Goings

by Gordon Lish

  I said, “Is it bad? Then it’s bad.”

  She said, “What kind of child speaks to his mother like this?”

  I said, “You can tell me.”

  She said, “Tell you, tell you—all of a sudden such words.”

  I said, “Then it’s bad, isn’t it?”

  She said, “Listen to this talk from a kidlach. Be quiet. Go to sleep.”

  I said, “I can’t til you tell me.”

  She said, “I’m your mother and I told you.”

  I said, “Are you trying to scare me?” I said, “You’re scaring me.”

  She said, “To speak like this, for shame.”

  I said, “Do I die?”

  She said, “You want to make your mother sick?”

  I said, “So you know, don’t you?”

  She said, “What know, where know?”

  I said, “Am I going to die?”

  She said, “Please, the language of it. Sleep.”

  I said, “Who dies?”

  She said, “Maybe sometimes certain people, yes.”

  I said, “Not everybody?”

  She said, “Who is everybody?”

  I said, “You, for instance—do you die?”

  “Please,” she said. “Shush,” she said.

  “Then it’s true,” I said.

  “Enough,” she said. “Sleep,” she said.

  I said, “Sleep? There is no sleep,” I said.

  “So fine,” she said, “a person dies.”

  I said, “People, then? All of the people?”

  She said, “People, what people?—it’s nothing, people.”

  I said, “You mean everybody really?”

  “Please,” my mother said. “Just sleep,” my mother said.

  I said, “You mean you too—that you’re going to die too?”

  “Who doesn’t die?” my mother said. “To live is to die,” my mother said.

  I said, “Yes, yes,” I said. I said, “That’s you,” I said. I said, “But what about me?”

  IN THE DISTRICT, INTO THE BARGAIN

  HERE’S A BIT for you. It’s an impressive one too. My bet is you are going to be really refreshingly impressed with it, or by it, which I have to tell you is what I myself was when the woman involved in the event disclosed her heart to me. First, as to setting—temporal, spatial, all that. So, fine, so the thing starts maybe all of an hour ago just a block from where I am sitting right this minute typing this up for you to read it and get out of it the same kick I did. She types too—the woman. She is always typing, is my understanding—or was, back when I used to see her somewhat, let us just fancy, social-wise. As a matter of fact, when I said to her, “What’s up? I mean what are you doing here in this neighborhood? Do you have a pass, were you issued a pass, a license maybe, any kind of a permit you can show me authorizing you to come up here into this restricted district of mine?” she laughed. I think she thought I was trying to be funny. Let me tell you something—that’s the one thing I never try to be—namely, funny. No, no, I was just doing what I could to maybe get away with having to snoggle for the usual sort of talk, lay on her a smart-aleck greeting of a sort, which apposition I only went to the bother of just now constructing so I could say sort and sorts, repeating and repeating stuff to stuff the insidious silence with insidious sound, however otiose or bootless or inutile dexterity appears (to be?) on the surface. You get what I’m getting at?—the stressing of the effect of there being something sly down beneath down under things as regards below the surface, see? But which surface, eh wot? Or, anyway, surface of exactly what, eh wot? (You see? Can’t help myself. It’s like this thing I’ve got which is like an irresistibly compulsive thing.) Oh, boy, I am all of a sudden so tired. I, Gordon, son of Reggie, am all of a sudden so suddenly utterly all in, just fucking pooped. Like, you know, like weary, wearied, ausgespielt if you’re German, right? Nap. But, hey, before I fall and hit my head, I’m just going to go ahead and take myself a little teensy tiny nap, fair enough? Be back in a shake, I promise.

