Stephen Dixon: Time to Go

I wake up around three to go to the bathroom. I go back to sleep and dream about her. She’s clothed. I’m sitting on our old bed in her apartment now without any clothes. She sits beside me, says “Open your mouth, I want to kiss you.” She kisses me as I’ve never been kissed in a dream. It’s the longest kiss I’ve ever had in a dream or out of one. I almost faint in the dream during that kiss. The dream ends when she takes her lips off mine and says “That was a good kiss, wasn’t it? I know it was for you. You lovely man. We know how to kiss.” I don’t go back to sleep. I try but can’t. I think about the dream and that it was a very exciting one but what does it mean? As far as I know, I don’t long for her. I no longer love her. Obviously the kiss dream is tied in with seeing her and dreaming about her yesterday, or is it? Because what about my lovemaking dream with her yesterday? What’s that tied to? It doesn’t matter. Dreams are dreams. They mean one thing, they mean another, they mean many things. I’m not much for interpreting my dreams. I like them when they’re good. I wouldn’t mind dreaming of her every night if I could always have such exciting dreams. Now, if I saw her today on the street or somewhere, that would be different. Then I’d think that maybe my dreams mean something important. That suddenly they’ve begun to predict when I’m going to bump into someone, or at least her. I can’t get back to sleep. I turn on the light and read till about the time I usually get out of bed on a workday.

I wash, shave, do my morning things, go to work. I spend my lunch hour sitting by the fountain in front of the Plaza Hotel. I sort of look for her while I’m there and on the street, but don’t see her. I go back to work, finish for the day, go home. I think of calling up a friend if she wants to have dinner here tonight, but I don’t feel I’ll be good company. I make a salad, finish the book I’ve been reading and start another. I have several brandy and sodas. I get very tired and go to bed. I wouldn’t mind having another exciting dream with her tonight. I go to sleep and wake up around eight without being aware of having had any dreams at all.

His father came home from the army a year after V-J day to the day. Don waited for him at the Columbus Avenue corner of their block but his father came up from the Amsterdam Avenue corner and was home an hour before Don gave up his wait.

“We’ve a little baby,” Don said on the phone. “Well, of course, little. Well, not of course ‘little.’ It could’ve been a big baby — big for a newborn baby. In other words — ah, I’m too excited to talk. Just that you’re a grandmother again and of a girl. Now I have to phone Lucy’s folks.”

It rained heavily the night his wife left. He said when she was at the door and the taxi was honking downstairs “This is a lot like a lot of the novels I used to read in my twenties and some of those movies too and which now turn up on TV. When the wife or husband leaves or the lover or newborn baby dies, it often poured and the hero would walk out of the hospital that night into the driving rain.” His wife said “Sometimes life is like that, sometimes it isn’t. I suppose in those books and movies the rain was supposed to add drama, but here it’s just anticlimactic.” “What do you mean?” he said but she said “Just don’t walk in it after I leave — you’ll catch a bad cold,” and grabbed her valise and opened the door. His two daughters and father-in-law were waiting in the cab.

“I love you,” a girlfriend said to him. “I can’t believe this. You’re such a screwy mixed-up angry guy and not at all goodlooking, though you got a perfect physique, or with much of a future ahead of you from what I can see — and in dancing no less; what will people think? But I love you. What does that make me: screwy, mixed-up and angry too? Who cares right now. Prove you’re no pansy. Do me.”

“God be with you,” the beggar said on the street today when Don gave him a dollar. “And if he doesn’t get with you, get mean with him. That’s what I do. Yell at him, scream, say ‘God, what’s with you today, man, huh, huh?’ It works.”

When he was a boy and there was lightning out as there is tonight and he was asleep, he’d wake up in a panic and crawl under the bed with his covers and clamp the pillow over his head and in the morning wake up and wonder for a minute how he got there.

He remembers when his sister came home from the hospital when she was born. The buzzer from the building’s vestibule rang. His babysitter rang back whoever it was and Don opened the door. His parents and brothers were walking up the stairs, his father holding his sister. “Here she is,” his father said, “a present for you. Now you’re no longer the youngest,” and he put Rita into Dan’s arms.

After they were called out for the last time, he didn’t know what to think. Either I did well, very well, or I’m fooling myself and I just did adequately and maybe even poorly, because the audience goes wild on premiere night and especially for a young dancer who replaces the not-so-popular soloist at only a few hours’ notice.

The cats whined and rubbed up against his ankles and he fed them for what he thought would be the last time. About ten minutes later, while they were licking each other’s faces, his wife called from the corner phone booth and he put the cats into their traveling case and carried them and their kitty litter box and what was left in the kitty litter bag downstairs.

He met a woman in a theater lobby. They talked during the two intermissions and after the, ballet she suggested he come home with her for lots of “wine, wooing and womance.” They took a cab to her apartment and after they had some wine he tried to kiss her and she held him at arm’s length and said “Not now, not tomorrow, not ever if you mind it with a guy who’s better at part of it than any woman can be and who’s going in for an operation next month to complete the job.” “Goodnight,” Don said, and the man started to cry.

He goes over to the dinner table, looks at the elaborate salad he prepared and main and side dishes he cooked for three hours tonight, and goes into the bedroom with a bottle of wine and a juice glass and shuts the door and turns on the TV.

“Oh, you’re having another girl, aren’t you?” the nurse said to them at the obstetrician’s office. “Oh, I wasn’t supposed to say that, since you didn’t want to know the sex of your baby, did you?”

His mother called and said “What’s this I hear you’re going out with a black girl?” “I don’t know how you could’ve heard it so fast,” he said, “as I’ve only known her for a week.” “Someone saw you two walking in the street and said she was short and not even pretty.” “Look, I don’t want to get cross with you, but what I do and who I go out with is my own business,” and she said “Not if it touches on the lives of your father, brothers and sister and even your only grandparent who can’t see, hear and can barely think.”

His father never went to a doctor till he was seventy-seven and three months after that died at home in his sleep. The City doctor who did the post-mortem later said “He died of old age; otherwise, he was in perfect health. I’m not joking. After what you said about him, I don’t understand how someone could be that age and stay so healthy yet drink the way he did and never exercise or eat the right foods for all his life.” “Let’s not go into it any further,” Don said, and the doctor said “What’re you so worried and upset about? It means you carry some great genes.”

His sister dropped by. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” she said. He said “As long as you’re here I suppose you should be the first to know. This is Lucy. I met her last Friday, proposed to her this morning, and we’re getting married, if we can get the blood tests and license and all in that time, Saturday of next week.” “I’m glad to meet you, Lucy, and to know I’ll have such a beautiful sister-in-law, but what,” she said to Don, “happened to my best friend and your fiancée Susan who you were in love with so much till last week?”