Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“I don’t think I’m prepared.”

“You need a script? It’s all right — she doesn’t know who you are. And unlike me, she likes to speak to anyone who calls. Here.”

“But I’ve never really spoken to her before. Help me out if it gets rough. And don’t forget to come back. Chloe? Chloe?”

“Could you repeat that for my journal jottings starting from ‘to her before’?”

“Hello,” a girl says.

“You speak,” he says.

“I speak. Lucia speaks.”

“You wouldn’t remember me, Lucia. I’m Piers. Did you, about a month ago, get a postcard from a person named Piers?”

“Postcard?”

“Do you know what a postcard is?”

“He says postcard,” she says away from the phone.

“Tell him they’re neither made from recycled paper nor nourishing.”

“Lucia,” he says, “did you ever get a postcard over the phone?”

“I know a postcard.”

“Good. Because, you see, I’m a long ways away. So far away from you that if you got on a plane to fly to the city I’m in, it would have to be in the air for many hours to get here. And a regular postcard takes days and days to get to you, so to speed things up I’m going to send you one over the phone instead. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Fine, then; here goes. A postcard for Lucia over the phone. ‘Dear Lucia.’ That’s your name, right?”

“Dear Lucia Maria Dorn.”

“Good. ‘Dear Lucia Maria Dorn. I’m sending you a postcard from a place far away that takes hours to fly in the air to and I hope you like getting my card very much. Love, your friend, Piers.’”

“What?”

“I just sent you a postcard over the phone. There’s not much room to write on a postcard, so I had to keep it short.”

“He’s sending a postcard on the phone.”

“Lucia, how old are you?”

“Five.”

“Five. I see. Do you like to go swimming?”

“What?”

“Swimming. Do you like to run through the forests with the animals?”

“Are no animals here. No pets allowed.”

“No wild weather-wise animals like woody woodchucks in the woods?”

“No.”

“Skunks, chipmunks?”

“No.”

“No raccoons, baboons?”

“No.”

“Goose, moose? Grouse, mouse? Cockatoos, kangaroos? Chickadees, wallabies?”

“No, no, no, no.”

“Well, then, do you like to fly in the sky with the magpie and other birds?”

“Are no birds here.”

“Do you like to swim in the ocean with the fish?”

“No fish.”

“Sure, there are fish.”

“He says there are fish here.”

“In the ocean, I said. I didn’t mean in fishtanks. And you’re near the ocean. I know where La Honda is. I used to live around there. And you and your mom and I once built a whopping bonfire on a beach nearby that burned through the night, but that was too far back for you to remember.”

“I remember.”

“You remember the potatoes we roasted? The wieners as big as big bed pillows we toasted?”

“We have to go for food now.”

“She’s right, Piers. We gotta go.”

“She speaks; does she read?”

“Only the words ‘flash’ and ‘cards’ on the giant flash cards I hold up. ‘Giant’ she only knows by my accompanying drawing of one, and ‘I’ she thinks is a bed on its headboard, and the flash card set doesn’t have a card for ‘hold up’.”

“I also wanted to know when you’re driving east.”

“To…know…when…I’m…driving…east. Got you. To that I say ‘I don’t know if I am.’”

“You can stay with me. There’s enough room.”

“In the unlikelihood that I even start out from here and then get past my friends in Pennsylvania, I’ll stay with you if I don’t get stuck in New Jersey, yes.”

“And if I flew out tomorrow on a twenty-seven-day excursion flight, would I be able to stay with you?”

“My camper’s too small for us all.”

“No double sleeping bags or available space in the main house?”

“If he…means…he and I…then I…tell…him—”

“Stop that.”

“I’m with someone else.”

“No one else. You and I. Someone else you can always be with. You and me. Woman and man. Man on woman, woman on man. Side by side, grunt to grunt, stomach to stem, my woman, my man.”

“To fall in love?”

“We’ll see. But just to be with me.”

“For two weeks?”

Three weeks. Past the excursion flight mini-maximum into the unknown beyond. I don’t know. That’s the unknown. I don’t know if that’s the unknown. What do I know? What I knew? What I know now? That’s it, no. Even what I knew as the well-known turns out to be unknown again and again. What I know is that I can’t say I don’t know anything, as that’s not implicit in my saying I don’t. Nah, maybe not even that. But you’re with someone else. A man?”

“He is. I am. Quote he is, I am, unquote. I’m sorry. It’s exhausting enough chattering this stuff over the phone. And my despicable compulsion to write everything down simply because I began doing it when I was six. For you, I’ll tear up this journal page. Book 85, page one twenty-two, lines nine through eighteen. I tore it up. Eliot’s piaculative and I’m not sure about Pound’s, but now mine. Did you hear the tear? There’s a lit fireplace a hand’s toss away from here and the expiatory ultimate would be for me to throw in my hands. The penultimate would be this entire journal’s death fire. Naturally, not my other eighty-two books, as throwing them in has no estimable sacrificial grading and is less likely to occur than self-immolation, and I’d also sear my arms pulling them out as Nora did with Stephen’s Arsonist , and then I couldn’t drive. And Lucia can’t both reach the floor clutch and steer. And we’ve really got to go. I hate belaboring the point, but the all-night supermarkets in the valley don’t stay open all night. There was a suit to that effect and the county ruled that ‘all-night’ means only till midnight. The stores could stay open past then if they liked, but they couldn’t put ‘all-morning’ on their signs unless they meant to stay open till at least noon from twelve-o-one on. ‘Bye.”

“Don’t go.”

He turns on the TV. The movie is about a young writer who trains to New York from Texas with a huge novel and falls in love with a rich woman twice his age. His editor is secretly in love with him and warns him about the older woman and her circle of culture hounds. They have a single gift and unsparing craving of preying on talented writers and transforming them into puny hacks in half the time it takes me to edit their hulking novels. Leastwise with me the author has every right to reject my deletions and corrections, which if stubbornly done to excess could mean the manuscript’s rejection no matter how fat the advance. While none of her young men have had the grit to resist being regaled and eventually devoured for new meat by the insatiable Hazel Brawn and her highborn ravenous friends.”

“Since I’ve the lifelong incurable disease of cacoethes scribendi ,” the writer says, “they’ll either find me stuck in their throats or be suffering from my cramps and blocks, but massively incapacitating.”

“I still think you’ll be what they eat.”

One of the commercials ends with Anne Hathaway saying to Shakespeare, who’s slavering over the cardigan sweater she bought him after he fretted about being chilled at his desk and unable to finish Richard III , “As someone once said, Bill, ‘All’s wool that wraps Will.’ Or was it ‘Ill’s Will no longer with his garret chill’? No, I think it was ‘All’s better in belles lettres with a swell Metre sweater.’”