Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story
Page 1
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The short stories in this collection are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in these stories are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
OBJECT LESSONS. Copyright © 2012 by The Paris Review. All rights reserved.
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Cover design by Charlotte Strick
Cover artwork: Jane’s Remington, 2002, oil on canvas, 84” × 74” © Robert Cottingham, courtesy of Forum Gallery, New York, N.Y.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Object lessons: the Paris Review presents the art of the short story / The Paris Review; edited by Lorin Stein and Sadie Stein.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-250-00598-4 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-25001618-8 (e-book)
1. Short story—Authorship. I. Stein, Lorin. II. Stein, Sadie. III. Paris review.
PN3373.O33 2012
808.3‘1—dc23
2012026322
e-ISBN 9781250016188
First Edition: October 2012
Contents
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
COPYRIGHT
EDITORS’ NOTE
Joy Williams, Dimmer
Introduced by Daniel Alarcón
Craig Nova, Another Drunk Gambler
Introduced by Ann Beattie
Leonard Michaels, City Boy
Introduced by David Bezmozgis
Jane Bowles, Emmy Moore’s Journal
Introduced by Lydia Davis
James Salter, Bangkok
Introduced by Dave Eggers
Denis Johnson, Car Crash While Hitchhiking
Introduced by Jeffrey Eugenides
Mary-Beth Hughes, Pelican Song
Introduced by Mary Gaitskill
Jorge Luis Borges, Funes, the Memorious
Introduced by Aleksandar Hemon
Bernard Cooper, Old Birds
Introduced by Amy Hempel
Thomas Glynn, Except for the Sickness I’m Quite Healthy Now. You Can Believe That.
Introduced by Jonathan Lethem
Mary Robison, Likely Lake
Introduced by Sam Lipsyte
Donald Barthelme, Several Garlic Tales
Introduced by Ben Marcus
Raymond Carver, Why Don’t You Dance
Introduced by David Means
Ethan Canin, The Palace Thief
Introduced by Lorrie Moore
Steven Millhauser, Flying Carpets
Introduced by Daniel Orozco
Guy Davenport, Dinner at the Bank of England
Introduced by Norman Rush
Norman Rush, Lying Presences
Introduced by Mona Simpson
Lydia Davis, Ten Stories from Flaubert
Introduced by Ali Smith
Evan S. Connell, The Beau Monde of Mrs. Bridge
Introduced by Wells Tower
Dallas Wiebe, Night Flight to Stockholm
Introduced by Joy Williams
CONTRIBUTORS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM PICADOR
Editors’ Note
Since its founding, in 1953, The Paris Review has been a laboratory for new fiction. The editors have never believed that there was one single way to write a story. We’ve never espoused a movement or school. We’ve never observed a word limit. We think every good story writes its own rules and solves problems of its own devising.
That’s the idea behind this book. It is not a greatest hits anthology. Instead, we asked twenty masters of the genre to choose a story from The Paris Review archives—a personal favorite—and to describe the key to its success as a work of fiction. Some chose classics. Some chose stories that were new even to us.
Our hope is that this collection will be useful to young writers, and to others interested in literary technique. Most of all, it is intended for readers who are not (or are no longer) in the habit of reading short stories. We hope these object lessons will remind them how varied the form can be, how vital it remains, and how much pleasure it can give.
Daniel Alarcón
on
Joy Williams’s Dimmer
Joy Williams is one of those unique and instantly recognizable storytelling voices, capable of finding the mysterious and magical heart within even the most ordinary human acts. Her stories begin in unexpected places, and take surprising turns toward their eventual end. She doesn’t describe life; she exposes it. She doesn’t write scenes, she evokes them with a finely observed gesture, casually reinterpreted to provide maximum, often devastating, insight:
He had straddled the baby as it crept across the ground as though little Mal were a gulch he had no intention of falling into.
The baby in this startling image is Mal Vester, the unlucky and unloved protagonist of “Dimmer.” He is a survivor, but there is no romantic luster to his suffering. Mal is rough, untamed, stricken, desperate, and alone. His father, who never wanted him, dies in the first sentence; his mother, the only person who loved him without restraint, dies in the second. Her death haunts this beatiful, moving story, right up until the very last line; but what keeps us reading to the end is the prose, which constantly unpacks and explains Mal’s unlikely world with inventive and striking images. Williams has done something special: she makes Mal’s drifting, his lack of agency, narratively compelling. Life happens to Mal; it is inflicted upon him, a series of misfortunes that culminate in his exile. (A lonelier airport has never appeared in short fiction.) Mal never speaks, but somehow, I didn’t realize it until the third time I’d read “Dimmer.” I knew him so well, felt his tentative joy and fear so intimately, it was as if he’d been whispering in my ear all along.
