What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  She didn’t try to dodge me or anything like that,

  so I thought it was a good sign. When I’d pressed

  down harder on her lips, she pulled back and said

  “No, that’s enough. Things are different now.”

  Shortly before she left I asked if she’d read anything

  interesting lately, and she said The selected letters

  of Joyce—it recently came out and was reviewed,”

  and I said “Oh? Me too. The one with lots of heretofore

  unpublished erotic if not masturbatory letters between

  Nora and Joyce when they were still fairly young,

  right around your age. What a coincidence.”

  “Not much of one. You got me started with him

  —I’d always resisted, thought he’d be too difficult

  —and now my passion for his life and work is out of control.”

  “I get blamed for everything…something my father

  used to say about himself,” and reached across the

  bed to the night table and turned over the book.

  The letters, see? Just so you wouldn’t think I

  was lying to accrue some advantage with you.

  Hardbound or paper?” and she said “Same as yours

  —what do you think? I only have so much money,

  so even six dollars was a sacrifice, but I had to have it.”

  Her last words before she told me not to get up,

  she’ll see me, and blew a kiss and left.

  “Sorry it didn’t work out,” I’d wanted to say, and

  what would she have answered? Probably just a shrug.

  I’d also given her a book due at her library in a

  few days and which I’d checked out and was going

  to mail back. She said she’d read a few pages of

  one on artistic creativity I’d left behind and was

  a couple of weeks due, and found it very dull.

  “What do I owe you for the late fee?” and she said

  “Grace”—the librarian of her town’s small library

  —“said you have your own card, something I didn’t

  know—I’d always thought you were checking them out

  on mine—and that she’d collect from you next time

  you’re there. I didn’t say anything.”

  Made coffee, read today’s Times in bed while I sipped

  from the mug, tried to stay calm but couldn’t.

  Stripped down to my boxer shorts and exercised—

  pushups, situps, swinging from the chin bar between

  the bathroom’s door frame, running in place.

  Drank several glasses of water.

  Ate carrots, celery, raw cauliflower florets, peanut

  butter on crackers and thin slices of Swiss cheese.

  Squeezed the croissants in their bag into the

  refrigerator’s tiny freezer. Never cared for them,

  or haven’t since I lived in Paris and had one with

  jam and café au lait almost every morning in the

  back of a café while I read the Herald Tribune.

  Walked across Central Park. Bought her daughter

  a beaded necklace for Christmas from a jewelry crafts

  stand in front of the Met on Fifth.

  Walked downtown in the park thinking “I don’t feel

  too bad. A little better than I thought I would,

  in fact. So she’s gone; so what? I’ll see. Could

  lead to something good. New woman I might even be

  more taken with, and she with me and with greater

  constancy. Someone who lives in the city—maybe even

  on the West Side, so I won’t have to go so far to

  see her—and who’s marriageable but never married,

  or if once married, no kid, much as I adored hers.”

  Wished we’d had the baby she aborted without my wanting

  her to. “Are you kidding?” when I said a year ago

  “Let’s get married and keep the kid.” Oh, if only

  she’d wanted it too, but the hell with it. “Do you

  hear?” I said in my head. The bloody hell.”

  Saw places in the park we’d walked past, commented

  about, rested at. Zoo Cafeteria we’d sat outside in

  the cold, pretending it was a ski lodge, though I,

  unlike her, had never skied, and had hot chocolate

  and shared a warmed-up roll.

  Tonight I won’t feel so good. But with a little

  vodka and a lot of wine, I’ll be much better tomorrow.

  And day after that, not great but just fine, and

  every day after that, always better.

  I exited the park at Central Park West and 72nd,

  headed to a liquor store near Broadway for a bottle

  of wine. When goddamn, on Columbus near the corner,

  she was unlocking the driver’s door of her VW bug.

  I ran up to her while she was putting a shopping

  bag on the front seat, and said “Do I know you?”

  and tried to kiss her.

  “No way,” she said, swiveling out of my grip.

  “I know you too and have read your stories. You

  and your surrogates never stop with a civilized kiss.

  By the way, I never asked—how’s your mother?”

  “The same, the same, but do you mind if we don’t

  start that how’s-so-and-so talk today, okay?

  I’m sort of fed up with it.”

  “I thought you wouldn’t get angry,” she said.

  “Who the hell’s angry? I’m not. Say, how about

  a coffee for old friends’ sake?” and she said

  “Got to go. Only came down to quickly see you

  and do some Christmas shopping. Now I have to get

  back to correct papers and prepare next week’s classes.”

  She got in her car, door was still open, and I said

  “Boy, you’re sure not going to suffer.”

  “What about you? You’ve said yourself you only

  give your suffering over somebody three days.

  Then they’re out of your mind, which I find healthy.”

  “That was two months after I first met you and we

  split. Not three years, and half of it living together.

  Screw it,” and I waved with my back turned to her,

  and instead of going to the liquor store, I headed for home.

  Few seconds later, I heard footsteps running up

  behind me. I turned, but it wasn’t her. Some young

  father pretending to run away from his young son.

