Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story

by Lorin Stein

  Possibly under his hat was a filthy mind. He imagined Veronica and I might be having sexual intercourse. He resented it. Not that he hoped for the privilege himself, in his coat and soldier hat, but he had a proprietary interest in the building and its residents. I came from another world. The other world against which Ludwig defended the residents. Wasn’t I like a burglar sneaking out late, making him my accomplice? I undermined his authority, his dedication. He despised me. It was obvious. But no one thinks such thoughts. It made me laugh to think them. My genitals jumped. The elevator door slid open. He didn’t say a word. I padded in like a seal. The door slid shut. Instantly, I was ashamed of myself, thinking as I had about him. I had no right. A better man than I. His profile was an etching by Dürer. Good peasant stock. How had he fallen to such work? Existence precedes essence. At the controls, silent, enduring, he gave me strength for the street. Perhaps the sun would be up, birds in the air. The door slid open. Ludwig walked ahead of me through the lobby. He needed new heels. The door of the lobby was half a ton of glass, encased in iron vines and leaves. Not too much for Ludwig. He turned, looked down into my eyes. I watched his lips move.

  “I vun say sumding. Yur bisniss vot you do. Bud vy you mek her miserable? Nod led her slip. She has beks unter her eyes.”

  Ludwig had feelings. They spoke to mine. Beneath the uniform, a man. Essence precedes existence. Even rotten with sleep, thick, dry bags under his eyes, he saw, he sympathized. The discretion demanded by his job forbade anything tangible, a sweater, a hat. “Ludwig,” I whispered, “you’re all right.” It didn’t matter if he heard me. He knew I said something. He knew it was something nice. He grinned, tugged the door open with both hands. I slapped out onto the avenue. I saw no one, dropped to my feet and glanced back through the door. Perhaps for the last time. I lingered, indulged a little melancholy. Ludwig walked to a couch in the rear of the lobby. He took off his coat, rolled it into a pillow and lay down. I had never stayed to see him do that before, but always rushed off to the subway. As if I were indifferent to the life of the building. Indeed, like a burglar. I seized the valuables and fled to the subway. I stayed another moment. Watching good Ludwig, so I could hate myself. He assumed the modest, saintly posture of sleep. One leg here, the other there. His good head on his coat. A big arm across his stomach, the hand between his hips. He made a fist and punched up and down.

  I went down the avenue, staying close to the buildings. Later I would work up a philosophy. Now I wanted to sleep, forget. I hadn’t the energy for moral complexities: Ludwig cross-eyed, thumping his pelvis in such a nice lobby. Mirrors, glazed pots, rubber plants ten feet high. As if he were generating all of it. As if it were part of his job. I hurried. The buildings were on my left, the park on my right. There were doormen in the buildings; God knows what was in the park. No cars were moving. No people in sight. Streetlights glowed in a receding sweep down to Fifty-ninth Street and beyond. A wind pressed my face like Mr. Cohen’s breath. Such hatred. Imponderable under any circumstances, a father cursing his daughter. Why? A fright in the dark? Freud said things about fathers and daughters. It was too obvious, too hideous. I shuddered and went more quickly. I began to run. In a few minutes I was at the spit-mottled steps of the subway. I had hoped for vomit. Spit is no challenge for bare feet. Still, I wouldn’t complain. It was sufficiently disgusting to make me live in spirit. I went down the steps flatfooted, stamping, elevated by each declension. I was a city boy, no mincing creep from the sticks.

  A Negro man sat in the change booth. He wore glasses, a white shirt, black knit tie and a silver tie clip. I saw a mole on his right cheek. His hair had spots of grey, as if strewn with ashes. He was reading a newspaper. He didn’t hear me approach, didn’t see my eyes take him in, figure him out. Shirt, glasses, tie—I knew how to address him. I coughed. He looked up.

  “Sir, I don’t have any money. Please let me through the turnstile. I come this way every week and will certainly pay you the next time.”

  He merely looked at me. Then his eyes flashed like fangs. Instincitvely, I guessed what he felt. He didn’t owe favors to a white man. He didn’t have to bring his allegiance to the transit authority into question for my sake.

  “Hey, man, you naked?’

  “Yes.”

  “Step back a little.”

  I stepped back.

  “You’re naked.”

  I nodded.

  “Get your naked ass the hell out of here.”

  “Sir,” I said, “I know these are difficult times, but can’t we be reasonable? I know that…”

  “Scat, mother, go home.”