Joy Williams
Dimmer
I
Mal Vester had a pa who died in the Australian desert after drinking all the water from the radiator of his Land Rover. His momma had died just like the coroner said she had, even though he had lost the newspaper clipping that would have proved it. Not lost exactly. He had folded up the story and put it in the pocket of his jeans for one year and one half straight because they were the only pants he had and the paper had turned from print into lint and then into the pocket itself and then the jeans had become as thin and as grey as the egg skins his momma had put over his boils when he was little.
He still had the jeans—spread out flat on the bottom of his suitcase but they were just a rag really, not even a rag but just a few threads insufficient even to cover up a cat hit in the street.
The coroner, in absolving anyone or everyone of guilt in Mal’s mother’s death, had stated to the press, represented by a lean young man in a black suit with a nose blue and huge as a Doberman pinscher, that
<
br /> the murky water and distance from
the shore precluded adequare witnessing of the terminal event. If
the victim were in the process of
having her upper extremity avulsed
by a large fish she would have had
little opportunity to wave or to
render an intelligent vocal ap—
praisal of her dealings at that particular moment … Death being unavoidable and by misadventure …
Mal thought the wording cold but swell.
Everyone had thought she was mucking about. It was dusk and there were hundreds on the beach … cooking their meat, the children eating ice-cream pies, the old ones staring into the sun. There was a man washing his greyhounds in a tidal pool. The water was cold and pale, flecked with filthy foam, green like the scum of a chicken stewing. Mal was in the cottage, fixing supper, pouring hot water over the jello powder, browning the moki in the skillet oil, and next door Freddie Gomkin was burning out another clutch as he tried to coax his car up and over the hill to the flat races in Sydney.
It certainly did not seem at the time that anyone could be dying. It was not the season. It was Durban’s season.
And no one was really paying any attention. She was by herself in water no deeper than her ribs, 100 feet down the beach from the public conveniences. And she disappeared. Someone later said that they thought they saw her disappearing. But they saw no fin. Blood came shoreward in a little patch, bright and neat as a paper plate. The only thing that Mal Vester had to go on of course was that she never came back. A few days later, someone caught a tiger shark and when they cut it open, there was a bathing costume stamped with a laundry mark wrapped round its intestine. But the laundry mark was traced to a Mrs. Annie White of Toowoomba who was still alive and who worked in a doll hospital.
After it happened, he was unsure that it hadn’t. He lay in the cottage and didn’t know what to do. His mother always hated the water because she could not swim and because she was convinced that people pissed in it all the time. This had become a minor obsession with her. She went all white and shaky when she saw the women sitting on the sandbank, their legs stretched out into the waves, the water rattling in between their thighs. Mal was eleven and she held him close. The beach was no place to bring up a fatherless child by god she always said. Snorkels and men spitting. Women shuffling behind towels, dropping their clothes. Bleeding and coughing. Hair everywhere and rotting sandwiches. Unmentionables coming in with the tide.
He lay on a rolling cot and struck his hips with a loose fist. The moki was dumped charred into the sink. The clocks ran down. He moped about the cottage, practically starving to death while he thought of his mother and how she smelled. She had sung to him—all the American hits—
There ain’t nothing in the world
But a boy and a girl
And love, love, love …
Accompanying herself with salad spoons. It had not been long ago that he had squirmed between her breasts, chewing on a smooth flat dug, smelling food, night spent somewhere by something in the branches. It was like sucking a penny.
Nothing ever came to him directly. Nothing occurred outright. The things that had changed him were blurred and discreet and this gave the life that yet remained for him to live a strange unwieldiness and improbability. Death was not thorough. It had no clean edges to it. And all that love and responsibility left behind—mewing and forever lost.
II
The spleen weighs 15 Gm. The capsule
is wrinkled, thin and red-purple. The
cut surface shows vascular congestion.
The lymph nodes and bone marrow are not
remarkable. The liver weighs 1500 Gm.
It is red-brown, smooth and glistening.
They had been farming in the desert for one year; the man tall and ropey-limbed with the studs of his blue jeans shining around his hips and the heels of his boots making broad coffin holes in the sand; the woman sulky, pulling spinifex spines out of her skinny legs, rubbing her soiled ankles. She nearly drove him mad, wanting him to press his ear against her belly to hear the heart beat. Sometimes hit was and sometimes hit weren’t, he told her. Sometimes hit growled at him like any old mutt. She’d been eating wormy flour and was imagining things. She’d only gained three pounds.
But she was sure. The wolf, hating emptiness, fills his belly with mud and then disgorges it when he finds food. The woman hates emptiness. The woman is a glass waiting to be filled and her belly is heavy with hope before the seed. For a time, little Mal had been blood and air and sour dough, but then her breasts were swinging with yellow milk. She dreamt of things that her man had never told her. She dreamt of snow which she had never seen. She dreamt of eating books and knew that someone would die soon.
