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Chilled Fork

  

Low Cover

Flat Earther in Repose

Stories in the Worst Way, published in the 1996 with Knopf, first brought attention to Gary Lutz in an era when a few of the big-guns New York publishers still vibed with the mid-century practice of making space for innovative, disturbing writing.

Through the next two decades, this unique writer’s writer continued his language-driven project with four consistent collections published by boutique indie presses such as the visionary yet now-defunct 3rd Bed, as well as Calamari Press, Black Square Editions, and Kevin Sampsell’s long-standing Portland-based Future Tense Books. Now, all of the author’s work is available in this volume from New York Tyrant.

For the uninitiated, Lutz (who has also, in the past, written under the flat, gratifying nom de plume “Lee Stone”) makes short stories with a focus on sentences themselves rather than progressing events or unspooling revelations. These sentences, with stomach-dropping little dictional surprises, draw low-spirited, nervous, and/or masochistic protagonists, most of them nameless and devoid of gender, as they observe their own relationships with wariness and resignation, more or less enduring them, sometimes watching them evaporate. The narrators have no trouble talking or connecting with others, but overall, it’s cold comfort for them. Some of the trouble seems to be the gray setting, a version of our world, from which the narrators’ relationships arise. Simultaneously, intimacy offers these narrators a wealth of minutiae for observation: “She had a frivolity of moles on one arm,” “He was loiny, and pustuled, with an utterness of hair, ginger squibbles of it all over,” “[She was] putty-faced and dressed.”

True, this hardly sounds like a party. But don’t think these stories aren’t hilarious—they are, verbally and situationally. In “Onesome,” the protagonist describes his wife’s work in “a program that reached out to anyone for whom speech had become a hardship. These included the people who said they instead of he or she to jack up the population in their private lives.”  Another narrator signs off a paper letter to an ex-lover with “xoxo,” but, in their ambivalence, adds penmarks to the letter’s closure so it resembles a crossed-out tic-tac-toe game.

Even when the stories take place in the present day, Lutz has a penchant for preserving heirloom words and phrases.  “Car-coat,” “shoehorn” “frankfurter shack,” a “custard shop,” “business traveler,” “the phone book,” “bric-a-brac,” and countless others tint the writer’s prose to mid-20^th Century atmospherics.  Meanwhile, numerous verbs, adverbs and adjectives have the propulsion to make language do more, often pointing to that despair and discomfort about the body. A man’s voice sounds “messy, squirky from disuse,” a wife “fumed and soured and stenched in bed beside a husband who himself was a cloud of exhausts and leakages. (I had to head to the urban dictionary for “slurked,” but am unconvinced Lutz sourced it there).  The understated humor here is edged by bleakness and distant cruelty.

The church meeting-room, the overlit, shabby rental hall, a corner of the discount store: Lutz is brilliant at setting up blurred glimpses of North American communities’ stale, exhausted grimness and drabness. The language can sound quite Ohio or Plains. In “Am I Keeping You?” the narrator’s aunt “could never see herself outshining a child, but there she was with two daughters, neither of them a marrier.” A woman’s lurking boyfriend in “Meltwater” reveals: “Sometimes I could make out a third voice downstairs, that of a contestant female, just a visitor, no doubt, and a laugher. I never got to meet her and to this day still suspect she had a smoky hood of unshampooed hair and the sleep-buckled arms of a quitter.”

The pleasures of those two sentences are fun to parse: their ricocheting sounds, “a laugher,” and the disconcertingly erotic “hood” of hair. Then there’s the wonderfully visual buckling arms and the deft way they correlate with a “quitter,” and the rhythmic closure.

Lutz packs sentences with his characteristic cadences and maneuvers things so there’s a tang somewhere between ghastliness and comedy. In “I Crawl Back to People,” the narrator, with coldheartedness and a signature Lutzian punchline that feels like a drop into hell, offers, “There was a kind of woman you could spend weeks with, months even, and never get it settled to your satisfaction whether she was on the mend or not yet finished being destroyed.”   

“Pledged” takes place in a small city or town. Like many stories in Lutz’s oeuvre, it doesn’t move forward in time so much as rock to and fro. And if it switches between first person plural and first person singular, locales are also neither one nor the other. The narrator, a young woman with a best friend, establishes the setting by stating, “the name of the town depended on which direction you came from. We were approaching form the east, so it was called West Southfork.” The two friends, disoriented for perhaps no other reason than life’s toughness, walk where “grass had been mushed” and “the planeting underneath the dirt felt even mushier.” They drop to their hands and knees and dig into the earth, mud caking their arms and bracelets as if in an actual search for firmer ground. As they pull a pile of graph paper out of the mud, “the planet slump[s] for a sec.” Muddy and “smutched,” they go to a restaurant where a local man leans against their booth, watching them eat with their “abstruse” manners. This causes both girls to not truly eat but pretend to eat. As the leaning intruder’s mouth is “stirred up,” it could be an escalating scene about gender and power, but Lutz is incapable of writing the expected. OCD and nervous, the man yatters at the woman about the way they’re eating: “Is that why you’re doing it? Just to be doing it? For the sake of it? All I’m saying is don’t be picking at it all the time. Leave well enough alone is what I’m saying. You ever stop to think that somebody else might come along and want it? Leave something for somebody else.” The stranger isn’t rapacious, but a Midwest nut overflowing with problems and double entendres. It’s the reliable restaurant server who calls him off.

Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that Lutz’s fiction comes up sometimes between women readers and/or writers as a topic of discussion along with the sentiment that the writing is sexist–even among those who admire the work. A writer and critic friend summed it up pretty well: “I guess I’m used to feeling pissed off at something or other in men’s work and loving what I love at the same time.” She must’ve been referring Lutz’s narrators’ uninhibited dislike/alarm over female bodies (sentences like “Thirty-eight years of picked-over, furying age she was—brittled hair, a bulwark forehead, a voice that sounded blown-through.”). Descriptions like these can “slap,” my friend attested. This is important to note. However, the narrators don’t spare male bodies from the withering descriptions, either, and…they’re characters. Really damaged ones, too–so it’s all of a piece. Lutz’s work as a whole, domed-over by gray atmospherics of pain, minimizes my response to the narrators’ making verbal field days of women’s appearances—actually it makes me question my own expectation that life should be fair.

