Interior Design

by Philip Graham

  Interior Design

  STORIES

  Philip Graham

  BY PHILIP GRAHAM

  Braided Worlds (co-authored with Alma Gottlieb)

  The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon

  Interior Design: Stories

  How to Read an Unwritten Language (novel)

  Parallel Worlds: An Anthropologist and a Writer Encounter Africa (co-authored with Alma Gottlieb)

  The Art of the Knock: Stories

  The Vanishings (prose poems)

  Praise for Interior Design: Stories

  “‘We actually turn ourselves inside out and find comfort in what we’ve imagined,’ one of the characters in the book’s title story says, and it’s that odd mixture of illusion and disillusion that makes Graham’s stories so compelling, that makes reading this collection a sad and utterly convincing encounter with one who can, like the magician pulling an endless string of knotted scarves from beneath his cuff, perform the fiction writer’s greatest feat–making us see through his eyes, compelling us to believe, without a doubt, in the world he has created.”

  –John Gregory Brown, Chicago Tribune

  “Philip Graham’s characters exist in worlds parallel to our own. It is as if the most ordinary and intensely familiar objects, actions and relationships are evoked, but with their meanings and significance rearranged. These stories represent a tour de force of imagination.”

  –Janet Burroway

  “Eight disturbing, elegant tales that plumb the obsessive powers of the imagination … Unique, somber terrain, precisely charted by a writer in absolute control of his material.”

  –Kirkus Reviews

  “Novelist and short story writer Graham fills his newest story collection with a sense of the power of imagination. One by one, his characters tap their own inventive powers to alter the troubling world around them … Quietly engrossing, Graham’s stories illustrate the ways our souls, craving meaning, instinctively make patterns out of experience–and that this process, whether heroic or neurotic, is not all that different from the work of an artist.”

  –Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

  “Philip Graham’s new collection, Interior Design, is lyrical and complex and offers the reader the depth that a talented and original writer acquires with maturity. It is dazzling and insightful, a collection well worth reading again and again.”

  –Oscar Hijuelos

  “Graham’s prose is marked by truly masterly touches: exacting observations are rendered both forcefully in their import as well as refined and respectful in their tone. Intense, absorbing, graceful, and precise, these tales of our fin-de-siècle America announce that the most intense and powerful events are the ones we create ourselves. In an elegant and original manner Graham delimits the private blueprints of the unconscious–the delicate, unstable, and never certain boundary between the real and the imagined–to reveal that ’the true beauty … was that past, present and future bled into each other.’”

  –Jeanne Claire van Ryzin, Review of Contemporary Fiction

  “The collection is littered with examples of people shaping their experiences through imagination, basically turning themselves inside out. In “Angel,” a young man becomes emotionally paralyzed after his parents die and he obsessively imagines a guardian angel devouring his every thought. A pregnant woman spends hours mentally fusing her husband’s features with her own, creating a meticulous cognitive portrait of her unborn son in “Geology.” The narrator of “Another Planet” spends his childhood drawing imaginary continents on tennis balls, creating worlds where his family is always contented. The title story’s protagonist is an interior designer who works under the belief that objects are all bits of mind-made material and eventually tried to reshape her own life by decorating with materials culled from dreams and fantasies … Despite the thematic complexities, the lyrical story lines are disarmingly simple: tales of people dealing with death, crumbling families, and increasingly distant spouses. Many of the stories are also rather somber and dark, underlining Graham’s belief in the self-inflicted dangers threatening every individual.”

  -Annabelle Villaneuva, New City Chicago

  “The beautifully written story, “Angel,” comes from Graham’s most recent collection, Interior Design. This mainstream collection contains a number of stories that cross the line into contemporary fantasy … This is a beautifully textured book, and well worth seeking out for both its realist and fantasy tales.”

  –Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Tenth Annual Collection

  “The writer Philip Graham was born in Brooklyn, and yet the places that have exerted the strongest influence on his imaginative life, and hence his fiction, are West Africa and the Midwestern United States … Graham has lived in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, for the past two decades, but he’s also spent quite a lot of time in the Ivory Coast, supporting the research of his wife, anthropologist Alma Gottlieb. Africa informs every story he writes, Graham says, though virtually all his stories are set elsewhere … One normally wouldn’t pair the Midwest and Africa, but that’s why Graham sounds unlike any other writer you’ll encounter, why his stories are familiar and simultaneously extraordinary.”

  –Robin Hemley, Turning Life into Fiction

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1996 by Philip Graham All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  Originally published in hardcover by Scribner, 1996.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Graham, Philip, date.

