Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  The baby comes out and doctor says “Got it, it’s a girl,” and starts to hold it up but says “But you knew that, right?” and nose is suctioned again, eyes cleaned, umbilical cord’s cut and quickly does some other things and hands it to the nurse who rushes to the warmer, pats the baby dry, says “Heartbeat’s normal, color’s a healthy pink,” weighs and measures it and wraps it up and brings it to them and says “So who gets her, Daddy first?” because his arms are out and he says “She’s still a bit dizzy and weak, I’ll hold it OK,” and takes it in his arms, shows it to Denise, who’s being sewed up while waiting for her placenta to pass, and breaks into such deep sobs that the nurse takes the baby from him and puts it on Denise’s stomach. Breaks into sobs during his wedding ceremony. Rabbi smiles, says “Let’s hold it a few seconds, people,” looks at his watch because he has to officiate at a funeral in an hour, he told them before the ceremony, and it’s a half-hour cab ride from here. Sobs when he hears a certain Bach cantata on the radio and the woman says “It’s a beautiful piece and a very lovely interpretation, I know,” and he says “It’s not that. I should have turned the radio off when the announcer said what number it was, for I know what it does to me and I didn’t want to screw up such a nice dinner.” “It’s done, so maybe if you want to eat, you should say,” and he says “It reminds me of my brother. A few months after that ship he was on got lost and probably split up and sunk, I bought a record of this same cantata. Not for it but for the much more exalting one on the other side whose number I’ve since forgot—thirty-three, I think. I played it, after I played the one I bought the record for a few times, and right at that sad part just before my brother popped into my head and I started sobbing more for him than I had since he was lost. To top it off, for about ten years after that, whenever I wanted a good cry, I’d put that cantata on. Though first I’d have a couple of vodkas or half bottle of wine, and would douse the lights—it was always at night—or just keep a low-watt one on and sit in a chair with another vodka or the rest of the wine and often with some poetry books to turn to two or three of what I knew were particularly sad poems, and my brother would automatically appear about five minutes into it and I’d sob uncontrollably. It rarely failed and would probably work for me today if I had the record and there weren’t too many scratches on it and the sound wasn’t too inferior to what we have on records today.” Sobs the first time he sees a certain Russian film. Went to the theater alone, it was about a year after his brother was lost, good reviews, a friend whose opinion he respected had told him it was a terrific film, interesting and moving and cinematographically near perfect, the second or third contemporary Russian film to hit the States since the new Soviet-American cultural exchange, sat in back, film was touching in places and light and a little trivial and dull in others and as far as he could tell very well acted and made. But the ending. Young soldier returning to the war front, never coming back, babushka’d mother seeing him off minutes after he got there, as he’d spent his entire leave getting home—powerful music, serious voiceover with a few words Howard could make out because of similar ones in German and English, closing shot of him on the bed of the truck that had taken him the last few miles to his village and will drive him back to the train, but before that shouting “There, there,” and pounding the truck’s cab and directing the driver down a country road, jumping out, kissing his mother—she was working in the fields with other women—soon the driver shouting “Come on, soldier, we don’t have time, you’ll miss the only train,” and they hug and kiss and paw some more and the driver honks and he climbs aboard, his mother and he waving to each other as the truck gets smaller and smaller as it drives to the main road. He sat sobbing when the Russian word for “The End” appeared and then the music stopped and screen went dark and houselights came on. It was an art movie theater so almost everyone had seen it from the beginning and was now leaving when someone coming up the aisle said “Tetch?” Newsman he knew from Washington. Introduced his wife, said “This guy and I covered Congress at the same time, used to interview Kennedy together right in the Senate cloakroom sometimes, since we each had a 50-kilo station in Boston and my outfit one in Wooster—Remember, Jack tapping his pen on your mike when he talked, then on his teeth while he was thinking till you had to tell him to stop? Clink-clink, he was killing the tape—This guy was a maniac reporter, all over the place. Three to four interviews going at once sometimes—his outfit just edited and aired them separately—and who once boxed me out of a once-in-a-lifetime interview with Nixon when he was veep and who no one thought gave single radio interviews. But he catches him flying through the halls and shoves the mike into Nixon’s mouth and starts asking questions, and when I see it and try to set up to join in, he says ‘Stubbs, this is mine, back off.’ Nixon’s just laughing but wouldn’t give me one after his was over. But I got him back with an excluso with Hoffa on some hearings and one with Lyndon on Ike taking too many naps and golfing days that for a while had that town upside down. But the real killer was when he gets one with Khrushchev, if even only for two minutes and in translation, by breaking ranks with the rest of us cordoned-off reporters and running with his tape recorder and gear up the Lincoln Memorial steps. ‘Who is this imp?’ we all later hear Nikita say through his translator on radio that day. Nothing much of substance—he’s sure he’ll enjoy his brief stay. But just to have got the first interview with English in it three hours after he steps off the plane? And then quickies with Mrs. K. and his son-in-law from Pravda or Izvestia and his wife—I wish they’d shot this guy. And you really could have been shot by either of the secret services for running up on them—you knew that, didn’t you?” “I knew but didn’t think. My boss was hot on my getting beats and I guess I liked the little notoreity that went with it. But listen, Mickey, and excuse me,” to his wife, “but I found the film so moving I still really can’t speak. I’m going to sit another minute.” “Sure, the movie?—I can understand,” and said they’d wait for him in the lobby for coffee if he was only going to be a few minutes, and he got up in a minute when the movie started but they weren’t there. Takes the woman he’s engaged to to the film a few months later. Doesn’t say what it did to him, just that it was a movie he remembers liking very much, thinks she’ll enjoy it and he wouldn’t mind seeing it again. At the end he’s sobbing so hard his shirt’s wet from where the tears dropped and she says “What are you crying like that for? It was sad but not that sad and it certainly wasn’t that convincing or great a film. Fact is, it was kind of schmalzty, if I can use that ugly word, and which hasn’t almost applied to any movie I’ve seen in years till this. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to belittle honest and open emotion, and I think it’s wonderful the way you let it flow so freely, but that overgrown boy and girl with those half-witted innocent expressions and twinklings of what we know will never be consummated love? And the mother—holy Horace, get me a double vodka straight.” “It just affected me, what can I tell you—maybe the music most of all.” “Leave it to the Russians: mother patriotism with no faults.” Calls his mother up every year on his sister’s birthday, never says why he’s calling, just “Hello, how are vou, what’ve you been doing?” and she always says “Fine, I guess; you know me: not doing much. Today’s Vera’s birthday, but you probably knew that,” and he says “I was thinking of it today too,” and she usually says “What age would she have been?” and he gives the age and she usually says “It’s hard to believe she would have been that old—she was twenty-six but so small and such a child,” and by then he’s feeling like crying and she usually starts in too till she tells him she can’t speak anymore and she’ll call him back later tonight if she can remember by the time it’s not too late, or tomorrow, does he mind? and he says no, not at all and puts the receiver down and sobs where he’s sitting till he can’t anymore. Sobs when he comes over to her apartment and says he might have the same thing Vera had, or at least the doctors think so. First tells her to sit, they drink coffee, she says “Like me to toast you a b
agel?—I just took them out of the freezer,” and he says no, she says “What’s on your mind, you look so worried,” he says he has some bad news, she says “You and Dora breaking up again?” and he says “No, everything’s fine between us, or as good as it’s going to get, which ain’t hot and not the way I want it but that’s OK, we still have something and lots of good moments and I love her little girl and maybe it’ll get better, anyway she’s been wonderful about this,” and she says “What?” and he says “I think—the doctors think—I’ve seen two surgeons already about it, one of them Dora’s father-in-law—she still has a nice relationship with him even if she’s divorcing Lewis—anyway—she insisted I go to him when she saw the lump on my leg that wouldn’t go away—they think I could have the same thing Vera did, a neurofibroma, though in all probability—at least it’s as good a chance—it’s a synovial cyst—” “A Baker’s cyst?” she says. “Yes, and they’re going to operate—he is—as soon as—not Dora’s father-in-law but the other surgeon—he sent me to him, a neurosurgeon specializing in limbs—Dr. Michaels isn’t; he’s strictly brains—but as soon as this Dr. Vinskint gets a bed for me in the hospital he’s associated with, which is Memorial, I’m afraid, Vera’s old place,” and that’s when he starts sobbing, not for himself he later tells her and believes, but for Vera, “the poor kid, because what she went through, nobody should. Me, I’ll be all right, and I’ve lived past forty so, you know, I’ve at least had a shot at things. Though