Though Lutz’s work makes me laugh more than it offends me, his paragraphs reverberate with the sensation of some sort of serious injury. And most of the stories, which expose little corners of our culture’s cruel, cipher-like qualities, are especially unnerving as the country dips into political despotism today.

The narrators’ bafflements, disconnects, shame, and little humiliations never abate. This is most clear in this book’s final story, “Am I Keeping You?” which describes a seemingly endless series of brute, terribly abusive aunts. No possibility of love, or awe for the universe, soothes any of these narrators’ distress away. But language is there instead: communication, via elaborate, hand-built sentences, tonally fascinating: a complex reprieve.

The writer’s intense interest in words, sound, and rhythm versus fiction’s usual conventions were apparent to me in a workshop he led in Seattle in the mid-aughts. Around this time he also co-authored, with Diane Stevenson, the student textbook A Grammar Reference, which contains sections you’d be hard-pressed to find in Bedford English handbooks: “Indefensible Split Infinitives” and “Special Problems with That.” In both the handbook and his hardworking fiction, Lutz pulverizes the creative writing schools’ injunctions that fiction is best made from lush characterization, painstakingly made beats, and sacrosanct central conflict. I hope this collection of virtually all the short fiction by this legendary writer (including nine new stories), along with a wonderfully anecdotal and contextualizing introduction by Brian Evenson, will bring a new generation or two to Lutz’s mysterious and troubling art.

For the past year I’ve been mentoring a student at NYU Abu Dhabi, Vamika Sinha, on her hybrid project Cranes, which is a mix of poetry and essays, and has to do with identity and moving through the world as a young woman of colour—a 21^st flâneuse who’s discovering the failures of cosmopolitanism, the burden of hyphens, and how art is a kind of hunger that fills and sustains us. I’m new to teaching, but I doubt this thrill ever diminishes—when you come upon a voice that feels grounded and wise, that’s looking backwards and forwards at the same time, when goddamit, they’re just beginning. Vamika’s voice has a choral effect because she’s in dialogue with so many artists—Coltrane, Teju Cole, Solange, Gloria Anzaldúa, Yasser Alwan, always coming back to the question, “What am I?” A flautist and photographer, she understands the power of the image, but also knows how to riff and jump octaves. She’s less interested in crescendo, more excited by synchronization and that lovely moment that she describes in jazz as “the opposite of foreshadowing…the proclamation of what came before, the hint of an older tune.” She’s building on all that’s come before by pushing up against it or subverting it or singing it some other way, and by doing so, she’s evoking Audre Lorde. She’s smashing down that house and building her own house, and the result is glorious. I can’t wait for the world to discover her.

–Tishani Doshi, author of Girls Are Coming Out of the Woods (Copper Canyon) and Small Days and Nights (Bloomsbury)

 

blackbrown crush: a sonnet

In praise of all the blessings we wouldn’t get, call upon my breaths,
phone-line gossamer. Make them fervent, & pull
the string in my windpipe, till the monarchs come down
from their clouds into my stomach. In the name of crippled wings,
Messenger, the hours of time split
like filaments on our screens, injera like naan, Hawkins’
‘Body and Soul’, history bleached & sonnets
undone like a corset. For this thread-thing    I wait
which is to say,                                             I want you
to wait for me, how long                               I migrate.

You call & what sun, what slaughter
of delicate, queens toppling & I hope you catch me
with a net as big as the atlantic, sieving
words struggling under the coats of our wings.

 

(st)ars poetica

in the open city, i move like an eel. i am electric and curved like a smile razored. in the open city, i live on hot food and hot music. i distract myself from weight. in the open city, a man makes a rape inside the womb of a book, and fills it with hot air. the words never deflate. and i believe in wonderlands lying at the bottom of holes, and i believe in blackbrown alices who reach their destination. in the open city, translation is not sold in the shops like rope necklaces. in the open city, i fly without wires making me marionette. look there, some me has fallen and killed their darling self. in the open city, i am flâneuse venus never in retrograde, cinnamon brown flesh and moonless. an open city is the woman itself. free to lay. in the open city, i am a queen on the chessboard, mobile as a dream or dictator. in the open city, memory is no cannibal but a child making jigsaw. in the open city, i can change colors. make blues into hot pink, my brains all alchemist. 

 

self-portrait as nation-state
after safia elhillo

for a language i choose the pen
filled up                            in red
runny like syrup in spoons 
sticky on my                        lips.
for borders i choose the      seam
running across my mother’s 
stomach, proof of birth, that 
i am         i am an aftermath;
that i did not slip into a life that should
not have been, like that
brother of mine who never  crowned
any territory, only                 bled.
for a culture i breathe          breath 
into plastic dolls
like myself, i give
them songs & color &          ink 
as thick as what flows         within them.
for an anthem, i                   laugh —
jagged, jazzy, juicing 
a child’s voice ripening        towards 
its own self – colored           soul
stained. & for my people     i give
them throats full, to speak 
i belong you belong         i belong to you & to me.

They were arguing, stupid fight, about if you were color-blind how many colors would you see.  Would there be only black and white?  Or is color-blindness something larger in scope, with many shades of color, only re-assigned to objects differently than others see them?  Listening to them fight, Elaine thought more than once that you could perhaps characterize the two men by the positions they took on the issue.  The one who believed that color-blindness reduces everything to black and white, was he the more romantic one of the two?  Or was he the more classical?  “Like Balanchine,” she thought vaguely, having forgotten most of everything she ever knew about Balanchine somewhere over the years.

No wait a second, there must be still plenty she recalled about Balanchine.  Seemed like she could almost see one of his dances, right in front of her eyes, the hush around the dancers, the andante of the music—live music, as she recalled.  Did the City Ballet rely on taped music nowadays, hard to know who to ask.  My God, George Balanchine meant everything to me at one point, Elaine thought, trying to work herself into a frenzy, and now I can’t even think of the names of any of his dances.

