His Wife Leaves Him

by Stephen Dixon

  So what happened next? he thinks. As he walked, he probably looked back for her a couple of times, even though he must have known she wouldn’t be there. He was also probably thinking What a doll, what a doll. This has got to work out, it just has to. Got to the subway entrance and started down the stairs and then thought something like What’s the big rush to get home? Walk till you get tired or bored with it and then take the subway or bus. Walked all the way home. Took him about two hours. Doesn’t remember being cold. Remembers a full moon. No, why’s he making that up? But he does think there was a brief fall of light snow and he looked up at it and thought how pretty it was and romantic. Probably also thought Wouldn’t it be nice walking with her now in the snow? Starting from when he was around seventeen he’d wanted to hug a woman from behind while it snowed, burrow his head into hers, but just never had a chance to, and of course a woman he was in love with. Later, after they’d been seeing each other a few months and were walking along the park side of Riverside Drive in a much heavier snow, he got behind her and hugged her and nuzzled his nose into the back of her neck and she said “What are you doing?” and he said “What do you think?” And she said “We’ll slip; let go. You want to kiss,” she said after he let go of her, “that’s different, though my lips are probably cold,” and they kissed. First time for that during a snow? Doesn’t think so. Could have got home quicker but stopped at a bar, sat at the counter and ordered a draft beer and asked the bartender if she had a Manhattan phone book. Remembers she was tall and striking-looking and young, around twenty-five, or looked young, and was built and moved around behind the counter like a dancer and had short blond hair almost the same color as Gwen’s but not looking as real. He really remembers all that? And he means the hair color real. Yes. He still has a vivid picture of her and the bar but can’t recall what streets it was between and avenue it was on. Somewhere between Houston and Eighth Streets, he thinks, in the middle of the block on the west side of the avenue. Good-looking and trimly built as she was, if he can put it that way, he had no interest in her and wouldn’t have even if she had come on to him, which she never would have. First off, on her part, the age difference, and on his part, she came off as hard and tough, qualities, if that’s the right word, he disliked. Maybe she was just acting hard and tough because she was a young attractive female bartender and felt she had to put up that kind of front with her male customers, especially the ones sitting at the counter. She also smoked, another thing that put him off, and ground out her cigarettes in an ashtray full of butts, but he might be imagining the last part of that. But most of the rest did happen, or close to it. He recounted to Gwen several times what he did that night after she left him. And one of those times he said something like “Of course, in telling you all this, I’m saying that I fell for you immediately—maybe even while stalking you at Pati’s party—which is one more reason I had no interest in the beautiful bartender.” “With me,” she said, “I knew I liked you after our first two dates and thought that something could possibly develop between us. But falling for you took a much longer time.” “How long?” and she said “I forget. Maybe weeks, once we started going together.” “Why so, do you think?” And she said “Innate cautiousness. Self-preservation. Because of my early history, perhaps, of jumping in too fast and getting burned when the man’s feelings for me went sour and flat. I’m not quite sure why, but that’s the way I was since my senior year in college.” “Well, we went to bed pretty quickly—third date, and first was just a short walk and cup of coffee, but in reverse order,” and she said “That’s something entirely different. I liked our foreplay, I got very much in the mood, and I felt you weren’t the type to get too terribly hurt if I decided not to see you again or for a while.” “Why would you decide that when we were really just starting out as a couple and had just slept together and, as I recall, it was pretty good lovemaking for both of us, and everything seemed to be working out fine?” and she said “Because I might have thought I’d reverted to my old self-destructive propensity of jumping in too fast and risking getting hurt and I needed time alone to think more about it. I know it makes no sense, especially the part about not seeing you again, and how I’m explaining it is only muddying matters, but for now that’s the best I can come up with. If you want, ask me again some other time and I might have a clearer answer. Anyhow, my sweetie, things continue to go well with us, don’t they? And I haven’t just