What Is All This?

by Stephen Dixon

  “Long time ago. Garbage barge. Skippered it around the bigger ships and smaller destroyers. But I was a lousy sailor. Bad sea legs. I also can’t stand to fight. The judo and stuff was just for mental discipline and body tone. I’m really a peaceful man experiencing a painful crisis. But if your wife suddenly told you she’s slept with six other men in the last year and in the last few months with one in particular and that she hates your guts and sight and said all this in the dark of your bedroom moments after you told her how much you still adore her and long to make love with her, I doubt either of you would have taken it any better than I.”

  “I never married,” Russell says.

  Then you, Jim.”

  “I was. To be honest, splitting up was the next best thing that ever happened to my wife and me, the first being our brood.”

  “You see, Walt?” she says. “If the marriage isn’t working out, why postpone the divorce?”

  That’s how we felt, Mrs. Wilkerson.”

  “Oh, do call her Edith,” I say. “Anything more than that, she’ll begin to mind.”

  “We had three kids. Bing, bang and boom, that’s how quickly they seemed to come. But we’d gotten hitched too young. So, very amicably, no dillydallying with legal advice or anything, we decided, after we’d seriously talked it over, and have continued to honor our original arrangement once we knew the marriage was through—”

  “Yes, yes,” I say, “that was you two, but with me it’s different. I still love my wife and think a reconciliation can be made.”

  That’s absurd and a lie, Walt,” she says.

  “Will you just get these men some coffee?”

  “No, thanks,” Jim says. “We just had breakfast.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a cup,” Russell says.

  “Heat up the Danish also. Please, they work hard and are probably hungry.” She goes into the kitchen. “Can I speak plainly with you guys, man to men?”

  “Of course,” Jim says. That’s what we’re also here for.”

  “It’s not only my tender feelings for her or that I can’t see myself suddenly living alone after so many years of marriage, kids, barracks, barges, college dorms and with my siblings and folks. Or even those six brief liaisons and now the one long one. But then when a woman tells you she’s never loved you and in fact could never stand you and you’re that and this when you always thought you were this and that, well—”

  “You got agitated,” Jim says.

  The windows. The everything. I even threatened to kill her and her lawyer both.”

  “Shouldn’t do that.”

  “Don’t I know. It’s all wrong. But man—a person, is only human. If we didn’t get excited sometimes, we’d explode. Or we’d be automatons, if that word’s still used.”

  “Even so—three windows. It’s going to cost a lot. This house jointly owned?”

  “She can have everything—that’s not my point. But only after I bust a little more of it up first.”

  “No can do,” Russell says. The house has to be totally yours to destroy. Even if it is, if your destroying it is disturbing the peace of your neighbors, you’d be breaking another law and so can’t destroy your own house. It sounds unfair. You should be able to do with your own property what you want, right? But if you live around people, you have to show respect for them if that’s the norm of the land and the law.”

  “Wait till your divorce settlement comes through,” Jim says. Then, if you get the house and still feel the same way, do it with as little noise as possible and staying within the building safety code. Bust up the whole inside if you want—we won’t stop you. The outside might be a different story. For instance, something like a very neglected lawn or façade that’s beginning to depreciate the property value of the rest of the neighborhood, I think they can get you for that too.”

  Then I ought to swing along with the divorce, say all my threats were said in a fit of anger and I didn’t mean them, and try to get this house. If I do, I can do what

  I like inside it providing I don’t cause too much of a ruckus or make the place structurally unsound and its exterior isn’t visually offensive to my neighbors. I got it. Thanks a lot, guys. I think that should be all.”

  “We have to speak to Mrs. Wilkerson first before we leave,” Russell says. He goes into the kitchen.

  “You like your job?” I ask Jim.

  “Very much, and it pays okay.”

  “Ever remarry?”

  “Me, I freelance now and have plenty of fun.”

  “You meet them at bars?”

  “Bars, parties, friends’ homes, workplace and on vacations. No shortage of great ladies out there, I found.”

