Stephen Dixon - 14 Stories

This woman looked at me, emitted an expression that wholly disapproved of my staring, and went back to sipping her ice-cream soda, which stimulated me even more. I sat at her table and asked what grade she taught. Seventh, she said, and I told her I taught the same group of monsters and that most days last year they had sent me home sick and tight in the head and belly and very often close to tears. She said she thought that might happen to her also, though truthfully she had only just begun to teach, and loudly drained the soda from the bottom of the glass till a strawberry from the ice cream got caught in the straw. She said her name was Libby and I said “Well, Libby, I don’t know how you’re going to respond to what I’m about to tell you though I suspect all your composure and reasonably good feelings to me will dissolve the moment I say what I feel most compelled to say, but I’m absolutely stuck on you — hooked is more the word I mean, and have been from the second I saw you sitting here sucking up this soda, and that I’ve never had such an immediate feeling for a woman and I ain’t just putting you on.” She said that what I was saying was both juvenile and absurd, and excused herself and left the room.

I returned to class and was feeling dejected when a student entered the room with a note from Mrs. Redbee. Who, I asked, and he said “The pretty teacher from upstairs with the long blond hair and you know,” and he gestured with his hands and chest to describe Libby’s fairly large breasts. I tore open the envelope, and the note from Libby said she was very sorry she had been so abrupt before, she had never known how to react to honesty directed straight at her, if that’s what it was, but for one thing she was married, for another she had two children of her own, for a third she thought she felt the same way about me, had, in a sense, from the moment she saw me sitting there nibbling away on my runny egg-salad sandwich, and that really turned her life into an unwanted dilemma, because when she left for work today she was feeling intensely in love with her husband, so what should we do? And what about me — the same truth now: was I married, engaged, did I have any kids?

I sent back a note with one of my students saying I wasn’t engaged or married but living with a woman who up till the time I last remembered leaving her warm and wet in our morning bed — and I had recalled that delicious image during every class period break till lunch — I loved more than any one person on earth. She sent back a note saying we both apparently faced the same problem with probably the same brutal consequences if we followed our impulses and so it seemed best we should forget whatever romantic feelings we might have for one another as life was too troublesome an affair to contend with as it was. My return note said I thought she was right, indubitably inexorably immemorially right, and that accompanying this note was a photostat copy of my lesson plans for the year, as I figured she might use them since she was an inexperienced new teacher teaching the same grade and subject I taught She sent back a two-by-three-foot manila envelope, and inside was a note the size of a fortune cookie message that said “Stick all classified material in this envelope and burn.” I laughed so hard I cracked the class up. After I restored order and provided the class with more dictionary words to look up and define at their desks than they could do in five periods, I sent two students to Libby’s room with a large carton filled with three more cartons of progressively smaller size, and inside the smallest carton a note that said “Missiles deactivated; explosives under control.”

We met after dismissal at the teachers’ time clock. Libby said she was glad the fire was out though after giving it some thought she really didn’t think we were all that combustible, and then looked for our timecards in the card rack and punched out for both of us. We parted at the bus stop, agreeing that as long as we were teaching in what the city considered a problem school, we should remain, for the mutual protection of ourselves and discipline of our classrooms, helpful colleagues to one another.

That evening I spoke to Shannah about Libby. I only mentioned over dinner that I had met this fairly attractive female teacher today who had just started in the profession and had a lot to learn, but Shannah quickly flew into me as to what I really wanted to say. “Nothing more to it than that,” I said, “except for the fact that maybe we were unusually pleasant and considerate to one another for teachers,” but Shannah said “Come on, Cy, out with it, where’s the old honesty, I already told you I wouldn’t mind your sleeping with three brand new teachers as long as I’m the only one who has your love.” I told her there had been nothing more between Libby and me except for a momentary infatuation, but Shannah screamed back “You’re in love with her, you bastard, I can see it all over your ugly dishonest face,” and when I said that perhaps I was in love with Libby, she said “Then don’t think I’m going to stay here while you’re sulking and pining away for some bitch you’d rather be with, no boy, not me,” and she went to the bedroom to pack her poetry and clothes. She returned to the table while I was finishing my dinner and said “I’ll stay, you know, if you guarantee me your total committed love,” and when I said I couldn’t give that when it was requested of me, she borrowed a hundred dollars for a hotel room and left the apartment. Then Libby called, said she had accidentally blabbed out to her husband about this fairly attractive male teacher she met, and, after he had pumped it out of her, about that fleeting five-minute nice-feeling time she had had with me. Her husband became so enraged, as she had unwittingly said all this in front of her children, that he demanded she move her flighty carcass out of the house that instant, and did I know of any place she could stay?

Our living together caused a minor scandal among the faculty and school administration. Eventually the principal told us that because of the large student interest in our affairs and the parental concern about the effect such alleged teachers’ moral laxity might have on the children, one of us would have to leave. Libby settled on my working, since I had gotten her pregnant a few weeks back and she was more than satisfied to stay home reading and enjoying her pregnancy and whatever she could do around the house for me.

That was a very beautiful time in our lives. We never had a fight, never a serious misunderstanding. Every time we got even slightly ticked off at one another, the less emotionally upset of us would say “Let’s talk the damn thing out,” and we would get whatever was bothering us out into the open before it overwhelmed us inside and made us explode. Then the baby dropped, the labor pains came and went and stayed, and I drove Libby to the hospital and waited in the waiting room while the baby was being delivered. A few hours later a nurse told me my wife had just given birth to a healthy cheerful seven-pound-six-ounce boy baby. I said that was nice, very nice indeed, and my legs tottered and I told her I was about to faint. The arms that guided me to the couch were gentle and strong, the hands that stroked my forehead and nose more knowing and softer than any that had ever touched me. In my semiconsciousness I imagined these same hands skimming over my entire body, giving me more physical pleasure than for the first time I could possibly stand. It was the nurse. She was towering over me, more than six feet of her, and she was saying “It’s all right, Mr. Block, your wife and son are as well as can be.” I held her hands, said they were soft, very comforting, she was a good nurse and she said “Thanks kindly, as I don’t often get roses thrown at me like that.” I told her that Libby and I weren’t married because her divorce hadn’t come through yet, and she said that wasn’t very unusual these days with what she had read and heard about and in fact she had the exact opposite problem as me in that she was very much legally married but her husband didn’t want any children. I said I loved kids and unlike Libby I wanted to have a half dozen more of them and that I thought it was a pity about her husband because I felt she’d make a superlative mother with those comforting hands and empathic disposition and because she was in such a selfless if not selfdemeaning profession and also because of her body — I meant because she looked so strong and healthy to me that it seemed she could give birth to many babies and even three or four at a time. She said that come to think of it she was quite strong and healthy and that also being my nurse in a sense she was giving her most thoughtfully considered medical advice that I have a coffee with her downstairs, since we both looked like we could use one.