Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

They have lunch at a restaurant a mile off the interstate. Parked in the shade because of the cats. Car windows rolled up to about three inches from the top. Cats let out of the carriers to jump around but mainly to pee and shit in the litter box and drink from the water dish so they don’t dehydrate. She’s stopped here twice before. Last night, she said this is where, if they start out early enough, she’d like to lunch: about four hours from the city. “With another guy once?” and she said, “No, my mother, and the second time alone. It’s a real homey place.” Her mother and she had driven to the cottage from New York, stayed overnight in a Kennebunk motel along the highway because her mother doesn’t drive and the entire trip … (and so on, or just get rid of it). “Then am I the first guy you’re bringing to the cottage?” and she said, “To be perfectly frank, I’d rather not discuss it. But I hope you’ll be the last, but to come with me in succeeding years — how about that?” “I like it. It tickles me randy. It douses me proud. Oy, what dumb remarks, those last two. Forgive me.” “No need; we’re having fun. Let me think of something funny too. I lub you. That also makes no sense except for the sound of it.” They were in bed, apartment had been cleaned, almost everything packed, rented car picked up that afternoon and parked in a nearby garage, some of the heavy stuff already in it: books and wine and two reams of his typing paper. He had sublet his apartment starting last week. (Fix that. His sublessees [-lessors?] moved in three days ago and have the place for two months. He stayed with her the last week. But he sublet it starting a week ago but the tenants only moved in the last few days? They got to New York later than they thought they would.) She puts her sandwich down, looks so beautiful, is chewing, looks up and catches him looking at her. What? her expression says. He says to her—

Car radio’s on: a beautiful orchestral piece he’s never heard. Wants to hear it till the end and then get its name and the composer’s and buy a recording of it when he gets back to New York. He hopes they don’t drive out of range of this station before the piece is finished. But it’s 4:58, then:59, the car clock says. She’s spoken of a national public radio news program at five she usually listens to in Maine and which he thinks she’ll want to find on whatever public radio station around here gets it. (That all right, not too confusing and long, doesn’t need to be cut into two? No, seems fine.) She reaches for the dial, other hand on the steering wheel. He puts his hand on hers, keeps it from fingering the dial, and says—

He likes the trip so far, even the long stretches of boring highway and interstate: it’s new and the air’s cool and the conversation’s been good since they set out. She drives; he. They stop twice more to pee, and for containers of coffee to drink in the car while they drive, and once on a country road in Maine for fresh strawberries from a stand. “They’re always a month or more behind New York,” she said at the start of the trip, “so we’ll be getting strawberries around where we live for the next few weeks.” (That add anything? Mostly what he’s least interested in: local color.) “They’re much smaller and more compact than what we’re used to, and sweeter; you’ll see. Then, near the end, when they start picking from the bottom of the bushes — or is that raspberries, which come later, and by the way there are farms where you can pick both of them yourself? — they’re as tasteless and mushy as the New York kind.” Also stopped for a pound bag of cashews off a truck, and then the longer stop at the market some twenty miles from the cottage. They arrive when it’s dark. (He thinks he’ll delete everything in this paragraph so far but the last sentence.) The caretaker had left most of the windows open and a light on by the front door. They close the windows, unload the car, and start putting things away. He fills the litter box and feeds the cats. Sets up a desk downstairs with his typewriter and supplies and then starts dinner, which means boiling water for pasta while he prepares a salad, slices bread, opens the wine, puts a stick of butter in a butter dish and washes several bowls and two plates and wineglasses and silver and sets the table. He makes himself a vodka and grapefruit juice, though without ice, as the water in the ice trays isn’t solid yet. (He’s already said they’d do most of that. So here he says they did it.) And nice of the guy to put water in the trays. And the drink? Juice he got at the market, but what about vodka? They stopped at a state liquor store in New Hampshire about five miles from the bridge into Maine. She said the prices are much cheaper there because there are no state taxes, but they didn’t seem so to him. And the store was like a supermarket for booze. Some people had huge shopping carts with what looked like twenty to thirty bottles of liquor in them. The wine selection wasn’t good and the better wines were more expensive than they were in New York. He said, “Let’s get out of here and buy what we need tomorrow at a regular Maine store.” “You don’t like it? I thought you would.” What does she think, he thought, he’s a dipso or something close? Big of her, if that’s it, but he hates this place though doesn’t want to say so and maybe disappoint her. “It’s only that I don’t see trudging through such a vast store and waiting on long lines for the few bottles we’d buy. This joint’s for serious drinkers with lots of time to spare, while we gotta get moving.” “But you want your vodka and I’d like a glass of port tonight after the long trip. Go back to the car and read and open the windows so the cats have plenty of air, and I’ll quickly pick up what we need and get on line. There’s one there for five items or less.” (Why’d he go into all that? Maybe because it was the worst moment of the trip and he wanted to show it, which wasn’t such a bad moment at all. Which means he was actually showing what a good trip it was and something about how accommodating she is to him and particularly was then. But go over all of that starting from how he got the vodka, and if it doesn’t do what he wanted or seems to hold things back — he’s almost sure it does — chuck the whole thing.) The radio’s on. (Said that.) They’re in the cottage. She comes into the kitchen while he’s making dinner, says everything’s put away and swept up and even the bed’s made, smiles, her look wanting to know what he thinks of the place and also showing how pleased she is he’s here. He says to her—

