30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  The second time Gould met him in Maine was a year later, over drinks at a little dinner party. Gould sat down next to him and said, “So, how are you, sir, you’re looking fine,” and the poet said, “I know you? What’s the name?” and he told him, and the poet said, “Sorry, no bell struck. What do you do, young man?” and he said, “It’s nice to still be considered young, but now I’m a teacher though I was once a reporter,” and the poet said, “For whom?” and he said, “You mean teaching?” and the poet said, “I mean both: whom, what, where, when, all the journalistic questions,” and he said, “Well, many years ago I was a newsman in Washington when you were the Consultant in Poetry,” and the poet said, “Lucy, latch onto this; this pleasant young man was a reporter during my Washington consult-the-poet days, can you believe it?” and she said, “I think I knew that,” and Gould said, “Not only that, sir—and I think we talked about it before, but at a crowded party in Castine and pretty quickly—but you gave me a lift once,” and the poet said, “I did, on one of the roads here—your car broke down, son?” and he said, “I meant in Washington then, during a tremendous snowstorm, and you stopped for me and drove me to my office, something I was always grateful for. I mean, you didn’t know me and just appeared when I needed help the most because of all the heavy gear I had on me—I was in radio news, did interviews, so carried my own equipment,” and the poet said, “Lucy did you hear what I did for this young man years ago? Stopped in a snowstorm, didn’t even know who he was or what he did, and gave him a ride to his office when he needed one the most,” and she said, “It was very nice of you” and, to Gould, “I can tell, after so many years, that you were quite appreciative,” and he said, “It was wonderful, one of the most selfless acts anyone’s ever done for me, because I’m telling you, this was some snowstorm—a blizzard, knocked out Washington for several days,” and the poet said, “Good, I’m glad you survived it and are here today to recount it,” and a couple of people in the circle of chairs they’re in started laughing and the poet said, “Did I say something that seemed to you unintentionally funny? Well, good, it’s summer and we’re supposed to be relaxed, so people should laugh.”

  It’s in Maine at the old farmhouse they rent that Gould hears the poet’s in a nursing home and his wife died the past year. He asks about him, and the man who told him says, “As far as anyone knows, the old fool’s on his way out too.” The man’s wife says, “Now that’s unkind,” and the man says, “I only meant he was once a fairly good poet and critic, and two to three of his poems are among the best produced by any American in the last four decades, which is something, but he’s been an old fool for more than thirty years, the longest period of addlement I’ve witnessed in a human being. Besides, with his memory failing for years he’s become a menace to our entire cliff colony, forgetting he turned on a gas stove, leaving his suburban van parked on a steep hill with the hand brake disengaged, and things like that.” “I’m sorry to learn of it,” Gould says, and the man says, “We were too, but worse to observe it. Most of us haven’t the kind of fire insurance to cover a completely burnt house. It’s punitively expensive because of the local infatuation with arson on our peninsula; nor has anyone devised the type of body armor needed by one of us or our grandkids to withstand a ramming from a megaton van,” and Gould says, “Excuse me, but I meant I was sorry to hear about his wife and illness and confinement and so on. What a pity, for what a nice man.” “Excuse me, and Dolores will no doubt rebuke my pitilessness to this moribund old fool, whom we both like, mind you, enormously, and, as I said, admire. But to be honest, a greater egotist, braggart, social manipulator, and literary operator never walked so assuredly through the fields of poetry, and I’ve run across some lulus in my time. An example, and this also of his idiocy, since it didn’t start when he first became senile, you know—” and his wife says, “Now that’s enough,” and he says, “No, let me finish, since I never could make any sense to Bill on this score, simply because he refused to see anything he’d done as wrong, no matter how inappropriate, ill-considered, or just plain dumb it was. Once, an anthologist was putting together a book of poems by poets under forty. When our poet hears this, and he had his ears screwed into anything he thought could help his career, he contacts the anthologist and says, ‘Why haven’t you asked me for any poems?’ ‘Because you’re over forty,’ the anthologist says; ‘you’re sixty-two.’ This was a number of years ago, of course, though he never changed. And Bill’s answer? ‘So what? If you’re compiling an anthology of contemporary American poetry I’d think you’d want my work in it, because who cares what age a poet is when you read his poems?’ Does that make any sense to you? Are we talking here of a truly great self-effacing unfinagling realistic guy?” and Gould says, “He’s—well, yes, it doesn’t make much sense—but still, and maybe this’ll seem silly to you, but he once did something so wonderful for me that it’s hard to think anything bad of him.” He starts to tell the Washington story and the man says, “I know, I was at some party up here when you gushed all over him in recapitulating it, but you must know that everyone has his three to four involuntary selfless acts to his credit, and Bill probably has a few more than that, and not just because he’s survived past ninety, but listen to this”—and he reels off a number of stories showing the poet manipulating people and institutions—“and I’m only going back fifty-some years, which is how long I know him,” and Gould says, “Still, you can’t see what I’m saying? I’m sure there was this other good side to him. Not so much involuntary or momentarily magnanimous but downright selfless and bighearted and generous. Going out of his way for a stranger when most people in the same situation—a blinding snowstorm, which also meant he couldn’t have recognized me as the fellow who interviewed him months before—would have driven past. Ten inches on the ground, maybe another fifteen expected, and you’re in your warm car with your warm pipe and you want to get to your warm home fast with maybe even a fireplace going? Risking your life, you can almost say—that’s not so farfetched. The snow was piling up a couple of inches an hour and the car could skid, when if he didn’t stop for me and take all the time it took to load my equipment up and drive me to my office, he might be able to make it home safely … anyway, the chances of it would be better. But what did I start out saying? This other good side of him that I caught immediately from that one situation and which I don’t hear anything of in what you’re saying about him over fifty years. And the interview he granted me when I first met him. That’s what I meant by saying he didn’t recognize me at first. He didn’t have to give it. I was a shrimp of a reporter, and the news service I worked for was small too. And I should’ve got his press conference on tape when the other radio and TV guys did, if any other radio newsman—I forget—thought there was anything potential there to even attend it, but I asked him for an interview right after. I might even have given him some cock-and-bull story that my tape jammed. I did that then to get solo interviews—lied, finagled, cajoled, etcetera, all the things you said he did,” and the man says, “Sure he gave you an interview. For the fame, not because of your cajolery. When Bill saw a newsman’s tape recorder and mike, he saw an audience of millions and possible book buyers and poetry-reading invitations and so forth. I bet you even had him read a few of his poems for radio,” and Gould says, “I think I did; it’s what I normally would have done for an interview like that with someone in his position,” and the man says, “That’s my point. The regular press conference was what came with the turf of being introduced as the new Poetry Consultant, but your solo with him was gravy that made him giddy. You showed him individual attention that also had a good chance of being on radio for a lot more time than a news report of the pro forma press conference,” and Gould says, “But if I remember, he told me to come back anytime for a coffee and chat but not to bring my tape recorder. So if that’s the case—” and the man says, “Ah, come on, he was only trying to show he was more interested in you than in what you could do for him. But you probably would
have brought your tape recorder and he would have seen it and somehow worked you around to where he ended up gladly giving you another interview,” and Gould says, “No, I’m not getting through to you and you really can’t change my initial opinion of him, though you have opened me up to him a little, mostly because I didn’t know him. Anyway, he did a wonderful thing for me, and I just wish everyone would do things like that for people in similar situations, and I also feel lousy about the condition he’s in now,” and the man says, “That’s not the question; we all do.”

