Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

HE’S DONE SEVERAL quick versions of this already, none have worked, and he dumps them into the wastebasket by his desk and starts again. He picks up his younger daughter at the camp she goes to every weekday for seven hours and they’re walking home from it. “Do you mind if we walk home?”—this is probably where he should have started it—“Do you mind if we walk home today?” and she says, “How long is it?” and he says, “If we walk at a normal pace—” and she says, “I mean streets,” and he says, “You know, same old route, ten mostly short avenue blocks and then the long side street to our building, which we’d have to walk down anyway if we took the bus. But we can get — you can; I’ll just have a coffee if we stop — a bagel or frozen ice or pizza or anything you want along the way, though what else is there after those three?” “I’m a little tired to walk,” and he says, “But it’ll take two blocks to the bus stop from here, so that means only eight more blocks to walk,” and she says, “How do you know that?” and he says, “Well, two from ten is eight. And it’ll be interesting — things to see, people and such, sudden surprises: you never know what’s going to happen on a walk that long in this city. Not long; just ten short blocks and then the side street to our building, and that one’s all downhill. We’ve done it a few times and you haven’t complained. And if you get tired along the way, we’ll take the bus,” and she says, “Okay, we’ll walk, if you want me to.”

They start walking. They said all that standing in front of the church school the June camp’s in. They’re walking and he takes her hand; his other hand holds her little knapsack and his book. “Was it a long day, sweetheart?” and she says, “Same time as all the days there,” and he says, “I meant was there a lot to do today that tired you out? You go swimming?” and she says, “We always go if there isn’t a trip. Today there was no trip. We even go if it rains, but not hard. We have to walk a long way to the pool. I hate it in the rain when I have to carry my swim things. And then we have to walk back but just as slow because there’s a big group and some of the kids are very little, and that’s harder than going there.” “It didn’t rain today, did it? I mean, maybe it did on your block but not ours, or not when I was looking out the window,” and she says, “How can it rain where I am but not where you are?” and he says, “It’s possible, take my word, we can be on the same street but different sidewalks and on yours it’s raining and mine it’s not. But it didn’t rain while you were on the camp roof or walking to the pool and things like that, right?” and she says, “We didn’t go to the pool. It was closed for cleaning.” “Then did your counselors run you around a lot at camp, to make you tired?” and she says, “How, make us run round and round till we fell?” “No, I’m not being clear, I—”

