30 Pieces of a Novel

by Stephen Dixon

  Later, he wants to say how beautiful everything was tonight right to the end, but she seems asleep. She’s on her side, he’s holding her with his arms from behind, and she doesn’t move. He pulls the covers up over her shoulder. She shut off the light soon after they’d made love. He didn’t see her do it. Suddenly the room was black, and then after a few seconds there was a little light from outside. He rubs her nipple, and she doesn’t say anything or stir. Don’t do it again. If she’s asleep she won’t want to be woken up by his doing that. They’d made love, it was long and strong and so on (that should be sufficient as a description of it), and now she’s very tired and wants to sleep. That’s what she’d say, minus the long and strong and commentary on it, if he were rubbing her nipple and woke her up, he’s almost sure. If he persisted after that, which he’s done when they hadn’t already made love and he wanted to, she’d get mad. He wonders if she’s dreaming. If so, of what? If he’s in it: their lovemaking, his hand on her breast now and the rubbing before, and things like that. She drove half the way here and during it complained her eyes hurt and she may need glasses. Would he also, when he takes off her clothes when they start making love, take off her glasses? They got up early to get an early start. (He knows he’s said that but he’s making a point, which is what?) That they’ve been going seventeen-eighteen hours straight. Where does the energy come from for that kind of strenuous lovemaking after so long and arduous a day? But he’s not tired. That could be for a number of reasons—his excitement at being here with her, the sea air and that it’s a new place, all that coffee on the road—and he thinks lots of activity makes him even more active, till he just drops. That so? Doesn’t know. He’s just saying, which he often does. (He doesn’t see the need for any of that after the dreaming part, and maybe not that either, so out.) He continues to hold her breath and shuts his eyes. Breast. One hand on it; other arm, because it was starting to hurt under her shoulder, pulled out and tucked under his pillow. This is how he likes to sleep. What he returns to several times a night after he turns over and maybe sleeps for a while and then turns back to her: left arm under the pillow under his head, right arm around her and its hand usually on her breast, though sometimes, when he tries and she lets him (maybe one time out of five), on her crotch, and maybe one time out of ten with his finger on her clitoris or inside. But this way—hand here, arm there, which is what he started out to say and which he hopes will be his evening’s final resting place—he can fall asleep faster, and the faster he does, the less chance he’ll annoy her, which he doesn’t want to do because… but he feels himself drifting off, so just go to sleep. He almost always says good night to her when he’s dozing off or she says she is. Sometimes when he’s said it she didn’t answer, because she was already asleep or so close to it that even if she tried to answer, she couldn’t. But before he also gets too drowsy to speak, he says—

  He’s dreaming he’s in a forest: thick woods like the ones they drove past once they got off the main highway and headed east on a two-lane road for the ocean about an hour away. He’s sleeping in a tent in a sleeping bag. (He’s sleeping in a sleeping bag in a tent. He’s in a tent, sleeping in a sleeping bag.) Drifting off, really—thinking how nice it’ll be for him and healthy and restful for his mother after he picks her up at the airport tomorrow to camp out with him—when a claw rips through the tent, slitting it cleanly to the floor. A bear’s claw, then a big bear on its hind legs, roaring at him as it walks into the tent. Behind it are two cubs tossing a live fish back and forth. He tries unzipping the bag but it’s locked at the top. He finds the key in his pajama shirt pocket, unlocks and unzips the bag, and jumps out and grabs the tent’s center pole and begins swinging it at the bear, the tent collapsing on the four of them. The bear throws off the tent, grabs the pole and snaps it in two with its teeth and eats part of it, and flings the other to the cubs and makes clicking sounds with its teeth as if they should also eat it, and then comes at him, arms out and claws open as if it intends to strangle him, the cubs now scratching and biting his ankles. “End this dream, end it before I’m mauled!” he screams, and wakes up pressed to her from behind, hand on her breast and other arm still under his pillow, and says—