  I crouched as if to dash through the turnstile. He crouched, too. It proved he would come after me. I shrugged, turned back toward the steps. The city was infinite. There were many other subways. But why had he become so angry? Did he think I was a bigot? Maybe I was running around naked to get him upset. His anger was incomprehensible otherwise. It made me feel like a bigot. First a burglar, then a bigot. I needed a cigarette. I could hardly breathe. Air was too good for me. At the top of the steps, staring down, stood Veronica. She had my clothes.

  “Poor, poor,” she said.

  I said nothing. I snatched my underpants and put them on. She had my cigarettes ready. I tried to light one, but the match failed. I threw down the cigarette and matchbook. She retrieved them as I dressed. She lit the cigarette for me and held my elbow to help me keep my balance. I finished dressing, took the cigarette. We walked back toward her building. The words “thank you” sat in my brain like driven spikes. She nibbled her lip.

  “How are things at home?” My voice was casual and morose, as if no answer could matter.

  “All right,” she said, her voice the same as mine. She took her tone from me. I liked that sometimes, sometimes not. Now I didn’t like it. I discovered I was angry. Until she said that I had no idea I was angry. I flicked the cigarette into the gutter and suddenly I knew why. I didn’t love her. The cigarette sizzled in the gutter. Like truth. I didn’t love her. Black hair, green eyes, I didn’t love her. Slender legs. I didn’t. Last night I had looked at her and said to myself, “I hate communism.” Now I wanted to step on her head. Nothing less than that would do. If it was a perverted thought, then it was a perverted thought. I wasn’t afraid to admit it to myself.

  “All right? Really? Is that true?”

  Blah, blah, blah. Who asked those questions? A zombie: not Phillip of the foyer and rug. He died in flight. I was sorry, sincerely sorry, but with clothes on my back I knew certain feelings would not survive humiliation. It was so clear it was thrilling. Perhaps she felt it, too. In any case she would have to accept it. The nature of the times. We are historical creatures. Veronica and I were finished. Before we reached her door I would say deadly words. They’d come in a natural way, kill her a little. Veronica, let me step on your head or we’re through. Maybe we’re through, anyway. It would deepen her looks, give philosophy to what was only charming in her face. The dawn was here. A new day. Cruel, but change is cruel. I could bear it. Love is infinite and one. Women are not. Neither are men. The human condition. Nearly unbearable.

  “No, it’s not true,” she said.

  “What’s not?”

  “Things aren’t all right at home.”

  I nodded intelligently, sighed. “Of course not. Tell me the truth, please, I don’t want to hear anything else.”

  “Daddy had a heart attack.”

  “Oh God,” I yelled. “Oh God, no.”

  I seized her hand, dropped it. She let it fall. I seized it again. No use. I let it fall. She let it drift between us. We stared at one another. She said, “What were you going to say? I can tell you were going to say something.”

  I stared, said nothing.

  “Don’t feel guilty, Phillip. Let’s just go back to the apartment and have some coffee.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Don’t say anything. He’s in the hospital and my mother is there. Let’s just go upstairs and not say
anything.”

  “Not say anything. Like moral imbeciles go slurp coffee and not say anything? What are we, nihilists or something? Assassins? Monsters?”

  “Phillip, there’s no one in the apartment. I’ll make us coffee and eggs…”

  “How about a roast beef? Got a roast beef in the freezer?”

  “Phillip, he’s my father.”

  We were at the door. I rattled. I was in a trance. This was life. Death!

  “Indeed, your father. I’ll accept that. I can do no less.”

  “Phillip, shut up. Ludwig.”

  The door opened. I nodded to Ludwig. What did he know about life and death? Give him a uniform and a quiet lobby—that’s life and death. In the elevator he took the controls. “Always got a hand on the controls, eh Ludwig?”

  Veronica smiled in a feeble, grateful way. She liked to see me get along with the help. Ludwig said, “Dots right.”

  “Ludwig has been our doorman for years, Phillip. Ever since I was a little girl.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Dots right.”

  The door slid open. Veronica said, “Thank you, Ludwig.” I said, “Thank you, Ludwig.”

  “Vulcum.”

  “Vulcum? You mean ‘welcome’? Hey, Ludwig, how long you been in this country?”

  Veronica was driving her key into the door.

  “How come you never learned to talk American, baby?”

  “Phillip, come here.”

  “I’m saying something to Ludwig.”

  “Come here right now.”

  “I have to go, Ludwig.”

  “Vulcum.”

