Stephen Dixon - His Wife Leaves Him

On the windowsill across from his work table is a three-by-five-inch Plexiglas frame with a photo of Gwen giving Rosalind her first bath. He doesn’t have to get out of bed and turn on the light to see what’s in the photo. He’s looked at it so many times he’s practically memorized it. Sometimes when he’s at the table he’s taken the frame off the sill and stared at the photo for a minute or so. A number of times he’s looked at it through the magnifying glass he also keeps on the sill, to see if there was anything he might have missed in it. There wasn’t, the last two times, though he’s still trying to identify one object on the ledge behind her: an orange blob the size of a baseball. He once showed her the photo and asked if she knew what the blob was and she said that was a long time ago and it doesn’t look like anything she remembers using in the bath or shower. He just thought of something. Maybe it’s a sponge to drip water over Rosalind’s head after Gwen washed it. He also once asked her if she minded his keeping the photo in such a visible place and she said “Why would I? My breasts are discreetly concealed and my genitals and pubic hair are underwater. And who sees it but you and the kids and the cleaning woman every other week, and if a plumber has to go through the room to get to our bathroom, I’d want you to put it facedown. Besides, it’s as much a photo of Rosalind as it is of me, isn’t it?” and he said “No. I mean, it’s a sweet domestic scene of mother and child, but it’s my favorite of you. Although there is one of you I like as much. You’re at an outdoor cafe in Deauville with your boyfriend Hendrick, three years before we met. Your hand’s covering his, he’s got his other arm around your shoulder, you’re both giddy with happiness, so it’s not one I’d want to see every day unless I snipped him out of it, which’d ruin the part with you.” She looks beautiful in the bath photo, but there are others where she’s as if not more beautiful. Maybe he likes it so much because she also looks so happy in it, sitting in the tub and holding a calm-looking Rosalind halfway out of the water. It could also be something to do with her being nude, the only one he has of her that she let him keep. He did once have a full-frontal nude Polaroid of her when she was seven months pregnant with Rosalind, taken behind the cottage in Maine they rented, but she found it about ten years later when she was looking for photos for a family album she was putting together and tore it up. “It wasn’t only my ugly bloated belly and what seemed like pubic hair crawling up to my navel, but my fat face and thighs and cantaloupian breasts,” and he said “It wasn’t that bad and you looked so shtark and radiant in it. I used to pull out that photo several times a year to look at it and now it can’t be replaced.” Her back’s a few inches from the curved end of the tub. Her long blond hair, brown in the photo because it’s wet, hangs over her left shoulder into the water in a single thick strand she made with her hands. The ledge is at the same level as the top of the tub and has a number of things on it besides what he’s almost sure now is a sponge. Five bottles of shampoo and conditioner, a small bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo, a bar of red soap in a plastic soap container, the bottom part fitted into the top; two hairbrushes, one, he thinks, for taking knots out of wet hair. Two identical tubes of something, one squeezed a lot more than the other. In fact, the second one looks unused and he has no idea what the tubes were for. A baby’s comb, a washrag glove, he’ll call it, that they bought two of — one for each of them — on their first trip to France together in June ’81. In the recessed soap dish in the tile wall above the tub, a bar of Ivory soap, which he always used — it’s still the only soap he uses — when he showered in the tub. The red one was Gwen’s, bought in a health-food store. A bath toy — a book with a plastic cover and pages — floated behind Rosalind in the tub. At the bottom right corner of the photo: part of a folded-up gray towel leaning against the rim of the tub, probably on a clean bathmat. How he came to take the photo. They were in the bathroom. The heat in the apartment had been turned up and the bathroom door closed to make the room even warmer. He was holding Rosalind, who was naked. Gwen took off her bathrobe and hung it on the door hook, felt the water with her hand, got into the tub — he’d filled it to about six inches from the top and dropped the plastic book in — and dunked her head in the water. “To make Baby less afraid of the water,” she said when she came up, and then wrung her hair and shaped it into a strand. “All right; I’m ready for Baby’s first bath and shampoo,” and she held her arms out and he handed her Rosalind. Then he got the idea to take a few photos. “Be right back,” he said, got the camera off the fireplace mantel in the living room, where they always kept it so they’d always know where it was, came back, got the camera set for shooting, held it up to them and said “Okay? A little smile?” She said “I’ve no clothes on; what are you doing?” and he said “Nobody but us will see it and this is a major event in her life.” “Just one, then, but I don’t want the flash going off in her eyes.” She splashed the water with her feet, said “Look, Rosalind, look.” Rosalind looked down at the splashing or maybe at the book floating past because of the splashing, and Gwen said “Take it now,” and he took three quick pictures with the flash but only this one came out.

