Stephen Dixon - Frog

Gets out of bed, thinks of taking the stick, leaves it. Goes into Olivia’s room. Covers are on her, she’s alseep, kisses her, strokes her head. Eva’s room. Asleep, covers off, puts her back on her stomach, covers over her, reaches down to kiss her. Mattress position in the crib so deep his lips can’t reach her, so he strokes her head, leaves his hand on her forehead. Goes through the apartment. Everything OK. Jumps when the cat walks into the living room, cat runs away. Goes back to bed, under the covers, holds the stick. “Denise?” No sound. Holds his breath. She’s breathing lightly, on her side, back to him. Lets go of the stick and snuggles up to her. She’s wearing a bathrobe. Pulls it above her waist, nothing on underneath, sticks his penis between her thighs and leaves it there. Doesn’t want to bother her. Really doesn’t. If he gets an erection he won’t do anything like press even closer to her, wiggle around a bit to show he’s interested in making love if she is. Kisses her shoulder through the robe, her neck. “Do you want me to get up and put the thing in?” she says. “I’m sorry. No. I thought you were asleep. I didn’t kiss you for that. Just as a good-night.” “Oh?” “No, really.” “It might get rid of some of your tension.” “And yours, but better we just sleep. We haven’t got many hours left and the kids might get up again tonight.” “I don’t mind if you don’t. If I stop being involved in it it’ll only be because I’m too sleepy or still too nervous or something of before all of a sudden came back to me and took my mind off it, but you just go ahead.” “Same here then. OK.” “OK I should get up?” “Sure, if you really don’t mind and it’s not too much trouble. But I don’t want you to think I needed all that fighting and violence to incite it. I’m perfectly happy to go to sleep now holding you like this.” “How about if I put it in just in case?” and she gets out of bed and goes to the dresser.

In bed he says “I don’t want to go on with what I’m doing. I have to find something else.”

“Become a plumber.”

“What could I do? I should have been a cop. My dad actually said ‘If you can’t become a doctor or dentist, become a teacher or cop. Good money and your own hours in the first group, long paid vacations and early retirement in the second.’ As a cop I could have been semiretired by now or even three or four years ago.”

“That’s just what you needed to have become. I’d be a widow or close. You could be lying beside me now with a bullet or part of one in your spine. I’d have to feed and dress you, wipe your backside every day for years. Maybe several times a day, because you’d be incontinent.”

“I would tell you to get a divorce, take other men, remarry, move out.”

“I wouldn’t want to.”

“You would after awhile. Or I’d have divorced you by now, got myself an apartment in some special building for handicapped cops. I wouldn’t let you come see me. I would probably let the kids come. But if I hadn’t got shot, because I would have been extra careful to avoid it—”

“Not with your temperament and always sticking your nose and often your whole body in. You would have been shot two to three different times and the third time would have paralyzed or killed you. That’s the way I see it.”

“What about being a wine grower? I think I’d like to be away from people and so totally occupied like that. In the hills, probably remote dry ones, so even while I’m sweating hard from all the work it wouldn’t be that humid and hot — the air wouldn’t. Good smells, sights, fresh wine, and all of it except the wine good for the kids too.”

“You know nothing about wine growing. Vorticulture? Vinticulture? The kids would hate it, taking a bus to school for an hour each way, and so few playmates around.”

“They’d love it there. Living in a house. Family very tight. Maybe pitching in with the work. Horses, sheep maybe, rabbits bounding around, lots of dogs.”

“You’d complain about the dog crap all over. The work would be too tough. It’s too late to start out so late. It would take too much money.”

“I could go to work for someone as an apprentice for a couple of years.”

“And the money? It sounds nice, and you know I love growing things, but I’m sure it would be too rough on us all.”

“Maybe I should have been a soldier. By now I’d be a major. I could even be retired by now — just takes twenty years for half or three-quarters pay. There’s a fellow in my class who was an officer. I told him ‘Christ, to be retired so young.’ He said he isn’t that young but I said ‘you’re around my age and that’s still pretty young. No major illnesses and none foreseen for a good fifteen years. You have twenty good working years left and maybe more because you won’t be working your butt off at a job for the next fifteen years.’ He said the last seven years in the army were unrelievedly boring. That he never would have gone in if he’d known about them. I said ‘Seven boring years for twenty to thirty years of retirement?’ Or at least fifteen years of retirement before he’d normally retire? I’d go through that. I should have joined the army. Even got into ROTC when I was in college, and started as an officer. I might even have ended up a colonel.”

“You would have gone off to war. You would have been shot at, booby-trapped, lost your legs. We never would have met. I wouldn’t have liked most of what you thought and felt. If you had made it through the war or come out in one piece, you’d be involved with military science now, probably a little too gung-ho and rigid about most things, and you’d be deadly dull to me. Your student still talks like an officer, doesn’t he?”

“Maybe talks like one but writes like a poet. Each paragraph seems scratched out by pen thirty times. Maybe he’s hiding behind it, all those long descriptions, flowery language and showy emotions and words. True, I probably would have had a different kind of wife. Fluffier hair, maybe a few blond streaks in it, or just shorter or more athletic-looking hair. Maybe not as intelligent or with much interest in literature, but nice, taking care of the kids, cooking, lots of housecleaning — things like that. Same kind of sex, I suppose, though truth is I think intellectuals generally have the best sex.”

“She’d have smoked. You’d have hated that. Stubbing out her cigarette when she left it for a second, emptying her ashtrays ten times a day — I could see you. Because somehow I think all army wives smoke a lot.”

“You’re probably right. The men too. And the hillbilly music and dumb TV shows and all that sports and pussy talk — I never could have slept in the same barracks with them. But what should I do about a different job?”

“I’m telling you, become a plumber. They do very well. Take a few courses in it while you’re still teaching. Fifty dollars an hour they get.”

“That’s what the plumbing contractor might charge when he sends one of his men over. But I’d say twenty-five an hour when they’re on their own.”

“Thirty-five then, forty. And forty times seven or eight hours a day? You’d only have to work three weekdays a week. The other two you could do what you want.”

“I should have stayed in news. But I knew after three years it wasn’t for me and would only get worse. All those mindless stories, half of them publicity pieces for the person or group or institution I was writing about. Nothing in depth. The editors said ‘Whataya think ya writing here, philosophy or literary crits? Cut and simplify, cut and simplify.’ And also embarrasing when I asked a fireman with smoke coming out of his nose and mouth how he feels. Or people at the airport, still waiting for the plane with their loved ones to arrive, the miracle to happen — That’s the story; dig into it; more they cry, better the copy’—when it hit some mountainside a couple of hours ago. Worst kind of writing, but it was stupid of me to quit. At least so early in it.”