by Lorin Stein
Stark came down and wants to know if he can fall, but I told him no. Then he told me I could fly if I wanted to. He told me to fill my cheeks with air and breathe fast. I tried but only my heels came off the ground. We talked about blue and Stark said that black was blue, that everything was black and that was why he was flying. He laid an egg and flew back up to the ceiling.
The painting is turning out to be larger than I thought. It already covers two walls, and everyone who sees it wants to fall in it. Jenny wants to fall in her furs and I asked if she meant that old muskrat coat she wears. Like all old people when they get upset, Jenny’s nostrils flutter and go pale, the tissue drained of blood. Blue again. I told her she could fall in her furs. She’s happy.
If you look towards the center of your nose and press the corner of your eye, you can see a small cornea of the visible spectrum. Newton in the Optics.
Steinmetz’s mother wanted to know why people fell and I asked her if she knew Sinkowiz’s mother but she said she never associated with anyone who had a plastic face. I can see why. Her’s is leather. Cracked and peeling, like a blue Michelangelo ceiling, with faint flakes that fall like flesh showers on her teacup. She takes no notice. Still, we can talk.
She speaks in blue syllables, like old river icicles. She takes one bony peeling hand and reaches inside her dress, the black gabardine crinkling like a forest fire. Fingers fumble, feeling old linen and immigrant undergarments. When she finds the word she wants, she has no hesitancy in bringing it out, holding it between her dead fish fingers like a cracked amethyst. We spent one evening talking of Japan. She attributed her old age to cigar smoking.
Did I tell you the Pope, His Holiness, is falling in my picture? To be sure. Along with the entire College of Cardinals and selected artifacts of Vatican City. They fall feet first, their robes billowing up like mushrooms. His Holiness holds a miter in one hand and a fork in the other. It is Friday and he is eating cod.
Sinkowiz came and said the picture was too big. It now covers three walls, and I have half the upper chamber of the New York State Legislature falling along with two dozen rock-and-roll stars, five respected surgeons, and ten policemen, arm in arm, who are ceremoniously trampling on a select group of Ban the Bomb demonstrators. Sinkowiz saw the last vignette and wanted to know if I was going political and I told him I would if I could. Did you ever notice the look on someone’s face when they get testy? All wound up, like a rusty screw that’s been worked on backwards? That’s Sinkowiz. I’m having reservations about him. He talks with Golub too much, and lately is getting very commercial. Stark thinks commerce is good for art but after my last arrest I don’t agree.
Jenny’s teeth hurt. I told her they would. At her age what can you expect. She took them out and showed them to me. They were hurting. She has arguments with her teeth several times a day. She says they make her say things she doesn’t want to say.
I told her I’d put her teeth in the picture, falling.
Golub tried to hit me with a lead pipe.
With Sinkowiz, it’s the mouth. I tried to explain that to him the other day. I told him, look Sinkowiz, your mouth is shaped like a saucer and that’s why you say what you do. It may be the last we’ll see of Sinkowiz. O.K. with me. Have been trusting him less since he started brushing his teeth.
Yesterday we celebrated the King of Denmark’s birthday and everybody came. Steinmetz and Steinmetz’s mother, Jenny, and even Golub, who brought his own control panel with him. Golub is very intent on passing his driving test. Wherever he goes he takes his steering wheel, pedals, windshield, gear shift lever, and bench seat. We had ice cream and cake and Jenny passed out party hats, shiny little elastic domes with a rubber that fit around the neck. Golub sat shifting gears and making Plymouth noises. He takes his test on a Plymouth, six cylinder, though at the present he’s having clutch trouble. Stark flew down and read a poem though he’s no poet. Jenny gave him a hat and he complained about the elastic. Someday I’ll have to have a good talk with Stark.
Why do old men walk in the streets in winter?
