Collected Fictions

by Gordon Lish

  No, he says, instead the hippopotamus says, "Hey, it's such a crime for me just to stand?"

  No, wait a minute, she said he says, she says the big old hippopotamus says, "Who can think, a thing like this? Can anybody collect his thoughts, a thing like this?"

  The truth is this—I don't really remember what the punch line was. But I don't suppose I have the other part much more faithfully recorded, either. You see, I think I was pretty jumpy when I heard it, plus I know I was much too young to be anywhere near old enough for me to listen faithfully enough when big stuff were probably being said. The only point I have for all of these years been sure of is that my Aunt Adele hunkered down and told jokes when the cancer started going from her bladder to her bones, that and the fact that my Aunt Adele kept calling up to my house from Miami to New York to tell lots of different jokes to whoever it was who was home. Of course, it was always my mother who always was home—my mother, so far as I can remember, always was. Not that I didn't once pick up the downstairs phone once, and hear something for myself on the order of what you just heard, this plus the power of hearing two women laughing as a child listens in.

  THE WIRE

  MY WIFE SAYS, "Look at you. Just look at you. How can you look like that? Why don't you take a good look at yourself? Look at me, don't you have any idea of what you look like? What do you think people are going to think when they look at you? Tell me, how can you go around looking like that? Do you know what you look like? You couldn't conceivably know what you look like. Who would believe anyone could look like this? I cannot believe what you look like. It is hard for me to grasp it, a man who can go around looking like what you look like. What is the matter with you, don't you know what you look like? You probably don't have the first idea of what you look like. You act like you are completely oblivious to what you look like. Don't you realize people are looking at you? Have you no conception of the fact that there are people who are looking at you? Why are you so utterly unaware of the fact that you cannot go around looking like whatever you happen to feel like looking like? Take a look at yourself. Just go ahead and just take just one good look at yourself."

  This is what my wife says.

  As for myself, I used to think it didn't put her in the best of lights for her to be going around being heard looking like somebody saying things like that.

  YEARS AGO THERE HAD BEEN a fellow who kept trying to offer me some observations along the very same lines of the ones which my wife, in her time, did. But I didn't see any reason to argue with him, either. So far as his story goes, he's dead as a doornail now, so let's just get his name and address right out here right onto this sheet of paper here—Wortis, S. Bernard Wortis, his conduct of the business of psychiatry being carried out by him at one of the high even numbers on, you know, on East Fifty-seventh Street.

  Here's an example of it.

  "Just look at yourself. Don't you ever look at yourself? Why don't you come to your senses and sit yourself down and take a good look at yourself?"

  But I have always been the sort of person to take a different view of looking.

  You take today on the subway, for instance, this woman with this hulkiness of a suitcase . . .

  Here is what my mother used to say to me:

  "Do you see what you look like? I don't think you see what you look like. How can you let people see you looking like this? You want to through life seeing yourself looking like this?"

  Look, the man committed me and made sure I stayed right where he did it to me to, and this was for just shy of eight brazen months.

  I kept trying to see up inside of her pants past where the crease was.

  I'm leaving out everything. I'm leaving out even the tits and ass of it. I am just too weary of it for me to ever go over the whole history of it in the sense of the whole anything of anything again.

  All right, shy of nine months, not shy of eight months—but since when is time the point?

  He said to me, "It's high time you took the time to sit yourself down and take a good decent look at yourself."

  Here is what happened on the E train today—the woman the color of what do they say? There is a woman the color of coffee with cream in it, and she's got on short pants on her, and for the top she's got on what I think they call a halter top, and they're both, they are both, the top and the bottom, they have that look, the both of them, that you will sometimes see of their being both at the same time just tight enough and just loose enough, and she has got her hair mown all the way down to her skull to a woolly-looking fuzzy high-domed cuntlike frizzle of a thing—and there her legs are, there her legs are, they are uncovered and glowy right up to almost past her backside almost and crossed in the manner, leg over leg, of how only a woman who gets herself looked at like this ever crosses her legs leg over leg like this—and the eyes and the arms and the mouth and the throat! I mean the things of her, the woman, the things!

  She had a small child up on one shoulder.

  She was about twenty, and it was—I don't know—maybe it was a baby.

  There wasn't any ring on any of her fingers.

  The child, the baby, it was out like a light in any light, and I could tell the mother was almost also.

  Oh, well, yes—I could see the slenderest of gold ones.

  Like a wire.

  But it wasn't on any of her fingers.

  My sister used to say to me: "I don't think you ever stop to think of what you look like."

