Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

The Phone

He got a phone put in that day. His woman friend had said, “How can I stay over in an apartment with no phone? My daughter, when she’s with her father, might want to call me, or he might want to call me about her or that he’s going to be late bringing her home.” She said, “Sometimes I’ve business to do on weekends, so how am I supposed to do it at your place if I can’t make or receive a call?” She said, “What if we just want to call a theater for movie times or make a reservation for someplace?” and he said, “For movie listings, we look in the paper — that I’ve always got. And what would we make a reservation for, a restaurant? I don’t go to restaurants I have to reserve a table for. Right away I know it’s too expensive for me, and I like to go to a restaurant when I feel like going to one, not when they tell me I can have a reservation. So what else, a resort somewhere? Who’s got money for resorts? Maybe you do, a little to spare, but I wouldn’t let you pay for me for even a night’s stay.” “My dad might be sick and I want him to always be able to reach me in case it seems it could get worse,” and so on. “I don’t like it when the damn bell rings,” he’d said. “I might be deep into my work or a book, cut off from everything outside my head, when suddenly there’s this loud ring; it sometimes scares the hell out of me,” and she said, “Millions of people in the city put up with it, you can’t? What am I saying? Billions around the world put up with phone rings. But if it jars you that much, get one where you can turn off the rings, though I don’t see how you’ll know if someone’s calling you then, or one which has soft tinkling chimes instead of bells — I haven’t seen one but I know they exist.” So he got the phone, a regular one with an ON and OFF switch, since the chimes cost a few dollars extra a month. It was the daughter argument that mostly convinced him — her daughter even told him: “Sometimes I want to talk to my mother if I’m with my father for the weekend and I’m feeling sad or lonely.” His first phone of his own in about ten years — the last was when he was a per diem substitute teacher for the Board of Education and got work when one or another school called him almost every morning. And that night, while reading in bed, he got a call, the first ring startling him. It’s probably her, he thought; nobody else knows he has a phone, and he gave her the number a few days ago, after he’d applied for a phone and the phone company told him what it’d be, though next time when it’s this late and he’s reading or going to sleep he’ll turn the phone off. He grabbed the receiver — phone was on the floor by an easy chair at the other end of the room; he’d wanted it installed away from his desk and bed because of the rings — sat in the chair, and said, “Hi, and just think, my very first call on my very first phone in more than ten years — a landmark of sorts, wouldn’t you say?” and a man said, “What’s that?” and he said, “Oops, sorry, thought you were someone else. You must have the wrong number, sir, or the right one, but of someone who had this number a few months to a year ago,” and the man said, “I don’t think so. Is this Mr. Bookbinder?” and he said yes and the man said, “Then I have the right number if your name is also Gould, and only wanted to say—” and he said, “You’re not from the phone company, are you? It’s too late for that kind of call. What is it, near twelve?” and the man said, “That late? Excuse me, I wasn’t aware. But not phone company; just someone who—” and he said, “And tell me, how’d you get my number? I only got the phone today, maybe six hours ago. What, the phone company passed my number around already — sold it, I mean, for whatever lists companies buy to contact people at home to sell them something? Because I explicitly told them not to sell it, give it away, anything, to any person or company; just to list it with telephone Information and in the directory and that’s all,” and the man said, “I got it from Information. I looked in the Manhattan phone book, didn’t see your name there or even in the ones from a few years back, so called Information, and when she told me there was no listing for you, I said — because I knew you lived in the city; your bio notes always say that — well, then try new listings, since it’s possible he only got a phone the last week or so. But I never thought today was that day; that’s astounding,” and he said, “Okay, but why is it you called?” and the man said, “Only to say — and I don’t do this regularly with people like you, I want you to know — how much I admire your work, especially the piece in the current Zanzibar . I hope this isn’t inconvenient