s wing upstairs.

“We’ve got his breathing controlled and his temperature’s already down,” the nurse says. “What is he, asthmatic?”

“We were told it was croup,” I say. “Seemed like an asthma attack. You ought to check with his pediatrician or a doctor upstairs. Okay,” she says to Jim, “here we go through the big building. Ready for a long ride?”

“Ha-dah, beh,” Jim says.

“Look at him. Knows what a ride means. Cute kid. Where’s he get his orange hair?”

They put him on a gurney. “Hold my hand now,” the nurse says. Jane takes his other hand. The hospital aide tells me to walk in front of the gurney in case there’s lots of traffic in the halls. I walk in front and push open the doors as we leave Emergency.

“You’ll be just fine, Jim,” Jane says.

“Oh, yes,” the nurse says.

“If your father wasn’t so concerned about the whole world, you needn’t have been brought in here at all.”

“Oh, yes? What he do?”

I turn around. “Watch it,” the aide says. “I don’t want to ram in to you.”

I step to the side. “Incidentally,” I say to the nurse, “would you know of a man treated in the last hour or so with a broken wrist or arm and broken shoulder or some part of his neck that he could have gotten from a heavy stick?”

“Not that I know of, and I’ve been here all day.”

“Who’s that?” Jane says.

The guy in the park who knifed me.”

“Did you get that treated yet?”

“It’s okay. A detective sprayed methiolate on it and bandaged it up.”

“You should get a tetanus shot,” the nurse says.

They told me.”

“I don’t want to say I saw it coming,” Jane says, “but it wouldn’t have happened if you’d stayed home with us like I said.”

“Ba-ba, ba-ba.”

“Is he asking for his bottle?” the nurse says. They almost all say it that way.”

“You’d really be much more help to your son by continuing to run interference,” the aide says. “We’ve had some bad accidents here when two gurneys coming from different directions collided.”

“He’s been hurt,” the nurse says.

“I didn’t know that.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll do it,” I say.

“Better I do it if your arm’s really that bad,” Jane says.

“Hot soup,” the aide says as we approach a crowded cross corridor.

“One baby Jimbo coming your way.”

“You wanted it as much as I did,” she says.

I say “I did want it, that’s true, or thought I did. But now I don’t, and I don’t know what to do about it because it seems too late to get rid of it.”

“Rid of it, you say? Rid of it? Rid of what? And why ‘it’? Why not ‘him’ or ‘her’? It’s more than an it. He is more, she’s more. No, you wanted a him and I wanted a her and now we have him or her whether you or I like it or not, and I’m going through with it. You don’t want to, you can leave. I’ll take care of him or her on my own. Or the baby. What have I been talking about? That’s what it is — just a baby. But to you, just a goddamn pain in the ass.”

“It’s because it’s changing our lives so. The baby is. And will change it even more when it comes, and for years. It was nice, right — nice and uncomplicated without it — so why do we want to screw things up now with it? Excuse me — with the baby. It’s got months to be born yet, but it’s a baby. Okay. But I won’t get as much of my work done as I want with the baby around. You’ll be up all night, and I’ll be up because you will, and because fathers just are today with newborns — the father I’d be, anyway — and that’ll be the pattern of our lives. Being up, feeding and cleaning him, the kid getting sick, and schools, clothes, all those forced nights at home when I want us to be out, determining our vacations and trips by him, boxing in our lives in every kind of way. I didn’t think of all this when I first consented to having it, or her, or him.”

“You should’ve. But as I said — oh, I said all I had to about your leaving or staying, though naturally I want you to stay. But if you’re asking me to choose you over the baby — there is no choice. The baby’s been in me too long and I can’t give it up now. So make up your mind and then do whatever,” and she goes into the bedroom and slams the door.

I stay there and in a few seconds I hear her crying. I say “Beth, Beth — ah, the hell with it,” and go into the kitchen and get a bottle out and pour a couple of inches into a glass, throw some ice in, swirl it around with my finger, and drink. I drink it all down in a minute and then go back to the bedroom door. It’s quiet. I knock. She says “What?” and I say “Is it all right if I come in so we can talk?” “What about?” she says. “What do you think what about? Look-it, maybe there’s a way we can work this out. Mind if I open the door so we can discuss it?” “Go ahead.”

She’s lying on the bed, her stomach sticking up. It’s her stomach that first made me think if we weren’t doing the wrong thing by having the baby. I liked her stomach before she got pregnant and even better when she was two months pregnant. She was always a bit too thin for me, and also, though I had no real complaints about this, too small-breasted, and the pregnancy the first two months expanded her both ways a little. But by the fourth month, though I liked it, and still do, her breasts getting even larger, her stomach really started to get big. Although it was almost cute, her stomach then — plump but hard; it wasn’t a big dumpy stomach. Now she has a big dumpy stomach and has had it for a month, though it’s still pretty hard and I know it isn’t fat. She’s in her sixth month and I almost can’t stand to look at it, though the odd thing is that from behind she looks almost the way she always did. Still, I can take the stomach, since it’ll only be that way another three months and for a short time after. What I don’t think I can take is the sudden irreversible big change in my life once she has the baby.