Collected Fictions (2 page)

FOREWORD

FINE, FINE
—now here’s a trope for you.

To fetch groceries, to collect rations, to supply the place with vittles, unless it be deemed better spelt victuals, I do not have to but indeed do choose to make my arthritic, rachitic grudge down a steep hill and thereafter to groan my way back up the steepness steeper still, what remains of my proprium all the while suffering ever more keenly the impudent yearage step by hideous step, whereas, please be so good as to be listening to me, I could just as well carry out my commerce among the aisles of a spankingly swell food-o-rama no more distant from my door and, more’s the madness, reachable via a byway latitudinous to a fault.

But I go down, down, down, up, up, up.

You hear?

Now down, now up—to and from where the grisly shelves are stocked with little in the line of the recognizable, to and from where the ether within is never not vicious with infection and disinfectant, to and from where the personnel (am I kidding?—personnel, personnel?) would even on Easter sooner spit in your face than to face it in a faint-hearted experiment in decency.

Go know.

But look at me, look at me!—I went and I went, dark purchases mounting against the load-bearing walls of my household trip upon ghastly trip.

So there for the nonce is the figure of the day, your author having hence satisfied himself of his having hinted at the amentia of what founded the variously deformed fundaments of the stories (am I kidding?—stories, stories?) all arranged for you in the very sequence of their sequentiality ahead.

I, I, I was the maker of them.

Once.

Long ago.

When the literateur’s swindle was no less the rage.

So now to quit now.

Ah, but curse, curse the volition!—too much paid for the profit, too much told for the gain.

EVERYTHING I KNOW

THE WIFE INSISTED
she would tell her version first. I was instantly interested because of the word.

The husband stood by in readiness. Or perhaps his version still needed work.

She took a breath, grinned, and got right to the most alarming part first. At least to what she wished us—and the husband?—to regard as the part that had most alarmed her.

She said she waked to find a man in her bed. Not the husband, of course. The husband, she said, was next door, visiting with a friend. She said the husband often did this, spent the evening hours visiting, next door or somewhere else. At any rate, the wife said she did not scream because fear had made her speechless. She said that speechlessness was a common enough reaction, and to this the husband nodded in enthusiasm.

But she was able to get to her feet and run. She ran out the front door. She said she ran three blocks to a telephone booth and called the police.

"My God," I said. "That's terrifying."

"I know," she said, and smiled.

I took her smile to be a common enough reaction.

I said, "And you were so terrified that you ran away from the house with the man and your little boy still in it?"

"Isn't it amazing?" the wife said. "That's how scared you can get."

"You don't need to tell me," I said. "But just think."

"Oh," she said, "they're not interested in kids."

THE HUSBAND TOOK A BREATH
, and then made his way into his version, not one word about which part was the worst.

He said he came in by the back door, exercising great care to quiet the key because it was, after all, late. He said he did likewise with the action of his tread. But then he saw the front door wide open—and so he stepped swiftly to the little boy's room, and saw the little boy safe in his bed.

"You see?" the wife said.

I said, "Thank God."

"I went to our bedroom next," the husband said.

He said he saw the bed empty and the bathroom door closed.

"Good God," I said, "the rapist is in there!"

My wife said, "For goodness sake, let
him
tell it."

The husband said he went weak with shock. He said he understood it was useless to stand there exhorting himself to open the bathroom door. He said he was simply certain of it—the wife would be in there, dead.

"Can you blame him?" the wife said.

The husband said, "So I sat down on the bed and called the police."

Then they both smiled.

"The rapist wasn't in there?" I said.

"
Please
," my wife said.

The husband said he could barely speak. He said the police kept urging him to speak up.

"My wife's missing!"

This is what the husband said he screamed into the telephone, but that the police said no, not to worry, that his missus was in a phone booth just blocks from the house.

"
THAT'S AWFUL
," my wife said.

I said, "But the bathroom."

The husband said, "I didn't touch that door until the police got there—and when they did, of course inside it was empty, wasn't it?"

"Of course," I said. "Is there a window in there?"

