Late Stories

by Stephen Dixon

  Why’s he going? he asks himself the next day, Thursday. Day before his first session, or whatever it’s called when the therapist and patient meet. He should know. His wife was in therapy before he knew her. And then continued for about twenty of their thirty years together, the last ten years of it or so on the phone because it got too hard on her to get her up the steps in her wheelchair to the psychiatrist’s office. She’d call him every other week at a time they arranged at her last session, he’d call back a short time later, and they’d talk for the next fifty minutes, the door to her study closed. He tried to stay away from the door. Didn’t want her to think he was snooping. Her voice was always muffled. And then she’d open the door after she hung up the phone. He never asked her what she talked about with her psychiatrist and, before that in New York, with her therapist there, or not much. Maybe: “So how’d it go?” and she’d know what he was referring to and say “Good” or “Pretty good.” “I’m not asking what you talked about,” he said a couple of times. “Just wanted to know if it went well.” And a few times in those years of phone therapy in Baltimore: “I guess I came up because of our little dispute since you last spoke to him and what I said” or “what I did,” and she’d say “Yes” or “You did, but not for long. I only get to talk to him twice a month, so I have a lot on my mind.” “I’m glad you have someone else to speak to other than me,” he said once, and she said “I’ve a number of people to speak to, but it’s important for me to also speak to a professional, someone I pay.”

  Maybe tomorrow the therapist will start it off by asking him a lot of questions about his life, and later in the session why he thinks it’s necessary to do what his daughters want him to, especially if he might not have wanted to start therapy. If she does ask that he’ll say he doesn’t really know, but he assumes it’s to make them happy, just as he thinks his seeing a therapist will eventually make him happier than he is now. They’ll talk about his wife, of course. She’ll ask questions, he’ll give answers. But how much can they get in in fifty minutes? Well, certainly they’ll get in that. That he isn’t fully recovered—maybe nowhere near so, he’ll say—from his wife’s death. He means he’s still bereaved. Tremendously so. He should have gone to the bereavement counseling the hospice center offered for free for up to a year after his wife died, but he didn’t. He was crying enough. He felt he was crying too much. Any thought or mention of her set it off. He still cries sometimes when he thinks of her. He’ll probably start crying during the first session because he’s thinking and talking about her. Thinks about her many times a day. If he said twenty, thirty, would she believe him? he’d say. Because he’s not exaggerating, he might say. And dreams about her almost every night. Even dreams of her half the times when he takes thirty-minute afternoon naps. He started a spiral notebook, which he calls “My Dream Book,” of dreams just about her. It doesn’t have any dreams in it that don’t have her in them. Started it four days after she died. That was the first time he dreamed of her after she died, and he’s filled up three dream books and is near the end of the fourth. He’s already bought a new spiral notebook. And he doesn’t spend an entire page on a dream. Most times he recounts them in a few lines, and then writes the next dream, with the date he’s dreamt it, right under it. Has he gone back to read any of them? he might say. Very little, and always a few hours after he wrote them down, and never goes back to them again. In other words, he has a dream, wakes up—he always seems to wake up after a dream—writes it down, and reads what he wrote when he gets out of bed in the morning. So what’s he writing them down for, filling up book after book of them, if he’s not using them in some way to benefit him personally—some insight about himself he might get from the dream—or in his writing? Maybe for something later, but what he doesn’t know. Sometimes he dreams about her two and three times a night and she was once in four different dreams of his in one night. And they’re mostly good dreams. He usually feels good after he wakes up from a dream she’s been in. But sometimes she’s angry at him in a dream or she’s started an affair with some much younger guy or she wants a divorce or she just wants to separate from him for a while, and she won’t listen to him pleading for her to stay, and when he wakes up from one of these dreams he doesn’t feel good. Regrets often come back after one of these bad dreams. Why he did this or that to her. He did mostly good things to her—they were never anything but faithful to each other those thirty years, he wants to point out: he certainly was and he can take her word she was too—but so many times he didn’t do such good things. When he got angry at her for spilling something, for instance. Or just dropping a fork or spoon she was holding and he had to pick it up. He remembers saying, he doesn’t know how many times, “Oh, not again.” And the times he had to clean her up. After she made in her pants, he’s saying, or on the floor because he couldn’t get her on the toilet fast enough because she didn’t tell him in time. And the time he slapped her hand. That was probably the worst thing he ever did to her, physically. She’d knocked over a mug of hot tea on him and it hurt like hell for a few seconds, and he reacted instinctively, he could say, and slapped her, but he only did that once. He’s not blaming her. Meaning, for anything she did. Not for her bowel movements on the floor or pissing in her pants and sometimes right after he’d changed her and pissing in the bed lots of times and on the floor. How could he blame her? She was helpless. Or she became such. She had little control over her body functions, is the best way of putting it. He’s blaming himself for every single bad thing he did to her. Not only after she became sick but before that when she was healthy. There wasn’t any malice in her. She was a person without malice, he’s saying. He means that. He’s not trying to make her seem better than she was or himself worse than he was. She did nothing to intentionally hurt him. Never. She never said anything harsh or critical of him that he didn’t deserve or that wasn’t right. He doesn’t like to think of it but occasionally he does and the bad dreams also bring it up. So he’ll probably have to talk about it with the therapist. It’ll come up. He’s almost sure it will. How could it not? And if he cries while he’s talking about it, that’s probably good. No, it is good. It’s good to get those things out.

