by Lorin Stein
“Man!” Connie said.
“She did indeed,” said Buddy.
He got up. The cats were yowling and hopping at the glass door. “I have to stop for a second and give them dinner. I’ll be right back.”
“Go,” Connie said, “go,” and signaled with a flick of her hand that she understood.
While he was filling the dish with Science Diet, he had caught her figure in the shadows, descending the porch stairs.
Buddy rocked on his shoes. A light switched on at the lawyers’ place next door.
He watched as the cats chowed. He refreshed their water.
He stood in the center of the kitchen and waited, without going to a window, for the effect of a taxicab’s headlights out on the lane.
*
It was quiet where Elise was. She almost had to whisper. “This is eerie. All the patients’ colored faces in the TV light? It’s despicable that I’m always canceling on you. It’s the worst thing I do. It’s what destroyed every relationship I’ve had.”
“Oh God, let that be true,” Buddy said.
He was flicking a stub of paper around on the countertop, to no end. “Are you ever nervous around me?” he asked Elise.
“What?”
“Nervous about me, I mean. Because of the way I bothered that woman.”
“Don’t insult me,” Elise said.
“Excuse me?”
“I’m a smart person. One of the smart ones. They insisted on textbooks where I went to school.”
“Oh,” he said.
There was a pause between them. Buddy paced up and back a step, holding the phone. The room was overly warm and the cats had taken to the cool of the floor tiles.
“I should go,” Elise said. “I really have to pee. Plus they’re right now carrying Vincent in on a stretcher. Directed towards the Time Out Room is my guess. Will you be okay? Do you feel okay?”
“Maybe I’ll just keep that to my own fucking self,” he said and grinned. “It’s a joke you don’t know. I’m sorry. I’ll explain it to you some other time.”
“They don’t need me that bad. I’m free to talk,” Elise said.
“No, I feel fine. The joke isn’t even about me.” His index finger traced around and around one of the blue tiles set in the countertop.
“Listen to me a second,” she said. “Are you there? This is the last thing I want to say before I have to hang up. Grief is very mysterious, Buddy. It’s very personal.
“Bye for now,” she said, and Buddy stayed a moment after he’d closed the phone, his hand on the receiver, his arm outstretched.
*
He stood on the side porch. The night was warm and a full white moon dawdled over Likely Lake.
Across the lane at the Tishman’s a car was adjusting behind a line of cars—latecomers for the bridge party Carl and Suzanne hosted every other week. One of them or somebody appeared in the entryway, there to welcome in the tardy guest.
Buddy was thinking about other nights, when he and Elise had sat out here until late, telling each other stories and drinking rum. On his birthday, she had worn a sequined red dress. There were nights with his wife, their last sad year.
How silly, he thought, that Connie’s confession had bothered him. He should have absorbed it. He should have taken her hand and held her hand, as a friend, or even clenched it, and said what a very long life it can seem.
Issue 162, 2002
Ben Marcus
on
Donald Barthelme’s Several Garlic Tales
Donald Barthelme was a magician of language, and it would be most respectful, perhaps even ethical, not to look too closely into the workings of his magic. But it’s to the brilliant Barthelme’s credit that analysis of his methods does nothing to erode the joy of his stories. Like all good magic, Barthelme’s just cannot be explained away. And thank God for that. His first sentence here, like many of his sentences throughout his hundreds of delirious stories, could be yanked out of context and pressed into service as the perfect Barthelmean emblem: “Amelia and Paul moved dreaming through the color photographs of human lives.…” This gets at the funny feeling his characters have, a feeling of the uncanny, of queasy, unstable familiarity, of dreaming while waking. The falsity of the real, and the fascination and beauty of the unreal. But Barthelme didn’t just create characters who feel absurd—even though this was 1966—he fitted his stories with some kind of release mechanism that catapults this absurd feeling deep into the heart of the reader. His strangeness is visceral, chemical. It’s delicious to read him, but scary, too, because through the antics and whimsy of his characters Barthelme always had his eye out for how sorrow could be smuggled into his sentences. If he is among our funniest short story writers, he is also among the most gifted at making real sorrow on the page.