  Falls back to sleep holding her the same way but not as tight. She doesn’t seem to have moved from the position she fell asleep in. (So? So he’s just saying; he thinks it’s interesting, but if he later feels it isn’t or it holds things up, out it goes.) Dreams he’s at his apartment desk, typing. “This is the quai of strays, go to the fire, don’t stop for pyre, do thumbthin but sucking the shit, as life isn’t made to be staid sense of in a day or end yesterday, nor think a crown or two will help you bob.” Reads what he typed and says, “This is how I want to write from now on: dream walk with multiple illusions, or at the em and em till I’ve boringly exported it. I sow I’m in deep but when I alake I want to pure all these merdes down jest as they art ear. In crap they’ll be the earth turds of my nest crook and will set the bone and smile for the best of it, one driveling into the udder before I’ve something that seeps. Now get a cake. That’s a delivery!” Wakes up, has turned over, fingers around for his memo book and pen to jot down what he dreamt. Room’s dark, no moon, and he doesn’t want to turn the light on to write and wake her, so he’ll print it in big letters on several pages. Finds the pen and book, opens both, but forgets what he dreamt. A concept. Something about fests and fakes? Rests and wakes? Neither; and he’s sure nothing of that dream jungle can be used if he did remember it. Her body shivers and he gets an erection because he has his hand on her breast again and his groin’s up against her bottom and he thinks wouldn’t it be nice if she intentionally shoved her buttocks into him this time, usually a sign she’s interested if she jiggles it and then turns her face toward his for a kiss, and he squeezes farther into her, makes sure the covers are over her shoulder, runs his hand up and down her leg and then around her nipple and she doesn’t stir, and he thinks what can he do to get her interested and not infuriate her, and says—

  Dreams he’s sitting at the desk downstairs. “There’s a pen,” he says, “and there’s a paper.” Takes the paper and starts writing with it on the pen. Looks closely at the pen and nothing’s written on it. Directs the gooseneck lamp to it and holds his city dictionary magnifying glass to where he wrote, and still there’s nothing. What happened? he thinks. Why does he always lose his best ideas because of malfunctions or personal blunders or because they take place in his sleep? “You don’t write it that way, that’s why,” he says. “Nothing will come out of paper. It only comes from the bed. I mean, that too can be true though not absolute, but for what you want to do, words only come out of the pen onto the paper.” (The bed remark was a slip he’s going to keep and probably same with what followed it.) He writes with the pen on the paper but nothing comes out. He inspects the nib and sees it’s straight. It’s last summer’s pen, he thinks. She must have left it on the desk over the winter, and the ink froze. But it would have unfrozen by now so either the pen’s dry or the nib’s bent or there’s no reservoir or the pen’s just here for decoration, like the old spice products and loose-tea boxes in the kitchen, a holdover from the cottage’s owners, who last summered here ten years before Sally started renting it. Tries straightening the twisted nib but sticks himself with it and bleeds blue-black blood that quickly turns red. Symbols, symbols, he thinks in the dream. Wants none of them, and sticks the nib into his finger cut and looks for something in the pen to draw the liquid up but no part of it opens or unscrews. Searches the desk drawer for another pen and then his pants pockets. Everything’s empty. Slaps his shirt but he isn’t wearing one with a pocket. All the pens are in New York, he thinks, and he wants to start something new that’ll carry him through the next two months. First draft first, which should take him about as long as it takes him to scribble it out—maybe an hour, maybe two—and then he’ll work on it page to page as he always does, refining and perfecting it, building it, no doubt expanding it and adding roo
ms and maybe a second john and definitely a new shower stall, for the one that’s here is rusty and cracked. But he has to put in a real cellar first; the one they have is just earth. And before that, a foundation, which will be an enormous undertaking, with him hand-digging a vast hole with only manual tools. All this labor will give him something useful to do this summer and also keep him fit and out of her hair. Forget constructions. Rule one: stay seated and start writing and something will come from it as it has for the last thirty years. Where’d he get “thirty”? Barely twenty, but first he needs something to write with. He’d normally use a typewriter, but he left his in the city. She said there wasn’t room for it in the car. That to take it would mean leaving behind one of the cats, and they’re a family she reunites for a month or two every summer and they thrive for the rest of the year because of their time up here. That’s not what she said. (And “that’s not what she said” and then saying what she or he really did say and then possibly contradicting that is something he’s done so much in his writing that he should stop doing that, too.) She knows the first thing that goes with him for even a weekend away is his typewriter. He thinks she even reminded him in the car before they set out: “Did you remember to take your manual?” and for some reason he said yes. But he left it because he thought that for one man he’s done more than enough writing for a lifetime, if that’s to be gauged by the number of pages, or more than the most ardent reader of a writer would ever want to read, and he wants to take a long and maybe even an endless break from it. No, he forgot his typewriter: got to be honest. He often sets a time he wants to get something done or leave a place by and then rushes like mad to meet that deadline and usually makes it or is late by just a few minutes, but messes things up and causes bad feelings with any other person involved with him in it. (Mouthful? You bet, but he’s so close to the end, go on.) The typewriter’s still in its case on her living room floor, standing on its end and waiting to go. If it could speak it’d probably say, “Why’d he abandon me? Haven’t I been a faithful and helpful servant for years, and don’t I only break down when he abuses me? And doesn’t he think that after working continuously for ten months in the city that I could also use a change of scenery? What does he think the humidity here does to my keys?” Typewriter abuse, he sees himself being charged with, if that typewriter brought him to court, his other no-longer-used broken-down typewriters over the past twenty years acting as corroborating witnesses against him. He banged away on them mercilessly sometimes, often kept them uncovered and unclean. Took out his aggressions on them, and there were plenty of those—forget what he says about his soft spot for manuals and how he prefers them to all other writing machines because of their simplicity and portability and pianolike keyboard action—till they were broken beyond repair. He’ll have to drive to New York for it, there’s no other way. Head out later today and start back early tomorrow, so only missing a night’s sleep with her and one more workday. Bunglers and malefactors. Wishes he had the dough to buy a new one up here. Or could arrange for someone to get into her apartment and pack his typewriter and send it to him. But that might take days and be too much to ask of anyone, and the typewriter no matter how well packed could get damaged along the way. He has two reams of paper and plenty of typewriter ribbons, correction tabs, and eraser pencils, which he forgot to take out of his suitcase before he left, but nothing to write on. She comes into the room and says—

