Long Made Short

by Stephen Dixon

  “Well thank you, thank you,” he says, “and I don’t think I’ll be needing this now,” giving her back the questionnaire and clipboard it’s on, and she says “The pen,” and he says “Right,” and takes it out of his pocket—“You can’t believe how many pencils and pens I’ve accumulated this way”—and she says “Not from this office, you don’t,” and he says “Right, I can see that,” and leaves, takes the bus downtown, walks across the bridge, walks another two miles to get to the address he saw by his father’s name in the phone book.

  “Yes?” his father says on the intercom, and he says “It’s me, Junior,” and his father says “God, you’ve been gone a long time. Do you really think it’s worth it for me to come down to see what you look like?” and he says “How’s Mom?” and his father says “Your mother? My dear boy, she’s been gone a long long time.” “Gone where?” and his father says “Gone to rest, my son, to rest,” and he says “Not dead,” and his father says “Dead, my dear son, dead.” “Dad, please come down and help me, I don’t think I’m ready to face this yet. I’m not. I’ll never be,” and his father says “Nobody is, my dear son, nobody, and neither was I, but I was only her lover and husband and closest friend and father of her children and then of her only surviving child, not her flesh and blood. I’ll be right down.”

  He waits there. Day becomes night; warmth, cold. He’s not dressed for it, he thinks, and rings the bell. Nobody answers. Rings and rings and nobody answers. If this were an apartment house, he thinks, he’d ring several bells to get in. But it’s a private home, and he just sits on the steps, hoping his father will come down.

  A police car stops in the street, the policewoman says through the car window “Is there a good reason you’re sitting there, sir?” and he says “No, officer, there isn’t, and I’ll be on my way,” and gets up and goes. When he’s at the corner he looks back, thinking if the officer’s gone he’ll go back and ring some more and maybe even make a commotion under the windows, but she’s sitting in the car, now peeling and eating what looks to be an orange or tangerine. Then she looks his way, points her stick out the window at him, and he turns the corner.

  LOST

  He’s called at his office. Something unspeakable’s happened. “What is it?” Come home quick, the caller says, his wife needs him. “Why, what’s wrong, something with her?” His daughter. “What, what is it?” Come home now. “Just tell me, then I’ll be right home. Is she hurt? Was she hit by a car? Is she dead?” She was on her way home from school—“A car? Is she alive?” She’s dead. A fight started between several boys and girls a block from school. Someone pulled out a gun—a kid, they don’t know if it was a boy or girl. They don’t even think this kid was one of the ones fighting. Everything happened so fast. Some shots were fired. One went into her head.

  After it’s all over—the medical inquest, funeral, reporters at his door—weeks later, he tries to go back to work. Before then, he couldn’t leave the apartment. He and his wife stayed in their bedroom most of the time, sleeping, staring, talking very little. People came every day—friends, relatives—shopped and cooked for them, cleaned the place, answered the phone. Then his wife said one morning “I guess it’s time to face life; what do you think?” He said “You face it, I’m not going anywhere yet; who knows when I’ll be ready.” She started cooking, shopping, continued with her translating work, even returned some overdue books to the library and paid the fines, checked out a few, resumed reading, though still didn’t want to look at a newspaper. He stayed in the bedroom. A week later he came out, ran around the block once, and a few days later headed for work.

  It’s awful for him on the street going to the subway. There are little girls his daughter’s age going to school in groups or with a parent or nanny. Awful on the subway. Girls, boys, a few years older than his daughter, some reading, studying, others playful, a few looking like killers, or ones who want to be. She loved to read, was a terrific student, liked being playful with him, as he did with her. He got off after a few stops and cabbed home. Stayed in the apartment a few more days, helped his wife with things like cooking and cleaning, read her translations for corrections. Then he went back to work.

  People there: “We’re sorry,” “I’m sorry,” “We’re all tremendously sorry, words can’t express it.” He says “Please, I don’t want to hear of it, I don’t want to discuss it, and I especially don’t want any sympathies or condolences or regrets or things like that. I just want to forget, I just want to forget, I just want to forget, so please don’t.” But every so often someone says something that makes him burst out crying in front of the person or run into one of the bathroom stalls to do it. “My kid’s suddenly doing lousy at school, and we don’t know what to do about it. Oops, forgive me.” “I gotta be home early tonight—it’s my girl’s birthday, and all this when I’ve a ton of work here to do, but my wife says I have to. Oh, jeez, I forgot, excuse me.”

