Fall and Rise

by Stephen Dixon

  “In English or Japanese?”

  “You speak Japanese too?”

  “Now who’s kidding whom?”

  “I’m not. I thought it might be one of those transliteral or what do you translators call those translations—where you translate from the less meticulous and poetic translations of the originals?”

  “That’s close enough. Now don’t call me a chauvinist, at least the malevolent kind, for I could give you a list of my kindred and unconsanguineous sisters who’ll swear I’m not, but I bet you picked that up from your husband who I bet is a lit professor who I bet has writ tomes of published poems.”

  “He is and has.”

  “Well, that’s a good profession. No, I do the entire thing. I even write the poems for Hasenai in the original and let him take all the credit.” I take off my glasses. “I have to take these off and put them in their holder and the holder into my pocket or someplace safe so I know they won’t fly off my face and break or holder flop out of my pocket and get stepped on, when I recite one of Hasenai’s peppier poems. ‘Night is a moon and then it’s cigarette-yellow and done. Christ, I can’t go on. The evening’s reached its peak and the coyote is gone.’”

  “That’s good. And the whole poem I wager. And who would have thought they have coyotes in Japan, or is that your word for a similar animal there that has no exact counterpart in English? Of course the poem’s probably better in the original.”

  “I just now made it up.”

  “Translated it?”

  “No, it’s my own.”

  “That’s mean. You fooled me.”

  “Or maybe I’m a good spontaneous poet, how about that?”

  “You’re not being very nice.”

  “Why? Suppose I now said it was Hasenai’s and I worked days on it and had only said it was mine to momentarily fool you? I don’t usually do that and wouldn’t know why I would, but I’m capable of it.”

  “No, you’re smart enough to know what your motives are. As for the poem, I’m no hypocrite. To my uncultivated ears—hubby’s poems or not, and I plead guilt to not reading them all and those I do I mostly don’t understand, a problem no one else seems to have—what you recited seemed quite good.”

  “Thanks. And I was being too playful—maybe prematurely playful—with you. You already admitted you didn’t know or care much for poetry, so where’d I come off trying to fool you? And it was my poem alone. I don’t know if it was whole. I’ve even forgotten what I spontaneously wrote, but since I didn’t put it on paper or memorize it—you don’t remember it, do you?”

  “Except for a coyote in it, no.”

  “Anyway, I can’t say it was written. And probably everything I’d spontaneously compose is influenced by modern Japanese writing and these days especially, Hasenai’s, so you’re right if you also thought it sounded somewhat Japanese.”

  “Since it had no Japanese references in it, it didn’t particularly sound like anything to me.”

  “Okay. Just don’t if you don’t mind tell Diana about this or she’ll never invite me back and then we’ll never meet again.”

  “I’ve a big mouth too sometimes so I can’t guarantee what will happen.” She gets up. “Excuse me. I’m not going to the powder room or to take a breath of fresh exercise or anything. Enjoy yourself.”

  “Please. No apologies necessary. Just mine.” She leaves. I get up for more cheese. I also don’t want to be sitting here when she starts talking to someone about me. “That man there. On the couch, to the left. I don’t want to turn around but he—there’s nobody there? I’m referring to his left. He’s sort of disinterestedly dressed, hair gushing out of his chest, a varicose nose? There he is. Well him. Talk about a man being mixed up?”

  Jane and Phil are talking to each other at the cheese table. Now there are hard sausages on it, creamed herrings, sliced vegetables, an egg and chicken salad mold with a dollop of caviar on top, pâtés and dips. I dip a zucchini stick into a dip, bite it while I slice off some pâté, put the pâté on a cracker, add a piece of cheese to it, put the rest of the zucchini into my mouth, cheese falls to the table, while I reach for it the pâté drops to the floor. I pick the cheese up and put it into my mouth, pick up the pâté with a paper napkin, can’t find a used plate or ashtray to put the napkin in so I put it into my back pants pocket, but I might sit on it by the time I get rid of it so I put it into my side pocket, eat the cracker and look at Jane and Phil. They’ve been watching me, resume talking. “I’m not so sure,” Jane says. “You’re not so sure? Good God, if Shakespeare could mix metaphors and get away with it—”

  “So what did Alan have to say?” I say and Jane says “Wuh?” and Phil looks at me curiously, skeptically, some way that way that makes me feel I shouldn’t have interrupted or that I might have said something before that should have discouraged me from speaking so openly to them now. I think. Jane was nice, Phil not so much. “Nothing really,” waving them back to their conversation and I take a glass of wine off the table and am about to drink it.