The wife nodded.

"Open," the husband said, seeming satisfied.

"That's the way he got out," the wife efficiently added.

"The rapist," my wife said, in just as quick succession.

I'VE TOLD YOU EVERYTHING
I know. I've told it to you precisely as it was revealed to me. But there is something in these events that I don't understand. I think there is something that those two people—no, three—aren't telling me. I sometimes think it must be staring me right in the face, just the way the three of them were when the story—or my version of it—was all finished.

HOW TO WRITE A POEM

I TELL YOU
, I am no more a sucker for this thing of poetry than the next fellow is. I mean, I can take it or leave it—a certain stewarded pressure, some modulated pissing and moaning, the practiced claims of a seasonal heart. But once in a blue moon I have in hand a poem whose small unfolding holds me to its period. It needn't be any great shakes, such a poem. I don't care two pins for what its quality is. Christ, no—literature's not what I look to poetry for.

Fear is.

You know—as in the fear of nothing there.

You keep your head on straight, there'll be this breeze you'll start to feel, a sort of dainty susurration of the words. That's when you can bet the poor sap's seen it coming at him—an ordinary universe, the itemless clutter of an unmysterious world. First chance he gets, it's a whole new ball game, touching bases while he races home free, that little telltale wind on the page you're looking at as the gutless poet starts to work up speed.

Maybe I don't like poets—or people. But I just love to catch some bardness at it, and then to test myself against the thinglessness that made him cut and run. What I do is I pick it up where the old versner's nerve dumped him, right there where he just couldn't stand to see where there's never going to be anything where something never was.

It's no big deal. You just face down what he, in his chickenheart, couldn't. Then you type your version up and sign your name to it. Next thing you do is get it printed as your own, sit back and listen to them call you the real thing when you weren't anything but bold.

It's the safest theft, a stolen poem—and who, tell me, doesn't steal something? Besides, show me what a poet dares demand his right to. A public reading? Public subsidy? But certainly not a grand banality. Least of all the very one his cowardice dishonored! Forget it—this is a person who is afraid.

WHAT BRINGS ME
to these brusque disclosures is an experience of recent vintage, a poem I took over from some woman you'll never hear of, and that I have since passed off—not without applause—as my own.

Nothing to it.

Just you watch.

The text—I mean the one that came before me—situates us in a situation as follows: two women, the poet and a widow, the bereaved missus of the lover of the poet.

For how long had the lovers been lovers?

Long enough.

And the deceased deceased?

A less long time than that.

Whatever the precise relativities, we are talking about an adulterous liaison along the usual lines.

So far, so good—the loved and the loveless.

Of course, the poet is herself married. But since her spouse never enters the poem by more than intimation, we are led, I think, to conclude that his relation to all this is of no concern and of less importance. I mean, insofar as people going and fucking people they weren't supposed to, the poet's spouse doesn't figure into any of this at all. He is not contingent, that is—at least not with respect to the prospect of what we are guessing must be coming.

Not so the dead man's wife. What I am suggesting is—what is suggested by the poet in the poem (oh yes, the poet, as I said, is
in
the poem, in the poem and speaking)—is that an air of discovery thickens over things very greatly: the unsuspecting widow, her husband's sneaky copulations. But, naturally, this is where we are headed, where the original text is taking us—toward exposure, toward widow-know-all.

As for the one party the poem pays no mind to (now that the poet's version has been published—in not nearly so distinguished a setting as mine was) doesn't he, must not he, even as I write this, know all too?

But perhaps the spouses of poets don't read poetry.

Is this not why the poet was in this fix in the first place?

What does it matter one way or the other, the poet's hubby, what he knows or what he doesn't? It's plain we are not required to direct toward him more than passing notice. The poet urges us to do as much. Or is it as little?

One dismissive reference.

WHAT HAPPENS IS THIS.

In the poem, remember?

We see the poet and the widow at the widow's. Newly back from the cemetery? We're not informed. Just this—a blustery day, late autumn, late morning, the women in pullovers and cardigans, grays, tans, tweeds, second sweaters arranged autumnishly over shoulders, ankles brought back under buttocks.

