Love and Will

by Stephen Dixon

  I called her tonight and she said sure if you want to come by. She didn’t know how it had happened with David so fast—would I like a beer? She’s grown addicted to Heineken’s this past week. A girlfriend rang her up. But I’ve been over all that. Maybe I’ll ring her when I get home. Hello, London calling. Oooh our mouths. Our attacking genitals. I liked us best when—no. The one post she lost her mental self in most was—no. In the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last month—no. Same day we watched the bonsai grow and she zipped us through the Van Gogh exhibit, afraid I might faint from the crowds. Ballet, dinner parties, never a stage play or sporting event, long park walks, and when it was nipping cold, backwards short runs. Do you also dance to records and thumping FM while you’re both undressed? and she said yes. Next thing you’ll say is he’s as loving and rutty as I when you’re both entangled and compressed and she said she’s afraid even more so yes. I told her I never quite felt I was good enough for her anyway and she said she was surprised she got to like me as much as she did. My moral code and standards were usually too rigid and high, too many times she felt compelled to concur with me or be browbeaten, there was something disquietingly revealing about the fact that I never got along with any of her male or female friends. Before we met, she never before told me, she vowed never again to date a psychologist or any man too analytical of himself or critical of her. No, David’s a psychologist, though she thinks they’re called another name in England as lawyers and lorries are, and maybe too self-analytical though not at all critical and like her a bit weary of the supersensitive and inordinately cautious and just plain brilliant and creative types and loves lots of dumb horsing around. Baby powder’s what she used to put on in the morning if we made love the evening or hour before and she was late for work. What could her fellow subway riders and her students be thinking, she said, when she sits down and up comes clouds of scented smoke. Besides everything else I was too caliginous and morose. Can’t stand that in a man. I can’t stand it in myself so we also agreed on that. And also how good we were feeling those days when we were so often laid so well. And that the bed was our preferred mediating place in case anything between us went awry. And that there was nothing wrong with a lifelong streak of vanity, that this summer we’d try two months of northern Maine sanity, that philosophers are not doctors of philosophy who teach and lovers are not people who preach and Blake’s binding with briars my joys and desires the most novel last line we knew in a non-twentieth-century poem. I’m home.

  “Will?”

  Let me at least remove my guaranteed waterproof shoes, my sopping socks. Why’d I throw away the guarantee? Why do I usually speedily discard vouchers, contracts, receipts, invitations, instructions, stubs, phone numbers, directions, warranties and guarantees and whatever else relevant to me in this category and rely on my time-attested incompetent memory or good luck or the buyer or seller’s good faith or will?

  “Junior?”

  Why don’t I keep a record of the checks I make out? The poems, drawings and picture-poems I send out? Where they are, how long, and if they’ve ever been there, how much money I’ve still in my account or owe or am owed and who the owers are?

  “Will?”

  “Coming.” Why won’t I wear a watch? Why do I avoid health checkups yet see my dentist twice a year? Is it only money that keeps me from buying a reliable pair of waterproof shoes or shoelike insulated boots? How come I’ve never been able to resist chocolate, have always hated the flavor of coffee, can’t pass a day without munching several carrots, have never wanted to smoke? Why have the girls and women I’ve fallen in love with dumped me in a maximum of three months? Why have I always reacted to these one-sided falling aways or breakups in the same hurt sorrowful mawkish way? Why am I always so much of the same? Why are things so permanent? Why can’t I tease instead of torment myself for my seemingly eternal limitations? Why can’t I take my satisfactions in just the barely perceptible change? Why have I been so consistently contradictory and thus contradictorily consistent? Why is it such a struggle to lift a toilet seat when I pee when by nature I’m so unlazy? Why do I usually get nauseated in art museums and libraries and end up making runny movements in their johns? Why have I always been a whiz at mathematics and picking up languages and a dunce at any subject scientific or doing anything with a typewriter except two-finger typing and clogging the keys with eraser flecks? Is it the stars, God, gods, my hormones—

  “Junior?”

  —genetic code, parents, theirs, our great and grand great-grandparents and what we and all the plant and animal life we’ve come in contact with have breathed or ingested or something or ings or body or bodies else? Other influences influencing these influences with still even more influent influences which some people have or might have spoken or written about but which I generally find too tedious to listen to or want to learn about or have simply forgotten about and which in fact might be too complex or mazy or lost in space, time or imagination for any man in this or any of the past thousand centuries to know about if any of those or these are or is the reason or reasons I am the way I am or am what I was or am what I will probably always be?

  “Will, please.”

  “Got you, Dad. The bows and knots in my shoelaces got shrunken tight. And I’ve got to get rid of these drenched socks and turn on the kitchen lights first. It’s snowing outside.”

  “Well, come on.”

  “Take it easy. You’ve got to hold on at times too.”

  “Oh go take the gaspipe.”

  “What? Just screw yourself.”

  “And you take the gaspipe.”

