30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  They meet after customs: “To save on the expense,” she says, “can we take a tram to the hotel?” They check in as husband and wife—“It’s not what I want to do, to fabricate,” she says, “but it’s the law”—and go to their room. He says, “Would you get peeved very much if we do it right away—at least start? I’ve been wanting to with you all nine days,” and she says, “Let’s have a big drink first—I’m nervous. I haven’t done this from my husband for many years,” and he says, “But drinks will jack up the expenses,” and she says, “Just wait,” and opens her valise and brings out a bottle of Pernod. They drink, kiss; he feels her breasts, she touches his penis through the pants and then jerks her hand away. “It scares me, it feels so powerful and big,” and he says, “Nonsense, nonsense, I’m normal.” She says, “Now this is what we’ll do, and I insist if we’re to go through with it. First I wash up thoroughly and alone. Then you go into the bathroom and take a long shower and clean every part of you, inside and out; every hole there is below the neck, but many times. I want you smelling of so much soap that I would think I’m at a perfume counter in Paris,” and he says, “Okay, that’s easy enough.”

  She goes into the bathroom—he hears water running, the toilet flushing several times—then she comes out in her clothes. He undressed while she was in there, is sitting naked on the bed, and she says, “What are you doing? Be a gentleman; put on your clothes,” and turns around, and he says, “But I’m going right in there to shower,” and she says, “Do what I say,” and he puts his pants on and says, “Okay, you can look,” and she says, “Did you put everything on? Undershorts, slacks, shirt, socks, shoes? I want it to begin at the beginning and slowly, not just quick without preparations and for your contentment only,” and he says, “Oh, God, this is something; funny, but all right,” and takes the pants off and then dresses completely, and she turns around and he says, “There, see?” and goes into the bathroom, takes a long shower, washes his anus and penis several times, gets into every hole with a washrag and soap, rubs his ankles down with the washrag, shampoos, makes sure his ears are clean, even the tips of his nostrils are clean, all the cracks and folds and places he wouldn’t normally take so much time at. He turns the shower off, dries, and yells out, “Okay, I’m finished. What should I do now, come out nude or just in my briefs or fully or semifully clothed? I’m so clean I think any used clothing I’d wear would soil me,” and she doesn’t say anything. Bet she’s left, he thinks, and says, “I’m coming out, Lisabeta, no clothes, so let me know,” and opens the door, and she and her things are gone. She left a note: My darling. It would have been exciting but never have worked. Not only would I have had to tell my husband, who I love, but he would have hurt me and I think come to kill you. I decided: All that for one short day’s fun? Besides, I checked in my own ways, while you were under the shower, and everything said it was the wrong time. Maybe we will meet another day. I can’t say that I hope so. I embrace you.

  He thinks, The hotel bill; she pay it? He calls the front desk and says, “Did my wife pay the hotel bill? I just want to know so I don’t have to bother about seeing to it later,” and the clerk says, “No, sir. In fact, I saw your wife leave with much luggage.” “Yes, she had to go home early, I’m staying the night,” and he doesn’t know how he’s going to get his bag and books out of the hotel without someone seeing him. He calls the desk again and says, “What do we owe you?” and the clerk gives the price in American dollars, and he figures it’s about the same or even less than what his things are worth, and he goes downstairs, says to the clerk, “Something just came up, and I have to leave too. Can we get a break on the room because we only used it an hour or two?” and the clerk says, “Sir, what are you saying?” and he pays, decides to take a train because he doesn’t have enough money now for a plane, and walks the two miles to the station.

