Stephen Dixon - Frog

Years. He doesn’t go out with any women. Wrong. One he took to a movie, shook hands good-bye at her door and didn’t call again. She did and he said he was sorry. Another for dinner at her apartment. He thought maybe he should try something, just to take the big plunge again and she seemed responsive, and he made a move and she said she had nothing like that in mind when she invited him over, and showed him the door. It’s not that he’s lost his sex drive, he thinks. Sex drive; funny term. Or not that much, but how can he tell? He does it to himself much less often than he did after Denise died and before he met Gail; that should be an indicator. Even those are mostly motivated by health reasons to avoid something with the prostate. Doctor’s suggestion. But then he still stares after women’s behinds and legs as much, fantasizes having sex with women he sees and meets, gets plenty of spontaneous erections and they seem to be as hard most of the times and stay up as long. He’s sure it’s mainly because his kids are older now and he’s afraid of getting caught by them or leaving some sign of it around. When he does do it it’s usually afternoon when they’re in school though he’d prefer it late at night when he’s in bed. It’s also not as exciting anymore, no matter what drugstore and picture aids he might use, which could be another indicator. And though it doesn’t take any longer than it used to he often thinks while doing it that he should be doing the whole thing with someone, not just this by himself, and that takes away something.

A couple of friends want to hook him up with this woman or that but he never wants to. He usually says he likes the way things are, not so hot as they might be at times, and also doesn’t want to hurt his daughters again, and other excuses: couldn’t for the life of himself call up a woman for a blind date, wouldn’t want a woman calling up him for one, would never go to a dinner arranged just so the host could make a match. Uncomfortable. A large party partly for that or just to go to has been OK but so far all the available women he’s met at them didn’t interest him. Only other way would be to meet a woman accidentally. In an elevator even. Times he has and was interested he didn’t know what to say quickly enough before they got away, and then wouldn’t call them, when he knew who they were or how to reach them, because he didn’t feel he knew them well enough to call to arrange something. Then Olivia talks about her Russian teacher in high school. “She’s divorced, no children, very intellectual, unstrange and nice. She carries these enormous nontextbooks with her everywhere and you can always see her reading them when she’s not teaching, and scribbling down notes about what’s inside them I suppose, even when she walks to the parking lot. And she’s pretty as anything, with this big athletic body, and she used to be a beauty contest winner too.” “I never liked the type. Not the athletics. That can be all right if it’s not where she gets carried away. Goes pro or runs three times as much as she needs to keep her weight down or build up her lungs. Or is afraid, missed one run, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ll decay in a day’ or I’ll become a balloon.’ But the kind of mind, I mean, that would enter such a contest, much less to win. ‘Tuck in your turn, Hon, and grin for the pubic’—excuse me, but that sort of thing.” “She knows, but that was around ten years ago and she pooh-poohs it too.” “Ten? Then she’s much too young for me. It wasn’t a thirty-and-over contest? No? Then the age gap could never be jumped.” “I heard she goes for older guys and you’re still relatively good-looking, youthfullike and crazy-excessive sometimes and so on.” “For your sake then or just to prove something, I’ll have a look at her next time I visit the school. More. I’ll do what I’ve done since you started kindergarten and that’s to check out your teacher while checking up on how you’re doing from her point of view.”

Olivia points her out at the next parent-teacher meeting. Already admired her at the last one without knowing who she was. Attractive, intelligent face, nice body from what he can remember and now see of it in a seated position from about twenty rows back, neat, nicely simply dressed, hair becomingly done, smiles when something’s bonafidally funny, frowns same time he does at several of the speakers’ shortsighted or long-winded or just simpleminded remarks. After the auditorium meeting he goes to her classroom. Large library of great Russian books for the students. Travel posters of Russian cathedrals and long Leningrad buildings. Poster-sized blowups of modern Russian novelists and poets. Corner table with a samovar on it where Olivia’s said the teacher and students occasionally have pechenie and Georgian tea. Listens to her conversations with parents before him. Soft voice, clear speech, common sense, good choice of words, a few he doesn’t know or has forgot and jots them down. Exomorph, vertiginous, chimerical, philippic, quid pro quo. Olivia’s doing exceptional work; he says she always has. He’s done a heck of a job with her alone; her mother laid it down year by year for him in a notebook, even how to braid the girls’ hair. Then what else can she tell him about Olivia except more praise? Pasternak, Chekhov, Babel, Leskov, Mandelstam, Ahkmatova, Nabokov, “Tsvettava… I can never pronounce it, less ever spell it.” She does both, says he came close, quotes some lines in English from poems he’s never read. “Beautiful. Naturally I didn’t altogether get them. Oops, there are daddies behind me, so I’ll go. Maybe another time we can go on with our non-Olivia talk if she continues to do as well.” “I’d be delighted; you know where I am.” She’ll never be interested in him, and tells Olivia that on the way home. “I’ll speak to her and find out.” “No, please, forget it. I don’t want to start again and I certainly don’t want to get you involved. She might lower your mark to an A-plus.” “Grade. And she’s way above that.” “Mark, grade. I don’t know why I always make that mistake. It’s from before I taught. you make the mark, you mark the grade. But ‘Oakujava’ I think is how you pronounce his name. As for the spelling — as with Tsvetaeva before Ms. Munder told me — I could only guess. I should’ve mentioned him, is what I’m saying, rather than just poets and fiction writers. Wouldn’t have narrowed me.” “She’s played him for us. Also for his perfect diction. O-k-u-d-shav-a.” “Really, you got to swear you won’t. If I later think differently about myself in relation to her, I’ll call her or just arrange to bump into her by chance as she leaves school. Like ‘Oh, I was on my way to pick up Olivia. She’s not expecting me, and just between the two of us I’d rather talk lit and troubadours with you.’ But she needs someone younger, stronger, smarter, singler, handsomer, head hairier, clothes clothier, in every way still shiny and on the way up, and not some seemingly semicontentedly cloistered dumpy grump who prizes just good wine, a few soups, a number of records and books, that hard-crusted bread we get delivered from Canada, and you girls.”