  “And you go screw yourself.”

  I leave him holding the filled urinal. In the kitchen I open an ale. He must have used it when he heard my keys in the locks or while I was untangling my shoelaces’ knots. But I don’t want to be teaching lessons tonight. With his arms reared high and jug in hand he looked like a proffering trodden servant-slave in a hieroglyph. Nor if possible to Dana tomorrow about her unattractive brusqueness with cabbies and waiters or even where her fondling and positioning with me had been remiss. Some days while walking it to the john I thought I might suicidally take a swig of his piss. And morning he’ll badger Mom about my conduct and she being what she is will take the brunt. She’ll say I know he can be rough on you at times but he’s a sick helpless man who if we want to help we’ve got to give in.

  “Finished?”

  “Yeah.”

  I turn him over, empty, wash out and replace the urinal on the table-tray. When he said go take the gaspipe I should have clutched my throat, gagged, fallen to the floor and played dead for a few seconds as if one of his curses had finally worked. I cover him, kiss his forehead, pat his back. “Goodnight.” From what I’ve seen and my mother’s said and said his mother’s said, he’s always been the same too.

  “You drink too much.”

  “I should have left the glass inside.”

  “Not the glass, your breath. From alcohol. It stinks.”

  “Anyway it’s only ale.”

  “Ale now, what before? Some more later. For ten years at least. From what I can imagine, longer. Your liver.”

  “My liver’s okay. Though maybe it’s not. What do I know? That a man starts off at the place where he’s born and ends at the place where he dies. Sound bright? It’s what the priest or anti-priest said in a movie on television I recently saw. But I should get it checked out. By an expert on foie gras. I’m the goose, take a gander. No, but maybe a bad report will give me a good scare. Though I do like to drink. But only wine with my evening mess, beer with my friends more or less, ale for what ails me, never cider cept on salads, hardly the hard stuff anymore, but you used to drink.”

  “I got smart. Be like me.”

  “Why should I be like you?”

  “Because you’re not as smart.”

  “Well, by the time you wake up tomorrow I’ll try to have become as smart as you.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “
Why so sure?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “Ah the good are, when we get down to the nitty-gritty, beyond all the flim-flamming hunky-dories and icy-nicies to the heeby-jeeby really trulies, is that you only tolerate me as much as you do because you think I might beat it out of here and leave you both stranded or stay and start selecting the insulin needles I inject you with daily for their barbs.”

  “Go to sleep. I’m tired.”

  “Pleasant dreams.”

  “The pills?”

  “They’re here. Two of them, one for each stomach. Tissues in your pajama pocket. Urinal within easy reach. Bell. Chux. I forgot. Your teeth?”

  “Your mom.”

  I place the Chux between his penis and thighs. “Now you’re set. Sleep well.”

  “Thanks.”

  I kiss his forehead and shut the light. In the kitchen I open another ale and dial Dana’s number.

  “Hello,” she says.

  “Hello, London calling.”

  “Yes?”

