Time to Go

by Stephen Dixon

  “You’re lying to yourself.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “You’re already jealous of other guys I see and sometimes when I’m just doing nothing alone away from you, and we weren’t really that serious as lovers.” “We almost were. Maybe for a while we definitely were. Obviously now we’re not, but what is it?”

  “Excuse me, but what is what?”

  “You think I look too old for you? Act too old also, or both those or more?”

  “No. You act young enough. Maybe too young for your age, but not for mine. Actually, sometimes the young way you acted kind of embarrassed me, though I’m sure it didn’t bother anybody else.”

  “So I’ll act older. Not as old as your father or like your father, but just older.”

  “I don’t want you acting any way but what you are, not that you could be any other way. As for your looks, well, you don’t look forty-two but you do look thirty-six or so, though don’t ask me what’s the difference. And your physique is good, but for a thirty-five-year-old man. Not one twenty-five or even thirty, which I think, if you want my preference, is the maximum age I’d like my man’s body to look now.”

  “I don’t get it. What could be the difference? “

  “Your upper arm muscles, for instance, are huge, as are your pectoral and whatever those muscles are in back—the ones like water wings when they’re flexed. But all of them, hard as they are and maybe too overdeveloped, like your pects, which if you continue exercising as you do will in a year be grotesque, are sagging somewhat. That disturbs me, what can I say? As great a shape as you’re in, your body still seems to be starting to fall apart because of your age.”

  “I don’t see it.”

  “It’s true. Look at any twenty-five-to-thirty-year-old man at a pool next time, or even thirty-five, but not one overweight. Their pects, even when they’re not developed, are a little higher, and if you see them in the shower, so are their testes by a bit. You can’t stop that.”

  “Say you’re right, which I’m not saying you are, how come you never said anything about it before?”

  “How come? You kidding? Because I didn’t want to mention it. I thought of it though, occasionally. Your body’s the body of a man desperately trying to stay in shape and look much younger than he is, and that makes me sad in a way. Also your hair.”

  “I’m nearly bald, okay, but so are lots of twenty-five-to-thirty-five-year-old men. Blame my father. Even if when he was my age, though he said it came from wearing tight religious caps when he was a boy, he was completely bald on top.”

  “Baldness I can live with. Though again, everything else being equal and you gave me my choice of men, why wouldn’t I choose one with a head full of thick hair? Wouldn’t you if you had your choice of women who were in every respect alike except one who was much more beautiful than the rest?”

  “I don’t see how any two women could in every respect be alike except for being very beautiful.”

  “For argument’s sake.”

  “For argument’s sake, yes.”

  “Anyway, what I was talking before about your hair was the gray.”

  “So I’ve a little on my sides, so what?”

  “On your back, shoulders, chest and also around your groin. There more than anyplace disturbs me about your hair. I don’t know why. Maybe because I think that’d be the last place someone getting gray would get gray. And soon you’ll be totally gray allover or close to it and it would seem strange in a way going with someone who’s all gray, bald and desperately trying to make his body look like the body of a young man who lifts too many weights. You’ll probably even get a heart attack from it.”

  “Chances are a lot better that I won’t. I run and enough miles a day so that my heart and lungs are probably as good as any man who’s twenty-five.”

  “Heart and lungs I can’t see, the body I can. Anyway, why would you want to continue seeing a woman who thought all these awful things about you?”

  “Why? Very simple, I’ll tell you.”

  “Don’t bother, because why wouldn’t you want to see me? I’m twenty, no, twenty-one plus years younger than you. Even if I don’t work out, my body is still great. I haven’t a line or sag on my face or anyplace. I’m still growing in fact. This year alone so far I’ve grown a quarter of an inch. I haven’t a gray hair. No reading glasses either just because I might’ve reached thirty-five, nor a tooth missing besides.”

  “That’s because your dentin’s impenetrable, which you were born with, so thank your genes and stars. As for my eyes, I’m lucky that’s all that’s wrong with them with the reading chores I’ve put them through in thirty years.”

