by Gary Lutz
The teachers read the note and placed the son at a special desk, where they quizzed him about kings and invertebrates. He answered bodily, and correctly.
He came home having been taught how to answer the telephone in a telephone voice.
“Speaking,” he had been taught to say.
His one big break was being told he needed eyeglasses — an encumbering portable fenestration that made props of his nose and ears. It was not so much that the world was now filled in more tidily (things were less destitute of outline, less likely to drown within themselves before they arrived in the thick of his eye) as that he felt he had acquired a wicket about himself, a little cage up front through which business could get quickly and fittingly done.
I WAS SURER OF THINGS
Try it this way: there was a woman who betrayed me with a man who had opened a factory in which it was suggested that the workers make things out of glass. The man did not believe in pushing people. He never once looked over anyone’s shoulder.
The man had no luck in hiring the woman’s children.
They lived off their mother and grew demandingly lovely on two slipcovered sofas pushed together end to end.
Coarse, dandelionish tufts of fabric sewn at intervals into the slipcovers left pink imprints on their cheeks, their foreheads.
I later liked to watch them walking ably away from me but not yet toward each other.
I will not give you any of the gore.
EMPLOYMENT
I’m looking for work in this room, naturally. I’m desiring lots of work in this room. I’m very serious about my desire.
I go up to the guy. “Is there work?” I ask.
“I would imagine,” he says. He shows me to the desk. It’s the same old desk, my desk.
I pull out the chair and sit down.
I open one of the drawers. I find my underwear and socks exactly where I keep them. I open another and find my health-and-beauty aids.
The guy says, “You get dental, eyeglass, life insurance, major medical, death and dismembership, two weeks’ paid vacation, seven paid holidays, fifteen paid sick days, personal days TBA. Employee pilfering is the retail sector’s filthiest of secrets. Lift with your whole body, not with your limbs. Don’t just be a people person — be a person’s person. Come in through the employees’ entrance and breathe out through your nose. This concludes the orientation.”
I reach for a pen.
He slaps my hand hard.
“Just do what you’d be doing anyway,” he says. “Only now it’s going to be work.”
SPEAK UP
She wants to know what he saw in her, so I reach right in for it, pluck it out, and hand it to her. It’s a grammatical occurrence of something big, something way out of scale.
This is a conversation we’re having, an incident. She is hemming his trousers, the six pair he left behind. I have been encouraging her to wear them herself — one pair per day of the week, time off on Wednesday, middle of the week, in case she runs out of anecdotal material.
In short, I tell her, Hate him.
But she wants to know what if he calls, what if he comes back, what if they’re both shopping for memo pads in the same micromart.
Skip it, I tell her.
To be fair, what goes where? In terms of my life, where should this be taking up places?
The only way this keeps going is if you speak up.
Tell me something.
Tell me every other thing.
How’s every other thing?
THIS STORY
This story has two parts.
The first is about his last love — how he got circumstanced in it, and all the antiperspirants and behaving and abbreviations it later came to entail. This part is long — much too long for me to include or even synopsize here — and it darts out at this or that. Please do not hold it against me if I pretend that this part of the story was misplaced or, better, put aside to boil.
The second part of the story is short and familiar. It parallels your own life, so it is that much the easier to remember. It lends itself handily to discussion in groups small and still smaller. I will recite it in its entirety:
Son, you cunt!
Loo
Shall we face something else?
I had a sister once.
The center square of the little city where she had grown up still had a couple of “comfort stations.” That was what they called those belowground public lavatories whose stairwelled entrances, sided and canopied with frosted glass, looked like gateways to some sunken Victorian exposition. She could not remember whether she simply wasn’t allowed down there or just preferred holding it in.
This sister was the self-silencing type.
She was done up in a body bereft of freckles or shine.
She never found a way to get her hair rioting upward in the flaring fashion of her time.
Loo (for that was the name she used) was already at that stage in her headway toward demise where it was best to tell people what they wanted to hear. What they mostly wanted to hear was that nobody else, no matter her station in life, ever really knew how much it was she should by now have gone ahead and packed.
Her sleep in those days was generous to a fault. But she would wake up and feel herself felled by the clarities and definitudes of the new day. Then to work, in the afternoons, in a windowless basement office in an overchilled building on the outskirts of town. There would sometimes be too rational a cast to her mind, and sometimes she nodded off, but this was an ungiving, dream-free species of sleep and did not want her in it. There was nothing to be made of it, either. It left no residue.
She was a remainder of her parents, not a reminder of them.
Her private life was not so much private as simply witnessless.
The shops in those days did in fact sell something called a “body pillow,” but she had not brought any of them home yet.
