The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018
Page 24
Your Perrier, sir, said the room-service waiter outside the door, but then he had to send him back for an additional bottle, and he had to request that the first bottle be exchanged for a larger one, then he had two or three fresh pitchers of ice brought up because after he at last arrived in his room and toppled onto the bed it was not so much that his head began to ache immediately as all of a sudden there was a large bowl of mush in place of a head; he had entered the room, taken off his clothes, kicked off his shoes, and thrown himself on the bed, arranging for everything from there, the phone within reach; his room-service order, the modification of the order, the repeat of the order, and so on, meanwhile lying on his back and not moving, resting his head—that bowl of mush—against the pillow, his eyes closed; that’s how it was for a while, until the horrendous stink he himself emanated began to bother him, whereupon he crawled to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, turned on the shower, and scrubbed his body with soap and remained under the shower for as long as his strength held out, then toweled himself dry, sprayed frightful amounts of hotel deodorant on himself, pulled on a clean T-shirt and underpants, and before lying back down he took the soiled garments and his light summer leather shoes, stuffed them in a plastic bag that he tied with a tight knot before placing it outside in front of the door, then stretched out on the bed, and turned on the TV, merely listening to the sound without watching, for his head continued to remain a bowl of mush, and this was all right, things were all right now, his eyes shut, the TV on, the sound not too loud, the words, sentences, voice, speech morphing in slow gossamer-light increments into a so-called eternal sound of running water, but no, not really the sound of water splashing, and he pulled the blanket over himself, for he was starting to shiver because the air conditioning was set too high, no, this was not water splashing, it was a roar, like the ocean, but no, not the ocean really, reflected that sizable load of mush inside his head, this was something else, this . . . this sound, he now recognized, before sleep swallowed him up, was a waterfall.
He woke immediately, as if jolted by electric shock, he looked at the TV set in disbelief, only the waterfall sound could be heard, he leaped from the bed, sat down on its edge, and leaning forward stared at the TV set, oh my God, he clenched his fists in his lap, it was exactly the same as the sound of the waterfall that he had never been able to identify among those three, he watched the TV screen panic-stricken, the image now showed a cascading waterfall, and he slowly grasped that this was not some nightmare, he leaned forward even closer and watched the waterfall on the TV screen, he saw no subtitles whatsoever that could have helped to identify which one it was, the Angel, the Victoria, or possibly the Schaffhausen, all they showed was the waterfall itself, the sound was a steady roar. He watched each and every drop of the waterfall, feeling an unspeakable relief, and savoring the taste of a newfound freedom, he understood that his life would be a full life, a fullness that was not made of its parts, the empty fiascoes and empty pleasures of minutes and hours and days, no, not at all, he shook his head, while in front of him the TV set kept roaring, this fullness of his life would be something completely different, he could not as yet know in what way, and he never would know, because the moment when this fullness of his life was born would be the moment of his death—he shut his eyes, lay back on the bed and remained awake until it was morning, when he rapidly packed his things and checked out at the reception desk with such a radiant face that they contacted the staff on his floor to check whether he had taken anything with him, how could they have possibly understood what had made him so happy, how could the cab driver or the people at the airport understand, when they were not aware that such happiness existed, he radiated it as he passed through the security check, he glowed as he boarded the plane, his eyes sparkled as he belted himself into his seat, just like a kid who has at last received the gift he dreamed of, because he was in fact happy, except he could not speak about it, there was indeed nothing to do but look out through the window of the plane at the blindingly resplendent blue sky, keeping a profound silence, and it no longer mattered which waterfall it was, it no longer mattered if he didn’t see any of them, for it was all the same, it had been enough to hear that sound, and he streaked away at a speed of 900 km per hour, at an altitude of approximately ten thousand meters in a north-by-northwesterly direction, high above the clouds—in the blindingly blue sky toward the hope that he would die someday.
