Stephen Dixon: Time to Go

“Sex.”

“You’re very experienced, but you’re not a young man in bed.

You make love the way you do because you have to because of your age. One time and that’s usually it, right? But a young man, if he ejaculates too quickly, can be right back at it. Maybe not with your experience or cooperativeness, though I’ve known some who have been as experienced as you or acted like it, but at least he’s ready for more in fifteen minutes and right now that’s the type I want to be sleeping with. Young, energetic, wants to try lots of things, and more in tune with my own energy, curiosity, stamina and so forth. Does all that make any sense?”

“Sure it does. I wish you would’ve complained sooner. It would’ve made this whole discussion unnecessary.”

“I’m not complaining. I loved making love with you and have gotten as excited with you as I have with any man I’ve made love with who I didn’t love. But I’ve lots of’ years before I want to settle in with someone who makes love like you.”

“Anything else?”

“What I said wasn’t enough?”

“My feet? Do they stink? My breath. Is it smellier than a man’s half my age or even ten years younger?”

“No. You take good care of your teeth — a plus for you compared to some of the younger men I know — and you don’t smoke anything and know how to get rid of the horrible alcohol breath. Your body smells nice too. Maybe you’ve more hair on your body than a younger man, which can catch the perspiration more, but you’re clean, so it’s no real problem. But you also in a way make me feel dumb at times — at least ignorant or near to because of everything you know from books and life and just reading the newspapers for twenty-five years. But then I get sort of exuberant when I think that in ten to twenty years I’ll know as much if not more than you, and maybe for one reason because by that time your brains will have started to forget.”

“It’s a possibility. Though if I stay active and creative and don’t drown my head in alcohol and have no serious accidents up there, I don’t see why my brain capacities shouldn’t even grow.”

“Another thing is that I sometimes feel you think you’ve seen and felt it all or almost. I don’t want to be intermittently tugging at your sleeve and saying ‘Ooh wee, you ever see anything like it in the world?’ knowing you probably have and then pretending, for my sake, it is interesting or exciting what I’m looking at or experiencing for the first or second time. Also—”

“There’s more?”

“You said you wanted to, but I’ll stop.”

“No, let’s finish. Honesty? Facts of life? That’s what I want? Sure I do, or at least how much can it hurt?”

“Well, all those cultural things you try to turn me on to. I wanted to turn you on to things too, but you were so set with everything you liked that it was nearly impossible. Music and films for instance.”

“If you mean your new music — that heavy electric guitar and tom-tom stuff that’s been increasingly crowding the atmosphere for the last fifteen years with its untrained bombastic voices and illiterate lyrics, most of it’s worthless. Worthless.”

“But I don’t think it is. I think a lot of it is great, as good as the best ever, and outside of the younger teenage music, appealing and meaningful and even poignant to people my or any age.”

“Maybe it is, I don’t want to be unfair. But I’m sure you’d appreciate my music more if you’d had some grounding in the classical and really serious modern works. But that’s my preference, I don’t see why it should be yours, and obviously one of the big differences between us. As for films, I thought our tastes were pretty much the same.”

“They are. I forgot. Though for you it’s mostly just entertainment while for me a lot of it is art. But I used to love when we were in a theater and I’d turn to you or you to me and we’d with just a look know we both didn’t like the movie or stage show and get up and go before it was over. That kind of silent likemindedness happened so many times there and the pity’s that it didn’t in most other things we did.”

“Like reading.”

“I love writers you hate. And I know it’s because they’re writing about things closer to my age and past experience, and same with your writers to you. Some we both like, but they’re masters or poets, so easy to like, or writing about eternal questions or the few things we both experienced or want to know more about.”

“We forgot food.”.

“What about it? I think we both like the same kinds, except for the meats I won’t eat and you do, but that was never a problem. You’re also a lot less into the junk thing than me, though you think it’s cute that I am. Really, I was partly raised on it, while you grew up when there was almost no junk food and your mother, you even said, strained your vegetables with a hand strainer, which of course my mother, who’s almost your age, never would.”

“But junk food’s bad for you.”

“They taste good though. But that sort of represents another thing we disagree on. You’re so much into health in your own way and I simply haven’t come to that point except for my staying away from chemically filled carcasses and dead crap like that.”

“I’ll give up all my meat for you.”

“I know you’re joking. But there is some truth in it, isn’t there? and that’s that you’d give up things you like for your woman while I don’t want to give up anything for any man yet. But another thing is your mother. Nice as she is to me, she seems like my grand or great-grand—”

“Don’t go overboard. ‘Grandparent’ should suffice. Just ‘parent’ would suffice also if you considered that some adults, like the possibility of myself, have children at a later age.”

“Your possibly becoming a parent I don’t want to go into. But I do want my man’s parent to be around the same age as mine, so she can get along better or whatever the reason. Though how can she be when the man I’m with is the same age as my father minus two years? And talking about that, people have sometimes looked strangely at us because of it. I know I shouldn’t be bothered by such things — that it’s so bourgeois as you say for them to think that way. But I do get bothered by it sometimes, probably because I am young and as a result still unsure of myself in some ways, and I want to avoid those looks and talk.”

“Those looks you can get walking with any man. Though I can see how it could bother you if you’re in no way in love with that person.”

“Listen, what it comes down to is I want to give myself more of a chance and time, okay? You seem more desperate to be mated now and from everything I said today, I’m not, agreed? And it’s not only what I said but all the other things I didn’t, all right? And I don’t want to talk anymore about it, I just don’t. It was nice, different, we had some terrific times, etcetera, and I know the break will be a lot more painful for you than me, but what can I say? You feel more deeply about me than I do you, that’s all. And maybe I don’t or couldn’t because of the age difference — well of course that’s one of the main reasons because that’s what I’ve been saying all along, true? And I know I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times in almost everything I said, but in a discussion like this, who doesn’t? And — excuse me but what was I saying before I started talking about contradicting myself?”

“I forgot,”

“Your memory’s not too hot also, but I’m only kidding.”

“And yours? You’re the one who forgot what you were saying after you got into that topic about deep and no feelings for me.”

“Oh yes. I was saying that the break, more painful than you, etcetera, and I know why. You think because of your age you’ll have little chance of meeting someone new. But for all I know there are many women and even some my age and maybe even younger who might want to be with you because of your age. Sure there are — plenty. But to me your real obstacle in future relationships is that because you’ve had so many affairs and breakups, you’ve become cynical about them and women and so they’ll never work out or almost.”