All Gone

by Stephen Dixon

  THE TRUE STORY

  I’m walking past a cheap Village hotel. It’s on a side street. I didn’t know it was cheap, but later I do, and a woman comes out of it, taller than I, much younger too, long heavy fur coat that looks worn and old and she says from a couple of yards away while she’s approaching me “Would you like me to be your date tonight?”

  “What?”

  “You didn’t actually hear me?”

  “Only something about a date.”

  “Would you like me to be your date tonight?”

  “I really would but I’m going to a party now.”

  “Oh well,” and she walks away.

  I continue in the direction I was heading and then turn around. She’s near the corner, opening her handbag. I run to her. She turns around quickly as if expecting trouble.

  “Oh,” she says. “What do you want?”

  “Would you like to come to the party?”

  “Thanks but no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I won’t know anyone there.”

  “You’ll know me by the time we get there.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think you’ll know me? We could stop in a bar first for a drink.”

  “Drink sounds okay but when I said no I don’t think so I meant I didn’t think I want to go to the party even if I knew you. I don’t like going to strange places with lots of strangers around. And my clothes aren’t nice. Really.”

  “Your clothes are fine. Look at mine. It’s just my coat that’s nice.” I open my coat and show her my clothes. “And there won’t be many people. They’re all very pleasant, mostly friends.”

  “I still won’t know any of them and they won’t appreciate me. They’ll say to you where’d you find me.”

  “I’ll tell them ‘One hour ago outside this hotel.’”

  “Thanks loads.”

  “Why, what’s wrong? You were lonely, that’s what I’ll say. Or not that, that’s no good, but they know I’m single, so something that we’ll say happened to you like you just had a fight with your husband—”

  “I have no husband.”

  “I’m just making that up. Your husband or boyfriend or even your mother—for the story we’ll give these people at the party.”

  “I don’t want to give anybody any story.”

  “But say you did come with me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “But say you did.”

  “Listen, it’s cold. I was about to phone someone, but you want to have a drink?”

  “Sure. There’s a bar I know over there.”

  We walk to it. It’s on Sixth Avenue. I say “So let’s say you came with me and I tell them you had a fight with your best friend or anyone like that and you were anxious to talk to someone about it or some serious problem you had and you saw me and it suddenly occurred to you then or maybe even when you were riding down the elevator of the hotel—”

  “It has no elevator.”

  “How will these people know?”

  “They might ask what hotel and if I say which one they’ll know I’m lying because one of them could know that hotel and it has no elevator.”

  “Okay. Let’s get our stories straight for them if we do go to the party.”

  “I’m not, but okay, let’s get the story straight. You’re buying the drinks so you have the right to tell stories.”

  “No more right than you have no matter who’s buying. You can tell one if you like and as long as you want it to be.”

  “I don’t know any and I don’t like to.”

  “Let’s just go in and order and we’ll talk some more.”

  We go into the bar. I ask what she wants. She says scotch and soda. I order a glass of wine for me. Bartender gives the two drinks to us, I pay and we sit at a table in back. “Okay. Where were we?” I say.

  “To your health.”

  “To our health. Of course.” We click glasses and drink. “All right. You came out of the hotel without an elevator. The hotel had no elevator. We got that far. But while you were in the hotel in your room, we’ll say, you had a bad fight with your best friend—a male, who was up there chatting or dropping something off for you and you said to yourself right after he left ‘The hell with that guy. I’m going downstairs and make a date with the first decently dressed and seeming man that comes along, just to show him and also to have a good time.’”

  “That never happened.”

  “Say it did, that’s all I’m asking—I’m no psychic. You just had that quick-as-amoment thought in your room. You wanted to teach that other man a lesson or do something wild tonight like ask a stranger for a date. Nothing’s wrong with that. If a man can do it, why not you? And people can understand that impulse or frivolousness and probably most have wanted to do it in the same circumstances too but never had the courage. And you did ask me.”

  “I asked if you wanted me to be your date. You don’t know what that means?”

  “I’m sure I do but maybe I don’t completely. What does it mean, just in case I don’t?”

  “First tell me what you think it does.”