  Interior design: stories / Philip Graham, p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3557.R217I58 1996 96-19894

  8i3*.54—dc20 CIP

  ISBN 0-684-80372-0

  The following stories have appeared, some in slightly different form, in these magazines and/or anthologies:

  “Beauty Marks” in Apalachee Quarterly, “Geology” in Arrival; “The Pose” in The Chariton Review’,

  “Another Planet” in Fiction; “The Reverse” in The Florida Review; “Interior Design” in Mid-American Review; “Angel” in The Missouri Review and; “Lucky” in The North American Review.

  “Angel” was the winner of the 1992 William Peden Prize for Fiction, and has been reprinted in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Tenth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling.

  “Interior Design” has been reprinted in Turning Life into Fiction, 2nd Edition, edited by Robin Hemley.

  The brief passage quoted in “Lucky” is from Grays Anatomy.

  Cover image copyright by David Maisel

  History’s Shadow GM18, 2010

  www.davidmaisel.com

  An introduction to the 2013 ebook edition of Interior Design

  by Roy Kesey

  “The actual tragedies of life,” says Jean Cocteau, “bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them.”

  That quote, from the Rosamond Lehmann translation of Cocteau’s novel Les Enfants Terribles, is so perfectly apposite to my intentions here that I almost wonder if I made it up. Philip Graham’s short story collection Interior Design, first published by Scribner and Sons in 1996, has long deserved a new edition. There are many reasons why this is so, but here are three of the biggest: its bewildering simplicity, its grand design, and the element of the bizarre that inheres in it.

  Graham has wor
n multiple hats the past few decades: travel writer and satirist, memoirist and book reviewer; university professor and magazine editor. I would argue, however, that it is his output in fiction broadly defined—his two short story collections, his novel, his prose poetry—that are most fundamental to us as readers.

  Interior Design is in fact the most recent fiction of Graham’s long career. First came The Vanishings, a collection of prose poems published by Release Press in 1978. Next came his debut story collection, The Art of the Knock, put out by William Morrow in 1985; it included stories first seen in The New Yorker and The Washington Post Magazine, among other venues. Graham followed that up with his debut novel How to Read an Unwritten Language, put out by Scribner in 1995 and nominated for the 1997 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

  While Interior Design has features that will be familiar to readers of Graham’s earlier fiction, many of its stories grow on bones he first unearthed in the course of developing his nonfiction work. Together with his wife, the anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, Graham has written two memoirs addressing their years of research and life in West Africa: Parallel Worlds, published by Crown in 1993, and Braided Worlds, published by University of Chicago Press in 2012. These two books also bookend The Moon Come to Earth, a memoir of Graham’s year with his family in Lisbon, first documented in the series of dispatches he wrote for the literary website McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and subsequently expanded for print publication by University of Chicago Press in 2009.

  Several of the strongest stories in Interior Design apply Graham’s anthropological insights and techniques to the raw material of American life as it was lived near the end of the past millennium. An interesting set of insights into this process is provided by Robin Hemley’s Turning Life into Fiction (Graywolf Press, 2006). As Hemley notes, Graham’s years among the Beng minority in Côte d’Ivoire provided him with a means of defamiliarizing himself with the cultures of his Brooklyn birth and Midwestern adulthood. Just as importantly, given what Graham had learned abroad, strange new fictional amalgams were possible upon his return. In the story “Angel,” for example, the Beng understanding of the afterlife overlays the American workaday world so as to address eternal issues of grief. In the title story, meanwhile, one aspect of the Beng sense of communal space is made manifest to an American architect’s daughter, thus allowing Graham to explore domestic isolation more deeply than might otherwise be possible.

  Graham the traveler is of course also Graham the artist. The characters in his stories must by needs come to terms with the oddnesses of contemporary existence, and in so doing, they often draw upon the same set of techniques—for example, the search for patterns to which worthwhile meaning can be assigned—that an author uses to create stories in the first place. As the main character of “Angel” posits, “Maybe we’re compositions, evolving works of art for angels, and they’re attracted to the elegant patterns they make of our fates.” This notion makes all of the characters artists in a sense; it is creativity, then, that will see them through to grace.

  The collection begins with “Another Planet,” wherein a young boy spends his days creating make-believe continents, drawing them on the surfaces of tennis balls, seeking a space where familial happiness is possible, even as he looks past these tiny spheres at the sight of his father going to pieces. The theme of watching over continues into the second story, the aforementioned “Angel,” which won the 1992 William Peden Prize, and was included in the tenth annual edition of the anthology The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Here, a boy is obsessed with the notion of guardian angels, an obsession that only grows deeper and more strange following the death of his parents.

  The collection’s title story makes active use of the most straightforward reading of the book’s title, the notion of someone who will arrange our furniture in such a way as to better our lives. However there is nothing normal about the main character’s approach to her job: Josephine seeks to decorate her clients’ homes using the materials of their very dreamworlds. Meanwhile, in her personal life, she is dating a man who has no dreams. She attempts to build them for him, but soon realizes that building an exterior from one’s interior means that there is no escape from either.