A living room, a fire.

Are the principals seated on the floor?

I think so. I like to think so.

What we're told is the poet's here to lend a hand—help sort the dead man's papers, be good company, a goodly solace, a presence in an empty house. So we see the women being women together, being the bereaved together, fingering what the dead man wrote.

(Was he a poet, too? More than likely. Nowadays, there are many, many poets.)

We see them grieving lightly, smoothing skirts, reminiscing, sipping tea, making tidy. Well, we hear this, see that—I don't recollect if the poet really keeps her senses keyed to this or that event. So we see, or hear, their speeches when they reach into a carton to read aloud a bit of this, a bit of that.

You know—fellowship, fellowing. A little weeping. Women's shoulders. Women's sweaters.

Nice.

When—didn't I say you'd guess it?—there's the wife with her hand at the bottom of a carton, and then her hand up and out, a neat packet in it, envelopes, a certain shape and paper, a certain fragrance, the dead man's record of the poet's indiscretion—letters that record the couplings, letters that give account.

My God!

Etc., etc., etc.

BUT LET'S NOT BE
non-poets here. It's not as bad as all that. After all, the man's dead and buried. Quite beyond a scolding. The widow's seen plenty. The poet is a poet. Life is . . . life.

Oh, well.

So there we are (at the poet's placing), watching women being wiser together—cry a little, laugh a little, and then at last, seeing them, as the worldly will, embracing.

I'm not so sure who speaks first, nor what the poet said was said—the poet's poem being somewhere here among my trophies but I being too caught up in this to get up to go check. Let's just say the widow says, "All these years, all these years, and who was he? He was who you talked to in these letters."

And the poet?

Who remembers?

But I expect she says whatever's said to someone being spacious for your benefit. Perhaps this: "No, no, it was you who had the better of it—the husband, the man."

Etc., etc.

The deceased, in pursuit of this assertion, is then celebrated, in two deft lines, for his performance in the two domains indicated.

Is there guile in this? Does the poet mean for us to take a tiny signal? Consider—why the symmetry? Is this the actual or the artful? And consider even further: What are we to do about the difference?

Anyway, who's the kidder here—the poet in the poem or the poet not in it?

Balance, don't I detest it! Some ghastly disproportion, now there's the thing!

SO THERE THEY ARE
, poet and widow, usurper and usurped. Unclothed, as it were, disrobed—each jumpy to reach out and grab for cover what's nearest.

So they hurry to hide themselves in other people's bodies.

Another embrace. Sort of sisterly. Sisterly hugging. But it goes from this to carnal. At which point, the poem has furnished us with the great fraction of its text, the day (get this!) having, in its pliant time, accomplished (the poet tells us) a like progress.

So it's dusk when the two women make their way to bed, to do what the poet then gives us to imagine. But before we know it, the poet reappears, having projected (she explains) her astral body back to the room where she'd left us. We see, via her sight, the letters lying strewn among the papers. We see teacups, saucers, purses, shoes, sweaters. We see these things as things at first, as enumerations on the widow's Chinese rug.

The rest of the poem?

Now here you have it! For the poem now labors to extract from the figure of these particulars a facsimile of the human spectacle, something serviceable in the way of a teaching, the event freed of the uneventful, the meaningless made to make way for a meaning.

THIS WAS THE POEM
the poet published and that I—genius that I am for spotting where a work has turned away from the unendurable vision in it—have since rewritten and passed along for a small disbursement and the fun.

Now let me tell you what I did.

In my poem, nothing's different. Word for word, it's all the same—up until the astral body comes back for a summary. Just like the fake poet, I take a look around. I see the same junk the poet saw. But in my poem, where I see the crap is on a decent grade of wall-to-wall broadloom bought at the mall and installed when the rhyme—sorry, the price!—acquired when the price was right.

And, notice, was I ever even once a person in that house?

Skip it.

It is all the same to me—the goddamn fancy phony rug, what's on it and its fucking whereabouts.