  What else? He’s cut himself off from most of the people he and his wife were friendly with before. Rarely accepts an invitation for dinner or lunch at a restaurant or someone’s home or even just for coffee someplace. Or a movie, on a Sunday afternoon, so it’s not just his eyes and the problem of driving at night or that he’s afraid of getting stuck in rush-hour traffic. And a couple who were maybe their best friends here has offered numerous times to pick him up for dinner at a restaurant or their house or to go to a movie or play and drive him back. That it’s no inconvenience to them, even though he knows most times it’s out of their way. But they’d like to do it, they’ve said, because they’d love to see him more often than they do. Once, he let them drive him to a movie and then wine and tapas after at a place right next to the theater. Did he have a good time? Did it make him feel he should accept more invitations than he does? No. He felt uncomfortable and he was barely intelligible when he had to talk to them, something he can’t explain. He gave them excuses the other times. Excuses they and everyone else who invites him out can see through. And some people, after he turned down their lunch or dinner invitations a few times, have called to say they’ll be in his neighborhood that day and would like to drop by for a chat, but he always says he’s busy with something, so maybe another time. But why? And he knows they just want to see if he’s okay. He used to like going to movies and eating out after or having lunch at an informal restaurant with people or having friends over for drinks or coffee or dinner, but all that when his wife was alive. He used to make the dinners, buy a special dessert he thought everyone would like—a fruit torte, a Black Forest cake—and set the table, serve the food, wash and dry the dishes after dinner. He liked doing that. Having friends over also made his wife happy. Sometimes they had two other couples for dinner, but no more th
an two—he thought that would be a little hard for him to manage without his wife’s help. What about this? Maybe he turns these people down for whatever invitations they make to him because he really wasn’t that friendly with them. His wife was—she was so much more sociable than he—even after she got sick, but not the last half year of her life or so. But he likes this couple. Likes talking to them most times. They’re smart and interesting and very much involved with life. Books, music, theater, art, politics. Lots of things. Music, maybe the subject he likes talking about most. Both the husband and wife are excellent pianists and she also plays the violin and they sometimes performed duets together for their guests and they like most of the same composers he does but can talk about them and their music much more knowledgably than he, of course. Maybe, because he thinks they liked his wife way more than they liked him, they’re just saying they want to see him more often than they do because they feel sorry for him. That’s the kind of people they are, and sorry for his loss, he means. Or because they think it’s something his wife would have wanted them to do or might even have asked them to near the end of her life. Is that another problem? That he thinks that about himself? That people only invited him to dinner and similar events, as this couple still do, out of some obligation? That they might like his writing—this couple say they like it very much; that they eagerly look forward to each of his books; that his oeuvre, as they called it, take up an entire shelf in one of their bookcases and the ones he didn’t give them they bought—but don’t really enjoy being with him as much as they say they do, or at least alone with him now that his wife is dead. That most people were mainly friendly with him because they liked his wife’s company and he was along for the ride, if he can put it that way. He and the therapist will talk about it, he’s sure. What he just thought about himself and why he’s cut himself off from old friends so much, to the point where almost all of them don’t call him anymore. Why would they? he could say. Would he keep inviting someone to dinner or lunch or for coffee who kept refusing him? Or he’ll talk and she’ll listen and, he supposes, say something every now and then. That’s why he’ll be going to her, isn’t it? He’ll find out.

