Collected Fictions (6 page)

I'M WIDE

MY WIFE AND SMALL SON
were away for the week, having removed themselves from the day-to-day predicament for a brief travel to a place of better weather. I was fine the first night, and remained equally fine the second and third, feeding myself from the cabinets and cupboards and pantry and doing what seemed expectable in the way of tidying up. Yet each night I would put off my hour of retirement a trifle longer than that which had found me seeking the sanctuary of my bed the night previous—so that by the fourth night, it was virtually daybreak when I sought the security of blankets and pillow. Mind you, I was not passing the sleepless hours in any particular fashion, aside from the regularity of those few moments that saw to my nutrition and the succeeding clean-up of the premises. But I cannot tell you what precisely I was doing, save that I think I spent the greatest particle of the time moving from room to room and regarding the objects that appointed them. At all events, it was during the course of the fifth night of their absence—of my wife and small son, I mean—that I was suddenly, in my meanderings, captured by the sense that I had happened to come upon the thought of my lifetime. It was while beholding the seat of a wainscot chair of the Jacobean period, and while losing myself in the patina my week-by-week waxing of its surface had achieved, that I thought, "Why wax?" I mean, it was utterly stupefying, this notion—
Why wax?
Why, indeed, wax anything ever again when one could instead coat a surface with—ahh—shellac!

I was positively beside myself with excitement, gripped by a delirium of a quality I am not competent to describe. I remember thinking, "My God, just look at me, an ordinary fellow abandoned by wife and child, now exalted in his possession of a piece of the most exquisite invention!" I was quick to consider the punishing labors of all those persons who, for years by the eras, had applied themselves to the rude practice of spreading on and then of rubbing and buffing, this when one layer of shellac could end such brutish industry forever.

I went first to the shelves that we used for the storage of all inflammables, took what I wanted in the way of a can and a brush, and then made haste for my closet, there taking up the two pairs of shoes I then owned and carrying them into the living room, stopping en route to gather several sections of the Sunday paper from the stack it is our habit to keep accumulating from Sunday to Sunday.

Oh, you goon! Did you honestly think it was the furniture I meant to have a go at? Great heavens, no! Shellac on wood has been done and done—whereas who'd ever thought of
shoes
?

I arranged things.

I laid out paper.

I pried off the lid of the can.

I inspected the brush for dust, for hairs.

Have I said that wife and son are endowed with hair of the finest filament? In any case, I went to work, and left my efforts to dry, sleeping more satisfactorily than it had been my fortune to do in years.

But when I returned from my office the following evening, both pairs of shoes were still wet—two nights thereafter (I was appalled), they were no drier. It was only then that I realized I had been wearing galoshes.

I went at them with a razor blade, the shoes, scraping. I scraped and then I tried a solvent. I admit it—this time I didn't bother myself with newspaper. I no longer liked the floor any better than I liked my shoes.

I won't make this last forever.

I murdered those shoes.

I hacked at them—I dug and delved at them, and stabbed and stabbed.

Toward dawn, I dumped them in the trash, and got out the vacuum cleaner to suck up the shreds of leather. But I could see where there was no repairing the floor by such measure. The solvent had eaten holes through the varnish. It was festered, the floor. It was an infestation.

I skipped my office after scrubbing off the stain on my hands. I went in galoshes straight to a shoe store, took a seat, stuck out a galosh, said, "Nine-and-a-half, E. Give me a brogue."

"You mean a blucher?" said the simp.

"That's it," I said. "E. I'm wide."

"In a jiffy," he said, and the purchase was made, the whole ugly affair accomplished in minutes.

I was fine. All the way home, I was fine. For the rest of the day I ate biscuits and tidied and waxed those shoes. It was not until the new shoes seemed as shiny as they would get that I left off and squatted there gazing at things, studying the chairs and the tables, all the surviving surfaces that gleamed. It was then that I was willing to reckon with the rest of what I had said to that fop of theirs when he had asked why in the world was it that I was wearing galoshes now that the streets were empty of snow.

Oh, listen to me listening to myself!