or even upsetting to you in any way to hear this. But when I truly like someone’s work and I know that person lives in the city, and a few times elsewhere in the States and once even in Paris, I call him. My French isn’t good, or not fluent enough to get a number from Paris Information, or perhaps that particular person I wanted to reach wasn’t listed there or didn’t have a phone: Daniella Raymonde, do you know her work?” and he said, “Never heard of her,” and the man said, “Oh, you should, and she’s been translated very well here too. She’s unbelievable, almost the best; certainly up there with the contemporary great ones, I’d say, of the last twenty years. Now she’s dead, a year ago, lung cancer — her smoking … you didn’t read of it?” and he said, “As I told you—” and the man said, “It was a small obit — typical, typical, for so fine an artist, but in the Times , though no photo; the smoking and lung cancer I learned of from a friend. You don’t smoke, do you?” and he said, “Never. Anyway, thanks. Raymonde, Daniella; I’ll try to remember it. And your name, sir?” and the man gave it and started going into what he liked about Gould’s work: “Not just that almost no one’s heard of you, so I feel you’re like my own discovery, though you do have an audience, believe me; I’ve spoken to a few people who are acquainted with your work, and I try to hype you up whenever I can to others, but” the this, the that: the way Gould slyly maneuvers the archetypal incident into something original, aggressively abuses the commonplace phrase into new meaning, withholds, then all of a sudden unloads; the excisions, elisions, excursions: Gould didn’t know what he was talking about—“If you say so, I guess, though most of what you’re saying is news to me and not exactly part of my work habits or mental … well, you know, process, since I never think of those things when I’m doing it or after”—the extremes he goes to, ways he exploits the matter-of-fact and the inconsequential and often the underexploited and occasionally what to everyone else heretofore was unexploitable, then coming around to the beginning again and starting the same thing in the same way as if he never touched on it before but making it entirely fresh and equally inimitable: “This I find amazing if not miraculous or, let’s say, because I don’t want to get too off-the-wall about this, done amazingly well, especially in the Zanzibar piece. That one seemed an enormous breakthrough for you and is one of your best, perhaps your best, of what I’ve read — I hope it’s your newest. It amalgamates everything you do — is almost an historical pastiche of all your past styles and themes, or ones I’m familiar with. What do you say about that, would you agree?” and he said, “About what?” and the man said, “About what I said,” and he said, “And what was that?” and the man said, “Please, you have to be kidding me,” and he said, “Best, worst, where it stands among the others and so forth, even if a little of what you said I think I can now recognize in some of what I do. But the truth is, I hate talking about any of that and feel such talk can only be self-defeating in the long run, though I can’t now say why specifically, and in the short run — well, it can only turn out to be something else, but I forget what I started out to say,” and the man said, “Yes, I’m sure you did, since I doubt you forget anything — that also comes out in your work,” and he said, “I don’t see how, though eliciting an answer to that would only be self defeating in another way, even if I can’t specifically say how on that one right now either”—how he does this, that, some other things. “But I’m repeating myself now,” the man said. He’s in the same field as Gould—“which you must have figured out by now”—and he said, “No, but I’m often a little dense, so I hadn’t.” “And I’ve had a sprinkling of success, you can say, both critical and financial, and once even a brief torrent that drowned my house or at least flooded my basement, so maybe even more success with one of my works than you ever had. But you’re right: what the hell’s success anyway? And now I’m just about finished — I barely get in a smidgen of work in a month — while you, and we’re not so many years apart, seem always to be toiling, judging by the amount of your work I’ve seen around the past few years, or is that mostly old trunk stuff taken out and freshened up and aired?” and he said, “No, I throw out everything that didn’t work or got too old,” and the man said, “That’s the way to do it, discard the old, bring in the new, every day a bonne année , isn’t that so? But I’d like to talk about a few things you’ve done particularly, and if nothing else, since we probably haven’t time for too