now troubled you unnecessarily, right?” and he said “I don’t see how you can say I wouldn’t be terribly hurt if you had broken up with me then or said you didn’t want to see me for a while. I know what the last part means. In the past, whenever a woman said it I knew she was just giving me time to adjust to what was actually her cutting me off and that she had no intention of resuming anything with me. As for your question do things continue to go well with us, yes.” He’s also written a lot about their first meeting. Self-contained chapters of novels and parts of or complete short stories, changing it around some each time. In three or four of these pieces the party’s in different kinds of buildings in SoHo and TriBeCa: a three-story brownstone, a tall modern apartment building, a warehouse or factory—he forgets which—that’s been converted to six floor-through artist lofts, with a fancy women’s shoestore occupying the entire ground floor. Other times he meets her in a theater lobby with a mutual friend, at a subway token booth where he tells her he forgot his wallet and could she loan him a token or money to buy one and he’ll mail one back to her if she’ll give him her address, at a rally for the Solidarity movement in front of the Polish consulate on the East Side, at a book signing in an academic bookstore on the Upper West Side, with the Gwen character the author of a biography of a not-very-well-known avant-garde twentieth-century Russian fiction writer. He came into the store to browse and look at the literary magazines and maybe buy one or a book if they weren’t too expensive. A table was set up with Georgian wine and chilled Russian vodka and various pickled herrings and a small dish of caviar on a plate with little squares of black bread around it. The Gwen character—he thinks her name was Margo—was seated behind the signing table—no, it was Mona—with stacks of her book on it. A lot more copies were in two large cartons on the floor. Oh, boy, he thought, would he ever love to meet her. Beautiful face and smile, trim figure, nice-sized breasts, he liked the simple way she was dressed, and no doubt a big brain too. Also, the way she graciously and unhurriedly made conversation with each of the four people on line who wanted her to inscribe her book for them. “Take as much as you want,” she said, when a woman said she’s taking too much of her time; “I’m not going anywhere for the next hour and I’m truly enjoying our little chat. Thank you.” He looked at her hands and saw she wore no engagement ring or wedding band—an action he used, he thinks, in every piece he wrote about their first meeting, and also in each she had long blond hair, sometimes hanging loose over her shoulders or in a ponytail, but mostly pinned or rolled up in back, with a big enough clump there that he knew it was long. So let’s see, he thought, what could he do to meet her? Got it, and he grabbed her book out of one of the boxes and read the jacket copy and checked the price. Book was more than 400 pages and had lots of photographs and was published by a university press, so it was very expensive. Really worth buying it? Hopes so, but if his plan doesn’t work out he could always, when she wasn’t looking, and before he paid for it, slip it back into the box. He got on line with it. When his turn came—there was no one behind him—he said to her “Hi, how’s it going—exhausted by all this yet?” and she said “No, and I’m fine, thanks.” And then something like “I first want to say—and I’m going to buy your book, by the way—but how unusual it is for a bookstore, or maybe it was your publisher who sprung for it, to put out such a generous spread. Usually, and not that frequently these days—publishers and bookstores alike are cutting back—it’s crudités without the more expensive veggies, and cheap white wine. But caviar, and all the appropriate accompaniments? They must really love you. For me, a
nd here I’m talking about just once, it was pretzels and tortilla chips with no salsa or dip, and nothing to drink.” “Well, I’d like to give this store and my publisher credit for this modest spread—it’d certainly look better for me—but I happen to be the sole provider of it. I thought it the least I could do for anyone who’d make a special trip or stop what he was doing in the store to hear me.” “You read? I’m sorry, I didn’t know, and I missed it.” “You bet, I read. To standing room only, but that’s because the store manager said she had just one chair to spare—I’m sitting on it—and nobody wanted to sit on a cold uncarpeted floor. Around six people attended the reading. I’m sure half of them were store employees told to put on their coats and look like customers so I wouldn’t think the audience was too small. Believe me, I came with no illusions there’d be a crowd, and was simply doing what my publisher asked of me. But nothing will