She sipped a little bit of her drink, then put the glass down on the marble coaster.  I love these coasters, she thought.

Balanchine, everything black and white, Allegra Kent in some kind of white leotard with little handles around her hips.  The stage all very dark except for spotlights from beneath the stage.  It must have been the 70s, she thought.  She remembered Balanchine’s profile, the way it looked like a mountain peak, and his long legs.  They’d met at a party and she wondered why all the women went for him, then she’d decided the women in question must be a horribly neurotic bunch.  Last autumn she was down in Los Angeles for the West Hollywood Book Fair, and a woman was speaking who’d written a book all about her late-blooming passion for anal sex, and Elaine had been puzzled and a little nauseated, and then all became clear when the speaker revealed she had been one of Balanchine’s ballerinas.

It had been a beautiful afternoon, outdoors, the speakers at long tables under tents, everyone wearing sunglasses.

The heat concentrating on the very top of your scalp, so Elaine had guarded it with some kind of flyer for the ballerina’s anal sex book.  A discreet flyer, thank God, it could have been far worse.  There was something almost dignified about it, just as there was, Elaine realized, about all of Balanchine’s work, no matter if he were choreographing for elephants at the circus (surely he did something of the sort, it was part of his legend), or for these incredibly elegant and soignee analholics like Suzanne Farrell or Vera Zorina.  And that woman Joan in The New Yorker who never wrote an article without bemoaning the way the City Ballet had forgotten about Balanchine and treated his legacy like so much flypaper.  Nowadays there’s a general cultural amnesia about the past.  Why in her dim memory she recalled being taken to the NYCB by her godmother, oh, in the middle of some war, everyone upset outside, but inside a dim sense of peace and money.

“You must know Mary Sue,” Tim was saying, “she’s colorblind and you don’t have to be intimate with her to know, just take a look at her outfits, stripes with plaids, everything five different shades of orange.  It’s like, when you go into an elevator and it’s all gray rubber, gray steel?  At least this is how I understand it, and say you stepped into a big puddle of blood, you wouldn’t even know it.  Gray and red are the same thing.”

“I do know Mary Sue and she has often told me, that she has shoppers who put together her clothes for her.  It’s a service for the colorblind, and there’s a whole C-B department at Macy’s or Saks.  One of them.”

“Oh, she doesn’t buy at Saks.”

“No, that’s true.”

They thought awhile about Mary Sue.  Elaine remembered her from the days when all of them used to act in Beach Blanket Babylon, a San Francisco institution that had been running a hundred years; a revue of songs and topical skits and big, brash satire like Saturday Night Live.  Mary Sue often played the big, clownish types like Dolly Parton, Peggy Lee, Imelda Marcos.  She always dressed beautifully, in Elaine’s opinion, but maybe she had the Macy’s shoppers working for her even then, or else maybe her disease hadn’t spread up to her eyeballs yet (or wherever color blindness affected you last).  She imagined it was in the eyeballs, sort of like cancer except not as painful, perhaps not painful at all.  You certainly never heard people give little gasps or clutch hankies to their eyes and claim they had just had an attack of color blindness.  It couldn’t be painful, but who knew?  That Balanchine woman had evaded the question entirely about whether or not anal sex was painful.  This guy who she met through the personals (of The New York Review of Books believe it or not) didn’t like her lubricated.  He would come over and she was just supposed to lie there while he plunged into her, without a word, without even taking off his pants, just pulling down his zipper—which he could have done easily, in her foyer—and he’d be out of there in two shakes—so to speak—and leave her rapt, restless, and with another chapter’s worth of anal sex to write up in her so-called “diary of obsession.”  So, Elaine thought, if Mary Sue indeed suffered from being color blind—in fact, whether or not she was color blind at all, and she, Elaine, did not think she was, despite what Tim and Gerald were swearing, so united in this one lie, despite being at loggerheads in every other aspect of the color-blindness debate; anyhow, if Mary Lou were colorblind she did not seem to ever have felt pain a day in her life.  Save perhaps for the day when she was fired from Beach Blanket Babylon for moving to Oakland’s Lake Merritt.  You were fired just for moving out of town?  They said it’s a betrayal of the BBB ethic.

 “Could we stop the car, please,” she said faintly.  They’d been bucking up and down the hills of Pacifica and Devil’s Slide for what seemed like hours, and she wasn’t feeling at all comfortable.  The drink she put down more firmly in its slot, above the cunning marble coaster.  Tim took another glance at her, over his shoulder, with an unspoken fear in his eyes.

“Mom, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, dear,” she said.  “That last drink was just a little on the strong side.”

“That’s Gerald,” he said.  “When it comes to pouring out, guy’s got an iron hand.”

Gerald protested, as Tim pulled over to the wide gravel next to Highway 1.  “It’s hard when someone else is driving.  You can’t anticipate, that’s the problemo.”

Elaine put one foot down on the sand, judging its wet firmness.  Thirty yards below, the ocean slopped and howled, a hungry beast prowling the shore.  When they asked her if she felt better, she nodded, but the truth is it’s so hard to gauge how well or ill you’re feeling when you’re looking down at this horrible wet ocean that’s suffering its own spectacular storm from underneath.  All roiled up as though octopi and squids were fighting it out on the ocean floor like King Kong versus the T Rex.  In France didn’t they call nausea the “mal du mer”?  That expressed it absolutely, the sea suffering, and “mal” meant—evil.

“I’m fine, Gerald,” she called back blithely while slipping a little mirror from her purse and quickly dabbing on some blush.  You’re never so sick as makeup won’t help put a better spotlight on things.  She wondered what the colorblind did about blush.  Weren’t they always putting weird colors on their face?  Maybe that’s what happened to all those women the Germans painted in the Blue Rider school, with deep blue cheeks and green chins.  It wasn’t the painters who were colorblind, she flashed, it was the models!  She should write an article for Art Notes about it.  Tiny flakes of powder dusted her fingers and surreptitiously she wiped them on Gerald’s leather seats, the rich leather he was so proud of.  However now the apricot dust was staining the black in a way that reminded her, disconcertingly, of a crime scene.