  “I can’t face the world, I can’t live with myself, I can’t forget her, I don’t know what to do, I want her back, I want her here now, I can’t sleep nights, I walk around in a daze most of the day, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to lie in bed or be out of it with my mind on anything but her, I can’t live in this apartment, I see her room, I see the dinner table, the silverware, sink she dumped the dishes in, goddamn pot she shit in, streets she ran and skated on up and down, kids she played with or who look like the ones she did, elevator she rode up on, doormen she spoke to, shop windows she looked at, reflection of herself she caught or caught me catching her admiring herself, you name it, it’s there, the works.” All this to his wife. She says “Don’t you think I feel the same? But what am I supposed to do, get sick and crack up or die over it and not be there for you?” “Of course, I’m sorry,” he says, “I know you think of her as much if not more than I. Certainly at least as much. But it’s become so individual though. For all the reasons that it would.”

  They move to an apartment across town—he insists. Costs them twice the rent and for less space, but the hell with it, he couldn’t live where they were. “It’s the only way,” he told his wife, “plus giving away just about everything she owned or used, that I think I can make it, or for the next couple of years or so.” He sees girls her age in the new neighborhood. He expected to but hoped his reaction wouldn’t be the same. One girl he thinks looks almost exactly like her. If he saw her from maybe ten feet away but didn’t know his daughter was dead, he’d at first think it was her. The long light hair well-brushed, same solid build, tall height, style of clothes, bulging forehead, high cheeks, eyeglasses with big eyes, skin, neck, little nose. He follows her awhile, imagines he’s following his daughter for fun though isn’t so out of it that he really thinks he is, then says to himself “This is nuts,” and turns back.

  He can’t pass schools once he knows where they are on his routes. Can’t even stand hearing kids shouting from classroom windows. Almost every time he sees girls her age laughing, he starts to cry, or stops whatever he’s doing—walking, reading—and closes his eyes to give himself time to get over being choked up. He doesn’t know what to do. “Maybe I can get a job somewhere else. You could do your translating anywhere—out in the country, let’s say, and maybe even in a different country where I don’t understand the language. Though kids’ laughing and giggling and stuff would be the same anywhere, I think, and I probably couldn’t get the same kind of work anywhere but in a city and in this country. But I could commute to the city. And we of course should start making love again and have another child if it’s not too late.” “We can try,” she says.

  They try, and she can’t conceive. It may be something missing in him or her. They take tests to find out what might be wrong, and nothing shows up. “Maybe it’s my disposition,” he says, “or ours. I’ve never heard where that has anything to do with it, but it does affect some illnesses, doctors have said, maybe even cause them, so it could with this.” He’s always sad, or close to it. One night while they’re in bed
he says “You know, I don’t think I’ve smiled once since Lynn died. Oh my God,” and he cries, and when he comes out of it he says “That was the first time I’ve said her name, or even said the word ‘died’ when I was alluding to her, since that thing happened. That thing, that thing,” and cries some more. “I cry as much as you,” she says. “I don’t mean for this to be competitive grieving or anything, but I want you to know I still think of her almost all the time and get very little sleep because of her, like you,” and he says “I assumed that; I really did,” and kisses her and turns off the light on his side.

  A few months later he says “Maybe I should begin facing it, talk to people about it, even bring it up out of the blue sometimes. Not to a professional but just people who have wanted to express their sympathies to me for months but I’ve fought them off. Yeah, I’ll try that. I think I can swing it.” She says “If you think it’s a good idea, do it. But I still feel you should see a therapist, even mine if you want. He’s wonderful—smart, sharp, caring—and he already knows from me how you feel and what Lynn’s murder has done to you. And maybe he would even see us together about it, at other times, which is also what I’ve been wanting. And you remember, I was never a great believer in it before this, but he’s certainly helped me.” He says “Nah, what’s good for you might not be for me. For now, just regular people.”

