30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  The Place

  So finish. They’re in a car heading to Maine. Get closer. Sally and he, Gould: eventually they’ll get married, have children, but now they’re about to spend their first summer together. They met in November, about a week before Thanksgiving. Why’s he mention that holiday? Because his mother was giving a Thanksgiving dinner, and though he’d only known Sally for a week and had gone out with her just once, he invited her to it. A cousin and his family and a couple of his mother’s friends were there. They later told his mother, This looks like the girl for him. When his mother told him that, she asked was it true, she’s a very nice girl and does he think she’s the one? He said he hopes so but he’s had this hope before so he doesn’t want to pin any—well, hopes on it and be disappointed. “For now,” he said, “it’s going fine, and for maybe the first time in my life I’m going to take it slow.” He’s driving; she’s looking at him. He can see her out of the corner of his eye. Corners of his eyes. (He’ll find out which one’s right later, probably by looking in a dictionary of slang or asking his wife.) He can see her, though, and she seems to be looking at him, and when people look at him he looks back, so he turns to her and smiles and she smiles, and he puts his right hand on her cheek, other hand holds the wheel, and she kisses it and then holds it and he says—

  They left the city two hours ago. Packed, loaded up the rented car, got the cats—her two and her parents’ two—into two cat carriers and started out. She tells him which roads to take. He’s been to Maine only once before, on his way back from hitchhiking through Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia more than fifteen years ago. (That’s not relevant, so delete it.) She’s made the trip several times, always taking the same route, which she got from someone who belongs to Triple A. They’re going to a cottage she’s rented the last three summers. She said a few days ago she doesn’t think he’ll like it up there: the quiet, solitude, almost nothing to do at night, and if it rains or stays foggy for a few days you feel like a prisoner in the place. And the bugs—black fly season’s only just ending; mosquitoes will be pestering them till a week or two before they head home, if they’re lucky—her few friends in the area he probably won’t get along with: older academics, mostly, and she knows what he thinks of academics. He said how can she say that: she’s one, and she said, “You know what I mean.” Anyway, he said, nights will be cool; days, she’s said, never get too humid or warm, and he’ll be with her, and if he just has that he can put up with anything. His one regret, he now thinks, is that his mother will be in New York the whole hot summer, and every time he calls her, which he’ll try to do every day, he knows he’ll feel guilty and terrible about it. Though he is glad for a stay in a real vacation place after working the entire year adjuncting those dumb and useless continuing-ed creative writing courses four to five days a week, hardly any rest. (Make that clearer and more concise. Or just skip it or say, working at poorly paid jobs almost every weekday with barely an hour a day to do his own work.) This is their first summer together. (He said that.) They’re going for two months. (Thinks he said that too.) He’ll have to split the rent and expenses and car rental fees with her, which will be a sacrifice. She doesn’t earn much either as a teaching fellow and also has no money saved, but she’ll be getting a check every two weeks from her university while his school stopped paying him the week his work ended. It’s something he always wanted to do: spend a few summer weeks or more in the country or at the shore with a woman he’s in love with and who says she’s in love—once even said “deeply in love, and that’s the truth”—once even said she’s never been so happy or felt so comfortable with a man as with him. He says to her—

