Object Lessons: The Paris Review Presents the Art of the Short Story Read online

  Mal Vester was fourteen and he switched from gin to rye. Rice from weddings, confetti from the holidays were deep in his thick yellow hair. He went everywhere unasked in a soft sweater too small for him and trousers unraveling at the crotch. He sewed them up with red thread which was all he had. He wore a grey shirt buttoned at the throat and a string tie held by a steer raised from tin. He had bruises beneath his eyes. In the homes with young daughters, fathers lay sleepless and frantic, for when need is on the loose, running like a hungry hound, how does one protect the loved from love?

  Freddie Gomkin’s wife, who had a face like an ewe, gave birth to twins in January, when everyone knew that poor Fred had been gelded in the war … and gassed … and that he had a plate in his head and a glass eye and rubber bags hanging inside the clothes he wore. They knew that he was hardly a survivor at all. His only lusts were two—for dying and a winning pony—but he was happy with his heirs. He gave a party with brandy and beer, and although he didn’t say a word, one could tell that he was pleased with the way his life was moving along, each day with its noon and now all those noons behind him, the days being maneuvered properly and with skill, his life moving along just like a real life, just like anybody’s.

  Mal was not invited but he came, with the water slapped onto his hair running into his ears, crouched with his elbows on the heating unit, gathering up the room with his slovenly eyes. The brandy rocked like mud in the paper cups. The wife smiled, the tip of her tongue curving shyly before her bad teeth. Mal wanted to see the twins but he was told by someone that they were in the pantry sleeping. The door was not hung properly but was pulled shut all the same with wadded newspapers sealing up the spaces. Otherwise the house was neat and bright and the sun shone in all the corners. The floor was white as a tub with sunlight. There were no bugs or rats. There were no hairs on the women’s chins or dried nostril grime on the men. Everyone was there dressed soberly in brown and white—white shirts and dresses and faces and hands, brown trousers and beads and boots and hair—brown and white and moving like a bread pudding.

  But there was no sign of the babies. No prints or droppings. No bark torn off the rough pine walls. Or cloth snagged on a splintered seat.

  They all had brought gifts but none were being used right. Mal had brought an empty egg painted in bright colors with a string run through the pin holes. He imagined that the babies could bat it with their hands. But Freddie’s wife had hung it on the Christmas tree, which was still up but dropping, falling but not over, pale as wheat now, incongruous, leaning like a person ill at ease, the berries strung there rotting. The egg rolled back and forth in the air. The needles clicked as they struck the floor.

  The young girls bent over the twins’ toy that lay by the sink on the breadboard. Something furry—a rabbit’s foot. They drank hot sugared water, giggled at the spot where Mal was drinking his brandy down.

  “A door is not a door until it’s closed,” Mal kindly thought, squinting at the colored funnies that hid his nest of young. The papers were old and crumbling. The news was history. The missing persons, listed in rows tiny and in code like the cricket scores, had all been found.

  “Oh what is there about him that makes him so worthwhile…” the young girls thought, their legs twitching and joggling below their laps.

  Everyone was ogling the spot where he was as though they wanted to sit there too but wouldn’t. Mal swallowed his brandy, pushing his face deep inside the cup. He licked the bottom dry and put it down. He was sorry for the babies in the black pantry, rocking in their cribs like corn. Had they destroyed the babies he had made? Had she taken his sack of seed, tied it up and chucked it out as she would the gizzard bag in the pit of a grocery hen?

  He walked away. No one said good-bye.

  IV

  The kidneys are equal in size

  and shape. The capsules strip

  with ease. The esophageal mucosa

  is grey-white. No food is present

  other than a few intact, cooked

  beans.

  The day had been very blue and the sea black but now the sea became blue and fearful like a shotgun’s bore and the sky became black and scuddy with clouds. The water in the harbor began to pitch and foam as though it were about to give up its dead. Mal was pushed into town by the wind and he stood in a doorway and watched the storm. The doorway led to a mudroom and the mudroom to a cheap restaurant, filled with cowboys and wax flowers. The chaps of the cowboys smacked wetly as they walked. Little pieces of food flew in the air between them as they talked. The place was warm and steamy and stank of sheep. He sat at a tiny table for two in a corner by the window and a running toilet. No one bothered Mal Vester. No one asked for his order.