go to waste. I can always take home the unopened wine and recap the vodka bottle. As for the food, I perhaps overbought, but I love pickled herring of all sorts and it takes a while for it to spoil. I can’t say the same for the caviar, though, if any’s left, so you should go over there and have some now.” “I will, and some of your vodka too, if you don’t mind. But to change the subject, I also want to tell you how much I admire biography writing. It’s got to be the most difficult and time-consuming form there is. All that research before you even get a word down, and the traveling you must’ve done in the Soviet Union. And no doubt dozens of interviews with people who knew him and going through archives and having to read twice, three times, maybe more, all of his fiction, and according to the flap copy, he was very prolific, in addition to the thousands of letters it says he wrote. The copy also says this is the first book-length bio and exegesis of him and his work in any language. That means you had to retrace his life and get all the facts and such yourself and couldn’t crib some details, as a legitimate shortcut but in your own words and citing where all the references came from, from other scholars’ books. By the way, did this book come out of your Ph.D. thesis at Columbia, or was that on someone or something else? But I’m prying, which I usually don’t do, and as one of the women before said, taking too much of your time. I also probably don’t know what the heck I’m talking about as to what goes into writing biographies. So let me buy your book already before the store closes. But would you do me one favor, though? I don’t know how you’re going to take this—maybe you saw something like it coming long before—and if it’s wrong of me or wildly misdirected, and not because of anything you said or did, and you feel offended or just put off by it in any way, I apologize. But could you, when you inscribe the book to me, if you’ll still be willing to after what I’m about to say, put your phone number under your name?” She said “Now there’s an approach I never heard. And I’m not offended. I in fact think it’s funny. But I’d rather not have my phone number near my inscription or anywhere else in the book. I can just visualize it. You forgetting the book on a bus and some sleazy guy picking it up and calling me. No, that’s carrying it too far. But all right, if you want to get in touch with me to have coffee together one afternoon, you know my name and I’m the only one with it in the Manhattan phone book. Now tell me yours, in case you do call, so I’ll know who you are when you give it, and can I make the assumption you teach on the college level too?” “Nope. I just write what others teach, although nobody’s ever taught my work, far as I know, or written about it except in a few small mostly negative book reviews.” And he’s said a number of times to Gwen and their daughters and a friend or two and once in a taped phone interview—right after the call he had misgivings he said it and called the interviewer to delete that part when she edited the tape for radio and she said she would but didn’t—that his first meeting with Gwen was the single most important thing to happen to him. “Event” was the word he used in the interview. “How could it not be,” he said, or something like it, “for look what it led to. The deepest most enduring love relationship in my life and the marriage and children I always wanted and at least a dozen fictional pieces and a whole novel and about half of another one based on that night. I even took a teaching job I didn’t want and have held on to it for more than twenty years now so I could support a family and get good health insurance for them and send my daughters to college no matter how expensive and buy a house with lots of trees around it and no neighbors close by and do some traveling with my wife and spend summers in Maine in a nice rental cottage near the coast and have a good retirement plan and then when I’m retired, enough money put away to shell some of it out to my kids, and so on.” But maybe he’s saying—he means, what he’s saying is that he might be getting some of what happened in that first meeting with Gwen mixed up or in with what he changed or took liberties with in the writing of it. He thinks he finally got that thought straight. Anyway, that can happen and has several times, especially with something he’s written so much about. But where was he going before, regarding the bartender? Not so much her but the bar. He was excited at the possibility of seeing Gwen again, if just for a coffee and maybe a walk. That’s what he thought as he headed home soon after he left her. He’d gone into the bar to look her up in the Manhattan phone book to see if she was really in it with the name she gave. If she wasn’t in the book, what would he have done? Not think she