Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

What else? He’s cut himself off from most of the people he and his wife were friendly with before. Rarely accepts an invitation for dinner or lunch at a restaurant or someone’s home or even just for coffee someplace. Or a movie, on a Sunday afternoon, so it’s not just his eyes and the problem of driving at night or that he’s afraid of getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. And a couple who were maybe their best friends here has offered numerous times to pick him up for dinner at a restaurant or their house or to go to a movie or play and drive him back. That it’s no inconvenience to them, even though he knows most times it’s out of their way. But they’d like to do it, they’ve said, because they’d love to see him more often than they do. Once, he let them drive him to a movie and then wine and tapas after at a place right next to the theater. Did he have a good time? Did it make him feel he should accept more invitations than he does? No. He felt uncomfortable and he was barely intelligible when he had to talk to them, something he can’t explain. He gave them excuses the other times. Excuses they and everyone else who invites him out can see through. And some people, after he turned down their lunch or dinner invitations a few times, have called to say they’ll be in his neighborhood that day and would like to drop by for a chat, but he always says he’s busy with something, so maybe another time. But why? And he knows they just want to see if he’s okay. He used to like going to movies and eating out after or having lunch at an informal restaurant with people or having friends over for drinks or coffee or dinner, but all that when his wife was alive. He used to make the dinners, buy a special dessert he thought everyone would like — a fruit torte, a Black Forest cake — and set the table, serve the food, wash and dry the dishes after dinner. He liked doing that. Having friends over also made his wife happy. Sometimes they had two other couples for dinner, but no more than two — he thought that would be a little hard for him to manage without his wife’s help. What about this? Maybe he turns these people down for whatever invitations they make to him because he really wasn’t that friendly with them. His wife was — she was so much more sociable than he — even after she got sick, but not the last half year of her life or so. But he likes this couple. Likes talking to them most times. They’re smart and interesting and very much involved with life. Books, music, theater, art, politics. Lots of things. Music, maybe the subject he likes talking about most. Both the husband and wife are excellent pianists and she also plays the violin and they sometimes performed duets together for their guests and they like most of the same composers he does but can talk about them and their music much more knowledgably than he, of course. Maybe, because he thinks they liked his wife way more than they liked him, they’re just saying they want to see him more often than they do because they feel sorry for him. That’s the kind of people they are, and sorry for his loss, he means. Or because they think it’s something his wife would have wanted them to do or might even have asked them to near the end of her life. Is that another problem? That he thinks that about himself? That people only invited him to dinner and similar events, as this couple still do, out of some obligation? That they might like his writing — this couple say they like it very much; that they eagerly look forward to each of his books; that his oeuvre, as they called it, take up an entire shelf in one of their bookcases and the ones he didn’t give them they bought — but don’t really enjoy being with him as much as they say they do, or at least alone with him now that his wife is dead. That most people were mainly friendly with him because they liked his wife’s company and he was along for the ride, if he can put it that way. He and the therapist will talk about it, he’s sure. What he just thought about himself and why he’s cut himself off from old friends so much, to the point where almost all of them don’t call him anymore. Why would they? he could say. Would he keep inviting someone to dinner or lunch or for coffee who kept refusing him? Or he’ll talk and she’ll listen and, he supposes, say something every now and then. That’s why he’ll be going to her, isn’t it? He’ll find out.