In “Several Garlic Tales,” Paul and Amelia travel the world. I think. Or maybe Ezra fumes at Paul. Or Elspeth inspects an army, and discovers that Paul, the climber, has joined up. “Anything for a stripe, is that it, Paul?” Which leaves us in Greece, to collect ourselves, not at all unhappily confused. If anything, Barthelme proves that, in reading a story, it’s not the facts—what we know—that matters, but what we feel, and sometimes the business of making feeling from language necessitates a disloyalty to quotidian sense and stability. Barthelme cares about his characters, sure, but he also would seem to understand that his characters don’t really exist. They are a means to get at something emotional. He needs them, but he is also prepared to spin them in circles if the rush of resulting color will look beautiful. He writes, “I think what ought to obtain is a measure of audacity, an audacity component, such as turning your amplifier up a little higher than anyone else’s … I insist only that it be relevant, in a strange way, to the scene that has chosen to spread itself out before us, the theatre of our lives.”
Donald Barthelme
Several Garlic Tales
I
Amelia and Paul moved dreaming through the color photographs of human lives in articulo mortis, in Europe, in the album. “First,” Paul said, regarding the first photograph closely, “we visit Denmark’s unique Tivoli Gardens with their bursting green, red and blue and silver fireworks at a quarter to twelve. Bawdy pantomime it says here.” They looked in every direction but all they could see was a few hundred chaps from the U.S. Department of Commerce. “Those chaps from Commerce turn up everywhere,” Amelia noted. “That must be a really fascinating Department to have so many decent-looking young men, chaps I mean, in it, at the point of death.” Paul looked at Amelia as if he would like to strangle her. What a thing to say! Especially now, on Thermidor the thirteenth! (It’s too bad Amelia is Japanese. Not in itself, for I like Japanese people and their warm buttered legs, but this pachinko parlor is driving me…)
II
Ezra looked carefully around the French room. Yes, it was empty. If one excluded Paul. Excluding Paul was the reason Ezra was looking around the room. Ezra pretended not to see Paul. Yet Paul was palpably present. There he is, sitting on a cask, mending his pike. (Well, I can’t ignore him forever, Ezra concluded.) That damned Paul is always busy. Never an idle moment to imbue with the raincoat colors of fancy under the ax. Would that I could say of you, Paul that you left things alone once in a while. But in fact you are always tampering. Those strong brown fingers forever shuttling back and forth like some insane loom weaving beautiful Czasy tapestries in brilliant hues.
Paul is not serious. It is what everybody says of him. How to give him a degree of seriousness that would lift his works to importance?
“Did you bring the twine?”
“Yes, here’s your damned twine!”
III
I took her to the picture show. The pictures “moved.” We saw “pictures.” A certain number of apologies were offered. I have divided the “moving” pictures into forty-eight squares, eight across, six down. Each square contains a part of either Greta Garbo, C. Aubrey Smith, John Gilbert, or pseudo-medieval décor. The “picture” is
of course Queen Christina. The length of the film is, I don’t know, an hour or so. If each “frame” is divided into forty-eight squares and each square described meticulously, in the Turkish manner, there is a danger of tedium. Especially if we also “fold in” (Rombauer) the emotions and responses excited in the brains and breasts of those hired to “watch” the “picture.”
“All this literary criticism,” Elspeth said to Paul. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I like it. I don’t know if it pleases me.” They regarded the Ankara critic on the shelf.
