Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

“If she got separated from you in a wheelchair and was able to move it by herself, she’ll come back.”

“That’s why I’m shouting for her,” I say. “The streets are crowded and she’s sitting so low in the chair that she won’t be able to see me from it. But she’ll hear me and come back to the spot I lost her at.” I cup my hands around my mouth again and shout “Abby, Abby, it’s Phil. Come back to the spot.”

A policeman comes over and says to me “You can’t be shouting out like that, sir. Is it something I can help you out with?”

“My wife, in a wheelchair, was here with me and then vanished.”

“I can take a description of her wife and have a patrol car look for her.”

“No, I say, “it won’t work. This is crazy, I know, to do what I’m doing, but I had to see it through. Thank you. I’ll go home now. I just have to believe she’ll be all right.”

I hail a cab, take it to Penn Station, and get the next train back to my city. I better watch out, I tell myself. I could get arrested. Taken in. Held overnight. Locked up for I don’t know how long in a nuthouse. Not something I need.

I’ve been writing the same story for weeks. I can’t seem to get past page four. The woman’s name has been Delia, Mona, Sonya, Emma, Patrice. The narrator’s name has been Herman, Kenneth, Michael, Jacob, Jake. From now on I’ll call her “his wife” and him “he.” The locale is a Baltimore suburb. The time is today. The title has been Liebesträume, Nothing to Read, Lists, The List, A List, The Wedding March, Wedding March, The Church Bench, Humming . I always put the title near the top of the first manuscript page. So I always have to have the title before I start the final draft of the first page of the story, which I’ve done with this story about a hundred times. I think I know what I want to say in the story and where I want it to go. Maybe they’re the same thing. What I’m having trouble with is how to say it and keeping the story from being boring, stodgily written and overexplanatory. In other words, a story I wouldn’t want to read. It’s been like a wrestling match. The story’s fighting me and I’m fighting it. Sometimes I think it’s got me in its hold and sometimes I think I’ve got it in mine. What I want to finally do is pin it to the mat rather than be pinned. I’ve fought like this with a story before, but never for so long, and I always won. But end of wrestling analogy. I probably used it incorrectly anyway. This is what I’ve got so far: the start. I want to continue writing it after what I write what I’ve already written down.

An Episcopal church is directly across the street from his house. (In some versions it’s “. . is right across the street. .” and in others “. . is across the street. .” When I’m retyping a page, even after fifty times, I’m always changing a word or two or even a line. But I won’t stop the story anymore like that till I get to the place where I left off.)

An Episcopal church is right across the street from his house. Every afternoon between five and six he takes a walk in his neighborhood and almost always ends up sitting on a bench in front of the church. There are four benches there, all in various places in front of the church and each facing a different direction. He’s sat at least once on all of them and prefers the one that looks out on the street that runs parallel to the church. Not the street his house is on but the one perpendicular to it. He likes that bench best because it gets the most sun in late afternoon and there’s more to see from it. He usually takes a book with him on these walks and reads for about a half hour on the bench if the weather permits it. If it’s not too hot or cold and it isn’t raining or snowing. He always takes his walk, though, no matter what the weather’s like. Well, if it’s raining hard, he doesn’t take a walk. But if it’s snowing or just a light rain, he’ll walk but he doesn’t take a book with him or end up on the bench there. It’d be too wet to sit on. All the benches would. None are protected by trees. If he knows there’s not going to be enough light out to read on the bench by the time he gets there or it’s already dark by the time he starts out, he also doesn’t take a book with him, though he still might sit on the bench for a few minutes. But if he’s tired from the walk or his lower back hurts, which happens a lot by the time he finishes his walk, he’ll sit longer and just think about things — a dream from the previous night and what it might mean, a short story he’s been working on — or let his mind wander. He’s even nodded off a few times on the bench, but only when it was dark out.

So he’s finished his walk and is sitting on what he’s begun to call, in his daily phone conversations with his daughters, his bench. “What’d I do today?”—he always speaks to them in the evening, an hour or so after his walk. “I wrote and went to the Y, of course, and took a walk and sat on my bench and read.” It’s early April, around six-thirty, a bit chilly. Daylight Saving Time started a week ago. The sun’s out but setting. Cherry trees around the church are in full flower — a little early, but what does he know? No cars in the church’s small parking lot the bench also faces, and no people around, which is usually what it’s like out here at this time. He does hear children’s voices from somewhere far off, and a car or pickup truck occasionally passes. But that’s about it for distractions and noises. Oh, a jogger and a woman walking two dogs also went by, but that’s all, or all he saw. So: a peaceful place to sit and think or read. He did bring a book with him — a short biography of Maxim Gorky, one of about two hundred books his wife had on Russian literature in her study and which are still there. But he isn’t interested in reading anymore of it after reading the first thirty pages last night in bed. So why’d he take it on his walk? It was on the dryer by the kitchen door leading to the outside, where he’d left it this morning; he hadn’t decided what book he was going to read next, so he just grabbed it before he left the house. He sets it beside him on the bench. When he gets home he’ll stick it back in the bookcase he got it out of. So, nothing to read, really, he closes his eyes. See what comes, he thinks. Nothing does. Just letters and numbers bouncing around in his head, then a vertical line moving right to left, right to left, and then flashing, like lightning, but he doesn’t know what it is. Maybe lightning. He opens his eyes and looks at the sky, then at the two houses across the street, and finds himself humming something over and over for a couple of minutes. Liszt’s “Liebesträum.” Just the beginning of it. He doesn’t know the whole piece. Why’s he humming it, and now? Well, nothing else to do. No, there’s got to be a better reason than that. It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Sure, it’s a beautiful piece of music when played on the piano — not with the mouth sounds he was making — or even the cello, meaning he once heard it played on the cello at a concert, but long ago. Before he met his wife. Did she play it on the piano? Doesn’t think so. Or she might have — she knew lots of pieces for piano — but she never played it while he was around. And if she played something — well, he was going to say she practiced it till she could play it without reading the music, and in that time he just about got to know it by heart too. But that doesn’t make the sense he wanted it to — to explain why he would have had to have heard her play it, if she did.

Then he remembers. Esther, a concert pianist who was also her piano teacher at the time, played the entire third “Liebesträume,” the one he was humming, in the living room of their New York apartment before their wedding ceremony began. As a warm-up, or to prepare the guests for the ceremony, perhaps. Then she went into her interpretation of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March,” which was the signal for his wife to walk slowly out of their bedroom with her bridesmaid and stand in front of the rabbi with him for the ceremony. He burst out crying right after the rabbi pronounced them married, was told by the rabbi and several guests “Kiss the bride, kiss the bride,” and he wiped his cheeks and eyes with his handkerchief, kissed her and thought this is the happiest moment in his life. And it was and continued to be so for around eight months, till the happiest moment in his life took place in the birthing room of a Baltimore hospital when his wife gave birth to their first child.