Fall and Rise by Stephen Dixon Read Free Book Online

take a breath of fresh exercise or anything. Enjoy yourself.”
    â€œPlease. No apologies necessary. Just mine.” She leaves. I get up for more cheese. I also don’t want to be sitting here when she starts talking to someone about me. “That man there. On the couch, to the left. I don’t want to turn around but he—there’s nobody there? I’m referring to his left. He’s sort of disinterestedly dressed, hair gushing out of his chest, a varicose nose? There he is. Well him. Talk about a man being mixed up?”
    Jane and Phil are talking to each other at the cheese table. Now there are hard sausages on it, creamed herrings, sliced vegetables, an egg and chicken salad mold with a dollop of caviar on top, pâtés and dips. I dip a zucchini stick into a dip, bite it while I slice off some pâté, put the pâté on a cracker, add a piece of cheese to it, put the rest of the zucchini into my mouth, cheese falls to the table, while I reach for it the pâté drops to the floor. I pick the cheese up and put it into my mouth, pick up the pâté with a paper napkin, can’t find a used plate or ashtray to put the napkin in so I put it into my back pants pocket, but I might sit on it by the time I get rid of it so I put it into my side pocket, eat the cracker and look at Jane and Phil. They’ve been watching me, resume talking. “I’m not so sure,” Jane says. “You’re not so sure? Good God, if Shakespeare could mix metaphors and get away with it—”
    â€œSo what did Alan have to say?” I say and Jane says “Wuh?” and Phil looks at me curiously, skeptically, some way that way that makes me feel I shouldn’t have interrupted or that I might have said something before that should have discouraged me from speaking so openly to them now. I think. Jane was nice, Phil not so much. “Nothing really,” waving them back to their conversation and I take a glass of wine off the table and am about to drink it.
    â€œThat’s my wine,” Jane says.
    â€œI’m sorry, I thought it was mine.” I hold it out to her.
    â€œI don’t want it now. I’d just rather not have anyone else drink from it.”
    â€œI can understand that.” I put the glass down, see a full glass of wine at the other end of the table, look at the people near it and they all seem to be holding a glass of something. “There’s mine.” I reach over and grab it. “Same kind of glass and green and full, just like yours. And don’t worry, I’m not drunk,” I say, drinking. “Just a little uncomfortable. All these big makers here and everyone knowing one another and all that or whatever it is making me uneasy. I’m also not in any kind of therapy as that must—that remark must—those last remarks must make me sound like.”
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œWhy do you say that?” Phil says.
    â€œYou referring to her ‘what?’ or to my being uncomfortable?”
    â€œSince I was looking right at you, I think I meant you. And about your thinking you’re sounding as if you’re in therapy.”
    â€œReally, I know nothing about therapy.”
    â€œCome on…what’s your name: Scott?”
    â€œDan,” Jane says.
    â€œEveryone knows something about therapy. Either we’ve been in it or have read scores of books about it or know scores who’ve done one or both. But forgetting that if you don’t want to talk about it, why do you feel especially uncomfortable here?”
    â€œNot ‘especially.’ A little, and because I’ve made a couple of people uncomfortable. If I also made you two uncomfortable, then more than a couple. Perhaps three or four. Definitely three or four if I’ve made you both uncomfortable, but now that I think of that pipe-smoking man over there I talked theater to before, it’s more like five. But really. I’m