Olivia comes home next day and says “Amby wouldn’t mind your calling her. She said ’Your dad seemed intelligent, cultured, obviously serious at what he does, and we have some of the same interests, including you,’ meaning me, which was the one part of what she said I didn’t like. Too trying-to-please-me and maybe through me, you, something I never saw in her before. ‘So,’ she continued to say, which you can tell from my voice change, ‘I don’t see why we couldn’t spend half an hour over coffee, unless it would disturb you,’ meaning me again, which was OK this time, since she was showing she was aware of the possible conflict, she being my teacher and me so often still talking of my mother, and things.” “You do? Me too, my sweetheart.” He calls her. They have coffee after her school lets out. Olivia waves to them and then points them out to her friends as they walk down the hill to the coffee shop. Start seeing each other, marry. She wants a child. He says he doesn’t think he has the energy to help bring up another one but if she wants it, fine, all right, “Three was what we originally planned… Denise and I. Excuse me. Nothing there meant that wasn’t there, but you know what I mean.” They have a girl. He’s never really in love with Amby. She’s nice, all that, but something keeps interfering. He just doesn’t feel what he’d love to for her. It’d so simplify things. This way’s unrealistic, bordering on the crazy, can only make him unhappy, also Amby and the girls. She’s still very pretty, good figure, nothing she does or says puts him off, but he hardly even ever wants to put his arms around her or kiss her. No long deep ones when he does as he sometimes even did with… he can’t believe it, forgot her name, Susan was her daughter; Gail. Rarely gets erections. When he does they’re rarely full. A few times she’s said “What’s wrong? Something I’ve done? Anything I can do?” and he said “It’s nothing, maybe my bloodless age, I’ll see a doctor if it doesn’t get better.” They usually have to work hard before anything happens with him. He looks at Denise’s photos when she’s not around. Especially the pregnant ones, nude and clothed. Remembers how he felt then. Sex just about every day till she went to the hospital three weeks overdue. They were warned not to. Hates looking at the photos he’s in with her. Not because he looks so much younger. Hell, he was much younger, so no problem there. It’s that he was much happier then and in them. He can’t think of life without Denise. Exaggeration. Sometimes he thinks he can’t live without her. Another way. The three girls, they’re wonderful, he loves them, always wants to be with them, if something happened to one of them he doesn’t know what he’d do. Forget it. What he said about life and living without Denise expresses a lot about how he feels. He prays she’ll come back. “Dear God,” he says in his head, Amby asleep beside him, “I don’t believe in you but will in every possible way if you bring her back and in the condition she was in before she got sick plus whatever natural aging and minor-illness effects that would have taken place. I’ll make everything good for this hurt. Which will probably only have to be to Amby, but whatever you want, I will.” This is silly, he right away thinks, praying and this prayer. If there’s a God, He can see straight through it; if there isn’t, then what’s the sense? He writes poems to her, most going something like this: “My love, my dove, it’s what I feel, awfully unpoetical as these lines must be to your trained ears, but it’s tearing at my entrails and is that any better than gripping my gizzards or quickening my doom? Come back, I’m on a rack, the birds have stopped singing for me and now I don’t even see them when they pass close overhead on a clement day or beg for attention or crumbs at my feet. What do I mean? I’m a bird. I’m going cuckoo for you. Cuckoo, cuckoo, I miss and worship you, my fellow indivisible cuckoo.”