His Wife Leaves Him

by Stephen Dixon

  New Year’s Eve. They had three parties to go to. The first was at her parents’ apartment in the West Seventies. “They give it every year,” she said, “and it’ll be nice for you to first meet them in a festive setting.” The second was at the SoHo loft of her best friend and her friend’s husband, both artists. “There’ll be lots of music and fine wine and champagne. Vincent, and I know you’ll want to say it’s an appropriate name for him because of what I’m about to tell you, is a wine maven of the most extravagant sort. He has a wine cellar in their building with more than two thousand bottles, and the best of them will be out tonight.” The third, a few blocks from her apartment, he was invited to yesterday by the host whom he’d bumped into on Broadway. She was once married to a very old friend of his. “I don’t really see the point of our going to her party,” she said, “as you’re not friendly with her anymore and you haven’t seen her in years. But since you’re going to two of mine, I can go to one of yours, but can we make it short?” “If we feel we’re over-partied by then,” he said, “or just over-champagned and over-kissed, we can even skip it.” Going up the elevator to her parents’, she said “We’ll stay no more than an hour, have some kippers and herring and lox to minimize the effects of too much to drink later on—the Russians swear by the pickled and smoked fish antidote—and then head downtown.” One woman there—a research scientist; in fact, they were all, woman and men, professionals—said to him “May I steal you for a while to question you as to who you are? So far, you’re an unknown quantity, and we’re all curious about you.” She led him to the kitchen and asked where he was raised and educated and were his parents born here and what does he do for a living and what are some of the titles of his books and in what magazines may she find his stories. “I belong to a good library, and when it doesn’t have what I want, there’s an excellent bookstore in my neighborhood. This is a reading crowd we have here, all very intelligent and high-minded about literature, so if you’re a serious author, I think we can sell some of your books.” He said he only had three titles and they’re short ones and easy to remember, and gave them. “Now I’d like to ask you a personal question,” she said. “What are your intentions to Gwendolyn? You have to understand, we are all former refugees, almost all of us Holocaust survivors, met in New York City after the war, and are like family to one another to replace the ones we lost, and Gwendolyn is like our own child.” “We’ve only known each other a month,” he said, “though for the last week and a half have seen each other almost every day. So I’d say I like her a lot and enjoy her company, and that what I find particularly appealing about her is her gentleness and intelligence and warmth,” and she said “Does it go deeper than that? I can say that for most of us here, outside of our own, she is our favorite child, so we would be greatly upset if any hurt was done to her.” “You don’t have to worry. Women usually end up hurting me, which I’d think is better than the reverse. But you should speak to her and see what she thinks,” and she said “I plan to, but not tonight. So, my opinion, after speaking to you, is that you are a pleasant, serious and honest person, with a good sense of humor, so I can only hope that something long-lasting materializes between the two of you. As you might know, and if not, will surely learn, her one marriage was a catastrophe.” That night he met her best friend and her husband for the first time too. As with her parents at their crowded party, he didn’t get to talk to them much. “Another time,” her father had said. The food, wine and champagne were very good. But the music was too loud and the living room where the dancing took place too dark and the cigarette and cigar and pot smoke were stifling and smelling up his clothes and probably his hair and the strobe lights hurt his eyes. After an hour, he said to her “Do you think we could go?” and explained why. “If you want to stay longer and dance with someone—music’s too fast for me and I’d look silly dancing dances I don’t know, and there seem to be a couple of guys who want to dance some more with you—I’ll stay in the kitchen and nurse a glass or two of wine. You were right; it’s really good stuff—everything they served.” “No, I’m ready to go. Four times on the dance floor are enough for me. Do you want to go to your friend’s party?” and he said “We don’t have to if you don’t want. We could go to a nice bar around here, order champagne and toast the new year in there.” “That’d be depressing. Let’s go to your friend’s, and it’s close to home. New Year’s isn’t important to me.” “Except for whom you’re with,” and she said “I like being with you tonight, but who I’m with on New Year’s Eve isn’t that important too.” It was a small party. Maybe eight people. They sat on chairs or the floor in the living room—there was no couch—and