Late Stories

by Stephen Dixon

  His fifth happiest moment was in January, 1965, when The Atlantic Monthly took a short story of his, almost twenty years to the month before their second child was born. He was on a writing fellowship in California, had just come back from a month’s stay with his family in New York. Lots of mail was waiting for him. He’d only had two stories published before then, or one published and the other accepted, both with little magazines. Rejection, rejection, rejection, he saw, by the bulge in each of the nine-by-twelve-inch manila envelopes he’d sent with the stories. He opened the regular letter envelope from The Atlantic Monthly, assuming they didn’t bother to send back his story with their rejection slip in the stamped return envelope as the others had. In it was the acceptance letter from an editor, with an apology for keeping the story so long. He shouted “Oh my gosh; I can’t believe it. They took my story,” and he knocked on the door of the political science graduate student who lived in the room next to his. “I’m sorry; did I wake you? But I got to tell you this. The Atlantic Monthly took a story of mine and is giving me six-hundred bucks for it. We have to go out and celebrate, on me.”

  The sixth happiest moment was nine years later. He was walking upstairs to his New York apartment with a woman he’d recently met. By that time—fifteen years after he’d started writing—he had eight stories published, about a hundred-fifty written, no book yet. “Another rejection from Harper’s,” he said. She was in front of him and said “I’m not a writer, but I guess that’s what you have to expect.” “Let’s see what they have to say. It’s always good for a laugh.” He opened the envelope he’d sent with the story. “What’s this?” he said. He pulled out the galleys to his story and a letter from the editor he’d sent it to and a check for a thousand dollars. The editor wrote “I realize this must be unusual for you, receiving the galleys to your story along with the acceptance letter. But we want to get your story in print as soon as possible and there’s space for it in the issue after next. We tried calling you, but you’re either unlisted or one of the few writers in New York who doesn’t have a phone.” That was true. He didn’t. Too costly. And the sudden phone rings in his small studio apartment, when he was deep into his writing, always startled him, so he had the phone removed. “This is crazy,” he said. “Harper’s took instead of rejected. And for more money than I’ve ever made from my writing,” and he waved the check. They were on the top-floor landing now and she said “Let me shake your hand, mister,” and tweaked his nose.

  The seventh happiest moment? Probably in 1961, when a woman, who had dumped him two years before and then three months after they’d started seeing each other again, said she’d come to a decision regarding his marriage proposal. They were in the laundry room of his parents’ apartment building. Had gone down there to get their laundry out of one of the washing machines and into a dryer. “So?” he said, and she said “Okay, I’ll marry you.” “You will?” “That is, if you still want to go through with it.” “Do I? Look at me. I’m deliriously ecstatic. Ecstatically delirious. I don’t know what I am except giddy with happiness. I love you,” and he kissed her and they got their laundry into a dryer and took the elevator back to his parents’ floor and told them and his sister and brother they had just gotten engaged. She broke it off half a year later, a few weeks before they were to be married in her parents’ summer home on Fire Island. A big old house, right on the ocean. Her father was a playwright, her mother an actress, as was his fiancée.

  The eighth? Maybe when a publisher called to say she was taking his first book. That was in ’76. He was happy but not ecstatic. He’d been trying to get a story collection or one of his novels published for around fifteen years. But it was a very small publishing house, no advance, a first printing of five hundred copies, and probably little chance of getting any book reviews or attention. So maybe that was his ninth happiest moment, and the eighth was when a major publisher took his next novel and for enough of an advance for him to live on for a year if he lived frugally. But again, not a great happiness when the editor called him with the news, since the novel was accepted based on the first sixty-seven pages he’d sent them and the rest of it still had to be written.

  The tenth also happened while he was living in New York and had no phone. 1974. Same year Harper’s took, but months later. He’d come downstairs from his apartment to go for a run in Central Park. The mailman, whom he knew by name—Jeff—was in the building’s vestibule, slotting mail into the tenants’ mailboxes. He dug a letter out of his mailbox and gave it to him. It was from the National Endowment for the Arts. He’d been rejected two years in a row by them for a writing fellowship, so expected to be rejected again. He opened the envelope. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “I won an NEA fellowship.” “What’s that?” Jeff said. He told him. “But it says for five hundred dollars.” “So, five hundred isn’t anything to sniff at,” Jeff said. “But I thought all their fellowships are for five thousand.” “Now, five thousand would really be something, landing in your lap like that. Do I get a cut for delivering the news?” He ran down the street to the candy store at the corner, got lots of change and dialed the NEA number from a phone booth there. The person he finally got to speak to who he was told would know how to deal with the matter said “That is strange. We don’t have any five-hundred-dollar fellowships. Let me look into it and call you back.” “I don’t have a phone,” he said. “Then you’ll have to hold the line while I check.” She came back about ten minutes later and said “Are you still there? You were right. Your notification letter was missing a zero.” “So the fellowship is for five thousand?” “In a week you should be receiving a duplicate letter to the one you got today, the only difference being the corrected figure written in.” “When can I start getting the money?” and she said “You’ll receive another letter after the duplicate one with some forms to fill out.” “Can I get the money in one lump sum, or do you spread it out over a year?” and she said “Everything will be explained in the instructions accompanying the forms. But to answer your question, yes.” “One lump sum?” “If you want.” “Whoopee,” he said, slapping the metal shelf under the telephone. “Boy, am I ever going to write up a storm the next year.” “That’s what we like to hear,” she said.

