What He's Poised to Do: Stories (P.S.)

by Ben Greenman

  Deborah had heard some fish stories in her day, and this ranked near the top.

  “I’ll bring you the magazine with the article,” Boatman said. He pushed his cup of coffee forward as punctuation.

  “You do that,” she said, coming to her feet.

  While she waited for the magazine, she poured herself into the books about painting she had brought from home. She spent time going slowly through museums. She talked on the phone to her mother more than she had in months. There were no men—there was no man—and that left her time. “We can have lunch every week,” she told Boatman. “I’ll even pay if you bring that magazine you lied about.”

  He presented it to her rolled up and rubber-banded. “Don’t read it here at the table,” he said. “It’s rude. Wait until you get home.” They ate. She went home. The magazine, thick and printed in an oversize format, was called Topic: A Month of Things to Think About. She was mortified that she had never heard of it and at the same time thrilled, because she was now permitted the pleasure of discovery, which was considerable. The magazine was a fantastic mix of high-toned reporting, lurid celebrity news, science, culture, home design, and travel. The cover story was about Corrado Feroci, an Italian sculptor who traveled to Thailand in the early twentieth century and created works at the behest of King Rama VI. Then came a piece about the metabolic studies of stressed cells, and then one about an actor who had left his wife for a costar. The print in some of the longer articles was tiny, but Deborah read every word, and when she looked up at the clock, more than an hour had passed. She went right back in for another hour, and called Boatman when she surfaced for dinner. “This is the best magazine in human history,” she said. “I put it down, then picked it back up, and guess what story I landed on?”

  “Metabolic studies of stressed cells?”

  “No. A piece about Marcus Hebert.”

  “Who?”

  “The French critic of accidental literature. Do you know him?”

  “No,” Boatman said. “The only French critic of accidental literature I know is no one.” He waited a beat. “Jean-Marie No One.”

  “Hebert is a genius. He became famous writing these short essays about texts he would find in the street. Initially, he thought they were the literary equivalents of ready-mades, but then he designed this inverted critical structure that privileged a letter you might write to a girlfriend over, say, Tolstoy.”

  “Well, of course,” Boatman said. “Stupid Tolstoy.”

  “It got to the point where Hebert felt that the only way he could make good on his theory was to stop publishing, and instead write his essays in the form of letters to other critics and authors, who occasionally published them as correspondence. He went on to write about the way that writing has changed: the death of handwriting and the birth of typing, the death of words as possessions and the birth of words as currency. Anyway, he has a new book.”

  “A book? Hypocrite.”

  “That’s addressed in this piece,” she said. “Anyway, for years he’s been at American universities, but he’s spending this whole month in Paris. And because he’s perverse to the end, he’s doing all kinds of things to alienate himself: staying in a different hotel every week, staging a series of readings at rock clubs, speaking only in English while he’s here. I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I can’t believe this magazine.”

  “I told you.”

  “Though come to think of it, I can’t find the article you mentioned, the one about the men studying images of women.”

  “What? Wait.” She heard shuffling on the line. “Damn it. I brought you the wrong issue. You have November and that article is in December. I’ll bring it the next time I see you.”

  “Or the time after that,” she said. “No hurry.” She had time. Time had been returned to her. And now she had something to fill it. When she hung up the phone with Boatman, she went immediately to the suitcase she had brought from Seattle, which was now serving as a kind of bookcase. She pushed through until she found the slim green volume of Hebert’s work. She knew it by heart, almost, from the first sentence of the first essay (“It is lost to history who made one of the truer observations regarding our perceptual abilities”) through the final sortie of those early years, “The Notepad and the Dictionary: Writing Down as a Form of Looking Up.” She reread his work on the couch. She took the book to bed. She read in the bath. Hebert was with her everywhere, more than a lover was.

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF HEBERT’S FIRST READING, weather threatened and then made good on its threat in the evening. By eight the streets were drenched, but there was no way she would be dissuaded. She had thought about asking Boatman to go with her—he was responsible, in a sense—but that ran counter to her ultimate goal.

  Hebert looked as he looked on the promotional poster, which was a surprise. Usually such figures submitted outdated pictures of themselves out of vanity, but this one seemed accurate to within a few years. His hairline had receded early, and his skin was not so fine as a young man’s. He held an unlit cigarette and waggled it around in a way that was comically French. He read a pair of short pieces, performed one longer one, and then read a new essay. “I have come back to my home country after a span of nearly a decade and found its character patently obvious from the first steps off the airplane,” he said. “There is a poverty of minor detail and a surfeit of broad strokes, which makes it perfect for philosophy but in some way unsuited to artwork.” Behind Deborah, a woman murmured and said, in nearly inaudible gospel, “C’est vrai, dites-leur, c‘est vrai.”

  Afterward there was a reception. Hebert stood in the corner of the lobby where the walls were covered with a growing collection of posters for all the artists who had played at the club. He was directly beneath the poster for a band named Lowest Lane, whose lead singer was a woman who had filed her teeth to fangs. His cigarette was lit now. He seemed to need it. Deborah approached him.

  “Will you sign this?”