  100th Street

  “I DIDN’T TELL you this story before?” and she says, “If you did I’ve entirely forgotten it, so it comes out to be the same thing,” and he says, “Well, I was around six, at the most seven. No, because my cousin had to be at least eleven to take me to the movies alone, and he was three years older than me, so I was eight or so; I’ll say eight. I’m sure I wasn’t nine, for the incident never would have ended up the way it did if I was that old, since by that time I would have been able to get back home on my own. Anyway, very early in my moviegoing life, that’s for sure, so no more than eight. I don’t think I even saw my first movie till I was seven or eight, so this must have been one of the first, though not the first. That one was a Western, while this one took place in a modern city. The Western had this man—the hero, a cowboy—and I could remember only one thing about it. In fact, when I got home from seeing that first movie, a friend of my father’s, I remember—it was in the afternoon, probably Saturday—asked me what the movie was about, and all I could tell him was that this man came into a bar and said ‘Give me a soda pop’ when the bartender asked him what he’d have—” and she says, “I always thought they asked for sarsaparilla,” and he says, “Maybe it was, but what I definitely remember telling my father’s friend was that the hero ended up destroying the place and knocking out about twenty men and shooting and maybe even killing another dozen of these bad guys, though that was before the gore and shattered-bones-and-brains days, so you really couldn’t tell for sure,” and she says, “But this movie, the urban one, your story,” and he says, “I got into—the show was over and we were standing outside the theater, the Stoddard, I think. No, that one was farther uptown, in the Nineties, and this one was in the mid-Sixties—but I got into an argument with him,” and she says, “Who?” and he says, “My cousin. Randolph. He lived near us, and my mother must have given him money to take me to the movies with him, and probably a little extra money for himself. He was with Terry Benjamin, his best friend for as long as he lived near us, and maybe I got into an argument with both of them, feeling they were ignoring me or something; I forget what it was about. But I just turned my back on them and headed uptown, and he’s—Randolph is—yelling after me to come back, and I probably said something comparable to ‘Screw you’ and kept walking, thinking I’d find the street we lived on—the side street that went into the avenue. West Seventy-eighth, I mean, between Amsterdam and Columbus, but I’d find it on Broadway, which was the street the movie theater was on, and walk east to our building,” and she says, “That was unnecessarily complicated, to the point where if I didn’t know what block you were brought up on I never would have found out by what you just said,” and he says, “I always had difficulty giving directions. But I remember I also yelled out something like ‘Don’t worry’—he was still calling for me to come back or wait up—‘I can get home on my own, I don’t need you!’ and walked to the corner and turned around, and they were still in front of the theater. I was surprised he didn’t run after me to say, ‘Listen, you’re my responsibility, your mother said so, so you have to stay with me,’ and grab my arm and force me to. I suppose he and Terry Benjamin just wanted to be together and rid of me, and maybe I had been more of a brat than I’d thought. So I kept walking, looking for the street to turn into,” and she says, “Now some of your story’s coming back to me. This the one that ends with you sitting on a candy store counter?” and he says, “Drugstore, but one with a soda fountain,” and she says, “That’s right, but go on; all I can recall is you sitting on the fountain countertop and possibly someone like a policeman giving you an ice-cream cone,” and he says, “No cone. That only happens in movies, or did when I was a boy, and it maybe happened in real life too sometimes, because people weren’t afraid to do that then and also because store owners might mimic what they saw in movies, but it didn’t happen to me. My experience was a little scarier,” and she says, “Then tell it, if you still want to, we’ve plenty of time”—their kids are on sleep-overs tonight and they’re in a restaurant waiting for their main courses to arrive, something they do—go to a restaurant alone—once or twice a year, and