  Accidents and Mishaps

  SHE’S ALMOST TWO years old, on her back on their double bed while he’s changing her diaper; as he bends over to unpin the diaper, several coins, three pennies and a dime, drop out of his T-shirt pocket. He pushes them to the edge of the bed, doesn’t want her handling them and then putting her hands to her mouth or sucking on one of the coins and maybe swallowing it. He unpins the diaper, lifts her rear, pulls the diaper out and wipes her with it and folds it up and says, “Stay here a minute, Daddy’s going to clean this,” and presses down on her chest a little, a signal between them she seems to understand that she stay lying on her back where she is while he’s gone. He goes into the bathroom—doesn’t know why he has to wash the diaper out immediately but he almost always does, something about the smell and that there’s feces in it and wanting to get the job over with as soon as possible and not have to think about it later—and empties the diaper into the toilet bowl, flushes the toilet, and after the shit’s gone he continues flushing, which he can do with this toilet because it has a flushometer instead of a water tank, while he rinses the diaper out several times. “You okay, dear?” he yells between flushes, and she doesn’t answer, and he yells, “Fanny … you all right? Say you’re okay, Daddy wants to know,” and she says, “Yes,” and he drops the diaper into the diaper pail, washes his hands, and comes back with a washrag rinsed in warm water, cleans and dries her and is about to poof some cornstarch around her anus when he notices the coins aren’t on the bed. “Hey, where’d they go, the coins, the pennies, where?” and she just looks at him, and he says, “Did you knock them off the bed?” and she shakes her head and he quickly looks on the floor and under the bed and lifts her rear up by her ankles and they’re not under her or the towel she’s on and when he sets her down he sees her eyes bulging out at him and he says, “What’s wrong—Fanny—you didn’t swallow them, did you—in your mouth?” and she looks scared and coughs but can’t expel any air and he says, “Oh, no, what do I do?” and still has his hands around her ankles from when he’d lifted her and jerks her up and holds her upside down in the air and slaps her back and continues slapping it while bobbing her up and down, up and down, and she spits some coins out and starts crying, and he says, “Is that all? You still got something in your mouth or throat? Goddamn, I’m saying are there any more coins inside you?” but can’t make out what her expression says because she’s crying and is upside down and he looks at the coins on the bed, two pennies and a dime, and then hears a coin hit the floor on the other side of the bed, and he sets her down on her back, jumps onto the bed on his stomach, head hanging off the side so he can see what coin it is, a penny, and he says, “Thank God!” and stands up and sits her up and says, “You all right, coins all gone, no more pennies in you?” and she’s crying but breathing normally again, and he grabs the two pennies and dime off the bed and sticks them into his pants pocket and says, “Open your mouth,” and nothing else is in it, and he says, “Never stick coins in your mouth, never, nothing but food, you hear?” and she’s still crying, and he says, “It was my fault too, Daddy’s fault, bad Daddy, leaving them there, but never again will I leave around any pennies or small things like that; you can swallow them and die, just so you know,” and she’s crying more hysterically now, and he says, “Oh, gee, I’m sorry,” and picks her up and holds her to his chest and cheek and pats her back and says, “I’ll tell you this another time, when you’re old enough to understand.”

  IN THE CAR, family heading to D.C. to go to the East Wing of the National Gallery, he’s driving, wife beside him, Fanny in her kid’s car seat in back, winter, freezing out, but inside it’s warm, radio playing what the announcer said was a song cycle by Ravel, something with the word Exotiques in it, he thinks, and which he wants to hear to the end to find out exactly what it’s called and who’s singing it and on what label so he can look into buying it this week, he likes it so much, when the car in front of his on the ramp leading to New York Avenue, or maybe they’re already on New York, starts to slow, and he applies his brake a few quick times, the tap-tap-tap he knows to do so the brakes won’t lock, and his car suddenly spins and he doesn’t know what to do, turn the steering wheel into the spin, which he’s heard you’re supposed to do but it seems unnatural, or away from it, which his instincts tell him to do, so he just grips the wheel tight and yells, “Hold on, I can’t control it!” and the car spins all the way around and continues spinning a second round to the ramp railing and his wife’s screaming and the baby’s shrieking and the car slams into the railing on his side and stops, now facing cars from behind that are now coming toward him, the nearest one in his lane managing to stop two feet away, maybe one. It was ice he didn’t see, thought it was a shadow, didn’t even see that, just didn’t see anything on the pavement, maybe wasn’t paying attention because he was absorbed in the music, but later when he gets out to see what caused the spin and how bad the car’s damaged he sees that’s it, ice, big patch of it, five feet by five or almost, his door smashed so hard he couldn’t open it and had to climb over his wife to go out her side, and he thinks, Thank God we’re all right and everything was working for us once we started to spin, that the railing was near to stop us, that we didn’t spin the other way into oncoming traffic, that I did just hold on to the wheel tight and not try to correct the spin one way or the other, that the cars behind us were far enough away not to crash into us once we started spinning and then, when we were facing them, that they didn’t spin out of control when they braked, and so on, and says some of this through the window to calm his wife and daughter, but she’s just staring straight ahead, oblivious to everything, it seems, who knows what the hell she’s thinking, and Fanny’s gone from shrieking to crying.