Stephen Dixon: Time to Go

“Friends if we really need one another — in six months, maybe more. But I won’t need you. I’ve my parents, and good friends. And you’re a very nice man, very desirable too. There must be lots of women ten to fifteen years younger or older than you or the same age who’d love to have you as their lover, husband or friend. You should even get married and have the baby you say you always wanted so much before it’s too late.”

“Men can be fathers into their sixties and seventies.”

“Not if your prostate’s removed before then. Besides, you don’t want your five-year-old kid wheeling you around an old age home. You want to get down on the floor with it, run and play sports with it, dance with it at its wedding and so on, if it’s a girl, and maybe even later playa little with your grandchild.”

“Don’t worry about me — I’m going to stay active until I’m eighty. I’ll also dance with my son at his wedding if we feel like it. It just doesn’t have to be a girl.”

“No matter what, I can’t get married and have a baby for at least six or eight years. I’ve too many things to do before then. I have to graduate college first. After that I want to move to New York ‘and get a job as an editorial assistant in a publishing house somewhere while I write myself sick on weekends and early weekday mornings and late at night. I want to do all that while I’m young. I have to. Then, if one of my books sell or lots of my stories and some money’s coming in or I’m starting to get established, I’ll maybe settle in with someone and have a baby. So when I’m twenty-eight or twenty-nine. But no matter what happens, certainly not sooner.”

“It could happen sooner. You could fall in love and the pressures from him might be too great. Who knows?”

“I won’t. But if I do, and actually I probably will several times, I still won’t get married or have a baby. I’ll get rid of him, no matter how much it hurts, because I want to know many men. I want to be able to say ‘All right, I’m experienced, or as much as I want to be before it starts working against me.’ I also want to travel, but not where it takes too much time away from my writing, and not necessarily with a man. That I can always do ten years from now.”

“If you stayed with me you could do all of those.”

“You’re lying to yourself.”

“You’re probably right.”

“You’re already jealous of other guys I see and sometimes when I’m just doing nothing alone away from you, and we weren’t really that serious as lovers.” “We almost were. Maybe for a while we definitely were. Obviously now we’re not, but what is it?”

“Excuse me, but what is what?”

“You think I look too old for you? Act too old also, or both those or more?”

“No. You act young enough. Maybe too young for your age, but not for mine. Actually, sometimes the young way you acted kind of embarrassed me, though I’m sure it didn’t bother anybody else.”

“So I’ll act older. Not as old as your father or like your father, but just older.”

“I don’t want you acting any way but what you are, not that you could be any other way. As for your looks, well, you don’t look forty-two but you do look thirty-six or so, though don’t ask me what’s the difference. And your physique is good, but for a thirty-five-year-old man. Not one twenty-five or even thirty, which I think, if you want my preference, is the maximum age I’d like my man’s body to look now.”

“I don’t get it. What could be the difference? “

“Your upper arm muscles, for instance, are huge, as are your pectoral and whatever those muscles are in back — the ones like water wings when they’re flexed. But all of them, hard as they are and maybe too overdeveloped, like your pects, which if you continue exercising as you do will in a year be grotesque, are sagging somewhat. That disturbs me, what can I say? As great a shape as you’re in, your body still seems to be starting to fall apart because of your age.”

“I don’t see it.”

“It’s true. Look at any twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old man at a pool next time, or even thirty-five, but not one overweight. Their pects, even when they’re not developed, are a little higher, and if you see them in the shower, so are their testes by a bit. You can’t stop that.”

“Say you’re right, which I’m not saying you are, how come you never said anything about it before?”

“How come? You kidding? Because I didn’t want to mention it. I thought of it though, occasionally. Your body’s the body of a man desperately trying to stay in shape and look much younger than he is, and that makes me sad in a way. Also your hair.”

“I’m nearly bald, okay, but so are lots of twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old men. Blame my father. Even if when he was my age, though he said it came from wearing tight religious caps when he was a boy, he was completely bald on top.”

“Baldness I can live with. Though again, everything else being equal and you gave me my choice of men, why wouldn’t I choose one with a head full of thick hair? Wouldn’t you if you had your choice of women who were in every respect alike except one who was much more beautiful than the rest?”

“I don’t see how any two women could in every respect be alike except for being very beautiful.”

“For argument’s sake.”

“For argument’s sake, yes.”

“Anyway, what I was talking before about your hair was the gray.”

“So I’ve a little on my sides, so what?”

“On your back, shoulders, chest and also around your groin. There more than anyplace disturbs me about your hair. I don’t know why. Maybe because I think that’d be the last place someone getting gray would get gray. And soon you’ll be totally gray allover or close to it and it would seem strange in a way going with someone who’s all gray, bald and desperately trying to make his body look like the body of a young man who lifts too many weights. You’ll probably even get a heart attack from it.”

“Chances are a lot better that I won’t. I run and enough miles a day so that my heart and lungs are probably as good as any man who’s twenty-five.”

“Heart and lungs I can’t see, the body I can. Anyway, why would you want to continue seeing a woman who thought all these awful things about you?”

“Why? Very simple, I’ll tell you.”

“Don’t bother, because why wouldn’t you want to see me? I’m twenty, no, twenty-one plus years younger than you. Even if I don’t work out, my body is still great. I haven’t a line or sag on my face or anyplace. I’m still growing in fact. This year alone so far I’ve grown a quarter of an inch. I haven’t a gray hair. No reading glasses either just because I might’ve reached thirty-five, nor a tooth missing besides.”

“That’s because your dentin’s impenetrable, which you were born with, so thank your genes and stars. As for my eyes, I’m lucky that’s all that’s wrong with them with the reading chores I’ve put them through in thirty years.”

“Okay. Maybe you’re right there. But everything about me is young and in perfect shape — that’s my argument. There’s no way I’ll die of a heart attack in twenty years. My liver has to be a beautiful pink and its proper size because I’ve hardly taken a drink to your, what, maybe twenty-five years of drinking too much wine and liquor and some years heavily you said. I’m even so young that I still get pimples about once a month.”

“There. Ask me why I’d go with a woman who still gets pimples.”

“Because it means I’m still physically growing and changing, my glandular system particularly, and to a man your age, that might be attractive and even exciting. But you go on about my skin, I could talk more about yours and also your hair. It’s aging, getting brittle, while mine is still soft and bouncy, even if I don’t brush it for days. I know all this must sound shallow to you, but I find what a person physically feels and looks like to be important. But there are other things.”