he says, “So I continued walking north. And I think I now, just this moment—I’m not kidding—after about fifty years I think I finally figured out how I missed my side street. I bet I was looking for some identifying marker on Amsterdam and Seventy-eighth. Meaning that—” and she says, “That Broadway and Seventy-eighth you weren’t as familiar with—the identifying markers—so you missed your turnoff, we’ll call it,” and he says, “And I think I know why too. At West Seventy-second Street, Amsterdam and Broadway, after running not quite parallel for about a mile, converge. And Amsterdam, which up till that point was west of Broadway, after Seventy-second it’s on Broadway’s right, meaning east of it, and I probably thought I was walking up Amsterdam when I was actually walking up Broadway,” and she looks perplexed and he says, “You know how Broadway, south of Seventy-second, is east of Amsterdam, and that starting—” and she says, “Yes, I know, I know, and you already explained it, but what I’m wondering is why you didn’t just look at the street sign for Seventy-eighth Street and then know where to make a right to get home,” and he says, “Maybe kids that age, around seven or eight—or this kid, then—don’t do that. They look for stores and buildings they’re familiar with, and I was familiar with the ones on Amsterdam and Columbus at Seventy-eighth and not the ones a block away—a short one, I’ll admit—on Broadway,” and she says, “It still doesn’t seem right to me. Because if you were so unfamiliar with landmarks and buildings just a short block from your home—but your building was closer to Columbus than to Amsterdam, so we’ll say almost an entire block plus a short one from your home—how were you able to know that Amsterdam and Broadway meet at Seventy-second Street and that you were supposed to take Amsterdam there and not continue on Broadway?” and he says, “My cousin could have yelled it out to me when I walked away from him. I don’t remember that, but it could have happened. He looked out for me when he was with me and for sure was never a guy who wanted me to get lost. If I insisted on going home alone, he might have yelled, ‘Then get on Amsterdam at Seventy-second where it crosses with Broadway’—something like that. And I either forgot his advice, if he did give it, or thought I was taking it but stayed on Broadway by mistake,” and she says, “Okay, that makes a lot more sense, but you should get on with it,” and he says, “Or I could have once walked down Amsterdam by myself or with a friend or my mother or Randolph a number of times—maybe even that same day with him to get to the movie theater. My father I don’t think at that age I ever walked anywhere with, except to the Broadway subway stop at Seventy-ninth a couple of times. But all the way to Seventy-second and Amsterdam, so I knew that Broadway cut across it there,” and she says, “Anyway, you missed your side street, so then what happened, other than your ending up on a drugstore soda fountain counter without a pacifying ice-cream cone in your hand and maybe even without a policeman’s cap on your head?” and he said, “Definitely no policeman’s cap, since there wasn’t any policeman involved in this. I just kept walking north, that’s all, and looked back. Didn’t see my cousin or Terry Benjamin and after a while forgot about them and got this idea—forgot even about making a right at Seventy-eighth Street, of course, for by this time I was way past it—but this idea that was maybe the most powerful one I’d had in my life till then. And that was to walk all the way to a Hundredth Street, something I’d never done from the mid-Sixties or Seventy-eighth Street and maybe nobody in my family had ever done. My parents weren’t walkers. Subways, buses, a rare cab if it was very late and they were at some big affair or my mother was exhausted, but nothing more than a few blocks of walking for her and three to four for my father and usually to and from his subway stop. And my cousin had never spoken of or, should I say, boasted about such a long walk uptown or to anywhere. And then, to make it even more monumental for me, I had it in my head that once I reached a Hundredth Street I’d walk back to Seventy-eighth and go home. Do all this even if it was dark or getting dark by then. And when my parents asked me where I was I’d tell them: on a Hundredth Street; that I had walked about thirty-five blocks to get there and another twenty-two, not counting the side streets, to get home, a total of several miles—three at least—and all done straight with no resting. And if they said they didn’t believe me I’d rattle off store names on a Hundredth and Broadway that I had memorized for just that purpose,” and she says, “But after you got back downtown from this great journey, how did you expect to get to Amsterdam Avenue, if before you said you weren’t familiar with the landmarks on Seventy-eighth and Broadway?” and he says, “Come on, give me a little credit, will ya? I knew … in fact I must have known since I was four or so that Amsterdam was one block over from Broadway, and I even knew where Columbus was, if you can believe it. I just happened to miss the side street to Amsterdam because I was looking for those familiar landmarks, or I was oblivious for other reasons—who knows what? Just walking