Last night Sinkowiz came and knocked on my door, late at night. I had trouble with some of the chains, and at least one padlock had rusted shut, but I finally got the door open. Sinkowiz asked me if I believed in art for art’s sake, and I told him I might. Who knows? He said if I did I should cut up my big picture and sell the pieces. I let him into the main studio because I liked a vein that was throbbing on the side of his temple. It wasn’t a big vein, actually about the size of a fingernail, but it jumped up and down like a snail strangling. Someday I’ll tell you more about Sinkowiz. That he’s a prick, in the aforementioned sense, you know, but did you know that he wears white hair silvered and has a camel’s hair coat which he’s thrown up on three times already? His face is the color of shiny pigskin, and that always fascinates me. I’m a sucker for Sinkowiz’s face, I must admit. It’s like new money rubbed into old leather. There’s a sheen about it, soft, as if he spent his entire life crying in expensive sand. So I let him in and sat him on a kitchen chair over which hung an electric light bulb, swaying on the end of a frayed line. Sinkowiz’s head danced on the floor like a sea horse in a storm as the bulb swung first one way and then the other. When the bulb was at one end of its arc I could see that vein, throbbing like salmon sperm, dark blue, the color of the Baltic. At the other end of the arc the vein was hidden in the shadow of his head, beating, but beating unseen. I wanted to reach over and touch his vein. All I could think of was electricity and telephone lines. Sinkowiz blubbered on about how he had to have that picture to sell, that he was committed to sell it, that he needed the money, that it was too big to sell in its present size. It now covers all four walls and the end is not in sight. It’s heading for the roof, my canvas, my resurrected linen, unfolding its scroll like equator up to the heavens. But with his vein and my unfinished canvas and Sinkowiz’s blubbering, I had to set up a new canvas. I worked fast, sketching him in charcoal. Titanium blue, zinc red, and some old yellow that has been drying up in a forgotten tube. I started with a brush but couldn’t get the paint on fast enough to match the frenzy of that throbbing so I moved on to a spatula and then fingers, trying to keep up with the mad army of blood that raced through that temple. Let me tell you what I put in. First of all electricity running through frayed lines, sputtering, and then shadows crossing soft faces, old olives, the sun in Sicily, expensive conversations, and of course Sinkowiz’s face in triplicate, pleading, smiling, crying, being soothed by costly salves and rubbed with blushing liquids from near-nude virgins. Hair like hoarfrost, looked at in mirrors, often combed. If you look closely at Sinkowiz’s face you’ll find it’s hideously smoothed by small scars, brushed shining like tight leather over upholstery. And the vein, beating its own metronome, reckoning the cost of cocktails and canvas, calligraphy and Corot.
I finished at five a.m., and Sinkowiz was asleep, so I wrapped his lank, slack body in the dirty camel’s hair coat and carried him over to my couch. I pulled the coat around his shoulders with the feeling I was wrapping a piece of fish.
No more room in the studio.
I’m painting on the roof. Set up curtain stretchers weighted down with bricks. Stark flies up now and then to see how I’m coming. I show him the new fallers. The mayor and the city council, five rabbis making liberal pronouncements, a dozen candy store owners, innumerable mothers with babies in arms, two thousand Gideon Bibles placed here for your convenience and enlightenment, and seven irreproachable Miss America contestants.
Word has gotten out about my picture, and everybody wants to fall in it. Stark sells tickets and Jenny seats them in a chair, or tells them to stand. There is no longer room on the roof, so I let the painting drape down the side of the building. Last night it rained, altering the composition of one section. Stark is against touching it up. He feels that whatever happens is, and should be left. I can see now that this painting will have no end. I hate to disappoint Sinkowiz and the mortgage on his Long Island home.
/> An accident.