  At work he says to his closest colleague “Sven, if you want I’m ready to talk about my daughter now. You know, Lynn. There. You can’t believe how tough it is to even say her name aloud; even in my head, if there’s a reason for it. But there, I’ve said it and I’m not falling down, am I? What I’m actually saying is I have to talk about her, have to, do you mind?” Sven says “You know how I felt about it and still do—heartbroken—and you can come to me anytime. But probably the best guy to talk about this to is Boris Lehman in Sales. He lost a son a few years back when some crazy kids started shooting up a subway car. His son was going to school, though, not coming back.” And he says “Maybe he would be a good person to speak with.”

  He calls Boris, and they meet for lunch. “How’d you get over it,” he says, “or at least where you could begin functioning like a semi-normal human being?” and Boris says “For a while I didn’t think I ever would. But I came out of it a little when I found out there were at least three other people in this organization who’d lost their kids this way, or maybe one lost his wife, who got it in the grade school she taught at. But anyway, to these deranged spontaneous shootouts or just individual slaughters. One was the guy who still cleans my office—Hudson. His kid was out roller-skating and got caught in the cross fire when two teenage drug dealers started popping off at each other with automatics. Fortunately for Hudson, he had three kids and a wife who was pregnant, not that it still didn’t nearly kill him at the time, he said. Like you, I only had my one, and that little fellow took eight steady years of mating to get. And then Clarence Fangel in Publicity downstairs, ten years ago his daughter was stabbed to death. Something about some other girl in her high school who thought she was trying to steal her boyfriend away…”

  He speaks to Hudson and Fangel and learns there are a few more people in the building and the ones around it who lost their kids or younger siblings this way: shot, stabbed, pushed in front of a train, thrown off a roof after being gang-raped. There’s even a lunchtime support group in this business district for such people, and he goes to a few meetings, but the stories he hears, instead of helping him, make him feel even worse. “You got to give it time,” the group leader tells him, when he says he’s thinking of leaving it, and he says “I’m sure what everyone here’s going through is as inconsolable to them as I am to what’s going on in me, but something chemical or whatever must be in me where the feeling can’t be reversed. But I’ll give it its due.” Finally at one meeting some new woman, a copywriter in his building, tells the group of her two-year-old twins a few months ago when she was making a phone call on the street from a public booth, and he rushes out with his hands over his ears, goes home, pulls down the shades in his bedroom and later, when his wife comes home, tells her he doesn’t know if he’ll ever leave. “Forget the country. Forget another country. From what I heard in the group it’s not a lot better anyplace else, and there’s more and more of it every day. Also forget about having another child, with or without my sperm, or even one we adopt. The times just aren’t right for bringing kids up.”

  He quits his job. His wife tells him he has to do something else besides stay in his room, “For this way you’ll get even worse than crazy. Maybe you can work in some way against the kind of violence that killed Lynn. Get a job teaching kids in school, or after school, or with an organization that fights such violence, or just work at your old job to have enough money to give to places and schools that fight or just study such violence.” He says “Best I can do is just to be talked about as someone whose grieving for his daughter totally disabled him for anything but staying in his room. Maybe that piece of information will filter down to people who are violent and prone to killing other young people…Nah, who am I my kidding? I had a daughter, loved my daughter, lost her and now grieve every waking second for her. Maybe one day I’ll come out of it, but right now I don’t think I will.”

  They still sleep together, but he finds it very difficult to make love anymore. She says “I want a child desperately. It’s the only way I’ll become relatively sane again myself. I love you and don’t want to lose you, but would you consent to a divorce so I can possibly meet someone else and try to have a child or adopt a child as a single parent?” “I think that’s fair,” he says. “I know I could never have another kid. I’d be so protective I’d squeeze the life out of it, send it to a shrink by the time it was five and maybe, because of my terrible parenting, turn it into a violent kid who hurts other children and maybe even kills them.”

  They divorce, he moves out of the apartment so she can have it, moves in with his sister in another part of the country. She looks after him, gets him his food, cleans his room and clothes, doesn’t complain. “Who do I have but you?” she says, since her husband divorced her soon after they lost their only child to disease. “Oh my God, I forgot that,” he says. “It must be just as bad for you as it is for me. What am I saying? It is; I know; I should have been taking care of you then in some way, but I didn’t.” “You gave me lots of sympathy, and I was married at the time, so that was enough. Now, what is it?—ten years later—I can take care of myself just fine.”

