Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

Afriend of mine said “Would you like to meet Cochran?”

“Sure, what writer wouldn’t? But what would I say?”

“You don’t have to say anything. He’ll do most of the talking. If there’s silence, even long silences, there’s silence, but then he or I will say something or the visit will be over. Here, I’ll call him. I’m sure he’d like to meet you.”

“Why would he?”

“Because you’re my friend and a writer.”

He called Cochran from a telephone booth. Cochran said for them to meet him in the bar downstairs in the building he lives in. We went there. He wasn’t there. We ordered a glass of wine each and waited.

“I’m surprised,” my friend said. “He’s usually so prompt.”

“Maybe he meant another day or another hour.”

“No, he specifically said he’ll meet us in exactly twenty minutes in this bar and please don’t be late. Also, he could only give us half an hour.”

“That’s better than nothing. Fact is, it’s something I never expected, ever. I knew you knew him, but I didn’t know how well and didn’t want to ask because I thought you might think I was pushing for a meeting with him. Where do you know him from?”

“Oh, I get around.”

Just then Cochran came into the bar, but from the street entrance, not the one to the apartment building. He put out his hand to me and said “Cochran. It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’ve been a long-time admirer of your work.”

“Please, I’m sure you haven’t read my work. It hardly gets around and there’s so little of it.”

“Take my word, son. I’ve read it. So, what are you boys drinking? Wine? Have another on me.” He ordered a glass of white wine for himself, refills for us, and some bar food for us all. “Have some,” he said. “It’s delicious.”

“What is it?” I said. “I don’t recognize it. I only ask because if it’s shrimp or anything even close in the shrimp family — langoustines, for example — I’m allergic to it.”

“It’s shrimp,” he said. “You no doubt couldn’t tell because the shells have been removed. I was also fooled the first time. I’ll order something else for you.”

“Really, I’m not hungry.”

“I insist. You’re young; you have to eat.” He ordered something else. But he spoke so rapidly to the waiter that I again didn’t make out what it was. “No meat in it of any kind,” he said to me, “so you’re safe. Now, let’s talk about your work while we have one more drink. Or I’ll have; you two can stay here for as long as you want and drink on me. The waiter will put it on my tab.”

He went on and on about my work. What he liked, what he didn’t think particularly worked but could easily be repaired, because it was too good to toss out; what he thought was original. He’d obviously read both my books, or a lot of each of them.

“May I now say what I think about your fiction?” I said. “Especially, the short prose. What I have to say is all good, believe me. And I’m not saying that because of the kind things you said about my stuff.”

“ Stuff . Oh, I love that. No, my friend, I have to go, and please don’t save it for another time. I mean, we might meet again — I’ve enjoyed our brief conversation — but I get extremely uncomfortable when someone even alludes to my work in front of me, no matter how high the praise. No, I correct myself. Higher the praise, worse I feel. So.” He drank up, shook our hands, patted my shoulder and left through the street door.

“He lives upstairs, as you know,” my friend said, “and could have got to his building’s lobby through that door there. But he likes leaving the bar and entering his building from the street, don’t ask me why.”

“Maybe he went for a walk or had an errand to do.”

“That could be true too, though I know he wasn’t planning to. He told me on the phone that after he leaves us he was going to take a half-hour nap, which he does daily at precisely this time.”

We didn’t take Cochran up on his offer for us to run up his tab. We drained our glasses, left, and I went back to my hotel and immediately sat at my tiny work table and started to write about my meeting with him. But the account was so much about me — what the great writer thought of the much younger writer’s work and how it made the younger writer feel — giddy; ecstatic — that it seemed so silly and self-aggrandizing a piece that I tore it up. Maybe one day I’ll write about it, I thought, although so many other writers, young and old, have written about their first and usually only meeting with him, that I doubt I could have anything new to say. Anyway, I met him. I liked him. He was the way I felt a very successful serious writer should be. Warm, personable, courteous, modest, affable, and it was generous of him to want to talk only about my work. It didn’t take me long to realize he did that so he wouldn’t have to talk about his own work. I don’t like talking about mine either, or haven’t since that meeting.

Cochran checked himself into a small simple nursing home in the city a year later. He told friends that after sixty years of writing without let-up he was finished with it for good. He refused to see any visitors at this home but his niece, lawyer and long-time publisher, and the word was that he didn’t think he’d ever leave there or else didn’t think he’d want to.

A few months after that I got a letter from his lawyer saying that Cochran had given me his one-room writing studio in a building a short walk from his apartment. He owned the studio outright, as he did his apartment, and the maintenance fees for it were paid up for the next five years. The only things I’d have to take care of were gas and electricity. “All Mr. Cochran asks of you,” the letter said, “is that you not try to thank him by letter or telephone or visiting the nursing home.”

I called my friend, who already knew about my getting the studio, and said “Why would he give me it? You know better than anyone that I had no connection to him but a half-hour’s talk.”

“Beats me,” he said. “I saw him a couple of times since that day and he never mentioned you once, not even ‘How’s your friend?’ I don’t know if you know — it’s in the recent J.T. Christophe bio of him — but it was the only place he wrote in other than his cottage in the country, and that he gave to the village it was in to be used as a public library, along with enough money to convert it. As for the studio, no one, for more than forty years, has been in there except Cochran, the housekeeper who came every other week to tidy it up, and the occasional plumber and electrician if something went awry. Not even his wife was allowed in it. Maybe he liked your work even more than he said that day and thought giving you the studio he’ll never use again and with everything paid up, will be an incentive for you to continue to write. And his wife died a couple of years ago, as you probably know — not by her own hand, as your wife did, and nowhere near as young as yours, though just as ill — so maybe there’s something in that too.”

“I’d rather not talk about that,” I said. “By the way, you ever write about him? I never saw anything and you never spoke about it.”

“No, never, and not just because he wouldn’t have wanted me to. He scorned writers who wrote memoirs, especially those who included him in theirs or published their personal encounters with him. He never read these accounts and cut off anyone who wrote about him. You?”

“For that one meeting? Nah. I kept it all in my head. Let me just ask you, though. What did you talk about with him those last times?”

“A variety of things. Sports, visual art, modern Italian poetry. Homer, Rabelais, Heine, Musil. The street he lives on. What he saw from his windows. The pigeons he fed on his window sill. Good scotch. How in his next life he was going to become a serious bird watcher and maybe even a park ranger or fire tower warden. A dog he had as a boy. And when he was in his cups, a lot about his sister, who also died young and whom it was obvious he adored. Did the lawyer say how you can get into the studio?”