  Mmm, nice. Told you I’d be right back. So there. Good as my word. Plus, feeling ten thousand percent. Nothing like sleep, let me tell you. Anyway, as I was going to say to you, small talk, the ceremonial, it gets me jumpy and tongue-tied, see?—especially when there’s the blam of a city smashing the nuclei of your cochlea from all four sides of your brain. Or, okay, six. I mean, the street. Knocking yourself out to make a show of confecting coherent conversation on the street, okay? This was the street. Or, fine, on the street. Or in it—since as for on, we were, the scene was taking place, the one consisting in this woman and I—on the sidewalk. But I may have already said so, mayn’t I have? Anyway, I was aiming for home from marketing and here she was, the woman I am telling you about, making her way along the sidewalk, coming right dead-on at me, a woman I, Gordon, had not, I swear to you, laid eyes on in a shockingly long time. Some beauty too. A real knockout. But in her years, of course, not in the slightest other than I. That’s right—we’re old. Okay, so this woman laughs a little and she says to me, “I was at the school—went by for a used-book sale at the school.” “Really?” I say. “At the school, you say? Buy anything?” I say. “Oh, just these,” she says, spreading open the dainty shopping bag she’s hauling with her and giving me a peek inside. There’s two books in there. I finger them around, trying to get it to look as if I’m earnestly interested in getting a look, and see, yeah, yeah, just crap, more crap, writing, writing, etc. and so on. “Sophie, this is crap,” I says to her, and she says, abashed is the word, or embarrassed, “I know, I know.” So I says to her, “Sophie, will you please explain yourself? I am waiting to hear you make a forceful enough attempt to explain yourself,” which, you know, gets another laugh out of her, but she touches my arm, the way you do, and I do ditto to hers, and this part of it is really honestly terrific for me because, don’t make me have to say it to you again, this person is, old as she is, a really terrifically classy-type of a looker. “And you?” she says, “because I never see you on the street anymore—oh, but probably it’s me—always hatching up dreams at home by reason of beating my keyboard to death.”

  “Um, not me,” I say. “Quit it all just after the wife died. It’s not for me anymore, all of that maddening shit, verbs and nouns and worse. What I do,” I says to her, “is I keep myself frantically busy fussing with the place.”

  “Is that so?” the woman, tired and tiresomely, says.

  “Seems to be,” I say, and can see this powwow half a lick from a ghastly stall, and, thus, high time for everybody’s sake to make all speed for a semi-graceful goodbye and let us please get going on our separate ways.

  I touch her arm.

  It’s nice. Like sleep.

  “Got to giddyap,” I say. “Projects.”

  “Oh?” she says. “Like what?” she says.

  Well, you can see how it is—one, I don’t want to be outdone, take off with the question, with her question, still in charge of the verbal situation which had been developing on the street just more or less just moments ago, which would be, if I did it, did yield, did give way, did fail to return reply, it would be like my giving this person the, you know, the victory, you might not inappropriately say, yes—and, two—two, I all of a sudden figure there’s maybe more to be said for touching hastening on the way in the offing for me here, so sexily, you might say, I says to the woman, “Ah, you know, just puttering around with my place, keeping things up to grade—or is it code?—doing what I can so the wife does not have to rest in everlasting shame.”

  “Barbara?” the woman says.

  “That’s right,” I say. “Good of you to remember the name. And Howard?” hoping and praying it’s me who’s this time remembering right (unless it’s aright), that it’s not John or something, Alphonse or Gray. “Pretty tough still, is it, or are you actually getting yourself settled in with all of the adjustments and all?”

  “Yes, Howard,” she says, and looks off up into the wild blue yonder and, still gazi
ng away, says to me, “Projects you said? Such as what?” she says to me, saying to me, after her saying just that little bit to me, not one other word, not nought, by Christ—until I, Gordon, am standing there with her on the sidewalk with her all talked-out, not having shown this person up, I should certainly say, not having exhibited to this person just what fucking grief is all about, which is when the woman gives me a look and says to me, touching my arm again into the bargain, “Oh, Gordon, you are such a tease,” and keeps touching my arm, keeps her hand in noticeably secure touch with my arm, in the manner of somebody determined to hold a person stationed right there where the two of them, persons the pair of them, are—as in don’t leave, don’t leave, and, sighing, saying to me, she says to me, “I know, I know—it’s exactly the same with me.” And here it happens, I can tell it, I can tell it, this woman is going to come at me with a comeback, goddamnit—I took too stuporously long trying to think up some sort of a reportable project—the mattress, the bedskirt, the phone in the kitchen sticky with its locale in the vicinity of lots of lonely frying.

  But it’s crazy how I remember it.

  His pipe. The man’s pipe. Her husband’s pipe, which I, Gordon, first apprehends as a pipe, as just a fucking pipe, as just the prop like a man named Howard, isn’t it, type of chap for him to sport, a pipe, hah!

  “Oh,” she murmurs to me getting herself right in close to my face, “but isn’t one forever thinking of it—Howard’s favorite pipe?”

