Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

A couple of years later she said her gynecologist said she’s stopped ovulating, so it’s all right for them to make love from now on without any kind of protection. “What a relief,” he said. “It’ll make our lovemaking much freer. Now we can hop straight to it without a lot of fussing around and making sure the thing’s in right and washing and drying my hands and giving them some time to get warm again before touching you.” “Was it that bad? We always, you know, could have inserted it hours before,” and he said “I think we thought that would have entailed getting you on and off the bed before I got you on the bed again to make love, so we never did it, or not after the first time.” “Anyway, I’m glad of the way you accepted the medical report,” she said. “I thought you’d be disappointed, even a bit depressed, that I wasn’t able to conceive anymore, which I know for the last few years you secretly wanted.” “Who, me? Not on your life. You didn’t want another child, then that was perfectly understandable and fine with me. And the two we have are wonderful. Never a handful, so I thought another wouldn’t have been rough on us either. But two’s enough, as you’ve said; really. I’m not making this up. So what do you say? When do you think’s the first time we can take advantage of this windfall? Without any appliances or anything to stop the momentum, so to speak. We haven’t been able to do that for years.” “Tonight, if you like,” she said. “I’m sure I’ll be in the mood.” “How about now? I’m good for it. No, that must seem so stupid for me to say.” “You have to pick up the kids in half an hour,” she said. “Ah, but I suppose we have time if we do it relatively quickly, or you do, and we can now omit the tiresome routine with the diaphragm, which will give us a few more minutes.” He wheels her into the bedroom, helps her undress. “I don’t have to take everything off, do I?” and he said “You can leave on the socks. We’ll still have time to get everything back on.” He lifted her out of the wheelchair onto the bed. “That was so good,” he said, after. “I don’t know if it was because of what we didn’t have to do, but really nothing stopping us.” “You did seem to make a little more noise than usual.” “You too,” he said. “I thought you were going to make it this time. I tried my hardest for you to. Your pleasure comes first with me.” “Oh, please.” “No, I mean that.” “Then thank you,” she said. “Though I doubt I’ll ever be able to achieve what you do every time. It makes me sad. It’s not that it isn’t fun without it — don’t think that — but it’d be so much better with.” “You’ll have it. It’s got to happen again. We’ll work on it together. And once we’ve mastered the trick to it, or whatever will do it, there’ll be other times too.” “I hope so,” she said. “I’m certainly not blaming you. It’s my wretched condition. Now, help me get dressed. If you’re late, give me my bathrobe and I’ll pretend to them I’m still in my robe after a shower.”

