Love and Will

by Stephen Dixon

  Mina, Milos and I went to a coffee shop nearby. I told Mina I’d like to take her out for dinner one night this week and she said “I don’t think it’d be too good an idea as I’m sort of seeing someone now.”

  “But we’ve had too inauspicious and eventful and coincidental a beginning not to see what develops next.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far. But I don’t suppose a single dinner with you can matter that much and we can also learn how we all made out with our bites.” She gave me her phone number. The three of us shook hands and took separate buses home.

  I called the police station the next day and the man at the desk said the first address Jersey gave was fake and they’re now trying to run him down at either his own apartment or where he said his friend lives.

  “This is a real emergency,” I said. “As even the injection treatments for rabies can sometimes be fatal, so this other man and I want to avoid them at all costs.”

  I called the station the next day and the policeman said “All three addresses were fake and we don’t know what else to do for you now.”

  “I know where Jersey and his type hang out.”

  “You one of them?”

  “No, I just live in the neighborhood and walk around a lot. And I see that on the island across from Loews 83rd is where a lot of the transvestites like to hang out these days, though every other month or so they switch to another island a block or two north or south.”

  “If you see him let us know,” and he gave me a special number to call.

  I went to the island on Broadway. One of the transvestites of two days ago was sitting alone on a bench.

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but do you know where I can find your friend Jersey?”

  “I’ve no friend Jersey. She a friend of yours?”

  “Jersey’s dog bit me the other day and I’m trying to find it to see if it has rabies.”

  “Oh sure, now I remember. Bad scene. Too many police.”

  “Can you tell me where Jersey is?”

  “She and her dog are dead.”

  “No, really.”

  “No, really, dead. Hit by a car.”

  “Both killed by the same car? Around here?”

  “She didn’t die, just her dog. Ballpark, she called him. The dog. Jersey went to California. Picked up on this very comer here by some new queer who stops his car and says ‘I love you, darling, what’s your name?’ And they made it—just like that.”

  “I could still find out if the dog had rabies if you knew when and where the accident took place and what they might have done with the dog’s body.”

  “Her dog didn’t die either. He ran away. Ballpark. Jersey let her go when she got in that rich queer’s car. ‘Freedom,’ she says to Ballpark, ‘that’s your new name,’ and Ballpark runs off.”

  “Is that the truth now? It’s kind of a life and death situation for me that I know.”

  “I don’t know Jersey anymore. I don’t want to. She’s a mean mother. You saw. Lie and cheat, cheat and lie. I hate them all. And all her friends too, rich or poor.”

  “Can you at least tell me where she was staying or give me the name and address of someone who might know?”

  “No. No one knows. And if I see her I don’t speak to her or say hello. I’ll say nothing. I’ll walk past. Besides, I hear she’s gone to Las Vegas for good with a gambler who gave up his wife and kids for her and now only likes gays. A laugh. Because Jersey’s no gay. That’s true.”

  I called Mina that night.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but Lewis who?”

  “The fellow who was bitten by a dog the same day as you.”

  “Of course. You know, I told that story about us to my roommate and she said that only happens in movies where we get married the following week and a month later regret racing into it and have major calamities and breakups together but live happily ever after for life, though of course she was only kidding. How are your bites?”

  “They haven’t found the dog.”

  “That’s terrible. Mine’s healing nicely. And so far the dog seems okay and I’m even planning to adopt it, since that poor car driver was crippled and can’t take care of it anymore. You going to take those treatments? It’s been two days.”

  “I think I’ll wait it out. Would you like to have dinner with me tonight?”

  “I’m afraid that person I said I’m sort of seeing I’m sort of engaged to now, so I don’t think I can.”

  “I’ll call back next week to find out about your dog and you. Maybe by then you’ll also have changed your mind about me.”

  “I don’t think so, but thanks.”

  The police never found Jersey or the dog. I called Mina again after our incubation period for rabies was over and her roommate answered and said “Mina? That rat skipped off on her honeymoon to Bermuda and left me with her two stinking retrievers and a third one that bites people coming any day. Who is this?”

  “Lewis.”

  “Of the dogs?”

  “Yes.”

  “She left a message for you, Lewis, that she told me to read to you if you call again. It says ‘I didn’t know your phone number nor last name so I couldn’t call you with what I forgot to remind you about the last time you called. I was also in too much of a rush to get off on my honeymoon trip to wait the two days the hospital said it would take to locate your records. But I want to make sure, if that dog that bit you isn’t found, that you phone the Hungarian man to tell him a lot of people would think it advisable for him to take the ten to fourteen day vaccine treatment for rabies.’ That’s it. So long.”

  I’d completely forgotten about Milos. I called the restaurant number he gave me and the man who answered said “No Milos, sir—tonight. Can’t speak English please. Tonight.”

  I called back that night and the restaurant owner said “Milos is in the kitchen now washing the dishes. He’s doing a fine job here and not suffering any rabies or illnesses we can see. Want me to have him phone you back?”

  “No thanks.”

  Buddy

  Today was a day of meeting people I know.