  Eventually he gets out—it takes a couple of years—gets a job as a salesman in a department store, still thinks of Lynn a number of times every day, and sometimes so much he has to quit work for the day and go home, drinks too much lots of nights to blot her out of his head, pays half the rent and upkeep of his sister’s place, learns that his wife remarried and adopted two children, sends her kids gifts every year for their birthdays and Christmas, never goes out with women, makes no friends, every now and then does have lunch in the employee cafeteria with a few of the same coworkers, goes through life like this, feels lucky he can get through every day without cracking up and that he’s able to make even a marginal living. His sister does well at work, has many interests, several boyfriends, sometimes stays out all night with them, goes to parties, takes vacations, knows lots of women she calls buddies. He tells her “That’s the way it ought to be, I guess.”

  THE VICTOR

  Way it happened. The chairperson of the committee is called up to the stage podium by the head of the American Fiction Foundation. Rob is sitting at one of the many tables, holding his wife’s hand. He leans closer to her and says in her ear “I know I’m not going to win.” “Wait and see,” she whispers; “you never know. Though you’re not expecting it, are you?” “Nah, I know who they’re going to give it to; at least not to me. Because when it comes down to it at the end, the establishment, right? Onwards and always. But why’d you say ‘you never know’?” “Shh, she’s talking.” A couple of people at the table�
�his editor and publisher—are smiling at him; then the editor starts grinning. He smiles back and looks at the opened program on his lap. They know something? They smile because they know he’s won but were told not to say anything, or because he’s lost and they don’t want to reveal it with a serious expression. But why her almost ecstatic grin? Maybe she has a problem faking a smile around so many people, or she’s the only one at the table who knows he’s won and she can’t keep her exhilaration in. He looks around at several other tables. A few people are looking at him, but no smiles, nothing serious, just with interest, as if “How does a person appear at such a time in his life? And if he wins, I want to see his immediate reaction, since he is the one sitting closest and facing me, and if he loses, well that too.”

  The chairperson’s going on about the “distinguished history of this prestigious award,” mentions several recent winners and the book titles, “all of which, I’m told, are still in print, no doubt because of their high quality but I’m sure also because of the recognition the prize gives,” the healthy state of American fiction today, based on her judging experience the past half-year, “so if anyone tells you of the present or possible demise of written fiction in this country, you send him or her to me,” and finally “the long arduous job of the five judges, all working fiction writers themselves, in choosing this year’s winner. We each read the more than three hundred entries in book form or galleys. Or, to be vulnerably honest, only segments of some of them—after all, we’re only humans and writers with just so much human and writing time—to come up with the five finalists, and met today in this hotel to make our decision: Lemuel Pond. The winner of the American Fiction Award is Lemuel Pond for his novel Eyeball, published by Sklosby Press, edited by—”

  Lights go to Pond’s table; he slaps his head with both hands as if he can’t believe it. Rob looks at his wife—she’s already looking sympathetically at him and squeezes his hand—then at the editor and publisher. They’re smiling at him, or trying to, the publisher sticking up his fist and jiggling it, whatever that’s supposed to mean; the editor now wiping her eyes with a table napkin. “Fuck them,” Rob mouths to his wife. She puts her finger over her lips. Pond gets up, most people in the ballroom are applauding, a few whistling and shouting, and starts walking around the tables to the stage, people patting him and grabbing his hand, and one man kissing it as he goes. “That jerk didn’t deserve it,” Rob says to his wife over the noise, “that’s all I’ll say. It’s a piece of shit, what he wrote, so of course you have to expect they’ll reward it, the gutless judges, the toadying foundation, the scummy big stiffs of the publishing world here, our little guys excluded.” She puts her mouth to his ear. “Don’t say any more, really; someone will hear. And especially not to any reporters if they ask, or anyone tonight. Give it a day. I’m sorry, darling. You should have got it, and it’s what you’re saying, but it’s over, so go along with it or you’ll regret it.” “Not so much me,” he says, moving his head away, “but really almost any one of the other three. But he’s an amateur. Albeit, a first-class one, which accounts, doesn’t it? for all the newspapers and highfalutin magazines that slavered over it in reviews, the biggest hype job of them all by a writer from the same smelly Sklosby stable. ‘Oh! Can’t he much! Can’t he perfectly! One of our precious traditional own. Oh! Oh!’” “Enough. Really, enough. People have to be looking, and they eat up this stuff.”