She dropped him off at his building. He’s previously thought of this tonight. They’d spent the entire day driving back from Maine. He got his things out of the car and she said “I have to tell you something. You’re not going to like it, or maybe not.” “You want to end our relationship,” and she said “That’s right.” “It was the argument I had with your mother,” and she said “That contributed to it, but it wasn’t only that. It’s just not working out. And I don’t see it working out. No, I definitely don’t.” “Okay,” he said, “I’m not going to argue with you. I think it could work out and I’ll be sad for a few days that I won’t be seeing you anymore, but I’ll be okay. So long, Gwen,” and he picked up his typewriter in its case and a knapsack and a shopping bag with his things and went into his building. She called, he’s almost sure now, around two months later. “Hello,” he said, and she said “Hi.” “Oh, Gwen, what a surprise. How are you?” and she said “I’m doing well; and you?” “Good.” “How’s your teaching going?” and he said “Well, you know, it’s continuing ed, so not real teaching like yours. They’re all adults, most of them around my age or ten to twenty years older, though there is a couple in their mid-twenties. They come in together, leave together, but sit at opposite ends of the room during class. Nice people, all. Intelligent, mostly woman, and a few are pretty good writers but not yet of fiction. I also try to do a short story a week from an anthology of contemporary European writers I had them buy, but I don’t lead the class discussion well and I have little to say about these stories, so I might stop assigning them,” and she said “But it’s a good idea, getting them to analyze and comment on fiction by accomplished writers. And it’s a break from just talking about their own work,” and he said “That was my intention, but it isn’t working. ‘The Adulterous Woman’ was one of the stories we read. That was the only one I had a lot to talk about, no doubt because you and I once discussed it and I remembered what you had to say. But then I started in about how at the end she seems to be fornicating with the firmament and getting a release from it, and they all thought I was nuts. I’m not a literature teacher. I’m a literature reader, and only for my own enjoyment and to pass the time in a quiet, simple way. And after I read something, even if I liked it a lot, I forget it and go on to the next. I’ve even taken to reading criticism, if I can find it, on the stories we read, but it hasn’t helped. I think I’m doing a little better by them with their own writing, though, and I have lively literary conversations over coffee with some of them after class, primarily the ones who don’t have to go back to work. But if teaching’s the career I’m to fall back on for the rest of my writing life, I’m in trouble. But how are your classes going?” “Very well, thank you. Easier than last year, but same heavy load.” “And your parents?” and she said “They’re fine. Thank you for asking.” “Your mother still angry at me?” and she said “She never was. She saw it as a minor spat too and half her fault. And I hope your mother’s doing well,” and he said “She’s fine too, thanks. I’ll tell her you asked.” “Listen, Martin, you must be wondering why I called,” and he said “I thought maybe just to see how I’m doing; catch up on stuff and things like that. It’s been a while. I’ve been curious about you too.” “That’s part of it. I also wanted to know if you’d like to meet for coffee, so we can have a more extensive talk,” and he said “Sounds good to me.” “Then I suppose the next step is to arrange it. What’s a good time and day for you and where would you like to meet? Your neighborhood, mine, somewhere in between?” and he said “Any place convenient for you. I teach at noon Mondays and Wednesdays on 42nd Street off Sixth — they’ve taken over five floors of an office building there — so we should probably avoid those days unless you teach a full load on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday.” “This Tuesday would be all right. For coffee? A drink?” and he said “Coffee would be best. If I have a glass of wine or beer, I’ll have two, and I want to keep my head clear.” “You know, another possibility is my apartment. I can make Turkish coffee and also provide cookies from Mondell’s.” “I’d feel funny,” he said, “saying hello to one of the doormen I knew. Better a nice unfrenetic coffeehouse. What about the Hungarian Pastry shop? I love that place,” and she said “So do I. I remember you did most of the galleys for your last book there. Okay. This Tuesday, at three? and he said “Perfect. I’ll be through rereading my students’ manuscripts for Wednesday and also done with my own writing for the day.” “So I’ll see you then,” and he said “Tuesday, three, Hungarian Pastry shop. I look forward to it,” and she said “Thanks. So do I. Bye-bye, Martin,” and he said “Good-bye,” and she hung up. “Oh, God, oh, God,” he said, after he put the receiver down, “this is wonderful.”