  “Okay. Maybe you’re right there. But everything about me is young and in perfect shape—that’s my argument. There’s no way I’ll die of a heart attack in twenty years. My liver has to be a beautiful pink and its proper size because I’ve hardly taken a drink to your, what, maybe twenty-five years of drinking too much wine and liquor and some years heavily you said. I’m even so young that I still get pimples about once a month.”

  “There. Ask me why I’d go with a woman who still gets pimples.”

  “Because it means I’m still physically growing and changing, my glandular system particularly, and to a man your age, that might be attractive and even exciting. But you go on about my skin, I could talk more about yours and also your hair. It’s aging, getting brittle, while mine is still soft and bouncy, even if I don’t brush it for days. I know all this must sound shallow to you, but I find what a person physically feels and looks like to be important. But there are other things.”

  “Sex.”

  “You’re very experienced, but you’re not a young man in bed.

  You make love the way you do because you have to because of your age. One time and that’s usually it, right? But a young man, if he ejaculates too quickly, can be right back at it. Maybe not with your experience or cooperativeness, though I’ve known some who have been as experienced as you or acted like it, but at least he’s ready for more in fifteen minutes and right now that’s the type I want to be sleeping with. Young, energetic, wants to try lots of things, and more in tune with my own energy, curiosity, stamina and so forth. Does all that make any sense?”

  “Sure it does. I wish you would’ve complained sooner. It would’ve made this whole discussion unnecessary.”

  “I’m not complaining. I loved making love with you and have gotten as excited with you as I have with any man I’ve made love with who I didn’t love. But I’ve lots of’ years before I want to settle in with someone who makes love like you.”

  “Anything else?”

  “What I said wasn’t enough?”

  “My feet? Do they stink? My breath. Is it smellier than a man’s half my age or even ten years younger?”

  “No. You take good care of your teeth—a plus for you compared to some of the younger men I know—and you don’t smoke anything and know how to get rid of the horrible alcohol breath. Your body smells nice too. Maybe you’ve more hair on your body than a younger man, which can catch the perspiration more, but you’re clean, so it’s no real problem. But you also in a way make me feel dumb at times—at least ignorant or near to because of everything you know from books and life and just reading the newspapers for twenty-five years. But then I get sort of exuberant when I think that in ten to twenty years I’ll know as much if not more than you, and maybe for one reason because by that time your brains will have started to forget.”

  “It’s a possibility. Though if I stay active and creative and don’t drown my head in alcohol and have no serious accidents up there, I don’t see why my brain capacities shouldn’t even grow.”

  “Another thing is that I sometimes feel you think you’ve seen and felt it all or almost. I don’t want to be intermittently tugging at your sleeve and saying ‘Ooh wee, you ever see anything like it in the world?’ knowing you probably have and then pretending, for my sake, it is interesting or exciting what
I’m looking at or experiencing for the first or second time. Also—”

  “There’s more?”

  “You said you wanted to, but I’ll stop.”

  “No, let’s finish. Honesty? Facts of life? That’s what I want? Sure I do, or at least how much can it hurt?”

  “Well, all those cultural things you try to turn me on to. I wanted to turn you on to things too, but you were so set with everything you liked that it was nearly impossible. Music and films for instance.”

  “If you mean your new music—that heavy electric guitar and tom-tom stuff that’s been increasingly crowding the atmosphere for the last fifteen years with its untrained bombastic voices and illiterate lyrics, most of it’s worthless. Worthless.”

  “But I don’t think it is. I think a lot of it is great, as good as the best ever, and outside of the younger teenage music, appealing and meaningful and even poignant to people my or any age.”

  “Maybe it is, I don’t want to be unfair. But I’m sure you’d appreciate my music more if you’d had some grounding in the classical and really serious modern works. But that’s my preference, I don’t see why it should be yours, and obviously one of the big differences between us. As for films, I thought our tastes were pretty much the same.”