LAURA FRANCIS AND ALEXANDER MASTERS
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Love, Death & Trousers: Eight Found Stories
from The Paris Review
It’s quite possible that the existence of these eight short stories, taken word for word from a collection of 148 diaries found in a dumpster in 2001, would come as a surprise to the diarist, Laura Francis. All the sentences, events, perceptions, and fineness of writing belong to her, but the plots and narrative arcs have been manufactured by me.
The discovery of these diaries and the four years I spent hunting down their author are the subject of my book A Life Discarded. Laura Francis was a live-in companion and domestic servant for an aged professor of IT—like his wife in every respect except the sex (“thank goodness”). She barely knew how to cook and had no time for tidiness. On several occasions, during her thirty years of service, she grabbed a knife and was vicious to the old man’s furniture. But she was also funny, self-sacrificially kind, and a profound observer of loneliness and disappointment.
Laura could be an excellent diarist, but frequently wasn’t . Why should she be? She wasn’t performing for an audience. She had no duty to entertain. Her writing is repetitive, self-obsessed, confused, and two millimetres high. A typical two-hundred-page notebook from the 1990s contained over a hundred thousand words and covered just six weeks of her life in which nothing happened. Yet her style has the one quality that professional writers, of fiction or nonfiction, find the most difficult to capture: vitality. Her life is small-scale, quiet voiced, punctuated by moments of gentle humor and shocking poignancy. Even when the diaries are agonizingly tedious, you want to go on reading them because they are true. No novelist has clattered into this woman’s life to impose a well-managed structure on her images of incarceration and waste. There’s none of the storyteller’s fraudulent scene setting, character development, points of conflict, concluding resolution. You are peering in on a real woman who thinks she is alone—a woman in the final stages of tedium. She is writing about being human: the arbitrariness, the impotence, the fog. Vitality—aliveness—comes to her because she has just picked up her pen. Her drama is that she is not fiction.
Laura’s diaries work best at the extreme dimensions of writing: page by page, they lack structure, pacing, plot, character development, and most of the time, excitement. But at the large scale (book by book) and the small (sentence by sentence), they are replete with human insight and lurking dramatic narratives.
—Alexander Masters
DRAMATIS PERSONÆ
“I” Laura Francis, the diarist
E her guide and muse, a piano teacher
Peter Dame Harriet’s nephew, who also lived in the house
Elf Dame Harriette Chick DBE, for whom Laura worked as
a housekeeper/companion during the second half of the 1970s
SUDDENLY E CAME TO MY COUNTER, 1958–59
December 17th, 1958: Lovely afternoon spent in happiness and utter satisfaction and harmony. Harry & Mrs. Willey talked of how they’d have a copy of my book when it was published.
Dec 18th: A pity, though, my profession takes so much of my time.
Dec 19th: Tiresome, having to be tied down to fact & reality.
Dec 19th: Working on out-counter at Central Library.
Dec 20th: Suddenly E came to my counter. I gave the usual terrific jump I do with the sight of E unexpectedly, and sat down on the chair. E amused, said I’m a funny girl. E looked round library, eventually got out “English Villages in Colour.” She looked terribly swerb [wonderful]—waves of dizzy excitement swept throu
gh me, head over heels with adoration for E. Her sweet smile, rather wicked & sideways.
Dec 22nd: She invited me to supper. The mutual love and our expressions must’ve been very noticeable. Just adored her, and felt she was adoring me back with her sweet, warm brown-eyed gaze—currency of love.
Dec 23rd: We kissed. I called E “you sweet darling.” E said yes.
Dec 29th: We went in E’s bedroom—it was both unbeautiful and untidy. E herself as I like her—in a sloppy old coat, with bedroom slippers.
March 5th, 1959: E said she was not interested in sex at all. Said only when one is engaged should one go to the doctor and find out “what it is all about.”
THE AIR HOLLOW AND EMPTY, 1959
Mar: The air hollow and empty of E. Our last time together was so joyous, and full of dramatic irony & little E standing rapt & thrilled on the doorstep. And now E gone off to Switzerland.