  BURGLARS.

  Something’s wrong. I unlocked the door to my mother’s apartment as I do every night to check up on her and take her garbage out, and a breeze blew past me into the public hall. It’s winter and very cold out and during this time of year she always keeps her windows closed.

  I go in and see from the foyer, papers floating to the kitchen floor. I run to the kitchen. Her pocketbook’s on the floor, has been turned inside out and its personal papers and coins are scattered about.

  I yell “You sonofabitch, I’ll kill you,” and open a kitchen drawer for a knife, but right away know I’ll never use it on anyone. But I can hit a head with a hard object if I have to, so I grab a candlestick out of a cabinet and bang the base against the counter and yell “You better get out the way you got in here or just peacefully identify yourself to me and leave through the front door, or I’m going to beat your thieving head in,” and go into the breakfast room.

  A window to the backyard is open and two of its bars have been pried apart. The backyard door is locked and I open it and go outside, and nobody’s there. I check the downstairs bathroom. The light’s on, there’s a cigarette in the toilet bowl and a faint odor of cigarette smoke. I flush the toilet, then think I shouldn’t have—police might have wanted to
examine the cigarette—and go upstairs.

  The ceiling light in the girls’ room is on and all the dresser drawers have been pulled out, nothing inside them but clothes of my five brothers and sisters from ten to twenty years ago. I look under the bed, inside the closet, throw open the door of the bathroom right outside the bedroom and shove the shower curtain aside.

  My mother, and I run to the front of the apartment, turning on the lights as I go and glancing around, and listen at her door. I hear breathing, she seems to be sleeping. I turn on the night light in her room. She dozed off in her house dress, closed book on her chest, afghan she’d knitted, covering her. I make the same quick search: closet, bathroom, under the bed, candlestick ready to come down on the burglar’s head, though I’m almost sure he escaped through the breakfast room window and over a backyard fence right after he heard me open the front door.

  I put the book on her night table and turn off the light. I search the baby’s room next to my mother’s, the linen closet, living room, boys’ room, which is now unused like the baby’s and girls’ rooms and where I slept with my older brothers in bunk beds for about fifteen years.

  I phone the police from the kitchen, then yell from the backyard “Attention, neighbors who have backyards on these streets. A burglar, about ten minutes ago, broke into my mother’s apartment here and climbed over one of the connecting fences to get away, so turn on your yard lights and all your rear room lights and make sure your rear doors and windows are locked tight.”

  I repeat the message and then return to my mother’s room and shake her shoulder. “Mom, it’s me, don’t worry,” and I tell her what happened. She puts on a robe, is very shaky and I have to hold her arm when she walks downstairs. I make us both a drink. We sit in the breakfast room while we wait for the police. It’s now her sitting room of sorts, where she embroiders and reads and watches TV. There used to be a table and eight chairs in here when the family had breakfast together every Sunday and dinner together almost every night.

  She says This never used to happen on the block when you kids were growing up.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “We used to keep the front door unlocked during the day because of all you kids running in and out, and nobody but someone we welcomed or invited ever came in.”

  “You started locking the front door about twenty years ago, when all of us were grown up or could be trusted with keys, but I get your point.”

  “But double bars I didn’t have on these windows till three years ago, and only because a couple of neighbors got burglarized from the backyard, but the thieves still break in.”

  “I’ll get more bars put on. Stronger ones. Maybe even gates, if you can overcome your aesthetic distaste for them, but you’ll be safe.”

  “It’s not my safety I’m worried about. At my age, though I don’t want them here, they can come and go, so long as they don’t do it while I’m asleep. It’s just that I hate to see these things deteriorate the way they have, for everybody’s sake.”

  “Your safety is important. You’re just talking like that because you’re flustered and upset. You’re healthy and can live lots of years yet, so we’re going to make it extra safe for you here. Unless you want to give up the place and come live with Marion and me.”

  “Never. I like my privacy even more than you do. And we’d end up barely tolerating each other after a few months, and I’d probably sour your marriage a little besides. You will sleep over tonight, though, won’t you?”

  “Sure. In the boys’ room. Marion would want me to. Then early tomorrow I’ll call the locksmith.”

  The police come, write up a report and give us a prediction and statistic: we’ll never again see what was stolen and this was only one of an average of ten burglaries a day in this precinct.

  One of the policemen picks up the silver candlestick and says This what you made your noise with to chase the kid away?” They already determined it was a strong man with a crowbar who pried the bars apart and a small wiry kid who slipped in. Think you would have used it on him like you did on the countertop?”

  “I don’t know, now that you say it was a kid.”

  “Even if it was a kid, you think he came empty-handed and wouldn’t have used his weapon on you, and believe me, he had one.”

  Then I suppose I would have had to protect myself with this stick, though I wouldn’t have liked myself later on for doing it.”

  “No,” my mother says, “I wouldn’t want you hitting any child, even if it meant he took everything from me.”

  “Even if it meant he’d bash in your son’s brains protecting you?” the policeman says.