  “Still see the kids?”

  “On my days off. I take them or just visit. My ex-wife has a much better disposition to me when I get there, now that I’m gone.”

  “You still don’t desire her when you see her?”

  “Why should I? I have my own women now, she her men, so between us it’s all business and concerns and tales of the kids. When you first divorce you can’t believe you’ll think this way, but soon it becomes second nature with you no matter how hard you fight it.”

  “Can I get that down in writing?”

  “As long as you don’t ask me to do it in blood. Look, to me with your sense of humor and clear moments coming up more now than then, your problem is just emotional and temporary. Off the record, you’re still pretty young; not old, at least. So you have kids college age. So will I in twelve years, and you still got your energy and if you lose twenty pounds and keep jogging around a bit and let the hair on one side grow out and comb it over your head in a concealing way, you’ll have a good face and figure too. And living in this house and neighborhood must mean your standard of living’s way up there also, so you’ll survive. Better than that, you’ll thrive. Women go for guys with money to burn. Maybe we weren’t made for living with just one person all our life, something only this generation’s finding out.”

  “Oh, they knew it in early Greece and ancient Rome.”

  There you are; you’ve brains too. Think of your split-up as almost a renewed lease and blessing. But now let me ask you a few questions. You going to pack your bags now, go to the city and take a room there and let Mrs. Wilkerson live peacefully in the house for the time being? Because if you insist on staying and she presses charges to force you to leave, the judge, as they usually are with the wives, will be more sympathetic to her than to you.”

  “Yes, I’m going to do exactly as you say.” I head for the door.

  “Wait till Russell comes back. And don’t you think you should put on your socks and shoes?”

  I get my keys off the wall hook and open the door.

  “Now I said to hold it, Walt. That means stop right there.”

  Their car’s blocking mine. Edith left the keys in hers and I get in it. Jim and Russell rush up to the car as I back out of the driveway to the street. “I said to halt,” Jim says. He unsnaps his holster.

  “Don’t be a fool,” Russell says. “We’ll get him later.” I drive off, waving to them as I go. Edith is at the door. I drive down the street. There’s the tricycling McQuire kid and Gretchen raking her lawn. And the Beinstock triplets in their stroller, three of them in a row. Cute. Abe Eaton. Myra Skintell. Mrs. Nichols. “Hiya, Mrs. Nichols,” I yell out the window.

  “Morning, Walt,” she says. Nice lady. Always there when we needed her or one of her children to babysit. All seemingly happily married couples and contented boys and girls. So Edith and I and our kids didn’t make it. Or at least I didn’t with them. So, that’s what happens sometimes.

  I drive to town, park and go into the smoke shop where I know there’s a phone. Two men at the magazine stand look at me and then at themselves as if they think I’m a bit off. Sure, the bare feet and the only shirt I have on is an undershirt and it’s late fall. Well, so I’m doing something out of the norm, but not against the law, I don’t think. I say to them “You’d be in ba
re feet too and only this skimpy shirt if you went through what I did today. First my wife tells me about her six and one lovers. Next I knock out three front windows of my house and threaten not only her life but her lawyer’s. The cops are after me for fleeing what might be considered the scene of a crime, which is knocking out my windows and threatening my wife’s life or just escaping in her car, which might not be a crime if it’s considered jointly owned, but anyway, before they said I could go.”

  “Shouldn’t you be going back to square things with them?” the younger man says.

  “Mind your biswax, Pete,” the other man says.

  “He told us, so I’m just suggesting to him.”

  “Do what I say; don’t get involved.”

  “Ah, the attitude of the day,” I say. “Stay cool, your nose clean, hands off, once removed—no, I don’t know what I’m saying. But that’s what I hear a lot from the guests and call-in folks on the radio talk shows, going into the city and on my way back. You know, to and from work? But I don’t believe it, do you? We’re all still earth dwellers and not very far from our origins and so pretty much the same, isn’t that so?”