  The eleventh or twelfth happiest moment in his life? He forgets what number he left off at. It could have been when he was living in a cheap hotel in Paris and was called downstairs by the owner to answer a phone call from “les États-Unis,” she said. He ran downstairs. Something awful about one of his parents, he was sure. This was in April, 1964. He’d been in Paris for three months, learning French at the Alliance Française; his ultimate aim was to get a writing job in the city with some American or British company. It was his younger sister. “Dad’s not too thrilled with my making this call,” she said. “Too expensive. A telegram would be cheaper, he said, if I kept it short. But I explained the urgency behind my calling you. Prepare yourself, my lucky and talented brother. I have something terrific to tell you.” “Come on,” he said, “what is it? The madame here doesn’t like me hogging the one phone.” “You got a telephone call from someone at Stanford University. You won a creative writing fellowship there for three thousand dollars, this September.” “Oh my god,” he said. “I forgot all about it, which tells you how much I thought I’d get it.” “Listen, though. This woman said because they took so long to select the four fellows, they want your decision right away. If it’s a no, they need to choose someone else in a hurry. I told her I’m sure you’ll take it, but I’ll call you and then call her with your answer.” “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I mean, I’m grateful, and I should be overjoyed, but I’m just beginning to really like it here and I’m learning the language and making friends. Think they’d let me defer the fellowship for a year?” “I already asked her about that possibility,” she said. “She told me you have to accept it now for this year or reapply with completely different supporting material for the next year, though you wouldn’t need to get new references. Th
at’s their policy.” “The madame’s staring at me. I have to hang up. I guess I’ll take it, then. My feelings are mixed, as you can see, but it’s too good an opportunity to pass up. And California should be fun.” “Monsieur?” the owner said. “Sometimes,” his sister said, “you have to give up something good to get something better or even comparable. And I’ll fly out to California to see you, which will be a nice break for me.”

  And his next happiest moment? Can’t think of one now, or where he was just as happy or even happier than he was in some of the last ones he mentioned. Maybe, going very far back, when he won the All Around Camper Award at the sleepaway camp he went to with his sisters and his brother Robert in the summer of 1948. So when he was told he won it by the head counselor. Or when the principal of his elementary school—this was in 1949, a couple of months before he graduated—called him and several other eighth-grade students into his office to tell them they’d each gotten into one of New York’s elite public high schools, and one of them got into two and would have to choose, and which schools. His was Brooklyn Tech. He was happy but at the same time a bit disappointed because he wanted to go to Stuyvesant, where Robert was a sophomore at, but he obviously didn’t do well enough on its admissions test to get in. Odd, because he thought the Stuyvesant test was a breeze compared to the one for Brooklyn Tech.

  Any other time? Oh, how could he forget? They were in a little hill town in Southern France, looking at a Giacometti drawing on the wall of a small museum, when he turned to his wife half a year before she became his wife, and said “Let’s get married.” She said “Are you joking?” and he said “I’m dead serious. Here, or in Nice by a rabbi if they have one there or some justice of the peace,” and she said “If I got married again it would have to be in New York so my folks and relatives and friends could come. And I’d think you’d want your family there too. But let’s talk about it in a few months.” “So you’ll consider it then as a possibility?” and she said “Let’s say I’m not rejecting the idea outright, as preposterously as it was presented,” and he said “You don’t know how happy you’ve just made me. All right. I’ll shut up about it for a few months.” Of course, he hugged and kissed her and then he took her hand in his and led her to the next Giacometti drawing.

  And the saddest moments in his life? His wife’s death, of course. Next Robert’s. Then his younger sister’s. Then his oldest brother in a boating accident a few years ago. Then his mother’s. Next his father’s. After that, his two best friends dying a year apart, both from strokes. But he doesn’t want to think about them. Actually, the second saddest moment of his life had to be when his wife, two years before she died, was in the hospital for pneumonia and her doctors told him she’d have to be intubated and that there was still only a slight chance she’d survive. “One to three percent,” they said, or was it “three to five”? He can’t say, when he was told by them several days later that she’ll survive, that it was one of the happiest moments in his life. He was too sad at the time. He’d just seen her in her ICU room—in fact, he remembers at that moment looking at her on her bed—struggling with the ventilating tube inside her. “Get this thing out of me … please, please,” her painful look seemed to say. No, he knew her look; that’s what it was saying. But if he was going to list the saddest moments in his life, those would probably be it, plus a few he missed. His wife first, his wife second, then the rest in the order he gave.