Better explain about it from the ending. We had a fire. Golub keeps insisting that I had a fire, but he says that for the benefit of the insurance agent who stands perpetually at his elbow. The insurance agent says he can’t understand how the fire got started, but it’s perfectly simple. Stark did it. Of course he really didn’t do it, but since we’re going backwards to explain (which is really the only way to explain), he did it. How did he start it the agent asks. With the ash from his cigar I say. The agent tells me that birds don’t smoke but I try to explain to him that Stark is no bird. Temporarily, a phase. Behind all those feathers stands Stark, the real commercial menace. Now why is Stark smoking a cigar? Easy. He is upset. And where did he get the cigar? Another easy one. Steinmetz and his mother, Steinmetz’s mother, went in halvsies on a box of slim Panatellas, Stark’s favorites. Stark goes for your riverboat-gambler cigar, and likes to fiddle with a gold watchchain when he smokes. For the benefit of the insurance agent, I explained why Stark was upset. This was because of the argument I was having with Golub. Now why was I having an argument with Golub? Simple. Because I was having an argument with Sinkowiz. Golub and I were arguing over what Sinkowiz had said. I told Golub he couldn’t hear because he keeps his driving gloves in his ears. He doesn’t have pockets on his pants. So the only place he can keep his gloves are in his ears. They hang down to his shoulders, easily the world’s longest, with deep folds in which he keeps all the things he normally would keep in his pockets. But as a result of this he has trouble hearing. Maybe that’s why he fails his driving tests. Try to take something out of his ears and he says his ears get cold. His earmuffs look like knee-length socks. What were Sinkowiz and I arguing about? About Golub’s ears. Sinkowiz claims they’re normal ears, like everyone else’s. He says they don’t hang down, but I claim they do. When ears hang, they hang. No one can tell you different. I tell Golub he should face his long ears. Then he could accept disappointment.
Golub wants to set up a driving school in my studio. He has a plan to buy old junks and haul them up here for beginners. Golub loves driving. He figures with his own driving school he’ll be able to pass his driving tests. How can you argue with a man who carries gearshift knobs in his ears?
Steinmetz’s mother wants to know if this is all real, and she has a point there. Jenny argues yes, but then she always was an incurable romantic. Steinmetz doesn’t say much. Did I tell you his eyebrows and hair were completely burned off? Steinmetz’s mother thinks the whole idea of people falling is unreal. She suggested I do old ladies with lap dogs, or something classic like Man Brushing his Wig, or Portia Surprised. She’s a great one for people being surprised. She says that real people are always being surprised. But this she says, waving a bony peeling hand in front of my people falling picture, this is not real. I tried to tell her that people are always falling.
They even fall surprised.
New fallings: five generals in full battle dress, seven postmen delivering dead letters, twenty precocious epileptics.
Golub is upset.
I tried to hit him over the head with a lead pipe. He also claims I tried to tie his ears in knots. He is currently pushing a Studebaker into my studio. It’s wedged rather tightly in the elevator door.
At eight a.m. Golub is out in the rear of the elevator, feet wedged against the elevator wall, polished little landlord hands on the rear bumper of the Studebaker trying to push it into the studio. And me? I stand on the floor trying to push it back into the elevator. Golub gives a grunt, pushes, and a small drop of businessman’s sweat drops from his oily brow. At ten we break for coffee, at twelve for lunch, and by special agreement we knock off at four. He is persistent, this Golub, and shows amazing strength for a landlord. The Studebaker is three inches in his favor. I calculated this amount to a bumper so I cut it off with my acetylene torch and threw it in the back yard. Golub claims he’ll sue. He comes back with a lawyer, who helps him push.
Sinkowiz came over and helped me push, but he’s like a lawyer, no back or shoulder muscles to speak of. Again he’s crying for the big picture.
Fat men keep coming into the ground floor, but never leaving. I can see them now, wedged bulging hip to portly shoulder, Golub’s Dachau. If the pain wasn’t so bad I’d go downstairs and let them out. Golub’s probably hoarding them, for the time when there’ll be a shortage of fat men.
When fat men fall, they flutter. I’ve shown that. Sizzling little pork butterflies.
Steinmetz finally gave me the idea!
He sucks his teeth, but he sucks a new set each day. He has seven sets of false teeth. A Monday set, a Tuesday set, and so on. That means he returns to his sucked teeth. I call them Steinmetz’s Revolving Sucked False Teeth.
The same thing with my picture. Mount it on a gigantic revolving drum, spectators at the apex. My Revolving Falling People.