  There are ways. There have to be. Talk, for instance. He was a junior high school teacher, so he knows how to talk to boys and girls.”

  “Talk. That’s years ago. When I was a boy, and I’ve got at least ten years on your son. Anyway, you’ll have to take it to a silversmith to get the dent out, if you can find one these days. Looks like an antique.”

  “It is,” I say. “A wedding gift to my folks from my mother’s parents more than fifty years ago.”

  “You want the truth after all this time?” my mother says. “I only told your dad that’s where they came from. It’s fifty years old, all right, but I bought the pair of them in a department store for myself so he’d think my parents were even more generous than they were.”

  “He never knew?”

  “Why would I have told him? It was only a harmless fib. Now it comes out because of this robbery and I don’t want to tell real lies for the policeman’s report. Otherwise, I would have kept it to myself for life.”

  THE LEADER.

  Hitler was coming to town and he wanted one of us girls. Young, he liked them young. “How young?” I asked the prostitute who told me this.

  “Young like you,” she said. That’s what I heard from a friend of mine who’s still a prostitute in Berlin. She was in a house that Hitler went to—oh, that was a long time ago. Now he doesn’t go to houses. We just go to him and he or one of his aides selects. Anyway, he specified young—at least twenty years younger than him. That was ten years ago when he was first becoming our leader. Now it’s maybe thirty years younger than him—who knows? So you got a good chance to be the winner, sweetheart.”

  “Did your friend say what he’s really like in person? Because I don’t think I could take doing it with such an incredibly powerful and famous man.”

  “He’s all right.”

  “She say that?”

  “She didn’t say much. Just that she didn’t get him. She was already too old. And that he took the youngest girl in the house, who also happened to be the prettiest and best built, so nobody was sure if he picked her only for her being young or pretty or her build or what. She had big boobs, that’s what my friend said. Big and high and a tiny waist and hips that were in proportion to her breasts and long legs. And she was blond.”

  “He prefers them blond too?”

  “It’s difficult to say what he prefers. Remember, this is all secondhand. I don’t know what other houses he’s been to or if he’s changed his taste much in women since then, but he’s seen plenty of women, I understand. That’s what a general friend told me. Not a friend—a client, a one-shot deal. He came in here a couple of years ago for a supposed quickie and said before we did anything ‘You know what?’ I said ‘No, what?’ He said ‘Did you know I’m on Hitler’s personal general staff?’ I said ‘No kidding, that’s great.’ What else was I to say? He said ‘Wouldn’t you like to know what Hitler’s really like?’ I said ‘Yeah, yeah, tell me,’ because I could see he was aching to say it. I didn’t actually care then or now, but you do?”

  “Well, yes, in a way. After all, he is Hitler. The leader of the entire continent. Maybe one of the greatest men ever.”

  The hell with Hitler, and you know it. And the hell with all the continents he conquers—though don’t breathe a word to anyone I said any of this. Oh, go ahead. Tell the world—what do I care? I’
ll say I never said it. No, that never works anymore. But I couldn’t give a toot what Hitler’s really like. Just give me my money, get your cookies, and go—next customer, please, know what I mean? But he was a general and, if he was telling the truth, on Hitler’s staff. And he had plenty of money to throw around also, so I said ‘Of course, I’ve always been eager to know. But he’s very nice, though, am I right? Sort of like a god.’ I said that to make sure he knew whose side I was on. He said ‘He’s a god like you say, but a real god.’ I could see he was having second thoughts, as if I might be an informer or so patriotic that I’d run out and blab if he said the least thing critical of Hitler. ‘You would like him,’ he said. ‘He goes for girls like you and makes them excited with his godlike qualities, and I’m not just talking about the spiritual and moral, you understand?’ ‘Not exactly,’ I said. ‘Because maybe I shouldn’t be telling you this, General, but I heard from a prostitute friend who’s now dead that he likes girls much younger than me—half his age, preferably–and with big parts in all the important places, no disrespect meant, is that true?’ He said ‘The cut of the female figure doesn’t matter to him so long as it’s perfect for him.’ Now that can almost mean nothing or two things, which can also be nothing if you can’t or don’t want to figure it out, so I dropped the subject. After, which is way after, for that was a weary old general who I think fought his greatest and maybe last battle on me and in the end won at an enormous sacrifice to himself, he said ‘Want to know what Hitler’s really like?’ I said ‘Didn’t you ask me that before?’ ‘Did I?’ he said, and I quickly said ‘No, it must have been someone else,’ for he seemed angry. He said ‘Who? You know people who are talking disparagingly about our great leader?’ ‘No, just some harmless lieutenant in the tank corps I saw a year ago.’ ‘You go to bed with lieutenants?’ he said. ‘No, I only overheard him downstairs when I was wandering through the main room looking for a lost brooch. Me, I save myself only for colonels and higher.’ Anyway, Hitler’s coming to town to check the military base, I suppose, and his first stop after he detrains is the Forest Hotel. We’re all to be in a room there when he or his aide comes in to make the choice. And no men for any of us till after the selection, as he wants the one who’s picked to be, at least for the time being, pure.”