talked about the middle school in the Bronx they all seemed to teach at and how angry and tough so many of the students were and incompetent the administrators. Food was a few leftover pastries, and the only things to drink were hard cider and cheap wine. “Don’t go into the kitchen,” someone warned. A while before, someone from the SRO building that faced the women’s kitchen shot a bullet through the window. “Fortunately, everyone was in the living room at the time,” the woman said. They found the slug in the wall—“From a .22, a gun expert here said, which is why it only made a tiny hole in the window, with little cracks around it.” “I don’t know how you can live here after that,” Gwen said, and the woman said “At the rent I’m paying, I can’t afford not to.” “Did you call the police?” and she said “I was advised it’d be an exercise in futility. For what are they going to do—go through every room facing my window? There must be a hundred.” “Wouldn’t they be able to tell which window it came from by the trajectory of the bullet?” and the woman said “You’ve been watching too many TV shows,” and Gwen said “I don’t watch any.” “Maybe you’re right,” she said. “But I’ll just keep my kitchen shade down for a few weeks and the kitchen dark when I’m not in it, and hope the shooter moves out—the turnover in these flophouses is very high.” Soon after, Gwen got him alone and said “Please let’s leave. This place gives me the willies, and I don’t want to have my first kiss of the new year here. I’m also afraid one of the guests—the one with the Hebro; he’s been eyeing me—is going to use the New Year’s excuse to kiss me.” “What time is it?” she said on the street, and he said “Three minutes till twelve.” Just then they heard horns blowing and cars honking and people shouting “Happy New Year,” and he said “I guess my watch is a little slow.” She took her hand out of his and said “Well?” and he kissed her. When they got back to her apartment, he said “Not a great evening, except for meeting your parents and friends, however brief, but New Year’s Eves never were.” “I had a good time, other than for the bullet through the window and, I’m hesitant to say, your friend and her friends,” and he said “And I very much enjoyed being with you. I can’t imagine what kind of evening it would have been without you. I probably would have gone to that last debacle and left after half an hour, claiming I had some other place to go to or didn’t feel well, and gone home and opened a good bottle of wine, or let’s say one of my two bottles of wine, and read the newspaper. But I couldn’t have gone to that party if I didn’t know you. I was only in the Columbia neighborhood, where I bumped into her and we got to talking and she invited me to her party, because of you. So I just would have visited my mother around eight, instead of six, which I did, and had two or three drinks, instead of one, from the bottle of Jack Daniels I brought her, and then gone home too early to buy the next day’s Times. While you, you might have met a new fellow at your friends’ party. Some of them were handsome and spiffily dressed and quite polished looking, and good dancers and more your age than I am, and New Year’s Eve parties tend to bring out the mating instinct in unattached people,” and she said “There could always be that chance—I think I’ve met half my boyfriends and also my future husband at parties—but I doubt I would have gone if I didn’t have a date. It’s not a good night to be a single woman riding the subway.” “You could have taken a cab,” and she said “I could have, bu
t who’s to say I would have been able to get one coming home.” “Did any other men call you to go out tonight?” and she said “To be perfectly honest, yes, two—men I’ve been close to—but I said I was taken.” “That’s nice to hear—the last part. But you wouldn’t have even gone to your parents’ party?” and she said “For an hour…for that one I could take the bus. They’d be disappointed if I didn’t come, and I love all their friends. After, I would have taken the bus or a cab home long before midnight, when they’d still be available.” “Incidentally,” he said, “did one of the women there—I think her name was Riva, or Eva—talk to you about me?” and she said “Riva Pinska…yes, and I know she talked to you about me. We don’t have to tell each other what we told her. I hope you liked her and didn’t think her questions were too nosy. As she must have told you, as with my parents they all lost most to all of their families in the war, so they’re extremely protective of me.” “I told her I would never kick you down a flight of stairs. No, that’s a bad joke. First of the year, and a lulu. I’m sorry. I don’t know where it came from. No, I wanted to tell her I think I’m falling for you, but didn’t think she should be the first to hear that,” and she said “A good recovery from a rather strange gaffe. Now, do you want a nightcap—I don’t—or should we just wash up and go to bed? I’m very tired.” “But what else do you have to say?” and she said “I’m thinking about it.”

