Collected Fictions (22 page)

THE LESSON WHICH IS SUFFICIENT UNTO THE DAY THEREOF

HAVE I NOT BEEN INSISTING
it is the most instructive of stories? In fact, it is the most instructive of stories. Indeed, the great object will be to see if I can uncover the core of the instruction that is prospectively in it. I mean, in the telling, maximize the teaching—do it, and keep on doing it, from the beginning to the end.

As to what I am talking about, it concerns an apple and an apple tree, the one having fallen from the other.

Not that that is all that there is to it. I mean, there are people, there are things. But who has the patience for even the enumeration of these?

Here is the bitter truth.

You have to have the patience of a saint.

Whereas I do not even have the patience of a Lish.

But I should say of a Lishnofski, not of a Lish.

Considering.

Considering the name Lish doesn't point to where I meant to. It doesn't point to the tree I fell from.

LISTEN TO ME
talk in metaphor!

Isn't it always the way? One minute, making excuses for yourself—the next minute, making life miserable for everybody else.

It's hopeless.

Let's be honest with each other, I am already exhausted from just this much of it—the story of anything, even the narrating of Gordon Lishnofski.

But there I go again, piling figuration upon figuration. For one thing, Gordon just stands for Morton—and exhaustion, for another, for boredom.

Or nobody calling or coming around to say hi, hello, aren't you swell.

GOD, YOU GET SO FED UP
with speech.

Just the idea of telling anybody anything is enough to make you sick, every word weighing tons more than it did the last time you said it—or saw it—or heard it—or wrote it—or thought it. Who's got the energy? Who's got the strength? Isn't this why the apple falls off the tree—from such a heaviness from life, from what's holding it getting weak?

BUT SILENCE IS A TIRESOMENESS, TOO
.

This is what my dad's was, wearying all the way. Oh, he was the wordless one, I can tell you. No one came any more wordless than my dad did. But don't think it wasn't a shout to you if you were his son.

You know what his favorite word was?

Atrocious.

Putrid
and
vile
, he liked those ones, too.

He'd say, "These string beans are atrocious," and for the whole rest of the meal he would say not one other thing at all.

Or he would say, "These string beans are vile," or "Putrid, putrid—can you guess what I mean?"

It never occurred to me until right this minute that maybe that this was what they incontestably were. I mean, when I was there at the family table, when did I ever sample any of the vegetables? Who knows, maybe vile and so on, maybe these complaints were restrained complaints insofar as denunciations of my mother's canned vegetables might justifiably have gone.

Considering.

Considering my mother could not actually cook anything any good in the can or out of it.

It was just that I didn't care if she couldn't.

Bananas—I loved bananas—and olives and crackers—and licorice—licorice was my idea of great eats as great as eats can get.

You know how my father would eat an apple? You want to hear how my father would eat an apple? Get a bite off of it and chew it and chew it and then hold under his chin the hand that holds the apple, and spit into it, spit into the hand, spit into it nothing but the chewed-up skin.

I used to think he could do it because of his teeth, or because of his gums, or because of his tongue—or because he had this kind of a cockeyed kind of an enunciation and nyalked nyike nyis.

It scared me silly—somebody eating an apple like that, somebody nyalking nyike nyis.

Hey, where did I all of a sudden get all this get-up-and-go from? To speak with such vim and vigor with!

Considering.

Considering that I have been trying so hard to get across to you and to your fruiterer the impression that I absolutely do not give a shit.

So what do you think—fact or fiction, Morton Lishnofski?

I WONDER WHAT
it would have felt like, kissing a person with a funny-looking lip. Kissing the person right where the funniest-looking part of his lip is—just imagine it! All I can say is, praise be that in my house we had a host of rules set up to keep the specter of contagion at a distance, or in check. Wiping off the mouthpiece of the telephone with anything disinfectant—there was one of them for you, and kissing someone on the cheek, there was a second.

I can't think of a third.

Sorry, mind's not quite on enough on what I am saying, I think.

So which was it, Pine-Sol or Breath O'Pine or CN?

I DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU
—but me, I have had enough of this. I mean, how much is it that they can expect a man to take?

Considering, of course.

Considering today's another Father's Day.

Considering that here I am having to sit here and hear myself say all of this.

It's nyile and nyutrid, isn't it?

Or, to get it really hard and right—carbuncular is as carbuncular does—nyanyonyis for atrocious.

Apples falling, falling, falling at all, and then where, where they fall, when they do.

CAN YOU TOP THIS?

LISTEN TO ME
, there are a pair of hippopotamuses standing in a river, such a filthy dirty river, it is horrible, it is simply horrible, and the sun, my God, you would not believe it, who could believe it, what with the heat and with the sun and with how sticky and muggy and awful it is, it is stifling, it is absolutely unbelievable how stifling, it is positively beyond all believability, a day so stifling like this day is, a day which could kill you like this day could, a day which could do away with you in just one hour, in just one minute, in just one breath, but meanwhile all day long, from when the sun comes up in the morning to when the sun is going down at night, all day long this pair of hippopotamuses is standing here in the scorching water like this, they are up to their ears, they are up to their eyeballs in the scorching torpid water like this, and it is this filthy dirty hot disgusting dirty scorching torpid water like this, not either one of them moving a single muscle in it, the two of them not budging, not even one inch, not even leaning a fraction of an inch in this direction or in that direction, except for maybe if you want to count these little tiny twitches of the eyelids, these little tiny twitches of the ears, these little tiny trembles you would probably call them, these little tiny trembles and twitches, but otherwise the two hippopotamuses are like granite, like stone, like standing here in the disgusting filthy water from first thing in the morning to the time when it is almost sundown, all day long the two of them all covered up by the filthy hot dirty torpid scorching dirty water like this except for just where their little ears are sticking up out of it and are constantly twitching little twitches and for where their big bulgy eyes are poking up a little bit out of it and the eyelids, the eyelids, you can see the eyelids are giving these little bitty trembles, these little tiny itty-bitty trembles, these little tiny tremblings like, like maybe from flies probably or like maybe from little nits like or like from something even tinier than this, or it could be from some kind of teensy almost invisible itsy-bitsy thing which likes to creep around on the eyelids of hippopotamuses—but barring this, but barring the twitchings of the ears and the twitchings of the eyelids, the two hippopotamuses are just standing here and standing here and you could not even see them even breathing even, because this is how still as stones they're standing, because this is how still as boulders they are standing, and the water meanwhile, it just just goes gurgling all around them like it is some kind of filthy dirty torpid scorchy syrup probably, or more like it is torpid dirty ooze than it is like anything like even water even, more like it is some kind of special water which can get totally exhausted from just being water, and this is it, this is how it is, this is how the whole situation of it is from just after when the sun first comes up in the morning to almost when the sun is getting good and ready to go down again at night, which is when one of the hippopotamuses, which is when, lo and behold, the hippopotamus which is the slightly older hippopotamus and which is the slightly more overweight hippopotamus, which is when this particular hippopotamus all of a sudden moves his little feet a little teensy tiny bit and more or less just gets them moved into place into a somewhat slightly new position a teensy tiny bit, and then he opens his eyelids all of the way open and he looks all around a little bit and he says, "I don't know—all day long, I still can't get it through my head today is, you know, not Monday but Tuesday."

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?