Another thing is that he won’t go to New York. It’s where he and his wife were born and brought up. They lived together there for years. Kept an apartment there for about twenty years after they moved to Baltimore. Got married in the apartment; conceived both of their kids in it. His daughters live in Brooklyn. He could stay with one of them, but that would mean going to Brooklyn and he wants to go there even less than he wants to go to New York. His sister has an apartment on the East Side, with a spare room he can sleep in. He can stay there and it’d give him an opportunity to be with her for a day or two. He used to love New York. Walking its streets, stopping in someplace for coffee. So much to see and do. Museums. Central Park. So many art movie houses, they used to call them, and a terrific variety of good affordable restaurants. Chinese food like he never gets in Baltimore. He certainly isn’t going to drive to New York alone and deal with its crazy drivers and cars cutting him off and the parking and so on and possibly getting stuck in gridlock for he doesn’t know how long. But he won’t even go in by train. For sure, not the bus, which his daughters like to take between New York and Baltimore. He hates long trips by bus. Feels trapped. And there’s the good chance he might have to pee a lot and the bus will probably only have one toilet for sixty or more passengers. He also feels trapped and uncomfortable when he stays just for a night at someone’s apartment or house, and that’s everywhere, not just New York. He can stay in a hotel in New York, but he doesn’t want to do that either. It’s not the expense but the possibility of bedbugs, which has become a big problem in New York. Hotels are expensive there but he can afford it for one or two nights. Maybe just one, because he wouldn’t want to leave his cat alone longer than that. He knows he can get someone to look in on the cat — a neighbor’s kid, who lives right up the same driveway as his — but he doesn’t want to take the chance the cat will scoot out the door. The cat might stay out all night. Foxes are around. One caught their previous cat and nearly killed him. Bedbugs, though — that really scares him. That’s all he needs is to bring even one back to his home. The therapist might make something out of all or some of that too. He hasn’t been to New York in what will soon be two years. Nor has he seen his sister in that time. She’s five years older than he and in relatively good health and they get along well together, but she doesn’t like to travel out of New York except for a stay in Rome for a month once a year.

So what else? Probably, plenty. He doesn’t talk much with people he knows. Lets others do most of the talking. He used to be funny, sprinkle his conversation with amusing or interesting anecdotes, but he doesn’t anymore. Or else he relies solely on the anecdotes to be his part of the conversation—“That reminds me,” he usually says — ones he’s told many times before, so they now come out sounding a bit too well-rehearsed, but he’s mostly silent with people he knows: listening, smiling, laughing, nodding or shaking his head, pretending to be interested, but really bored and not saying much. What happened? He doesn’t know. His wife’s death changed him, that’s for sure, because all this started after she died.

Also, he doesn’t want to go away for even a week in the summer. They used to go to Maine with the kids for two months. They loved it there. And it got them out of the heat and humidity for most of that time. Now he’s anxious about driving long distances alone. It’s a twelve-hour drive and he doesn’t want to stay overnight in a motel on the way. It used to be fun with his wife, and relaxing — not having to make the bed or cook dinner that night. A simple breakfast, but actually much more than he usually had, the motel would have prepared for its guests the next morning. Maybe one or both his daughters would drive to Maine with him this summer and stay a week or two in the cottage he’d rent for a month. Wouldn’t seem worth the trouble to drive to New York to pick them up — drive to Brooklyn, in fact — making the trip even longer if he didn’t stay the night with one of them, and who’d drive back with him? Maybe one could drive to Maine with him and stay a week or two, if she could get off work that long, although, to be honest, she might not want to spend her entire vacation time with him or in Maine, and the other would come the last week or two, if she could get off work that long and same thing about wanting to spend her entire vacation time with him and in Maine, and drive back with him. But there would still be the same problem. He’d have to pick one of them up in Brooklyn when they leave for Maine and drop the other one off when they return. And he’d want to have both with him in Maine at the same time. They always have a better time together that way. His daughters can talk to each other, when he’s not talking much, and borrow his car and go someplace, when he wants to stay in the cottage and write. It’s a dilemma. He doesn’t see right now any way to work it out. And would he want to be alone in Maine for even two weeks, if that’s what it’d end up being if his daughters came up with him or left with him but could only stay two weeks? Alone, that is, other than for the cat. He has friends in the same area he and his wife always rented a house in in Maine. People he liked seeing a few times each summer, when he used to go with his wife and kids for two months. Maybe it’s not something a therapist could help him out with or would listen to him talk about with much sympathy or interest. He should be thankful, she might think, he can be in Maine for so long, even if alone, during what is typically such a hot month at home. Or maybe therapists don’t think or act like that and always come up with something to say. His daughters would know. They’re familiar with therapy. For him, it’s all new territory. He should ask them.