  “Sorry there, Miss. Can’t hear you my very best. Must be a bad connect. Transatlantic tubes must have become untied or innerpacific allied.” But I can just as well imagine our conversation and I hang up. She’d say Will? I’d say the tubes are retied now, Miss. Called in London’s leading gynecologist for the job, pronouncing gyn as gin. She’d say aren’t they called cables instead of tubes and I’d say fables instead of cables and maybe then hang up. Maybe she’ll call back. Twice before when I hung up she did and both times I said we’d been disconnected and we talked about the continually declining phone service in New York till she said didn’t we discuss this same subject last time we were cut off? My continually declining glass. Star fright, snow blight, I wish tonight for tomorrow an empty class. Maybe stout rather than ale or sour mash straight up or with water and or ice. Perhaps a sketch of her in bed on her back in her bedroom on the back of an ordinary white postcard will suffice. Or a story drawn in two strips of four boxes apiece on a postcard showing scenes of my life serially from the start of a standard weekday. Jiggling alarm off at eight, pastry shop clock on my way to work late, teachers’ punch-in clock, wall classroom clocks accompanied by students’ mocks and socks and then three o’clock schlock and clock store clocks on the block and maybe Dana’s shock and my father’s pocket tick-tock and again me in bed behind locks beside my Baby Ben clock drinking bock from a flock of crocks. Or a long amusing letter. Sent several and she said there’s almost nothing about you I like better. I’ll write I’m leaving the city forever as I can’t endure being in it without her. Kissing the folks adios on the avenue I stick out my thumb. Plans are after I get out of the city to make it cross country on the bum. Hop in, a shopper holding open a shopping bag will say. Hop aboard, a boy on a skateboard will say. Hop off, says the bus driver when I can’t cough up the exact fare. Hop to it, says the motorcyclist after slicing off my thumbing thumb with a razor blade and breezing away with it leaving my thumb base bare. I swaddle the hand in a rag, flag down a cab, say tail that motorcyclist who’s copped my thumb, as I read if you’ve lopped off a digit you’ve no more than an hour to get it sewn back on. I find the thumb on a manhole, rush with it to a hospital, the receptionist sends me to the toe-finger section, I get lost in the many corridors and wind up in the room for cadaver dissections, at the hospital pharmacy I ask for digitalis, for I also read doctors adhere fingers back to hands with it along with a dash of Vitalis, the pharmacist asks for my prescription slip, I say are you kidding and bleep bleep your blip blip, she says no prescription no digitalis, but no female pharmacist could be that callous, so I show her my severed thumb, as I figured she faints and lies numb, I leap over the pharmacy counter, just reprisal might be for me to savagely mount her, but I’m losing time all the time so I look for shelf D, find the digitalis and help myself to some Vitalis on shelf V, blend the two ingredients together with pestle and mortar, as the directions suggest add three tablespoons of tepid water, guzzle down the entire mixture, press thumb to hand till it again becomes a fixture, but maybe another letter or continuance of this one where in the digitalis section I also find shrinking powder, though because it’s on the D shelf it’s here called drinking powder, which makes me so small I can sit up in Dana’s hand, after having tumbled out of the same envelope I sent her this letter in from a foreign land. But instead on the bottom of a postcard I draw my face frontwards from chin dimple to dome, and inside the word balloon above me write in wee letters the following poem. Skin of stone, rock for a heart, dead glaze and gaze for a look that once leaked longing, loving, sapless tree about to fall, cold dusty remains of burnt charcoal, bones found in a hundred-year-old grave, thousand-year-old grave, ancient Mesopotamian tomb, empty hospital room, pencil lead, desert of dead, polished ball of solid steel, endless wheel, nothing but space in a carapace, sealed airless Plexiglas box, doors opening on doors and each with numerous locks, vacuum, exosphere, or whichever atmosphere where there’s no breathable air, light bulb with broken filament, lightninglike cracks in buckets of hardened cement, wall of unshatterable glass I exhaust myself trying to smash, moldy lace, unalterable obdurate face, stiff plastic, what was once elastic, but didn’t I, hint I, that just seeing a woman steadily for a month is for me a torrid love affair?

  I address the card to Dana, drop it in the street’s mail container, dogfight, lamppost light, make everything turn out all right.

  And then that Will who became Guil who wrote si jamais revient cette femme, Je lui dirais Je suit lui content.

  My old man’s snoring, the snow’s now pouring.

  Will’s tight, his poems trite, maybe sleep will shorten his halfwit’s height.

  To her living room ceiling’s attached a double-sized hammock, first time I met her she wore gobs of blue eye shadow but no other makeup.

  Losing sight, nighty-night—oh one other thing she said was will you go fly a kite.

  Falling, stalling.

  Dog Days

  I was crossing Broadway in the eighties when the light turned red and traffic sped past. I waited at the crosswalk on one of those islands in the middle of the avenue when a dog rushed at me from the benches and sunk its teeth into my leg. I tried shaking it off. It growled but wouldn’t let go. I swatted its head with my book and it snapped at my swinging hand and then put its teeth back into my calf. I yelled “Goddamnit, whose dog is this, call it off.”

  Three transvestites were sitting on the row of benches with two more normally dressed homosexuals. They were all looking and laughing. I kicked the dog with my other foot and it yelped but ran away this time as I fell to the ground. The five men laughed much harder, seeing me on my behind. I got up. The light turned green. My pants were ripped where the dog had bit me and I felt saliva or blood or both leaking into my socks from the wound. The dog was sitting between two transvestites, licking himself. One of the transvestites tied a tattered cord to the scarf around the dog’s neck and patted its head where I’d hit it. I limped over.

  “That your dog?” I said.

  “I’m not talking.”

  “You just talked, Jersey,” one of the more normally dressed homosexuals said.

  “Why you going and tell this nice man what my name is, you pimp and a half?”

  “I didn’t tell him. I was only addressing you by what I thought was your name. It isn’t?”

  “Why didn’t you call your dog off?” I said to Jersey.

  “That’s my business and when I want it to be yours, I’ll tell you.”

  “But he bit me.”

  “I thought he just psyched you out.”

  “He sunk his teeth into my leg twice.”

  “Oh yeah? Show me. I got to have proof.”

  I pulled up my pants leg to the calf. Blood was dribbling out of both sets of bites.

  “Whoo whoo,” one of the other transvestites said. “Show us some more leg, honey. You’re getting me hot.”

  “Oh God,” and I let my pants leg down.

  “God had nothing t
o do with it,” he said.

  “Who said that before you just said it?” Jersey asked him. “Some famous old movie queen.”

  “Beulah.”

  “That’s it—the grape. Oh, she was so funny and great.”

  “Your dog been vaccinated?” I said to Jersey.

  “People are vaccinated. And for smallpox and polio, not animal bites.”

  “Then dog shots. Has he had them?”