  Me, I told her about some stuff I couldn’t seem to shut up about—the mattress, the bedskirt, the kitchen telephone. “Oh,” she says, “isn’t it what always so heartbreakingly happens when you don’t buy bedding at a department store where if you don’t, then you don’t have any, not the least, latitude as to any recourse of return, or last resort to it, or for credit? Gordon,” the woman says to me, admonishing me, and not at all soothingly, “don’t tell me Barbara never advised you to keep yourself well out of the reach of the specialty shops!”

  I think I said, “Latitude?”

  I think I may have said, “Latitude?”

  You can lose the thread, you know.

  You can lose it even if it’s your own textile you’re weaving.

  Jesus, I am so goddamn tired again. Oh, man, am I … beat! Do you ever get to feel like this? You know what I mean? But maybe you don’t. Maybe you’re different from me. But maybe you’re not like her, either. I mean, I’m thinking a pipe pipe—like a briar pipe, right? But you know what in just mere minutes from then I’m willing to grant? And, hey, listen, I’m prepared to insist it’s a sign of growth in me, isn’t it?—this recent willingness I just mentioned to you where I’m willing to grant somebody a little something by way of exoneration—as in maybe a little benefit of the doubt.

  “Sophie,” I says to her, tap-tapping the handier of her elbows with my two happy fingers working in synchrony. Still, doing this pretty consolingly, you do, I trust, understand—tap, tap, tap, gently, gently. I says to her, “Sophie, do you actually mean for me to interpret your meaning as meaning like a pipe in the basement or something—not something like a Meerschaum, right? But, you know, instead—instead an overhead pipe, industrial and all that?”

  “Well,” she says (Sophie says to me, Gordon, you do continue to see), “dear Howard, dearest Howard, he had, I have to tell you, the man had picked out a big green heating pipe he felt very protective about.”

  Or of, I, for the record, corrected—but, uncharacteristically, keeping my annoyance to myself.

  Fuck it. You probably know how it goes from here—her getting me, with a touch and a half, to go with her over to her place to see it down there in her building’s basement—some superintendent’s gardener’s glossy high-class green. Then I, of course, got her to come hurry right over with me to my place and, you guessed it, showed her, I showed her, absolutely—well, yes—every dazzling detail.

  Which is to say the sole project left to me.

  Oh hell, the one, to be fair, left to the legion of both of us, I suppose it’s, inescapably, only virtuous for me to allow.

  VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

  YOU LAST BEHELD the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge in this or the antecedent century? Unless it’s called the Queensborough now. Who can tell anymore? It’s been millineries and chin straps and millineries galore. Listen, what hasn’t been? They could have revisionated the name of it and uninformed the newspapers. This is one of the projects they historically execute—slip on a different name for it and keep it secret until the next stage. It happens to be Perchik in a nutshell and history as well. Things are all of them akin to progress, only inorganic from the word go. Besides, what kind of a mental case dares decline custard? We’ll come again to consider again when Medicare merges with Christianity. But who cares? Do I care? Look, you want me to tell you what I want? A fork on the tray, Perchik seizing it and mortally stabbing me with it before the peaches are peeled and served. Think about it. Misapplication. The man could merely maim me. When did I, one of the earliest devotees of humanity, not consent to my being maimed by a maniac? Let’s face it, what’s the story of the spread? There is no going back, is there? Motion has gone to the dogs as a concept. Listen, I myself was the sole possessor of a semi-mild condition. That’s official. As to the question of you personally, so? I mean, all my life that’s all I’ve ever been—all fucking ears, okay? Guess who’s getting a polyurethane utensil in the eye if he keeps on confusitating my “food.” Is there one thing I am not, as an American, convinced of? Cultivate the utilization of A CERTAIN TYPE OF LANGUAGE and the next thing you know, the whole United States nation has to go ahead and take another one in the chops for the sake of socialization. People. Don’t they make you sick? Perchik says, “Grow up. Act your age.” Fine. Between you, me, and the lamppost, Updike’s not his name. You know what shuts everybody up? That does. Okay, let’s switch topics. What say ought be proposed apropos of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge? Is the reason why you’re having a tough time following me the same as the reason why you’re having a tough time following yourself? Here’s some factuality for you—it isn’t even a real bridge in anything close to the biblical sense. I looked it up. I’m telling you, I, Gordo, took it upon myself to exercise the initiative to inquire into the subject from a materially theoretical aperçu. You know the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano Bridge, the Bridge of Sighs? Those are bridges. They’re like for people not just to get across over to the other side of something by, they’re for people to—skip it, sentence was already a pain in the ass miles before it had its toe in. It’s an affiliation, you do realize. Trust me, I used to teach contrivance. It’s college-level thinking, granted—whereas Paley and Barthelme, they were, or weren’t, an item in your better class of sexual magazine? Sneeze if you must. With regard to our republic, what used to be totally lacking in it still is. Whither refinement? Why is this so hard for everybody to understand? Abominable as Perchik is, is he nevertheless not perfectly pervious? Time was when I was pretty impervious, too. This is what this issue is. Take any edition of The Antoich Review. Now tell me who Robert Fogarty is. Don’t make me laugh. You know what’s a crying shame? The whole affair—it’s indecent. Turning to our study of the infrastructure, doesn’t it look like shit from here? From coast to coast, you know what? The pressure is fantastic. The only explanation is this—Gordo’s got a certain something on a certain editor-in-chief. See the hyphens? Believe you me, they’re a thorn in the man’s kishkes. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. That’s a set of seven—the acoustical limit, breathingly speaking. I’m going to tell you one last thing—never mock Queens. You know what I miss? I miss seeing derricks. I miss seeing kids who knew how to hold a pencil right. But that’s it. Being in here, not one other thing I can think of would I adjudge myself unjustly deprived of—except, of course, something smart to read. Also Perchik’s wife’s keester, which was, as the keesters of wives who shlepped upstate to visit went, ingenious. Oh well, the lady’s probably been renamed by now. Calling herself, or being
called, Nina Foch. Or maybe Faye Bainter of yesteryear. Check the tray for a fork first. Perchik suffered. Do I hear a rebuttal? But that’s Perchik. Now take a taste of tonight’s pudding. It is or isn’t underwritten by the United Federation of Teachers? Canned peaches by Krupp—sure, sure, I get it, how impeccably politically convenient. Time was when what? Time was when the human race spoke English! Watch Fogarty—if only to begin with. Not to mention the Department of Transportation and its dirty stinking lousy rotten vendetta against free speech.

  GNAT

  SHE SAID, “PUT it on, I want to see it on you.” Or “see you in it.” She perhaps said “in it,” and not “on you,” but in either event I complied, got into the shirt that I had purchased, what does one say, on the fly? By gum, yes, there had not been any of this frantic shopping around, that I can promise you, trying store after store, nor, when the saleslady had pointed it out to me, did I find myself the least uncertain, asking, as a person unsure of himself might, “Looks good, you bet—but what else do you want to show me? I mean, don’t you think you should show me something apart from just this?”

  No, I took my purchase as one would take to oneself a kidnapped newborn, paid for it, and left the premises, assured by the, what do they say for this occasion nowadays, not saleslady but server, that the shirt needed only be washed and then let hang to dry for it to be restored back to its original good looks.

  Oh, the relief, the relief, to have proved myself already poised on the farther end of the accomplishment of an initial gesture toward a bold review of the long-postponed project respecting the lightening of my hourly, my daily, my lifely load: cut down on the ironing, shift footwear into sneakers from shoes, and then, refreshed, encouraged, stimulated by this hurtling into assertive action, press on from there with the embrace of synthetic fabrics, the time-honored ones demanding more and more labor for me to get about in, as my strength—I am no spring chicken anymore, it might interest you to learn—is ebbing, waning, suit yourself, choose a word. This, then, creaking in my jeans, as it were, was the measure by which I was charting the rate, and the most recently achieved stage, of my ageing: to wit, the increasing burden to my body clothes were. So I was resolved to quit heaving my person around in cottons and woolens, for example, and to get ready to consent to the genius of micro-fiber, a feathery, gleaming, watertight substitute for the materials God had all too rashly proffered to us in their place. The shirt—a much-pocketed affair with a stunning variety of Velcro fastenings shrewdly featured here and there—would establish me as someone who had taken a first earnest step toward adjusting himself to inevitable defeat in his struggle against the superior tactics in reach of the relentless—why pussyfoot around?—malicious forces in charge of the earth, a longish, not unchallenging bit of prose, that, don’t you think, at least for one whose energies are in such quick-footed retreat.