  There are three stories that make active use of Graham’s scientific bent. The first is “Beauty Marks,” wherein a young husband and wife are both drawn and bound by the consequences of what they learn in the course of their anthropological research. “Geology,” meanwhile, features a woman obsessed with melding her own features with that of her husband so as to perfectly imagine the face of her unborn child. Lastly, in “The Pose,” an unemployed factory worker builds a fetish object, a talisman, a human body, out of spare wire; he then dresses it with his wife’s clothes, not knowing that his wife is complicit in the act, hoping that somehow it will bring them back together.

  “The Reverse,” perhaps my favorite story in the collection, deserves a paragraph of its own. In it, a small-time actress named Fern takes a gig starring in an increasingly bizarre series of television commercials for cleaning products. At home, the songs her husband writes become more and more jingle-like; the producer, Marjorie, becomes more and more seductive. It isn’t until the end that Fern realizes why she was cast. At that same moment, she sees that she’s been doing good work, but not at all the work she thought she was doing, which is freeing in its own way: “She presses the button again and again, and when the elevator finally arrives with a silky whoosh, its door slides open like a curtain and Fern steps in.”

  This brings us to the collection’s final story, “Lucky,” wherein the aging owner of a men’s store has rituals of his own, mainly involving the commonplace phrases he whispers to his customers, meant to ward off the fact that so many of them are passing away of old age. Strange as the character comes to seem to himself, he is the key that brings the whole collection into its own, centered as it is on the notion that there is always something worth holding on for, something born in the interstice between fate and the qualities that keep us human, in this case generosity: “(H)ere it comes and it’s better than money, it’s good luck, maybe even a new life, and I’ll say the number you’re waiting for, see?—I won’t keep it, I’ll give it to you, it’s yours, not mine.”

  In each of the stories in this collection, ritual is invoked: to bring sense to the past, or meaning to the present, or some sense of control for the future. Workaday objects and processes are recast in powerful talismanic light. The defamiliarized gaze of the foreigner and the power of the creative mind are brought to bear, and experience is reformed, reshaped, understood newly. The line between what is real and what is imagined is blurred intentionally with the goal of letting events slide from one side of the line to the other according to the needs of a given psyche. These are the services Philip Graham has rendered us over the past several decades, services of which we are ever more in need. How good it is at last to have this new edition of Interior Design in hand.

  CONTENTS

  Another Planet

  Angel

  Interior Design

  Beauty Marks

  The Pose

  The Reverse

  Geology

  Lucky

  To Grace Paley, Frederic Tuten, and Donald Barthelme: splendid teachers, gracious friends

  I would like to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts; the Corporation of Yaddo; the Illinois Arts Council; and the Department of English, School of Humanities and Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for generous support during the writing of this book. For their support, counsel and friendship during the writing of this book, I’d like to offer my thanks and appreciation to Robert Olen Butler, Maria Guarnaschelli, Oscar Hijuelos, Sandy Huss, Margot Livesey, Greg Michalson, Robert Dale Parker, and Geri Thoma. As always, my deepest thanks and love go to my wife, Alma Gottlieb, and our two children, Nathaniel and Hannah.

  You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table a
nd listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

  —FRANZ KAFKA

  But then that reality suddenly turned out to be no less complex and secret, indecipherable and dark than that world of dreams.

  —NATALIA GINZBURG

  The real is as imagined as the imaginary.

  —CLIFFORD GEERTZ

  Another Planet

  Because for the longest time I hated the thought of hitting any sort of ball, I always swung wildly at even the easiest pitches. So I often trudged home through the park after school, still filled with the groans and taunts of my gym class teammates. Once, trying to drown out the laughing contempt of those voices inside me, I kicked at the gravel in the path, and after all these years I can still remember how those tiny pebbles looped in the air. My little sister Molly, following me home again, watched briefly and then she stopped to examine a twig. I stood there and tramped down on the ground until I began to enjoy those curious crunching sounds. They reminded me of the clicking odometer on my dad’s latest project in the basement, his machine designed to determine just how many miles a shoe will last.

  I kicked again and walked on. Molly was scribbling invisible marks in her notebook with that twig and didn’t notice I was leaving her behind. So I stepped faster, and then I ran a weaving route through the park, imagining that I clicked away miles. I sped past old people and mothers with their babies as if they were trees planted in the gravel path, trees with no fruit, no blossoms, no birds’ nests, nothing to make me pause, and I ran until I had to kneel in the grass, my lungs heaving. I felt as if my body could not contain me, my arms and legs potential explosions, my fingers and toes flames, and as I crouched there, trying so hard to keep still, I gave in to the forbidden thought of sneaking downstairs to Dad’s workshop.