This wasn’t her first visit to Blanc Marie.  She had endowed the sisters with a $10,000 fellowship to say prayers in some sort of universal novena in Marty’s memory.

Tim had not been in favor of this investment at all.  And Gerald was, predictably, on the fence, not wanting to hurt Tim’s feelings by being disloyal to him, and yet not wanting to rock the boat so far as Elaine went either, for things had been rocky between them ever since Gerald had picked Tim up at some kind of gay cruise and married him on the steps of City Hall.  Tim didn’t understand why she felt it necessary to have prayers said in Marty’s name.  “I loved him too, Mom,” he said.  “But he’s dead and all the prayers in the world aren’t going to bring him back.”

That was his argument, and how could she say that she doubted his sincerity?  But the truth is she knew he would rather she spent the money on what, an extra bathroom on the house Tim was building for Gerald in St. Francis Wood.  Not that it was all so black and white, she admitted.  Marty hadn’t been the world’s best father, number one, and hell, maybe two men living together (with herself to be installed in this deluxe sort of “inlaw” apartment in what wasn’t actually the basement—but amounted to one)—maybe two men needed two bathrooms.  (She’d have her own, of course.)  Gerald thought it would be cute to have a bidet in his.  She made herself grin when she joshed him about it, but inwardly she was thinking of whether or not he enjoyed anal sex and if so, why and how.  She kept looking at Tim wondering how she had raised a son who would inflict anal sex on another, smaller boy.

Well, he was forty.  And Gerald close to it.  They weren’t boys, they just acted like it sometimes.

Today was supposed to be a nice drive in the country but now, as the two men stood there in twin sweaters, staring at her balefully, she felt alarm, seeing her nice afternoon go up in smoke.  “What?” she asked.  “I’m not going to feel any better with you two glaring at me as though I were–“  She couldn’t think of what.  Instantly they broke their gaze off, as though ashamed.  One looked up the side of the cliff; the other, to the rocks below.  They might have been two surveyors, in fisherman’s sweaters, assigned to measure cliff erosion.  Softly, out of the side of his mouth, Tim said, “Mom, do you want a handkerchief?”

“For what?”

“You’ve got all that makeup on the leather.”

Abruptly she swiveled in the backseat and pivoted herself out of the car entirely, hoisting herself up on her pins.  Marty always told her she wore too much makeup.  That she was beautiful just with a touch of lipstick.  She didn’t need all that junk on her eyes.  But what did Marty know?  He was the one who said they shouldn’t leave New York, they’d be crazy to leave a place they knew, and at night she would feel the fear in his bones as he lay next to her, feigning sleep, in that awful apartment on the Henry Hudson, their last before abandoning the city for once and for all.  That lumpy mattress she could have sworn had bedbugs.  Him staring at the ceiling through closed eyes but his pulses jumping like the trotters at Aqueduct.  

“Are you awake?”

No reply.

“Marty, you’re not kidding anyone, you’re awake.”

You’d hear a snore, a horribly unconvincing snore, a snore so fake it seemed to signal the very pit of despair, for it didn’t seem to, well, it didn’t seem to care if you thought it was real.  Whatever it was, it was not going to then turn around and say, oh yes, I was awake all along.  She got up, put her feet in her slippers, padded out to the kitchen, and in the glare of the pink “Pharmacy” neon she picked up her crossword and sat down again at the table, thinking that it would be the last crossword she’d ever do in New York.  The sugar bowl was empty, white crystals clinging to its rim.  The Daily News printed the most preposterous puzzles, clues so simple little Tim could finish one up by the time he was seven or eight.  They did have the Jumble puzzle which has pizzazz, a fairly elegant mess of consonants and vowels you could scramble till they formed a real word.  ECRMA.  You’d look at that combo and then “cream” would bubble to the surface.  She used to tell Marty, “People talk about ‘I love New York,’ all the shops and shows, but all I love is the Jumble puzzles and the City Ballet.”

“Yes,” she said to Tim, “I’ll take a hanky if you have one.  I don’t know why I’m so clumsy.  It’s just the emotion of the day, I suppose.”

“That’s all right, Elaine,” Gerald said.  “We understand.”

“Do you?”

Was there a simper of condescension in his voice?  There always is, when the young address the old.  But they were neither of them young, neither of them old.  Wasn’t there some fellow feeling among the middle-aged, or was your birthdate everything forever?

“Of course we do.  Marty was a great guy and you probably miss him to bits.  I know I do, and who am I?”

“Yes,” she mumbled.  In her fist she was rubbing great streaks into his leather, like a Number Two pencil eraser, till it foamed with shavings.  The white of Tim’s handkerchief, the thick black leather.  It was like some old-fashioned view of the world she had put behind her long ago when she had become a feminist and taken up International Modernism—the new.  No more black and white, she’d laughed to Marty, who shook his head like a rueful cart horse.  “Everything new,” Marty said, looking around him at the new place on Russian Hill—well, sort of Russian Hill.  She never knew when he was kidding.  She only knew when he was afraid of something.