much—” and he said, “It is getting late; in fact, I’m an early get-to-bedder, so it was late for me when we began,” and the man said, “Then just for a minute the Zanzibar piece, which is the main reason I called you anyway, to let you know how much I loved it — that I desperately wanted to tell you that and to discuss it; to me, it’s a true work, one that seizes my throat and continues to hold it — and, if possible, to delve into the particulars of it a little,” and he started to say, “I don’t think we have the time,” but the man immediately began to say what there was in it that even Gould might not be aware of or have intended, “considering how remote our subconscious is in relation to our exterior or, at best, our subcutaneous creative selves. By the way, do you go along with anything I’ve said so far or am I simply sounding like a pedantic ass on his high horse?” and he said, “What in particular, of what you said, did you mean?” and the man said, “Anything; subconscious, conscious, the receiver occasionally understanding the work better than the giver, for a variety of reasons,” and he said, “I don’t know, possibly. Excuse me, I’m not trying to be ingenuous, if that’s the right word … disingenuous? No, ingenuous, at least for what I want here, but it’s because I’m feeling a bit tired — that business before of its being late for me,” and the man said, “Then one more thing and I’ll let you go,” and immediately began analyzing the Zanzibar piece, and Gould cut him off and said, “That wasn’t what I had in mind and I swear to you that everything I put in I intended. I don’t like to leave room for interpretation or error, but there I go talking about what I hate talking about and have no feel for and think is self-defeating, et cetera,” and the man said, “Even still; though while we’re on that subject—” and he said, “Of what?” and the man said, “The possibility of misinterpreting a piece, would you mind my speaking of one or two things — just one, then — of what else I’ve come up with in a couple of your non- Zanzibar works? And I had to look hard to find them, I want you to know. There may be a lot of you spread around over the years but they’re mostly in out-of-the-way uncatalogued places, so the search wasn’t easy,” and he said, “Okay, just one. And I don’t mean to sound curt or rude or anything, but because of the time — well, you know — so go on.” “Modality” the man used in his first sentence on one of Gould’s earliest works, and he said, “Excuse me, wait, that word,” and the man said, “Which one?” and he said, “It could only be one — modality. I’ve heard or read it ten to twenty times in my life and have looked it up in the dictionary a number of times, and even then I didn’t get what it meant, though I probably went over and over the definition each time I looked it up,” and the man said, “The state of being modal,” and he said, “And what’s that?” and the man said, “It relates to ‘mode,’ the actual and unadorned word ‘mode,’ but in logic, music, statistics, and other places,” and he said, “Okay. And ‘monad’? That’s another one, as long as we’re on the mo’s and I have the ear of a guy who seems to be good at this,” and the man said, “Now you’re referring principally to philosophy; Greek, in particular: the one and only, and I say that in both definitive ways. But please, don’t try and fool me, Mr. Bookbinder, although that’s only one more thing I love in your work: the humor,” and he said, “I do try for it sometimes, but as I already said, I hate talking about my work in any kind of way, though I thank you for calling.” “And you’re very welcome. But listen, before I go — and I am going — maybe, since I also live in this city and am now semiretired so have plenty of spare time on my hands, and that we have similar interests and pursuits, and for most of our lives, I’m sure — it has been that way with me — we could—” and he said, “Really, I’m pretty much a solitary guy. I didn’t even want to have a phone. I’d rather do all communication like this through the mail or the building’s intercom. But someone insisted I get one,” and the man said, “Let me guess who.” He was about to say, Really, don’t bother, when the man said, “A girlfriend, or woman friend, we’ll call her, because for guys our age or thereabouts, ‘girlfriend’ would be anachronistic. And she’s divorced or separated, besides probably being quite beautiful and intelligent, and has a young child and wanted the kid to be able to be in touch with her at all hours — meaning when this woman friend’s staying with you,” and he said, “Something like that. You don’t know her, do you? I mean, this couldn’t be why you know so much about it. This isn’t her husband, by chance, whom I’ve never met — only kidding again,” and the man said, “I can see that, and of course it’s no to all your questions. I’m just an avid admirer of your work, I’m sure one of many, even if most haven’t emerged from behind their walls yet, and particularly of that Zanzibar piece, which was something, truly something. And I felt like passing that info on to you personally. People have done that to me with my work. Phoned me out of the sky-blue— ring ring —you must know how it is,” and he said, “Honestly, never,” and the man said, “Then good, you’ve been initiated tonight with me: ‘Hello?’ ‘Is this Bernhard Goldstone?’ ‘Who’s this?’ ‘I simply had to phone you, Bernhard’—as you noticed, I never once called you by your given name. I didn’t think I had the right to, since I was the one to phone you. ‘And that your work has really done something to me, Bernhard’—one even called me Bernie straight off the bat, something I wouldn’t even allow my siblings to do. Anyway, I was usually thankful when I received such calls. Why wouldn’t I be, so long as I wasn’t being rung up during a horrible hangover or intestinal flu, let’s say, or something more flagrant? And it used to happen regularly for a number of years, though I don’t want to give you the impression it happened that often. But not recently, since I haven’t had anything out in the marketplace for a long time, and it could be that the people who would normally call think I’m dead or very ill. But still, once every six months would be the average, someone would feel compelled, as I was with you, to look my name up in the phone book — and wait’ll you get in it. I wager you’ll be swamped, relatively speaking, the next year or more, and then it’ll gradually recede once the caller-admirers learn you’re not exactly welcoming their interest with open ears. Word gets around quickly among them. You can’t imagine the little fan cells that spring up for almost everyone in our stratum and then, if they’re not nourished, dry up.” “Well, you’re different from me in how you handle it, which is fine; besides that, it’ll never happen once my phone’s listed. No ungratefulness intended, but you’ll be the anomaly. Anyway, it’s late now—” and the man said, “My gosh, nearly one. Does your watch also say that or is mine running very fast? Even if it were only half past twelve, who could have believed it? I meant to be brief — a minute of your time, two. All right, I won’t lie — I’m unable to — five, but at the most. I didn’t think you’d mind. Someone calling to extol you and your work? How often does that happen? With me, as I said, around every six months, when times were good. And I didn’t think I’d be the first on the phone to convey it to you. If I had thought that I would have also thought you’d welcome the call even more, for who doesn’t respond positively to an affirmative first? Later you can get jaded,” and he said, “Could be that you’re right. Thank you, and I will now have to say good night,” and the man said, “I should too,” and went on for another ten minutes, Gould couldn’t find a place in the man’s talk to interrupt and hang up: what he’s done, where it’s been, why he isn’t doing much of it anymore—“If you talk about wells, mine hasn’t so much run dry as been poisoned by someone’s having plunged a decomposed goat down it”—how there are similarities not only in their ardor toward what they do, or, for him, did, but in the subject matter too and often in the most minute particulars, “Though know I’m not suggesting you’re copying or pilfering from me in any way. Because of our similarities, you could toss the same charges back to me, but to be honest about it, I think you’ll find I was there before you. It’s simply that we’re both extremely serious and ardent at what we do, though we’re also quite funny in our work, though tragic too, which is another thing. One piece of yours — I forget where I found it, but it kept me up part of the night it was so vivid, sad, and searing and familiar — not to my work, I’m saying — even if I recall thinking at the time that I’ve tackled similar themes, though in the end how many are there? — but to life in general. What the heck was the name of it again? I’m sorry, but it’s on the tip of the tip of my tongue, just busting to cut loose, a short title — actually, all your titles are short; not all, but a lot I’ve come across, but anyhow — since I can’t remember the title or where I first saw it — know what it did to me: literally knocked me for a figure eight. So thank you, Gould, if I may call you that,” and then started right in on something else about another of Gould’s pieces — this one he has to admit he didn’t care for as much as the last one he mentioned, “though it was still pretty good”—and then his own work.