  “That you wanted us to have a drink and talk and you’ll tell me your story, even if you say you don’t have one—why you asked to be my date and so on. And I’ll tell you mine or several and that’ll be after a couple of drinks and we’ll know something about one another by then and maybe later we’ll go to a movie or for dinner and I’ll walk you home and say good night and get your phone number if you don’t mind or I’ll come in and say good night till the morning when I’ll say good morning—you know what I mean. In other words it could end up with our possible sleeping together through the night. Or you might even end up at my place.”

  “You have a place alone near here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we can go to your place if it’s not a mile-high climb upstairs. I don’t like my hotel. Too shabby, dirty, they don’t clean and it’s noisy, walls like thread. And no movies, dinner. No boyfriend, best male friend, husband, mother—none of that. I just occasionally need money. So when I do I go downstairs or wherever, if I’m out of a job and can’t borrow, and ask a man who’s alone and dressed well but isn’t too young and doesn’t look like a cop and also like he can afford it if he wants me to be his date. If he says yes, we talk. Sometimes in a bar, sometimes right on the street where I meet him, but discreetly. He asks how much, I tell him. We don’t bargain. If he still wants me to be his date, we go to my hotel if we have to, because I don’t want them getting ideas there that meeting men is all I do, so better to his place if he seems okay and has one alone and nearby and doesn’t mind my coming up or to another nearby hotel if he can pay for it. You have that clear now?”

  “Yes.”

  “I only do this when I absolutely have to and with the men I’ve picked I’ve never been wrong.”

  “They’ve always said yes?”

  “No, but the ones who did always were polite and generous.”

  “I see now.”

  “Then you surely don’t want me to come to your party.”

  “Yes, I still do. I do.”

  “Why would you? That’s so crazy. Besides, you’d be wasting my time. One date for me tonight isn’t going to pay my back build-up of rent and the food bill, which is what I need tonight, mine and the cat’s, besides next week’s too.”

  “How much would you make—maybe I shouldn’t ask you this.”

  “Just ask. We’re being honest and free and if it’s something I have to hide, I’ll let you know.”

  “How much if you had the number of dates you think you would get tonight?”

  “Hundred fifty.”

  “I don’t have that. I couldn’t spare it even if I did. I’ve twenty-five and change on me.”

  “Twenty-five will be all right. How close you live nearby?”

  “I’m going to a party. I don’t want to go back to my home with you right now or your hotel room and maybe not even late
r. I want to go to the party and I want to take you and I’ll give you the twenty-five to come along. You won’t meet men there and I wouldn’t want you to for the purposes you might want. I mean, well maybe you might meet men—how do I know what can happen and you’re attractive and in the end that’s your concern what arrangements you make with men, and if all that came out sounding nasty or cynical what I said or any of it, I didn’t intend it that way. Now do you want to come with me or not?”

  “No. But answer me one thing before I leave here. If you don’t want me to be your date for that twenty minutes and however many it takes to get to your place, which I don’t think you do, how come you want to take me to your party and give me twenty-five dollars for going to it—it just doesn’t make sense.”

  “The twenty-five’s to help you with your bills. It’s probably enough to put off your creditors for a day and I don’t expect anyone to make immediate complete sacrifices for me, one hundred percent and so forth, when their other worries or concerns go way beyond anything dealing with me. As for the rest of your question, at first I did think you weren’t what you said you only occasionally are, or not that, but at least wanted me to do with you what I at first didn’t think you wanted me to. Maybe that doesn’t make much language sense or something but I did at first think you were lonely and wanted a date tonight in the sense of date—to have a meeting or appointment for one between two people for the mutual enjoyment of some kind of social activity but not necessarily sex. So I thought, why not? I thought that then. You seemed pleasant and now intelligent. You’re attractive as I said. And definitely frank and loose in the sense of being open with your thoughts, far as I can tell, and what you feel, besides your vivacity and enthusiasm, all of which I like too, but not all of which was I able to gauge so quickly when I first met you. And I don’t have a date tonight and just about everyone at the party will—a companion they came with, husbands and wives, men and women friends, all-to-mostly coupled. I might even be the only truly single person there, not that it bothered me till maybe when I began thinking of it with you. Secondly, now that I know what you wanted to have a date for—but I’m not answering this correctly or whatever, am I?”

