Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

— and now my passion for his life and work is out of control.”

“I get blamed for everything…something my father

used to say about himself,” and reached across the

bed to the night table and turned over the book.

The letters, see? Just so you wouldn’t think I

was lying to accrue some advantage with you.

Hardbound or paper?” and she said “Same as yours

— what do you think? I only have so much money,

so even six dollars was a sacrifice, but I had to have it.”

Her last words before she told me not to get up,

she’ll see me, and blew a kiss and left.

“Sorry it didn’t work out,” I’d wanted to say, and

what would she have answered? Probably just a shrug.

I’d also given her a book due at her library in a

few days and which I’d checked out and was going

to mail back. She said she’d read a few pages of

one on artistic creativity I’d left behind and was

a couple of weeks due, and found it very dull.

“What do I owe you for the late fee?” and she said

“Grace”—the librarian of her town’s small library

—“said you have your own card, something I didn’t

know — I’d always thought you were checking them out

on mine — and that she’d collect from you next time

you’re there. I didn’t say anything.”

Made coffee, read today’s Times in bed while I sipped

from the mug, tried to stay calm but couldn’t.

Stripped down to my boxer shorts and exercised—

pushups, situps, swinging from the chin bar between

the bathroom’s door frame, running in place.

Drank several glasses of water.

Ate carrots, celery, raw cauliflower florets, peanut

butter on crackers and thin slices of Swiss cheese.

Squeezed the croissants in their bag into the

refrigerator’s tiny freezer. Never cared for them,

or haven’t since I lived in Paris and had one with

jam and café au lait almost every morning in the

back of a café while I read the Herald Tribune.

Walked across Central Park. Bought her daughter

a beaded necklace for Christmas from a jewelry crafts

stand in front of the Met on Fifth.

Walked downtown in the park thinking “I don’t feel

too bad. A little better than I thought I would,

in fact. So she’s gone; so what? I’ll see. Could

lead to something good. New woman I might even be

more taken with, and she with me and with greater

constancy. Someone who lives in the city — maybe even

on the West Side, so I won’t have to go so far to

see her — and who’s marriageable but never married,

or if once married, no kid, much as I adored hers.”

Wished we’d had the baby she aborted without my wanting

her to. “Are you kidding?” when I said a year ago

“Let’s get married and keep the kid.” Oh, if only

she’d wanted it too, but the hell with it. “Do you

hear?” I said in my head. The bloody hell.”

Saw places in the park we’d walked past, commented

about, rested at. Zoo Cafeteria we’d sat outside in

the cold, pretending it was a ski lodge, though I,

unlike her, had never skied, and had hot chocolate

and shared a warmed-up roll.

Tonight I won’t feel so good. But with a little

vodka and a lot of wine, I’ll be much better tomorrow.

And day after that, not great but just fine, and

every day after that, always better.

I exited the park at Central Park West and 72 nd,

headed to a liquor store near Broadway for a bottle

of wine. When goddamn, on Columbus near the corner,

she was unlocking the driver’s door of her VW bug.

I ran up to her while she was putting a shopping

bag on the front seat, and said “Do I know you?”

and tried to kiss her.

“No way,” she said, swiveling out of my grip.

“I know you too and have read your stories. You

and your surrogates never stop with a civilized kiss.

By the way, I never asked — how’s your mother?”

“The same, the same, but do you mind if we don’t

start that how’s-so-and-so talk today, okay?

I’m sort of fed up with it.”

“I thought you wouldn’t get angry,” she said.

“Who the hell’s angry? I’m not. Say, how about

a coffee for old friends’ sake?” and she said

“Got to go. Only came down to quickly see you

and do some Christmas shopping. Now I have to get

back to correct papers and prepare next week’s classes.”

She got in her car, door was still open, and I said

“Boy, you’re sure not going to suffer.”

“What about you? You’ve said yourself you only

give your suffering over somebody three days.

Then they’re out of your mind, which I find healthy.”

“That was two months after I first met you and we

split. Not three years, and half of it living together.

Screw it,” and I waved with my back turned to her,

and instead of going to the liquor store, I headed for home.

Few seconds later, I heard footsteps running up

behind me. I turned, but it wasn’t her. Some young

father pretending to run away from his young son.

Something’s wrong. I unlocked the door to my mother’s apartment as I do every night to check up on her and take her garbage out, and a breeze blew past me into the public hall. It’s winter and very cold out and during this time of year she always keeps her windows closed.

I go in and see from the foyer, papers floating to the kitchen floor. I run to the kitchen. Her pocketbook’s on the floor, has been turned inside out and its personal papers and coins are scattered about.

I yell “You sonofabitch, I’ll kill you,” and open a kitchen drawer for a knife, but right away know I’ll never use it on anyone. But I can hit a head with a hard object if I have to, so I grab a candlestick out of a cabinet and bang the base against the counter and yell “You better get out the way you got in here or just peacefully identify yourself to me and leave through the front door, or I’m going to beat your thieving head in,” and go into the breakfast room.

A window to the backyard is open and two of its bars have been pried apart. The backyard door is locked and I open it and go outside, and nobody’s there. I check the downstairs bathroom. The light’s on, there’s a cigarette in the toilet bowl and a faint odor of cigarette smoke. I flush the toilet, then think I shouldn’t have — police might have wanted to examine the cigarette — and go upstairs.

The ceiling light in the girls’ room is on and all the dresser drawers have been pulled out, nothing inside them but clothes of my five brothers and sisters from ten to twenty years ago. I look under the bed, inside the closet, throw open the door of the bathroom right outside the bedroom and shove the shower curtain aside.

My mother , and I run to the front of the apartment, turning on the lights as I go and glancing around, and listen at her door. I hear breathing, she seems to be sleeping. I turn on the night light in her room. She dozed off in her house dress, closed book on her chest, afghan she’d knitted, covering her. I make the same quick search: closet, bathroom, under the bed, candlestick ready to come down on the burglar’s head, though I’m almost sure he escaped through the breakfast room window and over a backyard fence right after he heard me open the front door.

I put the book on her night table and turn off the light. I search the baby’s room next to my mother’s, the linen closet, living room, boys’ room, which is now unused like the baby’s and girls’ rooms and where I slept with my older brothers in bunk beds for about fifteen years.