  “That’s my wine,” Jane says.

  “I’m sorry, I thought it was mine.” I hold it out to her.

  “I don’t want it now. I’d just rather not have anyone else drink from it.”

  “I can understand that.” I put the glass down, see a full glass of wine at the other end of the table, look at the people near it and they all seem to be holding a glass of something. “There’s mine.” I reach over and grab it. “Same kind of glass and green and full, just like yours. And don’t worry, I’m not drunk,” I say, drinking. “Just a little uncomfortable. All these big makers here and everyone knowing one another and all that or whatever it is making me uneasy. I’m also not in any kind of therapy as that must—that remark must—those last remarks must make me sound like.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you say that?” Phil says.

  “You referring to her ‘what?’ or to my being uncomfortable?”

  “Since I was looking right at you, I think I meant you. And about your thinking you’re sounding as if you’re in therapy.”

  “Really, I know nothing about therapy.”

  “Come on…what’s your name: Scott?”

  “Dan,” Jane says.

  “Everyone knows something about therapy. Either we’ve been in it or have read scores of books about it or know scores who’ve done one or both. But forgetting that if you don’t want to talk about it, why do you feel especially uncomfortable here?”

  “Not ‘especially.’ A little, and because I’ve made a couple of people uncomfortable. If I also made you two uncomfortable, then more than a couple. Perhaps three or four. Definitely three or four if I’ve made you both uncomfortable, but now that I think of that pipe-smoking man over there I talked theater to before, it’s more like five. But really. I’m being silly. A bore. I can tell when I’m being a bore. Been a bore before for sure and a boor to boot. A boor-bore or bore-boor. You see? Still a bore but not necessarily a boor-bore or one to boot. Too much to eat, that’s the problem, and possibly too much wine rushing too suddenly to my head or wherever wine rushes to, and green, for whoever heard of green wine even on Saint Paddy’s Day? Beer, sure, but—I should go.”

  “Why? Calm down. Let’s talk.”

  “I’m calm. And thanks. That’s very nice.”

  “Why’s it so nice? If we’re here for anything on this gosh-darn globe, which is just what Jane and I were having it out about before—”

  “Time out,” a man says to us, holding his hands up to make a T. “This is a joke.”

  “We know,” Jane says.

  “Good, you know, you love jokes. But this one is not intentionally meant to offend any ethnic or national group and any similarity to such is purely coincidental. The Polish army purchased ten thousand dilapidated bathtubs from an Italian scrapman—”

  “You told us it.”

  “How they refurbished the tubs and used them as tanks to invade Russia?”

  “And I told you i
t wasn’t a very appropriate joke for this party and as far as jokes go, not at all droll.”

  “Play ball,” he says, dropping his hands and walking away.

  “Who let that guy in?” Phil says.

  “I kind of liked it,” I say. “Not the joke so much but the ‘Time in, play ball.’ Takes a certain amount of guts and it’s something I might do—the preambular apology.”

  “It takes stupidity, not guts. I think he’s an idiot. You know Milikin?”

  “Seen his illustrations all over the place but never met him.”

  “Genius, man, genius, and where I come from you’d get strung up for using that word for his work. I wanted to find someone to introduce us. Diana’s busy.”

  “Just go over to him, say ‘Hello, how’s by you, what’s new, the family, and I wanted to meet you.’ He’ll like the attention, especially from an artist.”

  “That’s what I told him,” Jane says. “I’m in no rush to meet him myself, although I do admire the regard and prices he gets. I’ll speak to him of course, but first I want Phil to introduce himself. Do it, Phil. Everyone has to humble himself to someone at times, and he has thirty years on you, so you have nothing to feel competitive about.”

  “It’s not that. There are people talking to him.”

