Stephen Dixon: 30 Pieces of a Novel

THIS IS SOMETHING that comes back at moments that for the most part don’t seem to have anything to do with the incident. When he was standing in the bathtub yesterday taking a shower. Well, now that he refers to it he sees where it could sort of be explained why it came back there: the incident happened when he was walking back to the house he was staying at, after swimming in a public pool, and also his nakedness in the shower and no doubt washing his genitals during it. Another time: when he was walking across Central Park on his way to the Whitney Museum. The museum couldn’t have had anything to do with it, but the park certainly might have, if he really wants it explained why the incident comes back at certain times: it happened in a state park, and of course he was walking through it when it did. Other times? Plenty, but he forgets, except one when he was making love with his wife in the daytime when the kids were in school. Why it came then is easily explainable, even if he was in almost the exact opposite mating position as the guy in the incident, though who knows if with a little more thinking that couldn’t be explained too: for instance, the girl with the guy was in the same mating position that he was in with his wife when the thought of the incident came to him again.

He was walking — this is the incident — taking a shortcut through the state park to the house of the woman he was spending the weekend with. But now he remembers he got there Saturday night after work (so the incident could only have happened on a Sunday, not that this adds anything to why it comes back to him so often), after not seeing her for five days — he was a salesman at the time in the Little Boys Shop in Bloomingdale’s and always worked Saturdays, the store’s busiest day, till closing around six — and would usually stay at her place till early Monday morning when he’d get a ride back with one of her friends or neighbors in her village: most of the people she knew there worked in Manhattan. He’d been seeing this woman for about a year now. In fact, shortly before the incident, though he doesn’t think this has anything to do with the frequency with which he recalls it, he’d lived with her a couple of months and commuted to the store: car ride with one of her friends or neighbors to the city, usually public transportation back, and on Saturdays public transportation both ways — subway to the 175th Street station and the Port Authority bus terminal upstairs, Red & Tan bus to her village, and then the long walk up a steep hill to her house if she didn’t meet him in her car at the stop. She was a high school teacher in Nyack, her house a few miles south of Nyack in Piermont, near where the state park and pool were. Her house was once one of the small workers’ row houses owned by a huge paper mill on the Hudson in Piermont. Now the mill only made paper bags and all the row houses were privately owned. It was summer, July or August, so the woman was on vacation and her daughter was either at sleep-away camp, if it was July, or with her father in East Hampton for the weekend, if it was August. But the point is he was taking this shortcut on a park service road that connected the pool with a gate about half a mile away in Piermont. He’d swum in the pool, walked on the service road to get to it. If he’d driven the woman’s car he would have taken a much longer way to get to the pool, though shorter in time, since no vehicle but a state park one was allowed to use the service road. There were the same two or three park trucks, with nobody in them, parked off the road when he walked to and from the pool, and the car of the incident parked on the road when he walked home. If he’d taken her car he would have parked in the pool lot, swum, showered— showered; so that’s possibly another reason why it comes back to him while he’s showering in a bathtub or stall — then driven back to her house and never seen what he saw that afternoon, and it was the afternoon. After a quick light lunch around two or so she asked what his plans were and he said, Why, what does she have in mind? — nothing suggestive in the remark, as sometimes when he said something like that, with a smile or leer, it meant does that mean she wants to have sex? — and she said she was going to do some errands in Nyack and, if she didn’t find what she wanted, then at the Nanuet Mall. Not the greatest thing to do on a hot day, but does he want to come along? and he said it was much too hot — both the temperature and humidity were in the nineties — and he thinks he’d like to go swimming in the park pool. She said she’d drop him off if he wanted to go now, as she was leaving in a few minutes, and he said he didn’t mind the walk — what was it, a mile, maybe a mile and a half? and it could be more peaceful — and also he wanted to have another iced coffee before he left and read the paper a little, which he hadn’t even opened yet. He knew that as much as he’d cool off at the pool, he’d get heated up and sweaty again walking back to her house, since he’d have to climb that steep hill, most of it in the sun. She said she’d probably be here when he got back, if he wasn’t going to leave in the next half hour and just take a quick dip and hustle right home, and she’d see him then, and they’d talk about what they were going to do for dinner, or maybe he wants her to pick up something special on the way home. He said they shouldn’t worry about dinner now — too hot and sticky to — and if the weather stays the same, with no breeze or anything, he doubts he’ll want anything for dinner but a beer and some celery and carrots and a slice of bread. But he wished she’d change her mind and come to the pool with him. It could be crowded, but they’d find a relatively quiet place in the shade — most of the people who go there like to bake in the sun — and read, relax, chat, even nap, and she said that she never cared for public pools, and the horsing around and all the other things that go on there, and that these errands were essential.

So he swam, then the walk back. But swam several times, read parts of the book review and magazine sections of the paper in between swimming, and once rested on his stomach and closed his eyes for a few minutes and, he thinks, fell asleep. And occasionally just looked at the other people at the pool, especially some of the younger better-built women in swimsuits, and maybe even fantasized about them, but that he forgets. It was mostly shady on the service road, tall trees with overhanging branches above almost the entire area. He was about three-quarters of the way to the gate when he saw from a distance a car parked on the road. There seemed to be plenty of room off the road for it to park, and why they chose there he’s never been able to figure out — immediacy of the moment, perhaps? Doesn’t make sense. They could have, he’s saying — the couple in the car — parked almost anywhere off the road. But maybe they were afraid of possible ruts or mud or something, when there really wasn’t that much and nothing a car couldn’t drive out of. In fact, the ground was pretty hard, if he remembers. Maybe they thought — or the guy did and the girl went along with it or was persuaded to by him, or the girl did and the guy thought, What the hell, if she thinks so then he’s not going to protest, for all he wants is to get to it: the action, the sex — that no other cars would drive by. After all, it was Sunday, they could have reasoned, so wouldn’t most of the park’s service vehicles be idle for the weekend or just for the day? Actually, probably not, for the weekend could be when they worked the most, Sunday being the park’s busiest day by far, but this was a remote area, so how often then would a service vehicle pass by or a police car check it: every two hours, three, even four? And what they wanted to do would take ten to twenty minutes, or for the guy maybe not even that.