Mal himself, one noon, had dropped early from the womb with a full head of hair and a face white and soft as a candle dripping but what they believed to be his baby chortlings were only the mice clicking and ticking in the stove. For days he had no features at all. For weeks he still seemed unborn, his little eyes all pupil and of a peculiar green like something wedged in a privy crack, the bones growing beneath his face like weeds.
His eyes stayed funny. They were not strong and they were somehow ill-timed like a gesture of empty hands. His momma said that the heat and the weather had wrecked her honey’s eyes just as the heat and the weather had wrecked her fine bone-handled hairbrush. She said that her honey’s eyes were weak because his daddy had never quit doing with her.
His momma told him things were never what they seemed so it made no difference anyhow how much his eyes could see.
The man was never there in daylight and the child’s only memory of him were his jeans, hanging on a hook, the leather boots not quite touching the floor, like the boots of a hanged man, extending up to the empty knee sockets, the jeans being plastered inside the boots by sweat and greasy creek clay, the cloth stringy in the hide. At night the child saw the pale torso quivering over his mother while the hips and legs dangled in shadow on the wall, and he saw it drop soundlessly like a white bird turning out of a storm.
In the morning he was not there. Only his mouth was on the taste of the fork stabbed into a pan of fatty mutton.
One night he was brought back dead on the haunch of a horse. The horse’s legs were like the stems of tall flowers in the moonlight and the child could see that his throat had turned blue and that his brain had risen up and come out of a rent in his skull, hanging outside, white and lacy stiff like the coral sold in Sydney shops. Little Mal rubbed his eyes with ragged nails and the sight swung to the left and disappeared. He opened his mouth wide and stuffed the curtain in, kneeling on his mattress, frail scabby child with warm and gritty hair and he saw them truss his father up in canvas and bury him in the ground.
In daylight he dug on the other side of the house. For what if he should search and find nothing? What if there should be no grave full?
III
The heart weighs 350 Gm. There
is dilation of both chambers.
The superior and inferior venae
cavae, portal and hepatic veins
are patent. The valvular measure—
ments are within normal limits.
The myocardium is a homogeneous
red-brown.
He was an orphan with no distant kin and the house on the harbor began to smell like a kennel. He was eleven and a half and he began drinking gin, threatening motorists by falling in front of their cars. Being loved had taken up more time than he would have ever thought possible. His hair and legs grew long. His teeth became furry as stones in a brook. He ate his bread by the sea and cast the crusts upon the water. The world was Mal’s grey graveyard and the rain ran into the sea from a sky pale as a winding sheet. The rain rang and sang off the prawners’ slick jackets. It drummed upon the sand and upon his bony jaw.
For Mal had learned in his brief joyless life that nothing is faithful and that one needn’t have a body to be
able to mourn, for death is everywhere. Cyanide fills the peach pit. Meningitis in a napkin fold and polio on the wet shower boards. Eternity is in the evening air.
He read in a book that King Henry died from over-eating lampreys and that Princess Kristila succumbed from under-eating greens. There’s no way to account for people’s tastes. He read in the Sun that a farmer had a stroke in his pigpen and not a trace was found. Just his hat and a sack of untouched corn. There’s no way to account for the taste of things.
At night he would have noisy odorous and colorful nightmares that would hurl him out of bed and into the wall. He would trot to and fro in the dark, tiny rhumba steps, his toes curled in the cold, his long yellow nails cracking against debris. At last his mind would clear and he would not be able to remember what had frightened him so.
For the most part, people were kind to him. They smiled at him and didn’t smash his windows. Occasionally they left something in a covered dish or a sealed jar on the window ledge. But they were uneasy about him. He had a great absence of presence—a horrorful past, an uncertain future. He ran and the dust kicked up on the roadway, hissing like the rain on a searing day.
And it became spring and Mal was pubescent. He needed razor blades. He was very lean and the lack of love lay open on his face like a wound. Even though he smelled like a melon and was skittery as a bat, the girls found him attractive with his thick pretty hair and his way of chewing gum. His boy moanings were heard as he ran through the groves of kurajong trees. He was seen to have pollen in his hair.
It was spring and for days there was a black, large and silent dog sitting in front of his cottage. He had dug his paws deeply into the murky lawn, his tail fell in the direction of the sea, his haunches were hairy and dropping like ferns. The dog was very polite and very silent but he was regarded suspiciously by everyone and taken as a bad sign. No one had ever seen the dog before. He was a stranger and black as oblivion. Mal Vester never seemed to notice him which made them believe that the animal was his doom and gloomy future, visible because unavoidable. The dog was waiting for a bitch in heat. When the bitch didn’t present herself, the dog went away. He was very polite and from another town, but by that time, everyone was convinced that he was not a normal dog.