30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  Going over these two suicidal times in his life didn’t help him understand any better why Roland went through with it in the most painful way possible, but it did make him more sympathetic to him, that’s for sure. Perhaps, if you’re of a certain mind or in a certain frame of mind, he might mean, you can get so depressed you just lose it completely, while someone else in the same circumstances but of a different background and mindset and nature might have a built-in … he’s saying there might be an attitude or predisposition, let’s say, in some people that’s inherent or possibly even congenital and that prevents them and maybe everyone else with something approximating that gene pool, or at least holds it off more, from … oh, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, or not much, so why try?

  Roland’s grandmother and a cousin never come to his room to see what’s in it. It could be they’re too despondent or it’s difficult or inconvenient to travel to the city or they assume there’s nothing of any value or worth to them there, but anyway they tell the landlord to let the tenants on Roland’s floor, and especially the one who received the suicide note and then the ones who helped Roland that last day, to go in and take what they want. If anything’s left after that, to let anyone from the building in whom the landlord approves of, and then to dump or get a junkman to cart off the rest; they’ll pay for it. Gould gets a letter from the landlord on this: You and apt. 7-J, for a maximum of one hour, will be allowed inside Mr. Meese’s apartment. Help yourselves to whatever you wish, and please don’t make a mess. The super will accompany you, but he won’t be taking anything himself. He doesn’t want to go in Roland’s room. There are probably a few good books he’d like to have, but it’d be too ghoulish—Gould the Ghoul, which is what kids occasionally called him when he was a boy for no other reason than the words were so close—and he writes the landlord a note, thanking him for his offer but declining it and adding, Why not, to avoid what could end up being a greedy free-for-all over Roland’s things, give everything to a Christian mission house—I know of one on West 75th Street off Columbus Avenue near where I used to live, and there must be others in the city—or a poor people’s home, if such a place still exists, or the Salvation Army or an organization like that, but doesn’t get a response. About a week later 7J says he got some great books from Roland’s apartment, “One a first edition of an early Thomas Mann in the original German; how do you think he acquired such a thing? Also a decent night table that could be an antique—he probably picked that one up off the street—but there was nothing else there worth more than a nickel, unless I missed a few rare books that to me just looked mildewed and old.”

