Stephen Dixon - Frog

“It’s just not working,” he says to Amby one morning, she’s feeding the baby by spoon, he’s in the next room putting in toast. “What isn’t? The toaster?” “Listen, hell with this goddamn toast and eating,” and he pushes the toast up and throws it into the sink. “What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he says, coming into the living room. “Listen, I still — hours every day. No that’s a little too farfetched, but I know it’s a short to moderately long time and just about every day. Please, stop feeding her for a second. This is very important. You have to have my complete attention. I have to have yours, I of course mean, for I might not be able to say this again. I was saying ‘long’ for something like this — a long time, almost every other day, and year after year, even when you wouldn’t think I would … the general you and maybe you-Amby too — think of Denise. There we are. Denise, that’s who.” “You’re a liar or a bastard. You just want to get out,” and she drops the spoon and runs upstairs. The baby cries in her highchair. Food runs out of her mouth. He sits, wipes her, says “There, there,” finishes feeding her, takes her out for a stroll. He speaks to Amby again later. I’m sorry. Listen, just sit. I’ll try to stop thinking of her. I know we should stay together — you and I. I want to. Olivia and Eva also shouldn’t lose you as they did their mother and then Gail. And lose their baby sister too, whom I’m sure you’d want to have total custody of if we separated or divorced, weekends this and that, which wouldn’t be enough for them — would be a great loss.” “You speak of her as if she isn’t yours.” “I do? Where? Because I’m sure she is. Who else’s could she be? Meaning: sure she is. I know you haven’t had lovers. Neither have I. I’d never do that to you. Meaning, that’s not what I’d do to you. The other thing — it’s all in my head — I’m guilty. Listen, I’m a confused man; very. Denise’s death must have turned off some important lights in me. And they just don’t make, or they’re too tough to find anymore, the same kind of bulbs — but enough of that crap. I should get a new lamp though, right? Or see a lamp fixer, even if he charges ninety-five an hour per. So what? What’s money in something like this, and I’m covered. We are, and I want us to continue to be. Listen, don’t pay any attention to what I’m saying. But I loved her deeply. I told you that when we met. But I also told you it was all over, except sad moments that come back now and then. That was natural. We agreed. But she got sick. She deteriorated badly and too quickly. Bam, I looked around, she was gone. The girls and I were heartbroken for a year. They could have got out of it sooner if I hadn’t been such a mess. Well, natural, natural, guilty as I still am about that too. Though they turned out all right, are turning out all right, and what else could I have done about it much as I wanted to and tried? Most of the time tried — I milked a little of it too. But it takes a year — it took a year — I thought, but some of it obviously stayed. Obviously. I still can’t quite get her out of my clunky head. Not ‘quite’—more. I’m a schmuck, a fool, something’s still got to be wrong with me and maybe I’ve gotten progressively worse. It’s ruined all my relationships with women since. The ones I wanted to be close. We’ve talked about that. Till you came. You were supposed to be different. Your patience with me, my feelings for you. Mutual, the other way around, though not my patience. And you were. You are. There isn’t anyone like you. But that woman keeps coming back. I can’t get hard-ons? Most of the time. Fine, now you know why. I’m almost sure that’s it. And I’ve pictures. I look at them of her. Nude ones even. I used to jerk off to them, now I don’t, maybe because I no longer can. Physiological, psychological — something, or the two combined. And her old letters. Me, with my bad memory, I’ve memorized whole passages. I sit and sit and stare at them, as if I expect the script to disappear and then her hand to write the same letter again or a new message to me. One time I actually thought I saw her hand doing this. I was ecstatic, though I couldn’t read it. First the hand, then the arm, then the whole body, I said to myself then — I won’t be able to sit still when it gets to the breasts and face — when the image of the hand faded. It’s crazy, I know. The entire thing. Or very bizarre, terrible, out of kilter, but it’s something and probably much worse than I’ve said. In those adjectives. But I don’t know what to say about it to you anymore. Thanks for continuing to listen to me. I shouldn’t have married you. Neither Gail — no one but my first wife. Denise. Meaning — but you can see what I mean. I’ll see a doctor. A head one. For the head. It was unfair to marry you, was what I meant, if I had any idea I was going to act like this — and I did — or even to have started with you. Well, we got a nice baby out of it. And I still love you — that’s no lie — that’s the truth — and need and want you — all that — and certainly for you and Gwynne to stay. I think it’ll get better. Don’t ask me why I do-something just tells me all of a sudden. Maybe all I needed was this — to let it out. I almost know it will, in fact — get better — so trust me, please. I’ll get down on my knees. A Bible. Anything. Swear on my beloved mother’s head. Actually not that, since it’s too much name-in-vain business and also too much like part of an act. But whatever, if you want, to convince you I truly believe all of it will get better to the point of being vastly to completely improved. I mean by that: you and I and also my body and mind. OK, I’m done, thanks again, listening and so on, and now you.” “I don’t see it, really. Let’s say I’m skeptical, based on what you’ve said. If it’s gone on for so long and with so many women and has only gotten worse, why should I think it will get better because of one voluminous and somewhat confusing airing-out? That said, we can still try. There are the children. I don’t love you anymore, but we’ll see about that too. But enough. The baby’s waking up.”

