Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

The tenth also happened while he was living in New York and had no phone. 1974. Same year Harper’s took, but months later. He’d come downstairs from his apartment to go for a run in Central Park. The mailman, whom he knew by name — Jeff — was in the building’s vestibule, slotting mail into the tenants’ mailboxes. He dug a letter out of his mailbox and gave it to him. It was from the National Endowment for the Arts. He’d been rejected two years in a row by them for a writing fellowship, so expected to be rejected again. He opened the envelope. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I won an NEA fellowship.” “What’s that?” Jeff said. He told him. “But it says for five hundred dollars.” “So, five hundred isn’t anything to sniff at,” Jeff said. “But I thought all their fellowships are for five thousand.” “Now, five thousand would really be something, landing in your lap like that. Do I get a cut for delivering the news?” He ran down the street to the candy store at the corner, got lots of change and dialed the NEA number from a phone booth there. The person he finally got to speak to who he was told would know how to deal with the matter said “That is strange. We don’t have any five-hundred-dollar fellowships. Let me look into it and call you back.” “I don’t have a phone,” he said. “Then you’ll have to hold the line while I check.” She came back about ten minutes later and said “Are you still there? You were right. Your notification letter was missing a zero.” “So the fellowship is for five thousand?” “In a week you should be receiving a duplicate letter to the one you got today, the only difference being the corrected figure written in.” “When can I start getting the money?” and she said “You’ll receive another letter after the duplicate one with some forms to fill out.” “Can I get the money in one lump sum, or do you spread it out over a year?” and she said “Everything will be explained in the instructions accompanying the forms. But to answer your question, yes.” “One lump sum?” “If you want.” “Whoopee,” he said, slapping the metal shelf under the telephone. “Boy, am I ever going to write up a storm the next year.” “That’s what we like to hear,” she said.

The eleventh or twelfth happiest moment in his life? He forgets what number he left off at. It could have been when he was living in a cheap hotel in Paris and was called downstairs by the owner to answer a phone call from “ les États-Unis ,” she said. He ran downstairs. Something awful about one of his parents, he was sure. This was in April, 1964. He’d been in Paris for three months, learning French at the Alliance Française; his ultimate aim was to get a writing job in the city with some American or British company. It was his younger sister. “Dad’s not too thrilled with my making this call,” she said. “Too expensive. A telegram would be cheaper, he said, if I kept it short. But I explained the urgency behind my calling you. Prepare yourself, my lucky and talented brother. I have something terrific to tell you.” “Come on,” he said, “what is it? The madame here doesn’t like me hogging the one phone.” “You got a telephone call from someone at Stanford University. You won a creative writing fellowship there for three thousand dollars, this September.” “Oh my god,” he said. “I forgot all about it, which tells you how much I thought I’d get it.” “Listen, though. This woman said because they took so long to select the four fellows, they want your decision right away. If it’s a no, they need to choose someone else in a hurry. I told her I’m sure you’ll take it, but I’ll call you and then call her with your answer.” “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I mean, I’m grateful, and I should be overjoyed, but I’m just beginning to really like it here and I’m learning the language and making friends. Think they’d let me defer the fellowship for a year?” “I already asked her about that possibility,” she said. “She told me you have to accept it now for this year or reapply with completely different supporting material for the next year, though you wouldn’t need to get new references. That’s their policy.” “The madame ’s staring at me. I have to hang up. I guess I’ll take it, then. My feelings are mixed, as you can see, but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. And California should be fun.” “Monsieur?” the owner said. “Sometimes,” his sister said, “you have to give up something good to get something better or even comparable. And I’ll fly out to California to see you, which will be a nice break for me.”

And his next happiest moment? Can’t think of one now, or where he was just as happy or even happier than he was in some of the last ones he mentioned. Maybe, going very far back, when he won the All Around Camper Award at the sleepaway camp he went to with his sisters and his brother Robert in the summer of 1948. So when he was told he won it by the head counselor. Or when the principal of his elementary school — this was in 1949, a couple of months before he graduated — called him and several other eighth-grade students into his office to tell them they’d each gotten into one of New York’s elite public high schools, and one of them got into two and would have to choose, and which schools. His was Brooklyn Tech. He was happy but at the same time a bit disappointed because he wanted to go to Stuyvesant, where Robert was a sophomore at, but he obviously didn’t do well enough on its admissions test to get in. Odd, because he thought the Stuyvesant test was a breeze compared to the one for Brooklyn Tech.

Any other time? Oh, how could he forget? They were in a little hill town in Southern France, looking at a Giacometti drawing on the wall of a small museum, when he turned to his wife half a year before she became his wife, and said “Let’s get married.” She said “Are you joking?” and he said “I’m dead serious. Here, or in Nice by a rabbi if they have one there or some justice of the peace,” and she said “If I got married again it would have to be in New York so my folks and relatives and friends could come. And I’d think you’d want your family there too. But let’s talk about it in a few months.” “So you’ll consider it then as a possibility?” and she said “Let’s say I’m not rejecting the idea outright, as preposterously as it was presented,” and he said “You don’t know how happy you’ve just made me. All right. I’ll shut up about it for a few months.” Of course, he hugged and kissed her and then he took her hand in his and led her to the next Giacometti drawing.

And the saddest moments in his life? His wife’s death, of course. Next Robert’s. Then his younger sister’s. Then his oldest brother in a boating accident a few years ago. Then his mother’s. Next his father’s. After that, his two best friends dying a year apart, both from strokes. But he doesn’t want to think about them. Actually, the second saddest moment of his life had to be when his wife, two years before she died, was in the hospital for pneumonia and her doctors told him she’d have to be intubated and that there was still only a slight chance she’d survive. “One to three percent,” they said, or was it “three to five”? He can’t say, when he was told by them several days later that she’ll survive, that it was one of the happiest moments in his life. He was too sad at the time. He’d just seen her in her ICU room — in fact, he remembers at that moment looking at her on her bed — struggling with the ventilating tube inside her. “Get this thing out of me. . please, please ,” her painful look seemed to say. No, he knew her look; that’s what it was saying. But if he was going to list the saddest moments in his life, those would probably be it, plus a few he missed. His wife first, his wife second, then the rest in the order he gave.