  And, to end it, something like this: He gets off the bench and walks the rest of the way to his house. The cat’s waiting for him by the kitchen door. He wants to be let in and fed. He’ll want to be let out after, but he won’t let him. It’s already getting dark. He gets the opened can of cat food out of the refrigerator, gets the cat’s empty plate off the floor, washes it and spoons the rest of the food in the can on it and puts it back on the floor. The cat starts eating. He’s about to make himself a drink—something with rum tonight, he thinks; he’s been drinking vodka every night for a week—when he realizes he forgot the Gorky book on the bench. Leave it till tomorrow. No, it’ll be gone, or if it rains, wet. Get it now.

  He goes back to the bench. The book’s gone. Who’d want to take it? Nobody was around; no cars were in the lot, so nobody was in the church. And really, no one but a Russian literary scholar or maybe a serious fiction writer would be interested in it. Maybe someone who lives around here was out for a walk and saw it. He wants to look at the good side of things. So it’s possible a passerby got it and will bring it to the church office tomorrow and say he or she found it on one of the benches outside and thought it might belong to someone connected to the church. Ah, just forget it, he thinks. He’s never going to read anymore of it. If his wife were alive, he’d go to the church the next day—midafternoon, though; he’d give the person who might have taken it time to bring it to the church—and ask if anyone turned in a book about the Russian writer, Maxim Gorky. He goes home, carefully opens the kitchen door so the cat doesn’t run out, and gets some ice out of the freezer and puts it in his glass. Rum it is, with a sliver of lime.

  The Girl

  Summer, 1952. He’d just turned sixteen and was a waiter for two months at a co-ed sleepaway camp. He and the other waiters—there were about fifteen of them, all boys—went to another camp to play a softball game against its waiters. He was his team’s best hitter. He often hit balls fifty to a hundred feet farther than anyone else on the team. He wasn’t that big a kid, but for some reason—his strong arms and maybe something to do with the wrists—he could hit a ball hard and far. He also had a good eye for the ball. He rarely struck out and he got his share of walks.

  Their camp was in Flatbrookville, New Jersey. He thinks the town is underwater now because of a lake that was created when a dam was built there about twenty years after he worked at the camp. The camp they were playing was also on the Delaware River, near Bushkill, Pennsylvania. They were driven there in an old World War II army truck, with an open flat bed large enough to seat the entire waiter staff and all their sports equipment. One of the camp directors and the head of the waiters sat up front with the driver. It took about an hour to get there, which was as long as it took to get to the Bushkill public landing the one time he paddled to it in a canoe with another waiter. His first time in Pennsylvania, he thought then. They didn’t do much once they reached the landing. Ate the lunch they brought with them and then paddled back to camp.

  This other camp had a softball diamond much better taken care of than their camp’s and with real bases, not pieces of cardboard and linoleum their camp used. They were there only a couple of minutes when the camp director told the team to take batting practice and make it fast. “I want to get the game going so you kids can be back in camp to set up and serve dinner.” Everyone lined up to swing at three pitches each. The camp director lobbed in balls. He hit two of them over the heads of the outfielders, who were from his camp and playing him far. “That a way to go, slugger,” one of them yelled. “Show ‘em where you live.”

  “Do that for real when you come up to bat,” the camp director said. “I want to announce in the mess hall tonight that you brought pride to our camp and helped win the game.”

  There were about a hundred people from the other camp, kids and adults, sitting in the stands along the first-and third-base lines. One of them, on the third-base side, was a very pretty girl. She was around his age, so he assumed she was a C.I.T., or maybe they had some girl waiters in this camp. Long blond hair brushed back, slim, a good figure, and calm and collected expressions and a bright face. She had the look of some of the brainier girls he knew, but was much prettier than any of them. She was wearing shorts, cut well above her knees, and seemed to have nice strong legs. When she laughed with the girls her age she was sitting with, she laughed modestly, quietly, not loudly or uproariously as the rest of them did. And her face didn’t get distorted when she laughed as theirs did. He liked her face. In fact there wasn’t anything about her he didn’t like. She seemed like the perfect girl f
or him. He had a hard time taking his eyes off her and wished he could meet her. But what were the chances of that? He wasn’t the type of guy to just go over to her after the game and introduce himself and say he hasn’t got much time to talk, his camp director will want to get them back on the truck soon and out of here, but can he have her name and does she think he could maybe write her? The camp director had told them before they left for this camp that it was a kosher one like theirs, though not as strictly religious, and that almost all the campers and staff came from Pennsylvania, and most of those from Philadelphia. “Just thought you should know a little history about who you’ll be playing and whipping the butts off of today, and that if they offer you snacks after the game, you can eat them.” Anyway: Pennsylvania. So what good would it be in getting to know her? But who knows.

  After he took batting practice, he looked over to her to see if she might be looking at him. One of her friends may have told her that he had looked a lot of times at her. If she was, and she smiled to his smile, or even if she didn’t smile, it might give him enough courage to make a move on her later. But she was listening, with her hand holding her chin and with a serious expression, to one of the other girls talking.

  The umpire, who was some kid’s father from the other camp, said “Okay, visiting team; batter up.” His side went down one-two-three. The pitcher was good; hard to hit. Struck out the first two batters and got the third on a pop-up. He was on deck, batting clean-up, flexing his biceps as he swung two bats, even though she didn’t seem the sort of girl to be impressed by them.