  My Christmas job was over till next year. I finished another sonata last night. I didn’t feel like looking for work just yet or starting another composition or hanging around the house all day cleaning, doing the laundry, shopping for groceries, none of that. So I slept late, had coffee, browsed through the who’s-who-in-contemporary-music book while the eggs boiled, and after breakfast decided to take a walk downtown.

  The first person I met was the old man from the first floor. It was right outside our building. He beeped his horn. I turned and saw him in his parked car, the windows up and motor running. He often sat there like that, reading, singing, sleeping, not doing much. In the eight years I’ve lived here I’ve never seen him with another person. He rolled down his window and said “You get any heat today?”

  “Some.”

  “Boy, my place is an icebox. Can’t understand it. We’re all fed from the same boiler and pipes. That’s why I’m here. And last night my fuse blew and the box is in the locked basement and the landlady wasn’t answering her phone. After sleeping with an electric blanket for fifteen years, I couldn’t get in three winks. So what, right? And getting too cold for me. See ya,” and he rolled up his window.

  The next people I met were from the block and immediate neighborhood. I must be acquainted with a couple of hundred people from around here including neighbors, supers, kids playing, shopkeepers, city service people, people from the bars and stores and the local street winos and summer domino people and the like. The seven or eight I met till I finally got out of the neighborhood I either smiled or waved to or said “Hey, how’s it going?” and they said “Fine” and I said “Good” or they said “How are you?” and I said “Fine” and they said “Good” and that was our conversation. Occasionally when I’ve said “How’s it going?” someone would stop to tell me. Usually it was the blues. Today the only person who stopped me was the owner of s
everal remodeled brownstones on the block. I nodded as I passed. She grabbed my arm and said “Those people.”

  “I looked around” and said “What people?”

  “Those people. There. Look at them,” and she ripped a sign off the lamppost which said there was going to be a block party with guitar entertainment at the corner church one week from tonight: free admission, bring cookies, wine and soda sold. She’d been in a Nazi death camp and had numbers on her arm and a few times had told me how the Russian soldiers liberated a boxcar of women she was in and raped all of them and shot half of them and shaved off all their body hairs and carved Cyrillic letters into their montes veneris and heads. She said, tearing the sign in two, “All these committees are nothing but pseudoliberal gudgeons or Reds.”

  “Who knows,” I said, “and try and have a nice day.”

  The first person I recognized outside my neighborhood was someone I went to school with at Music and Art and Juilliard. He was entering a bank. I yelled out his name. He didn’t hear me. I followed him in and joined him on the teller’s line. “Hey, Enos.”

  “Buddy old boy,” and he kissed my cheek. “God you look good. What’s new? Still in their pitching?”

  “No sell or soap though. But you’re strong. Mr. Jingle, name up in brights.”

  “Let me tell you about it.”

  “Great if it’s what you like. How’s Lola?”

  “Where you been? She unloaded me for my lyricist and took the girls. Third page in the Post. Don’t you read anything but scores? I’m with a new chickadee now. Young. Great flautist. Really does those scales. Gomes from a fine family of virtuoso pipers that go back to Prince Kinsky and Rasoumou. And anti-marriage and big knockers that Lola never had. Remember? Flat, like everything else about her. I’m going to snap a time shot montage of those tits with me blowing and playing on them and send it to Lo just to make her seat sweat. You married?”

  “Nah.”

  “Teaching?”

  “Those kids were nuts. Throwing the music stands at me, pouring mucilage between the keys. Screw it. Even for money I wasn’t going insane.”

  “Try college.”

  “No master’s.”

  “Get a master’s.”

  “No stomach for going back to school.”

  “Find a stomach. What about private lessons?”

  “Some people teach,” I started to say, but the teller said “Next.” Enos waved a fistful of checks at me and went up to the teller and said “This one I’d like in cash, the rest deposited.” I told him I had to run. He said “Wait, we got to get together. At my place for dinner one night or one of the old bars. You listed?”

  “No phone.”

  “Still rebelling?”

  “No afford. Deposit’s too high. Those rings. Bad tone. They don’t fit in my small room. And stuff the bell up with tissues and I don’t know when someone calls.”

  “Then reach me through my agent.” He gave me a card. “Be speaking to you, Bud.”

  A few blocks further downtown I saw one of my father’s old friends.

  “Mr. Landau,” I said.

  “Sorry, I don’t quite catch you.”

  “Ira Quiver’s son, Buttinsky. How are you?”

  “Buddy. It’s been a long time. How’s dad?”

  “He died last month.”

  “How’s mother taking it?”

  “She died three years ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that. Good seeing you again. Regards home.”

  “You too to Mrs. Landau and stay well.”

  I watched him go. My father and he were very close. They used to kick the can and get in the movies two-for-five together on the Lower East Side. The day my father died I called him and gave the time and place of the funeral. It was in the neighborhood. I live a few blocks from the building I grew up in and where my folks lived the last forty years of their lives. He didn’t come. A month ago I got a condolence card from his wife saying “Lou forgot and never told me and I avoid the obits like the plague. He hasn’t been in his right mind these past years. He started to forget his name and address and who his wife is the day your father first got so seriously ill. Sometimes he tells me he wants to visit Ira and Liz and the kids, and sneaks out when the cook’s not looking and for a day and night nobody knows where he is. If you ever see him on the street or buzzing the bells of your parents’ old building, please put him in a cab and personally deliver him home.”