  He was the only guest who was not a cowboy. Never had he wanted to be a cowboy. The cowboys were chewing and laughing and cutting the wire stems of the plastic flowers with their huge pocket knives. They threw the flowers at one another and entwined them in their lank and dripping hair. The knives turned and sawed white and watery like fish and the flowers fell clumsily into their hands and then onto the soaked and puddled floor. Wool had become embedded in the wounds of their fingers, spun out black and coarse like a paw’s webbing. The blood of lambs lay caked beneath their nails.

  On their dark arms they had tattoos. Legends of roses and tigers. Puce needle diggings. Stain of capillaries. The muscled petals that women love to touch.

  But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian blue.

  It rained and rained. Mal wrung out his cuffs and watched the dim day through the steamy window. Someone had written a word on the glass. NICE, it said. The street was buckling. The rain was clattering like teeth in a cold mouth. Swings moved between poles in the park without children and the sea slammed against the pilings and carried off the crabs. Everything in the world was slick and trembling like a gland, like something gutted, roped and dangling from a tree.

  Mal’s eyes were fogging up like they always did. He touched them carefully, worked out a piece of grit. He bent his wide lashes back, propping them up with spit. One eye leaked something and it ran gooey down his cheek. He was too old to cry. He fingered the small paper cones of mustard and cream and salted his hand. The table was the best in the house for it offered a view of the street, but the toilet ran on and the wooden doors of the stalls banged in the draft. The menu was glued beneath the glass table-top. Moisture had soaked it with brown. Cuttlefish was unintelligible. As were the fried breads and the list of cola drinks. Actually, Mal couldn’t make out any of the words at all. Life is a filthy bill of fare. Death by dyslexia. Still, everything is pretty much the same.

  He tried thinking of things as though he could remember them. He could not recollect being born. He had depended upon the aberrant memories of others, upon their eccentric recall. His momma had told him that his little dick was a bright yummy bow like a piece of salt water taffy. His daddy had said nothing before he went away. He had straddled the baby as it crept across the ground as though little Mal were a gulch he had no intention of falling into.

  The cowboys ate, wickering through their noses, the roses lurching at will on their hairy chests. The coach came in from the racing trials at Milk Creek. He wore a hooded jacket of purple silk and looked like a priest with a whistle hanging around his neck instead of a cross. His day had stopped three years ago although the school still kept him on. He ordered a pint and a meat pie.

  “I went crook at them for running back along the bank instead of swimming,” he said, “but how was I to know the kid had drowned.”

  He persisted in teaching the butterfly. His trunks sopped beneath his trousers leaving a stain like a map. He persisted. For the butterfly could not cease to exist simply because one of his charges had died, with his white membranous arms flailing in the current, with his young ribs swelling like hoops in the sunny water … The boy had been doing fine until he drowned. He had been making good time. When ret
rieved, he looked quite ordinary except for the tips of his fingers.

  The coach ate quickly. The pie juices ran down his jowl. Mal, embarrassed, looked away, out into the street again, through the runny lines of NICE. A waitress went by, flicking her tail like a bird. On her lip there was a mole with two long hairs that drooped and crossed prettily upon her teeth when she smiled. But she did not smile at Mal Vester. She went about her work with a vengeful dish rag. She ran it across his folded hands, dug it into the knuckle cracks as though she were scouring a fork. His poor hands reeked and wobbled. They leapt across the table, almost falling off the edge like a pair of gloves.

  He pretended he didn’t notice.

  The cowboys were mopping their plates with cake; the coach tapped his groin uncertainly and wriggled in his chair. From a hole in the wall, plates of food were shoved, the fingers lingering on the sandwiches, snipped off a dangling piece of lettuce with grace and love.