  The building I live in now, hey, it's so full of psychologists and psychiatrists and psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, it isn't even funny.

  This whole block is.

  They know who Wortis is here.

  Or who Wortis was.

  His fame went all of the way up from Fifty-seventh Street—or, if the rhyme's all the same to you, came up—because here is where I live up here now.

  The suitcase, just to look at it—you could just look at it and tell it weighed a ton.

  The first girl I ever tried to get to do it, she did it—but she didn't look like anything, and neither have any of the others of them all of the million times since.

  Hundreds.

  Thousands.

  Not one fucking one!

  But what about the girl on the E train today when I was going for the D at Seventh?

  Look, you've got a perfect right to know why the man committed me, but tell me something, tell me—can't you already tell for yourself?

  I thought: "Someone's dumped her. She's got no one. God has sent me, as my deliverance, this deliverance."

  The second girl I ever did it with was probably less good to look at than the first one was. Right then and there, who couldn't have taken one look and doped it all out, the hopeless oblata of desire.

  The last one said: "Okay, but do not think you are getting away with fooling me with what you look like, buster, not even for one stinking minute."

  I thought: "Wouldn't it be proof of heaven's handiwork if she gets out at Seventh to also change over for the D?"

  He said it with the accent on the nard.

  Dead at forty-three.

  Heart.

  Heaven was taking a hand in it, all right—except only up to a point it was. Because when she got it to the door, struggling with it and with the baby so piercingly, so pitiably, that it made you want to kill for love, what she said to me was "No" when I said to her "You want for me to come try to help you with it so you can get it down the stairs?"

  I'm not telling the whole story.

  Tomorrow is June 17th.

  That's a little more of the story.

  The rest of it is, she said she wasn't going down the stairs, but when I got down them and then looked back up them, then there she was, coming down them and then going right past me on the platform and then going all the way away from me to the end of the platform as far away from me as she could get, all that cargo of her wretchedness notwithstanding.

  My wife says, "Who do you think is ever going to look at you looking
like this?"

  Hey, but guess whose sister the motherfucker was humping when his ticker up and jumped him forty bucks into a one-hundred-dollar hour of friendly family psychotherapy!

  Yeah, but lately, lately, what I'd like to know is this: Who has the one validated desperation of my life ever been doing to death for me, no es verdad?

  MR. AND MRS. NORTH

  "YUH, YUH, YUH."

  "Oooo. Uuuu. Uuumach."

  This is how they wake up. They wake up vomiting. Actually, it is a little after they wake up that Mr. and Mrs. North commence to first retch, then vomit.

  They are not fools.

  They know as well as you do the large peril of vomiting in one's sleep. Even in a condition of light sleep, there is the risk of strangulation on some chunk of what gets thrown up from the stomach. The odd bolus of ingestimenta could come skidding back up and lodge-self in some impromptu kink in the food pipe. Even with pillows lifting the head, you're looking for grief if you sleep on your back.

  Mr. and Mrs. sleep on their backs. Once abed, this is the posture each pursues throughout the course of the dream-driven night.

  They are good sleepers.

  They do not vomit until they wake up.

  They have separate bathrooms. Mr. and Mrs. use separate bathrooms for the act of vomiting. True, they could both in fact hasten themselves to the nearer bathroom, the one spouse disgorging himself into the sink while the other kneels before the toilet.

  Don't ask me why it's not the way they do it.

  Perhaps in some families vomiting is a private matter. Or perhaps it is that in this family each of the parties favors the same class of receptacle—Mr. and Mrs. being, after all, husband and wife and therefore alike. Without my speaking of it too descriptively, I take due note that the duration of their relation might have made of them a pair of sink-vomiters or of toilet-vomiters or even of tub-vomiters—vomiters whose practice it would be to vomit into the same style of concavity.

  SEE WHAT YOU CAN MAKE OF THIS.

  Early in the marriage, mixing bowls were kept at the ready—his on his side, hers on hers—on the floor by their bed. But as the marriage matured, its principals managed to scale certain elevations of self-control—thus making, in the end, the preparation of installing the nearby catch basin superfluous to their needs.

  Just as well.

  For the bowls were notably unsightly seen squatting there to either side of the bed, where company might spot them when company was taken from the receiving rooms onto a tour of the interior of the Northern family residence.

  "What's that?" the alert caller might think to himself—and, getting for his trouble no answer to the unstated but no less tasksome question, presume the offensive and worse.