  A few blocks farther downtown I saw one of the women I worked with at my Christmas job in a department store. She was across the avenue, separated from me by a lot of traffic, walking in her very distinctive way past Philharmonic Hall. Her height, singer’s chest and quick dignified walk were how I could pick her out in the crowd from so far away. We’d sold men’s pajamas. During the slower moments we talked about music, recordings, love, sex and the stage. She told me she was studying to be an opera and operetta singer and one time asked me to explain how I liked having it done with the lips and tongue as a few of her boyfriends complained she didn’t do it excitingly enough for them though none could pinpoint what was wrong. I asked her to demonstrate how she did it. She turned her back to the main floor customers, voyeurs and exhibitionists flitting past and did these rapid up-and-down motions with her tongue. I said it looked like a paddlewheel working at breakneck speed. I suggested she move it slower, like an oar of a rowboat piloted by a one-armed lethargic oarsman in calm waters with no express place to go, and see one of the raunchier porno flicks that were all over town: the best cost five bucks. She said she’d seen the best and doing it their way especially with one of her boyfriends would ravage her vocal cords. “Those cords come first in my life,” she said, “so I don’t want them cut or touched.” I ran across the avenue against the light and tapped her shoulder.

  “Hi,” she said. “How weird seeing one of my coworkers,” as we were called, “outside the store. You like to walk?”

  “Love it.”

  “Besides singing I like to do it more than anything. And on these raw days, almost more.”

  “What do you like to do more on these raw days?”

  “Don’t horse me.”

  “You mean you like to do that too?”

  “You’d think with our musical background and education we’d have much more to say.”

  We walked uptown. It was a grind keeping up with her. She had long legs and a big gait and was taller, taller than I and I’m tall, besides wearing platform shoes that hoisted her a half foot more. She was also beautiful and people stared, several drivers honked their horns at her and one trucker even rolled down his window in this weather to whistle. Things like that still went on. I actually pictured her practicing this walk nude with these shoes on and a glass of water on top of a book balanced on her head.

  We passed most of the places I’d recently passed. The bus stop Mr. Landau was still waiting at. I waved. He licked his fingertip and held it above his head to learn something about the wind. “I know that man,” I said, “honest.”

  And Enos coming out of a high-priced men’s store with clothes boxes. “Two times in twenty minutes is kind of pushing it,” he said. He stared at Carla and winked that man-to-man wink at me and hailed a cab. I winked back at him and my eyelids got stuck.

  “Who’s that?” she said.

  “Fiddler I know.”

  “What’s with your eye? Never met anyone who could hold a tic that long.” I pried my eyelids apart. “That’s better. He looked prosperous. I like prosperous men. All creative and performing types have just about the same thing going for them, so why not one who’s rich?”

  “Beats me. And I’m cold. I’d like a hot chocolate or just to head home.”

  “Your place? You could show me something for voice you’ve done.”

  “You wouldn’t like my closet. Too raw. I’ve lieder based on passages from German sex manuals, but you’d be too chilled to sing them and I’ve no piano.”

  “I’ve got hot water and a pot.”
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br />   She lived a few blocks away. I sat in her living room. She had a grand piano, perfectly tuned. When I wanted to play I subwayed to other boroughs or pretended to be a customer in a piano store. I went through a movement of last night’s sonata while she made hot chocolate in the kitchen. “That’s nice,” she said, “but it can’t be sung as nobody has that range.” I told her it was written for kit violin and contrabassoon.

  “All serious geniuses are self-destructive and ultimately boring,” she said. “You ought to give your fiddler friend my number and name.”

  I devised an elaborate plan of getting into bed with her, starting with wandering through the ancient instrument rooms at the art museum and then drinks, dinner, coffee at an espresso house whose jukebox only played opera overtures and arias and barcaroles, and then a cab home. She passed through the room chumping on a thick sandwich and sipping the only hot chocolate and from the bedroom said “Listen, composer, I’ve a voice lesson in an hour and acting and fencing classes after that, so if we want to make it a duet we better do it right now.”

  She had an upright in the bedroom, also perfectly tuned. She took off her clothes and went into the bathroom. I took off my clothes and played a new melody that was in my head. “Hey,” she yelled, “tinkle something madrigalian for me in here.”

  There was a harpsichord opposite the toilet. I sat on the toilet seat cover and played a madrigal by Gesualdo while she hummed along as she swabbed her underarms and genitals with a washrag. I said “If you take a lot of these steamy stand-ups and hot showers, you could ruin your plectra and keys.”

  “Come here,” she said, and still with her back to me, grabbed my penis from behind, vised it between her thighs and sort of gave it a shoeshine with the washrag. Then she leaned forward, popped me in, clutched the two towel racks on either side of the sink and right at the end of her lovemaking broke out into several bars from Lucia’s Mad Scene but the peak in high coloratura F instead of Donizetti’s original E-fiat.

  “You’ve a very fine voice,” I said, “though I don’t see you singing this way on stage.”