  The apartment’s painted and a young woman moves in, an opera singer. She looks pleasant—a soprano, when he hears her through her door practicing—always dressed in beige or black or combo of the two, big hefty chest and thin legs and an intelligent face, is never with a man or really anyone, and Gould, the three to four times he sees her in different places the first few weeks, greets her and says things like “Enjoying the apartment? … Liking the building? … The neighborhood? It’s a quiet part of town and usually safe—though if I were you I wouldn’t walk alone after ten at night—and lots of good bookstores.” She says yes to all the enjoyment questions and to the last adds, “And thank you, I’ll take your safety advisory seriously. Everyone else here pretends ignorance or has been cagey about it.” He finally stops her on the street and says, “Hi, just a second, wait up, I want to talk to you,” because she’s nodding and walking past, and he says, “Maybe I should identify myself—your neighbor in Five-twenty, don’t you remember me? Not from right next door but on the same floor, 7-D,” and she says, “It’s my eyes; I left my corrective lenses home, sorry.” He says, “I know you’re a singer—I’ve even stopped to listen to you, but not right in front of your door. Lyric soprano?” and she says, “Mostly coloratura,” and he says, “Oh, so many of the great hard roles. How tough it must be to get up so high and stay there—in Lucia, for instance, and that mad scene,” and she says, “That one I’m still only familiarizing myself with; if you take it on too early it’ll kill your voice.” He says, “I hope I’m not offending you when I say that these days I prefer modern opera—Berg, Schoenberg, all the Bergs and Britten, and Ravel’s little whatever they’re called in French—those shorties—and even Bartók’s one shot at it, though my love for opera isn’t as strong as when I was a teen. Then I used to line up at the Met for standing room downstairs once a week, and, if I was close to broke or got on line too late, then the cheaper standing room in the uppermost ring where you can’t see and can barely hear. Now I find the singing in the older operas still glorious but most of the plots excessively melodramatic, even for opera, and sometimes unintentionally funny—I really expect Tosca to bounce back onto the top of Castello something-or-other when she makes her grand final leap … excuse me, and you could say here, ‘What do you know?’” and she says, “We all have our tastes, but take it from a budding pro that some of the characters’ subtleties may be eluding you,” and he says, “I agree a hundred percent,” and finally gets around to asking if she’d like to go to a movie with him one night this week: “I’d love to go to an opera with you also, if the seats were affordable and not in that top ring—my feet have done more than their share of theater standing and would now revolt by turning in under me. And I’d probably ruin it for you by asking for a running translation of everything being sung and said and, if it’s unclear to me, done onstage,” and she says, “Then spare me,” and they make a time to go to a movie, start dating. One night at her place she asks about the tenant who previously lived there: “This woman—the tenant on my line on the fifth floor—said he took his life in the building but she wasn’t sure if it was here or in the hallway or on the elevator or stairs, but she knows it wasn’t on her floor or in the lobby,” and he says, “Oh, Roland, a very brilliant fellow, handsome, everything. I didn’t get to know him well—he was kind of reserved and I guess I wasn’t too outgoing and forthcoming to him either,” and she says, “But as to what happened to him?” and he says, “He made it as far as our hallway but I think died during the ambulance trip or in the emergency room.” “What did he take, pills? And why’d he go into the hallway if he wanted to die?” and he says, “Maybe pills, and I don’t know the rest, I’m sorry. A change of mind? Who can say what anyone would do when the prospect of death—of not living anymore—suddenly hits you and then knowing you were the one who pulled the plug and now you don’t want it unplugged or something? The realization would be incredibly frightening, maybe even, for some, heart-stopping, especially if you felt it was too late to be saved,” and she says, “All that’s probably true.” A week later she says, “Why didn’t you tell me your part in it? and I don’t want you to give me any false modesty. You made me feel—I was talking about it to my next-door neighbor—like an awful fool,” and he says, “Why, because he knows we’ve been seeing each other? Okay: I didn’t want to scare you out of your apartment with what happened there before you, or even out of the building. Some people would get freaked knowing how horribly the previous occupant of the place died. And then I thought you’d ask for details, everyone does: ‘What were his last words?’ someone asked, and when I said I wasn’t near him then—he supposedly said them to the medical team working on him—she asked, ‘Then his last words to you,’ and so on. Anyway, that you’d get some of the details out of me and be horrified, because that’s what the whole thing was. I still shake when I think of it and I still see his burnt mouth and the rest of it and smell his smell and that’s all I want to go into it,” and she says, “Nothing like that fazes me, and I’m not superstitious in the least. I’d vacate the apartment if the rent was raised too high or it was overrun with rats and the landlord and the city couldn’t do anything about it, but not from something like what happened to him. And he supposedly only took the arsenic inside the apartment, never came back to it once he went looking for help, and the place had been thoroughly painte
d and cleaned of any sign of it. The landlord did a spectacular job; I’d never seen such an immaculate apartment for rent in New York. You forget I was raised on a poultry farm and one of my chores from the time I was eleven was to cut off the chickens’ heads,” and he says, “I’m surprised your parents made you do that,” and she says, “The birds weren’t about to kill themselves. Besides, I started getting paid a little for it once I was thirteen, dime a head. But even worse than chopping the heads off was beating them to death when some of them ran around headless,” and he says, “How’d you ever do that? I know I couldn’t have; I guess you grow used to it. But you’re right, I should’ve leveled with you long ago—maybe even told you of it the first time we spoke. The truth is I thought you already knew and I didn’t want to upset you even more. You’ll just have to forgive me for doing something I thought was best for you. I guess you never know what’s going to backfire on you: the intended good you do, even the bad, which can turn out good. It all depends on how the people it’s meant for take it, and of course, like I said, how it ends up,” and she says, “Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself. I hate that in a person, especially a grown man, and particularly one who cloaks it in a lot of philosophical and psychological jargon and gibberish,” and he says, “Boy, who even knew how tough you were … I’m learning something about you today,” and she says, “It’s not toughness. I think I’ve seen some of the worst in life and the hardest and so forth, but none of it has stopped me from doing anything I’ve wanted and getting to be who I am and achieving what I have so far, maybe not even for a minute,” and he says, “Where did all that come from?” and she says, “It came and it’s addressed to you.” “Oh, is it? Give me a day to think why. But it’s funny, too, because now I see something I didn’t, after all my explorations into Roland’s death before, and that’s that you’re the kind of person he needed and should’ve known, not some delicate creature like the one he flipped over and who probably dumped him, which I think set off his suicide, because she was so spooked by his pessimism and gloom. If he had, you would have shaken him up some and maybe out of his feeling so bad about himself and his future, and the poor guy might’ve lived,” and she says, “What do you think, I exist only to take care of weak men? If he had it in his mind to die and he asked my opinion I would have told him what I thought of doing yourself in before you’ve tried a thousand other things to fill your life, and then if he was still determined I would stop bothering with him because I don’t go for men who are that heavy or even want to be around them: they’d just depress me till I’d possibly start thinking about taking my own life. No, the last isn’t true. Besides all that, it’s a ridiculous thought, yours, even a bit ugly, hitching me up hypothetically with a crazy dead man, and, I’m certain, deep down, meant to be cutting and mean,” and he says, “Not so, and I apologize for whatever you think I ulteriorly said,” and she says, “I don’t believe a stitch of your apology, how about that?” and he says, “Then what can I say?” and leaves her apartment and they don’t speak to each other for a few days. About a month later—they’ve resumed seeing each other but only about once a week—she gets an opera singing job she auditioned for more than a year ago and she says it’s too good an opportunity to pass up and she moves to San Francisco. He calls her a few times—she never calls him—and says he’s still hoping to save enough money to fly out to see her, especially for her debut in a few months and also to see that part of California—maybe they can go camping together in a redwood forest—but a month after she gets there she says they should break off their relationship entirely. “Why? There’s still a strong possibility we can make it work, and I’d even think of eventually moving to San Francisco,” and she says, “Whatever you do, don’t come for me. It’s not only that I’ve met a man and am now pretty serious about him: one of the stagehands for our company, but he’s a master carpenter, no furniture mover. But also that the conversation we had awhile back—about the suicide guy whose apartment I took over?—turned me off you to the point where my skepticism about you just grew and grew. I didn’t like what I saw emerging from you, is how I’ll put it, to be real polite and not encourage you to flare up and try to malign me even more, and I thought it would only get worse. That’s why I became sort of cold to you after that, though it isn’t why I moved out here, of course,” and he says, “Cold? I didn’t notice it,” and she says, “Sure,” and while he’s asking her what she meant by that sure she cuts him off with “I beg of you, no more,” and he says, “Oh, my, how operatic; when do you impale yourself on your dagger?” but she’s already hung up.