  The first time she saw him cry. They were eating dinner in her apartment. A particularly sad part of a Corelli concerto grosso was playing on the record player. It was still light out and the windows were open and they were both in short-sleeved Tshirts. So it was late spring or early fall, around or a couple of months more than a half year after they met, when the phone rang. She answered it, and said “It’s for you—Pearl Morton,” and he said “Pearl? Rob Heimarck’s old girlfriend? Uh-oh; bad news,” and he took the phone and said “Hi, Pearl. How are you?” and she said “Not good. And I’m sorry for disturbing you at your friend’s place. I originally wanted to get you at home. You’re not listed?” and he said “No, I’m listed,” and she said “Well, I couldn’t find it. Roberto had an address book on a chair by his bed, it had an old number of yours—must have been from when you were still living with your mother, because that’s who I spoke to and she gave me this number and your apartment’s but said chances were you’d be here. As you probably guessed by now—” and he said “He died?” and she said “Had a heart attack in bed when he was trying to call someone, probably for help. The phone was off the hook when they found him and the address book was open to the letter G. But that doesn’t mean anything. The pages may have turned themselves. You know he had diabetes,” and he said “I knew he was sick with something but I didn’t know with what.” “I’m surprised,” she said. “It wasn’t as if he kept it a secret, and you two were once pretty close. Had it for twenty years. Gave himself an insulin shot twice a day, or did when I was living with him. Lately, because he was getting so weak, he had a visiting nurse or a friend do it for him. The diabetes is what gave him the heart attack.” “I’m sorry, Pearl. Very sorry. I know what you meant to him and what he meant to you,” and she said “Yeah, well, I thought you should know. Happened three days ago. His body’s been given to science, as was his wish and because he knew he had no money to be cremated, and his ashes will be scattered around Mt. Tamalpais, which is what he really wanted. But there will be a memorial, and I’ll let you know. He liked you, you know—your fortitude and your work,” and he said “Thanks for telling me that, and of course, same goes from me to him.” “That’s not what Roberto told me, and it sort of hurt him. But okay, he’s dead, so we won’t go into it. Will you be able to say something at the memorial? I’m lining up people now. I figured, you being a writer for so many years, you’d be able to scratch a minute or two out and read it.” “I’ll try. As you might not know, nonfiction doesn’t come easy to me,” and she said “So lie, what the hell. Now I’ve got to make some other calls,” and she said goodbye. He sat back at the table. “You heard,” he said. “Roberto was a good friend of mine. Met him summer of ’61 at a writers’ conference we went to at Wagner College. Saul Bellow was the fiction teacher. Then, the late sixties, we stopped meeting as often, I forget why. I think it was more on my part than his. I know he lived so slovenly that I hated going to his apartment because I thought I’d come home with cockroaches in my clothes. I actually used to shake out my coat after I left his place. Later on I only met him for coffee or beer once, at the most, twice a year, and for the last few years, not at all. But we should finish dinner.” He picked up his knife and fork, started crying, and put them down. She took his hand and put it to her cheek. “I don’t know why I’m crying. I never would have thought I would. The music’s not helping, meaning, it’s helping,” and he got up and shut it off, and sat back down. “He was such a nice guy and always a big booster of my work. One time, I remember, he came over to my apartment when I lived on East 88th Street. I told him I was going to send my new novel to New Directions or Grove Press—anyway, one of them near where he lived in the Village—and he said ‘Don’t trust the mail with your manuscript,’ and volunteered to drop it off there instead. Next day he calls and says he started reading my novel on the subway, couldn’t put it down, read it till four in the morning, could he have another day to finish it? He calls the next day and says he finished it that afternoon and made the delivery. ‘It’s fantastic,’ he says. ‘They have to take it, and that’s what I told the receptionist I gave it to,’ and went on and on with his praise. I should have done the same thing with him, after I read a story of his in a magazine, and then his only published novel, which he gave me, rather than being stingy with my praise and a bit nitpicky. That could have been what stopped us from meeting as much. That he thought I didn’t like his work. And he’d be right—he wasn’t a good writer, at times he was even a lousy writer, but I never said anything close to that. Was I jealous that he got a book out before me? Not with the book he got out, but I got to admit I was a little sore. So maybe the falling-out was mostly my fault. But too late to smooth things over and make amends. And what a way to go. In bed, trying to phone someone for help, Pearl said. A very decent guy and a much better friend than I was, and I’ll miss him, even though I didn’t see him for so many years,” and he started crying again. And the first time he saw her cry? At the same table. He’d finished wiping his eyes with his handkerchief or table napkin and saw her crying. “What are you crying about?” he said, and she said “You. I hate seeing you sad.” “C’mere,” he said, and he moved his chair closer to hers without getting up from it and hugged her and she hugged him. Then he started crying again and she started crying again. So also the first time they cried together.