Too, he was the victim of a dreadful pair of, well, you could hardly call them parents, they were just monsters.  That’s all, monsters.  The Nazis, Goebbels and Goering, were better parents, probably.  They gave all three of their kids a loveless childhood and made them feel guilty for wanting to get away from them.  They picked on the one boy so much he gave it up at thirteen, expiring in some sordid Coney Island brawl that made the papers.  And Elaine could just about remember Marty’s sister, who tried to join the Army during Korea and then disappeared into the bars and clubs of the Village sometime around 1956.  And the monsters lived on, as monsters always will, their posture stiff and immobile, ruling the roost and keeping poor Mart under their thumb as though he were still a little boy with his father’s—

“Stop staring at me, boys,” she said.  “It’s just not polite.  Let’s let this be a happy day, shall we?  And when we get to Blanc Marie the sisters are going to treat us to a lunch you’ll never forget.”  The food they offered the public was spectacular, that was the only word for it.  Pressed by friends to describe it, Elaine could only compare her experience at the refectory table to some great fireworks display, perhaps the one Leopold Bloom describes in Ulysses while he’s melting and rubbing himself over that innocent convent girl.  Vaguely she knew, somewhere in her soul, that the voluptuousness of the food was in some direct relationship to the simplicity, some might say harshness, of the nuns’ order, but she couldn’t think why.  “Sublimation” seemed too simple a concept, something beneath the register of the experience.  She had heard that M.F.K. Fisher, the famous California food writer, had devoted a chapter to Blanc Marie in one of her early books, either The Gastronomical Me or I Ate A Whole Fat Pig, but as of yet she hadn’t tracked down the reference.  M.F.K. Fisher—the Balanchine of food writers—joyous, vigorous, sensual, in fact downright sexy.

Gerald had picked up a small stone from the side of the road and was expertly tossing it from one hand to the other.  “Well,” he said, “you want to get a move on, Elaine?  You’re making me hungry, and we still have quite a hike.”

A hike?  Just as though they were walking instead of driving.  But that was Gerald for you: imprecise.  Sometimes, she thought, dealing with him was like dealing with someone who didn’t speak English very well.  His expressions were either slightly askew, or else so vulgar you’d think he’d have dropped them years ago as he rose higher in society and status.  “Chunk of change,” for example.  To Gerald everything was a big chunk of change.  The outlay for Marty’s novenas, of course.  The cost of a bidet.  He whistled beautifully, like Bing Crosby, but only in connection with mentioning a sum of money.  “Four hundred dollars!” he would whistle.  “That’s some chunk of change all right.”

“Oh yes, let’s move on, I’m so sorry,” said Elaine, drawing her feet together and lifting them back into the car proper.  Tim shut her car door from outside, then walked around the car, grabbing for his keys in his pocket.

“We had a little break, that’s all,” said Gerald generously.  He held the black stone he’d found in his palm, gazing at it as though it were worth something.  Elaine watched it glisten, catching the pinkish cool light and something of the rigor of the waves far below.  All greeny dewy stars falling with golden, O so lovely!  O so soft, sweet, soft!

“I don’t even know how the sisters get to the farmers market, considering they’re not allowed to talk to men,” Elaine said, looking forward now to her lunch.  “Maybe they speak only to the women farmers there, I don’t know.”

“Or eunuchs?” Tim said, pulling the car back onto 101, eyes fixed on the rearview mirror.  “That would be practical.”

“Hard boiled eggs for lunch?” Gerald suggested.

“Stop it, do,” Elaine laughed.  “You two are terrible, terrible.”  Tim had grown up with Marty’s sense of humor, an uneasy humor you might say, one that found the wry jest in every awful turn of fate.  For Marty, she knew, all too well, such a philosophy had come naturally, for his life really had been tough.  Hearing it from Tim, it seemed a little false, for outside of being gay, which in San Francisco was hardly a tragedy, what had he to complain of?  It was the same way that the jokes coming out of Woody Allen’s mouth at least seemed felt, whereas the same jokes from Jerry Seinfeld lost punch somehow, or even meaning.  Still, nuns were always ridiculous, weren’t they, and the best of them even seemed to concede as much.  Mother Hilda always wore a little smile as though she, too, the intimate friend of Loretta Young and Teilhard de Chardin among others, saw how crazy it all was.  And good with money too!  Tim said that Mother Hilda had the mind of a steel trap, and sometimes she frightened Elaine, just a little; she was utterly pragmatic, hardly spiritual at all in affect.  Like a character from one of her favorite books, The Corner That Held Them, Sylvia Townsend Warner’s divine novel about a cloistered order.  But then again, the older she got the more Elaine realized that the important part of life, the life of the soul, was all about simple things, and like it or not, the simple things cost money.

You could make a little chart, she thought, about which ballerinas, the ones she’d seen and envied over fifty years, which ones were Catholic girls and which were not.  Maria Tallchief, yes.  Alicia Alonso, for sure.  Janet Collins, probably.  Margot Fonteyn, don’t make me laugh.  The drive was lovely, but a little dizzying, and it was beyond her now to correlate the data of religious background to the need some lovely dancers seemed to have for anal sex.  Maybe after lunch all these columns and lists would add up.  In the meantime she applied a renewed vigor to finding a comfortable place on the bridge of her nose for her sunglasses.  In the shadowy back seat, she saw what amounted to a stranger—herself—reflected in the tinted glass.  A stranger with an expensive pair of shades that looked as though they were biting her nose, as though she were in pain, and a stranger who wore a grimace even on a lovely day.

“Can I roll down the window?” she called up to Tim.  “Or are we childproof?”  The three of them laughed, just burst out in guffaws, at the incongruity of—of what?  That she was no child, and that they had no parental authority over her?  That they had no children and they didn’t really want any, so why buy a “childproofed” car?  Well that last wasn’t strictly true, for Gerald in fact had three children, apparently, though Elaine had never met any of them.  To her they were phantoms, forgettable phantoms, to be trotted out whenever any of them wanted a reminder that Gerald wasn’t maybe one thousand percent gay as he so often seemed.  Those three kids, hidden from him by a vengeful ex-wife in Manila or Melbourne, were like the Lost Boys in the story of Peter Pan—they were doing something tropical somewhere, forever young, and noisy, but just about faceless.  Elaine supposed that Gerald knew their names but they were so little a part of her life that most of the time she forgot they existed.  She had to give him that, he wasn’t one of those fathers who was always trying to show you slides of his children, or JPEGs of their first day at school.  Even when he’d downed a few, he never sobbed into his beer about Gerald Junior and the others.

“We’re childproof,” Tim affirmed, and this sent them all into giggles all over again.  It was almost as though they had never been at loggerheads, her wonderful son and herself.

“May I see your little rock?” Elaine asked Gerald, raising her hand to his shoulder, pressing her fingers into the wool of his sweater, with what she hoped was a tender sort of touch.