Her second job was an older person’s job.
She was afraid there was nothing she didn’t find entirely mysterious, nothing that didn’t make her feel as if she had never once belonged in her life. But the two or three people to whom she had been closest had always been the most difficult to fathom or even unveil. Even their faces seemed to destabilize themselves into new forms of unrecognizability under the hardly forceful pressure of her gaze. She would no longer know who the person was that was morphing disorganizingly before her eyes while the two of them were eating or pretending not to be hungry or doing whatever they did that kept them together undefended. She would have no steadying sense of what the person truly looked like from one instant to the next. And if the externals were themselves so mutable, there could be no end to speculation about what exactly might be going on inside any human body purposely neighboring her own. There was no reliable way of finding out. Everything she claimed to understand about people was no more than hazarded.
She wanted to convince herself that there was a way to learn how she might securely know just one thing, maybe a couple of things, about any other person — if only the most persuasive of that person’s reasons for having hated his handwriting at the moment it came time at last to make a list of things that must change absolutely right away or else.
Other things that brought a better grade of sorrow into her world, broadened her agony, etc.?
She had the disadvantage of apparently looking like a lot of other people, because she was often accosted by strangers who took it for granted that she was somebody they knew, and they insisted on resuming conversations broken off long ago and threw fits when she could not supply the precise lines of flattery or remorse they had been waiting all this long while to hear.
She had been living for some disorderly time in furnitureless, dun-colored small-town apartments with the blinds drawn at all hours. She had never learned the names of the streets. She had only a punctured knowledge of geography. She supposed that it helped her to be far from the center of anything, never incited by what went on in thicker populations.
Looking too long unfondled, she would doubtless have a different answer now, but coach herself forward she did. A heavy-haired girl of terrorizing ordinary beauty cornered her, unpeppily, at some upstairs cabaret, but were teems of feeling fizzing between the two of them afterward? Or did memory spoon out some garniture of emotion over everything taking its time in catty months to come?
Nothing nestled in her remembrance.
There were belongings to buy, and a ruesomeness incompressible into any of the words she knew, and a past already kaput and ready to rebulk, rebuke.
But twenty-two, twenty-three — she was running out of realms.
Or it was just that she had such an overacquaintance with herself, suffered from such an oppressive overintimacy with her body and the contents of her every minute, that on those rare occasions when she stumbled upon a glimpse of the bigger picture of herself, and actually got a look at the contours of her life, she was practically undone — because the microscopic view and the larger perspective did not fit together at all. So she was plunged into a disabling uncertainty that at length infected her speech and gave her trouble with the first-person pronouns, because the range of reference was now clouded and baffling.
There were jolts and didders to her nervous system.
Her life did not so much advance as narrow itself out unamelioratingly.
But did she shoplift?
With fingers so thin they looked like snippets from somebody else’s?
She was not blessed with a voice in the head that furnished a running interpretation of human incident. Lives around her motioned brokenly this way and that. She made herself more available, visible, riskful. But even her own body would not honor her. There were flubs in her private locations, and her hands did not mix all that well with each other.
There was in fact less and less talk in her life, and when she did speak, it was as if the words were issuing not from her mouth but from some rent in the murk of her being. It was the penetralia speaking for once and at last. So what came out did not sound that much like ordinary utterancy but came crashing out of the vocabulary she kept crashing herself against.
Her bugginess and obsessions and sexual instabilities were probably never that far from home, though they were mostly a tiny and shrinking department of her life.
It was a life into which others now and again must have pitched some of their woe.
Our mother?
Two parties must be present at every birth.
Neither ever survives in one way or another.
While she was growing up, some packages of potato chips used to carry, on their backsides, a defensive notation along the lines of “This package is sold by weight, not by volume. Contents may have settled during shipment.” It put her in mind of daily, unshapeful life — though the generalizings about it would carry her only farther and farther away from where she was trying to throw herself at the first perfectly rotten mood to come along in anyone looking more likely to last.
And our father?
As a girl, she must have known it was a coin collection, at least of sorts. But the nickels and silver dollars had not been pressed into any of those gloomy folders from some hobby shop.
My sister needed the chocolate teenies, the sourballs, the licoriced whatnots.
She was big on upshots and bitter ends, but she did not see herself as polarizing. Why should she have to see herself at all? That was somebody else’s affliction, not hers. She had learned long ago how to prepare herself for a day without recourse to a mirror.
It was in the restrooms of cosmetology colleges, restaurants with communal tables, underemployment agencies, off-price stores, that her fingers offered herself and others a fugitive and unimproving satisfaction of a kind, though she otherwise lacked the reach that life was said to require.