Vinskint did say—and don’t get worried; chances of it are slight—that if it’s what he hopes and generally thinks it isn’t and it’s really spread and is malignant, which it was with Vera but in most people it’s benign, he might have to take off the leg below the knee, which is where the cyst or fibroma is, behind it, though not then and there. He’d want me to wake up and think about it a while but I’d have to make my decision soon.” Vinskint wakes him during the operation and says “The biopsy report was just wired down from that window up there—you can’t see it—and the pathologist said it’s the cyst, which is what I thought and hoped it was, but we had to make sure, and I’m taking the rest of it out as long as I’ve got you opened up. You should feel very fortunate and relieved, Mr. Tetch, which I’m sure you are,” and he says “Thank you, I do, I am,” and they put him out. After, people say—a doctor cousin especially who berates him for not coming to him for a third opinion—“I could have told you over the phone what it was by your description of it and it could have been drained with a needle in any doctor’s office for two hundred bucks”—that he should complain to the hospital and its medical board and some even say he should sue the doctors for malpractice—the one who first diagnosed it and referred him and the one who operated on him—but he doesn’t like to sue and hates getting involved with lawyers and it’s Dora’s father-in-law and Gretchen’s grandpapa and he doesn’t want to hurt their relationship with the man and his own with them. Is dropped by a number of women over a period of about three years after Dora. Some in a week or two, some in a few months, and it hurts a little sometimes but no stronger reaction than that. But with the one months before he meets his future wife—the last woman he slept with regularly before her—he sobs when she tells him it isn’t working out between them anymore and she’s calling it quits. She asked him to meet her at a bar near her job after she gets off from work and he starts sobbing in one of the front booths. She looks around, seems alarmed, tells him to stop, please, this is a place she comes to almost every day for lunch or a beer and it’s a good place to read and draw—the lighting and they don’t bother her after they clear away her plate or glass—and now they might think she’s afraid to think what, and what’s all his blubbering for anyway? They never were that close. It was an affair of convenience—affair’s even too weighty a word for what they had. He was coming from someone, she from someone else, they both had been given the ole heave-ho so felt good meeting up with someone nice so soon and someone who didn’t give them each a hard time and want to spend all his hours with her or she with him, like the last one with her did before he kicked her out, and they had some fun, were companions, helpmates, bedmates, had similar interests—of course still do—and were even helpful in other ways like when she took care of his mail for two weeks when he was away and he helping her move into her new apartment and also helping her paint it with her—but now she feels it’s gone about as far as it could or should, that it’s sort of reached a point where it has to develop or just stop—he’s still sobbing—and since it never can go any further—they both know that—and please stop crying, stop it, people are looking, it’s too damn embarrassing and uncalled-for and unfair, because he couldn’t have felt anything more for her up till now than a slight attachment, and look at their ages, he’s almost twice hers and should want someone closer to his own, at the most ten years younger, just as she does with a man but the opposite way around, so please, cut the blubbering or will he at least just spit what it is out? and he says he was thinking he’d like to marry her and have a baby, so maybe that’s why he’s so sad and disappointed—says this when he knows it’s out of desperation and a lie and he wouldn’t know what to say or do if she said yes or give her time to think about it—but she says what? he crazy? Where’s that come from? This some sick stupid joke on his part? It’s a lie, she knows it, blubbering didn’t work so now he’s offering-suggesting—bullshitting to her about marriage and kiddies just to get her back for a week, maybe even just to fuck tonight, and let’s face it, before he drops her dead flat because he’d be so frightened and perplexed if she ever said yes. For how can he think marriage and babies? How can he?