  “This is an old edition,” he said. His tone was gentler than she had expected. “You don’t see them very frequently.”

  “Well, I remember buying it in the bookstore in Seattle, during college.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Seattle. A place I’ll never be.”

  “You were there in spirit,” she said, “through your book.” She was laying it on thick, but that’s what you were supposed to do. “You are in the city now?”

  “I am.”

  She circled around. She showed leg when leg needed to be shown. She asked him where he was staying, and nodded approvingly. “Would you like to see it?” he said, and she did not answer right away, as if she was surprised, which allowed Hebert to feign a moment of embarrassment even as he was emboldened. Outside in the still-rainy night, the sky was many shades of gray. Hebert called a taxicab, one shade of yellow. At intervals he began to speak, and each time she cocked her head to show that she was listening. She took his hand in his hotel as they rode up in the elevator. The way to do it, she kept thinking, is just to do it. It reminded her of a sentence of his—“Opportunities will not represent themselves unless they are re-created and re-produced, and by that time they are less opportunities than products that carry the sense of opportunity”—and that made her laugh. She stifled her laugh by putting his hand in her mouth.

  Hebert, though one of the sharpest and most original of modern thinkers, was uncomfortable in bed. His movements were sudden and seemed to have little to do with his pleasure. Deborah had always taken pride in her body, particularly in bed. It was one of the rare places where she could dominate and seem submissive. Here, though, she felt she was risking injury to Hebert. After working the bed from head to foot, they made their way to the couch. She sat there naked. He occupied the end closer to the window. “Do you believe that humans have bird songs?” he said. “By that I mean, do you think each of us has a native melody that, unsung or sung, represents us like a fingerprint?”

  “Stop avoiding me,” she said. Many thoughts drifted across
his face, slowly at first and then quickened by the winds of his panic. He was triumphant, he was contrite, he was friendly, he was brusque. Mostly, he was limp, skinny, and pale, and she was delighted. Having gone at him, she could now set him aside. The power had shifted entirely. She had been wary of returning to men, but this was precisely why her decision was immoderate. She took a cigarette and stood by the window as he got dressed.

  “Next week, I will be in a different hotel,” he said. “And another after that.”

  “Well, then, I will see you in one of those,” she said.

  When she called Boatman the next day, she explained herself forcefully. “Got him,” she said. “Two strikes, one after the other. The second time around he took it to me a little bit more. It was like he saw something on the surface and had the courage to go in after it.”

  “Right-o,” Boatman said. He was as unfazed by her as ever. “Who’s on tap for tonight? The prime minister?”

  That night she read but retained little, and when she finally gave up, she did not sleep. She expected to have kept something from her time with Hebert: memories, pictures. But her recollection of the evening was pitch-black. She reread his book to try to jog her memory. The next night she painted better, but still no memories. She was drawing a deep blank. On Friday night, she went to a café down the street and allowed herself to be chatted up by a young French lawyer who loved to talk about automobiles and drugs and gourmet foods, after which she followed him to his apartment and engaged in a drunken and spirited session on a bed he had not bothered making from the night before. The morning after that, her memory of him was sharp, down to individual smells and textures. There was a patch of hair on his lower back. But she could recollect nothing of Hebert.

  The following week, Hebert held another event at another rock club. She attended. He read. The audience was somewhat more hostile this time; a young man stood up without being acknowledged and challenged Hebert on his decision to speak only English. “Don’t get so exercised about it, man,” Hebert said, and enough of the crowd laughed that he was able to move on. Afterward there was a reception in the lobby, as before. Deborah stood in the corner with her legs crossed and watched Hebert work the room. It should have been a source of excitement to see him swerve from guest to guest. He noticed her and drew near. “Hello,” he said. He was looking at her like she was already hooked, and she decided to play along. She heard a murmur ripple through the crowd standing near the door. In the cab he said nothing. In the elevator he said nothing. They sat on the edge of his bed and watched television. At last she grew impatient, reached into his pants without an invitation, and began to work on him. The result was not what she had expected. His entire body was consumed by a spasm of pleasure. He leapt up and plunged back down. “Oh! Oh!” he yelled. His face was as red as his eyes were bright. During the next hour he made love to her three times, each more intensely than the last. He took her out to sea. Stretched out beneath him, she wondered if she would forget this, too.

  SHE DID, WITHIN A DAY. She shut her eyes tightly and tried to recover it, any part of it, but she could not. She did not even tell Boatman that she had gone back to Hebert. “I have a magazine for you,” Boatman said. “How about lunch tomorrow?”

  “I feel a little sick,” she said.

