Stephen Dixon: Fall and Rise

I meet her at a party. It’s a large room I first see her in. I was one of the first guests to arrive and I thought I was late. The host lives on the top floor. It’s a four-story building, small for what I know of most of the city but not for her neighborhood. Red brick, narrow width, low ceilings in all the apartments but the two on what was originally the parlor floor, with a steep stoop outside of about ten steps. It was raining. I took the subway down. I didn’t know what to wear. I haven’t many clothes. One pair of shoes I shined the previous night. A corduroy sports jacket, couple of wrinkled dress shirts, three ties — one a bow — which I never like to put on and are a bit stained and out of date. Really only one pair of what could be called dress pants if I don’t want to wear my good blue jeans. Good meaning the jeans that are still reasonably new and rough and dark blue instead of light and smooth from lots of washings and wear. Black corduroys. They needed a pressing. It was too late for that now. I had thought of it earlier. The day before. Then thought if I wear these pants I can’t the jacket, since the jacket’s a faded olive green and of a wider wale and wouldn’t go with the pants. To me if one wears corduroy pants and jacket together it has to be a suit. I also thought, more than a week before, of getting the shirts laundered and pants and jacket cleaned or pressed, so I’d have one or the other garment and either of the shirts ready for the party. I knew I was going to it, knew some interesting and successful people would be there and a few in my field or close and that most would be well dressed and some even in elegant clothes: skirts or gowns to the floor, dark wool suits with vests. I didn’t know she’d be there. Nobody had ever spoken of her to me even in passing. “Oh, maybe eighty or so,” the host had said a month ago when she phoned to invite me and I asked how many people would be there. And rather than meet her at the party I saw her there and later met her on the landing outside the host’s front door. Diana’s. One large smartly and no doubt — unless she inherited most of it, and judging from what she’s told me about her genealogy and bringing-up she probably did — expensively furnished living room and an adjoining room with only an enormous armoire and dresser and big brass bed and whose lights were usually off and louver doors closed. Both rooms overlooking a small square park with joggers running around it even at night and in the rain. Even till very late, Diana had told me and several others this summer when we were having drinks outdoors and watching the sun set over some mountains or hills of upstate New York. The setting sun reminded her of the sunrise or latter part of it she can see from her apartment during the winter and spring months, and that connection led to a number of other things she sees from her windows. That sometimes she’ll get up for something at three or four in the morning and see joggers and occasionally a cyclist doing several laps, or at least in the time she looks, and once even a unicyclist, though she only watched him till he reached the corner because it took him so long and she had become bored. I could see joggers and pedestrians from her windows at the party but no cyclists. It was mostly raining when I looked out her windows, raining when I left my building uptown. Black corduroys, I decided on — unpressed. Sweater instead of jacket, still smelling from the natural waterproof oils the manufacturer had left in the wool, and which I’d take off at the party when I took off my coat. I had no iron, though could have asked the landlady on the first floor to loan me one. She’s loaned me things like that before. Vacuum cleaner, dishes and candlesticks when I was having eight people for dinner once. That was a year ago. May was there, slept over, made the pastry and bread in my stove. But I didn’t want to go through the chore of pressing the pants without an ironing board or carrying the board up and down two flights if I also borrowed that, and thought the pants being black wouldn’t look too unpressed. Long-sleeved blue cotton shirt, in the rugby mode, with a tan collar that didn’t look quite right with the rest of the shirt or the pants. The shoes were the best-dressed part of me, only a month old so still with good heels and soles. I took an umbrella. Not the one someone had left behind several months ago. A woman I’d met at a PEN symposium on the rights of the translator and minimum rates he should receive, and who stayed the next night at my place. Came when it rained, left when it was sunny and mild. I cooked us dinner, made her breakfast, phoned the day after and she said she’d changed her mind and would rather not see me again if it was all right. I asked was it anything I did or didn’t and she said no, everything was great in every way. I said I’d call back in a couple of weeks and maybe she’ll have changed her mind. She said I shouldn’t bother to call, nor even bother her with my phone rings. I said then how can I get the umbrella back to her, since it wasn’t the contractible kind that were fairly simple to mail. She said she had plenty of umbrellas that people have left behind at her apartment so why don’t I keep it for a rainy day. Used those very words. What was my reply? I said goodbye, though wanted to say “You think I’d use an umbrella that has a gilded mermaid handle and a canopy that’s hot-pants pink?” Took my regular folding umbrella to Diana’s party. Looked out my window, saw there was rain. Couldn’t see how much rain because I live in back and all my windows face either an air shaft or alleyway and are two stories down from the roof. So I dialed Weather and a man said periods of heavy rain tonight and possible sleet and snow but no measurable accumulation. When I got outside it seemed as if the rain was coming down in printed periods. Hundreds of them every square foot per second. It rained buckets of periods except beneath the streetlamp where it poured cats and dogs of diagonals and double primes, and I was glad I’d also worn my fake fleece-lined raincoat. Not nippy enough yet for my muffler, I thought upstairs, or watchcap or double socks. I don’t have rubbers and the rubber boots I have don’t take shoes. I should get one or the other and will this week if I remember to and the price isn’t too high. In the meantime I applied, half an hour before I left, mink oil around the shoes’ stitching and seams and hoped they wouldn’t get too wet. I headed for the subway. The periods and diagonals drummed my umbrella homophonically. Theoretically, the party had started. “Eight,” Diana had said when she invited me and I said “Eight? Seems like an in-between hour to start a party: so soon after most people have just sat down to or finished their dinners.” “No, when I say eight, people will know I mean nine and that’s when they’ll start coming, only a little after because no one likes to be first, and to only eat a light supper beforehand because I’ll have lots of food there. Now if I had said nine, they’d begin coming at quarter to ten and then the party wouldn’t end at one when I want it to but around one forty-five, and I have to be at work noon Saturdays.” It was now half-past eight. Entire trip to her place shouldn’t take more than forty minutes if there isn’t an inordinately long subway station wait. There are good bookstores down there so if I get downtown too early to be late I’ll browse around in one and maybe even buy a book I’ve wanted a long time and was only recently remaindered to a dollar or two or turned into a moderately priced paperback. Insert my umbrella into one of those stands or leakproof cans by the door, for I worked part-time in a bookstore this year when I couldn’t, in spite of my various salaries, honoraria and advances, pay for both my rent and food, and know what damage a leaking umbrella and umbrella can can do to the books and floor and salesperson or customer who slides along it and maybe sprawls and then what that customer can do to the store.