The face he sent back was confused.

“What rock, dear?”

“That little stone you picked up from the roadside,” she said.  “It was such a thoughtful souvenir of our day.”

“Did I have a rock?” he said.  It was clear he’d forgotten the incident already.  “Sure it weren’t no hard boiled egg, Elaine?”

Her nose itched.  Sort of a flimsy sensation probably aggravated by the severe bite of the bridge.

“You were tossing that tiny stone around as though you wanted maximum publicity for it,” she said, coolly enough.  “I saw it in your hand and for a moment you reminded me of Saint Francis.”

“St. Francis Wood maybe,” said Tim, for that was the luxury neighborhood in San Francisco that he and Gerald aspired to.

“I’m no Saint Francis,” Gerald chuckled.

“Apparently not,” she agreed, with an asperity that afterward dismayed her.  Why couldn’t she keep any affection going for Gerald?  She would catch it for a second, and she could nurse it for minutes at a stretch, but then like a firefly in her hand it would buzz and flare out, you could almost feel it dying, vacant with beauty.  How long did it take to be able to love someone?  With Marty it had happened in an instant, like snapping your fingers—or was that the marvelous diminution that time brought with it—everything seemed to have happened in a jumble, fast as thought itself, even falling in love.  Or one day she, walking through Flatbush, seeing a used condom on the steps of St. Cecilia’s, suddenly deciding that come hell or high water she would move her family out of New York.  And that was that.  There were things irrevocable, matters of the spirit, decided in an instant; and then there were men like Gerald who no matter how hard you tried to treat him like a human being, you just kept seeing Tim’s thing in his mouth, his fat little mouth like a daffodil.

“It might be on the floor,” Gerald said.  He shook his head from side to side.  “The rock thing I mean.”

“You could look,” Tim said.

“Oh it is so unimportant,” Elaine said.  “What’s important is having a good time while we still can.”

“Or when we stop I could get out and get you another one,” Gerald said.

“It’s not like they’re expensive,” said Tim.

“Oh, that would be fine,” agreed Elaine.  “I wouldn’t want you to be out a chunk of change.”

She noticed, in the side mirror to her right, the cheerful orange and white boxy shape of a U-Haul van in their wake.  It was keeping right up; as she thought back, she had been noticing it here and there, in the twisty turns of 101 by Devils Slide, or later, along the bleak Dover Beach seascapes of Pigeon Point, in her peripheral vision that U-Haul van had been almost traveling with them.  When they had pulled over for their impromptu “stretch of the legs,” the van had maintained a discreet distance a hundred yards down the highway’s edge.

“Have you boys been watching this U-Haul truck?” she asked, wanting to amuse them.  “As Marty used to say, remember Tim?  It’s been sticking to us like white on rice.”

“I don’t remember the white on rice thing, Mom.”

Gerald laughed.  “What would he say today, when rice isn’t necessarily white, I wonder?”

Tim glanced in his rear view mirror.  His lip twitched.  “He’d say that the fucking piece of shit was on our ass, is what he’d say.”

“Tim, please,” said Gerald.

“’White on rice,’” he hooted derisively, and if there was one thing Elaine hated it was when someone mocked you by imitating your voice or your expressions—the very things that belonged to you.  “Give me a fucking break.”

Gerald leaned over the back seat, cuffed him on the shoulder.  “Tim, let’s just try to have a nice day, okay?  Our last one for a while, let’s make it nice.”

Last one for a while?

What was going on with that?

“I hurt you, Tim?” Gerald said in a small voice.  “Baby, I’m sorry.”  Then he must have pushed down a button in the armrest of the “childproof” car, for his window rolled down, nearly inaudibly, but she had always had good hearing and she could sense the atmosphere within the sedan changing, shifting slightly.  “I don’t think I hurt our boy, Elaine,” he continued, his voice getting blown about by the wind so that, or so it seemed to her, the syllables in the different words he used seemed to bounce all over them, like the inflatable silver pillows Andy Warhol made for his Factory parties.  Those silver pillows she had seen in Time magazine when all New York was talking of Pop Art and Warhol’s Silver Factory, which sounded so elegant.  Even in the best of times, Gerald had an affected way of speaking.  “He’s made of sturdy stuff as we both of us know all too well.”

Elaine was barely listening to him . . .  When she got to Blanc Marie she planned to tuck into whatever rich dessert the Sisters had set aside for her.  Too often in the past, she’d scrimped and cheated herself to keep the figure she’d had as a young girl, but we can’t all be sylphlike, so we might as well eat what desserts we may.  Look at Violette Verdy!  Balanchine had made dozens of dances for her, might as well call them “pipe cleaner dances,” but by the time she retired it was as though someone had pumped air into her like a dirigible so that by the time Reagan became President dear Violette had that silver pillow look herself, like a dumpling wrapped in foil at some dim sum place.

That U-Haul van was really moving. She saw its squarish cabin comically bumping up and down. She glanced at Tim’s knuckles on the steering wheel, how white and old they looked, his fingers knotted around the wheel as though arthritis had molded them into hooks.  Poor boy, really.  Upset about a tiff with Gerald, no doubt.

A good meal would sort them all out.

“Mom,” Tim said.

Chicken, spinach, chocolate cake—dumplings were in her head thanks to Violette Verdy; maybe there’d be dumplings.  Not the Chinese sort, the—

“Mom, it’s not like we haven’t talked this out over and over,” Tim said.  He sounded resigned.

She felt Gerald’s paw on her left shoulder.

“Oh, Elaine,” he said.  “So awful to see you like this.”

“Don’t pretend you’re, like, all in the dark about the U-Haul, Mom.”

“In the dark?” she repeated.  It was like he was being patient with her.  An unusual note for Tim.  Patience.  Something new for our boy.  “In the dark about what?”

“About the U-Haul,” Gerald whined.  Oh, maybe it wasn’t whining, but his affected way of speaking.  No wonder his kids never liked visiting him.  Who would want a Dad who talked like Lauren Bacall in an old Douglas Sirk weeper like Written on the Wind?  At least Tim had had a manly sort of father, a mensch as they say.