  “You want a few more drinks first? Because you know you’re going to go over before the night’s over. But then you’ll be too sloshed to make any sense to him and for him to appreciate your going over to want to do anything to help push your work.”

  “You know that’s not why I want to talk to him.”

  “Hey baby, this is the itsy old art lady you sleep with, so don’t be giving me that shit.” “Then speak like a lady, act like a lady,” and he gives more reasons why he can’t, shouldn’t, won’t introduce himself to Milikin and when she tells him to stop being a child and particularly with a voice so loud the whole world can hear, he says much lower that he’s not a child which she should know by now if she sleeps with him as she says and if she hasn’t been then he’s been having one hell of a ball with someone else the last ten years. But all kidding aside. If she has anything like that to say to him, say it at home. Then I see Helene. Of course I didn’t know her name at the time. Looking at me when I first looked at her. I’d lifted my head. First I turned my head away from Jane and Phil while they caviled about what each had just said, looked around the room, saw the woman from the couch, man with the pipe, Alan making a point, Milikin nowhere about, Cylette I think her name was being offered a light, looked at the rug, raised myself an inch or two on the balls of my soles, raised myself an inch or two on my heels, seesawed back and forth a few times like this, sipped some wine, set the glass down without looking away from it, then lifted my head while Phil told Jane how in many ways he’s more honest than she despite anything she might say, but none of it loud enough it seemed for anyone else to hear, and found myself looking at Helene looking at me. Well what do you know I told myself—hello, hello. She was standing between the food table and bar, about seven feet from the bar and seven from me. A crowd stood behind her, crowded around the bar, and there was an opening between us a foot or so wide and while we looked at one another people moved past it but nobody blocked it. She was being spoken to by a man whose whole body her whole body faced, but her face was turned sideways to me. She held a wineglass with two hands. Only the stem and lip of it showed, so I couldn’t tell what color wine she drank. We looked at each other for about ten seconds. Then I turned my head back to Jane and Phil while she was still looking at me. That’s when I said to myself Well what do you know, hello hello. I don’t know why I turned back to Jane and Phil. The position—body facing one way, head the other—could have been making me physically uncomfortable, but I don’t think that was it. If it was and I’d corrected it by turning more of my body to her, she might have construed that move as too open and provoking. I suppose I also didn’t think it right to look too long at someone looking at me whom I didn’t know, though she did to me. Jane said something to Phil about iguanas and sausages. Phil said “What do you think about that, Dan?” I said “About what?” “Damn lf he wasn’t even listening when we figured out the key to his past and present and all his future configurations but swore on our children’s heads to say it only once to him and never again. Tough luck, fella.” “He’s better off,” Jane says, “and you’re an awfully slick liar. Now let’s drop the subject, darling, okay?” “J’agrée, mon queen—to any sing.” She grabs his hand and yanks him closer to kiss him. I turn my head and more of my body this time to this woman. She’s facing the man with her body and face, listening to him engrossedly it seems. “We’ll saunter up to him en duo,” Jane says. “It can’t hurt. Speak to you later, Dan, unless you want to join us,” and I say “No thanks, I’ll save your place,” and turn back to the woman. She’s still listening. He’s using the words “quiddity,” “tendentious” and “rhetoric” in one sentence. If I look at her long and hard enough without looking away I bet she looks at me. Seconds after I think this she turns her head to me. It never worked before. It didn’t work now. She just turned to me again, or turned this way, not realizing I was still here, and last time I tried that trick I was probably in high school. We look at each other. She starts to smile, sort of smiles, then smiles because I smile or maybe I smiled because I felt her full smile about to appear and we smile at each other like this and I bob my head once and she blinks her eyes once, more a reflex than a signal I’d say, and turns to the man who has stopped talking to her and might have been looking at us looking at each other since she turned to me but is now looking at her, and raises her empty glass and he says “Not yet but it could stand some filling up,” and they go to the bar.