  Outside in the rain, a hand waved feebly from the gutter. Mal was uncertain. He rubbed away the NICE. The street was empty. Everything was turning into a yellow dusk and the rain ran down with a tired sound over the small lame hand that flopped and sank. He ran out startled through the doors, falling in the mudroom, skidding along on his ear. He picked himself up gently as though he were someone else and ran on to the gutter, his cheekbones stinging, string and ashes hanging from his light eyebrows. The air was yellow. The tops of trees. The plastic protecting the druggist’s window candy. The edge of town run off the hill. Did he have a liver ailment? Had he slid by error down a commode? He yelled and stumbled on.

  The errant hand flopped like an empty sack. A bird’s nest floated by, trim and watertight, softly struck the fingers and was gone. There were no grates on the city’s sewer holes. Things fell down there and lived beneath the town—dung black ponies and shit brindle cats. Fish with white bones that shone through the gills. Eventually all were tumbled away, moved by the moon and tidal heaves—horny hoofs and claws and plushy meat out to the sharks banking like birds off the seaweed ledges.

  Mal knelt down in the rushing water, grabbing and tugging at the hand soft as pork. The fingers, old-maidish and ringless, skinny and worn down, did not grip him back and he felt sick, all that salt he had licked in the restaurant rising in the back of his throat, his eyes wet and ringing in his head. It was like pulling the glug from a shower-drain. The arm came out stringy and then a little grey head, rising peeved and fierce with lobeless ears. For a moment, he thought it was his dear momma, for she had been lobeless too, all ear itself and open mouth, hearing and saying and kissing him dry. He almost dropped her back in his joy, for one must not dwell on differences. The way to fidelity is through mistaken identity.

  But of course it was not his momma, this slippery gloomy wretch that he had hauled onto the street. Quite a crowd had assembled by then to witness the rescue and the old lady lay drying in a muttering circle of hobbled delight, her small feet lopped over the curbstone, her skinned but bloodless knuckles up and rapping at the air.

  The next day she was buried, for she had been found dead during the night with peroxide burns around her mouth.

  V

  There is no evidence of

  trauma about the head. The

  central nervous system is

  not examined.

  For nothing is faithful and nothing stays saved. The watery caul of our birth protects us from nothing and one can die by drowning beyond the sight of a sea.

  The black jelly in the roadway was once off and running warm through the trees. And somewhere a place waits for us …

  Mal was sixteen and a grateful town sent him to America, for although they all agreed that his intentions were good, there was no denying the traumatic concurrence of his adolescence with death and flood and pregnancy and now all the lambs in the pastures starving and dropping on their way to nurse. The men spat blood in their dinner soup for their daughters paid them no attention and were down at the laundromat, dancing to small radios, picking the lint from their soapy lacy things before the frightened boys, and their women lay immobilized in bed biting at the pillowcases and listening to the rabbits eat the flowers up.

  The mayor had a high faint voice and cancer in a nasty place. The town hall was cold and listing, filled with poisoned saucers for the mice, a structure that had been built hurriedly with the threat of constant vows in mind. Mal stood timid and sweating before the extravagant praise, tipping with the pressure of the colored medal as they pressed it to his chest, his eyes opalescent beneath the low thick lids. They appeared that day to be grey in color.

  The mayor moved on his rubber donut, his mouth pink and sagging at the corner from the weight of medicine spoons, his bowels bound up, all hope lost, the town’s money gone and all his own, spent on shark nets and bubbler screens and keeping the public wards alive. And he was dying all the while. Dying, and his wife was not true, though she was taking in washing to pay for the stone, and each night for him, as he grew thinner, covering less and less space on the brass muggy bed, lisping words against the water glass, the sky turned into bright flame like wormwood falling, and now this troublesome licentious boy was out saving suicides.

  There was only the mayor and Mal and the council sitting in an even row, their stomachs sick with a heavy breakfast waffle. They placed a plane ticket into Mal’s seedy pocket, some folding money … for they did not wish him any harm. Gas blew up between their lips. The health inspector had butter on his sleeve.