—tell her, tell her. He says nothing, just looks at the table, and she says sure one day she’ll want a baby, but when she’s ready, which she’s not and won’t be for years—five, six-she has her education to finish, her art to develop and think about, some other experiences including other men to go through—just as sure one day she’ll want a young husband as her children’s or child’s father—but also when she’s ready, which she of course right now isn’t. And why a much younger husband than he when she is ready? She’ll tell him. He unloaded that bomb about marriage and babies on her, she’ll unload this on him. Because of the personal energy-level thing, for one reason. Between him and someone much younger. And because she wants someone with the same or close-to-it cultural attitudes or values and interests rather than differences and different frames of reference or frame of references or frames of references or whatever the hell he called them—what he liked to talk about a lot, she should say: culture, morals, values. And just someone to look at who’s younger and less line-ier in the face and who’s hairier in the head and less on the body and not so gray there and firmer, solider, more athletic, less serious, less done in by life, less seen-it-all in life, just less a lot, she’ll say, plus more juvenile in humor and spirits even. So anyhow, don’t tell her it’s the marriage-baby thing why he said he blubbered, because it’s not, they both know it, so come up with something better or nothing, for all she cares now, and he says, wiping his face, maybe it’s because so many women—he thinks this is it, because he’d like to get at it himself—women young and older but none younger than she even when it first started, have dumped him in the last few years that it secretly took its toll and culminated in that dumb what she called blubbering before. But OK, no marriage, forget babies, though he does eventually want to have them before he gets too old and weak to pick them up and carry them—maybe that’s the problem too. But just leave him here—she should go—and let him figure out what it really is if it isn’t what he just said, and she says she does have to be someplace now but he promises no more scenes here?—remember, this is her place almost every weekday and it’s already been embarrassing enough for her here today, and he nods and she says he’ll pay? for she’s had a pie and two beers and there’s his coffee, and he says he has enough on him, and she says leave a dollar as a tip too—two, even—that should smooth things over with the bar, and he says will do but just go, and he le
aves right after she does, no thinking about it, there’s nothing to think about it anymore, he could see she’s had it with him, she’s probably got another guy and didn’t want to say it, she already gave him crabs a couple months back from some guy she met when he was away for those two weeks, but she at least told him when she found out she had it and gave him enough of her prescription medicine to cure it, and she calls that night, says he all right? he says yes, thanks, she says good, well that’s all she wanted to say, and he says thanks for calling, that was very considerate, but would she like to do something tonight? and she says after that scene today and what she said about him he still thinks she’d want to screw with him? and he says who mentioned screwing?—just to go out, a movie, he feels much better, whatever she’d like to do—a bar, even, or someplace for a bite—and she says didn’t he hear her today? She doesn’t want to see him again ever. She only called out of concern because he was in such terrible shape today but she can see even that was a wrong move, another reason why they’re so incompatible—that’s the word she was searching for all that time in the bar—they’re incompatible, because he takes things—looks at things—so differently than her—he looks at them as if he’s not twenty but sometimes thirty or forty years older than her and not because she acts much younger than she is either, and he says thank you, that’s very nice, what he wanted to hear, she’s a sweetheart, really, but if she has a few seconds more he’d like to say this—something he just came up with but had thought hard about since the bar and nothing insulting, so don’t worry—but the reason why he felt so bad about himself today and did that sobbing was because he thinks after her he’ll never get anybody, that she was the last one or possibility of one, that he has no job, no prospects of one, no money besides, and at his age, well he must have felt his whole life was hopeless and still does in a way, foolish and hopeless and on a terrific decline, and she says is he pulling one on her again? and he says when did he ever? and she says come on and he says absolutely, he’s not pulling anything, and she says then no, it’s not hopeless, it’s never hopeless, what’s hopeless is getting into the bag of thinking it is, but with him it’s probably just his thinking it is tonight, but tomorrow he won’t think that, she assures him, or at least not to the degree of tonight, and the day after hell think even less than like tonight, and he says maybe she’s right, maybe he’s wrong, she’s got a good point, he usually makes things seem worse off than they are, so thanks, and now he also wants to say that if she ever changes her mind he’d certainly like to see her again and yes, if it resulted in it then to end up in bed with her anytime in the future she’d like, so if she ever reconsiders, though he knows what her feeling now is about it, give him a call, and she says did she hear right? yes she heard right, well she’s going to tell him something now also, but something insulting but she also hopes constructive—if it keeps him from contacting her again that’ll be constructive enough—and