  Blouse, neck, hair, breasts, forehead, cheek, collar, cuffs, skirt, can’t see her shoes. She squeezes through the crowd that came together behind the man who squeezed through first. Her back’s to me. She seems to have a large round rear and small waist. I picture her ironing one of those cuffs and me moving flush up against her rear, arm around her waist, other hand cupping her breast, fiddling with her nipple, neither of us in clothes. She’s behind some people now and all I see is her hair, then what seems her hand pouring wine from a bottle into a man’s glass. Go over, say hello or if she’s still with the man then stay close to say hello when he momentarily looks away or talks to someone else and maybe even leaves her. I head for the bar, turn to the food table, I wouldn’t know what to say. “Hello, how’s by you, the family?” Might be original enough to tickle her but I doubt it. A funnyman she might think, one who isn’t afraid to make a fool of himself, but I doubt it. Earnest approach then. “I wanted to meet you, plain as that, what can I say?” She looks earnest herself but the approach might what? Put her ill at ease or touch her in some not too positive way and then she could silently blame me for her sudden awkwardness or whatever it might come to when before she was feeling so good. Just go over. Say and do nothing. Or say nothing but do something. Pretend to want more wine. Just want more wine, since when do you have to pretend, and while there look at her and if she’s not looking at you continue to look at her and if she then looks at you, maybe then you can make one of a number of moves. But finish your wine first. Or go over with it. She’ll know the real reason you’re coming over, but if she’s interested, and for an intermittent minute she seemed to be, she won’t care what’s the excuse.

  I drink up and start for the bar. “Excuse me, excuse me.” She’s still talking to that man. What did I expect? And if she was talking to anyone, what did I tell myself to do? I look for Jane and Phil. Nowhere around. I told myself to get near her and at the right time strike. I go to the food table, put my glass down, slice some cheese, but too much cheese tonight, too much food for now. Sit down. I head for the couch. “Excuse me, excuse me.” It’s filled. Look for a chair. All filled. Diana’s talking to someone. Seeing me she lifts her eyebrows as if saying still not having a good time? You look lost her eyebrows say. I smile, holdup my ha
nd, thumb and index finger joined, indicating the obvious. She smiles. I turn to the bar. Woman’s not there. Good. Could mean she’s by herself somewhere where I could get to meet her. Good also means I can go to the bar now because she’s not there. I need to? Not that I’m high but I might be slightly. No, I need something to hold. Some people smoke. Others jingle change. I go over, “Excuse me, excuse me,” and pour a glass of red wine. Woman at the bar’s pouring a thick liquid from a decanter into what looks like a silver thimble the size of a double-shot glass. “Vodka? Is it for someone special or can anyone have it?”

  “Since it isn’t hidden, I think everyone.” She gives me another silver glass off a tray. Hieroglyph-like characters scratched into it that are probably Cyrillic. “You don’t think a problem mixing spirits and wine?”

  “My first,” setting the wineglass down. “Never even tasted it.”

  “Then pour it back if it can be done without spilling.”

  “I don’t know—won’t people mind? And judging by the wine bottle neck, I think I’d need a funnel.”

  “Funnel and people indeed. Take chances.” Holding the decanter and her glass in one hand, she pours my wine into the bottle with the other. A drop runs down the neck but never reaches the bar. “Hold ready. It’s real Russian and ice-cold,” and she starts filling up my silver glass.

  “Half will be fine.”

  “The custom in Russia is to pour all the way up. But you want to stop half with such beautiful vodka, you must be much better man than I.”

  “You can say I’m a man at least. Ah, pour all the way.”

  “Please, you have to excuse me, but try as I have I can’t be my equal in English.” She fills my glass and holds up hers. “To the Western Wind. May it blow and blow.” We clink and drink. “Pretty good, yes? We never saw this good there in all my years. You’ll forgive me?” As part of the crowd breaks for her I see that woman by the food table, alone it seems and looking at me and then at her fork coming off her plate. Wait a moment so the woman I just spoke to doesn’t think I’m following her and then go over, say prosit or how goes it or nas zdorovie if I can remember how to pronounce it or just hello and after her hello show her the glass and ask if she knows what the Cyrillic letters mean or if she thinks the snowy troika and onion dome scene also tooled-in is just for foreign consumerism. No, no plotted approach and she might be married, in love, living with the man she’s married to and in love with and who’s here or coming later. But if so why’d she look at me way she did?