intentionally misled him; she didn’t seem the type for that. If she didn’t want to give him her phone number, he would have thought, she’d have told him straight off that for one reason or another, or no reason given, she’d rather he didn’t call her. He wouldn’t have liked it. He probably would have thought at the time “Too bad, what a loss, first woman in a long time I’m really attracted to and think something could come of our seeing each other, but nothing I can do about it: she’s not interested, so that’s that.” Or maybe he would have pressed her a little—sure, that’s what he was like then—and said “Listen, what’s the harm, just for a cup of coffee, and, if the weather’s okay, maybe a short walk. Or forget the walk; just a coffee. Though maybe you don’t want to meet because you’re presently tied up with some guy and you don’t want to lead me on. If that’s the case, not that I have to tell you how to act, you should say so, although I still think it shouldn’t stop us from meeting sometime for a longer conversation about your work and past studies and European literature in general, even, over coffee,” or something like that. Also, if she wasn’t in the bar’s Manhattan phone book, he would have checked the cover of it for the period it was printed for. If it was even a year out of date, it might have meant she had an unlisted phone number then or had only recently got her apartment and didn’t have a phone yet at the time the book was printed, or did have one but it was too late to get her listing in it. If it was an old book—last year’s or later—and she wasn’t in it, he thinks he would have gone to another bar farther uptown, ordered a beer and asked the bartender for the Manhattan phone book, if it’s the current one, or looked for it at the pay phone there, if they had one, or just gone home and looked her up in his phone book. The phone company dropped off a stack of Manhattan phone books once a year in the vestibule of the brownstone he lived in then and he always picked one up and brought it to his apartment, so he was sure to have the current one. If she wasn’t in any of the phone books he looked at, current or out of date, he would have called Pati the next day for the phone number, saying he met Gwen for the first time at the elevator after they both left the party, they seemed to hit it off, at least enough so that when he asked her if he could call her sometime to meet for coffee or lunch, she didn’t so much give him her number as tell him how to get it in the Manhattan phone book, but he couldn’t find it. He looked in several other Manhattan phone books and her number wasn’t in them either. Would Pati have it? If she gave it to him right away—she might have said something like “Let me see if it’s all right with Gwen first, even if I’m sure it will he, based on what you just said”—he would have called Gwen that day or the next and said it was Martin Samuels from the other night, Pa
ti’s friend from Yaddo. He couldn’t find her name in the phone book where she said it’d be, so he got it from Pati, if that was okay. She still interested in having a coffee or something one day? If she is, then maybe they should just set a time and date. He also probably would have thought before he called Pati or went into another bar for a current Manhattan phone book or looked in the one he had at home, that maybe he got the spelling of her last name wrong. Then he would have looked up in the Manhattan phone book in the first bar, even if it was an old one, all the possible spellings of the name he could think of: Leaderman, Leiderman, Leederman, Lederman, even Liedermann and Leadermann and so on. But before he looked up any of those, he would have dialed Information from the pay phone in that bar and given the spelling of the last name he thought Gwen gave him and said he thinks it’s under “Gwendolyn” but it could also be under “Gwen” or just the initial G instead of a first name and that the address, if it’s listed, is an Upper West Side one, most likely around a Hundred-sixteenth Street between Amsterdam Avenue and Riverside Drive or even on Amsterdam or Riverside Drive—anyway, near Columbia University: a Hundred-tenth to a Hundred-twenty-fifth—and got her number that way. The bartender said there was a Manhattan phone book by the pay phone just past the entrance to the bar. He said he saw the phone when he came in but not the book, and she said the book’s got to be there unless someone’s stolen it again. “It’s attached to the phone stand by a chain, but a flimsy one,” he thinks she said. “Or it could be hiding in the little cubbyhole in the phone stand.” He went to the entrance. Chain but no book. He actually hadn’t seen the phone when he came in and doesn’t know how he could have missed it, but didn’t want to admit to the bartender he was so oblivious. Could be all he had his mind on was Gwen and