  She canceled a second lunch date and then the cures began to come in on two legs: Wilbon, who owned a watch shop; Denis, a musician; Leigh, a British actor who had worked briefly in adult films; Charles, an optometrist. She even considered a dalliance with Boatman, raised the issue with him at lunch. He looked at her, then burst out laughing, then took her hand in his. “I’m going to have to say no,” he said. “I’d rather keep living through you, if that’s okay.” This she remembered down to the last precise thing—the streak of blue ink on Boatman’s right hand, which had the appearance of a vein—but she could not retrieve a single detail about Hebert. She went back to read his essays, found them brilliant as always, but had no memory of the man. What did he smell like? How did he conduct himself while at her breast? “What is happening to me?” she asked Boatman. He laughed but said he didn’t believe her. She flipped through the blips in her mind: the tall one, the skinny one, the goatee, the glasses. She could see them perfectly, but when she tried to come around to the other side of them, she could not. They were pictures in a deck of cards. She shuffled them, but it was no consolation. She called Boatman on the phone and was humiliated by the safety he felt.

  She flew back to Miami on Labor Day weekend, leaving Hebert’s book in the small apartment off the rue Beauregard. Still humiliated, she met a man named James at a party in a friend’s backyard. He was large and dark and told her, soon after they met, that he thought of her as his girlfriend. “Oh?” she said. She was secretly pleased that someone was making this decision. On their fourth date he took her away for the weekend to a house he had bought with his ex-wife. “I always thought it needed a birdhouse,” he said. He fashioned the birdhouse carefully, and it was a testament to his skills as a carpenter. He made a frame. He added a round front door and a window as decoration. He shingled the roof with tiny shingles and hammered in a perch just beneath the door. She watched him from the porch.

  James stood back and looked at what he had made. Deborah called to him. Her voice turned him. Just then an untimely gust of wind arrived. It knocked down the umbrella post, which bumped against the table, which tilted downward. The birdhouse slid into the creek. “Well, hell,” he said. “There it goes.” And there it went. It floated down the creek until the creek fed the river and continued on down the river, turning as if with purpose whenever the river turned. People on the opposite bank saw the floating birdhouse and laughed at it, amazed. James came back inside the house, his face darkened by his failure. Deborah was sitting in a love seat rereading the magazine that Boatman had given her. The piece about Hebert quoted one of his famous statements, that music was a superior substitute for time itself: “What is not remembered in a song is kept nonetheless,” he wrote, “because the next notes collect those that came before them.” She looked at the picture that accompanied the article. That was exactly how he had looked when he had taken her to bed, or was it? James kicked the wall next to her chair. “I want that birdhouse to roast in hell,” he said. She knew she would remember everything she was hearing. As she told Boatman on the phone that night, it wasn’t so much what James said as the way he was saying it. “Hey,” Boatman said. “That’s exactly why I’m going to remember what you’re saying now.”

  TO KILL THE PINK

  I’M GOING TO MALAWI. I’M WRITING THAT DOWN ON A SINGLE sheet of paper, folding it into thirds, putting it into an envelope, and leaving it on the kitchen table leaning up against the sugar bowl. When I go, I don’t want you to have any outstanding questions about where I’ve gone. Though most of your questions are outstanding. Pause. Get it? Remember when I used to do that, make a joke and then wait a minute before announcing it back to you like you were blind or deaf or dumb? I’ve been doing that to you ever since we were kids, ever since I nicknamed you Tails on account of your pigtails and it stuck. Fifteen years later you are a grown woman with a fine shape, top-shelf and bottom-drawer both, and it’s that bottom drawer that lets the nickname live, even though I had to take off the s. I call you Tail sometimes because it makes you laugh and sometimes also makes you hot, but usually not in public, where you’re Angie.

  Last year I made a mistake in this regard, and I apologize. We were out for a walk, talking, and Lee Johnson who joined the seminary overheard our conversation and told me he thought the name was disrespectful to one of our beautiful sisters. I explained to him that it wasn’t at all, that I was honoring one of the most divine aspects of you or any other sister, the woman’s form, and that he could see how it was intended if he watched me when I bent down in the morning to kiss you good-bye before I went off to the radio station for my shift. You are a beautiful sleeper. You are beautiful awake, too, except when you try to be funny, which is wh
y you shouldn’t try to be. You look good, like I said. You’re morally certain. You notice things about people and comment upon them in a manner that almost always leads to improvement. You’re full of more love than hate. Why bother with funny? Leave that to me. You can come visit me in Malawi.

  Let’s go back twelve days. You go first, and when you get there, take everything off and slip into bed. When I arrive, I’m bound to be disoriented and dispirited from the trip—no one likes going backward—and I want to get a little sugar before I head out into the cruel summer. You can leave the black bra on if you want. It does its job in the way of shaping and holding but is camouflaged against what you always like to call your African complexion. The first time you told me that, you were fourteen, maybe, and I was a year older, like always, and I was running with your brother Larry in that gang he had for a little while before he decided to become an accountant. Tough guy. The gang was called the Tigers, and Larry said we had to snatch a purse for initiation. I didn’t want to, so I went around to all the girls I knew and asked them if they had a spare purse I could borrow. The first two girls I asked looked at me crooked, like maybe I was going to wear it for my own pleasure, but you just said “sure” and ran upstairs and got me one. It was black and you said you preferred bright colors to go with your African complexion. “Complexion?” I said. “But Africa’s so simple. See lion, flee lion.” I paused. “Get it?” I said. “No cars, no bars, no drugs, no hustlers. Just a lion wanting you to be his lunch.”