home by myself from the movie theater from so far away when I was so young, maybe. And listen, if I ever really felt lost anywhere on the West Side within a ten-block range of my street, all I had to do was ask someone where Beacon Paint was. I think it’s still on Amsterdam between Seventy-seventh and Seventy-eighth, but closer to the Seventy-eighth Street corner—or was till a few years ago—it’s big sign a couple of stories tall painted on the side of the building overlooking the school playground there, though when I was a kid that playground was where the old P.S. Eighty-seven was that the new one replaced. Beacon was the largest paint and artist-supply store on the West Side, and maybe in the whole city. I was also somewhat familiar with the Woolworth’s on Seventy-ninth and Broadway, so I probably could have got home alone from there too—just walked east on Seventy-ninth a block, then down Amsterdam to Seventy-eighth,” and she says, “But it obviously didn’t work out that way … the drugstore,” and he says, “That’s right, it didn’t, you remember,” and she says, “But not how it didn’t,” and he says, “It was very simple. What I did was look up at the passing street signs as I walked north, or started to look up, probably, at around Eighty-fifth or Ninetieth, getting closer and closer to my Hundredth Street objective and all the excitement that goes with that. Till I saw, or thought I saw—I’m convinced I did but I don’t know what the heck happened—100TH STREET on a streetlamp sign, but this is the west side of Broadway I’m talking of, not the east, which could also explain why I missed the Woolworth’s on the northeast corner of Seventy-ninth and also missed Amsterdam at Seventy-second,” and she says, “I don’t follow you,” and he says, “You see, if I had been on the east side of Broadway when I left my cousin and his friend—of course I wasn’t, since the movie theater was on the west side of the street—but if I had, then I would have come to Seventy-second and Broadway, crossed Seventy-second and been on Amsterdam, and then continued north six blocks and been home. But instead I was on the west side of Broadway, and Broadway sort of stops at that side around Sixty-ninth or Seventieth and only starts up again on Seventy-first, since it’s around that point where this whole Amsterdam-Broadway crisscross takes place, Amsterdam veering east and Broadway veering west there—when you’re facing north, I’m saying. And next thing across from Broadway at Sixty-ninth or Seventieth, on the west side of the street, is the southern tip of the narrow island for the Seventy-second Street subway station kiosk. To reach that from Sixty-ninth or Seventieth—well, that would have been extremely dangerous for a kid or really for anyone to do then, since there were no traffic lights or pedestrian signals to it and I think, at the time, not even a crosswalk. I don’t even think you were permitted to get onto that island then from the southern tip. But lots of people did by racing across the avenue, and then to get to Amsterdam you’d go around the kiosk and cross from the northern end of the island to Verdi Square at Amsterdam and Seventy-second—actually, that narrow park’s bound by Broadway and Amsterdam till Seventy-third Street. But the safer way would be to cross to the southeast corner of Broadway and Seventy-second, where I think an Optimo cigar store was—now it’s a hotdog and papaya-drink stand. I onl
y know about the Optimo, or remember it so well, because an uncle’s brother—not Randolph’s father, this uncle; Randolph was actually a second or third cousin—worked there or managed it for a few years. Which now that I think of it could have been who I was with and why I had walked one or more times down Amsterdam from Seventy-eighth to Seventy-second—with my Uncle Bert to see his brother, and who I think always gave me a Hershey bar when I went in … Bert’s brother did,” and she says, “That would have been very complicated for your cousin Randolph to have told you: what and what not to do with that island and even how to get to the east side of Amsterdam and Seventy-second from the west side of Seventy-second and Broadway,” and he says, “If he gave me any directions, you’re right. Smart and articulate as I remember he was, and also, as I think I said, usually a very nice kid, his directions would have been a lot simpler than that … you know, for a seven-to eight-year-old to understand. Probably he told me, if he said anything, and this would have been difficult to yell too if I was a distance from him, to just cross Broadway at the first corner heading uptown, which was Sixty-sixth or Sixty-seventh, or maybe even Sixty-fifth or Sixty-fourth, but a half block from where the theater was. And once I got to the other side of Broadway, to walk up to Seventy-second. ‘You might even recognize the Optimo cigar store where your Uncle Bert’s