  “They are. I forgot. Though for you it’s mostly just entertainment while for me a lot of it is art. But I used to love when we were in a theater and I’d turn to you or you to me and we’d with just a look know we both didn’t like the movie or stage show and get up and go before it was over. That kind of silent likemindedness happened so many times there and the pity’s that it didn’t in most other things we did.”

  “Like reading.”

  “I love writers you hate. And I know it’s because they’re writing about things closer to my age and past experience, and same with your writers to you. Some we both like, but they’re masters or poets, so easy to like, or writing about eternal questions or the few things we both experienced or want to know more about.”

  “We forgot food.” .

  “What about it? I think we both like the same kinds, except for the meats I won’t eat and you do, but that was never a problem. You’re also a lot less into the junk thing than me, though you think it’s cute that I am. Really, I was partly raised on it, while you grew up when there was almost no junk food and your mother, you even said, strained your vegetables with a hand strainer, which of course my mother, who’s almost your age, never would.”

  “But junk food’s bad for you.”

  “They taste good though. But that sort of represents another thing we disagree on. You’re so much into health in your own way and I simply haven’t come to that point except for my staying away from chemically filled carcasses and dead crap like that.”

  “I’ll give up all my meat for you.”

  “I know you’re joking. But there is some truth in it, isn’t there? and that’s that you’d give up things you like for your woman while I don’t want to give up anything for any man yet. But another thing is your mother. Nice as she is to me, she seems like my grand or great-grand—”

  “Don’t go overboard. ‘Grandparent’ should suffice. Just ‘parent’ would suffice also if you considered that some adults, like the possibility of myself, have children at a later age.”

  “Your possibly becoming a parent I don’t want to go into. But I do want my man’s parent to be around the same age as mine, so she can get along better or whatever the reason. Though how can she be when the man I’m with is the same age as my father minus two years? And talking about that, people have sometimes looked strangely at us because of it. I know I shouldn’t be bothered by such things—that it’s so bourgeois as you say for them to think that way. But I do get bothered by it sometimes, probably because I am young and as a result still unsure of myself in some ways, and I want to avoid those looks and talk.”

  “Those looks you can get walking with any man. Though I can see how it could bother you if you’re in no way in love with that person.”

  “Listen, what it comes down to is I want to give myself more of a chance and time, okay? You seem more desperate to be mated now and from everything I said today, I’m not, agreed? And it’s not only what I said but all the other things I didn’t, all right? And I don’t want to talk anymore about it, I just don’t. It was nice, different, we had some terrific times, etcetera, and I know the break will be a lot more painful for you than me, but what can I say? You feel more deeply about me than I do you, that’s all. And maybe I don’t or couldn’t because of the age difference—well of course that’s one of the main reasons because that’s what I’ve been saying all along, true? And I know I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times in almost everything I said, but in a discussion like this, who doesn’t? And—excuse me but what was I saying before I started talking about contradicting myself?”

  “I forgot,”

  “Your memory’s not too hot also, but I’m only kidding.”

  “And yours? You’re the one who forgot what you were saying after you got into that topic about deep and no feelings for me.”

  “Oh yes. I was saying that the break, more painful than you, etcetera, and I know why. You think because of your age you’ll have little chance of meeting someone new. But for all I know there are many women and even some my age and maybe even younger who might want to be with you because of your age. Sure there are—plenty. But to me your real obstacle in future relationships is that because you’ve had so many affairs and breakups, you’ve become cynical about them and women and so they’ll never work out or almost.”

  “Not so.”

  “Believe me, it’s so. And maybe you really don’t want, no matter what you claim, a longtime relationship—one ending in marriage and a baby.”

  “How can you say that? I’d marry you today and conceive with you tonight if you wanted and we could.”

  “You say you would but if I said yes, I’m sure you’d change your mind.”

  “Say yes then. Go on, say it.”