  The apartment’s rented to an elderly woman but isn’t repainted, as the landlord says the singer only had it a few months. The first time Gould meets the woman she tells him that her husband recently died, she was like a full-time nurse to him the last six years—“That’s how much he suffered, and we couldn’t afford real ones”—and since there was nothing left for her to do in their suburban community and her kids were scattered around the country in towns just as dull as hers and anyway didn’t really want her, she decided to move back to the city she was raised in, “and especially this Columbia area, which is like a quiet sanctuary in a noisy fast-paced city, just the place to start out in again.” She often has tenants on the floor in for dinners she cooks. She invites Gould a few times and he always begs off. After the singer and Roland, he doesn’t want to go inside the apartment. And it’s not that he’s afraid the woman will ask him about Roland’s suicide. She’s already said she knows and nothing he says concerning it could surprise or scare or repel her after what she went through with her husband. Mostly, though, he doesn’t find her interesting or intelligent, so he thinks the evening would be very boring. “Nothing personal, I want you to understand,” he tells her the last time she invites him. “It’s just that I don’t usually have dinner, and if I do it’s usually very light and with my own kind of special foods and preparations and eating it by myself while I work,” and she says, “Please, I learned long ago not to take personally the idiosyncratic things people do. So if eating alone or starving yourself to death is what you want, I’m certainly the last person to try and interfere with it.”

  Everything Goes

  THEY’RE SITTING AT a two-seater, having lunch in a restaurant’s enclosed patio on a busy avenue. It’s her favorite restaurant, favorite table position too: alongside the window, and his mother, looking outside, says, “My goodness, did you see that?” and he says, “No, what?” “That young woman, what she was wearing—she’s passing your way now. Is it permissible to go around like that in the city?” and he says, “I didn’t see her; she must’ve got in front of someone. What’d she have on?” and she says, “I didn’t hear,” and he says, “About it being permissible or not. What was she wearing—or not wearing, perhaps?” and she says, “Her shorts. They had long fringes or frayed threads coming out of the leg part, but were cut right up to here,” and she slices her hands at the top of her thighs. “Can they do that, walk around like that without getting told not to by the police?” “Oh, sure, that’s the style among many young girls today: cutoffs—they do it themselves, or if they really want to be extravagant they buy them new that way. Your granddaughters have shorts like that, though I think Sally cut the pants legs off for them,” and she says, “That was no girl, it was a young woman, in her twenties, possibly thirty,” and he says, “What can I tell you, Mom; that’s the age we live in,” and she says, “What do you mean ‘age’? That our styles are dominated by cheap women in their twenties and thirties who act like they’re thirteen and don’t know better?” and he says, “The age of showing off what you have, or what you think you have, anyway. I didn’t see this one so I don’t know if what she’s got is worth showing off. Even if it isn’t, and you’re saying it should never be, that’s the way it is today, I’m afraid. Here”—taking her glass off the table—“drink your drink. You know, though, we cheat a little on this; you’re only allowed one every other day, doctor’s orders
—the alcohol doesn’t mix with your medications—so make the best of it. Certainly don’t leave it undrunk,” and she says, “Little chance of that,” and takes it from him, raises it, and says, “To long life, happiness, and better days,” and he holds out his coffee mug for her to clink and she says, “You’re not having one?” and he says, “Never before six or thereabouts,” and she says, “I’m retired, so I don’t have to worry. I’ve finished everything I’m going to do, have no energy left to start anything new, and whatever damage there is is done, right?” and she sips a little and puts it down. “It’s strong,” she says, smiling. “Maybe I should add some water,” he says, and she says, “What, and kill it?”