“Gould,” someone says, and he looks and it’s the same guy he met two Junes ago on Broadway when he was also taking her home from camp, or both kids, or maybe he was alone and it was last year; and she thinks, Oh, no, it always happens, this is awful, he knows so many people around here, where they used to live all the time, before she was born, and now only in the apartment in June and around Christmas for two weeks and lots of long weekends when all of them can take off on Friday or Monday. And he keeps bumping into people when he’s out with her, while she wants to get home fast — though first stopping for a pizza slice or, if it’s hot like today, a frozen ice — and then take a shower and have a snack at home too, but a shower first if she’s already snacked outside, or maybe a bath, whichever she feels like — they let her take both now by herself — and read and watch the hour of TV a day she’s allowed and maybe a nap if she’s tired, which she’s not — where does he get that? — and to be with her sister. To play with Fanny, who doesn’t go to camp every day anymore: too old, she says; twice a week is the most she’ll go for — and her parents let her get away with it because of all the money they save, she bets — but to have fun with her, like go up the block to shop for something or to the library if it’s open, things Fanny’s more willing to do with her than on other days, maybe because she’s mostly alone and done almost nothing that day and so wants her company, and now he’s going to talk. And talk and talk. Talk’s what he loves doing most when he’s in the city, she thinks, and he knows how awful it is for her when he does it on the street or in the building lobby with other people when he’s with her and they’re going someplace. The man says to the man he’s with, “This guy got me my first and only news job at NBC thirty years ago. What am I saying? Closer to forty; so long ago I had hair then, a fantastic mane of it.” A mane? she thinks. Like a lion? He’d look funny. “When he went to Europe to study—” “Just to travel,” her father says. “Gave myself a postgraduation hiatus for two months before I looked for a real nine-to-fiver in New York, though I believe then it was till six.” “Travel, then. And play around, don’t tell me. I used to see you operate in school.” Play around? She thinks. Operate? How? The first, he’d be too old; the other, too young. It must mean something else. “So he got me in as his replacement. Weekends. The Monitor radio show. Copy boy. Paid next to nothing and they worked you to death. We went to City together; that’s how we met. I wanted to be a newsman then, had worked on the school newspaper…. Good grief, I forget its name now, the evening-school one; I was the features editor.” “Observation Post,” her father says. “That’s it. It’s obvious your brains haven’t rotted away from alcohol, not like a lot of our fellow students then. Remember Johnny Welsh? He became an actor.” “No.” “The name’s familiar,” the other man says. “A basket case now. Last time you saw him in a film was ten years ago, and I think he played a drunk. Only thing he could play. They must have pushed him in front of the camera and said, ‘Act natural.’ But working at NBC convinced me news wasn’t my lifetime thing.” Oh, darn it, will they never stop? “Tearing copy off the wires and feebly rewriting it. But was that what those teletype machines were called?” and her father says, “If they weren’t, that’s what we dubbed them. From wire services, I’m sure.” Dubbed? she thinks. Like knights and things? That what he means? “So I began thinking of applying to grad school for something else…. This your little girl? You didn’t introduce, and such a cutie.” “No, it’s some kid who’s been following me the last few blocks.” “I have not.” “I only said it — watch this, she’s going to know the word; we spoke about it this morning — facetiously.” “It didn’t sound like that,” she says, “and you told me the word’s meaning yesterday.” “Oh, boy,” the man says, “not only like a tack but a wit too. I think I saw you the last time I met your father on the street, or was it your sister — you kids grow so fast. Are you Franny?” “No, Josephine. My sister you met is Fanny.” “I stand corrected and censured. Josephine, eh? After the great French emperor? Ah, I’m only kidding too. Your dad and I took a course in kidding at City, just ask him. Lenny Moses,” and puts his hand out to shake and she shakes it. Such a fat wet hand, like a big dog’s paw, and she wipes her hand on her shorts. “So I should have realized,” the man says, “you were a year ahead of me, if you had graduated when you went abroad.” Goodbye, good luck, good wishes, so long, we’ll see you. “And now you’re a professor of something at Princeton,” her father says, and the man says, “Hunter. Urban anthropology. I can never leave this city, in both ways.” What are they talking about? And they won’t ever stop unless she does something, and she folds her arms across her chest and puts on the face; she knows what it looks like and hopes her father sees it because he knows it too. Uh-oh, her father thinks, the pout. Next, she’ll be tugging his arm and then saying angrily they should go, and if that doesn’t work, she’ll storm off. “Excuse me, Lenny, but Josephine’s had a long day at camp—” and the man says, “Oh, yeah? Where? My kids also went to camp when school was out, but in Brooklyn, where we were living and where their mother still does. Now they’re grown, one has her doctorate, other’s writing plays, and I miss that age enormously; I pine for it, in fact. Got divorced three years ago — I told you about it last time — and I have a one-bedroom on a Hundred-twelfth, and I love it. The neighborhood’s fantastic: bookshops, subway stop two blocks away, and all the indigenous cafés. We should meet for coffee or lunch; let me write down my number,” and her father says, “Just tell me, I’ll remember,” and the man does. But he won’t remember, she thinks. He’s pretending, maybe because he saw her look so wants to get them away faster before she gets madder, or else he doesn’t want to meet the man again. Who would? The man never stops talking and won’t let the other man talk and didn’t introduce that man to them, yet scolded her father for not introducing her to him. And his hand is fat and wet and she bets his whole body is but he’s keeping his stomach and chest in so nobody can see it. He also has no hair on his head except the sides and is much taller than almost anybody so is too tall for a man with no hair like that. It makes him look funny and scary, as if the whole top of his head is like a shiny piece of empty skin. And his face is long and full of big holes and with a pointy chin with a deep hole in it, and it isn’t nice when he smiles like her father’s. But the worst thing about him is he sometimes spits when he talks, and he also doesn’t say he’s sorry when it gets on people’s clothes. She’s standing far away from him, but if it got on hers or her hair she’d wipe it off right away because she wouldn’t want it to dry on her, but then wouldn’t know what to do with the spit on her hands. She’d think of it all the time she was walking home, or maybe she’d ask to go to a restaurant for some pizza, but the one that has the bathroom, just so she can wash her hands. She bets he was mean to his children when they were kids, that’s what his smile and everything he does says, mean to his wife, which is why she didn’t want to stay married to him, and is now mean to all his students but his favorite ones. She can see someone like him living alone the rest of his life because no one would want to be with him again, and his children not wanting to visit him much either, and his wife never even to speak to him on the phone once they were no longer married, but also because he would never shut up. “Goodbye, little Josephine,” the man says, and the other man says goodbye to her and shakes her father’s hand and says, “Nice to meet you,” and she says goodbye nicely to them, one goodbye for them both, and smiles nicely at them too. She knows when she’s smiling nicely, she can feel it on her face, and this time it’s because she’s finally going, and Gould thinks, She’s smiling because they’re going, otherwise she would never have given up those angry clenched arms and that pout. Kids can be so transparent.