this will also be the last words she hopes to ever say to him, unless he’s going to be one of those annoying-type schmos where she’ll be forced to get an unlisted new phone number, and that’s that an idiot—is he still listening or has he hung up? and he says go on, shoot—an idiot is someone who’s never going to learn anything in life and, she wants to add, not because he’s unwilling to either, and before he can say does she mean him? she hangs up. They never speak to each other again, he never bumps into her, sees her on the street, nothing like that, or meet any of her friends or hear anything about her till four years later, on a Broadway bus heading uptown, a woman waves to him from a seat when he’s walking up the aisle, he stops, says hello, she says doesn’t he remember her? he says he thinks he does but forgets from where, she says she’s Aluthea, Carrie’s best friend when he was going out with her a few years ago—she was in fact at the same party he met Carrie at—remember? she went out with his crazy friend Bernie for a while till she found out how crazy he was, and he says oh yeah, he remembers, asks how she is, then how Carrie is and she says Carrie’s married, living upstate, on something like a farm, her husband has lots of money and bought it, and he says that’s nice, he’s married too and not only that his wife’s two months away from having their first baby—a girl, though they weren’t supposed to know but the obstetrician’s nurse blabbed the results of the test—vindictively, they’re pretty sure of, but that’s over and done with and asks if he can sit and sits next to her and says is Carrie anything like that?—a baby, maybe two by now, even if it seemed she didn’t want to get married or have kids for about ten years—her education and art, she used to say, and she says her art’s not as important to her anymore and she’d like to get pregnant but hasn’t been able to, and he says well, they’ll go, if they haven’t already done so, for pregnancy tests, and maybe a tube will have to be blown through with air or whatever the process is, or fertility pills, though one has to watch out with those because you can wind up with triplets, and she says oh no, her doctor says that as a couple they’ll never be able to have children, that she’s simply unable to because of some incorrectible malfuction with her ovaries—not even an implant’s possible, it’ll just reject, all of which has devastated her for she’s been saying there’s nothing she wants more than to have a baby, and he says he’s sorry, it must be a hard thing to accept for somone so young, and hard for her husband also, and thinks how strange, for if anyone was built to have a kid and then nurse it, it was she, which was probably mostly what attracted him to her, her large tall shapely body, perfect but just bigger in every way, and she says it’s been a lot more than hard for her—she’s become a wreck over it, principally because her husband doesn’t want to adopt a child, he only wants to have a natural one, and he says an adopted one is natural but he of course realizes what she means and doesn’t know what he’d do if he were in the husband’s position but hopes they can work themselves out of the dilemma, and then his stop comes and he sees someone’s rung for it and he says goodbye and hopes they’ll see each other on the bus again sometime and to give his best to Carrie and walks home feeling bad for her but doesn’t say anything to his wife about meeting the woman on the bus and has never told her about that time in the bar. To her, Carrie’s just someone he saw one day a week for a while till she gave him crabs or a short time after that and the last person he slept with, though months earlier, before he met her. He’s thought of the sobbing scene lots of times since it happened, not for a while though till he bumped into Aluthea, and never could come up with what precisely brought it on and then kept it going for so long, since he doesn’t think he ever sobbed longer as an adult, and was always ashamed of it and glad he never met Carrie again. He wonders if Aluthea recalled the sobbing scene, since she must have known about it from Carrie, and if anytime while she was talking to him she thought of him peculiarly. Anyway, the culminating explanation—that her dropping him so unexpectedly came after so many other women had dropped him or had refused to go out with him when he heard about them from a friend and called or met them at a party and asked and by someone he thought would be the last to do it—she in fact had said several times that if anyone dropped anyone it’d be he—probably comes as close to why it happened as anything he can think of. Thinks why again. Yep, that’s about the best he can come up with. Sobs when his second daughter comes out but not as hard as he did with the first. “Wow,” the obstetrician says while she’s stitching up Denise, “I never saw a man react so emotionally to the delivery of his child.” “You forget what he was like when Olivia was born—much much worse,” Denise says she said when she later told him what the doctor had said, for he was sobbing too loudly and ferociously to hear either of them.