  “You’re not answering it just about at all. All I asked was why you still want to take me there. It can’t be because you might be the only single.”

  “No. I also wanted to continue talking to you because I think what you’d have to say over one evening when we were socializing rather than in the thirty-minute span when we were just biff-banging and walking to and from the place of sex, would be very interesting—more interesting than my going alone to the party, though even more interesting if we were both at the party. No, that still doesn’t sound clear or right. Maybe, almost probably certainly, because after the party you might also consent to coming to my apartment and then I would have the best of both evenings—party and now this, when we could make love. Because then I wouldn’t have to pay for it, which I don’t like doing, and it would be better because we could take our time, there’d be no thought that a man just preceded me—that and maybe you’d even be grateful that I took you to someplace nice and you had a good time among friendly people but something that was maybe untypical in your experiences—but that must sound so self-serving and egotistical, it does to me.”

  “I’ve been to lots of nice parties before. I go to them as often as almost anyone and ones without pressures too.”

  “Of course. But that’s all. Just that we’d go together and you’d talk, I’d talk, together, to other people, you might have to lie a little, I don’t know. I’d have to lie a little about you too. Or we could both lie about the same thing: we met on the street, you were lonely, etcetera—that story about coming out of the hotel which doesn’t have an elevator, etcetera. Or you could have been upset because your dog or cat jumped out of your window and you were upstairs when it happened but downstairs when I met you—the ambulance had just taken the dead animal away, or injured if you don’t like it dead. And I was passing by on my way to the party and asked or you asked if I could talk to you because you were so heartbroken and lived alone or your roommate was out of town or away for the night and I bought you a drink for your nerves and we talked at the bar or restaurant and that’s when I invited you to the party, more to take your mind off the cat—something like that. And we’d eat the good party spread they’d have there, maybe drink too much, and if you wanted to smoke I’m sure there’ll be some people there who smoke and will let you join their circle—I don’t like to but you just go ahead. And then when most of the guests have left or are leaving I’ll get our coats and we’ll leave too and cab to my apartment—that is, only if you want to. And I won’t try anything funny with you—meaning I’m not a masher or beater or anything weird. That I’m not. We might have a nightcap. You might want to change your mind at my place and leave. Or you could even take a shower if you like. No pressures about any of those either. Do what you want. I won’t leap into the shower or tub with you and insist you scrub my back. And then I’ll light the fireplace and we could sit in front of it—I’m not kidding, I actually have one and plenty of kindling and hard wood and you could undress me if we haven’t already undressed and I’ll undress you or we’ll undress separately if we undress at all—”

  “Can I have another drink?”

  “Sure. I’ll get it.”

  I go to the bar and get another scotch and glass of wine and bring them back.

  “Where was I? We were in front of the fireplace?”

  “I was thinking,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  “Let’s go to the party. We’ll stick with the lie you just made up. I like the cat out the window. That sounds real because it sounds possible and I do have one in my room so I know how they love ledges and what they’re like if anyone asks me about him and the stupid things he can do. And you made the party sound like fun—the whole evening. I won’t let myself meet anyone else and I’ll leave when you want us to or maybe a little before then when I want to if I’m feeling uncomfortable there or things get sticky. You’ve been nice and I expect you to stay nice. But you can’t kick me out of your apartment at three or four in the morning, all right?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Some guys have. Even the ones I was in love with. Suddenly they don’t want me. Maybe I can’t blame them sometimes—the new ones I just meet overnight. They get scared their wife or girlfriend’s coming home or that’s just an excuse and they want me out because they’ve had enough of me or they suddenly feel guilty or even diseased sleeping with me. Or listen to this, they have to go to work extra early that morning they say and don’t want me in their apartment alone. I don’t want you doing that.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday. I’ve the weekend off. If you come to my apartment—though who knows what could happen by then. I might get drunk at the party, though I don’t usually, and make a stupid scene about something else and you’ll get embarrassed or frightened and leave without me and regret you ever met me.”