getting into the bar and asking for a Manhattan phone book to see if she was listed in it, and if she was, to write her phone number down. Pen and folded-up sheet of paper he always had with him. But what does he do now, he thought, or something like it, go to another bar for a phone book? He also might have thought he should forget it for now—and dealing with the bartender, just from her harsh looks and voice, could turn out to be unpleasant—and pay up and leave the bar and go straight home and look in his phone book there. He really didn’t want the beer he ordered—he’d already drunk plenty for the time being. When he gets home, especially if he walks all the way, he’s sure, he may have thought, he’ll want a beer or two or couple of vodka and grapefruit juice drinks, something he started drinking when he was a bartender two years before, though he told his manager and customers if they asked, that it was plain juice to keep his energy up and just to drink something, and drink them while he sits in his easy chair and reads a book or the Times. He only ordered the beer, with no intention of taking more than a few sips of it, so the bartender wouldn’t think he came in just for the phone book. “Pain in the ass,” he could imagine her thinking, “making me look for the fucking book and then put it back.” He’s still like this. If he’s on a city street and he has to pee, which he’s recently been having to do frequently, and goes into a bar to use its restroom, he always first orders a beer, if he doesn’t have to pee real bad, and leaves most of it. If it’s a coffee shop he goes into, he orders a coffee at the counter and drinks it after he pees. If he has to pee real bad for both those or all the stools at the counter are filled, then he goes straight to the restroom and usually leaves without ordering anything. Leaves fast, though, without looking at the person behind the counter. In other words, he never likes to use something in a bar or coffee shop or place like that, without buying something, but the cheapest drink they have, and when he does, he always leaves a tip, even if he only drinks a little of the coffee or beer. Part of that’s because…because of what? Lost the thought. Not tired, either. He thinks something to do with…about how relieved he is to have peed. That he was able to find, he probably means, a restroom that was free. He went back to the bar in the bar, the counter, whatever it should be called here so it’s clear what he went back to—suddenly he’s having trouble not only remembering what he was saying but putting his thoughts into words—and sat on a stool at it. Other customers in the bar? Thinks so; doesn’t remember, but can easily picture it. Bartender put his glass of draft beer in front of him—so she knew what she was doing, not drawing and putting it down before—and said something like “I was right, right? The phone book’s in the cubbyhole or dangling on the chain,” and he said something like “Chain’s there, book’s not, so it was probably stolen like you said. Look, I was once a bartender—not too long ago, either—and we always kept the Manhattan phone book under the bar’s counter. In fact, four of the five boroughs’ phone books. We didn’t keep Staten Island’s. I think we even had the Manhattan Yellow Pages, but all of them in case a customer wanted to look up a phone number or address.” “Then you must’ve not had a pay phone in your bar,” and he said “I think we did, in the three I worked at, and with the Manhattan phone book and Yellow Pages by it or resting on top of the phone. The books under the bar were mainly for the convenience of a customer who didn’t want to get off his stool to look something up. If he wanted to make a call, though, he had to use the pay phone.” She asked where he worked and he said “Main one was a restaurant-bar on West 57th between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. Lunch-hour drinkers, mostly, and sort of the runoff from the Coliseum trade shows, and also the after-work crowd starting around five for a couple of hours. Subway entrance was right there, and for a while, at happy hour, we had a buffet table with free hors d’oeuvres.” “You must’ve made a bundle,” she said, “getting regulars. Here, it’s more than not customers I’ll never see again, so I usually get stiffed. Okay, though you’re making more work for me, so don’t be next asking me for Brooklyn,” and she went to the end of the bar, opened a cabinet under it and got out the Manhattan phone book and gave it to him. He checked, and it was the latest edition: 1978–79. He looked up Gwen’s name in it and it was there as she said it’d be: the only Gwendolyn Liederman in the book, at 425 Riverside Drive. Way uptown, he thought. Past Columbia? It could be that enormous curve-shaped Columbia-owned faculty residence he’d been in once, a few blocks south of 125th. He forgets the building’s number, if he ever knew it, since he was taken to this private piano recital by someone who was invited. The area didn’t seem that safe, and it might worry him going there to pick her up or take her home, if it ever came to that. But she did it, though maybe during the day it was safe and at night she always took a cab to her building, or called one from it, or got off at the 116th Street subway station on Broadway and then got a cab. Or the Riverside Drive bus—the number 5?