And soon I’ll start on the drum too, when the fire in the elevator shaft dies down and the claws on my hand turn back into fingers.
Issue 42, 1968
Sam Lipsyte
on
Mary Robison’s Likely Lake
In the famous Mary Robison story “Yours,” an elderly man and his young wife carve pumpkins on their porch for Halloween. Hers are messy and mediocre, while the husband, a retired doctor and “Sunday watercolorist,” creates inventive, expressive faces. Later, after a startling turn in this very short story, the old man wishes he could tell his wife his truth, “that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little.”
It’s a fascinating idea to consider in relation to Robison, one of the enormous talents (and great practitioners) of the short story in America. Maybe it speaks to her deep knowledge of the various ways life tears at us, that there are the monstrous crushings—death, abandonment—and then there are constant abrasions. Most people learn to live with both. Most people, Robison’s people, also, while maybe waiting around for the pain to subside, or at least turn briefly amusing, laugh, console each other, make dinner, sit on a bench, and try new tricks for better candlelight.
Many of them also secretly revel in language, in keeping an ear out for the bounties and desolations of speech. Robison not so secretly revels in language, in the odd surprises of everyday utterance, the potentially stirring rhythms. Her prose, often called minimalist during the 1980s, isn’t. She suggested subtractionist, but another word is exacting. When you are exacting, you are a master of the notes and the space between the notes, as Robison has always been. In “Likely Lake,” when Buddy decides he will “dissuade” Connie, it is as though the strategy could not exist if Buddy had not struck upon the right word. Robison’s stories often depend on the rightness of the word, or the right wrongness.
That wrongness, or awkwardness, is layered into her work. She might not have known that “awkward” would be a national catchphrase someday, but Robison has always understood the emotional power of discomfort, self-consciousness, and the manner in which people, eager for real connection (or sometimes not), slide past each other, shrugging, remonstrating, cracking wise. Robison’s stories and novels illuminate day-to-day confusion, as well as the great hurts that sweep down upon us. They are urgent and elegiac, funny and beautiful. If you begin to read them, they will dissuade you from doing anything else for a long time.
Mary Robison
Likely Lake
His doorbell rang and Buddy peered through the viewer at a woman in the courtyard. She had green eyes and straight black hair, cut sharply like a fifties Keely Smith. He knew her. She did bookkeeping or something for the law partners next door, especially at tax times. He also remembered her from his wife’s yard sale, although that was a couple years ago and the wife was now his ex. She’d bought a jewelry case and a halogen lamp. He could picture her standing on the walk there—her nice legs and the spectator pumps she wore. She’d driven a white VW Bug in those days. But it must
have died because later he had noticed her arriving for work in cabs.
He had lent her twenty bucks, in fact. Connie was her name. Last June, maybe, when his garden was at its peak. He’d been out there positioning the sprinkler, first thing in the morning, when a cab swerved up and she was in back. She had rolled down her window and started explaining to him. She was coming in to work early but had ridden the whole way without realizing she’d brought an empty handbag. She showed it to him—a beige clutch. She even undid the clasp and held the bag out the window.
Now she waved a twenty as Buddy opened the door.
“That isn’t necessary, Connie,” he said.
She thanked him with a nod for remembering her name. She said, “Don’t give me any argument.” She came close and tucked the bill into his shirt pocket. “You see here?” she said. “This is already done.”
“Well, I thank you,” Buddy said. He stroked the pocket, smoothing the folded money flat. It was a blue cotton shirt he’d put on an hour earlier when he got home from having his hair cut.
She was still close and wearing wonderful perfume, but he didn’t think he should remark on that. He kept his eyes level and waited as if she were a customer and he a clerk. He said, “So, are you still in the neighborhood? I rarely see you.”
“They haven’t needed me.” She pretended a pout. “Nobody’s needed me.” She stepped back. It was the first week of September, still mild. She wore a fitted navy dress with a white collar and had a red cardigan sweater over her arms. Her large shapely legs were in sheer stockings.
“We have one last problem,” she said. She held up a finger.
He looked at her, his eyebrows lifted.