  “What?” Pete said.

  “Now I told you, Pete,” the other man says.

  “My dad says to keep my trap shut, so I will, but I can’t make out half what you’re saying.”

  “Your father? How nice. Hello, sir. Walt Wilkerson here. May I ask your name?”

  “Hyram Falk. This is Pete.”

  “Glad to meet you both.” I shake their hands. “What are you reading?”

  “Just magazines,” Pete says.

  “Good for you. Excuse me; I got to make an important phone call.” I dial Information, get Miriam’s work number and call her, “Miriam, I’m about to make your job much easier and also make it possible for Edith to pay your exorbitant fees. I’m going to burn down my house now so she can collect all the insurance money from it and, though I’ll contest it to make it look authentic, a quick divorce because of the mental cruelty inflicted on her by my burning the house down with all her things in it.”

  “Don’t, Walt,” she says. The authorities will say you did it only to get the insurance money for Edith, and then she’ll get nothing. Besides, she called before and said your house is being watched and that the police of your town and the surrounding ones are out looking for you. She suggests, and I go along with it, that you plead temporary insanity and that I represent you in criminal court. Believe me, it all looks bad now, but everything will work out.”

  I do. It doesn’t. Six months in the clink for resisting arrest and attempting to run over an officer. Lies, but what can I do? After that, too much to drink and everything goes down the tubes. Wife and kids are already gone, but now business, savings, friends. Ten, twenty years pass. Cheap rooms, rotten food, crummy jobs, too many times fired or laid off, for entertainment: watching lousy television on thirdhand TVs. I don’t want to go into it that deeply anymore. I get sick, liver and kidneys fail, I get worse—throw in the heart and lungs—but I don’t do anything to control or prevent it. With each succeeding operation I tell the surgeons not to worry if it looks bad for me on the table: just put me away for good, something I’d do myself but can’t. They say Hmm, interesting entreaty, they’ll think seriously about my suggestion but I should know that in the last years of some of their 90-year-old patients there was nothing they liked more in life than sitting out on a porch or sidewalk under a warm sun. Finally, the one who’s to operate on me today says he’ll take away my life support system under anaesthesia as he’s a great believer in mercy killing too. So that’s where I am now. Men’s ward of the city hospital and soon on my way to the operating room. Since there’s no one to say this for me, I’ll say it myself: “May he rest in peace forever; I mean me.”

  I wake up in the recovery room. “Sonofabitch lying doctor,” I try to say. One of these days I’m going to be gutsy enough to do myself in. But by then I probably won’t have the strength.

  IN MEMORIAM.

  He phoned the newspaper and said to the woman who answered “I’d like to place a notice in your In Memoriam space.” She said The In Memoriam notices are handled by the Obituary section of the Announcements department. Hold on and I’ll connect you.”

  “Obituaries, Ray Kelvin speaking.”

  “I’d like to place an In Memoriam notice, Mr. Kelvin. You have a pen handy, because I’ve the notice all set?”

  “Just a second, sir. What’s the name and address of the person we’re to bill this to?”

  That would be me. Stanley Berwald. B-e-r-w-a-l-d. Three-seventy-six President Street. Brooklyn.”

  “Is there a middle initial?”

  “It’s ‘O,’ but it’ll get to me without it.”

  “And repeat the address, Mr. Berwald?”

  He repeated it.

  “Zip code?”

  He gave the zip code.

  “Finally, your phone number.”

  Phone number.

  “What date do you want the notice to appear?”

  “February 10th.”

  “Now, if you’ll write down the cancelation number in case you later want to change or cancel the notice, we’ll go ahead with the wording.”

  “I’m not going to want to cancel or change it. I’m going to give you this notice and when you send me the bill, I’ll pay right away and that’ll be the end of it.”