  She points out a highway sign for a rest stop in three miles: gas, food, information, the symbols on it say; buses and truckers welcome. He can’t believe his luck. Two summer months with this beauty. This beautiful person. This brain-clever woman with all the right values, it seems, and a heart like—well, something, and a magnificent soul. (He used to say whenever he sees the word “soul” in prose he bolts the other way. So strike out the soul and don’t try to fiddle with it, since nothing can take its place.) He thinks about what they’ll do tonight after they arrive. It’ll be dark. Won’t take long to unpack the car. Or maybe just dusk, remnants of a great sunset, though he doesn’t know yet how much sky hell be able to see through the trees there. Their bags, his typewriter and writing supplies, her box of books, a few of his, mainly his big dictionary and thesaurus—“There’s a terrific library in town,” she’s said, “with a steady stream of new books of all categories, though mostly poetry and fiction, furnished by the book editor of The New Yorker, who summers in the area but keeps to himself except, I suspect, to drop off his weekly bags of books”—some provisions from New York and a little they bought on the way, and, of course, the cats and litter box. There’ll be cleaning up to do: mouse nests, maybe some dead mice and even a carcass of a bird that got down the fireplace chimney, dirt and dust that accumulated over the year, but she’s said there’s never much. Cottage will have been aired out by the caretaker, all he’ll do other than get the hot water heater and refrigerator going and prime the well pump. “The place isn’t entirely mouseproof,” she’s said, “but the moment the cats are carried across the threshold, the mice disappear.” (Does he need all that? He’ll decide when he goes back. And add “case of wine” and “boxed Cuisinart” to what they bring in from the car.) She’ll take care of most of the cleaning and putting away clothes, she said last night. She has a system that gets it done in less than two hours, and she knows where everything goes and was stored last year. If he wants he can take their suitcases upstairs and set up his desk and make dinner: pasta, a quick pesto for it or just good olive oil and freshly grated romano cheese, wine and bread, and a simple salad. They have all that in the car except the lettuce. That they’ll buy, as well as a few things for breakfast and maybe a dessert for tonight at a market about twenty miles from the cottage. (He already said that but in a different way, so it’s okay to let stay.) Tomorrow they’ll do their first big shop in the next town over, she’s said. If he doesn’t want to come along and wants to work or look around or nap, she’ll do it herself. No, he said, he wants to be in on everything with her at first and start getting to know the area. Cats will have to be fed right after they get there, she said, and litter box refilled. He’ll do that, don’t worry, he said. “Pasta, sprinkling of cheese, little white wine in their drinking dish, right?” But which first? Probably the box, since it’ll be a number of hours since they last used it. (The two sinces. That’s always been a problem, since “as” or “for” or “because” just don’t seem right in a sentence like that.) Phone will have been turned on, so he’ll call his mother, if it’s not too late, to see how she is and tell her—she’ll really just want to hear his voice—that the trip went fine and the cottage and grounds, from what he can see, are quite pretty, all of which, because of what Sally’s said about them, he assumes. (He didn’t say that right, though he thinks the meaning got across, but he’ll change it.) Her mother’s coming up for a week. He wonders if she’d mind if his mother visited too. For five days, two less than her mother. His mother’s frail but still gets around, and she can use a break like that from the city. It’d mean a lot to him, he’d say, and he won’t ask for anything else, no other visitors, though she can have as many as she wants. (No, that’s too much like something a kid would say, but for the time being keep.) He should ask her now. They’ll have lots of time to talk about it if she has any objections. That way, if it’s yes, he can tell his mother right after they get there. Or not that quickly. He doesn’t want Sally to think he’s a momma’s boy—she knows he isn’t; he just wants to make his mother happy—so maybe a half hour after they get there, if it isn’t way too late. He says to her—

  They have lunch at a restaurant a mile off the interstate. Parked in the shade because of the cats. Car windows rolled up to about three inches from the top. Cats let out of the carriers to jump aro
und but mainly to pee and shit in the litter box and drink from the water dish so they don’t dehydrate. She’s stopped here twice before. Last night, she said this is where, if they start out early enough, she’d like to lunch: about four hours from the city. “With another guy once?” and she said, “No, my mother, and the second time alone. It’s a real homey place.” Her mother and she had driven to the cottage from New York, stayed overnight in a Kennebunk motel along the highway because her mother doesn’t drive and the entire trip … (and so on, or just get rid of it). “Then am I the first guy you’re bringing to the cottage?” and she said, “To be perfectly frank, I’d rather not discuss it. But I hope you’ll be the last, but to come with me in succeeding years—how about that?” “I like it. It tickles me randy. It douses me proud. Oy, what dumb remarks, those last two. Forgive me.” “No need; we’re having fun. Let me think of something funny too. I lub you. That also makes no sense except for the sound of it.” They were in bed, apartment had been cleaned, almost everything packed, rented car picked up that afternoon and parked in a nearby garage, some of the heavy stuff already in it: books and wine and two reams of his typing paper. He had sublet his apartment starting last week. (Fix that. His sublessees [-lessors?] moved in three days ago and have the place for two months. He stayed with her the last week. But he sublet it starting a week ago but the tenants only moved in the last few days? They got to New York later than they thought they would.) She puts her sandwich down, looks so beautiful, is chewing, looks up and catches him looking at her. What? her expression says. He says to her—