"Listen," I said, "I got this boy, God love him, he's seven, and all he wants to do is do for me. So what happens? So when I'm not looking, what happens? Listen," I said, now raising my voice for all of them in that whole shoe store to hear, "that kid, that wonderful kid, he takes shellac to every last one of my shoes to put a lasting shine on them!"

I even laughed when everybody laughed.

Do you understand what I am saying to you?

I winked my goddamn head off—me, a man.

IMAGINATION

X WAS A TEACHER
of story-writing, and Y was a student of same. X was a remarkable teacher of story-writing. In the opinion of A to Z—exclusive of Y—X was the best teacher of it there ever was. Still, Y sought out X for instruction—for although Y was not willing to hold X's skills in the very highest esteem, Y nevertheless held them in esteem high enough. Perhaps he viewed X's great gifts as a teacher as meriting X the status of second-best, whereas the first-best had nothing to teach Y.

Y was a hairy person, and very grave in his manner. X, on the other hand, tended toward the bald, and was light-hearted in all save two respects—his wife being one and stories the other. In these two matters, X kept up his purchase on the world as he thought it was, never cracking a smile in relation to either topic, a practice that Y thought foolish and tiresome. But of course Y had neither wife nor a vocation for living inside stories. Y wanted to write them, create them—and, as for women, he amused himself with reptiles instead.

Listen to X commenting on Y's stories, the which he judged the weakest among those produced by the class.

"What's this dragon doing in here? Why a dragon?"

"Dinosaurs are extinct. Write about the world as it exists in our time."

"Very good, except for the snake. The snake's a deus ex machina. Don't you see you can't just stick a snake in here to resolve a difficulty people have produced?"

X shouted. X was passionate about stories. In X's opinion, that's where reality got its ideas from. Y, for his part, listened with interest. After all, Y had sought out X to learn.

"For God's sake, man, why pterodactyls? Can't you make it a family of farmers instead?"

Y would smile. He had such a lot of hair and it all seemed to smile right along with him when he did. It made X think of Samson, all this ferocious growth, and of his own near-hairless self. Poor X, his body was weak, but his mind, he observed, was very strong.

THEN X MET Z.

Oh, Z!

Z was neither teacher nor student of the writing of stories. Z cared not in the least for stories, and surely would take no position in the debate between X and Y. Z's tendencies were restricted to the parts of her body and to the uses that might be made of them.

How can it be that such a creature would come to fall within the ken of X?

In one version, Y proposes her, presenting her to X as Y's barber, the person whose attentions account for the vigor and abundance of Y's hair.

In a second version, X's wife is the agency through which X and Z meet, the former woman having heard that the latter could do wonders in the contest against thinning hair—restore growth, prolong vitality, work a miracle.

In either version, Z did—barbering X before and after his classes, a program Z kept up until Z's husband came back to her, thus making it necessary for X and Z to find another privacy for Z's talents to continue going forward in the matter of X's hair.

Insufficiency of it, that is.

HERE'S WHERE Y
comes into it again.

In one version, X and Y are quarreling about one of Y's stories, and X decides to give ground in order that he might then beg of Y a certain favor—in vulgarest terms, the use of Y's bed.

In a second version, Y remarks on the improved condition of X's hair, whereupon X, for whom everything is a story except stories that are not real, sees the way to make this one "come out," resolving the conflict that people have brought about, this without resort to some damned deus ex machina.

In either version, X and Z get Y's bed.

Or were about to, that is.

For it would first be necessary for Y to give X a set of keys and a caution, which latter was this—to vacate the premises before a certain hour, there being a cleaning woman and a delivery person scheduled to put in appearances at Y's at that hour in the first case and shortly thereafter in the second.

Did X understand?

He did.

It was not difficult for the teacher to be instructed by the student since, apart from the writing of stories, X appreciated he had everything to learn. On the other hand, this wasn't much—since, for X, very little stood apart from the writing of stories, the major exceptions being X's wife and now, of course, Z. And besides, Z only counted in what Z did for X's hair.