  She went directly to the bathroom. I waited in the hallway between the Vlamincks and Utrillos. The Utrillos were pale and flat. The Vlamincks were thick, twisted and red. Raw meat on one wall, dry stone on the other. Mrs. Cohen had an eye for contrasts. I heard Veronica sob. She ran water in the sink, sobbed, sat down, peed. She saw me looking and kicked the door shut.

  “At a time like this…”

  “I don’t like you looking.”

  “Then why did you leave the door open? You obviously don’t know your own mind.”

  “Go away, Phillip. Wait in the living room.”

  “Just tell me why you left the door open.”

  “Phillip, you’re going to drive me nuts. Go away. I can’t do a damn thing if I know you’re standing there.”

  The living room made me feel better. The settee, the chandelier full of teeth and the rug were company. Mr. Cohen was everywhere, a simple, diffuse presence. He jingled change in his pocket, looked out the window and was happy he could see the park. He took a little antelope step and tears came into my eyes. I sat among his mourners. A rabbi droned platitudes: Mr. Cohen was generous, kind, beloved by his wife and daughter. “How much did he weigh?” I shouted. The phone rang.

  Veronica came running down the hall. I went and stood at her side when she picked up the phone. I stood dumb, stiff as a hatrack. She was whimpering, “Yes, yes…” I nodded my head yes, yes, thinking it was better than no, no. She put the phone down.

  “It was my mother. Daddy’s all right. Mother is staying with him in his room at the hospital and they’ll come home together tomorrow.”

  Her eyes looked at mine. At them as if they were as flat and opaque as hers. I said in a slow, stupid voice, “You’re allowed to do that? Stay overnight in a hospital with a patient? Sleep in his room?” She continued looking at my eyes. I shrugged, looked down. She took my shirt front in a fist like a bite. She whispered. I said, “What?” She whispered again, “Fuck me.” The clock ticked like crickets. The Vlamincks spilled blood. We sank into the rug as if it were quicksand.

  Issue 39, 1966

  Lydia Davis

  on

  Jane Bowles’s Emmy Moore’s Journal

  Many of Jane Bowles’s typical superb narrative characteristics are evident in just the first two pages of this small story: the clear and forceful narrating voice; the odd female protagonist; the humor arising from this eccentric protagonist’s worldview; her obviously tenuous hold on “reality”; the inevitable distinct and funny secondary characters (here, the “society salesman” whom the narrator has “accosted” in the Blue Bonnet Room); the pathos of the main character’s valiance, disorientation, and ultimate defeat.

  A closer look, tracing the progress of the story over just these two pages, sentence by sentence, shows the following shifts: The story opens without prologue or preamble, with a clear and plain declaration in simple, forceful language, by a strong first-person voice: “On certain days I forget why I’m here.” Already, we experience this narrator as emphatic but not quite in this life or not quite competent. In the second sentence, we sense a certain insecurity: “Today once again I wrote my husband all my reasons for coming.” The fact of her introducing him as “my husband,” instead of by his name, suggests an emphasis on his role in relation to her rather than on his unique individual identity in a larger public world. In the third sentence, her reliance on him (“He encouraged me to come”) as well as her insecurity (“each time I was in doubt”) is emphasized further. She hesitates, he urges. In these first three sentences, we haven’t yet seen any sign of the humor that is almost omnipresent in Bowles’s writing. In the fourth sentence, it appears: first, along with a reiteration of her husband’s authority, there is the oddity of the faux-clinical phrase “state of vagueness”: “He said that the worst danger for me was a state of vagueness…” Then comes the name of the hotel, so prosaic, so deliberately flat or unromantic (for a hotel): “… so I wrote telling him why I had come to the Hotel Henry.” (Compare her naming of Camp Cataract, in her short story of the same name.) Still in the same sentence, there is then a third moment of humor: “—my eighth letter on this subject—”

  But with that statement, something else has crept in. The narrator is declaring that she is writing to her husband for no less than the eighth time about why she has come to the Hotel Henry. Since this is unarguably many more times than would seem necessary to anyone else, it suggests that the narrator is someone obsessed, or highly anxious, perhaps neurotic, perhaps even seriously disturbed. The fourth sentence is not yet over, though, and now the tone changes: “but with each new letter I strengthen my position.” With this change in tone comes another moment of humor, arising from the disproportion between the language used by the narrator, which might be that of diplomacy or international relations—“strengthen my position”—and the subject: why she has come to the Hotel Henry. The new tone is one of sudden self-confidence.