They try. He tears up the pregnant photos. Doesn’t want to throw away all the pieces — sees himself tucking away two or three in some corner pocket of his wallet — but feels he has to. Also the poems and most of the letters. Two, and innocent ones, he puts in a file folder marked “keepsakes for the kids”—she’s talking about taking her summer vacation in one of them, her grandmother’s illness in the other and what it was like visiting her in a nursing home the first time. Goes to a therapist with Amby and to the same one alone and at each session says he’s thinking less and less of Denise, more of her, feels their recent efforts at saving the marriage are working, but not much of that’s true. Though it will be, he thinks, and for now she feels a lot better toward him. They have sex more often than they’ve had in a year, but it mostly doesn’t work for him. When it does he’s usually only hard for a short time and only twice did it end up for him in even a little thrill. She says a couple of times “Don’t worry, you’ll be the same bellowing bear as always, down on me, under me, in me, all around me, if just a bit less of that perhaps, modifications for age factors and all, but certainly this more than anything takes time. The essential thing is we both feel infinitely better about each other, true?” “Without question.” He still has a tough time holding her hand or putting his arms around her or pressing up close to her, except in bed, and there mostly to keep warm. He kisses her without feeling but seems to do a good job not showing it, the way she kisses back. Maybe she’s thinking of someone else or is kissing him like that to goad him on. If so, hasn’t worked. Sometimes she whispers in his ear, something she never did before like this, “Go, bear, go, bear, do it, any way you like.” He usually apologizes after, says he wishes it was better for her no matter what it is for him, and she says once “No real problem; I’m getting a few kicks out of it.” He starts sneaking looks at Denise’s photos in the kids’ keepsake folder. Some with the girls, others of just her, one of her in a bathing suit when they were on a beach building a sand whale with Olivia. It’s the only one where even a little of her bare legs and a lot of her bare arms show and more of the top of one breast than in any other photo, but she’s mostly hidden behind their beach equipment. He stares at the photo sometimes, trying to imagine from the way the breast’s shaped in the suit and on top what it would look like uncovered. In a book of hers — the variorum edition of Yeats’s poems that had been her first husband’s — a photo drops out when he’s reading it of Denise and Eva in a bath. Eva’s first bath in a real tub, he remembers. Denise yelled from the bathroom “Howard, come quick with the camera — we have to catch this; she’s an absolute scream. She wants to swim first time in and I think she’s almost doing it.” The print’s not a good one and he can just about make out, because she’s helping Eva stand in the tub, which body’s which. He gets out the two letters and reads them almost every day, trying to find something in them he might have missed. A sexual or amorous reference or suggestion to him or anything hidden or not initially obvious of any kind. He also starts praying again for her return, things like “Please, if it can be done, let it be done, for me, for our girls, I’ll give a finger, a hand, an arm if You want, anything to get her back in one healthy piece and if the cutting off of it doesn’t give me too much pain,” and finally in another confessional burst tells Amby all this. She says “Perhaps you should go to the therapist twice a week in addition to the once-a-week with me,” and he does for a couple of months, no change, maybe even gets worse, searches the house frantically a few times for something of Denise’s he doesn’t know is there, curses out loud to himself when he can’t find anything, tears up an entire room’s carpet because he thinks he remembers she for some reason hid something under it, digs up a plant she planted thinking maybe when she dug the hole she intentionally or inadvertently dropped something of hers in it, and then says to Amby “Look, to avoid any discomfort or whatever you want to call it — call it ‘hell’ for all I can do about it now: hell, hell, I’ve become a freako wacked-out maniaco the last few months — I think I should start sleeping in the bed in the basement and maybe even start cooking and ka-kaing and living my whole fucking horrible life there.”