brother works,’ he could have said, ‘so cross Seventy-second to Amsterdam there and go up Amsterdam till you’re home,’ though I doubt he would have said that since he wasn’t related to Bert. He still could have known about him and the Optimo. I might have told him—something a kid my age then would have been proud of or just done—‘That’s a store my uncle’s brother runs,’ when we passed it going to the movie, if we went that way, and it was the shortest. Or he might have met Bert a couple of times—Bert came over fairly frequently—and even walked to the Optimo with us once. ‘In fact,’ he might have said, ‘if you feel lost or anything at Seventy-second and Broadway, go into the cigar store and ask your Uncle Bert’s brother’—Hal or Hank, I think his name was, Hesch—‘to help you get home.’ ‘In fact,’ he might have said, ‘if you’re lost anywhere from here to your home, ask someone where that Optimo cigar store is and go in it and get help from your Uncle Bert’s brother, and if he’s not there then tell somebody in the store that he is your Uncle Bert’s brother and you need help getting home.’ But all that’s lost in the past, what he said and a lot of what I did. He might have just said—this would have been more like him, from what I remember of him then, or any boy his age when faced with a suddenly defiant and furiously independent younger kid, which I don’t remember being before that incident, who they probably didn’t much like taking care of in the first place. So who knows? Maybe that time was my declaration of independence, so to speak, when I thought I didn’t need anybody taking care of me and could do things like walking home alone from so far away. Maybe I didn’t even have a real argument with him. Or I contrived an argument just to get away from him so I could test out my new feeling of independence and taking care of myself. Anyway, he might have just said something about responsibility—his—when I left him. ‘Your mother will be mad. And I’m being paid to look after you,’ which I think would have made me even more—what?—reluctant to go back to him if I’d already started on my way. Or ‘Oh, go the hell off if you want, you little turd, you stupid brat, I’m glad to be rid of you and I hope I am for good,’ and went to his house with Terry Benjamin, which was just two blocks from ours, some other route, surely one where they wouldn’t have to bump into me. Over to Central Park West, for instance, and then along it—even though that’s a dull walk, just apartment buildings on one side and the park wall on the other—till Eightieth, and then down Eightieth to his block. Actually, there’s no side street off Central Park West between Seventy-seventh and Eighty-first, because of the Natural History Museum there, so down Seventy-seventh or Eighty-first to Columbus and then north or south to Eightieth, where Terry Benjamin also lived,” and she says, “But what happened after? You were saying something about the Hundredth Street that never was,” and he says, “Well, I thought I got to a Hundredth and then, I think, because it was dark and I was tired from the walk, I got cold feet about walking back to Seventy-eighth. Or maybe that it was dark only came to me once I reached my goal. But I felt I was lost, all of a sudden became a dependent unself-sufficient kid again, you could say, and needed help getting home. So I went into what I thought was the friendliest kind of store on what I believed to be the corner of a Hundredth Street and Broadway, and I suppose I told them I was lost and about my cousin on Sixty-fifth or Sixty-sixth or someplace down there, and they asked my name and didn’t sit me up on the soda fountain counter, or anything with an ice cream, and in fact asked me for a nickel—the cost of a phone call then—so they could call my home from the phone booth in the store,” and she says, “Why would they have to call from a booth?” and he says, “Wait. Maybe I wasn’t lost or even a little worried about the dark but only exhausted and didn’t want to walk home from there because I didn’t think I had the strength to and also didn’t have the money for bus fare downtown, if I even thought of that, or a trolley; I think they still had trolleys on Broadway. So I went into the drugstore not so much because I was lost, if at all that, but for help getting home, if you can see the difference,” and she says, “Okay, that could be so too, but I’m still asking why they would have to call from a booth. It’s a drugstore, so there would have to be a private phone to take prescription orders on and so forth,” and he says, “I don’t know, but it’s what I remember. That they asked me for a nickel—they, meaning two men there, the druggist and maybe another druggist or a helper or someone—the soda-fountain man, of course! Someone had to be taking care of the counter—and I think they even got mad when I said I didn’t have a cent on me. My cousin