Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“Decided not to come after all,” Chrisie had wired from San Luis Obispo this morning. “Why not drive down here instead, Love,” her address and the number of the main connecting highway, 101.

“Remember Dirk, Caroline?” Chrisie said to her older daughter, and Caroline said “No, when are we going home?” “Remember Dirk, Sophie?” and Sophie, two in a month, said “Dow? Dow?” and painted her hand with his purple marker. “Remember Chrysalis, Dirk?” Chrisie said, and he hugged her, made bacon and eggs for the girls on his two hot plates, gave them juice in clean paint glasses, set up Sophie’s portable crib, unrolled a sleeping bag for Caroline, later placed a triptych screen between the section of the room the girls were asleep in and his mattress on the floor.

He and Chrisie had tuna fish salad sandwiches, wine, carrots, cookies, grass, got under the covers, turned down the electric blanket, tuned in a Vivaldi piccolo concerto, watched the lights of a low-flying plane pass his window and cross the full moon. A dog from the house below his began to bay.

“Happy Easter,” Chrisie said when he awoke, handed him a wicker egg basket filled with candy eggs, jelly beans, chocolate bunny and new electric razor. Caroline said “Merry Easter, Dirk,” and showed him a similar basket with a baby rabbit inside sniffing the green-paper grass. Sophie was standing in her crib, nibbling a blue candy egg.

Two conductors wouldn’t let them on their cable cars because of Caroline’s rabbit. The conductor of the third car patted the rabbit’s head and asked if he could feed it part of his apple. The car rattled along Lombard street, was very crowded. A woman said to Dirk she would have thought twice about getting on a cable car if she had known a rodent was aboard. A man hurrying to catch up with his wife, who had suddenly jumped off the car to take movies of what her guidebook said was “the world’s crookedest street,” nearly knocked Caroline off the rear platform. The rabbit got out of a basket, as Chrisie was picking up Caroline, and disappeared into a storm drain. They got off the car, and Chrisie and Dirk made a show of looking for the rabbit. Dirk blew the highest note of his harmonica at the man, who snarled back “Hippies,” and resumed his smile and pose for his wife’s camera. Caroline stopped crying after Chrisie told her the rabbit had joined its Northern California family underground and Dirk gave her his Kennedy half dollar and harmonica.

They took the next car, Dirk holding Sophie as it headed down to the Wharf. She was wet, smelled, her mouth bubbled, he kissed her sticky fingers, felt her firm back, rubbery legs, grazed his face across her thread-thin hair, which was getting blonder than Chrisie’s lemon-colored hair. They got off at the turntable, Chrisie said how touristy the whole area was, got on the same car for the return trip up the hill, went to Golden Gate Park, where a radical New Left political party was sponsoring a be-in, and got up to leave an hour later. The sound equipment was bad, not enough music was being played, Chrisie was getting paranoid at the number of people openly turning on around then, and the field was too crowded and the girls could wander off and there were too many political speeches being made and most were too virulent. The black man,” the black woman candidate for the state’s 18 thassembly district said, “and the white man had all better start working together fast to end the repulsive criminal police power in this fascist town, or else the whole Bay Area’s going to go up in flames, a lot of noninnocent people going to get accidentally wiped out, the entire state and country might even get cooked, and I ain’t just bull-jiving, brothers and sisters.”

“We simply don’t work together, fit together, do anything well except sex together,” Chrisie said in his apartment, “and even that we can’t be too certain about, Dirk. I liked you better when I first met you — even liked you better during that last disastrous weekend in L.A. I like you better in your letters, prose paintings, painted postcards and grunts and silences for phone conversations. I think you only see me because of Sophie. You’re so compulsively solitary, while at the same time, so hungry for companionship and maybe, maybe even love. Most people we both know agree to my theory about you, or have even volunteered a similar one of their own, that there are really three of you — and, we can say this unhypocritically while realizing you probably represent, in an exaggerated form, the condition of us all. The pleasant helpful exterior, the bored angry man inside, who keeps distorting the fake amiable face, and the third you, who’s inside the second you and who deeply wants a close enduring relationship with someone but can’t find his way out. I’ve thought about it a lot, Dirk, so maybe you can think about it a little after I’m gone. Blaise didn’t know I was driving up. Nobody knew except my father, who called as I was leaving the second-to-last time and asked why I couldn’t spend Easter Sunday with them. I told him because I was celebrating it with a friend, and he said which friend, as he thinks he knows all my friends, and I said a friend, and he said male or female friend, and I said male, of course, though we’re strictly platonic, but only because he’s a brilliant young scientist fag. I finally had to divulge your name, John Addington Symonds — I love playing literary jokes on my dad, if only to let the snob know how really uninformed he is — and gave a bogus address, which they’re likely driving to right now. This place is like a monk’s room other than for the paintings. Though David Lieberman became a monk and he still paints. I think Blaise is going to cut up your painting when he discovers where I’ve gone. I’d hate for him to do that. You painted it for me without my asking you to, and it’s going to be worth a lot of money one day. Everyone who’s seen it concurs with me on that except my father, who says it’s too psychedelic and you ought to try another art form. That one looks like a sexed-up vagina close up. And that one there has always been my favorite — an immense forget-me-not, which was my pet flower as a girl. But Suicide —no, it makes me anxious, tense. You should have sold it when that very suicidal man wanted to buy it from you, just to get it out of the house. Show me all the new ones, Dirk. I like that one; that one’s fantastic; that one’s another great pulsing vagina; I don’t like that one — another Suicide . This one should be reproduced in an alternative newspaper’s centerfold; this one hung on a busy street corner; this one hung above the bed of a couple who want to but can’t conceive; this one given to Blaise to cut up. Can I make you a liverwurst and cheddar on rye? Are we getting along better than we did last night? Do you have any more Miracle Whip for the girls’ tuna fish salad?”

The telegram to Chrisie from her husband read: “Don’t bother returning less you bring back two fresh loaves Larraburu extra-sour sourdough white.”

They drove to the party where Helen, Donald and Roy might be. Sophie in his arms, Caroline behind them, blowing into the harmonica, they climbed the steep flight of stairs, were greeted at the top by the host, who was the twin brother of the man who’d invited Dirk. He shook their hands, seemed disappointed. “Cute kids,” he said, “the little one a girl? Coats over there, head’s through there, drinks in there, nice to see you — Dick, is it? Julie? I never remember names and especially not children’s, and he greeted the childless bottle-bringing couple behind them with a long noisy hug. “Wendy, Harris, glad you could come, glad you could come.”

Ken, the host’s twin, said he was happy to see them, lifted Caroline and swung her, kissed Sophie’s head, Dick’s cheek, Chrisie’s lips, said “Soft, soft, like morning mush. Bar’s over there, head’s back there, I guess you know where you put your outer dugs and I’m the bartender, so vodka and tonic for everyone except the teeny kids. Orange pop on the rocks do you, Caroline, my dear?” and he put her into a soda carton and carried her to the bar.