  So the mixing bowls were set aside, and it was a welcome triumph when they were, for now neither Mr. nor Mrs. has to cope with the nuisance of collecting such clumsy utensils from the kitchen night after cantankerous night. Sad to say, they had, in the old days, now and then quarreled on this score, but only on those occasions when they had both already retired for the evening, their having neglected to situate their bowls in place beforehand. First he, then she, or first she, then he, would claim fatigue much too fantastic to undertake the tiring travel all that mileage to the kitchen.

  He, for example, would say, "I'm just too spent to do it, my darling," whereupon she would say, "Goes double, my love, for me."

  Or sometimes say for me before saying my love.

  Yet someone clearly had to, and, in the course of things, much as it was contrary to their temperaments, a fearful disputation would ensue until one or the other relented—which one being neither, as a rule, here neither nor there.

  Thankfully, the debate over the mixing bowls became, in its time, a datum of the past. What remained to be ironed out was this—who was to have exclusive use of the nearer bathroom? It was vexation itself, this question. Naturally neither Mr. nor Mrs. proved willing to concede that he was any the less in control of his vomitus. To be sure, it seemed unfair that one or the other of them should have to lose one point to win another. So it fell out between them that it was quite properly the Mr. who ought traipse the greater distance—since this seemed to them the chivalrous, and therefore the more romantical, resolution.

  Oh, Mr. North, Mr. North, the fellow insisted he could be happy with this program, and indeed he proved to be—for it pleased him to act in a fashion that promoted his self-esteem, and she, Mrs. North, she, for her part, was happy that her presence created the opportunity for Mr. North to carry out those gestures of courtly conduct consistent with his status as he understood it to rank, a generosity that enhanced her self-esteem inasmuch as she, Mrs. North, she, in effect, was providing for his.

  BUT AS TO THE PRESENT, so that you might hear for yourself without hearing overmuch from me.

  It ordinarily happens that the spouses greet each other before they start to vomit—a hale, a hearty, "Good morning, dearest," or some such expression of politesse. It might even happen that a number of sentences will have passed between the parties before one or the other of them is seized by the first official squeeze of the incipient spasm.

  The following passage is drawn from their jointly reported account.

  "Good morning, my dear."

  "Good morning to you."

  "Sleep well, my sweet?"

  "Ever so well, thank you. And you?"

  "Oh, fine, thank you. Very well indeed."

  "That's good. Good . . . good . . . goo-uh. Goo-uh! Uh. Yuh! Yuh! Yuh!"

  "Uuuu. Uuuuuch!"

  "Yuh, yuh, ooyuch, yach!"

  "Uuuuuch. Uuuuuch. Ooooowach!"

  And so on and so on, a connubial symphony, an achievable excellence, the matchless accord of the seasoned adventure in the monogamy of the over-fed.

  LAST DESCENT TO EARTH

  MUST BE MY THIRD TIME around this time. Or is one supposed to say round? Not that I am claiming that this is such a lot, just the three tries, and one of them not even plausibly a try yet, not even decently enough of a try so far that I could quit it right here and still get to count it as anything much more than the start of a start of a try at a try. Great Christ Almighty, there used to be a time when one could slog one's way through twenty, thirty, forty of the kind, knocking one's fnocking brains out over some adverb-ridden thing, proud as punch to have turned one's nose up at as many as that many words. Ah, but Great Christ Almighty all over again, my friends, your parts of speech were no big deal back then.

  One had words galore.

  One had words to burn.

  One had to beat them back with a stick.

  I myself had words to kill back then, and did away with as many as the country limit allowed.

  Oh, there were words to go around back then, and don't let anybody ever tell you any different!

  Unless he says round.

  That I should have said round.

  That actually it's round that would have been the proper way for a proper writer to do it.

  MY PAL DENIS SAYS that one of the things which Nietzsche once said was a thing which went roughly along the lines of a saying like this:

  "What good did killing God do if grammar still sasses you back?"

  Listen, you think anybody ever needs to be told?

  Speaking of which—not of Him or of Denis but just of listening—there is this one fellow who is sitting listening to this other fellow in the two earlier times around when I made the two earlier tries at the story which I am fixing to try to tell you for the third time this time now, just like it right this minute now is supposed to be you sitting, please God, listening to me.

  Except they're both, those both, on a plane.

  On an airplane.

  Which airplane has been going around and around over the airport because the airplane can't get in.

  IT IS A QUESTION of congestion.

  Or of round and around.

  You have to have a runway, you have to have clearance, the traffic is terrific, y
ou think it takes a genius to invent such an explanation as this?

  Or to tell you how scared to death it is so easy for everyone up in the air for them to get when you have gone from all of the way here to all of the way there but, word to word, the pilot cannot get in?

  Save your breath.