  Now the long paragraph continues in the same confident tone, which evolves, even, to sound a note of defiance: “Let there be no mistake. My journal is intended for publication.” And develops, further, into the heroic, now colored by delusions of grandeur: “I want to publish for glory, but also in order to aid other women”—the choice of the lofty “aid” over the more common “help” enhancing, with a single word, the suggestion that the protagonist has unrealistically high ambitions. (Compare, in “Camp Cataract,” this wonderful bit of dialogue: “‘Not a night fit for man or beast,’ [Harriet] shouted across to Sadie, using a voice that she thought sounded hearty and yet fashionable at the same time.”)

  The paragraph then relaxes a bit, rambling on with some disjointed information about her husband, his knowledge of mushrooms, herself, her physical attributes, her Anglo stock (“Born in Boston”), and some incoherent generalizations about “the women of my country.” Eventually the narrator trails off altogether, lapsing into uncertain, repetitive speculations about Turkish women and their veils.

  Typically, given the skewed hierarchies of Bowles’s characters, the event with the best possibilities for some drama is tossed away within a parenthesis at the end of the second paragraph: “(written yesterday, the morrow of my drunken evening in the Blue Bonnet Room when I accosted the society salesman.)” The subject of drink will reappear in a deadpan, touchingly simple statement later in the story: “When I’m not
drunk I like to have a cup of cocoa before going to sleep. My husband likes it too.” As for the unfamiliar term “society salesman,” it will be defined through the unfolding of the story—although the incident will not be fully narrated—and the man himself, an exceptionally wealthy department-store clerk, will soon be described with Bowles’s typical vivid precision and ear for the percussive possibilities of English as “a man with a lean red face and reddish hair selling materials by the bolt.”

  Jane Bowles’s odd, half-unworldly, off-kilter heroines are of course versions of aspects of herself, in her troubled course through an often flamboyant or exotic bohemian life to her end in a clinic in Spain, where, weakened by alcoholism and a previous stroke, she died in May 1973, at the age of fifty-six, soon after, in fact, writing “Emmy Moore’s Journal.” It may be too easy to say with hindsight, but the bleak return to the bottle at the end of the story—really, the story’s bleakness throughout—seems to announce Bowles’s imminent capitulation in her decades-long struggle with the challenges of her life, which included many episodes of manic-depressive psychosis, and of her writing, which was hard won from regularly recurring severe writer’s block. Nearly fifty years ago, in 1967, John Ashbery called her “one of the finest modern writers of fiction in any language.” Although she is still considered one of the best by many contemporary writers and readers, she remains stubbornly underrecognized.

  Jane Bowles

  Emmy Moore’s Journal

  May

  On certain days I forget why I’m here. Today once again I wrote my husband all my reasons for coming. He encouraged me to come each time I was in doubt. He said that the worst danger for me was a state of vagueness, so I wrote telling him why I had come to the Hotel Henry—my eighth letter on this subject—but with each new letter I strengthen my position. I am reproducing the letter here. Let there be no mistake. My journal is intended for publication. I want to publish for glory, but also in order to aid other women. This is the letter to my husband, Paul Moore, to whom I have been married sixteen years. (I am childless.) He is of North Irish descent, and a very serious lawyer. Also a solitary and lover of the country. He knows all mushrooms, bushes and trees, and he is interested in geology. But these interests do not exclude me. He is sympathetic towards me, and kindly. He wants very much for me to be happy, and worries because I am not. He knows everything about me, including how much I deplore being the feminine kind of woman that I am. In fact, I am unusually feminine for an American of Anglo stock. (Born in Boston.) I am almost a “Turkish” type. Not physically, at least not entirely, because though fat I have ruddy Scotch cheeks and my eyes are round and not slanted or almond-shaped. But sometimes I feel certain that I exude an atmosphere very similar to theirs (the Turkish women’s) and then I despise myself. I find the women in my country so extraordinarily manly and independent, capable of leading regiments, or of fending for themselves on desert islands if necessary. (These are poor examples, but I am getting my point across.) For me it is an experience simply to have come here alone to the Hotel Henry and to eat my dinner and lunch by myself. If possible before I die, I should like to become a little more independent, and a little less Turkish than I am now. Before I go any further, I had better say immediately that I mean no offense to Turkish women. They are probably busy combating the very same Turkish quality in themselves that I am controlling in me. I understand, too (though this is irrelevant) that many Turkish women are beautiful, and I think that they have discarded their veils. Any other American woman would be sure of this. She would know one way or the other whether the veils had been discarded, whereas I am afraid to come out with a definite statement. I have a feeling that they really have got rid of their veils, but I won’t swear to it. Also, if they have done so, I have no idea when they did. Was it many years ago or recently?