  Car radio’s on: a beautiful orchestral piece he’s never heard. Wants to hear it till the end and then get its name and the composer’s and buy a recording of it when he gets back to New York. He hopes they don’t drive out of range of this station before the piece is finished. But it’s 4:58, then :59, the car clock says. She’s spoken of a national public radio news program at five she usually listens to in Maine and which he thinks she’ll want to find on whatever public radio station around here gets it. (That all right, not too confusing and long, doesn’t need to be cut into two? No, seems fine.) She reaches for the dial, other hand on the steering wheel. He puts his hand on hers, keeps it from fingering the dial, and says—

  He likes the trip so far, even the long stretches of boring highway and interstate: it’s new and the air’s cool and the conversation’s been good since they set out. She drives; he. They stop twice more to pee, and for containers of coffee to drink in the car while they drive, and once on a country road in Maine for fresh strawberries from a stand. “They’re always a month or more behind New York,” she said at the start of the trip, “so we’ll be getting strawberries around where we live for the next few weeks.” (That add anything? Mostly what he’s least interested in: local color.) “They’re much smaller and more compact than what we’re used to, and sweeter; you’ll see. Then, near the end, when they start picking from the bottom of the bushes—or is that raspberries, which come later, and by the way there are farms where you can pick both of them yourself?—they’re as tasteless and mushy as the New York kind.” Also stopped for a pound bag of cashews off a truck, and then the longer stop at the market some twenty miles from the cottage. They arrive when it’s dark. (He thinks he’ll delete everything in this paragraph so far but the last sentence.) The caretaker had left most of the windows open and a light on by the front door. They close the windows, unload the car, and start putting things away. He fills the litter box and feeds the cats. Sets up a desk downstairs with his typewriter and supplies and then starts dinner, which means boiling water for pasta while he prepares a salad, slices bread, opens the wine, puts a stick of butter in a butter dish and washes several bowls and two plates and wineglasses and silver and sets the table. He makes himself a vodka and grapefruit juice, though without ice, as the water in the ice trays isn’t solid yet. (He’s already said they’d do most of that. So here he says they did it.) And nice of the guy to put water in the trays. And the drink? Juice he got at the market, but what about vodka? They stopped at a state liquor store in New Hampshire about five miles from the bridge into Maine. She said the prices are much cheaper there because there are no state taxes, but they didn’t seem so to him. And the store was like a supermarket for booze. Some people had huge shopping carts with what looked like twenty to thirty bottles of liquor in them. The wine selection wasn’t good and the better wines were more expensive than they were in New York. He said, “Let’s get out of here and buy what we need tomorrow at a regular Maine store.” “You don’t like it? I thought you would.” What does she think, he thought, he’s a dipso or something close? Big of her, if that’s it, but he hates this place though doesn’t want to say so and maybe disappoint her. “It’s only that I don’t see trudging through such a vast store and waiting on long lines for the few bottles we’d buy. This joint’s for serious drinkers with lots of time to spare, while we gotta get moving.” “But you want your vodka and I’d like a glass of port tonight after the long trip. Go back to the car and read and open the windows so the cats have plenty of air, and I’ll quickly pick up what we need and get on line. There’s one there for five items or less.” (Why’d he go into all that? Maybe because it was the worst moment of the trip and he wanted to show it, which wasn’t such a bad moment at all. Which means he was actually showing what a good trip it was and something about how accommodating she is to him and particularly was then. But go over all of that starting from how he got the vodka, and if it doesn’t do what he wanted or seems to hold things back—he’s almost sure it does—chuck the whole thing.) The radio’s on. (Said that.) They’re in the cottage. She comes into the kitchen while he’s making dinner, says everything’s put away and swept up and even the bed’s made, smiles, her look wanting to know what he thinks of the place and also showing how pleased she is he’s here. He says to her—