Marty.  Buried on a hill, the sea breeze lilting, the stars above blinking out unendurable messages of gravity.  A branch of one of those sea-drenched white trees pitched above his grave.  Him a suit of bones, as she had used to lie in bed next to him, pressing his skin with her thumb, feeling the bone along his skinny little spine, his absurdly large skull.

“In the dark about what about the U-Haul, can you tell me that?” Elaine cried.  “Because I don’t know what you could possibly be talking about.”

“Oh Elaine,” said Gerald, patting her shoulder, gently, as though she were some sort of National Velvet.  “Those nuns are gonna take such extra good care of you.  You’ll be their sugar doll with all your beautiful clothes and manners.  Look!  I can almost see it now.”  Suddenly his face was next to hers, wreathed in smiles.  “It’s coming up around the bend, just you wait and see.”

“#imaginary,” “#genuine” and “#phenomena” belong to a series titled with words from Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” that I have hashtagged and run through various social media platforms—Reddit and Twitter most often, though Instagram has played a role as well. Each poem is then sculpted from its hashtag’s search results. 

 

#imaginary

Her name was Nadine. She existed solely to blame things on.
I knew what she looked like. But I didn’t see her.
I understood that some people could be invisible. 

His name was Business Duck. He was the back half of a tugboat
and the front half of Donald Duck. He would do absolutely nothing
except occupy seats that other people wanted to sit in.  

I also had one named Boy for years. I had to intervene
in their arguments many times: you know, kid stuff,
like what to have for dinner or how they should murder everyone.  

I used to just talk to people, as if
there were people with me all the time,
even when I was completely alone. 

One of them was a skeleton dog.
It would race everywhere, and always be beside me.
I practically had a midget vampire following me. 

His name was Splashy. Miss that guy.
I had these black panthers that would run alongside the car,
going into the houses of kids I didn’t like and messing with them.  

My best friend and I each had a fleet of friendly bed bugs.
My Mum would often hear me when I was taking a tinkle speaking to them
and thanking them for helping me shake off my junk. 

I had a husband when I was four.
He was a giant sweater vest named Herman,
and we had a son named Boobie. 

We had two restaurant chains:
Chi Chi Nose Shop, a Chinese restaurant run by mice
in the roofs of cars, and the Nake, a restaurant that you ate in naked. 

Alice was pretty tame, just needed to have a spot saved at the table, car, etc.
Then one day, I just got sick of her, and threw her out the car window
as we were driving, saying, “Goodbye, Alice.” 

I remember what she looked like (a glow worm)
and I remember having conversations with her.
I would make my parents re-open gates and doors, telling them they forgot her. 

I even remember asking her to stop coming around
because I was too old to have friends like her anymore – five –
and when I couldn’t stop thinking about her,  

I tried to flush her down the toilet on a few occasions.
After that I had a star with a face that would float around after me,
or dance around during class to make me laugh.  

He was a blonde version of me
and we ran around on the edges of grass and pavement.
It didn’t take too long for my dad to inform me 

that my friends were the devil’s minions,
and he drew the star I described on a piece of paper
so we could burn it. That was the end of that.

 

#genuine

Death removes a lot of cover
When you’re covering the world in your thoughts.
It’s not like losing a pen, is it. 

That’s not the argument.
These are the sorts of things I say to people.
I work their job for them so they can stay home and grieve. 

I know you’re hurting.
I’ll be over Tuesday to mow your lawn for you.
I’m all for your fucking off with your secretly soy self. 

I’m talking about YOUR lawn, widow.
Not just some canned cliché that means nothing.
Surely you have more complex feelings about it than “thoughts and prayers”. 

There are no words that will fix it.
It’s not about you. Don’t try to make it about you
By being the one who has to say the deepest, most touching words. 

I’m Christian and personally don’t like this statement.
My child got run over by a car and is dead.
I’m going to write a facebook post about his death 

I’ll be tweeting about his death tomorrow #YOLO
It’s a double standard, and nothing changes: it falls on you.
I didn’t give a damn if they were sincere or not. 

You’re just throwing those emoticons everywhere…
protecting yourself from awkwardness
people use it use it on the internet all the time when someone dies. 

Hey man. I’ve been thinking about your dead mom.
I talked to Jesus about her for a little while. Mostly good stuff.
It felt like a token comment to make her lower her shields in respect 

while her boyfriend was getting a lung transplant
and was in the public eye too much. Shut the fuck up.
I acknowledge you, you’re part of my social group, and I’m not a threat.

 

#phenomena

A kid I knew lost his backpack and needed a replacement.
He came to school the next day with a big mailbox in his hands
Filled with his books. A couple of days later he added straps to it.  

Voilà, he had a mailbox backpack. He made a million dollars!
When women would wear thongs to show high on their hips,
Kids started to spike up their bangs and bleach them. 

Grown-ups are sporting plastic decorations on their heads
In the shape of vegetables, fruit and flowers.
We had a few kids choke on them from chewing on them. 

If you survived the rubber band installation alone, you were lucky.
But if you snapped them open and slid them against someone’s skin
It was just like a knife. It had a star on it, so I told the gas station attendant  

I was getting another one for free.
She thought I belonged on the short bus.
We wrote a letter demanding reparations  

For having tracked down so many star-labeled pops.
They wrote back essentially saying, very softly,
You kids made this shit up, stop bothering us. 

Every flea market in Florida still sells these to old people.
Mine looked like it could fit a doll when I took it off.
If you stuck two together, it would make a baby. 

I worked at a day care when they got really big.
If someone ripped the bracelet off, you had to perform a sexual act with them.
They were color coded and could range from a hug to anal sex.  

Sixth graders said You have to do it doggy style! to each other.
Girls everywhere when I was in elementary school
Wore pacifiers around their necks like a necklace. 

Like women who purposely shave off their eyebrows,
Only to draw them back on with a pen.
It was pretty cool to color on yourself with those gel pens. 