IV
Paul stood before a fence in Luxembourg. The fence was covered with birds. Their problem, in many ways a paradigm of their own, was to “fly.” “The engaging and wholly charming way I stand in front of this fence here,” Paul said to himself, “will soon persuade someone to discover me.” Lanky, generous-hearted Paul! “If I had been born well prior to 1920 I could have ridden with Pershing against Pancho Villa. Alternately, I could have ridden with Villa against the landowners and corrupt government officials of the time. In either case, I would have had a horse. How little opportunity there is for young men to have personally-owned horses in the bottom half of the twentieth century! A wonder that we U.S. youth can still fork a saddle at all … Of course there are those ‘horses’ under the hoods of Buicks and Pontiacs, the kind so many of my countrymen favor. But those ‘horses’ are not for me. They take the tan out of my cheeks and the lank out of my arms and legs. Tom Lea or Pete Hurd will never paint me standing by this fence if I am sitting inside an Eldorado, Starfire, Riviera or Mustang, no matter how attractively the metal has been bent.”
Howard was extremely irritated. What about the “match” scheduled for tonight? Would it be called off, as so many other scheduled activities had been?
V
Ezra’s father put down his instrument case.
“I love acting in this Czechoslovakian People’s Theatre,” he said. “But the director is a fool. Trying to cover up our American accents with these trombones.”
VI
The trawler made a smooth landing in the fjord country of Norway. “Sightseeing” would be a cheap word for what they were experiencing.
Yum Yum wrinkled behind her fan. Paul resolved to “have it out” with her. “Have a cigar,” he said. “All the Scandinavian girls smoke them.”
Amelia, or “Yum Yum,” stamped her tiny imperious foot in its “geta,” or wooden sandal, on the square “paving stone,” or big flat piece of rock. “All the Scandinavian girls smoke them! All the Scandinavian girls smoke them! All the Scandinavian girls smoke them! All the Scandinavian girls smoke them! All the Scandinavian girls smoke them! Paul you are trying to make me something I’m not. Just like when you wanted me to wear those white rubber pajamas! I don’t care if they were in all the newspapers! And just like when you wanted me to be like that girl in the film! I don’t care if it did win the Golden Fig at Cannes! And just like when you wanted me to be like the beautiful horse in that book! I don’t care if you did own the first North American serial rights! I can’t stand it any longer! Do you hear me!”
(Quell. To quell. Quelling the outburst.) “There is nothing to get excited about,” Paul said.
VII
The bishop in his red mantelpiece strode forward. “Yes, we are in a terrible hurricane here,” he acknowledged to the wrecked cries of the survivors. “If we can just cross that spit of land there,” (gesture with fingers, glitter of episcopal rings) “and get to that harlot over there,” (sweep of arm in white lacy alb) “pardon, I meant hamlet, we can perhaps find shelter against this particular vicissitude sent by God to break our backs for our sins.” The “flock” moaned aloud. They had been eight days without … The sudden pall on the fourth day had been the worst. There was a silence. Silence. Everything silent. Not a sound for six hours. Nothing. “This is the worst,” they murmured to one another in sign language not wanting to … break the … A few young men of good family crawled away into the night to find help (tingle of mace against bone). The Marchesa de G. had fainted again. Blockflutes were heard.
“So this is Spain!”
VIII
Elspeth inspected the new German army. Well, I’ll say one thing, the Germans certainly know how to “put on” an army! From the mortar pit where she was standing she could see all the way back to O.K.H. headquarters. So many soldiers “ranked up” in lines! And such good-looking lines! No wonder General de Gaulle was thoughtful. “Are you going to behave, this time?” She asked a common soldier. “Da,” he said.
But who is that? in the rearmost rank? Isn’t that Paul?
“Paul what are you doing in that foreign army? Don’t you know that’s a good way to get your passport blown out?”
They drank “rosinwasser.” A sadness drifted over them. Then came “lunch.”
Anything for a stripe, is that it, Paul?