  Another thing is that he won’t go to New York. It’s where he and his wife were born and brought up. They lived together there for years. Kept an apartment there for about twenty years after they moved to Baltimore. Got married in the apartment; conceived both of their kids in it. His daughters live in Brooklyn. He could stay with one of them, but that would mean going to Brooklyn and he wants to go there even less than he wants to go to New York. His sister has an apartment on the East Side, with a spare room he can sleep in. He can stay there and it’d give him an opportunity to be with her for a day or two. He used to love New York. Walking its streets, stopping in someplace for coffee. So much to see and do. Museums. Central Park. So many art movie houses, they used to call them, and a terrific variety of good affordable restaurants. Chinese food like he never gets in Baltimore. He certainly isn’t going to drive to New York alone and deal with its crazy drivers and cars cutting him off and the parking and so on and possibly getting stuck in gridlock for he doesn’t know how long. But he won’t even go in by train. For sure, not the bus, which his daughters like to take between New York and Baltimore. He hates long trips by bus. Feels trapped. And there’s the good chance he might have to pee a lot and the bus will probably only have one toilet for sixty or more passengers. He also feels trapped and uncomfortable when he stays just for a night at someone’s apartment or house, and that’s everywhere, not just New York. He can stay in a hotel in New York, but he doesn’t want to do that either. It’s not the expense but the possibility of bedbugs, which has become a big problem in New York. Hotels are expensive there but he can afford it for one or two nights. Maybe just one, because he wouldn’t want to leave his cat alone longer than that. He knows he can get someone to look in on the cat—a neighbor’s kid, who lives right up the same driveway as his—but he doesn’t want to take the chance the cat will scoot out the door. The cat might stay out all night. Foxes are around. One caught their previous cat and nearly killed him. Bedbugs, though—that really scares him. That’s all he needs is to bring even one back to his home. The therapist might make something out of all or some of that too. He hasn’t been to New York in what will soon be two years. Nor has he seen his sister in that time. She’s five years older than he and in relatively good health and they get along well together, but she doesn’t like to travel out of New York except for a stay in Rome for a month once a year.

  So what else? Probably, plenty. He doesn’t talk much with people he knows. Lets others do most of the talking. He used to be funny, sprinkle his conversation with amusing or interesting anecdotes, but he doesn’t anymore. Or else he relies solely on the anecdotes to be his part of the conversation—“That reminds me,” he usually says—ones he’s told many times before, so they now come out sounding a bit too well-rehearsed, but he’s mostly silent with people he knows: listening, smiling, laughing, nodding or shaking his head, pretending to be interested, but really bored and not saying much. What happened? He doesn’t know. His wife’s death changed him, that’s for sure, because all this started after she died.

  Also, he doesn’t want to go away for even a week in the summer. They used to go to Maine with the kids for two months. They loved it there. And it got them out of the heat and humidity for most of that time. Now he’s anxious about driving long distances alone. It’s a twelve-hour drive and he doesn’t want to stay overnight in a motel on the way. It used to be fun with his wife, and relaxing—not having to make the bed or cook dinner that night. A simple breakfast, but actually much more than he usually had, the motel would have prepared for its guests the next morning. Maybe one or both his daughters would drive to Maine with him this summer and stay a week or two in the cottage he’d rent for a month. Wouldn’t seem worth the trouble to drive to New York to pick them up—drive to Brooklyn, in fact—making the trip even longer if he didn’t stay the night with one of them, and who’d drive back with him? Maybe one could drive to Maine with him and stay a week or two, if she could get off work that long, although, to be honest, she might not want to spend her entire vacation time with him or in Maine, and the other would come the last week or two, if she could get off work that long and same thing about wanting to spend her entire vacation time with him and in Maine, and drive back with him. But there would still be the same problem. He’d have to pick one of them up in Brooklyn when they leave for Maine and drop the other one off when they return. And he’d want to have both with him in Maine at the same time. They always have a better time together that way. His daughters can talk to each other, when he’s not talking much, and borrow his car and go someplace, when he wants to stay in the cottage and write. It’s a dilemma. He doesn’t see right now any way to work it out. And would he want to be alone in Maine for even two weeks, if that’s what it’d end up being if his daughters came up with him or left with him but could only stay two weeks? Alone, that is, other than for the cat. He has friends in the same area he and his wife always rented a house in in Maine. People he liked seeing a few times each summer, when he used to go with his wife and kids for two months. Maybe it’s not something a therapist could help him out with or would listen to him talk about with much sympathy or interest. He should be thankful, she might think, he can be in Maine for so long, even if alone, during what is typically such a hot month at home. Or maybe therapists don’t think or act like that and always come up with something to say. His daughters would know. They’re familiar with therapy. For him, it’s all new territory. He should ask them.