  The mayor tenderly licked his teeth for they were white and perfect, without cavities and strong as a dog’s …

  the rescue had taken place and should be suitably rewarded. It was unfortunate that the victim did not recover but beside the point. The old lady had resources that thwarted Mal’s brave concern

  … though one now seemed loose. He pushed his tongue against it and it lifted neatly out of its socket in the rotting gum and slid down his throat. He grew more pale than before and bolted from the room, his bony hips whirling against the desk, ripping open the drawer where hair ribbons lay tangled with a wet glue pot and discs of plaster painted like coins.

  … And what is it that you protect and swaddle in your fashion? Your darling, your favorite, that part of you which you most fear for in the night?? Spine testes head breast lung eyeball?????? There’s something for everyone. Some cyst or rupture, tumor or bacillus spore, fracture or fever for us all.

  … And the place that you will last recall? Abandoned fridge? Train toilet? Electrocuted pony?

  For death is everywhere and the zoo-keeper waits in his soul for the mauling, the coon dog for the master’s meat, the maid for the bloody sheet …

  Mal went meekly up the ramp with the nerveless calm of perfect fright and into the sky, his passport pinned above the medal to his chest, the photo punched across with green, his poor wet eyes closed but shining behind the lids like a kerchief Christ, and the plane lifted, leaving behind him all his dead, his momma in the foamy trickle, the black dog grinning on the slanting lawn, the rabbits drifting over his daddy’s hollow …

  VI

  The attack occurred in a small

  bay with a small watercourse at

  its head. The victim was put into an ambulance but because of the

  steep grade leading up from the

  water’s edge and the slippery surface the ambulance clutch burnt

  out. There were several dogs taken

  in the area last week.

  He wore a tan suit, too tight at the armpits. The button at his neck was split in two and kept sliding through the eyelet, exposing his white throat. He refused dinner and a magazine. He felt as though he were dying. His ears were dully popping. There was a taste of garbage at the very root of his tongue. The clouds gaped and he could see the sea wallowing black and mean, the colors changing to yellow and green over reefs and island shoals. A stewardess swished by, smiling, he knew, like a lunatic. He crouched in his smelly seat. He lifted his heels off the floor. Would they
band him like a bird? Tattoo his lip with a number as they did the polar bear? It wasn’t a question of affection or protection. They would just want to know how far he had gone by the time he died. She stopped and dropped her hands down to his hips. He looked at her beseechingly and attempted to withdraw himself into his spine. His lap seemed as vulnerable as a child’s winter mitten … untidy soiled serge … as the fingers advanced, long and blue near the nails, four like a fork, with a thumb the spoon, her mouth full of Sen-Sen swinging by his ear, ready to masticate, to subdue him forever. She scowled and fumbled, mistakenly sticking her finger into his navel. It dropped in a good inch like a score in a game. He was full of orifices. Like a pinball machine. They could groove or notch or tag him anywhere. They had ways. They could scoop out his brain, he figured, and no one would ever know, because they were so clever, because they left wounds with no scars.

  She cinched him up and strolled away. The belt was buckled too tightly, Mal knew, having bisected the cheese spread sandwich he had brought aboard in his pocket. His discs were bunched like poker chips. But he knew that he was safe, that his fate was not happening yet, and the blood began to course down again from his eyes to the points of his stiff body.

  The plane bucked. A baby across the aisle spit up into a National Geographic. Mal’s stomach rolled and rose, larding his ribs with the fat of its wall. On the sea it was raining and blowing. He could imagine the storm down there. He crossed his chest and closed his eyes. He could see the tankers going down tonight; the tuna seiners with the nets sweeping over the dead men’s eyes; women on yachts in diaphanous gowns, crying in their cabins, their earrings flying away in the howl, their sharp heels wedging in the decks …

  A woman was holding the sick baby. “Do you think we’ll crash?” she said to Mal. “Do you think this is the end for all of us? And me with my man in Hawaii?” Her voice rose, humming like a set of wings. The child spit all over her hands. “He’s so young he don’t smell yet. So I guess we can be thankful for that at least.”