Have we gotten to the point
Where we no longer understand
How ideas can spread without the Internet?

Beverly, a town near Salem, spring 1692. A STRONG GUST of WIND then lights up to see a young girl, ELIZABETH, pacing back and forth behind a meeting hall. Her apron has been intentionally placed on the ground to hide something. The sun hangs late in the day. ELIZABETH seems very aware and disturbed by this.

ELIZABETH

 

Another young girl, ANNIE, enters dressed in similar attire. She carries a wooden bucket and wears her apron.

ANNIE

I prayed you’d still be here!

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

I will do no such thing.

 

2.

ELIZABETH

Do you strike out against me?

ANNIE

ELIZABETH

ANNIE turns away.

ELIZABETH

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

You take their story for sport?

ANNIE

ELIZABETH

  3.

ANNIE

Pray, why do such a thing?

ELIZABETH

ANNIE

Shut it, Elizabeth. You talk nonsense!

ELIZABETH grabs ANNIE by her arm and holds her tightly.

ELIZABETH

ANNIE

ELIZABETH releases ANNIE’s arm.

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

  4.

 

ELIZABETH

Ye are afraid. Admit it!

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

   

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH quickly covers ANNIE’s mouth.

 

ELIZABETH

Hush, someone will hear you!

 

ANNIE removes ELIZABETH’s hand

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

I SHALL NOT FAIL!

 

ELIZABETH quickly moves aside the apron on the ground to reveal a bloody knife and a cup. She picks up the knife and cup.

 

ELIZABETH

5.

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

     

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

Because Goody Henry gives him none.

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

  6.

     

ELIZABETH thrust the bloody knife towards ANNIE’s neck then pushes the cup up to her lips.

 

ELIZABETH

You must drink!

 

ANNIE

I SHALL NOT!

     

ELIZABETH

DRINK!

 

CATHERINE, another young girl, sallies in holding three poppets.

 

CATHERINE

I pray, what is the matter here!

 

ANNIE

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

You do not believe me?

 

ELIZABETH lowers the knife and the cup. ANNIE seizes the moment to escape into CATHERINE’s arms.

 

CATHERINE

 

ANNIE

 

 

7.

 

ELIZABETH

 

CATHERINE

   

ANNIE

 

CATHERINE

 

CATHERINE hands the poppets to ELIZABETH and curtsies.

 

ELIZABETH

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

That’s what you think.

 

CATHERINE

  8.

 

CATHERINE (CONTD)

 

ELIZABETH

You are truly wise, Catherine.

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

I am neither sensible nor wise.

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

Aye…you are right. So dangerous.

 

In a flash, ELIZABETH drops her knife, grabs CATHERINE by the hair and quickly pours the chicken’s blood into her mouth. CATHERINE falls to her knees gagging while trying to spit out the blood.

 

ANNIE, alarmed, rushes to CATHERINE’s side.

 

ANNIE

I pray it be tomatoes or beets!

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

You will live, unfortunately.

 

9.

 

ANNIE

 

ELIZABETH

Let Catherine give us a word first.

 

CATHERINE

 

Elated, ELIZABETH kneels down next to CATHERINE.

 

 

CATHERINE

OH, GOD! OH, GOD! I FEEL HIM!

 

ELIZABETH

GOOD, I WILL FEEL HIM TOO!

 

ELIZABETH drinks from the cup. The WIND begins to blow.

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE

I… I can not.

 

CATHERINE

 

ELIZABETH

10.

 

The sound of CAWING CROWS joins in with the sound of the blowing wind. Afraid, ANNIE kneels with the others. She takes the cup and drinks. She violently coughs and rolls to the ground.

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE’s body jerks, convulses. The WIND HOWLS LOUDER.

 

  CATHERINE

My Goody Johnson will hang! 

 

ELIZABETH

 

ANNIE rises to her feet and starts to flap her arms.

 

ANNIE

I’M ABOUT TO FLY! I MUST FLY!

 

ELIZABETH and CATHERINE also stand and begin to flap their arms.

 

  CATHERINE

I’M GOING TO FLY, TOO!

 

ELIZABETH

 

They continue to flap their arms while crying out – Goody Johnson must hang, Goody Williams must hang.

ALL

Goody Williams, Goody Johnson, Goody Henry…THEY MUST HANG! THEY MUST HANG!  HANG…

BLACKOUT.

Winter

Woman wants forever
And man wants heaven
And sometimes not oftentimes
The two wants collide
And both become a cloud
Less often still but sometimes
They die, actually die
Before it can rain
And the world stays dry
And everything remains
Just fine

 

Rome, February 2015

Then a white bird comes. A big white bird. And it is close, closing like it is going to land on your head. After the rain has stopped. Wings level with your shoulders. On the rooftop before you’re due to leave. Exactly like it’s on your head. And you in the dark with no umbrella over you. The size of your suitcase. On the roof the night you’re due to go. Before getting lost at the station. The water running to your feet. And the sun lost in the light. And beneath a Roman column. The alleys that curl. And the wind which irons the umbrella. And the umbrella yawning. Life at both sides of the road. And life is always a life. And rain until departure. And the umbrella lifting in the wind. And the sound of the suitcase’s wheels. Gravel then tiles. And the dream of faces in the glass. The taste of thyme in the potatoes. A building the colour of a peach. Mounds of melon beneath shavings of mortadella. And the shavings which curl. And the blacks selling umbrellas. And on the thresholds of the restaurants. Speech a song sung over and over. And a white bird saying farewell. And the umbrellas at the entrances to the restaurants. And the wind at the entrances to the restaurants. And life at the entrances to the restaurants. The size of your suitcase. And life always a life. 

 

Shipping traffic

The grey ships come from the north,
The snow-white ships come from the pole,
The ships of the south are all broken down.
O harbourmaster sitting on the cloudbanks,
O harbourmaster walking on the water,
Tell those leaping on the equator line
How their flesh might turn to wood,
How their bones might turn to steel,
Until from out their bodies comes a ship,
Its black pushing through the swell. 

 

Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.