They’ve eaten dinner. (Scratch that.) She asks if she has time for a shower before dinner. She feels so slimy after twelve hours on the road and then running around the house doing things. She tends to sweat a lot, she’s said, and when she told him that, he said, “Nobody would ever know it. My schnoz is still pretty keen and, hackneyed as this remark might be, you always smell sweet to me.” That was about three weeks after they met. It’s still true: she’s never smelled bad or of a deep sweat anywhere on her body except a few times her hair. Water for the pasta’s about to boil and he turns it off, finds the flashlight he brought, and heads to the shore about two hundred feet from the cottage. Hears some funny bird sounds as he walks down the path, and then they stop as he gets near the shore and he hears the flapping of wings or feet or both against the water as the bird or birds take off. Over dinner she’ll tell him those were loons. Sea sounds: soft crashing of tiny breakers and a buoy from somewhere in the bay. So, he thinks, this is it; nice. Gets bitten by insects on the path and beach. (“Mosquitoes” for “insects”: he knows their buzzing and bite.) Walks along the shore to the closest point. (Is there another way — well, there are always other ways — but a better one to say all this so it doesn’t sound so perfunctory and drab? Later.) Lots of moon, also mirrored in its squiggly way in the water. “Loons and moons, that’s about all I found down there bigger than a mosquito,” he would have said to her soon as he got back, if he’d known what those birds were called. Enough light to walk by, so he turns off the flashlight. Then thinks, Don’t go falling over a boulder or into a hole. Just what he needs: to break something first hour he’s there and have to crawl to the cottage, be driven to a hospital, ruin what he hopes will be as near-perfect a night as he’s ever had: sounds, smells, light, breezes, freshly made bed with what she said were the cottage’s very fine old cotton sheets, and of course her. No other houses around, it seems. Lighthouse way out in the water. Stars, more than … but not more than he can ever remember seeing, maybe because the moon’s so full and bright. His mother, he forgot to call her; do it when he gets back, though check the time first. Sits on a rock shaped like a chair with arms. Gets buzzed and bitten but tries to think. Let things run through your head, he thinks. Nothing much does. Shuts his eyes. Woman he was in love with two years ago. Wanted to spend the summer with her; instead she went to Europe alone. They’d planned to go together, even bought the plane tickets. Were going to buy fold-up bikes and ride them through Holland and France, take trains or buses when they wanted a rest. Travel light except for the bikes. One big paperback apiece: War and Peace for him, a new difficult modern novel for her. They’d already bought the books and an anthology of Romantic verse between them. Then she said she needed to be completely free for two months. He knew she’d meet guys. In Turkey she let a man penetrate her behind, a first for her. She said she didn’t like it and would never try it again. “How come you let him?” he said. “Not that I’d ever want to do it. Though if you had asked, and you knew me for six months, I would have done it once.” “He wanted to very much, was very sweet and pretty and claimed to be an expert at it, and I’d always been curious about it.” She fell in love with a Frenchman and they traveled through Greece for two weeks. She didn’t think she’d ever return home; then he told her he was married. “Boy, for a smart city gal, you really fell for a couple of drips.” “Neither were,” she said; “both were extremely sophisticated and intelligent.” She discovered in Europe what she wanted to do the next ten years: films. Write and direct, though of course she’ll have to go to school for it first. “Always so full of new projects and beginnings,” he said. “I guess that’s supposed to be good.” “This is why I didn’t want you in Europe with me. You’re so cynical and critical and don’t like to do anything unusual or new. I’m sure I wouldn’t have been able to try a plate of sea urchins at a Greek seaside stand without you fretting over the cost and the possibility of dangerous bacteria, killing the experience for me. You knew what you wanted to do with your life when you were two and stuck to it, the same way you stick to me, and it makes me claustrophobic.” (Pare all that down, maybe paraphrase what’s left of it. But the woman he least wanted to spend a summer with.) More bites, making it impossible to sit here, and he breathes in deeply — he loves the ocean at night, he thinks, and at dusk, minus the mosquitoes, though to him, unless the sky’s overcast, it gets too bright and hot during the day and he ends up hating it — and goes back to the house. She’s upstairs, probably getting dressed after the shower, and he yells up—