IX
Greece. “When we turn our amplifiers on,” said Eliot, strumming his suit, “already cant is forming over some people’s minds, like the brown crust on bread, or the silence that ‘crusts over’ inappropriate remarks. I think there ought to be, and remember I’m talking normatively here, I think what ought to obtain is a measure of audacity, an audacity component, such as turning your amplifier up a little higher than anybody else’s, or using a fork to pick and strum, rather than a plectrum or the carefully calloused fingertips, or doing something with your elbow, I don’t care what, I insist only that it be relevant, in a strange way, to the scene that has chosen to spread itself out before us, the theatre of our lives. And if you other gentlemen will come with me down to the quai, carrying your amplifiers in boxes, and not forgetting the trailing cords, which have to be ‘plugged in’ so that we can ‘turn on’…”
X
Paul handed over the green and gold armband. What a defeat for one who had hoped to make the Italian Postal Service his entire life and breath! “I hope you don’t mind that I have left my shirt in that damned Otis elevator.” “No. I don’t mind. I like chests. Especially with strong American brains behind them.” Elspeth wondered what attitude she should adopt. If only she were not pledged to Howard. Howard with his preoccupation with “boxing.” Even now, she suspected, Howard was out somewhere, on the streets, in the midst of this … noise, with his friend Pete. Pete, who always remembered something. Those interminable remembered fragments!
Amelia pulled her brilliant silver, green and black kimono more tightly around her slight but incredibly beautiful Japanese “figure.” Paul was welding flanges to everything in sight. He looked very athletic and workmanlike in his great mask. His sparks contributed to the … In the sky black clouds appeared, like fine-line seventeenth-century steel engravings showing Raleigh being stripped of his honors. “Half-life,” the radium salesman said, “in the case of radium for instance is estimated at—” Now everything has been clarified. A half-life! That is what I wanted all the time! That is what I have been searching ceaselessly, for.
Will we ever fly without the aid of mechanical contrivances? Without seat-belts? Without roar?
Issue 37, 1966
David Means
on
Raymond Carver’s Why Don’t You Dance
A great story is like an itch that has to be scratched eternally. It opens up a singular feeling forever in the reader that arises out of what seems to be a paradigmatic stance. We’re left with more questions than answers, and more answers than questions; therefore, the paradoxical quality of a good story is that it seems to give us everything we need and yet not quite enough to fulfill a sense of having been shown a full life. All we’re given is a sliver of some wider existence, a collection of minutiae, a shift of viewpoint, a statement made weeks later. The poetics of the modern story are both anachronistic (tapping old modes of myth and folklore) and contemporary (the pop song, the thirty-second commercial spot). One must—as a writer and a reader—crystallize deep meaning from a few, slight gestures: a man puts all of his household furnishings on his front lawn. A
young man and a young woman arrive to find a yard full of abandoned furnishings. The older man arrives back at the house with a sack of food and drink and begins a brief verbal give-and-take in which the irredeemably sad distance between lonely souls is expressed. The older man and the younger woman dance. Weeks later, the young woman tells the story of the man and his furniture on the lawn. Her voice is distinctly bright, lively, and sharp with judgment. She has passed on to the green pastures and, presumably, what she feels is an enlightened grip on reality. Her comments pass retroactively through the previous slice of narrative, casting light on the scene in the yard while, again paradoxically, throwing everything forward into the infinite silence and open just ahead, at the end of the story. “There was more to it, but she couldn’t get it all talked out. After a time, she quit trying.” (Note: She quits trying, but we, as readers, can never quit.)
Raymond Carver brought an art form back around into relation with itself. He moved the short story forward but seemed to be rehashing and digging up his style from some buried aboriginal source. James Joyce did the same thing in Dubliners. He reengineered the short story, solidifying it with a new type of lyric firmness. It might seem, because Carver’s style is so pristine, so simple-sounding, that the lesson of his work is that one should keep the writing clear and simple. It might seem that the lesson of his work is that one must revert to the Hemingway technique of cinematic reportage, zeroing in on the peak of the meaningful action and image while leaving everything else submerged. Maybe, maybe not. Carver’s style teaches us that the bare bones of a story—no matter how ornate or twisty a style might get—are always simple, rudimentary, and arriving from a deeply humane source. Heart and style and story must be united, somehow. In other words, you have to care, and care a lot. Fancy prose—wildly interesting mannerisms, snarky jokes, weird cartoonish futures—are all fine and dandy, as long as the bare bones of the story come from a pure, honest, humane concern.