In X's opinion, both before and after this story, he wouldn't have had any of it if it hadn't been for Z.

Now, in a good story, the reader would be entitled to know why. What was it that lay at the root of X's unlucky hair? Didn't X have a lady without a letter to massage his scalp for him, finger it with enriched shampoos?

He did.

In one version, this very question occurs to X himself-—and in the same version, he is unable to answer.

In a second version, the wife is absorbed by her interests as much as X is by his, typing being the only one of them that seems evident in persisting in her.

True enough, it was a means of supplementing the meager income produced from X's teaching. And anyway, didn't his wife type also for X—his lecture notes, his comments to students, though never a story he'd made up?

X did not have to make up stories. Those of them that were written for him to read and to hand back were, in his opinion, quite enough as to the category of stories.

"
BE OUT BY TWO SHARP
," Y warned. "Because the cleaning lady comes right when I told you on the dot."

"Good God," said X, unimaginative as usual, "you certainly don't expect me to let her in."

Y sighed in weariness with expectation coinciding with event.

"Of course not. She has keys," Y said.

"Two o'clock?" said X, wishing to make certain he was not uninstructed as to fact.

"Um," Y said. "She promised to be there in time to let the delivery in."

NOW TO THE GOOD PARTS.

Z was undressed.

Naked.

Not a stitch on her barber's body.

And she had carried it all into the bathroom to urinate and to place into position her device.

X, for his part, sat on the bed, his hair-deprived being quivering with desire—too, it must be admitted, with spasms of anxiety set astir by what X now sees showing in the space between the floor and a certain closed door. Through the crack a red light glows—a red light in a closet? A light lit? Even an ordinary light would have been something to wonder about—and X's brain went to work, invoking its powers to proliferate fictions, imagine revisions, get scared.

A hidden camera? Maybe even some sort of sound-recording mechanism, too. Yes, of course! It's a setup. Y, Y, Y! It's revenge for all the criticisms, for "Very good—except, you know, for the snake."

X BETOOK HIMSELF
and leapt off the bed.

"Stay where you are!" X called to Z. "Don't be alarmed," he counseled manfully, "but I think there's something up," and with this X crossed the tiny apartment to view the source of the luminosity from within.

X would have screamed had there been any breath in him to do it with. He threw his shoulder against the door and shoved as strenuously as a man with too little hair could. But the thing had its nose against the bottom of the door. When it came to pushing it back in, X was no match for what was pushing its way out.

It lumbered sluggishly toward the center of the floor as X flew back to the bed, hopped up on the mattress, and threw himself against the wall in defeat.

THAT'S HOW
the cleaning lady found them—Z locked in the bathroom and X trembling against the asylum of the wall. It was she who got the thing back into the closet, where its feed was and where its bowl of water was and where the infrared bulb did its best to simulate the temp of its natural habitat. She just shooed it back in there with a broom, more startled of course by naked, glabrous X (a bit of diction X would have deplored, would have shunned, were this composition to have been his composition) and by the small shrieks borne from the bathroom than by the giant lizard slumbering heavily in the middle of the apartment floor.

"
IT'S CALLED A MONITOR LIZARD
," Y told X years later at a cocktail party celebrating the publication of Y's first collection of stories. "Dead now—couldn't take the climate. African, you know. Largest of the land lizards."

"I thought the Komodo was the biggest," said X, trying to put the best face on things.

"Well, you know," Y said, and turned to greet another ardent bearer of admirations, leaving X to doubt even the little he dared to claim.

THAT STORY ENDS HERE
. But this one goes on for a bit.

In this story, the end has different versions.

In one version, the delivery was a manuscript, and the person making the delivery was Y's typist—who is, of course, X's wife, and who arrives in time to see the cleaning woman gathering up the clothes anticipated by the man who is standing on the bed. In another version, we have Y inscribing a copy of his book for presentation to his old, valued, indispensable teacher, X.

Y writes:
Things always work out for the best. With affection and appreciation, your grateful student and collaborator
.

And then there is the date—and the city.

And the author's name.