  “You know I won’t. Not to you or any man, as I said, for six to eight years or more. Not that when I get married a man will have to ask me to. I can just as well ask also, right? Or that person and I will just naturally slide into marriage, but a happy slide, without either of us asking the other. But what was I saying again? Oh yes. I really believe that deep inside you want to live alone for the rest of your life. That’s why you’ve lived alone all these years and all your relationships have failed, except for a couple of unsuccessful living arrangements with women—relationships which eventually failed because of the very living alone reason I gave.”

  “Okay, say what you said is true. All of it, right from since we started talking. But now I want to stop that pattern for good.”

  “Then do, but with someone else, not me. It will in fact have to never be me. Because when I get to that age where I only might want to get married, you’ll be forty-eight or fifty-two or whatever then and so still way too old for me. So you see, it can never change. There’s no reason in the world for you to think it can change. At forty-five I might not find a man sixty-six or so that unappealing, but that’s so ridiculously far away and I also, if I was going to have a baby, would have had one long before that age. So from this point on the relationship and everything we have to talk about it has to end, okay?”

  “Not even as friends?”

  “You know that’s not all you’d want, and besides, I really have more friends than I can deal with now, but thanks.”

  “All right then, goodnight.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Right. Goodbye, goodnight and the rest of the goods. I’ll see you.”

  “Okay,” and hangs up.

  I hang up, tell myself to stay calm, it’s happened before, though it hasn’t happened and hurt so much with someone in a couple of years, pick up the receiver to call her back, put it on my lap and think what am I going on about, because she’s right, I am too old for her though her reasoning against my a
ge is mostly bull and my arguments against her reasons are just as full of it, when the phone starts making its off-the-cradle noise and I put the receiver back on.

  Meeting Aline

  I dreamt of her. That’s nothing unusual. Dreamt of her plenty of times before. About every four months or so since I last saw her three years ago. Since I walked out on her after she asked me to. “Walk out. I want you to,” she said. “Walk. Really. It’s no good. For too long it hasn’t been good. It’ll never be good.” Other things she said. I walked, got another apartment that day, a cheap enough place, hotel I still live in, residential hotel, so I didn’t have to bring or buy any furniture. Called her the next day and said I’d like to pick up all my things and she said she’ll send them to me with a friend, where am I? I told her. She sent them. Some things I wanted weren’t in the cartons and valises. I never called back and asked her for them. That phone call was our last communication. I’ve thought of her many times since. Haven’t pined for her though. I don’t mourn for her and never did. I was glad it was over. I loved her when I left her but knew we were never going to work out too. But tonight I dreamt of her. It was a good dream. She was very nice to me in it. She was nude too. Right from the beginning of the dream. Had a darker suntan than she ever got when I knew her. The white marks of a brief bathing suit’s top and bottom showed. It must’ve been summer. The windows were wide open. It was very bright in the room. We were high up, overlooked a river, in a bedroom I didn’t and still don’t recognize. She smiled, we talked, I forget about what. Something about how you doing, how are you doing, I’m doing fine, I’m doing fine too, “Why don’t you take your clothes off?” she then said and when I said “Well, I really don’t know,” wondering if the pleasure I’d probably get would be worth the problems I might have to go through later because of it, she took them off for me, or started to. I let her. I wanted to make love very much. Her body was smoother and stronger than when I knew her, though when I knew her her body was very good. Her body in the dream was exceptional. Smaller waist, larger breasts, firmer buttocks, longer slimmer legs. She used to say—said it several times, usually when we were naked on top of the bed covers—”If I’d been stretched on a rack when I was fourteen, which was when I stopped developing, I’d have a perfect body, one, not that I’d want to be there, good enough for a centerfold.” I never had any complaints. In the dream we made love twice. I was very satisfied in the dream. She seemed to be too. I woke up with an erection, played with myself, lost it. How many times have I had an orgasm in a dream?—forget two, which was how many I had in this one. Maybe once. A few years ago. I vaguely remember it. I forget who it was with but I don’t think it. was her.