—stopped right in front of her building and same with the downtown one across the street. But he remembered a way to figure out what street her building was at. For about two years when he was fourteen and fifteen, he was a delivery boy for a food market and catering service in the West Seventies. To help him make his deliveries, he had a street-location guide to find the cross-street a building was closest to for every avenue on the Upper West Side. He only delivered the smaller orders; the larger ones and anything to the East Side or any area that would have taken him a long time to get to, were delivered by truck. Central Park West and Riverside Drive were the two easiest avenues to use on the guide, and he still remembers how to do them now. For Riverside Drive, just lop off the last digit of the building number and add 72, the street the Drive started at, to what was left. For Central Park West, it was add 60. West End Avenue he remembers as being complicated to do, and he rarely delivered—maybe never—anything to Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues, since those two hadn’t been gentrified yet, and the place he worked for was kind of fancy and expensive. He used the guide for Gwen’s building number and came up with a hundred-fourteen. So it might be Columbia-owned, he thought, and if so, a better and more convenient location and probably a more attractive building too than the institutional-type one near a 125th. He wrote her name and phone number on the folded-up sheet of typing paper he took from one of his
pants pockets—most likely one of the back ones, which was where he usually kept it and still does, whenever he goes out; the pen, then and now, always in a side pocket so he doesn’t sit on it. He thinks he finished his beer and thought something like Hot damn—well, maybe not that. Just: Oh, boy, she was leveling with him after all. Now, what he wouldn’t give to have their first date, so to speak, and he could call it that because why else would she have given him her number if not to see him again, but to go well and then to start seeing each other regularly and for it to become serious between them and for them to start sleeping together exclusively, if he can put it that way—nobody else—and everything like that and for it to only get better and them closer and marriage, even, and for it to never end. It’s about time, and he can visualize it; foresee it as a possibility; something. For everything about her; everything; he just knows. And with a name like Liederman, he remembers thinking—maybe not the “Gwendolyn” so much, and not from anything about her mannerisms and face and voice and way she spoke and what she said—she’s probably Jewish, so even better. For all the women he got serious with and the three he lived with the past fifteen years, except one, Rhoda, whom he gradually didn’t much care for but it took a while to finally stop seeing her because she kept calling and was so good in bed, were Gentile, and most had a kid or two—actually only one had two—and the relationships always soured or sputtered out. And she didn’t seem to have a kid. In fact, it was obvious she didn’t; it would have come out. Good, because he already told himself after his last bad breakup more than a year ago that if he did get involved with another woman, and he was beginning to doubt he ever would, he wanted it to be with someone who had no kids and was a nonobserving Jew, among all the other things he wanted her to be—smart, interesting, sexy, gentle, and so on. Pretty, genuine, slim, intellectual. Was that asking too much? Was it asking for the wrong things? No, he doesn’t think so. The change could be good. And he wants to be happy with someone and have a relationship that’s easy for a change and lasts and goes on and the rest of it, and she seems perfect for him—again, in the short time they spoke and long time he observed her at the party, everything about her, everything, so this has to work. It’s got to, he means, got to. He put the folded-up sheet of paper into one of his pants pockets, paid up, gave an extra large tip for a single draft beer, said to the bartender, when she took the phone book off the bar to put it back in the cabinet, something like “Much thanks for the use of the book. You’ve no idea how important it was to me, which must sound silly to you but it’s the truth,” and left.