  “You probably won’t cancel or change as you say,” Kelvin said. “In Memoriams, in fact, have the lowest cancelation and change rate of any of our announcements, obituaries being the next. But there have been placers like yourself in both categories who also had no intention of changing or canceling their notice, but who later, after the paper’s closing time for canceling or changing one for the next day’s edition, called and wanted to do just that. Even that we change the name and address of the person we’re to bill the notice to when the bill’s already been sent out—we get some of those also.”

  “You won’t have that problem with me. I’ve lived in the same apartment the last thirty-eight years and don’t plan to move, and nobody but me knows the notice’s being placed. And I’ve worked most of the night composing it, so it’s the one I’ve decided on without question.”

  The paper, no matter what the circumstances, still requires me to give a cancelation number for each notice, both for our protection and yours. The number I give will be the only way the paper and you can identify and locate your notice once I’ve put it through. We’re also required to give cancelation numbers to all death, birth, marriage, engagements, memorial services and thank-you-for-your-condolences announcements. Also for help and situations wanted, personal and commercial notices, real estate, auction sales, merchandise offerings, business opportunities, automobile and pet exchange and anything else in the line of classified ads. We use this system because we haven’t the filing space or staff to keep any records of announcements and classified ads other than the cancelation numbers, which are automatically processed into our computers and then removed once the announcement and ad charges are paid.”

  “It seems you’ve made your system a lot more complicated than it need be, and probably at the expense of the customer.”

  The system actually simplified the placing and taking of announcements and ads. And the fees for them are much less than they’d be without the system, if you’ve any idea what filing and office space rent go for in this part of the city and what kind of payroll it’d take to keep a staff of bookkeepers and filing clerks for this department, not that it’s so easy to hire them. But what do you say we finish up with your notice, Mr. Berwald? There could be another caller with a notice or announcement he or she wants to get in before closing time.”

  “After all you’ve said, I’m not so sure my notice will get in on the day I want it to or won’t get mixed up in the real estate or help wanted sections or canceled soon after I get off the phone.”

  “Not anything to worry about. Because of the early closing tim
e for In Memoriams, as compared to obituaries, let’s say, typographical errors or misplacing an announcement almost never happens. The most likely error, though chances of it are extremely rare, is that your notice will get lost between the time I type it up and dispatch the original copy to the printers and the carbon to the accounting department, both by pneumatic tube, which is usually done within twenty minutes after our call’s completed, depending on the length of the notice to type and how busy the tube is. This also further illustrates how important the cancelation number is. Call us before I’ve dispatched your notice, and without cancelation number or anything else, I or one of the other announcements reporters will be able to locate your In Memoriam at one of the three places it could be: still in my typewriter, typed up and on my desk waiting to be inserted into the pneumatic tube cylinders, or in the cylinders and waiting to be placed in the tube to the printers and Accounting. But call without cancelation number after the cylinders have been sent and you could end up with two published In Memoriam notices and bills, if you’re calling to change the wording of the notice, or one bill and published notice if you wanted the original notice and bill canceled.

  He gave the number.

  “Keep it in a safe place till you get your bill, which takes about a month,” Kelvin said.

  That’s a long time. Suppose I lose it before then?”

  “If you lose it but don’t cancel or change before your notice’s in the paper, then nothing will go wrong and the notice will appear as you requested it.”

  “Suppose it doesn’t appear as I requested it? I don’t want, for instance, to be paying for something that puts someone else’s In Memoriam above my name.”

  That won’t happen. But in the rare chance it did, you’d call this department and give your cancelation number to whoever answers the phone and say your notice appeared incorrectly and you don’t want to be billed for it or that you already sent a check for it and want to be reimbursed. We’ve a policy here where if the announcement isn’t printed as directed, the customer doesn’t pay a cent. What happens then is that the person you speak to sends down your cancelation number to Accounting, which keeps copies of the announcements for sixty days and then stores them on microfilm for ten years. If they find your notice didn’t appear as it should have, which means the way I wrote it up, then you’re reimbursed. If it appeared the way you gave it to me, which is why I’m being so meticulous about it, then of course you’re expected to pay in full.”