  He wakes up, isn’t holding her, pats around the bed; she isn’t there. “Sally?” he whispers. He feels over the side of the bed, since she once rolled off it and continued to sleep on the floor. Maybe she went to sleep in another room because he was keeping her awake with his noises. Or she suddenly couldn’t see herself with him for even a few days this summer and didn’t know how to tell him or didn’t want to wake him to tell him or wait for him to wake up, so got in the car and quietly drove off, or drove off normally but he was sleeping so hard he didn’t hear. She could be driving around aimlessly now, thinking of what to do about him—not say anything or ask him to leave?—or drove back to New York or to a friend’s place around here. She knows how hurt and disappointed he’ll be. What it also means is their relationship’s finished and with it all his plans of marrying her and having kids and coming here every summer with her and them for years. But she didn’t know how to tell him in any other way but leaving while he was asleep and hoping he’ll understand what’s happened when he awakes and doesn’t see her. (He knows he’s repeating himself and could tighten this a lot but don’t stop.) She probably left a note. It probably says—it could say this, in other words, though it could also say Please be out of here tomorrow or even by late today—Feel free to stay here for a week. That’d only be fair after what I’ve done and all the trouble you went through in getting here. You can rent a car if you want. The rental companies—you’ll find several of them listed in the local directory by the kitchen phone—will drive the car to the cottage and do all the paperwork here. But you don’t have a credit card, so renting a car’s out of the question even if you have the cash. Whatever you do, please be out of here by Thursday at the latest, six days from today, so I can come back. Don’t worry about the various house and car expenses I incurred, since it’ll cost you plenty to return to New York unless you get a ride. I’m so sorry. What I’ve done is wrong and contemptible and (find the word later, but something to do with pusillanimousness, so maybe the adjective for that) as anything I’ve done to anyone in my life. He wakes up, has been dreaming she left him alone here. When he’s fully awake he realizes he’s not holding her anymore and he can’t feel her near him in the dark. He pats her side of the bed just as he did in the dream, looks over that side to the floor, though she’s never fallen off a bed that he knows, and says—

  He’s dozing off again when he hears a buzzing by his ear. He slaps at it and hits his ear, which starts ringing. Oh, Jesus, he thinks, cupping his ear and rubbing it, the city fool in the country. Suppose he goes deaf in that ear because of the slap, how’ll he explain it? “I didn’t think.” Listens for the mosquito, doesn’t hear anything, so maybe he got it, and shuts his eyes. Minute later the buzzing’s by the other ear, almost as if in it. Same mosquito—different?—they zooming in to torment him one at a time? Turns on the ceiling and bed lights, waits a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to them, can’t see or hear the mosquito, stands on the bed naked and will just stay there, giving the mosquito as big a target as he can so he’ll have more of a chance of slapping it and also be in a better position to, or at least till Sally starts back upstairs. Doesn’t want to look the fool, standing on a bed with his penis flopping. Then he hears one. (Is he going on too long about this? Just finish it.) Turns around and sees it coming toward him, holds his hands out, aims and slaps them together, and thinks he got it. He did, and rubs it off onto his thigh and then flicks it off with his finger. In the light, he thinks, I’m one for one, batting a thousand, though the ear still hurts. The mosquito lands on the bed instead of the floor. Tries flicking it off the bottom sheet and leaves a bloodstain there an inch long. She’s coming up. He’ll have to say something about the stain. Is there some protocol for this? No slapping mosquitoes on rented sheets or someone else’s walls because of the possible bloodstains? He could say—well, lots of things. That’s what he does, makes things up or fools around with the truth. “The first mosquito I faced in years, so lost my head when it bit me—that’s my blood there,” and so on, “and I think it also got me inside the ear, or one of its sisters did, for something in there itches and hurts.” He says to her, the moment her head gets above floor level—