She did not like to drive, she suffered motion sickness on trains, planes were much too aerial for her taste, and on buses she would get stuck next to the perspirational, the heartsore.
She was uncottoned-to, but a soft touch always.
She audited an Oral Communications class at the township college. But despite all that dreamy speech-course certitude about “messages” and their “senders” and awaiting “receivers” (those textbook diagrams with the perkily curving arrows always made her sad), wasn’t most communication of any sort a one-way street anyway? Shouldn’t she have been content with the inner sentences of hers going on for miles and miles — an entire continent’s worth, for that matter — without anyone in any oncoming traffic taking any notice whatsoever?
The professor said things like “Other things being equal” and backed drably away from her after class. He looked cramped and made sport of in his own life and forums. There was a turnout of papules, ingrown hairs, whiteheads, on his face. Her final grade was a Courier-font C.
Of the flight home for the first of the funerals, she remembered little except that the couple sitting to her left kept rousing her from her narcosis (she had chewn some stupefacients) so they could use the restroom. They always left and returned as a couple.
She hoped she hadn’t been talking in her sleep. A big fear was that in her sleep she would “open up” and give untidy, exploded views of her psyche.
Later still: that dick-ridden gleam to her, the razzmatazz of her makeup, an autumn with a winterly girl (lavish of eyeliner and with that knack for the pathetical), then newer and newer dips to her sadness, and the panache of her about-faces to follow: setting foot out of herself, or making overtures to herself — she owed it to herself to see life flatten itself desirably in the very design of a day.
Then where — Kansas, Arkansas? The paychecks were direct-deposited, so you tended to forget.
She felt cozy in the time zone, but her days out there were as livelong as all get-out.
In those parts, the supermarket bakeries baked bagels without even a hole.
There was a diary for a while. She dressed page after page in a sneaky, tossing backhand:
Rubbing: I came to it late and didn’t get a whole lot out of it.
My life, so help me, has been little more than an ongoing demonstration of the fiasco of the bodily.
Other pages, I later saw, concerned the ruck and malarkey of monthly life, the unwondersome ways in which people finished with each other.
I like to think she might have said something quieteningly final and fair enough.
I bought a car, a black one, and drove it. I let the thing fill up with more and more trash.
In next to no time, the driver’s side had been keyed intricately, all-overishly, though perhaps keyed is not quite the word. There must have been ice picks and chisels involved as well.
Partial List of People to Bleach
She was either next to me on a plane and turning a page of her magazine every time I turned one of mine, or else she had come forward from way back to be a handful anew, because people repeat on you or otherwise go unplundered. I will think of her as Aisler for any priggish intentions I might still manage here.
Aisler had spousy eyes, and arms exemplary in their plunges, and she brought her bare knees together until they were buttocky and practical. I hemmed and hawed inside of her for some weeks after but never got the hang of her requirements. A woman that swaggering of heart will not bask in deferred venereal folderol.
Anyway, she had a kid, and the kid’s questions kept tripping me up — e.g., if you let people walk all over you, do you become a place?
Seven, seven and a half, and there were tiny whelms of hair already all over the guy.
I was flushy, heavy-faced, bluntly forty.
The morning they moved out (this was winter; flurries quibbled at the window), I made a sinking study of the lease. I had never given much thought to its terms before, the deductional verve of “lessor,” “lessee.” I was worded into the thing just once as an accountable, but the woman’s name was right and left, gothicked in fountain-pen flaunts.
In short, I left the apartment the way
I had found it — evacuated, fakedly intact, incapacitated for any glorying course of residential circumstance.
This was the demising district’s lone block of limestone heights.
I had lived there wreckingly in pairs, and in notional associations of greater than two. I had painted many a rosy picture. My eyes, it had usually been claimed, were bigger than my asshole.
So I stored some things, some becalming ensembles, in my car of the decade, a four-door sobriety. Set out for a pay phone, called some people to ask after people even sparser. But after a while it was just their biles vying with mine.
Night was a portal to the morning, maybe, but morning was no gateway.
At the office campus: a couple of new hires on my level, a woman and a man. The man was in his meridian twenties, not a quick one to color. It was all I could do to show him the quickest way to disable a paper clip so it could no longer get a purchase on the pages; how to refuse food from people who came in one day with new teeth shingled over the old.
There were spatter-dash cookies all week the week he started.
We had, this new one and I, some jaunty pleasance in the john. We carried on without bywords or backwash, got to the bottom of our camaraderie pronto. He was inconclusively beautiful, a crude breather through it all, and I was easy to glut, even easier to usher out.