had paid for everything that day with the money my mother had given him, even for our candy in the theater,” and she says, “You remember the candy?” and he says, “I’m just saying probably, since I always was able to get a five-cent box of candy then when I went to the movies,” and she says, “But out of that money your mother gave him, he didn’t give you bus or trolley fare home when you left him? No, he wouldn’t have to; he thought you were walking fifteen blocks or so. Still, what these men did doesn’t make sense—asking a little kid for a nickel to call his parents, who are probably beside themselves that he might be lost or abducted,” and he says, “Maybe that part about the nickel didn’t happen. Is that possible? Because I remember vividly it did. Or maybe it did happen and they were only kidding me. That’d be more like it, but it really frightened me. I thought if I didn’t come up with the nickel they wouldn’t call my home and they’d send me back on the street and I’d have to try another store that might even be less friendly, and—who knew?—I also might have thought, How many stores are going to stay open, now that it was dark? Maybe this is the way people are on a Hundredth Street or just around there or from a Hundredth Street on, I might have thought, but I was scared, I’ll tell you. But then one of the men called from a regular phone up front. I was standing beside him and must have given him my phone number or, if I didn’t remember it, my last name and address or street I lived on and he got the number that way, from Information or the phone book, and called. But then I hear him say something on the phone that disappointed me I can’t tell you how much, and that’s that he’s Dr. So-and-so, if he was the druggist, with a lost Gould Bookbinder in a drugstore on the southwest corner of Ninety-ninth Street and Broadway,” and he stops and smiles, and she says, “So what’s the big disappointment?” and he says, “Ninety-ninth—not a Hundredth,” and she still looks as if she doesn’t understand, and he says, “I didn’t make it, don’t you see? I thought I’d reached a Hundredth Street and then got a little concerned because it was dark and all that and went into a drugstore on what I thought was the corner of a Hundredth, and this guy—” and she says, “Oh. So you probably, once you reached a Hundredth, walked one block south till you found
what you were looking for, a friendly-looking drugstore for someone to call your parents from,” and he says, “But that wasn’t what happened, even though I could swear I looked up at the last corner street sign and saw 100TH STREET on it, thought I’d reached my goal, and then got worried or something because of the dark and the time and the realization I was very far from home and tired and I’d never make it walking back and had no carfare and probably didn’t know how to take the bus or trolley if I did have the fare and also wouldn’t know what stop to get off, never thinking I could ask the driver to tell me, and went into a drugstore on that corner to have someone there call home for someone to come get me. So all my walking and defiance and everything was for nothing, I thought, when this man spoke into the phone, because who cared if you walked all the way to Ninety-ninth Street? One Hundredth was like another world, much farther than Ninety-ninth, three numerals to two, and so on,” and she says, “No, I’m sure you reached a Hundredth and then went into that drugstore on Ninety-ninth,” and he says, “Even if that were true, I couldn’t prove it. I knew no landmarks on a Hundredth. The only ones I knew up there because I memorized them before I went into the drugstore were on Ninety-ninth, sort of confirming that I never got to a Hundredth. And I couldn’t go a block north to get those Hundredth Street landmarks because I had to wait now in the drugstore till the person from home came. And when I got home? I don’t remember what that was like, although I’m sure I got a tongue-lashing from my folks, if not worse: sent to bed without supper and that sort of thing. All I remember after is the ride home in the cab with the person who picked me up—it might even have been Uncle Bert—and him asking me why I ran away, because do I know how much I worried my mother? and I’m trying to explain about a Hundredth Street, and he’s saying, ‘But I picked you up on Ninety-ninth,’ and I just gave up right there, knowing nobody would take me seriously about it, they would only think of all I’d put them through,” and she says, “Yes, the story definitely rings a bell now—not the end of it, with your Hundredth Street disappointment, but going into the drugstore and someone picking you up and your feeling bad in the cab, though why you were feeling bad I don’t remember your telling me,” and he says, “I’m sure I did, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been any point in telling the story.”