He thinks: I’m getting worse. My hands have trouble typing. They don’t feel connected to the keyboard. I make a lot of mistakes, and then make mistakes correcting the mistakes. Sometimes I can’t get the Ko-Rec-Type tab underneath the ribbon to type a word or letter out. I have to retype a page ten to fifteen times now to get it right, when before it was only around five or six. Also, my fingers tighten up, and sometimes, but only a few times, though it never happened before, they curl up and get so stiff I have to pry them apart with my other hand. Though if I wait a minute or so, they usually come apart by themselves. Other signs. I can barely hold a pen sometimes. And when I can write with one, the writing’s so small I can’t read it, even with the magnifying glass I keep on the window ledge next to my desk. And my feet feel cold almost all the time now, when before it was just a few hours a day. I wear socks when I go to bed now, but they don’t help much. I wonder how long it’ll be before my right foot can’t feel the gas and brake pedals of my car. I also have trouble getting out of bed in the morning. Not just the morning. It happens a lot, since I have to pee three to four times overnight. To get out of bed I have to sit up slowly, then stand. The bathroom’s just two feet away from the left side of the bed, the side I mostly sleep on because it’s the closest to the bathroom. It’s also the side nearest the chair that has my clothes for the next day and on the floor right beside that side of the bed are my socks where I left them the previous night when I undressed for bed, thinking I might put them on in the morning. I usually change my socks every other day, but I’ve often gone three days without a change. I think that’s because they’ve been stretched so much the last two days that they’re easier to get on. When I stand up from the sitting position I sometimes feel a bit shaky on my feet and think I might fall. So I sit right back on the bed and try to stand up a minute or so later. That usually does it. I have fallen a couple of times, which isn’t much in almost a year, and it wasn’t hard to get up again. Though the last time I fell was around six months ago, so who knows how hard it would be now to stand up or get back on the bed from the floor. And of course I’d first sit on the edge of the bed, but not too close to the edge, before I’d try to stand again. Anyway, I didn’t hurt myself those two, or maybe it was three times I fell. The room’s carpeted — my wife’s idea after we moved into the house, to cushion her falls if she fell, which she did increasingly over the years. Off the bed where she was sitting or out of her wheelchair if she wasn’t strapped in, and once when she was strapped in and fell over in the chair and broke her nose. That bedroom’s the only place in the house that’s carpeted except for the short hallway right outside it, which the carpet company threw in for free. Then walking. Mornings, after I put my socks on and get off the bed and do what I have to in the bathroom and dress, is probably the worst time for that. That’s because, or at least is the likely cause, I haven’t taken the pill for my illness, which I do three times a day, since around six the previous night. So I take the pill while I’m in the bathroom and then exercise with two ten-pound weights and stretch a lot before and after I exercise with the weights, but nothing seems to help my walking much. I’m getting worse. No question about it. If I go to my doctor and tell him what I think’s happened to my body since I last saw him, around six months ago, he’ll increase the dosage of my medicine, which is what he did the last time I told him I thought I was getting worse, and now I’m sure I’m worse than I was then.

My back, he thinks. The lower part. This has been going on for a year: sometimes it hurts so much I can’t walk. Or I can, but only tiny steps — more like a slow shuffle — and not for long. If I fell, when my lower back hurts this much, I don’t know how I’d get up. It’s never happened, but I’d probably have to stay on the floor or wherever I fell till I felt strong enough and not in so much pain to get myself up. If I was home I might have to crawl to the living room couch or my bed to support me as I lifted myself up. If I was outside, and nobody was around to help, I don’t know what I’d do. Stay there, that’s all, till I felt better. Sometimes, and this really creates a problem, my back hurts so much that I can’t get my hands far enough around me to wipe my behind. I take a healthy-back class at the Y twice a week, where I’m taught various stretches to prevent and relieve the pain in my back, but they only help for about an hour after the class is over. Same when I do these stretches at home at least once a day. These back pains could be tied to my illness, or maybe not. My doctor says “Perhaps, but it’d be unusual. It’s probably just your age and that you exercise too much and too strenuously.” And I keep calling what I have an illness when the right word for it is disease. And my right leg. No, my left. I don’t know why it’s always one and never the other, and neither does my doctor. But sometimes it hurts so much I can barely walk on it and it feels like it’s going to collapse on me. So I have to sit, or stand without moving, or hold on to the top of my dresser or the dryer or washing machine in the kitchen and swing that leg back and forth, meaning forward and back. And after I do this about ten times, hold it straight out behind me or as straight as I can get it behind me while I’m holding on to one of these objects, till my leg feels better or doesn’t feel it’s about to collapse from under me. Is this also tied to my disease, or illness, for both are just as good, because what else could it be? And my doctor? Again he only says “Perhaps,” or “Maybe,” and again that it more than likely comes because I exercise too much and too strenuously. That, he says, may explain a lot of my physical ailments. Have I ever thought of reducing my exercising routine by half or even cutting it out entirely for a while to see if my back and leg pains would go away? “I can’t,” I said. “You yourself have said it’s slowing down my main disease. And I only feel good, or let’s say better and stronger when I exercise at home with weights in the morning and sometimes before I go to sleep, but mainly for an hour every day at the Y on the resistance machines and stationary bike and the weights there.”