  Anything else? His neurodegenerative disease, of course, which he thinks he showed small signs of his wife’s last two years but was first diagnosed for it a year after she died. His doctor said he’ll never be cured of the disease but he won’t die of it. He got it so late in his life that it’ll never get that bad. His father died of it forty years ago, but the doctor said medications
and treatments for it have vastly improved since then. Still, he’s scared. Sometimes his right hand shakes. Some days he feels weaker than he does other days. He never stumbles but he has lost his balance a number of times during the same period his hand shakes and he feels weaker than usual. When he tries to run, he runs clumsily. That never improves. Short jerky strides; nothing like he used to do, and he can only run a quarter of a mile at the most before he has to stop. He wouldn’t even call it running anymore. It’s closer to something like speed-walking, but a little more than that. So he sometimes thinks he’s getting worse. Is this something to bring up to the therapist? His fear? But the doctor said he’s showing fewer signs of the disease than he did in his last checkup a half year before. “It might be that I’ll only need to see you once a year,” the doctor said. He’s also afraid he’ll get sick again with the bowel obstruction he had two years ago and he had to be operated on twice in three days to turn a section of the small intestine around. He thinks that’s what the surgeon did. One operation to straighten out the kink in the small intestine and the second operation to see if the first one worked. Something like that. Almost every time he’s just a bit constipated or he has even a slight stomachache, he worries the obstruction has come back. He doesn’t want to go back to the hospital and be operated on again. And maybe twice in three days again, the second to see if the first operation worked. He doesn’t understand. They couldn’t have done that with x-rays? Did he ask? He forgets. He felt he almost died in the hospital. His regular physician said he could have with what he had. And the pain before he was operated on the first time was about as bad for twelve hours as he ever had in his life, but the pain after the operations was for a while even worse. They gave him pain medication that made him crazy for almost an entire day. He hallucinated, heard voices, thought he was in hell, that he was being punished for things he did in the past but wasn’t told what they were. A woman in a lab coat stopped in front of his room and held up to the window a clipboard and pointed to a long list on it without looking at him. He yelled for her to help him, or thought he did, but she quickly left. He kept yelling for someone to help him, screamed sometimes or thought he did, but nobody came to his room. His door was wide open and he heard people walking past or standing outside it, talking about obscure things—space shuttles, metallurgy, a 16th century pope—all of it in a language he understood only a few words of. It sounded more like a combination of several languages of different origins plus pig Latin. He also pressed the call button a lot, or thought he did. Nobody came into his room or asked on the intercom, as they usually did, “Yes? What is it?” Then he remembered he had a cell phone and put on his glasses and found it and called one of his daughters—this he knows he did—for them to come and take him home right away or else he’s going to escape from the hospital, in his hospital gown if he has to, and make it home on his own. It was around two in the morning. They were at his house, a five-minute drive away. They’d come down for the operations. They called the hospital and he was moved to a room much closer to the nurses’ station so someone could look in on him more often. The voices he’d heard turned out to be that of hospital workers on the floor, standing and chatting in front of the employees’ lounge across the hallway from his room before they went inside it or after they came out of it. So how come one of them didn’t check to see what was the matter when he was yelling for help, if the yelling wasn’t part of his hallucinations? He’s also worried he’ll get very sick at home. Something he can’t take care of himself. A minor stroke or a major one, or something equally as bad, and no one would be there to help him and he couldn’t reach the phone or didn’t have the energy to even dial 911. He’d die in his bed or on the floor. Who’d look after the cat in the time before they found him? He’s serious. For how would anyone know he was dying or dead? After awhile his daughters, when he didn’t answer the phone or call them back for a long time—a day, two, maybe even longer—would call a friend of his in the neighborhood who they know has a key to his house, just as he has one to his, and he’d find him, maybe alive, maybe dead. He worries about all of that. Also what it’d do to his daughters if he died that way. Aren’t most of these good reasons to go to a therapist and talk about? Probably. He’d think so. He doesn’t know.